Delicate Monsters (6 page)

God. He even sounded like a textbook. What was this
we
business? And had he called her
a child
? Sadie was sure this guy didn't get laid. Ever. “So then that's it, right? That's my deal? I mean, we both know I've done antisocial things. That kid at my last school, Roman. He almost died because of me. I know that's what you want to talk about.”

“That is what I want to talk about. But I can't give you a diagnosis. Behavior is one thing. But there's still always…”

Sadie leaned forward. “Always what?”

“Context,” he said.

*   *   *

Sadie told her new therapist a few other things, nothing critical, but what she didn't tell him was this: Roman Bender was on her mind of late. Ever since the night he'd emailed her, he'd occupied her dreams, her nightmares, her every waking moment. She hadn't replied, of course, but he had her attention. Wasn't that something? After all this time, he was finally doing something right.

It was almost four in the afternoon by the time her appointment was over, and the school was already empty. Sadie stalked off campus and got into her Jetta. She cruised aimlessly with the music up and her windows down before driving to that taqueria she liked that was located behind the train station. There, Sadie ordered a soda and two shredded chicken tacos with hot sauce. She took her food away from the picnic tables and neatly trimmed grass and wandered close to the train tracks. Settling herself on the flat surface of a large rock, she unwrapped her tacos, wadded up the waxy paper into a tight ball, and let the wind take it.

There wasn't much to see from here, which was what she wanted. She was chasing peace. But boredom soon set in, and Sadie kept noticing things that brought up her memories of him. She couldn't help it. The thick roll of fog coming over the hills from the west, chilling the valley and rustling through the trees, reminded her of those autumn hikes in the New York woods—gold-red-bronze leaves crunching underfoot, the air ripe with chimney smoke, and Roman trailing after her like a lost puppy, while she told him whatever the hell was on her mind.

A tall, serious boy, Roman had worn his hair military short like his Marine father, but the style never suited him. To Sadie, he'd looked like a shorn lamb, offered up for the lion. Especially with those desperate hangdog eyes of his. The ones that said he'd given up hoping anyone would ever believe in him but didn't know why. And he'd had so many questions for her. Real questions. About life. About death. Morality. Anything.

Things no one else ever asked Sadie about.

“There are two kinds of people in this world,” she'd told him once. “People who can give the benefit of the doubt and people who can't. Compassion's like a gift, you know? Think about it. Some people, they know it's your birthday, and they just want to rush out and pick out the perfect thing for you. They don't care what it costs. They don't care if it's silly or trendy or something they wouldn't like. They want to make you happy. Gift giving makes them feel good. Your happiness makes them feel good. It has meaning.

“Then there are those people who know it's your birthday. And they know they
should
get you something. But they don't ever get around to actually doing it. They'll say things like ‘gifts are materialistic.' Or they didn't have enough time and it's the thought that counts. But those are all lies. The truth is, they don't care. Your happiness doesn't make them feel good, so there's no motivation to do it. It's the same thing with compassion. It's not something that's handed out freely. Most of us are looking for excuses not to give it.”

 

chapter ten

Friday morning, Miles awoke long before his brother did. It'd always been that way. Miles had looked it up online once and learned that Emerson was a
night owl
. By contrast, he was a
morning lark,
fueled by a rattling set of circadian rhythms and social zeitgebers that shook him from sleep hours before the sun rose.

Slick as a lake trout, he slipped from beneath the sheets to the worn carpet. Pills and frays shocked his bare knees while he fumbled around on the floor in the dark for clothing. Across the room Emerson lay snoring in his own bed, thanks to a deviated septum from a childhood fall that had occurred at the automotive shop where their father had worked.

Their dad had been stern with them back then, bringing the boys to his place of employment, telling them not to run around and climb on things. But Emerson hadn't listened because Emerson never listened, and when he'd gotten hurt it'd been no one's fault but his own. Years later, the grate of his subsequent snoring was a bleak reminder of both the accident and the fact that there'd never been money for surgery to fix the problem. Not when Miles was in and out of the emergency room as often as he was. He supposed Emerson resented him for this, draining the family bank account with illness and ailment and legal proceedings.

