Frail

by Joan Frances Turner

  And none of this would have happened. None of it.

  Oh, my dear, Ms. Acosta said once, last winter, when I told her this. My poor Amy. Her arms around me felt papery and fragile and so weirdly soft, that crumpled-paper softness of bones and muscles growing old, and she pulled away quickly as if scared I’d push her off. Would that have been what it felt like, a grandmother’s touching you? But Ms. Acosta wasn’t old enough for that, fifty at the most. And I never knew my grandparents. They died before I was born.

  Lightning flickered through the room, a match blown out the moment it caught flame, and only many seconds later came the thunder. The rain was coming in sporadic bursts now, the storm already passing.

  I thought I was still awake, lying there in wonderful padded softness with the thunder and Lisa’s snoring and the dim smokecolored afternoon light, but things began fading in and out and I had to go answer the phone that was ringing, somewhere up those broken rotten stairs. No, it was my own phone, the opening guitars from “The Last Transit” I’d set as my ringtone, playing right here in my pocket loud as—

  Dead battery. Dead people, who used to live here. Who used to live there, everywhere. Dead everything. That’s how it is, from now on, for the rest of your life. All your life. And you’re only seventeen.

  As I drifted deeper into sleep I kept right on hearing it, in my dreams. Those first opening bars retreating and repeating in an endless loop like an evaded promise, soft, insistent, impossible.

  FIVE

  Something heavy and furious and swollen with blinding, meteoric light flew from the sky, hitting the roof with a crash that rattled every wall and window frame and made the air shudder, ravenous, growling. Thunder straight on top of lightning, jolting me wide awake with a shout, another storm passing through and the windows were still shaking, the sky even darker—I ran for the door. When I pushed it open against cascading streams of rain and the winds trying to seal it shut I saw everything overhead tinted a deep algae green, green bisected by a smokestack column of blackness growing bigger, wider, closer with every passing second. I knew it, I knew it—the winds slammed the door shut for me and I ran back to Lisa, already on her feet.

  “Tornado,” I said; my voice was high-pitched and taut with the need to burst out laughing: I take us all the best places, don’t I, Lisa! “It’s coming this way, look out the window—”

  Lisa gave the carts a frantic glance and then we were both heading down the hallway, out of that ridiculous egg carton front room, looking for a way downstairs. The front door, I thought, as I went from kitchen to family room to living room to bathroom, weren’t you supposed to open all the doors and windows if a tornado was coming, less air pressure, where the hell was the—Lisa was yanking up strips of the filthy hallway carpeting, tearing away glue and nails easy as pieces of papier-mâché and she looked just like I felt, on the verge of laughter turning to screams.

  “There’s no basement,” she said, almost giggling as she hurled the carpet pieces into the kitchen. “No fucking basement, no safe house, a half-million each and they’re all built on slabs—”

  The bathroom, you were supposed to take shelter there if there was no place else, curl up with your head in the southwest corner of your bathtub and pray the roof somehow stayed where it was. I ran for the front room, my backpack, my lighters, my atlas with all the notes, and I was reaching down to grab it when the windows exploded. The palm of a huge, suffocating hand propelled me backward, eyes squeezed shut and arms wrapped around my face, and Lisa had me, shouting, dragging me back down the hall; we tripped over each others’ feet hurtling into the bathroom, half-falling into the bathtub together like a pair of drunks. She was whispering something beneath her breath, over and over, her words lost beneath the shattering roar outside.

  “Blessed art thou among women,” she repeated, hard unforgiving tongue and teeth snapping every soft petitioning syllable in two, “and blessed is the fruit of thy womb Jesus—”

  Everybody talks about freight trains when they try to describe a tornado’s sound but it’s nothing like that, nothing like it at all. A freight train sounds just like what it is, a rattling, groaning Lego-piece mechanism always this close to flying apart—but it stays right where it’s meant to, follows those straight solid double lines so obedient with eyes for nothing else, shouts to warn you it’s coming, leaves nothing but quiet behind when it’s gone. A tornado starts off with the same distant inchoate roar but then keeps getting bigger, louder, a great jaw unhinging around a long deranged scream; it jumps its tracks, cuts its own path over everything it sees, opens wide as it can to swallow up the greenish-black skies, the biggest and deepest-rooted of trees, the miserable ticktack slapdash nowhere houses. And us. The screaming sky was all around us and inside us and I screamed too, loud as I could against the devouring thing smashing through the living room, coming to find and kill us, and my voice was lost to the dirty whirlwind but I could still hear Lisa, her lips to my ear. Shouting into the void. Almost crying with fear.

