by Anthology
“Hey kid,” he said. “Great shoes.”
Angela grinned, and kicked her shoes against the stool leg to show them off.
Ms. Greer humphed again, tapped her pencil on the badly-stained card table in the center of the room.
It was time for group.
Gary stood up. Gary had one normal arm. The other was not normal. It was fine until it got to the tricep, then it corkscrewed in on itself. His hand was a shiny knobby mass with no nails and a thumb as wide as a matchbook.
“Last Monday I realized my girlfriend was cheating on me,” he said. Angela heard her mother snicker, inside.
“All in all, it was a typical day. I was at the south-side Denny’s eating breakfast. Sent the meal back three times. Eggs too runny, too dry . . . and by the time they’d gotten the eggs right, the pancakes were cold. When no one was watching, I unscrewed the syrup caps at other tables. I did over half the restaurant before the manager came out. He had the picture of me from the north-side Denny’s, with a long list of reasons why I had been labeled a problem customer there. He threw me out. I didn’t even get to finish my eggs.”
“Real nice, Gary,” muttered Oliver.
Smirking like a child who pulls the wings off baby birds, Gary continued. “Anyway, my girlfriend. That little slut. My antennae had been up for weeks. And I could smell the stink of the lawn boy in her hair. I had to open the windows to let it out. She’s allergic to bees, and our yard is full of them. So she would never have gone out to him. He had to come to her. I don’t blame her. She’s only human.”
“That doesn’t bug you?” Oliver asked.
“Hush, Mr. Spare,” snapped Ms. Grier. “This is a support group.”
Angela caught a waspish flare of anger from Gary, but he didn’t show it. “I wouldn’t blame any of you for being jealous. By any measure—population, adaptability, territories occupied—insects already control the world. I’m living proof that one day, hardy Coleopteroids like my father will take over. After the next war, it’s either us or Twinkies.”
“On the drive to my bookstore, I took the route with as many right-turn-only lanes as possible. At the last moment, I’d cut from them to the left-most lane. Let me tell you, the horns are better than any early-morning radio show. I made sure they could all see me on my cell phone, ordering a dozen daisies for my girlfriend.”
The group was a yellow muddle of confusion. Angela blinked—it hurt her eyes.
“That was very positive of you,” said Ms. Grier.
“Hmm? Oh. Well, you see, bees love daisies,” said Gary. “And with all those open windows . . . well.”
Angela wasn’t sure why, but the group’s yellow muddle slurred away as if someone had spilt icy white paint into it.
“When I got to the bookstore, I let Fenton out. He hurried out to wherever he goes during the day. As usual, he’d done a great job on the shelves, and made a beautiful pyramid of the new Caitlin R. Kiernan books. I don’t know how I got along before I started locking in an obsessive-compulsive at night.”
Through the yellow and white and ice, a crack in her mother’s mind, light from under a door, a seam in a folded-up memory. Angela tiptoed up to its edge, very slowly, and peeked inside . . .
Every so often, someone in the hotel ballroom would notice Bella. Most looked confused, but content to ignore her. A few crossed to her corner to peek at the canvas.
“That’s wild,” one of the men said to her, almost tipping his Diet Coke over with the gesture towards the painting.
Bella peered at him as if trying to make him out through binoculars. “Thanks.” Curls of honey blonde hair framed her painter’s squint. She pushed them away with blue-stained fingers.
He wasn’t done. “It’s got some great color. Like it’s moving across the painting.” He glanced around, complete in his awkwardness, finally setting his drink down and wiping his hand before thrusting it at her like a yardstick. “I’m Jim,” he said.
Bella had already turned back to her canvas, but took two of his fingers in her left hand and waggled them. “Bella Dunleavy.”
“Get you a drink, Bella?”
“No thanks, um, John,” Bella said, pursing her lips and narrowing her eyes as she arced a snatch of blue back onto itself. “I paint better with a clear head.”
