Frail (19 page)

Lisa just stood there, pondering this still and quiet. Something small and high-voiced called out from one of the trees,
oooh-ahhh-wooo, woooo, wooooo
, then the leaves rustled and it flew away.

“My sister’s a good person,” Lisa replied. Fingertips shoved in her jeans pockets, idly rocking back and forth on the side of a sneakered foot. “A good human being. Living and dead. Though she wouldn’t ever believe it herself, no matter what anyone said to her. She just wants to be left alone, live whatever sort of life this is we’ve all got now—she’s not out threatening unchanged humans, enslaving them, making them run and fetch for her and feed her like some overgrown screaming infant. She’s out in the woods, hunting for herself. You’re her family?” Lisa took a step forward, the quick, strutting step of someone ready and aching to fight. “Go on and tell her that. You
find
her, if you can, and tell her that. Because family or no family, she wouldn’t want anything to do with you, the way you are now.”

I held my breath, waiting for Mags to rear up, snarl, jump on her striking and biting like a cat teased past its limit. Instead Mags just stood there sagging in her own skin, a big soft deflated balloon with all her bravado a lost exhaled breath.

“No,” she said to Lisa. Completely calm. “She probably wouldn’t. The way we are now. She’s not the only one.”

Completely calm. So sad. Those eyes so pale and clear that you’d never see tears coming until they spilled over and rushed down her face, but she wasn’t anywhere near the brink. It wasn’t grief that I saw, but regret. She glanced at me again, and frowned.

“Fuck off to work,” she said.

I fucked off to work. Only nodding quick at Lisa as I left without trying to catch a glance, both because lingering might really set Mags off and because that face of Lisa’s that I’d seen, the hungry angry thing huddled up behind her eyes like a bear in a cave, it scared me and that wasn’t fair after Lisa had kept me safe over and over again. It was my own fear I didn’t want her seeing. She wouldn’t have done that to me, what she did to Phoebe, even if I pushed her.

Unless she forgot, like sometimes tamed animals forget themselves, or decide they’ve had enough. Except she’d never been close to tame in the first place. She just kept trying to tame herself. I wasn’t jealous of Naomi anymore, didn’t feel like she was taking anything from me. I just hoped she was safe, in Lisa’s care, the gazelle on whom the lioness took pity.

What they didn’t understand was that the person folks should really be afraid of was me.

TWELVE

A
l, Bonnie, Alice were on water duty. They were the only humans on the kitchen crew authorized to go past the gates, down to the Prairie Beach neighborhood where they could access Lake Michigan water: hard, heavy, grueling work, filling all those containers and hauling them into the back of an ex guard’s pickup truck and then unloading and going back for another. I was glad I wasn’t allowed. The second they left, Stephen steered us out the door on a garden scavenge, leading me into a tiny white bungalow at the corner of Milstead and Braeburn.

“What about the onions?” I asked, as he shone his flashlight all through the living room. Stephen kicked idly at the carpet, bringing up a cloud of dust.

“In a minute,” he said, and motioned with his flashlight, glancing out an uncurtained window as if he thought someone were watching. “Over here.”

We surprised a little nest of mice, darting away from our feet swift as big sleek silverfish, and then we were in what must’ve been the dining room, a dollhouse-tiny chandelier and one of those god-awful vista murals painted on the wall and a big wooden table with one wonky leg. Piled up on the tabletop, sliding from their moorings thanks to the short leg, were dozens of CDs. Stephen stood back, still aiming the flashlight at the table, a museum curator showing off some new exhibit.

“I collected them,” he said, “from some of the other houses. And this one. I wouldn’t know what’s good, you pick.”

His voice was impatient, almost brusque, like I’d nagged him into foraging for me, but it hardly mattered. Music. I started sifting through them, wiping the grimy plastic covers clean with my fingers, my own private garage sale: Dirty Little Whirlwind—that one CD of theirs that everyone had—and Kelp’s first album, and Bellepheron’s first album, and a Nina Simone best-of my mom had had. I loved how deep and furious she sounded, like a righteous tide coming in sweeping every dirty thing off shore. I was glad she’d died before all of this happened. Sins of Our Fathers’ third CD, crap for the dustbin. Some hip-hop I vaguely knew, a string quartet—I liked violins—I made myself stop, we needed room for the onions. Stephen watched, unsmiling, his hands curled around the tabletop; his fingers were long and thin, knobbly and bulging around the knuckles like they were swollen up from overwork. And probably were. I opened the CD cases, one by one, just to make sure they weren’t empty.

