Veneer (54 page)

“This tray,” she said, placing a finger on it, “has been in our family for five generations. One hundred percent silver.” Her accent suggested she should be dropping an article now and then, but Babushka spoke English well, albeit very slowly. “It was my grandmother’s. American businessman bought it for her.
Iz Praha
. Very beautiful.”

Ilya examined the tarnished tray. It was decades from beautiful.

“It survived two wars. Even Yuri Lyakhov could not take it.”

The details of the Lyakhov Insurgency came up automatically, pulled from a brain cell that had been programmed in seventh grade.

Babushka motioned to the window. “This is nothing. If this tray could talk, it would laugh at us.” Her smile was full of stained teeth. “When I left Ukraine, it was just me and tray. My grandmother told me to sell it, but I could not.”

“You’re saying I should be more like tray?”

“No.
The
tray is just a thing. You are a person, Ilyushenka.”

She liked it when Babushka used the long form of her name. The Americanized version had nothing on the Russian pronunciation.

“The tray does not notice the world as we do. Look at Petter; he thinks someone will take the house. Do you think he cares about the veneer?”

Ilya realized her father had bigger problems. She clenched her eyes and felt the pull of the stitches in her skin. “Let it hurt, right?”

“There is no choice. We come and go. The world stays. The tray stays.”

The words swirled in Ilya’s head. “What the fuck is that supposed to mean? You sit there and say this is nothing, but you have no idea how much I need the veneer.” She felt her voice break. It was the first time she had ever spoken so rudely to her grandmother and the worst part of it was that she couldn’t stop herself. “Look at me,” she shouted. “Look what she did to my face! How am I supposed to live with this?”

Babushka studied the swirls in her cup.

“Nobody cares what this tray
used
to look like. All they see now is how ugly it is. You carry it around like it’s the most valuable thing in the house, but it’s not. I don’t want to carry my scars around forever. I want to reconcile them into oblivion and never think about them again. That’s my right! And if that means no one can ever touch my face, then fine. The world has to see me as I want to appear, not how I am.”

“It’s not that bad.”

Ilya swung her feet to the floor and leaned forward. “Then why won’t you look at me? All this time, you’ve been staring at that stupid tray.”

Babushka shook her head.

“If you love me, if you’ve ever cared for me, look me in the eyes.” She felt bad forcing her grandmother’s hand, but she needed to know. There were no portals left in Easton that could tell her what she looked like. Seeing Babushka’s reaction was the only way.

Sure enough, there were tears in the old woman’s eyes. She held her gaze for all of three seconds before turning away again. The hand on her mouth barely contained a sob.

It was all Ilya needed to see. She stood and left the room. At the top of the stairs, she debated going down to the living room, but her mother was probably on the couch making love to something alcoholic. Instead, she walked past the master suite and her grandmother’s room to the door at the end of the landing. It went up to the attic and there she found the lack of veneer less jarring.

This was where all the old stuff was kept; even the serving tray had spent most of its life up here. Ilya wandered from one shelf to another, looking at the ancient and colorful things that had once been Babushka’s prized possessions but were now relegated to a dusty vault. They might have filled an entire house at some point, been the backdrop to a life that she thought would never wind down, would never finish out its days as a third wheel in her son’s guest bedroom.

Ilya didn’t find it on the shelves or in the boxes that were stacked near the back of the house. There was a mobile wardrobe that held only fur coats that had long since been made illegal in Easton. Sports equipment stood guard at the top of the stairs; a small tennis racquet reminded Ilya of the fifth grade, of a passing fancy that barely lasted a summer.

What looked like a pile of old jackets actually concealed a hope chest and it was there that Ilya focused her search. She lifted the wooden lid and squirmed at the sound of the rusted hinges opening. The dust had not intruded into the chest, leaving the old trinkets and costume jewelry in good condition. The object of her desire sat on a shelf that rose with the lid. It was trying to hide under a yellowing handkerchief, but Ilya would have recognized the Revlon font anywhere.

Like the tray, the compact had seen better days, but inside, the untarnished mirror reflected the world as well as any portal. Ilya held it at an angle at first and looked at the stairs behind her. She took a deep breath and rotated her hand.

