Frail

by Joan Frances Turner

  “You’re right,” I said. “I’m not. But that’s exactly the problem, isn’t it.”

  My fingers lingered, memorizing the color so dark it had that faintest sheen of icy blue, the texture silken and thick even when long uncombed: one good thing nobody had been able to take away from her, here or in Paradise or anywhere else. One good thing to take with me wherever I was going. Then my hand dropped and I turned my back on the lab and her, stepping off the cheerful gamboling white stone road.

  “Where are you going?” she demanded. “You can’t just wander around the sands and find anything, you know how many people tried that? You won’t find anything by yourself!”

  Some of the beaches had little whitewashed wooden stairways leading down to the dunes, I’d seen pictures, but here was just a slim sandy pathway tucked between two thick, tufted outcroppings of beach grass, up at the top of the hill. I took a handful of tufts for support, winced in surprise at how sharp they felt against my cut-up palm, slid my feet like a skater down the ridge.

  “You have to come back!” Natalie shouted. “You have to!”

  Standing up here you could see the whole long sweep of the beach: rucked-up dry beige sand like frosting clumsily spread on a cake, then the wet stuff at the shoreline a darker sugar-brown, smoothed out by the tides, studded with the dried fruits of stones. The trees up on the ridge, when you took just a few steps closer to the water, already looked distant and lonely like they were somewhere far removed.

  “Watch your feet,” someone said softly behind me. My mother, probably talking to Naomi. I kept going, ignoring the grit in my shoes, the sand easy underfoot as we traveled down.

  “Come back!” Natalie was screaming, as far away and untouchable as the trees. “Come back!”

  Seagulls strutted along the sands, absorbed in whatever it is seagulls do all day, wheeled briskly away at the human approach. Nothing but old bones here sticking out of the sand, there’d been all those wild rumors near the end that lake sands and the waters cured the plague; you heard stories, crazy stories, about people burrowing in near the shoreline, like sand crabs trying to escape a predator’s shadow. The sky was hard and painfully clear, the remains of Chicago a bluish shadow out on the horizon just across the lake.

  “Come back! Please come back!” Fear, and thwarted rage, and begging. “I don’t want to be here all alone! Please! It’s so lonely by myself, I don’t want to be alone!”

  She was too far away now, I could barely hear her. A seagull marched past me, with that comically furious, head-bobbing bird’s concentration; I turned at the last minute, walking along the damp tide line studying the brown-sugar sand, the stones of a dozen-some muted colors like dust-caked stained glass, splintered bones picked clean months past. The gull kept straight on toward the water.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  “Don’t,”my mother said, running up to me quickly as I bent down. “All you’ll do is get sand in your eye.”

  She was right, of course. I put down the wet, cool handful I’d vaguely thought to slop over my bruised eye and gazed out toward the water, the faint bluish shadow of a dead steel mill—dead long before the plague, operations shifted to China, though I’d seen decades-old pictures of its thick white smoke wafting over the shore—still sitting at the far end of the sands. Naomi came up beside me, bark strip abandoned for a lake stone.

  “If you put it to your ear,” she said, holding it out to me, “it sings. Just like a shell.”

  I put it to my ear, and heard nothing but the thick, contented silence of a tiny slab of rock. That was a sermon I saw advertised once, on the marquee of that little church near our house: THE STONES WILL SING. LUKE 19:40. Red graffiti sprayed on the side of their white cinderblock building, calling them heretics, Satanists, necrophiles, kept bleeding through the hasty cover of paint. I handed the stone back to Naomi and she slipped it in her pocket, staring at me like I’d know what to do next.

  “Don’t look at me.” I shrugged.

  Stephen picked up a stone, raised his arm to hurl it at the water, but something in Naomi’s face made him drop it back to the sand.

  “It’s headed out there anyway,” he pointed out. “Just like it came in with the tides—”

  “They’re all headed out,” Naomi agreed. Happy, suddenly, like someone finally understood. “But not yet. Right now, we still need them.”

