A Cup of Normal (11 page)

“I need you to go into town and get some pigs for the lizard. Would you do that for me, Ned?”

“Sure, Tilly, but . . .”

“But nothing,” she said, maybe a little too fast. She smiled. “I’m fine, really. I’ve just got some burying to do.”

Ned stood, and for a moment, both heads stared her hard. She stared him back.

“You did all you could, Tilly,” Right Ned said.

Tilly nodded.

Ned turned and walked to the house. Tilly watched him swing into the battered Chevy. It wasn’t until he had wrestled the truck down the road and around the bend before she looked at the beast again.

“But this mistake I can fix,” she said.

The beast didn’t reply, which was good considering the state it was in.

Tilly rolled up the sleeves of her cotton shirt. She picked up the beast and carried it to Father’s workshop.

The workshop was away from the house a bit — down on the creek bank and so covered in brambles, not a brick or window showed through. Tilly was sweating pretty hard by the time she reached the door. She shifted the beast’s weight, leaned back and stuck her fingers through bramble runners to catch and lift the wooden latch. She pushed the door open and stepped in.

It was cool and damp here, and smelled like earth, and river and sharp antiseptics. The shop was about the size of a double-wide horse stall, but instead of hay on the ground, there was concrete. A tall wide table took up most the middle of the room and drawers lined the walls.

Tilly laid the beast on the table, then flipped the switch by the door. Lights powered by the water wheel up-creek snapped, clicked, then flickered on. Father told her it wasn’t right to run the workshop on the house’s electricity. He said all the power needed to do stitchery was in the river itself.

Tilly rubbed her hands on her jeans and noticed the long thorn scratches on her fingers. Blood seeped out, just enough to make sure the cuts were clean. Then hot pain flashed across her fingers. She breathed out real hard a couple times and tipped her palms to the light. The cuts were gone.

She was glad Ned wasn’t here to see that.

“Awfully dark in here, dear.”

Tilly spun. The grandma stood in the doorway and was practically naked, her thin nightgown translucent from the sunlight at her back. The knitting bag swung at her elbow, needles sticking out of the top of the bag like giant insect feelers.

“Granny, what are you doing down here?”

“I thought there’d be a little time before it rains.” She shuffled into the room, her hands clasped in front of her. “Oh, now. Here’s the poor thing. Is there anything we can do for it?” she asked.

Tilly shut the door and stood next to the table. “I think so. But I might need a little time.”

“Oh my, yes.” The grandma smiled and rummaged for her knitting.

Tilly opened drawers, and shivered at the cold air they expelled. One drawer was filled with thin spools of crystal thread — thread that held new parts to old parts and melted into whatever kind of flesh or muscle or bone needed so the new and old accepted each other as a complete whole. Tilly figured it was those crystal stitches in her hands that heated up so bad whenever she healed. She took a spool of the thread and opened another drawer.

Needles, wires, jars of liquid, delicate saws, tubes with rainbow colored labels, and every once in awhile, the leftover bits of something Father hadn’t managed to put back together, filled the drawers. In one of the bigger drawers, Tilly found the body of a small pony. Its legs were missing, and its coat was brown, but other than that, it was nearly perfect.

“Granny,” Tilly said as she put on a pair of heavy gloves, “I could use a little time now.”

The grandma hummed and pulled stitches.

Tilly lifted the cold-preserved pony out of the drawer, and set it on the table next to the beast.

The room temperature had dropped to near-freezing. Tilly’s breath came out in clouds, and her skin was cold with old sweat. She took off the gloves and used one of the saws on the beast’s legs. She used tiny hot crystal stitches to attached the legs to the pony. Next, she removed and attached the forehead nub. Crystal thread and needle slid through bone and flesh equally and sent a thin line of steam into the cold air.

“My, you do this well,” the grandma said.

“I just hope I do it right.” Tilly opened the beast’s chest and searched for its heart.

“Right as rain,” the grandma said, “don’t you worry, dear.”

Right as rain, Tilly thought. No matter how hard she tried, she’d never done anything right in her life. She pushed that thought out of her mind and paid attention instead, to the beast.

