Precious and Fragile Things (9 page)

G
illy woke again to the morning sun and frozen cheeks. She hunched the covers up around her face to warm it. From the other side of the barrier she heard the low, familiar rumble of male snoring.

It was early, judging by the slant of sunlight made brighter by its reflection off the snow. Her entire body still hurt, possibly worse than it had the day before. Her bruises had bruises. Joints popped and crackled as she stretched. Her stomach wasn't too happy, either. She hadn't eaten much of anything, but the thought of food made her swallow a gag.

Her head hurt. Gilly had been prone to headaches her entire life, most of them tension related, but this was a bad one. Pain cradled her skull and spiked her eyes from the combination of infected sinuses, lack of food and anxiety. She'd never been diagnosed with migraines, but now she blinked away what sure as hell looked like an aura.

Groaning seemed worthless, but she did it anyway. No cease
from the snoring on the room's other side. Gilly pressed her thumbs to the magic spots just above the bridge of her nose, willing the pain to go away. It didn't, but it did ease a little. Long experience told her that eating would help, even if she didn't feel like it. A hot shower would, too, but she was out of luck on that one.

She flung the covers off and swung her legs over the bed. Her head spun and her stomach rocked alarmingly. Clenching her jaw didn't help her headache, but she refused to puke. Absolutely refused. Raw bile burned in her throat, and she swallowed convulsively, over and over.

Breathe, Gilly. In. Out. Keep it together.

She must've groaned louder because suddenly Todd appeared, leaning on the partition. “You okay?”

She didn't dare speak, and so only nodded. She pressed her thumbs more firmly against her forehead. The throbbing subsided. Sheer willpower kept her stomach's contents inside it rather than all over the floor.

“You don't look good.”

“I don't feel good.”

He didn't say anything. Gilly looked up at him. Sleep had mussed his hair and still clouded his eyes. He wiped a hand across bristled cheeks. “You gonna puke?”

“No!” Her indignation chased the last of her sour stomach away.

“Just asking. You look kinda pale.”

“I'm always this color.”

He raised his eyebrows at her. “If you say so.”

“I just need to eat something.” Gilly pushed past him and hobbled down the stairs. In the kitchen, she toasted bread and poured cereal. The single half-gallon container of milk was almost empty. She swished it around thoughtfully before
pouring it. There'd be no more for a long time after this was gone. She poured it anyway.

Todd had bought the kind of sugary cereals she never bought at home because she knew they'd rot her kids' teeth or give them cancer or send them into hyperactive spirals. Now Gilly dug into the bowl and crunched the sweetness. She gobbled it. She watched the colored cereal turn her milk the color of a tropical sunset.

Todd appeared at the bottom of the stairs. He wore a loose-fitting pair of sweatpants, slung low across his hips. When he lifted his arm to scrub at his face she saw the tan expanse of his belly, not taut and buff but soft and slightly curved. A long, angry scar dimpled the skin.

“It's starting to snow again,” Todd remarked as he looked out one of the back windows. “Goddamn, look at that coming down. Fucking snowpocalypse out there.”

Gilly filled her bowl again and kept crunching. Famine had replaced her earlier nausea. The sweet cereal made her teeth ache.

“There's no more milk,” she said when he entered the kitchen, and waited to see what he would say.

“There's five gallons outside in the lean-to,” Todd replied. “As long as it's cold like this, it'll stay frozen out there.”

Gilly felt somehow defeated in her defiance. “You've thought of everything.”

Todd got a bowl from the cupboard and sat across from her to fill it with Lucky Charms. He shrugged. “Didn't want to get caught needing something I didn't have.”

Gilly pushed her bowl away, suddenly no longer so hungry. “You planned this.”

His spoon stopped halfway to his mouth, then lowered. “I had a plan, yeah. And then it changed. I wasn't sure what the
hell was going to happen, so I tried to make sure I was ready for whatever. Lucky for us, huh?”

He had that wary look in his eyes again. Gilly toyed with the floating rainbow chunks in the bright pink milk. She watched him lift the spoon to his mouth, watched him chew.

“It was a pretty piss poor plan.” Todd shrugged, pretending it didn't matter. “I didn't plan on you.”

“You took my truck! How could you not plan on me? Why not just steal a car if you wanted one so bad?”

