Alone With You

by Marisa Silver

  Candy listened as her grandmother hurried into the bathroom to turn off the faucet.

  “Turn that water on again and I’ll murder you!” Marjorie said to the ghost, on her way past Candy’s room to the kitchen. “It’s quarter past three, for Lord’s sake.”

  Candy got out of bed and made her way to the kitchen, too. Marjorie wore her quilted bathrobe, and her bulb of short graying hair was lopsided from lying in bed. She had already set the kettle on the stove. “Ah, she woke you up, too,” she said, shaking her head ruefully.

  “You woke me up,” Candy said, sitting down at the table. “You probably woke the whole building.”

  “That ghost is running up my water bill. It has to stop.”

  “Maybe he’s thirsty,” Candy said.

  “He’s a she, and ghosts don’t drink, darlin’. They have no bodies. She just turns on the tap to get my goat. And in a dry season, no less!” she yelled, shaking her fist in the air, as if the ghost were hiding just outside the kitchen door. The wattle beneath Marjorie’s upper arm wavered and Candy remembered how she had played with that loose skin as a child. Something about her grandmother’s excesses of flesh was comforting. On bad nights, when Candy felt an aching maw open up in her chest, she’d slip into Marjorie’s bed. Her nameless dread was always calmed when her cheeks grazed the loose bags of her grandmother’s nylon-swaddled breasts.

  Marjorie set down two mugs on the kitchen table, then brought over the kettle and poured. “I’ll tell you what, though. I’m tired of waking up in the middle of the night. I’m too old for it.”

  “Maybe we should have an exorcism.”

  “You don’t believe in that foolishness, I hope.” She saw Candy’s grin. “Oh, you’re just teasing me, you bad girl.”

  “We got a new boy in,” Candy said, changing the subject. “He’s a mess.”

  “Ahh,” Marjorie said, sympathetically, replacing the kettle on the stove.

  “No one’s come to visit him. It’s been two days.”

  “Maybe he has no one.”

  “They’re usually there at admitting with their balloons and those smiles. You can see them counting the minutes until they can get the hell out of there.”

  “You’re harsh, baby girl. It’s not easy to see something destroyed.”

  Candy looked at her grandmother’s hands. Arthritis, that devious sculptor, was beginning to shape them, and it wouldn’t be long before she could no longer work a sewing machine or hold needle and thread. What then? Could they survive on Marjorie’s Social Security and Candy’s pathetic salary? Candy remembered Marjorie’s younger, stronger hands cupping Sylvie’s cheeks as she tried to wake her, tried to get her to stand up from the living-room floor where she had collapsed sometime during the night. “Time to get your girl to school!” Marjorie would say, her determination fending off the futility of her effort. Candy remembered, too, her grandmother’s callused grip around her own small hand when they made those hurried journeys to school together, more often than not leaving Sylvie behind, curled up on herself like a pill bug.

  El Lobo was, of course, where Candy had left him the afternoon before, lying in his bed, gazing up at the ceiling. She raised the mattress so that he faced forward, placed his breakfast tray on the rolling table, and swung it across the bed. She removed the lid from the oatmeal and the canned pears and peeled off the layer of plastic wrap covering the glass of water. The meal’s monchromatic paleness was disheartening, but Candy dug into the oatmeal with a spoon and lifted it to El Lobo’s mouth. He ate dutifully but without affect, as if some inner computer chip were responsible for the opening and closing of his lips and the gentle modulations of his throat. He made no eye contact with her. Candy took the opportunity to go vacant as well, a state she had perfected as a child. She’d found that she could continue to do what was required of her—clean her room or go through the motions of paying attention in class, even read out loud if the teacher requested it—while her mind wandered. In that peaceful oblivion, she felt swaddled in cotton, divorced from the feelings that usually plagued her, unworried about what she looked like in her homemade clothing or what others thought of the girl with a grandmother for a mother. The sounds of her fellow students came at her muffled, harmless. Time passed. She disappeared.

