Nothing to Devour

by Glen Hirshberg

  What a sweet, surprising, sustaining thought that was. Because if there really was a home for Jess, or even the possibility of one, after everything life had savaged her with, then surely, someday …

  “You’re so good with her,” Jess murmured, nodding up at Trudi’s window. As usual, she made no move to touch Rebecca. Usually, Rebecca felt grateful for that.

  Something about hearing Kaylene talking to her mom, and the sight of Joel setting the table, and the realization that Jess had long ago started settling (or sinking) into this landscape pricked at Rebecca. She shook her head. “Meaning, I manage to get her to dinner? Most days?”

  Jess’s smile was her usual one, faint and faraway. It shed light, but not much warmth. “Baby steps, kiddo.” She stopped watching the woods long enough to eye Rebecca up and down. Rebecca had to resist the impulse to spin away, Trudi-style, and burrow for the main house.

  “What?” she finally said.

  “Nothing.”

  “Something.”

  “Your clothes.”

  “My clothes?”

  “They’re not you, hon.”

  Surprised, Rebecca glanced down at her black sleeveless vest-shirt, black pants, black flat-heel boots which were neither ass-kickers nor come-hithers. Boots for pumping bass-drum pedals. “I think they’re me. Sock Puppet me.”

  “I’m talking about the black.”

  Rebecca waited. To her annoyance, she realized she was holding her breath. When Jess didn’t say anything else, she gestured back toward the house, up at Kaylene’s window, and with a ferocity that surprised her. “Look at Kaylene. Look at those stripes. Look at those tights. Are you saying that’s her? Is that the Kaylene you know? Because the one I was best friends with—”

  “She’s wearing all that for herself,” Jess said, not looking where Rebecca pointed. “What you’re wearing is for everyone else. At everyone else.”

  Jess might as well have punched her. It was completely true, of course. Also—worse—it was exactly the kind of observation Crisis Center Rebecca would have made, once upon a time. The kind of observation her friends, and the people who used to call the Center, and poor Danni and Amanda, and pretty much everyone in her life back then had counted on her for. The only gift she’d ever been absolutely sure she had, which was now just another something she’d lost, somewhere.

  She met Jess’s gaze. As always, those eyes held tears that seemed on the verge of spilling over. Yet, not once, since that last East Dunham night, had Rebecca seen them fall.

  The door to the windmill flew open and Trudi stalked into the yard, glaring but just for show. To stay in character.

  “Come on, Mom,” Rebecca whispered, so quietly that only Jess could have heard.

  But Jess didn’t hear. She had already moved away across the grass toward the woods, not the house. “I want to find Eddie,” she said.

  “He’s fine,” Rebecca called after her. “His okras will watch over him.”

  “Yeah, well, I want to watch them doing it.”

  Most times, these days, Jess stopped at the edge of the woods. But not today. Which wasn’t like her. Not anymore, anyway. There was nowhere on the island for Eddie to go. Nowhere he would go except to the cove or across one of the grassy, rocky expanses of openness, chasing butterflies or collecting stones. There was no one else within a mile of Jess’s Stockade, not even any actual buildings until the abandoned, century-old English army barracks and, past those, the overgrown meadows that wound down to the automated lighthouse on the isle’s southernmost tip. Eddie had never shown interest in any of those, nor in the town where Benny had his diner and Jess her little donation center and charity shop.

  “Don’t make me come after you, now,” said Rebecca.

  “Tell everyone I’ll be right there,” Jess said, and vanished into the hemlocks.

  Mist streamed from the trees like smoke Jess had generated while disappearing. Rebecca could smell its saltwater damp, and also Benny’s chicken, the leaves dying overhead and underfoot, some far-off island neighbor burning other leaves somewhere. The season changing. Rain coming. She turned to start for the house and bumped face-first into Kaylene.

  “Ow,” she said. “Hi.”

  “Ready to go hit something?” Kaylene rubbed her own arms where Rebecca’s elbows had bumped them.

  “I’m ready to eat.”

  “No time. Vancouver. Early load-in, remember?”

