Burntown

by Jennifer McMahon

  There’s a pause. It feels like they’re both holding their breath. “And?”

  “I’ve decided I want to keep it,” she tells him. “But I don’t expect anything from you. I know the last thing on earth you want to do is be a daddy, especially like this. I’m thinking that maybe I should check in to a shelter, the Lighthouse or someplace like that. Get off the street, get checked out in a clinic.”

  She’s been reading up on pregnancy at the library and thinks of all the things that can go wrong: ectopic pregnancy, miscarriage, various birth defects. She needs to give this baby a chance to grow and be healthy. She needs good food. A safe place to sleep at night. Vitamins. She needs to start taking special vitamins with iron and folic acid. That’s what the books said.

  Hermes smiles real wide. “You’re going to have a baby.”

  “Yes,” she says, her head spinning a little, because hearing it out loud like this, hearing someone else say the words, that makes it real.

  He puts a hand over her belly. His palm is warm, fingertips calloused and rough.

  “You’re going to be someone’s mommy,” he says. “And I’m going to be a daddy.”

  And hearing those words, it’s like a wave crashing over her, carrying her off to a land far, far away. A land of mommies and daddies and tiny babies and songs and cribs and nursery rhymes. Hey, diddle, diddle, the cat and the fiddle, the cow jumped over the moon. But then, another wave of memory comes, one that threatens to destroy anything that might bring her a taste of a normal life. That’s what the Great Flood has done to her. She struggles her way back to the surface, her head aching.

  “Yes,” she says.

  “Are you sure you want to do this?” Hermes asks. “Be a mom?” He says it like she’s been given some mistake disguised as a gift that she might not want any part of—two left shoes, a teacup with a hole at the bottom.

  “Yes, I’m sure. But like I said, you don’t have to be a part of this. I can do this on my own.”

  “But I am a part of it,” Hermes says, pulling her close. “I’m not going anywhere. I’ll take care of you and the baby, and we’ll be a real family. You’ll see. And all this makes what I have to show you tomorrow so much more important. It’s perfect really.”

  A real family. She’s not even sure what that means. She remembers her own parents tucking her in at night, back before the flood, when she was just a little girl. Mama would brush and braid her hair, Daddy would read her a story. How happy and whole she felt with both of them there each night. Necco closes her eyes, concentrates, and the memory is gone. Banished, like all the others that came before it. She’s tried so hard to put away all the memories of her own family, of growing up in the time Before the Flood. She keeps them all locked up in a box inside her, because it’s just too painful to think about how things used to be. It’s how she survives; how she doesn’t let herself go crazy. Crazy like Mama went crazy.

  She knows it’s not fair, the life that she has right now to offer her baby—living in a car, eating fire for candy and trinkets. But she’ll change things. She’ll turn it around. She’s got a reason now. And Mama’s gone. There’s no reason to keep living like this, like a girl on the run. The things that Mama said, they were paranoid thoughts from too much snuff. There was never any bad man after them. No one watching, lurking. It’s time to move forward. To get off the street.

  She’ll go to the shelter, ask for help. And piece by piece, she and Hermes can build a real life together. Get jobs maybe. An apartment. A little crib for the baby. She’ll learn to knit. Use the needles she got today to knit little baby booties, a tiny hat. Click-click-click will go the needles while she knits in a rocking chair, just like her own mama once did.

  “It’s going to be okay,” Hermes says. “Hell, more than okay. I can make this work. I can even go to my family if I have to. My dad’s a complete asshole, but my mom would help us. We’ll figure it out.”

  Hermes rocks her, and she closes her eyes, feels the key around his neck press against her back. She imagines a baby tucked deep inside her, a tiny tadpole breathing fluid, a gilled thing.

  She falls asleep and dreams she’s pushing a baby carriage over a bridge. Then her skin gets clammy because she realizes it’s not just any bridge, but the Steel Bridge, the one her mama jumped off, throwing herself into the muddy river fifty feet down.

  But Necco’s ripped a hole in time somehow and Mama’s there, alive again, waiting, perched on the edge, looking down into the water. Her mouth is stained red, her singed hair in tangles. She’s dripping wet, like she’s just climbed out of the water. She’s got Hermes’s key strapped around her neck.