“Al won’t let me play half of these,” I reminded him. “You were right, if it’s not Ornette Coleman or whoever, he doesn’t want to know—are you allowed to hoard these?”

He shrugged. I loaded up the bag, let him sling it over his shoulder, and we went back outside to nose around deserted neighborhood gardens, seeking out promising bits and pieces of edible green like any actual four-legged rabbit. I remembered my Safety and Crisis Management classes from high school, Ms. MacAllister’s fat rump in clingy pink polyester making us giggle every time she turned around and her thickened, clammy fingers like moist potato slices pointing to the old 1930s USDA poster: IF THE TOWN GATES CLOSE, CAN YOU STILL FEED YOUR FAMILY? START A “HAZARD GARDEN” TODAY. I never paid attention, during the gardening parts. I hated crouching down in the sun, sweating, grabbing stray handfuls of poison ivy weeding, driving soil so far under my nails that it hurt trying to dig it out.

Everybody living here had been good, while they were alive; they nearly all had dedicated hazard patches to root through. I found a clump of what looked like dandelion greens, tugged it up. The night air was perfect, that cool half-wet freshness that smelled and felt like being enveloped in a single new soft spring leaf.

“Phoebe came by the kitchens,” Stephen said. His fingers hovered over a clump of mushrooms, tiny little deep orange tabletops at the base of an oak. Of course Billy or Mags wouldn’t lose a beat if he slipped them a toadstool. “Jabbering, like—”

“She keeps acting like she knows stuff about me,” I said. Dandelion greens were bitter as hell anyway, why was I scrounging for them? Rather have the instant rice. “Like a couple days ago at dinner, you saw it.”

Stephen sat down next to me. In the moonlight the bruising on the side of his face looked like a great smudge of dirt, charcoal ash smeared on his skin; it was almost reassuring, a mark of mutual humanity. Our defanged voices, our fragile skin, our frail little bodies that won’t just up and heal. A whole race of turtles who’ve forever lost their shells.

“I shut her up,” he said. “She started talking, and talking, like she does, like there’s a damned windup key all in her back, and I shut her the hell up. It was my pleasure.”

Something fierce crossed his face, heat flaring suddenly from the dead ashen debris of a fire pit, and he laughed, dry and rasping, like a cigarette cough. The sound of it made me hope he never found anything funny again.

“She can’t help it,” I said. Phoebe running hunched over and tripping over her own feet, half-crying, still cradling the arm Lisa had hurt. “I hate her too but she can’t help it, she’s crazy—”

“Oh, you’re right about that,” he said, and laughed again. Just sucking in that smoke. “Everything she does is crazy, says, thinks—”

“What did you do?” Sharp, verging on angry, because I wouldn’t be made to feel sorry for her, but his eyes, his laugh, I didn’t like them right now at all. “One of the exes almost broke her arm tonight, I hope you didn’t decide to finish the—”

“I scared her,” he said. So calm. He tugged the orange mushrooms out by the roots. “I just told you that. Scared her enough to shut up and go away. I didn’t need to hurt her.” He turned, looked me square in the face. “I’m good like that. When I want to be.”

I looked him right back. Eyes so dark you couldn’t see to the bottom of them, thick smears of paint that never quite dried. We had gray eyes, my mother and I, like Mags did. I’d always wanted eyes like his, that deep opaque brown that’s nearly black; light eyes illuminated too much inside you, glass instead of paint. Left you too exposed.

“Is that supposed to scare me?” I said.

“No.” No more smiling. “There isn’t much scares you, really. I don’t think. So why would I try?”

He held up a mushroom, waxen and caked in dirt, already bruising like his face from the light touch of his fingertips; he bit off half the cap, chewing methodically, swallowing. I waited. Nothing happened. Maybe it wouldn’t until tomorrow. I’d seen wild mushrooms in the woods near Dave’s house a lot of times, foraging in the fall when our food was already running thin, but I never dared touch them.

