Frail (8 page)

“I used to write songs sometimes too. Did I tell you that? Before?”

She shook her head. Her eyes looked dull.

“I didn’t have a band or anything, I just—I had a notebook full of them. I lost it last fall, it got all torn up. Someone tried to eat it.” Any sort of paper, cardboard, tissue, the sick shoved it in their mouths and goat-chewed it to shreds; I went back to my uncle’s house just once, to look, but I couldn’t stand to touch the wads of it littered everywhere, I was afraid I might catch the disease from their spit. “I had a lot of songs.”

Don’t ask me to sing them, I thought, whatever you do. Things between us were already awkward enough.

Her fingers faltered on the loose thread, the fabric starting to gape and rip. “What were they about?”

“Just stuff I was thinking about that day, or, whatever.” I rested my chin on my backpack. “Greek myths, some of them. I liked mythology.” That was my favorite part of English class, freshman year. I didn’t know why everyone whined about how haaaaaaard Sophocles and Euripides were to understand; it all sounded clean and sharp and like things moving forward, not just characters standing around spouting poetry, and Euripides especially never wasted a word. I’d read ten Euripides plays any day, over
Julius Caesar
. My mom found me a secondhand copy of Ovid, two dollars, with illustrations that made me wish I knew how to draw.

“I never knew much about Greek myths, either,” Lisa said. “It’s one of those things you know you’re supposed to know at least something about, but you don’t?”

“Like Shakespeare.” I felt my pockets again. Cell phone, ID cards. Good. “My favorite I wrote was about Callisto.”

Lisa shook her head. Nobody ever knew that one, or they confused her with Calypso. “Callisto was a beautiful nymph,” I explained, “a follower of Artemis. One day, Zeus saw her wandering over the mountaintops. He raped her. Once he was done with her Artemis banished her, as punishment for no longer being a virgin.” That part confused me no end, the first time I read it; I thought Artemis was meant to be a lesbian, you’d think she’d understand. “Then, because she just wasn’t punished enough, Zeus’s wife, Hera, turned her into a bear—but the worst part was she still had her old mind, trapped in a bear’s body. She tried to beg the other gods for help, tell her family what Zeus had done to her, but she’d been robbed of speech forever. And she didn’t know her own strength. I mean, she literally didn’t know her own strength, in her head she was still a young girl. She fled over the mountaintops because she was terrified of the other animals, she couldn’t see herself for what she was. She hid in a cave, away from everyone, crying for everything she’d lost, but all that came out was the sound of an animal that’d crawled away to die.”

My mom cried when I played it for her, that song. I hoped it wasn’t just because I got nervous and fucked up all the chord progressions. I stared up at the slope of the sky, the little pizza slice of the quarter moon.

“So what happened to her in your song?” Lisa asked.

“She got captured by a circus. She became a dancing bear. Then one day, right in the middle of her act, she suddenly understood that she had teeth. And claws. And enough strength to decapitate an animal trainer, with one swipe of her paw.”

Something too high-pitched to be an owl called out a few times from the birch trees, lapsed back into silence. There was a faint rustling sound in the trees, the grasses, some small furry thing scuttling toward its hole. Nothing had changed, for them. Nothing at all.

“Would you mind if I closed my eyes for a while?” Lisa asked. “Just a few minutes. It’s been a hell of a day.”

“You’re the one who kept saying you didn’t need it. Not me.” I clutched my backpack tighter. “Good night.”

“I’m just taking a nap. Get some rest. Good night.”

She stretched out on her side and in seconds was sleeping like an animal sleeps, flinching limbs and piteous snoring cries giving way to deep sighing breaths and a sort of graceful weightiness; her whole body sank straight into the blanket with the heaviness of fatigue. I’d never slept that soundly, my mother once told me, even as a toddler. It’d be her thirty-ninth birthday, in two and a half months.

What would I be doing, in two and a half months? In Elbertsville? Weeding a vegetable garden. It was too early to grow anything now, weird hot weather or not, the last frosts didn’t end until after Memorial Day. Mending clothing pulled off dead people, after slapping it clean on a rock. Laying snares for rabbits. If this arm didn’t get me first. If Lisa were wrong about the rabies, it’d definitely have happened by then.

