Surrender (14 page)

My mother’s world had contracted like a dying spider.

In the past year she had become isolated, and increasingly querulous. Her days of stalking the town had ended, and she kept to the house and yard. She’d come to feel that Mulyan was an ungrateful place, its inhabitants not worth the effort. She wafted whitely through the rooms, bored, alert to insults, alone. She went nowhere and spoke to no one. I felt instinctively that her hibernation could end at any time, that she was banking energy for the moment she chose to rise and return. I understood that, although she lived in rooms, the world —
my
world — lay at her feet, shielded from her sight by something flimsy as silk. Mother need simply twitch the hem, and the truth would be revealed. My mother was like an adder in an unlocked cage.

I read to her; I didn’t complain. I did exactly as I was told.

I shut the windows against laughter on the street.

In our house, the floors and walls were ice.

Within the house I never so much as whispered Evangeline’s name. I thought of her, I ached with worry that I was missing a chance to talk with her . . . but I would stay home, mute and harrowed, rather than raise suspicion and leave. If Mother called me, if Father wanted a pot of tea, I needed good reason not to be near and obey. On countless occasions I announced that I was going to walk the dog — only to find that Surrender was not in the yard, was off gallivanting somewhere with Finnigan. I couldn’t disappear with a dog that was gone. Frustrated, I berated Finnigan: “Don’t blame me,” he replied. “Surrender follows because he wants to — I don’t make him.”

I gritted my teeth. “Make him stay in the yard.”

“I won’t.”

“Then I’ll chain him up. That will stop him.”

Finnigan lifted his gaze and laid it coldly on me. “You’re your father’s son, aren’t you.”

That quieted me. It was minutes before I could look up from the stones. I stroked the dog’s canoe-brown head, ran a hand across the soft peaks of his mountain-range shoulders. He needed chaining — in the past I’d seen gore on his paws, wool snagged in his teeth — but, “Yes,” I sighed. “I’m sorry.”

He should see me now, that addict of hurt, that merchant of distress: I’m paying for my sins. Now I hardly sleep, and exhaustion eats at me; I’m jerked from rare, merciful moments of rest by goblins gouging my chest. Now my throat constricts around clots of mortality so I struggle in panic to breathe. Now I couldn’t cross the room without help; now I’m almost too weak to blink. Now, undrugged, I am nothing but ache.

This is the price: it’s high. I close my eyes and want never to open them again. I want somebody to tell me,
You needn’t open them again
.

The drip needle is like a talon in my wrist. My arm is lame with the pain. If I could, I would peel from my skin the tape that holds the needle in place and I’d draw the spike from my vein. I wouldn’t want it leaking its fluids onto the floor, so I would drop the tube into the water jug. It would coil and float there like a glass worm.

If I could, I would do it.

I could ask Finnigan, when he gets here, but he’ll refuse.

Once more, then, to close my eyes.

In the end I suppose I walked with her only six or seven times; I suppose we only spoke for a handful of hours. It’s funny how, in my head, everything seems larger. I counted the smiles she gave me, the turns of her head. I remember the grain of the sunshine on the carved nape of her neck. “What do you talk about?” Finnigan asked once, although surely he knew.

I lay in the warm grass, my heart shuddering with joy. To be in love is so exciting. “Things. School. People. Nothing.”

“Vernon?”

“A little.”

“You’ve dragged him out for her entertainment?”

“. . . No, it’s not like that.”

And I hoped it wasn’t.

“Do you talk about me?”

The sky was bluer than I’d ever seen. I reached up and wrapped my fingers around a cloud. I was stalling, pretending I wasn’t afraid. “You know I don’t like to talk about you.”

“Why not? I’m not important?”

I folded my hand to my chest, felt my heart beating there. “You said no one would believe me if I told them about you. You also said you would kill me if I ever told.”

“That was child talk.”

“I believed you, though.”

He set his jaw. I buried my sights in the grass, saw ants dragging a dead cricket. Here, at the ragged edge of the creek, where weeds and scraps of rubbish thrived, the trees grew green and quiet. The water moved slickly over moss-covered rocks; apart from the whir of click-bugs in the leaves, the only sound was Surrender’s panting. Finnigan stared at me with his predator eyes; I had to say something or die. “I like you being my secret. I don’t want to share.”

