Skin and Bones (18 page)

“She ran away?” Bones finally said.

When Dr. Chu glared, his eyes were steel barrels of a .44. “Get dressed. In my office.
Now
.”

Then he left.

Lard scrambled for his glasses. “Surprise party, my fat ass,” he said, fully awake. “It was a going-away party.
Hers
.”

“No, something must have happened—” Bones’s heart had shriveled to a dark spot, sloughed off, ready for a biopsy. “Something we don’t know about. After the two of us split up in the elevator, something—”

Lard turned to him, his glasses half cocked in an awkward pause. “She planned it, man. Every damned detail.”

“No, she—”

“Jesus, how could we be so stupid? Alice doesn’t need Tampax. She probably hasn’t had a period in years.”

Bones stood there so confused about everything.

“That happens to girls who don’t have any fat,” Lard said, grabbing a pair of pants off the floor. “Time’s up. Chu Man’s waiting.”

Bones put on sweats and slammed out behind him. At the last second, he changed directions and ducked into Alice’s room. Bones felt alone and afraid in the lifeless space. Her bed had been stripped to a stained plastic mattress pad. The linens were piled in a heap on the floor. How could the staff be sure she wasn’t coming back?

Then he thought,
Maybe Alice stripped it herself
.

He picked up one of the sheets. It smelled like Marlboros and Preparation H.

Alice.

Why?

Where?

He couldn’t make sense of it.

Then something caught his eye, in the corner below the window. Her wastebasket, filled with crumpled paper. Bones dropped the sheets onto the bed. He emptied the basket, picked up one piece of paper, smoothed it out, and then another.

Damn.

Pages from the magazine she’d painted.

Alice had licked off every bit of Ex-Lax.

Bones couldn’t believe it.

Could. Not. Believe. It.

I should have taken the magazine away from her.

He sat on the cold floor, staring up at her bulletin board. It was bare too. He went back to the mess on the floor until he found what he was looking for and then checked his watch for today’s date. Auditions. Today at the opera house downtown.

Bones hurried back to his room to get Lard’s car keys.

To hell with Dr. Chu.

The day was gray as a low fog marched its fingers over the parking lot, the same type of eerie gloom that crept through vampire novels. Bones shook all over as he climbed into Lard’s seat, which was too laid back, more like taking a nap than controlling hundreds of horsepower. He adjusted the mirror and tugged on the seatbelt. It could have looped around his middle and the steering wheel with room left over for Alice.

Bones fumbled the key into the ignition. He backed out looking over his shoulder, shifted into drive, and watched the hospital shrink behind him. His eyes locked on the road, making all the lights on Jefferson, easing from one lane to the other, from one indistinguishable neighborhood to the next. Billboard after billboard. Huge faces peered down with fake smiles.

Alice should have been beside him, smoking and changing radio stations erratically. Instead
How to Shit in the Woods
rode shotgun. The odometer ticked off 226,226 like some kind of ominous sign.

At six forty-five, even on a Saturday morning, the streets were awash with commuters. Coffee-drinkers and women putting on makeup. He counted three Kindles propped on dashboards and five guys shaving with electric razors. The Doodle cornered better than his mom’s SUV. It actually dug into the asphalt instead of riding on top of it.

Bones hooked a right at a busy intersection as a big truck whipped by.
Relax
, he told himself. Try to look like any other guy going to work.

The speed limit on surface streets was forty miles-an-hour. Bones figured he could go fifty without getting stopped, unless a cop was below his monthly ticket quota. He turned at the corner of Figueroa where Felix the Cat towered above a Chevrolet dealership.

Bones drove on knowing he wasn’t alone in being crazed over Alice’s disappearance, also knowing Lard was going to kill him when he found out he stole his car. Grand Theft Auto. That’s what the cops would tell his parents.

He kept checking the rearview mirror, as if Chu’s posse was on his tail. Two blocks later, he pulled into a driveway next to the opera house. It was seven thirty. Breakfast time at the hospital. His stomach growled.

Just a few weeks ago if his body had started eating itself, it would have been some kind of high. He wouldn’t have been able to feel anything else. No pain. Just the bliss of emptiness. Euphoric. It didn’t feel that way this morning.

