Slice Of Cherry (27 page)

She looked toward the grave where Kit was hiding. “I already lost her.”

Ilan’s head smacked against the floor.

“Ouch!”

The dogs had gone, and they were back in Gabriel’s room. Fancy hadn’t even noticed the change.

“We can only stay in the happy place for a little while,” Fancy explained, as Ilan picked himself up off his brother’s bedroom floor.

“What about Gabe and Kit?” he said. “How’re they getting back?”

“How would I know? I don’t even care. Kit’ll look after your brother.”

Ilan drove her home and she made him park well away
from the house, just in case Madda was awake. As he walked her across the yard, he paused before the cellar doors.

“You wanna see?” she asked. Everybody was curious about the cellar.

Ilan nodded, so she threw open the doors and led him down the steps. As he looked around she imagined him on the shelves in neat, labeled pieces like the painting he’d done of his father, and felt an urge to pull at him, to make sure he wouldn’t come apart like monkey bread. She dug her nails into her palms to keep her hands in check.

“Where’re the bonesaws?” he asked. “Those old-fashioned ones. What’d Guthrie call ’em?”

“Osteotomes,” she said, marveling at how normal he made it all feel. “Cops took ’em as evidence years ago. Haven’t seen ’em since. And they’re really old and valuable, too. Daddy loves all those really old devices.”

Daddy had used those old devices to dismember his victims, usually while they were still alive. He’d then hide the bloodless, individually wrapped pieces in random places around town. By the time Daddy had gone to trial, all the victims had been accounted for, but not all their parts. Since Daddy hadn’t been able to remember every hidey-hole, several of the
victims had been buried without hands or toes or buttocks. Only last month a kid hunting for pretty bird eggs had found Mrs. Edith Burleson’s forearm wrapped in butcher paper inside the knothole of an oak tree.

Unlike with the other victims, Daddy hadn’t told the cops where the rest of Mr. Turner was hidden. When asked, he’d only say, “You’re lucky to even have his arm.”

Most people thought that he must have eaten Mr. Turner and that’s why he hadn’t been found. Fancy thought it highly unlikely, though it bugged her that she couldn’t rule it out as a possibility. Daddy was mysterious.

Ilan sat on the cot and ran his hand along the thin mattress, perhaps imagining his father lying there. Perhaps imagining too well because he shot off the cot and wiped his hand on his pant leg. “Has Guthrie ever talked about that night?”

“He said he didn’t do it.” Ilan was still scrubbing his hand against his leg. He didn’t seem to notice he was doing it. Fancy hoped he stopped soon, before he scrubbed all the skin off. “It’s what he told Madda when she caught him. ‘Caught in a lie? Deny till you die.’”

Ilan stopped scrubbing. “Do you agree with that?”

“
I
like to know the truth, but I lie to Madda all the time. Some people can’t handle the truth.”

Thunder rumbled outside, and the distant smell of rain poured into the cellar through the open doors. “You better go,” Fancy told Ilan. “Summer storms are the worst.”

“Yeah,” he agreed, and then just stood there.

“Or”—Fancy couldn’t believe she was about to say it—“we could go to my room.”

Ilan smiled at her, and even after all this time it still hit her like a kick to the chest. “Okay.”

Fancy led him out of the cellar and took him across the yard, past the riotous flap of the laundry sheets billowing like sails on the clothesline, clean and white against the dirty gray sky. She let him inside the sleeping porch, and saw right away that he didn’t belong there. He didn’t fit.

Ilan wasn’t the tallest boy in the world, but he looked like a giant at the tea table, his knees jutting up twice as high as the tabletop. And though Fancy was shorter than Ilan, she was a giant too; she’d never noticed before. She tried to continue not noticing as she turned on the phonograph out of habit and turned the volume low when “My Baby Shot Me Down” began to play.

Madda was baking bread; she could smell it. Cranberry
bread. Daddy’s favorite. Kit’s, too; it was a shame neither of them was home to enjoy it.

“All of a sudden,” said Ilan, watching her closely, “you look more sad than angry.”

“Maybe I caught my sadness from you.”

“I’m usually better at hiding it,” he said, not bothering to deny it. “Sorry.”

“Be sad if you want. I don’t care.” “I know you don’t,” he said sadly.

But Fancy didn’t want to think about Ilan’s bad feelings, not when she had so many of her own. “I don’t know what to tell Madda about Kit.”

