Frail (15 page)

“You had your fun,” he told Billy, his knuckles pale and taut around the knife handle. His face was as thin and angular as Billy’s was smooth and full. Naomi just stood there between them, crying. “It’s not enough you make that new girl turn her life inside out for you, now you have to beat up on a little kid, again, because you’re such a pathetic fucking freak you can’t handle looking at—”

Billy hit him in the jaw and Stephen went sailing, face-first to the floor. Don wrenched himself from Lisa’s grasp and kicked Stephen in the side, hard, again, and Stephen made retching sounds and stretched an arm out, shielding his face. His fingers uncurled slowly, he let the knife drop, and Billy motioned Don back.

“Don’t fuck him up too much,” he muttered to Don. “He’s our best cook.”

Don kicked him a few more times, the ribs, the back of a knee, and Stephen made a choking noise, retched in earnest; he curled up, knees to chin, rocking where he lay. Janey still had my arm and when she stared at me it was like a cloth suddenly swept cobwebs from a smudged window, she was alert and urgent and every part of her signaled
Be quiet, be still and quiet
—and then she blinked and her eyes filled with formless, benign shadows once again. She sat down and smiled at the air until Don returned to her, patting her hand reassuringly like someone else had caused all the fuss.

Phoebe, standing back against the wall, let out a high-pitched, seesawing giggle; Kevin gave her a sharp nudge to silence her. Billy still had Naomi clenched in his hands, beneath the panic in her face I could see how much it hurt, and Lisa was reaching for the carving knife when Mags polished off the last of her rabbit, let out a huge rumbling belch, stood and slid her fingers up and down Billy’s arm, down and up. His mouth curled up, slowly, into a sulky pucker; he let Naomi go, and Mags smiled.

“I think we got the point across, William,” she said, and even with all those poker thrusts of the tongue it was the softest exvoice I’d ever heard. “The whole point. One of these days, you’ll go and kill her without meaning it.”

She shook her hair back, every part of her rippling and shuddering beneath the wine-colored dress, and bent her head to Naomi, crouched in a huddled heap of misery by Don’s chair. “We were just angry, pet.” Naomi was crying again, tiny little sniffing sounds as she mopped a small hand across her cheek, and Mags murmured and cooed. “We didn’t mean it. We’re sorry. You’re a good girl. There’s no such thing as Scissor Men—”

“There are!” Naomi shrieked, her hands balling into fists by her sides; coughing up snot, big brown eyes pinned in terror, but the words flew from her in a paroxysm of frustration. “You’re lying, you’re lying to everyone, I’ve
seen
Scissor Men, they’re all over the beach, there are, there are, there are—”

Billy flew at her, and Janey and Phoebe both screamed; Mags grabbed and wrestled him backward, forcing him back into his chair like he was the little kid misbehaving, and shoved him back against the cushions while Lisa held tight to Naomi, teeth bared, febrile and vibrating to hurt something like she never was with that feral dog. Stephen tried to get up and Don kicked him again. Billy made a horrible sound, a squeezing strangling noise as if his own body were throttling him, and then caught his breath. Inhaled like some agitated horse, with a loud, whinnying whistle.

“Okay,” he said, staring up at Mags, not resisting her anymore, breath slowing as she rubbed the back of his neck. “Okay. Okay.”

Mags twined fingers in his hair, pale blond and cornsilk-fine so it slipped away as she touched it. She gave Lisa a rueful little smile. “You better take her,” she said, glancing at Naomi. “Mood he’s in, he really will snap her neck. You want the run of her so bad? Go on, then. Play saint for a few days. You’ll get sick of her soon enough. Trust me.”

Billy got up from his chair, sliding an arm around Mags’s waist; they turned and headed for the back porch, side by side. Naomi, who’d been staring from ex to ex wide-eyed and fearful, pushed hard against Lisa’s arms.

“Daddy!” she shouted at Billy’s retreating back. Neither of them even slowed their steps. “Daddy! Mommy! Don’t leave me again!” Lisa bent close to her, trying to soothe, and Naomi beat fists against Lisa’s body as her face distorted, crumpled. “Mommy,
Daddy
, come back, I’m sorry!
I’m sorry!
”

“Later,” Lisa told her quietly. She couldn’t see us, the whole rest of the room had vanished. Only Naomi. “They’ll come back later, when things are better, not—”

“Mommy!”
Naomi screamed.

