Delicate Monsters (18 page)

Far more than he wanted to.

Far more than he should.

 

chapter thirty-three

Sadie closed her eyes, made a nasty wish, and chucked the empty bottle of champagne straight over her shoulder, as hard as she could. Hand cupped to her ear, she waited for the clunk and crash of breaking glass.

But it never came.

Disappointed, she opened her eyes again. Got to her feet. And swayed. Everything about her felt sloshy, overfull, like she was on the verge of springing a leak. She lit a cigarette in order to keep herself grounded, then stumble-skidded down the hillside to retrieve the bottle. It deserved a more destructive end, she decided, and as she walked, Sadie sent one last impulsive email to Roman.

P.S. Is your dick really that small?

She made it to the dirt road that ran the perimeter of the property. Steeply cambered, it consisted of two parallel truck ruts that were the lowest points around. According to Newton's laws of motion and the theory of gravity, this stretch of road was precisely where the heavy champagne bottle should have rolled and lodged itself.

Only it wasn't here.

Sadie turned around and around. Peered through her sunglasses back up the hill. She couldn't see any point on the way down that the bottle might have gotten snagged or hung up on. Then she looked behind her and across the road into a bunch of scrub brush and wilted weeds.

No bottle.

What the hell? Sadie hated moments like this, when something she
knew
to be a fact was not, in fact, demonstrating its factness to her. It was just really fucking rude. She puffed harder on her cigarette, enjoying the burn on her windpipe and the hope that she was giving someone somewhere cancer. Ambling down the road a bit, she looked this way and that to see if the bottle might be caught in some funny shadow or a strange trick of the light. Nothing.

Then Sadie stopped walking. She blinked.

Up ahead, maybe an eighth of a mile farther and standing in the middle of the road perfectly upright, was the champagne bottle.

That did not make sense.

It just didn't.

Sadie walked faster, and now there was a cramp in her stomach, a tight one, right beneath her navel. She reached the bottle, leaned down, and picked it up. She held it to the light, turning it around and around, but there was nothing about the object that told her anything about its journey. Sadie considered the remote possibility that it had come down the side of the hill and rolled toward the road, only to be pushed far off course by a freak wind current, causing it to land in the most unlikely of positions—one of those brilliant oddities of nature only pure chance could produce, like the Hope Diamond or the Grand Canyon or even those Goblin Valley rock formations down in Utah that those dumbass Boy Scout leaders had gone and ruined.

Only there was no wind at the moment.

Not even a little bit.

The cramp in Sadie's stomach grew sharper.

Tucking the bottle beneath one arm, she veered toward the creek. It wasn't much farther, and once there, she could smash the bottle on the rocks by the water. That would make her feel better, more in control. If some of the pieces were large enough, she planned to lay them in the roadway and hope one of the vineyard workers got a flat. In particular, she had her sights set on Gerald Corning, who drove around in this shitty tricked-out Escalade with fuzzy dice hanging from the rearview mirror. As if Sadie's mom didn't already own his balls.

The old press was up ahead, on Sadie's right. A remnant from the vineyard's long-ago past, it was an ugly structure: a round slatted vat, framed by a thatched-roof structure that loomed from the earth like a monster. Beyond the press was the old wine cellar, also in disuse. This was the place Sadie and Emerson Tate had shared their darkest secrets during the months they'd spent together while his mom tended to Sadie's grandfather.

After seeing what he'd done with that frog, Sadie had invited him down with her and she'd shown him her collection of dead animals. Nothing she'd killed herself—Roman had been wrong about that. She might be a General Zaroff at heart, but not
literally.
The animals were mostly things she found while out exploring. She kept them hidden down in that dank room, to use when needed, like the time she'd dumped a handful of decomposing field mice into her uncle's custom leather riding boots after he told her parents she was an “insolent brat.”

