“I heard you.” Todd took a step away. His words were slow and cool.
“And you knew, didn’t you? You knew the whole time.”
“Emily, Don’t. You don’t want this.”
“How do you know what I want? Why would you lie to me? You remembered everything, my dress, the cake, your brother. You didn’t forget my maid of honor. You didn’t forget my best friend. I did, and you knew.”
Todd swelled with sour outrage. “Of course, I didn’t tell you. Look at what it did to you. I didn’t tell you because I knew you’d do something crazy, and I was right. You went out to a strange neighborhood and almost killed yourself for no reason.”
“No reason?” Emily couldn’t get out the rest of what she wanted to say.
Todd interrupted the effort anyway. “There was nothing you could do, Emily.”
“Except what I did, but you couldn’t let me have that. You wouldn’t let me help her.”
“And what am I supposed to do if something happens to you. What do you think is going to happen to me?”
She spoke bitterly to the carpet. “You’d have make your own damn dinner.”
“Christ, Em. What were you thinking?”
“You wouldn’t tell me the truth. What else was I supposed to do?”
Todd returned to his fatherly voice, stiff with logic, oozing with reason. “You’re mad at me for trying to protect you, for caring about you enough to not want to upset you. And you ran off where it wasn’t safe to punish me for trying to love you. Do you realize how insane that sounds?”
“This isn’t about you.” She looked down at Red because she couldn’t stand to look at Todd anymore. Red was lying patiently on the couch, but his early warning system was sounding the alert. She tried to smooth down his mohawk.
“Yeah, Em. It is. You’ve been pissed at me forever for no good reason. You act like I’m the worst guy in the world for wanting to protect your feelings. You have no idea how lucky you are to have someone who cares about you that much, so all you ever do is point out everything I do wrong.”
“Then stop always doing the wrong thing.” Emily pressed her lips together and looked out into the garden again. She wasn’t so irrational as to not listen to what he had to say, but none of it rang true. She couldn’t feel grateful for him. She couldn’t be thankful for a mouth full of lies that had done little more than deny her the opportunity to grieve and heal. She didn’t feel lucky at all. She felt sick. She felt dead and hungry. Every time she looked at him all she could see was the lie, and the worst part was how familiar that feeling was. The feeling of mistrusting him, questioning him, was more familiar and more trustworthy than the idea that they ever loved each other at all.
But there was nothing to be done for it. He said he lied to keep her safe, and she understood the reason if not the decision. She didn’t want to give him points for doing a shitty thing, but even if she was willing to admit that he tried to do it out of love, it didn’t erase the magnitude, the perpetuation of his lie. Emily had to believe if he had kept this from her, this huge, mountain of a thing, there must be other things he kept hidden at the back of the garden shed buried in the dark where the light wouldn’t reach.
He made her helpless without the truth. She had no proof that he’d done anything beyond what he’d said, lied to protect her feelings, but she wanted truth more than love, more than anything. “I don’t feel lucky. I don’t feel grateful. Do you want me to lie to spare your feelings? You must prefer that since it’s what you do to me.”
“If it meant that I don’t have to listen to you criticize everything I do, yeah. Sometimes I’d rather hear you lie through your teeth.”
That felt like the most honest thing he’d said to her in weeks. She chewed on the inside of her mouth. “It wasn’t always this way.”
That was somewhere between a statement and a question, but Todd answered anyway. “No. It wasn’t.”
“Do you know what changed?”
“No.”
She looked at the dog to spare Todd the effort of lying to her face.
13
If Todd wanted her to lie, she would have no guilt in doing it. She had his permission, his damn endorsement never again to tell him the truth about anything. She had no intention of letting him complain. He’d signed the dotted line by his own admission, so she lied. When he woke up that morning, she kissed him on the cheek as though nothing was wrong. She packed him some leftovers in a brown paper sack and drew a little heart on the bag. By the time he left for work, she had him convinced that her sorrow and anger had abated, and they would be as happy as they ever were. But that was the biggest lie. They’d never been happy.
She waited until he was gone and was sure he wasn’t going to come home having suddenly forgotten something. Then she cleaned out her backpack and repacked it with necessities. She felt the need, she wasn’t sure why, to be extra prepared. She loaded two handguns into the backpack, and another into a holster on her hip, and she took Red, because he was better than her own eyes and pretty good at having her back.
She wasn’t certain why she felt the need to return to the garbage dump. Todd had called her crazy and part of her believed that was true. But Red had seen the man rifling through the garbage bags too. If Todd didn’t want her to believe something was real, that was all the motivation she needed to prove that it was. She needed to believe her own eyes. She needed to trust herself beyond all doubt if she couldn’t have faith in the only other person she knew.
