Catalyst (20 page)

“No.”

“Typical.” She studies the crowbar in her hand for a second, then sets it on Bert’s roof and reaches in for the pack of cigarettes on the dashboard. She shakes one out and sticks it between her lips. She shakes another one halfway out and offers it to me.

“No, thanks.”

“Suit yourself.” She tosses the pack back in the car and lights up.

“I saved the leftovers for you. They’re in the freezer.”

She inhales deeply and blows smoke at the sky. It floats above her head like a gray ceiling, then dissipates and drifts away.

“People always bring too much,” I say.

She removes a flake of tobacco from her tongue and inhales again. The ash at the end of the cigarette is the same color as her face.

I should go. My car is in one piece. It’s none of my business if Teri wants to wreck her house. I need to go home and wash the kitchen floor, check my e-mail, call Diana for the chem lab notes. I have to buy plastic wrap. I should go.

Teri flicks the end of the cigarette with her thumb and the ash crumbles. “I dressed him, you know.”

“Dressed who?”

“Who do you think?”

Idiot. Moron. “Oh. Sorry. That must have been hard.”

Her chin dips down the tiniest bit, then comes back up. “The funeral guy wasn’t going to let me do it at first and I got pissed. But your dad talked to him. Then he said it was okay.”

“What was he wearing?” I ask.

Teri smiles a little. “Jeans. Sneakers. Mickey Mouse T-shirt.”

I shiver. “Did you put on diapers or pull-ups?”

“Pull-ups. So he could be a big boy—” Her voice breaks off.

I step toward her. She blows past me and leaps up to the kitchen, scooping to grab the sledgehammer. She raises it over her head with a roar and slams it into the wall where the cabinet had been attached.

“Teri, no!”

She can’t hear me. I can barely hear me. The air fills with her voice, the hammer hitting the walls, dust, wood, plaster flying in all directions. Her face is red and wet, her mouth open. She screams, screams, hits, hits, stops to pant, then brings the sledgehammer up again and lays into the walls, the door frame, anything that she can destroy.

“Please stop. Look, you’re bleeding. Come home with me. I’ll take you to the doctor, whatever you want.”

She stops to look at the blood on her left forearm, gashed by a piece of wood. She turns over the palms of her hands. She didn’t put her gloves back on—they must be raw.

“This isn’t doing any good,” I say. “You’re just wrecking your house. Come on.”

She picks up the hammer and breaks through the wall that leads to the playroom, then pounds away until there is enough space to step through. She drops the hammer and disappears inside.

It’s quiet. I move along the outside of the house until I can see her through the windows. She’s studying Mikey’s handprints on the wall, and the “art” we added. It looks so stupid from where I’m standing. I hope she doesn’t think we were trying to make fun of her and her family, or that we were defacing her house. Mitch was right, that was a stupid thing to do. We didn’t belong there.

“Teri?”

A paint can sails through the closed playroom window, spraying glass like a fountain. The lid comes off in midflight and a yellow swath of paint splats on the ground. A few drops land on my shoes. A second can launches through the middle window. I throw my arms over my head and duck. It arcs over me and explodes in the dirt like a blue bomb.

“Stop!”

Teri comes to the window. “What’s wrong, Katie, scared?”

“Of course I am. Look, I’m sorry about the wall. We were trying to, I don’t know, we were trying to say good-bye to Mikey. I know it’s stupid, I’m sorry.”

She picks a shard of glass out of the window frame and tosses it at me.

I jump out of the way. “We’ll fix it. We’ll repaint it for you. Come on, I’ll drive you home.”

Her red eyes harden. “I
am
home.”

I step toward the window. “Exactly. That’s my point. This is your house. You can’t tear it down.”

“Watch me. I’m going to rip out every board, every beam, every door, all the locks, the stairs, the walls, the freaking windows. . . . ”

She steps away from the window, then—
smash—
the sledgehammer comes down on the frame, splintering the wood. She whales away at the frame until she can kick the whole thing out of the wall. She stands where the window used to be, struggling to catch her breath. “You can help me or you can go home. Suit yourself.”

“Teri, you need professional help. This is not normal.”

Her laugh sounds like cloth ripping. “What the hell is normal?”

