Orpheus Lost by Janette Turner Hospital Page B

Don’t you want to meet them?”
    For answer, Mishka played complicated rhythms on the oud.
    “That’s not a wholly adequate answer,” Leela teased.
    “Music’s the way I talk.”
    “Want to play me again?”
    But exactly what game was he playing?
    She knew everything and nothing about him.
    She also knew everything and nothing about Cobb Slaughter.
    Apparently.
    He had told her years ago that she knew nothing about him. He had told her that many many times.
    She knew it was true and yet she realized she had never believed it.
    She opened her wallet. Behind the clear plastic window which showed her ID was a hidden pocket. She reached in with her index finger and thumb and pulled out her contraband: three photographs, old ones, dog-eared, the color fading. She had not looked at these photographs for a very long time, though she was always aware of their presence. One photograph showed her father and her mother seated rather awkwardly on chairs beneath a pecan tree. Her parents were laughing. Leela, a child of six with fiery corkscrew curls, was nestled into her mother’s lap and was leaning toward her father and pulling at the pocket of his shirt. She remembered with the utmost clarity what she expected to find: the brownie in her father’s pocket. This brownie was not something to eat; he was related to goblins. “He’s very shy,” her father said. “He always hides. His name is M’sieur de Crac de Bergerac.”
    Leela’s little sister Maggie was present in this family photograph as the bulge beneath her mother’s shift.
    “Only the baby can see the brownie,” Leela’s father said.
    He always laughed and winked when he said this, and Leela had kept the photo for two reasons: it was the only one she had of her mother, and it was proof that once upon a time, her father laughed.
    In the second photograph there were three people, all standing, in the shadow of the pecan. Leela’s father looked somber, his thoughts on eternity. Though he had his hands on the shoulders of his daughters—Leela was on one side, Maggie on the other—he was thinking of something else. His eyes were half closed. He might have been praying for his wild andwayward ten-year-old and for four-year-old Maggie. Leela was gesturing to someone outside the photograph, to Cobb, on whom she had pressed the Kodak instamatic and her orders.
    The third image was of Leela and Cobb, arms entwined. They were fourteen years old and had just placed first and second in the Math Prize.
    Leela tucked the photographs into her bra and lay on her back on the bedroom floor. She felt the thump-thump of her heart against the glossy-paper image of her mother. What she smelled was the rotting floor of a veranda in Promised Land, a sweet fungal smell. She heard birds calling. Her eyes followed the slow curve of wasps through magnolia trees.
    “Have you ever been stung by a wasp, Cobb?” she asked drowsily.
    “Yes,” he said. “Have you?”
    “On my eyelid once. It swelled up as big as an egg. I couldn’t see.”
    They were on the floorboards, side by side on their backs, studying stains on the pulpy ceiling of the veranda of the derelict Hamilton house. They were seven years old.
    “What can you see?” Cobb asked.
    “I can see a parallelogram.”
    Cobb said, “It’s not a parallelogram. It’s a coffin.”
    “It can’t be a coffin. You can’t have a crooked coffin. It would have to be a rectangle to be a coffin and it’s not.”
    “I’m not looking at that one. The one I’m looking at is a coffin.”
    What he saw, Leela knew, was the box where his mother lay, still open for viewing.
    Leela rolled over and stroked Cobb’s hair. “I’m so sad about your mama, Cobb.”
    “I can see a rattlesnake,” he said.
    “Where?”
    “Up there near the post. The curly brown stain.”
    “That’s not a rattler, it’s a river.”
    “It might be the Styx,” Cobb conceded. “Like Mr. Watson told us. When people sail over it they don’t come