Mabel longed for the circle of lights of the Ferris wheel at the fairgrounds on the edge of town. The Hamilton County fair had just ended after a long weekend; as a little girl, Mabel had sat on the roof of the porch to watch the lights of the fair spin and flash, the carnival like a ghost city, a mid-western Brigadoon, rising from the mist once a year. On still nights she could hear the smash of the demolition derby or even the bleat of sheep penned and judged. Even years later, walking alongside the booths and tents and trucks of the carnival, the air thick with humidity and the smell of cotton candy and candied apples, Mabel wouldn’t have been surprised to see her father holding Lily up to pick a rubber duck from a tub of running water. On the bottom of the duck would be the number of Lily’s prize, a plastic shark’s tooth on the end of a necklace that Lily would give to her mother to wear. When her parents fussed over Lily, when Lily was small, was when Mabel most felt part of a family, when Lily’s crying and laughing, napping and waking, were of great amusement and concern. Mabel would never forget sitting on her mother’s lap in the old apartment one Sunday, both of them rapt and silent watching Lily sleep naked but for a diaper against her sleeping father’s naked chest. Her father lay back on the sofa, Lily in his arms, the funnies spread out on the floor beside them. The Silly Putty they’d been playing with still held the stretched-out image of Dick Tracy’s daughter-in-law Moonbeam. “Aren’t we lucky?” Mabel’s mother whispered in her ear.
At the fair just the night before, Jordan, even three sheets to the wind, had won Lily one of those square, painted mirrors, by knocking over milk bottles with a wrecked baseball, its stitching in pieces. On the mirror was a retro cartoon of R. Crumb’s bald-headed Keep On Truckin’ high-steppers. But Jordan let Mabel have the mirror when Lily disappeared with a gangly, nothing-to-lose carny who felt her up beneath the bleachers of the rodeo. Lily confessed in the middle of the night, in the middle of the midway noisy with heavy-metal music blaring from the Wild Octopus and the Screaming Mimi, and Jordan forgave her because she was in tears—the carny had stolen her ruby earrings by expertly nibbling on her lobes.
“There’s a State Highway 666,” Jordan said, the car still and silent, “goes south down Arizona. Can you imagine? Driving Starkweather’s car down Highway 666?”
The sleeves of Jordan’s shirt were too short for his long arms. Lily traced her finger along the scar across Jordan’s right wrist. “When you did this,” she said to Jordan, “did you leave some kind of note?” Lily and I wonder about so many of the same things, Mabel thought, pleased.
In all the months Mabel and Lily had known Jordan, they’d not spoken of his most obvious relation to their father. But the similarity wasn’t all that obvious. After all, she thought, their father had succeeded at suicide and Jordan had failed—two very, very different situations.
Mabel listened closely to Jordan’s hindered breathing, the old-man’s rattle of congestion in his young-man’s chest. He was only a boy, just barely nineteen, yet afflicted with a litany of minor ailments and an addiction to over-the-counter remedies. He licked at those cold-medicine lollipops for kids even when he had no sniffle; he constantly popped Advil, sucking the sweet, candy-like coating off each tablet. As he took another hit off his Primatene Mist, Mabel wondered how Lily could just sit there resisting holding his stuffed-up head to her bosom to smooth down his rooster tail and whisper love and comfort.
Jordan recited from his suicide note. “Think this not,” he mumbled, “a tragedy of great proportion. Think it only the delicate misstep of someone’s dying life.”
“Hmmmm,” Lily hummed, her voice a sexy wink. “You’re a poet, sweetie.” But Mabel leaned back disappointed. She’d hoped for a letter violent with accusation and spite. These were not the true words of a young man longing for death, and Mabel knew something of fake suicide notes. Before her mother left for Mexico, she took Mabel and Lily aside. “Girls,” she’d said, for Mabel and Lily were just very small girls then, Mabel only about ten years old, “I have something for you.” She took a piece of paper from her pocket and unfolded it. Mabel recognized her mother’s stationery—powder blue with gray kittens next to Fiona B. Rollow at the top of the page—and her mother’s handwriting, all petite curlicue and extra flourish. But her mother said, “Your father left this note behind. To whom it may concern,” she read aloud, “Please, no one take responsibility for my pain . . . it is my own fault, my own failing. My daughters, please don’t blame your mother for my death, and don’t blame your mother if she can’t take care of you on her own. It would be much too hard for her, as it would be for anyone. I realize what I am about to do is so unfair. But I dug a hole for myself, and I can’t get out of it. Sincerely, Eddy Rollow.”
Mabel had wanted to believe those were her father’s words, but it had been impossible. My daughters? as it would be for anyone? I dug a hole? It had depressed Mabel even then that her mother wouldn’t have known better, wouldn’t have known that Mabel and Lily loved their father so much because he was not a man who would write with such formality and stiffness. If Eddy Rollow had left a suicide note, Mabel thought, it would have been in the margins of a favorite book. Or he would have written it on the wall of the kitchenette of the old apartment, his script flowing around the pomegranates and grapes and almonds in the wallpaper’s print. Or, more likely, he would have written his words in the dissolving steam of the bathroom mirror.
Now the note, which Mabel kept in a fire-safe box, was taking on the qualities of age and of damage from the constant opening and closing. Each time Mabel took the note out to read it again, its folds crumbled and tore a bit more, and more of the words, in pencil, had begun to fade away into the powder blue. Always before, Mabel had hated the letter, this evidence of her mother’s deception, but she’d grown to need it. As its words dissolved and the paper fell apart, as it slowly ceased to exist, it became something true. This lie became an honest portrait of Mabel’s mother and her 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.