All We Want Is Everything (11 page)

When the pit first opened up, the city said they would come out and fix it. Kids tossed pop cans down its maw, waiting to hear them clink. Some of the older tenants whispered that there was no bottom to the hole. I watched its edges spread, swallowing the courtyard that used to stand between the four apartment towers they built to keep us from messing up their city streets. So many people out here got needs and wants displayed openly on veiny arms and pitted faces. They call it Willow Ridge, but nobody could mistake this place for a golf club.

“Alice, I don’t want to see those dishes in the sink when I get home. You hear me?”

Dad moved out here when the plant shut down. They were making tricycles until someone sued and the whole thing closed up shop. I was still in diapers, but I remember a house somewhere on a street full of golden retrievers and Dalmatians. I remember a mother and the sound of bikes ringing their bells. I remember grass that had yet to die and trees swaying in a yard. I don’t hold these things against him. I tell myself they are dreams. I know dreams always have a lie buried in them somewhere, up to its neck in all the things we wish were true and all the things we don’t want to say. I bet those dogs got rabies.

“I hear you. The dishes. Got it.”

“I mean it this time, Alice.”

The door slams and I can hear him pounding down the hallway toward the elevators. Only two of them work these days. The super says it’s too expensive to fix the other ones. Dad would take the stairs, but we’re on the twenty-sixth floor and his heart isn’t the greatest. Sometimes he gets winded walking down the hallway with the groceries. Sometimes he falls asleep on the toilet and I consider going in the kitchen sink. I don’t like to wake him up. The dishes in the kitchen now are a few weeks old, but they can wait a bit longer. I’m used to the smell.

I turn off the TV and walk over to the window. Down in the courtyard, police tape flops back and forth in the wind around the pit. It’s so dark down there, sometimes you wish there was no bottom. You might just fall forever from one side of the earth to the other, exploding on impact with a star out there in the galaxy. But I know it’s just a sinkhole, slowly expanding around its edges. One day one of the towers will topple inside, but the city says that’s a long way off. They don’t have anywhere else to move all the people anyway. They keep hoping some of the poorer ones will die off.

“Did he leave yet?”

Kayla just walks in because she’s Kayla and her mom can’t spell manners or anything else. She comes to stand beside me at the window, looking down at the pit. She smells like plastic fruit and those flowers made of paper at the Chinese restaurant down the road.

“I heard some of the boys threw a dog down there, and you could hear it yelping for like five days afterward. They felt bad by the third day, but what could they do about it, you know?”

“Your mom tell you that?” I say, pressing my nose on the glass.

“My mom would believe it, I’m sure. She’s conked out in bed if you wanna go to my place to escape all the dude smells. You know your dad could at least wash his underwear in the sink or something. Or just burn it. I’d prefer that smell.”

Kayla’s dad lives in one of the other towers. Even though they are only five minutes apart, she doesn’t see him much. A lot of people get lost in the buildings out here. We don’t even have names for them. North, south, east and west—no one’s got the energy to be more creative. Our parking garages are filled with forgotten jet skis and boats from when people thought Willow Ridge was going to be something. They had brochures and everything. There are still a few floating around the lobby with big pink font and black and white pictures of appliances.

“Alright, so what are we doing? You going to get Tyler to come over again? I know you think he digs me, but the lazy eye just ruins it every time.”

“Nah, we’ll see him tonight,” Kayla says. Her teeth are too straight for these towers. The older men like to whistle at her from their balconies. Sometimes they toss garbage at us if they are drunk. The janitors the city sends out here every few days push most of the trash down into the pit. One day, we might fill that hole all the way to the top.

“I don’t wanna stand outside in the cold tonight, pretending to enjoy beer,” I say. We are headed down the stairs now, stepping over sticky spots on the concrete.

“You don’t need to pretend, you just need to drink more. My mom says you can take some of her schnapps if you want, but not to drink it all. She needs a reason to get up in the morning.”

