by Laura Ruby
“Priscilla Willis,” Mel said. Her tone was warning enough.
“Sorry,” Petey mumbled, not sorry either.
“Don’t mind her,” Mel explained. “She’s just worried about Finn.”
Petey tossed her wild hair. “Who says I’m worried?”
Mel pressed a palm to her forehead. “Anyone want to adopt a couple of teenagers?”
“They’re all yours, Sweet Melissa,” a man said.
“Groovy,” said Mel.
Sirens blared. Actual ones. An ambulance. Usually, EMTs worked in pairs, but only Sean jumped from the driver’s side with a black bag. He always made his own rules. He strode toward Finn, one long drink of water, not a drop spilling out. Mel stood and caught his arm, whispered in his ear. Sean nodded.
He set his bag next to Finn. He didn’t say a word, just pulled up Finn’s T-shirt. In the middle of his chest, right on the breastbone, a furious red horseshoe was indented in the skin. Sean grabbed his stethoscope and touched it to the left of the mark.
“Breathe in,” he said. Finn did.
“Breathe out,” he said. Finn did.
Sean felt each of Finn’s ribs with expert fingers. Then he laid his palm flat in the center of Finn’s chest. “Does it hurt when I press down?”
Finn gasped. “A little.”
“How much? Scale of one to ten.”
“One.”
“I mean it.”
“Fourteen.”
Sean inspected the scrapes. “These aren’t too bad,” he said. “Considering.” He put his stethoscope back in his bag. He glanced up at Mel.
“Can you sit with him? I have to get the gurney.”
“Sure,” said Mel.
“I don’t need the gurney,” Finn said. But it was like talking to a bee’s nest. Nobody heard him. And if they did, they didn’t care to listen, because they all had things to do. Sean went to the ambulance and got the gurney. Mel and Petey said they would take the mare home while Finn was being checked out at the hospital. They would make sure she had food and water. They’d call the vet.
Sean helped Finn lie on the gurney and wheeled him to the ambulance. One push and Finn was inside. Sean closed the double doors, moved around to the side of the truck. He hopped into the cab and started the engine. This time, he didn’t bother with the sirens.
The hospital was twenty minutes from where the horse had stomped Finn. For most of this time, Finn could feel Sean gathering himself to ask one of his questions. Finn knew not to rush him. Finn shifted on the gurney, trying to ignore the sting of his cuts and scrapes, and the dull ache that bloomed in his chest with every beat of his heart. He counted the boxes of medicine on the cramped shelves. He counted the freckles on his arms. He imagined Petey visiting him in the hospital, slipping into the bed with him, letting him bury his nose in her hair, letting his hands roam where they would. He thought about Roza sitting in the back booth at the Chat ’n’ Chew, waiting with two ice cream sundaes and a lot to say.
Nineteen minutes into the ride, Sean asked, “Were you trying to get that horse killed?”
Finn almost swallowed his tongue in surprise. “What do you mean? I saved her.”
A pause. “You chased her.”
“She was running toward the highway,” Finn said. “I had to try to stop her before she got there.” He tried to turn his head to look at Sean, but the gurney was too low for him to see over the front seat.
“So you thought the best way would be to go after her on a really loud machine?”
Finn said, “Something scared her and I—”
“Horses are prey animals. She thought some smoke-belching monster was trying to eat her for lunch, so she did what prey animals do. She tried to escape.”
“But—”
“Don’t you see?” Sean didn’t sound angry, just tired. Tired beyond tired. The kind of tired that worms its way into the bone and stays there, feeding on the marrow. “You were the one who scared her, Finn. She was running away from you.” Sean stopped the ambulance and leaped from the cab. When he threw open the back doors, the sunset was blinding.
Petey
THE WHOLE PICTURE
PETEY AND HER MOTHER GOT TO FINN’S HOUSE ABOUT AN hour after Finn attempted to grate himself into sausage and his brother had to cart him off to the hospital for reassembly. They led the mare back into the slanted red barn. They fed and watered her and spent some time petting the desperate little goat that kept the mare company, a goat that promptly tried to eat the eyelets off the bottom of Petey’s dress.