  “Holy Mary, mother of—”

  Something banged and crashed above us and the roaring hit a crescendo: The roof had gone, the outer framework, maybe everything but our own four walls. The bathroom was an eggshell and when the winds broke through the soft oozing contents of our skulls, guts, blood vessels would spill out unstopping—no, not ours. Mine. Mine only. I put my forehead to the plastic masquerading as porcelain, beseeching nothing.

  “—pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death.”

  You don’t need prayers, Lisa. Not like me. Sins mean nothing, when you can’t die.

  A hard thump against the bathroom walls, once, twice, and the noises of the wind dropped and diminished but that meant nothing: Tornadoes liked to circle back, finish what they’d started before they spun out exhausted and dead.

  I stayed curled up in the bathtub, a sprouting thing cowering in the shell of the seed. Lisa had an arm curled around my chest and little threads of blood were trickling down the sides of the tub, wet like tears against my face, the tiny wounds from hundreds or thousands of flying shards of glass. Hers, mine, I couldn’t tell. Inside, outside, we both still looked the same. But it’s she who’s praying, crying, beseeching the air, when she needs no shelter and can’t die and nothing can ever touch her, nothing at all. The wind was softer now but it still wouldn’t stop. I made an angry lowing noise like a scared cat, scaredy-cat, and her arms held me tighter.

  “Oh my God,” she whispered, “I am heartily sorry for having offended thee . . .”

  Too late.

  The roof above our heads got ripped away, I’d been right about that, but the bathroom held, the rooms above it held. The back half of the house just collapsed, our hallway reduced to a teetering mountain of plywood, plaster chunks and cottony pink puffs of insulation. The front room where we’d slept, foyer, faux-atrium all sheared clean away, like a chunk of cake torn off by a toddler’s grasping fingers. I saw a dented can of pineapple peering from the wreckage, a torn bit of red nylon with a backpack strap still attached, but otherwise nothing but broken roof tiles and splintered wood scattered over grass illuminated, as if from within each blade, by soft, powdery fistfuls of glass. Four of the other houses were just gone, leaving only ribbons of rain-soaked Tyvek like wet toilet tissue; one of our shopping carts lying there upside down and empty. The second cart was stuck up in a tree, back wheels poking out almost abashed like it was trying to pull free and fly off to some new adventure.

  I had some glass cuts on the backs of my hands, shallow little wounds that kept opening up, and a huge bruise on my shoulder where I’d banged it on the faucet. The air was cool, wet, fresh, and everything felt oddly drained and subdued; the sun lit the edges of the pearly cloud wash still masking it from view, the rain hadn’t quite stopped. Lisa poked at one of the rubbish piles, then stepped back shaking her head.

  “All buried,” she said. “Or blown miles off.” She gazed up at our shopping cart. “So much for those damned flashlights
. And all my batteries.”

  Most of the blood in the bathtub was hers, she’d taken a forearm full of glass when she grabbed me, but of course she was already good as healed and pulling the shards right out of her skin, pick, pick, tug, yank, until I winced and looked away. Little dragons’ teeth like in the legends of Thebes, sowed in her flesh to spring out as brand-new exes, a progeny of monsters. I had a song about that too in my old notebook. Suddenly the loss of all my songs I wrote down and kept right on writing after my mother left, so I could show them to her when she came back, hit me like the winds had just carried them off and I felt something flattening inside me, my whole chest a torn, deflating balloon.

  My jacket, I still had that. Her torn-up jacket. Her ID cards, the CDs Lisa said I could keep with me, my broken cell phone. It didn’t help.

  “I can’t go to Elbertsville,” I said, and turned my back on Lisa.