  “Mama?”

  Mama turns from the water, studies her.

  “I’ve been waiting for you,” Mama says, smiling, showing teeth the color of blood. “Let me see that grandbaby of mine.”

  Necco bends down to pull back the covers on the carriage, but can’t. She’s afraid of what she might find there.

  “Sometimes,” Mama says, her fingers wrapped around the key that dangles from her neck, “the truth isn’t something you want to look in the face. Sometimes, you’re better off not knowing.”

  Theo

  Theo walks along the sidewalk quickly, her left hand holding a cigarette, while the fingers of her right hand work their way over the neatly stitched rows of purple yarn, plucking at it worriedly. Will Hannah like it? Will she think a hand-knit scarf is stupid? It suddenly feels sappy, way too sentimental.

  A moving truck rumbles by on the street: LET US HELP YOU WITH YOUR NEXT BIG MOVE, it says, its tailpipes belching diesel fumes. Someone coming or going—going, if they’re lucky, moving far away from this stinking city.

  Theo’s on First Street, which is paved in old cobblestones and full of shops and cafés that cater to the college crowd. It’s the part of the city that pretends to be something other than what it is, the part that says “Vibrant, fun college town!” when the reality is that walking three blocks in any direction will reveal just how economically depressed the whole city is. You’ll see the closed storefronts with broken windows, or the guy begging for change on the corner holding a sign that says I’D RATHER BEG THAN STEAL.

  Theo passes Blue Coyote Burritos; Lavender and Lace: Supplies for Body and Spirit; Pen and Ink Art Supplies; Two Rivers Books and Cafe (POETRY SLAM TONITE!); and Millhouse Coffee Roasters, where people are sitting at the little tables outside and trying not to let the stink of the paper mill ruin their lattes.

  Theo sucks the last drag off her cigarette, stomps out the butt with her boot, then checks her watch. Three-thirty. Shit. She’s going to be late. All because Luke made her go see the Fire Girl. He was too afraid to do the deal in school, so they’d done it as they crossed the street in a jostling crowd of kids. She handed him a brown paper grocery bag holding two ounces of cocaine wrapped in plastic; he gave her an envelope stuffed with two thousand bucks. Easy-peasy. She didn’t think people even did coke anymore. She rarely sold it to anyone at school. Luke was going to resell the coke to his cousin downstate for a wicked profit, he’d told her, but Theo couldn’t care less. The kid was a nasty weasel. As long as she got her money and didn’t get caught with the drugs, she was fine. Having so much of it in her bag all day had worried the hell out of her, made her suspect she was pushing her luck big-time.

  But then suddenly, the deal was done, and she felt such sweet relief that she went ahead and saw the Fire Girl anyway. Gave up her pink knitting needles to see the trick (it was okay, though, she had a couple other sets of size 8s—she’d bought a whole bag of miscellaneous needles and yarn at the church rummage sale last year). She’d been hearing stories about the Fire Girl for weeks, boys who said she was magic, could hold fire in her fingers and swallow it down. Someone said that she also gave blow jobs for ten bucks.

  Theo didn’t believe that. Not after meeting her. The girl was tougher than Theo had imagined, the kind of girl who didn’t take bullshit and had a knife to back her up.

 
It makes Theo smile to think about it now. Maybe she should start carrying a knife strapped to her boot. Maybe Hannah would think it was sexy.

  She smiles bigger, harder; a face-cracking smile. The worrying is over. She feels almost giddy. Alive in some new way. Like a kid who’s just dived off the tallest rock at the swimming hole on a dare, then surfaced, alive and well. Now all she has to do is deliver the cash to Hannah and she’s set. She’ll tell her no more giving her huge amounts of product to carry around. Too stressful.

  Her mind drifts back to the scarf. Maybe she shouldn’t give it to Hannah after all, even though Theo has worked so carefully on it all week—knit a row, purl a row—sure that the very act of knitting Hannah a scarf would bind them together somehow, as if the little knots she made with the needles made a net that could hold them and keep them safe.

