The Space Between (13 page)

When Truman appears in the doorway, they don’t acknowledge each other. He doesn’t come all the way into the kitchen, just leans there with his hands in his pockets. He looks better this morning, clear-eyed and alert, and his color is much better. His hair is damp and clean, falling over his forehead in a way that makes me want to brush it back.

I stand up, smoothing the front of my dress automatically, even though it’s ridiculous to think of decorum when I’m looking at a boy who does nothing but shiver and tremble and damage himself in useless ways.

“Do you want some breakfast?” Charlie says finally, still looking at the table. “I’ll throw in a couple eggs for you if you want.”

“Thanks. I’m not . . .” Truman swallows, his voice trailing away.

When he starts to fall down, he does it slowly. Then he’s sitting on the floor, hanging his head between his knees and breathing hard like he’s been running.

Charlie pushes back his chair. “You want to tell me the last time you ate something besides cereal?” His eyes are warm and kind and sad.

Truman just sits in the doorway, taking deep breaths and pressing his hands to his face. “Look, I’m fine. Everything is
fine
.”

When he tries to stand, he has to reach for the wall to get his balance. I cross the kitchen and tuck my hand into the crook of his elbow. The skin is cold and slick. He doesn’t protest and I lead him back down the hall.

In his room, Truman pulls away from me and lowers himself onto the mattress. He rolls over so that his back is to me, and draws his knees up. Through his T-shirt, his shoulder blades are like something by Rodin or Bernini.

“Are you asleep?” I ask, trying not to sound loud, but I can’t help it.

The room is hollow with how quiet Truman is. He doesn’t answer. If he is breathing, I can’t hear it.

“Are you all right?” I take a step toward him, and when he doesn’t move, I touch him gently on the arm. His skin feels warm and he flinches.

I stroke his hair the way I did before. It’s still damp. He smells different now. Clean, like water.

“Could you please not do that?” he whispers.

“You liked it last night. You asked me not to stop.”

“Yeah, well last night I was wrecked. Now, I’m asking you to stop.”

I take my hand away. His eyes are closed and his mouth looks tight, like he’s biting down on something to keep from crying out. It’s hard to know how to touch him. His bones look delicate under his skin.

“What’s wrong? Will you talk to me?”

He rolls over, looking up into my face. “I don’t even know who you are.”

“I’m Daphne.”

And he smiles at me for the first time since he’s been awake, a sad, tired smile. “That doesn’t
mean
anything, okay?”

“I have a brother, though. His name is Obie.”

“Obie.” Truman’s eyes are flat, suddenly. Far away. “From the hospital?”

“I don’t know. Probably. Can you tell me where he is?” All at once I feel desperate for whatever information he can give me, even some small, offhand recollection, some little story.

Truman sighs and pushes himself up on one elbow. “Look, I haven’t seen Obie in more than a year, okay?”

And for a moment, I just sit looking at him, because a year is a long time. I understand that. A year is a very long time, and part of me is still certain that I saw Obie only recently—a week ago or a month. But that was Pandemonium, and in Pandemonium, centuries slip by like no time at all. Here, time matters and any number of terrible things can happen in the space of a single year.

“Please,” I say, trying to make Truman see how much this matters. “You have to help me. I think something awful’s happened to him.”

He shakes his head, looking helpless—almost apologetic. His eyes are a clear, icy blue like running water, and it’s in this moment I know for sure that I’ve found him. Last night, that was someone else, dazed and unresponsive.
This
is the boy who looked up at me in the terminal. The boy who reached for my hand.

Only now, I’m the one reaching for him. I turn his arm to expose the inside of his wrist, tracing the branches with my fingers, but he twists away and won’t look at me.

“What do they mean?” I ask. “Do they mean something?”

“They’re scars,” he says softly, says it to the wall. “They don’t mean anything.”

“Will you tell me about the hospital?”

But Truman goes rigid and still, staring past me toward the window. “Leave.”

“But—”

“Get out of my room.” He says it in a flat, measured voice, without looking at me. Then he rolls over, turning so that his back is to me, and doesn’t say anything else.

I want to protest, or at least ask him what it is I’ve done, but my tongue feels stuck. I want to make him take it back, but I don’t know how. Neither of us says anything and time stretches out.

After much too long I stand up, shaking the creases from my skirt, and I start for the door.

2 DAYS 22 HOURS 25 MINUTES

T
ruman faced the wall, listening to her footsteps as they faded down the hall, away from his room. Then he rolled onto his back, one arm resting across his face. All the numbness and the sick, heavy stupor were gone and now he just felt cored-out. The daylight was bright and chilly, making his eyes hurt. He was so unbelievably tired.

With his eyes closed, he had a brief flash of the girl—Daphne—standing in an empty L station, looking up at him. There was a clearer memory of her fingers sliding through his hair. Her fingers on the insides of his wrists, tracing the lines there, exploring. How she hadn’t looked at him with horror or pity, and she hadn’t recoiled. She’d simply traced the lines with her fingers. He closed his eyes, swallowing against the ache in his throat.

Her voice was an urgent whisper, repeating in his head, and he thought of Obie because he couldn’t help it.

The emergency room, the hospital—everything seemed rubbed-out around the edges. He knew there’d been Jell-O every day, but he couldn’t remember exactly how it had tasted. He knew the sheets had been blue, but he couldn’t say if they’d been blue like sky or like detergent.

The first night in the ICU was barely a coherent memory, but now and then, parts of it came back in excruciating detail. That night, he had dreamed of dark hallways and a blue-lipped-cadaver version of his face. Himself smiling at himself. In the dream, he’d closed his eyes, cringing away. And that was when the shadow man had appeared for the first time, only Truman didn’t understand the consequences yet—didn’t understand that he would come back, dragging Truman out of bed or whispering from the closet. From now on, they would excavate the jumbled garbage dump of Truman’s deepest fears almost every night.

