Frail (20 page)

“I said I was surprised that
Mags
, you know, the
zombie
as was, I’m surprised whenever she sounds halfway human! And I am! All right? I’m surprised when any of them sound halfway human! It’s not like they think of themselves as human and I’m taking that away, now is it? They hate us! Work until you die, that’s us, then they feed off what’s left! Just like before! I’m not fucking talking about
humans
with Alzheimer’s!”

I turned away to stare into the depths of the garden. Weeds everywhere, predictably, clumps of shiny reddish leaves and patches of soft spring-green furze and a tiny vine with purple flowers I could see winding slowly, mercilessly around far bigger plants. Alzheimer’s. What if you were human before, with Alzheimer’s, and then you got plague sick and recovered and were stuck like that, forever? Who would take care of you, knowing you’d never die and let them catch a break? From the corner of my eye I saw Stephen, back on his feet, fingers curled vine-tight around the trowel and glowering at the peonies like he wanted to tear them in fistfuls out of the ground.

“Everything that’s happened,” he said, “and that’s what surprises you.”

I kept my eyes on the garden: a bush with huge, top-heavy creamy-lacey blooms already a mess of petals on the ground. Bright orange poppies, a vibrant deep orange with the petals blushing all over like skin. I used to think they only came in red.

You were right, I thought. You don’t scare me. Though I guess you got me to shut up anyway, just like Phoebe. Enjoy it.

“They surprise me too, Amy,” he said, something tangled in his voice like a snarl of hair too painful to comb out. “All the time, they do. But that doesn’t get me anywhere.”

I turned back to him, slowly. He’d stolen those CDs for me, and that fork. He could get in trouble. He was probably remembering someone old he’d seen die and he got upset.

“Are you and Natalie related?” I asked.

He blinked in surprise. “If we are,” he said, “it’s news to me. She came here without any family, just like me. Why did you think that?”

“I don’t know, I just did. Making up more stupid things to be surprised about.” I dug under my nails again, ignoring the rawskin feeling making me wince. “Why does everyone here act like she’s contagious?” And you too. Diseased. Though we don’t talk about that, we pretend not to see it even as it happens right in front of us. Nothing’s changed. Nothing’s changed anywhere.

“Amy—”

“Why are we even doing this?” I flung a hand at him, bent over the dirt again and scrabbling hard, a dog set on digging but all grimness instead of animal bliss. “I hate dandelion greens. Everyone hates them. It’s like when everyone was sick and eating the grass like goats.”

Stephen looked up at me, our faces inches apart. This close his bruised side had a yellowing tinge, greenish-yellow like those potato skins. The jaundiced ugliness of healing.

“I don’t know why we’re doing this,” he said. “I don’t know how the hell we ended up here at all.”

Fate. Ms. Czapla, my eighth-grade English teacher, she loved that I liked Greek myths, she said it was especially hard for an American to wrap their head around the Greek idea of Fate since our big myth was that anyone could do anything.
Hubris is in our national DNA,
she said,
we think every good thing we have we did all by ourselves
, and then told the story of Niobe. There was no Fate or destiny or grand plan, she said; life had no point at all, in the end, but to perpetuate itself. She got in trouble sometimes, talking like that to us kids. I don’t know what happened to her when the sickness came.

“Maybe we only find that out when we die,” I said.

He looked down at our hands, grime-caked and digging side by side. About to tell me just how full of it I really was.

“Have we met before?” he asked.

I frowned in surprise. “I’m serious,” he said. “There’s all sorts of holes all through my memory, things just keep dropping out and reappearing and I don’t know why. Maybe Natalie really is my sister. I don’t know.” He shrugged. “But, you say things that’d be crazy out of Phoebe’s mouth but right off I know what you mean, so—it just seems like we’ve talked before. Enough that we both know what to talk about and what to keep—”

He shut up quick, and got back to digging.

“I can’t remember stuff either,” I said. “There’s spaces where there shouldn’t be, like my mind’s this big mouth, biting down on reality, and there’s gaps all in the teeth.” I reached over and yanked out a clump of weeds, greens, something I couldn’t identify. “And things I do remember, it’s like they’re—pulsing, inside, but my head keeps shoving them away. Forgetting while I remember.”

