The Air We Breathe
Read The Air We Breathe Online
Authors: Christa Parrish
Tags: #General Fiction, #FIC026000, #Female friendship—Fiction, #Psychic trauma—Fiction, #Teenage girls—Fiction, #FIC042000
© 2012 by Christa Parrish
Published by Bethany House Publishers
11400 Hampshire Avenue South
Bloomington, Minnesota 55438
Bethany House Publishers is a division of
Baker Publishing Group, Grand Rapids, Michigan
Ebook edition created 2012
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—for example, electronic, photocopy, recording—without the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.
ISBN 978-1-4412-1315-0
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress, Washington, DC.
Most Scripture quotations are from the Holy Bible, New International Version®. NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.™ Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide.
www.zondervan.com
Other Scripture quotations are from the King James Version of the Bible.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, incidents, and dialogues are products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Cover design by Gearbox
Author represented by William K. Jensen Literary Agency
To Carol Parrish, my grandmother—
Sometimes a love of words grows in families.
M
OLLY
F
EBRUARY
2009
She wanted to poke out Elvis’s eyes. He stared at her from the corner—the young King, not the old, sweaty, fat one—in his suit of shiny white, clutching a microphone in his wax hand, his molded face frozen in his signature twisted-lip grimace.
Louise had moved him out front because “The King” brought the tourists in. There weren’t any tourists on Dorsett Island, in February, but her mother opened the wax museum every day of the year, except Thanksgiving and their vacation time between Christmas Eve and New Year’s. Even if Uncle Mick hadn’t required it, Louise probably would have done the same. She needed purpose to her days. All the dusting of displays and painting new scenery would be meaningless without the
potential
of someone coming through the museum doors.
Molly took a pushpin from the counter drawer, tore a page from her notebook, and covered Elvis’s face with it, jabbing
the pin into the middle of his forehead. His hair would hide the hole. Maybe now she could finish her history homework.
Tap. Tap. Tap.
Her pink eraser bounced up each time she thumped it against the oak counter. She held the sharpened tip between her pointer and thumb, graphite filling her fingerprints. She rolled the pencil along the wood; it limped unevenly because of its six-sided shape, and stopped, quivering before falling still. Molly rubbed her fingertips across a sheet of paper, smears of pencil-lead storm clouds forming on the white.
No one would come in today.
The wheeled stool squawked as she shifted on it. She moved again, perched almost birdlike on the padded seat, feet hooked in the metal bars. Another squawk. The building had all sorts of sounds to it—one big cacophony of air clattering through old pipes, of the television constantly playing in her mother’s office, of shifting floors, and of toilets that didn’t stop running unless Molly remembered to jiggle the handle.
Across the narrow street, Tobias parked in front of Island Pizza & More, his Civic dressed in magnetic signs declaring Free Delivery, the letters floating above a simple sketch of a red lobster holding a slice of pepperoni pizza in his claw. The
More
indicated typical Maine tourist fare—chowders and seafood salads and fried fish. Neon signs taped in the restaurant window advertised lobster roll platters for $11.99, plus tax.
She walked to the window and watched him through a palm-sized worn patch in the blue F of the window lettering—Lou’s HOUSE OF WAX, with
Lou
written in script letters and balanced on the corner of the H in HOUSE.
During the summer, tourists came in demanding, “Who’s Lou? Is there really a Lou?” and sometimes her mother would appear from the back and say, “You’re looking at her.” Uncle
Mick’s father had been named Lou. When talking to Mick about the caretaker job, her mother had told him her name was Louise. He slapped his dirty denim thigh and said, “Guess it’s meant to be,” and Louise pinched Molly’s upper arm through the sleeve of her winter coat. A warning.
Keep your mouth shut.
That had been a long time ago.
As he got out of his car, Tobias looked back at her, and she slipped her hand over her peephole. Moments later, the front entrance opened and he walked through, a cackle of menacing recorded laughter greeting him from the speaker in the corner above the door, angled downward so the sound tumbled atop his head.
“Man, I hate that, even though I know it’s coming.” He tilted a small pizza box at her. “Garlic knots. Frank got the order wrong. Again. Want them?”
“Okay, I guess.”
“You guess? The best garlic knots outside Brooklyn and you only guess you want them. I’m wounded.”
She smiled, head turned away from him, tilted to the floor. The flat brown carpet was littered with little Ts of white, the ridges she plucked off the margin of her spiral-notebook paper. She brushed at them with her toe, trying to move them under the counter, but they stuck, stubborn and thin. “Do you have sauce, too?”
