The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 2003, Volume 14

by Stephen Jones

  “Oh yeah?” It’s the weekend. He shouldn’t have to be learning anything. He stands up. Maybe from a higher perspective the wasps will look like they’re only sleeping. “What kind of lesson?”

  For a moment, Evan stands with his oversized hands in his pockets as he regards the toxified nest. “They thought they knew their place in the scheme of things. They had it all figured out, didn’t they . . . knew right where they belonged. Now look where they are.”

  Micah doesn’t say anything, just wishes he had the courage to tell Evan to go eat a magazine or something. That talk of place and belonging and being wrong . . . it sounds like a threat, a very subtle threat.

  “I don’t know if you ever thought about anything like this before,” Evan says next, kind of bumbling about it, a completely new and unexpected direction, “but if you were ever interested in piano lessons, maybe I could get you started. I had to sell my baby grand last year, during the divorce, but I’m thinking about buying a good digital piano. Kawai makes them pretty close to the real thing. You’d be welcome to practice on it whenever you wanted.”

  “I don’t suppose you’d know anything about guitar instead, would you?”

  “Afraid not.”

  “That’s okay,” Micah tells him, and doesn’t know why he says things like what’s about to pop out, things he doesn’t mean, it just happens: “Anyway, nobody makes real music anymore. They just sample what somebody else has already done. Kinda makes you a chump if you take up something you have to practice, instead of just pushing some buttons.”

  Evan blinks at him from the other side of his little round glasses. This is the cleanest man he’s ever seen, Micah realizes. Never a smudge or a fiber out of place. Maybe it’s the hair, not even long enough to blow.

  “A chump,” Evan says, almost whispering.

  And now, the guilt. “I just . . . meant for me, you know? I didn’t mean you. They didn’t have the kind of technology they do now when you were my age.”

  But Evan tells him it’s okay, he hasn’t said anything wrong, that this would hardly be the first time he’s thought the word applied to himself. He starts to look as though he wishes he were someplace else, or maybe it’s a hungry look, like he could really go for a nice candy wrapper about now.

  Piano lessons. Of all the lamebrain ideas.

  “You never had kids, did you?”

  “That lived?” Evan says. “No.”

  Abruptly, Micah is overcome with a powerful awareness of the can he’s holding, and it’s a good thing that his normal-sized hands seem to be under greater control than his vocal cords, because he can’t help wondering what would happen if he turned the spray on Evan, and again, if it would be an act of cruelty, or just another name for mercy.

  A few days later he takes the snow shovel from the garage and uses the front of the blade to scrape the barren nest from the side of the house. It hits the ground with a rattly, papery sound, pieces of it flaking away, but most remains intact, still looking like something from another world, or at least something that doesn’t belong in this one. Micah steps on it, feels its dry crunch through his sneaker, and when he takes his foot away can see the shiny broken husks of the unborn glittering in the wreckage.

  He’s a moron, of course. Feeling sorry for a bunch of bugs that, if the spray can’s label was accurate, existed only to sting you full of welts. And so much for Lydia’s system of personal development, too. If giving is supposed to prevent you from getting hardened by life, it makes sense that taking would promote it. Well, he took, all right, took on an epic scale as far as those wasps were concerned, and the act hasn’t accomplished a thing. He’s got plenty of pity left inside, more than ever it seems, although maybe it is misdirected, because probably he should be slopping some of it Evan’s way.

  But the guy sure doesn’t make it easy.

  And could be Evan doesn’t really need it, either. Overall, things must be going pretty much the way Evan wants in the Lydia department. They must think he isn’t hearing them in their bedroom lately, and maybe he wouldn’t if not for his new habit of sneaking out his own window late nights to link up with Charisse for an hour or two, whatever they can steal away. After sneaking back in and lying in bed awake, like sleep is something for other people, most nights Micah can’t help but have his nose rubbed in the fact that Evan’s getting a whole lot more action than he is. Although Micah figures that potential is working in his favor, at least.