  She looked over to find that El Lobo’s chin was covered with syrup where she had missed his mouth. It irked her that he had let this happen without making any sound to alert her to the problem. She wiped him clean, becoming even more irritated when he didn’t seem to register this help either. She took a last, hard swipe at his mouth. He finally looked at her, and his glance was sharp and full of menace. The ease with which his expression resolved into hatred made it clear that anger was his default position. The nurses talked about the “sweet” boys or the “darling” boys, as if the upside of the physical damage were that it turned a soldier into a feckless three-year-old, thus ridding the world of one more potentially dangerous man. But Candy knew that this boy was neither sweet nor darling and probably never had been. She imagined him as a bored high-school shark, moving slow and silent through the halls, heavy with his own power and cravings. She had known boys like this, had fucked boys like this.

  She marked on his chart the amount of solids and liquids he had consumed, rolled the tray away from his bed, and carried the half-eaten breakfast into the hallway. She spent the next seven hours of her shift changing sheets and emptying bedpans, delivering food baskets that would be at the nurses’ station by day’s end, as most of the patients were on restricted diets or were fed through tubes. She wheeled one boy to X-ray through the maze of hallways and elevators. Every time the gurney lurched over a transom the boy winced in pain. The first few times she apologized, but then she stopped because she knew that her regret, like a basket of muffins, was, in some way, an affront.

  Later that day, after she had finished her shift, she returned to El Lobo’s room. He was asleep, so she sat in the orange plastic chair in the corner and watched him. When he lay in his bed covered in blankets, his wounds were invisible; his head, his nutmeg skin, his thick, dark eyebrows and generous, scowling mouth were untouched. A stranger might have thought him one of the lucky ones in this war. Only after his so-called recovery, when he would have to have special clothing made, when he would be assaulted by all the daily acts he could no longer accomplish, would he truly feel the extent of his wounds. She knew about collateral damage, knew that the injuries people saw were never the gravest. After Sylvie died, the school counselor had brought Candy into her office and handed her a pamphlet called “Teen-Agers and Grief: A Handbook.” She’d told Candy that although it was against state regulations she was going to give Candy a hug. She’d had no idea about the hard lump of rage that sat lodged in Candy’s throat like a nut swallowed whole.

  After fifteen minutes, El Lobo’s eyes opened. For a second, his expression was soft and pliable like that of a child waking from a nap, but then his mind took over and something calcified in his features, his muscles hardening against the invasion of thought. His gaze fell on her. She didn’t move, but continued to stare at him. He stared back, his upper lip trembling in what she thought was the beginning of an insult. She felt a tingling in her gut, and her nerves were on alert, as if he had actually grazed her skin with that leftover hand. The second-shift nurse’s voice cut through the silence as she entered and exited rooms along the hallway, announcing pain-relieving meds in a voice as bright and cutting as a laser. Candy stood and walked over to the bed. She reached under the cover and pinched El Lobo hard on his arm. She heard his sharp intake of breath, and slipped out of the room before she was discovered.

  At 3 a.m., Marjorie tore into the bathroom. “You leave me alone!” she yelled. “I’ve done enough for you already.” Candy decided to stay in bed. A few times, over the five years since the ghost had announced itself, Candy had tried to stay up all night. She thought that if she could just once catch Marjorie turning on the faucet—perhaps it was sleepwalking or some ea
rly sign of senility—her grandmother would stop the nonsense, and Candy could get some rest. But on those nights either the ghost did not appear or Candy dropped off to sleep despite the cans of Coke littering her bedside table.

  She heard the sound of the sewing machine clattering into action. The machine slowed and quickened, and Candy imagined her grandmother’s bare foot playing the floor pedal. Candy knew that she had little chance of getting back to sleep. It was too hot to put on her terry-cloth robe, so, wearing only her T-shirt and underwear, she went into the living room, where Marjorie bent to her task.

  “What are you making?” Candy said.