“Molly Fisk,” Tobias said, setting the box on the counter and flipping back the lid, “for you, anything.”
A small container of marinara waited in the corner. She popped off the cover, squeezing too hard, the chunky orange sauce spilling over her fingers. She didn’t want to lick them in front of Tobias. “Napkins?”
“Well, not anything.” He laughed, and Molly smiled for the second time that day. The only times that day.
Something fell from the ceiling into the pizza box, a black speck with legs. She nudged the shelled body over and onto its feet, exposing a tomato-colored back and four inky spots, like the tip of a marker dabbed onto the beetle’s wings.
“I don’t think you should be awake yet,” Molly said, blocking its path with her finger. The beetle hesitated, then crawled onto her skin. She held it up to Tobias.
“Did you ever make a wish on one of these?” he asked.
She shook her head.
“Really? When we were kids, my brother and I would find ladybugs and make a wish, and then blow them away home.”
“They’re beetles, actually. Coccinellids. And there are more than five thousand different types.”
“Of beetles?”
“No—ladybugs. There are like three hundred thousand species of beetles.”
“They could take over the world.”
Molly laughed a little. “Possible.”
“How do you know all this bug stuff?”
She wanted to say,
my father
. “Wikipedia is my friend.”
“You should be an etymologist.”
“Entomologist.”
“I said that, didn’t I?”
“There’s a . . . Yeah. You did.”
Tobias scratched his head under his knitted hat, stripes of green and blue and brown and orange, his near-black hair shaggy to his collar. She had called it black once, and he insisted it was brown. “My mom’s hair, now that’s black,” he’d said. But his eyebrows were definitely black, thick and
untamed, as was the little triangle of beard he kept right beneath his lower lip, a patch small enough Molly could have covered it with her thumb. She thought about it sometimes, when she saw him laugh, and she’d feel a jolt in her belly and had to clasp her hands behind her to keep from reaching out to him. Her mother hated his facial hair.
“When I see it, I want to lick a Kleenex and scrub it off.”
Molly had once asked him what his little beard was called. “I don’t know,” he said. “I just like it.” So she went to the computer and, after searching various terms, found an ESPN article about speed skater Apolo Anton Ohno and his tuft of chin hair. Jazz dab, it was called when trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie sported it in the ’50s, or soul patch. Soul patch. That fit Tobias. He wore his soul all over. She felt as if she had none, like one of the wax figures, empty, crumbling.
She remembered the box of tissues in the counter drawer, opened it and wiped her hands. Then she took a garlic knot and broke an end off, dipping the bread in the sauce. Tobias asked, “Can I?” and Molly nodded, saying, “They’re yours.”
He scooped one up and crammed the entire thing into his mouth. “No lunch today.”
“Busy?” Molly asked.
“Came straight to work from class.”
“It’s Wednesday.”
“Had to make up a lab this morning. Total pain,” he said. “But just this last semester and I’m done here.”
He drove an hour each way to the closest community college. To save money, he said, so he could transfer to a real school—somewhere away—leaving his family’s business behind. Leaving her behind.
She thought she loved him; at least she had all the symptoms
portrayed in the romance novels Louise read, the boxes of used paperbacks Uncle Mick brought when he visited—more often lately, despite it being the off-season. Yes, she’d skimmed a few of them, picking out the ones with the most clothed cover models, mostly skipping over the racy parts. She had the flutters and the bumbling tongue-tied conversations. She had long talks with him in her mind, forgetting all she’d planned to say when he stood in front of her. She thought about him at night, when she changed into her pajamas in front of the mirror and wished she looked more like the women on those Harlequins.
She couldn’t think about him going. “How is it out there? It looks gray and cold.”
“Gray. Cold. Perfect. Come out to the beach with me.”
She flinched, shrinking into her center, folding up, a magician’s handkerchief stuffed into the cup made by his hand, pushed in by his pointer finger, and then, when he shook his hand open, it had disappeared. That’s what happened when Tobias—anyone—prodded her for more information, for feelings, for something she couldn’t do.
She disappeared.
“I can’t. I’m . . . working.”
“No one is in town, Molly.”
“Not here. Well, yes, here. But also schoolwork.” She nudged the history textbook on the counter. “I graduate in June, too, you know.”
“Ayuh. I know,” Tobias said, and he looked puffed up with more to say, dark eyes full, swirling with thoughts, questions. Molly heard the door open behind her, and he flattened a little. “Maybe another time.”
“Tobias,” Louise said, coming close enough for Molly to smell tuna fish and caution. “Can we help you?”
“Louise,” Tobias said back. “I thought Molly might want a break. You know, take a walk, get some air.”
