by Brian Hodge
“So you’re on summer vacation now?” she says. “What are you going to do?”
“I figured I’d just get a crappy job somewhere.”
“No … no, that’s a bad idea. Maybe you should take off and travel. Did you ever think of that?” she says from faraway, from what sounds like a small cave. “You should have some adventure in your life.”
There’s something about hearing her echo Evan now, in very nearly his exact words, that makes Micah want to be sick. She tells him how wonderful traveling would be for him, how it would broaden his horizons, except all he can hear is what she’s really saying: that he no longer belongs here and maybe never has.
A thing like that and she can’t even say it to his face?
He looks at the doorknob. How good a lock can it be, anyway? Locks inside the house are only meant for the people you live with, so you can’t accidentally walk in on them while they’re in the process of deciding to hate you. It’s not like they’re meant to keep out thieves. Once the thieves are inside the house — and some even come in by invitation — it’s too late.
He slides the wallet from his pocket and slips out his student I.D. It’s as stout as a credit card, and with another year survived, useless. Except maybe as a break-in tool. He wiggles it between the door and the frame, working it into the latch until it gives with a soft pop, and so much for home security. He can’t think of one thing he learned in school this year that was half this useful.
Even though it’s not nearly as strong here, the same smell is in the bedroom that he remembers all too well from the garbage can. Except there’s something about it now that’s cleaner, purer, less diseased and more a fact of biology.
The last thing he was expecting to find was no Lydia. Not only is she not on the bed, the bed doesn’t even look slept in, doesn’t look like anyone’s so much as reclined on it. It’s made up as neat as a barracks bunk.
The curtains and blinds are pulled halfway shut, making a pleasant light actually, enough for him to walk in and see how worthless his and Charisse’s theories have been. There’s no junkie paraphernalia. None of the stuff that would accumulate where someone depressed was holing up, whatever that would be — food and magazines and sleeping pills and liquor bottles, he imagines. And for sure there’s no swirling vortex into which someone could just disappear.
He checks beneath the bed — nothing but luggage and boxes of old pictures.
The only other alternative is the closet, although that seems way peculiar, since it’s not big enough, deep enough, to be a walk-in. It’s just two sliding doors on rollers in a track, like in a motel, only not as cheap-looking. He pushes one door aside, right to left, and lets in the light.
When he looks downward, Micah backs away with a start and probably a loud cry, then has to stare for a few moments simply to process the presence of what he’s seeing. How about those eyes — they can really play tricks on you sometimes, can’t they? At first he can’t believe it has the remotest connection with Lydia. It’s a science project. It’s an industrial accident. It’s something one of them has brought home from an anatomy lab, then form-fitted into the corner of the closet.
He remembers from school that the skin is the body’s largest organ, and yeah, he supposes it would take something like that to have created what he’s seeing — this fleshy hollow, its opening nearly as big around as a barrel. Its inner walls are surprisingly thick, pink as muscles. The edges of the structure cling to the floor and the closet wall like they’ve been fastened with some sort of natural adhesive.
The worst part about this? Those two wide, familiar eyes staring out at him from the shadows at the very back of the inside of … it? her? They seem to reflect their own unique brand of shame and guilt, like the time a few years ago when she loaned money to a boyfriend who then split town in his new car, no forwarding address.
He can’t fathom how such a thing can begin to be possible, no more than he can figure out what sustains her. It looks so painful and raw, what she’s been made into. If her cries at night were any indication, it had been. But Lydia had to have wanted this, because it couldn’t have happened all at once. Micah imagines that Evan must’ve used his teeth. And lots of patience, along with architectural skills learned from … where? Strange grey things clinging to the outside of the house?
Every impulse is telling him to run, that what he’s seeing is overload and if he stares at it any longer something terrible will happen, over and above his insides feeling as chewed up and reprocessed as Lydia’s body.
Because what else is this but the ultimate proof of how much it must actually take to keep someone loving you?