Though they could detect no injuries to the horse, Mel decided to call the vet anyway. They let themselves into the O’Sullivan house, where Mel made herself a cup of tea and sat at the kitchen table, sipping quietly while they waited for the vet to arrive.
Petey wasn’t sipping, wasn’t waiting for anyone. She moved around the house, examining family photos, opening and closing books, and peeking into drawers. If there had been a computer, she would have booted it up, but the O’Sullivans, it seemed, didn’t have a computer anywhere.
“You’re not looking through their things, are you?” her mother called from the kitchen.
“No,” said Petey. She wasn’t looking through their things as much as she was looking through Finn’s things. And considering what she and Finn had done—how real things had become—and considering the fact that Finn had tried to get himself killed right afterward, she had a right to snoop. She could still feel his arms around her, still feel his lips on her neck, hear the hitch in his breath, and yet when she’d seen him bloody and limp on the ground, she’d wanted to kick the crap out of him. It had been his idea to meet at the diner, but as soon as she’d put on this dumb dress, she knew she wanted to do all the things everyone else did. She wanted to go out for ice cream, she wanted to go to the movies, she wanted to hold hands while running through the rain, she wanted to get in idiotic spats over idiotic things, she wanted to make out until she didn’t know whose tongue was whose. But none of these things would happen if Finn were too good to be true, if he were some character out of a tale, if she’d made him up through loneliness and sheer will: And so the young lovers had a month together before he was stomped to death by his magical horse.
That wasn’t the real reason she was snooping, though. The real reason was what he’d done at the diner, how he’d acted before his horse ran off. Cagey and strange, as if he didn’t want to be seen with her after all.
Didn’t want to be seen with her.
“Mom?” Petey called. “What was Finn like as a really little kid?”
“Spacey. Just like he is now. Why are you asking?”
“No reason,” said Petey, who had no real reasons but a gnawing worry in her gut that Finn was hiding something from her, from everyone, and she had to know what it was.
Petey pulled a photo album from a shelf above the couch. In the beginning, the photos were of a very pretty woman holding a pretty little baby, and later, a small boy and another, even prettier baby. Finn’s mother, Didi, and her sons. The people of Bone Gap talked a lot about Didi, about how lovely she was, but unstable, and how her husband was devoted to her anyway, speculating as to whether she was the reason that Finn was so lost and so spacey, that maybe Finn was too much like her. They said that it was a shame that Roza had run off, too. Women, said the people, were always running away from the O’Sullivan men, and wasn’t that a shame, particularly for Sean, who could do no wrong.
She slid the album back into place and selected another. Lots more pictures of the boys growing up, skinny boys with dark curling hair, Didi as lovely as ever, no pictures of Hugh anywhere. Maybe he was the one with the camera. She wondered if Finn had forgiven his mother for leaving. He hadn’t sounded angry when he spoke of her, but what did that mean? Sean, she thought, Sean probably hadn’t forgiven Didi. The people of Bone Gap worshipped him, but Petey knew what Sean thought of her, knew what he thought he’d seen at that party last year. He hadn’t been any wiser than anyone else.
But lots of people ran away. Petey’s father had also run off, and when Petey was only a toddler. Her mom said it was because they’d had Petey so young, and he couldn’t handle the responsibility. Petey thought that was a lame excuse and had decided long ago she would never look for him, let alone forgive him.
So maybe Petey was hard, too. Wasn’t that why she was looking through the albums?
Someone knocked at the back door, and Petey heard her mother talking to the vet.
“Priscilla? I’m going out to the barn with Dr. Reed.”
