Burn (10 page)

She moved toward him without thinking, crashing into the freshly scrubbed kitchen table. Her shoulder hit him in his rib cage, hard enough to make him gasp for breath, flail his arms.

She saw the broom handle come in slow motion, frame by frame. It cracked against her skull and there was something runny and wet running down her temple.

“Ned, we're heading up now. It's really time to—” The cigarette man was back. He froze in the doorway when he saw the scene in front of him, the blood and the chaos and the splintered wooden pieces of broom spread out on the neatly swept floor. “Paul!” he yelled. “Paul, get up here now!”

The man with the cross appeared seconds later. He and the cigarette man had Mr. Hildreth between them.

“They're trying to set me up,” he wailed. “They're trying to say I did something.”

“We're not,” Lona said. “He attacked us out of nowhere.”
Out of nowhere?
She felt guilty as soon as she said it.

The cigarette man shook his head back and forth in a stunned apology. “I'm sorry – I don't know what happened. Ned's a good guy. I promise. You can report him to the counselor if you want,” he said. “I can go get her.”

“No.” Lona struggled to her feet. “We don't want to report him. Things just got – we're leaving now.”

“I didn't know,” Ned was babbling. “When I found out about those kids, that's when I started drinking. That's when I got in the accident. The Julian Path is why I'm fucking here.”

“Hey, it's cool, man.” The man with the cross wrapped his arms around Ned Hildreth, who was shaking like a baby. He stroked his hair, making hushing noises. “It's cool,” he said again and again. “It's cool. It's cool. It's cool.”

She was still panting when they reached the car. It hurt to twist her body. She could reach for the seatbelt, but not pull it over her chest and across her lap. Her head was a dull nexus of pain, but her shoulder was what really hurt. She must have wrenched it when she crashed into the table. A spot of blood seeped through her shirt, right near the neckline; something slivered and brown poked through the fabric. She pulled on it. A splinter. A shard. A thorn in her side, buried a quarter of an inch below the skin, the tip a rusty red.

“Fenn, will you help—” She broke off when she saw the state he was in. The keys in his hand jingled as he tried to steady them enough to fit in the ignition. His curls were plastered to the back of his neck with sweat, even while the temperature outside was freezing.

“Are you okay?”

He tried the keys again. He wasn't okay. He was even less okay than she was. With her good hand, the one that didn't send pain missiles up her shoulder, she reached over to help him.

“Here—”

“No.” He blocked her hand with his forearm. “I can
do
it.”

“Your hands are—”

“Leave me alone, Lona. I can do it.” She shrunk back at the harshness. He couldn't do it. His shaking was getting worse, not better, and she didn't like the fragile edge of his voice. She took more time than she needed to buckle her seatbelt now, focusing intently on the metallic click, on tightening the strap securely against her waist. Maybe Fenn just needed to have a minute to steady himself. She tried to give him the privacy he needed to pull himself together.

“Shit. Shit.” He'd dropped the keys under the dashboard; he scrambled blindly to find them. Lona saw them by the heel of his right shoe. She undid her carefully buckled safety belt and leaned over to pick them up.

“How about I drive?” she said.

“I'm fine.” He reached for the keys.

“You're hurt.”

“I can do it.”

“Fenn. I'm going to drive.”

He didn't agree, but when she got out of her side and walked over to the driver's, he stepped out without protest. Her shoulder was manageable as long as she didn't raise it above her head. It was freezing in here. Lona moved to turn the heat on, but it was already on the highest setting. She turned on the radio instead. All-day Christmas carols, cloying and warming. After a few blocks, she'd started to feel better, but Fenn was still silent, rigid, staring out the windshield.

“Fenn. Are you feeling okay?”

“I'm fine.”

“You're not.”

“We're done now, right?” he asked.

“Done?” Done with what? With the visit? She couldn't wait to get home, strip off her bloody top and stand under the hot stream of a shower.

“We're not going to visit those other two men.”

Done with everything. That's what he meant. With their whole search.

“Fenn. I know that was  …  awful. But it was our first try. We'll be better the next time. We'll do more research. We'll have a better story.” She tried to sound positive, upbeat. How could he want to be done with everything?

“I don't want to make a better story, Lona. I want our first try to be our last try. We were wrong to come here.”

