Precious and Fragile Things (26 page)

“I can't change things,” she told him. “And I wouldn't if I could. I have too much to lose and nothing to gain.”

His face broke, his head dropped. His knees buckled for an instant before he caught himself and made his way to a chair. Todd buried his face in his hands, his sigh soft but as loud and mournful as the howling of wolves. He pressed the heels of his hands to his eyes.

“Is it wrong to want just one thing? One good thing?” He spoke so low she could've pretended not to hear him.

But she did hear him, every word.

“No. But I'm not it.”

“You could be. If you wanted to.”

“But I don't want to, Todd.” She hated the words the second they came out, even though she meant them.

“See? I am stupid.”

He hadn't moved from the chair. She was still by the table.
A vast distance separated them, too far for her to touch him, but she put out her hand anyway.

“You're not—”

He cut her off with a low noise from deep inside him. Gilly stopped, uncertain. Todd looked up at her.

“Go away,” he told her, and she went.

T
he gears had jammed, the machine ground to a halt. Todd replied when she spoke to him, but only in the gruffest, briefest words. Gilly didn't really blame him. There wasn't much more to say. She should've been grateful for it and could only be sad.

They fixed lunch at the same time but not together, bound by mutually growling stomachs if nothing more. Long weeks of confinement meant they'd worked out a routine in the kitchen. A step here, a dodge there. Today she zigged when he zagged, and Gilly found herself with both hands pressed to his chest to keep them from colliding.

He pushed her away, gently but firmly. “Don't touch me.”

Now she understood how it must've felt for him when she'd said those same words. “Todd.”

“Don't.” He jerked his hands away, lifting them out of her reach as though she'd tried to take one, then moved around
her to grab his plate. He turned his back on her to take a seat at the kitchen table.

Gilly had fixed herself the last handful of wheat crackers and some squares of defrosted lunch meat that was a little too pink to be turkey. Was it only weeks ago she'd refused a plate of eggs mixed with bacon? She'd have eaten it, now. They were far from starving but they'd had an unspoken agreement to cut back on their meals. Their stomachs, like the pantry and fridge, were emptier every day.

At the table across from him, Gilly attempted to start a conversation that Todd shut down with one-word answers. They ate in uncompanionable silence. Her food tasted bad because of it.

“Don't blame me for what I can't change,” she blurted finally, unable to help herself.

He lifted his eyebrows at her and leaned back in the kitchen chair, tipping it. The smoke from his cigarette wreathed his features, made them softer, even as his scowl became harsher. He said nothing.

“I can't,” Gilly whispered, and got up from the table. She left her plate.

Behind her she heard the thump of all four chair legs hitting the floor, but she didn't turn. The scent of his cigarette smoke tickled her nose, but she refused to cough. She went to the bathroom and ran the cold water, splashed her face again and again until her eyes burned and her face turned red.

When she came into the living room, he'd gone upstairs. She heard the sound of his footsteps on the creaking wooden floor. She tilted her head toward the ceiling, but he didn't seem to be coming back down. This time, Todd was the one who'd escaped upstairs.

“I can't change things, damn it!” she cried to the ceiling,
her fists clenched in impotent anger. Even as she said it, she could taste the lie on her tongue. Could not and would not were two separate things altogether.

Gilly pressed the heels of her palms to her eyes, willing away the urge to cry. She owed him no tears. If she wept it should be for Seth, for Arwen, for Gandy. Perhaps even for herself. But not Todd. Not over this.

All at once, she couldn't breathe. Her throat burned with the effort, and Gilly sank onto the sofa. She pushed her hands against her chest, feeling and hearing the thunder of her heart.

“I'm sorry,” she whispered. He couldn't hear her, but that didn't matter. She knew she'd said it.

“C
oming to bed?” This is Seth's code for wanting to make love.

Gilly looks at the pile of bills as-yet-unpaid. From the laundry room, the dryer buzzes with a load of sheets and towels, with one last load in the washer ready to be transferred. It's only a little after nine o'clock, and she could easily stay up until eleven without suffering too much in the morning. Two whole hours with a house sleeping around her—how much she could finish in that solitude!

“I have to finish a few things first.”

He comes up behind her to kiss her neck. Gilly stiffens. The inside of her cheek burns and stings as she bites, though at least she doesn't taste blood. Not yet.

“Come to bed,” her husband says as his hands come around to cup her breasts even though she's told him time and again that nursing made them too sensitive for her to enjoy being grabbed that way. “I'm horny.”

She isn't.

Her mind races, calculating if she can satisfy him with a quick
hand-job at the desk so he'll go away and leave her alone. He's already taking her hand and rubbing his crotch with it. Seth thinks this will make her want to have sex with him, when all it really does is make her want to grab as hard as she can and yank.

It wasn't always this way. Gilly remembers a time when she was the one chasing her husband for sex, he the one complaining about being tired. That was before children, though, back in the days when she had nobody to take care of but herself. When she could stay up until midnight and still get seven hours of uninterrupted sleep. Back when her belly had been smooth and curved, not loose and doughy and road-mapped with scars.