The door slammed. “Don’t call me Priscilla,” Petey told the furniture, in case it had a mind to address her. She pored over the bookshelves, found lots of biology and physiology and animal science books, some agriculture, only one little book on myths, which she pulled out; she had this book, too. Once, she had asked Finn what his favorite book was, and he’d blushed and wouldn’t answer the question. She’d said, “What? Is it a romance or something?” and still he wouldn’t say. She wouldn’t have minded if it was a romance or one of those books about a really awesome golden retriever that ends up dying at the end, but she minded that he wouldn’t tell her. She read and reread all kinds of books for all kinds of reasons, complicated reasons. When she was little, someone gave her some weird book called The Wife Store. It was about a very lonely man who decided that he wanted to get married. So he went to the wife store, where endless women lined enormous shelves. He picked himself a wife and bought her. She was bagged up and put in a cart. He took her home. After that, the two of them went to the children store to buy a few kids.
Petey read this book over and over. Not because she liked it, but because she kept waiting for the story to change, kept waiting for the day she’d turn the page and a woman would get to go to the husband store. She kept waiting for justice. But, of course, the story never changed. She never got justice. If Petey were keeping one of her lists of the things she hated, she would have to add: the fact that there was no justice. But The Wife Store was still on her shelf at home, if only to remind her that there were assholes in the world who would write such things, believe such things.
What did she believe?
She believed Finn had a secret.
She headed for the bedrooms. There were two in the house—one in the front, one in the back. One neat, one messy. Petey stepped into the tidy room first. Though this was a violation, though she would be furious if a stranger did this to her, she couldn’t help herself. It was like opening up that graphic novel about the brothers and the blankets and getting a peek into the lives of boys, lives that had always been so closed off to her, had always been such a mystery. The tidy, tiny room was furnished sparely—a large bed with a plain blue cover, a dresser, a nightstand, groups of old family photos on the walls. On top of the dresser, some sort of instrument that could have been a police scanner or radio next to a picture of Hugh O’Sullivan tossing a laughing boy in the air, the boy himself a grinning blur. The air in the room was cool and crisp, like pine trees, but there was another scent underneath, the scent of a person—a man—a scent that got stronger when she moved toward the bed. On the nightstand, a lamp with a ragged shade and a worn anatomy text.
I shouldn’t be doing this, I should not be doing this, Petey thought, as she opened the drawer of the nightstand. But her hands dipped into the drawer anyway and came out with a fat spiral-bound sketchbook. Loose pencils rolled around in the drawer. She sat on the bed—she would have to remember to straighten the cover later—and flipped through the book. The drawings at the beginning were of trees and corn and things, some animals and people, drawings lovely but crude, as if they had been drawn by a younger person just figuring out his talent and skill. But as she leafed through the book, the drawings got more sophisticated, more detailed, more artistic. Through the middle of the book, Petey found nudes of various women in various poses. Not pornographic but beautiful, worshipful, as if the artist was trying to understand a woman’s body from every angle. Her skin flushed as she examined these drawings, the lines of thighs and rise of breasts—were they imaginary women? Did he know these women? She didn’t recognize any of the faces, but Sean wasn’t a kid anymore, he was a man, he had a job and a life outside Bone Gap and could know all sorts of women from all sorts of places.
Face still burning, Petey turned the pages. She was looking at a chronicle of Sean’s artistic life; even the nudes got more sophisticated and intimate as she progressed. Toward the last quarter of the book, she did find a face she recognized. Roza, laughing. Not a nude, but a picture of her crouching in the garden, laughing as a butterfly flitted by. After this picture, another of Roza’s small hands kneading dough, Roza chopping firewood, Roza knee-deep in mud, Roza curled up in a chair reading a book, Roza, Roza, Roza, Roza. Petey stopped at a close-up of Roza’s face, drawn with such loving detail that Petey felt like the worst sort of intruder, like a monster who peeps in windows in the dead of night. But she could not stop staring at it. Though the drawing was done in black pencil, Roza’s smile blazed, her hair seemed to glow with dark, unearthly light, the hollow of her throat pulsed with a private invitation. The page had bumps in the paper, and Petey ran her fingertips over them, reading what must have been tearstains.
Petey closed the book and slipped it back into the drawer. She straightened the blue cover on the bed to erase the evidence. Sean wasn’t a hard man. And Petey wasn’t hard, either. She was just a nosy, presumptuous jerk.
