Breaking and Entering (27 page)

“The Invisible Girl,” she said. “Sister to the Human Torch and wife of Mr. Fantastic.” I had a favorite glass, she thought, and here it is. The Invisible Girl could be seen. She wore a silver jumpsuit and her lip was curled.

They drank champagne. He scattered the pills in the lap of her skirt where they gleamed like candies. There were so many there—she put one in her mouth and it had a greasy, purpling taste. Another had a flavor of metal, as though she’d pressed her tongue against a chain. She thought of the coat that had many pockets, but it was an imaginary coat.

“You’re a natural thief,” she said.

“We’re both thieves,” Willie said, “stealing God’s day.”

Soon all the pills were gone. She saw him swallowing and she swallowed, but there was nothing left. Her head was pounding. She said, “Sssshh, I’m trying to remember everything.” Snow, she thought, I want to remember snow. But she had never seen snow. Beaches, she thought. Water falling upon water. She thought of the little glittering pool in the garden, then thought of a well, filled with the bones of luckless creatures. But beneath everything, deep down, the freshness, she felt it, the freshness, the sweetness there. She stretched out in the shade. Willie held her, but she didn’t want him to
for the first time. The Invisible Girl, she thought, wife to Mr. Fantastic. They were dying, she thought. She smiled and said to Willie, “I know better than this.” Her eyes were burning and through them she saw the raked driveway winding to the blacktop road. It was just the road that wound past other houses into town, but it seemed strange. The trees seemed taller alongside the ditches, their green and gold leaves trembling from the heat of her burning eyes. She started to walk down the road but there was a dog guarding it.

She was all alone, and she stopped.

Mercury found them. She had come back to talk to Liberty about her Chester, for she liked to talk to Liberty, she liked the way Liberty listened. She saw them there, sleeping hard, leaves lying on their faces. Mercury giggled and touched Willie’s hair, the long, soft hair of a white boy. But when she turned to Liberty, she saw green foam around her mouth like you’d see on a horse, and when she touched her she felt cold. She managed to slap and shake Willie awake. He vomited with his eyes open, becoming unarresting forever more in Mercury’s mind.

The sheriff’s men were called and Liberty would think later that she could remember them, the colors of green and gold weaving in the heat, the leaves’ sick colors blending into the deputies’ shirts. And she thought later she could remember them asking her questions. People always asked the dying questions, Liberty thought, and the dying probably lied and didn’t even know it. Having the same words available as they’d had all their lives and no new ones probably made lying pretty much inevitable. The click of the heat had become their questions, which had then become a clatter, like utensils
being stirred about, being rattled in a pan. Her throat was opened, like a window, she thought, being flung open wide, although they said she could not remember such a thing. But she did remember. She was alone with them in a white room, the men in green and gold, and the days passed. Once, she heard one musing …

I surely wish I could catch that boy that keeps robbing them banks. That boy just seems to float through them drive-in windows, waves a paper bag he’s got wrapped around his hand and the ladies just start heaving the money out. Four banks in a week and a half. That boy could steal the stink off shit and not smell
.

The other said
Shut your mouth, Hicks. There’s a sick girl in here
.

Hicks said
She’s in a coma. She won’t take no offense
.

She was brought back, then almost lost to septicemia, but her poisoned blood was taken from her drop by drop and she was brought back again. Mistakes were made, but in the end, infection simplified her. It unadorned her. There would be no more babies for Liberty. Liberty’s babies all went to live in that world where mistakes aren’t made.

There was one floor on a wing of the hospital where certain people went for a while and Liberty went there. It was called Five North. Willie was not allowed to visit her, but he sent her things. No one else came. Willie sent her perfume once and once he sent her a game where there were numbered black and white plastic pieces sliding in a frame. There was one empty space. Each piece had a number, but the numbers were all mixed up. The person who was playing the game was supposed to use that empty space to make order.

On Five North there was a lady who came once a day to talk to Liberty. Her name was Miss Tweedie. Miss Tweedie
enjoyed working with people on this wing because they were so polite. Being back in the world seemed to hypnotize them.

You look upon your nondeath as a threatening danger to you
, Miss Tweedie said. She had bitten nails, which must have been a drawback professionally, but she had a birthmark on her jaw that could be interpreted by the ill at their leisure. Liberty almost expected her to point to it and say
What does this represent to you?
, but she never did. Liberty did not look at Miss Tweedie’s face much. Instead, she watched the gnawed, scrubbed nails lying in the woman’s lap, sometimes on the coverlet, sometimes daubing in the air.
Love can sometimes be a curse
, Miss Tweedie said,
even a sickness
.

