Frail (30 page)

She was saying it was really my fault, Dave dying. That’s what she was doing. My fault I couldn’t find more insulin, my fault we got a sudden freak thaw right when we
needed
snow and ice to help keep it cold. My fault I couldn’t stanch Kristin’s blood, all over the living room rug. My fault I handed Susan over to die. She was laughing at me, taunting me with how stupid I was, she pretended she was trying to explain things to me but really she was laughing inside.

“You’re enjoying this,” I whispered, and the person who said that was a stranger I’d never known lived inside me, slithering out my throat. “You’re enjoying telling me just how much I fucked up—”

“Amy? You are not losing your mind
now
, not after we’re almost through the winter—you want to end up like Kristin?” She was shouting again, pitiless. “You want to be helpless? Useless? A walking target? This is no damned time to talk crazy.” She pulled away, trembling fingers stroking a shepherdess’s lacy Marie Antoinette skirts. “There’s gangs out there now, Amy, gangs of—things, those creatures that bit Dave, human beings too hungry to look at a baby and see a baby. Is that what you want to risk? No.”

She shook her head, hard, almost baring her teeth. “You saw that during the sickness, we all did, I saw another little baby that got—it’s done. It’s done, and I’ve condemned myself to hell, but it happened fast and she’s out of this world now and she’s
safe
, she’ll never suffer, and nobody will find her and decide to—nothing will find her. Nobody will find her.”

She stared down at me, her mouth a straight thin colorless line, a gray-eyed gray ghost lit from within by the certainty that what she’d done was right. The sparking all through my nerves had become a steady flame, sucking down my every breath before I could take in any air so I felt light-headed, faint, and yet at the same time full of awful, growing strength.

“You heard me promise Kristin.” I wasn’t crying anymore, and something deeper inside me knew that wasn’t good. “That I’d take care of her baby. That
I
would.”

“Amy, in this world that’s a promise you could never keep.”

How dare you. How dare you tell me what I can and can’t do, how dare you take it all away—I grabbed the shovel, the fire beneath my skin leaping up gleeful, greedy-hot, when she flinched and backed away. “Show me what you did with her.” It was heavy, that shovel, thick metal with a solid wooden handle and nearly as tall as I was, and I felt strong, far too strong, as I raised it a few more inches from the floor. “Show me right now.”

“Amy.” She wasn’t scared yet. She’d seen too much, before this, to be scared. Just wary. Sure I wouldn’t do it. “Put that down and stop it.”

You don’t think I’ll do it, do you? You can’t even imagine it, like I couldn’t possibly have imagined you’d take Kristin’s child, the child she trusted to me, and—stupid, incompetent, that’s what you thought of me. And now, stupid, incompetent and weak. I’ll show you. I’ll show you how weak I am.

“You won’t show me. Because you can’t even look, can you?” The shovel wasn’t heavy anymore. It was a part of me, an extension of my arm. “I wasn’t gone long enough for you to bury her. The ground isn’t soft enough yet.”

“Amy.”

“The ground’s not soft enough. Not to bury her deep, where the dogs won’t get her.” The shovel was light and words far too heavy, each one dropping slow from my lips like clumps of tar oozing from an oily puddle. “You hid her. You show me where she’s gone.”

“Amy?” She was breathing hard now, broken bits of deadstem hair falling into her eyes. “Put that goddamned shovel down. I’ll show you if you just put it down.”

A lie all in your eyes. My mother used to say that, when I was little, I could never lie to her but she left me, she’s gone. She was mine and she got taken away. “Show me right now. You show me exactly what you—”

“Amy! I swear to God, I’ll—
stop it! Now! Amy!
”

She flung her arms out to try to grab the shovel, wrench it away. I don’t know if I was hitting her before that, if that’s what made me strike, but the shovel blade slammed into her arm, her face, her crumpled-up back and she was screaming things I couldn’t hear, couldn’t hear over the hiss, spit, rumble of tar bubbles all exploding with
you killed her, you killed her it was a baby Kristin’s baby mine and you killed her.
She made a horrible groaning sound, huddled helpless and broken on the floor and all winter, I’d listened to her, all winter I’d done what she said and look where it got us, look at all of us dead, her bones were so frail and gave way so quickly and I couldn’t stop, I couldn’t stop. She let out another, sighing sound, like the water rush of the blood all inside her overflowing its banks, flooding her, drowning her, and then I was back in my own body. I was standing there, holding that shovel, and she was lying at my feet. What was left of her. What I’d left of her.