But when he does run, he doesn’t get far, running smack into Evan out in the hallway. Immediately Evan knows what’s up — can’t put anything past Evan — and for a guy who’s always seemed so passive, he can look awfully enraged. Before Micah has even recovered from the collision, Evan’s grabbed him by the shoulders with those oversized hands and hurled him into the wall. He’s bounced all the way to the floor before he hears Lydia’s oddly reverberant voice crying out, “Don’t hurt him, don’t hurt him,” except Micah doesn’t know which of them she’s calling to.
He lies facedown while feeling Evan’s legs swing over him, hearing the footsteps proceed into the bedroom. There’s a murmur of voices, maybe the sound of someone crying, and the sound of someone getting undressed.
Micah debates it for a few moments, but it’s no debate of intellect, more like warring instincts, and finally one side wins and he squirms forward along the floor and gets as far as his shoulders through the bedroom doorway. Just enough to see what’s going on over at the closet, where Evan is pulling the last of himself into the cell that they’ve made of her.
And could it really only have been minutes ago that he was thinking about Lydia after so many wrong men, doubting if for her there could be such a thing as the right one?
Listening to them, to the sounds they make together, he knows he shouldn’t have been so quick to judge.
Now, at least, this time, the fit is perfect.
Before The Last Snowflake Falls
The afternoon I saved my sister’s life it was autumn, and autumn the way I have always remembered it. Autumn to me always meant the Michigan woodlands that came almost up to the cedar deck bracketing two sides of our home … a constant and luring presence when you were inside the house, and the entire welcoming world once you stepped past the door.
The way I remember, it was always autumn while we were growing up, at least whenever it wasn’t winter. Autumn and winter were so eternal to me that they’ve blotted out all memories of long days and mosquitoes and the green buds of springs that must have sprung but are gone now, completely gone, because as far as I’m concerned they never happened. Winter and autumn, those seasons of slow decay and sluggish blood, were what always felt most real to me, because they were the ones that seemed to last. And still do.
Children on farms, on ranches, gain an early understanding of death — its finality, its processes, its faceless fickleness and refusal to play favorites — but my education was no less complete than theirs. Around the bases of oaks and sugar maples there was always the stiffened corpse of a bird or squirrel to poke and prod with a handy stick, and nearly always more than one. Wander the Easter-egg hunt that they made, planning a daily route just right, and it became a progressive tour of the inevitable, their reclamation by the ground on which their cold bodies lay. Here was one so freshly dead it looked as though it were only sleeping. A few yards away, one left ratty and ill groomed by the morning dew it could no longer shake off. Keep going and here was one reduced to a deflated husk by the gnawing of bugs, then double back to find those who were more bones than skin. Always these, changing one into another day by day, and sometimes bigger animals too — household pets who’d crawled off before they could face a veterinarian’s needle, and, late each year, the tawny bulk of deer.
I’d grown used to the distant rolling crack
s and thunder of weekend hunters, their heavy rifles and their shotguns loaded with massive, rib-smashing deer slugs. Every autumn they tramped through the far forests with beer on their breath, or stinking of lotions made from the pheromones of does ready to rut. We lived far enough out of the town where my sister and I went to school that it wasn’t uncommon to see cars passing by with antlered carcasses strapped across their front ends, and pickup trucks whose beds bristled with stiffened spindly legs … four, eight, twelve of them. If you walked far enough into the woods, on late afternoons after the day’s killing had been mostly completed, you could sometimes find spots where hunters had lightened their burdens, leaving behind glistening piles of everything that had been inside the deer except, perhaps, their souls.
It was just such a day, chilly in the shade and warm in the sun and with the colors of autumn starting to mute on the trees, that I saved my sister’s life.
She’d given up the woods quite a while before, Terri had … four years older than I was and with no more use for them. Forever gone were the days when we explored them together. Every miracle that went on every day inside that world of trees that had once fascinated Terri now repelled her, or worse somehow, left her utterly bored, unmoved and uncaring. Once she might’ve looked at a curled leaf swept along by the eddies of a brook and seen a boat; now she saw a wet leaf. Where once there might’ve been a hundred reasons to break crusty ridges of fungus from the trunks of fallen trees, now she just looked at it and crinkled her nose. She was fifteen now, and from another planet.