Pretty soon Sadie found out Emerson liked dead things, too, but for a very different reason. She didn't care much about his reasons; he could do what he wanted. But it was the last time she'd gone down there with him that she'd finally gotten to see a real penis and the things he could do with it.

“Aren't you supposed to look at naked ladies when you do that?” she'd asked from where she sat, legs dangling, on the marble-topped work slab that had once been used for corking. But Emerson wasn't looking at naked ladies. He wasn't even looking at her. In the dim glow of the bare lightbulb that hung and swayed from the dirt ceiling, he was doing what he was doing while staring down at the lifeless body of a small black cat he'd kept in his backpack all day before bringing it over after school. He told Sadie he'd found it already dead on the roadside, but she had her doubts. There were no tire marks on it or anything. The cat was just dead.

Dead. Dead. Dead.

And that's what he was looking at.

“I've never seen a naked lady,” he grunted, before scrunching his face up in a funny way.

“Hmmph,” said Sadie, as he made more faces. Later, in the privacy of her own room, she would touch herself once or twice after seeing what he did and how much he liked it, but nothing mind-blowing would happen, much to Sadie's bitter resentment. Not until she was older, at least. And then, it wasn't like what you read about in books or saw in movies; Sadie's body didn't
blossom
or
awaken
or
come of age
so much as it became
aware.
It wasn't all that different from learning how to wiggle her ears or getting her first period. She simply woke up one morning in her thirteenth year with a newfound sentience that taught her that
this
was what it was like to have fire in her veins, and
this
was how to bring her body alive with twisting want using the force of her own hand.

Dead cats weren't what she thought of then.

She glanced over toward where she knew the cellar lay. It was a spot that had been overrun with weeds and trash over the years, but she could usually make out the shape of the cement structure that had been poured into the earth to hold the double doors to the cellar.

Then Sadie frowned.

Because both the cellar doors were open.

Slowly, very slowly, the champagne bottle slipped from Sadie's armpit to smash onto the ground. Glass sprayed everywhere, across her feet, the dirt.

She barely noticed. She was already marching forward on tense legs, heading straight for the patch of overgrown grass and grubby weeds that sat in the shadow of the old press, and nothing felt right, not after finding the bottle in a place and a position it shouldn't have been, and now this.

The air hung in clumps all around her, small pockets of heat that she had to push through. It was an effort moving in such conditions, but she was determined to find out who was screwing around in a place no one should be. Sadie's dad had chained those cellar doors up years ago, just days before Emerson's mom was dismissed from her nursing job and Sadie's grandfather was transferred to a care hospital. He'd lingered there another month before falling out of bed and dying alone on the floor in the middle of the night.

When she was five yards from the cellar entrance, Sadie's phone chirped and all of her muscles loosened with relief. It was Roman, no doubt, and remembering what she'd asked him made her feel good again. It reminded her that she knew how to work people and get what she wanted out of them.

It was a reminder she seriously needed at the moment.

Sadie pulled her phone from her pocket, curious about his answer to her nosy question and wondering which way he would play it: seizing opportunity and demonstrating newfound bravado by telling her his dick was way bigger than she gave him credit for or maintaining his meekness, his gloomy honesty that was so Roman and so pathetic, because it seemed he hadn't yet realized that
everyone
lied about things like dick size and intelligence and their concern for others. So which would it be?

Had he changed at all?

Sadie looked down at what he'd written:

That's none of your business.

 

chapter thirty-four

“Mom.” Emerson shook her shoulder. “Mom, wake up.”

She was asleep on the couch again with the television on, although instead of housewives, it was tuned to the news, that endless loop of tragedy and suffering.

“Mom,” he said again, eyeing the sleeping pills on the coffee table with no small amount of alarm.

She sat up finally, letting the quilt slip from her shoulders and pushing her pale hair out of her face.

“Miles?” she said.

“No, Mom. It's Emerson. There's nothing new about Miles right now.” He sank deep in the couch cushions beside her and hoped the breath mints he'd been sucking on would give a convincing impression of sobriety. “I just got home. I wanted to talk. Can we do that?”

