Beautiful Sorrows (9 page)

“I did,” Billy said, looking at me. I could tell this was taking all of his courage. “For half of a second, I did. I stomped on the gas and headed for the trees.”

I was shaking.

“I think I hate you,” I said, and my teeth chattered.

Billy bowed his head, and then he looked up. His eyes were glowing.

“What gives you the right to hate me? I screwed up, okay? All of a sudden I came to my senses and I jerked the car back onto the road, but I jerked it too far. The car’s spinning, and you know what? It’s surreal. It’s like a ride. And I’m sitting there thinking, ‘Wow, this is fun, I bet Jake would love this’ and then it’s all
over
. It’s
over
and I’m sitting there alone without my frickin’ body and I need to die and kill me kill me
kill me kill me!
”

He was screaming at the top of his lungs, and, I realized, so was I. I pushed him down onto the floor and sat on top of him. I wrapped my hands around his throat and pushed down and squeezed as hard as I could. That familiar resistance, but I was stronger than that, I could press harder than that, and I was yelling and crying and my sweat and tears were dropping down onto his face. Billy was gasping, but I didn’t care. I’d already killed him a million times by now. I squeezed until his eyes changed and he faded away, but I didn’t move. I crouched over where he had been, my hands clawed and ready to squeeze if he came back. He didn’t.

Eventually I pushed the hair out of my eyes and took the bag of games. I didn’t touch the bag of weapons. I wanted nothing to do with them. I wiped my sweaty palm on my pants. I didn’t need weapons, anyway.

Downstairs, Rose greeted me with a knowing glance.

“May I have his games, Rose?” I asked in a voice that didn’t sound at all like mine. I was surprised when Rose brushed tears off of my face. I had thought I’d stopped crying long ago.

“Of course you may, dear,” she said. I was prepared to apologize for the screaming that she had heard, but she simply never asked. Maybe she had covered her ears and turned away from the sound. Perhaps she had done the same thing in his room late at night.

Billy didn’t show up in my room again. I don’t exactly know why that is. Maybe it’s because I killed him in anger with my bare hands. Or maybe it’s because now I know the truth. That he was frightened. That he screwed up. Maybe it’s because it turned out that we were both killers.

My dad is relieved now. No longer does he have to watch me throwing axes in the backyard. No more seeing me with guns and nooses made out of shoelaces and setting the shed on fire, screaming at myself. No more saying a prayer and locking his bedroom door against me at night, just in case, his trusty golf club by his side.

“I’m glad everything’s back to normal, Jake,” he told me. “You don’t know what a relief it is.” He turned to me, and I had to look away from his sincerity. “I know that Billy’s death has been hard for you, and things were rough for a while. But you’re coming out of this just fine. Something like this, and the way that you act under stress...well, it shows you just what kind of a person you really are.”

I glanced down at my killing hands, which were curled into fists.

Yeah. That’s exactly what I’m afraid of.

A PLACE SHIELDED FROM HORRORS

She carried a basket of warm muffins. They smelled of orange and lemon and had a rich, crumbly topping made out of brown sugar. She tripped over something on the floor and nearly dropped the basket. It was the tiger shark. He turned his head and growled at her, nipping at her ankles.

“Toby, no biting,” she said firmly, and tapped the shark’s blunt nose with the toe of her slipper. The shark snorted and swam across the carpet.

She had been here for days. Days and days, or even weeks. Months, perhaps, or as long as a year. She couldn’t tell. It was a beautiful place without windows. A home with a single door that assembled itself together like a puzzle made of different types of wood.

An orange puff meowed and clawed at her skirt. She set the muffins down on a table made of bone and picked up a green-eyed cat. He purred.

“How are you, my lovely, my perfect one?” The cat pushed his head into her neck, kneaded his paws into her shoulder. I love you, I love you, he told her silently. She understood.

She hugged him back and took him to the Water Room. Keeping her feet carefully away from the edge, she tossed the cat into the air. He sang a joyful note before splashing into the water, zipping around the floating furniture and stroking his way even deeper into nothing. His happy sounds created bubbles that floated to the surface and broke.

There was a knock at the door. Surprised, the girl danced over to answer it. It took several minutes to disassemble the door enough so a dark haired man could step through.

His hair was mussed and he held a bouquet of singing flowers. He peered at the girl with raised eyebrows.

