The Phantom Limbs of the Rollow Sisters Read Online Free PDF Page A

thing Mabel had been able to rely upon—her mother in a place that children would not want to be, a place where black widows lay eggs in your ear canal and snakes slept curled-up in your cowboy boots.
    “I read in the newspaper,” Mabel said, “about a pregnant woman in Mexico whose sister drugged her, induced labor, sold the baby, then told her sister the child had died.” Mabel had clipped the article and held onto it, saving it to put on Lily’s pillowcase when she had her next long fit.
    “It’s time Lily saw her mother again,” Jordan said with a shrug, as if saying,
Isn’t it obvious
? As if saying,
Don’t we want the best for Lily
?
    Mabel walked away from Jordan and looked out a broken window, down to the familiar street. The streets of the town square were all brick with patches of gray concrete. She could hear the rattle and bump of every car she’d ever ridden in as it crossed the streets, could feel the rough ride in her spine. If Jordan took Lily away, even for just a week, even if they never made it to Mexico, everything would change for all of them.
    Jordan took Mabel’s hand, and he slipped a ring onto her finger. In the set of the ring was an opaque sphere, and Jordan flipped it open on its tiny hinges to show something could be kept inside. “I found it under the stage,” he said. “There’s all kinds of things under there. Maybe it was good luck for the actors to drop things through the loose floorboards or something.” Jordan lit his cigarette lighter, led the way to the base of the stage, and pushed aside a panel. The stage was so low to the floor that Mabel had to lower herself to her stomach to get beneath.
    As she bellied her way across the floor, she could hear Jordan crawling in behind her. Her sandal fell off, and she felt Jordan touch the sole of her bare foot. She felt his fingertips stepping as light as spider’s legs across her heel and up along her ankle. She remembered the afternoon that her mother read aloud her father’s unlikely suicide note and how her mother then took Mabel and Lily to the river for a swim. Naked in the cold river water, the three of them hid beneath the trestle as a train crossed. They shivered and held each other. Unable to hear anything other than the passing train, they sent wordless messages, Mabel pressing her palm to hermother’s stomach, Lily putting her cheek to her mother’s breast, her mother running her fingers over the goose bumps of their skin.
    Jordan, his face next to Mabel’s, relit the lighter, and Mabel leaned back from the heat in her face. “You’re filthy,” she said, pressing her thumb against a spot of dirt on his cheek. As the lighter went out, Mabel lay back and thought more about her father’s last words—he would have written them on thin pieces of paper and baked them into fortune cookies. With a puddle jumper, he’d have smoked the words across the clouds.
You’ll live happily ever after
, he would have promised them all.
    Jordan tried to find Mabel’s lips in the dark, kissing her cheek, then her nose, then her lips. He kissed her only once, then crawled away and back to the front of the stage. With the kiss, Mabel forgave him everything—for liking Lily more and for buying a car to take Lily away. And she forgave him all further destruction; she would forgive him if he ruined Lily and if he ruined her and if he became someone she and Lily could only talk about very carefully.

3.
    IT WAS MABEL’S BIRTHDAY, AND LILY had slipped a card beneath her bedroom door, inviting her down to her school-bus apartment for cocktails and cake. As the sun set, Lily unplugged the lava lamp from the thick orange extension chord that snaked in through a break in a window of the bus; in its place, she plugged in a string of blinking Christmas lights. The cord, its other end plugged into an outlet in what had once been a hog shed, into what had once powered a low electrical fence that Lily had once tripped over, jolting her knees,