Long after dark, she heard the grumble of the Chevy. Ned must have bartered with Mr. Campbell for the pigs, which was fine. Tilly liked a man who could stick to a budget.

The truck growled past the house and straight out to the lizard’s corral.

Tilly got up from the chair she’d been dozing in and stretched stiffness out of her arms and back. She pulled her coat from the corner closet and listened a minute for the grandma. All was quiet from her upstairs room.

Tilly slipped out the front door, the screen snicking shut behind her. The night air was clear and cold. Stars chipped holes in the otherwise soft, black sky. Way off in the west, the moon hung, distant and oblivious to anything earthly. Tilly crossed her arms over her chest, and headed out to see if Ned needed any help with the pigs.

The track to the lizard’s corral was rutted and hard to follow, but Tilly’s feet knew it as well as every other inch of ground on the run-down ranch. She’d been down this path with Mother and Father the day she was born, and later, when she’d lost a year to the hot healing. Father said he’d carried her in his arms back and forth on the road, letting her body cool in the living air. That was a long time ago, before they left for better things in the big city.

The wind slipped down from the stars, carrying a breath of ice with it. Tilly shivered. She wondered if Ned would understand what she’d done. Wondered if he’d leave when he found out. Ned believed that stitchery was wrong. He never had himself re-made, though he’d had a chance to when he was a boy, before the laws against such things were passed.

Tilly took the curve in the track and walked into the grass. She could smell the lizard, musty and dry, like mold found in old closets, but ten or a hundred times stronger than that.

She expected to hear the pigs, but only heard the lizard shifting inside the fence — his claws sheathing in and out of the ground, big as shovel blades cutting dirt.

There was a boat-sail snap and Tilly felt heat as the lizard pulled its wings away from its body, but no charred smell of pig-ka-bob, no flame in the air.

Something was wrong.

Tilly picked up the pace and climbed the fence. She ducked the electric line at the top, sidled through the bars and dropped down inside the corral.

The lizard, a good four-feet taller than her, swung his big triangle head her way, eyes shining with ambient moonlight. It didn’t see too good anymore, so Tilly held still and let it smell her. Then she walked across the corral toward the silent pigs in the fenced-off feeding chute.

As she drew closer, she saw a bigger shadow in with the pigs. Ned was on his knees in the middle of them all, hands spread wide and pushed tight against dirty hides.

Freak,
Tilly thought fondly.
You’ll mingle with pig brains, but won’t touch your willing girlfriend.

“Ned,” she said. She unlatched the electric wire at the gate to the chute and stepped in. “Now who’s being pig-headed?”

Left Ned looked up and scowled. Right Ned looked up too, but his pretty eyes were glazed, his face slack.

“Ned. Let the pigs go,” she said, her words soft and sure, and for Right Ned only.

He looked down at his hands and after a minute seemed to realize they were on the pigs. He drew back, embarrassed.

Left Ned chuckled.

“Sorry,” Right Ned said. “I’m sorry, Tilly. It was just after today. Getting caught in the dying, I guess, I needed to feel living again. I told you once I do it, I want it more.” He stepped away from the pigs and rubbed his palms on his overalls. “I’m sorry.” The pigs began grunting and rooting around.

“That’s okay,” Tilly said because he didn’t know what she’d done either. “Let’s go on back to the house and get some sleep, okay?”

The night was interrupted by a whinny. It was a far off, spooky sound, but any fool could tell what it was. The beast.

Ned was no fool. “Tilly,” he said, “what did you do?”

“I fixed it up a bit, that’s all.”

“Did you bring the beast back from death?” Real honest horror carried his words up an octave.

“Granny and I, we used a little time so I could get the fix-up bits out of Father’s workshop and apply them to the beast. I didn’t really stitch it, Ned, I took parts of the old beast and made a new beast just like it.”

“Holy, Tilly,” Ned said. “That’s plain wrong. You don’t fix up dead things and you don’t make copies of them. Don’t you know how illegal that is? For Holy sake, it’s why your Daddy left you.”

“You’re talking crazy,” Tilly said, trying to be calm, even though he was starting to scare her. “Father and Mother went to the big city for better things.”