  Lisa tossed aside a fistful of wood and slipped an arm around my shoulders, ignoring how I twitched and tried to shy away. “I didn’t mean you needed to bribe anyone,” she said, her voice thick with remorse. “Just that it might’ve made things a little—people, that’s what they need. Manpower. They’ll take you. We’re only a few days away, I can get my own food . . .” She glanced at my knife, Dave’s knife, that I hadn’t dropped or lost this time. “I’ve got a lighter in my pocket. With that, and your knife, I can fix it so you can—”

  “No.” It irritated me, the way she kept dancing around the subject—she could hunt just fine for herself in the woods, I got it, and she never needed to bother with cooking but she’d roast me a few leftovers. Did she think I didn’t know she was only living on fruit slices and Bronson’s Best Chili because she thought otherwise she’d scare me? “You go hunt without me, I don’t care. There’s still some stuff left here, I’ll dig it out and—”

  “Amy, see sense. Even if you could find any of it, we don’t have a can opener anymore.”

  Stop reminding me I should’ve kept one in my pocket, a lighter, batteries, aspirin, that the first thing I should’ve done when I saw that dark green splotch of a sky was grab my backpack and—“I’ll smash them open on a rock or something, okay? Just, go eat something, I know you’re hungry. You’re always hungry.”

  “I’ll do it all where you don’t have to watch. All right?” She was facing me now, a hand resting on my shoulder but even her lightest, most cautious touch felt like she was trying to force me to my knees. “I’ll just, I’ll take care of all that, so we both have something to eat, you won’t have to see it.”

  “No!” I shoved her arm away, the cuts on my hand opening again like weeping mouths. “I know it was fucking stupid not to keep a can opener with me, okay? I know I should’ve kept it in my jacket, just in case, I—”

  “That’s not what I said!” She forked fingers through her hair, seized hold of a few scraggly ends and tugged. “That’s not what I said and it—”

  “You just want my knife. I’m not giving you my knife.”

  “Amy, listen to me. We’re a good three days from Gary and the safe houses up north are all depleted, you can’t keep walking with no—”

  “I can’t go there!” I was crying now, hard, I’d sworn I wouldn’t do that in front of her or anyone else but it was like my skin got torn away in that storm, just like the rooftops, every nerve exposed to the agony of the air. “Why don’t you listen to me, I can’t go to Elbertsville and I can’t be around other people, I don’t want anyone else to die! I can’t stand it! And you’re not killing anything walking around the woods minding its own business—you’re not doing it, just so I can stuff my stupid face!”

  I kicked at a small white stone stuck in the damp ground, slammed it harder with my toe, again and again. Lisa stroked my arm, the barest brush of fingertips against cloth, and her softest touch had the tension of muscles aching to clench and grab and her voice could never be tempered, never be soft, but she couldn’t help that. Any more than I could help standing here, wailing over squirrels and bunnies like an infant fool.

  “Don’t cry,” she muttered. She sounded embarrassed, at me, at herself, I didn’t know. “Is this all about my killing something to—”

  “Yes!”

  A lie, all a lie, I’d been so proud I could hunt my own food. Before. I ducked my head, folded my arms tight and protective against my chest. Raindrops hit dispiritedly here and there, making black spots on my charcoal sleeves.

  “That ravioli you had for breakfast,” Lisa said, not unkindly. “There was beef in it. Dead cow, last I checked.”

  I know I’m being stupid, for God’s sake, Lisa, I know that. Too much blood, a different kind of blood, and now I wasn’t proud of anything anymore. That’s all. You don’t understand and I can’t explain it to you, I can’t ever tell anyone. I wiped my eyes, my nose on my sleeve.

  “God.” Lisa was laughing now, helpless, the blood from another tugged-out glass shard trickling down her arm. “You and Jessie, when she was still alive—did I tell you about that? All her animal rights stuff? One day when she was thirteen, it’s like she woke up and decided she was PETA’s new pinup girl. Never mind meat, she’d give us all hell for eating eggs, milk, butter, threw out half her shoes because they were leather—stop crying, Amy, just, three more days, maybe four. That’s all. We’ll both get somewhere better. All right?”

  The mighty bunny hunter and crazy tree hugger, a real pair of Wonder Twins. Was this supposed to distract me or something? I needed a tissue and, of course, we didn’t have them anymore. I snorted it all back, scrubbed at my nose, made myself look her in the face.

