Precious and Fragile Things (21 page)

“There was so much blood,” he said. “And the smell of it, like lightning, like biting on a penny, I couldn't breathe. She took Katie first, and Mary didn't even cry when Mama did her, too. Joey tried to get away but she grabbed him by the shirt and hauled him up front, and she did him, too. Right across the throat, like killing chickens.

“Freddy screamed, and when she was fighting with him, Stevie started kicking at the glass. Stevie was my oldest brother, but he was still just a kid, and that glass wouldn't break. Freddy fell on the backseat like he was broke, just like the doll Katie got one year for Christmas that fell down the stairs. Mama was reaching for us, and all the time she was singing. ‘Go to sleep, little baby,' she sang, that song she used to sing when we was wakeful and wouldn't go down at night for her.

“She caught Stevie by the hair, but he was near as big as her, and he pulled away. She couldn't get into the backseat too easy, not with Freddy in the way, gurgling and kicking. Stevie grabbed the jack from alongside us and he whacked that glass window with everything he had. The glass fell in on us. It got in my hair, all sticky and gummy, and all over my clothes.

“Mama yanked Freddy out of the way and went for Stevie. She looked like she'd dipped herself in black paint, and all's I could see was her eyes and her teeth as she grinned. She grabbed Stevie by the back of his shirt, but he pushed me through the hatchback like I wasn't nothing more than air. ‘Run, Todd!' he hollered. Then he couldn't say anything else. I fell over the bumper and landed on my head, and that was the only time I saw any stars that night. I was froze to
the ground, couldn't run. I heard her scream, and then it was quiet. I stayed there all night, until the cops came.”

“Oh…” No endearment seemed right, no matter how much he needed one. “Oh, Todd.”

She put her hand on him, and it landed upon a piece of lined notebook paper. Todd looked at her, then down to the paper. He took it from her and opened it, smoothed it out, handed it back.

“She left a note,” he said.

Gilly didn't want to see what sort of words a woman who killed her children might have thought important enough to leave behind, but she took the paper. She smoothed it as Todd had done. In the dim candlelight she'd have been happy not to be able to read it, but she could.

Nothing stays clean.
Three words only, written in a rounded, careful hand in dark ink gone faded with time.
Nothing stays clean.

Gilly imagined that would be true for a mother with six children each only a year or so apart. She thought of her own two children and the swath of destruction they left in their path. No, nothing ever did stay clean.

Gilly didn't forget what Todd had done. She didn't forget her vow to escape him in any way she could. She simply put those things aside. She dropped the folder without care, not bothering to notice if the pages in it scattered on the floor. She opened her arms to him in invitation, and without hesitation.

“Come here, Todd,” Gilly said, and enfolded him in her arms to weep there until his sobs faded away, and at last, he slept.

T
he next morning, Gilly helped Todd clean up the mess he'd made. Together they swept up broken glass and the shattered remains of one of the dining table chairs. Gilly piled all the papers, the newspaper clippings and the note, inside the battered red file and handed it to him.

“Burn it,” Todd told her.

She did without hesitation. Then she went to the kitchen sink to wash her hands, because touching those papers had left her feeling as though she'd laid her hands down in the fly-blown corpse of something only recently dead. Todd waited until she had washed, rinsed, then dried her hands.

“I never told anybody that stuff before.” His gaze was earnest, not shifty. “Lots of people knew, but I never told nobody that story. Not the cops, not the Social Services zombies, not the people in the hospital or even my uncle Bill. You're the first person I ever told that story to.”

Would she rather have lived her entire life without hearing
that? Definitely yes. But she had heard it, and hearing it, could never forget it. Gilly put the towel back on the hanger.

“Did telling it make you feel better?”

The shaggy head moved from side to side, then hesitantly, up and down. “I don't know for sure. I guess so.”

“Sometimes, getting something like that off your chest can make a world of difference.” Gilly meant what she said but it still sounded wrong. Sort of patronizing, which wasn't what she felt at all. It was daytime television psychobabble. There was no way talking about what had happened could ever make it better.

“You ever have something bad like that happen to you?” Todd's left hand went habitually to his pocket for the package of cigarettes.

Gilly thought of her mother's “vacations,” which were better in many ways than the silent dinners or the bouts of screaming that became weeping. At least, when her mother was in the psychiatric hospital or in rehab, life moved in an orderly fashion. With her mother home, nothing was standard, nothing was reliable. Everything was chaos. Time and prescription drugs had cleared her mother's mind and helped her stop drinking. Before she died of cirrhosis at age fifty-six, Gilly's mother had actually become a woman she felt she could be proud to call “mom.”

