by Cubed, Magen
“Just pictures, I think.”
Bridger shrugged again. “Toss them. Or burn them. Whatever.”
To his credit, Kyle decided not to destroy them. He stacked them in the corner by the window so that they were not underfoot and safe in case Bridger changed his mind. Satisfied, he set about to setting up his corkboard above the desk by his laptop and police scanner, to fix it to the wall with two nails and a hammer. It was then that his grip on the hammer slipped. Purely by accident, distracted as he was by the footfalls thundering overhead as Hannah and Clare played in the green house, but just enough to throw off his aim and land it squarely on his finger and thumb. He cursed and pulled back the wounded hand to wave it uselessly. The tips of the digits stung from the force of the impact. However, when he inspected them for damage—some sign of purpling or swelling—he found them completely unharmed.
“Shit,” he cursed again, rubbing his thumb and finger together.
He had almost forgotten about this inability to be hurt or killed. It was still a foreign idea to him; a parcel of information that he hadn’t quite yet cycled through. He dropped the entire idea of his sudden invulnerability inside a little box and refused to deal with it while in the face of bombers and madmen. If he thought long and hard about it, the signs of this transfiguration had always lingered in the margins of his life.
As a child, he was rarely sick or injured beyond the initial shock of pain from falling from his bike or a tree. He might have stubbed his toe, jammed his finger, or slipped on an icy patch of sidewalk, but he was never truly harmed by anything that life hurled at him. The explosion on the train didn’t even stick, it seemed, or the bomb at the bank that threw him into a nearby bus. The bus gave in to him; he didn’t give in to it. He didn’t give in to anything.
Standing in his room, staring at his uninjured hand, Kyle found himself overwhelmed with the sudden urge to test himself. It was a sick little feeling, like the weird sense of thrill that came from picking scabs or peeling dry skin from the corner of his mouth. The hammer felt slick in his palm. His arms pimpled with gooseflesh as he raised the tool up and held a breath to bring it back down hard on his other hand. The bright burst of pain made him scream aloud. His nerves danced with the fire of the blow. He sighed out the breath he was holding and examined his hand. It pleased him to see the bones hadn’t broken, the muscles unbruised and the tendons intact. After a moment, he laughed.
A sudden knock caught his attention. He turned to find Bridger at the entrance to his room with his hand hovering over the wall to signal his arrival. Looking at the hammer, Kyle quickly set it down on the desk.
“Hey.”
“Hey,” Bridger said slowly. “So, uh, heard you scream just now. Everything okay?”
“Yeah, I just...” Kyle realized he didn’t really have an answer. “I was just putting up some stuff.” Bridger saw the hammer. Kyle stuffed his hand in his back pocket to hide it. Bridger nodded and turned to leave. “Yeah, I got it. Carry on.”
“Yeah,” Kyle said stiffly. “Thanks.”
“Oh.” Bridger stopped to tip his chin to the boxes in the corner. “Thanks for not throwing my shit out.”
“Sure,” Kyle said. “No problem.”
They would never speak of it—the hammer or the boxes Kyle kept in his room. These things weren’t secrets, but they both kept them to themselves. For what it was worth, Kyle felt better for it.
IV.
Clara was the one who decided to build the fort in the living room this time. She enlisted Hannah’s help in assembling their shelter of bed sheets and pillows. Piled around the television, Clara pulled up the internet browser and explained that they were about to watch something important to Hannah’s personal development. From the kitchen, listening in on the furtive plotting, Norah helped Adam cook dinner and said nothing of it.
“Okay, I’m about to show you the greatest show ever developed,” Clara explained, scrolling through a sea of science fiction shows to select Star Trek.
“This is old,” Hannah remarked from the floor. She swayed back and forth on her outstretched palms. “It’s boring.”
“This isn’t boring. This has been critical in shaping my worldview,” Clara corrected her, folding her long arms and legs in to sit under the floral canopy. “You’ll like it. Just give it a chance.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s about science.”
“I’m not good at science. I like to draw.”