She has friends whose husbands don't like to screw the way they used to—something about their wives gaining weight or being matronly, something about being unable to look at them as lovers any longer. She should be thankful her marriage is still strong, that her husband watched two children come out of her vagina and still finds her not only just attractive but sexy enough to chase around the house.

He shouldn't have to chase her.

At the very least, she shouldn't mind when he catches her.

But she does, and Gilly sighs as Seth whispers in her ear again, adding a stroke of tongue to her earlobe that makes her shudder with nothing resembling passion.

“Come to bed,” Seth says.

Gilly does, because appeasing him has become one more thing on a long list of chores she needs to complete before the night is through. She goes through the motions and the noises, wanting to please him because she does love him, after all, this man who quickly turns to snoring beside her in their bed. He doesn't notice when she gets up to go back downstairs and finish the chores she'd left undone so she could take the time to satisfy him.

“Don't forget to take your pills,” Todd says from the bathroom when Gilly at last finishes the last load of laundry, closes the checkbook,
and heads for a hot, steamy shower. She wants to stay in the water for a long time, letting it beat on her neck and shoulders, blocking out the world. She stops, instead, to listen to him say, “They're on the counter. You're sick, remember? The antibiotics.”

As the steam begins to fill the room, Gilly thinks she ought to scream. There's a stranger in her house. He's staring at her like he knows her. Not a stranger, after all.

Gilly doesn't scream.

But she did wake up, heart pounding and stomach sick. She rushed to the bathroom to hover over the toilet, hoping she wouldn't vomit and yet somehow relieved when she couldn't hold it back. She was in there for a long time and when she came out, unlike all the others, Todd didn't ask her if she was okay.

G
illy wasn't used to being the bad guy, and she definitely didn't like it. Three days had passed since Todd had asked her to dance. Early on in all of this, she'd have thought it better if they didn't speak, but they'd gone beyond that now. Todd turned his back on her when she entered a room and ignored her when she spoke. He'd even taken to sleeping downstairs on the couch so they didn't have to share the room upstairs. It was killing her.

She'd spent the morning tidying just to keep herself busy, but at last she turned to him. “Are you ever going to talk to me again?”

Todd said nothing.

“Please?” Gilly said, exhausted. She sank into a chair across from him. “C'mon, Todd. Please. Don't do this.”

Todd got up when she sat down, but before he could escape Gilly had snagged his sleeve. He set his jaw and deliberately pulled it from her grip. He didn't look at her.

“I'm going to get some wood.” He might've been talking to himself for all the attention he gave her.

“Do you need some help?”

He fixed her with a look so contemptuous and bitter she recoiled from it the way she would've if she'd stumbled on a snake in a woodpile. Without answering, he shrugged into an extra sweatshirt and pulled his hood up over the fall of silky dark hair. Then he stomped outside.

It always seemed to come back to sex, with men. Whether they wanted it and didn't get it, or got it but not enough of it, it led to more arguments and hard feelings than anything else Gilly could think of. In the beginning she'd been afraid Todd meant to rape her—and that would've been about power, not sex. Now it was simply about longing, and somehow that made it so much more frightening.

She couldn't repair the hurt she'd caused him. Any apologies she made would ring false, and Gilly wasn't sure she could convince him of the difference between being sorry she couldn't give him what he wanted and sorrow that her decision had caused him pain.

She cradled her head in her hands for a minute, willing her headache to subside. The rolling of her stomach had woken her early this morning. She'd been sick again. She didn't want to contemplate what that might mean.

She watched Todd from the window as he trudged through the thigh-deep snow. She gained some small measure of satisfaction from seeing that he didn't have a much easier time wading through the snow than she had. He disappeared into the woods.

He'd only taken a small hand ax. Guilt nudged her when she glanced at the empty wicker basket next to the woodstove. She hadn't ever thought about where the wood came from, or
wondered what would happen when the stockpile outside the lean-to disappeared. Then again, neither of them had expected so much snow, or to be here this long.

She busied herself with her puzzle, nearly completed now, but could find no pleasure in it. She heard the thump of wood against the back of the house, and jumped. Todd didn't come back inside.

More time passed. Gilly finished the puzzle, but her triumph was empty. She sat at the table and stared at the brightly colored picture she'd made. Then she took it all apart.

She heard another load of wood thump against the house. She looked at her watch. An hour had passed. Plenty of time for him to have cut enough wood to last a few days. She went again to the window, and was just in time to see Todd vanish again into the woods.

Gilly went to the back door and gaped at the size of the pile. How had he managed to cut and carry all of that in so short a time, and alone? Her gaze followed the trampled path in the snow to where it led to the trees.

Heart attack snow.

What if Todd had gone out there alone and fallen ill? Hurt himself? What if the ax had slipped and he was lying in a pool of his own frozen blood? What if he was exhausted and hypothermic?

What would she do out here, alone, without him?

Gilly boiled water, found a mug, dunked a tea bag. She added extra sugar. While it steeped she wrestled herself into several layers of clothing and forced her feet into her boots. As an afterthought, she found the large deep stockpot, filled it, and put it on top of the woodstove.

