Hugo & Rose (25 page)

Hugo was looking around. “You're Summer Cameron. That's how she dressed.”

Rose looked at Hugo. He, too, had been transformed, though he was still Hugo. Or rather a version of Hugo. He looked to be about sixteen. His skin was raw with acne, his hair spiked and short, a thin line of a rattail ran down the back of his neck. Plastic-rim glasses. Pleat-front acid-washed jeans. A well-loved “Rush” T-shirt.

“This isn't the island.”

They were in a stairwell, the concrete landing between two flights. Rose took in the institutional metal railings, the gray-painted blocks.

“This is my high school.” Hugo was taking it in.

He turned and looked at her again. “Oh God.”

“What?”

“You're Summer Cameron.”

“You said.”

“You're the girl I had a crush on. You never talked to me, but then one day you brought me down here to make out after school.”

Rose was frustrated. Between her legs the
want
that Hugo had been building was still there, embers waiting to be blown into a flame. “That's kind of hot.”

She wrapped her hands around him and pulled him into the wall.
Why were they here?
She didn't care. She wanted to feel Hugo against her body … even if it looked to him like this high school bimbo's.

“No!” He pushed away from her violently, fear in his voice.

“Hey, asshole!” a young male voice echoed down at them.

Rose looked up. A crew of jocks in letter jackets leaned over the metal guardrail above them, their faces caught in cruel grins.

Hugo started shaking his head, his breath short. “No. No.” He put his hands at his groin, attempting to cover the huge erection that strained at the pleat of his jeans.

“Dude!” Above, the jocks were pointing. “Loser!”

Their laughter bounced off the close walls, turning their trio into a chorus.

Hugo looked at Rose. “She did it on purpose. They put her up to it. To humiliate me.”

Rose's heart ached at the look of pain in Hugo's eyes. The way he was trying to hunch over to hide evidence of his arousal. “This really happened?”

She took a step toward him and heard a soft splash. Rose looked down. The lace of her anklets bobbed, lifting in a pool of cold water.

“What the—”

Rose turned her head. The whole stairwell below them was submerged, flooding from below. Through the gray water Rose could make out the steps of the stairwell. It was rising fast from below … already the lace of her socks was underwater, the edge creeping closer to her knees.

“Oh, God.” Hugo's face was stricken. White with panic. Staring at the water at their feet.

“What's going on, Hugo?”

Above them the jocks were still laughing. Their cackles were loud in Rose's ears. Hugo seized her hand and pulled them toward the upper stairwell, dragging Rose away from the flooding stairs. “Come on!”

“What's happening?”

They crested the stairs, water dripping from their legs, painting wet Rorschach blots onto the concrete steps.

Hugo blew past the still laughing and pointing jocks, his fingers digging into Rose's hand. “We have to get back to the island!”

Rose's ankle twisted, pink heel giving way under the slippery linoleum, but Hugo kept dragging her, yanking her down the tiled hallway of classrooms. Frantic, he began opening doors, revealing the fluorescent-lighted desks and chalkboards within. Portraits of the presidents, inspirational quotes.

“Hugo, I don't understand.”

He dragged her to another door, twisting the lever and pushing it open. The door vibrated as it hit a wall of file cabinets. “This place isn't safe. We have to get back.”

Rose looked back at the end of the hall. The jocks were still there, laughing and pointing, their grins monstrously huge. Gray water broke from the threshold of the stairwell and was spilling over their ankles, reaching its way down the corridor.

Hugo spotted something across the hall. Through the wire-laced safety-glass window of a classroom door, they spotted a curl of pink sand. A glimpse of a turquoise sea. The cloudy promise of the island.

“Come on!” He hauled Rose toward the door.

The thin line of clear water approached them. The leading edge of the spilled contents of a mop bucket. At the end of the hall, the jocks were waist-deep, laughing monsters, their eyes pinpricks beneath their rictus smiles.

“Hugo…”

Rose felt him yank her inside the classroom and shut the door. She turned.

