Althea and Oliver

by Cristina Moracho

  The wind stings the raw, bloody skin on her knees and elbows and the fresh burn on her arm. The too-vivid world abruptly retreats, leaving her alone in the woods, claustrophobic with the understanding that she is going to be stuck in her own head forever.

  She peels off her shirt and wriggles out of her shorts. The yelling has almost tapered off when she dashes out of the trees and down the dock like it’s a runway and she’s been cleared for takeoff, feet pounding the wooden planks, flying off the end and hanging in the air just long enough to hear them cheer before she plummets into the water, almost losing her panties on impact, river weeds tangling around her legs. The Cape Fear wraps around her. Underwater, everything is muffled and remote, and she wishes, she wishes she knew how to keep it that way. Althea sends this new wish out into the universe—that the peaceful emptiness she feels down here might last, that when she surfaces, when she climbs out of the river and back into the world, she’ll still feel gone.

  chapter four.

  OLIVER CAN’T FIND his aviator sunglasses. The street looks blown out, overexposed, the hubcaps and fenders of parked cars shimmering maliciously. It’s not just the bright light that pains him, but having his eyes open at all, having to see. He clenches one hand into a weak fist several times, trying to get used to being in his body again after so long—two months this time. Is he hungry? When was the last time he ate? In his rush to leave the house and get away from Nicky and her questions—she wanted to know how he was feeling before he had been awake long enough to divine the answer himself—he had neglected to shower or even brush his teeth, and now he’s embarrassed by his sour smell, intensely aware of the rancid film in his mouth. His hair, normally so neat, has grown into a shaggy mess. He runs a hand over his cheek, where the blond stubble is verging on full beard; his nails, at least, seem recently clipped, but the thought of Nicky performing this chore while he slept is beyond mortifying. Slipping into Althea’s backyard, he squints in the sun. There’s movement in the gazebo, ice against crystal, the rustle of pages.

  “Oliver? That you?” Garth looks up, surprised.

  “It’s me.”

  It looks like Garth’s been planning on making a day of it. There’s a stack of books about the Aztecs on the bench beside him, an errant mystery novel wedged into the middle, a pitcher of honey-colored sweet tea filled with lemon slices, and a plate of red velvet cupcakes within reach.

  “You’ve got some setup out here,” Oliver says.

  “Welcome.” Garth plucks a cupcake from the plate, arranges the rest in a neat circle, and offers them to Oliver.

  “What are you working on?” Oliver indicates the books. “Is that for a class?”

  “My next book, actually.”

  “What’s it about?”

  Garth slips effortlessly into professor mode. “Two Spaniards, Gerónimo de Aguilar and Gonzalo Guerrero. They were survivors of a shipwreck that landed them in what’s now Mexico in the early 1500s. They were captured by the Maya and came very close to being sacrificed, but they were enslaved instead. Guerrero married, and he fathered some of the first mestizo children. When Cortés heard there were two Spaniards living among the natives, he sent for them. Aguilar came on as his translator, working in tandem with La Malinche, but Guerrero wouldn’t leave his family. Of course, neither of them fully understood Cortés’s intentions, at least not at first, but it didn’t take long to realize what they were.”

  “So what happened?” Oliver asks.

  Garth laughs. “It’s Mexico now, isn’t it?”

  “I mean to the two Spaniards.”

  “You’ll have to read the book to find out.”

  Oliver contemplates human sacrifice, trying to imagine it as something normal, like setting off fireworks on the Fourth of July. It’s August now. He missed Independence Day this year. He wonders who won the hot dog eating contest.

  “Where’s Althea?” he asks finally, in a scratchy voice that doesn’t sound like his.

  “I think she’s over at Coby’s, hanging out.”

  Oliver bites angrily into his cupcake. How does Garth even know Coby’s name? How did Coby come to exist in the universe of the Carter household? The cupcakes are Althea’s work—rich and moist, minimal frosting, not too sweet, not too red. She hates to use food coloring, and for years she’s been searching for a good recipe without it.