She carried the mug carefully through the path Todd had made and into the woods. She found him seated on a fallen
tree, the ax resting at his side. His breath plumed out in front of him. His hair had frozen, stiff with sweat, into random spikes.

“Here.” She handed him the mug.

He took it with cold-reddened hands. “Thanks.”

“You've been out here a long time.”

“We needed wood.”

She glanced at the pile at his feet. “I think we have enough.”

“I needed to work.” He cupped the mug with his hands and tested the still steaming liquid with the tip of his tongue.

“It's cold out here,” Gilly said. “Why don't you take a break?”

“Why don't you get the fuck out of my face?” he replied evenly, and handed her back the mug. “Don't you get it, Gilly? I
need
to work.”

His gaze swept her from head to toe, burning her even through the many layers. She nodded quickly, her cheeks heating, and took the cup. She hurried back through the snow and into the cabin.

Inside, she tore her top layer of clothes off and flung them to the floor. She splashed frigid water on her hot face. Dripping and gasping, Gilly pushed back from the sink and dried herself with the hem of her shirt.

She let herself rest at the table. She put her head in her hands. Stifled a groan.

The thud of logs against the pile outside again startled her into standing. In another moment, the back door opened. Todd stomped in, scattering clods of snow onto the linoleum. He blew into his hands. His teeth started to chatter.

“You need to get those wet clothes off…I didn't have time to fill the tub like you did for me…but I heated some water….”
She was babbling, and realized it. Gilly closed her mouth abruptly. “Come sit over on the couch.”

He did. Gilly found a smaller pan and set it on the floor in front of him. She added enough cold water to make the temperature bearable and got up. “Take off your boots.”

Todd bent, but she could clearly see that his fingers were too numb to work the laces. Gilly knelt and did it for him. He groaned as she pulled off the battered hiking boots, and then the socks beneath. His toes were ice cubes.

“I'll make some more tea.”

He caught her hand as she turned and tugged her close to him. “Now you're being nice to me again. I don't get it.”

At first, Gilly couldn't form her answer into words. She held his icy feet between her hands to warm them a bit before she slipped them into the hot water. He hissed and clenched his fists, but didn't protest.

“Todd,” Gilly said finally with a sigh. “Being nice doesn't have to mean…”

She stopped, mouth working as she tried to put her thoughts into speech. “I can take care
of
you without caring
for
you.”

She raised her gaze to his face and instantly wished she hadn't. Beneath the ruddy color from the cold, he'd gone pale. His mouth set in a thin line.

“I guess you can,” he said.

“I have a home,” Gilly said. “I have a family. And I will get back to them someday. Whether you want to believe it or not. I believe it. I have to.”

He nodded twice, sharply. “You still want to get away from me.”

“How can you ask me that?” Gilly reached for a towel, lifted his feet from the water, dried them. “Todd, can you expect anything else from me?”

He leaned forward, grasped her upper arms. His eyes searched hers. “Yeah. I think I can.”

Gilly shook her head. “No. You can't. It's too much to expect. Even for you.”

“What's that mean? Even for me? Even for a dumbass like me, you mean?”

“That's not what I meant, and you should know that,” Gilly said. “I meant that no matter what I know…”

His fingers tightened. She restrained a wince. “You pity me.”

“I empathize with you, Todd. There's a difference.”

His grip softened, but not by much. His gaze did, too. “I ain't asking for so much. Am I, really?”

“It's too much.”

He shook her a little, and the role of power had shifted. Now kneeling at his feet felt subservient instead of caretaking. Gilly started to get to her feet, but Todd's grasp stopped her.

“What
can
you give?”

She looked at him, then waved her hand at his feet. “This. It's all I have for you, Todd.”

He gave a low, growling laugh. “You want to be my fucking mother?”

“Interesting choice of words,” Gilly murmured.

“You shut…you shut your mouth.” He pushed away from her, got up, took long, limping strides to the edge of the room before turning back to her. “Is that what you think of me?”

Gilly shook her head, her knees hurting on the bare floor. She got up. “No, of course not.”

He drew a cigarette from the crumpled pack and threw the empty paper to the floor. The smoke seeped from his nostrils in slow, twin tendrils, Fog. He picked a bit of tobacco off his tongue with one finger, turned and spit onto the floor. When
he looked at her, Gilly wanted to turn away from the bluntness in his eyes.

“What, then?” he shouted. “The fuck am I to you, then, Gilly? Because I know I'm something to you.”

Todd's voice dipped low and soft. Hopeful. “I am, right?”

She couldn't answer and he seemed to take her silence as assent.

“I never met anyone like you, Gilly.” Todd's smile was lopsided. “You…you're clean. When I'm around you, I feel clean, too.”

“Then let me stay that way,” Gilly said. “Please.”

Todd shook his head and bent his head to stare up at her through the sheaf of his dark hair. “I don't think I can.”

“You have to.”

He shook his head. “I ain't that good a person, Gilly.”

A drop of cold sweat trickled down her spine, but she refused to shiver. “You can be. If you try.”

Todd drew deep on his cigarette, watching her. Thinking. When she saw he wasn't going to say anything else, Gilly took the basin into the kitchen and emptied it. They did not continue the conversation.