The Magnetic Girl. Jessica Handler

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      Across the schoolyard, the boys ignored us. That very minute, two boys were brawling in the swept dirt, dust swirling around their flailing arms. The other fellows circled them, shouting encouragement.

      I could win that fight without trying, but who’d ever want to sit with me in the schoolroom after I’d pushed one fellow onto his rear and pulled the other one to his feet?

      I had been a town girl once, when Daddy clerked at the hardware store. Momma and Daddy and I lived upstairs. Leo hadn’t been born. What I remember is that inside our home, the curtains fluttered in a breeze that I tried to catch in my hand, and when I walked on the sidewalk with Momma, the sun made the world too bright at the edges and hard to see. The fresh-cut pine smell from the boards in the sidewalk made me want to inhale all the air all at once.

      I taught myself to read before I turned four, pronouncing words from the sides of grain sacks and the labels on medicine bottles at the store. Saying the black and gold lettering’s alchemy aloud, I practiced my words. “Hoofland’s Bitters for the Liver,” I said. “We sell everything from horse shoes to hats.” For the longest time I believed the store only sold objects that started with the letter “H.”

      A few months before God brought Leo, we packed up and moved to a big white house and acreage outside town, where Daddy said a man could be himself and not feel like other people and their avarice—he spit the word in a way that frightened me—shadowed him at every turn.

      Not long after my terrible mistake with Leo, my brother was one day speckled with an angry red rash. For two days and a night between he cried so hard I thought he would explode. The doctor came with a Vapo-Cresolene lamp that Daddy kept lit day and night. The lamp didn’t do anything but tear our throats with the smell and make everyone’s eyes sting. Poor Leo must have hardly been able to breathe right under it.

      Although he’d made attempts at talking and could almost sit up on his own, when his fever broke, he made only sad little squawks of dismay, a sound like a bird trapped in the eaves. He spooked me. If I could hold him like I had before, I would have gladly shared some of my already oversized height and heft, but Momma banned me from getting near him.

      Even from my station at the doorway I could see how he kept his neck bent like he had a crick in it. I couldn’t tell anyone what I knew about the reason for his sickness. I tried once, twice, but the words gagged me until I nearly blacked out from regret.

      The doused lamp went into the barn, where it hung blindly from a nail. The light was gone from Leo’s eyes. His arms and legs flopped, and I cursed myself for ever having let myself think of him as a doll. Momma said that because of his fever, Leo’s mind would never grow up.

      My love had done this to him. Sick and silent with guilt, I held Leo’s head up with my arm when Momma left the room, and I begged his forgiveness. He and I both knew that if he were ever going to be a regular child again, the responsibility would be mine. I leaned over him and brought my face close to his. His gray eyes didn’t fix on anything.

      “Leo,” I whispered.

      My voice sounded like a branch scraping rusted metal. No nursery songs came to mind, so I tried hymns. They were all about death and leaving this world, so I quit, with him so close to having done that very thing.

      “Look in my eyes,” I said.

      Leo smacked his lips but didn’t look at anything.

      “Leo,” I said, low and slow in a voice that didn’t sound like mine, or our mother’s, or our father’s.

      His body jerked. I jumped back, then eased myself close again. I waved a hand over his eyes. He followed it. Maybe he could only see close up. I held my breath and half-lidded my eyes. His gaze drifted away as my hand made a full transit across his face, my palm like a full moon.

      “Leo,” I said. “Help me fix you. We’ve got to finish before Momma or someone comes in.”

      He opened his mouth like he was about to squawk. Now or never. Leo watching and seeing, Leo talking, that was my due to him, a payment that would make everything right again.

      “Look at my hand, little boy,” I said, my palm inches from his nose. Leo’s eyes wandered. Nothing would come of this. My brother would be broken forever. He stiffened and tried to push himself over with the little strength he had. I didn’t want him to roll over, not yet, and he knew it. He gave up trying to change position and returned his sight to my palm. I drew my hand back slowly, thrilled to see him follow my motion. When my hand was before my face, I drew my hand away, and let his gaze settle on mine.

      I saw my brother. My brother saw me. And he smiled.

      Our parents wept when I showed them what he could do.

      “He can watch me move, Momma,” I said, after I’d called her in to show how he watched my hand. He and I did our trick a half-dozen times, and instead of tiring, he made a sound that I knew was a laugh.

      Momma wiped her eyes on her sleeve and reached for Leo. His laughter had become a whistle in his throat.

      “Next time you handle him, watch that he doesn’t choke,” she said.

      She spanked him between the shoulders, and when he’d quit whistling, she lay her hand, gentle, on my cheek.

      When she told Daddy, his smile was crooked, a broken window shade.

      Leo and I grew into opposites. He was delicate, I was ungainly. At fourteen, I walked like a dray horse, according to my mother. Leo was eight. We could look each other straight in the eye and know right away what the other was thinking. His walk was tentative. He supported himself with his hands against a wall. His legs gave in more often than not. To an observer, Leo would be the weak one and me the strong, but they would have it backward. I was weak inside.

      Without Leo whole, I would never be enough. Our parents looked at him and saw an empty space shaped like the man he could never be.

CHAPTER TWO

       Tennessee: July 1862

      WILL WAS NINETEEN THE FIRST TIME HE GAMBLED. Almost all the soldiers did, waiting for a skirmish. Short on pay, Bill Lee and Harmony played every chance they could. They bet buttons or stones when they had to, laying out IOUs worn and bent at the edges like a tomcat’s ear as collateral for the day when the paymaster’s leather folder would be full.

      “Seven,” Bill Lee said.

      Will watched them play.

      He had been sitting on a stump, cleaning his Winchester with a cotton rag. His grey wool cap lay on a different rag he kept for the purpose of protecting the hat’s rim from dirt. His blond hair was filthy. He hadn’t had a decent wash in a long time. His scalp itched.

      “Can’t make seven on your come-out throw,” Harmony scolded Bill Lee.

      “Go on and watch me, asshole,” Bill Lee said. His heels were in the dirt, the dice curled in his fingers. Bill Lee always seemed to watch everything closely, as if the world held a secret code that he would find if he peered close enough. He’d have made a lousy devotee: Will had known him to bird-whistle a warning СКАЧАТЬ