Hemlock Grove (18 page)

At seven Tyler came and took her to the roller rink. Initially Alyssa vetoed this plan as silly and juvenile, but Alexa thought about it and pointed out that it opened the door for hand-holding that didn’t necessarily reveal intent and planted suggestive make-out music while on the surface deceptively silly and juvenile. Christina did not interject that she liked roller-skating.

On skates Tyler was endearingly klutzy, which calmed Christina’s racing heart. He said he hadn’t put these things on in years, and when they stepped on the rink he humped back and forth to maintain his balance, throwing his arms up in mock triumph when he fell.

“Here,” said Christina, holding out her hand.

“You sure?” said Tyler. “If I go down, you go down.”

She noted his palm was as clammy as hers. Well!

Tyler and Christina had first had a moment during drama class when they wound up partners for the mirror game. Tyler was a gangling boy, all knees and elbows, making him the star physical comedian of the HGHS stage. When Christina missed a couple of days of school he dropped off the DVDs of the first season of
Glee.
There was nothing imposing about him other than the fact of his sex; when they had changed into skates she noticed his pinkie toe poking through a hole in his sock, the adorable way he’d tried to hide it.

They were passed by a very skinny very pregnant lady in denim short shorts and a lime green tube top who was skating like greased lightning.

“I’m glad you’re feeling like better and everything,” said Tyler.

“Oh, I’m fine,” said Christina, affecting breezy nonchalance.

“You look fine,” said Tyler, and Christina blushed.

The pregnant lady did a pirouette and Christina saw that she had a long and ratty goatee, and Christina realized it wasn’t a lady at all but a man dressed like a girl carrying his beer weight in his gut.

“Hello, nurse!” said Tyler, and Christina giggled, per the twins’ instruction to laugh at
everything
he said. She had her own doubts about that one—it seemed like it would make a person feel like some kind of circus clown—but the twins seemed, as usual, correct: she noticed that the more she tittered, the more generally pleased he seemed.

After a couple of minutes the rink darkened and a disco ball spun slowly. It was the couples skate. A Madonna song played. Other skaters joined hands.

“Now I’m not the only one who looks special ed,” said Tyler.

When you call my name it’s like a little prayer

His grip tightened. A simple adjustment, or was that a squeeze?

I’m down on my knees, I wanna take you there

The movement of his feet became less jerky and halting, falling into rhythm with hers. They made a full, smooth pass.

“You’re
getting
it,” said Christina, imitating the kind of coo she would envision the twins approving of.

“Whoops,” said Tyler. His left foot slipped out and he fell, legs splayed, Christina coming down right on top of him. It was the first time she had felt the body of a boy beneath her, the solid and the warmth of it. She would have to remember to make a note of the sensation later, how these poor innocents have no idea that they are prey to the budding writer’s catalog of impressions! Then she realized she probably should get off him; he appeared to be in serious pain. But he laughed through his grimace and some wise guy yelled to get a room and Tyler said, “Warned you.”

When they were done skating, he asked what she wanted to do and she shrugged. Her curfew wasn’t for another hour.

“We could just, like, figure it out in the car,” said Tyler, reaching for his shoe.

Oh, will we now, Christina thought, and she reached and pinched the protruding toe and wiggled it.

“This little piggy went to market,” she said.

They drove to the 443 Sunoco, which was on a bluff overlooking the river.

“Do you want anything?” said Tyler, which impressed her as chivalrous.

She said, A cherry Coke if you please, and he went inside. But he did not lock the door behind him and she worried for a half second it would be rude if she did, but the car was parked in the penumbra of the nearest streetlamp and one glance at the darkness beyond the hood and she reached over and slapped the button. Just a precaution; there was nothing to be afraid of here.

“Remembering that you don’t have to be afraid is a Positive Coping Strategy,” she said.

