The Air We Breathe (3 page)

Tears bubbled out of her eyes, catching the corner of her bloated lip, pooling there for several seconds, then spilling over, like spit, down her chin and onto her shiny pink blouse. Her head trembled side to side. “No,” she whispered.

“See. I told you. Marie wasn’t going to do anything stupid. Marie is going to finish filling those bags. Aren’t you, now?”

“Yes.” A hoarse, helpless whisper.

“Well, aren’t we making some mighty fine progress,” the thin man said, chuckling in a way that scared Hanna more than any shouting or gunfire. She cowered against her father, who had his arm tightly around her.

“Now, next order of business. You two fine gentlemen there are going to send that sweet little girl over my way.”

The other man in the aviator glasses—short, compactly built, and wearing a cap from a team Hanna didn’t recognize—whipped his head toward the thin man, so quickly she expected it to twist off and roll across the floor. If the thin man noticed, he didn’t let on. Not even a twitch.

“No,” Henry said, his voice plain and firm.

The thin man chuckled again. “Well, I thought you might say that. No daddy wants to turn his baby over to some . . . miscreant. But, I tell you, there’s much less chance of you deciding to play hero if she’s tucked away right by my side. It won’t be for too long. Just until our lovely Marie completes her assigned task.”

“No,” Henry repeated.

“Now, okay, no need to be snippy. We’ve all been right
friendly to you, and I’d hope for the same courtesy back. I promise nothing will happen to this dear angel if you instruct her to march right over to me. However,” the thin man said, “if she’s not here in thirty seconds, someone
is
going to get hurt.”

“That wasn’t in the plan,” the fat guy said, his gun aimed toward the floor, arm jiggling. “You said no one gets hurt. You said—”

“Enough,” the thin man snapped. “No one will get hurt
if
”—he raised an eyebrow—“people start listening.”

The short one looked at his watch. “We need to get out of here.”

Hanna had to pee; she felt the familiar warm tingle, the needling pressure. All her fear had settled in her pelvis. She concentrated on willing the urine back up into her bladder, but the more she thought about it, the worse it felt. She hadn’t wet herself since first grade, and the idea she might humiliate herself in front of these men horrified her. She clamped her fist between her legs.

“Please,” she managed to squeak out.

Her voice must have stirred something in the security guard. As quick as his old arm was able, he moved it from the raised position to his waist, tugging his weapon from the holster.

Boom
.

The guard fell, his body jostling Hanna on its trip to the floor. A fine curl of smoke floated from the barrel of the thin man’s gun. The fat guy swore. “You killed him.”

Hanna felt her father’s body tense behind her. She imagined a panther, ready to pounce, knowing he was about to use the moment of distraction to try to . . . What? Save her? Save them both? She wanted to beg him not to; the gun fired
again and Henry crumpled on Hanna’s feet. She couldn’t see his blood, but something warm dripped through the holes in her beach clogs and between her toes.

Fat Guy wretched. “You stupid—”

“Shut your mouth or you’re next,” Thin Man told him. “Get the money, now.” He jerked his head toward Hanna and said to Short One, “Get the girl.”

“This isn’t—”

“Get her,” Thin Man barked.

Without another word, Short One picked up Hanna, her front against his, her chin on his shoulder. She watched her father’s unmoving body as she was carried away, each step bouncing her field of vision, and felt a warm wetness spread between her and her captor’s body that rapidly turned cold as he shoved her in the back seat of the waiting car.

M
OLLY
F
EBRUARY
2009

It rained so heavily the air looked jellied, denting around Tobias as he ran across the street, collar of his jacket pulled over his head and one hand holding it there, the other cradling two bottles of soda. Water erupted from the asphalt, flooded it, and then bubbled downhill and over the scraggy slope at island’s end to be reclaimed by the sea. Molly watched—always watching, only watching—as the bottles squirted out of his arm, little torpedoes skidding across the pavement. He bent to grab them as he went, a smooth, perfect motion, and tucked them both into the waistband of his jeans before hopping up the steps.

