The Listeners (23 page)

No response.

Mink jogged over to shut off the TV. “Quinn has generously offered to feed you tonight.”

The girl smiled up at us from the carpet. “Awesome.”

“I was thinking Chinese,” I said. “We can get pot stickers.”

Meli shook her head. “Can we please go to You Hop, please?”

“Not tonight, bee,” Mink said quickly.

“But I want You Hop.”

“Well, you're not going there.”

“But
why
?”

“Because you're not.”

“But I want chocolate-chip pancakes.”

“Then you can stay home,” said Mink. To me: “Sorry.”

“It's not her fault she likes them,” I shrugged. “How about deep-dish pizza?” I would not let the bloodworm come. I would eat like a regular person. Hamburger nubs were not my sister's flesh.

“Oh, yes! Okay!”

A car horn. “Have a great time, beautifuls!” cried Mink over her shoulder.

It had crossed my mind to ask her if could I stay here for a little while. She'd have said yes, however reluctantly. But Mink was irrevocably responsible for the welfare of a small human being. She didn't need me on her couch too.

“Oh god Quinny! Come here quick!”

“You're not allowed to cause catastrophe on my watch,” I shouted back.

“But spider! By the terlet!”

Last summer, in the park, when the girl had been reduced to spasms by a web hanging across our path, was the first time I'd regretted that a dad was not around—to brush the web back with his
powerful forearm
and boldly decree: Can't hurt you, sweetheart! Where could Mink have bought such a father? During her recent stint
with a flower-shop manager, I'd noted that his voice was too high to qualify for the position. His forearms—slimmer than my own—had had little power in them. He'd played cards with Meli, but I wanted him to wield a knife. Slit the necks of encroaching wolves, laugh at their blood tracks on the snow, on his shoulder lean an ax for the wood. Meli's biological father had been a one-week stand whose name Mink had practically forgotten by the time she found out she was with child. He moved to Los Angeles before the baby was born. Meli had been told he was a good person, someone good who was far away now and could not live near them. That paltry line had, miraculously, sufficed. It wouldn't always. Soon she would start asking,
But who was he? How did you know him? Did you love him? Did he love you?

I wadded up paper towels and slammed them down on the creature, telling myself not to be such a girl.

She whined, “But what if his brothers . . . ?”

“Then we'll kill them too. First, however, we have an appointment with hot cheese. Get your shoes.”

“I'm wearing shoes,” she pointed out.

THERE ONCE LIVED
a girl who had lost a leg in a Ferris wheel accident and was unfit for all the jobs of work available to her. This girl could not pay the weekly attention required of her by law of the village where she resided. From her red hill she watched the ocean and longed to disappear under its waves where it made no difference if she had one knee or two.

AFTER THE ACCIDENT,
and after the flight home from Minnesota, and after a plastic surgeon had tidied up the four holes on his hand, Cam left town. Nobody knew where he went. I called his parents' house and his mother told me Cameron preferred not to have contact and she would appreciate it if I didn't call again.

And when, after what seemed like forever, my period still hadn't come, I concluded I was pregnant. The pee sticks were negative, but those foggy lines are so hard to read in the first place and my blood kept not coming, not coming, same as in high school, only this time I rubbed my belly every night and whispered to the baby:
Grow well!
I didn't drink a drop of alcohol for three weeks. It would have Cam's black hair and height and smartness; it would have my, what, I didn't know—maybe the freckles—but most things, I hoped, would come from him.

THE HOSPITAL SMELLED
sad. All hospitals were required to. The one in Minnesota had still been decorated, on the sixteenth of February, with paper Christmas trees along its salmon halls. This one featured a pamphlet tacked to an otherwise empty corkboard: DOES THE PERSON YOU LOVE MAKE YOU HATE YOURSELF? We were directed to a distant floor, the chemical dependency unit, a hall of smudge-eyed shufflers in gowns and a guy crying into the pay phone: “But you said—but you
said
—”

Geck's skin was a little gray, the acne scars more pronounced, but otherwise he looked good for someone who had almost died. His shirt was off, the sheet bunched at his waist; I hoped he wasn't naked under there.