“It’s not that bad,” she said, her lip trembling. “It’s not that bad.” Even as the sobs climbed her throat, she couldn’t stop repeating her grandmother’s lie. “It’s not that bad!”

In fact, it was worse than she had imagined. Even as she turned away, she couldn’t escape the memory of her bandaged face. She saw it in her mind, her perfectly reconciled face with a veneer that wouldn’t hold, that kept slipping away to reveal the carnage underneath.

It wasn’t her; it couldn’t be.

“It’s not that bad,” she whispered.

Ilya threw the compact at the wall and collapsed on the floor, her cheeks already damp. She wanted to curl up into a ball and disappear, but the pressure against the side of her face made her yelp. Instinctively, she put her hand to her cheek, but even that was too much to bear.

“It’s not that bad,” she screamed.

It’s just my face, she thought. Who even looks at people’s faces?

No, it wasn’t her face. It was someone else’s, someone’s sick joke, like Russo making shops of Deron.

Except it wasn’t funny. She hated it, just wanted it to go away.

A hand came up and slapped her gently on the cheek. It stung, but Ilya hit herself again. More pain, she thought. More pain would make her forget about the end of her social life. There would be no more friends, no more Ramseys to seduce or Rosalias to fondle in the dead of night. The window of possibilities had slammed shut and Ilya couldn’t think of anything she wanted more than to drown in the pain.

Another slap on the cheek, followed by a closed fist against her forehead.

“It is that bad.”

The next shot caught her on the nose and made her cry out. The sound attracted Babushka and Ilya opened her eyes as footsteps climbed the stairs.

“Ilyushenka!”

Not so comforting this time.

Blood covered Ilya’s hands and most of the floor, but she barely recognized it as her own. All she could think about was how she had been wrong. She didn’t want to suffer forever. If anything, she just wanted it to go away.

The pain. Easton. Everything.

Ilya recoiled when Babushka tried to help her up. She pushed past her and ran down the stairs, smearing blood on the handrail and the walls. Her fingers slipped on the doorknob, but she managed to lock her bedroom door behind her. She fought through the throbbing in her head to the dresser. There, she had wisely left the cap loose on the clear bottle. She turned it over and dumped the remaining Oxycodone pills into a small pile.

“Be enough,” she prayed.

Be enough water to down the pills, enough pills to drown the pain.

Just be enough.

70 - Deron

Deron thought about the tunnel leading out of Easton.

Down where the light couldn’t reach, he saw nothing, only an infinite blackness that had no shape yet crushed in on him from all sides. At the time, he had been more concerned with bugs and spiders hanging from the ceiling or crawling up his legs, but in the days after, he remembered only the silence, not of sound, but of light. The lack of stimulus did not make him feel empty; it felt more like stillness with no one pestering him to move. Nothing vied for his attention and nothing stood in the way of his imagination. The spiders he saw with his mind’s eye were more vibrant and alive than anything in the real world. As consolation prizes went, it wasn’t bad.

It was that silence that Deron thought about as he writhed in the muddy waters of the football field. He had overwhelmed Russo with reconciliation and was seconds from putting an end to the nightmare. Then, his shoulder exploded and a jet of red liquid spewed into the space in front of him. The impact put him off balance, but it was the resulting pain that brought him to the ground. He watched Agent Ruiz approach, the gun still steaming in his hand. He realized Ruiz had never intended for him to win, that it was all some sick game that ended with Deron bludgeoned to death and Russo made into a full-blown killer.

He tried to ignore Ruiz and focus on the storm roaring overhead. The rain fell in tiny explosions in the water around him. He heard the sound and tried to push it away. Closing his eyes, he thought of the tunnel, of an unstoppable darkness that could wash over Easton like a tsunami. Where everything had once been white, it would now be black. The field, the school, and even Russo who he could hear on the ground a few feet away crying out like a wounded dog; they would all be in shadow. Deron imagined it and pushed the command out with a guttural scream. In the resulting emptiness, he found a moment of silence.