“What time is it?”

“Four thirty.”

“In the afternoon?”

“Yeah.”

“Oh.” She went to get up. “I should be getting ready for work.”

He pulled her back. “No. You're not working today. Miles is missing, remember?”

She blinked. Looked confused. Then the tears came.

Emerson hugged her. He gave her tissues.

“I want to talk,” he said again.

“That girl called, you know.” She sniffled.

“What girl?”

“Margaret Bowman. She was pushy with me, Em.”

Emerson frowned. “Why did May call
you
?”

“You left your phone. I answered it. What was I supposed to do?”

“Well, what did she want?”

“I don't know. She wants to see you. I told her you were busy, but she said she's coming over at six. Pushy, like I said.”

“I want to see her, too, Mom.”

She made a sound of disapproval. “You don't need to get involved with all that. Especially not right now.”

All that.
Emerson sighed. “Both her parents have Ph.D.'s, you know.”

“What's your point?”

“My point is that I like her, and we're already involved. So if this is about you being bigoted or close-minded or whatever it is you always do, just drop it. God knows our family isn't anything to aspire to.”

His mother burst into tears again, worse than before. Big wracking sobs shook her body.

Emerson wanted to die, right there on the spot. “Oh God, no, no, stop. I'm sorry. I didn't mean it. Don't do that. Come on. I love you. You know that.”

She kept crying. Blew her nose loudly.

“I went and saw Brewster today,” he said, after a moment.

She looked up. “You saw Paul?”

“Yeah.”

“Why?”

“I wanted to find out more about Dad. About why he did what he did.”

His mother nodded, and with her thin shoulders and wet cheeks, she looked so vulnerable, like a piece of crystal balanced on the very edge of a high shelf, that Emerson almost didn't ask his next question. He didn't want to be the one to tip her over.

But he had to.

“Mom, is it weird I don't remember you telling me Dad killed himself?”

“What are you talking about?”

“Brewster said you told me. Or that he and Uncle Petey did. But in seventh grade I heard a girl talking about it, and I swear, it was the first time I knew about it. I always thought he'd had a heart attack in his car or something. I didn't know he'd actually—”

She grabbed his arm. “I can't talk about your father right now.”

Emerson paused. “Well, did you tell me or not?”

“Yes,” she said. “We told you. Of course we did.”

“Then why didn't I know?”

“I don't know if we should get into all this.”

“We should definitely get into this. How could I forget something like that?”

“Maybe you forgot because you didn't want to remember.”

“What?”

“Just what I said.”

“I
forgot
?”

“It was for the best,” she said. “Kids don't need to know about things like that. Poor choices and sick minds. That's grown-up stuff.”

“So Dad was sick?”

“He was definitely something.”

“I don't remember him being sick. I don't remember anything like that.”

“That's good, Emerson. Remember him good and loving. That's what he would've wanted.”

“But I don't understand. Did you
let
me forget?”

“Is that worse than not telling you the truth in the first place?”

Emerson faltered. “No. But I don't understand why you wouldn't be honest with me.”

She reached out and stroked his hair. “It had nothing to do with
me,
baby. It was you. All you. You were so mad about your dad. For good reason, but your anger … it was scary. There was nothing I could do. So maybe sometimes I told you what you wanted to hear. That your daddy didn't choose to leave us. That his heart just gave up one night. It's almost true, if you think about it. I just wanted you to be happy. Don't you remember that?”

Emerson shook his head. What
did
he remember? He recalled flashes of his father's wake. Of wearing good shoes that were too small and getting blisters on the bottoms of his feet. Of looking at his mother's wall calendar to see his father's death date scribbled out in Sharpie, the whole thing a furious black square. He remembered returning to school a few days after the funeral and kicking a teacher in the stomach for saying he wasn't paying attention. He'd called the teacher a name, too, a really bad one, and he'd told his mom what it was when he'd gotten sent home.