confusion.
If Mabel had been in the front seat with Jordan, she would have taken his hand and kissed his scar, then held his hand to her cheek. She and Lily knew none of the details of their father’s suicide, except that it involved a gun. They didn’t know if he’d put it in his mouth or in his ear, didn’t know if it had taken apart his head or had left a simple clean hole. Mabel had even fantasized that he’d merely meant to shoot himself in the foot, to injure himself to get disability. He’d often complained of his job as a foreman at a company that manufactured trailer homes. Mabel had loved how his skin smelled of the sawdust from freshly cut wood, and she’d sit on his lap and nuzzle her nose in his neck as he read from the funnies page at night. He particularly enjoyed Andy Capp, so much so that he even ate a bag of Andy Capp—brand Hot Fries every day from the lunchroom vending machine.
Mabel touched at the back of Jordan’s neck; his skin was hot, almost feverish, and damp with sweat. “Drive us someplace,” she said, looking toward the little yellow lights of Bonnevilla. Mabel wished Jordan would drive them quickly away, fast enough for them to move ahead in time, for her to look back on the whole of her life and learn something about who she would become. Would she have any babies, and would she be the type of mother to abandon them, or would she be the type of mother to steal them away and vanish without a trace? Actually, she couldn’t see herself with children at all—she imagined something of a monastic life for herself, imagined a life of stomped grapes and kept bees and scratchy robes with belts of rope.
2.
STREET LAMPS LIT THE EMPTY SIDE - walks of the town square. The only places still open were the steakhouse and a pool hall that Mabel hadn’t been in since she was four years old. As they passed, Mabel could remember the smell of her dad’s Old Golds doused out in mugs of flat beer. Mabel had felt like a celebrity as she’d spun around on the stool, gathering up the attention of all the barflies and pool players. She once ordered a Shirley Temple because that was what she’d heard a little girl in a beret on TV order in a hotel lounge, but her father had said with a wink, “Nah, give her something stronger, Les. Mix her up a Roy Rogers.”
As Jordan parked the car in front of The Red Opera House, Mabel said, “What would I have been doing in the pool hall at four years old? And where were you, Lily?”
“Mom needed a break from having a rowdy four-year-old all day long,” Lily said. “And I would have been practically a baby, so he couldn’t have taken me to the bar.” She added, “I would’ve been just about a year old,” pleased with her youth. “It would have been so inappropriate.”
“One foot in the womb,” Jordan said, pinching Lily’s baby-fat cheek.
Mabel’s father quit drinking shortly after that night he treated her to a Roy Rogers. Mabel reached over and combed her fingers through Lily’s ponytail, pitying her because she never got to have a mocktail with their daddy.
“I found a way to break into The Red Opera House,” Jordan said, looking into the rearview at Mabel. Mabel had longed for years to get inside. She’d heard of the curtain hand-painted with birds by a Dutch artist and of ruby-eyed dragonflies in the stained-glass chandeliers. “There are murals on the wall of people in masks,” Jordan said, telling her about how he’d found his way inside only a few nights before.
Lily threw open the car door, got out, and kicked off her too-big shoes. She carried one shoe in each hand as she stormed down the sidewalk, away from the opera house. “Lily!” Jordan called. “Lily! Where are you going? What are you mad about?” But Mabel knew this was another of Lily’s fits—Lily didn’t like Mabel and Jordan’s shared interest in junk and old buildings. Mabel knew that Lily was headed toward the end of the block lit up by Jordan’s father’s barbershop; it was after hours, but Mr. Swain often spent evenings in his barber chair avoiding Mrs. Swain at home. Mrs. Swain, when stewed, which was often, became a comic-strip domestic situation, her brittle bleached hair up in rollers, her housecoat hanging open over a flimsy slip, a rolling pin a weapon in her hand. So Mr. Swain kept a VCR at the barbershop, along with his collection of old Suzanne Pleshette movies and the complete episodes of The Bob Newhart Show. He’d watch the tapes on his black-and-white portable, drinking Windsor and smoking Swisher Sweets. Both Lily and Mabel had terrible crushes on Mr. Swain; he, like their own parents, had been only a teenager when he’d fathered Jordan, so he was an extravagantly young older man with thick yellow hair and a flat stomach. He cut hair in his Levis and tight, white T-shirt and wore a plastic comb tucked behind his ear. Lily claimed to Mabel that he once unbuttoned his jeans and pushed them down a bit for her to see a horned red devil with “The Devil Made Me Do It!” tattooed at his lower abdomen.
“Just forget about Lily,” Mabel said, though she knew Jordan could never. He didn’t even hear Mabel say it; he was concentrating on the sight of Lily walking away.
In the stone at the top of the building before them was written “The Red Opera House 1893,” but the bricks had been painted green for as long as Mabel could remember. Mabel wondered if “red opera” referred to the kinds of productions the theater had staged—bloody conflagrations in all red costume against red backdrops, the actors wailing and moaning their music as they fell to the floor stabbed or shot through.
Jordan got out and held his hand into the backseat to help Mabel from the car. Though he moved toward the alley, he didn’t take his eyes from Lily’s back. But once off the street, he cheered up, and he nonchalantly pushed open a hinged basement window with the toe of his boot. After crawling in through the basement, Jordan and Mabel walked up into the grocery store. Jordan climbed onto a corner pinball machine to pull a ladder down from a door in the ceiling, and he and Mabel both stepped up into the opera house of the second floor.
Mabel was anxious to see the walls and the stage of the theater lit by the full moon, but she couldn’t take her eyes off Jordan pushing aside a cobweb to clear Mabel’s path, a web so thick it looked like a nylon stocking. “No one’s spoken a word here for years,” Mabel whispered in Jordan’s ear, thinking of Mary and Dickon and their secret garden. The room was surprisingly cool, and she thought she could hear the drip of a faucet. A painted Ophelia, in a dress with the iridescence of peacock feathers, drowned on the door to the dressing rooms. Lady Godiva with butterflies in her long tresses rode a horse across the ceiling.
“It’s so beautiful in here,” Mabel said, touching the burned wick of a candle on a chandelier that sat in a heap in the corner. “Why don’t they let anyone up to see it?”
“The place is falling apart,” Jordan said, “and it would be too expensive to repair. All the boards are rotten through. We could fall through the floor at any given minute. So walk on your tiptoes and keep yourself as light as you can.” Jordan opened the doors to a wardrobe, and the glassy eyes of a fox stole caught a sliver of moonlight and stared back at them.
“I’m taking Lily to Mexico,” Jordan said. He blurted it, like he’d been waiting and waiting for just the right moment but had given up.
“The beer tastes like skunk down there,” was all Mabel could think of to say. “You have to put fruit in it to drink it.” For years, Mabel’s mother had discouraged Mabel and Lily from visiting her, painting a portrait of Mexico as a place of banditry and bad water, a place where children lost their arms in factory machines and dead hookers were left to rot in the streets. Even when very young, Mabel had seen through her mother’s efforts to disguise her new home as uninhabitable, but Mabel had also grown comfortable with the idea of her mother as virtually unreachable in her foreign land. It was one 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