There was a common room on Five North where people could gather for coffee in the morning. On Sundays, there were cookies with the coffee and a Bible was placed out. On the day Liberty was going to be released, a woman in the common room screamed out
His children are far from safety and they are crushed in the gate!
She poured scalding coffee over her arms with joy. A man shouted
Amen, Amen, we’re Job’s children we’re all of us Job’s children!
The people stirred and flung themselves back and forth like fish in the waters of a shrinking pond. Some shouted and wept. Liberty pressed herself against the wall and played the plastic game, hearing the others but not watching them. Her fingers quickly moved the plastic pieces back and forth, up and down. Her fingers flew across the moving pieces. The woman who had burnt herself with such happiness was led away, and the room grew calm again, and stilled. There was no outside to the room, that is, the outside could not be seen. The room was wallpapered to appear like a long, wide view of trees—a young forest of slender trees with the glint of a river winding deep within the dimensions of it. It was a
glade
, Liberty thought,
or a
copse
. She could look at it for a long time. The colors were green and gold like the deputies’ uniforms. She thought she could remember the deputy who was a philosopher, or was that the other one? The one who was writing something down, his big hand cupped as though he were writing on the palm.
She is a felon
, he was writing,
who attempted to break into the house of death …

Once a day, Miss Tweedie came to see Liberty. Miss Melanie Tweedie had been employed to help her.
You almost died, dear, and at times you feel you did die. That’s a very common feeling, it’s been well documented. In times of war when a man survives and the buddy right next to him does not. That’s where most of our documentation comes from. Or from multiple car crashes or tornadoes
. The word
buddy
sounded strange on Miss Tweedie’s lips.
But in your case, dear, no one died. That little thing, bless it, wasn’t anything you must think died
.

Liberty sat on a bed in a seersucker bathrobe and stared at the nubs of the cloth. She counted the nubs on one sleeve and then the other. The numbers never came out the same. The nubs of the seersucker gave the appearance of something missing.
You are preceiving your life, which you really look upon as your nondeath, as a spectator
Miss Tweedie said.
Oh, it’s possible to know so much today
.

There was, of course, a doctor. He told Liberty that there was a chemical substance similar to morphine produced naturally in the brain when death was near, when the other systems began to fail.
Everything
, the doctor said,
can be explained eventually
. The doctor’s son had won a jingle contest sponsored by a cereal company and the whole family was going to Hollywood for a week.
Doctors can’t afford to take
things too seriously
, the doctor said. Miss Tweedie was short and the doctor tall. They came to her each day like the hands of a clock.

Then on that day Liberty was to be released, it was Willie who came to her. Miss Tweedie helped her pack her things in a brown paper grocery bag. The bag had a hurricane-tracking map on it, for it was the season. The sky was gray with big hot rain clouds massing. It was the fall now. Willie had been outside and she had been inside all this time and no one thought it was unusual.

She stood outside the hospital with him, looking backward at the windows of Five North. There were holes for windows there, but there was no glass. There were louvers, and behind the louvers, concrete block.

“Where have you been?” she asked him.

“I haven’t been home,” Willie said. “They won’t let us live there anymore. I’ve been living in Blossum in a trailer.”

“Are we going there?” she asked. She shaded her eyes with her hand against the stolid light. She felt that she had a job to do, that she had just been hired for this job. She had to live out each day, one after another, until her days were gone.

He shook his head. “We’ll go outside town.” He wore jeans, a jacket without a shirt and a beautiful and incongruous pair of wing tips from a thrift shop. She knew they were a dead man’s shoes.

“I still trust you,” Liberty said.

“We missed, didn’t we.”

“Part of us didn’t,” she said.

“My father gave us money. It will last us a while.”

Liberty remembered Beg-A-Loan. She remembered a drawer in Doris’s kitchen filled with clean dishtowels, the smell of her embrace like fresh biscuits. Everything had been in order
there, loving and illusionary. “Are your mother and father all right?” She tugged at her hair, a habit she had picked up in Five North. Broken strands of it fell through her fingers.

“No,” Willie said, “they’re not all right.”

“They’ve shut the door, have they?” she said, pulling her hair.

“Old-fashioned banishment,” he said. “The result of too much Bible study.”

“My parents don’t even know anything about this, I guess.”

“I don’t think so,” Willie said. He took an envelope out of his pants pocket. “We have to get a car. I know where we’re going to live.”

“All right.”

A school bus went by with younger children on it.

There was money in the envelope and a tape. “They sent us this too,” Willie said. “I haven’t listened to it.”

“I can imagine,” Liberty said.

“Hurt and sadness,” Willie said. “Fear and panic. Regret.”

“I don’t want to hear it.”

“We could go over to Tape Ape and listen to it.”

Across the street from the hospital was a record store called Tape Ape. Beside it was a florist, then a bakery, then a bar. Liberty and Willie had often gone into the record store after school and played records in the cubicles there. She had forgotten about it. They had gone there all the time. A lot of the kids from school did. She tried to remember if she had any friends at school, if she had ever done anything with these friends, like listen to a record in a booth at Tape Ape, wondering whether to buy it or not. She thought she probably hadn’t. She had gone there with Willie. She held the bag with her things in it against her stomach. She couldn’t get the thought out of her mind that she had been hired for the job
of accomplishing this day and the day after. The thought picked away across her mind like a buzzard on a highway, its ragged wings raised, its frightful head daintily moving. Across the street in the bakery, cardboard cakes filled the window in tiers. There were birthday cakes and wedding cakes, samples of what could be done.

Liberty looped the tape out with her fingers, then bit it in two. She wound the tape round and round her finger and dropped the plastic casing into the street.