I ran for the front door as fast as I could go.

 

 

Illinois Avenue was empty again and I kept running, away and away from the back porch and that whole house, until I was winded and dizzy and had to sit down hard on the curb at Buell. I pulled out my cell phone, I was going to call whoever called me, find them, ask them to come get me out of here, but it was dead and wouldn’t light up no matter how many buttons I pressed and I choked back all my shouting, shoved it back in my jeans. Closed my eyes. Still dizzy.

I had my head hunched down and my jacket open to let in cool air, trying not to remember that boy Stephen puking sick because I already felt nauseous enough, and then I heard footsteps and jolted my head up. Phoebe. She gave me a big hearty grin, like we were old friends meeting in a bar, but the whole rest of her face sagged in exhaustion.

“They’re not actually her mom and dad, you know,” she told me, sitting down next to me. “If that’s what got you all upset—”

“So tell her that,” I said. I took my jacket off, folding it up on my lap. Maybe I’d sleep somewhere around here tonight, use this as a pillow. Eating, that’d be a problem, but I’d think of something. Berries. Nuts. Spring was coming.

I want to go home.

“They hate each other, you know,” Phoebe said, her voice sprightly with the chance to pass on gossip. “They can’t stand each other.”

“I can tell,” I said. “I was there—”

“No, I mean, the bosses like Billy, Mags, Don, who really were dead? Undead, however you want it? Can’t deal with the ones like your Lisa, the plain old living humans who got sick and passed over. It’s like the Serbs versus the Albanians, or whoever the fuck they were fighting.” Her toes raked against the knifescarred asphalt. “I mean, makes sense, no? The undead ones, some of them kicked maybe a few years ago and some of them like Don, his time stopped in the
forties
, for God’s sake, I think Mr. and Mrs. Mae West are even older than that. Imagine your great-great-grandmother trying to make a clue of this world, for God’s sake they didn’t even have antibiotics.” Her face knotted up, imagining it, and she laughed. “Of course, neither do we, anymore, for now. But yeah. You and I only think Lisa’s the same species as all of them, but she’s as different from them as from Naomi. Or me.”

Don’s smell, Billy’s, that pungency of decay steeped in saltwater. Pickled. When I was five or six there was some sort of environmental security conference in Boston, discounted group rates for everything, and my mother got to go and so we flew on a plane for the first and only time in my life; there was a day trip to one of the protected Cape Cod beaches out by West Dennis, and for the first and only time in my life we saw the ocean. I grabbed a huge chunk of bright green seaweed and started chewing it and it was rubbery, sticky, oozing this salty sap that was like sweat solidified but brinier and I spat it out, Mom laughing at me. Then she chewed some herself just to see what it was like. Don and Billy, Mags, that’s what they smelled like. That seaweed, sitting on a dry shoreline oxygenating and going rotten. Lisa, her skin, it just smells like skin.

“Fine, so they can barely stand each other,” I said. “What’s that to me? They hate all of
us
. They hate Lisa because she doesn’t hate me—”

“Don doesn’t hate Janey either, or maybe you didn’t notice.” Phoebe beamed, lay back on her elbows on the grass. “Doesn’t hate her
at all
. Billy, I think it sickens him. Oh, well. My point is, kid, never make the mistake of thinking they’re all some sort of tight little tribe, they’d kill and eat each other if they could and I’d bet that’s actually happened, once or twice. They don’t like each other. They’re not each other, period. I mean, at least
we
can all say we’re one and the same.”

Phoebe one and the same with me, after she called me a liar right in front of Billy? Who the hell did she think she was kidding? She just wanted to get me out of Lisa’s corner, use that for her own leverage. Like my mom used to say, subtle as the Black Death. I hate people who think I’m stupid.

“Poor Naomi,” I said. I hadn’t even tried to help her. Too scared what’d happen, if I weren’t still and quiet.

A faint little line popped up between Phoebe’s brows, then subsided again. Up this close her skin was equal parts oil slick and iguana hide.