“For jail time, Tilly. They went to jail. Because they made things, like the beast, the lizard and worse, they re-made their own . . .” He stopped a second, then looked down at his feet.

She knew what he’d been about to say. They’d re-made their own daughter.

When he looked back up at her, she knew he was dead serious.

“Now you promise me,” both Neds said in chilling unison, “right now, right this second, that you will never stitch nothing or nobody back together again.”

“But, Ned,” she said, feeling shaky inside and wanting more than anything for him to stop acting crazy.

“But nothing,” he said. “Promise me.”

She took a deep breath. It was a scary thing giving the power of a promise away, but Ned was real upset and she figured they’d have time to talk this over later.

“I promise,” she said.

Just then, the lizard opened its wings and lunged whip-quick for the pigs. In the same instant, Tilly realized she had forgotten to close the electric line behind her.

The lizard aimed for the pigs but instead of pigs, it got Ned.

It felt like a cold fist punched Tilly. Her mind tried hard to make sense of things. She hollered at the lizard until it dropped Ned in a bloody heap. She picked Ned up, stumbled out to the truck, and managed to get him into the front seat, though he wasn’t conscious.

“You keep living,” she said, her words rough with panic. She ground gears and the truck sped down the rutted road. “Keep living.”

Both Neds were silent, their eyes cinched with pain.

Once she made the house, she lifted Ned out of the truck careful as she could. She took him into the front room and laid him on the couch. Blood the color of the grandma’s knitting covered him, darkest over his stomach. She peeked under his shirt and swore. The bites were deep, and Ned’s life pumped out with every breath. He was going to bleed out before she could get the crystal thread from the workshop.

She needed more time.

The grandma.

She ran across the wood floor, then up the stairs, up and up, and the stairs kept on going and she wasn’t getting any closer to the end of them, until finally, she reached the landing.

She ran to the right, to the grandma’s room, but her feet took twice as long as they should to get her there, and on the way she noticed the hall was in need of new paint, and a layer of dust had grown along the edge of the floor, and then finally, finally, she got to the grandma’s room and opened the door.

The grandma was sitting in her bed, pulling red yarn out stitch by stitch, just wasting time.

“Granny, you got to help me. Ned’s hurt bad.”

The length of red knitting that had been at least seven feet long this morning was down to its last foot, and shrinking ever closer to white.

The grandma looked up and smiled. “Hello, Tilly. It’s going to rain, you know.”

Tilly ran across the room, grabbed the grandma by the wrist and took her, bag and all, down the stairs.

The only thing different about Ned since she’d left him, was the pool of blood on the floor had grown.

“Granny, you stay here and pull out a little time for him while I go get the stitchery from the workshop.” Then Tilly stopped. She’d promised Ned she’d never stitch nothing or nobody again.

Holy
. . .

Thip, thip, thip, the grandma sat herself down in the old rocker and unwove another row of red.

Tilly stepped over to Ned and looked at his wounds again. The blood flow wasn’t stopping.

Thip, thip, thip, stitch after stitch of time pulled out.

“Ned,” Tilly said, hoping he could hear her. “I have to fix you up. Just some stitching, but nothing fancy. You’ll still be you — not like what I did to the beast, okay?”

Tilly couldn’t believe her eyes when she saw Right Ned shake his head.

She looked at the Grandma, saw how she was trying to pull the yarn real slow so it would last.

“Ned,” Tilly said, “you can’t die.”

Thip, thip, thip.

There were only a few rows of red left, and then the grandma would be into the white. As soon as the white was gone, there’d be no time left. She had to do something now.

She kneeled down and put her hands above Ned’s stomach, her unnatural, patchwork hands. She closed her eyes, just the way she’d seen Ned do it. Then she tried to find his spirit, the living thing that made him what he was. Somehow, she had to convince him to stay living until she could stitch him.

She sensed his heartbeat and the sluggish push of blood under her fingers. Briefly, something else flashed past her closed eyes, something sweet as honey and fresh as lemons. Ned’s soul.

She held on to the idea of that, hoping it wasn’t just her imagination. Her feet and face and hands tingled as she wrapped her mental self gently as she could around that warm sweet core of him.

“Please keep living, Ned. I love you.”