  They’d met three months ago at the Ashford library, in the biography section. Theo was looking at books on P. T. Barnum and Hannah was searching the shelves.

  “You don’t see anything on William Jensen, do you?” she asked.

  “Who?” Theo asked, looking at the girl beside her. She was slightly shorter than Theo and wore jeans, flip-flops, and a black T-shirt. Her hair was twisted back in a painful-looking knotted ponytail, and there were sunglasses with mirrored lenses perched on top of her head.

  “Jensen—you know, the guy who built the mill here in town? Did you know his wife and son were murdered?” She waited a beat, then widened her eyes, and said in a low, eerie voice, “Decapitated.” She drew a finger across her throat to emphasize her point.

  “Wow,” Theo said. “I had no idea.”

  “Totally true. You’d be amazed at all the dark history this town has—stuff they don’t teach you in school—you’ve gotta go digging to find it. I’m kind of an expert. The Jensen double murder was never solved. The police thought Jensen did it, but he had an airtight alibi. The poor guy was never the same. It ruined him. I’m doing research on old crimes of Ashford for a summer sociology class. But I don’t see anything on Jensen in the biography section.”

  Theo glanced at the shelves. “Um…I think there’s a local history section around the corner.”

  “Right…of course. Thanks!” Hannah wandered off around the corner, came back with a book, and sat down in one of the chairs. Theo sat across from her. Hannah cracked her knuckles while she read, pulling on one finger at a time, then folding them over, pushing them closed: pop, pop, pop.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, when she caught Theo looking at her. “It’s an annoying habit, isn’t it? It helps me concentrate. I’m not even aware I’m doing it half the time.”

  “It’s fine,” Theo said. “We’ve all got our bad habits, I guess.”

  Hannah looked at Theo a moment, taking her in, sizing her up. “Not you, though, surely. You don’t look like a girl with a single bad habit.”

  There was something oddly flirtatious about the way she spoke. Did she know somehow? Had she had a glimpse of Theo’s most secret thoughts, the ones she hardly even admitted to herself?

  Theo laughed, looked back down at the open book in her hands. “I’ve got plenty.”

  “Good ones? Juicy ones?”

  “Maybe.” Theo’s heart felt light and fluttery as she wondered what might happen next.

  Maybe that was that. The girl would get up and leave. Just as well, really, Theo told herself. This was real life, not some crazy novel or art house film. The girl would leave and Theo would check out her book, go home, and order takeout with her mom. The regular Friday evening routine.

  The girl closed her Ashford history book, but kept her eyes on Theo. “You know what one of my bad habits is? Chocolate malts. Why don’t you come with me? My treat, but in exchange, you have to promise to tell me at least one bad habit.”

  Theo felt her face flush. She set down the P. T. Barnum biography. “Deal,” she said.

  “I’m Hannah,” the girl said, standing, then linking arms with Theo as they left the library.

  Hannah was a sophomore at Two Rivers College studying sociology.

  “The whole reason I came to Two Rivers, the whole reason I got into sociology in the first place, was this guy who used to teach here. Dr. Miles Sandeski,” Hannah explained over milk shakes.

  They were sitting across from each other in a green vinyl booth at the Koffee Kup—an old aluminum landmark on the corner of Stark and Spruce Streets. Theo had never been before because her mom said the food was “a heart attack waiting to happen.” The arched ceiling was painted turquoise, the walls were covered in orange and black ceramic tiles, and the floor had black-and-white checkerboard linoleum.

  In addition to the chocolate malts, Hannah had ordered sweet-potato fries, which they were sharing.

  “Dr. Sandeski wrote this book on how society and the stories we tell each other can create criminals and heroes. He weaves all this amazing stuff about culture and myth and the hero and the antihero into it. It’s called The Princess and the Elephant. Have you read it?”

  Theo shook her head.

  “Oh my God!” Hannah’s eyes were huge and her jaw dropped in this totally drama-girl way. “We’ll go to my place right now. I’ll give you a copy. You’ve got to read it! It’s like the greatest book ever! Life-changing. I actually own two copies—hardcover and paperback.”

