Slice of Cherry Read online

  “Lemme get this straight. You wanna go back in time to stop Daddy from killing?”

  “I know it’s a long shot,” she whispered, and looked away from the incredulity in Kit’s face, trying not to feel like an idiot and failing.

  Kit pulled Fancy away from the tree and into a loose embrace.

  “He wouldn’t’ve stopped. It’s like with me and Franken—once you get a taste for blood, nothing else satisfies.” Kit kissed her fingers like a gourmand.

  “Stop joking.” She hid her face in her sister’s neck. “Sometimes I feel like he’s dead already.”

  “Everybody dies, Fancy Pants.” Kit steered her sister back toward the creek. “Now I’ll tell you a story. Do you know what Uncle Miles did before he died in our room, all feverish and snotty? He opened a door.”

  Fancy lifted her head and looked her sister in the eye and still couldn’t believe it. “Shut up.”

  “Big Mama told me! Well, she didn’t tell me. I heard her talking about it with Aunt Sybelline one day, a long time ago. The door that leads from our sleeping porch to the inner room isn’t the original door. The door that used to be there had a keyhole. Uncle Miles put his key into that keyhole and twisted it and twisted it until he unlocked a door.”

  Fancy’s hand dropped unconsciously to touch the silver skeleton key dangling from the silver necklace she always wore. Kit and Madda carried their keys on key chains, and Daddy had kept his inside his shoe. All Porterenes had such keys. The Mayor, an ageless mysterious woman with mirrors for eyes, gifted them to all Porterenes on the day of their birth. Porterenes would sooner part with an arm than with their keys. It was as much a part of them as their skin and bones: They were doorkeepers, stranger, braver, and more badass than anyone else in the world.

  “What was on the other side of the door?” Fancy asked.

  “Death,” said Kit, as though it should have been obvious.

  Fancy tried to picture it. “What did Death look like?”

  “Not the person. The place. Uncle Miles opened a door, not to another world, but to his own grave. A big hole in the cemetery waiting for him to fill it, and the sight of it freaked him the hell out. He slammed that door and locked it and never opened it again. Anybody who wanted to get into his room had to go outside and circle the house and come in through the porch door. Nobody could open that inner door, even after he died. That’s why they had to tear the whole thing out and put in a new door.”

  “But it’s not like Uncle Miles locked out death. He died anyway.”

  “That’s what I said! Nobody can escape death, not even Daddy. If you did go back in time and warn him, he’d probably get hit by a bus or something. Daddy made his bed, and now he’s gotta die in it.” Kit squeezed Fancy’s shoulders. “I’m not saying it doesn’t suck, but sometimes you just gotta face facts.”

  Fancy, who had zero interest in facing facts, pulled out of Kit’s grip and plopped down next to some shrubbery near the creek. “I don’t wanna talk about death anymore.” She reached in her pocket and removed a worn leather pouch. “You wanna play marbles? I found a cat’s-eye the other day. It’s pink.” She fished it from the pouch. “See?”

  “Forget that.” Kit sat next to her. “All this talk about death has me in the mood to see Daddy. Show me.”

  “In what?”

  “One of those marbles?”

  “They’re too small.”

  “In the creek?”

  “Too big.”

  “I know.” Kit went to their bikes, leaning tiredly against two pine trees, and retrieved her water bottle. She then kicked off her flats and pulled off her leggings and waded into the creek in her black bikini, navigating the skeletal river stones that gave Bony Creek its name. She splashed the clear, sunny water on the back of her neck as she filled the bottle.

  “How’s this, Goldilocks?” she asked after she’d returned to her sister.

  “Just right,” said Fancy, glumly.

  She took the bottle from Kit and stared at the clear water, and after a short time it darkened.

  It was like watching a wee film. A grim one featuring a slight man in an orange prison jumpsuit swinging gently from an improvised noose made of bedsheets that dangled from the ceiling of a narrow gray cell.

  Kit gasped. “Daddy?”

  The man’s legs twitched at the sound of Kit’s voice, then kicked up and out, high kicks like a Rockette as Fancy hummed the cancan song under her breath.

