Fearful Symmetries (14 page)

And Hector was there.

Hector was wearing a suit. Leah wondered if it was the same suit that he had worn to Yasmine’s funeral, and if he’d looked just as good wearing it then as he did now. A suit did something to a man.

Leah was wearing a black dress. Not a little black dress. She didn’t have a little black dress—she and Inez had decided they would wait until their breasts came in before they got little black dresses. But Inez had never got her breasts.

The funeral was nice. There were lots of gorgeous white flowers: roses and lilies and stuff, which looked strange because everyone was wearing black. And everyone said nice things about Inez—how she’d been on the swim team, how she’d always got good grades. But there was something tired about all the nice things they said, as if they’d worn out those expressions already. “She was my best friend,” Leah said into the microphone. She had been nervous about speaking in front of a crowd, but by the time her turn actually came she was mostly just tired too. She tried to find Hector in the audience. His seat was empty. “We grew up together. I always thought she was like my sister.”

Leah found him outside, afterward. He was sitting on the stairs of the back entrance to the church, a plastic cup in one hand. The suit looked a little crumpled but it still looked good. At nineteen he was about a foot taller than most of the boys she knew. They were like little mole-rats compared to him.

Her mother was still inside making small talk with the reverend. All the talk anyone made was small these days.

“Hey,” she said.

He looked up. “Hey.”

It was strange, at that moment, to see Inez’s eyes looking out from her brother’s face now that she was dead. It didn’t look like the same face. Leah didn’t know if she should go or not.

Her black dress rustled around her as she folded herself onto the stair beside him.

“Shouldn’t you be back in there?”

Hector put the plastic cup to his lips and took a swig of whatever was inside. She could almost imagine it passing through him. She was fascinated by the way his throat muscles moved as he swallowed, the tiny triangle he had missed with his razor. Wordlessly, he handed the cup to her. Leah took a tentative sniff. Whatever it was, it was strong. It burned the inside of her nostrils.

“I don’t know,” Hector said. “Probably. Probably you should too.”

“What are you doing out here?”

Hector didn’t say anything to that. He simply stared at the shiny dark surface of his dress shoes—like the coffin—scuffing the right with the left. The sun made bright hotplates of the parking lot puddles. Leah took a drink. The alcohol felt good inside her stomach. It felt warm and melting inside her. She liked being here next to Hector. The edge of her dress was almost touching his leg, spilling off her knees like a black cloud, but he didn’t move. They stayed just like that. It was like being in a dream. Not
the
dream. A nice dream.

“I miss her, Leah. I can’t stop it . . . you look a bit like her, you know? I mean, you don’t look anything like her really, but still,” he stumbled, searching out the right words. “But.”

“Yeah,” she said.

“I’m glad you’re here.”

She took a larger swallow. Her head felt light. She felt happy. She knew she shouldn’t feel happy but she felt happy anyway. Did Hector feel happy? She couldn’t tell. She hadn’t looked at enough boys to tell exactly what they looked like when they looked happy.

Suddenly, she was leaning toward him. Their hands were touching, fingers sliding against each other, and she was kissing him.

“Leah,” he said, and she liked the way he said her name, but she didn’t like the way he was shaking his head. She tried again, but this time he jerked his head away from her. “No, Leah. I can’t, you’re . . . you’re just a kid.”

The happy feeling evaporated. Leah looked away.

“Please, Hector,” she said. “There’s something . . .” She paused. Tried to look at him and not look at him at the same time. “It’s not just Inez, okay? It’s me too.” She was lying. She didn’t know why she was lying about it, except that she
wished
it was true. She wished it was her too. She wished Inez hadn’t found something first.

He shook his head again, but there was a glint in his eyes. Something that hadn’t been there before. It made him look the way that Inez’s mark had with its wide, hollow eyes. Like there could be anything in them. Anything at all.

“I’ve found something. On my skin. We were like sisters, you know. Really. Do you want to see it?”

“No,” he said. His eyes were wide. Inez’s eyes had looked like that, too, hadn’t they? They both had such pretty eyes. Eyes seeded with gold and copper and bronze.

“Please,” she said. “Would you kiss me? I want to know what it’s like. Before.”

