Skin and Bones (13 page)

Bones would do anything she asked, although he was lousy when it came to telling jokes or stories. Then he thought about a kid named Calvin who wore a neoprene wetsuit and risked imprisonment to play his guitar. He told Alice what he knew about Calvin’s love for a beautiful girl. How they struggled to survive after the present world was destroyed by who knew what?

Then he leaned down and kissed her forehead.

“What’re you doing there?” she said, teasing him.

“Uh, I didn’t want to mess up your lipstick?”

Alice smiled again, a nervous little twitch. He’d never hungered for her more.

Bones was about to tell her the rest of what he knew about CRAP when the line on the screen spiked.

“Alice?”

No answer.

Alice?

Nothing.

Wake up!

Suddenly two sumo wrestlers in nurses’ uniforms stormed the room screaming medical stuff he didn’t understand, although, “What the hell are you doing in here?” seemed clear enough.

Bones stepped back cringing when the biggest nurse jabbed Alice’s arm with a needle. He looked back at the screen, watching the ping-pong ball that was her heartbeat. He began praying inside, barely breathing. After an eternity the line evened out, slowly at first, like a simmer.

“What’s wrong with her?” He was crying now.

“I don’t know who you are or what you’re doing in here,” the nurse spat with an accusing look. “But you have to leave.”

“Alice—” He had to say her name, say good-bye.

“
Now
.”

Bones breathed in Alice’s air again before backing out of the room. He was in the hall just outside her door when one of the wrestlers barreled out, nearly knocking him down. “Do I have to call security?”

“I’m leaving,” Bones muttered.

Then he retraced his steps back to the fourth floor.

He couldn’t get his brain around what had happened to her. Just last night he’d helped her sneak off the ward to rehearse—watched her fly up and down stairs, skim the landings in pink satin, never breaking a sweat.

Bones approached the dayroom slowly, surprised to hear what sounded like a meeting in progress, not even caring that he was done for if he missed one. He hugged the wall, peeking around the corner.

Lard sat on the couch next to Teresa.

“She suffered heart failure…” Nancy was saying.

Bones let out the air he’d been holding in. Alice’s air. Heads turned at the sound. For a terrible moment everything was quiet; nothingness filled the space. All he could do was stare back.

Alice.

They’re talking about Alice.

Bones tried to get his shoes in a forward motion, wondering where his balance had gone.

Nancy caught his eye. “She died a week before her thirty-third birthday—”

Bones didn’t hear what came next. He staggered to a chair and fell into it choked by relief.

Not Alice. Not Alice. Not Alice.

They had to be talking about Eve.

“The coroner said she died because of heartbeat irregularities brought on by chemical imbalances,” Nancy said. “They also cited cachexia—meaning extremely low weight and weakness.”

Mary-Jane sat with her feet on a chair, chin on her knees. “Why couldn’t her doctors do something?”

“Karen was still using laxatives,” Nancy went on. “Even while she was under the care of a psychotherapist—”

Karen?

Bones finally got it.

They were talking about that singer from the 1970s—her story was legendary in therapy groups like this. But he knew this wasn’t about Karen Carpenter. Not really. It was about Alice. That’s why Nancy had called the meeting.

“Anyways,” Elsie said. “I heard she gained thirty pounds in two months.”

Nicole rocked in her chair. “Maybe it was the shock of her body trying to be normal that killed her.”

“That’s too much at one time,” Teresa said. “No one’s body can handle that.”

“Could something like that happen to Alice?” Nicole asked.

“It’s impossible to know,” Nancy said.

The room grew quiet.

And suddenly Bones understood.

Alice couldn’t lose anymore weight.

Not now.

Not ever.

Lard stormed around their room, his combat boots seriously attacking linoleum. His face was so red Bones thought his cheeks would burst from the pressure.
Splat
. Blood vessels all over the aggressively sterile walls. He opened his journal, took out Alice’s phony menus, and threw them at Bones.

“Do you think I give a shit that you lied to me about the fucking green beans?” Anger spread like a fever down his neck. His eyes were magnified behind his glasses. “YOU ALMOST KILLED HER, DICKHEAD!”

