“Kristin was pregnant,” I told him. “And crazy from losing her other kids, or maybe just from being sick—she couldn’t stop throwing up for months, nothing went right.” That time Ms. Acosta found her lying on the floor with something wrapped around her neck, too weak to stand up and hang herself but trying to tug on it and strangle out her own life. Her hands were freezing, Kristin’s were, when we got that scarf or extension cord or whatever it was, I couldn’t remember, off her, her fingers never got properly warm again after that. “I promised her over and over again I’d take care of her baby, sometimes she’d make me say it dozens of times in a row and it didn’t work, none of it, Kristin died and it was—”
Skip to the next part. The part that came just afterward, the aftermath that mattered, it wasn’t sayable.
“It was stillborn,” I said.
I stared down at my jeans, the little coronas of worn threads turning to fuzz. Stephen turned the onion bag over in his hands, cradling our few finds through the cloth.
“I wrote a lot of music,” I said. “That’s what I was going to do with my life. My mom, she was never all over me to go to college instead.” Something inside me was thin and delicate like a shell, mentioning her to Stephen, and I couldn’t let it break, what spilled out of that particular crack inside me would never stop. “She always said, when you have a band. Not if. She said I could do it, that—I wrote a lot of songs. But I’ve lost them all.”
“You must remember some of them.” He actually almost smiled. “I mean, I wouldn’t be able to, but—”
I laughed and then felt rotten about laughing, but he didn’t seem to mind. “Of course I remember some of them.”
“Then could I hear them sometime?”
He asked that with respect, a respect I could feel. Like he understood you don’t just casually ask someone to share that huge part of themselves, scoop out bits of their insides and offer up the tasty pulp any time they want the flavor. Respect, and the near certainty of being refused.
“Not now,” I said. There was something stuck in my throat like bits of that hard thin dry shell all inside me, the idea of singing around that felt impossible. “Maybe later. Like, maybe later for real, I’m not just saying that to—I can’t, right now. But when I can.”
The bushes rustled and all sorts of things I couldn’t quite see hurried through it. I hoped none of them ended up in the kitchen traps and snares, it wasn’t fair, but then neither was any of this. Stephen wouldn’t stop looking at me and I kept my eyes on my folded-up shins, the muddy rubber of my shoe toes.
“There’s a huge old community garden, over at Fisher and Elbert Gary Place,” he said. “There’s bits still fallow where we might find stuff. I’ll head over and you finish up here, meet me when you’re ready.”
“Okay.”
He put out a hand and we helped each other up; one of my feet buzzed and stung, tucked under my leg too tightly, and I rocked back and forth on it until it stopped.
“I could’ve saved her baby,” I said. “Kristin’s. But it just—things didn’t go my way. I would’ve done it.” My foot worked the dirt like a sewing pedal, tingling toes pushing down, then back. “Fed it. Done everything. I would’ve done anything, to keep it alive.”
Stephen didn’t answer. Just looked so sad, just for that split second, it was like he might decide to forget to breathe.
His fingers around mine were gritty and knobbly and scrapingdry, like ancient parsnips pulled from drought-dry soil, and I felt a pang inside when he slid them slowly away and let go. He picked up the full onion bag, the one with all our music in it, and left me the lighter one.
“Fisher,” he said. As if I’d suddenly forget. Maybe that was what it was like for him. His papers, carried place to place because without one reminder after another he’d be lost. I nodded.
“Fisher,” I said.
He walked off. The garden looked so picked over and dug up the more I trudged through it, those pretty poppies to stare at but all the edible parts reduced to scraggly little tufts, that I shook my head and thought, Fuck it, I’m leaving now. Can’t dig up all the onions anyway, the gardening crew needed those as reserves. I tilted my chin to the sky, the darkness overhead thin and clear to the eye as a cup of plain tea.
“Kristin’s baby was stillborn,” I told it. Because sometimes there were certain things I needed to say out loud, when no one else could hear me. “My mother is alive. Kristin’s baby never was.”