He licked his lips, looked away. I drew an unrelieved breath. We both knew that what I said was the truth, as well as being a lie. The pure and honest answer was pinging between us, hovering above the weeds. Neither of us reached to catch it. Finnigan sighed, brushed hair from his eyes. His hair was long now, and incorrigibly matted. Always scruffed around the edges, on this day he looked particularly shabby. His elbows were crusted with dirt, his hands marked with inflamed nicks, the legacy of a tangle with barbed wire. He looked hungry, untended, adrift. A brook of sadness suddenly welled in me, at the thought of the hard life he led. To break the unhappy silence I said, “We talk about nothing, Fin — nothing that would interest you. We talk about my mother and father. We talk about how things are, for me. About how to change things. It’s just my life, Finnigan — stupid things.”

He watched me wave a hand, indicating my entire faulty world. He said, “You’re telling her everything that’s important. Everything she can laugh about later, with her friends.”

I did not flinch. “She wouldn’t.”

“How do you know? How do you know? You hardly know her.”

“I trust her,” I said. “That’s why.”

“Do you trust me? I’ve known you forever.”

“I know. I do. I do trust you.”

He gazed at me. Midges blew past his eyes. “You liar,” he said, and chuckled.

From the swirling depths to which I’ve sunk I hear footsteps in the hall. I open my eyes, consider the ceiling. My breathing hardly disrupts the sheet. The footsteps come, without hurry; the floorboards complain. Finnigan, it seems, has chosen the most untriumphant way to return. He could have slipped down the chimney or crashed in a window, he could have smashed through the ceiling or ripped a hole in the floor. Instead he walks peacefully, something tame.

My eyes grate like sandpaper in their sockets. I turn my head and rest my chin on the pillow. Now I can see the door.

The footfalls stop. Maybe the clock in the dining room does too, there’s such a cavernous silence.

In this room, night is not black but gray. The door is gray, the walls are gray, the air itself is gray. Yet light skates goldenly round the door handle as it spins.

I remember vividly the last hot afternoon. Surrender, Finnigan, and I were wedged in the space between the chicken coop and the back fence. Sunshine never reached this place, nor did very much rain. Feathers could lie here for years, unblown; spider webs, decades old, hung preserved. Snapstick, indifferent to conditions, covered the earth with a maze of green stem, and had raised pink welts on our arms. The fence line was potholed with burrows; the fence itself bowed drunkly. A shower of paint rained from the coop wall when Surrender stretched and restlessly moved. It was a dry, windless day, and our closeness made us irritable. Finnigan could talk of only one thing — nothing else concerned him anymore. “Surrender doesn’t like her,” he was saying, his voice like a bee. “You don’t like her, do you, Surrender?”

I had my shoulders against the fence and my heels propped on the coop. I was smoking a cigarette, though this wasn’t my habit. The smoke whittled up the wall but dispersed when it reached open air. “He doesn’t have to like her.”

Finnigan sneered, radiating petulance. He picked his teeth with a twig of snapstick, his gaze skimming loose and dangerous. He reached out to take the dog’s paw. The dog glanced at the hyena and apprehensively away. “Do you know what else?” Finnigan asked, in a voice sweet and unearnest. “Do you know what else, Surrender? The girl doesn’t like the boy.”

I plucked the cigarette from my lips. “Shut up, Finnigan. You don’t know anything about it.”

Finnigan smiled affectionately at the dog. “We know some things, don’t we, Surrender? We know most things, in fact. We know — for instance — that Evangeline’s got a lot of friends — hasn’t she, my hound? Yes. She goes with them to the pictures and driving up the road. She doesn’t do that with Gabriel. How come? Is she ashamed to be seen with him? Maybe.”

“That’s not why!” I struggled to sit up, a brittle storm of paint shedding from the coop. “I wish you’d mind your own business!”

Finnigan squeezed Surrender’s paw, gazed steadfastly into the dog’s eyes. “I think Evangeline should get herself a
proper
boyfriend, don’t you, Surrender? One she’s not embarrassed to show off in public. But oops, I forgot — Gabriel’s
not
her boyfriend, is he? Gabriel is only her
friend
.”