He rasped, “Wow, my first visitors, other than those whose loins I sprang from!”

“Here,” Mink said, thrusting forth the box of chocolates.

“Thanks, valentine.”

“Why's your voice all . . . ?”

“They ram this tube down your throat,” he explained, “when they're plucking you from the reaper's jaws. I don't remember the tube, but it still hurts like fuck, so I guess it happened. Awesome-town, let me tell you. Heart?” He held out the opened box. I shook my head, but Mink took a chocolate. She'd gone to the gym four times last week.

“So how long do you have to stay here?”

“It's like this fourteen-day program. Standard fare.”

We stood uncertainly by his bed. He coughed and sipped from a plastic cup. Finally: “You just missed my nidget roommate. He's at group. Already tried to poach my wallet. I wake up from a nap, right, and first thing I see is his withered hand in my personal-items drawer—but anyhoo, you guys want to admire my cane?” Geck reached for the long stick leaning next to the bed. “This here is made from a bull's pizzle. I asked my mother to bring it to cheer me. She has no clue what it's made of. Other than my dad's and mine, I am pretty certain this is the only penis she's ever laid a finger on!”

“Don't talk about your mom like that,” Mink said.

His belly and biceps were flecked with little white slashes. I'd seen stretch marks on Mink's bubs when she'd aired the dairy, and on my own thickening hips; but they were surprising on a guy-body. Sad white body, inflating, deflating, drawing on ever-shrinking puddles of strength to bounce back from years of
chemical dousing. Body that had once put itself into my body. Sex with Geck hadn't been bad. He'd shown a lot of enthusiasm.

In childhood, he had not dreamt of being jobless, carless, and poonless at forty, overdosing in his parents' ranch house. The boy Geck had had more interesting plans for himself. A hot stripe ran from my ribs up my throat, opening at my teeth like a flower. I didn't want him to die. He might not have been the most luminous bulb in the chandelier, but he was a full-knit body of fibers and cells, skin that bled if you ripped it, hair that came out in the shower. He had a mouth that kissed well, even with its roan tooth. First time I ever saw the tooth up close I had laughed, and he'd said You're chuckling at my dental burden aren't you.

Now here he lay, pantless under a sheet, pretending to enjoy the piffle we'd bought at the hospital gift shop—acting unbothered by the fact that he was on a bed with metal sides. Well,
I
was bothered. A person could slide off the earth in one second, never to return.

Mink leaned back in a chair with the penis cane propped between her knees, clicking her long nails along its shaft. “So what happens after fourteen days? Outpatient again?”

“Uh, sadly, no.” Geck coughed again and I handed him the water cup. “My counselor doesn't think I'm a
trustworthy candidate
for outpatient. Wants me to go to a halfway house—”

“Great!” we said together.

“In rural Pennsylvania,” he hissed. “I'm supposed to get away from my usual persons, places, and things. But what am I gonna do all day, milk Amish cattle?”

“Think of it as a vacation,” Mink said.

“Plus you're too old,” I said, “for this crap. OD'ing is a young man's game.”

“I'm young,” he said irritably. “Look at my hair.”

THE MIDDLE OPENED
her notebook. “Here is the first question: If you were sentenced to death but could pick the method, would you rather be drawn and quartered or killed by necklacing, which is
a form of punishment used in South Africa by blacks against blacks thought to be government sympathizers by which a petrol-soaked tire is placed around the victim's neck and ignited
?”

“What's drawn and quartered, again?” asked the youngest.

“Where you get each arm and leg tied to its own horse and they all gallop in different directions.”

“Oh yeah,” said the youngest.

“Necklacing,” decided the oldest, “because you'd die quicker.”

The youngest had to agree.

