Jane Was Here (8 page)

“What’s this?” Pearl turns the bauble in the light.

“An old pin I found. I could polish it for you. It might be valuable, I don’t know.”

“It’s junk.” Pearl tosses it out the window.

She goes next door to Madame Bertha’s to have her fortune read while Marly lugs the wash into the laundromat. It’s crowded; people sit waiting for machines.

By the time Pearl returns, Marly has only just started sorting the clothes to put into the washers.

“This time Madame Batbrain told me I’m going to inherit a lot of money,” Pearl reports, “but for it to happen I have to give her some money to bury in the yard, and it’ll be multiplied by a hundred when the inheritance comes through…”

Marly hunts for the bloodstained nightgown; she’ll treat it with spray before adding it to the load.

“…I guess the theory is, if I’m stupid enough to give her five bucks for a reading, then I’m stupid enough to give her a thousand so she can blow town. Skank. If I had a grand don’t you think I’d blow town myself?”

Pearl notices her mother staring in a panic at her nightgown, flapping it this way and that. “What’s the matter?”

“Nothing,” mutters Marly, stowing the nightgown in the washer and pushing in the coin slot.

Last night, the blood from her arms had smeared all over the front of the gown, red on white—she
saw
it.

There were no bloodstains on the nightgown now. Not anywhere.

BY BEDTIME MARLY’S
head pain has vanished, never to return. But in its place come the bad dreams.

She dreams about the pale girl she glimpsed just before the accident. The girl stands outside Marly’s gate, a long old-fashioned dress draped over her thin figure, gleaming through the night. She lifts her chin, as if to peer at the stars, head straining farther and farther back, until the muscles on the neck give and Marly hears the sound of crackling, of bones separating. Suddenly the woman’s head topples to one side, as if snapped off its stalk.

Marly cries out in the dream, then wakes to the sensation of Pook’s warm tongue slithering over her hand, ardently licking its way up her arm. She raises herself with a groan, thrusting Pook away. She squints at the clock through the darkness: 3:42. Irritated by the callous red glow of the numbers, she turns its face away, closing her eyes and sinking back on the pillow.

The next minute, the dog is all over her outflung hand, lavishing his tongue on every fold and crevice.

“Pook!”

When she switches on the bedside lamp, the burst of light shows what Pook was licking with such relish.

Red blood, welling under her fingernails, springing up faster than the dog can lick it away.

C
HAPTER
S
EVEN

S
he’s back in the pool.
Seth looks out the window at his sister Gita. She thinks the chlorinated water will lighten her skin. Gita has a drawer full of bleaching creams; she’s always adding extra Clorox to the pool, steeping in it for hours.

The various welfare families who live at the motel sit around the pool, dully sopping up the hot sun. Seth’s parents are visiting family in Mumbai for three weeks, so he is stuck indoors at the reception desk.

His parents make the trip every summer; usually they take Seth and Gita with them, but this time both children refused.

Seth doesn’t mind being Indian, but he hates India.

Gita is okay with India, but she hates being Indian.

Ironic, since only last year she was the world’s most obnoxious Hindu, berating her parents for their hypocrisy in joining the St. Paul’s Episcopal Church: “You throw away your whole heritage because you’re afraid to be different!”

True, but the Poonchwallas like to feel part of the community, and church is a pleasant way to mingle with neighbors and feel accepted. They chose St. Paul’s because in mid-August it holds a fair with rides and raffles, and the whole town attends; and the date coincides with the festival of Ganesh, the elephant-headed son of Parvati and Shiva, so the Poonchwallas feel they have only cheated a little on their religion.

“You think being a Christian will make you white!” Gita told her parents, running off her mouth about Krishna and Vishnu at every meal, as if they needed to be taught their own faith. For months she threw herself into worship and meditation, painting a bindi above her unibrow and stumbling around in a sari, until the school asked her to stop.

Of course, Gita would sell her soul to be white.

After the Hindu thing came Gita’s holy roller, born-again phase. She rode her bike to First Calvary of Innocents on weekends. Once when it rained, she asked Seth to drive her. He went along because he’d heard that the Pentecostal girls were brilliant at oral sex: all that speaking in tongues. This turned out not to be the case. And the service was bogus beyond belief, like a rave without the Ecstasy—crumpin’ with a cross—not to mention non-stop solicitations for money, which he had to lend his sister.

The fun part was when some parishioners testified about their struggles with dope addiction. Seth knew them all.

He’s their dealer.

After a month of getting washed in the blood of the Lamb, Gita switched to the Unitarians, taking the bus to Sunday services ten miles away in Quikabukket. There was a mosque nearby, so Gita stuck her head in there too, but they wouldn’t let her in.

Eventually, she stopped shopping.

She has something going on, though. Tacked to her bedroom wall are pictures she drew of weird mutants, some kind of private pantheon he can hear her praying gibberish to.

Wack job.

Their parents walk on eggshells around Gita. They seem frightened by both their children, who say and do as they please with sullenness and disrespect, the hallmarks of American adolescence. Frightening children are yet another cost of fitting in. Mother and father have only one condition: that the children excel in math and science. Since both kids post stellar grades in all their subjects, humiliating their peers, the Poonchwallas can feel as if they’ve gotten back at America.

Seth has a hardon again, something that happens so often the fabric of his tight jeans has gone threadbare and faded from the strain.

If he lived in India, he could be married by now. Even little children get married there. Then he would have someone to fuck whenever he wants—three, four times a day even.

He presses his penis against the handle of the desk drawer. He has got to get laid. One of these nights he’ll swing by Marly Walczak’s.

He looks up to see the mulatto kid come through the gate, waving eagerly to Gita and stripping to his swim trunks to get in the pool with her. He’s here every day. Maybe those two should get married.