Bones looked around helplessly, completely lost. He wanted to stop the clock, give himself a second chance to do it over again. Rewind his trip to the kitchen; bypass the box on the counter with the menus. All he could do was stare at the floor and try to picture Alice back on the ward.

“You think I don’t know that you two meet every night? And exercise like sick fucks? But did I say anything about it? No. None of my business, I told myself while she got skinny enough to thread through a needle.”

Bones knew he did this to her.

All by myself.

“You were there when I refused to substitute those menus.” Lard punched the air. “You heard me say it was suicide.”

I’m going to be sick.

“I thought you cared about her, man. I thought you
loved
her.”

“Stop it!” Bones ran to the bathroom.

Lard chased him, pummeling the fake wood door. “I’m not finished!”

Bones barely got his pants down, falling backward on the toilet seat, grasping at the waste can. His body erupted in a brown explosion from one end, dry heaves from the other. He flushed and flushed wishing he could go down with the mess.

The next voice he heard was Unibrow’s. “What’s going on in there?” he called through the door.

“Get lost!” Bones shouted back.

“Open up!”

“No!”

Bones hit the shower to scrub off the stink of panic and worry and guilt.

Lard was right.

I could have killed her!

Until his last meeting with Dr. Chu, Bones hadn’t spent that much time thinking about guilt. Sure he felt bad about his family. But the guilt he felt about Alice was all consuming, like a million needles injecting poison into his heart.

Guilt.

An invisible tattoo scarring him for life.

Lard was gone when he came out of the bathroom. Unibrow stood in his place. “Guess that door’s going to have to come off its hinges.”

“Bring on the screwdrivers,” Bones said.

“Chu isn’t going to like this,” Unibrow said on his way out.

Bones didn’t know what to do. He collapsed in his chair and stared at the letter he’d started to his parents. He’d gone on and on, thanking them for getting him up for school every morning, for staying a safe distance back when he went trick-or-treating. Bullshit like that.

He tore the page from his notebook, crumpled it into a ball, and flung it on the floor. None of that stuff mattered now. He stared at a new page, trying to remember when he’d started telling his friends he was allergic to pizza then eating the crust they tossed back in the box. Or standing in front of the fridge obsessing over a doggie bag brought home by his parents. Sixth grade. Maybe seventh. That was around the time he thought calories in other people’s food didn’t count.

His sister had been right. His sister had been right when she told him that everyone suffers damage on some level—just from being on the planet. The bigger issue was how people cope. Do they admit it, deal with it, and move on? Or numb themselves with drugs? Food? Or spend the rest of their lives shielding themselves from the Valerie Willendorfs of the world?

Bones picked up his pen and forced himself to tell his mom and dad what he was thinking, what he was feeling, really feeling, down in his gut, as honestly as he could. He started by telling them chunky kids were always chosen last for kickball, about cross-eyed Jenny Willendorf and the custard disaster, about the bitch at the department store handing him a pair of Husky jeans, wishing he’d been upfront about the impact these things had on him.

Writing a letter, knowing he didn’t have to send it, helped him understand what people had been telling him for a long time—he wouldn’t get better unless he worked at it. He had to want it, really want it. He was the only one who could exorcise his demons. He had to learn to do things differently.

He closed his journal and leaned back, balancing precariously on two chair legs. He knew Alice would have rehearsed with or without him. And she would have found a way to trade menus if he hadn’t done it.

But none of that mattered.

Bones had thought he was helping her. But he was really helping her stay sick, because he was just as sick in his own sick way.

After a long hour of staring at nothing, Lard came in stomping heavily to his side of the room. He set his lunchbox on his desk with a thud. “In case you’re interested,” he said, tossing a piece of paper on his desk. “Here’s more of the story. I found it in an empty Tupperware container.”

“Have you heard anything about—” Bones tried.

Lard slugged the question. “Just shut the fuck up before this day gets any worse.”

Bones read the page in silence.

Calvin and Lily met like this each night after curfew in the mangled milieu of colorless glass, steel, and concrete that were once museums, libraries, concert halls, and video arcades. He played his guitar while she painted, using the old-world technique of fresco. Tons of plaster littered the ground, so no problem there.