Her hands were restless waiting, so she flipped down the visor and regarded herself in the mirror. The physical activity had disheveled her hair somewhat, but rather than fix it she decided she kind of liked it—the effect combined with the white striation was in its own way kind of hot. Fierce, even—like you didn’t know what you bargained for letting
this
out of its cage! Or was it? Really, it was just as possible she looked retarded. Suddenly, as happened with some regularity, she hated the twins. What were they thinking, letting her in this situation by herself? How she wished they were here right now.

Someone worked the door handle and she gasped in surprise, but of course it was Tyler who entered and handed her a cherry Coke.

“Scared you,” he said.

They sat looking out over the guardrail. The dark treetops on the ridges of the hills over the opposite bank like the bristling of massive beasts and the shimmering river a long lady in a black and sequined dress.

“It’s really pretty here,” said Christina, grasping the bottle with both hands between her thighs to hide her nervous fidgeting.

“I used to know the graveyard dude,” said Tyler, nodding to the store. “He hooked me up. Now it’s some fat dyke. She probably just got dumped by her Facebook girlfriend or something.”

Christina nodded. Her job now to wait and embarrass herself as minimally as possible. But wait for what? Her stomach was all tied up. She knew the sort of things boys were supposed to expect going into these things, but being in the thing itself she had no idea what he expected. She had told herself, before, she was more ready than anyone would have expected of her, but now that there was this big, warm thing taking up all that space so close to her, she was so scared. Could it possibly be as enjoyable as this tension was unbearable?

They both sat staring out the windshield. About a half mile down the river stood the remains of Castle Godfrey, its chutes and furnaces in the dark giving it the appearance of some nightmare burlesque of an amusement park.

“I was inside there once,” Christina said, pointing to the mill. Making conversation because just sitting there not saying anything felt like that millisecond right after hearing tires screech and not knowing whether the crash would follow, that millisecond stretching on and on.

“Yeah?” he said.

“My friends and I were walking on the tracks this one day and we were just messing around.”

“What’s it like?” he said.

She rubbed the sweat of the bottle with her thumb. “It’s … so big. And so empty. Except for this giant whatchamacallit—this cauldron thing they used to make steel in, like a giant black egg with a hole at the top, that’s still there, on its side. It’s supposed to be cursed or whatever. So I went to check it out, you know, peek inside. Put my head in.”

“Put your head in!” he said.

“Oh, you know,” she said airily. “Just gathering material.”

“You’re a really good writer!” said Tyler, impressed.

She neglected to mention that she couldn’t sleep with the bedside light off for weeks afterward, that she had never hated or misunderstood the cruelty of the twins more for daring her to do it, for knowing she would because they wanted her to.

Tyler nodded. He was reminded of his brief experience dating Letha and how he could never know conclusively that the bouquet of severed doll heads attached to plastic flower stems the opening night of the previous spring’s production had been related or not.

“Those Godfreys,” he said. “You’re lucky the elephant girl didn’t jump out and eat you.”

“Shelley’s okay,” said Christina, chastising. She was surprised and pleased at her own conviction coming to the other girl’s defense.

“I didn’t mean anything,” said Tyler.

“It’s okay,” said Christina. “I just don’t know if we … get her.”

They were quiet. Then without warning he reached and touched her white bang. She flinched. He withdrew his hand.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I … thought it was cool.”

“It’s okay,” she said. “It’s okay, sorry. You … I think you should.”

She touched her hair nervously. He touched his own in the same place. She realized he was playing the mirror game. She giggled, and so did he in imitation. Feeling much more lighthearted, she did a jazz handsy sort of thing and so did he. He puckered his lips. Oh did he! She puckered her own. He leaned in and so did she. She tasted sweet boy breath and felt inexpert boy lips. The soft insistence of his lips. Wet, moving lips.

He made a noise between an exhalation and a moan and he did not notice as all the fingers on both her hands extended fully and she placed her rigid hands to either side of his face and shoved him off, then fumbled for the door and fell to the pavement, screaming and screaming and screaming.

The Crucible

“I can feel it when you’re doing that,” said Marie. “I can feel it when you’re just lying there, worrying. It keeps me awake. Will you please go downstairs?”