  The air is so different, out here by the water: so still and yet the noise of every murmur, footstep, birdsong carries so clear, like the sounding of a great glass chime. The feather-flaps of the gulls, as they marched around the sand not giving a damn we were there, they were deafening. “I wish I still had my guitar,” I said. “It was a cheap shitty guitar, but still. It got lost along with everything else.”

  “Just as long as it wasn’t a recorder.” Stephen made a rueful face. “Did you have to do that ever in music class, keep tooting like an idiot into some stupid little fucking plastic—”

  “You do remember something!” I stopped right there in my tracks, I was so pleased. “See? A real memory. We had to do that in third grade, I had this lunatic teacher who made us play ‘Greensleeves’ and ‘Madman Across the Water’ until they were coming out our—”

  Stephen shook his head, gazed at the sand.

  “Actually, I’ve just seen it in pictures,” he said. “Kids doing that. That’s it.”

  Like I’d only seen the beach in pictures, before this, but it turned out to be true after all. He remembered something, one specific thing. I was sure of it. I’d believe in it for him, that memory, even if he couldn’t bring himself to think it was really his.

  New songs. How about a murder ballad? In just under a year I’ve killed three people, two of them before I ever had the excuse of what Natalie did to me. Just under a year. Stephen, his face pale and drawn and his eyes so weary, his mouth coated in blood. There’s something in my head now, when I get scared enough. I already had that in me when I killed Ms. Acosta, I didn’t need scientific intervention. Rage was my one horrible, worthless excuse. Do we eat human flesh now? Could we? What a ridiculous question. Anyone could, anywhere. Last winter. People could do so many things, so many awful things, if that was all that stood between them and death. Humankind dreaded its king, its emperor, just that much.

  So maybe, Natalie was right. Maybe any king, any ruler inspiring that much fear and dread, applauding such chaos, clasping those of us who caused it so close, deserved nothing better than to be deposed, assassinated—

  “Naomi!” Lisa called.

  Naomi was running, all flying dark hair and spindle-limbs and bits of driftwood in her fists. They came up to meet her, Lisa and my mother, faces sagging with an exhaustion sleep couldn’t hope to repair; we all stood there, together, where the dry sand rolled over and surrendered to the wet, as cautious and reserved as the mutual strangers we all were.

  “Where are we going?” I asked.

  “East,” Lisa said. “Cowles Shores, over the county line. My sister—I think Jessie sees things, sometimes, that other people don’t. Knows things she doesn’t talk about. At least not with me.”

  She gave me a look then, Lisa did. She and my mother. Amy, who are you talking to? I just gazed back, acknowledging nothing. Another crazy person then, this sister, just like me. Somehow I wasn’t surprised. Except my own craziness, every bit of it, somehow it was all turning from haze to flesh. And nobody could explain how.

  “She sees things,” Lisa repeated. “And never talks about them. When we were all sick, she somehow figured out how to save us, how to—” She turned to me, almost laughing. “She’s out in Cowles Shores now, she’s turned into a hermit. A hermit crab, burrowed in the sand. She never was great with people. Things . . . follow her. Just like they do you.” She swallowed, thrust her hands into her pockets. “What happened, last fall, the lab might’ve helped start it but it’s so much bigger than anything Jim—than anyone ever planned. I can feel it. Like how heavy the air gets, how you can see the sky all weighted down, rig
ht before the thunder starts. This is beyond anything Natalie can understand, or control—we have to figure this out together. Somehow.” She wrenched at the strands of hair fringing an ear, so hard I saw my mother wince. “I thought we had forever, to figure it all out. We don’t. And we have to.”

  Stephen touched fingers to his throat, grabbed at a loose loop of suture, pulled at it before I could stop him like Lisa had pulled on her hair. It didn’t bleed. Naomi had wandered off again, digging sand ditches with her feet.

  “And what exactly do we do,” he said, “if we figure it all out?”

  Lisa shook her head. “I don’t have the slightest idea. But . . . the bigger thing, out there, maybe if we try to work it out then it’ll toss us a sop. Tell us what it’s up to, what it really wants.” She glanced at me. “Tell one of us, anyway.”

  My mother held a long black stick in her hand, balancing it against her fingertips, tracing thin raggedy lines along the sand. “Is it like this everywhere?” She dug an idle, wandering circle, bulging at one end like an unevenly filled balloon. “Does anyone know?”

