Untouchable

by Scott O'Connor

  “Where are you going?”

  He tilted his head toward the hallway.

  “You’re going home?”

  He nodded.

  “When does your dad get home from work?”

  The Kid shrugged, picked up his backpack, strapped it over his shoulders.

  “If he’s not going to be home for a while, you might as well stay here.”

  That sound was back in her voice, the shaky sound from the phone call. The Kid set his backpack on the floor, sat down beside her, took out his notebook.

  Is your mom looking for you?

  “I don’t know,” Michelle said. “Probably not. Who cares? I’ve been gone before.”

  When?

  “Last year. I slept in a garage at the end of our street for a couple of days.”

  The Kid tried to remember when that would have been, tried to remember seeing her in class last year, noticing something different about her.

  Were they mad when you came back?

  “Who?”

  Your mom and her boyfriend.

  “Yeah, they were pretty fucking mad.”

  What’s going to happen this time?

  “When?”

  When you go home.

  “Nothing’s going to happen. I’m not going home.”

  You can’t stay here forever.

  “I know that. You think I don’t know that?”

  I can’t bring food every day.

  “Kid, I know that, for fuck’s sake. Just shut up about it already.”

  She picked up an issue of Extraordinary Adventures, flipped angrily through the pages. She wasn’t careful with the comic at all. The Kid worried she was going to rip the cover.

  “Those fuckers just came at me,” she said. “Some drunk bums. They came out of the dark and started grabbing at me. I fought them, but I don’t know how many there were. There could have been ten of them, I don’t know. All those grabbing hands. If there were less of them I could have fought, but there were too many. So I ran out of there, but they had my backpack.”

  The Kid thought about his mom maybe sleeping outside, sleeping in a park somewhere on the way to Chicago and getting attacked by some drunk men.

  Michelle said, “Is it true that you stopped talking because your mom died?”

  The Kid thought about this. The answer was yes and no. The answer was more complicated than that. He made his usual decision, that it was easier just not to answer.

  “What happened to her?” Michelle said.

  The Kid figured it was better to tell her his dad’s story. His own story was too complicated.

  Something exploded in her head.

  Michelle thought about this for a second. The Kid could see her picturing it, what she thought it meant.

  “Why?”

  She was sick with something that she didn’t know about.

  “Who told you that?”

  My dad.

  Michelle put one comic down, picked up another. “I wish my mom would die. I wish something would explode in her head. My mom’s boyfriend, too. My sisters. I wish everybody’s head would explode.” She sat back. “Did you ever wish that? That your mom would have died?

  No.

  “Your dad?”

  The Kid didn’t answer. He looked at the mural, the cannonballs flying from the guns on the pirate ship.

  “Did you ever wish that? If you could have picked one or the other?”

  Yes.

  “It’s a fucking bad thing to think,” Michelle said. “To wish for someone to be dead. But I think it all the time. Do you think it’s possible to think about it hard enough for it to happen? It’s a stupid thing to wonder, but I don’t know. Maybe if you just have that thought long enough it becomes something else. It just happens, finally. Like what’s going on with the computers. They don’t believe that next year is going to happen, so they get all fucked up and destroy the world and then next year really doesn’t happen.” She finished flipping through the comic, set it on the floor by the candle. “Are you mad about the books? That I lost those comics?”

  Not really.

  She looked around the room, at the mural, the hole in the ceiling. “Are you going to go home soon?” she said.

  The Kid nodded.

  “You want to stay until maybe I start sleeping? I’ll start sleeping and then you can leave.”

  The Kid knew he should go home, knew his dad would be angry if he came home and The Kid wasn’t there, but he also knew he couldn’t just leave Michelle alone like this.

  He turned the page in his notepad. Okay.

  She moved the comics and juice boxes away from the candle, tipped herself over onto her back. Didn’t put her hands up under her head, just let her head rest on the hard wood. She looked up at the ceiling for a while, her eyes drooping closed.

  “Once I start snoring or whatever, you can go,” she said. “Until then, just sit here for a while, okay?”