“VAMPIRES DON’T EXIST,”
says Gita. Collin lies splayed on his back in the dead man’s float Gita has taught him. “But it could be Shaarinen taking the shape of a vampire to scare you. Shaarinen gets his power from fear. He needs it to take different shapes to make evil.”

She keeps her hand under his body, not touching, just poised there in case he panics. But somehow she removes his fear with the power of Gana, the woman god. That makes Gita the personal enemy of Shaarinen; she goes around evaporating all the fear he has taken the trouble to create.

“How do we know for sure that he’s Jane?” Collin asks.

“When I see her, I’ll know.” She tosses aside her long thick black hair, the ends coiling like king snakes in the water. Drops of sweat cling to her moustache. He can’t help but be impressed by the implacable eyes, swooping brows, the fierceness jutting from the soft nascent curves of puberty, like rocks tearing through dough. She thumps her hand on her heart, just north of her budding breasts. “It feels like someone’s cold hand reaching in, right here.”

“I felt it when she looked at me!” Collin is so excited he starts to sink. Gita’s hand meets his back, lifting his body back to the surface.

“I have to see her myself.” She adds, “You can’t go around deciding everyone’s Shaarinen. You’re new at this.”

Collin has trouble keeping up with her religious instruction. The strange names of her gods (Gana, Yenu Krisnu, Hotis) reverberate in his mind as vivid colors: magenta, lime, and gold; not at all like the gray uncertainty of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. Their names create pungent flavors in his mouth, like the spices in the Poonchwallas’ kitchen: cardamom, turmeric, mace.
Gana, Yenu Krisnu, Hotis
.

Gita has told him the legends and drawn their pictures, but Collin still has difficulty remembering who they are and what they do—except for Hotis, who has two penises where breasts should be and two breasts between his/her legs. Somehow he/she (Hotis is both male and female) and Yenu Krishnu (the Tawny One) are part of Gana the Mother. Only Shaarinen is separate, an outsider.

It all makes sense when Gita is talking, but as soon as she stops, it goes right out of Collin’s head.

He wants to bring Gita to the house to see Jane today. Not that he has any doubt Jane is Shaarinen: that cold hand has squeezed his heart not once, but twice.

The first time was today at breakfast, and the second time was after his father sent him upstairs. Collin put on his clothes to meet Gita, then crept into his dad’s bedroom to swipe some change left on the bureau.

“Put it back.” Suddenly Jane was behind him.

The coins were already in his hand when he whirled around. His heart froze; he was in the presence of Shaarinen for sure. He thrust out his chin. “Dad said I could.”

“Surely you know God’s commandment, ‘Thou shalt not steal.’”

But Gita had said it was all right: the money was for tithing. Tightening his fist, he tried to push past her.

Jane stepped to the side, blocking him. “I will give you some of my money instead.” She brought some crumpled dollar bills out of her pocket. “It’s already stolen.”

“You took it?”

She nodded shyly. “I had little choice. Therefore let me be the sinner, not you.”

“A lotta shit over three quarters and a dime,” Collin muttered, but he replaced his dad’s change on the bureau and took the money from her.

He is justified in hating Jane, he thinks as he and Gita wade to the shallow end of the pool. She’s nothing more than a thief.

“Stealing is peanuts for Shaarinen,” says Gita. “He’ll commit any crime, ‘specially murder.’”

She isn’t interested in inspecting Jane just yet; today she has planned for them to bike all the way to the Jewish synagogue in Huxberry Heights. Gita will talk their way inside. (Usually she pretends she’s writing a school paper on religion.) While the rabbi’s back is turned, Collin will take something.

When they staked out the Catholic church near the mall last week, Collin snuck into the sacristy and stole a set of bronze altar bells. Gita rejoined him a block away after she finished interviewing the priest. She said Gana would be pleased by the offering.

Their best heist was pedaling up Putman Hill to the big Meltzer estate and creeping onto the property to steal one of the tiki torches lining the path to the pool. Afterwards, they brazenly coasted down the hill with the torch balanced on Collin’s handlebars. Later they lit the wick and, by the light of the propane flame, chanted to Gana until the smoke detector went off in the vacant motel room they were using.

The mission is going well. They’ll both be rewarded when they’ve presented Gana enough offerings.

Unless Shaarinen intervenes.

“There he is!” cries Collin.

Gita’s eyes follow his pointing finger to the sidewalk across from the motel. Peering through the chain-link fence that surrounds the pool, she sees a skinny, pasty young woman walking down GraynierAvenue.

“Jane,” whispers Collin. He glances eagerly at Gita. “Do you feel anything?”

Gita starts to shiver as Jane walks out of sight. Wading out of the pool, Gita wraps herself in one of the motel’s skimpy sandpaper towels. Her teeth are rattling, shoulders trembling.

“Gita…are you okay?”

“Shut
up
. I got a tummy ache is all.” After a long moment she stops shaking. “Let’s get the bikes.”

“You sure you’re not sick?”

Ignoring the question, she’s already headed to the parking lot. “We’re gonna follow her.”

AFTER CRUISING EVERY
inch of Graynier on their bikes, with Collin pedaling Seth’s old banana seater, they give up. Jane is nowhere to be found. A day wasted. Back to Plan A: tomorrow they’ll head for Huxberry Heights and the synagogue.

All the same, Collin feels strong. Gita believes him that Jane is evil, and the hunt for Shaarinen is on. His new friend has the courage of titans. If she’s not afraid, he won’t be either.

He remembers how Gita helped him overcome his fear of water the first night they met. She led him down the pool steps, wading to the middle. The water came to his neck; the floor fell away steeply into the deep end.