The happy feeling evaporated. Leah looked away.
“Please, Hector,” she said. “There’s something . . . ” She paused. Tried to look at him and not look at him at the same time. “It’s not just Inez, okay? It’s me too.” She was lying. She didn’t know why she was lying about it, except that she wished it was true. She wished it was her too. She wished Inez hadn’t found something first.
He shook his head again, but there was a glint in his eyes. Something that hadn’t been there before. It made him look the way that Inez’s mark had with its wide, hollow eyes. Like there could be anything in them. Anything at all.
“I’ve found something. On my skin. We were like sisters, you know. Really. Do you want to see it?”
“No,” he said. His eyes were wide. Inez’s eyes had looked like that, too, hadn’t they? They both had such pretty eyes. Eyes seeded with gold and copper and bronze.
“Please,” she said. “Would you kiss me? I want to know what it’s like. Before.”
“No,” he whispered again, but he did anyway. Carefully. He tasted sweet and sharp. Like pumpkin. He tasted the way the way a summer night tastes in your mouth, heavy and wet, wanting rain but not yet ready to let in October. The kiss lingered on her lips.
Leah wondered if this was what love felt like. She wondered if Yasmine had felt like this, if Hector had made her feel like this, and if she did, how could she ever have left him?
She didn’t ask for another kiss.
The world was changing around them all now, subtly, quietly at first, but it was changing. It was a time for omens. The world felt like an open threshold waiting for Leah to step through. But she couldn’t. She couldn’t yet.
The day after the funeral Leah cut her hair and dyed it black. She wore it in dark, heavy ringlets just as Inez had. She took a magic marker to the space just below the collar of her shirt, the place Inez had showed her, and she drew a face with large eyes. With a hungry mouth.
She looked at forums. They all had different sorts of advice for her.
If you say your name backwards three times and spit. . . .
If you sleep in a graveyard by a headstone with your birthday. . . .
If you cut yourself this way. . . .
Those were the things you could do to stop it, they said. Those were the things you could do to pass it on to someone else.
But nothing told her what she wanted.
For Milo, it started slowly. When Leah tried to feed him, sometimes he would spit out the food. Sometimes he would slam his chubby little hands into the tray again and again and again until a splatter of pureed squash covered them both. He would stare into the empty space and burble like a trout.
“C’mon, baby,” Leah whispered to him. “You gotta eat something. Please, monkey-face. Just for me? Just a bite?”
But he got thinner and thinner and thinner. His skin flaked off against Leah’s shirt in bright, silver-shiny patches when she held him. Her mum stopped looking at him. When she turned in his direction her eyes passed over him as if there was a space cut out of the world where he had been before, the way strangers didn’t look at each other on the subway.
“Mum,” Leah said, “what’s happening to him?”
“Nothing, darling. He’ll quiet soon.” And it was like the dream. She couldn’t move. No one could hear what she was saying.
“Mum,” Leah said. “He’s crying for you. Can you just hold him for a bit? My arms are getting tired and he just won’t quit. He wants you, mum.”
“No, darling,” her mum would say. Just that. And then she would lock herself in her room, and Leah would rock the baby back and forth, gently, gently, and whisper things in his ear.
“Mummy loves you,” she would say to him, “c’mon, pretty baby, c’mon and smile for me. Oh, Milo. Please, Milo.”
Sometimes it seemed that he weighed nothing at all, he was getting so light. Like she was carrying around a bundle of sticks, not her baby brother. His fingers poked her through her shirt, hard and sharp. The noises he made, they weren’t the noises that she knew. It was a rasping sort of cough, something like a choke, and it made her scared but she was all alone. It was only her and Milo. She clung tightly to him.
“Pretty baby,” she murmured as she carried him upstairs. “Pretty, little monkey-face.”
It was only when she showed him the little kitten she had tucked away in her music box that he began to quiet. He touched it cautiously, fingers curving like hooks. The fur had shed into the box. It was patchy in some places, and the skin beneath was sleek and silvery and gorgeous. When Milo’s fingers brushed against it he let out a shrieking giggle.