He supposed Emerson resented him for a lot of things.

Once inside the bathroom, Miles flipped on the light and the fan and locked the door. He balled his clothes up in the corner and opened the bottom drawer of the sink vanity. A black notebook and a bland assortment of pens lay inside. There were other items in the drawer, too, like ipecac, ephedrine, Imitrex, things he often needed to make himself feel better. Mind humming with urgency, Miles grabbed for the notebook and selected a slim black rollerball, the cheap kind from the drugstore that usually stained his fingers with ink.

He crouched with his back against the wall, thumbed quickly to a blank page, and began to draw. He sometimes did his sketching while seated on the toilet or else sprawled in the tub, head numbed by migraine as he leaned against cool yellow tile pockmarked with mold, cobwebs dangling in the corners above him. But today his body had none of its usual complaints or banal needs, and Miles soon lost himself in the act, tight fingers swirling-scrawling-scratching in an effort to re-create his dreams, those dark moments he believed to be echoes of his vision. He drew a river run red with blood. The glinting sun shining off the blade of a sword thrust upward into the air.

The grace and agony of his own stunning death.

Ripe with violence.

Steeped in shame.

 

chapter eleven

“Where were you this morning?” a female voice asked.

“Huh?” Emerson set down the sandwich he was attempting to eat and squinted. It was lunch period, and he was sitting alone on a bench at the far edge of the school's main quad. Clouds floated in the sky above, casting haze, but the day was bright enough so that the girl speaking to him was completely backlit. All he could make out was the soft golden glow around her head. A solar halo.

“Where were you?” the girl asked again, twisting her body like a helix as she spoke. Then she flopped beside him with a sigh. Emerson's breath hitched inward. It was May in fall—pretty as a postcard and then some. She smiled warmly at him then leaned so close that one of her dusky plum-ripe breasts threatened to leap from her tank top and graze against Emerson's shoulder. But what should have felt like a gift, didn't. Dead leaves swirled in the wind. Numbness swirled through his veins.

Emerson shrugged listlessly. “Had to take my brother to the hospital.”

“Is he okay?”

“No. I mean, yes. I mean, he'll be all right. But no, he's not okay. He never is.”

She frowned. “What's wrong?”

~what's wrong what's wrong what's wrong~

A chill slithered up Emerson's spine. Those two words were the echo of his childhood. They were the ones whispered in hospital corridors, the ones spilled from the lips of social workers and lawyers. They embodied the existential mystery that was Miles.

“They're running tests,” he said. “Could be a virus. Could be his allergies. Could be…”

“Could be what?” May asked.

“Anything.” Emerson shuddered. The memory of breaking down the bathroom door that morning and finding his brother splayed out on the floor, his heartbeat tachy, left leg twitching, wearing nothing but a dingy pair of briefs with a torn waistband, was a moment he couldn't stop replaying in his mind. Their mother had been working graveyard out at the home in Napa, so Emerson was the one who'd called for an ambulance. Who'd ridden to the ER with Miles. But
what's wrong
wasn't what he'd shouted at his brother as he grabbed his shoulder and tried to shake him out of his seizing stupor. No, Emerson had demanded to know
what happened?

Which was a different question altogether.

“He's sick a lot, isn't he?” May looped her arm through his. “You've mentioned that.”

“Yes.”

“Is it serious?”

“No,” Emerson said. “That's the thing. He's sick a lot, but the doctors never find anything wrong.”

“I don't understand.”

