White Horse (4 page)

Left at the top of the stairs. Second right. Through the open door.

What’s left of her family is in there with her.

Her father is a leaner man than his brother, younger by a handful of years, although from this angle I can’t see his face. His ass is a glowing white moon with a pale slash of hair dividing the hemispheres.

Beneath him, Lisa is pressed into the bed facedown. She’s past struggling, resigned to her place in the family hierarchy. A crude puppet impaled by her puppet master, hunching the bed herky-jerky with his every thrust.

Disgust is lava and pyroclastic ash erupting from my pores. A small cry is all the warning he gets as I race forward and grab his testicles mid-slap. Before our world ended, I was never one for manicures and pedicures. A stranger flicking a file across my feet would only make me squeal as the nerve endings danced. Hangnails frame my fingertips still. White dots are albino freckles on my nails. The edges are ragged where I’ve lain awake and nibbled while I rifled through my thoughts. All of this adds up to the one time a man doesn’t want a woman’s hand on his balls. My nails are pincers sinking into the delicate skin..

I expect him to shriek, but he doesn’t. There’s one last ripple of his ass and he stops cold as though he’s awaiting my instructions.

“Get off her.”

His voice is husky from the grunting. “I’m sorry.”

“Not me. Pull out and tell
her
that.”

He eases out. His erection withers until it’s a limp shoestring dangling in the air.

“I’m sorry,” he repeats.

“Lisa,” I snap. “Get up and get your things.” I wish my words could be gentle, but that won’t get her up and moving and out of here.

There’s a moment’s hesitation, then she pushes her body off the bed. She tugs up her jeans and fastens them without lifting her chin.
This is not your shame
, I want to tell her.
It’s him. All him
. But now is not the time.

“Lisa’s part of my family now,” I tell the man who created half of what she is. “We’re leaving.”

He’s a chipped and damaged record. “I’m sorry.”

When I release him, he remains frozen. His shoulders shake and it
occurs to me he’s crying. I kneel beside him as his daughter gathers her things and crams them into a backpack the same size as mine. My hand comes to roost on his shoulder and I am shocked at myself because I know I’m about to comfort a rapist.

“We don’t have to be monsters. We still get to choose.”

“I have urges.”

“She’s your daughter.”

“I’m sorry.”

“We’re leaving now. Lisa?”

She shakes her head; she has no last words to give him.

We pack food: bread, preserves, canned goods. Anything with a high-calorie punch. These we wrap in plastic trash bags and tuck into my bicycle’s basket. There’s milk in the kitchen drained by one of the men from the cows that wander the yard. They’re living off grass now, scavenging the land. And they’re lucky, because all the rain means thicker, lusher pasture for the eating. At the back of my mind is an image of me slaughtering a cow to survive, my arms stained with what looks like ketchup but is really blood. I shove it away and try not to think about that yet.

“We should drink it all,” I tell her, dividing the tepid liquid into two glasses. My gag reflex tries to reject the fluid, but I force it down, knowing that my body needs this. Food is becoming more scarce. An estimated ninety percent of the population is dead, but perishables are long gone and fast food is anything but. What remains is processed foods. Hamburger Helper that for the first time actually does help. Eventually we’ll all be down to foraging, or subsistence farming—if any of us make it that far.

Lisa sips at the milk: a church mouse with a precious piece of cheese.

“Where’s my uncle?”

The question hangs in the air between us.

“On the floor. I had to stop him.”

She swallows. “Is he dead?”

I don’t want to touch him. I don’t. But she’s looking to me like I know what to do. She doesn’t know that I’m making it up as I go along. Pulling it out of my ass like my butt is a magician’s hat.

Kneel. Two fingers against her uncle’s neck. They’re swallowed by his flesh knuckle-deep, like he’s made of quicksand.

Please let him stay down, I chant. The fingers not lost in flab curl around a paring knife. A postapocalyptic insurance policy. For a few seconds his pulse eludes me and I think he’s dead. But no … there it is.
Pa-rump, pa-rump, pa-rump
. He’s the Little Drummer Boy on speed.

“He’s alive.” For now, because a galloping pulse can’t be good in a man the size of a VW Beetle.

“Thank God,” Lisa says.