“Well, it’s also about the future, and people who go out into space to understand man’s place in the universe.”
Hannah scrunched her face thoughtfully. “I do like space.”
“See? And it’s about aliens and technology, and the philosophical nature of space exploration.”
“I don’t know what that means.”
“It’s important. It’s about asking questions and being open to new ideas, and bringing people together for the betterment of mankind.”
“But—”
“Shh, it’s starting.”
By the end of the night, Hannah was talking about Vulcans and Klingons and warp speed travel. Clara couldn’t help but feel just a bit proud of herself. By the end of the week, they were finished with Kirk and Spock and on to Picard and Riker. Within a few weeks, they would be on to Sisko and Janeway, too, and Hannah would scribble the Bird-of-Prey in her notebook and think of the stars.
V.
The new unit in the boarding house wasn’t much bigger than Adam’s old ramshackle apartment in Jonestown. It just a bedroom and bathroom, with a tiny living area for his bookshelves and sofa. His family pictures covered the walls and his trinkets the shelves, making for a cluttered little space that he could call his own again without Bridger and Clara bumping into each other in the hall. It felt real as he sagged onto his bed with a sigh, letting his full weight sink into his tired, old mattress. It felt like it belonged to him, something to call his own. The house was Bridger’s, who slept next door. Norah’s and Clara’s voices drifted in from either end of the hallway if they left their doors open. Kyle’s booted feet stomped overhead. Hannah’s steps made the staircase creak as she roamed the house. But the space was his, filled with the sounds of life and closeness to keep him company.
Before he could close his eyes, the sounds of stamping and scraping broke his quiet calm. He made his way to the landing to peer down into the foyer. Bridger tugged a broad dresser across the floor, fighting to get it across the carpet in the center of the room.
Adam sighed. “You need help?”
Bridger looked up. For a moment, he looked sheepish. It didn’t suit him. “No, I think I about got it.”
“Can you carry it up the stairs, too?”
“Probably. I mean, I think I can manage. If I just, you know, make Norah do her gravity thing, or something.”
“Or you could just ask me,” Adam said, coming around to head down the stairs. “And not kill yourself.”
Bridger scratched at the back of his neck. “Yeah, if you want.”
Adam picked the dresser up easily, lifting it to balance on his back. “Where did you get this, anyway?”
“I decided to pick up some furniture for my room since I remembered that I don’t actually own anything these days,” Bridger explained, dutifully following Adam upstairs. “I had everything delivered but the guys just dropped it off on the curb, I guess.”
Adam chuckled and changed his grip to maneuver the dresser through Bridger’s doorway. “You could’ve just asked me to help you.”
“Yeah, well. I didn’t want to put you out.”
“You just didn’t want to ask.”
“Whatever.”
In the bedroom, Adam set the dresser down against the indicated wall. He dusted off his hands and looked around. The entire unit was still empty, the walls blank. With a sigh, Bridger ran a hand through his hair.
“I don’t have much, as I’ve said. It didn’t really occur to me to buy anything else. I was kind of just operating under
the assumption that I was going to off myself. No need for luggage where I was headed, you know?”
“Yeah.” Adam shrugged. “Can you get anything back from your wife?”
Bridger shook his head and ambled to his mattress on the floor to sit down. It was still bagged in plastic from the store and made a crunching noise when he dropped onto it. “I couldn’t ask her for that. Too many memories. I don’t think I could handle having our things here, anyway.”
“I guess you’re right.” Adam followed suit, taking a spot on the other side of the mattress. “Are you going to be all right otherwise? I mean, you’ve kind of gone full tilt since we got started on moving. This is a lot to take on.”
Bridger shrugged. “I’ll be fine. I don’t have much of a choice, right?”
“You’re not weak for needing help, Bridger. None of us are. That’s why we’re all here.” It sounded remarkably like Dr. Bell’s words coming out of his mouth again, but Adam didn’t care anymore. They carried some weight, regardless. They made sense to say in the face of the strange and terrible things that had brought them all together.
