The Very Best of F & SF v1 (66 page)

For three days
Alex ordered his coffee to go and drank it in the park. On the fourth day,
Agatha wasn’t anywhere that he could see and he surmised that it was her day
off so he sat at his favorite table in the back. But on the fifth day, even
though he didn’t see her again, and it made sense that she’d have two days off
in a row, he ordered his coffee to go and took it to the park. He’d grown to
like sitting on the bench watching strolling park visitors, the running
children, the dangerously fat ducks.

He had no idea
she would be there and he felt himself blush when he saw her coming down the
path that passed right in front of him. He stared deeply into his cup and
fought the compulsion to run. He couldn’t help it, though. Just as the toes of
her red and green sneakers came into view he looked up. I’m not going to hurt
you, he thought, and then, he smiled, that false smile he’d been practicing on
her and, incredibly, she smiled back! Also, falsely, he assumed, but he couldn’t
blame her for that.

She looked down
the path and he followed her gaze, seeing that, though the path around the duck
pond was lined with benches every fifty feet or so, all of them were taken. She
sighed. “Mind if I sit here?”

He scooted over
and she sat down, slowly. He glanced at her profile. She looked worn out, he
decided. Her lavender eye flickered toward him, and he looked into his cup
again. It made sense that she would be tired, he thought, if she’d been off
work for two days, she’d also been going that long without stealing breath from
cups. “Want some?” he said, offering his.

She looked
startled, pleased, and then, falsely unconcerned. She peered over the edge of-his
cup, shrugged, and said, “Okay, yeah, sure.”

He handed it to
her and politely watched the ducks so she could have some semblance of privacy
with it. After a while she said thanks and handed it back to him. He nodded and
stole a look at her profile again. It pleased him that her color already looked
better. His breath had done that!

“Sorry about the
other day,” she said, “I was just....”

They waited
together but she didn’t finish the sentence.

“It’s okay,” he
said, “I know I’m weird.”

“No, you’re,
well—” she smiled, glanced at him, shrugged. “It isn’t that. I like weird
people. I’m weird. But, I mean, I’m not dead, okay? You kind of freaked me out
with that.”

He nodded. “Would
you like to go out with me sometime?” Inwardly, he groaned. He couldn’t believe
he just said that.

“Listen, Alex?”

He nodded. Stop
nodding, he told himself. Stop acting like a bobblehead.

“Why don’t you
tell me a little about yourself?”

So he told her.
How he’d been coming to the park lately, watching people overfeed the ducks,
wondering if he should tell them what they were doing but they all looked so
happy doing it, and the ducks looked happy too, and he wasn’t sure anyway, what
if he was wrong, what if he told everyone to stop feeding bread to the ducks
and it turned out it did them no harm and how would he know? Would they explode
like balloons, or would it be more like how it had been when his wife died, a
slow painful death, eating her away inside, and how he used to come here, when
he was a monk, well, not really a monk, he’d never gotten ordained or anything,
but he’d been trying the idea on for a while and how he used to sing and spin
in circles and how it felt a lot like what he’d remembered of happiness but he
could never be sure because a remembered emotion is like a remembered taste, it’s
never really there. And then, one day, a real monk came and watched him
spinning in circles and singing nonsense, and he just stood and watched Alex,
which made him self-conscious because he didn’t really know what he was doing,
and the monk started laughing, which made Alex stop and the monk said, “Why’d
you stop?” And Alex said, “I don’t know what I’m doing.” And the monk nodded,
as if this was a very wise thing to say and this, just this monk with his round
bald head and wire-rimmed spectacles, in his simple orange robe (not at all
like the orange-dyed sheet Alex was wearing), nodding when Alex said, “I don’t
know what I’m doing,” made Alex cry and he and the monk sat down under that
tree, and the monk (whose name was Ron) told him about Kali, the goddess who is
both womb and grave. Alex felt like it was the first thing anyone had said to
him that made sense since Tessie died and after that he stopped coming to the
park, until just recently, and let his hair grow out again and stopped wearing
his robe. Before she’d died, he’d been one of the lucky ones, or so he’d
thought, because he made a small fortune in a dot com, and actually got out of
it before it all went belly up while so many people he knew lost everything but
then Tessie came home from her doctor’s appointment, not pregnant, but with
cancer, and he realized he wasn’t lucky at all. They met in high school and
were together until she died, at home, practically blind by that time and she
made him promise he wouldn’t just give up on life. So he began living this sort
of half-life, but he wasn’t unhappy or depressed, he didn’t want her to think
that, he just wasn’t sure. “I sort of lost confidence in life,” he said. “It’s
like I don’t believe in it anymore. Not like suicide, but I mean, like the
whole thing, all of it isn’t real somehow. Sometimes I feel like it’s all a
dream, or a long nightmare that I can never wake up from. It’s made me odd, I
guess.”