She had decided that she would leave Finn’s room alone; she had intruded enough for one day and found nothing, no reason not to trust Finn. But as she strode past the messy room, determined to act like a decent human being, she heard a strangled little squeak. She stopped, listening for it. Another small squeak lured her into the room. On the floor, a rag rug in blues and reds. Random piles of clothes. A cluttered desk. On the walls and dresser, photos of horses. Of cats. Of the cornfields right before harvest. Of stones in the creek bed, all of them different shades of gray. One single bed, unmade, the quilt bunched, the sheets rumpled. Curiously, no pictures of any people, anywhere. Not Miguel Cordero, who was Finn’s best friend. Not his brother or his mother or father. But maybe it wasn’t so odd. What did Petey know about boys?
Petey floated like a ghost toward the rumpled bed, drawn to the outline of Finn’s body in the old mattress. As in Sean’s room, the smell of skin, salty and sweet, was stronger by the bed, but the smell in this room was slightly different, more familiar, and not overwhelmed by pine-scented cleaner. She told herself that it was not so terrible to lie down on the bed, not so terrible to wrap herself in the sheets and the quilt, not so terrible to sink into that Finn-shaped space, not so terrible to put the pillow on her face and breathe in the scent. It was a narrow bed, like hers, and she imagined Finn on top of her, murmuring something about how beautiful she was, and her whole body flushed with the knowledge that she wasn’t just a nosy jerk, she was a weird nosy jerk. And then she was jerking for real because something crawled across her feet. She yelped, tossed the pillow aside, and sat up to find a tiny kitten, ears like little tufts sticking from its head, getting ready to pounce. He must have used his claws to climb up the bed, because there was no way he could have jumped that high. She laughed as the teeny thing attacked her toes, but tried not to move too fast so that she didn’t hurt him, this brave thing, this new thing. A larger striped cat leaped onto the bed. With great dignity, the mother cat took her baby by the scruff and jumped down. The cat padded over to the closet and sat, peering at Petey.
“You want me to open it?” said Petey. She got up from the bed and pulled the closet door wider. At the bottom of the closet was a pile of towels. The striped cat slunk inside and dropped the tiny kitten onto the pile. Then the cat stalked from the closet and crawled under the bed. She came out again bearing another striped kitten, which she also dropped into the nest at the bottom of the closet. She did this four more times, until six kittens wriggled in the towels. The mother
cat walked around her babies a few times, rounding them up in a tight writhing ball of fur. The cat flopped down, too. She started to clean each kitten methodically, running her tongue over their stubby ears.
Petey went to the kitchen and found a saucer in one of the cabinets. She filled it with water, just an inch or so. She returned to Finn’s room and placed the saucer on the floor by the closet door, where the mother could find it. Finn wouldn’t mind if she went into his room to see the kittens, to give them water. She sat by the open door, pressed against the jamb, listening to the purring sounds of the cats. They sounded like a slower version of the hum of bees, and she felt the sounds in her skin. A lump curled in her throat, and her eyes prickled. The sight of the drawings and the sound of the kittens and the smell of Finn everywhere sapped her, made her ache for these brothers in different ways, confusing and strange and overwhelming ways, and she was again afraid that something was wrong, and she was missing it, and it would do her in.
She looked again at the kittens, each of them the same size, each of them marked with the same mottles and stripes. Petey wondered how the mother cat told them apart, if she ever needed to. They didn’t look different. Maybe they smelled different? The lump and the ache grew larger, fought her attempts to swallow them down, choke them back. She glanced around the room, at the pictures with no people in them anywhere. What had Darla said, that Finn didn’t recognize her with the dyed red hair? She remembered watching Finn sign her yearbook, how instead of scanning the page for his own photograph, he’d found his name first, counted from left to right to get to his picture. The swarm at the diner weeks and weeks ago, how Finn had mixed up Derek Rude with Frank. How distracted he always seemed. How he would never quite describe the man who stole Roza, at least not in the way that other people would. But his vision was fine. There were some people who were bad with faces, but . . .
She stood abruptly, fingers itching for a keyboard. But there was no keyboard here.