Joy Williams: The Quick & the Dead

“Do you think she was in love with your mother?” Alice asked. “Maybe she was in love with your mother.” What a thing to say, Alice thought. Love’s not that crooked. Though she suspected it might be.

“I remember her being with us pretty constantly. It was like she was a boarder or an aunt or my mother’s stepsister.”

“She didn’t try to pass herself off as your godparent, did she?” Alice asked. “There is something so sinister about those people.” They were unaccountable, shadowy figures, practically bearded in Alice’s imagination, bearing peculiar half-priced gifts like peppermint foot cream or battery-operated lights you clipped onto books or socket-wrench sets. She’d never heard of an effective or efficient godparent. As liaisons went, they seemed to be pretty much failures.

“My mother never trusted anyone after that. Not even me. I felt that she didn’t have much confidence in me. It’s funny that this picture has survived all these years, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” Alice said. “I mean, no, not funny.” What was sort of remarkable was that Corvus’s parents had ended up the drowned ones. She chewed on the inside of her mouth to check thoughtless utterances. She should invent another habit since it was already sore. But you didn’t invent habits, did you? Didn’t they invent you?

“They got Tommy then — didn’t they, Tommy?” The dog raised his head in polite acknowledgment, then lowered it with a sigh.

Alice looked at the photograph. She’d been holding it firmly, her thumbs at the woman’s throat. She was blond and quite heavy, a real butter pat. “Are there other pictures of her around, or is this the only one?” She really thought this memento should be ditched.

“Whenever we were alone together, Darleen and I, she spoke to me in sort of a singing whisper. But in front of my parents she wouldn’t whisper, she talked like anyone else. She didn’t say anything out of the ordinary in front of my parents, she would look at me in the most normal way and then would look away again in an utterly natural manner, but when we were alone she’d say the most maliciously nonsensical things. She thought everything was grotesque. I was mesmerized by her.”

“She sounds pornographic,” Alice said. “She was, like, molesting your mind.”

“She had me share her private world, all right,” Corvus said. “And I soaked it all up, whatever it was that was in that whisper. People think innocence can soak up anything. That’s what innocence is for. She never bored me, but when the time, in her opinion, came for me to vanish, I struggled. I struggled hard. Nothing in the whisper had prepared me for this. She had me scissored between her legs and she was turning, so it looked above the water like she was searching for me. The sea was calm, and where had I gone? And then she let me go. I popped up like a cork, too shocked to scream, and saw my father swimming toward me. He was a good swimmer, an excellent swimmer, and he’d almost reached me. My mother was floundering behind. She was trying to run through the water, to shovel it aside with her body. I noticed the marks the straps of her bathing suit had made on her flesh. The straps weren’t aligned with the marks they’d made over the summer. I hadn’t noticed that before, and I fell into detail then, the sweet, passing detail of the world. The next instant I was raised up, grasped beneath my arms, and Darleen said, ‘Until again, Corvus. In this world or the next,’ and she threw me toward my mother and my father.”

“It’s like you were being born,” Alice said. “She was trying to take charge of you being born.” She had quite crumpled the photograph by this time. She had wadded this woman — long overdue.

“That’s when I had my first thought. I was five years old, probably a little late for first thoughts.”

“I don’t think that’s late at all.” Alice didn’t want to ask her granny and poppa what her own had been and risk disappointment. They undoubtedly had it written down someplace.

“It was — There is a next world, but no one we know will be in it.”

“That’s good for five,” Alice said. She wanted to ask her if she’d seen a kelpie when she was underwater. They were supposed to look like a horse, a little horse, and to warn you if you were about to be drowned or to assist in your drowning. She didn’t know how it could do both, but that’s what she’d read in some book that for a time had fallen into her possession.

But it wasn’t appropriate to ask. Not shades nor ghosts nor apparitions should have a place at the table tonight.

“So what happened to her? Did she just walk out of the water and disappear?”

“She walked out of the water and across the beach and into the changing room, which was a large walled space without a roof. I’d always hated it. There were no private stalls inside, just an open area where women and girls changed into their bathing suits. The floor was dirt and the sky seemed always to be moving quickly overhead, and it frightened me. There were all ages and sizes in there, everyone quickly getting in and out of clothes, everyone awkward and hurried and pretty much silent, though not completely silent. The bodies seemed to be all one body, the differences only momentary, and this was horrible to me.”

Alice put the crushed photograph into a bowl. She picked up a matchbook from Corvus’s parents’ considerable collection. There were hundreds of matchbooks, no two the same. “Never Settle, Always Select,” her matchbook said. It advertised an indoor flea market in Gallup. She struck the match and stuffed it into the folds of the picture, but it went out.

Corvus smoothed the picture out and folded back the cover of another matchbook. She propped it open beneath the woman’s face and when she lit one match, all the others flared.

“That’s better,” Alice said.

“My father carried me back to the beach and wrapped me in towels and then took me to the car. The car had been parked in the sun with its windows rolled up, and it felt delicious. My father held me in that warm car, and I’d never felt anything so delicious in my life up until then. My mother had gone to look for Darleen. She kept saying, ‘I’m going to scratch her eyes out.’ ”

“I bet she would have, too.” The phrase had always impressed Alice favorably, but she doubted that Corvus’s mother was capable of such a thing. She had always considered Corvus’s mother a genial person and had admired her bosom, which was nicely freckled. Corvus’s father had been more difficult to gauge. He had studied to be a doctor but had had some sort of breakdown. He seemed strong, if unpredictable. He could have gone after this Darleen to her great detriment, though apparently he had not.

“My mother couldn’t find her. We didn’t even return to the house that night because my mother thought she’d come in and steal me, so we went to a motel. I’d never been in a motel before, and it seemed like a playhouse to me. My mother threw away my bathing suit and my flip-flops with the plastic starfish on the straps. She threw away all of the clothes of that day and bought me new ones. And we never saw Darleen again. We never talked about her.”

“What a peculiar episode,” Alice said.

“I have to go to school tomorrow,” Corvus said.

“Oh, you do not!” Alice exclaimed. If ever there was an excuse, she thought. “Has the counselor gotten to you yet?”

“No, not yet. Oh, you mean in terms of career placement? She said physics.”

“Physics?”

“I think her notes concerned someone else.”

The counselor was supposed to assist the students with their college choices but also doubled in grief management, which made her sound to Alice like a dog handler, as though grief were something that could be taught the down-stay. There was no love lost between this counselor and Alice, who thought she should stick to her smarmy recommendations and not be allowed to dabble in Corvus’s life. She should be prevented from attempting to manage Corvus’s grief. Maybe Alice could get a restraining order on her.