“The thing is,” Stephen said, “Phoebe thinks you remind her of someone.” He ran his free hand through his hair, standing it up on thick bristly ends and then letting it collapse. “I guess someone from her precious lab. She thinks you’re holding back something big, something you’ll use to get things you want. Things she wants, like getting back to Prairie Beach. To whatever she thinks is still going on there.” He snorted, took another bite of mushroom. “She’s welcome to it, what went on there was—anyway. That’s what she thinks.” Another bite and he made a face at the mushroom’s aftertaste, licked at his lips like a cat. “I mean, you never were there, right? Even just sneaking in, like kids used to try to do sometimes?”

Too casual, that question, and he knew I knew it. I waited until he looked up again, then deliberately bit a mushroom in half. A little rubbery, a bit earthy, a faint bland sourness like soil slowly transmuting to wax. I waited. Nothing happened.

“I don’t know what the hell she’s talking about,” I said, and licked dirt from my fingertips like sugar. There was something oddly comforting about the tangerine color of the cap. “My dad was a steelworker. My mom—nobody I know worked for the labs. I’ve never been halfway near the beaches in my life. So I guess she really is just crazy, and I get to be her crazy fixation. Lucky me.”

Weirdly that was almost a letdown, a slumping feeling inside, like I’d been on the verge of some horrible but truly interesting revelation about . . . something or other, and it all came to naught. It was the boredom of this place, the boredom of every place now, the utter tedium of putting one foot in front of the other, in front of the other, every day, hour, minute . . . for what? My cell phone was stone dead now, nobody ever called me back. Farther from my mother than I’d ever been. Lisa had Naomi now, I didn’t hate either of them for it but it was still true. Me, I was treading water. Sliding backward, like a moving glacier. I finished off the mushroom.

“Phoebe thinks she knows Lisa too,” I told him. “And so does Mags.”
Jessie’s Lisa.
Whoever this Jessie was, Lisa’s lost sister. I didn’t think much of them both together, to be honest, if they’d had each other’s company and then just decided one day to throw it away. I wouldn’t have behaved like that. I knew what I had before I ever lost it.

“Maybe she does,” Stephen said, pulling himself to his feet, offering me a hand up. He didn’t seem particularly interested now. “Bully for them. Time for an onion hunt.”

I was expecting more stumbles through knee-high weeds but the patch of ex-garden was right there, big patches of dirt still untouched by grass and with the telltale long, slender spring onion shoots poking from the depths; some thinner ones too, that might be garlic. I dug carefully around the edges of a bulb. “Anyway,” I said, “Phoebe was jabbering at me and then Lisa and Mags showed up, thank God, never thought I’d say thank God for Mags, and then Mags got really weird—”

“She hurt you?” Stephen glanced up from where he knelt, an onion bulb in each hand.

“God, no—she was going on and on about her old gang, I mean, her gang back when she was really dead. And then she was talking about her childhood or something, I guess, when she was human and alive. Alive for the first time. It’s just . . . weird, isn’t it? I mean, I always thought they were just sort of bags of flesh, walking around. Bags of rotten flesh with nothing inside.”

That seething, swollen thing that looked at my mother like he knew her. Like he was trying to tell her something. I pushed him from my mind, even though it’d been him who took away everything I had, before any of this ever started. “But they think and feel like we do—I mean, they’ve got whole histories inside them, everything that happened before they died. They remember everything. Everything a human remembers, about their own past. Isn’t that weird? They’re actual people. I’m sorry, I guess that sounds stupid but I’ll never get over it—”

“So that’s your yardstick,” Stephen said. He was just kneeling there now, the trowel idle. “How good someone’s memory is.”

His voice was distant, and far too brittle. I stopped digging and slid one fingernail under another, sawing at the grounddown dirt. “My yardstick of what?”

“Whether they get to be human or not.” Staring back at me now, detached and cold. “Whether you, yourself, deign to think of them as a person.”

What the hell had I said? “I didn’t—”

“So the more you remember, the more human you are. And if you can’t remember it, you can’t
think
, for any reason? That’s that for that. Good to know. Takes care of anyone with Alzheimer’s, or who got hit on the head, or just has trouble stringing their thoughts together for any—”

“That isn’t what I said.” I threw the onion bag onto the grass. “That’s not what I said at all, and you know it.”

“I do, huh?” His eyes were sparking. “Yeah. I do. I’m not fucking deaf, and you just said—”