Lona pulled the car over to the side of the road. She couldn't drive and focus on this conversation. “We were wrong to come here because he was the wrong person,” she insisted. “He was just a janitor. When we find the right person, he won't freak out like that.”

“No, you're right. When we find the right person, he might freak out in worse ways.”

She changed tactics. “Fenn, I know it was bad. But we can't give up. If we'd just given up six months ago, when we were trying to find out what happened to the Pathers who died – if we'd given up, then we wouldn't even be here.”

“But we
are
here,” he shot back. “We're alive. Only for some reason, you want us to throw away that fucking miracle of a gift and instead risk our lives again.”

She was angry and she was confused. She never would have given up on that search, when it was important to Fenn and his friends. She never would have “been done”. She knew none of this made sense to him. There was no logic to her yearning. There were no organized lists, no topic sentences, no neatly constructed tables of pros and cons. There was only the fact that she felt that this was the thing she was supposed to do. It was almost how she felt about Fenn. She couldn't have explained why they were supposed to be together, or the reason that his skin felt like home. But it did.

“I know it's hard for you to understand this – this dream,” she began.

“I know how terrible dreams can be,” he said bitterly. “Don't you think I know that? In
my
dreams you die and die, over and over again. In every way. On the floor in the remmersing room. In the river, after jumping off a bridge, like Byde. Sometimes it's you who stepped in front of the train, not Czin. Sometimes I can't get there in time to stop it, but I can get there in time to see it. To watch as you stop breathing, until you're completely gone.” His eyes were dark and dead. She knew he dreamed about her dying. She hadn't known it had been so constant, so relentless. She hadn't known that his dreams were graphic documentaries about all of the bloody ways her life could be over.

“Do you know that when I grabbed that knife, I was thinking about how I could saw through his neck with it?” Fenn asked. “Or his eyes – I was thinking about how I could pop his eyes out of his sockets like pats of margarine.”

Her stomach heaved, both at the image and at the perverse precision with which Fenn described it. “But you didn't,” she whispered. “You didn't end up having to.”

“But I wanted to.” His voice had become a rasp. A familiar one – one she hadn't heard in months and hoped she never would again. This was the voice of the broken Fenn. The one who had appeared when they both first left the Julian Path, who thrashed in his sleep. She didn't know that Fenn still existed. She thought he'd been fixed. Repaired. Painted up shiny and new. “I wanted to. I thought that he deserved that, for hurting you. And that's not the worst part.” He turned back from the window, and when he looked at her, his eyes were so intent that she found herself wishing he would look back away. She didn't want to know the worst part.

“The worst part is that I was wondering if the knife would be too dull when I was done. If I would need to get a new spoon or if that one would be sharp enough to use on myself. Because if something happened to you, I already know that I wouldn't want to be alive. Especially not as a person who had killed. I already know that.”

He laid one hand on hers. Usually they were warm and she could feel his heat seeping into her skin. Today they were colder than hers. “So can you promise me, Lona?” His voice broke over her name. “Can you promise me that we're done?”

“I promise we're done,” she whispered. “I promise.”

The lights were off when they got home, and the driveway was empty. A white square of paper was taped to the door, lined with Ilyf's handwriting.
Tried your phones. No answer. Left without you. See you at Talia's
. At the bottom, a postscript from Gamb.
Ilyf's pronouns have all been kidnapped. If you see them, bring them with you
.

Talia's. For the weekly dinner. “We don't have to go,” Fenn said. “We can say we had car trouble, or I felt sick. Make up some excuse. We can just stay here alone.” She leaned back against his chest. Staying here was tempting. Especially with that last word. Alone.

“We can't. We're supposed to be celebrating Christmas tonight. Gabriel will be disappointed if we don't show up. And Talia will be pissed.” If they stayed here alone, they would just end up talking again about what had happened that afternoon. His hands would end up shaking; they would both end up in nightmares. They needed to be around people.

She stood in the shower, with the temperature turned as high as her skin could stand it, massaging her tender shoulder. She stayed until the hot water had almost run out, and when she finally emerged, the bathroom was cloudy with steam. Standing outside the shower, she encountered a problem. Moving her left arm too high still sent shocks of pain up her side. She'd managed to wash her hair using only her right, but couldn't manage the fine work of detangling her hair with just one hand. Or even the work of pulling it into a ponytail, she realized, as she considered just letting it air dry.