But she was still subordinate to our parents. Go find Toby, they’d told her, he’s forgotten we’re eating early tonight, and I can imagine her sighing hugely at the unfairness of it all and stamping out the door, across the lawn, past the front rank of trees that marked the beginnings of what was, to me, holy ground.
When she found me I was digging for arrowheads. She planted her long legs steady, feet wide apart, and jammed both fists against her still-narrow hips with both elbows thrust out like handles, the absolute picture of scorn as she looked over and down at me. Me and my loamy hole and my makeshift tools. Terri tossed her head back, which always accompanied a great rolling of her eyes, the gesture never complete without a casual flipping aside of the full length of her tawny hair. She and her friends had perfected disdain into an artform.
“Hey creep, because you have no concept of time,” she said, “now you owe me the half-hour it’s taken just to find your grubby little ass.”
“Go away,” I told her, then decided to drive the point home by brandishing a weapon I of course had no intention of using. I grabbed a big rounded slab of broken tree limb that was within reach, two feet long, and dragged it up with me like a club. I lurched toward her, trying to look full of menace. Terri gave me a withering glance that implied I was more likely full of shit. So I heaved the chunk of wood above my right shoulder, cocked and loaded, shuffling forward under its weight as though nothing could stop me from bringing it down on her head.
And as soon as I had raised it, it shattered apart in my hands.
Bullets travel faster than sound, I realize that now, and for a bewildering instant all I knew was that something had smacked my club so hard that bark and sawdust and splinters rained down, and with such velocity it knocked the thing from my hands and pitched me forward with it, off balance. By the time the shotgun blast registered I was halfway to hitting the ground face-first.
Above me, Terri was screaming, convinced that I’d been shot. Terri, standing there with her tawny hair and wearing her brown suede jacket, didn’t even realize that she was the one who’d been hit. Sort of. Didn’t realize yet that her left earlobe was bleeding and that the tiny amethyst of her pierced earring had been knocked from its setting.
Evidently the deer slug had been deflected just enough by the wood to spare Terri’s life. But when I peered up from the ground, all I could see were the drops of blood making traces down her slim neck, and on her shoulder the hair loose that had been clipped as cleanly as with scissors, and in my own confusion I thought sure that half my screaming sister’s head was gone.
Crashing in the woods behind us, gusts of breath and the stomp of heavy green rubberized boots. “Jesus God!” the hunter bellowed as he froze in a small clearing. “Oh, Jesus God!”
My sister’s killer.
Who knows what he thought when he saw me spring from the ground and rush him, resurrected and on the attack. Eleven years old and half his size, snarling and shrieking with my pre-pubescent voice. I’d been digging for arrowheads, right, so I suppose it was only natural I would still have noble savagery on the brain. I hit him like a swarm of angry bees, and that fog of odor around his head was the first time I’d ever encountered the reek of whiskey.
Big-bellied guy with a face like a pounded porksteak and eyes that were, for the moment, wide and overloaded with terror — he flipped me off him and when I bounced back undeterred and clawing, he panicked and popped me in the forehead with the butt of his shotgun and I dropped to the dead leaves like a stone.
So said Terri, later.
Me, I didn’t remember a thing.
My stay in the hospital was the closest I’ve ever come to celebrity. The nurses absolutely loved me. They fussed over me, could scarcely pass by the room without checking on me, called me their little hero. And my pediatrician beamed with pride, as though maybe it had been his sterling care over the years that had instilled within me such fighting spirit. The local newspaper sent a reporter and a photographer, put me on the front page with my head bandaged so densely that I looked to be wearing a turban, and I heard that somebody was trying to interest Reader’s Digest in the incident. And I really didn’t understand what the fanfare was about. All this over a concussion?