  The weird part is, this whole time, he’s never figured Evan for a dynamo of passion. And ever since catching him noshing strips of paper, Micah’s wondered if Evan might not actually prefer paper women, if maybe to him the act of eating a centerfold would be better than the idea of having sex with the actual model.

  Turns out Evan must know his business behind a closed bedroom door after all. Either that, or Lydia’s just uncommonly good at faking it, but does it make sense that she’d fake it so enthusiastically every night? Not to Micah it doesn’t. Because if she’s not into it to the degree that she sounds like, surely not even Lydia would want to give a man that much encouragement. The kind of encouragement that, if they were in an apartment building instead, with thin walls, concerned neighbors would be calling the police.

  Most nights it sounds like she’s dying in there for a minute or two before dissolving into her strange, satisfied little whimpers.

  More now than ever before, he’s glad he has at least a few recollections of his real mother, enough to realize that her memory and Lydia are nothing alike. He’s got that little bit of distance left intact, and maybe this, finally, is the reason Lydia has always insisted upon things staying that way, that even though she’s been just like a mom for the last decade, she still wanted to hang onto the privilege of turning into a wildwoman without him totally freaking over it.

  Which is only validated by Charisse when he tells her about it one night, to get her perspective on the situation.

  “Good for Lydia,” is all she says, like she doesn’t see anything one bit weird about it.

  “So you don’t think it’s perverted?” He has to know.

  “That they’re not afraid of having a good time? What’s perverted about that?”

  “Well,” Micah says, only tossing this out for consideration, not that he’s made any determinations on it yet, “their age, for one thing.”

  “Let me tell you a secret,” she says, under the stars and with the taste of berry wine on her lips. “I wish my mother still remembered how to cut loose and enjoy herself that much. She’d be a lot more fun to live with, I think. Mostly she just seems to look at my sisters and me like we stole it away from her.”

  And it’s comments like this that make him realize one thing above all: He will never come close to understanding the way women think. Even at the best of times, they seem to him as alien as anything that came out of that nest he nuked.

  “Where does she think you stashed it?” he asks.

  Charisse stares at the sky with her arms around her knees, like she really has to think about this one. “I guess we’re supposed to have kept it for ourselves. Just sucked it out of her and held onto it. Like it was our birthright or something.”

  More bug imagery – he can’t help it. Maybe it’s the sticky almost-summer air and the expectation of what it’ll soon be bringing. He pictures Charisse and her four sisters, most known only through photographs, as mosquitoes surrounding their mother and bleeding her of any ability to get it on with abandon. No matter which way she turns, she can’t escape the sharp hollow probes they jam into her for another extraction of joi de vivre. Her exhausted cry of heartbreak and defeat: How am I supposed to live like this, love like this, you ungrateful little whores? A word he can’t even imagine the woman saying . . . which may be part of the problem.

  “So, all that pent-up energy, it’s, like, inside you now,” Micah says, clarifying, with so much hope it could power a city.

  “Don’t let it give you ideas. That’s not what I was driving at.”
>
  Again. Shot down in flames so many times he could qualify for frequent flyer miles. His craving, his absolute need, to be inside her churns away like a turbine.

  “You’re beautiful,” she tells him then, cheerfully, as if that’s supposed to be enough to quench every urgent yearning.

  Maybe it’s even good for Lydia, he decides eventually – that much attention, that much desire, that much satisfaction.

  These noisy nocturnal bouts between her and Evan have been going on for three or so weeks by the time Micah concludes that it’s not just his imagination: She really is losing weight. And not just those extra pounds she put on starting the year after his dad left them. At first that’s all it was, as if she were flipping through the pages of the last few calendars in reverse, restoring herself into the person that he remembers first taking him in. But soon it goes beyond this, and he’s never known her to be so thin, Lydia throwing an ever-narrower shadow, until she’s as gangly as any of Charisse’s friends that he’s hardly ever seen eat more than two bites. Except Lydia still has that soft little pad of jowl beneath her chin.