“No,” Gilly said. “Nothing so bad as that.”

“Uncle Bill used to say all families had their dirty little secrets.” Smoke filtered from Todd's mouth while he spoke. “Ours was just dirtier than most.”

“God gives us what we can handle.” Again, Gilly wished she could say something more meaningful. Something real that would actually help him, not something regurgitated and lame. “It doesn't seem fair, but that's how it is.”

“Pfft. I stopped believing in God when I was five years old. Not sure I can start now.”

What kind of God would allow a mother to slaughter her children? Would allow a child to witness it? The same God who would allow a man to take a mother from her children, and a mother to let him take her.

“I guess that doesn't matter, as long as God believes in you.” Even as she said them the words tasted false. Sanctimonious. She didn't blame him for rolling his eyes.

Todd's laugh was an ugly sound. “Bullshit. God doesn't believe in fuckall. Do
you
believe that, Gilly? Really?”

“I don't know, Todd.” It was the truth. Gilly'd spent her share of years wondering about the existence of a higher power. She'd decided believing in God was easier than not, but the real truth was, she spent very little time praying. Religion had become a set of holidays and habits, not of faith.

“You don't even believe in Jesus.”

That was true, too. Gilly shrugged. “Yeah, so? You think Jesus is the only way to believe in God?”

“It's the only way I know about.”

“Well,” Gilly said gently, because she wasn't trying to lecture or condemn him, “it's not.”

Todd shook his head and scrubbed at his face with the back of his hand. He wouldn't look at her just now. Gilly found herself wanting to take his chin in her hand the way she did with Gandy when he'd made a mess and knew he was in trouble.

“She used to tell us Jesus suffered the little children. Whatever the fuck that meant. I don't think it meant what she thought it meant, anyway. But we…they…suffered. Didn't they?”

Gilly thought the one who'd suffered most had been Todd,
the one left behind. The pain the other children had felt had, at least, been blessedly brief. He'd had to live with the pain for his entire life, and there didn't seem any way Gilly could see for something like that to ever fade.

“They were scared.” Todd said. “That was the last thing they had in them. Fear.”

He did look at her then, brown eyes bright with tears that didn't seem to shame him. Gilly thought of how she'd cradled him the night before, but comfort that seemed all right to give in the dark wasn't the same now the sun had come up. Things had changed between them, but not as much as that.

She could be sincere, though. “I'm sorry, Todd.”

His lip curled at her sympathy, and he backed away. “Forget it. It was a long time ago.”

He
hadn't forgotten it, and how could he, ever? Gilly hadn't forgotten it and she hadn't lived it. She'd never forget it now, either.

Todd turned his back. Walking away. He was giving up on her, and though Gilly didn't necessarily want the responsibility of trying to help him, she found herself speaking anyway.

“When I was about nine years old, my dad started traveling for business. Before that he'd worked normal hours, nine to five or so. He was always home for dinner. But his job changed…actually, he lost his job. He was fired.” Gilly drew in a sharp breath. “That's the first time I've ever told anyone that.”

Todd cocked his head and drew out a cigarette he held between his thumb and forefinger but didn't light. He didn't say anything. He offered her the comfort of a listening ear the way she'd done the night before, without trying to diminish any part of what she was saying.

“Anyway. He started traveling. Days at a time. Three, four.
Or he'd get up early in the morning and be gone until after I went to bed. I didn't know it at the time, but he probably didn't have to work so hard…it was easier for him, I think. Than being at home.”

Todd put the cigarette in his mouth and lit it, nodding. His eyes squinted shut against the smoke. He took care to blow it away from her face.

“I was an only child. My mom had been pregnant a couple times before and after me, but hadn't carried to term. It was something with her uterus, it was tipped or something.” Gilly had spent the bulk of both her pregnancies worried she'd miscarry the way her mother had, even though there were no indications it was likely.

“So it was just you and your mom?”

“Yes.”

“What happened when your dad started traveling?”

Gilly needed something to do with her hands while she told this story and found it in the task of making tea. They'd both drunk a lot of tea over the past few weeks. She filled the kettle and settled it on the burner before turning back to him.

“Well, my mom didn't like it when he was gone. She relied on my dad for a lot. Everything, really. She didn't work. I mean, she had worked, but when I was born she decided to stay home. She hadn't had a baby for other people to raise, she always said.” Gilly's voice hitched on that, remembering long hours with her mother reading stories or playing dolls.