He didn’t answer. Angry still, a taut vein of it pulsing through him with a soft, persistent beat like blood. So what? Jabber-jaw crazy or smoke-sucking angry, those were the only two choices left, and maybe he was only now coming out of a long stretch of crazy. That notebook of his, writing everything down because otherwise it might all vanish. My atlas, that I lost in the tornado.

“Only four of us lived,” I said. I sat back cross-legged on the grass. “Me and Kristin, and Dave, and Ms. Acosta. She kept saying to call her Alicia but I can’t think of her by her first name. She worked for my school. Her and Dave. I hid, we hid, in the school basement, when our town fell apart. A couple days later we found Kristin, in this little white stucco house near the school. She was holding her daughter who was dead from the disease. Suffocated. Her whole face, the little girl’s, it was so swollen and blue-black that her eyes just disappeared inside it. Swallowed up. Dave’s house had a wood-burning stove, and he knew how to hunt, so that’s where we went. That was us, the whole town.”

I hadn’t talked for months on end, not truly, not since I fled my uncle’s house, and now it poured from me like the rain in last week’s storm. “I should’ve maybe written things down, or something, but I couldn’t think straight enough, it’s like pieces of my brain got shoved around like blocks inside my head and—see, this is why I didn’t bother writing it down, I’m shit at describing things. It’s easier with songs, songs don’t have to make sense, they just have to sound
right
—”

“You write music?” he said. He was sitting next to me now, arms wrapped around his knees, the garden’s remains forgotten. His head, a shoulder would angle forward when he was really listening to you, I’d noticed that before.

“I used to. Stupid shit. I thought I was going to have my own band and live in Europe, and—it doesn’t matter what I thought. There’s no point.” My fingers curled around a shin, the denim rough and worn enough I could feel the fraying cords of the cloth like tiny wires losing their insulation. “Everybody thought they were going places, didn’t they? But we got shown up, shown up good. Me and Dave, and—and Kristin.”

Mourning doves. Those birds I kept hearing, when Lisa and Mags were with me, all over the place:
oooh-ahhh-wooo, woooo, wooooo
. And again, when I woke. I liked the sound of mourning doves, I always had before too; you would hear them calling from the grayness as the afternoon faded and you felt like something was saying it like it was, like their song was the perfect low, subdued sound to encapsulate the disappearance of the light. Onomatopoeia.

“Kristin was pregnant,” I told him. “And crazy from losing her other kids, or maybe just from being sick—she couldn’t stop throwing up for months, nothing went right.” That time Ms. Acosta found her lying on the floor with something wrapped around her neck, too weak to stand up and hang herself but trying to tug on it and strangle out her own life. Her hands were freezing, Kristin’s were, when we got that scarf or extension cord or whatever it was, I couldn’t remember, off her, her fingers never got properly warm again after that. “I promised her over and over again I’d take care of her baby, sometimes she’d make me say it dozens of times in a row and it didn’t work, none of it, Kristin died and it was—”

Skip to the next part. The part that came just afterward, the aftermath that mattered, it wasn’t sayable.

“It was stillborn,” I said.

I stared down at my jeans, the little coronas of worn threads turning to fuzz. Stephen turned the onion bag over in his hands, cradling our few finds through the cloth.

“I wrote a lot of music,” I said. “That’s what I was going to do with my life. My mom, she was never all over me to go to college instead.” Something inside me was thin and delicate like a shell, mentioning her to Stephen, and I couldn’t let it break, what spilled out of that particular crack inside me would never stop. “She always said,
when
you have a band. Not if. She said I could do it, that—I wrote a lot of songs. But I’ve lost them all.”

“You must remember some of them.” He actually almost smiled. “I mean, I wouldn’t be able to, but—”

I laughed and then felt rotten about laughing, but he didn’t seem to mind. “Of course I remember some of them.”

“Then could I hear them sometime?”

He asked that with respect, a respect I could feel. Like he understood you don’t just casually ask someone to share that huge part of themselves, scoop out bits of their insides and offer up the tasty pulp any time they want the flavor. Respect, and the near certainty of being refused.

“Not now,” I said. There was something stuck in my throat like bits of that hard thin dry shell all inside me, the idea of singing around that felt impossible. “Maybe later. Like, maybe later for real, I’m not just saying that to—I can’t, right now. But when I can.”