“Kit’ll be back,” Ilan said, as if he had any say in it. “I know Gabe will; he’s gotta work tonight.”

“They won’t leave the happy place unless I
let
them. And I don’t think I will.”

“You’re such a brat,” he said, annoyance overpowering his sadness. “But it’s no wonder you act the way you do.” He slid off the pink mushroom stool and pushed it away, crossing his legs on the floor. “Your room looks like it was decorated by a demented kindergartner. Which is what you look like. Don’t you have any big-girl clothes?”

“I could see you getting on me about trying to kill you and Gabriel, or the way my daddy killed your daddy, but . . . my furniture? My clothes?”

“I can’t change who you are, who your people are, or what they did. But tables and dresses, that I can change. Maybe if I keep at you for long enough, you’ll let me undress you.”

Fancy surprised herself by laughing out loud. She quickly put her hands over her mouth.

“I mean, and then dress you in something more appropriate. You make me feel like a dirty old man looking at you in those little-girl clothes. You know what I mean?”

Fancy couldn’t believe she was having such an inappropriate conversation. “Madda keeps telling me to get different clothes. I just don’t want people looking at me. More than they already do.”

“People are gone look at you regardless. Hot people always get looked at.”

“Do you like being looked at?”

“You think I’m hot? No, that’s good,” he said when she stammered. “I finally got your attention. Too bad I had to nearly die for it.”

“I’m sorry. I’m just . . . going through something right now.”

“I can see that.” He leaned forward, elbows on the table. “What do
you
see?”

“Why did you push Gabriel down the stairs?”

He leaned back. “Because I love him. And because pain is relative.”

She thought of Kit. “Pain is
relatives
.”

Ilan laughed. “It’s always family, right? What else could fuck up a person as much as his family?”

She touched his hand. “Don’t say ‘fuck.’”

He turned his hand over beneath hers, and their palms touched. Fancy understood what it must be like to get struck by lightning. She felt as if her hair were standing on end.

“Fancy!”

Fancy started at the sound of her sister’s voice.

“Let us out!”

“Do you hear that?” Ilan asked, staring all around the room.

“It’s just Kit,” Fancy said. “Begging for help that she’s not going to get.”

“Fancy, I’m serious. Let us out. Gabe says he has to work. Besides, the happy-place air is giving him a headache.”

“Yeah.” It was Gabriel. “My nose is starting to bleed.”

“Good.”

“Was that Gabe?” Ilan sat up. “Where the hell are they?”

“In the teapot.”

Startled, Ilan stared down at the table, and at the bottom of the pink teapot half full of cold chamomile, stood Kit and Gabriel. They were on the platform in the happy place where their graves had been, staring up at Fancy and Ilan.

“What the hell?” Ilan poked his finger into the teapot. “Gabe?”

“Ow!”

Ilan jerked his finger away, but his brother was laughing. “Just kidding.”

“Don’t pay any attention to them,” Fancy said. “They won’t be so amusing after I flush them down the toilet.”

“Please don’t, Fancy,” Ilan said as he sat back against the screen, “because if I see one more weird thing today, my head’ll explode.”

“Listen to him, Fancy,” Kit said from the teapot. “I don’t know how to get us outta here.”

Neither did Fancy. But . . . she had sent them all to the happy place without using the kinetoscope, possibly breaking all the laws of physics. But that’s what laws were for—breaking.

Fancy concentrated on Kit and Gabriel, their bodies rippling under the tea. Concentrated on Kit, who waited so patiently to be saved even though she’d betrayed Fancy so egregiously.

Fancy grabbed the teapot and tossed out its contents, and along with the expected splash of tea, Kit and Gabriel also hit the hardwood floor with a resounding thud.

Ilan looked away from them and said to Fancy, “See? Now my skull’s splattered all over the room. Are you satisfied now?”

Fancy wouldn’t have minded seeing Ilan’s skull—she was sure it must be very handsome. She remembered what Kit had said about wanting to see Gabriel on the inside, but even though she suddenly understood what Kit must have been feeling, it didn’t make her any less angry.

“Girls?”

Everyone held their breath at the sound of Madda’s voice outside the door of the inner room. “What was that noise?”

“Our old steamer trunk tipped over,” Kit called. “Sorry. Did we wake you up?”

“No. I’m just about to shower. When I’m done, y’all help me take in the laundry, okay? Before the storm hits?”