  “Why isn’t anyone following us?” Stephen asked. “Those can’t be the only ones who work here, the ones we—”

  “Because they know we’ll come back,” my mother said. She obliterated the circle with her foot and traced a parabola, sun rays or spikes arching from its sides. “Because if the secret’s in the sands, like Natalie said—the secret of us, whatever that is—then we won’t go very far.” She stared down at her picture. “We never did anyway, did we? Even after we got away, we stayed here. Even against all common sense something in us didn’t dare leave this place, its orbit, for good. Maybe there’s a reason for that. Maybe we’ll even figure it out.”

  What are we, what the hell are we now? How can anyone else possibly tell us?

  My mother drew stars in the sand. “Whatever we find out,” she said, “we can’t blame Natalie for everything. I know what they did to me.” She looked up at Stephen. “You know what they did to you. Imagine that happening over and over again, all your life, since you were a tiny child and nobody would help you. Nobody. You’d lose your mind, you couldn’t help it, you’d—”

  “And who says that wasn’t our lives too?” Stephen demanded, that coldness creeping back into his voice. “Who says? God knows, we wouldn’t remember it.”

  They stared at each other, quiet, my mother’s cheeks and jaw tightening into a precise curve of tension like fingers drawing shut. Then Stephen tilted his head and squinted into the sun, up at the trees on the dune ridge. “Billy won’t just sit there forever,” he said. “We should go.”

  Naomi came trotting up, like she’d had an ear cocked to our conversation all along. As she surely had. Lisa led us along the shoreline, away from the lab and toward the faraway shadow of the dead steel mill; we walked in silence, my throbbing eye, aching legs, burning chest and feet and sand-itching throat bringing up the rear. Naomi ran ahead, slowed down, dropped back to Lisa’s side like the pendulum of a rundown clock.

  Stephen was wrong, I thought. Billy had to leave Mags sometime, if only to eat, he had to—but he still might decide to stay beside her, forever. And I’d done that to him. Lisa’s face, when she spoke of her daughter, the expanse of unhealed grief in her eyes wide as the sky above us and as mercilessly indifferent. Billy, the realization I’d left him completely alone in the world, just as he’d done to Phoebe in his turn, making him split that inner sky open with his screaming. That rotten thing in the Lepingville woods, pleading with my mother to—no. Human emotions, those were, no other creature alive, dead-alive, can feel them! That’s what they told us, that’s how it is. That’s how it works!

  Right?

  That’s how I know I’m still human. Isn’t it? So just like Billy, then. Just like that dead man walking. Just like, just like.

  Mommy, what’s a “human” anyway?

  Something wet and cold touched my hand and I started, actually looked up like a fool half-expecting spatters of rain. The sky was a straight sweep of hard china blue, just a lone creamy smear of cloud-white near the horizon. I looked down, and smiled as it nuzzled my shin.

  “A puppy!” Naomi shouted. She danced around it, delighted, but he only had eyes for me. I reached down, smiling at the touch of rough fur, the smooth, close-cornered planes of a real, living animal’s skull. He was covered in angry scratches and cuts, blood scabbing up his fur, but he was already starting to heal. I scritched behind his ears and he wagged his tail.

  “Where’d it come from?” my mother demanded. She, Stephen, Lisa, all staring at me so disconcerted, like I’d kept this a secret from them all along. “Amy? Is that what you were calling to, through the door back in—”

  “What do you think of Nick, for a name?” I asked them. “Like Old Nick. Or is that stupid?”

  Stephen watched my fingers as I stroked the dog’s back, wary, waiting for it to rear up and try to tear my hand off at the wrist. Nick’s tail thudded against the soft gritty sand. “Amy, are you sure it’s not here to—”

  “Or Nick Drake. The folk singer? He had a song, ‘Black-Eyed Dog.’ I know, yellow-eyed dog, but close enough. The fur and all.” You didn’t even strictly need a guitar, for folk music, just your voice. That I still had. “That’s his name. Old Nick Drake.”

