“We made it,” Joy breathed, and Kelly bit back his desolation.
She turned to him. Her eyes shone with tears that had nothing to do with broken bones or terrified humiliation. “He’ll never touch me again,” she said, and Kelly could hear Joy’s heart sing. It was a cheerful melody in C Major.
“Never,” he agreed. “We won’t let him. He’ll never find you.”
He had always read about happy tears, but he hadn’t ever heard them until now. They sounded sweet. They sounded like horror. Kelly and Joy strode away from the bus station like two people who had purpose, but this was a lie.
They never had such little purpose in their lives. After the bus tickets, they had only enough money to grab a fast food hamburger two times.
Twice.
At home, Kelly would be downing burgers and spaghetti and milkshakes and whatever his mom would place in front of him. She understood lank teenage boys with hollow legs and grumbling stomachs. But here, food was harder to come by. After five days and two hamburgers, things felt dire.
“I’m hungry, Kelly,” Joy said. She wrinkled her nose in frustration. “I thought it would be easier than this.”
“It will get better,” he said, and he hoped with all of his might that this was true. It had to be the case, didn’t it? Like that old saying; When you are going through Hell, keep going.
“I know it will,” she said, and her hand wrapped in Kelly’s was still what mattered most. It was safe and cool and unbroken. He thought of her fragile little bird bones and held on a little tighter.
“How long do you think you’ll stay?” she asked him. She was looking at the ground, far too carefully, and he knew she didn’t want to see what was in his eyes. “I mean, before it becomes too much and you’ll go back?”
He thought. He thought slowly and carefully. They had barely slept in days, but had walked around the city holding hands and pointing at buildings. He’d never seen anything so tall and imposing in his life.
“We’re going to live up there,” Joy had said, gesturing at the tallest apartment building she could find. Its windows shone like stars. “We’ll wake up every morning and look down on this city and all of the people and know that we own it, Kel. It’s going to be something real special.”
It was a different place when you were up high. They’d rode in elevators and climbed stairs and being at the tippy top of the world changed the bleakness of the city. It opened beneath them like a cavity, a void. It showed the gentlemanly hollows beneath its concrete cheeks.
But down here from the street, they were face-to-face with the trash and refuse that this tall utopia excreted. Sewage rats, that’s all they were. Kelly bared his teeth briefly.
“That depends, Joy. When are you going to be ready to go back home?”
She was shaking her head adamantly before the words were fully out of his mouth.
“Never,” she said. She pulled her hand from his and crossed her arms across her chest protectively. “I’ll stay here for a hundred years before I ever set foot back in that town again.”
Kelly shrugged. “Then you just answered your own question. I’ll stay here for a hundred years. Wherever you are, that’s where I’ll be, too. You’d just better get used to it.”
She searched his eyes then, looking for the anger or deceit that she was half afraid would be there. Kelly gazed back, his face as wholesome and open as fresh ears of corn at the supper table, or a new bottle of milk.
“How did I get to be so lucky?” Joy asked, and Kelly laughed. His stomach growled at the same time.
“Guess it depends on your definition of luck, bunny,” he said, and Joy’s bright smile told him that she was the luckiest girl in the entire world, that she wouldn’t change a thing as long as it meant they were together. They could have a room in the penthouse or a little cottage by the sea or sit side-by-side, chained in the gulag and it wouldn’t matter as long as she had her Kelly.
That night was the first night it happened.
Kelly squirreled food out of a public dumpster. He used his long orangutan arms to reach in and pulled out a fast food bag full of trash. In amid the plastic forks and dirty napkins was a container containing a half-eaten salad and most of a chocolate chip cookie.
“Dinner is served,” he said, and although he and Joy winced as they first touched the old food, the spiked mace in his stomach insisted he eat it.
“Put the pride away, you fool, and feed me,” his stomach demanded, and Kelly, being a very good Southern youth, did as he was told. A quarter of a salad and a bite of cookie wasn’t enough to satiate him, but it was enough to convince his ravenous body that he was, at least, trying.