Yeah, God. That guy. He forgot to RSVP to mankind’s last party. Who could blame him? The fireworks were great but everyone attending was sick.

On the other side of the kitchen, knives wait in a drawer. Knives for sawing bread, for slicing cheese, for dicing tomatoes, for hacking meat. One cleaver for me, and the paring knife. Both bear keen edges.

“You should have a knife.”

Lisa’s brows dip. “Oh no, I couldn’t.”

“What if you need to cut something?”

“I thought you meant …”

She’s staring toward the thin air above her uncle. The drawer beckons. A corkscrew. Good for taking out an eye. An adequate weapon for someone who doesn’t want to carry one.

“Take this,” I say. Her fingers close around the helix. One presses against its point and she winces. “Just in case we find a great bottle of wine. This is Italy, remember?”

We walk with my wheels between us. Lisa’s hand balances on the seat, using it to guide her path while I hold the handlebars and steer us true. She took the corkscrew without question and shoved it into her jeans pocket, where she reaches down and traces the outline every few dozen feet.

This is the middle of nowhere, although its existence proves that it must be somewhere. So I pull out my compass and wait for the needle to still. Southeast. I want southeast. If we take a right at the farm’s entrance, that’s the road east. Good enough until we find a road that wanders south.

We don’t speak until we’re at the white mailbox and the old planks that form a halfhearted attempt at a fence are behind us.

Lisa cracks the silence. “I hope he’s okay. My dad.”

“He’ll be fine.”

“He’s my father.”

“I know.”

“You could have killed him.”

“But I didn’t.”

There’s a pause as she formulates the question. “Why?”

“The world you knew, that we all knew, is gone. Humanity is mostly dead and what’s left is dying.”

A ditch forms between her eyebrows, and it’s filled with ignorance.

“I don’t get it.”

“I like being human.”

The ditch digs a little deeper.

“He did it because he loved me,” she says after a while. “That’s what I tell myself so I don’t hate him. He’s still my dad, and a person shouldn’t hate their dad. In a way, I feel like I owed him something. It was a hard job, looking after me out here, being blind and all.”

“Did he tell you that?”

“Sometimes.”

“It’s no excuse,” I tell her. “You didn’t owe him
that
.”

She disappears inside herself for several moments before returning with a new question.

“During sex, did you ever close your eyes and pretend it was someone else?”

Did I? Maybe. When I was younger. Before I began having sex with someone other than myself.

“Sure,” I say to make her feel better. “Probably everyone does that.”

“I tried. It didn’t work very well.”

“Honey, what he was doing to you wasn’t sex or love.”

“Can I tell you a secret?” The question mark has a rhetorical curve, so I stay silent. When we reach the first crossroad stamped into the landscape, she says, “I think I’d still like being touched one day. By a man who likes me.”

“I think you will, too.”

“Do you have any secrets?”

I look at her sideways, tell myself I won’t let this one come to harm when I’ve lost so many along the way. “No.”

TWO

DATE: THEN

D
r. Rose opens a window. Sun and fresh air rush in like they’re in a hurry to go no place but here. This is their ultimate destination, their dream vacation.

I hold my face up to the light, smile. “That could be symbolic.”

“Of what?”

“Of what you do here.”

He smiles. “An optimist. That’s a step in the right direction. Often people who come see me look on therapy as a negative. A black mark against them.”

“
I
called
you
, remember?”

He gets up, goes out to the waiting room. “You want something to drink?”

“Is this a trick question?”

“Yes. I’m going to read your personality based on your beverage choices, so choose wisely.”

I smile. I can’t help myself. This isn’t what I thought it would be. I expected a dry soul shoehorned into a somber setting.

“Coffee with cream. Two sugars.”

“Two?”

“Okay, three.”

“That’s more like it.” He returns with identical mugs, passes one to me. The liquid is hot, sweet, smooth. I alternate blowing and sipping until the first inch disappears.

“What does this say about me?”

He takes his own long sip, slurps a little, doesn’t apologize. When he’s satisfied he swaps the mug for a notepad and pen. “You like asking questions.”

“My coffee tells you that?”

The pen moves on the paper. “No, your questions do.”

I laugh. “If you don’t ask, you may never know.”