  Kit looked away from the dancing man in the bottle and scowled at her sister. “That’s not funny.”

  Fancy abandoned the cancan for the Charlie Brown theme song. Immediately the man performed the Snoopy dance, twisting violently on the rope.

  “I said that’s not funny! Stop it!”

  Fancy stopped humming and squirted the bottled water at Kit, destroying the image inside. “You’re the one who wanted to see him.”

  “Him. Not one of your weirdo fantasies.” She wrested the bottle from Fancy and squirted her back.

  “I can’t.” Fancy scrambled away from the water and sat near a shrub overrun with mustang grapes.

  Kit followed her. “You could if you wanted to.”

  “I don’t want to.”

  “You promised!”

  Fancy picked a grape and popped it into Kit’s mouth; Kit accepted it in surprise, then puckered her mouth as though it was sour.

  “What if he’s getting raped?” Fancy asked. “You wanna see that?”

  “Nobody gets raped on death row,” said Kit, like she knew anything about it. “They’re all isolated from each other and lonely. Maybe Daddy’s just lying around, thinking about us and missing us terribly. Why don’t you fantasize about that? Or, I know! Show the day he took us fishing on the Sabine. That was the best day ever.”

  Fancy tried a grape. They were very sour. “I can’t see the past. Or the future. Unless I make it up. I can only see the present.”

  Kit shoved Fancy aside so she could reach the grapes herself. “You’re so useless sometimes.” She unscrewed the cap from the bottle, emptied the creek water, and began to fill it with grapes. “You think Franken’ll like these? They might be too sour for him.”

  Fancy, who cared nothing for Franken’s likes or dislikes, said, “People might be looking for him by now. We should probably do that lobotomy soon.”

  “What’s the hurry? There’s only him and his drunk mother, and she won’t even notice he’s gone.”

  Fancy slipped off her cover-up, revealing a black one-piece suit dotted with pink teddy bears. She was frowning. “How do you know that?”

  “He told me. His home life is extremely tawdry.”

  “You been going down to the cellar without me?”

  Kit paused in the act of picking grapes, seemingly surprised by the upset in Fancy’s voice. “You make him nervous.”

  “Me? You’re the one slicing him up every night.”

  “Well that’s just it, Fancy Pants. I know him inside and out. Literally. So he feels like he can talk to me. And I didn’t cut on him at all yesterday. I decided to let him heal like you suggested, and since I couldn’t play with him, we talked. I told him about our classes, and he thinks they’re a good idea.”

  “Who cares what he thinks?”

  “It’s just conversation, Fancy,” Kit said calmly, the way Madda would have, refusing to argue when that was what you most wanted to do. “Let’s go sit in the creek.”

  The sisters settled themselves in the middle of the creek. The jolt of cold water up to their hips made the idea of summer bearable again. Odd but harmless blue fish with forward-facing eyes swam fearlessly around the sisters’ legs.

  The sisters fell silent, listening to the woodpeckers jackhammer the trees. After some time Fancy asked, “You think it’s true? What they say about Cherry? That she can grant wishes?”

  “Madda swears it’s true. My problem is, I have no idea what to wish for.”

  “I’ll probably ask for tickets on a steamer ship.”
r />   Kit crinkled her nose and let the fish swim between her fingers. “Nobody travels by steamboat anymore, stupid girl. Not around the world they don’t.”

  “Fine, then,” said Fancy, disappointed. “Plane tickets.”

  “To where?”

  “The South Seas. Some island nobody’s ever been and could never find.”

  “How you gone get tickets to a place nobody’s ever been to and could never—?”

  Fancy splashed water at Kit. “Don’t bug me with details.” She thought some more. “I’ll wish for Madda to get promoted. Then she won’t have to work double shifts and we can all be together.”

  Kit splashed Fancy back. “If we could make wishes like that, I’d wish for Daddy to get a ‘get outta jail free’ card, but Madda says that at Cherry Glade you can only make a wish for yourself. It’s too bad I don’t know myself that well.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  The blue fish huddled in Kit’s lap, as if their weird, sad eyes could see her distress. But Kit didn’t want to be comforted. Not by fish. She shooed them away. “Something’s missing, but I don’t know what it is. Ever since Daddy left, there’s this hole.”

