Flux (15 page)

“Um, I’m sorry if I’ve been bothering you,” she said gruffly, ransacking her memory for something nice to say. Being in a house was different than goofing off in the street—you had to mind your manners and speak properly. “Well, I guess I’ll be leaving now,” she added politely, avoiding his gaze. “I do so thank you for your warm hospitality.”

Deller’s face twisted in disbelief. “You’re leaving? But what about supper? Mom made extra hamburgers for you.”

Hunger undulated savagely in Nellie’s gut. “Hamburgers?” she said faintly. “I guess maybe I could take one with me.”

“Take one with—?” Quickly Deller turned and hollered, “Mom, c’mere, would you? She’s awake, but she says she’s leaving.”

Footsteps rushed the kitchen door and Nellie looked up to see a broad plump figure coming toward her, dressed in an aproned sweatsuit and carrying the heady scent of hand soap and tobacco. A soundless cry passed through Nellie, her eyes dropped and she stared fixedly down. Once upon a time there had been a different woman, shorter and slighter but also dressed in a rumpled sweatshirt, who’d come flying toward her on invisible wings of hand soap and perfume.

A finger slid under Nellie’s chin, tilting up her face. “There now,” said a husky voice, roughened by years of smoking cigarettes. “You look like you could be kind of hungry. C’mon into the kitchen and get yourself something to eat.”

With a wide, almost pleading grin, Deller gestured emphatically toward the open doorway. Nellie slitted her eyes at him
suspiciously. All this being nice made him look like an idiot, but then it didn’t exactly come natural to him. Turning from his overdone grin, she followed his mother into a kitchen that was dense with the smell of food. A chair was pulled out for her and she sat down tentatively, certain it was about to dissolve beneath her. Still beaming like an idiot, Deller dropped into the chair opposite and tilted it back against the wall. Cautiously Nellie hunched in her seat and slid a fingertip carefully over the susurra-patterned tablecloth. It was yellow, her favorite color. So were the chairs and the walls. She wobbled her chair slightly to make sure it was still there. Sixteen months had passed since she’d sat on a chair in front of a table and the scene felt unreal, as if she’d entered a movie of someone else’s life.

A steaming hamburger was set before her. “You want mustard or relish?” asked Deller, pushing several condiment containers toward her, but the roar that erupted in Nellie’s head shut everything else out. Slapping the hamburger together, she rammed it into her mouth, chewing and swallowing, rushing it toward the rage of her stomach.
Hey kid, you’re supposed to eat that, not breathe it
, she remembered, but when a second hamburger appeared on her plate she attacked it with equal ferocity.

“Now,” said Deller’s mother, plunking a glass of milk in front of her. “Drink this. And while you do, Deller can tell me your name.”

Glass halfway to her lips, Nellie glanced at Deller in time to see panic grab his face. Shifting in his seat, he took on a decided wariness.

“Name?” he said carefully. “I, uh, I guess I don’t really know her name.”

“Don’t know her name?” demanded his mother, settling into an empty chair at the end of the table. This close, the scent of tobacco came off her in waves, and Nellie could see the thinking green of her eyes. “But you said she was your friend, she’d gone looking for Fen.”

“Yeah, well ...” Deller’s eyes darted toward Nellie, as if trying to read her name on her forehead. A tiny grin crept across Nellie’s mouth and she drank her milk, letting him sweat.

“A while ago,” muttered Deller. “Well ...” He stalled with a long breath. “Well, a while ago Pullo nicknamed her Bunny, and the name kind of stuck.”

Instantly his mother stiffened. “Bunny?” she roared. Surging to her feet, she leaned across the table and slapped him soundly on the face. “Is this the way I raised you to behave?” she boomed. “Running with a pack of hooligans, scaring young girls, mocking them and stealing their dignity? Is this why I gave you breath?”

Flinching back in her chair, Nellie stared at Deller’s mother in stunned amazement. Rigid, the woman stood waiting for a reply, her anger coming off her in dense tobacco-scented waves. With her short thick hair, slitted green eyes and narrow face, she sure looked like Deller. But not weasely, Nellie thought. More like the way Deller could look if he smartened up. A
lot
.

Across the table Deller was a headless figure, hunched between his shoulders. “No,” he mumbled.

“Ssssst,” hissed his mother, lighting a cigarette and inhaling. “You know I don’t have no call with that kind of ugliness, boy.”