“Oh, god. Not you, too.” Bridger collapsed back onto the mattress with a sigh and rubbed at his eyes with the heels of his hands. “This is just weird for me. I mean, yeah, this is weird for everybody, but I’ve never really done this before. I went from my dad’s house to a dorm in college, then I moved into my wife’s apartment after we got married. I don’t know how to live by myself. I never had to.”
Adam smirked. “Aw, you’re growing up.”
“I’m a grown ass man who never learned to sleep alone, and it scares the hell out of me. How sad is that?”
Adam stretched out on an elbow with a shrug. “It’s not so bad. I had four siblings and shared a room with my brother until I left for the army. Then, I always had bunkmates, so it’s not like I ever got to sleep alone until I was twenty-four.”
“Wow, yeah. That is pretty sad.”
“See? Not so bad.”
This close, in Bridger’s unused bed, all Adam could smell was the expensive cologne Bridger bought on one of their shopping weekend trips across town. It had a dark, woodsy scent and came from a clear bottle with no label. It was one of the few microscopic luxuries Bridger still allowed for himself in his secondhand clothes and old jacket with bloodstains on the collar. The smell of it made Adam’s fingertips tingle, wetting his lips as he stared at the broad silver band still on Bridger’s ring finger. His head buzzed with terrible ideas, but he ignored them determinedly. He got to his feet and propelled through the blank wall facing his own quarters. With a few punches, he tore right through it, opening Bridger’s empty unit to his cluttered one. Bridger immediately appeared at the doorway to see what Adam had done.
“There,” Adam said. “Now we’re roommates just like before. We can open all this up and put the bookshelves and sofa on that wall. Over here, I can get my old punching bag out of my brother’s garage and put it up to make a recreational area.”
At the door, Bridger couldn’t help but smirk. “You know, I could’ve paid somebody to do that.”
“Yeah, I know.” Adam’s face flushed, but Bridger didn’t say anything. “But my way is faster.”
Chapter Seventeen
I.
Sonya White took a deep breath. She shuffled through her colored notecards once more and smoothed her shirt. She reminded herself to breathe, smile, and not look anybody in the eye. If she did, she knew she would crack. It had been six months since she had buried her daughter Rebecca in a tiny, white casket. White like Rebecca’s dress had been the day she fell, and in Sonya’s camera snapshots of recitals and living room practice sessions. It had been three months since Sonya had last seen her husband, Damon. She only had photos and an empty apartment to fill the hole now left behind. Looking at this room full of people, she smiled and breathed.
It was Thursday night, and the Kleine Dance Academy was throwing a party. It was a somber affair with black dresses and suit jackets. Sonya was to speak at the little podium in the little banquet hall where the staff held charity fundraisers and school functions. She got up to the mic with her notecards in hand and looked at the room of instructors, parents and students. Their faces were expressionless. Their eyes fixed on the blown-up photo of Rebecca on the screen behind her. She took another deep breath.
It was her great honor to announce the Rebecca White Dance Scholarship, she said, established in her daughter’s memory. A small cash purse was to be awarded every term to promising students with trouble covering fees and equipment expenses. It was an honor to make something wonderful come out of something so tragic. She spoke slowly and carefully, making sure to enunciate, mindful of her tone and range. Speaking was difficult; it was tangled by the stinging in her eyes and the shaking of her fingers around her notecards. Deliver the speech, she reminded herself. Be brave.
Tell them the story of how Rebecca always danced, mimicking pirouettes in her dressing gown on Saturday morning or twirling in the backyard on warm nights. Tell them how she always looked at the stars at night to point to constellations and talk about how she wanted to dance among them. “Look, Mom,” she would say, looking up at the canopy of dust and pollution above the urban sprawl for the twinkling she swore was there. “Look at the stars.” But then, Sonya saw Damon in the back of the banquet hall, behind a sea of heads. His face was hollow, ghostly from sleeplessness, but he was still the man she married when she was twenty-seven. He stared at the picture of Rebecca like everyone else—staring through Sonya, through his wife like she wasn’t there. Panic caught her first, followed by joy, sadness, pity, and rage.