  “You don’t like him either,” Garth says.

  “Is it that obvious?”

  “Your poker face hasn’t improved much since you were six.”

  “So you’ve met him?” Oliver asks, surprised.

  “Just once, briefly.”

  “And? What? Was he rude?”

  Garth shakes his head. “He was oversolicitous. He seems—How to put this? I’ve seen it occasionally in my students. He seems not to understand how to strike the right tone with people, like he’s either trying too hard or not hard enough. It makes one very aware that he isn’t showing anything really of himself, which of course raises the question ‘Why not?’”

  “Because he’s creeptastic.”

  “I thought he was a friend of yours?”

  “Not really. He’s the kind of guy who just keeps showing up until no one remembers who was friends with him first, so when you figure out that you don’t like him, you don’t want to say anything, because you’re afraid you might offend whoever brought him along.”

  Garth sips his tea. “Well, Althea’s going to be thrilled to see you. She gets lonely without you. I think this time it lowered her standard for company.”

  A deepening disquiet settles in Oliver’s gut. Something’s gone wrong. Everything looks the same—the azalea bushes, the tear in the back door screen, the loosely coiled garden hose tossed carelessly to the side of the driveway. Another late summer day has reached that imperceptible pivot, when the gasoline hum of lawn mowers and the delighted cries of children give way to the nuances of cicadas and the rhythmic hiss of sprinklers fanning lawns with manufactured rain. But there’s something ominous about this placid afternoon. Oliver imagines he’s woken up in a different world, a stranger, darker place than the one he left in June, and even as he tells himself this is ludicrous, he’s already convinced it’s true.

  “Is everything cool?” he asks.

  Their eyes meet. Garth pauses, a frosting-covered finger en route to his lips. A mourning dove calls from the highest branches of a nearby tree. For the first time Oliver can remember, Garth blinks first, and looks away.

  • • •

  They don’t see him arrive, so Oliver is able to watch them from the ground, just the two of them, drinking a beer on the roof of the garage. Coby is wearing his I SOCCER MOMS T-shirt, a greasy lock of dark hair falling into his eyes. Althea’s pant legs are pulled up above her knees, her long toes wrapped monkey-like around the edge of a shingle, black bra straps electric against her white wifebeater (could it be Coby’s?) and her tan, tan skin. Oliver’s sunglasses sit smugly on her face. She’s dyed her hair black. She’s too skinny. She’s smiling at something Coby said.

  Althea opens a book of matches. Pressing her arm against Coby’s, she strikes one and lets it fall, clenching her fists, biting down on one knuckle. Oliver opens his mouth but can’t speak. Coby shouts wordlessly, a string of vowels rigid with pain, pulling his arm away and letting the spent match fall to the roof. Althea draws in a ragged gasp, like someone who’s been underwater for too long desperately breaking the surface.

  “You win again,” Coby says, picking up his beer.

  Again?

  Coby sees Oliver first; his shoulders slump even as he struggles not to let his disappointment show. Oliver wants to throw Coby off the roof of his garage. He wants to shatter the beer bottle in Coby’s hand and use the shards of glass to slice him into pieces.

  Following Coby’s gaze, Althea turns her head. She lifts the sunglasses, blinking stupidly in Oliver’s dire
ction. He forces a smile, and she recovers, as if she’s realizing that she’s happy to see him, rising to her feet with such enthusiasm that Coby grabs the back of her pants to keep her steady on the pitched roof.

  When she reaches the ground, she does exactly what Oliver had hoped she would do, which is wrap one hand around the back of his neck and pull him close. He presses his forehead against her shoulder. Even as he relaxes against her, she goes taut like piano wire in his arms. Coby gets blurry in the background. She smells like ChapStick and sulfur and burned hair.

  “I’ve been waiting for you,” she says.

  He closes his eyes and Coby goes away altogether. “I got here as soon as I could.”

  When they finish their embrace, he’s shocked to find himself looking down at her for the first time ever, her eyes no longer perfectly level with his, but a firm inch below them. Behind her new mess of black hair, she blinks, confused, then checks to confirm he’s wearing his usual tennis shoes.