It was the first happy sound he had made in weeks.
What were the signs of love? Were they as easy to mark out as any other sort of sign? Were they a hitch in the breath? The way that suddenly any sort of touch—the feel of your hand running over the thin cotton fibres of your sheets—was enough to make you blush? Leah thought of Hector Alvarez. She thought about the kiss, and the way he had tasted, the slight pressure of his lips, the way her bottom lip folded into his mouth, just a little, just a very little bit, like origami.
Leah checked her body every morning. Her wrists. Her neck. She used a mirror to sight out her spine, the small of her back, the back of her thighs.
Nothing. Never any change.
The stars were dancing—tra lee, tra la—and the air was heavy with the fragrant smell of pot. They passed the joint between them carelessly. First it hung in his lips. Then it touched hers.
“What are you afraid of?” Leah asked Hector.
“What do you mean, what am I afraid of?”
Leah liked the way he looked in moonlight. She liked the way she looked too. Her breasts had come in. They pushed comfortably against the whispering silk of her black dress. They were small breasts, like apples. Crabapple breasts. She hoped they weren’t finished growing.
She was fifteen today.
Tonight the moon hung pregnant and fat above them, striations of clouds lit up with touches of silver and chalk-white. It had taken them a while to find the right place. A gravestone with two dates carved beneath it. His and hers. (Even though she knew it wouldn’t work. Even though she knew it wouldn’t do what she wanted.)
The earth made a fat mound beneath them, the dirt fresh. Moist. She had been afraid to settle down on it, afraid that it wouldn’t hold her. Being in a graveyard was different now—it felt like the earth might be moving beneath you, like there might be something moving around underneath, below the sod and the six feet that came after it. Dying wasn’t what it used to be.
“I mean,” she said, “what scares you? This?” She touched his hand. Took the joint from him.
“No,” he said.
“Me neither.” The smoke hung above them. A veil. Gauzy. There were clouds above the smoke. They could have been anything in the moonlight. They could have just been clouds. “Then what?”
“I was afraid for a while,” Hector said at last, “that they were happy.” He was wearing his funeral suit. Even with grave dirt on it, it still made him look good. “I was afraid because they were happy when they left. That’s what scared me. Yasmine was smiling when I found her. There was a look on her face . . . ” He paused, took a breath. “Inez too. They knew something. It was like they figured something out. You know what I mean?”
“No,” she said. Yes, she thought.
Her mother had been cutting potatoes this morning. Normally Leah cut them. She cut them the way her dad had taught her, but today it was her mother who was cutting them, and when the potato split open—there it was, a tiny finger, curled into the white flesh, with her dad’s wedding ring lodged just behind the knuckle. Her mum’s face had gone white and pinched, and she dropped the knife, her fingers instinctively touching the white strip of flesh where her own wedding ring used to sit.
“Oh, god,” she whispered.
“Mum,” Leah said. “It’s okay, Mum. It’ll be okay.”
But all she could think was, “It should have been me.”
Because it was happening to all of them now. All of them except for her. When Leah walked down the street, all she could imagine were the little black dresses she would wear to their funerals. The shade of lipstick she would pick out for them. Her closet was full of black dresses.
“I’ve never felt that way about anything. Felt so perfectly sure about it that I’d let it take me over. I’d give myself up to it.”
“I have,” she said. But Hector wasn’t listening to her.
“But then,” he said, “I heard it.”
“What?”
“Whatever Yasmine was waiting for. That long perfect note. That sound like Heaven coming.”
“When?”
“Last night.” His eyes were all pupils. When had they got that way? Had they always been like that? The joint was just a stub now between her lips, a bit of pulp. She flicked it away.
“Please don’t go away, Hector,” she said.
“I can’t help it,” he said. “You’ll see soon. You’ll know what I mean. But I’m not scared, Leah. I’m not scared at all.”