She lulled him with endearing tales of paintbrushes woven from her own silky hair and tints she mixed from bodily fluids. “I tried state sanctioned art in school,” she said with a lazy stroke. “I prefer Jackson Pollock to Warhol and his soup cans. Don’t you, my love?”

Calvin nodded.

“If we’re going to stay together,” she said, her voice no longer frail or tired, gaining strength from his nightly injections. “We can’t keep meeting like this, it isn’t safe. It isn’t romantic.”

The universe had dropped the perfect woman in his junk heap.

Now Bones knew what he’d suspected all along. George was writing about the EDU, a place as twisted by rules and rituals as the fictional world he’d created. His Excellence was a metaphor for the supreme self-important authoritarian, Dr. Chu. Bones couldn’t believe he hadn’t figured it out sooner. George had been in love with Alice too. It made Bones crazy to think he might have stuck his tube in her…No, he couldn’t,
wouldn’t
go there.

Two days later, Lard was at his desk eating Cheese Doodles with Rachael Ray. Bones was too depressed to crack his new magazine. He bent over his journal writing the type of letter to his family that he could actually mail, telling them some of the things he’d learned in the program, explaining how he’d heard most of it before, but things were going to be different because now he’d started listening and wanted to change.

“Someone switched our room number from nineteen to sixty-nine,” Lard said, grabbing his lunchbox.

“That sucks.”

“Funny,
not
,” Lard said. “Since I’m not attracted to you in that or any other way.
Whatsoever
.”

“Three guesses who did it?”

“Elsie.”

Bones nodded. “She definitely spent too much time in the birth canal.”

“You think?”

Bones started to follow Lard down the hall when he realized Lard was on his way to the kitchen. Nancy stopped Bones in the dayroom with her usual smile. “Alice is doing much better.” She squeezed Bones’s shoulder affectionately. “Her heart is strong and there doesn’t appear to be any permanent damage to her other organs.”

Bones let himself breathe.

“They’re moving her from ICU into a regular room,” Nancy said. “She was lucky this time, real lucky.”

Luck had touched them both.

Teresa sauntered over with Mary-Jane and Elsie. Nancy answered the most basic questions.
Vital signs, stable. Mom and Dad with her. Field trip to the gift shop to buy her a get-well gift.

Bones ate dinner alone, his back to the others. And while the skinless chicken breast on his plate didn’t look all that appetizing, it didn’t look entirely revolting either. He reached for the saltshaker.

“What happened to your gloves?” Elsie snipped. “Did Lard eat them?”

Bones stared at his bare fingers, struck by the sudden shock of forgetting to put them on.

After dinner, Unibrow escorted the crew downstairs to the shop. “Five minutes, max.”

They crammed into a space aglow with too much optimism. Helium-filled balloons skipped overhead.
Get Well Soon!
seemed overly cheery. Bones blew dust off plastic flowers while Teresa, Mary-Jane, Sarah, and Nicole tried on jewelry. Lard flipped through cookbooks.

“Rachael Ray may be hot,” he said. “But Julia Child is the bomb.”

A debate broke out over which stuffed animal to buy. A floppy-eared cocker spaniel or a droopy-eyed basset hound. Bones held out for a bear with marble eyes and a crooked smile. “Perfect,” Teresa said.

The clerk smoothed out their crumpled bills. “You’re four dollars and sixty-eight cents short,” she said.

Unibrow made up the rest. Even more surprising, everyone agreed Bones should deliver the bear. But then, he thought, miserable all over again, only Lard knew that swapping the menus had almost killed her.

Bones slumped limply at his desk. The room was a tomb. Boring and utterly lonely. He didn’t feel like going to the roof, not while Alice was stuck upstairs. TV applause drifted in from the dayroom. A phone rang.

Anytime he tried talking to Lard, Lard snapped, “What is it about shut-the-fuck-up you don’t understand?”

It was like trying to communicate with someone onshore from a sinking ship. It was pointless, but Bones kept trying to convince Lard that he’d never hurt Alice on purpose. That he’d never do anything to hurt her, though he was completely aware of how completely and absolutely he had hurt her.