“First, you obviously don't know how fucking hard it is to steal a car in the middle of a busy parking lot, duh. If I even knew how to hot-wire one which I fucking don't. And…I didn't know you had kids in the back, okay?” Todd pushed back from the table, and his spoon clattered to the floor. He stalked to the sink and hunched over it, his hands splayed on the green countertop. “I didn't see the kids. When you went to the money machine, I just saw you.”

Gilly thought back to what seemed like so long ago. “I left them in the truck to run to the ATM for one second.”

“I thought I'd just take the truck and tell you to drive someplace quieter, then make you get out,” Todd continued. “The fuck were you thinking? Leaving your kids in the car. Don't you know you're not supposed to leave your kids alone in the car?”

“Don't you…don't you question my parenting skills!” Gilly cried. “You don't know anything about it!”

“I didn't know they were in there.”

His voice shuddered and his face twisted. Gilly sat motionless. It would have been easy for her to pity him, to soften her heart. But she did not.

“I'd never hurt a kid.” His mouth pulled down in distress. “I might be a fuck-up, but I'd never hurt a kid!”

She believed him, strangely enough. “That's a damn good thing, Todd. Because if you'd harmed one hair of my children's heads, I would've…I
would
have killed you.”

Saying it aloud, she knew it was true. There'd have been no hesitation. If he'd hurt her kids, she'd have done it.

He turned to face her, his eyes wide. “Shut up.”

She leaned forward, hands flat on the table, one on each side of her cereal bowl. Her voice was steadier than she expected. Full of truth. “I would have killed you.”

He wet his lips, thinking. Then he scoffed. “No, you wouldn't have.”

His easy dismissal irritated her. “Yes. I would.”

He stared at her, frowning. “You have no idea how hard it would be to kill somebody. You're not hard like that, Gilly. I can tell.”

Under any other circumstances, his comment would have been a compliment. Now she was as insulted as if he'd called her a vile name. Her eyes bored into his. “If you hurt my children, nothing in this world could have kept you safe from me.”

Todd's gaze flickered. He put his hands on the table, too, and leaned to look into her eyes. “You're full of shit.”

He was wrong about her—she did know how hard it was to kill. Her mother, at the end, had begged for Gilly to put a pillow over her face, to give her pills, to turn up the drip on the morphine until it sent her off to sleep for good. Her mother, sallow and scrawny by then, with nothing left of the beauty Gilly had always envied, had wept and pleaded. She'd called Gilly names and raged with breathless whispers, the loudest she could make. She'd demanded.

Gilly hadn't killed her mother, but she'd wanted to.

Gilly leaned forward, too. She could've kissed him, if she'd
chosen. Or bitten him. “I'm a mother and I would do anything for my children. I
would
kill you. Believe it.”

She had never meant anything more.

“Mothers don't love their children that much.” Todd stood and shrugged. “It's something they made up for TV. You don't have a clue about killing.”

“Do you?” she shot back, and was instantly afraid of the answer.

“Are you asking me if I ever killed someone?”

Did she want to know?

“Yes,” Gilly said.

Todd gave her no answer other than a shake of his head.

Gilly swallowed hard, choking for a second on the breath she'd been holding. “Would you kill me?”

“Aw, hell! I already told you that's not why I brought you here, Jesus.”

“I didn't ask if you wanted to kill me. I asked if you would.” She didn't like this side of herself, the relentlessness, but she didn't stop herself. “If I run away again, and you catch me, will you kill me? Will you kill me anyway? Because someone will come, Todd. Someone will find out where I am, and come for me. You know they will.”

He ran both hands through his hair, gripping his head for a moment before replying through gritted teeth. “Shut the fuck up, okay?”

She moved closer, tiny compared to his height, but pushing him back with every step she took. “I want to hear you say it. I want to know. I deserve to know!”

“Why?” He backed away, shaking his shaggy head, the dark hair swinging like the mane of some wild stallion. “Why the fuck do you deserve a fucking thing from me?”

“Because you took me!” The words tore her throat.

“At the gas station I thought you'd leave and it would be all over. You'd call the cops, they'd come, whatever. I figured that was it. I went in the store and bought my shit, the whole time thinking I was gonna come back out and find you gone. I thought for sure I was screwed, but you stayed in the truck. Why didn't you get out? Why the hell didn't you get out?”

“Why didn't you make me get out?”

