The Parallel Apartments (32 page)

“Squeeze!” she yelled, releasing, unzipping. “Crush.”

She bore down on Gracie the volcano. A rocket appeared on the horizon. It screamed toward her.

Uh oh, little girl, psychotic reaction.

“Lick.”

Troy licked. His boner began to regather against her chin. No, it was Gracie, touching Justine's neck with the tip of her nose. The volcano trembled, it roared in orange, it began to collapse.

Justine reached back, lifted up Troy's head by the hair, and tucked an ankle underneath. She moved her hips in tiny but explosive spasms along three dimensions. Troy's dick thrust between her cheek and shoulder. He ejaculated again, two, three, four, five, six long stripes across Justine's back, but this time he made no sound.

Uh oh, little girl, would you like to take a ride, now

Then, the familiar, almost-comforting black gauze of despair and self-deception that attended every orgasm like a widow's veil shook itself out and floated down to drape her. As it landed, a beautiful, wren-like warble rose in her ears.

“I'm gonna come!” cried Justine. “
Gra-a-a-a-a-cie
!”

Una voce poco fa…

Mr. Bugler came in. Justine screamed and jumped off Troy, landing knees first on the hard wood floor. Troy yanked a sheet over himself. The bettas darted, Mactard screeched and scuttled. Justine crawled into a corner, completely naked, smiling crazily, her butt touching the red toothpick on the underside of Troy's shoe. She grabbed the only cover within reach; the lid to the Game of Risk.

“Dad!”

Mr. Bugler stopped singing. His mouth hung open. He was holding a package covered in foreign stamps as big as banknotes. He put it down on Mactard's cage. He looked once at the ceiling, turned around, and left the room, leaving the door open.

Each alley appeared to feature its own cat.

The cat in the alley behind Troy's house, a short-legged, gray-striped female, paused in her dismemberment of a large salamander in order to
watch Justine put her panties and skirt and shoes back on.

“Did you see us, too, cat?”

The alley on the next block was staked by a marmalade cat leisurely squinting on top of a discarded Easy Bake oven. He didn't even flinch when Justine cried, “Oh, gross” after realizing that her blouse, which she'd hastily pulled back on after Mr. Bugler left the room, was stuck to her back.

A wiry, flea-spiced, comically cross-eyed calico in the alley behind the video store made Justine laugh.

“You can laugh at me back if you want, cat.”

A gamine, burnt-umber supermodel who reminded Justine of Prince whipped her tail in the shiny leaves of poison ivy and stared Justine directly in the eyes, seeming to shoot beams of shame at her. Justine repelled them.

“I don't care one damn bit that I got caught.”

In the alley behind the old boarded-up murder-suicide house barely obscured by a jungle of honeysuckle on a wire hurricane fence, on top of a rimless yellow Camaro that had been there most of Justine's life, crouched a Maine coon cat with half a tail and a shred of gore stuck to his chin.

Justine tapped her own chin.

“Man overboard,” she said.

The cat's pupils bloomed black.

And on the next block, out of a dilapidated shed at the side of the alley came a skinny black cat dusted with yellow-green pollen who walked up to Justine, stretched gymnastically, flopped onto his side, producing a little powdery cloud of ragweed spores and alley dust, and waited impatiently for Justine's full attention.

“You don't mind that I'm rubbing your belly?” Justine asked the black cat, who began to purr like a moped. “What kind of cat tolerates belly rubbing? It must be your secret.”

The cat stretched out to the length of a loaf of French bread and yawned. It seemed as content as Justine was blissful. She could never have guessed that the finest antidepressant would turn out to be not Parnate or ECT or fifty-minute blocs of expensive, unwanted therapy, but the tawdry splendor of cunnilingus interruptus.

“And you're very dusty. I'm dirty, too. Hooray!”

He wore a red leather collar aspangle with dozens of stamped-metal tags.

“You have many medals. You must be very important.”

The cat jumped up and walked away, tail in the air.

“It's nothing to be ashamed of!” Justine called after the cat.

In Justine's own alley, balanced with feral precision atop their cedar fence, and with its sites on a dove poking its head in and out of one of Charlotte's weathered bird feeders, was the Rooneys' whiny, compost-colored moggie, Rogelio.

When Justine carefully opened the gate, Rogelio and the dove scattered noisily. No matter—Charlotte was at the bank, tellering; so was Livia, skip tracing; Lou was at his job at the Registry. Dot was surely asleep. Justine could barely wait to tell her the whole story! Even Dartmouth was likely napping, probably at Dot's feet.

All Justine cared about at the moment was her tub. She would need two baths: the first to wash off all the sweat and fear and glazing fluids; the second to merely lie up to her nostrils in and review the day. And then, scrubbed and clean, she would call Troy and find out how much trouble he was in. Mr. Bugler sounded like a pretty cool dad, and hadn't done anything scary when he caught them. She couldn't really tell, though—the look on Mr. Bugler's face had been as unreadable as higher math. Maybe Troy wasn't in any trouble at all. Maybe his dad took him out for whiskey sours and a lap dance. Or maybe Troy was presently wrapped in canvas cerements, ready to be shipped off to a behavioral boot camp in some Canadian-border state free of corporal punishment laws. Whatever it was, they were unlikely to be going down to Sherpa's this afternoon. But they had to go soon; Dot's “treatment” was imminent.

A door in the rear of her house led to a tiny utility room, where the fuse box, water heater, washer-dryer stack, and metal shelves loaded down with cases of Tuborg, took up 80 percent of the space. There were two more doors inside the utility room: one that led to the garage—Lou's room—and another that went right into the kitchen.