There was a sudden little tremor in my pocket, and my cell phone, my stone-cold doornail of a birthday phone, let out a squawky, urgent beep: the text message sound. They found me. They found me again, whoever first somehow made it ring and somehow left no traces behind found me again and—my stomach dropped and I paced around for a few moments there in the soft soil, trying to calm down, more nervous the more I put it off, and then slid my hand in. 1 NEW MESSAGE—
LIAR, it said, flat and quiet. ALL LIES.
Then the screen went dead.
THIRTEEN
Back in March, just a few weeks ago, there was a storm that came in fast and thin, that winter thinness of cold sharp air sweeping through a gray sky and bare tree branches and over depleted ground because there wasn’t anything growing there to stop it, and then it turned thick with wetness and mushy snow that dissolved into clumps of sleet. Drippings and snifflings. I shivered and pulled on two more sweaters and made myself stay away from the woodpile Dave had left us, we were rationing it now thinking no point wasting it on late winter, but Ms. Acosta stood by the window smiling, almost her old pompous fluttery self again. Kristin lay on the sofa like always, face pressed to the arm.
“See that, Amy?” Ms. Acosta said, sharp beaky chin angling to motion me toward the window. She’d given up even trying to talk to Kristin, barely seemed to notice she was in the same room. “That’s a spring sleet, right there, all wet and loose and . . . disjointed, and a lot of it’s not sticking. Spring really is coming. We’ve started getting through it.” She smiled, wider and so much happier than her careful cautious words, and put an arm around my shoulders as I approached. “We’re really almost through the winter—”
“Snow is wet and loose,” I pointed out. “And that’s not spring sleet, it’s another ice storm.” There’d been one three weeks back that took down a whole row of power lines, which at least didn’t factor when you hadn’t had electricity in ages. “I know you have to take what you can get when it’s barely March, but—”
“It’s not an ice storm. See? It’s subsiding already, it’s not washing over everything. Winter’s running out of steam.” There was a sour smell to her, this close up, not only from armpit and mouth but her anemically faded hair, the folds of her own jackets and sweaters; it didn’t bother me, I’d already become so quickly used to the aroma of unwashed body. “Things’ll be better now. We can go out there, plan a garden, clean up a few things—maybe look for some more people. We’re almost through the worst of it, Amy.”
She smiled at me, so washed out and depleted from the winter but her eyes were sparky and bright, like a bird who’d just found a lovely seedy tree-cone in the snow. She glanced over at the couch, Kristin now half-asleep, and her voice slid lower. “And whether she wants to be or not she’s through the worst of it too. She has to help us out, Amy, she has to start contributing something and actually hauling ass and—we’d all like to lie on a couch all day crying, okay, Amy? But we don’t. We can’t. Dave was sick all the time and he didn’t behave like that, and pregnancy’s not a disease. She listens to you, Amy.” Apologetic now, embarrassed at the task she asked of me. “Talk to her about that. Work up to it, but . . . she needs to rejoin the living.”
There was only one thing Kristin ever listened to, from my mouth or anyone else’s, and that was the word yes. Said after, Will you take care of my baby once I’m dead swear to me Amy I mean it you’ve got to promise me, over and over and over again. Nothing else ever got through. Ms. Acosta looked from me to Kristin and as she did her fa
ce went from nervous contrition to pitying contempt, mouth pursing up in that way where you know someone’s thinking, Oh, poor you. Poor burdensome, worthless you. I turned back to the window.
“There’s no point in talking about all that yet,” I said, running a fingertip along the glass near the sill. Little designs on the dirty pane. “She hasn’t even had the baby yet, and then she’ll be—won’t she need extra food? To nurse it?” I swore I’d read somewhere that if you breast-fed you had to eat for a whole football team to do it right. Nutrients for the milk and things. “We should be getting all that ready. Baby clothes. Anything we can use as a diaper.” I turned to Ms. Acosta again. “She’s big as this room, we haven’t got much time left.”
Ms. Acosta gazed out the window, and didn’t say anything.
“I asked Kristin about a name,” I said. “She won’t think of one. What could we call it? David, for a boy.” For Dave. “What about a girl?”