“Fenn?” she called out the door. “I need a little help.”

He appeared seconds later in a clean shirt, his dark curls damp after his own shower. Lona blushed. It always embarrassed her, to be with Fenn when their skin was wet. It reminded her of the first time they'd kissed, when he took her to the swimming pool, and did somersaults in the water, and confessed he'd been in love with her since he was two, and, so softly she thought she would die, put his lips against hers.

“Oh. You're not dressed.” He sounded embarrassed, too.

She held up the comb. “I can't move my arm enough.”

“So … ” He was blushing.

“So can you help me?”

He slid behind her, pressed close to fit in the small aisle between Lona and the bathtub. Fenn was tall enough that she could see the reflection of his eyes, over her head. His eyebrows knit in concentration as he worked through the wet tangles. She could see his forearms, too. She loved his forearms – the bones of his wrist, the soft hairs that became visible when he rolled his sleeves up.

“What are you thinking about?” he asked her when their eyes met in the mirror.

“Your arms. What are you thinking about?”

“Your, um, arms.”

“Liar,” she said. The expression on his face had been too wicked for him to be thinking about her arms.

“I'm not lying. I'm thinking about your poor, sore arm, because if I remind myself that you're hurt, it's easier to stop myself from thinking about other parts of your body that are not sore, and that I could kiss.”

“What parts of my body do you want to kiss?” Her skin flushed warm, all over her body.

“There are no parts of your body that I do not want to kiss.”

He wasn't smiling anymore. She watched in the mirror as he reached around her shoulders, drawing a line on her skin just millimeters above the terrycloth of the towel. “Here.” When he reached the other end, he continued a path up her bare shoulder, around the back of her neck. “Here.” He moved down to the other side, stopping an inch before the wound, where a bruise was already beginning to form. He leaned over and pressed his lips very, very gently against the tender skin. “But I'll start with there.”

She shivered. The kiss on her shoulder had traveled through her body down to the pit of her stomach, and now she was imagining his lips tracing the path that his fingers had just made.

“Do you think you can put a shirt on by yourself?”

Using her good hand to keep the towel in place, Lona experimentally tried lifting her left arm above her head, but only made it halfway before the pain made her eyes sting with tears.

“Wait,” Fenn instructed. “I'll get something that you won't have to lift your arms for.” When he returned, he had something soft and flannel in his hand. One of his shirts – it buttoned down the front and wouldn't need to go over her head. It smelled like him. Grass and prairies.

“I'll help you.” He held out one sleeve so her hand could easily reach it. “I'll close my eyes.”

“If you close your eyes so you can't see anything, your hands might go off track instead.”

“I wouldn't try anything.”

“I'm teasing, Fenn. I can't do this without your help.”

Fenn obediently closed his eyes. She let go of the towel wrapped around her chest, and she saw him swallow when he heard it hit the floor. Carefully, she eased her bad arm into a soft, flannel sleeve, then the good one. The shirt felt warm against her wet body, brushing against the tops of her thighs.

“Okay now?” he asked, and his voice was low, his eyes still closed.

“The sleeves are on. It's just the buttons now. Those are kind of a two-handed job.”

“Guide me.”

She led his hands past the open front of the shirt, acutely aware of the fact that the only thing between her nakedness and Fenn's eyes were his own eyelids, and placed his hands on the first button. His knuckles grazed against the hollow of her throat, and against her sternum as he fastened the second. “I'm sorry,” he whispered. “It's harder to do this with my eyes closed.” His hands were shaking, almost as badly as they had been in the car.

“You won't break me.” His hands continued down until all of the buttons were fastened. “You're done,” she whispered, as his hands lingered near the lowest button. “All dressed now.”

He exhaled a breath Lona hadn't realized he was holding, then opened his eyes and kissed her again.

Forty minutes later they arrived at Talia's house, Lona wearing an odd assortment of clothes: Fenn's shirt, a stretchy skirt, thick wool socks and shoes that Fenn had tied for her.