  The Kid nodded again, even though she couldn’t see him. He sat there while the candle flickered, a half hour, an hour, different parts of the mural appearing and disappearing. He thought about Matthew, if maybe they would never be friends again. He thought about Arizona and if she’d read the comic, if she was still afraid of him. He thought about Michelle wishing that everyone she knew was dead. He thought about something exploding in his mom’s head. A half hour, an hour, maybe longer, until Michelle’s snoring filled the room.

  He left the rabbit there with her, the wooden rabbit he’d found in his dad’s drawer. He left it sitting on the floor between the candle and the door, a strange thing to do, a stupid thing to do, like this little wooden rabbit could protect her somehow, like this thing could guard the room. But he did it anyway, stupid or not. He didn’t know why. It just seemed like the right thing to do. He left the rabbit and strapped his backpack over his shoulders and crept quietly out of the house, back up the street toward home.

  He rarely went into that room. He did not sleep in the bed. It was their bed, the bed they’d bought when they moved into their first apartment, a drafty, leaky pair of rooms off Wilshire Boulevard. The bed they’d brought with them when they bought the house. The bed Darby had to be dragged out of on Saturday mornings. The bed she sat awake in many nights, drinking tea, reading magazines, waiting for sleep. The bed where they argued. The bed where they woke pressed close, with tangled limbs. The bed where they made The Kid.

  On the day the cops told him she was gone, after Bob had come and gone, after The Kid had gone upstairs, Darby had tried to sleep in that room. He’d turned out the lights, gotten into bed. The room was cold and quiet. After a while, he could hear a noise from The Kid’s room, a muffled whimper that grew slowly to a moan, to loud crying. He could hear dull thumps, The Kid punching his bedroom wall. He knew he should go up, hold The Kid until he was able to sleep or until morning, whichever came first. But he stayed in the bed, pressed the pillow over his ears, unable to move, ashamed at what he couldn’t do. His son moaning in the house. He held himself under the pillow until the sounds of The Kid faded away, until he could hear nothing but the rush of blood in his ears. He woke hours later. The room was dark, the house was silent. He could smell her, the warm smell of Lucy asleep, her hair and sweat. He wanted to cry out with relief. He’d had some kind of terrible dream. He reached across the bed for her, her warmth in the night. He found nothing but cool sheets, empty space. A shock ran through him. The truth of the thing. He got out of bed and went outside. He climbed into the pickup and sat shaking. He had to fight the urge to drive. He knew that if he started the engine, if he pulled onto the street, he would never come back. He knew that if he started the engine he would leave his son. He threw the keys out the window to get them away. He turned on the radio. He sat on his hands so he wouldn’t open the door, retrieve the keys, drive. Talk shows on the radio, diet advice, real estate advice. He thought about her smell in the bed, he held that scent with him until he couldn’t hold it any longer, until it slipped from him, until it was
gone. He sat on his hands and told himself the story that he had told The Kid, the story he had told Bob. He sat until he could picture her falling in her classroom, the awful scene, her cheek pressed to the cold floor. He sat until he could picture a student from her class lifting her, holding her in his arms, carrying her down the hall. He sat until he could see that she was not alone in that last moment, until he could picture her being held, even if he was not the one holding her. He sat in the pickup until the sun came up, until the story he had told The Kid became the only story he knew. He pulled his hands out from under his thighs. They were dumb and lifeless, unresponsive. He shook them, waited for some feeling to return, the first pricks of electricity in his thumbs, his fingers. He looked up and saw The Kid’s face in his bedroom window, The Kid looking down at him in the truck, and he was overcome by the shame of what he couldn’t do, what he had been unable to do, sitting in the pickup, desperately shaking his hands.

  He rarely went into that room. He did not sleep in that bed.

  The trick of the job is to forget what happened.