“I know,” she said. She remembered the way Milo had been with the kitten. He had known it was his. Even though it was monstrous, its chest caved in, the little ear bent like a folded page. It was his. She wanted that, God, how she wanted that.
And now Hector was taking her hand, and he was pressing it against his chest. She could feel something growing out of his ribcage: the hooked, hard knobs pushing through the skin like antlers. He sighed when she touched it, and smiled like he had never smiled at her before.
“I didn’t understand when Yasmine told me,” he said. “I couldn’t understand. But you—you, Leah, you understand, don’t you? You don’t need to be scared, Leah,” he said. “You can be happy with me.”
And when he kissed her, the length of his body drawn up beside her, she felt the shape of something cruel and mysterious hidden beneath the black wool of his suit.
That night Leah had the dream—they were on the road together, all four of them.
“Listen, George,” her mother was saying. (What she said next was always different, Leah had never been able to remember what it actually was, what she’d said that had made him turn, shifted his attention for that split second.)
Leah was in the back, and Milo—Milo who hadn’t been born when her father was alive—was strapped in to his child’s seat next to her.
“Listen, George,” her mother was saying, and that was part of it. Her mother was trying to tell him something, but he couldn’t hear her probably. So he turned. He missed it—what was coming, the slight curve in the road, but it was winter, and the roads were icy and it was enough, just enough.
“Is this it?” Leah asked. But her mum wasn’t listening. She was tapping on the window. She was trying to show him something she had spotted.
Leah knew what came next. In all the other dreams what came next was the squeal of tires, the world breaking apart underneath her, and her trying to grab onto Milo, trying to keep him safe. (Even though he wasn’t there, she would think in the morning, he hadn’t even been born yet!)
That’s how the dream was supposed to go.
“Listen, George,” her mother was saying.
The car kept moving. The tires kept spinning, whispering against the asphalt.
“Is this what it is for me?” Leah tried to ask her mother, but her mother was still pointing out the window. “Is this my sign?”
And it wasn’t just Milo in the car. It was Inez, too. It was Oscar Nunez with his shrivelled-up tongue, and Joanna Sinclair, and Yasmine with her black eyeliner, her eyes like cat’s eyes. And it was Hector, he was there, he was holding Yasmine’s hand, and he was kissing her gently on the neck, peeling back her skin to kiss the hard, oyster-grey thing that was growing inside of her.
“Leah can’t come with us,” her mother was saying. “Just let her off here, would you, George? Just let her off.”
“No,” Leah tried to tell her mum. “No, this is where I am supposed to be. This is supposed to be it.”
And then Leah was standing in a doorway, not in the car at all, and it was a different dream. She was standing in a doorway that was not a doorway because there was nothing on the other side. Just an infinite space, an uncrossable chasm. It was dark, but dark like she had never seen darkness before, so thick it almost choked her. And there was something moving in the darkness. Something was coming . . . because that’s what omens were, weren’t they? They meant something was coming.
And everyone had left her behind.
When Leah woke up the house was dark. Shadows clustered around her bed. She couldn’t hear Milo. She couldn’t hear her mother. What she could hear, from outside, was the sound of someone screaming. She wanted to scream along with it, oh, she wanted to be part of that, to let her voice ring out in that one perfect note. . . .
But she couldn’t.
Leah turned on the light. She took out the mirror. And she began to search (again—again and again and again, it made no difference, did it? it never made a difference).
She ran her fingers over and over the flawless, pale expanse of her body (flawless except for the white scar on her thumb where she’d sliced it open chopping potatoes).
Her wrists. Her neck. Her spine. Her crabapple breasts.
But there was still nothing there.
She was still perfect.
She was still whole. Untouched and alone.
“You can tell the lifers, not because of the look in their eyes. Not because of the way they handle the Santas. But because they have stopped counting.”
THE SANTA CLAUS PARADE
This is a shit job and everybody knows it.