“It was way before I
knew
her,” Deller protested to the half-eaten hamburger on his plate. “
Before
she went looking for Fen. Anyway, it was Pullo’s idea, not mine.”

“Last time I looked, your brain belonged to you,” snapped his mother. “Now, I’m going to give you a few minutes to apologize to this young lady and find out her
decent
name, while I fetch some dengleberry preserves from the basement.”

With another disgusted hiss, she pushed back her chair and strode from the room, leaving Nellie and Deller staring with enormous intensity at their plates. Somewhere nearby a door creaked, and emphatic footsteps descended a rickety staircase. Then there was only silence looming over the kitchen table and pressing down between them until it felt almost solid.

“Look,” Deller mumbled finally, still talking to his plate. “Everything I did to you ... well, you would’ve done the same to me if you could’ve.”

Nellie considered, staring at her milk glass, then nodded. “Except for the Bunny stuff,” she said. “I wouldn’t have done that.”

Some of Deller’s stiffness left him, and his head ascended slowly out of his shoulders. “It is a dumb name,” he agreed, shooting her a glance, “but we didn’t know your real one.” Again his eyes darted across her face, then away. “So, uh, what is your name, Bu–? I mean, well, what is it?”

Nellie scratched and fidgeted. A cough claimed her throat and a sniff took over her nose. “Nellie,” she whispered finally. No one had called her that since ... She wasn’t going to think about it, she wasn’t going to think about it
right now
.

“Hey,” said Deller in a startled voice. “You’re not crying, are you?”

“No,” Nellie lied, but he’d already launched himself from the table, disappearing through a doorway to reappear seconds later with a thick wad of toilet paper. Gratefully she accepted it and blew ferociously. A lot of gunk came out. She mopped it up carefully.

“Nellie’s a nice name,” Deller said with forced cheerfulness. “Sort of like mine, really, except for the beginning and the end.” He fidgeted, playing with his fork as footsteps began to mount the basement stairs. “I expect,” he said carefully, a very weasely look crossing his face, “next we’re going to have to tell her about your hair.”

Nellie’s eyes shot toward him in absolute panic.

“Don’t worry,” Deller said wearily. “She won’t go after you.” He paused, then added, “And I shouldn’t have done it. But I didn’t
know
you then. Didn’t know you were living on your own in the bush, making do. You were just some girl ... “ He trailed off as his mother entered the room, carrying a jar that caught the light in deep rich purples.

“So, Deller,” she said brusquely, setting the jar on the counter and turning toward them. “How about you introduce us properly?”

“It’s Nellie,” Deller said quickly, rising from his seat. “Her name’s Nellie. Um, could you sit down please, Mom? We’ve got something else to tell you.”

His mother’s eyes narrowed apprehensively, and she scanned his face over a long drag from her cigarette. Then she nodded and settled into the chair at the end of the table. Standing, Deller skirted the back of her chair and came to a halt behind Nellie. Instinctively Nellie ducked, lifting an arm to shield herself.

“There there,” said Deller’s mother, taking her hand and squeezing it. “You’re in my house now, and no one’s going to hurt you.”

“Mom, she’s from the Interior.” Ignoring the interruption, Deller spoke in a breathless rush. “They did an operation on her there. I, uh ... well, we sort of cut off her hair for a trick, and you can see the scars on her scalp.”

As he spoke, his hands fumbled with Nellie’s handkerchief, lifting it from her head. Instantly air and light swooped in on her scalp, exposing her secret ugliness.
The worms.
Closing her eyes, Nellie rocked fiercely.
This wasn’t happening; she wasn’t here and no one was touching her; she was going to climb onto the swing inside her head and swing herself out of her body, up into the clouds where it was safe ...

But someone was touching her. Two hands made of more than clouds and air were gently tracing the scars on her scalp. “Oh sweet Goddess,” clucked a voice wrecked by decades of cigarettes. “Sweet blessed Goddess. You said it was you that cut her hair, Deller?”

“Yeah,” came Deller’s glum voice. “We’ll be having a talk about that later, won’t we, dear? Sweet, sweet Goddess.”

Then Nellie felt herself gathered together like a heap of loose clothing and lifted into a warm fleshy lap. The smell of tobacco and hand soap enveloped her, and a hand guided her head onto a plump shoulder. “There there,” a voice murmured, stroking the frightened bristle on her scalp. “There now, there.”