Emerson grunted in response. Of course she didn't. May had moved to Sonoma their sophomore year. She hadn't been here when his family had been dragged through hell, landing first in the local paper, then the county courthouse. She didn't know how Gracie Tate's name had become linked to the cruelest sort of torture. The whole thing had unraveled after a string of hospitalizations when Miles was ten. Emerson grew five inches that same year, slamming into puberty like an ox, but even he couldn't stop his little brother from wilting into sad bouts of stomach pains and fever spikes. Eventually, a concerned hospital employee filed a CPS report, claiming there was a pattern to Miles's symptoms, one that indicated he was in urgent danger from the person trusted most to care for him. There was even a name for it, the report said: Munchausen syndrome by proxy. That's what it was called when doting mothers poisoned their children, injecting them with pus and feeding them actual shit, all so they could make their kids sick with the sole purpose of taking them to the hospital in order to be saved.
Their
mother had done no such thing, of course, but it turned out proving you weren't killing your own kid for attention wasn't so easy, even when you were innocent. It turned out some lies were so lurid everyone wanted to believe they were true.

“I don't understand it either,” Emerson said.

May made a clucking noise of sympathy and brushed her cheek against his shoulder. She was practically nuzzling him now, her nose to his chin, and it seemed like she wanted him to reach out, wrap his arm around her, only Emerson didn't do that, because the closer May got, the closer that plum-ripe breast came to slipping right out into the open. It bulged from her shirt in a promising way, like a sea creature coming up for air, and Emerson stared. He couldn't do anything else. He thought if he shifted, just the tiniest bit, then the plum would be resting right in his palm. It was the perfect size for him to hold, the perfect shape for him to reach up with his thumb and forefinger and gently grasp its dark center—

“I have to go,” he said, getting to his feet so quickly, May collapsed sideways like a house of cards.

She righted herself, but her expression was one of bewilderment. “What's the matter?”

He bent awkwardly, grabbing for his backpack and stuffing his uneaten lunch in with his books and papers. “I need to call the hospital.” A lie, but Emerson didn't know what else to say. He couldn't sit here with her curled against him, fantasizing about grabbing her tits with his dick getting hard. Not with everything that was going on. Not when all this with Miles could be starting over again, and his mom might need him.

Fuck,
he thought.
My fucking brother.

May watched him closely. “Is there anything I can do?”

Emerson shook his head. Pulled his backpack over his shoulders. Ran fingers through his hair.

“I'm sorry,” he said.

 

chapter twelve

It was Friday night, and Chad showed up for his date with Sadie in a black Civic with tinted windows and a fishtail spoiler.

Of course he did.

Sadie's mother peered from the living-room window out to where both boy and car idled. The Honda was lit up by the glow of custom lighting that lined the circular drive and the strands of tiny white bulbs that twined around the massive oak gate leading out to the rest of the property—those sprawling acres that included gardens and grapevines and barrel halls and tasting rooms and even the type of underground cellar that held not just wine or roots but the deepest and darkest of secrets.

“Great choice,” her mother said. “You sure know how to pick them.”

Sadie bristled. “I met him at that place
you
sent me to.”

“What place?”

“The wilderness camp. In Santa Cruz.”

“Interesting. I thought I sent you to an all-girls camp.”

This made Sadie smile her warmest smile. “You did.”

“You'd better come home tonight,” her mother warned. “I mean it.”

Sadie didn't answer. Of course she planned on coming home, but no one needed to know that but her. She grabbed her coat and skipped from the house to where Chad stood waiting by the driver's-side door, his best bad-boy scowl punctuating his pimply face. Sadie skipped because her mother was watching, and she skipped because it meant she hadn't a care in the world.

She didn't, after all.

Care.

*   *   *

They went to the drive-in out by the community college. Across the road, a football game lit up the field, all Friday-night bright, the air humming with the crush of bodies and bones, the sweet-sick scent of violence.

A superhero film played on the screen. The men were muscular and bland, the women pale and spiteful, the whole plot nonexistent, but none of this stopped Chad from complaining loudly about the game and the noise and the light pollution while they sat on the hood of his car.