The wedding had everything she was looking for: high energy and emotion, a large group of people she did not know, and an open bar to keep things interesting. The hotel manager had promised that if she stayed out of the way, Bella could paint it. So Bella stayed out of the way. She didn’t even laugh when the fat Italian uncle fell dead drunk into the piano.
The people that caught her eye she painted with slashes of color. The bride was three royal blue lines, looking like a slanting backwards E missing its middle stroke, waved in the center, while a curvier triple-helix of red burnt to her left, representing the groom.
Each person was a tiny live wire of color. Bella ignored the furniture and floor, penciling in only the barest rudiments of ballroom geography to keep the perspective straight in her own head.
Bella looked over to her left. Jim was still standing there, picking at the pocket flaps of his suit.
She sighed.
“You’re a friend of the groom’s?” she said, daubing the words with fake interest before saying them.
Jim nodded, and his eyes perked. “Yeah. Yeah, Todd and I were in the same frat. I was telling that videographer guy walking around earlier . . . we actually met when he was going crazy at 2 AM on a Sunday morning, looking for some baby spinach . . .”
Bella let Jim’s voice fade into the vague susurrus of the ballroom’s background chatter. Across the room, she saw the photographer. When their eyes met, he glared at her like a cougar at the edge of his territory.
“. . . so anyway, I’m always getting dinged for under-utilizing my decorating expense account, and love the use of color. Really juice up the whole brokerage. Do you have a dealer you work through, or . . .?” He left the question hanging.
Bella turned back to him and blinked. “I’m sorry?”
Jim already had out a gold-embossed checkbook. “Look, I’d hate to lose this to someone who just picks it out of a gallery. I mean, I was here for the birth, right?” He flashed her what she took to be his deal-closing smile. “I think that ought to earn me a few brownie points. Say four thousand?”
Bella understood the words he was using but could not assemble them in her mind. The binoculars had reversed themselves; now he was too close, and the ballroom moving further away, growing darker as it receded to a point.
He was beautiful. Not man-beautiful, the way too many men were, in a way that made them pretty but completely unattractive. Waif beautiful. He had the soft green eyes of a newborn angel, and the drawn cheeks of too many smiles.
Jim must have taken her confusion for reticence. “Sorry, sorry,” he said with a smile, while scratching numbers into his checkbook. “It’s hard to overcome the habit of low-balling a first offer. Here. Six thousand.” He tore a staid green check from the checkbook and fluttered it onto her lap.
Her eyes traveled to the check, while her paintbrush hand went wild, leaving a bright green streak in the upper right corner of the canvas.
Jim tapped a business card he had laid on top of the check. “That’s my card. Can you drop the painting off at the Carrington Hotel? Room 1014? It’s where I’m staying the next few days.”
Bella tried to say yes. Her mouth had forgotten how. She squeaked something, coughed, and tried again. The second attempt was more squawk than squeak.
Jim snatched a glass of champagne from a nearby table and offered it to Bella. She downed it in a single gulp.
“I won’t allow it,” Bella’s mother said. Her loose heel clacked for every pace she took around Bella’s studio. “It’s too close to mattering.” She was a squat gargoyle of a woman, with sulfurous stubs for teeth and a chisel-deep frown.
Bella’s eyes stung. They did not sting when she opened a can o
f turpentine but they stung now.
“It’s just one painting. He thinks it’s very good. And we could use the money—”
“He thinks it’s good? What do you care what he thinks? You’re a special child, Bella. You shouldn’t care what any of these people think of you. Lord, the whole reason I let you paint up here is that it kept you out of trouble. So much of your father in you. Every person I see out on the street, I wonder. They look just like us you know. You’d never see them coming. Your father—”
“Isn’t here!” Bella shouted. “Mother, this won’t hurt anything. The painting will sit in his office for a year till he hires a new interior decorator, and then it will all be replaced with a Southwestern motif or some nonsense.”