“Hey, you open?” he called, knocking on the glass.

Molly unlocked the door, held it open for him. After he came through, she twisted the dead bolt again. Tobias shook off in the lobby, rain splashing everywhere. “No witch today?”

“I didn’t turn the speaker on. And now I have to clean this mess. Mom will be so ticked if she sees it.”

“At the water or me?” He grinned, the acne craters at the corners of his mouth deepening.

“Your choice.”

Molly grabbed the dingy string mop from the corner storage closet and swished it over the puddle. “You’re not working today?”

“I am. But, you know, it’s still early for deliveries. But we just got these flavored seltzers in Friday, and I know how much you like them, so I figured I’d come bother you and bring the drink along. Since I know how much you like them.”

“And I know how much you don’t.”

“Nasty stuff,” he said, taking them from his pants, and in a suave move flipped them from caps pointed down to bottoms, a soft-drink slinger, and placed them on the front counter. “I wouldn’t open them yet, though.”

Molly laughed. “I won’t. Believe me.”

“Weird weather, huh?” he said. “For February.”

“I’m glad I don’t have to be out in it.”

On Sundays, like today, he came after church. His family made their way to mass early, so they could open for lunch, but he stayed back and, minutes before ten, sprinted down the street to the little Baptist chapel. She watched him go week after week, him leaving about the same time she settled in to watch a local service broadcasted on the public television channel.

During the off-season it didn’t matter if she left the door locked until the televised service ended, but even in the busiest summer months Louise gave Molly that hour for worship. They didn’t talk about religion, though, not anymore. Her mother wasn’t able to peer inside and see what the Lord had done for Molly, the healing hands caressing her bruises, the gentle whispers to her soul. The peace that came over her
when she cried out for it. The inexplicable hope, even though she stared at the same walls every day, the corners creeping with dark mold from the leaky roof. She could only regurgitate a handful of verses and the sermon notes she heard on the TV, and Louise came back with the same argument each time, the only one she needed.

“Where was God when your father died? Where was He when you—?”

She stopped there, always. Maybe she thought those words were enough, but Molly knew it was more than that; her mother had never gotten through to the realities lurking on the other side of that unfinished sentence.

“I think we can open these now,” Tobias said, twisting the cap off his root beer. He opened the seltzer, and the foam oozed over his fingers with a hiss, carbonated water spraying both of them. “Sorry.”

“You do that even when you don’t drop it,” Molly said. “Good thing there’s no sugar in it.”

He gave her the bottle. “I can go back and snag us a couple of slices.”

“No, don’t do that. You’re already soaked.” The bubbles danced around her drink, kissing one another, clinging to the walls, swimming to the surface and disappearing before more took their place, much more lively than in Tobias’s drink. Her stomach felt like that around him, all gassy and over-carbonated. He stared at her, and she wondered if his almost-black eyes saw something she didn’t. She sipped her water; it fizzed up into her nose. “How was church?”

“Great. You should come with me sometime.”

“I watch Pastor Gary.”

“Not the same.”

“I don’t know if I could get away.”

“On a Sunday? Come on, Moll, no one comes when it’s cold and rainy like today.”

“Uncle Mick wants the place open every day.”

“Which is why you had the door locked.”

“I hadn’t gotten around to opening yet. I was going to.”

“And the Closed sign still turned over.”

She reached out and flipped the flimsy black-and-red sign hanging by a suction cup on the glass. “There.”

“Your mother could watch the counter for a change. It’s just one morning, Molly.”

“She’s not here. And I—” Molly heard a piddling sound, like a dog urinating on the carpet, looked around until she saw it, a thin stream of stray rainwater dripping onto Elvis’s shoulder. “Oh, shoot.”

