Frail (23 page)

Stephen put a hand over mine. Steadying it. “None of what happened before,” he said, “is anyone here’s fucking business.”

His eyes were hard, his words, like he’d had to remind someone else somewhere of this. Phoebe, probably. “I mean it, Amy. Nobody gives a shit. Because if they did, they’d find out there’s always someone who knows what
they
did, and they’ll wish they hadn’t reminded them.”

“I don’t want to think about before,” I said.

“Then don’t.”

“Everybody acts like things only started falling apart last year. But they’ve been falling apart for—my mother, she worked security, for our town, did I tell you that already? She got a kill, it messed up her head and she—she left. She walked off one night and never came back, just like that, everything had
already
fallen apart, okay?” And now I was half-yelling, voice like a damp sponge threatening to squeeze out tears. Crazy as Phoebe, as anybody. “Don’t they get that?”

“No,” Stephen said, and shook his head. “And they never will.”

He wasn’t humoring me. He was listening, every word, his face as he looked at me full of feverish vindication like he’d felt just this way too, like things had long since gone sour for him too so none of this was a surprise. The whole world outside, losing itself like the way it’d collapsed inside me, wasn’t a surprise at all: It’s always been this empty, always been this lost. Everything you thought you had was a shell, a disguise, tap a finger on it and it all cracks open, there’s only nothingness outside. Always was.

I put a hand to his face. I don’t know why I did it, except, I could see he knew exactly what I was talking about. My fingers touched a cheekbone, the puffy yellow side of his jaw, and he swallowed and was silent.

“I saw a sick man in the street,” I said, “during the plague. I still dream about him at night. He was . . . you know how they got when they were so hungry but nothing stayed down, when they’d eat anything? When they tried chewing Styrofoam, cloth, bits of wood, swallowing glue?” My throat closed up saying that, something lethally sticky congealing inside it. “He was squatting in the road shoving pebbles in his mouth, trying to scratch up bits of asphalt, to swallow, like it’d melt back to tar. Like molasses. His fingers were bloody, the nails were almost gone. And then,” I was laughing now, and then just as quickly not laughing at all, “then he looked down at his own fingers, at all that meat waving around in front of his face, and he slid a couple of them into his mouth and—”

And. I’d screamed out loud when I saw that, louder than I ever did when I saw that other man shoot his family and himself, but I didn’t faint or get sick. And that made me think there was something wrong with me, something not quite human in me, but then maybe that’s what things had always been like, in their own way. Inside everyone. Stephen looked somber, sorrowful, hearing me talk. But not surprised. I was so thankful he wasn’t surprised.

“I don’t want to think about before,” I said.

He leaned closer to me, eyes crackling. “Then
don’t
.”

“Kristin’s baby.” The sticky congealing thing was back. It would never leave me. “Kristin’s baby . . . wasn’t stillborn.”

Stephen put a hand to my shoulder, so cautious and careful like my arm might shatter beneath his touch.

“I’m going to hell,” I said. “I can’t tell you why, but I am.”

“You already told me why,” he said. No contempt. No hate. “Because Kristin’s baby wasn’t stillborn. It’s nothing to what I’ve done. I can tell you that much and it’s true.”

“I haven’t even told you what—”

He had both my shoulders clasped in his palms, trying to stare me down. Trying to win this fight that wasn’t one. “It’s nothing,” he repeated, “to what I’ve done. At all.”

“Is that why they’re afraid of you?”

“I can’t explain it.” His fingers curled tighter. “I’m sorry. I just can’t.”

“Are you an ex, underneath?”

I had to ask. I’d wondered ever since I saw Billy hit him like that, and not kill him. “I know. You can’t be. You talk like a human. You don’t heal as soon as you’re hit. But they all act like you’re not really . . . here.”

His face contorted, his eyes hardened in a way that made my stomach twist. Then he forced himself to smile, and it passed.

“No,” he said. “I’m not one of them.”

He didn’t let go of me. I was glad of that.

“I keep telling myself how different I am from them,” I said. “From the exes. But sometimes I think I’m just kidding myself, and they know it. Like, all the human parts of me were always just this thin thing, pasted on, an eggshell, and the glue’s drying up and it’s all flaking and the real parts coming out. Like wallpaper, when it’s peeling off a wall, and then underneath the plaster’s all eaten away and inside, there’s all these cobwebs. A nest of rats. And that’s what’s really me. Since before. Since, forever. Inside, I don’t feel human at all.”

