Never-Contented Things

by Sarah Porter

  Josh would be free to leave in the morning. He was safe. That was all that mattered.

  you could put it like that

  The house packed the same depth charge of quiet and discomfort it had held the day before. With my hand on the knob, I knew I hadn’t stayed on Josh’s hospital room floor only because he needed me. I was afraid to sleep here alone. To share the walls with some broken-mirror imp that couldn’t possibly be real.

  But Josh bounced in the instant the door was unlocked. The black glitter stars on his hoodie caught the light and sent it flying, and he yanked the hoodie off and threw it on the sofa. “Oh, it’s so great to be home! I feel like it’s been forever. Kezzer, let’s not go out for the next week? We should make a fort out of the dining table and refuse to leave at all. Like, I’m through with partying, and now I just wanna eat crackers with you in the dark.”

  I’d followed him in. He plainly didn’t sense anything wrong, so how could I justify my fear? I was momentarily distracted, wondering if that disturbed cop had ever been back to question him; if so, Josh hadn’t mentioned it.

  “We can do whatever you want. Just so we have the house absolutely perfect before Mitch and Emma get back.” It should have been a simple matter, our foster parents returning, but now when I tried to think about it, my brain seemed to glitch out. I knew they were due back soon, that was all. “Wait—when did they say they’d be home? Thursday, or—? I can’t remember the date.”

  Josh came up to me, smiling. I’d forgotten to bring his makeup to the hospital and his face looked blurred and babyish without it. He locked his hands behind my neck and tipped back, swaying gently. My hat toppled onto the floor and rolled. “Oh, Kezzer. Don’t worry about that. Seriously, don’t.”

  “I don’t want to give them any excuse to say that I’m a bad influence, or too irresponsible to be around you.” But now I realized that someone would tell them about Josh’s three-day disappearance, the search parties that had gone out; it was inevitable.

  All at once it hit me: by bundling that secret in myself, by keeping silence, I’d guaranteed that Mitch and Emma would be beside themselves with rage. They’d never let me visit now, much less allow Josh to travel to see me. Looking back, I couldn’t understand how hiding the truth from them had seemed like the right move. It wouldn’t help to tell them that I had been too ashamed of having lost him. I’d doomed us.

  I yanked Josh’s arms off my neck, more roughly than I’d meant to. Turned my back on him so he wouldn’t see my face. My breath snagged in my throat like burning rope, my eyes blazed. I’d let the strangers steal him, and then I’d compounded that by failing him again, slicing myself into failures, crimping and bending the slices into walls, until there was no way out.

  “Kezzer? What’s wrong?”

  I couldn’t speak, couldn’t glance around. I was afraid I might hit him.

  Even though none of this was his fault. Unless I blamed him for being too trusting, which he was—but that was why it was my job to watch over him. Every bend, kink, elbow of the awfulness: they all kept coming back to me.

  “Never mind,” Josh said. He rested his hands lightly on my shoulders. “I know. You’re mad because you’re scared. About what Mitch and Emma will do. I wish you’d listen to me, Kezzer, because I keep telling you that’s not a problem anymore.”

  I shoved my hands into my armpits, clamped down. My muscles were jumping with the urge to strike out.

  “I can’t take this right now, Josh. Your bullshitting. Just stop.” My voice came out in a croak. It was hideous. “It’s a problem, and it’s gotten worse, and none of your cute little fantasies are going to help us. All that crap about them never coming back? Let go of me!”

  Because now his arms were reaching, rippling to pull me tight against him, and his lips were on the back of my neck.

  “It’s a nice house, Kezzer. Isn’t it?”

  Of course he hadn’t let go.

  “Nice? If you like this kind of crap. If you want to pretend life is a bunch of stupid glass flowers from craft fairs, and banana bread, and emotionally disturbed, white-trash kids who should be eternally grateful that you’ve given them a decent home!” I was hyperventilating, sobbing. I never, ever let myself crack up like this, except around him.

  It wasn’t the first time he’d had to talk me down.