  So they walked back to Hannah’s apartment, which was in one of the big brick buildings across the street from the college. They were old row houses for the mill workers once upon a time and had been turned into apartments and condos, some of which were better kept than others. Hannah lived in a nice one, but even though it had been thoroughly renovated, the building smelled of old bricks and timbers. “The smell of history,” Hannah said when Theo commented on it. “Or maybe it’s the smell of ghosts. They say my building’s haunted by one of the mill girls who used to live here, Anna Boroski. She was only sixteen and pregnant. She threw herself out the top-floor window.” Theo shivered, and Hannah looked pleased with herself.

  Hannah’s apartment was small but tidy, decorated in pale colors. There were exposed wooden beams in the ceiling, some original brickwork in the living room. It looked like it had come straight from the pages of a Pottery Barn catalog. Pretty nice for a college student’s place.

  Hannah plucked a paperback copy of the book from her shelf and gave it to Theo. “You can keep it,” she said.

  Theo looked at the book in her hand, and the strange but captivating illustration on its cover. There was an elephant covered in jewels, but inside the body of the elephant was a beautiful young woman who appeared to be either sleeping or dead.

  “What made you come to the library today?” Hannah asked.

  “To see if I could find anything on P. T. Barnum. You know, the ‘there’s a sucker born every minute’ guy?”

  “But why today? Why that particular time?”

  Theo shrugged.

  “You know what I believe?” Hannah asked, stepping closer to Theo. “I think everything happens for a reason. I think we were meant to meet, Theo. I think fate led us both to the library this afternoon.” She stroked Theo’s wrist with her fingers. “Don’t you feel it?” she asked.

  Theo’s pulsed raced. “Yes,” she said. Her face flushed. She was breathing too fast, too hard. She tried to pull away from Hannah, but Hannah held tight.

  “I’m going to ask you a question and I hope you say yes, but if you say no, I totally get it,” Hannah said.

  Theo nodded.

  “Do you want to see what I think fate has in store for us?”

  “Yes,” Theo said, more of a breath than a word.

  Hannah pulled Theo to her and kissed her. It was Theo’s first kiss ever. The book slipped from Theo’s fingers to the floor.

  “So did you finish the book?” Hannah asked her the next week. They were in bed at Hannah’s apartment. They’d been meeting almost every day. Going for coffee, browsing in the bookstore, eating sushi at Hannah’s favorite restaurant, where there were h
uge fish tanks built into the walls. But they always ended up back at Hannah’s apartment, in the bedroom.

  It was a game they played sometimes, to see how long they could wait. How long they could put it off. It was a delicious sort of torture to be with Hannah out in the world eating, shopping, walking through the city, waiting for Hannah to lean in and whisper in her ear, “Let’s go back to my place.”

  “Yes,” Theo said. “I finished it. It was great. I really loved all the mythology and archetype stuff.”

  The truth was, she liked it fine, but thought the part about how each person was living her own myth, and it was the early events in our lives and our environment that shaped what this myth would be, was a little far-fetched. She didn’t like the idea that people were all trapped inside some story created by events and circumstances they had little control over. She believed people were more powerful than that.

  Hannah brushed a chunk of hair away from Theo’s eyes. “Do you think it’s true what he said, that we’ve all got good and evil inside? That we’re all capable of doing something terrible?”

  “Sure,” Theo agreed. “Given the right circumstances. But ultimately, it comes down to choices, right? We have the power to say yes or no to a thing.”

  Hannah looked at her quizzically for a moment, then asked, “Have you ever done anything illegal?”

  Theo laughed, running her fingers over the perfect curve of Hannah’s shoulder. “What, like killed somebody or stole something? Um, that would be no.”

  Hannah stared down into the covers, disappointed, and Theo wished she hadn’t been so quick to answer.

  “Have you?” Theo asked, putting her lips right against Hannah’s ear.

  “Maybe,” Hannah said.

  “Tell me,” she begged, voice low and full of awe. “You can tell me anything. Whatever it is, I won’t care.”

  It was true. Hannah could say she had a body in the closet and Theo would find a way to help her get rid of it. Stupid, but true.