  “Goddamnit.”

  “That’s right. Save that anger. Nurse it.”

  “Shut up.”

  “Where’s Eddie?”

  Rebecca glanced once more toward the trees. Darkness had closed off the spaces between them.

  “Maybe we should go find Jess and Eddie,” she murmured, and the shiver that perpetually lurked just under her skin got out, swept down her back.

  “No time. We’ve got life to live. Screams to unleash.” Grinning, ridiculous in her stripes and tights, Kaylene shrugged the waterproof guitar case strapped to her back, then held up the paper bag packed with whatever else she was bringing tonight.

  “What’s that?” Rebecca said, but Kaylene had already turned to leave, laughing as she went.

  Fifteen minutes later, they were halfway down the hill, walking single file along the white line in the center of the road, the way they always did, to the rhythmic patter of a sudden rain in leaves. Sock Puppet, on the move. As usual, they kept clear of shadows. On either side, the woods rippled in the dark. Behind them, Jess’s Stockade had already disappeared behind its hedge. Down below, less than a mile away—so close, and yet, from inside their compound, so remote that they could all imagine it was no longer there, could not be reached, could not reach them—the lights and houses of January Bay scattered over the headland. The town looked pumpkin colored tonight, orange and yellow and red. For Halloween, Rebecca remembered. The day held no specific associations for her. It was just another one of those occasions where children who lived in their own houses went to other people’s houses. If she were going to be scared of anything, it would have been woods.

  Or else the whole rest of the world, out there beyond the orange and black lights, the taverns and shuttered shell-and-fossil shops and seasonal kayak-rental sheds.

  To prove, yet again, that she wasn’t, she marched side by side with Kaylene, straight through town to the ferry port where their ferry was already docked, huffing smoke into the evening as it gathered up cars and pedestrians like an octopus combing a coral reef. In silence, with her drumsticks in her hands in her jacket pockets, she joined the rest of the boarding travelers, the homeless and aged and partying college couples, all edging up the plank toward the strange and solitary souls in shapeless rain slickers who seemed always to be on board already, at any time of day or night, hunched on the back benches of the passenger cabin or standing at their separate rails at the ends of decks to watch the rest of them coming.

  7

  Ironies, Emilia thought, shuddering into the moth-eaten sheet he draped over her whenever he left her down here in the dark. So many ironies.

  The only place she was absolutely certain no one would ever look for her was in the library from which she’d vanished. That was a good one, for starters. To be fair, she wasn’t technically in the library anymore, but underneath it, in the bomb shelter she’d never heard mentioned and suspected no one who still worked for the county even remembered was there.

  But the Invisible Man remembered, or knew. He’d even known where to pull up the ratty green carpet in the back of the Records and Reference Room to reveal the trapdoor, which probably hadn’t been opened in decades.

  The back of the same room, in other words, where the records of bomb shelter trapdoors were kept, and the history of the county catalogued and almost never read.

  “Ironic. See?” she felt herself mouth into the scrupulously sanitized and deodorized blankets her abductor had provided, in the corner of the cement floor he swept clear of spiders and dust bunnies every single time he came back. She
was too weak actually to vibrate her vocal cords. But her lips moved, and she was fairly certain word-shaped air still spilled from them.

  Soon, he’d be back. Probably. Already, he’d been away a little longer than usual. She’d gotten surprisingly good at tracking passing hours down here, even without clock or light. Like a cat, she was. A feral, Piney Woods swamp cat, waiting for her captor to open the door.

  Right from the start, from the moment he’d grabbed her, Emilia had decided to survive. Somehow. So she tracked hours. Counted ironies.

  Here was another:

  The person the District had installed upstairs as her replacement apparently possessed a sense of thoroughness and efficiency Emilia had never encountered in another Butterfly Weed county employee. He or she had pasted copies of the police department’s HAVE YOU SEEN THIS WOMAN? flyer, complete with a faded, years-old, two-tone photo of Emilia, all over the library: not just on the doors to both bathrooms but inside toilet stalls; on cardboard bookstands, set up every few feet, all the way across the top of the circulation desk; in the empty end caps of each empty shelving unit.