She bit her
lower lip, glanced longingly at his cup.

“Here,” Alex
said, “I’m done anyway.”

She took it and
lifted it toward her face, breathing in, he was sure of it, and only after she
was finished, drinking the coffee. They sat like that in silence for a while
and then they just started talking about everything, just as Alex had hoped
they would. She told him how she had grown up living near the ocean, and her
father had died young, and then her mother had too, and she had a boyfriend,
her first love, who broke her heart, but the story she wrote was just a story,
a story about her life, her dream life, the way she felt inside, like he did,
as though somehow life was a dream. Even though everyone thought she was a
painter (because he was the only one who read it, he was the only one who got
it), she was a writer, not a painter, and stories seemed more real to her than
life. At a certain point he offered to take the empty cup and throw it in the
trash but she said she liked to peel off the wax, and then began doing so. Alex
politely ignored the divergent ways she found to continue drinking his breath.
He didn’t want to embarrass her.

They finally
stood up and stretched, walked through the park together and grew quiet, with
the awkwardness of new friends. “You want a ride?” he said, pointing at his
car.

She declined,
which was a disappointment to Alex but he determined not to let it ruin his
good mood. He was willing to leave it at that, to accept what had happened
between them that afternoon as a moment of grace to be treasured and expect
nothing more from it, when she said, “What are you doing next Tuesday?” They
made a date, well, not a date, Alex reminded himself, an arrangement, to meet
the following Tuesday in the park, which they did, and there followed many
wonderful Tuesdays. They did not kiss. They were friends. Of course Alex still
loved her. He loved her more. But he didn’t bother her with all that and it was
in the spirit of friendship that he suggested (after weeks of Tuesdays in the
park) that the following Tuesday she come for dinner, “nothing fancy,” he
promised when he saw the slight hesitation on her face.

But when she
said yes, he couldn’t help it; he started making big plans for the night.

Naturally,
things were awkward when she arrived. He offered to take her sweater, a lumpy
looking thing in wild shades of orange, lime green, and purple. He should have
just let her throw it across the couch, that would have been the casual
non-datelike thing to do, but she handed it to him and then, wiping her hand
through her hair, which, by candlelight looked like bloody grass, cased his
place with those lavender eyes, deeply shadowed as though she hadn’t slept for
weeks.

He could see she
was freaked out by the candles. He hadn’t gone crazy or anything. They were
just a couple of small candles, not even purchased from the store in the mall,
but bought at the grocery store, unscented. “I like candles,” he said, sounding
defensive even to his own ears.

She smirked, as
if she didn’t believe him, and then spun away on the toes of her red sneaker
and her green one, and plopped down on the couch. She looked absolutely
exhausted. This was not a complete surprise to Alex. It had been a part of his
plan, actually, but he felt bad for her just the same.

He kept dinner
simple, lasagna, a green salad, chocolate cake for dessert. They didn’t eat in
the dining room. That would have been too formal. Instead they ate in the
living room, she sitting on the couch, and he on the floor, their plates on the
coffee table, watching a DVD of
I
Love Lucy
episodes, a mutual like they had
discovered. (Though her description of watching
I Love Lucy
reruns as a
child did not gel with his picture of her in the crooked keeper’s house, offering
tea to melting ghosts, he didn’t linger over the inconsistency.) Alex offered
her plenty to drink but he wouldn’t let her come into the kitchen, or get
anywhere near his cup. He felt bad about this, horrible, in fact, but he tried
to stay focused on the bigger picture.