Gamb answered the door, wearing Gabriel like a cape, the younger boy's arms wrapped around his neck. “We're being a two-headed monster,” he explained. “Everyone else is done with dinner, but I think Talia put some stuff in the fridge for you. And there's a surprise guest.”

“Who is it?” Fenn asked.

Gamb rolled his eyes. “Lona, did you want to explain to Fenn what ‘surprise' means?” He cocked his head toward the kitchen. “Surprise guest – did you want to announce yourself?”

“Surprise!” A disembodied voice called, and Lona broke into a smile. It was as familiar as Fenn's, as familiar as her own.

“Julian!” She ran through the house to Talia's dining room, throwing her good arm around Julian's neck, jostling the glass of wine sitting in front of him.

He'd cut his hair since she'd last seen him – it was shorter now, still a light brown shot through with gray. He looked healthier, too. He'd put on some weight, which made him look younger. This should have made her happy, but instead gave her a brief pang.
We were the things that made him unhealthy
.
He looks healthy now because he finally got away from all of us.

No,
she tried to correct herself. The Pathers hadn't made Julian unhappy. The Path had.

“Lona Seventeen Always,” he whispered, enveloping her in a hug. “Happy belated birthday.”

“Julian, what are you—” She gulped back the sob that was rising in the back of her throat.
Why was she getting upset?
Why was she getting upset
now,
after everything else that had happened today? “Why are you here?”

“I came by your house first and caught Gamb and Ilyf on their way out the door.”

“No, I mean, what are you doing here at all? I thought you were in, I don't know, Paris or Prague or something.”

“Munich. Or just outside of it, actually. Did you know my ancestors emigrated from a town on the German-Austrian border? I've been sort of tracking my past.”

“Find anything interesting?”

“German is a really hard language to learn.”

It was the sort of answer Lona herself would have given. A non-answer, a deflection. Talia, who had been standing by the sink, came over with a paper towel to mop up the spilled wine. She moved uneasily around Julian. It must be so strange for her. It had been for Lona, initially. And Talia had worked in the Julian Path for almost nineteen years. She knew Julian's face almost as well as any Pather.

“What about you?” Julian asked. “Been doing anything interesting?”

How to answer that, in front of Talia and everyone else? “She's applying to colllllege.” Gamb swooped into the kitchen, finishing another lap with Gabriel. “It's very fancy.”

“You are? That's great.”

It was. It
was
great. It was exactly what she was supposed to be doing. “Just a tiny college,” she said. “It's actually not fancy at all.”

They stayed late at Talia's, listening to Julian talk about the places he'd been. The burly man who had efficiently pummeled him at a Turkish bath in Istanbul, the pizzeria in Naples with the cracked tile floors that had been using the same brick oven since 1873.

Ilyf and Gamb had brought egg nog, and Talia had made pecan pies, and because the only Christmas celebrations all of them knew were the ones that Julian and his family had celebrated, those were the ones they did: taking turns reading
The Night Before Christmas
to Gabriel, opening presents that Gamb passed out, one by one, wearing a Santa hat. Lona gave Gabriel one of Warren's favorite books. She'd bought it before Warren had hurt himself. She tried not to think about that when Gabriel tore off the paper.

Fenn gave her a small box, wrapped in dark red foil with silver snowflakes. She knew it was jewelry before opening it, by the tinkling, sliding sound the contents made when she shifted the box from side to side. He must have taken Ilyf's advice this time around. Inside was a chain – almost silver-colored, though she could instinctively tell that it wasn't silver – and dangling from it, an L, a cursive one that reminded her of motion or water.

“It's titanium,” Fenn explained. “The saleslady told me that titanium is stronger than gold. Or even than steel. It seemed more like you, somehow.”

“I'll put it on for you,” Ilyf volunteered, gathering Lona's hair away from her neck and fastening the clasp. She liked the weight of it, resting gently on her collarbone, reminding her of the touch of Fenn's fingers.

“I love it. I won't ever take it off.”

Fenn had now managed to give her two gifts that grounded her to her past, that reminded her of who she was. The book of photographs, and this, the first initial of her name. So what if the name wasn't the one her mother had originally intended, she thought, remembering her birthday wish from just nine days ago. That one didn't matter. What mattered was everything she did have, and what she did have was plenty. Or enough, at least. What she had was enough.

Wasn't it?