Untouchable

by Scott O'Connor

  How long would it take for her to get to Minneapolis? A week? A month? Would she be on the bus when Y2K happened, when the planes fell, when the missiles shot up? Rolling along a farmland highway at night, streaks of white light in the sky, some going up, some coming down. She’d never get a chance to monkey with the computers at school now, to try to convince them that the year 2000 could really exist. The Kid still had her money from that bet, the five dollars she’d taken from her mom’s bedroom. The retainer. The Kid guessed that this meant he’d won the bet. He’d lost the rabbit but won the bet.

  He blew out the last candle, gathered up his comics and walked back through the dark house.

  Darby woke in their bed for the first time in a year. Dusty sunlight streaming around the edges of the blinds, golden slats on his outstretched arm, the sheet beyond.

  He thought of arms around her, holding her. Not his arms, but at least she wouldn’t have been alone. The alternative was worse. The thought of her not surrounded by something, held and protected in those last moments. The thought was too much, but it would not leave him. He imagined Greene’s arms holding her and he wanted to smash Greene, he wanted to thank Greene.

  It should have been him. He should have been there, somehow. But it wasn’t him. This was the truth, this was something that would not leave him.

  He stood in the motel parking lot, the row of orange doors before him. He knew why he was there. He knew why he was there in the way certain essential things were ingrained in his muscles, in his bones. Something so obviously true that he could not let the thought form completely. Knowing that if he let it out, if he tried to release it from his body, then everything, every other certainty, would collapse in its presence.

  He didn’t know where his pager was. He’d lost it somewhere. The supermarket, maybe. Maybe that hadn’t been a dream, the supermarket, cornered in an aisle by angry strangers, The Kid leading him out by the arm.

  The newspaper clipping was gone, but there was a napkin in his pocket with a name and a town and he knew that a truth would be there, waiting for him in the desert.

  Of course The Kid knew her real name. He’d heard Miss Ramirez say it many times, heard other kids in class call her by it. He’d seen her write it in large blue letters on the dry-erase board, had seen it on the tops of quiz papers. But the name did not stick to The Kid, did not stay with The Kid. When he thought of her, he thought of the name he had given her. It seemed more right, it seemed more true.

  Arizona sat alone two lunch tables away. Rhonda Sizemore and some of the girls from Arizona’s old table were looking at her and whispering among themselves. Brian was suspended. Matthew was still staying home. The Kid didn’t know how long he’d be gone, if maybe his parents had pulled him out of school or something. The Kid chewed his sandwich, watched Arizona, tried not to get caught looking. He’d made his own sandwich that morning, packed his own lunch, his dad still back in the bedroom, sawing logs.

  He had to finish the angel. He knew this. Not just before Y2K when the whole world went crazy, but now, before things got any worse with his dad, before the police came and arrested his dad for what he’d done at the mall, what he’d done at the supermarket. He had to get his mom home now. He would finish the angel and she would send the signal and his mom would come back and make things right again. There was no more time to waste. Now Michelle was gone, Matthew was gone.

  He looked at Arizona, tried not to get caught looking. He thought about how she had come to visit him and Matthew at their lunch table that first day. How she’d come to be interviewed on Halloween. He thought about her hand on his arm when he’d made those jokes, when he’d made her laugh.

  She looked up when he sat across from her and her expression didn’t change. He couldn’t tell if she was happy for the company or if she wanted to be left alone.

  “How do you feel?” she said.

  The Kid shrugged. He shrugged again when she asked him how Matthew was feeling.

  “I hope he’s okay,” she said. She looked like she was going to cry. “I really, really hope he’s okay.”

  The Kid opened his notebook, turned to a blank page.

  How long is Brian suspended for?

  “I don’t talk to Brian anymore,” she said. She looked at Rhonda’s table. “I don’t talk to anyone over there anymore. I’m sorry I was ever friends with them.”

  The Kid stared at his lunch bag. When she didn’t say anything else, he looked up and saw that she was watching him, waiting for something. He realized finally that she had said that last thing to him, she’d meant it specifically for him.

  The Kid nodded. He didn’t want her to feel sorry.

  She looked back down at the table and The Kid could see her eyes filling, her bottom lip trembling.

  “I don’t want to be here anymore,” she said. “I want to go home. I want to go back to my old school. I was wrong about this place.”

  The Kid turned back in his notebook, looking for an earlier page. Something she had asked him at lunch, what seemed like years ago now. He finally found it, the blank space between two lines he had written, the time she had asked how long they’d have to be friends before he would tell her his secret.

  I need your help, he wrote in that space, and then he slid the notebook across the table so she could read.

  They planned to meet outside Gift 2000 right after school. The Kid thought they should meet at night so they wouldn’t be followed, but Arizona told him that there was no way she could leave her house after dark. Her father locked the doors at eight o’clock and that was it. The Kid would have to show her whatever he wanted to show her right after school.

  The Kid stood in the parking lot, waiting. He was still worried about Brian and Razz. Just because they were suspended didn’t mean they had been removed from the world. A long white truck pulled into the parking lot, stopped with a sigh. A man hopped down from the front of the truck, unlocked the big back door, rolled it up. He lifted out a red dolly cart, pulled some boxes down and stacked them on the cart. The Kid wondered what was in the boxes. More word search books, maybe. Y2K supplies, bottled water, batteries, clean underwear.

