Grave (20 page)

Maybe she thought Billy wouldn’t hit her, a woman. She bet wrong. She fell hard and rolled, like a toy tossed out of a crib, and the man with the trowel couldn’t get a grip on Billy’s arms and now that baby was screaming, it wasn’t any fool, and the palsied old man and old woman on the porch, living ballast, were watching in helpless wide-eyed horror. Billy grabbed Tina’s head by a fistful of her black hair and spit in her face where she lay, a long vile stream; she screamed, and Billy laughed when he pulled his hand away and it was still holding the hair, smears of blood on the severed ends. Janey who’d just been standing there shaking like the old folks let out a cry and kicked Billy just like Tina had, tried giving him a good shove, and she couldn’t make him budge.

“You don’t need to do this,” she pleaded, so soft and quiet and Daddy-may-I-please-have-this-toy like Don had taught her and I was afraid for her, afraid but frozen where I stood. “You don’t need to hurt anyone like this, when you’ll see her again so soon. I know it. It’s part of the weight pressing down on me, all that knowledge. I
know
it.” Janey laughed, blonde hair all unkempt in her eyes and suddenly I saw a different person there, someone she might’ve been before all this, ready to bust up with the absurdity of what she was saying even knowing it was all true. “It’s like he said, like Russell said, she’s not here, you have to go further down the road—”

It was like I saw the blood before Billy’s fists even before they landed, the stream of it sharp against Janey’s skin as it ran from her nose, her mouth, and it was worse even than with Russell and she curled up and cried and I was screaming at him to stop, stop. Humans were running from out of nowhere now, from the houses, the gardens, the woods, a few dozen at the absolute most, they were dragging Russell and Tina away, they tried coming between Billy and Janey and got torn up in turn—I was on Billy’s back now, leapt up piggybacking, fingers gouging at his eyes, trying to get around his neck. I could kill him. I could kill him like Amy killed his precious Mags, like they all killed those Scissor Men in the woods, an ambulating thing dead rotten inside was no match for
Homo novus
, just let it happen, feel the strength I had to have somewhere inside flow all through me—

My neck wrenched backward and I seemed to be sailing through the air, and when I opened my eyes I knew it wasn’t right away, that minutes or hours had passed even though I hadn’t felt it. My shoulders, my arms felt like something had wrenched them out of the sockets, popped them back in, yanked them back and forth over and over, and my whole face was tender, swollen, like a great stubbed toe. I couldn’t move. Turning my head to the side made waves of sickness surge through me and I saw Janey lying there next to me, limp and bloodstained like an old rag tossed in the trash. Pairs of feet all around us, threadbare sneakers and dusty cracked boots and two bare, waxen-pale sets of toes, fringe of dirt all around their edges like a piecrust, planted flat and wide apart inches from my head. I looked up. Billy, his face twisted up smirking and more tears rolling incongruous down his cheeks, blotted out the sun above me.

“I’m done dragging you along, deadweight,” he said, almost as soft as Janey herself. “Rot here with the rest of your kind.” He glanced over where Janey lay, laughed. “Thing is, I think that little bitch was right. Think I know where to go now. And you, you don’t know it but you ain’t never leaving here.”

The great barefooted cloud covering the sun lifted, floated back toward the road, and the light came flooding back in. It was too much for my eyes and I closed them again, and then couldn’t open them for a long time.

ELEVEN

LISA

S
o, we got this far, all the way from Great River to the south, Gary to the north, Leyton to the west and Cowles here in the east—all of us, one route or another—and now we were falling apart fighting over a dog. Not even fighting, really—the lot of us weren’t even that much on speaking terms to scream at each other. I’d given up searching for Nick and managed to calm Naomi down and coax her back to the cabins for a nap. Jessie pulled me aside as soon as she saw me, told me what happened in the woods with Stephen; she had the same hard-eyed, hard-nosed look in the telling of it that I’d wanted to slap off her face dozens of times before, while we both were still living. I never did. She would’ve, without a second thought, if the situation were reversed.