This is the thing I’d been afraid to say all along, the first thing. The second I can’t ever say out loud, not to him, not to anyone. Stephen stared back at me. Listening. Not surprised.

“Then it’s not just me,” he said, and kissed me.

Kissing him back was easy, like I’d done it all my life. Like I already knew from long years of kissing him what it should be like between us, like putting hands on him for the first time was really an old familiar habit. My skin twitched like his own hands might go all the way through me, like my body would collapse into its natural hollow nest of crumbling thin plaster, but the shell stayed intact. He had a good thick solid shell, over his own emptiness, I couldn’t feel the hollowness at all.

“I can’t get pregnant,” I said, the words slipping out in a quaver because I was embarrassed but it was true. It wasn’t just I can’t
afford
to get pregnant, in this world, as things are. It was how the mere thought of being pregnant, like Kristin, it filled me with horror and he didn’t need to know why. Nobody can make me say it. I put hands in his hair. Stephen nodded.

He had his face turned away. I looked at him and I saw too much to take in at once, no matter how close or long I stared; when people would say you could love someone and still never really know them, that must have been the feeling they were talking about. Overwhelming, the most mundane things like the way one lock of hair would crook and cowlick away from the rest of the scalp, the contrast between coarse tissue-paper fingers ruined by freezing dishwater and the smooth soft skin along the back of a wrist. The hunch of shoulders under a shirt that still smelled faintly of some stranger long dead.

“Hang on,” he said. Reaching toward the flashlights.

“I wish you wouldn’t—”

“Please, Amy.”

His face looked urgent in a way I didn’t understand; he couldn’t possibly be that shy. But I nodded anyway. He switched them off and we lay there in the dark.

“Can I stay here?” he asked. A question thick with actual fear.

“Yes,” I said. So he did.

I didn’t suddenly just forget about everything else, like they talk about in books. You’d have to be psychotic, to forget everything but yourselves that easy. Honestly most people in books seemed a little psychotic, acting that way. But things still changed around us. For a while.

FOURTEEN

I
n the morning I woke up alone, like I’d expected I would, and Lisa came to let me out, her face full of a tight, contained urgency as she slipped an arm in mine, silently escorted me up the stairs and through the remains of the house. Distracted, she looked, the hair over one temple pulled and tugged into a scraggly snarl of tension, and the sun was already high overhead like she’d forgotten I was here. She didn’t let go of me as we approached the front door.

“This way,” she said, pulling us leftward, toward a cluster of magnolias whose rotting petals had the color and smell of apples going brown. “I took Naomi down to Carlisle Street, a house there, she’ll be waking up.”

“Carlisle’s the other way,” I said, remembering the street signs from my onion hunt. We can shortcut across here and—”

“No. This way—Amy!”

She was tugging hard at my arm to haul me left but Carlisle was on the right, I remembered that from the onion hunt, and as I crossed over Connecticut, reached a Dogwood Avenue backyard, I saw something lying sprawled on the grass before me. Navy sneakers with bright red stripes, big wide sneakers for big wide feet, and blue-jeaned legs with one thighbone’s jagged, broken whiteness torn clean through the bloodsoaked cloth.

The other leg, there was spongy scarlet where the knee should’ve been and the whole thing crooked backward at a crazy angle, impossible angle, bent entirely the wrong way. The outstretched hands, their fingers, had no proper form anymore, pulpy sponge-cakes soaking in their own dark syrup. Concave chest, a stretch of Styrofoam stomped down by heavy shoes, and something spilling lividly rich and exuberant from where his stomach had—his face was gone. His eyes. A slab of rawness, like something hung up skinned, with a few teeth still clinging to it. But Kevin’s eyes, those were gone.

I squatted down sick right there but nothing would come up, just teeth-clenching cold rippling through my stomach and over my skin, and Lisa was pulling me away, putting her palm against my turned head like a horse-blinder so I mightn’t see what I’d just seen, that slabby rawness dressed in Kevin’s Bears T-shirt lying forgotten by the curb. She walked me back to Connecticut and the magnolias and I sat right down in slimy-soft heaps of falling petals, shivering. Lisa sat down next to me.