“That ‘bad place’ of hers?” she said, making little spinningfingertip quote marks against the sky. “The one they keep her hopping with, boohoo Mommy Daddy don’t send me away? It’s not half so bad. Honest. Sooner or later, folks will understand that—”

“It must be bad enough, if she got that scared.” I patted my pockets again, making sure nothing had fallen out of them when I ran from the house. “Or maybe you thought that was all a big laugh, like Mags did—”

“Oh, kid, for Christ’s sake don’t start with the
melodrama
, you saw what happened when Good Sir Stevie tried jumping in. Coulda told him. Have told him. But nobody ever listens to ol’ Pheebs! Not even her own damned husband!” She shouted that last part loud enough that I looked all around me, worried a gate patrol might find us. “There’s no ‘bad place’ and no Scissor Men and no whatever else that kid’s got mucked up in her head, she’s probably seen enough shit since last winter that she’s scared of everything that moves.” She shrugged, scratched hard at her scalp. “What’re you always looking for in those pockets of yours, anyway? Every time I see you, you’re patting yourself down like a cop.”

“Nothing.” I forced my fingers still. “Just habit.”

“The bad place,” she repeated. “So-called bad. It’s not so bad.” She tilted her chin, glanced at me. “You, kid, end of the day I think you’d actually understand that. Better than anyone.”

No trumpet blasts, no shouting. Just this concentrated look in her eyes and such quiet, intense purpose in her voice that something prickly and unpleasant began working its way along my skin, like a caterpillar undulating its way across droughty grass.

“I don’t know what
place
anyone’s talking about,” I told her, trying to talk in razor slices of rancor like an ex. Pretending I was singing it, up on stage, my own band. I couldn’t make the consonants punch and bleed like exes could. “There’s no such place, there’s a place but it’s not a bad place—make up your mind, is this a riddle?”

Phoebe pursed her thin colorless lips, like she really was thinking that over. “Kind of,” she said. “Kind of.”

She pulled herself upright in exaggerated fits and starts, like an actress imitating an arthritic old woman. “Go back to the ladies’ dorm and get some rest,” she said, curling her arms over her head, arching her back with a show of gritted teeth. She headed down Buell in a brisk little jog, and vanished from sight.

The sky was going soft and striated around the edges, the weakest bit of dawn sun showing like lamplight through a thick paper shade. Tomorrow. I will figure this all out tomorrow. I’ll tell Lisa. Right now she’s just got her hands full.

The few thin streaks of gray morning light were getting fuller, yet softer as I reached Elbert and the front porch steps, swung my hand to the wooden railing, and then I jumped and almost shouted as someone darted from the bushes right by the front door. A girl thirteen, maybe fourteen, long straight dark hair and a bottom lip chewed raw, holding something rolled up in a cloth napkin. I remembered her, vaguely, from the line of crew workers snaking into the kitchen.

“Are you Amy?” she whispered. “He said red hair—”

Wonderful, total strangers
everywhere
know me on sight. Can we trade scalps? “Yeah. So what?”

“Supposed to give you this.” She shoved the napkin into my hand. “Don’t show it to anyone. I gotta go.”

She ran off across the lawn and into the trees. I stood there holding the avocado green napkin, smeared stiff with gravy and wrapped around something hard, almost afraid what I’d find. I unrolled it—

A fork. Like the one I’d lost at dinner. Wrapped around the handle was a note.

This isn’t much of a gift, but after what happened at dinner you looked like you needed a token of . . . something. Ignore Billy, he likes to torture people. Your friend Lisa is burning up the place angry about what they did to you. And to Naomi. It’s good here to have Lisa’s kind on your side, get what you can out of it. Ignore Phoebe. As you probably figured out, she’s nuts. Speaking of how Billy likes to torture people.

Things aren’t usually as bad as this.

No signature. Janey? She wouldn’t be anywhere near this lucid. I read it again, turned it over but the other side of the paper was blank.

Ignore Billy. Laugh in the flying-glass face of a tornado.

I wrapped it all up again, fork and note and napkin, zipped them into my empty jacket pocket. The day shift was still sleeping but there was an empty futon in the far corner and I lay there curled on my side, waiting for tomorrow, waiting to see just how bad things usually got.

NINE

C
ommissary breakfast, this time, was honey-roasted nuts, sardines, stale onion crackers like plaster slices with little poppyseeds that burrowed into the gums. I was looking for Kevin’s crew again, like Phoebe told me to, when the girl who’d passed me the note ran up, still biting her lip, big brown eyes perpetually anxious and her dark hair a sleek shiny curve like the back of a seal.

“You’re supposed to go in the kitchens,” she said, whispering even though nobody was there to overhear. “Billy said, he decided it, ask anyone if you don’t believe me. It’s only Stephen there now, but the rest of the cooking crew comes in later—”