  Dislike in Stephen’s face as he stared at Nick, shading into resignation: Well, fine then, but I’m not feeding it. My mother reached out, gently petted Nick’s head, lingering on the solidity of fur and bone as if to assure herself he were really there. I wasn’t entirely sure myself.

  “Come on then, Nick,” she said. “Time for a walk.”

  We walked along side by side, behind the others, watching lake waters spill over the sands in a subdued, languorous rush; marveling that somehow, for some reason that might not bear examining, we were actually here to see it at all.

  We’d looped the long way around the lab grounds, their bit of the forest perimeter, and now we were on the farthest edge; cut straight through and we could find Lake Street again, pick up the ghost highway of U.S. 12, head straight east without ever leaving the heart of the Dunes.

  Miles to go. I caught my toe on a rock and Stephen grabbed my arm, pulled me back before I could sprain something. My eye was killing me, the skin around it tick-swollen tight and too tender to touch.

  “Is there such a thing as an ice pack you don’t need to refrigerate?” I asked him. “If there is and you find it, I’ll love you forever—”

  “There’ll be something, in the old pharmacy. Some aspirin, at least.” Stephen looped his arm through mine, ignoring Nick entirely. “Unless Paradise already got it all—do you think the old grandmother’s still out there?”

  I blinked, or rather winked in confusion. “What grandmother?”

  “Remember Natalie said ‘Daddy’ was dead, ‘Grandma’ was missing, and they’re the ones who ran the lab, whatever big earthshaking project we all are—” His eyes flickered to my mother. “Missing doesn’t mean anything, these days. She could still be out there, Grandma. Making her own plans. Making her way back.”

  Dead doesn’t mean anything either, these days. If it ever really did.

  “If she’s coming back,” I said, “we’ll be long gone anyway.” Unless we meet her along the road. Unless, in the guise of that death angel, I’d already long since met her. “We’ll—”

  “Lisa,” Naomi said, breathless, “Miss Lucy—look.” She pointed back down the clearing. “Someone’s following us.”

  The stranger trailing us was close enough I could make out he was a man, too far away to let me see his face. Tall, his shoulders high and poised as a dancer’s under a long black coat, he stood with hands in his pockets, a thin ray of sunlight snaking through the treetops to illuminate a head of blond, or silver, or pure white hair. Dark trousers. Feet wide and pale and bare just like Billy’s, but he was far too gaunt to be Billy. Every time I tried concentrating on his face, it was like something blurred and contracted in my good
eye and all I saw of his nose, mouth, chin were the vaguest of outlines, like one of Natalie’s drawings left half-completed.

  “I don’t know him,” my mother murmured.

  Stephen shook his head in agreement. But would they even know if they did? It wasn’t just me, though, seeing him there. Not this time. It was all of us.

  “Do you want something?” Stephen called out. Disdainful, indifferent, with a thread of nervous anger. “Whatever it is, we haven’t got it. Go find your own people, we don’t want you.”

  He just stood there, watching us. He shifted his hands from his pockets, long thin mushroom-white hands that he clasped before him, and something about the sight of those fingers so slowly, precisely folding together, like the thick petals of some sickly flower curling up and closing on the stem, made a twitching revulsion seize my skin. I took a step backward, not minding the tree roots, my eyes still on him. He took a step forward, just the one.

  “Watch out, Amy,” Lisa muttered.

  I stepped forward again. He stepped back. Forward. Back. Never an inch closer, not retreating, that same ribbon-length of space always between us and himself. Advance. Retreat. The mountain, always looming jagged and cold in the distance, was hell-bent on not coming to Mohammed.

  Nick put his ears back and growled, the low, rumbling sound you hear right before the sky tears open and more lightning courses down to split a dead tree in two. The man just stood there, as I knew he would. Everyone kept looking at me, like I’d have any idea what to do.

  “Ignore him,” I said, and even I didn’t understand the sudden urgency in my own voice. “Ignore him. Let’s just go.”

  We went. The few times I looked over my shoulder he was still there, never catching up.

  “It’s just another Scissor Man,” Stephen said. He swiveled his head around and glowered. “Let them track us wherever they want. Right? They’re just wasting their time. They want to say hi, we’ll give them a little surprise.”