Ms. Acosta didn’t say anything. “What,” I said, deliberately louder, “about a girl?”
The wet pale-gray clumps of stuff broke up falling as we watched and turned into actual rain, rain that washed away some of the ground’s old snow. Kristin had her baby two weeks later. It was a girl. There’s no point in saying anything about that.
And nobody can make me.
When I got to the kitchens there was a little crowd gathered, other shift workers milling and shoving around the back steps like it was already dinnertime; I saw Phoebe there wriggling with anticipated trouble, beaming like Christmas when she saw me, Kevin taking her arm and pulling her back stern-faced from barreling into my path. Stephen drew me aside.
“Natalie’s missing,” he said. “Since this morning. Her and Maria, another girl from the cleanup crew. They’re gone.”
My stomach dropped. “I don’t think anyone took her,” he continued. “Natalie, I mean. Someone on the gardening crew yelled at her for something and she started crying and shouting, I think she’d just had it, and she ran off into the woods and—”
“And good riddance!” someone shouted from the steps, a man with a potbelly and scraggly gray ponytail and T-shirt crustspotted with garden dirt. “You think people don’t know she was just like you? Another freak? And they let you cook our food, it’d better not be contagious—”
“You stop that.” Janey, fragile, crimson-mouthed, stern and gentle like a nursery school teacher. Janey with no Don in sight, all made up like always and nowhere to go. “Nobody here’s a freak, we’re all family and when a family fights it—”
“Shut up, you fucking whore,” said the ponytailed man. “Go spread for dead some more and keep your mouth shut.”
“Little necro,” someone else added, and giggled. “Nympho-necro.”
Janey ducked her head and sat down on the porch steps, shoulders curled up and hands in her lap. I waited for Al, Alice, to pull out their notebooks, their infraction notebooks they kept to show to Billy and Mags, and write that up. They didn’t.
Stephen turned back to me. “They don’t give a damn about Natalie,” he said, his eyes and voice hard, “like you can tell, but they think she talked Maria into going with her, they were starting to be friends—”
“You were trying to make nice with her—that Natalie.” The ponytailed man, who seemed to think he was in charge, was trying to stare me down and pin me to the wall. There was a glassy, feverish look in his eyes, a woman right behind him crying quietly. “We’ve seen you. Did you put it into that freak’s head, letting her think she could run off and take my little girl with her and—”
“Pete,” Kevin called out. “Leave it. Just leave it. She doesn’t know what the hell you’re—”
“Don’t give me that bullshit!” He rounded on Kevin, snarling. “We’re all sick to fucking death of your fucking Uncle Tom act, I wanna know what she has to do with this and I want my kid back!”
“I’ve never seen your daughter in my life.” I tried to be just as hard and glassy in return, ignoring the crying woman. Just like she’d turn her back on me. “I don’t know anything about her and Natalie. I don’t know anything about this.”
“You were making friends with her.” He was coming at me now, that Pete was, Kevin and Stephen hastily stepping into his path but no one else even trying to hold him back. “Just like you’re all friendly with that now”—he jerked his chin at Stephen—“all you little freaks together, plotting against us and getting us sent off to Paradise when it should be you that—”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about!” I pushed past Stephen to get right in Pete’s face, if he wanted it that bad, fuck his daughter and fuck his crying wife what one of them gave a shit if I disappeared, if Natalie they all spat on was gone. Natalie’s dead, Naomi told me. This is what she meant. “I don’t have a clue what happened to Natalie and I never met Maria in my life—”
He shoved something at me, a folded-up, crumpled piece of notebook paper. I can’t stay here anymore, it said, when I smoothed it out, I have to leave. Amy and Stephen from the kitchens understand why. They’re just like I am and people like me don’t have anywhere to go. I won’t bother anyone anymore. Signature, a scrawled letter N.
I shook my head in confusion. “I don’t know what this means.”