I fell asleep dreaming I snared a little skeleton wearing a zipped-up parka and tiny red boots and a soft rabbit-fur hat, the rabbit ears still attached and flopping over smelling of death.
Promise me you’ll take care of it,
Kristin begged me of the skeleton, pleading low and soft and desperate like she had last winter,
I know what I’m putting on your back but please promise
, and I did, because I had no choice, because otherwise the circus bears would break loose and kill us all. But the thing is, their cage doors were all open already, someone unlatched them while we weren’t looking. I tried to tell Kristin that, in the dream, but she just wouldn’t listen.

I told Ms. Acosta too. In the dream. She laughed, and said she’d unlatched them herself. As a joke.
Run, Amy,
she said.
Run very fast.

FOUR

T
he next day was even hotter, a little bit of July in April; the air felt liquid and huge shaving-foam banks of clouds drifted slowly through the sky, growing taller as they wandered, with trailing underbellies like columns of dark blue smoke. That was something neither of us had, a raincoat or umbrella. I let her pick the music, some eighties New Wave compilation—those synth keyboards were twice as grating as her laughter, but I owed her. I’d slipped the Good Terrorist CD into a zipped jacket pocket, that and a Victims of the Dance CD still sealed in plastic. Souvenirs of old times until all the batteries ran out.

“I don’t like that sky at all,” Lisa said. I could see the clouds changing too, the white candy tufts dissolving into a sticky mass of dark sugary gray rolling over the sun. “It’ll soak everything in the carts.”

“What about the tarp?” I asked, knotting my jacket sleeves tighter around my waist. Lisa had an extra pair of sneakers that as good as fit me, and I’d sprayed so much athlete’s foot powder inside my socks that every step was cool and squishy like I was walking in fresh mud. It still hurt like hell to grip the cart handle, but the sweat bath from those gloves was worse. “If we move the paper stuff into one cart, and cover it—”

“Let’s pull over here. You look ready to drop anyway.”

In a sickly patch of field, a WARNING! KNOWN ENVIRONMENTAL HAZARDS, ENTER AT YOUR OWN RISK! sign still sticking out of the ground, we pulled all the Kleenex and toilet paper and Triscuit boxes and winter coats from one cart, stuffed all the canned goods and anything that could take a soaking rain into another, threw the tarp over the first cart and tucked in the edges and sat down on the grass, me shoving cold canned ravioli in my mouth as hard and fast as Lisa. Midmorning, maybe ten or eleven o’clock; another thing neither of us had was a watch. The sky had gone the color of slate, the backlit clouds thicker and darker every passing minute.

“The tarp’s not long enough,” Lisa said, as she demolished a snack cake. Stale flaked coconut stuck like dandruff to her jacket, her sweater. “The rain’ll get in the sides, but it’s better than nothing. Whatever’s left is yours, when we get to Elbertsville. It’ll make it easier, I bet, if you have stuff to give everyone.”

I scraped the spoon along the bottom of the can, trying to dislodge a last ravioli—raviolo?—stuck in bright red glue. “I need to stop,” I said. “Everything hurts.”

The CD player kicked back to “Digging Your Scene” and Lisa snapped it off. “There’s some houses down past the trees. I don’t want to wake up soaked.”

We trudged through dead grass full of pull tabs and depleted lighters and cigarette filters devolved back to soft pussy willow tufts. It wasn’t a whole subdivision, just nine or ten dilapidated houses, some still with the Tyvek sheeting nailed to their plywood sides, plunked down in the middle of a field with a half-finished road stopping dead in the grass before them. This used to happen all the time: Developers went and built outside the designated safe zones, there’d be an “environmental incident,” the thing would sit there half-finished forever while the developer settled all the lawsuits. Steak houses, kids at school called them, when the homeless people moved in.

There was a faint, full rumble in the distance, like a sluggish winter car engine finally kicking to life. The storm, a huge one, was moving in fast from the west. I followed Lisa, letting her fight with both sets of cart wheels leading down the embankment, and went straight for the first house: huge, hollow, that pasteboard look of a crappy town house masquerading as a mansion. The front hallway had a neck-craning ceiling, two stories high, a light fixture studded with pink glass protuberances like tumors. Every fixture, every outside window broken, and in the next, the next. The fourth house had the jackpot: sleeping bags tossed around the enormous front room, a battery-operated space heater—dead, of course—in the center. Ridiculous thinking that little thing could warm a room this big, this many windows, at least the walls of my movie theaters were good and thick against the cold.