“No,” he whispered again, but he did anyway. Carefully. He tasted sweet and sharp. Like pumpkin. He tasted the way the way a summer night tastes in your mouth, heavy and wet, wanting rain but not yet ready to let in October. The kiss lingered on her lips.

Leah wondered if this was what love felt like. She wondered if Yasmine had felt like this, if Hector had made her feel like this, and if she did, how could she ever have left him?

She didn’t ask for another kiss.

The world was changing around them all now, subtly, quietly at first, but it was changing. It was a time for omens. The world felt like an open threshold waiting for Leah to step through. But she couldn’t. She couldn’t yet.

The day after the funeral Leah cut her hair and dyed it black. She wore it in dark, heavy ringlets just as Inez had. She took a magic marker to the space just below the collar of her shirt, the place Inez had showed her, and she drew a face with large eyes. With a hungry mouth.

She looked at forums. They all had different sorts of advice for her.

If you say your name backwards three times and spit
 . . . 

If you sleep in a graveyard by a headstone with your birthday
 . . .

If you cut yourself this way
 . . .

Those were the things you could do to stop it, they said. Those were the things you could do to pass it on to someone else.

But nothing told her what she wanted.

For Milo, it started slowly. When Leah tried to feed him, sometimes he would spit out the food. Sometimes he would slam his chubby little hands into the tray again and again and again until a splatter of pureed squash covered them both. He would stare into the empty space and burble like a trout.

“C’mon, baby,” Leah whispered to him. “You gotta eat something. Please, monkey-face. Just for me? Just a bite?”

But he got thinner and thinner and thinner. His skin flaked off against Leah’s shirt in bright, silver-shiny patches when she held him. Her mum stopped looking at him. When she turned in his direction her eyes passed over him as if there was a space cut out of the world where he had been before, the way strangers didn’t look at each other on the subway.

“Mum,” Leah said, “what’s happening to him?”

“Nothing, darling. He’ll quiet soon.” And it was like the dream. She couldn’t move. No one could hear what she was saying.

“Mum,” Leah said. “He’s crying for you. Can you just hold him for a bit? My arms are getting tired and he just won’t quit. He wants you, mum.”

“No, darling,” her mum would say. Just that. And then she would lock herself in her room, and Leah would rock the baby back and forth, gently, gently, and whisper things in his ear.

“Mummy loves you,” she would say to him, “c’mon, pretty baby, c’mon and smile for me. Oh, Milo. Please, Milo.”

Sometimes it seemed that he weighed nothing at all, he was getting so light. Like she was carrying around a bundle of sticks, not her baby brother. His fingers poked her through her shirt, hard and sharp. The noises he made, they weren’t the noises that he knew. It was a rasping sort of cough, something like a choke, and it made her scared but she was all alone. It was only her and Milo. She clung tightly to him.

“Pretty baby,” she murmured as she carried him upstairs. “Pretty, little monkey-face.”

It was only when she showed him the little kitten she had tucked away in her music box that he began to quiet. He touched it cautiously, fingers curving like hooks. The fur had shed into the box. It was patchy in some places, and the skin beneath was sleek and silvery and gorgeous. When Milo’s fingers brushed against it he let out a shrieking giggle.

It was the first happy sound he had made in weeks.

What were the signs of love? Were they as easy to mark out as any other sort of sign? Were they a hitch in the breath? The way that suddenly any sort of touch—the feel of your hand running over the thin cotton fibers of your sheets—was enough to make you blush? Leah thought of Hector Alvarez. She thought about the kiss, and the way he had tasted, the slight pressure of his lips, the way her bottom lip folded into his mouth, just a little, just a very little bit, like origami.

Leah checked her body every morning. Her wrists. Her neck. She used a mirror to sight out her spine, the small of her back, the back of her thighs.

Nothing. Never any change.

The stars were dancing—tra lee, tra la—and the air was heavy with the fragrant smell of pot. They passed the joint between them carelessly. First it hung in his lips. Then it touched hers.

“What are you afraid of?” Leah asked Hector.

“What do you mean, what am I afraid of?”

Leah liked the way he looked in moonlight. She liked the way she looked too. Her breasts had come in. They pushed comfortably against the whispering silk of her black dress. They were small breasts, like apples. Crabapple breasts. She hoped they weren’t finished growing.