“You need time to deal with this, talk to a counselor or something.”

“That’s bull.”

“You’re not thinking.”

“I don’t want to think.”

“That’s ridiculous.”

She pulls a broken piece of plaster-covered wood from the wall. “Ridiculous? When I wasn’t looking, my kid wandered upstairs and got killed. He had his brains fried. I don’t want to think, Kate. Never again.”

She turns her face away.

In the distance, there are cars and trucks speeding on the highway. The sound of their tires on the road provides a background hum, background radiation, like the ticking clock or dripping faucet you don’t notice until you notice it, and then the sound drives you nuts. My little black dress and my velvet headband feel like they are on a different body, like I’m inhabiting something else, the space between Teri and me, maybe, or maybe I left myself back up the hill. My hands are ice, but Teri is dripping sweat. What does it feel like to drive a sledgehammer through a wall? To scream so loud that the birds fly away? To rip down an entire house because it hurts so much to look at it?

“I’m sorry,” my mouth says. “I came down here to help you.”

“No, you didn’t!” she screams. “You came for your goddamn car! Get out!”

She’s not rational. Get a grip, Malone. I pull my sweater closed and tie the belt around my waist. I rub my hands up and down on my arms and clear my throat once. “I wish I could help you.”

“Fuck you very much.”

Well, then. I pick up the keys and get in my car, which reeks of smoke. I roll down the windows and toss out Teri’s pack of cigarettes and the soda. According to the odometer, she only drove eleven miles, but I doubt that she remembered to shift. Probably killed the transmission. Poor Bert. I pat the dashboard and put him in reverse.

A paint can flies through the last intact window of the playroom. The sound of exploding glass makes me flinch and stomp on the gas. Bert shoots backward and the can bounces off the top of the windshield on the passenger side. It tips and pours red paint everywhere.

I slam on the brakes and throw it into park. It takes a few minutes to stop shaking, a few more to realize that the windshield is still in one piece. The glass has a small spiderweb crack where the can hit, but the rest of the windshield is whole.

Teri stays out of sight, banging and cursing inside. I turn the heat on high and flick on the wipers. The motor whines as the blades smear the thick red paint across the glass. Back and forth. Back and forth. Back and forth.

12.0

Activated Complex

SAFETY TIP: Never mix chemicals without a defined procedure.

Dad’s mechanic promises to look through some junkyards for me. He swears the crack won’t get any bigger as long as I avoid speed bumps and I don’t exceed ten miles per hour. Poor Bert. I stick him in the garage to recuperate. After dinner I lose myself on-line. Teri stops by to chat with Dad. By the time I go downstairs for something to drink, she’s gone. Dad says that she decided to stay at Betty’s house for a while. She’ll pick up the rest of her stuff tomorrow.

Fine.

I go out for a little run at midnight. There is a light on upstairs at the Litches’. A flickering candle.

Fine.

After colleges have sent out acceptances and rejections, it’s rather pointless to make seniors show up for class. Like they have something new to teach us? Please. But I am still Kate Malone, so I attend class on autopilot. I keep forgetting to do homework, but I’ll make it up later. The week plays out without drama. I go through the motions, move from station to station along the assembly line. At night I run, in the morning I sleepwalk. I keep my curtains closed and try not to breathe too much. This flu/not-flu thing has put a big hurt on me.

Teri’s name shows up on the absent list daily. Good Kate thinks about collecting her books and homework, but somehow I don’t get around to it. I have her clothes, toothbrush, lighter, magazines, all her junk packed in a duffel bag, waiting by the front door. She hasn’t stopped by.

It takes Dad a couple of days to figure out that a) Teri is living in her house, and b) Teri is destroying her house. I watch from the sidelines as he moves from concern to deep concern to frustration to anger. He tries to talk to Teri. She treats him the same way she treated me, more or less. He tries to talk to her mom. He talks to the police, two shrinks, county social services, and back again to Mrs. Litch. The answers drive him crazy. She can’t be arrested; it’s not against the law to knock out walls in your house, not with the water and electricity already turned off. She won’t need a demolition permit until she breaks through an outside or retaining wall. She’s eighteen years old, so no one can go after her for cutting school. She’s living in a house that her family owns, so social services won’t get involved. And her mother doesn’t care one way or another, as long as she can keep living at Betty’s. Basically, Teri is doing what she wants and nobody can stop her.

