After Nothing (3 page)

He said my name. Not my whole name. He said ‘Nat.’ Then he said ‘Fuck.’ Then he pressed his mouth to mine again.

Even now I can distinctly remember the moment when I said, ‘I’m going to class.’

‘Now?’

‘Yes.’

‘Right now?’

‘Yes.’

Kane didn’t move. He wasn’t in me, but he was still standing between my legs, which meant I couldn’t get down off the desk.

His looked at me a long time.

‘Are you going to move?’ I asked.

‘Why’d you choose me?’

‘I don’t know. You chose me too.’

‘Say what?’

‘You didn’t have to follow me.’

‘You for real?’

‘Yes.’

‘Girl, I don’t know a guy alive who would turn down the invitation you gave me.’

I shrugged.

‘You really want to go to class?’ asked Kane.

I looked up at the dirty skylights, then around at the collection of discarded forgotten things surrounding us.

‘I don’t actually care,’ I said.

Kane seemed to study my face. Then he shifted his gaze to the right side of my neck. He kissed it gently. After not very long I thought maybe we were going to have sex again. The sensation of his mouth on that part of my body was definitely making me up for it. But then he stopped kissing me, although I could still feel his breath on my neck, and the firmness of his hand on my hairline, and the pressure of his thumb against my jaw.

Suddenly he put his teeth in my skin, and sucked on my neck. I flinched. My hand went up to his, and he responded by sucking harder.

When he was done he kissed where he’d marked me, his mouth gentle once more.

‘Feel that? Girl who feels nothing?’ he said in my ear.

Lisa’s room was untouched – or maybe I mean ‘unchanged’. My mom was a robot when she went in there to clean. Anything that she moved to dust around or under was put back in its exact place. Not a single thing had left that room since Lisa had died, except for the clothes she was buried in.

The stupid thing was, it wasn’t just Lisa’s things from around when she died, but a lifetime of her possessions: clothes and ornaments, shoes, schoolwork, photos and books. There was a plaster Minnie Mouse figurine that she had painted as a child still sitting on her dresser. There were clothes and shoes in her wardrobe that were too small for her before she even got sick. There was even a box of toys in her wardrobe: a naked newborn doll, a faded box filled with paper dolls, a pile of My Little Ponies, a bunch of white Polly Pocket dolls, a child-size music keyboard and a broken Barbie microphone.

I just felt that the least Lisa could have done was throw out a whole heap of junk before she died. I don’t mean that unfairly. I didn’t want her to have a spring clean on her deathbed. But there must have been a moment, or several moments, when she thought ‘I could make this just a bit easier on everyone else.’ All those years dying, and she didn’t let go of any of the stuff that she couldn’t take with her.

‘You’re fucked up,’ said Kane to me.

We were down in his basement room, both getting dressed. Me, into what I’d worn to school. Him, into sweatpants, a tank and a hooded sweatshirt.

I asked him if it mattered.

‘Depends what level you on. My mom was fucked up and she OD-ed. You that fucked up?’

I wasn’t sure how to answer. Instead, I asked about his dad.

‘Never had one.’

‘What about your uncle? Where is he?’

‘He inside. Be out soon though.’

‘He’s in jail?’

‘Yeah, what I said.’

‘What did he do?’

‘He didn’t do nothing.’

‘Must have done something.’

‘He blocked a cop from hitting him, and the motherfuckers did
him
for assault.'

‘Did your uncle tell you that?’

Kane looked at me coldly.

‘I was there when it happened.’

My dad was not the brainless fool my mom said he was. It was just that by the end of it all, he was a defeated man. Every day must have been a battle for him. He was the only source of income in our family, and I have no doubt that as wives go, my mom was an unsupportive bitch. Then there was the strain of Lisa’s slow crawl toward death.

That was what he was up against. My mom’s hatred, and my sister’s virus, and my sister’s cancer, and my sister’s death. And he managed over a hundred people at work, dealing with all their grievances and tragedies and lies about why they weren’t at work last Friday. Somewhere in all of that were the ingredients that made up the first stroke. And that first stroke paved the way for the second. And that was that. Life defeated him. But that didn’t mean he was a brainless fool. He knew plenty. Even though he was partly paralyzed and couldn’t move or speak that well, he could still think. And he could still feel all the emotions he’d had access to before he became unwell. Like his strokes dealt him some terrible blows, but I think his heart was more intact than Mom’s or mine.

He had these habits. Mom barely went near him, so she never interfered with them, and I just figured he’d earned the right to do what he wanted, so I just let him be.