  “Right about now: nothing,” Marjorie said. She lifted the foot of the sewing machine and pulled the material out, snipped the threads with a pair of scissors, and set to undoing her work. “Victor gives me two weeks to do a bride and four bridesmaids. Two weeks! The man is losing whatever brains he had to begin with.”

  Candy watched her grandmother’s hands shake as she pulled out the tiny stitches with her seam ripper. Marjorie was no longer as adept as she had been when she was younger and able to unroll a bolt of cloth and see every seam and dart, every buttonhole and facing, when she could tell, even before putting one pin into the material, how it would all fall together. A dress form stood beside the sewing machine, draped in the raw ivory silk that Marjorie was working with. Headless and armless, the figure tilted slightly on its stand, as if leaning over to tell a secret.

  “Expensive,” Candy said, fingering the cloth.

  “Hands off!” Marjorie ordered, batting Candy’s hands away lightly as she had done when Candy was young. “Spend all this money on silk and then give me next to no time to do my job. This missy will be lucky if the whole thing doesn’t come flying apart the minute she starts down the aisle.”

  “Where’s the ghost?”

  “Gone, that wretched thing. She’ll be back, though. What I ever did to deserve a hauntin’, I’ll never know.”

  “Maybe she lived here. Before us. Maybe she wants her place back.”

  “And it’s taken her thirty-five years to show up? Unh-unh.”

  “What, then?”

  “Honey, I’m still trying to figure out the reason people do what they do when they’re alive.” She finished ripping out the stitches, sighed audibly, and fit the material into the machine again.

  Candy went to the window and looked out over the apartment courtyard. The management had recently overhauled the space, taking out the grass and flowers that had required watering and replacing them with decorative pebbles. Only the concrete path that wound through the garden remained. As a child, Candy had ridden her bike between clumps of impatiens and begonia and stands of banana trees, clumsy with their thick, waxy leaves. She knew every turn and straightaway by heart, but there had been danger inherent in each corner, the thrill of heading into the unseen. She’d been eight when she’d made a turn around a bushel of bamboo and saw her mother lying asleep across the doormat of Marjorie’s apartment. Candy parked her bike against the wall and squatted down next to Sylvie. She looked pretty lying there, like the illustration of Sleeping Beauty in one of Candy’s library books. Candy watched her for a while as if studying an insect, noting the little flutters of her eyelids and lips, her long, corded neck, the muscles of which seemed tense, even in sleep. Finally, she stepped over her mother and went inside.

  “Mommy’s back,” she told Marjorie, who was bent over her machine.

  Together, they carried an incoherent and moaning Sylvie into the bathroom. Candy sat on the lid of the toilet while Marjorie ran the bath, undressed her daughter, and coaxed her into the water. Sylvie cursed her mother, calling her a bitch and a cunt, but Marjorie didn’t react, only shushed her the way she shushed Candy when she was crying over a scraped knee as if silence trumped pain. Once Sylvie was in the bath, she lay with her eyes closed, head back against the edge of the tub, while Marjorie gently soaped her body, lifting her arms one by one, cleaning between her small breasts and her legs. “Beautiful girl,” she sang in an errant, unidentifiable tune. “Beautiful baby girl.” Later, the three ate chicken with mushroom-soup sauce at the kitchen table and watched MTV on the twenty-one-inch Sony. In the morning, Sylvie was gone, along with the television.

  The apartment was reduced bit by bit over the following years. The microwave followed the television, and then some of Marjorie’s jewelry disappeared. Each time Candy came back to the apartment after school she entered with trepidation, waiting to discover what was missing. The relief she felt when she realized that Sylvie had not stolen anything new was always tempered by disappointment. When she and Marjorie arrived home from church one Sunday to find the space where the stereo had sat looking as vacant as a missing tooth, Candy felt a rush of elation. Her mother had been in the apartment. Her breath, her dirty, pretty smell still hung in the air. Marjorie never got angry about the thefts. She’d just stand, hands on hips, facing the emptiness, and inhale deeply as if acquainting herself with the new geography of her life.

