Haven

“Clusters and Voids 2” by Diana Naccarato

Luck and her sister Mercy meet at a deli downtown. Luck asks, where’ve you been hiding? What she means is what secrets do you have now. Mercy studies the menu fastidiously. I met someone. A man. She squeezes half a lemon into her glass, wincing when its juice meets the edge of her jagged cuticle. The water downtown tastes like pennies and the lemon doesn’t do it any favors.

Are the blintzes any good? She asks. Luck wrinkles her nose.

That’s OK, I don’t even like sweets anyways. Mercy declares. She will get the whitefish salad. She thinks whitefish salad will impress him. He only drinks herbal, viscous liquor from Italy, and laughs when she puckers around its bite. He wants her to get used to putting her mouth around something bitter. Older men don’t respect you if you still want things to be saccharine.

Since when? Luck demands. She once saw Mercy drink an entire ramekin of syrup at IHOP, and then ask the waitress for another. When she opens her mouth, a mine's worth of silver glitters in the light. Mercy ignores her. This is her prerogative, and besides, what does Luck know about men?

Actually, Luck would reply if Mercy dared say her thoughts aloud, quite a bit.

Sometimes she feels like she knows too much. Luck has been married since before she was Mercy’s age, clinging to the life raft of her husband since before she could rent a car. She can read the rorschach of his mood before he even finishes pissing in the morning, and then determine how he will want his eggs. What else could love be, she thinks, than never breaking the yolk.

Luck orders the blintzes to spite Mercy, even though they are not very good and make her teeth hurt. Mercy orders the whitefish even though the smell of it flips her stomach almost immediately. Both sisters just wanted the pastrami, but Luck won't take her chances with deli meat, and Mercy won’t eat beef for political reasons. It has to do with the climate, she says, but really it is the gentle, wet marbles of a cow's eye. How it rolls around in the soft white lid, sheltered by long silk lashes. Mercy once saw a cow laid out for slaughter, throat cut clean across. A fly crawled across the cow's open eye, its body a shiny emerald on the glassy surface. On the way home, their father stopped for hamburgers, and yelled when Mercy only wanted a milkshake. She wonders if Luck remembers. What Luck remembers: forcing herself to eat small bites of her little sister's burger to keep their fathers hands on the wheel, holding her head between her legs to keep from puking, her sister's small hand tracing letters on her back.

T-H-A-N-K-U

 ***

Mercy meets her sister Luck at a bar downtown. How are you, she asks, even though she already gets the gist of it. Luck’s mood has all the subtlety of a mushroom cloud, slouched as she is against the cool leather of the banquette with her shoulders almost touching her earlobes. A metal toothpick wobbles between her lips, stripped of its garnish. The extra olives in her martini are all she’s deigned to eat today.

Great, Luck replies, never better.

Mercy moves to touch her sister's hand but Luck slides it off the table and against her stomach, which is tender with bruises. The needles her husband empties into her subcutaneous fat have surprising bite for how small they are, and Luck has fostered a new sympathy for pincushions. Mercy says nothing. What is there to say? When Luck was in college and Mercy just barely graduating high school , Luck drove her sister across the river and waited in the parking lot of a sterile looking building while Mercy lay supine in a dark room. The doctor gave her pills in a paper cup and told her to take them again the next day. Luck handed Mercy a can of ginger ale and started the car—they didn’t discuss it then and they won’t now.

How’s your boyfriend? Luck asks her sister, raking the words across the sharp edge of her knowledge.

He’s not my boyfriend, Mercy demurs. The drink she orders tastes like sunscreen and corn syrup. She likes it as much as she regrets all the late night phone calls to her sister, which is to say very much. Not only is he not her boyfriend, he is another woman's husband. The word feels foreign to her. When his wife called her to ask her—more politely than the situation required—to please stop sleeping with her husband, Mercy turned it over and over in her mouth, a hard candy she was determined to suck the sweetness out of. Husband husband husband. The wife got flustered and hung up the phone, leaving Mercy chanting into the air between their phones. She told Luck the story in hiccuping sobs to which her sister replied, I’m not sure what you were expecting. As if Mercy had not mentioned the whittled bone of his naked ring finger, a suspicion that teased desire out of her like sharks in chummed water. His wife’s name was Honor. Mercy spent two hours finding every trace of her the internet had to offer, and then wept to Honor’s husband on the phone. They met at a hotel in Vancouver the next day.

Luck knows all about it, and only hates her a little for it. Mercy always wanted the toy at the bottom of the claw machine, or on the top shelf of the shooting gallery, and she usually cajoled someone into getting it for her.