He had two bathrobes that he wore in rotation. They couldn’t go in the wash at the same time or he wouldn’t get out of bed. At least one of them had to be there. If both were there he would always choose his blue and black check bathrobe over his red and black check one. He could bath himself, and he did this every morning after breakfast. He could shave himself – just not very well. He always missed patches, and sometimes cut himself, but he wouldn’t let me do it, and tutted when I suggested he grow a beard. He was great at making that tutting sound. Sometimes he wouldn’t be doing anything in his room but sitting in his chair and tutting. He could make that sound for hours and not stop until you distracted him.

Dad could get himself breakfast. Granola and milk every day. He always had to drink his tea out of the same stained cup. It had love hearts of different shades of pink all over it.

He didn’t eat lunch. Mom always put his dinner on the table in the early evening, but she never went into his room to tell him it was ready. If I wasn’t home he ate most of his dinners cold. In winter he had to have dinner extra early because for some reason, known only to him, he wouldn’t eat after it got dark. Those early winter dinners were the only allowance Mom ever made for him.

I’d often stand outside the door of his room before I went to bed. Sometimes I’d hear him tutting, sometimes snoring. Sometimes I could hear the soft hum of voices on the radio through the closed door.

‘Why’d you say “rubbish” earlier?’ asked Kane one day when we were lying in his bed.

‘Rubbish?’

‘Yeah. You said how there was “rubbish” all over the street.’

‘I meant trash.’

‘I know what you meant. Why’d you call it rubbish?’

‘My dad’s English. Sometimes I accidently call things what he called them.’

‘That’s why you sometimes speak different.’

‘No.’

‘Yeah, sometimes.’

I didn’t reply. Kane moved over on top of me.

‘My dad’s Black,’ I said.

He nodded, staring down at me.

‘You got gold in your eyes.’

‘Just a lighter brown near the center,’ I replied.

‘Looks like gold to me.’

I traced a finger over the black letters inked on the forearm he was resting his weight on.

‘What does this mean?’

‘One of my boys.’

‘Shys,’ I murmured. ‘He died?’

‘Yeah.’

‘What happened?’

‘Got shot.’

I looked up into the deep brown of Kane’s gaze.

‘You miss him?’

‘Yeah I miss him.’

I went to the doctor’s. I couldn’t keep eating the emergency contraceptive. It made me feel sick half the time, and was doing really strange things to my cycle. At one stage I thought I might have been pregnant. The doctor said the pill would take seven days before I could count on it working. Kane and I were meeting up every day by then, and he wasn’t too happy when I started putting him off, so I ended up telling him why. No one had ever looked at me the way he did. Like I was responsible for the worst thing that had ever happened to him.

‘It’s fine, Kane. I’ve been taking the morning-after pill.’

‘Bitch, you said you were on the pill.’

‘What does it matter? I didn’t get pregnant.’

He clenched his fists, and then actually backed away from me. I watched him take each step, and then I watched him walk away.

I didn’t see him for a week.

It was weird not knowing if he was in my life or not. I couldn’t really feel it, because that was how I still was, and it didn’t seem real. There were some things though that had a coldness to them. Walking past his locker and him not being there. Waiting on the front steps in the morning, and the afternoon, and not seeing him among the mass of students pouring through the school doors. Lunchtimes sitting alone at a crowded table in the cafeteria instead of meeting him by the hidden door of the old gym.

On the Friday of that week, school broke up for the summer. I got up early the next day. There was a tattooist in the city that didn’t care how old you were. Everyone at school knew about her, knew you just had to forge a signature on the consent form and she’d ink you outside normal hours.

That morning there was no one but her and me in the tattoo studio. I picked the lettering I wanted. She pulled on gloves.

She wasn’t big on talking. She
was
big on piercings. She must have had twenty in her face alone. There were eight through the white freckled skin on her shoulder. I counted them a few times while she did my tattoo.

The needle stung and burned at the same time. For what I was wanting though, it didn’t hurt nearly enough.

I went over to Kane’s, but he wasn’t home. The basement was locked but the key was where he hid it. I didn’t go in. Just sat on the cold concrete in the shadow of the house and watched the sunlight tiptoe across wet grass toward me. After an hour he appeared, dressed in sweatpants, a tank and running shoes. The top half of him was drenched in sweat. He was breathing hard, and his hands went to his hips as he leaned forward to catch his breath.

‘What do you want?’

‘You haven’t been at school,’ I said, standing up.

‘My uncle’s out. I needed to get my fitness sorted.’

I didn’t get it, so I didn’t say anything. Kane pulled his sweat-soaked tank off and threw it toward the shut sliding door of his room.

Down the side of his torso, marring a sketch-like tattoo inked into his skin, were three large dark bruises. I asked him how he got them.

‘How you think?’ said Kane, frowning at me.

‘Your uncle did that?’

‘Yeah. Nothing to what I did to him though.’

‘You beat him up?’