  “The fuck?” she blurts out. “Am I shrinking?”

  She grabs her messenger bag from inside the apartment and bids Coby a cursory good-bye, leaving him sulking on the roof. Oliver throws his bicycle in the back of the Camry while she gets behind the wheel.

  “Punch it,” he says, and she does.

  • • •

  Down by the water, they drink their coffee. Shoes abandoned, feet dangling off the dock. Althea lies back. Summer’s not over yet, they haven’t even started senior year, but she’s already full of plans for Halloween, her favorite holiday.

  “I was thinking Jack and Sally this year,” she says. “I’ll do some fake stitches around my neck, make myself a patchwork dress, and we’ll get you a pinstripe suit at Goodwill. Or a topcoat.”

  “I don’t want to wear all that whiteface. I hate makeup. If we do Jackie O and JFK, I just have to paint a bullet hole on my forehead.”

  “Yeah, but then I’m the one covered in blood. And I have to wear a wig.”

  “You have to wear a wig to be Sally, also,” Oliver says.

  “I can just dye my hair orange.” She tugs absently on his belt loop and he grabs her skinny wrist. He runs his thumb along her fresh burn, blistering and slick. There are other burns that have faded, bruises old and new. It’s Coby he suspects is at fault somehow, Coby he imagines as the cartoonish red devil that spent the summer on her shoulder, poking her with a pitchfork, growling in her ear, egging her on while Oliver slept, wrapped in his white sheets.

  Althea removes the plastic lid from her cup so she can chew on it. Sometimes hanging out with her is like playing Whac-A-Mole; even as one tic is suppressed, another rises to take its place.

  “Go ahead. Have a cigarette,” Oliver says fatalistically. She pulls out a pack of Marlboros, takes her time with the chosen smoke, making sure the paper isn’t torn and tapping the filter a few times on her book of matches. Oliver is sad to see how expertly she shields the flame from the wind, how she inhales and exhales with ease, like he always knew she would. “Since when do you hang out at Coby’s?” he finally asks.

  She shrugs. It’s getting dark, but his sunglasses are still atop her head, the same glasses he searched for only to find that she had had them the whole time, wearing them while she was at the beach and drinking beers on Coby’s roof. It infuriates him that his stupid sunglasses saw the summer he slept through. He imagines her lifting them from his dresser, thinking he didn’t need them anyway. He snatches them off her head, as if by doing so he could get this tiny piece of summer back. A flyaway lock of her hair catches in the hinge.

  “What the shit?” she says.

  “These are mine, you know.”

  “I know they’re yours. I was going to give them back.”

  “What happened to your arms?” Althea flicks the rest of her cigarette into the river. Pulling her knees to her chest, she wraps her arms around her legs, lowering her head. The fear he felt in the gazebo runs through him again, stronger this time. “Why won’t anyone tell me what’s going on? You’re being all cagey, Garth was acting weird—”

  Althea’s head snaps up. “You saw my dad?”

  “—and I don’t understand why I woke up in the fucking Twilight Zone and no one will tell me what the hell happened!” Oliver yells.

  “Ol, I know you’re upset—”

  “Don’t do that. Don’t act like I’m making it up,” he says wearily. “Don’t do that to me.”

  “You’ve been asleep for two months!” she shouts. “Of course everything seems all fucked up! It’s not surprising that when you go to sleep in June and you wake up in August, it’s not a seamless transition. It doesn’t mean there’s a Wilmington-wide cover-up with you at the center.”

  “Humor me. For once,” he says harshly.

  “I promise, okay? In a couple of days you’ll feel better and everything will go back to the way it was before and it’ll be like it never happened.” Reaching into her back pocket again, she pulls out her cigarettes and flings them into the river. “See?”

  They sit, both curled into angry balls, listening to the water lapping against the dock. Edging closer, she puts her arms tentatively around his neck. “It must be awful,” she says.