  “Are you feeling okay?” he asks her one day. Has to. It’s what sons do, even if he’s no one’s son anymore. What, he’s supposed to ignore it when she seems to have a bit of trouble walking?

  “Never better!” she says, very chirpy about it.

  She tries to reassure him with that same confident smile she must use whenever house-hunters say we’ll take it, where do we sign. Except he finds it impossible to believe her. Secrets between them, at last. Secrets and lies. It’s what mothers do, even if they didn’t give birth: lie so the kids won’t worry. Where did they ever get the idea this worked, anyway?

  Until now, he and Lydia have always been so open, because they can afford it, not one single chromosome in common. What could finally be so awful that she won’t tell him? It’s Evan-related, obviously. He’s brought home some appalling disease, the way musicians are prone to do. Or maybe she’s gone into the club one night to listen to him play and seen some other woman drape herself over him, a stick figure with nipples, and has decided she’s got to compete.

  No fair, Micah thinks. Lydia’s turning him into a detective right here in his own home, and her timing sucks. What kind of thing is that to force on him now, with the school year winding to a close and final exams to worry about?

  In this role as detective, it’s not like he can get anyone to answer questions; he’s forced to rely on observation. Which only creates more questions, and he sort of wishes that he never noticed the way Lydia wears nothing but long sleeves now, no matter how hot the days are getting. It’s been weeks since he’s seen her elbows.

  Likewise her knees. She wears only slacks now. She was never that prone to wearing shorts, being sensitive about a couple patches of spidery blue veins on her thighs, but used to be, it wasn’t like she’d never wear them. Some days, comfort got the better of pride. Except it’s not only shorts he knows she won’t be wearing again anytime soon. Even her skirts and dresses seem to have become obsolete.

  One evening his watchful vigilance pays off when Lydia gets careless. He sees her reach for the day’s mail, or what’s left of it after Evan gets through with the junk, except her sleeve isn’t buttoned. It rides up past her wrist and he sees the lower inches of a gauze bandage wrapped around her forearm, and the edge of a yellowish stain that’s seeped up from below. Sees it for two seconds maybe, hardly enough time to know for sure that his eyes aren’t playing tricks, then her arm is close to her dwindling body again. He pretends not to have noticed anything as Lydia’s other hand scurries to secure her sleeve and she pretends she’s not eyeing him to see if she got away with it.

  They’ve become junkies, he imagines. Suburban junkies. Evan’s found a connection and is trying in his own demented way to bring back the great dangerous age of jazz that he was cheated out of by being born too late. Except they don’t know how to do it right yet, and already they’ve made an infected mess out of her limbs by wrecking vein after vein.

  So maybe that’s the cause of the Lydia-sounds he hears at night. She hates the needles but loves what they bring.

  No fair, Micah thinks. Lydia’s turning him into a pervert right here in his own home, because now he actively listens for her – the moans, the cries, the whimpers, the sighs. He’s becoming something that his friends used to razz him about, back when all these guys started showing a freedom to admire Lydia that they wouldn’t have if she’d really been his mother. Telling him how they wished they were in his position, because since she’d only raised him for the last few years, she would probably be the one to fuck him the first time, too.

  So Micah listens for her sounds and excuses it by reimagining them as the soundtrack to his own life. Same sounds, different source, and he’s the one who inspires them. It’s a unique form of ventriloquism, throwing these anguished and delicious cries across town so they’re emerging from Charisse instead.

  Except . . .

  If all that about them being junkies is really true, how come Evan hasn’t started to diminish?

  Micah’s been turning that one over and over in his mind awhile, watching the creeping dawn brighten his window after a night without sleep. It’s Saturday, though, so maybe he can do some catching up. Saturday morning – garbage day for their part of town, he remembers after hearing the grind of the truck and the clang and thud of emptying cans coming from the end of the block.

  A whole week’s worth of their trash is sitting out beside the alley behind the house, waiting to be hauled away and made anonymous. If he’s going to get to the bottom of any mysteries, there may not be a better time.