  “I’m here, Whitley.” Arizona was standing beside him, wide-eyed, excited, maybe a little scared. They walked across the parking lot, then down through one of The Kid’s alternate routes. Arizona talked the whole way, telling The Kid about where she used to live, her old school, her old house. Telling him about her old friends. She said that it was possible they were going back there, her family, that her dad would be transferred back. She said she thought that would be a good thing, she thought she’d prefer that to staying here.

  The afternoon was cool and humid after all that rain the day before. They turned down side streets, came back around by way of others, a long, winding route, The Kid trying to throw any pursuers off their trail but also glad just to hear Arizona talk, just to walk and listen. He wanted to walk as long as they could, wanted to make the route as long as possible. He felt like they were in some kind of alternate dimension while they walked, just the two of them, shifted out slightly from everyone else, from the rest of the world, an alternate timeline where everything was different, where everything was okay as long as they walked, as long as he could listen to her talk.

  They finally reached the sidewalk across the street from the burned house. Arizona stopped talking, looked at the face of the house, the black-hole eyes, the charred, jagged roof.

  “What happened to it?” she said.

  There was a fire.

  “Was anyone hurt?”

  The Kid nodded. It was getting late. Arizona would have to go home soon. He looked both ways for traffic then jogged toward the house, motioning for her to follow.

  On the porch, he showed her the photos wedged into the security door. The color had faded and the pictures were curling in at the edges. The Kid wondered how much longer they’d be there, how much longer until they just fell out onto the porch and the wind blew them away.

&nb
sp; Arizona took some time looking at them, studying the faces. She kept her hands clasped behind her back as she looked, like she was trying to keep herself from touching the photos, like she was looking at something in a museum or an expensive store.

  After a while, she said, “Do you know her?”

  The Kid wasn’t sure how to answer. He’d never seen the red-haired woman while she was alive. He’d never talked to her. But now he saw her quite a bit, now he’d spent quite a bit of time with her.

  The Kid nodded. He guessed that he knew her. Guessed that he knew her at least enough to say so.

  Arizona looked back at the photos, the picture of the red-haired woman smirking in front of the gas pump. “She’s beautiful,” she said. “She’s not really pretty, but she’s beautiful.”

  He led her into the front room. The glass crunched under their sneakers. He showed her the cracked, blackened walls, the smashed furniture. They started walking again and then he felt her take his hand, felt her fingers laced with his.

  He needed to show her everything. He led her into the kitchen, the bathroom. They stood in the bedroom doorway and he watched her eyes following the black trail from the bed up the wall to the ceiling, and he could tell by how she squeezed his hand that she knew what had happened in this room, that she was picturing the red-haired woman and that she was seeing the flames and hearing the screaming.

  In the living room, he heard her take a quick breath when she saw the walls. He showed her the pirates on the open water, the school, the other kids in the schoolyard, the streets around The Kid’s house, Steve Rogers on the front porch, and then the center of the mural, the angel lifting up toward the hole in the roof.

  “Did you draw this?” she said.

  The Kid didn’t know if she could see him clearly, but he nodded anyway.

  “It’s beautiful.”

  He held out his notebook, flipped back to the pages of hand drawings. Michelle, Ms. Ramirez, the lunch lady. He gave her the notebook, then pointed to the angel so she could see what it was missing. She looked at the angel, up at the hole in the ceiling, the sky above. He didn’t tell her why he needed to finish the drawing. It seemed like she understood that it was important without him telling her anything. She walked toward the wall, holding The Kid’s notepad with one hand, letting her other hand hang at her side, the way that the angel’s hands were hanging. The Kid picked a piece of white chalk off the floor, walked over to Arizona and started to draw.

  They hadn’t exchanged so much as two words since what had happened at the supermarket. The night before they’d eaten dinner in silence, absolute silence, not even the sound of The Kid’s pencil in his notebook. Darby had tucked The Kid into bed and then sat in the pickup, waiting for daybreak. When The Kid left for school, Darby filled the dog’s food and water bowls, taped a note to the front door. He didn’t think he’d be home by dinner and he didn’t want The Kid to worry.

  He drove out of the city into the uncorrupted desert, north and east, one hour, two hours, the landscape flattening and spreading, going from green to brown, grass to dust, and it felt right, this movement across familiar terrain, it felt like going home.

  He stopped at a gas station just inside Barstow and looked for Greene’s name in a phone book. He went inside and asked the woman behind the counter for directions to the address. She said it was an apartment complex just off the freeway, just about the last thing you saw before you left town.

  The complex parking lot was poorly paved, nearly empty. There were five or six two-story buildings, first floor doors opening onto the lot, second floor doors opening along a narrow walkway. A dry, kidney-shaped pool sat behind a fence in the center of the complex. A boy with shaggy brown hair who looked a little older than The Kid was standing on a skateboard on the rim of the pool. He took a step forward and disappeared down the side, wheels grinding on the concrete, then he reappeared over the opposite wall, up and out, two or three feet into the air, turning in flight, then dropping back down into the pool.