The bushes rustled and all sorts of things I couldn’t quite see hurried through it. I hoped none of them ended up in the kitchen traps and snares, it wasn’t fair, but then neither was any of this. Stephen wouldn’t stop looking at me and I kept my eyes on my folded-up shins, the muddy rubber of my shoe toes.

“There’s a huge old community garden, over at Fisher and Elbert Gary Place,” he said. “There’s bits still fallow where we might find stuff. I’ll head over and you finish up here, meet me when you’re ready.”

“Okay.”

He put out a hand and we helped each other up; one of my feet buzzed and stung, tucked under my leg too tightly, and I rocked back and forth on it until it stopped.

“I could’ve saved her baby,” I said. “Kristin’s. But it just—things didn’t go my way. I would’ve done it.” My foot worked the dirt like a sewing pedal, tingling toes pushing down, then back. “Fed it. Done everything. I would’ve done anything, to keep it alive.”

Stephen didn’t answer. Just looked so sad, just for that split second, it was like he might decide to forget to breathe.

His fingers around mine were gritty and knobbly and scrapingdry, like ancient parsnips pulled from drought-dry soil, and I felt a pang inside when he slid them slowly away and let go. He picked up the full onion bag, the one with all our music in it, and left me the lighter one.

“Fisher,” he said. As if I’d suddenly forget. Maybe that was what it was like for him. His papers, carried place to place because without one reminder after another he’d be lost. I nodded.

“Fisher,” I said.

He walked off. The garden looked so picked over and dug up the more I trudged through it, those pretty poppies to stare at but all the edible parts reduced to scraggly little tufts, that I shook my head and thought, Fuck it, I’m leaving now. Can’t dig up all the onions anyway, the gardening crew needed those as reserves. I tilted my chin to the sky, the darkness overhead thin and clear to the eye as a cup of plain tea.

“Kristin’s baby was stillborn,” I told it. Because sometimes there were certain things I needed to say out loud, when no one else could hear me. “My mother is alive. Kristin’s baby never was.”

There was a sudden little tremor in my pocket, and my cell phone, my stone-cold doornail of a birthday phone, let out a squawky, urgent beep: the text message sound. They found me. They found me again, whoever first somehow made it ring and somehow left no traces behind found me again and—my stomach dropped and I paced around for a few moments there in the soft soil, trying to calm down, more nervous the more I put it off, and then slid my hand in. 1 NEW MESSAGE—

LIAR, it said, flat and quiet. ALL LIES.

Then the screen went dead.

THIRTEEN

B
ack in March, just a few weeks ago, there was a storm that came in fast and thin, that winter thinness of cold sharp air sweeping through a gray sky and bare tree branches and over depleted ground because there wasn’t anything growing there to stop it, and then it turned thick with wetness and mushy snow that dissolved into clumps of sleet. Drippings and snifflings. I shivered and pulled on two more sweaters and made myself stay away from the woodpile Dave had left us, we were rationing it now thinking no point wasting it on late winter, but Ms. Acosta stood by the window smiling, almost her old pompous fluttery self again. Kristin lay on the sofa like always, face pressed to the arm.

“See that, Amy?” Ms. Acosta said, sharp beaky chin angling to motion me toward the window. She’d given up even trying to talk to Kristin, barely seemed to notice she was in the same room. “That’s a spring sleet, right there, all wet and loose and . . . disjointed, and a lot of it’s not sticking. Spring really is coming. We’ve started getting through it.” She smiled, wider and so much happier than her careful cautious words, and put an arm around my shoulders as I approached. “We’re really almost through the winter—”

“Snow is wet and loose,” I pointed out. “And that’s not
spring sleet
, it’s another ice storm.” There’d been one three weeks back that took down a whole row of power lines, which at least didn’t factor when you hadn’t had electricity in ages. “I know you have to take what you can get when it’s barely March, but—”

“It’s not an ice storm. See? It’s subsiding already, it’s not washing over everything. Winter’s running out of steam.” There was a sour smell to her, this close up, not only from armpit and mouth but her anemically faded hair, the folds of her own jackets and sweaters; it didn’t bother me, I’d already become so quickly used to the aroma of unwashed body. “Things’ll be better now. We can go out there, plan a garden, clean up a few things—maybe look for some more people. We’re almost through the worst of it, Amy.”