“Billy,” she said.

I threaded hands into my jacket sleeves, trying to get warm. “Billy did that,” Lisa repeated, flat and distant like she was reporting some disaster halfway across the world. “Last night.”

Kevin. Phoebe’s Kevin, who tried to step in for me when he could. Right after my fight with Phoebe. He had no eyes left. “I did this,” I said, and I laughed without meaning. “I fought with—”

“It was nothing to do with you and Phoebe. Kevin got him angry, somehow, I don’t know how. And so Billy hurt him. He was screaming, Kevin was. They told me. I was blocks away, with Naomi. Billy beat him to death.” Lisa’s face was chalkcolored but she looked terribly calm, that grim peace that comes over you when every troubling option gets closed off at once. “We’re getting out of here, Amy. We’re—”

“I have to talk to Phoebe,” I said. I don’t believe you, Lisa, that Billy forgot us fighting, forgot Kevin trying to keep her away from me before it even started. It’s freezing cold here in the sun and I don’t believe you.

“It happened on Johnson Avenue.” Her voice was still so dry and distant, arm’s length from me and everyone else. “When I went to where he lay Phoebe was screaming about burying him. Billy would never allow that so some of us carried him to Dogwood, it’s out of the way enough to dig without Billy seeing—she’s not well, Amy.” Lisa folded her arms around herself, around her shirt streaked and stained with Kevin’s blood. “She was barely functioning with Kevin around and now—”

“I’m going,” I said. “I have to talk to her.”

She didn’t try to stop me. Everywhere I went were little clusters of folks from the garden, cleanup, engineering crews standing around murmuring distorted and high, like the distress calls of stranded birds; one turned to stare at me, an old man with a seamed old face and mouth tugged sharply down like a drawing of Tragic Grief, and he shook his head like we’d known each other ages, were mourning together. Then he looked away.

Phoebe was huddled on the commissary steps, a tight little ball yet also loose-limbed and rattling and broken. All alone. I looked at her and kept on feeling that same old overpowering dislike, that prickling tightness of my skin prematurely shying away from her, but she was a broken thing and I made myself approach her. My mother, Lisa, Stephen—three people I had and she had nobody now, she was poor and I was rich. I owed her, somehow.

“Phoebe,” I said.

“Oh, Jesus, kid. Oh Christ, oh Jesus Christ.” She kept on rocking back and forth where she sat, rigid with grief but also something in the muscles of her arms and shoulders weirdly relaxed now that her crazy had a target, a reason anyone could understand, now that none of us could have contempt for it anymore. Her eyes were brimming and spilling over with tears that never quite fell, there were strips of skin torn from the back of one hand with the cuts she’d made oozing blood.

“What happened,” I whispered and instantly thought I should never have asked, never ever, but she grabbed my arm with two hands and held on with a pleading look like yes, finally someone wants to hear it. She opened her mouth around the word, “He . . .” and then her lips twisted up and puckered, like a section of orange peel drying up in seconds before my eyes, and then she was rocking harder, sobbing, like Kristin with her little daughter, and I grabbed for her, though she was sitting down, like she might fall.

“Oh, kid,” she moaned, with a horrible laughter. “Oh, kid—Kevin was, he, last night he took some fucking garden tool without asking first, a hoe, rake, or—what the
fuck
, kid, stuff disappears around here all the time,
he
never cared before, Billy never cared, he’s dead!” She was sobbing in loud, spasmodic bursts, the shock of it breaking over her with cruel freshness every time. “He’s—that Mags tried to stop him.” Laughing, suddenly, not bothering to wipe away tears, futile, they would never stop. “She said, ‘Billy, Jesus Christ he’s a frail, you’ll kill—’ ”

She rested her forehead in her fingertips, as if she could barely stand to touch her own self, and sobbed so hard she coughed and choked. I couldn’t touch her, put arms around her, it’d be horrible hypocrisy after what had happened between us. I sat down next to her, waiting.

“We’ll leave,” I said finally, when she had to stop to catch her breath. “We’ll get out. You and I and—”

“Oh, kid, Jesus, you must’ve seen what’s left of things, when you two came here,
there’s nowhere we can go
!” She let out a shrill, hooting laugh. “Run away like Natalie? Run away to
nothing
? Nowhere to go and nowhere to hide and nothing but this for the rest of—”