She hugged the King around the middle, tried to slide his feet along the floor to move him, and stumbled backward. Tobias steadied both her and the wax figure, his arm around her waist and partly under her shirt, on her skin. The first time he’d touched her. And it wasn’t like the novels, with electric sparks running up her spine, and her head spinning with excitement. No. Her stomach roiled with revulsion, the way a snake slithered, contracting and releasing as it moved up in her chest, jamming against the back of her throat until she had to bring her hands to her mouth to keep from vomiting. Elvis, his weight entirely on Tobias now, shifted forward and fell to the ground. Tobias moved fast, stood him back up, as if the damage would be lessened if the statue lay on the ground less time. But the King’s arm fell out of his sleeve, breaking into pieces.

“You let go,” Tobias said.

Molly pressed herself against the wall, arms buckled around her shins, teeth digging into her left knee—a safe pain, one she knew from where it came and how to stop, one she controlled with the pressure of her jaw, the angle of her mouth. Tobias’s hand had been rough on her, like the edge of the corrugated pizza boxes he brought over. And it hurt, an old pain so deep she never thought she’d feel it again, but there it was, scuttling up from the past. It was as if his fingers were long, thin pins—straight pins, the kind she put through Shirley’s wax hand—sliding in deep and smooth.

“It’s broken,” she whispered.

“I’m sorry. I couldn’t hold it by myself.” He looked at her. “Are you okay?”

“Yes.”

He held out his hand toward her. “Here. Let me pull you up.”

“No,” she said, shrinking away, shimmying to her right and pushing herself up the wall so she wouldn’t come in contact with him again. “I’m good. I got it.”

“Can you fix it?”

“I don’t know.” She crept around the pieces of the arm, far enough away from Tobias so that, even if he reached out, nothing of him would graze any part of her.

“You’re mad at me.”

“No. It’s okay.”

“I’ll pay for it. I’ll tell Louise I bumped it, knocked it over. Whatever. She hates me anyway.”

She kicked at the broken arm pieces. “It’s fine. Really. I think there’s another arm in the storeroom I can replace it with.”

“I’ll help.”

“No. Please . . . go, Tobias.”

“Molly? What’s wrong?”

“Nothing.” She backed toward the door, until the dead bolt pressed into her spine, cool through her shirt, hard, menacing. “I just need to get this fixed before Mom gets back. She’ll be here soon.”

“You look weird. White. Scared.” He pinched his little beard. His soul patch. “Does she hurt you?”

“What? No. What are you talking about?”

“You’re practically a prisoner here, and—”

“I am not.”

“I never see you go out. You always have some reason why—”

“Stop it, will you? There’s nothing wrong.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“You don’t know anything.”

He took a step toward her. “Then tell me, Molly.”

She spun the bolt and, staying behind the door, pulled it open so she was trapped against the corner of the wall, the glass between her and Tobias. “Go,” she said again. It hurt to say it, the word barbed wire in her mouth, because she wanted him to stay, too. She wanted someone to strip off her skin and look beneath, to the tissue and vessel and bone, and see everything that she kept hidden away—to prove she wasn’t wax but flesh. She wanted normal.

Tobias looked at her through the glass, knocked gently on it with the second knuckle of his middle finger. His breath condensed, a film between them, and then, with his eyebrows crunched into the bridge of his nose, he shook his head and walked across the street.

She’d lost her only real, living friend.

When they’d first moved to Dorsett Island, there had been
no lack of curious neighbors; no one can hide in a town of two hundred year-round residents. People wanted to know what tempted the Fisks to move
from away
to Maine, why Molly schooled at home, and what on earth convinced Louise to work for eccentric Mick Borden. Molly didn’t know exactly what stories her mother fed them, though from snatches here and there she gathered they included fleeing some sort of abusive relationship and a desire to make a new start. People nodded and welcomed them, bringing homemade chowders and jams and neighborly wisdom in their loose-jawed accents. And for a precious short while, Molly thought the island could be home.