“Your kiddie can stay,” she told me. “You wouldn’t if she didn’t, anyhow. Amy can stay for a while longer, too, her and her mother. Stephen, he’s out. I want him gone by sunset tonight. And don’t bother running to Renee to be your angel of mercy—if it were up to her, she’d kick all of you, including the dog, out of here right now.”

“Jessie—”

“No.” She shook her head, over-emphatic like she was trying to shake water from her hair. “Enough fighting. I’ve had enough fighting for ten lifetimes. All of us have. I need some peace and quiet, and there won’t be any with that boy around. I know his type. I
was
his type.” She laughed without mirth, crossed her arms so her fingers dug gently into her own sleeves. “Russell will take him in. Russell’d take Hitler in, if he asked nice enough. He’s gone tonight.”

She trudged off into the trees without a second glance. I heard the rise and fall of voices, her and Linc saying things it was probably good I couldn’t hear, and then Naomi slipped out of our cabin, pressed her small head against the side of my leg. She’d heard everything, of course, though she’d been meant to be napping. Six years old, seven, and she didn’t miss a trick, probably the only way she’d lived through that first winter.

“I hate him,” she said. Her fingers crept to her mouth and her teeth tugged on a hangnail, biting down sharply.

“He’s acting crazy now, all the time, and he hurt Nick. I’m glad he’s leaving.”

People used to like to go on about how different the world would be if children were running it, how much better, but kids are merciless when you’ve fucked up and Naomi’s not got much reason, after having the likes of Billy as a stepfather, to forgive it. “Nick’s all right,” I said, and gently pulled her fingers away from her lips. “I don’t know what happened, but Stephen would never just—”

“He did!” She stuck her hand back to her mouth, wrenching at the cuticles. “He did! He’s—he’s hoo chickencrap, that’s what!”

She got that kind of talk from Billy, verbatim. Echo echo. It made me sad on her behalf. “Nick’s like me, I think—nothing much can hurt him. And don’t ever say ‘hoo,’ it’s a nasty word for human beings and that’s what you are. Or ‘crap.’ Do you want to walk around saying terrible things about yourself that aren’t even true?”

Naomi hung her head, shook it. She had such thick hair, thick deep mahogany brown with glints of dark auburn in the right light; I liked looking at it, for its own sake, from gladness that chance had handed her at least one nice thing. “I was saying it about him,” she muttered, “not me.”

“Stephen’s sorry for what he did.” That wasn’t a lie, I knew it wasn’t, though Amy wouldn’t hear it and Jessie wouldn’t have let her, either. When I prayed she and Amy would get along, when I was holding my breath hoping Jessie wouldn’t have one of her
moments
and kick us all out on sight, this wasn’t the kind of mutual accord I had in mind. “He got scared, Naomi, and fear makes you do some terrible things without thinking.” I brushed her bangs from her eyes, silky-thick hair so unlike my own drab scraggly flyaways. “You heard what Jessie said—he thought he saw something he didn’t. He thought Nick was attacking him. Like last night, when he thought Nick was going to hurt you. He’s sorry for it now, and we’re all scared, aren’t we, there’s some pretty scary things happening that—”

“I’m not scared.” Naomi scowled at me, baring her teeth like she must’ve seen Mags do in fights. “I’m not scared at all. I’m just glad he’s leaving.”

Bared teeth like a zombie itching for a fight, their version of a cat’s hissing and bristling fur, but her eyes were shadowed with adult fatigue and full of doubt.
I’m not scared, right? Am I? Do I have to be?
And me, I itched inside to tell her she was right, to
make
things right with a finger-snap and a triumphant smile—that was the better part of my love for her. I couldn’t give her birthday parties, I couldn’t give her Karen’s bedroom and toys and dolls, I couldn’t give her anything, but
that
I should be able to give. But in this world, that was just like dreams of birthday cake. I couldn’t give her dreams, just a few years’ worth of hope. Please, God, if You really exist and I’m not just kidding myself, don’t let her figure that out until years away, until she’s already grown up and ready to leave.

