Read Online The Phantom Limbs of the Rollow Sisters by Timothy Schaffert - Free Book Online Page B

different pairs by holding them before her eyes and reading from a framed list of hotel laws. Mabel opened the drawer of an apothecary and took from it a cornshuck doll, its skirt half eaten by mites. Mabel then sat on the floor next to a chest full of single, unmatched shoes, and she tried each one on. Lily pressed the dents from the plastic head of a doll.
    They lifted things, examined them, then put them in the wrong places; they scooted aside tables and chairs to make paths for themselves; they picked up boxes to look in the boxes beneath them. The shop, a secondhand shop where nothing ever changed hands, where the prices had all faded from the tags, possessed an order and permanence Mabel relied upon. It was as if the layers of dust and webs that covered everything anchored everything to the floor. Mabel had even hidden things of her own in the shop—there was a letter,from her Aunt Phyll, folded up and tucked behind a hat band; inside a toaster was a honeymoon photo of her mother and father in front of Mount Rushmore. Mabel even kept the pieces of a busted record, a recording, made in a booth at the state fair, of her father singing an old song—“Chuck E.’s in Love.” Mabel had hidden the pieces inside a long, white glove inside a long, yellow box.
    Lily’s act of theft, Mabel thought, her taking the little wooden girl, had changed something in the house, had changed the gravity in the room, lifting their mother from her bed. Mabel looked to the ceiling, worried about the chairs and rolls of carpet tied to the rafters with frayed rope and knots that hadn’t been tightened in years.
    They all quickly bored of their search and collapsed into a dusty sofa. Mabel rested her head in her mother’s lap; Lily lay against her shoulder. Mabel felt so at ease. For weeks, she had been too worried about them all to feel at all safe. She feared that, with her mother shut up in her room, her grandmother off robbing old farms and churches, that someone would sneak in to steal Lily away, to molest her; they wouldn’t take Mabel because she was too thin and prickly, but Lily they would find adorable. Someday, Lily would be found in the city, feral and dirty and mute. Mabel would be brought in to coax her from her silence. She would dress up in a gray wool skirt and a white blouse with a bit of lace at the tips of the collar. She’d ask private questions only a sister could ask. She’d ask Lily in a quiet voice, “Where did they touch you?” She’d ask, “What did they make you touch?”
    Lily took the plastic cork from a small vial and sprinkled some perfume on her wrist. She ran her wrist along her neck and chest. She then held the vial before her eyes to try to read the faint lettering, but even with her glasses so thick, she seemed unable to make it out. “Wild Skin,” Lily pretended to read, though Mabel could see that it said only “Do not drink.”
    Mabel, so exhausted she drifted into a minute’s sleep, saw her father’s eyes as pale green as Coke bottle glass, and his open mouth, and she heard the gun knock against his teeth. She woke with a gasp, and her mother said, “Shhhh,” and smoothed back Mabel’s hair. Mabel wondered if her father killed himself because her mother refused to ever see him again. He probably loved her so much.
    Lily held her hand to her throat and sighed, affecting their mother’s posture of grief. “My nerves are shot,” she muttered.
    They heard the rumble of an old car pass on the road alongside the shop, and they all rushed to the window to look out. An apricot-colored Toronado glistened like jam in a pot. Crammed into the car were the women, the birdwatchers Mabel had seen walking through the Riordan house. A ways down the first mile, the car slowed. Mabel took the opera glasses from her pocket and she could see the women spill from the car to investigate; Mabel held one hand over her heart beating hard as the women picked up the bloody feathers from the ground. Her mother