Luck looked Honor up too. She had an expensive nose and high breasts. Her photos glittered with competence. Luck thought, if a woman like that—but stopped short of putting two and two and her husband together. Thinking about it now makes Luck feel tired, like laying her head down on the table and letting her sister stroke the back of her head with her plastic nails.

Should we get some food? Mercy asks. Luck is looking around the bar, her sister, her near empty second martini like she is seeing it all from the wrong side of a hot day.

No, Luck insists, I’m great.

Luck wonders if her sister ever thinks about the car ride, the clinic, and Mercy does but mostly she thinks about the ginger ale. Her sister carefully maneuvering over speed bumps, as if she were made of spun sugar. When she dropped Mercy off at home, she’d turned and said, Are you OK?

Yes, Mercy had insisted, I’m great.

*** 

Two sisters meet in a wood paneled room on Failing. It has been months since they spoke. One arrives early to prove her sister wrong. The other arrives on time but sits in her car and looks at pictures of cats on the internet for five minutes before going inside. The one who is early has ordered two beers in a gesture of goodwill, but she’ll end up drinking both since the other, she sees after she has already ordered, is swollen through the middle. She looks like a summer tomato threatening to split its seams, and it is still early. Her doctor would be angry if he knew she was here for dough and sausage.

Silence heavy as fleece hangs over them. They both think the other looks tired, and neither are wrong. One’s makeup clings to the creases around her eyes, delineating where her smile has carved grooves into her face. The other has circles the color of a bruise, or the jacarandas they used to trample on the street outside their house. They look soft as flowers too.

They sit in silence until one ventures, We're moving soon.

The other snaps to attention. Where?

Reno. It’s nice and dry there. Better for him, the one who is moving looks over her sister's shoulder as she delivers the news, waiting for the sting of rebuke, but it doesn’t come. Her sister thinks the other has always been second wife material, and here she is, stretched perfectly over the dress form of her future.

The plates warm their faces with sauerkraut steam that cracks the glacier between them. It makes them miss their mother. Her name was Haven.  She smelled like caraway and would spend hours on Sundays rolling out tender dough to fill with cheese and onions. The sisters would eat scraps of it that she trimmed, the skin under her arms flapping like wings as she shooed them away. They never once got sick from raw flour but their mother would watch them intently, sometimes falling asleep on the floor between their twin beds, just in case.

 I miss her, the younger tells her sausage.

Me too, the older says to her borscht.

*** 

Luck calls her sister from a hospital bed, Mercy’s face appearing too close and blinking on her phone screen, which Luck tilts down to the newborn in her lap. The baby looks like a closed, red fist.

How do you feel, she asks, and Luck decides to lie.

I feel good, she says when actually she feels like she’s been run over by a truck, flattened like roadkill on one of the many scorching roads leading up the mountain to Mercy’s house. Every so often a nurse she has never seen before comes to knead their dry hands across Luck’s pelvis, and then judge the rush of blood it's just released. Luck minds terribly, mostly because they are calling it a massage.

Are they feeding you? Mercy asks. Her sister's face is swollen from fluids and high blood pressure, her nose spread wide across her face like a cookie in a too hot oven. She’s never looked more beautiful, Mercy thinks.

Yes. Jello, mostly, and they both laugh. Luck thinks the desert seems to suit Mercy. Her back is to a terracotta wall. An iced tea sweats in her hand, Luck would bet money that the lemon in it is from Mercy’s own trees.

The newborn begins to stir and finally opens her eyes, blinking slowly at the phone.

She’s beautiful. Mercy lies, Luck nodding in agreement. When she looks at her daughter, love like an anvil careens into the pit of her stomach. It’s closer to fear than she’d expected.

What’s her name? Luck and Mercy volleyed names back and forth for months. Charity. Joy. Fortune. Luck said them over and over to her belly and waited for one to stick, but none quite fit. She watched them slide off the baby, rain down a window on the wettest day of the year. Her husband said, let’s wait till she’s born to decide, but when they laid her daughter across her chest–larval and screaming, she only looked like herself.

I call her Jane, Luck says.

I love it, Mercy replies.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Emily Myles is a writer born under a Scorpio moon in Modesto, California. They live in Portland, OR with their children and partner. 

about the artist

Diana Naccarato is an artist based in New York City focusing on painting and drawing. Diana holds an MFA in Studio Art from The City College of New York (CUNY), and a BFA in Painting and Drawing from SUNY New Paltz. She teaches Foundations Studio Art and Art History at The City University of New York. Diana works with paint, paper, photographs and found materials to make images and objects that are ambiguous and not easily recognizable. You can view her art at www.diananaccarato.com and follow @diananaccarato on Instagram for news and updates.