  Darby sat in the pickup. It was midafternoon, hot and bright, quiet except for the skateboarder, a familiar long-dead desert time. He remembered skipping school with friends and this being about the time of day they’d wondered why they’d bothered, the thrill of the morning gone and the afternoon stretching on endlessly, longer even than if they were sitting in a classroom watching the clock.

  He was wearing the lucky shirt, the faded yellow date shirt, because he felt that it gave him strength, that it would keep him from turning back. He felt that it would keep him from sitting in the pickup all afternoon and then just driving away, leaving without getting what he’d come for.

  The skateboarder disappeared down one side of the pool, came up the other. Darby got out of the pickup, walked to a small building on the other side of the lot. The laundry and mailroom. One of the washers chugged along, filling the room with the smell of hot detergent, soapy water. He pulled the chain on the overhead bulb. There were two rows of mailboxes on the wall above one of the dryers, the last names of the residents embossed on small labels. He found it in the second row: Greene/Piniero, 23. Piniero must be the girlfriend with the baby. Darby hadn’t even considered the possibility that she could be there, with or without Greene. That she could be home right now. He hadn’t even considered her on the drive out, hadn’t considered the baby. He’d only thought of Greene.

  He walked back across the lot. Twenty-three was the last door on the top deck of the furthest building. There was a passageway that cut through the middle of the building, a couple of vending machines, a cement staircase. Up on the second floor, he could see across the complex to the scrub brush and sand beyond, the glinting asphalt of the freeway in the far distance. He could see down into the pool, where the skater sat beside his deck, rubbing his knee. Darby went down to the end of the walkway, stood beside 23, listened. There was a large window next to the door, thick blackout curtains drawn against the sun. The sound of a television from the apartment next door, a daytime talk show, muffled voices and audience laughter, but nothing from 23. The walkway continued around the corner, where it ended abruptly, the rusted metal railing turning in and bolted to the stucco wall. There was another, smaller window on this side of the apartment, the same blackout curtains drawn. Darby placed his fingers along the sash, pushed gently. The window slid open to the side. He stood, listened. No sound from inside the apartment. He pushed the window further, opening it completely. Still no sound.

  The skateboarder started up again, wheels grinding in the empty pool. Darby stood by the open window, touching the blackout curtain. He couldn’t wait any longer. He lifted one leg up and into the apartment, ducked his head and pulled the other leg through.

  He saw her in the school courtyard and thought she was a ghost. He thought he was seeing things, spirits in the morning light. The Kid wanted to blink to reset his vision. He wanted to rub his eyes like a cartoon character in disbelief.

  Michelle Mustache, coming across the courtyard from the back gate, dragging her backpack, her ratty sneakers flapping on the blacktop.

  The morning bell rang. He wanted to stay back and wait for Michelle, but Miss Ramirez had been keeping him close since the fight and she led The Kid into the building before all the other kids, losing Michelle back in the crowd.

  All morning he kept turning in his seat to look at her, to make sure she was really there. She sat at her desk at the end of the row, head down, doodling in a notebook. No one said anything about her return. Miss Ramirez didn’t make any kind of announcement. It was like nothing had happened, except The Kid couldn’t stop turning in his seat, looking back at her to make sure what he saw was true.

  She wasn’t at lunch. The Kid figured she was probably in Mr. Bromwell’s office. He sat alone, chewing the sandwich he’d made that morning. Matthew was back, and sat at a table with Miss Ramirez and some of the other teachers. Arizona was absent. The Kid wondered if she’d gotten in trouble for not going straight home yesterday, if she’d gotte
n caught somehow. Her dad the military man. The Kid wondered about the mural, the completed angel, how long it would take for the signal to go out and reach his mom.

  Michelle didn’t come back to class after lunch. The Kid didn’t know if she was still in Mr. Bromwell’s office or if she’d been sent home or what. At the end of the day, he stood out by the front gate as the courtyard emptied, waiting. Matthew walked by and nodded before getting into his father’s car at the curb. The last kids were coming through when he finally saw her trudging his way, head down. He stepped in front of her and she moved to walk around him and he stepped in front of her again until she stopped and looked up.

  “Get out of the way, Kid. I’ve got to go.”

  The Kid shook his head. He opened his notebook, but she was talking again before he could write anything.

  “My dad’s coming to pick me up and I’ve got to be out there when he comes. I can’t walk home anymore.”

  The Kid wasn’t sure what she was talking about. Her dad had come out from Minneapolis?

  She looked past him to the street. There was a line of parents’ cars and trucks idling at the curb. Michelle was anxious, chewing skin from her lower lip.

  “The cops found me that last night,” she said. “They just kicked in the door like they thought they were tough shit. They said neighbors had seen the candles the past few nights and called. They didn’t handcuff me, which was pretty dumb. They just put me in the back of the police car and drove me home.”

  She didn’t look at The Kid as she talked. She watched the street, chewing her lip.

  “I didn’t snitch you out, don’t worry. I didn’t tell them anything. I said I didn’t know anything about the drawing you made. I said it was already there when I found the house.”