with Stella in the fountain. He had known something was wrong. He had even asked me what I knew . . .
He should have known. I couldn’t get away from that. He was my father—Stella’s father—and he should have taken some responsibility, some interest in us apart from that absurd competition with his wife to make us love him more.
He should have known. But he wasn’t a monster. And I missed him. I wanted to have him back. I’d spent the last three years believing him to be something he was not, and I wanted to touch him, maybe have him ruffle my hair, anything, just to make contact again with the father I had thought I had known.
A barge hooted from downriver, a burly morning noise. Almost dawn.
I stretched and stood, feeling strange: wobbly and light-boned. So much had changed. I had my father back, and had lost my mother. And Magyar knew who I was. She could see through the obscuring reflections. To her I wasn’t van de Oest, I wasn’t Criminal, I wasn’t Bird. I was just me, Lore.
Lore’s birthday came and went. Twenty. She went out in the blustery September wind with the cat’s daily ration of leftovers. As usual she knelt to push the plate under the bushes without really looking, but this time the plate bumped into something soft. She peered into the tangle of dry wood and old, dead leaves.
It was a kitten. Dead. Probably about two weeks old. Skinny. Fur the color of sand.
She looked at it a long time, then went inside to get her work gloves and spade. It weighed nothing.
Kittens should be round, she thought. It struck her as terribly wrong for something so young to look so used-up. It should have had warm milk, and spring, and a skyful of butterflies to chase. Not a short, hard life and an end on the cold ground.
It was wrong. All wrong.
Spanner was reading. “I don’t really see what the difference is, whether you enjoy it or not.” She barely looked up from the gray book screen in her lap.
“Because it’s a lie.” Because kittens should be round.
Spanner switched to the next page. “It’s flickering again.”
“What?” Lore was confused for a moment; then she realized Spanner was fiddling with the screen contrast. “Turn that book off and listen to me.”
Spanner turned it off, put it down on the cushion next to her. “I was listening. You were saying that if you enjoy yourself it must not be real.”
“You’re being obtuse.”
“No. It’s a job, just like any other. You don’t begrudge Jamaican cane cutters a smoke to make their work less monotonous, do you? Or Chileans a good chew of coca leaf to get them up the next mountain trail where the air’s too thin for anything except their goats. So why deny yourself?”
“Because I hate what we do.”
“You just said you enjoyed it.”
“I do, at the time.”
“Then you’d rather not enjoy it?”
“I’d rather not do it at all.”
“And you’d rather not eat, too?”
“There has to be another way! We could use a fake PIDA, a good one, to get a job. We could—”
“We have a job.”
“I hate it! It makes me feel ashamed, and I’m sick of being ashamed.”
“There’s nothing to be ashamed of. You haven’t hurt anyone.”
“I’ve hurt myself. This is my body, my—”
“Temple, right?” Spanner shook her head. “It’s not a temple, it’s a sack of meat.” She slapped herself on the thigh. “A tool made of muscle and skin and bone, to be used the same way we use any other tool.”
“No.” Lore was horrified. “Your body isn’t just a tool like a . . . a screwdriver. It is you. What it does and feels makes you who you are. Don’t you see that?”
“You are who you fuck?” Spanner’s eyes were challenging. “Then who does that make you?”
“Someone I’m ashamed of.” And Lore understood with blinding clarity why Stella had killed herself. To be used like a receptacle, a commodity, and to know it, to be helpless before it, and then to see that helplessness reflected back at her every time her eyes met her abuser’s across the table, every time she saw herself in the mirror. There would never be any way to escape that kind of shame. She looked at Spanner, who was waiting with her eyebrows raised. “What happened? What happened to you, to make you feel you have to do this?”
“Nothing had to happen. I’m not some pathetic victim, reacting instead of acting.”