Kayla only lives one floor under me. Her mom used to be the guard the city hired to watch over the pit, making sure no one fell into it. Eventually they eliminated the position and just posted signs warning that the municipality would not be held liable for any accident involving the “temporary” sinkhole. They added the police tape for flare I guess. Kayla’s mom didn’t handle it very well. She figured the pit was going to be there forever. There was no need for a back-up plan at the time. The safety vest she wore still hangs in their living room like it’s a homemade quilt or something. The blocked font reads PIT GUARDIAN.

“So you’re sure she’s asleep?” I ask, before flopping down onto the orange couch.

“Zoned out, more like it, but that’s about as close as she gets. You take what you can.”

At two in the afternoon, the towers are quiet. Summer means all our fellow teenagers are at home, hanging out in the parking garages to escape the heat, smoking up whatever they can grow in closets full of rigged lamps and heated blankets, waiting to sell their homemade wares to kids from the suburbs. Willow Ridge is full of clogged bathtubs and empty cold medicine packages. Sometimes you find them in your mail.

There are stains all over the couch, but I try to ignore them. Some things just don’t wash out. Kayla pulls two bottles out of the kitchen and plunks them down on the coffee table. The glass is smeared with powder and too many fingerprints. The TV is sputtering on and off, but we aren’t really paying attention. Most people only get the same six channels. The satellite companies got tired of tenants tearing their dishes off the roof. Henry Gosling on the thirty-second floor thinks the government is after his brain. He’s tried to cover all the elevators in tinfoil a couple times, but the other tenants peel it off before he can really prove anything about brainwaves or conspiracies. I want to believe him. Staring down at the pit would make a lot more sense if there was a reason behind it, if we could blame it on someone in the shadows.

Otherwise, it might just be a hole.

“So what’s supposed to happen tonight?”

Kayla is still in the kitchen. She doesn’t like to eat in front of people.

“I don’t know. Tyler and the Chads said we should just meet them down there after it gets dark. They said they’d clear out the scabs before things get too crazy. It gets hot up here anyway. Heat rising, all that bull. I just don’t wanna listen to them talking about tits again like we aren’t sitting right there. At least pretend, you know?”

The TV features people screaming, but they don’t really mean it. The tendons in their necks aren’t straining and their world is filled with unchipped furniture and well-organized magazines. I can’t find the remote and I don’t want to stick my hand between the couch cushions. I imagine something moist and warm hiding underneath them, waiting for my touch. Something lonely.

“You wanna bet it’s just going to be those three idiots tossing bottles down the pit? Maybe they’ll decide you should go in next. Don’t you get tired of them?”

Kayla shrugs and sits down beside me. She pulls her hair back behind her head. Kayla’s got a hole in her ear where one of her mom’s piercings turned all infected. The doctors cauterized the hole so it wouldn’t spread. Cauterized is the longest word Kayla knows how to spell. She likes to show off the medical report. She says it was an experimental procedure, one of many. I don’t know what else has been done to her. There are injection sites like crop circles up and down her back. When she takes off her shirt, it looks like she’s been branded.

A fist pounds on Kayla’s door, but neither of us get up from the couch. We can hear him wheezing in the hallway. Arnold always knocks before pushing himself through the door; it’s the closest he can come to being civil. His gut swings before him, filled with deep-fried everything. Arnold keeps the water running through this place, fixing the clogged toilets and broken water mains that make everything feel damp to the touch. He’s like a super who doesn’t get paid. I hold my breath as Arnold lumbers past us toward the bedroom. His hair hangs down his back in one, long ponytail. It’s got bright red elastics woven into the greasy mess. Onions and yellow stains follow in his wake. He doesn’t bother to say hello. Kayla looks down at the rippled carpet until we hear her mom’s bedroom door slam. The drywall is thin.

“Wake up, Ginny. Wake your goddamn ass up.”

Before the floor can begin to shake, before another repetition of their daily ritual can begin, Kayla hurries out and down the hallway. I’m forced to chase after her toward an elevator, past empty units filled with busted televisions and those polyester bears you win at county fairs. They’re blue and pink and rotting. Kayla climbs into a shuddering box, and I know we’ll ride the elevator until she feels better, until the sound of all those pulleys and winches tells us this place is anything but real.