“I’m only here for the summer,” says Anna B. She’s Jewish. She lights a menorah every year. She doesn’t get what all the fuss is about and so most of us are willing to believe her. Sean M. is a lifer. He only started three months ago, but we can all tell anyway. That’s the way it is. His fingers are delicate. He loves the little Santas as they go past, but he is heartless as well. He doesn’t mind snapping their necks if they are Incompletes, throwing them into the heap. Anna B. still cries when she has to do that, though I can see her face hardening a little each time. That’s why I know she’ll be out at the end of the summer, and Sean M. will be a lifer. Some people get a taste for this kind of work.
Me, I haven’t decided yet. I started back in April when winter seemed a long way off, or too close maybe if I looked behind. There was still frost on the trees some mornings, but I knew it would be melting.
Maybe it’s not so bad. I have money in my pocket and Stacy S., the hot blonde, queen of Lincoln Central High, now gives me the time of day though she pretended, for two years, not to recognize me in math class. College is somewhere on the horizon. I need money for college. I need money for Stacy S. College seems further away than winter.
Some people think the Santas are smiling.
The Company tries to weed out that kind of thinking pretty early on with videos from the eighties, people with big hair, shoulder pads, smiling in bleached-out, crackling colours. There are diagrams about brain function. A specialist gave a talk on the subject but I slept all the way through it. Sweet dreams.
Anna B. worries that the Santas can dream. If the Santas can dream, does that mean they are properly alive? I don’t worry about that sort of thing. I have a job to do. These three feet of conveyer belt are all mine.
“One, two, three,” Sean M. sings next to me. “They don’t get by me.” It’s catchy.
I pick up the Santas off the conveyer belt. They’re naked and squidgy. Most of them just lie there. Some of them wriggle. They feel jelly-like when I hold them in my hand. I like the weight. Like a softball. I transfer the Santa from hand to hand, hot-potato-style.
Stare at both sides. There is a beard, check. There is an anus, check.
These are the two central qualifications for life. Otherwise the Santas get three feet to live. Only three feet on the belt.
A Santa without a beard isn’t a Santa at all. Sean M. calls those ones Cindies. I don’t think they are female though. Just beardless. I don’t know how Santas reproduce exactly. Maybe that was in the video. Maybe that was in the talk.
The anus is essential. Waste management. A Santa without an anus will build up waste over time. To be frank, it cannot shit. Shitting is essential, even for Santas. Sean M. says they will explode if we let them live. It’s messy. Easier this way, he says. I can see the look in his eyes. He is the perfect little killer.
It wigs me out when they don’t have anuses. I’m afraid I might handle them too roughly. I’m afraid when I slap them hard against the sharp edge of the table that they will explode in my hands. This has never happened. I’m proficient. The necks break with the sound of a wishbone at Christmas. I toss the dead Santa into a bin with other, smooth-chinned and smooth-cheeked Santas. The Incompletes. The Cindies.
Like I said, this is a shit job.
Sometimes Anna B. gets teary-eyed. Sometimes she comes to me during the break and she puts a finger on my wrist, feels my pulse.
“I could’ve got a job at one of the malls,” she says. “I could’ve been a fantastic elf.”
“Sure,” I tell her. She has a fantastic ass. It would look good in green leotards. But elves have to smile more, I think. Anna B. doesn’t smile so much.
“Do you think I’m pretty?”
“I guess so.”
She isn’t as pretty as Stacy S. but that’s okay, who’s judging really? Besides, Stacy S. has dumped my ass. She says I smell too much like peppermint at the end of the day. She says she’s tired of drinking hot cocoa in the summer. It’s a small price to pay, I try to tell her. And it’s the Company policy. The smells soothe the Santas. Apparently they can tell when something’s wrong. They don’t like the smell of us normally. That goes away by the time they are properly matured and they are sent out to the malls but in the early stages it just spooks them. The Company prescribes a strict diet for the handlers.
Gifts for the One Who Comes After Page 10