Her mother looked at her. Neither made a gesture. No blink, no brow wrinkle, no lid flutter. Molly’s thoughts spilled from brain to eye, all crammed up against her cornea.
Say no. Say no.
Louise had no trouble reading them.
“Molly has things to do. And I’m sure your parents aren’t paying you to stand here all day.”
“That they aren’t,” he said. “Later, Moll.” And he left with the ghoulish laugh following him out the door.
For a moment, she and her mother existed in a vacuum, the emptiness within both of them pouring out, flooding the room. Then Louise coughed. “Shirley’s lost her fingers again,” she said, holding out two small, flesh-colored digits.
“We should just put gloves on her,” Molly said.
“That’s not what I asked.”
“You didn’t ask anything.” Her words flew out, startled and confused hornets, stinging her mother on the way by. Molly had no reason to be angry—she had wanted Tobias sent away—and yet she hadn’t.
Louise folded the fingers back into her fist, her heavy shoulders falling a little more. “I’ll take care of it.”
“No.” Molly held out her hand. “Just give me.”
Louise set the pieces on the counter. “I’ll start dinner,” she said, and went back into the office.
Molly took her repair bucket—butane lighter, sheets and Duplo-sized blocks of beeswax, artist’s brushes, tubes of paint—and hurried through the exhibits to the Shirley Temple figure in the classic-movie room, between James Dean in a black leather jacket and Judy Garland dressed as Dorothy. Shirley was posed in a short plaid dress with white collar and
cuffs, chest puffed out, ringlets perfect, and deep dimples near the corners of her mouth. She pointed to herself, hand fisted, thumb toward her chest, like she did in the movie
Bright Eyes
while singing “On the Good Ship Lollipop.” Her other arm hung by her side, two nubs where there should have been fingers, like the buds babies have in the womb.
“Oh, Shirley. When will we get you to keep these on?”
When they’d started at the museum, Mick had given them some tips about repairing wax figures, but he’d inherited the place from his father and couldn’t have cared less if the sixty-year-old attraction remained a wax museum or was bulldozed to the ground. He kept the place open only for some spiteful family feud Molly knew nothing about, wanting to lose money.
So Molly and Louise did their best. Her mother searched the Internet for information on wax-figure upkeep but found only news articles about Madame Tussauds’ headless Hitler being sent out for repairs after some tourist decapitated it in Berlin. So instead she purchased books on figure sculpting. They experimented with techniques in the books, heating and carving and shaping wax at the kitchen table, giggling over the deformed faces they produced, the uneven biceps, the misshapen feet. Neither were artists, though Louise had loved art once, long ago. Molly managed the repairs better than her mother could, her own fingers thin and nimble as she worked. And she had something Louise didn’t—a relationship with the wax people.
Each time Molly worked on Shirley’s hand, the fingers became lumpier, more misshapen. Usually she just heated the broken ends of the beeswax with the lighter and squashed them together, holding them until they cooled and stuck.
Today, however, she snipped off the heads of sewing pins, wiggled them into the hand, and pushed the fingers onto them. Then she softened a bit of wax between her palms and molded it around the seams. She mixed pink, white, and yellow paint on a pallet and dabbed it on the repairs. It blended well enough.
“There you go, Miss Curly Top,” she said, and went back out to the front counter, flipped open her history book and tried to take notes on Vietnam. She saw movement in the corner of her eye, a flash of white through the worn F, and watched as Tobias pulled away from the curb in his car. He waved as he passed.
She hadn’t tasted air outside the museum or apartment for three years, maybe closer to four.
Inhale, exhale
—the same dust over and over, the same sad sighs, the scent of tourists, their stories and laughter. Her secrets, her memories, she couldn’t escape them; she breathed them out, they floated around and around the building until she breathed them in somewhere else—snapping photos of visitors in front of the Elvis figure in the lobby, back in her bedroom, the office, the storage closet. And each time they came back to her, the wayward memory flashed bright behind her eyes, only for an instant but with a full-color intensity enough to stop her, whatever she was doing. She’d blink and swallow them down into her lungs quickly, so she wouldn’t cry, or run away to hide. And out they went on the next breath, gone for a while, floating, floating, until she sucked them in again at another unsuspecting moment.
She would go outside today.
Gingerly, she lifted her body off the stool so it wouldn’t squeak and betray her. She crossed to the door, fast, planning
to ram her entire body against the metal push bar and break into the street, but she stalled at the glass, stuck, her heart swelling in her chest with each beat, feeling as if any moment it would rip through her ribs, too large to be contained.