When she finally stole his eye, he flinched. Without another look, he turned out the door and into the hall outside. She finished the speech, accepted her requisite consolations and quickly left, following his steps into the main corridor. The heavy sounds of footsteps brought her around the building to the darkness of the street. Something terrified and euphoric ran hot in her veins.
She had been looking for Damon since he left. She paid for private investigators and online searches she couldn’t really afford. It felt disingenuous to have to search for her husband’s whereabouts, to give strangers money to track him down for her. The last number he’d had was disconnected, and his old address led her to an empty parking lot on the edges of the Factory District. Even his brother, Mike, couldn’t point her in the right direction. He admitted he had stopped looking three weeks ago, shaking his head while they sat together over coffee. Searching for somebody who wasn’t lost—who’d disappeared into plain sight—all seemed hopeless after a while. She couldn’t blame Mike for giving up.
Maybe she should have given up, too. Damon was the father of her child and her husband of sixteen years when they’d made a home together in Plymouth Beach. But that was before the news and the bombings on the subway, at the bank, at the hospital. That was before she knew deep down inside—where the truth made her sick. This had gone on too long now. He’d pulled away when she needed him the most. He’d retreated to Primrose Pine Cemetery to relive Rebecca’s death over and over. He’d disappeared.
When she finally found him on the street, waiting for the signal to turn, she screamed his name. Sighing, he turned to face her. He was colorless now and dark under the eyes and in his cheeks. His face looked scratchy with a three-day beard.
“Sonya.”
She blinked back the tears that tried to claw out of her eyes. “Where did you go?”
“You were really good up there.” He almost smiled. “You look—you look good.”
“I’ve been looking for you for months. Mike, your parents—we all have.”
“I can’t talk to you right now, Sonya. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have come.”
“Stop, Damon. What’s happened to you? Tell me what’s going on. Where did you go?”
“I can’t.”
“Fuck you,” she screamed. She was shaking now, numb to everything but the tightness in her gut. “I’m your
wife, Damon. After everything that’s happened—after everything you’ve done—you owe me this much.”
He licked his chapped lips. “I never wanted to hurt you. You know that.”
“You abandoned me. She died and you—you just ran away. You disappeared, fell off the face of the Earth. And for what?”
“I’m sorry.”
“I needed you. You’re my husband and I needed you, and you wouldn’t even stay for me.”
“I had to make this right, Sonya. I don’t know how to make you understand, but I had to do it.”
“You can’t make it right. She’s gone, Damon. She’s just gone.”
“And someone’s going to pay for it.”
At that, she sagged. All the air sucked out of her and disappeared into the space between them on the street. “So it’s you, isn’t it?”
Looking down, he sighed. “I’ve got to go. I’m sorry.”
He walked away like he had before, disappearing down the street amid the creep of city blocks. This time, she didn’t try to follow. She closed a hand over her mouth to hide the animal sound she made and sat on the ground until the trembling stopped.
II.
Chris arrived on a Saturday morning in his white sedan. He pulled up to the curb outside the boarding house with Norah’s new address burning a hole in his pocket. He called Diane first when Norah stopped answering his calls, who sent him to their mother for Norah’s whereabouts. The conversation was terse, but she gave him the address Norah left with them when she moved Hannah to a house in East Essex with people she barely knew. Of course, her mother couldn’t help but stress that point—a decision she immediately regretted when Chris’s tone changed and he thanked her curtly before hanging up.
Norah’s behavior was getting erratic, as lawyers and family court judges liked to say. He wouldn’t go that far yet. He got out of his car to walk up the freshly cut lawn to the front door. She had been through a lot with the accident and losing her job. That didn’t excuse her or give her the right to move twice without telling him where to find her. But this was no time to call the authorities or drag her to court. He knocked on the door, unsure of what he would find inside. He needed to speak to her first and sit down face-to-face. To be civil and lay out his concerns. Then, it would be up to her to decide how she wanted to proceed. His knock received no answer. He knocked again.