  They ate drive-thru chicken for dinner, sitting in the pickup in the restaurant parking lot, listening to the radio news. The Kid didn’t eat all of his dinner, said he wasn’t that hungry, he’d take what was left to school the next day for lunch. He wrapped the leftover chicken in a napkin, wondered if his dad believed him, if it was obvious that he was lying. He knew you could tell someone was lying by the sound of their voice, like that day his dad had told him the lie about what happened to his mom. But he wondered if someone could tell you were lying just by the things you wrote, by the way your words looked in a notebook.

  His dad kept clearing his throat and covering his mouth, holding his mouth closed like maybe he was going to be sick, maybe he was going to throw up. The Kid wondered if his dad had food poisoning from the chicken, or if maybe The Kid’s B.O. and bad breath was making him sick. He tried to sit as far away from his dad as possible, close to the door, tried to keep his own mouth closed and breathe through his nose.

  They pulled into their driveway and The Kid could see something strange happening on the front porch, some weird movement. His dad had forgotten to leave the porch light on and The Kid could only see the outline of something, hear something thrashing around. The dog. The dog moving in an unnatural way.

  His dad ran up the yard to the porch. The Kid approached slowly, not sure what was happening. His dad fumbled with his keys, unlocked the security screen, the front door. Reached in and turned on the porch light. A burst of moths from the bulb, fluttering out into the night. The dog lay on his side on the porch, flopping violently, snapping his jaws, his eyes rolled up into its head.

  “Steve,” his dad said. “Steve Rogers.”

  The dog kept flopping, stiff-legged, making strangled gargling sounds from his throat. The Kid stopped at the foot of the steps, not sure what to do.

  His dad maneuvered around the porch, trying to get into a good position where the dog wouldn’t bite him. He finally knelt, put his hands on the dog’s sides, held him down.

  “He’s having some kind of seizure,” his dad said. “We just have to hold him steady until it passes.” His dad didn’t sound so sure. His dad didn’t sound completely convinced by his own explanation.

  “It’s okay, Steve,” his dad said. “This is fine, this is okay.”

  The dog thrashed, bucked, sputtered.

  His dad looked at The Kid, saw that The Kid was scared.

  “Take notes, Kid,” his dad said. “That’s your job during this. Take notes about how we get him through this.”

  The Kid pulled out his notebook, his pencil. Wrote down what his dad had said to the dog, the first step. This is fine, Steve. This is okay.

  The dog thrashed and jerked under his dad’s hands. His dad held the dog down, adjusted himself on the porch as the dog moved.

  “We’ve got to get his tongue,” his dad said. “We’ve got to hold onto his tongue so he doesn’t swallow it.”

  The Kid wrote this down. He thought of that long, gray tongue wrapping in on itself, working its way down into the dog’s throat, cutting off the air. He thought of his own face in the dirt in the alleyway, Brian’s weight on top of him, holding him down, The Kid unable to breath. The Kid knew how the dog felt. He nodded to his dad. He hoped his dad knew what he was doing.

  His dad put a knee on the dog’s ribs to hold him down. He grabbed the dog’s snout with one hand, his jaw with the other. Pried the dog’s mouth open. Steve Rogers’s teeth flashed in the porch light, snapping at his dad’s fingers. His dad reached around in the dog’s mouth, wrestling with his tongue. Looked like he got it and lost it a couple of times. The dog bucked again, harder this time, and his dad’s knee slipped. The dog’s jaws came down on his dad’s hand, and his dad fell back onto the porch.

  “Fuck,” his dad yelled, shaking his hand. The Kid wrote this down, even though he wasn’t supposed to use that word. He figured this was an extraordinary circumstance, and this was his job, to take complete notes.

  His dad’s hand was bleeding. He wiped it on the leg of his jeans, moved back in toward Steve Rogers. “Forget the tongue,” he said. “We just have to hold him steady.” He held the dog with his hands this time, one hand on the dog’s ribs, one on the side of its head, careful of the snapping jaws, holding Steve Rogers steady to the floor of the porch. Dad-strength.

  The dog began to shake. A new phase of the seizure. The dog stayed in place and vibrated under his dad’s hands, just shook and shook. The Kid took notes. The dog started to pee, just squirted out pee onto the porch. His dad ignored the pee, talked softly to the dog.