Tyler’s grandma claims his lazy eye came from too many days staring down into the pit after they moved him out here during the fifth grade. He’s been out here almost as long as me. I don’t know what he saw down there. His grandma says it’s like staring at an eclipse for too long—staring down into all that darkness, staring into something that doesn’t end. She says it does something to your soul, but that’s usually after she’s taken too much oxygen and Tyler has to wheel her back into the windowless room where she sleeps and draws on the walls. They give her chalk and magic markers. She seems happy enough if you don’t look too close.

“You need to get a monocle or something, Ty. Just to balance your face out. How ’bout it?”

There are floodlights down in the courtyard. They spin our shadows in every direction like we aren’t sure where to go. Occasionally, cigarette ash flutters down around us from the balconies above. You have to avoid the hot ones. I undo my hair and watch the Chads harassing Ty. They’re supposed to be identical twins, according to their mother, but one is a foot taller than the other. They both have orange hair and chase rats in the north tower until the little creatures’ hearts explode. The bigger Chad has bed bug bites up and down his arms. He tries to tell me they’re just ingrown hairs. I don’t know why the little one has been spared.

“I can see fine guys, it’s only the skin around the eye. Hold still and I’ll show you.”

Kayla and I are perched on a bench beside an old refrigerator. The door is down at the bottom of the pit somewhere, probably still full of old salad dressings and leftovers. The beer the boys brought is warm and attracts little swarms of gnats under the light. They drown by the dozens in the half-empty bottles we’ve scattered in the weeds. Old paving stones and bits of porcelain hide in between dandelions. We watch Tyler pitch his bottle at the smaller Chad, who tries to catch it between his hands before it explodes at his feet. The spray makes it look like he pissed himself.

“If you had an eye like mine, you might have caught that.”

“Suck it. You owe me a beer now. I bought that shit.”

“You stole it,” Ty says as he tosses a paving stone over the yellow police tape and down into the black of the pit. “Go home and get a new pair of pants.”

“It’s too far.”

The pit has spread slowly since I was a kid. It started out more like a well. People used to poke poles down there. My dad said it spread while we slept, waiting for everyone to look away. Like a pot of water waiting to boil, except nothing was overflowing, just sinking and draining. Now you have to walk around it to get to the other towers. It adds ten minutes to each commute from one tower to the other. I don’t even know if a Frisbee can make it across.

I like to run my hand along the temporary poles and police tape they got set up along the edges. The maintenance guys gave up on barbed wires fences after the pit swallowed the third set in a row one summer, after Dad got hired at the chicken feed place. It makes all his clothes smell like rancid butter. They have him running back and forth with bags of corn like he isn’t fifty-five years old, like his back isn’t made of glass and string and chalky bones. His tendons are all coming undone in the middle of the night. I can hear them popping on and off with the radiator.

“Move your skinny ass over, Allie. You should be nicer to me.”

Tyler sits down beside me on the bench they’ve got here to commemorate Kayla’s mother. She saved me once from falling in when I was five, but my name isn’t on the plaque. I am referred to as “the child.” I am sketched in bronze and I’m smiling. Tyler’s lazy eye bobs up and down beside me. I place a hand on his leg to stop him from shaking. I don’t even know what colour his eye is today. It fluctuates with the weather like it can’t decide who he wants to be.

“I am nice. I don’t call you the half-cooked Cyclops. I don’t call you Hawkeye or Lumpy. I could be meaner if you like, but I think you should just get used to this nice me. This is as good as she gets. Sorry to disappoint you. Well, not sorry, but you know.”

“Probably the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me, either way. As nice as you get, anyway.”

I don’t remember why I ran toward the edge of that hole. This was before Kayla started going for all those medical tests, paying rent with injections and taking the new treatments for food allergies—providing solutions for all those parents who still can’t handle the fact that all our air has been recycled since the start of time. Kayla’s mom spotted me hurtling toward the ledge in my yellow footie pyjamas. No one ever explained how I got down there by myself. Apparently she caught me just at the edge, before I discovered what lay down there at the bottom. There was an article on the front page of the paper, back when Willow Ridge was in the news for more than the occasional assault charge or string of petty thefts. Kayla says her mom still has a drawer of those newspapers bound up in butcher twine under the sink, going yellow along the edges where mice come to nibble and spit up the mess. Our faces are coming apart.