“How do you know it’s really empty?” I said. “These things all have eighty thousand rooms, they could be hiding upstairs—”

Lisa pointed silently to the staircase’s broken remains. We shook the mouse droppings from two of the sleeping bags and hauled them out.

There was a cracking sound from far away, then another low rumble, something metallic being dragged across the surface of a vast tin tub. The bottom of the tub split open and rain spattered against the windows, a sudden wet cool breeze dancing around our clothes and hair, spraying stray droplets through the open doorway.

“I’ll drag everything in,” Lisa said, as she ducked outside. “We need to sleep.”

The softness of a sleeping bag, after a blanket or two laid flat on concrete floors, industrial carpets, hard-packed soil, was such heaven I was floating. My whole head felt floaty and insubstantial, actually, I wasn’t sure I could get up again on short notice. I burrowed in deeper and Lisa curled up next to me. The light was dim and dark gray, choked with chalky clouds; so much rain was coming down, like someone was pouring it off the eaves from a vast pitcher. The wind picked up, sliding through gaps in the windows, the door frame, the fake-brick siding and I pulled my jacket back on, suddenly cold.

“It’s too early in the spring for this kind of weather,” Lisa said. She was lying back now with her eyes closed, hands tucked under her head. “Little bit of late May out there.”

“More like July.” I rested my cheek on my good arm. “August. But cold as March—”

“Go on and sleep. If the thunder won’t keep you up.”

“I like it,” I said, closing my eyes. Not a lie. The close-by storms scared me when I was small, the ones where a great overhead rumbling shakes the roof, the walls, the bed frame, and then the lightning flash, the
crash!
a half-second later, makes you flinch and crouch in your bed gazing vigilant at the window, watching for the angry thing outside to come crashing in. But the gentler thunderstorms, a steady but sedate pounding of water and some pot-and-pan banging from far away, those were just white noise that made you happier to be inside, dry, nesting in the dark.

I’m inside, I’m dry, it’s as dark as the daytime can get. Nothing’s really changed that much, then, has it? I should be grateful. Lisa was already snoring next to me, the sorts of soft little sounds she couldn’t make anymore while she was conscious. Like sleeping in Dave’s living room, all huddled together, all winter.

Promise me,
Kristin said, lying there on the floor by the woodstove, dazed and sick,
that you’ll take care of my baby. That you won’t let anything happen to it. I trust you, Amy. I know I can trust you—

I promised. Over and over. And I meant it, I always did. It wasn’t a lie. Ms. Acosta heard her sometimes, saw her clutching my hands, and she shook her head.
Amy, we’ll all have enough to do keeping ourselves alive—never mind a baby, if it lives. Don’t make promises you can’t keep.

I could have. I could have kept it. That wasn’t a lie. That’s what nobody, nothing, seems to understand.

If I’d just stayed in Lepingville, that ghostly black dog wouldn’t have found me on the road, wouldn’t have sniffed out exactly what had happened and—too late for that. I should’ve stayed. That’s what you’re supposed to do, sit, wait, and somebody will find you. That’s how it works. My mother, what if she’d already found her way back, and I wasn’t there?

What if she were there all along, all through the winter, but on the wrong side of town too afraid of exes or feral dogs or nobody knowing her to go any farther to find me? What if I’d had her, I’d
had
her, and then—

But that’s just what happened anyway, isn’t it, years ago. I had her. Then, because I wasn’t paying attention, because I couldn’t see how far she’d fallen, I let her slip away. If I’d stayed awake that night, that one night, if I’d
stayed
for her, she would never have left.

And none of this would have happened. None of it.

Oh, my dear,
Ms. Acosta said once, last winter, when I told her this.
My poor Amy.
Her arms around me felt papery and fragile and so weirdly soft, that crumpled-paper softness of bones and muscles growing old, and she pulled away quickly as if scared I’d push her off. Would that have been what it felt like, a grandmother’s touching you? But Ms. Acosta wasn’t old enough for that, fifty at the most. And I never knew my grandparents. They died before I was born.