Then, a crack of thunder and a searing pain in his gut.

Deron had been there before, had suffered through the interminable stage of thinking himself dead but knowing his brain still functioned. Death was the lack of all input, not an awareness that something was missing. This was not death. This was a gradual reinsertion into the world, a series of switches being thrown in the back of his brain. The voices came first, distant and muddled as if shouted from a moving vehicle. Later, the feeling in his body returned, a sensation that rivaled a warm bath but which quickly turned to pain. He tried to cry out, and for all he knew he did. The only feedback was a sting in his throat.

How long it went on, he wasn’t sure. At one point the hospital room came into view, and he saw a nurse doping him with something wonderful. It quieted the pain for a while, but the crawl back to the light became more difficult. The line between dream and reality shimmered like a bad veneer. He kept seeing the ceiling, kept trying to shroud it in black, but it only disappeared when he closed his eyes. The ceiling didn’t respond to his commands and lacked any decoration.

His ability to reconcile remotely was gone, but it didn’t matter. The veneer had gone with it.

It was supposed to be over. Ruiz had offered him a way back. All that was left was for Rosalia to realize she still loved him. The fight would have taken care of all that—had he won. And yet here he was, back at the start, worse off than ever before.

Deron spent the morning drifting in and out of the drug haze. He listened to the panic in the hallways and the shouting of doctors that grew worse as the day wore on. There was a window to the left and he could hear disorder outside. Breaking glass and gunshots broke up what was otherwise a continuous rumble of discontent. It was the shooting that made his heart race, that caused his shoulder and stomach to throb in remembrance. He could think of nothing but the memory, even when a man named Detective Pierce came into the room, even when he revealed that Russo was in the next bed.

Then Pierce had gone and for a long time, no noise in the room competed with the crowd outside.

“Hey, asshole.” It was Russo’s voice, less muffled than before.

Since kindergarten, Deron’s body had developed an automatic response to Russo’s presence that included increased heart rate and the release of life-saving adrenaline. He had become accustomed to the feeling, but not so much that he couldn’t recognize its absence. Deron imagined Russo and tried to make him a shadow. His mind answered with a fifty-fifty split, as if someone had dialed the brightness down.

“Answer me, faggot.”

The fear was gone, Deron realized. There was just nothing left for Russo to threaten short of death. With the drugs in his system, it wouldn’t even hurt that much. He would lose the war, but at least the battles would end.

“What do you want?”

“I want to strangle you.”

“Why?” Deron couldn’t see Russo’s face, but the pause told him his question was one rarely, if ever, considered.

Russo groaned. “I...”

“Do you even know why you want to kill me?”

“I know why.” Russo spoke slowly, steadying his voice. “Do you?”

Deron opened his eyes and saw the dim ceiling staring back at him. His ears perked up and caught the sound of the metal guardrail on Russo’s bed collapsing into its folded position. He resisted the urge to look, though there was no mistaking the movement of the bed and the scraping of tubes across the sheets. The monitor that had been belting out the tempo of Russo’s supposed heart increased to a frantic pace and then plummeted to a dull monotone. Bare feet hit the floor and Deron’s own monitor took up the second verse.

“Does not get along well with others. Do you remember that? When they pulled me out of Bowie? They told my mom I was bad for the other kids.” Footsteps brought his voice closer. “They made me wait outside. They thought I couldn’t hear them. That bitch teacher told them I was tormenting a boy named Deron.” His voice took on a high, mocking pitch. “It would be in
Deron’s
best interest if Russo was transferred.” He groaned again, breathed in sharply. “Do you know what they do to little boys at Glenmore? Do you have any fucking idea?”

Unable to fight it anymore, Deron turned and looked at Russo. The sight of blood still caked on his face made him happy, but the moment was lost as he looked into his enemy’s eyes. On Halloween, it would have made a decent costume. But today, out of context, Russo’s eyes made him look supernatural. The whites were completely gone, replaced by blood that had stagnated into black.

Russo shook his head; blood dripped from his nose onto his gown. He wiped it away and examined his finger. “I bet you thought you were going to win, didn’t you?”