From the cupboard she took a mug and added sugar. Holding the mug kept her focus on something other than the story. She felt the weight of Todd's gaze and didn't want to face him, but did.

“It's why I stayed home with my kids.”

“Because of your mom?”

“Yes. Because I hadn't had them for other people to raise.” Tears burned the back of her eyes and she blinked to keep them from overflowing. This wasn't the time for weeping. This was the time for telling.

Todd smiled faintly. “I had a foster mom once. She stayed home, too. She was nice. She's the one who taught me how to bake cookies.”

It was good to hear someone had been kind to him. The kettle whistled and she poured hot water over the tea bag, then took the mug to the table to sit. He followed.

“When my dad was gone, my mom was always more…nervous.”

Nervous.

It was what her mother had always called it.

“She drank a lot when she was nervous,” Gilly continued in a voice as flat and emotionless as she could make it. It was the only way to get through this. “She was too nervous to cook or clean the house. Mostly she stayed in bed all day.”

“I bet that sucked.”

That was succinct. Gilly smiled a little. “Yeah. It did. I got myself up in the morning to go to school, and when I got home, she'd still be in bed, all the curtains closed. She kept the bottle in her nightstand. What a fucking cliché.”

She surprised herself, but said it again. “A cliché. A fucking stereotype. It was like she'd put herself in some Tennessee Williams play. Pathetic!”

The mug warmed her hands, even though she had no desire to drink the tea. It sloshed, burning her fingers. Gilly didn't let go of the mug; if she did, she might make a fist. If she made a fist, she might use it to punch something. A wall, the door, herself.

She could tell Todd didn't know Tennessee Williams, but it didn't matter. He understood what she meant. He nodded. Gilly kept talking.

“One day, I was late coming home from school. I'd gone to a friend's house to play. I didn't tell my mom, or even call. I knew she wouldn't get out of bed to answer the phone, and we didn't have an answering machine. God. That was so long ago.”

“I've never had one,” Todd offered with a laugh. “Hell. I never even got a cell phone.”

Both of them contemplated the turning of time and technology for a moment.

“I knew she'd worry about me,” Gilly said softly. “I think I wanted her to.”

“What happened?”

“I got home. She was in her room. I could smell something bad, really strong. I went in, and…” Gilly swallowed hard against the memory and had to close her eyes for a minute to clear her brain. To make it just a memory, not something she was reliving. It was hard.

Todd breathed out. Gilly breathed in. She opened her eyes.

“She'd smashed all her perfume bottles. And the bottle of booze. She'd broken the mirror on her vanity table, too. There was glass everywhere. I ran into the room in bare feet—Mom always insisted on taking off our shoes in the house, even when she wasn't keeping up with the cleaning. Anyway, I ran in, right onto the glass. It cut my feet pretty bad.” Gilly gripped the mug. “She wasn't cut at all.”

“Of course she wasn't.” Todd sneered. “She'd have been careful, right?”

Gilly looked up at him, no longer surprised at his insight.
“Yes. She was careful not to hurt herself. She was crying, though. Blaming my dad for being gone, me for being late. Saying over and over again how nobody loved her. Not enough. I went to her on bleeding feet and tried to tell her I loved her, but it wasn't enough. Nothing was. Not when she was…nervous.”

“Shit. No wonder you don't drink.”

He had a way of summing it up her husband had never managed. It felt disloyal to think that, but it was true. Seth couldn't comprehend what it had been like for her, growing up. Seth's parents believed they meant well and were interminably pushy and self-centered, but nevertheless “normal.” If any family could ever be considered nondysfunctional, which Gilly doubted.

“I needed four stitches in my foot. I called the ambulance myself. She wanted to drive me. I wouldn't let her. I knew she'd been drinking.”

Todd leaned the chair, balancing, his hands laced behind his head. “You were a smart little kid.”

“Yeah. Well. You see why I laugh when you say someone ‘like' me.”

His chair came down. “But you don't laugh.”

Gilly could now sip from the mug, the story finished and tea cool. “Hmm?”

“You don't laugh,” Todd pointed out. “Not ever. I've never heard you laugh.”

Gilly met his eyes. “I have nothing to laugh about right now.”

Todd's eyes narrowed, his mouth pursed, but he gave her a curt nod. “Oh. Right. Stupid me.”

If only whatever this was between them could be balanced as easily as he balanced his chair, she thought as he pushed
away from the table and left the kitchen. She didn't go after him. Gilly sat and drank her tea, even though it had gone cold, instead.