Within two weeks, all pride was completely gone. They became more furtive. Their movements became darting. They went after garbage cans and dumpsters, pulling out half-eaten meals in Styrofoam and dining on rewrapped cheeseburgers with gusto. They scavenged deftly like the street mice they had become.
“Chinese, lover?” Joy would ask, and they’d eat quickly, using their hands and wiping them on the cold concrete later.
Their bodies stank and Joy’s blonde hair turned into straw after washing it in gas station bathrooms with hand soap. Nobody wanted to hire two high school dropouts who wore the same clothes day after day.
“Please, sir,” Joy begged. It was her third job interview that morning, and the look on the man’s horsey face said everything. “I’m smart and I learn really quickly. I type well. I just need a job. I’ll do anything.”
He eyed her too closely. “Anything?”
She stood up, her hands fisted at her side.
“Not anything.” Her voice was quiet with rage and she stomped out the door. Kelly met her outside, saw the way her mouth bitterly twisted, and wisely said nothing.
More weeks passed. She was shrinking away. The skin was pulling too tight over her face and her ribs were showing even more than normal. But Kelly, skinny to begin with, looked like a corpse. One evening Joy looked at him and studied the way the gray light of the city washed the color from his face.
“I love you,” she said, and he broke out into his goofy grin.
“I love you, too,” he answered, and his glowing face bobbling over his scrawny body broke something in Joy. She kissed him, long and deep like she was stealing his taste away. He was a treasure to save for later. Something to think of during the bad times.
“I’ll be right back,” she said, and touched her forehead to his. “Save my spot, okay?”
“Sure,” he said, and watched her walk down the alley, disappearing in the warm steam from the manhole covers. Save her spot, she said, as if people were scrambling to steal their particular section of gritty horror town. But Kelly was dependable, and Kelly was truthful, and if Joy asked him to save her spot, then he would guard it with his life.
She returned nearly an hour later with a bag of fast food in her hand.
“Here,” she said, and sat down. “This is all for you. I already ate.”
His stomach roared and ached as he opened the bag. The smell was teenage heaven.
“Fresh?” he asked hopefully. It was more than he dared.
Joy smiled, but something was lost there. “Fresh. Eat up, Kelly.”
He wanted to enjoy it. He wanted to take his time and savor it, but the burgers called his name too loudly. They were decimated, the burgers swallowed and the fries pushed into his mouth six at a time. When he finished, he licked his fingers, each one, starting at the thumb and working his way down.
“That was good, Joy. Thanks,” he said, and leaned his head against the wall. “Where did you get the money for it?”
She shrugged. “I had something to sell.”
“What?” he asked, but she didn’t answer. She slid close to him and pulled his arm around her.
“I’m not feeling so well, Kel. Mind if I take a quick nap?”
“I’ll stay awake,” he promised, and kissed her bird-nest hair. She settled into a fitful sleep, squirming in a way
that reminded Kelly of frightened kittens, and he whispered over and over that she was all right, that he was here, that she shouldn’t have to sell herself to feed him, that she could deny it all she wanted but he wasn’t an idiot. And he loved her anyway, always, no matter what, he murmured, and that’s when she finally quieted.
He held her all night long and hated this horrible bone-gnaw city.
#
It began little by little, bit by bit, like leaving a cobalt blue bottle hanging on a tree in hot summer nights, and watching the rain fill it up. Joy’s spirit began leaking out of her eyes and her mouth while she slept, and something else began to take its place. What was left of her began to be distilled, perfect and pure, precious little drops of Joy. He could let each taste of true Joy rest on his tongue for hours, to be delighted over, and it was a glorious thing when he could get it.
It became harder and harder to obtain.
Joy traded her time and her body for things. Food mostly, at first. Sometimes for something that seemed precious at the time.