Oh, God. Not my God. Not ever, not anymore.

Wake up. Please wake up.

 

 

Bottles.

I brought back formula, that sealed formula canister, but it never even occurred to me to look for a bottle.

They would’ve been right there, in the house on Forest Street. Lined up in the same cabinet. Inside the dishwasher. Somewhere. Didn’t think to look.

Didn’t think at all.

There was blood on the walls. On the wall behind the sofa. On every part of the floor, the rug. Fresh spray of it, all over Kristin’s tablecloth shroud. The shovel blade. My hands. My face, I felt wetness on it like rain. I dropped the shovel and animal sounds shuddered from inside me, horrible moaning noises like Ms. Acosta in death and what I’ve done, what I’ve done, what I’ve done. I was staggering around the perimeter of the room, almost sprinting, like a frantic captured thing stuck in a cage and I knocked over a chair as I ran, dusty old-lady lavender chair, and I tripped and went down with it and hoped I would hit my head but I was right there, wide awake, no oblivion after what I’d done. No rest. Never.

She didn’t have a face anymore. Alicia Acosta, who got me through the winter in one piece, who went hungry so I and the pregnant woman could have food, I took away your face. It’s leaking something now, not blood. I yanked at the tablecloth covering Kristin, pulled it away.

Ms. Acosta’s body had twisted around somehow when I hit her so that her fleece and sweaters got torn open, her shirt; one limp hunger-shrunken breast thrust forward through the gaping cloth, nearly exposed. That lone breast spilling out, her tippedback remains of a head were somehow so much more obscene than Kristin lying naked from the waist down in blood but I couldn’t touch either of them, I let the tablecloth drop over Ms. Acosta’s head and chest and then I was out the door, running.

Maplewood. Cypress. Sycamore. All that day I ran all over town, my head empty of everything but blood and fear, and then I collapsed in a front yard and lay there, shaking, clutching at the slush-coated stems of deadened winter grass. All night. Laughing, sobbing, shouting out incoherent bits of songs, my songs, other people’s, nursery rhymes, gammon, spinach, wild stories I’d tell the cops when they found me. Except, no more cops, no civic security. National Guard, Emergency Environmental Hazard Hotline, FEMA, aunt or uncle, Dave, Kristin, Susan, Alicia. No home. No rest. No nothing. Forever.

I found the broken town security gates, and started walking.

Even then, even after everything that’d happened to us all, I still had to remind myself there weren’t any more police. Nobody to arrest me, shoot me for security’s sake. It didn’t matter.

Something else was already following.

 

 

I lay there, at the bottom of that cold muddy lake, and then I floated slowly up, from the depths of that day in March I’d tried to shove aside, lock away, a broken dusty toy in the attic. But it was everything, that day, that moment when I stood there gripping that shovel bubbling and boiling over. I remember everything. I admit everything. I confess everything. I’m ready.

I’m not ready. I’m not. I’m so frightened I’m running around still inside my own head, overturning chairs, stumbling and falling over and over again into brokenness and blood. But I can’t run anymore, not in death’s own house. I have to be ready. Even my faithful black dog’s deserted me. It’s time.

I opened my eyes, and I woke up alive.

TWENTY

M
y throat ached, a raw nauseous burn, as if I’d swallowed mouthfuls of rubbing alcohol—I could
smell
alcohol. Wafting up from under my chin, my own skin. I reached up, underneath, and traced a thin, bumpy little line starting just below one ear, following along the softness beneath the jawline and petering out, abruptly, on the other side.

Stitches.