After picking at
her cake for a while, Agatha set the plate down, leaned back into the gray
throw pillows, and closed her eyes.

Alex watched
her. He didn’t think about anything, he just watched her. Then he got up very
quietly so as not to disturb her and went into the kitchen where he, carefully,
quietly opened the drawer in which he had stored the supplies. Coming up from
behind, eyeing her red and green hair, he moved quickly. She turned toward him,
cursing loudly, her eyes wide and frightened, as he pressed her head to her
knees, pulled her arms behind her back (to the accompaniment of a sickening
crack, and her scream) pressed the wrists together and wrapped them with the
rope. She struggled in spite of her weakened state, her legs flailing, kicking
the coffee table. The plate with the chocolate cake flew off it and landed on
the beige rug and her screams escalated into a horrible noise, unlike anything
Alex had ever heard before. Luckily, Alex was prepared with the duct tape,
which he slapped across her mouth. By that time he was rather exhausted
himself. But she stood up and began to run, awkwardly, across the
room.
It broke his heart to see her this way. He grabbed her from behind. She kicked
and squirmed but she was quite a small person and it was easy for him to get
her legs tied.

“Is that too
tight?” he asked.

She looked at
him with wide eyes. As if he were the ghost.

“I don’t want
you to be uncomfortable.”

She shook her
head. Tried to speak, but only produced muffled sounds.

“I can take that
off,” he said, pointing at the duct tape. “But you have to promise me you won’t
scream. If you scream, I’ll just put it on, and I won’t take it off again.
Though, you should know, ever since Tessie died I have these vivid dreams and
nightmares, and I wake up screaming a lot. None of my neighbors has ever done
anything about it. Nobody’s called the police to report it, and nobody has even
asked me if there’s a problem. That’s how it is amongst the living. Okay?”

She nodded.

He picked at the
edge of the tape with his fingertips and when he got a good hold of it, he
pulled fast. It made a loud ripping sound. She grunted and gasped, tears
falling down her cheeks as she licked her lips.

“I’m really
sorry about this,” Alex said. “I just couldn’t think of another way.”

She began to
curse, a string of expletives quickly swallowed by her weeping, until finally
she managed to ask, “Alex, what are you doing?”

He sighed. “I
know it’s true, okay? I see the way you are, how tired you get and I know why.
I know that you’re a breath-stealer. I want you to understand that I know that
about you, and I love you and you don’t have to keep pretending with me, okay?”

She looked
around the room, as if trying to find something to focus on. “Listen, Alex,” she
said, “Listen to me. I get tired all the time ’cause I’m sick. I didn’t want to
tell you, after what you told me about your wife. I thought it would be too
upsetting for you. That’s it. That’s why I get tired all the time.”

“No,” he said,
softly, “you’re a ghost.”

“I am not dead,”
she said, shaking her head so hard that her tears splashed his face. “I am not
dead,” she said over and over again, louder and louder until Alex felt forced
to tape her mouth shut once more.

“I know you’re
afraid. Love can be frightening. Do you think I’m not scared? Of course I’m
scared. Look what happened with Tessie. I know you’re scared too. You’re
worried I’ll turn out to be like Ezekiel, but I’m not like him, okay? I’m not
going to hurt you. And I even finally figured out that you’re scared ’cause of
what happened with your mom. Of course you are. But you have to understand.
That’s a risk I’m willing to take. Maybe we’ll have one night together or only
one hour, or a minute. I don’t know. I have good genes though. My parents, both
of them, are still alive, okay? Even my grandmother only died a few years ago.
There’s a good chance I have a lot, and I mean a lot, of breath in me. But if I
don’t, don’t you see, I’d rather spend a short time with you, than no time at
all?”