“Hey, pretty girl,” a man said to her one night. She was standing with other kids in an alleyway. They pretended to talk about movies they liked and boys they had dated, but it was an open ruse. They were really standing there in order to be seen, to show how their skinny legs would wrap around a person’s waist if they could pay. Their thin, bony fingers became deft at undoing zippers, buttons, and clasps. They picked at food in the trash heaps and shoved them into chapped lips like tiny racoons. Kelly stayed in the area, too, but far enough away that he didn’t intimidate the customers with his tall frame. He crinkled himself into the smallest ball of bones and rags that he could, trying to look as harmless as a newborn puppy without milk teeth.
“Hey back,” Joy said, and Kelly turned his face away so he wouldn’t have to see the way she arched against the man, the tiny buds of her breasts attempting brazenly to be those of a fully-grown woman.
“I don’t have much money on me,” the man began, and Joy immediately turned away.
“Then I don’t have much time.”
“But I have something shiny and I have some beers back in my car.”
Joy pretended to study her manicure. Her nails were bitten so far that they showed blood, the tender skin around her finger shredded and torn.
“I don’t work for beer,” she said.
“That’s just a bonus,” the man said, and held something up. It was a necklace, a cheap chain and some kind of pendant that glittered and reflected the sad streetlights. “How about this? Something pretty for the pretty lady.”
Kelly would think back to this moment often. It would come to him in dreams, completely unbidden. He’d be running down a grassy hill with a herd of wild horses, their hooves pounding around him. He’d have his arms out like an airplane, feeling the wind and freedom and the exhilaration of being in wide, open spaces with these beating hearts of feral muscle, and then he would stop. He’d pull up short, trapped in this piss-scented alley, and the horses would thunder on without him. He’d stand, and see his Joy staring at this cheap trinket like it was the most beautiful thing on God’s green earth. He’d try to reach out to her in this dream, to raise his hand or shout her name, but the most he could do was watch helplessly as she reached out to touch the pendant, pull her hand back tenderly, and turn to walk away with the man.
She didn’t come back that night. Not at all. Kelly waited, his hands shoved deep into the pockets of his hoodie, his head against the rough brick wall. He stood straight and stretched, not caring if he looked like a long shadow unboxing itself from its dybbuk prison. He paced back and forth, his feet scraping against the broken bottles and used syringes that littered the area.
“Knock it off,” a short girl with ratty black hair said. “Your creeping is going to scare guys away, and I’m sick as hell and need something to fix with.”
“I’m waiting for Joy,” Kelly said, and glowered at her.
The girl was unmoved. She looked at him with eyes that seemed cloudy. She had to have been born like this, hopeless and bored. She couldn’t have ever been a tiny little girl with a favorite stuffed animal who loved riding on her father’s shoulders. That couldn’t be true.
“I don’t care who you’re waiting for. Do it somewhere else.”
She turned away, her small back blocking him as firmly as any bolted, metal door. He wanted to throttle her, to pick her up by her slim throat and shake, shake, shake her while her legs bicycled in the air. He wanted to see her face purple and her mouth open, see her tongue starting to protrude as she tried to scream, as she tried to breathe, as she—
Kelly reared back, gasping. He realized that his hands were reaching for her. He tucked them up under his armpits and hurried away.
It started to rain, a cold, cheerless rain. It wouldn’t make the flowers bloom. It wouldn’t clean the streets or wash heavy makeup away, leaving rounded cheeks fresh and cool. It just plastered wet hair to faces and made the night feel even crueler. It made every hope and dream sodden. It did, however, run down Kelly’s face and drop from his nose and chin better than any tears ever could.
He walked all through the night.
During the day, he caught a few hours of sleep next to the vent by an old laundry. It smelled like mold and dryer sheets. He thought of his mother and curled up around himself. After feeling good and sorry for himself, he painfully got to his feet and looked for Joy.
He looked all day.
And then all night.
The next day he ate a crushed up taco shell and drank as much water from a public water fountain as he could hold. He thought his stomach would burst. He sloshed away. No Joy.