“Look,” the man whispered gently, taking Truman’s chin is his hand, turning him back toward his own decomposing corpse. “Open your eyes and look at yourself. That’s you, undisguised. That’s your black, revolting heart.”

Truman had woken up shaking, seasick with pain medication.

Obie had come into the room then, rumpled and friendly looking in his chalk-green scrubs. When he’d seen Truman sitting up with the blankets pushed back and his hands held awkwardly in front of him, Obie’s eyes had turned worried. “Hey, what’s up? Is something wrong?”

But Truman was much too shaken to answer, shivering so hard his teeth chattered, and every time he closed his eyes, he saw his own grinning body—rotten, covered with a thin slime of grave-moss. Maggots squirming where his eyes should be.

Obie was patient. He sat on the bed while Truman shuddered and tried not to think about his dream. When twenty minutes went by and Truman couldn’t stop shaking, Obie prepped a syringe and fed it into the IV line.

“What are you doing?” Truman whispered. It was the first thing he’d said since he’d woken from the dream, and his voice was dry and hoarse.

Obie stood over him, ready to depress the plunger. “I’m just going to give you something to help you sleep. It’ll knock you right out. You won’t even feel it.”

For a second, Truman could only shake his head, struggling to make his voice work. “Don’t,” he whispered. “Please don’t give me that. Don’t make me sleep.”

Another attendant would have given him the sedative anyway—easier to drug him up, put him out—but Obie only nodded. He pulled the syringe from the IV without asking any questions.

Then he sat back down on the edge of the bed and began to talk. He did it easily, leaning forward with his elbows propped on his knees, telling Truman strange, fantastical stories about astronomy and botany and God, until the sky lightened and Truman could finally close his eyes.

The first time Truman almost died, he’d been Obie’s responsibility. Obie had overseen the tubes and monitors, doled out the medication, changed the bandages.

Now, everything was different. Truman was in his own room. His sheets smelled stale and smoky, and it had been the black-haired girl kneeling over him on Dio’s floor, holding out her hands. When he closed his eyes, the pressure of her fingers was still there, exploring his skin, finding all the things that he needed to forget.

Truman got up.

His ears rang and he saw little starbursts at the corners of his vision. Twinkling bugs went squirming by every time he turned his head. The room glittered with fatigue.

He pulled on one of his school sweaters and smoothed down his hair. There was a bottle of aspirin in the bathroom cabinet and he swallowed two, drinking straight from the faucet. After a few minutes, his head began to feel better.

In the kitchen, Charlie was standing alone at the counter, eating scrambled eggs. He cleared his throat and took a swallow of the coffee at his elbow. “Sounds like you had yourself some kind of night. Not gonna take it easy for awhile, have some breakfast? Maybe try sleeping?”

Truman shook his head and opened the refrigerator. “I’m not tired.”

Charlie shrugged and hunched over his plate. “Whatever you say.”

Truman nodded, staring at a plate of leftover pizza, a half-full carton of milk. Then he closed the refrigerator again. He waited for Charlie to explode, throw his coffee cup or his knock his breakfast on the floor, to do something. Even shouting would loosen up the knot in Truman’s chest, but Charlie just scraped the last of the eggs onto his fork and shoved it in his mouth.

For a minute, neither of them said anything and then Charlie spoke again. “Hey, did that girl take off then?”

“Daphne? Yeah.”

“She was a weird one. What’d she want?”

“This guy I used to know a while back, she’s his sister. She just wanted to know if I’d seen him.”

He didn’t mention the hospital. He didn’t mention last winter, but the temperature in the kitchen seemed to change anyway. Truman stood at the end of the table and waited for Charlie to notice, but Charlie only put his plate in the sink and started out of the room without looking at him.

“Unless you need something,” he said on his way out, “I’m taking a shower and going to bed.”

Truman nodded, making fists so that his nails dug into his palms. He watched Charlie walk away down the hall to the bathroom, wishing that Charlie would punish him or hug him or slap him or do something to show that he’d noticed Truman was gone. Charlie shut the bathroom door and the apartment was suddenly so quiet that it seemed to hum. Then the shower came on and the pipes clanked and Truman breathed out.

He opened the refrigerator again and took out a half-gallon of Gatorade. He drank from the bottle in long gulps, stopping when he started to feel sick. Then he sat down at the table and rested his head on his arms.

Before Truman’s mother died, Charlie had been different. He’d laughed all the time, slinging an arm around Truman or tousling his hair. They’d gone places together sometimes, ballgames or movies. Charlie had been more like a father. But that wasn’t the whole truth. Before his mother died, they’d
both
been different. Even afterward, Charlie had done okay, for a little while at least. It was the other thing—the razor and the bathtub and the hospital. Then everything had changed.

Truman remembered the months between his mother and the other thing like one long, unbroken dream. In bed at night, he would curl around himself and the missing was so desolate and raw it was like a physical pain. Sometimes it was three in the morning before he slept. Sometimes the sun was already a glowing slice of orange on the horizon. Alcohol helped. He mixed it with things, fruit punch or strawberry Crush or cherry Kool-Aid. They all tasted like cough medicine.

Charlie kept a stash of decent bourbon in the cupboard over the refrigerator, but he hardly ever drank it. Truman helped himself, topping the bottles off with water until what was left was barely even the right color anymore. There were parties on the weekends, and if Truman was desperate, Dio could usually be counted on to scrounge something up. That was the thing about being bereaved. People were overcome with sympathy. They did things for you without even considering whether or not it was the right thing to do.