This was definitely not what they had seen through the door. Pink sand blanketed the floor of what looked to be a boy's bedroom from the late 1970s.
Star Wars
sheets on the bed. Rock'em Sock'em Robots nestled in a hollow between dunes. A flip-board alarm clock at the bedside.

Rose was reminded of her best friend's older brother's room when she was a girl. That stale young-male smell. The scent of sweat socks and ringer tees.

“Where are we?” she asked, but Hugo was lost in thought. Taking in the details. His hand found a small Matchbox Camaro on the desk in the corner, his finger tracing the outline of the wheels.

“Hugo?”

A shadow passed by the window and Rose went to it. Looking outside.

Wherever they were, they were on the second floor. Rose looked down on a placid scene. A flat river in the distance. An expanse of scrubby grass. A dirt road leading to a gravel drive. And a car—the make flew into Rose's head—a Subaru wagon.

Instantly Rose knew that the car didn't belong. It was out of place. She was peering through the window into another time. In this room, it was the seventies … but out there, it was a more recent past.

There was someone in the car. Two someones. Rose squinted and leaned into the glass.

“That's me,” she said, and it was.

But it wasn't her. Not the dream her. It was the “her” that lived in the waking world, glaring out at the house through the windshield. Her face was angry, ugly, her mouth a thin line as she turned the ignition.

Movement drew Rose's eye to the passenger seat. Two small hands pressed up against the dash.
Penny.
Unsecured, next to her in the front seat, her daughter smiled and waved up at her.
Hi, Momma. Bye, Momma.

Rose's dormant mind suddenly regained its lost strength.
Penny not in a car seat? In the front of a car? She would never … not in a million years.

Rose felt Hugo by her side at the windowsill. He wasn't looking at the car below them. He was looking at the river, panic spreading. He looked to Rose the way he had the day she showed herself to him in the Orange Tastee. Sweaty with fear.

“We can't be here! We can't be here!” he cried.

*   *   *

Rose awoke certain that Hugo had punched her. That he had flailed out in his attempt to wake himself and connected with the meat between her breast and shoulder. Pain radiated from that site, yanking Rose out of her slumber.

Hugo, for his part, was panting by the side of the bed. He had thrown himself off of it, distancing himself from Rose and the dream. His panic still following him.

“Hugo?”

He put his hand up. Blocking the sight of her from his eyes … blocking her from seeing his face. A small sound eked out of him.

Rose sat up. There was too much to think about. They had not been on the island. She had not been herself. There had been other people.

Rose started as a yellow
thing
jumped onto the bed. The cat.

It rubbed itself against Rose's elbow and made its way up to the nightstand. And then she noticed the time on the flip-board alarm clock. It was six
P.M.

“Oh, my God.”

*   *   *

Rose's skin was salty with dried sweat by the time she pulled into the garage. The ride home had been torturously long. She had driven without the radio on, her car tomb quiet. The better to hear her own thoughts,
Idiot.

Rose sat quiet and stewed in the things that had occurred while she had been having Hugo's nightmare. She knew that the boys had gotten home from school and that no one had been there to let them inside. She knew that Penny had been with the Widow Delvecchio much longer than either her daughter or the old woman could tolerate. She knew that there were certainly hundreds of missed calls on her cell phone and that Josh had likely been called from work. She knew that she was at least an hour's drive away from her home and that her husband would be waiting for her on the other end of that drive … full of the knowledge of where she had been.

Her husband, who had not replied to her text that she would be home in an hour.

His silence frightened her the most.

The door to the garage squealed as she opened it. The house was dark, though Rose could tell by the flickering blue light and the nattering sound track of an animated movie that her family was home. Of course the house was dark. She was the one who turned on the lights, setting the mood for each time of the day. She was the one who clicked on the lamps and turned off the overheads after dinner was finished, signaling to everyone that the time had come to slow down. She was the one who pulled the shades in the morning and drew them at night.

Josh was more binary. Lights were on if he needed them, off if he didn't. When they had first lived together, it had taken Rose a while to adjust to the fact that she might come home from work to find Josh in a dark apartment, a single bulb lighting his textbooks.