  “So we’ll redecorate,” Josh said, and applied a long, slurping kiss to my nape. “You’re right that those flowers are crazy ugly. Let’s throw them out right now! We can smash them on the patio and say, You’re not your mom, Ksenia Adderley, oh, no, you’re not your mom.”

  It was almost against my will, but I laughed at that. Sob-laughed, anyway.

  The flowers were in a glass-fronted section of the home entertainment center, a giant slab of bland, pale wood blocking out one wall. They consisted of scribbly twists of lurid red and blue and yellow, vaguely resembling clustered petals, jiggling at the ends of wire stems. A big bouquet of the things in a blue vase. Mitch and Emma were going to hate me anyway. We might as well. They’d blame me and Josh would barely get in trouble at all.

  He’d be okay, or as okay as he could be without anyone who understood him. Me? I’d just be gone.

  My knees were wobbling. I let them go, let myself sink onto the carpet. He came after me, sort of flopped across my back in a heap. And he was so warm, so velvety, his hands reaching around now to stroke my face and drag through my damp hair. He smudged my skin like finger paint, or dough. How did he always understand so exactly what I needed?

  “Mitch and Emma don’t know, Josh. About what happened. That you disappeared. I thought somehow—if I could just find you it would all be okay, and I’d never have to admit how stupid I’d been. But that was the biggest lie I’ve ever told myself.”

  “Oh Kezzer, it is okay. You’ll see. Let’s just forget about that night. Please? I didn’t disappear. I’ve been right here with you all along. We decided to play Parcheesi, and we just lost track of time, and three days later we realized the game was over. And you’d been totally whupped, naturally.”

  I laughed again, even though I knew it was wrong. “I can’t forget about it. Those assholes—they took you, they hurt you. Now it’s up to me to—”

  I didn’t finish. Josh knew me to the quick. He’d know what I meant.

  “You don’t have to do anything, Kezzer. Except stay with me, and love me. And let me make you dinner tonight.” He said it fast, like he could crack my thoughts in half. Throw the dangerous part away.

  He uncurled me, just the way I’d uncurled him, out in the rain. Nestled himself around me so that he was half-draped across my lap.

  “I’m going to find them, Josh. I’m going to make sure they suffer for what they did to you.”

  “No, you’re not.”

  “How am I supposed to let that go?”

  “Kezzer. This isn’t about you and Owen, okay? It’s not the same thing at all. I’m not like some replica of you, when you were eleven. And you can’t undo what happened then by perfectly protecting me.”

  “Josh!” I couldn’t believe he’d brought that up.

  “If you want to take care of me, Kezzer—and take care of yourself too—then I really, really need you to forget about what happened. Like, if we run into them sometime—the people we met that night?—then I need you to be incredibly polite. Like you’re at a job interview.”

  I stared down at him. His face was pressed against my chest, but the bruised cheek still showed: a trail of swollen blobs shifting into shades of mauve and rotten green. And he was telling me to be polite to the creeps who were responsible? But his tone wasn’t anything like it was normally; he sounded sharp, decisive. Even bossy.

  “That’s insane,” I said. And then I saw it.

  The imp-thing, the Joshling: the slippery, pleated horror that had stolen his image, snapped off a piece of him. It had been hiding in the home entertainment center, in that vase of gross glass flowers. The thing had crumpled itself down until it was
camouflaged by the oil-bright petals, but now it was blossoming. A shoulder unfolded, a glitter-crusted eyelid, a stretch of wet teeth too long for the diminished head. It popped out, expanded to its full height, and slithered down the back of the glass like a spill of viscous sludge. And this time I could hear it: a piping chitter that might have contained butchered words.

  Josh saw my face and rolled his head, still in the crook of my arm, to watch it go. He didn’t look surprised, or frightened. He tracked the thing impassively as it scrabbled at an angle across the TV, gripping the screen as if there were handholds in the flatness, then dropped to the floor with a whisking little thud.

  Where every piece of it seemed to divide along a mirrored fold, like a butterfly opening its wings. There were two symmetric eyes, sliding out from each other until they were linked by tips of overlapping white; two jouncing, agitated knees, two half-mouths slipping further apart. Until it broke into two separate Josh-imps that dashed in opposite directions. To the edge of the cabinet doors, where they vanished. Just the way it had done before.

