Fiction

For what do you pray, in La Cappella dal Salt? For what and to whom? You come upon it by accident (still believing in accidents) veering from the old mule track during a thunderstorm, taking shelter from the rain sweeping the mountainside and beating the piode roof. Inside green bracken ferns knuckle up through the flag floor, the stone benches still holding warmth from the morning.

At the moment of my father Chester Lemon’s birth, the doctor delivering him dropped dead. I’ve tried to picture it ever since my father told me this story – was the baby halfway out or all the way out?, what about the placenta? et cetera – but I’ve never been able to properly arrange the scene in my mind.

Vera pottered in the kitchen, a wise word in his ear about when to simmer and how long to rest before carving. She might even stir the gravy while Roberto set the table with candles and wine. After dinner Roberto helped Vera shower, handtowel covering his eyes, as he massaged her tender spots and volunteered tips on posture and pelvic floors. Doctor Tom was all smiles at her last check-up. She’d put on weight, her heart was thrumming along nicely and her blood pressure had dropped. He made special mention of the apples in her cheeks and the garlic on her breath. At home, tablets, including those supposed to lift her mood, flushed the toilet every colour of the rainbow.

The boy’s lips moved, soft and quiet and constant. His eyes tracked the toy car he pushed along the table’s edge. ‘Melinda Bird?’ A doctor stepped up to the waiting room threshold, then leant in. Scanned the room. ‘Melinda Bird?’ I kept my eyes on the boy. His lips stilled. Turned inward. He flew his car over the table’s edge in slow motion and made the quiet, descending sound effects to go with it. Rain sprinkled the sunny window behind him, turning his corner into a kaleidoscope of rainbow globs. I closed my eyes, held the image. Breathed deeply and stood.

They lifted their music sheets up, all of them holding the sheet the same way and at the same height, and the sound of feet stopped and the rustling stopped and the coughing stopped and I guess the lady must have smiled because the girls all smiled back and quickly brushed their hair off their foreheads and became like statues. Finally, the lady bent down into her crutches and lifted her hands up as much as they would go while resting on the crutches, and the shoulders of every girl in the choir bounced up all at once as they took a breath.

With time, they could afford a bigger house. A longer driveway. Inching further away from her family but not so far that Frida would ping it was intentional, or so Tom assumed. They didn’t know their neighbours. Tom liked it that way. In fact, he became so unpleasant at times Frida wondered if it was all by design to drive others away. There were two citrus trees in this backyard, but since Frida never cooked any of that weird Mediterranean food from her childhood, again the fruit went uneaten. No bowls of bright lemons sat decoratively on the kitchen table. Tom spent his weekends much the same as he always had, mowing and burying grapefruit corpses. He would never allow them to rot on the ground.

The first time, I followed him down the side of an old building, then up an old fire escape. The door on the first floor was unlocked. With his hand still on the doorknob, my cousin looked searchingly into a room the way a boss might. He gave a nod, and I followed him through to a reception area where we stood and waited to catch a lift to the top floor. 

An old ex of mine would grumble that the work they did, their day job, was beneath them. They were an artist in their not day job, their real job, and not at all untalented, working at huge scale and hyper-fine detail in pencil, portraits so large and close that the face within the frame would show a forehead or a chin, but never both; a nose and one ear, but never both.

It’s not as if they don’t all know. She’s told them, several times. She explained when the family WhatsApp messages went round about who was bringing what and who needed the most room in the freezer and what kinds of berries would not cost a fortune, the endless chipper shorthand as if they all were genuinely looking forward to seeing each other and couldn’t wait to wade through first the logistics and then the bacchanalian blowout all over again.

Ma grabs hold of the dashboard. Her fingers are white with wanting to see that thing on the footpath, but she’s not driving and it’s hard to stop a car you’re not driving. Ma likes to drive. When Jonah has soccer after school and it’s just us, she puts the windows down and the music up and sometimes we sing together and go over the speed limit and her hair flies wild and she tells me things like how she once wanted to be an astronaut. I don’t believe her, because you have to fly to the moon for that and who would look after us then?