The fog had some kind of energy to it, like the sun was trying to burn through it. Slowly, the Doodle warmed up. Bones grabbed a bag of Cheese Doodles from Lard’s stash in the trunk and counted out five pieces. Forty-five calories. Time moved slower than usual. The snack lasted an hour.

Bones stared out the window. The parking lot was wide, like there was no end to it. He tried to settle back in the seat, but he couldn’t settle. Not really. The situation was too unsettling. The rush of escaping the hospital twice in two days and the anticipation of seeing Alice began to give way to fears that this was all some cruel dream brought on by drugs slipped into his orange juice.

He watched an elderly couple amble down the sidewalk holding hands. Their clothes matched down to their thick-soled sneakers and golf visors. He’d bet they walked the same route every day, except Sunday, when the Mr. took the Mrs. to IHOP for blueberry waffles.

Cars slowly began filling the parking lot. Dancers—men and women thin as black ice—got out of beaters as old as the Celica. They were quiet and determined in sweats, scarves, knitted caps. All black, like a congress of undertakers. Dance bags drooped from shoulders. Most carried small ice chests. It was obvious they were fiercely serious about the auditions.

Bones searched faces, trying not to panic. Another half hour passed without seeing Alice. He thought about her leaping in the halls at night, dancing in her room during the day, working at it all the time. The only ambition Bones ever had was to blend in. To be invisible. Neutral. Non-reasons for goals. A real goal meant moving toward something, like Alice and her dancing.

Maybe she’d gotten here earlier? Or entered through a different door? Yeah, she was probably backstage right now cutting strips of adhesive tape for her toes. Wrapping satin ribbons around her silky ankles. Warming up with
pliés
and
port de bras
.

Bones took another Cheese Doodle from the bag, thinking how different this was from his field trip in the fifth grade when the lot was filled with school buses. He reached around for the M&M’s he’d left on the backseat, bummed that he’d already removed the red ones. Instead he climbed stiffly out of the car into the coolness of the morning and began snaking his way through the parking lot.

The wooden doors were heavier than they looked and rooted like trees. He took longer than necessary with his hand on the knob, suddenly apprehensive that Alice would be mad that he’d followed her.

A gush of cold air hit him in the foyer when he passed a refreshment bar with gilded mirrors. Velvet curtains opened into the theater itself. He stood in one place, blinking until his eyes adjusted, then made his way down the side aisle unnoticed. In the front row, men and women sat in dark suits holding clipboards. With everyone talking at once, Bones wondered how they knew who was saying what.

Piano music trickled in from some unseen place. An old man with a Van Dyke goatee wielded a cane on center stage. The man hollered, “Cue music!”

Bones watched as two dancers appeared like magic from the wings.

The girl moved silent as a shadow, then, suddenly, she seemed to levitate, her pointe shoes barely touching the stage. In one effortless movement, the guy lifted her above his head and they spun in a dizzy circle.

Alice had tried explaining this to him, this exact movement, but seeing it was the only way to fully understand the combination of strength and grace.

The old man pounded the floor with his cane. “No! It is still wrong! No matter how many times you do it! Why do you insist on acknowledging the audience?”

The dancers seemed to shrink in front of him, attentively sweating.

“And your
port de bras
! No one will care anything about your steps if your arms do not float through whipped cream!”

The pair nodded meekly. “Can we try again?” the guy asked.

The old man dismissed them with a wave of his cane. “There is no time for dancers who refuse to learn. Next!”

Bones felt bad for them but kept walking down the worn carpet, making his way toward a door that he remembered led backstage. He opened the door, relieved that no one was paying attention to him, and stepped into a confusion of limbs and spandex.

The guys were either bare-chested or wore sleeveless T-shirts. Their muscles were ripped. He spotted the girl who’d just left the stage, sitting on the floor untying her shoes and crying quietly. Then she began moving her arms through something invisible, probably whipped cream.

Bones stepped around an older woman doing the splits against a wall, then by a guy icing his knee with a bag of frozen peas. One dancer was talking on a cell phone and laughing. Another was contemplating the remains of a banana. Febreze was sprayed into shoes.