She headed toward the garbage dump with more than usual trepidation. Traveling through the cones at the construction site made her stomach lurch, and not from looking at the workers, grey and venous in their orange vests. It was more a sick, angry feeling. She stopped the SUV midway through the cones, put the SUV into park, and picked up every single orange cone into a stack by the car. No more blind belief. Those cones were useless. The road would never be finished. The work would never be done. Her questioning the authority of construction zone orange didn’t go over well. She pissed off the workers and they walked, herky-jerky toward her, their arms reached out in protest. She was prepared for this. One by one, she hurled the road cones at them with all the strength she possessed. She wasn’t particularly good and throwing; her upper body had never been very strong, but the few cones she managed to bop them with were satisfying enough to keep it up, and their startled eyebrows and mouths sagging open in complaint made it a worthy endeavor. When they got close enough for Red to start complaining about them by doing his little dance of discomfort in the seat, she got back in the SUV and left the confused workers standing dumfounded in the center of the pitted road. If they were still there when she came back, she promised herself, she was going to gun it and run them over.
She held her breath as she approached the abandoned garbage truck and those duct taped bags piled around and inside. The bags were probably filled with bones, except the ones festering inside the truck, shielded from bugs and sunlight. There was nothing she could do about that stink and the anger it caused, except to smoosh it away in her guts and let it rot.
She didn’t wave to the man in the gatehouse, even after she parked, and he beat the window frantic for her attention. She couldn’t think about him or any of those usual things. Today she only wanted to prove to herself that she wasn’t crazy. It took a bit of wandering through the mush and stench, but she found the place where she’d first met Red chewing on rotting meat and bones.
Red was not happy to be back in the dump. Though he followed her spryly, he tucked his tail between his legs like he was afraid she might run away and leave him there alone. She petted him often and told him he was a good boy and that she would never, ever leave him. He seemed better with the effort. She climbed the heap, her feet sinking into the morass, and Red climbed beside her where they looked out in the direction where they’d seen the lanky man in the distance. There was no one around. Even Red made no indication that something was wrong, and he’d managed to relax so much that
his only interest was to pee on a few things to claim as his own.
She was disappointed. Of course, that didn’t mean she hadn’t really seen someone out there. No one would want to spend more time at the dump than they had to, and whoever it was might have only been dumping trash like she was. There was no guarantee she’d ever run into him again, but she thought it was at least worth the effort to try.
When she was sure the place was deserted, she wandered further into the dump than she’d ever been before. Deeper in, there weren’t as many duct taped garbage bags, but everything was more decomposed. Red found a nest of rats to harass and huge numbers of pigeons pecked the garbage mostly unperturbed at Emily’s presence. At first, she found nothing to suggest anyone had been milling through the garbage but her, and she was on the point of giving up and going back. There was only so long someone could tolerate that smell, and rather than becoming used to it, she only felt progressively more lightheaded.
But by accident, when she turned to leave, she noticed a garbage bag sliced open as if someone had been practicing their skill at autopsy. It wasn’t unusual for bags to be ripped open at the dump. Red had ripped quite a few just since they’d arrived, but as Emily bent down to investigate, she was certain that no accident or animal had created cuts so straight and clean. The bag had been sliced open with a knife, and since there were very few knife wielders in the world, Emily had all the proof she could need. She hadn’t been crazy. Someone had been here.
Now that she had made a positive discovery, she lost the desire to turn back despite her ever-present gag reflex, and in a small radius around the first dissected bag, she found many others that had received the same treatment. She wondered what they could have been looking for in decaying heaps of garbage and regretted that she might never have the chance to ask. Surely, the possibility of running in to that person again was very remote. She felt elated and disappointed all at once, but at least she hadn’t been insane, and there was no way in hell she’d let Todd call her so again.
They started back to the car, but they hadn’t made it very far before Red stopped and sniffed the air with one filthy paw lifted questioningly in front of him. Emily froze, and watched as the hair on his back stood up straight. He growled, but softly, and bared his teeth the way she might draw her gun in anticipation for a fight.
She should have immediately sprinted for the car, should have, but she didn’t. Maybe it was the man she saw. Maybe it was something worse, a real monster this time. Either way, she wanted to know.
“Show me.” She commanded, and Red obeyed, walking cautiously, his shoulders low and ready to spring into action. Not far north of where they’d been, she at last saw what made Red so angry. There were three of them. Two large men, one wearing basketball shorts, and the other a rumpled tie, and a woman in a tattered green maxi-dress soaked from the hem to her knees in gore and garbage.
Red sent her a quick look, his feet pressing the ground in turn ready to spring. But she shook her head no. They had no reason to engage. She and Red hadn’t been seen, and all the people’s backs were turned as if they were transfixed on something else in the garbage heap. It was better just to let them be. But for the first time, Red did not agree. He unleashed a vicious bark and growled, and the three began to turn with interest to the spies that watched them.
“No, Red.” Emily shouted and tried to jerk his collar. “Run.”
Red was firm; he even pulled her closer.
And she heard the voice cry “help,” a voice strained and terrified. At the same time, Red began to charge at the garbage heap three. There was nothing else to do, no more time to think. She bolted after Red and reached the first man as the dog soared up, mouth open, to clamp savagely down on the woman’s neck.