  Now if only the District could generate one plausible reason for anyone not employed by the county to come to this library anymore, someone might actually see those flyers. As it was, the only people Emilia was certain had seen them were Emilia and her abductor. They noted them together upon resurfacing in the Records Room every night, after the lights shut down and the air switched off.

  Where had they even gotten that photo? she wondered, fingering the holes in the crooks of her arms, imagining playing herself like a recorder. Forming notes by opening and closing the holes, generating sound that way. She could still remember the fingering from elementary-school music class. D, E, A, C. She hummed inside her head, imagined playing a little Emilia’s-arm steel guitar solo over the top of that goofy new Kacey Musgraves song, the sweet and funny one about family being family. The last new Kacey Musgraves Emilia was likely to hear. Unless she got out.

  Until she got out, she made herself mouth even if she couldn’t quite say it, pressing her back into the wall, playing the holes in her arms.

  The police had gotten that picture from her parents. Obviously. If she thought hard enough—if she still had enough blood in her body to sustain memory—she could probably have called up the exact song her father was spinning on his record player at the moment he’d taken the shot, which had to be at least six years old. She knew this because Ursula, her turtle, was still alive, perched like a parrot on her shoulder. Was it the turtle, the music, her parents, or just habit that had once made her smile like that, sidelong and sly, whenever anyone snapped her picture? Apparently, the police had decided her Butterfly Weed ID photo wasn’t distinctive enough. That no stranger just happening to glimpse her in some passing car or down some alley somewhere would be able to identify her from it.

  Ironies.

  Her parents were almost certainly in Butterfly Weed by now, Emilia realized. She wondered how long they’d stay, what they’d think up to do that wasn’t already being done. A long time, and a lot, she suspected. They were those sorts of parents, always had been. The thought of them here … making nice to the asshole trust-fund Ole Miss dropouts downstairs who managed her building so they could get keys to her pathetic apartment … asking around the library and the Save-a-Lot and Hansom’s Diner to find friends who might know where she’d gone, and slowly realizing that there weren’t any …

  The sound of her own sigh startled her, and she twitched, made herself somehow wriggle into a sitting position with her shoulders against the wall. Her voice was still in there, somewhere.

  Thinking about her parents hurt. Even thinking about Ursula hurt. Not as much as the holes in her arms where the Invisible Man slurped at her every night, leaning across her lap and making little gulping noises like a five-year-old guzzling from a water fountain.

  But it still hurt.

  To distract herself, she curated and collated more ironies. In the weeks she’d been down here, she’d collected dozens more.

  Ever since she’d taken this job, for example, she’d fretted over the emptiness creeping kudzu-like through the Butterfly Weed branch, the town itself, and by extension her own life, only to find herself somewhere even emptier.

  Then there was the fact that she’d spent the better part of the last year—months and months, ever since he’d first appeared—trying to trick the Invisible Man into turning in her direction, looking her in the eye, and saying something. And now, she couldn’t shut him up. All it had taken, in the end, was a single, exhausted, “What on earth happened to you,” which had come out of her mouth sounding so much more gentle than she’d intended, simply because she didn’t have enough air or fluid left after his feeding to expel anything but words.

  Ever since, once he’d taken his nightly nibble, he just opened his mouth and rambled on and on and on. As though he were a vein she’d opened.

  And the stories he told …

  There was another irony, come to think of it. Perhaps the driving force behind her decision to become a librarian in the first place had been her love of Storybooktimes. How dearly had she loved her own, which had come complete with opening and closing theme music courtesy of her father and his magical, constantly detuning guitar? How often, in the midst of reading to the kids here, had she wished she could still have Storybooktime, too, find a lover or friend or surrogate dad to read or recite to her once a week, or every night, to help her sleep?

  Well, now she’d found someone. And he had so many stories, all of them connecting to each other without beginnings or endings, that they seemed to stretch across her life like a freight train that would never finish its traverse.