“Go take a nap,” I said. “For real, this time. And if I find you running around the woods playing when you’re supposed to be in there—”

“I am sooooo dead,” she sing-songed, “so soooo dead I’ll be crying at my own funeral.” And hurried back inside.

My lips twitched, wanting to laugh; already I’ve become predictable enough not to be intimidating. Would Karen have talked like that? Mouthed grownup words and looked up at me through the veil of them, scared, needing me to—the thought of all the things that could’ve happened to Karen, that first winter, made my skin hot and my stomach twist up with a sick scuttling panic. I marched away from the cabins, each step hard and arduous. Physical effort always made me feel better. Nothing from last winter ever happened to Karen. Karen was safe. I’d keep on keeping Naomi safe. I didn’t see Jessie again, as I descended the ridge; she was God knew where and I was glad about it. I didn’t want to talk to her.

Stephen was huddled near the shoreline, right up near where the tides came in; he stared out at the choppy gray water with arms wrapped around his knees, chin angled down, the sort of quiet wretchedness that isn’t seeking sympathy or a chance to explain or anything else but a hole to crawl into, to be by itself with itself. He barely glanced at me when I sat down beside him.

“Funny, isn’t it,” I said, as the water rushed in, slapped the sand like dozens of tiny, sharp little tapping fingertips, then swiftly and quietly retreated. “The lake looks so different, depending on where you’re standing. The water’s bluer over at Prairie Beach... it looks bluer, at least. And the tide doesn’t seem so strong.”

“There’s an undertow anywhere you go,” he said. His chin was resting on his knees now, dark hair falling over his face so I could barely see his profile. My fingers itched to cut it. “Anybody can get pulled under. Any time.”

“True enough,” I said.

The tide came in. The tide went out. The faint, faraway shadow of what was left of Chicago was harder to see, this far east, not a smoky charcoal outline like in Gary but a half-dissolved gray mirage.

“I didn’t mean to do it,” he said. “I didn’t even
know
I did it.”

His fingers shook a little and he gripped his knees tighter. I’ve been there, I’ve been there plenty of times: if you don’t hold yourself as still as possible, you really will dissolve into a thousand screaming pieces. Having Naomi isn’t magic, but it helps.

“I believe you,” I said.

“I didn’t—I didn’t know I was doing it, while I did it. I’m serious.” He shook his head, somewhere between genuine remorse and bewilderment. “The whole world just went... blank, like the sun blacked out and everything disappeared, and then I saw Nick coming at me and I swear I don’t remember ever picking that branch up off the ground but then Nick was just—lying there, and I was holding it—”

He uncurled a hand from his leg and gazed at it, as if it could tell him something, then squeezed it closed and tight again. “Every time I look at him I think he’s about to do something terrible, or that he actually
is
doing it and I have to stop him, and then—I can
feel
how much he’s part of all this, except, maybe he’s not, maybe something’s playing tricks on him too. Maybe something out there just wants me to think that about him.”

I gazed at the water, the smooth wet strip of sand it flowed over, the lake stones embedded in the strip here and there like hurdles on a long flat track.

“Did Amy tell you my brother was a scientist?” I asked. I didn’t say who he’d worked for, I couldn’t think Stephen would ever want to hear their names again—but then, around here
scientist
and
worked for the lab
are pretty much one and the same, unless you’re writing up studies for the oil refinery about how that on-site cancer cluster doesn’t really exist. “It’s like he always used to say, correlation isn’t causation. Wherever
we’ve
gone, all of us, this has been happening. So maybe it’s all of us.” The thought of that being true made my stomach lurch, but on the other hand, what we all accidentally started we could deliberately finish. We didn’t get this far to just sit down in the sand and cry. “Maybe it’s that... entity, that was following us before, maybe it’s angry we wouldn’t play along and it’s acting out. It could be any—”