  Except now Josh had seen it too. And he didn’t seem to mind. At the very most, his expression showed a lazy curiosity.

  I let out a choked noise that was nowhere near a scream.

  Josh sat up and hugged me. Kissed me on the lips, which he knew I didn’t allow, but I was in no state to resist. Was there some of the same prickling, sparking sensation that had flooded my mouth when the boy in peacock leather had kissed me, that night by the gorge? “Kezzer, I need you to listen to me. I need to know you get it. Can you do that for me?”

  I couldn’t speak. I nodded, with my face pressed between his hands.

  “What I’ve been telling you, that Mitch and Emma aren’t coming back? I’m not kidding about that. This is our house from now on, and you don’t have to leave. You won’t age out of anything when you turn eighteen, okay? Neither of us is going anywhere. Do you trust me now?”

  It should have been good news. The best news possible. The weird thing, then, was that I didn’t want to believe him. I was sick with the knowledge that the Josh-imp was still nearby somewhere, listening in.

  But since I didn’t know what else to do, I nodded again. I’d seen what I’d seen, it was no hallucination, so clearly I was no expert on what could be real. Maybe Josh really knew something I didn’t, even if that made no sense to me.

  “Great. Okay, then. That’s a big improvement, Kezzer. But then the thing is—I guess you could call it the catch?—it’s that we’re kind of guests here.”

  He really didn’t seem like he was joking, or even crazy. “Guests. You mean in the house?”

  “Not exactly,” Josh said. His hand gave a circular flick. It suggested something more encompassing.

  “On the planet?” I asked. It came out with a bitter snap. If that was what he meant, I guessed that it was nothing new, really. Not for me. If I hadn’t been a guest, all my life, then I must have been an invader.

  Josh kissed me again, very softly, and tousled my ragged hair. “You could put it like that.”

  what a little savage you once were!

  I didn’t know what was wrong with me. I sat for a while on the sofa, trying to cry out the feeling of being throttled and compressed by impossibility, until Josh brought me a mug of some kind of herb tea that put me to sleep. When I woke it was late afternoon. He’d spread a blanket over me. And the instant my surroundings entered my mind I jolted, staring around to see what the imp-thing had been doing while I slept. There was no sign of it. Just the usual pale wood and tan drapes, the musty gold carpet, those garish flowers. We’ll redecorate, Josh had said. Was he planning to attack the place with spray paint?

  To my taste, there was nothing he could do that wouldn’t count as home improvement. I could hear him scuffling around somewhere; maybe he had started with his room.

  Now that I was rested, more mentally together, I felt sure that everything he’d said was madness. Not that I thought Josh was crazy, exactly; just constructing a very complicated system of denial. I’d been wrong to get mad; no one plays games with their own mind that way unless they’ve been driven to it. But of course Mitch and Emma would come home, and learn the truth, and kick me to the curb. Sputtering with indignation. They would welcome an excuse to keep us apart, free Josh from my unwholesome influence. I knew that. As for what we’d seen? I couldn’t guess what that thing was, not now. I’d figure it out later.

  “Ke-ezzz-zer!” Josh trilled. He dashed up the half-flight of stairs leading down to the bedrooms, practically skipped across to me. He had his makeup on thicker than ever, concealer slapped over those bruises, and he’d been messing with his hair, puffing and feathering it. “Are you feeling better now?”

  “You’re the one who just got out of the hospital,” I pointed out.

  “Well, sure. But I think it’s easier for me anyway.” He crouched down by the sofa and got in my face. Blasted me with his grin at close range. “Kezzer, if you’re okay now? Then I need you to do something for me. Go out to a café or something? I need the house to myself. Just for a few hours.”

  That was when I noticed that the scuffling noise down the hallway hadn’t stopped. My heart tripped. I did my best to ignore the sounds, but they kept on, dry and whispery and insistent.

  “I’m not totally sure you should be alone,” I said. With whatever that is.