“Yes, ma’am!” cried the sisters in unison.

Gabriel jumped to his feet and helped Kit to hers. They were both remarkably clean and dry for people who had just returned from the inside of a grave by way of a teapot. “I can’t believe you got us outta that place.”

“
I
got you out,” Fancy snapped and then glared at her sister. “Why do people always give you the credit for everything?”

“It’s good to see you still alive, Ilan,” said Kit, ignoring Fancy.
Ignoring
her. Like some stranger on a street corner. “Good, but troubling, because if I know my sister, she didn’t plan on you and your brother coming back alive. I had better alert NASA. I just know that Fancy not getting her way for the first time in her life has opened up a wormhole in time and space.”

“Maybe we oughta go, Ilan,” said Gabriel, eyeing Fancy uncomfortably, unlike his brother, who looked more entertained than nervous. “Miz Lynne’ll be done with her shower any minute.”

Kit ruffled his wild mane of curly hair. “She won’t care.”

“I care!” said Fancy.

“I think Gabe’s right,” said Ilan, in a
let’s keep the peace
tone as he got to his feet. “We’d best get while the getting’s good.”

Gabriel kissed Kit rather sloppily in his haste and waited for his brother by the screen door.

“I’ll call you later,” Ilan told Fancy. He said it like a threat, but Fancy understood that he didn’t mean it that way, so she nodded. Her hand still tingled from when he’d held it.

When the brothers were gone, Kit glared at Fancy, like Gabriel’s lousy kissing was her fault. She said, “You
do
like Ilan. I knew you did. Notice how I’m not running after him trying to chop off his head?”

Fancy threw Kit’s favorite T-shirt to the floor and used it to mop up the spilled tea. “You don’t care about me the way I care about you. You never did.” She picked up something that looked like a compact from the floor. She shook the tea off it, but before she could open it, Kit snatched it from her.

“What’s that?”

Kit opened it and breathed a sigh of relief. “Thank God they didn’t get wet.”

“What didn’t?”

“My pills.” Kit waved the little compact or whatever it was proudly. “I’m on the Pill.”

“Why?”

Kit gave her sister a sardonic look.

“You’re having sex with him?”
As she said it she knew it was true. People said that you couldn’t see a difference, but Fancy could, now that she was looking. Kit had the same pixie hair and skinny limbs, but there was a certain ripeness, a ruddy glow beneath her brown skin. So ripe she’d been plucked while
Fancy still hung green and bitter on the vine. “Of course you are.” Fancy laughed humorlessly and tossed the wet T-shirt onto Kit’s bed. “With Franken, too? Was Franken the first?”

Kit burst into tears, a shocking explosion. Kit often pretended emotion, but not this time. “Gabriel was the first, the only, no matter what you think about me.”

“Was it bad?” Fancy went to Kit. “Did he hurt you?”

“Of course he hurt me!”
Kit pushed her away and scooped Kleenex from the box on the vanity. “It always hurts the first time. But it was beautiful.”

“Only you would think pain and blood and . . . bodily fluids were beautiful,” Fancy snapped. “Stop crying!”

“Why should I?” Kit threw the box of Kleenex at Fancy’s head. “Because you never cry? Because you don’t know how? Because you never felt anything real your whole life? Well, I have, and I’ll cry all I want—!”

“Over a stupid boy!”

“Over how I can’t share something so beautiful with an unfeeling bitch!”

“
I’m
unfeeling?” Fancy grabbed a jar of squirrel brain and brandished it. “When you go all psychotic on your precious Gabriel and start doing surgery on
him
, you ask me again
who’s unfeeling. You’re not any better than me. I know you
wish
you were—”

“You’re the one who thinks you’re better than
me
. That I’m an animal because I don’t mind gutting people or get prissy whenever I get a little blood under my nails. But it doesn’t matter. I don’t have to be better than you. I don’t have to be anything like you. Gabe likes me for who I am.”

“A killer.” Fancy put the jar back on the shelf with all the other jars.

“He knows about me,” said Kit defensively, as though she were ashamed of who she was. “I told him everything, even about the happy place. I wanted him to know before we did it. And I
love
doing it with him. It used to be only stabbing people made me feel connected with them, but . . . it’s so weird. When I’m done with Gabe, he’s not dead or cut up. Just sweaty and whole and in love with me. And I like that.
He’s
the good one, not me. He’s an angel.”