Emily drew the gun from her holster and aimed as she moved, and she would have taken him out at the eye if she hadn’t slipped in something wet. The shot went through his messy hair and only grazed his skull. But she recovered her footing quickly, and he’d moved so much closer there was practically no need to aim. This time she caught him just above the bridge of his nose, and the shot came out the top of his head because she was so much shorter. He fell to the bottom of the heap, and she turned the barrel at the second man, who was looming toward Red as he ravaged the woman’s neck. She wasn’t moving, but Red hadn’t let her be. Emily would have to talk to him about the overkill. It was going to get the better of him someday.
She caught the second man above his ear, and he fell backwards. His body made a sick squish as he sank into the trash and tumbled down the heap out of sight.
“Red.” Red didn’t hear her, and he didn’t stop. “Red!”
The dog backed away, staring between Emily and the woman he’d killed. Just to make sure, to make him feel better, she put the barrel against the woman’s head and pulled the trigger. Red’s mouth was dripping black and there was grey flesh caught in his teeth and chunks of it in the fur around his face. “Good boy,” she cooed. “Good baby.”
“Hello?” That voice again.
She’d almost forgotten why they’d bothered clearing out the area at all. “Hello.” She said to the rancid air.
His voice was a little dry and gravelly. “You just saved my life, I think.”
“You’re welcome, I think.”
14
“I hate to admit it, but I think I still need help.”
Emily followed the sound of his voice and peered down into the hole in the rubbish where the man she’d killed had fallen. That man, still missing part of the top of his skull, was sprawled on top of another, much smaller, much thinner man with a mess of black hair and narrow eyes.
“I was worried you were a figment of my imagination.” Even as she said it, she half expected him to disappear.
“Uh. No. Just a guy, suffocating under another guy.”
“Oh yeah. Sorry. Hang on.” Emily put the gun back in the holster on her hip. “Stay here and keep watch.” She scratched Red behind the ears and he started patrolling. Emily tried to carefully scale down to the man. She was usually pretty light on her feet, but it didn’t go well. The trash was loose and wet, and she slid down the last half of the slope, slicing open the side of one leg on a piece of rusty rebar that was poking out from the rest of the garbage. It hurt, and blood quickly mingled with the grossness in her sock. There were more important things. She was able to help just enough to roll the body off of the man beneath.
“Hello.” She said again.
“Hi.” He sat up and stared at her. His eyes were fierce but kind.
“Why are you in a hole?” Emily squatted down next to him.
“I didn’t mean to be. I fell.” He blinked and rubbed the back of his head with one dirty hand. “I’d probably be dead if you hadn’t found me.”
“Why didn’t you just run away?”
“Wrenched my ankle. Not even sure I can stand on it, and I lost my gun.” He lifted his hands helplessly. “Somewhere in all this trash.”
“That was stupid.”
“Uh. Yeah. When my life flashed before my eyes, the last thing I saw was how stupid that was. It wasn’t a really swell ending.” He stuck out a dirty hand for her to shake. “I’m Adam.”
“Emily.” She took his hand and shook it. “Do you need me to help you up?”
Adam nodded. “Yes, but also, do you have a car?”
“Yeah.”
“You’re bleeding.” Adam frowned and leaned in to look at her leg. “That cut looks pretty bad. What did you snag on?” But his eyes answered his question for him as he looked up the slope. “When’s the last time you had a tetanus shot?”
“I don’t remember.” She touched the skin around the wound. “It hurts a little.”
“Shit.” Adam put both hands on the back of his head and dragged them around to his face. “This is my fault.”
“Yes.” She wondered if he was always so prone to state the obvious.
“Look, I can barely walk, and I biked in here.”
Emily lifted an eyebrow. “Like an actual bike? With pedals and everything?”
“Yeah.” He shook his head. “What else would I mean?”
“I don’t know. I thought only little kids rode those or people that did marathons.”
“Well no. People use them for other things. They don’t need gas.”
Emily picked off a piece of plastic that had become tangled in her shoelace. “You don’t have to be defensive. I’m glad you ride a bike. I know I’m not imaging anything.”
“What does that have to do with me riding a bike?”
“I don’t think I’d imagine that sort of thing.”
He stared at her the way Todd did sometimes, like she was a zoo monkey. “If you were imagining this, I’d probably be better looking.”
“You’d smell better.”
“You’re kind of weird, Emily.”
She watched as another glob of blood ran down her leg to her sock. “As compared to what? All the other girls you’ve met in a garbage dump?”
“I’ve never met any other girls here.”
“Then, I’m not weird. I’m unique.”
Adam laughed, though she hadn’t really intended to be funny. “Look, if you help me out of this hole and take me home, I can have a doctor look at that leg and make sure you don’t get lock jaw or something. You might need stitches, and God knows what else got in there from all this garbage, and I sort of owe you for saving my ass and all.”
“Where do you live?” She wasn’t keen on the idea of giving a trash covered stranger a ride home, but she didn’t like the idea of leaving him there either, unarmed, and unable to walk.
“Out at the plant.”
She cocked her head to the side a bit. “The power plant?”
Homebodies Page 9