  “Oh Kezzer, of course I should! And how am I supposed to make a fabulous surprise dinner to welcome myself home if you’re sitting there watching me? Spoiler alert!”

  “You’re making your own welcome-home dinner?” I asked—though in fact he’d said something about this earlier, wanting to cook tonight. And my cooking is abysmal, while his is at least okay. “We still have enough money left that we could go out, as long as we don’t go crazy.” Mitch had left me cash for groceries, and so far I’d been careful with it.

  “I don’t want to go anywhere! Kezzer, I won’t feel like I’m a hundred percent home until we have a real celebration, right here, together. Right now I only feel like I’m, oh, eighty-five percent home. I wish we had champagne!”

  I didn’t much like the idea of Josh drinking, not after last time. But if we were staying in it might be okay. I wanted to make him happy, if I could.

  The noise down the hall went on, like a crumpled paper stuck to the bottom of my thoughts, dragging and muttering. A singsong rasp, crisp and hypnotic. I knew Josh was hearing it too, but somehow we’d entered into a silent agreement that everything was fine, that that sneaking horror was an acceptable presence.

  “If Hadley is around, she’ll probably buy a bottle for us.” Hadley was a friend, or friend-ish, who worked at the bookstore, and she was twenty-one; she thought Josh was so amusing that she would indulge him. The truth was, I didn’t entirely mind having an excuse to get out of here. “I’ll see what I can do. And you need money to go shopping, right? It’s all on my dresser. Under the shepherdess.”

  The shepherdess was one of Josh’s altered objects: a porcelain figurine of a damsel clutching a lamb he’d bought at Goodwill, then half-encased in a chrysalis of resin-dipped cocktail umbrellas, webs made of discarded jewelry, rhinestones, blobs of paint. He’d given it to me for my last birthday and it was both horrible and awesome.

  Josh pulled and prodded and badgered me to my feet, then paused to squeeze me again. “I already found it.” He dug in his pocket and handed me a twenty, then put on an exaggerated pout. “For the champagne? Don’t you dare come back here without it!”

  He was kidding, but he’d also feel hurt if I didn’t.

  I got my shoes and my bowler hat and left, even though I had a feeling in my stomach as if it had been lined with tinfoil, crinkling and sour and sharp. A feeling too much like I’d had when I’d watched him dancing with those people I was supposed to be so polite to. If I ran into them, that is. So did that mean they were still in town somewhere? What did Josh know?

  The suburban streets spread out in front of me, soft with gustin
g branches, with wisteria cascading off trellises. The lawns were clipped and neon green, the shadows a blue encroachment on the ground. Peace and prosperity, even if a few of those houses had been seized by banks and were sitting empty, their yards starting to fray. Textbook American Dream, give or take.

  But the feeling of wrongness, of difference, that had overcome our house yesterday—it was out here now too. There was nothing I could put my finger on, but the wrongness was spreading. Maybe the shadows seemed a bit too active. Maybe there was a vital quality to the air, like something fermenting. And even though it was a beautiful day, no one seemed to be around.

  I’d been expecting some relief, getting outside for a while, but that clearly wasn’t happening. I got out my phone to text Hadley; if she was working today, she wouldn’t care about running into the liquor store when she was on break. It was just three doors down from the bookshop.

  I turned the phone on. And it screamed.

  Not like a person, exactly; more like a teakettle squalling and babbling through its steam. A piercing hiss that hinted at garbled words, at radios lost in rubble. I flung it away, and it landed on that luminous grass, still piping away at a frantic pitch. It sounded like the voice of something small and not quite human, in terrible pain.

  For a while I stood in a world that had ground to a halt, watching my phone where it lay on the grass: its ordinary black plastic shell, its blue screen, but transmitting that hellish little voice. I was sure now that there were words somewhere in the stream of sound, but I couldn’t understand them. I could guess, though: the voice was begging me to do something.

  I dared myself to pick the phone back up: reached down for it, but yanked my hand away before it made contact. Then I tried to tell myself that it was Josh, pranking me somehow. I was still in view of our front windows. I looked to see if he was there, smiling slyly.