Bella’s mother stalked across the room and snatched Bella’s chin. The nails cut into Bella’s cheek. “Listen to me, Bella. You’re not like other people. The least little change can affect the entire future. Do you want to just disappear, to never have existed?”
“I might as well not,” Bella whispered. Fat tears rolled down her pale cheeks. “You never let me go to college or date. You don’t love me. You just want me to be a failure like you.”
The hard line around her mother’s eyes softened. “Why would you say that? Are you trying to hurt me? Is that it?”
Bella shook her head and sniffled. “No. But Mom, it really is just the one painting. And look at it, it’s really good . . .” Bella turned the easel so her mother could see it. “I call it Wedding Party.”
Her mother straightened up, released Bella’s chin, let out a loud sigh.
“You haven’t learned anything,” her mother said, in her matter-of-fact tone. She reached over and snatched the box cutter from the workbench. Before Bella could react, she had sliced the canvas once, twice, three times.
Bella hung there, in the place between desperation and crying. She reached out with her fingers, touched one of the flapping edges of the canvas. Bits of bright purple paint flaked off its edges, fluttering to the floor of the studio.
Her mother’s eyes caught Bella’s, hard.
“I should have had the abortion,” she said.
Bella sat there for an hour, two, occasionally pulling one of the shredded flaps back up, holding it to the light, watching it flutter across the colors like a searchlight over a fairy sea.
Bella’s eyes snapped open. Cold scratchy sheets, a mounted television, anonymous brown drawers, a Bible. She turned over, and there was Jim, breathing, with the streetlight shining through the window onto his unkempt hair. His arms piped around his head, tiny goosebumps making the hairs stand on end.
He must have felt her eyes on him. He turned over and said, in a sleepy murmur, “Hey. You alright?”
She hugged his chilled arm and tucked it under the covers. “I just wish you could have seen the finished painting,” she said. “I mean, you are out six thousand dollars.”
Jim gave her a wide puppy grin. “Did that impress you?”
“The money? Absolutely.”
“Really?”
“Only reason I’m here is to personally verify what kind of shortcomings leave a man spending that kind of money,” said Bella. Jim stuck his tongue out at her.
“You can show me the next one. You’re too young to have peaked.”
“Yeah. Yeah, I guess so . . . brr! Are you cold?”
Jim looked down at himself. “I guess I am.” He stood and shuffled naked over to the thermostat, flicking its switches back and forth til the hum of the air conditioner gurgled to silence. Two long scratches ran down his back, almost symmetrical, like patterns cut from red construction paper.
“Did I do that?” Bella asked, embarrassed.
Jim turned around and glanced down his back. “Hmm? Oh. I guess you did. Hey! What happened to the soap? And coffee?”
Bella smiled, let her eyes travel to her purse.
“You got all the good stuff!”
“I left you the shampoo/conditioner,” said Bella.
“I’d rather beat my hair against a rock,” said Jim, crinkling his nose.
“No need to be snarky just because I got best pick.”
Jim shrugged, sighed, shuffled back to bed and pulled the covers up. Bella wrapped her legs around him.
“I didn’t come here planning this,” she said.
“I know.”
“My mother would be furious.”
“Most mothers are.”
“Not this kind of furious. It’s a scared kind of furious.”
“Why?”
Bella sat up and took a deep breath of still-chilly air. “It will sound nuts.”
Jim sat up too. He smiled. He had pretty teeth. “Try me.”
Bella bit her lower lip. She thought about it.
“Well?” Jim asked.
“I’m thinking about it.”
“Bella?”
“Still thinking!”
Then she told him the way her mother told it to her. That her father had been a traveler. From some Other Time.
That she’d fallen in love with him, and gotten pregnant, and that he’d left her. Returned to his Other Time.
Once, Bella had her IQ tested. The school called her and her mother in to discuss the improbably high results. Bella’s mother had panicked, quit her job, and moved them to the other side of the country within a week. After that, there was an incident. Bella had run a mile in two minutes and fifty-eight point one two four six seconds. That was the town Bella left her teddy bear in.