I pushed up from my elbows, made myself sit. Something stiff and vaguely itchy was all over the front of my LCS jacket, a rusty bib-stain soaking the black cloth; I unzipped it, looked at my shirt beneath. Blood, my own blood. My neck, though, it’d been swabbed.

My stomach jolted with the sudden fear something had been cut out of me, my tongue, larynx—I actually reached into my mouth to feel my tongue was still there, nearly cut my fingers on my teeth. I coughed, thick and horribly congested like there were blood clots all through my throat, and spat out the words in a wet, painful croak:

“I’m—here.”

A steady pulse, I felt it. Rapid with nerves. Soft heartbeat, just like always, right at the inner edge of one breast.

“Here, boy,” I said, croaking still but already sounding more myself. “Come on, King. Come get me.”

I stared at the door. Nothing. “Nick? Old Nick? Champ? Rex? I need you! Come get me!”

Of course he didn’t come. I’d gotten cocky, thinking he was there to save me: He was there to guide me to the knife, encourage me down the chute. To make sure that when I did die, it was only at his master’s appointed place and time. In his master’s house.

But I wasn’t dead. Someone killed me, and I wasn’t dead. What happened, Prince? Was that part of the plan or not?

“Help,” I called out. “I’m alive.”

Nothing.

This room, it wasn’t Natalie’s room; it was completely empty, stripped bare. Empty except for the body lying in the far corner, beneath the windows: a man, lying facedown, a headful of tangled dark hair.

A lot of people have dark hair. Most of the human race has dark hair.

I turned him over and Stephen’s face was slack and ashen, his skin cold and dry and grayish-white like some sort of jelly, a congealed fat. Eyes squeezed shut, mouth half-open in death. His throat was cut open ear-to-nearly-ear and stitched back together again, just like mine, if I were alive then he was alive too and I put fingers to his neck waiting. I waited. I kept waiting. I felt nothing. Hand to his chest. Fingers hovering at his nose and mouth, waiting to feel the light little sweep of expelled breath.

Gone. Drowned.

 

 

I pushed his jaw slowly shut, feeling the muscles already going stiff and inflexible. Took my time smoothing out the collar of his T-shirt where it’d come up in tangled folds from inside the jacket, tugged the hem down to cover his stomach, the small things you should do to assure nobody else you got killed is a storm-twisted stripped branch at the moment of death. He’d never wanted to leave Paradise City. That was all down to me. I cradled an arm around his head, so I could feel his hair under my hand, and cried so hard my broken throat seized up and spasmed and I doubled over, coughing, closing my eyes and fighting nausea as the threading in my flesh strained and tugged with the force of it. I was crumbling where I sat, every part of me sharp metal corroding; the saltwater streaming from me, brimming inside me, left pitted, potholed trails of rust.

Gone. I’d barely known him, a harsh thing inside me kept whispering, but it wasn’t true, it didn’t matter, I
had
. Nearly as many days as I’d known Lisa, in the end, and I loved Lisa and I’d never see her again because there was no way out of here, there isn’t anything left, only the dead like me and Natalie (
She’s dead,
Naomi warned us all,
Natalie’s dead already
), killed for our crimes and brought back to watch over the true dead. All the dead were here somewhere, hiding in corners, I was sure of it, Stephen, Phoebe, Ms. Acosta, Bull’s-eye Jason, my uncle and aunt—

I mopped the back of a hand over my eyes, hard enough to bruise, furiously chasing every trace of tears. There was no way out of here and I’d brought myself here, I’d eaten my pomegranate seeds, way back in Dave’s living room in Lepingville. It was my job now, Natalie’s too I guessed, to look after all the deadstayed-dead and I would do it. I’d clean every corner of this filthy aquarium tank, make it shine, no more stench or shit piles or corpses just tossed in corners with bloody tablecloths only halfcovering their naked bodies, I’d fix it all, I’d fix it. That was my job now. Underworld custodian. Be proud of me, Dave. Be proud. I kissed Stephen and pressed my forehead to his, getting both of our faces wet, I had a job to do now, I had to say good-bye and go do it—