“Perhaps I am lost?” he said almost hopefully. Toby the tiger shark prowled over to inspect him. He rubbed against the man’s leg several times, his rough skin fraying the corduroy of his pants. The man patted the shark’s dorsal fin absently, and Toby slid away from his hand.

“Perhaps,” the girl agreed. The flowers had their heads together like an old barbershop quartet. The man looked at them again and handed the bouquet to the girl. She accepted it graciously. The flowers applauded themselves and began a new song, something melancholy.

“How about something with more pep?” asked the girl, and the flowers switched to an old June Christy song.

“Lovely,” praised the girl, and the flowers beamed.

“Anyway,” she said to the handsome, dark-haired man, “what brings you here. Can I help you in some way?”

His head swiveled as he studied the room. “I’ve never seen a place quite like this. It’s extraordinary.” His gaze settled on the girl, whose hair floated around her face as though she were underwater. She smiled at him.

“It is quite wonderful,” she agreed. “Although I do get lonely. I was forgotten here, you see. I had a friend who used to visit quite often, but that was so very long ago. Perhaps he has changed, and I haven’t, and I will wander around this eccentric apartment reading poetry and evading the sun and keeping the horrors away from those who can’t do it themselves. I suppose this is loss. I wonder if I should be sad.”

The man didn’t have an answer for her, but he studied her face with eyes too serious and too angry for someone so young. The girl didn’t blush under his analytical gaze, but watched him carefully, and her smile grew even wider inside her heart.

“Ah, you have seen many horrors,” she said knowingly. The man nodded gravely, and didn’t flinch when she reached for his hand.

“Then that is why you are here,” she told him, and led him through the apartment. He wrapped his fingers around hers carefully, and listened as she spoke. “Don’t mind Toby; he’s a bit of a pest. I have a cat who loves to swim. He’s always in this room. Do you care for sweets? I have some fresh muffins, if you’d like one.” She chattered away and he listened, a stranger in a place shielded from horrors, his empty shoes left by the door, already being mauled by a curious tiger shark.

CROSSWISE COSMOS SABOTAGE

I am standing in the backyard wearing a red shirtwaist dress and heels like it’s the 1950s. I’m spraying something with the hose.

It’s my son.

“He likes it,” I tell my neighbors, who are staring at me over the fence. My son is hunched over with his hands covering his head. “It sounds like he’s crying, but really he’s laughing.”

It doesn’t matter what I say; my neighbor doesn’t speak much English. I hear him chattering to his wife as soon as he’s inside the sliding glass door. Maybe one of these days he’ll actually close it.

“Okay, that’s enough,” I say, and turn off the hose. My son raises his face to me, water running into his eyes. “Maybe Daddy will hose you down after work tonight.” I coil the hose neatly, ignoring my child as he throws himself backward on the ground. The grass is lush. He won’t hurt himself. The neighbor’s wife rushes to her window to peek at us. I smile brightly and wave, walking across the lawn on my tiptoes so my heels don’t sink into the grass. She disappears behind the curtains. My son is still screaming. I step inside my house, kick off my shoes, and slide the door closed. It dims the sound a little.

The doorbell rings, and I’m surprised. It’s the bug guy.

“I thought you were coming on Thursday,” I say.

“Nope, Tuesday.”

I don’t care; I’m just happy to see him. He’s letting the cool air out, so I take him by the sleeve and pull him inside. My daughter crawls over and grabs onto my skirt. I pick her up.

“What do you have?” The bug guy asks. He’s young and pretty. He has huge plugs in his ears, and although I don’t usually like that sort of thing, I like it on him. They say: “Hey, I’m not going to be a bug man forever. I’m going to be Rob Thomas.” It’s oddly endearing. My daughter reaches for his white work coat, and I switch her to the other hip.

“Cockroaches,” I say. “Big ones. Everywhere.” I tell him one crawled across the small of my back while I was sleeping the other day. I had been all curled into a ball. I tell him they could be a viable, renewable source of food if we could all just get over the
yick
factor. They live through anything.

“Not this stuff,” he says, and goes to work. “When this activates, they’re going to want to bail, right? But they’re all going to
die.”
His obvious joy over their demise makes me happy
.
Bloodthirsty. My son wanders in, still dripping. He takes one look at the bug guy and cries.