She was fifteen today.

Tonight the moon hung pregnant and fat above them, striations of clouds lit up with touches of silver and chalk-white. It had taken them a while to find the right place. A gravestone with two dates carved beneath it. His and hers. (Even though she knew it wouldn’t work. Even though she knew it wouldn’t do what she wanted.)

The earth made a fat mound beneath them, the dirt fresh. Moist. She had been afraid to settle down on it, afraid that it wouldn’t hold her. Being in a graveyard was different now—it felt like the earth might be moving beneath you, like there might be something moving around underneath, below the sod and the six feet that came after it. Dying wasn’t what it used to be.

“I mean,” she said, “what scares you? This?” She touched his hand. Took the joint from him.

“No,” he said.

“Me neither.” The smoke hung above them. A veil. Gauzy. There were clouds above the smoke. They could have been anything in the moonlight. They could have just been clouds. “Then what?”

“I was afraid for a while,” Hector said at last, “that they were happy.” He was wearing his funeral suit. Even with grave dirt on it, it still made him look good. “I was afraid because they were happy when they left. That’s what scared me. Yasmine was smiling when I found her. There was a look on her face . . .” He paused, took a breath. “Inez too. They knew something. It was like they figured something out. You know what I mean?”

“No,” she said.
Yes
, she thought.

Her mother had been cutting potatoes this morning. Normally Leah cut them. She cut them the way her dad had taught her, but today it was her mother who was cutting them, and when the potato split open—there it was, a tiny finger, curled into the white flesh, with her dad’s wedding ring lodged just behind the knuckle. Her mum’s face had gone white and pinched, and she dropped the knife, her fingers instinctively touching the white strip of flesh where her own wedding ring used to sit.

“Oh, god,” she whispered.

“Mum,” Leah said. “It’s okay, Mum. It’ll be okay.”

But all she could think was, “It should have been me.”

Because it was happening to all of them now. All of them except for her. When Leah walked down the street, all she could imagine were the little black dresses she would wear to their funerals. The shade of lipstick she would pick out for them. Her closet was full of black dresses.

“I’ve never felt that way about anything. Felt so perfectly sure about it that I’d let it take me over. I’d give myself up to it.”

“I have,” she said. But Hector wasn’t listening to her.

“But then,” he said, “I heard it.”

“What?”

“Whatever Yasmine was waiting for. That long perfect note. That sound like Heaven coming.”

“When?”

“Last night.” His eyes were all pupils. When had they got that way? Had they always been like that? The joint was just a stub now between her lips, a bit of pulp. She flicked it away.

“Please don’t go away, Hector,” she said.

“I can’t help it,” he said. “You’ll see soon. You’ll know what I mean. But I’m not scared, Leah. I’m not scared at all.”

“I know,” she said. She remembered the way Milo had been with the kitten. He had known it was his. Even though it was monstrous, its chest caved in, the little ear bent like a folded page. It was his. She wanted that, God, how she wanted that.

And now Hector was taking her hand, and he was pressing it against his chest. She could feel something growing out of his ribcage: the hooked, hard knobs pushing through the skin like antlers. He sighed when she touched it, and smiled like he had never smiled at her before.

“I didn’t understand when Yasmine told me,” he said. “I couldn’t understand. But you—you, Leah, you understand, don’t you? You don’t need to be scared, Leah,” he said. “You can be happy with me.”

And when he kissed her, the length of his body drawn up beside her, she felt the shape of something cruel and mysterious hidden beneath the black wool of his suit.

That night Leah had the dream—they were on the road together, all four of them.

“Listen, George,” her mother was saying. (What she said next was always different, Leah had never been able to remember what it actually was, what she’d said that had made him turn, shifted his attention for that split second.)

Leah was in the back, and Milo—Milo who hadn’t been born when her father was alive—was strapped in to his child’s seat next to her.

“Listen, George,” her mother was saying, and that was part of it. Her mother was trying to tell him something, but he couldn’t hear her probably. So he turned. He missed it—what was coming, the slight curve in the road, but it was winter, and the roads were icy and it was enough, just enough.