Godfrey rose, leaden, and obeyed. In the kitchen he poured a scotch and poured an equivalent amount of water back into the bottle. He suspected she was monitoring. He looked at his reflection in the window, catching himself in the act, and made a ray gun out of his hand.

“Zap,” he said.

Disintegration: literally, the loss of integrity. But if the mind can be described as one’s subjective experience of the brain, then what is the self but vagrant fluorescings of neural constellations, individual states of consciousness determined by mercurial configurations of amplitude and alliance? And yet: he was not convinced, never able to shake the conviction there was so much more to lose …

He drank. Was his wife really snooping? Marie ran the Godfrey Foundation, the family’s charitable arm, and it had to be admired how good she had gotten at not bringing her work home. Although, to be fair, if she
was
snooping it was not entirely unjustified given how much he was drinking, albeit as an unusually educated self-prescription: in his medical opinion, if one must choose between the physiological deterioration caused by oppressive, neuron-murdering stress versus intoxication, who does one think one is possibly kidding?

His eyes fell to his phone but he looked away. No. Not that.

Bludgeoning himself with liquor was one thing, but fucking Olivia twice in one day for the first time in thirteen years in a feckless rage of potency would be a violence to his own soul. It was dangerous even to be thinking about her again. Fucking in the old places, thinking about her like he used to. Missing her exactly like he used to.

He poured more liquor into his glass and more water into the liquor. The front door opened, startling him so he nearly dropped the bottle. But this was absurd. As though thinking about Olivia was an act in which he might be caught. This was totally absurd.

“Letha?” he said.

She appeared in the kitchen, to his delight. But now shouldn’t he have some reason for summoning her beyond simple conjuration? Name, face. Or, as progenitor, did he? On balance he could be asking for a lot more in return for the fact of her existence. Like oh for instance getting an abortion. Kill it, kill it while there’s still time. But Godfrey was contorting himself through the motions of trying to see the potential for good to come from her decision; stranger things, in his professional experience, had happened. But down back the hill it rolled; he hated it, he hated the thing inside her and it pumped his stomach with battery acid every time he thought about it, which is to say, all the time. All the time it felt like this. He had the familiar impulse to pour a fresh drink with a full one in his hand.

“I’m told you had a gentleman caller this afternoon,” he said. (In fact he’d been told she’d gone
gallivanting
off with some ponytailed
hoodlum
.)

“Oh,” she said, “Peter.”

“Peter who?” he said.

“Rumancek. He’s a new kid.”

“The werewolf,” he said.

“He’s otherwise very nice,” said Letha. “I’m told you were Aunt Olivia’s white knight today,” she said, changing the subject.

He nearly spilled his drink. But she didn’t know. Somehow, still, no one knew. A feat of willful ignorance, as impressive as the pyramids.

Except Roman. Almost certainly an unspoken knowing earlier today in the boy’s eyes. Godfrey House was made of secrets, and he knew as well as anyone what the slightest creativity and stealth could uncover. But there was no way to ascertain without asking, an investigation he had no interest in pursuing. And assuming the boy did know, he was discreet about it. Criminal, his lack of generosity to his brother’s son. But didn’t it worry the bones to hear Letha speak Olivia’s name. When Marie did, it was invested with reassuring malignity; the way Letha spoke, it could have been anyone’s kindly old aunt.

“She fainted,” he said.

“Who faints?” said Letha.

She kissed him good night and he found himself left to the sudden onset of a complete and primordial sense of aloneness for which the only thing was the trivial distraction of modern technology. He went to the computer and surfed to distraction. Holes in the Steelers offense, reviews of books the likelihood of his ever getting around to reading decreasing each year, a vulgarity he’d meant to look up on Urban Dictionary. Then, for curiosity’s sake, he performed a search on Lod. Not that he expected it to generate any hit, but just supposing it did. And as it happened there were quite a few entries, although none of them from the corporate sphere. Lod, a city on the Sharon Plain of Israel: birthplace of the most venerated saint in Orthodox Christianity, Saint George. He looked at this useless incongruity on the screen and drank, the warm numbing finally offering the promise of sleep.