He gave me a look that made me take a step backward, Stephen darting between us, Kevin right behind him, the little gathered crowd ready to descend. Al and Alice, they just stood there. Didn’t try to stop it. “You planned all this, didn’t you? You and him and that little freak, you figured you’d bribe your way into never having to go back by giving them a normal human girl for—”
“Go back where? Plan what?” I was shouting now too, feet planted wide and solid in the grass like that could keep me from getting hit in the face. “I don’t know what you’re talking about!”
“The fuck you don’t!” He shoved Stephen aside, grabbing my shoulders and yanking me close as if for a kiss. “Give me my daughter back!”
Stephen knocked Pete aside so fast it sent me stumbling, punched him again, again so he grunted with the blows and gasped as he punched back. Scrabbling in the dirt now, just like Don and Lisa back at that first dinner, and Stephen’s bad eye caught a fist and he did something that made Pete almost howl in pain, and then Kevin was between them both, his arms around Pete, pulling him off so quick and easy that Stephen’s arm swung at empty air.
“Pete!” Kevin gripped Pete hard as he struggled, dragging him back as Stephen, breathless, came at them both for more. “She’s not lying! For Christ’s sake stop it!”
“I’m not stopping anything! I want my fucking kid back, or I swear to God I’ll break her—”
“Try it,” Stephen spat, and he was laughing again, that horrible dry-stick laughter, corner of his mouth bleeding like my dog-bitten arm. “Try it! You gonna fucking try—”
“What’s going on here?”
Lisa. Standing there on the sidewalk with Mags and Billy and a couple of other exes I couldn’t place, gripping Naomi’s hand and poised on the balls of her feet like a dog ready for the attack. She glowered at Pete, just waiting for him to get in her face like he had mine. He stared back, a sort of sweetly perfect hate in his eyes, and slowly went limp in Kevin’s grasp. Stephen, breath rasping, blood from his lip trickling down the side of his neck, looked from me to Lisa to Billy and lowered his arms, turned from Pete, rocked back and forth and back on his heels like that could exorcise the seizing need to hit, kick, break.
“Come here, Amy,” Lisa said quietly.
I stayed where I was. I’m not your fucking dog, I’m glad you’re here, Lisa, but I’m not your pet dog. She nodded like she’d heard and understood that, turned to Billy. “You see what crap everyone pulls,” she said. “With your kitchen crew.”
“I want my daughter back.” Kevin had let Pete loose and Pete was standing before Billy now, actually wringing his hands, drained and weary and all the fire gone out of him. All the jeers about other humans playing Uncle Tom. “That’s what
the bargain’s supposed to be here, protection, we work for you and this kind of shit doesn’t happen, you make sure we . . .”
He trailed off when he saw two guards come up the sidewalk toward us, a little girl between them with her head down and crying. Pete stared at them, and then actually sat down right there on the grass. The smaller girl, I guessed it was Maria, ran toward him, sobbing harder, and he stumbled to his feet and wrapped her up in his arms. Maria’s mother, the crying woman, she ran to them both. Billy just shook his head and smirked.
“You’re welcome,” he said. “Now fuck off back to work, all you little happy family, before I pound your skulls into the pavement right in front of each other—and you can all forget about dinner tonight and tomorrow, for that little stunt.” He glanced down at Maria, now mopping her eyes, like he wanted to hit her. Like the idea of hitting her consumed him. “And that’s getting off easy. Get out of my sight.”
“Where’s Natalie?” I shouted. The little girl didn’t answer. “What happened to her? Your friend, what happened?”
They ran, the three of them. Actually scuttled with their heads down. The rest of the crowd started breaking up too, still buzzing with all the truncated excitement. I bet they were disappointed it all ended so soon, that they couldn’t excite themselves more imagining two little girls wandering around alone, hungry, even better grabbed by someone else and dragged off, hurt, raped—not that they cared when it happened to Natalie right here, not that anyone gave a damn if it were the freak. The “dead” freak. All except me and Stephen and Janey, the corpsewhore, sitting there so curled up and sad. Another freak. Without Don she’d be like Natalie, she’d have no one and nothing. Like me without Lisa. My chest felt hollow and thin like an eggshell, a dry shell going to powder with what was meant to be curled up inside it long since rotted away.
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