She was a walking paradox, her mother said. And she must never make waves, never draw attention, never accomplish something or participate or pop her head out, for even a second. If she changed the future, her father might not exist, and neither would she. Summitto ergo sum.
“That’s why she cut the canvas. She was afraid for me. She told me I must never matter, because it might erase me.” Bella ducked her head. “I know it sounds silly,” she said, in a small voice.
Jim’s face had not changed the whole time. It had been blank and attentive. He cocked his head and stared at Bella like a worried puppy.
“I’m so sorry,” Jim said. He shook his head. “I’m so sorry that’s what she made you think.”
“You believe me?” Bella asked.
“I love you,” Jim said. He kissed her again, long, on the lips. His were warm. Hers were still cold.
“It’s all right,” she said. She shook her head. “Sometimes I don’t believe me. Why would people be coming into the past? I mean really? What’s the point?”
A pause. “Maybe they’re afraid of tomorrow,” Jim said.
“Hmm?”
“I think we all try to pull the past around us with a blanket,” said Jim. “We take pictures, we cling to friends who share even the worst of memories. The past wasn’t always great but what it was, it was. Tomorrow isn’t like that. Tomorrow’s an edge with no railings or lights and we’re all standing on our tiptoes.” He kissed the back of her neck. “Or not. It could be anything. Get some sleep.”
Bella smiled, pulled the blanket tight around her shoulders, and dreamt.
The next morning, Bella woke up alone. His side of the bed was cool, and unspoilt. Even the pillow lay perfect against the headboard.
She sat up, heart pounding. Then she saw the note, written on hotel stationary.
Bella,
I’m so sorry. I do love you.
I thought I had more time
Jim
“And then he left the room,” said the kitten-faced girl. She had wide wounded eyes and no name.
With those words the memory crumpled, balled up in her mother’s mind and tossed into the dark. Angela blinked, and sat up straight, listening to the tiny trill of the kitten-faced girl.
“I laid there until there was no sun left behind the blinds. Then I stood up and got dressed, very slowly. It hurt, but it was that numb kind of hurt. I never took my eyes off the door. I didn’t tell the police. I know the rules.”
Angela’s mother l
ooked worried. Angela reached out and squeezed her mother’s arm, but her mother shook it away. Angela saw something scaly curl up inside her mother, like a lizard crawling beneath a rock.
“I should have known. About who he really was.” The kitten-faced girl’s face fell. Curls of split hair fell across her eyes.
Angela’s mother nodded. “You always think you’ll know one when you see him. That we’d know, especially.” Angela added her own murmur to the group’s agreement.
The kitten-faced girl was crying now. Her stray curls caught most of the tears. “I don’t know why they do it. I’ve heard they think it’s humane, sending criminals into past disasters to execute them. Never mind if they happen to survive.” She wiped at her eyes. “I think it’s just about keeping their hands clean. Passing the buck to the past.”
The group was silent for a moment. Then another. The kitten-faced girl stood there, blinking and miserable, like a child waiting for a bandage.
Gary raised his mangled not-hand. He liked doing that. “Do you know what he was convicted of?”
The answer made no sense to Angela, but it came very fast, words under pressure. “Rape,” said the kitten-faced girl. “He was a rapist. Is. Will be. He told me he stowed away on a small colony ship and killed every grown man. And every girl under thirteen.” Her lips pressed tight, and her hands fell unconsciously to the bruises beneath her skirt. Angela wondered if anyone else could see them. Her mother always chided her for looking too hard into people.
“No one could understand,” the kitten-faced girl said. “For this to happen to me . . .” She left the words hanging there and sat back down, tucking her knees under her chin.
“No one could possibly understand what it is to be like us,” said Ms. Grier. She made a show of checking her dangly silver watch. “I think that’s enough for this week everybody.” She stood. “Remember. We don’t, therefore we are.”
“We don’t, therefore we are,” repeated the group, sounding like Angela’s class when they said the Pledge of Allegiance.