Nuzzling into the softness, Nellie shuddered and shuddered. Great cracks opened within her, cracks she hadn’t known were there, and as they opened they released waves of sadness, long raw waves of loneliness and bewilderment. How had all of this happened to her, why had her mother been taken away, leaving her alone? “There there,” soothed the voice above her head, but the cracks kept opening, the sadness passing from her body into the one that held her until it faded quietly away.

“No more tonight,” Deller’s mother murmured. “The Goddess knows I want to hear about Fen, but we’ll just give her a bath and put her to bed. She’s too worn down. Then you and me got some talking to do, don’t we, son?”

When she slid into the water’s silky warmth, Nellie began to sob helplessly and didn’t let up until Deller’s mother had finished scrubbing the lice from her scalp and left her alone to get dressed. Lying in the water, surrounded by dead floating bugs, she felt the sobs gradually die off, her grief retreating into the place she usually kept it hidden. She shouldn’t have cried like that, she thought shakily, wouldn’t have, but it had been so long since she’d been surrounded by softness and warmth. Weakness had caught her unaware. She was going to have to watch herself more closely, toughen up those crybaby cracks. Clambering out of the tub, Nellie fought off a fresh wave of tears as she reached for the voluminous nightgown Deller’s mother had draped over a chair. She was so tired she was staggering, her brain a dead weight. Fumbling with the door, she opened it to find Deller’s mother waiting in the hall.

“This way,” said the woman, taking her by the hand and leading her to a small bedroom at the back of the second floor. “You just go to sleep now. Deller and I will be here in the morning, and then we’ll talk some more.”

Nellie had never snuggled into such softness. Every part of her had been scrubbed clean, her skin gave off a fresh soap scent, she’d been washed down to the soft raw hoping of her heart. Alone in the darkened room, she lay listening to the gentle thump in her chest.
She’d never felt this close to it, it was as if she could take one step into her skin and there it would be—the sad-happiness that lived at the core of her being. With a sigh she turned over, nuzzling deeper into the pillow, the movement brushing the sheets and nightgown gently against her skin. And suddenly it was too much, too much kindness and goodness touching her everywhere—any more and she would break into a thousand pieces, flying every which way. So she froze, locking her body into a single position until the ache of her arm went numb beneath her, then sank into sleep.

MUTTERING AND TOSSING
, Nellie kicked against the unfamiliar weight that held her down, the warmth that clutched at her and fenced her in. What was grabbing at her, why was she so hot? With an emphatic kick, she sent the weight flying and came abruptly awake. Immediately she froze, staring at the strange room, its lumpy shadowy outlines and single arrow of brilliant moonlight that sailed through a crack in the window curtains and lay in suspended flight across the floor. Turning, she saw the blankets she’d kicked off dangling from the foot of the bed. Ah yes, now she was beginning to remember. This was Deller’s house, a bedroom at the back of the second floor. His mother had tucked her into this bed just like the made-up mother in her mind had been tucking her into an imaginary bed for the past sixteen months.
And this is just the same
, Nellie told herself sternly.
Just made-up friendliness. Once you tell them what you know about Fen, their niceness will be over and done with.

Sitting up, she felt the warmth of the bed slip away. She’d come awake as cleanly as if the arrow of moonlight had pierced her brain, but something continued to nag at her, teasing the edge of her thoughts. Stars, she’d been dreaming about stars again. A familiar slide started up in her head, tilting to the right, and the room’s molecular field came into focus, the energy of each molecule flickering quietly in the dark. And then she saw them, the hairline seams that ran the walls and ceiling, and hovered midair. Gates.
Turning to her left, Nellie scanned the rest of the room and let out a gasp. In the space between the bedroom’s open door and the wall behind it, and directly in line with the arrow of moonlight that lay across the floor, lurked a shadow too deep to be shadow, a darkness that could only be an opened gate.

She could tell immediately that this gate differed from the one that had materialized in the shack. No light shone through it, and the vibrations it emitted were only slightly quicker than those given off by her home level. Tuning out of the molecular field, she crossed the room and closed the bedroom door, then faced the open gate. Hovering inches from the wall, the shadowy opening would have been easy to miss if she hadn’t known it was there. Beyond it she could see the blur that would solidify into a copycat version of her home level once she stepped through and adjusted to its vibratory rate.