  “I’m here,” Fancy said, and hugged her sister as tight as she could.

  Kit hugged back, squeezing hard enough to hurt Fancy’s spine, but when Fancy let go, Kit slumped like an overwatered flower. “That didn’t fill it.” She pressed her hand to her chest. “That’s what I’ll wish for, I guess. Something to fill this emptiness.”

  FROM FANCY’S DREAM DIARY:

  A SHIRTLESS WOMAN LAY FACEDOWN ON THE CELLAR FLOOR. DADDY WAS STRADDLING HER AND YANKING BIG, SILVER BATTERIES OUT OF HER BACK. WHILE HE WORKED, HE WHISTLED A SONG. I THINK IT WAS “HAPPINESS IS A WARM GUN.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The sisters biked along the road that led into town, on their way to buy new dresses for Juneteenth. Even though summer hadn’t officially begun, the sun was brutally hot, burning the high grass and nourishing the virulent sunflowers that overran the fields.

  “Music for you makes sense,” Fancy was saying, longing for a heat rash or sunstroke so that she would have a reason not to go to Cherry Glade. “But me and art? I can barely draw stick figures.”

  “I’m not going to that class.” Kit removed her black newsboy cap and splashed water over her head from her water bottle, gasping as if it were freezing.

  Fancy was surprised into silence; the pink ribbons on her black sun hat flapped in the wind. Not even Kit would defy Madda. Would she?

  “What could Madda do?” said Kit, reading Fancy’s mind. “Put us on punishment? And if she did, how could she enforce it? She’s never home!”

  “I don’t want her to be mad at us,” said Fancy hesitantly.

  “Who cares if she gets mad!” Kit yelled, startling a flock of oil-colored grackles from the sunflower fields. The birds spun like a blue-black dust devil before resettling out of sight. “Why should I have to go to some phony-baloney class just to make Madda happy? How come nobody ever tries to make me happy? Why can’t I ever do what I want?”

  For once Fancy didn’t feel that Kit was being a drama queen. Madda acted as though they never saw other people. The sisters saw plenty of other at school, where they were in not only different classes but different grades. Fancy knew exactly how to deal with people: stay away from them, and when that was impossible, ignore them. People inspired too many unhealthy urges.

  The sisters coasted along in silence for a while, the trees thinning as they rode into downtown Portero, or the square, as everyone called it, after Fountain Square, a landmark in the middle of town that Porterenes used to orient themselves. Upsquare was north of Fountain Square, and downsquare was south. Anything north of upsquare or south of downsquare was way upsquare or way downsquare. Anything farther away than that was outside the borders of Portero and therefore of no interest to anyone but outsiders.

  Fancy and Kit jounced along redbrick streets past low, colorful buildings. The docile trees lining the medians had cute little cages around them and nothing in common with their cousins in the wild forests upsquare. The whole town generally smelled pine fresh or, when the wind was right, like freshly baked bread, thanks to the bread factory in the warehouse district. Many days, however, Portero smelled like blood.

  The sisters turned at the light onto Claudine Street and skidded to a stop.

  Claudine Street looked as though it had been unzipped, bricks scattered everywhere. Cars and trucks were flipped over or teetering at weird angles; hard, white water from a burst hydrant swept past the sisters’ tires in a flood.

  The sisters pedaled onto the dry, deserted sidewalk and parked their bikes at the nearest bike rail. Kit took Fancy’s hand and led her up the street, deftly maneuvering around the pools of blood on the sidewalk.

  “What do you think did all this?” Fancy asked, clinging to Kit’s hand, passing shop windows where wide-eyed people watched them go by.

  Kit only shrugged. That was the problem with living in Portero—it could have been anything.

  “Don’t be scared, Fancy Pants. Look.” Kit pointed out the sun-bright green trucks lining the street. “The Mortmaine are here. Whatever it is, they’re already on it.”

  If Porterenes were badass simply for surviving daily life in Portero, the Mortmaine were beyond badass, an elite group of men and women who wore only green, like a uniform, and whose only job was to prevent monsters from swallowing the town whole.