The bug guy looks at me.

“He doesn’t understand,” I say simply. The bug guy nods. I smile and call my son into his bedroom to change his clothes.

The doorbell rings again. It’s my neighbor from across the street and her terrible child. I want to beat the kid with a hairbrush. Most of us want to, but nobody ever mentions that to his mother.

The boy goes tearing off to cause damage and his mother sighs dramatically and sinks down at the table. “What a stressful day,” she says, and lays a hand against her forehead. She spies the bug guy, whistling cheerily as he sprays under the kitchen sink.

“Disgusting. You’re
infested
,” she says, and shudders exaggeratedly.

I hear something breaking in the back room, and go check. Her son has taken my jewelry box and thrown it into the bathroom sink. I come back to see the mom has my Coke bottle out on the table.

“So let me tell you about this day,” she says, and pours Coke into her glass. We both pretend not to notice how much of it she drinks. There won’t be any left for my real friend when she comes over, but I don’t mind that much. I’ve decided every sip she takes earns me another iris stolen from her garden.

My daughter pulls the tiny keys off the laptop keyboard and promptly starts choking. I lay her against my shoulder and whack her back until she spits it up on my shoulder. The ‘J’ key. Always a troublemaker.

There is sobbing from my son’s bedroom. The bug guy’s spray-gun looks like a giant hypodermic needle. I leave Neighbor and Boy to do as they will, and go check on my little one.

“We’ll be in here if you need us,” I tell the bug guy, and he nods.

I sit on my son’s bed, both kids on my lap. They snuggle against me. I read stories and my neighbor pops in with the phone.

“It’s your husband,” she says.

I take the phone. “Hi,” I say.

“She answered the phone like she lives there,” he says.

“It’s all part of her plan. Soon she’s going to kill me and just move in.”

“That would suck. I could never live on a vegetarian diet.”

I smile although he can’t see me. He knows this, laughs and hangs up.

There’s a hesitant knock on the door.

“Come in,” I say.

The bug guy opens the door to my son’s red and blue bedroom, looks around a little bit. He’s cute in the way that small children are cute. Puppies. I want to put him in a box with a warm towel and a hot water bottle.

“Your friend left,” he says. “The kid pulled down your blinds in the living room. His mom took a necklace out of that broken box in the sink. I don’t think I was supposed to see it.”

He holds out the paperwork for me to sign. I pat the bed next to me and he shoves over some stuffed animals and sits down. He’s not as scary without his equipment and my kids squirm over to him.

“When I was a kid,” I say, “I’d sit on my bed and pretend that it was a boat. I’d take the broom and paddle my way over to Hawaii.”

“My bed was always surrounded by molten lava,” he says.

I look at the paper again and smile. His name is Billy. I’m not surprised.

“I have a confession to make,” he says.

“What?”

“Your friend here asked for some spray to take home. I told her I can’t do that, but she kept bugging me. So finally, I gave her a squirt bottle.”

“What’s wrong with that?” I ask.

“It’s full of sugar water.”

I laugh, but he still looks worried.

“It’s okay,” I tell him. My son is trying to look under Billy the Bug Guy’s shirt. “For everything she does to me, I pay myself back in flowers from her garden.”

“Does she know?”

“Of course not. That would take the sport out of it.”

That night I get a phone call. It’s my fake neighbor friend.

“There was somebody in my yard,” she tells me. “Sneaking around. I think it’s a member of a gang.”

I don’t know what to say to this, but it doesn’t matter. She has more to share.

“I have ants,” she says. Her voice was trembling with, I want to say rage. “I have never had ants before. Never.”

I remember the sugar water and try not to crack up.

“And you have somebody coming up your drive. Somebody in a ball cap. Maybe it’s the gang member!”

The doorbell rings.

“He’s running away!” she hisses.

“Gotta go,” I say, and hang up.

I answer the door. Flowers are strewn all over the porch. Irises, cosmos, daffodils.

“Who is it?” asks my husband, coming up from behind me. The air smells sweet.

“Flowers,” I tell him.

“Where’d they come from?”

“The bug guy swiped fake neighbor friend’s flowers and then he ran away.”

My husband yawns. “Good for him. That took initiative.”

I take a flower from the porch and slide it behind my ear. There are enough blooms here to fill the tub.

Maybe I’ll do that.