Justine quietly snuck into the utility room, crouched down, and listened. The door to the garage was ajar. There was still an hour of school left; she was not supposed to be home. She especially wasn't supposed to be home pantiless, basted in semen, and practically jaundiced with embarrassed delight. If she had to, she'd squeeze behind the water heater and hide until she could gain her bathtub unnoticed.

She held her breath and shut her eyes. No sound at all.

Justine carefully tried the kitchen door: locked. She pushed open the door to the garage.

Lou and Livia stood in the middle of the garage, in a tight, full, motionless embrace, directly under the unshaded bulb, whose kite-string switch just barely touched Lou's shoulder.

Justine froze. Then she silently backed up, pulling the door so it was barely ajar. She watched.

“I'm glad you called me, Lou,” said Livia.

The embrace remained inert, but potent; a pendulum stopped at its apogee. What were they doing here?

“We had bad luck, Lou. It's the only way to think of it.”

“Bad luck,” said Lou, deep into Livia's shoulder.

The soapy, vinegar incense of vodka reached Justine. A fifth of Smirnoff lay on its side against the rusting blade of an ax that as far as Justine could remember had never been used or even moved. The bottle appeared empty.

“Where's Dot?” said Livia.

“Car.”

“Justine's boyfriend's car?”

“Sherpa's car. I took it. She's in the backseat. She's got her blanket.”

Lou began to cry.

“He tied her down,” he said. “With duct tape. Silver duct tape. He gave her those goddam pills. And I didn't stop him.”

“You did what you thought was the best thing.”

“And then he put the needles in her arms, big old needles, like ink pens, Christ mother. And I didn't stop him.”

Livia patted Lou on the shoulder. She rubbed his arm.

“Then he turned on his machine, and Dot's bad blood ran up the tube. She wasn't knocked out, and she started to whimper, like her little dog.”

Livia didn't say anything.

“And I didn't scoop her up and run out of there. I carried her two miles once, but I didn't pick her up when it really mattered. Oh, Livia. Oh, me.”

“All right. All right now.”

“He made her do something terrible then. He made her eat something. He called it communion, and I had to eat it, too, and so did he.”

“What?” said Livia, more of a hiss than a whisper. “What'd he make you eat?”

Lou sobbed. The most terrible sound in the world.

“My skin,” he said. “This cut, on my arm here, it wasn't an accident. He made me flay my skin and give it to him.”

“How did all this happen to us, Lou?”

“Then Dot had a seizure. Her feet, just her feet, began to shake like a copperhead's rattle. The rest of her was still, frozen, all clenched up, her little hands clawed up like rakes.”

“Why did all this have to happen?” said Livia, her voice rising, her own hands gripping her daddy's shirt.

“He got out a syringe and was about to shoot her with it, and I told him to stop.”

“I think I did all this to you.”

“He yelled at me to sit down, and I did. He gave her the shot.”

“I'm sorry about what I did.”

“Then she relaxed. There was blood dripping off her fingertips, but I couldn't tell where it was coming from. I got up, and he yelled at me to have a fucking seat, but I didn't listen this time. I went over there and pushed him out of the way. I pulled out the needles. The blood dripping off her hands was coming out from under her fingernails.
He did something to her so it squeezed the blood out of her own fingertips, Livia.
”

Justine couldn't feel her hands.

“I hit him with one of those brown bottles he had. He went down. I kicked him. I got one of his rifles out the case and hit him with it till he quit moving. I've never hit a man like that, and I'm sick from it. I picked up Dot. She was limp and cool and light as foam. I took her outside, but the cabbie who brought us down hadn't waited like he said he would. I put Dot down under a cedar tree and went back in for Sherpa's car keys. I found them but when I came back out, Dot was dead. There was already a hawk circling a hundred feet up. I drove us here. It wasn't even ten in the morning.”

Livia took several steps back. She crouched down, her face in her hands, her fingers in her hair.

“I'm taking her back to New Orleans,” said Lou.

Livia stood up. She ran toward Lou, embraced him, and kissed him hard on the mouth.

For one moment, an instant, a countable second, Lou did nothing, nothing at all.

Then he gently pushed his daughter away.

Justine soundlessly escaped the house and ran around to the front. In the street was parked a Monte Carlo. Across the backseat lay a figure covered with a blue-gray afghan. Justine banged on the window, but the figure did not stir. The car was locked. She fell to her knees in the road. She looked at her arms. She had left her backpack at Troy's; all her razor blades were inside. There was no glass or metal in the road, there were no sharp edges on the car, there was no way to leave all this. She hit herself, in the jaw, the eyes, but it didn't hurt, and could never hurt enough.

The front door of the house opened. Lou stepped out. Justine hid behind a tree. Lou came up to the car, fumbling with the car keys. She trembled as she watched him. Justine was enraged by his dense insistence on Sherpa's safe counsel; she hated them both for ruining their family just as it was coming back together; she was disgusted with herself for her pity for him and his daughter, she nearly choked on the acid surprise of seeing Livia passionately kiss her own father… behind the ancient sycamore she wept without control at the death of her best friend and the incest in her own house.

Lou got into the car, looked once into the backseat, and drove away.

Justine ran down the alley, back the way she'd come. She passed Rogelio, a rock dove in his mouth. The Maine coon cat on the old yellow Camaro had not moved, but the shred of gore was gone. The black cat hissed as Justine passed. The supermodel had disappeared. The wiry cat, now between the planks of a broken pallet, peered at Justine as she ran. The orange cat was staring down a mean-looking Siamese with gristly, corded muscles; neither paid Justine any attention. And the gray cat behind Troy's house stood in the dead center of the alley, grooming its apron.

No singing from the Buglers' house. Sticking out of the trash can in the alley was Justine's school backpack. On the ground below were her bra and panties. She retrieved only her backpack.

Justine went into Troy's backyard and crept up to his bedroom window.

“Troy?”