  That thought brought her to perhaps the worst irony she’d noted so far: if she ever did find a way out—when she did—she would miss the Invisible Man’s stories. Because those stories … snow falling in sugarcane fields, children playing hide-and-seek there, and what they found in those fields on the night after the boat parade … and that other night, on the riverboat this time, amid screaming and shooting stars, when the Invisible Man first met his Sally, or Aunt Sally, or whoever she was … and what happened to them after … and dancing with his mother (or someone named Mother?) on the porch of the Pine Palace in Grace Holler, which apparently had been a real place … Emilia had always assumed it was made up, just a line in a song … and the lemon cake served on the sheets of men who’d come into the forest on horseback for a lynching, and found Aunt Sally’s camp … and the months-long walks down the Mississippi toward its mouth with just a few companions, and sometimes none at all, only the Invisible Man and his Sally amid owls and bats and seabirds, with the offshore oil rigs rumbling and clanking in the roiling Gulf in the aftermath of a hurricane …

  Mississippi had always seemed such a brutal, wild, wondrous place to Emilia. It turned out to be much wilder and more brutal than she had dreamed. Than anyone she knew had dreamed. As wild as the Colombia of her parents’ childhood.

  She’d been sagging down the wall, but now, using mostly her feet, Emilia pushed herself back upright. Even that slow-motion lurch made her nauseous, set her starved veins twitching like cello strings loosened on their pegs. Once she was sure she wasn’t going to vomit, she took a deep breath, held it, went still, and listened. She wanted to be sure she’d heard correctly. Always, it seemed better to know he was here. That he was coming.

  He was.

  It had taken her a long time to learn how to hear him. The stairs out there, that led up through the trapdoor and back to the world, were concrete, free of creaks, and sheathed in dust, and the Invisible Man stepped so lightly. More lightly than a cat. It was almost as if he had no mass. As if he weren’t really there.

  “Close your eyes,” he called softly, as he always did, so he wouldn’t blind her when he pushed the door open.

  Emilia slitted her eyes instead, so she could watch him come. He had his flashlight tucked under his arm, aimed upward, so that his
bandaged head glowed like flame atop a candle. Outside-smells wafted off him, redolent and marvelous in this odorless room: burning-leaves smoke, wet earth, cigarettes (not his; he didn’t smoke). With his free hand, he offered Emilia a white paper bag, and when she smelled that, her eyes welled, and she almost fainted.

  “Catfish tacos,” he purred, and smiled. “From that place you like.”

  From the Strawberry Side? She’d told him about the Strawberry Side?

  And he’d listened?

  How funny, she thought, as her trembling hands shivered awake, rose off her lap to flit to the mouth of the bag. She could remember so many of the stories the Invisible Man told her, but she barely recalled doing any speaking of her own.

  Somehow, despite her nausea and sweating, there was tortilla in her mouth, sweet and fleshy fish falling apart in her teeth, on her tongue, as tears spilled from her eyes and vinegar-cabbage tumbled down her sweater into her lap like confetti.

  “Thank you,” she heard herself saying, in her scratchy new not-Emilia voice. She hadn’t meant to say that, hated that she had. But the fish taco had triggered gratitude, the same way it had conjured saliva out of the dry walls of her cheeks and throat. So, she had to admit, did the Invisible Man’s manner, which somehow suggested courtship, the antebellum kind she’d only read about in books from half a century ago. Books that had lured her father to the American South.

  “Shh,” he said, and edged a straw between her lips. A bendy one, no less. Sprite shot up into her before she’d even closed her mouth around the plastic, like fluid from an upside-down IV, something over which she had no control whatsoever.

  He waited until she was done eating, until the greasy paper wrapping fell from her fingers like a husk and the straw bounced along the bottom of the Sprite cup. Gently, he eased the cup from her hands, touched her face, let the flashlight catch in his eyes so she could see them. Sighing, crying without any tears—there wasn’t enough Sprite in the world, she thought, to get her producing those again—Emilia slumped back against the wall, and her elbow fell open in her lap.