Rose stepped into the family room. Addy and Zackie sat on the couch, blank faces, entranced by the television. Penny had fallen asleep on the floor, rump in the air, head to the side, rosebud mouth pressed against the carpet. They were all still in their day clothes, and Rose could make out ketchup stains on Addy's shirt. Fast food, the dinner of last resort.

“Hi, Mom.” Isaac lifted his hand vaguely. He didn't even look away from the screen.

Rose walked into the kitchen, stopping at the threshold.

Josh was at the table, his shape little more than a silhouette against the windows. She could make out that he was still in his scrubs, a polar fleece jacket the only indication he wasn't prepping for surgery.

He did not look at her.

“The boys waited for two hours on the porch before a neighbor finally saw them.” Rose could hear the sound of his lips meeting, the fleshy pause. “They pulled me out of the OR. Adam couldn't stop crying. They thought you were dead.”

“I—”

Josh ignored her. “This life we have, this is all I've ever wanted … I thought it was what you wanted.”

“I do want it.” Rose's voice sounded whiny and small in the darkness.

“Then … why?”

“Hugo—”

Josh exploded: “Is not real! None of this is real, Rose!”

“Mr. David told us he's Hugo. This morning.”

Rose turned. It was Adam, a few feet behind her, his face side-lit by the sputtering light from the television. Rose's mind was suddenly filled with the image of Hugo bending over her boys in the backyard. The way they had been whispering.

“He told us he and Mommy have been best friends since forever. That they live in each other's dreams.”

At this Josh stood so quickly that the chair under him fell back, bouncing off the floor. He barreled toward Rose and Adam, and for a moment Rose thought he was going to hit the boy. But then he was ripping the car keys out of her hand and continuing. He launched himself up the stairs, taking them three at a time.

“Is Daddy okay?” Adam's little face tilted up toward her.

No, Little Boy, no. Daddy is not okay. And neither is Mommy. None of this is okay.

But she did not say it. And then Josh was back. Thundering down the stairs. In the darkness Rose could make out a rectangle of paper in his hand. The envelope from the comic, Hugo's address in neat script in the upper right corner.

He blew past her, on the way to the garage.

“Josh.” He did not reply, footsteps loud and large in the house. “Josh!”

The door to the garage slammed. Rose did not have to guess where her husband was going.

She did not try to stop him.

 

seventeen

Josh had large fingers punctuated by a set of particularly knobby knuckles. His fingernails were short, well trimmed, their cuticles dry and callused, a casualty of the lengthy hand washing that preceded the practice of his profession.

When he had been in medical school, before he started his surgical residency, Josh used to stare at the large phalanges radiating out from his palm and wonder if in the end it would be his fingers that would betray him … if it would be his large hands that would keep him from being the surgeon he had always dreamed of being. He worried that his hands would fail him and he would end up in some lesser field in which dexterity wasn't quite as important: dermatology, perhaps, or pediatrics.

But as it turned out, Josh's hands, though large, were quite adept. He had “the touch.” He was gentle and precise with the scalpel. His sutures were small and neat. He was inordinately proud of this last fact, often electing to “finish up” himself when he could have had one of the interns do it. He rather liked the meditative quality of moving that thin needle in and out in a clean, straight line—the symbolic restoration of order to the chaos of the injured human body.

Even the largeness of his hands had turned out to be an asset. In his residency, Josh was a favorite of the older surgeons, who preferred him, with his long reach and wide hand span, over his shorter-statured colleagues. A long reach meant he wasn't crowding them to maintain his angle. Large hands meant a less tenuous grip on the slippery innards.

Once he learned that his hands were not going to let him down, Josh came to love them. They were, after all, the way he earned his living.

Because of this, Josh, for all his schooling and pride, would occasionally think of himself as little different from an auto mechanic. His job was to fix a machine (albeit a human one) that was not working correctly by using a specific set of tools that he manipulated with his hands. The level of peril was different—obviously no one is likely to die immediately if a mechanic accidentally cuts an antifreeze line—but nonetheless, both professions are dependent upon the dexterity of one's hands.