  But when Candy was ten and she and Marjorie returned from the grocery store to find that Marjorie’s black Singer Featherweight, the hand-me-down from her mother and grandmother that she had oiled and massaged and kept going for years, was gone, Marjorie went to her bedroom and didn’t come out until the following morning. Candy heated up a can of alphabet soup and sat on the couch waiting for Marjorie to show her how to skirt this new boulder in her life, but her grandmother didn’t open her door.

  “Are you mad?” Candy asked the next morning, when Marjorie finally came out of her room, her face blotchy.

  Marjorie fingered the thin pages of the phone book, looking for the number of a locksmith. “I’m just tired,” she said softly. Two weeks later, Marjorie held Candy’s hand at the kitchen table as they listened to Sylvie struggle to turn her key in the front-door lock.

  “I know you’re in there!” Sylvie yelled, pounding on the door.

  Candy looked at Marjorie, who held her finger to her lips, and the two sat in rigid silence. Giving up on the door, Sylvie came to the kitchen window. She pressed her pallid and wild-eyed face up to the glass so that her nose and lips flattened and distorted.

  “Let her in, Grandma. Please,” Candy said.

  “We don’t want any visitors just now,” Marjorie said.

  For the next year, until her mother’s death, Candy often had the feeling of being shadowed, as if a huge prehistoric bird were passing over her, but when she looked up there was nothing there.

  El Lobo had his eyes closed when Candy brought in his breakfast the next day, but she knew he wasn’t asleep—there was something too effortful about his breathing. Noisily, she set up the tray table and dragged her chair to the side of his bed. When he finally opened his eyes, he stared at the opposite wall. This time, she did not feed him but simply sat and waited for him to say something. He did not move or shift his gaze. The air in the room grew heavy with tension, but neither one gave in. After ten minutes, Candy rolled the table away from the bed and took the uneaten food from the room. In the hallway, she met up with Tammy, the floor nurse.

  “What happened?” Tammy said, eying the uneaten food.

  “He’s not hungry.”

  “He said this?” Tammy asked, warily.

  “He made it clear.”

  “He spoke?”

  “He wasn’t hungry,” Candy repeated. “I’m not supposed to force-feed.”

  “Well,” Tammy said, considering, “did you mark it down?”

  Candy nodded. “Zero in. Zero out.”

  “It’s bath time, anyway. Give me some help.”

  After gathering supplies and filling a small bowl with warm water, Candy came back into El Lobo’s room. Tammy leaned over the bed and pulled El Lobo toward her. “Candy, get the tie,” she said.

  Candy put down her supplies and came around the bed. She saw El Lobo’s dark skin where the hospital gown split open in the back. A fine down feathered away from his spine. She resisted the ur
ge to touch that fur. She undid the tie and watched while Tammy gently laid El Lobo back against his pillows, then drew the gown down past his shoulders and chest. The dressing that covered the wound where his arm had been was secured by white bandages that stretched across his breastbone, contrasting with his dark skin and his nearly black nipples.

  “We’re just going to do a little spa treatment!” Tammy said loudly. “How’s that?”

  El Lobo said nothing and Tammy chattered on, explaining that they would not be taking off his dressing but would just wash around it to freshen him up, and that the doctor would be in later to see how he was doing, and wasn’t he doing well, Candy? Good color in his face. Like he’s been to the beach! Have you been sneaking out of here and hitting the beach? Ha-ha-ha. All the while she sponged his chest, neck, and face, and then, reaching down under the blanket with the warm cloth, her head turned to the side as if to control her urge to look, Tammy cleaned him off below. Candy doled out fresh, damp cloths and took away the used ones, then held a bowl under El Lobo’s mouth while Tammy brushed his teeth. Spit! Good one! Spit again! They dressed him in a clean gown. Hello, gorgeous!