  “It’s okay, Steve. It’s all right. We’ll wait. We’ll just wait.”

  The shaking went on for some time. Finally it slowed; finally it stopped. Just a few random twitches. The dog was panting hard, his head against the wood, tongue spilling out of the side of his mouth, a white froth making a wet spot on the porch. His dad held the dog steady, held the dog in place, ran his hand gently along the dog’s ribs. The Kid wrote this in his notebook.

  “We did it, Steve,” his dad said, hand bleeding, breathing almost as hard as the dog. “We did it, Kid. It’s going to be all right now.”

  He sat at the kitchen table with his coffee and looked out the window into the backyard. Steve Rogers sniffed the perimeter, lifted his leg every few steps, marking. The dog seemed to be okay, seemed to have forgotten what had happened the night before.

  She’d lain here naked one morning, her body spread out across the kitchen floor, a growing smile on her face, their new house, a house of their own, taking his hand and pulling him gently down to her.

  She’d stood here late one night and called the toll-free number on one of her father’s infomercials that had surfaced on TV. Darby had stood in the bedroom doorway and listened to her on the phone, saying she didn’t want to order anything, she wasn’t interested in buying anything, she just wanted to see who would answer when she called.

  She’d sat sprawled here one evening, banging a bottle of olive oil on the linoleum, trying to get it to break, trying to get something to break.

  He sat at the kitchen table drinking his coffee. He could hear that bell in his bad ear, that faraway morning ring. He stuck his finger in his good ear.

  There it is, he said. Can you hear that? There it is.

  He stood at Lucy’s desk at the back of the house, looked at the class list, the last seat in the middle row. Thought of her in the arms of someone he didn’t know. Green, D. It was a game day, a Friday. On game days you wear your best clothes, pressed black slacks and starched button-down shirts, perfect and white.

  “Greene, D.” He said the name out loud, shifting the silence in the house. He said it again, “Greene, D.” It was an actual thing, a true thing. It existed. It made a noise in the quiet house. He said it again and again, the sound filling the rooms, creating something from nothing.

  No one but The Kid seemed to care when Michelle didn�
�t show up at school. Miss Ramirez marked her absent in the morning and that was it. The Kid sat and looked at Michelle’s empty desk. He couldn’t believe that no one else knew what he knew. He wondered if she was okay, or if something had happened, if the grabbing men from the library lawn had somehow tracked her down.

  At lunch, he and Matthew sat in silence at their picnic table. It was the night that The Kid usually went to Matthew’s for dinner, and The Kid wanted to ask him if that was cancelled, but whenever The Kid looked over at him, Matthew looked away. The Kid figured that he probably had his answer.

  In the library, he heard excited whispering, tried to ignore it. Rhonda Sizemore and Arizona and a couple other girls were standing on the other side of the shelves in the next aisle. The Kid could see them in the spaces between the books. They were pulling books from the shelves, pretending to read the back covers while they whispered. They weren’t whispering about the books, they were whispering about him. The girls telling Arizona that The Kid had gone crazy when he’d attacked Rhonda Sizemore. That The Kid’s dad had gone crazy in the mall, gotten into a fight in the food court. That his dad made blue star tattoos in a bathroom laboratory. The Kid couldn’t see Arizona’s face clearly, couldn’t see what her reaction was. He tried to ignore the whispering, concentrated instead on the titles on the spines of the books as he moved down the aisle. He was looking for information.

  This was something his mom always told him when he woke up in the night with a scary thought, something he’d heard at school, on the TV news, something he didn’t understand, something that had been mottled and magnified by a dream, plastered across the front of his brain. Look it up, she’d tell him, sitting on the edge of his bed or down on the living room couch, a single lamp alive in the darkness. Find out the truth, she’d say. Go to the library. It’s harder to be afraid of something that you understand. And it usually worked. It usually made him feel better, finding the subject in a book or a magazine, the certainty of answers in writing, facts in print, knowing that someone else had already tackled that thing, had already felt that fear.