No Joy that night. Or the next day.
The sun made noises like it was time to retire.
“Whoops, time for bed,” the sun said, and the city widened its sleepy eyes in horror. “Time for me to rest and for the things of the night to come alive and take hold. It is the hour for things to hiss and creep and take the tender hearts of the young in their teeth. Fare thee well.”
Shadows swept long and deep, turning the daytime parks and playthings into that which was dark and sinister. Kelly himself felt his arms stretch and elongate, felt fangs protrude and his walk turn into something prowling like a wild animal. He was no longer the good-natured, corn-fed boy who bagged groceries and helped little old ladies out to their car. He was here. He was Joyless. Anger built a fire in his chest and fed it with logs of resentment and shards of glass.
He scuttled with the other wild things away from the edges of the light, preferring to teeter outside where the darkness was deep and horrific and hungry.
He bypassed his usual route and walked around the back of a boarded-up store. He smelled filth and something sharp that reminded him briefly of gasoline. If he had a match, he’d burn the entire city to the ground with all of them inside. There was so much trash and refuse around that the area would catch immediately. He’d make a wall of fire so high that astronauts would be able to see the fire from space. A burning, roaring inferno on a hill should never be hid under a bushel, so the Bible said. He’d burn the evil out.
He nearly stepped on a bag of soggy rags covered in fallen leaves. He adjusted his footing and then stopped, suddenly. He saw something move.
“Ugh, a rat,” he thought, and his first thought was disgust. His second thought was whether or not he could catch it. Could he grab it in his shaking hands and bash its head against the concrete ground before it had time to bite him? How much meat would a rat have on it? How would Joy feel if she came strolling by and saw her Kelly with actual meat cooking over a fire? Would that be enough for her to forgive him for not protecting her?
He blinked rapidly and wiped his nose on his sleeve. He crouched down, looking for something to hit the rat with, if that’s what, indeed, it was.
It wasn’t. The leaves moved again, and he saw fingers poke out. Just a flash of dark skin. He fell back onto his butt, scrabbling away in surprise. Then his mind clear
ed. This was a hand. A moving hand.
Somebody was buried under the trash and leaves.
He sprang forward, grabbed the hand, and pulled. What he thought was a pile of garbage was instead a man who looked a few years older than him. His face was slack and his eyes refused to open. Kelly pulled the leaves from the man’s face and tried to get him to speak.
“Hey. Hey! Are you okay? Sir?”
The man wouldn’t sit up, and Kelly couldn’t make him. He kept falling limply back to the ground, moaning. He slurred something out, but Kelly couldn’t understand him.
It was there, on his knees behind the garbage bins, that he heard the most beautiful sound of his life.
“Kel?”
His name, whisper-soft, and suddenly his ears pricked like those of a dog.
“Joy? Joy, where are you?”
He crawled on hands and knees, completely ignoring the man who was again unconscious beside him. Back in the farthest corner, tucked away from the streetlights and police sirens, was Joy.
“Oh, bunny!” Kel exclaimed, and clasped her to his body. Her head lolled, her eyes rolling back until he could see the whites. “Bunny, bunny, you’re alive. You’re alive. I’m here. I found you. It’s me, your Kelly. I have you. Everything is okay. You’re safe.”
He was lying. He knew he was lying, but he didn’t care. He would promise her everything if she would just stay with him, and he did. He promised her heaven and hell and a home with a hundred milk cows and flashy cars and everything she ever wanted. She’d bathe in champagne and dress in new clothes, a different gown for every single day.
“You’d wear it once and then throw it away,” he said, and his voice sounded different to him. It was high like a child’s. “Or we could donate them to people who live on the street. We’ll box them up, and wrap them like birthday presents, and we’ll bring them to this very city with all the food we could carry, and we’ll give them out. Right here. It will be like Christmas every single day. People will be walking back here wearing nothing but fine things. And it will never rain. Can you imagine what that will be like, Joy?”
Lullabies for Suffering Page 25