  Micah grabs a pair of jeans, wrestles them up to his self-tenderized groin and fastens them on the run while, behind their closed and inviolable door, Lydia and Evan soundlessly guard their secrets. He doesn’t waste time with shoes and barely makes a sound himself as he rushes through the house and out the back door. He crosses the dew-slick back lawn with wet whisking footslaps.

  The truck and crew are four houses away, which doesn’t leave much time if he has to do any real digging to find anything. In the sticky-cool dawn, with a scab of pebbles and dirt forming on the soles of his feet, he stands over the pair of big round green plastic cans and waves away the flies that find them so appealing. Not both cans so much as just one.

  At first it seems reasonable that it’s only kitchen scraps they’re after, but two seconds’ thought and this theory doesn’t hold up. They eat a lot of carry-in in this household. How are you going to have kitchen scraps when hardly anyone ever cooks?

  He clutches the handle of the lid and yanks it from the can.

  More flies – they flurry upward into a dense cloud. Their buzzing is so thick that it has legs of its own, so loud that it nearly drowns out the rumble and hydraulic crush of the approaching truck. He swats at them with the lid like it’s a shield, feels the hailstone pop of their hard little bodies against the plastic and his stomach does slow rolls at the thought of something so many, so mindless, so greedy.

  When he’s cleared away the worst of them, Micah thrusts his free hand down into the can, not knowing the first thing about what he’s looking for. If it’s used-up needles, then he figures he’s doing a really stupid thing because he’ll be sure to get one through the palm.

  The stink hits him only after he remembers he should be breathing. He’s smelled worse – it’s not quite like something spoiled, or fast-food dumpsters on a hot day. It’s a stink with some mystery to it, a pliable odor that hasn’t yet tipped into full rot, but still has a richness of suppuration and decay. It’s like no smell he’s ever encountered rising out of a garbage can.

  He finds the source in a big white plastic bag forced into the can and subjected to a half-ass job of trying to conceal it, with a few other bits of trash scattered on top. It’s filled as tight as a sausage with soiled bandages, just like the one he saw bound around Lydia’s arm, except here there are wads and wads of them – so
many that he might as well have ripped open a trash bag behind a hospital.

  He scatters the more benign rubbish back over them, like more than anything it’s still important to maintain household secrets, and slams the lid back into place.

  He needn’t have bothered. By now the truck has pulled up to carry it all away. The ground trembles underfoot and until this moment he never thought he could be so glad to smell diesel exhaust.

  “That ready to go?” asks one of the garbage men. Barely six in the morning and already he looks like he’s made of grime. He points at the can and its halo of flies. “Or are you looking for something you lost?”

  Micah doesn’t know how to even begin to answer that.

  In hindsight, it seems inevitable that she would stop going to work. That one morning he would get up and the bedroom door at the end of the hall would still be closed. That there would be no coffee smell wafting from the kitchen, no Lydia rushing around with her day planner and trying to remember where she last laid her cell phone. That Charisse would drop him off after school and Lydia’s car would appear not to have moved an inch.

  Maybe she took a sick day, is all. If anybody’s entitled, Lydia is, judging by what he found in the garbage. And then a second sick day after that? Well, okay fine, but he can’t keep from wondering if she shouldn’t actually be in the hospital, instead of just replicating the trash from one.

  And shouldn’t he see her?

  “Maybe she’s depressed,” Charisse tries. “It happened to my mom once, a few years ago. She shut herself up in her room and drew the blinds and we hardly saw her for three weeks.”

  They’re on lunch break, except it turns out that the last thing he’s interested in is that greasy burger in his hand. Just like there are two days of school left and the last thing he wants is more time to spend at home.

  “But you did see her some, right?” he asks.

  “Sure. But we had to force our way into the room.”

  That’s the difference between them. He could never do that. Another side effect of not being related to the woman. Since he’s not bone of her bone and flesh of her flesh, he doesn’t have the full Bill of Rights. He can stand out in the hallway and look at the door like any pet thwarted by the knob.