I didn’t wake up from the blow until late the next morning, and the first face I saw belonged to neither of my parents — my father was out of the room for the moment and my mom was asleep in a chair — but rather to Terri. She’d sat beside my bed all night, refusing to sleep and gulping coffee because she didn’t want to miss my return to consciousness. By the time my eyes focused on my sister, tears had formed in hers.
“You stupid retard,” she greeted me, and was trying not to sob. “Why’d you have to go and do something like that?”
“Whatever I did,” I said, “is that how come I’ve got such a headache?”
Terri bit her lower lip and nodded and squinched her eyes shut, and her tears began to squeeze from their corners. I then noticed the white tab of bandage on her earlobe, and foggy fragments of the previous afternoon began to return to me.
“Oh yeah,” I croaked. “The hunter.”
Terri was laughing, and crying, holding my hand, and her fingers felt like chilled sticks. “It’s a good thing you’ve got such a hard head, because you’d look pretty silly mounted on that guy’s wall. I don’t think there’s anybody’s decor you’d go with.”
And by now our mother had awakened, and she rushed to my bedside and then spun for the door and called down the hallway for the nurse, then rushed back to the bed, and my father must have been within earshot too, following on the nurse’s heels, and then a doctor, and it was probably the most attention I’d had all at once since they’d cut the umbilical.
Even Terri’s boyfriend was there, a sixteen-year-old named Willard whose best asset, so far as I’d ever been able to fathom, was that he drove a car. But it was his presence, mute as it was, which first made me grasp the notion that something truly momentous must have occurred. As Sunday afternoon wore on, and the day before began to reassemble itself in my scrambled brains, Willard mostly lurked slouching in the corner and hardly ever took his eyes off Terri, but it wasn’t with the expression of a guy whose gaze is glued to a girl out of hormonal uproar. He wore a look of shell-shock, as though he were still climbing up a steep hillside of realization that were it not for a fluke of movement on my part, his girlfriend would be dead, taken from him and never given back. Until now I’d been ben
eath his notice, and he wasn’t sure how to handle this, because if there was to be any lifesaving going on around Terri, he was supposed to be the one doing it. Willard wore the look of a guy who suddenly had a million things inside him that desperately needed to be voiced, but didn’t know where or even how to begin, because he was articulate enough only to say he was hungry.
They kept me in the hospital for a few days — kids and concussions, you know, a worrisome combination — and the enormous knot on my forehead went down. They ran tests, and would continue to do so for a time, checking for neurological damage. What I found most amazing about the whole duration was the amount of time Terri spent at my bedside, nearly every waking moment she wasn’t in school. She brought me comics, even a few I wasn’t supposed to have and had to hide from Mom, and she raided the hallway closet back home for board games we hadn’t played for years, and let me win most of the time. And we talked, talked a lot, talked the way we hadn’t in almost as long as it had been since we’d played the board games, but it was better somehow because we were both older in years and certainly older since Saturday afternoon when the hunter had nearly put an end to both of us.
I didn’t know the word renaissance then, but that’s what it was like between us. Once upon a time I’d been her little doll to dress up and do with pretty much as she pleased, which I don’t remember but there are plenty of embarrassing pictures to prove it. And then I got bigger and could hold my own against her, tell her no, keep up with her, listen spellbound as she told me what kind of tree was what and took me to see the owls she had discovered deep in the woods. Years of that. Two kids could never have asked for more than the forest at our door, our forest.
But we’d hit that gulf, the four years between us suddenly a generation, and I was still a kid while she thought herself a grown woman. And I suppose she was in my eyes, too, even if I resented it. Taller, after a growth spurt, and she had a chest now, like all the women on TV, plus the additional underwear to go with it — that was new, and unsettling. She was appropriating far more of the bathroom vanity than she ever had before. Siblings or not, then, nobody who looked like Terri now did could have much use for anyone who looked like me. I wasn’t fooling anyone. I was still very much eleven.