MOST OF MY
earthly possessions lay stowed underneath Observatory Lane, so there wasn't much to pack. Cigarettes—underwear—Octy—and the old notebook, in a ziplock.

“You found a place?” said Riley, barging in with Pine, who looked milkier than ever.

“Uh, yep!”

“Where?”

“Secret,” I said.

Pine inclined her head Britishly. “Nice to see you, Quinn.”

“And you.” I rubbed my low back, ablaze from stooping. “How were the salt mines today?”

“The chief was in an extrarude mood,” Riley said, “but I…”

“What's that?”

“I
remained sanguine
.”

“You guys making, um, any tea?”

They looked at each other.

“Only because—you sometimes have afternoon tea. And snacks.”

“You want a scone,” Riley declared.

“I could murder a scone,” I admitted.

Pine said she would be happy to make some, if we had any flour.

“You really don't have to,” Riley said.

“Great!” I shouted.

“Settled,” she said.

I was starting to like her.

While she whipped up her batch, Riley watched me push small items into bags.

“I'll be gone on Monday,” I said. “Five days before the deadline, incidentally.”

“So where's the new place?”

“Told you. Secret. But I have a favor to ask.”

“I can't lend you—”

“No!” I said. “Not that. I am only asking for a few hours of your time. A day's worth. Next weekend.”

“For what?”

“A little road trip to bring Geck to a halfway house.”

“Why do you need
me
to come?”

“Because you have a valid driver's license, and I do not, and I want to borrow Mert's car because Mink's truck is in the shop, and Mert is highly more likely to—”

“I have to think about it,” Riley said.

“Cinnamon or ginger?” called Pine from the kitchen.

“Ginger,” he answered before I had a chance to say cinnamon.

“IF THE MAN
in the ice had taken the rope, would the lady's ghost stay mad at him?”

“No,” answered the youngest, “because the lady would understand—”

“But what if she didn't,” said the middle. “What if she was too angry that he got to live and she had to die?”

“Then she would haunt him,” said the youngest.

“Haunt how?”

“I don't know.”

“What particular freakeries would she do?”

“I don't
know
!”

The middle said, “How about wake him in the night with the feel of being poured with freezing water? Turn his lips blue like if he drowned? Whisper in his ear until he went lunatic?”

“But he
didn't
take the rope,” said the youngest.

The middle nodded, sighed, and stood. She hadn't even bothered to open the notebook. That was their last game of Curious. Stopping was not decided or discussed;
in the remaining months of the middle's life, they simply never played it again.

OCTY NESTLED IN
my lap while I played Wake Up the Sister. In the dark room, only the scrinkling television was alive; and on the screen was a screened porch; and on the porch you were sleeping. The fold-out couch was lumpy but you were fifteen, healthy and strong—you slumbered easily. Morning came. A coyote pup wobbled in on stuggy legs to tell you it was time to get up. Together you had to rouse the sister.

Most times, the sister was dead; but every once in a while she was not. One of the buttons allowed you to earn Anti-guilt points by not asking her to change sides the night before, and thereby dying in her place. The points clicked up in a red dial on the screen.

If she was dead, you couldn't earn Anti-guilts or Virtues.

If she was dead, you could watch her in the afterworld trying to get strangers to play Cadmus and Europa.

WITH THIS VOYAGE,
my brother and I were flouting family law. Never in the same car for any trip longer than half an hour. But Mert and Fod did not mention the flout; instead they encouraged Riley to honor the speed limit, especially once we reached Pennsylvania, whose state police were notorious.

“Thanks again for the car,” I said.

“Just bring it back in one piece,” said Fod. “And your brother does all the driving. Not you or—or the junkie.”

“You
know
his name.”

Riley put a hand on my arm and said, “Don't worry, Fod” with the authority of an elder sibling.

 

He double-parked in front of the diner. “Get us a couple of coffees?”

Sex—if he had, in fact, been having it—was making him kind of bossy.