The Palace of Illusions. Kim Addonizio
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T-shirt, thick dark hair all down his fat arms. One dark, ugly arm is around her mother’s shoulders. Her mother lets her head fall back, and the man pours beer from the bottle into her mouth.
“Atta girl,” he says. “Shit, you can hold it.”
Her mother sits up, reaches for a bottle on the table. There are a lot of bottles. Her mother’s legs are open, her dress hiked up. Annabelle watches the man put his own beer on the floor, watches his hand disappear under her mother’s dress. Her mother squirms, then pulls his hand away.
“Not here,” she says. “My kid—”
“She’s asleep,” he says. He unzips his pants, leans close to her ear, and says something.
“You’re filthy,” Annabelle’s mother says.
Annabelle thinks about filthy germs.
But her mother is laughing. “Not now,” she says. “Later—”
“Okay,” the man says. He reaches for his beer on the floor and knocks it over. “Hell,” he says. “Sorry about that.” He looks at Sam’s cage on the table, the plastic cover over it. He pulls the cover off.
“Where’s the bird?” he says.
Annabelle is being punished for letting Sam out of his cage. She is not allowed to watch TV for three days. She told her mother that she wanted Sam to be free. She didn’t tell her that he had bitten her finger, that she had unlatched the door and put her hand in to grab him, then run to the bathroom sink and turned the water all the way on and stuck him under the faucet. She felt his small body, his heart beating frantically in her hand.
“You’re bad,” she told him. “You’re bad and you have to be punished.”
He struggled and thrashed in the water, splashing her face and arms.
“I think you’re sorry now,” she said. “I think you’re sorry and don’t need to be punished anymore. And just remember, don’t try to fly away.”
But when she lifted him up he wouldn’t move. She patted him with a dry washcloth, but he stayed sodden and still. She wrapped him in the washcloth and rocked him back and forth. Finally she carried him outside in her pink Barbie purse and buried him around the side of the motel where she isn’t supposed to go, where there is nothing but a field of dead grass and an abandoned gas station where the high school kids leave empty beer cans and candy wrappers and cigarette butts.
Now Sam will be with her in hell, by the river where the goldfish will swim back and forth like tiny flickering pieces of fire. There is no way she will get the Holy Spirit now. She doesn’t care about not watching TV; she sits in her room, holding Simba, rocking him the way she did with Sam. Simba knows all about Grandpa, but he won’t help her.
In the afternoon she runs errands for her mother, brings her Diet Mountain Dew and Fritos from the apartment, and by the end of the day her mother has forgiven her.
The man is in room 220, just upstairs from them. No one ever stays here more than a night. They check in one day, and the next day they are gone, to someplace where there is more to see than some caves in the ground.
“You’re staying at Grandpa’s tonight,” her mother tells her.
When the night clerk, Jolie, shows up to relieve her mother, Annabelle has packed her pajamas and toothbrush and clean underwear and Simba and two Barbies in a plastic bag. Her Barbie purse is over her shoulder. In the purse is a tube of Cherry Chapstick, a pair of yellow sunglasses with daisies on them, some butterfly hair clips, and one blue feather that belonged to Sam.
On the drive over her mother talks nonstop about the man, whose name is Jim. Jim is a hoot. Jim likes to watch baseball and hockey. Jim sells office supplies right now but he could sell anything, anywhere, even something here in this town. Jim is a miracle from heaven, God has finally heard her prayers, and Annabelle should pray that he stays so she will no longer be a fatherless little girl.
Annabelle doesn’t want to pray. Jim isn’t her father; Joe was, but Joe has gone and she doesn’t know where. When he left, he forgot to say good-bye; she had watched his pickup turn out of the parking lot, and waited for him to remember and turn around, the way he often turned around because he had forgotten his glasses, or forgot he didn’t have any money to take her for an ice cream and had to go back and get some from her mother. Sometimes they would get as far as Denny’s before he remembered, and he would whip a U-turn in the middle of the road and then she would run in and get the glasses or money or his cigarettes, and run back to the truck. Maybe Joe will remember one day that he forgot Annabelle, and will come back for her in his truck that smells like cigarettes and air freshener, and they will go away and be married.
“I don’t want to go to Grandpa’s,” Annabelle says, as soon as her mother pulls out onto the road.
“Tough titties, baby,” her mother says. “Your old mother’s got a date.”
“He smokes cigars,” Annabelle says. “I think they have germs.” She tries to think of what else she can say, to get her mother to turn the car around.
“Those cigars are going to kill him for sure,” her mother says.
The trees go by on both sides of the road. They are tall, so tall it’s hard to see the top of them. Annabelle wishes she were a tree, with her feet planted firmly in the dirt behind the motel and her head sticking into heaven.
“I dance for him,” Annabelle says finally.
She wants to take it back as soon as she says it, because her mother’s face changes right away, and she pulls off abruptly into a gravel turnoff and jams on the brakes.
“What do you mean?” her mother says. “What do you mean, you dance for him?”
“Nothing,” Annabelle says, looking down into her lap.
Her mother has her by the shoulders. “You dance for him,” her mother repeats.
“Is it a sin?” Annabelle says.
She thinks about doing the hula in front of Grandpa, to the music she has to imagine in her head. She thinks about her arms moving from side to side, like waves in the ocean, wherever it is. She thinks of climbing into a boat that is too small for Grandpa and his wheelchair. A whale will tow her out to sea, a rope from the boat looped around its tail.
“I do the hula,” she says.
“Oh,” her mother says, looking into her eyes.
But Annabelle feels, now, that her mother can’t see anything there, that she probably doesn’t want to see anything—not the fish, not Sam, and not Grandpa watching her dance, drinking his whiskey.
“Be careful,” her mother says.
“Yes, ma’am,” Annabelle says.
At Grandpa’s, Annabelle watches whatever Grandpa watches; tonight it is one of the crime shows he likes. There is a little girl about Annabelle’s age, but she isn’t really in the show, only her picture; she has disappeared, and the police are trying to find her, talking to different grownups and to the girl’s teenaged babysitter.
A commercial comes on, a big expensive car going fast down a highway toward some mountains in the distance.
“Fix me another drink,” Grandpa says.
He has been saying this for a while now, drinking fast. Annabelle hopes that means he is going to fall asleep soon. She goes and makes him another one. She sees the new box of chocolates in the refrigerator when she opens the freezer for ice.
“How about a little dance from my girl?” Grandpa says, when she brings him his whiskey.
“It’s my bedtime,” Annabelle