‘What?’ I must have been looking at him just as blankly as he was looking at me, because then he said, ‘You know I’m a fighter, right? K-1?’

‘What’s K-1?’

‘This is bullshit,’ said Kane. ‘You don’t know that? Why do you think I couldn’t ever hang late with you?’

‘I thought you had other things you had to do.’

‘Yeah, like training. Like spending my fucking life at the gym.’

‘That’s not all you do,’ I said quietly.

‘So now you know my business?’

‘I’m not questioning you about it. You can do what you want.’

‘Yeah, well I want the rent paid so I’ve got somewhere to live. That way you can come over all the time till you get knocked up.’

‘I told you, I’m not pregnant, and I don’t want to get pregnant.’

‘Bitch, you said you were on the pill. You looked me in the eye and you said it.’

I answered that by saying, ‘I am on it now. I can show it to you. I’ll take it in front of you if that’s what you want.’

Kane shook his head, muttered, ‘I don’t get you,’ and turned away.

He walked partway down the slope and stood looking down at the oversized concrete drains. I could see the outline of every single muscle in his back and arms, and when he turned back toward me the lines of the tightly packed muscles of his chest and abdomen stood out in relief.

I knew his body was hard; I was touching it all the time. But it’s not like I’d ever been with anyone else, so how would I know the difference between a normal lean and muscular body, like the guy who sat next to me in English class, and a fighter’s body? It wasn’t like he’d told me he was a fighter. When I thought about it, though, maybe there had been some clues. Next to a whole lot of weights in the corner of his room was a box with a heap of padded gear in it, and once when we’d come back to his place there’d been some long, elastic blue bandages lying on his bed. Also upstairs, where I only ever went to use the bathroom, there was a line of boxing gloves hanging from nails in the living room. I guess I could’ve asked Kane about all of that. I could have actually asked him more about himself. But getting to know him wasn’t exactly why I was with him.

Kane came back toward me, and the sweat on his skin must have glistened in the light or something, because for some reason I looked at his chest. It was like my stomach changed places with my heart and then they swapped back again, and all of a sudden I felt nervous.

‘I got a tattoo,’ I blurted at him.

‘Yeah? What of?’

‘My sister’s name.’

Kane’s expression softened, and I lifted the hem of the skirt I was wearing, revealing the bandage high on my inner thigh.

‘That’s where you got your sister’s name tattooed?’

‘Yes. She died.’

‘I know that, Nat,’ said Kane, still staring in the vicinity of my thigh.

‘You know?’

Kane lifted his gaze to mine.

‘When we hooked up I asked round ’bout you. She had cancer, right?'

I nodded.

‘That sucks.’

‘They think she got it because she was HIV-positive.’

‘What?’

‘She had HIV,’ I said.

His eyes narrowed.

‘Who gave her that?’

‘Just some guy. She met him at my dad’s work picnic. They only went on one date.’

Kane was so quick. I couldn’t believe how quick he was at making the connection. But he did. He’d already been trying to figure me out, and he’d always been that close to having my number. Now he really did have it.

‘Are you fucking kidding me, Natalie?’ he said, exploding. ‘That’s what you wanted? Fuck you harder? Always fuck you harder. You thought that I could fucking infect you or some fucked-up shit?’

‘I just thought –’ I stopped short.

‘What? You thought what?’

‘You’ve been with lots of girls. I mean, I know you wouldn’t do it on purpose.’

‘You think I’ve got HIV?’

‘No,’ I said in a voice so small it didn’t even sound like me.

‘You ever been straight with me?’

‘It’s not like I’ve got tested or anything.’

‘Jesus, Natalie.’

He was backing away from me again. I followed him; grabbed his arm in a bid to stop him moving any further from me.

‘Bitch, you need to leave.’

To this day I wish I’d never said what I said next.

‘Can you hit me?’

‘What?’

‘Hit me.’

‘No,’ said Kane, pulling his arm free from my hold.

‘Please, Kane. I need it,’ I said, trying once more to be close to him.

He wouldn’t let me. He held me away from him, my desperation no match for his strength.

‘Please, Kane.’

‘You fucked-up bitch. I’m done here.’

He left. He left his own house to get away from me.

I started crying on the bus. Tears blurred my vision as I looked upward and tried to blink them away. They fell. My throat tightened; my hands shook. I made it home before the pain rendered me helpless on my bedroom floor.

I thought my world was dark. A place where Lisa and Dad and Mom and me were all compartmentalized into our rooms, walled in by each other’s death and sickness and just plain given-up-on-life meanness. It wasn’t the truth. I wasn’t dead. I wasn’t sick. My body was well.

‘I’m done here,’ is what he’d said to me. And then he’d left.

It was my sixteenth birthday. No one else spoke to me all day.