  “That tulip bulb,” I said, “from when we left Leyton. Why did you take it? We couldn’t plant it. It’d gone rotten.”

  Lisa looked startled, like she’d completely forgotten. Then her face actually flushed. “I thought, maybe you could peel the outside skin off, where it’d gone soft, and the inside would still be good? Good for planting. Something pretty to look at, for later on. But I don’t know anything about gardening.” Her mouth twisted in a mirthless little smile. “Or music, or Greek myths, or anything else. Hunting, eating, eating, hunting. That’s pretty much it, kid. That’s all.” She shrugged, tugged again at the sagging ponytail flopping over one shoulder. “That’s what you’ve got.”

  There was such sadness in her eyes, flooding them like a sudden tide overwhelming the sands. I tensed up, my skin almost itching from a sudden uncomfortable, crawly curiosity: What was it like, what was it really like, to lose yourself to this disease? To lose yourself entirely, for real, to sicken yourself eating and cry in disgust at what you must look like in the cafeteria, classroom, funeral home, to go down in starvation-wracked delirium and come back to yourself lying in a rigid, unyielding carapace that looked like you, but would never be you, ever. No way to smash through the shell, no way out. Did it actually hurt? How could she stand it? But that wasn’t the kind of thing you could ask someone, at least not someone who could snap your neck as an afterthought.

  “If I go to Elbertsville,” I tried to explain, “something bad will happen.”

  “Amy, it won’t always be as bad as this. It won’t. I swear.”

  No, I believe you. It won’t. It’ll be worse.

  “You didn’t get through the whole winter on peaches and ravioli,” Lisa said. “I know you didn’t. You told me you didn’t.”

  I shook my head.

  “I’ll find us something. Dress it, make a fire. God knows we’ve got enough wood. But you keep the knife for now. It’s your knife.” She hesitated. “You should still come with me. Safer.”

  “I’m fine here. I can see any more coming a mile away.” I nodded toward the ruin of the houses. “Especially now.”

  She wanted badly to hunt by herself, just to be alone with herself and her hunger. I could feel it. She was twitching in her shoes, the spasmy jolt of muscles aching to stretch out and move. “Those trees over there, down past the—”

  “I see them.”

  “Don�
��t go anywhere.” She gave me a suspicious look. “And don’t go digging in this crap, if you hurt yourself I haven’t got any first-aid kit left.”

  “You’re the one who looks like a walking mirror ball. I’ll be here. Go.”

  She went.

  Dave wouldn’t be pleased with me right now. Not at all. Leave her alone, Ms. Acosta used to snap at him when he’d nag me about helping set the snares, her bird-fluttery voice trilling even higher with anger in a way that made me want to stifle laughter even as my stomach twisted watching them fight. We spent six hours today foraging for more insulin for you, six goddamned hours, if that’s not “pulling her weight” in your fantasy kingdom then you can just go to—

  They shouted, and Kristin screamed, and Dave screamed right back and slammed fists against his own living room wall so hard he drew blood. Diabetics don’t heal. Ms. Acosta drew me aside later and said, Amy, you have to understand. His wife, his daughter. And I thought, there’s nothing I can do about that, nothing at all, but I just nodded. Six hours, she kept saying. Does he understand anything? And Kristin, she’s got to pull herself together, I know she’s sick but she can’t just lie there waiting to die, Amy, talk to her, try to, she listens to you—

  What did she want from me? There was nothing I could do about Kristin, nothing at all. And the one thing I promised her, the thing that kept her going, I went and—stillborn. Dead at its first breath. There was nothing I could do for it. Nothing at all.

  My skin was damp with sweat though it kept getting colder; I raised my arms up in the too large, floppy-sleeved jacket, letting the air whoosh through the fabric of my T-shirt, and then I heard it: a small, muffled, insistent sound, inside my front jeans pocket. “The Last Transit.” Those opening guitars, sprightly and melancholy and tentative all at once. My cell phone.

  My dead cell phone. I hadn’t imagined it. It rang again and I scrabbled frantically to pull it from my pocket, maybe I’d been wrong all this time, the battery was just dormant from the cold or—lighting up, it was all lit up but no number came up, just ringing, it didn’t stop—