  But just because the Mortmaine were out in force was no reason to be incautious. The sisters hurried into a dress shop midway up the block, a cool oasis with “Summertime Blues” thumping from a hidden speaker. A shopgirl in a slim dress with a mandarin collar stood behind the counter leisurely munching her way through a bag of pork rinds while flipping through Vogue.

  “Hey,” Kit called. “What the hell happened outside?”

  “Monster,” said the shopgirl, not looking up from her magazine. “Came up from under the ground. Usual shit.”

  Slightly disappointed that an exciting tale wasn’t to be had, the sisters set themselves to the task of dress hunting, rummaging through the clothes racks for something ruffly and refined enough to pass muster at Cherry Glade. When they’d narrowed it down to two dresses, Kit sought the opinion of the shopgirl.

  “What do you think of us in these?” Kit held up the black seersucker halter dress with white dots for herself and the black lace cotton pinafore for Fancy.

  The shopgirl sucked pork-rind crumbs from her fingers, studying not the dresses but the sisters. “Ain’t y’all those Cordelle girls?”

  The sisters sighed. It had only been a matter of time. “Yeah, we’re those girls. So what?” said Kit.

  “Too bad they don’t still hang people,” said the shopgirl. “That’s what. Y’all’s daddy was purely evil. Lethal injection’s too good for him. After what he did, hanging’s too good for him.” She didn’t even say it in a mean way, as though Daddy’s “evilness” were such a foregone conclusion that it didn’t even bear getting upset about.

  Kit took the dresses to the shopgirl, her friendly smile poison red. “Forget hanging,” she said as the shopgirl rang up the dresses. “I think they should peel all the skin from Daddy’s body with a fruit knife, fry it, and then make him eat it. Like . . . well, like pork rinds.” Kit helped herself to a handful from the bag on the counter. “Think of it! A pound of Guthrie Cordelle flesh, all crispy and delicious. Mm-mmm!”

  The shopgirl turned pale at the sight of Kit’s bared teeth, so pale she was nearly invisible. “Th-that’ll be seventy-eight seventy-three.”

  Kit swept the bag of pork rinds to the floor and then flung four twenties into the shopgirl’s face, making her flinch. “Keep the change,” she said sweetly.

  Once they were outside, Kit’s friendly smile melted in the fervid sunlight as they stormed up the broken street. “Hanging’s too good for him?” she yelled, flinging the dress bag backward to Fancy. “What does she know fro
m hanging?”

  “The bike rack’s back that way,” said Fancy, running to keep up with her sister’s longer legs.

  “You know what we should do? We should hang her and then ask how good it is. Get her expert fucking opinion.”

  “Don’t say ‘fucking.’ And you can’t kill someone for being rude. If we did that, we’d have to kill everyone in Portero.”

  “So no downside, right?”

  Kit detoured down a shaded alley and then another. Fancy realized they were behind the dress shop. A few of the bricks from Claudine Street had made their way back here—whatever had exploded out of the ground had done so with great force. Water from a leaky pipe sticking out of the building had created several tiny puddles that wet Fancy’s pink bobby socks and attracted thirsty clouds of mosquitoes.

  Fancy looked around, uneasy.

  “Why’re we back here?” “We’re gone wait for that shopgirl,” said Kit, her long spider hands picking carefully over the Claudine Street bricks, testing the heft of each one.

  “Why would she leave the shop?”

  Kit settled against the building opposite the side door of the dress shop, her cap pulled low over her eyes so that her poison mouth was the most visible part of her, the same shade of red as the brick in her fist.

  “She smelled like an ashtray,” said Kit, “so she’ll take a cigarette break. And she’ll come back here because going out front and blowing smoke in the customers’ faces ain’t exactly good customer service.”

  “We don’t have to hurt her. We could just . . .”

  She had Kit’s full attention, but Fancy had no idea what normal people did when someone insulted them.

  Fancy swung the dress bag a few times and then stood near her sister against the wall. “We can’t really hang her, Kit.”

  Kit stared unblinkingly at the blank metal door of the shop. “Why don’t you go get us some snow cones?”

  “You trying to get rid of me?”