He smiles down at his paper. “Why don’t you tell me why you called me?”

“Don’t you know?”

“I’m a therapist, not a psychic.”

“That would make your job easier, no?”

“Scarier.”

I take another half inch of coffee. “I’m not crazy.”

“There are two ways to look at that. Either no one’s crazy, or we’re all crazy in our own way. As a great Greek philosopher once said: Man needs a little madness, or else he never dares cut the rope and be free.”

“Socrates?”

“Zorba.”

Again with the laughter. “I don’t know, Doctor, it’s possible you might be crazier than me.”

“Sometimes I talk to myself,” he admits. “Sometimes I even answer myself.”

“Only child?”

“Eldest. Of two. I have a brother.”

“I have a younger sister. She had imaginary friends. And because my folks wouldn’t buy me a Ken doll, I drew a mustache and chest hair on one of my Barbies.”

“Do you still do that?”

“Only if my date turns out to be a woman.”

The dimple in his cheek twitches. Am I serious and therefore nuts,
or am I the perennial comedienne, stowing my pain under a funny blanket? Am I in dire need of analysis? Would I make a great research paper wedged somewhere between obsessive-compulsive plucking and multitasking personality disorder?

“If this is ongoing, you should be in therapy,” he says.

“Do you think?”

“Why don’t you tell me why you’re here.”

I lean back. Take a small sip. Arrange my lie.

“I’ve been having this dream about a jar. Not the grape jelly kind—the old kind. It’s the color of scorched cream.”

“How does it make you feel, this dream?”

“Terrified. …”

“It’s old,” James Witte tells
me. Letters trail after his name, interspersed with periods to denote that he’s spent a whole lot of time with his head in books and his mind in the past. He’s an assistant curator at the National Museum. An old friend, although he looks the same as the day we graduated high school: thin, narrow-shouldered, pale. His eyes gleam as he circles the jar.

“Really old.”

“Is that a technical term?”

He laughs. I get a flash of him sucking on a beer bong at a postgrad party. “Yeah, it’s technical. Translation: I don’t know how old it is, but it’s really fucking old.”

“Wow. That
is
old.”

“If I had to guess, I’d say it’s Greek. Maybe Roman. The curve of the handles, the way they attach to the tapering trunk … But there’s no design. Yet, it’s symmetrical, which would suggest it was made on a wheel. And everything made on the wheel had some design, be it painted or etched.”

A soft shadow bats at the window. My next door neighbor’s cat, Stiffy. Because Ben’s a teenage boy living in the basement of a grown man’s body. The window barely has time to scrape against the frame before the marmalade beast’s squeezing underneath, launching his invasion.

“Can I take it?” James asks. “I’ll bring it back. But I can give you a
much better idea of when and where it’s from if I can inspect it in my own space. That way I can get other opinions if I can’t figure it out. Our new intern sorts potsherds like some kind of savant. The other interns call him Rain Man.”

I’d trust James with my life. We’ve been friends since tenth grade when he moved to the area from Phoenix. He’s steady. Loyal. Decent to the bone. So I tell him what I can’t tell Dr. Rose: that someone sneaked into my home and I’m driving myself slightly nuts wondering how and why. All except the fear. I hold that close to my bones lest it seem trite, thin.

He listens intently. That’s how James has always listened. Every so often he asks a question and I do my best to answer it.

“Why don’t you just open the thing?”

“It’s not mine to open.”

On the door, the locks feign innocence.
Don’t blame us, the security system failed you
. The panel blinks silently. It’s just a robot awaiting instructions from a mother ship in a building downtown.

“Why not toss it in the dumpster?”

“It’s not mine to throw away.”

“Leave it to me.” He grins. “I love a good mystery. Worst case I’ll bring Rain Man here. I’ll tell him it’s a date.”

Stiffy rubs against my skin, his purr vibrating all the way up to my knees as he figure-eights my shins.

“Aha, so he’s cute, then?”

“Tasty. And smart. Can’t beat that with a stick.”

“Bring him over. I’ll make lasagna.”

The cat detaches himself from my legs and saunters over to the jar. He circles it twice, then sits a foot away, tail tucked neatly around him in a protective ring. With a fascination bordering on obsession, he stares at the jar.