  Relenting, he returns her embrace, and they huddle together in the dwindling purple light. “I missed my birthday.”

  “I’ll make you a cake,” she says.

  “I missed your birthday.”

  “It rained.”

  “It’s like a joke,” he says. “A total fucking joke.”

  Holding her, he remembers the walk home from the party; so recent those memories are to him—her laughter in his ear, her eyelashes against his cheek. And the stupid thing he’d said after, that he’d done it because he was drunk. It’s here again today, that same tugging want, making everything just a little more goddamn confusing.

  “So is Coby, like, your boyfriend now?” he asks her.

  Althea laughs. “Christ, no. You haven’t been asleep that long.”

  Oliver knows it’s not normal that he’s never had a girlfriend, that she’s never had a boyfriend, that they never even talk about what it would be like. To talk about sex would have inevitably drawn attention to the possibility that they might someday have it with each other, or that they would someday belong to other people. The territory was just too dangerous. Still, Althea’s answer fills him with enormous relief.

  “I hate your hair,” he says.

  “You need a shower.”

  “I just want everything to go back to normal.”

  “I know.”

  • • •

  Nicky cooks for him that night, or tries to, coating chicken breasts in flour and capers and lemon juice, singeing the kale around the edges and scraping burnt jasmine rice out of the bottom of the pot. Typically, when she ties on an apron, Althea is around to avert these minor disasters, readjusting the burners on the stove while Nicky is waist-deep in the fridge hunting for the chardonnay, or adding black pepper and paprika to whatever pan needs it when Nicky turns her back to put on another album by the Replacements, but Althea has bowed out of this meal, perhaps wisely. As Nicky moves around the kitchen she speaks wistfully of New York: her old stack of takeout menus, scallion pancakes and shrimp dumplings delivered in the middle of the night, floppy slices of pizza so cheap you could pay for them with the change in your pocket.

  “People talk about how expensive New York is,” she says as they carry their plates to the front porch. “But you can still get two slices and a root beer for five bucks. It’s about all you can get for five bucks, but, you know.”

  This is when he normally inquires about her former life in the city, listens to her wax nostalgic about Alphabet City and the early days of rock and roll. She’s told these stories many times, about dinner parties thrown in cramped walk-up apartments and stifling summers spent on the beach at Coney Island, and he can
imagine it all perfectly—Nicky in some red gingham sundress with her hair pulled back in a bandanna serving red wine in plastic cups, or napping on a towel with a Corona in her hand and a copy of Pride and Prejudice open across her face. And always in the background of these stories his father hovers, a blue-eyed phantom sharing cigarettes with Nicky on the fire escape, drinking her lemonade on the beach. He imagines their laughter as a breathing, perpetual thing. Oliver looks down at his plate. His father must have done all the cooking.

  “The soccer team started practices already,” Nicky says, “but I can call Coach if you want.”

  Oliver shakes his head. “Don’t bother.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I’m in no shape for sports. No point in spending the fall on the bench.”

  “Did you find Althea this afternoon?” Nicky asks, cutting her chicken into tinier and tinier pieces.

  “She was at Coby’s,” he says with distaste.

  “Why didn’t she come over for dinner?”

  “She said she didn’t want food poisoning.” He digs at his plate for a decent bite of rice.

  “What did you think of her hair?”

  “You’ve seen it?” Oliver moves on to the capers, trying to spear them with his fork.

  “I see everything.”

  “Have you seen her around much?” he asks.

  “Here and there.” Nicky turns her attention from her food to her wine.

  “Does she seem different to you?”

  “I’m not sure the black hair suits her.”

  “If you know something, could you please tell me? Because I’ve had this really bad feeling since I woke up today, and no one is giving me any straight answers, and Garth was acting funny when I went looking for her, and I just want to make sure that she’s okay.”

  Nicky doesn’t answer right away. “Why are you so worried about her?”

  Oliver thinks of the burns on her arms. And of Coby. “I didn’t say I was worried.”

  “Are you jealous?” she asks delicately.