I felt a giddy sickness rising, and a tide of crushing shame. “You don’t know anything,” I breathed. “I wish you’d stay out of it —”

But Finnigan continued blithely, as if he hadn’t heard. “Only a
friend
,” he marveled, “and she’s
still
embarrassed to be seen with him! I wonder why she bothers? Maybe because . . . well, she’s got everything, hasn’t she? Nice house, nice family, nice little friends. Now she’s got Gabriel, her nice little kook. Her nice little locker-in-the-refrigerator. Not everyone’s got one of those, have they! He’s a well-trained pet, too: he runs and jumps and sighs for her. He walks and talks and pants for her. Would you do that for me, Surrender? Would you? No — you’ve got too much pride.”

He uncurled his claws from around the dog’s paw and stroked the animal’s ear. I glared at the wall, hating him massively inside. Finnigan pressed his lips to the dog’s head, murmured into the dense fur. “And what does the angel get in return, hound? Nothing, I think. Gabriel’s giving himself away, and he gets nothing back. Unless you count his dreams, of course, and all his wishful thinkings.”

I shrank against the fence, mortified. It was true I couldn’t bring myself to touch her, though it was all I wanted to do, all I could think about doing, the single thing I would die to do. My nights were filled with seared imaginings — my hand on her chest, my palm on her spine. I loved and dreaded the fanciful nights; the hammered day was better because she was there, a thousand times worse for the same reason. Again and again I vowed to reach out, and helplessly lost my nerve. I worried she would duck from beneath the weight of my uninvited touch; I worried, worse, that she would endure it with an ill-disguised shudder. I worried she would smile politely and murmur,
Anwell, don’t
.

The humiliation of that would ruin everything, kill our friendship in its tracks. I told myself I would rather keep my hands to myself. Then changed my mind, knotted with anguish, then changed my mind again. I didn’t know how to tell if somebody wanted to be touched, and I had no courage to take a chance. Staring down at my empty hands, I realized something I hadn’t understood before. Never having been touched, I didn’t know how to touch; such things would never come naturally to me.

I never felt my wrongness more keenly than I did in the dry weeks of the summer I was sixteen. I was frantic with indecision, with fear and desire. I didn’t know how to make Evangeline like me. And I was deeply unsure about what to do next, in the unlikely event that she did.

And Finnigan knew.

I pressed to the fence, the air a snake around my neck. I said, “Finnigan, you were supposed to be my friend.”

“You decided that. I never said that word.”

“You are crushing me —”

“No — I’m telling you truth. I’m saving you.”

I looked at him, my blood churning; he looked back, unmoved. Behind his peeling lips I saw a sliver of teeth. “You’re her game, Anwell,” he said. “You’re a strange little beetle she’s put inside a jar. She’ll keep you until she gets bored. Then she’ll forget you, let you starve. Maybe she’ll do something worse — maybe she’ll feed you to the cat. And you know
why
she’ll do this, Anwell? Because you’re just a bug. Who can you complain to? How can you make her sorry? You can’t — you can’t do a thing. Mulyan is her town, not yours. No one here will take your side — they wouldn’t even know they could, she’s kept you such a secret. She can tell her friends you’re dreaming, you’re lying, and they’ll believe her. After all, she’s never been seen with you. She’s never even said your name.”

I looked at the dirt, at the trampled snapstick leaking fluid from its wounds. He shifted against the chicken coop, glanced up at the blue sky. “I think this, Anwell: I think she
does
like you — I think she thinks you’re a pretty little beetle. But that’s all you are. You’re not a bright future for her. She’ll ditch you in exchange for some boy — some farmer’s son, some plumber — someone who isn’t so
other
. Someone respectable. Someone who doesn’t live in a jar. She
has
to do it, you see? She has to make her life good. That’s what people want to do. So end it here and now, Anwell. Get rid of her, before she laughs at you. Before she hurts you to make you go away.”

I stayed silent for moments. “You’re mistaken,” I said.

His face darkened. “Think again.”

“No,” I said. “I won’t. I’m not like you, Finnigan. The water and trees and the hills . . . that’s not enough for me. Maybe I am a bug in a jar — better that, than nothing. I’d rather be that, something alive — better than being a stone on the ground, like you.”

The sky above our heads dashed white with cockatoos. Calmly as snow Finnigan said, “Think again, Gabriel.”

I hit the earth with defiant fists. “No!” I shouted. “I won’t! I don’t belong to you! Don’t tell me what to do!”

His black pool eyes looked into me. “You do belong to me,” he said, “and I don’t share.”