There were a handful of girls her age—newly turned twelve—and they came around inviting her to do twelve-year-old things. Molly tried to join them, but soon the waves outside became too loud in her ears, the wind too rough against her cheeks, and the wildness of it all forced her back through the doors of the museum, safe inside.

She only left with her mother.

And then not at all.

And the girls scattered to do their twelve-year-old things without her.

Molly didn’t meet Tobias until later. She knew of him, of course—one of the reasons the island girls had been so eager to come around and befriend her had to do with the fact she lived across the street from his family’s restaurant, he being an object of several of their almost-teenage crushes. Tobias had nothing to do with them, too busy working or hanging out with his own friends to take much notice of some girls a couple of years younger, dressed with too much eye shadow and too small bathing suits, strutting for his attention.

Molly’s Bible had started things with Tobias. She wasn’t quite certain what those things were, exactly—on his side of it, at least. It had been toward the end of last summer, a frantic weekend of tourists trying to cram in a few more hours of carefree leisure, a few more days of sun-induced forgetfulness. The museum was busy enough that Molly didn’t want to duck back into the apartment to make a sandwich, and her mother couldn’t get her lunch. Louise had locked herself in the bedroom, suffering from one of her “migraines”—those times when she couldn’t cope and ended up chasing a few sleeping pills with spoonfuls of applesauce. It had been some time since Molly believed her mother had real headaches, and some time since Louise thought she was fooling her daughter, but they both still played along.

Molly had been starving, her stomach curling around itself and making noises worthy of the Chamber of Horrors. She decided to order some fried mozzarella sticks from across the street, have them delivered. Tobias showed up not long after that, styrofoam container balanced in one hand. “Hey,” he said. “Molly, right?”

She nodded. “How much do I owe you again?”

“Five thirty.”

She gave him seven dollars from the cash drawer. As he reached for it, he noticed her Bible open on the counter. “Job, huh? I read that today, too. You working through the one-year schedule?”

“Yeah, the one online.”

“Me too. Wicked cool.” And he looked at her, the way she’d once looked at a drab, dusty brown owlet moth in her father’s tweezers—him holding it up to the desk lamp, her at first finding it startlingly dull compared to the brightly
colored butterflies in cases around the room and not any different than the hundreds of stupid moths that bumped around the porch lights every night.

But when Daddy told her this moth had special organs in their ears that could pick up bat sonar, and they flopped to the ground when they heard it so the bats couldn’t eat them, the boring bug suddenly became special. And she saw it not as a pesky thing that stupidly chased the hallway lamp when she opened the front door, getting trapped in the house to die there, but as something with value.

Molly had that value now in Tobias’s eyes. Before that day, he had waved a few times but was just as likely to ignore her. He’d delivered pizza or subs or calzones to the apartment every four or five months. But now, he said, “Maybe I can come over sometime and we can talk about the readings.”

“Okay.”

“Awesome. Wow. This was really a God thing, wasn’t it?”

She had to agree it was. And since that day he had stopped in nearly every day, some excuse or another in his pocket, and Molly told herself that he was, like herself, lonely. He’d told her more than once he didn’t fit with his family, that they were content on Dorsett Island and he wasn’t, that they wanted him to stay on with the business forever, and he planned to go to medical school, Lord willing. “And,” he said, “they’re Catholics. So they totally don’t get me.”

Molly had been so thankful for a friend. And now she’d gone and ruined it.

She rammed the door shut, locked it again, and ran back into the museum, through the first three exhibit rooms, to the workshop door hidden behind a musty black curtain. Every time she moved it aside to get through, her nose filled with
dust and she’d sneeze, like now, covering the bottom half of her face with her sleeved arm. She knew instinctively where the pull was to the light; three steps in she swept her arm through the air around her head until the balled chain caught her fingers. She tugged. On burst the light, and she flinched at the body parts strewn over the workbench, dangling on hooks, staring down at her from shelves. She still wasn’t used to that initial inhuman sight.