She’ll move out of there eventually; November, maybe. Definitely by the first snow.

Toby has to write a biography about someone for his English class. He wants to write about our mother. I suggest he choose a different subject. He slams his door and turns up his CD so loud it scares the dog.

I sleep all weekend or maybe I don’t sleep at all. Hard to tell what is asleep and what is awake. They have blurred into each other. I’ve given up on my contacts. Wearing them is like jamming thistles in my eyes. My glasses are fine.

In the bottom of Toby’s clothes hamper, I come across Mikey’s pajamas and one of his socks. It takes me a couple of hours to wash and iron them. I fold and lay them under my pillow.

The last track meet of the season is on Tuesday, a week after the funeral. A big deal, this one. Last chance to qualify for states. Perfect weather. My father and brother in the crowd to watch my final race.

When the starter’s gun goes off, I just stand there. My feet refuse to move. Very odd. They have always moved before. I sit down on the starting line. My legs are still attached, knees operational, socks rolled down, shoelaces tied. I stand up. Nope, the feet will not race. It’s not dark enough, I guess. Dad drives me home. He wants me to take a nap.

I wake up in the middle of the night. The Litch house is quiet. It’s been quiet for three days. I can’t tell if that’s a good sign or a bad sign. Dad has stopped talking about Teri. To me, at least.

Mitchell e-mails and I delete. He took it upon himself to tell everyone about my little college disaster. Sara has been spending a lot of time in my face, trying to get me to talk about it, to “share.” Travis thinks I need a road trip. Mostly I think about the advantages of being abducted by aliens. The pharmacy calls and fires me on the answering machine. Good Kate and Bad Kate have not come home. Either they are lost or I scared them off.

I have a new slant to my Quantum Futures options. I could work in a coal mine. I could move to Australia, learn how to shear sheep. I could donate my body and brain to science. I could volunteer at a Third World orphanage. I could work on a cutter in the Arctic. When I show Sara the new list, she throws it out.

On Thursday, Ms. Cummings catches me mixing Dangerous Chemical A with Dangerous Chemical B in class. This creates quite a reaction. We have to evacuate the building, which is a pain.

On Friday, Dad makes me stay home and commands me to rest. As if. When he leaves, I sneak into Toby’s room to clean. I open the windows, strip the bed, take out the trash, and put all of his gym socks in a caustic bleach bath. His Mom project is on his desk, hidden under a layer of comic books and algebra notes. He has glued photos and written down a few facts: born on . . . went to college . . . married . . . taught math . . . died on.... Hobbies: fractals, studying transition metals, knitting. He didn’t write down that her favorite perfume smelled like roses. Or that she knew the value of pi to the fortieth digit. Or that she knew all of Tom Lehrer’s songs. Or that she used to stay up with Toby all night to make sure he kept breathing. Or that she liked a clean kitchen. Or that she was Phi Beta Kappa at MIT. Maybe she called it Pi Beta Kappa.

And then I am in bed quite sure that I am awake, and then I’m running, convinced that I’m asleep. I have a dream in which Mitchell “Lips” Pangborn tells me none of this would have happened if I had learned to write better essays. And then he puts me on hold while he talks to some chick in Cambridge.

I can’t get warm. I pile all the blankets from the linen closet on my bed, and my winter coat, and a sleeping bag, too. I put my head under the covers, worry for a second about the possibility of a carbon dioxide/oxygen imbalance, then crash.

13.0

Critical Pressure

SAFETY TIP: Do not use reflected sunlight for microscope illumination.

When I wake up, it is Saturday and Sara is standing over me, frowning her displeased goddess frown. “Okay, that’s enough. Get out of bed and take a shower. You’re coming with me.”

It would take too much energy to argue with her. I do as I’m told. Once I’m clean and dressed, I follow her outside. She sends me back inside with instructions to put in my contacts and comb my hair. I do as I’m told, then return. Travis is driving. I get in the back seat. Sara tells me to buckle up.