Bones smelled the smells—Bengay and Preparation H—and listened to the hum of brittle chatter. And then he saw her—standing in the corner away from the others—delicate as a ladyfinger.

Alice
.

Her back was to him, one hand on her ankle, her leg a perfect arc over her head. Little pearls of sweat glistened on her shoulders and neck.

“Alice,” he whispered, making his way toward her.

Dr. Chu, Lard, and her parents—everyone had been wrong. This wasn’t about the pill of fame taking away her pain. Alice was a dancer, an artist pursuing her dreams. Pure and simple. Why couldn’t they understand that?

Bones reached out, gently touching her shoulder. She swung around, obviously startled. Her lips moved, nothing else. “Excuse me?” she said.

Her voice didn’t sound right; it was too deep. Where were her almond eyes? Her sexy smile? The aroma of sugarless gum? He shook his head to make her cinnamon freckles materialize.

“You’re not Alice,” he muttered as his throat closed up. Tight. Little ice picks stabbed at it. His feet tried to move. Stuck. There was nothing left in him. Nothing.

Bones wasn’t aware of driving back to the hospital. He could barely hold the steering wheel—dying inside an orange Celica with expired plates. He’d started to believe thoughts were real things, but if they were only real in his head, then they weren’t real at all.

The only empty parking spot had a pole with a sign attached to it showing a wheelchair. Perfect for a three-thousand pound Cheese Doodle with a moribund driver.

His tears came slowly.

Once inside the hospital, Bones moved swiftly down the corridor, intent on snatching the sheets from Alice’s bed for himself. He’d remake his bed and sleep tangled in her essence until she came back.
She always does
, he told himself.

But for some strange reason, he wasn’t surprised her bed had been remade. Crisp sheets tucked in too tight. The sheets he’d planned on taking to his room—her sheets, the sheets he’d left in a pile on the floor a few hours ago—had vanished. Not even Nureyev looked down from the wall to say Alice had lived and breathed in this space.

Bones checked Alice’s closet and dresser frantically, unsure what he was looking for. Then he hit her bathroom, kneeling on the cold tile in the shower. Pine Sol stung his nose. His eyes burned. Not a single strand of strawberry blond hair.

He squeezed his eyes shut and folded up on himself, held down by the everyday hospital racket resonating from outside. He figured he’d been crumpled up long enough when he’d lost all feeling in his legs. If only he could numb his heart. It seemed he was always saying good-bye to pieces of Alice.

Bones forced himself to get up and caught a glimpse of himself in her mirror. His image looked deflated, his oxygen out on loan. He’d always had food or the lack of it to focus on in times like this. But he didn’t want to eat. He didn’t want not to eat. Only one person could give him any kind of comfort, and for the millionth time today he felt the lack of her presence.

Missing her hurt as much as loving her. But I will never stop loving her, not as long as I live. And I will never stop dreaming about her, never stop waiting for her, never stop looking for her. Never.

But the truth stretched out in front of him: loving her hadn’t been enough.

Not enough for her.

Lard was right; Alice had thrown herself a going-away party. She’d given him a parting gift in the elevator. Bones had to admit it. No he didn’t. Couldn’t. Wouldn’t.

Bones barely made it though lunch, gagging down the extra four ounces of Ensure Nancy gave him to make up for missing breakfast. He sat alone with his back to the room and tuned out the meaningless chatter. The weirdest thing of all was Dr. Chu hadn’t called him to his office for the umpteen infractions over the last two days.

Bones stayed in his room as much as possible. He lay on his bed, floating in the sweet memory of the elevator, halfway between heaven and hell. A void where it didn’t matter that nothing mattered.

Even Lard moved through space noiselessly.

They didn’t know what to say or do.

Neither of them slept that night.

It was as if they’d had their own private meeting where they’d mutually decided to check out for a few days—like their brains were on overload and were shutting down to recharge. Sometimes when there’s so much to think about it’s better to be quiet.

Just when the dream-state seemed to be lifting, Bones was summoned by Dr. Chu. Bones stood lifeless in the cramped office space facing a pair of navy blue uniforms who introduced themselves as Officers Brunner and Manor. Badges pinned beneath dull expressions.