“Fuck if I know. I figured…what the hell, if you didn't get out, you wouldn't tell the cops…I dunno. Christ, you scared the shit out of me, Gilly. That's all. I didn't know what the hell to do with you. You had the chance to get out and you didn't….” Todd's grin reminded her of the Big Bad Wolf. All teeth. “You're as crazy as I am.”

Crazy meant medication, hospitals, long narrow corridors smelling of piss and human despair. Crazy was her mother, locked away in a room with only her mood swings for company. It was the grit of shattered glass underfoot and the smell of spilled perfume.

“No, I'm not.” Her words weren't as convincing this time.

Todd snorted and turned back to the window with the same easy knack he had of pushing away the tension, making it appear that it hadn't happened at all. “Man, it's really coming down. We might get another foot, at least.”

Gilly stood and took her bowl to the sink. She had to push past him to get there, but he stepped aside and didn't crowd her. Side by side they stared out the window.

“So,” she said. “What happens now?”

Todd shrugged again. “I don't know.”

Gilly wanted to slap him. Instead, she rinsed her bowl and spoon and set them to dry in the drainer. He didn't move, only watched her.

“I won't stop trying, you know,” she whispered. “To get away, I mean.”

“I'll always stop you.”

“No,” Gilly said. “One day, you won't.”

S
hort days passed into long nights. Gilly's body ached, but she forced herself to appreciate every ache and pain and hobble around the cabin to keep her stiff muscles limber. She didn't think there'd be another chance for escape, but if one came she didn't want to be too disabled to take it.

Todd didn't say much to her, and if he noticed Gilly keeping her distance from him, he didn't show it. Again, she was struck at how easy he was about all of this, how commonplace he made it. While every gust of wind scraping a tree branch on the house startled her into jumping, Todd barely glanced up. When she padded past him to the kitchen to forage for something to eat, he called out casually for her to grab him a beer.

She did, not sure why. The bottle, a longneck, chilled her palm as she brought it to him. She watched while he took a pocketknife, much smaller than the one he'd threatened her
with, and used the bottle-opener part to open it. He tipped it to his lips, drinking it back with a long sigh.

“Want one?” he said. “There's a couple in the fridge, couple of six-packs on the back porch in cans. I should've bought more.”

“No.”

Todd lipped the bottle's rim and drank again. His throat worked. She was looking at him but her gaze fell on the knife on his belt. He watched her looking and tipped the bottle at her.

“Might be good for you,” Todd said.

Gilly felt her mouth go tight and hard. “To get drunk?”

“Might loosen you up.”

“I don't need to be loose,” Gilly muttered, and turned her back on him.

In the kitchen she opened drawer after drawer. He'd taken away all the sharp knives. She went through the cupboards, too, aware he'd come to watch her. Todd leaned in the doorway, one ankle crossed over the other, beer in his hand.

“What are you looking for?”

She slammed a drawer, making the silverware inside jump. She shrugged. She didn't really know. Todd laughed, and Gilly glared at him over her shoulder.

“Have a beer,” he said. “It'll make you feel better, really.”

“I don't drink.” She pulled down a glass and filled it with cold, clear water that must've come straight up from a hundred feet underground. It went down the back of her throat like a shot, delicious, and sent a spike of pain to the center of her forehead.

Todd took a long pull from the bottle and set it on the counter next to him. “How come?”

Gilly blinked slowly and rinsed her glass from the faint
imprint of her lips. She dried it with a hand towel and put it back in the cupboard. She didn't answer.

“Whatever,” Todd said, and went back into the living room, where he lit a cigarette and fiddled with the small radio he'd pulled from someplace when she wasn't watching.

At first it blatted static interspersed with gospel music. Finally, after several minutes fidgeting with the knob, Todd tuned in a station playing some contemporary music. The song ended and the disc jockey came on.

“…worst blizzard in twenty years…” The static broke the words into burps and fizzles, but the message was clear. More snow had fallen on the region than in twenty years, and more was predicted.

“Fuck me,” Todd murmured. “More damned snow.”

She'd already paced the length and width of this place while he was gone. There wasn't enough room to keep between them. She could find privacy in the bathroom, though not for long since he had to share it, or upstairs, where she'd lain for hours listening to random songs on her increasingly finicky iPod. Here in the living room, though, he was too close even when he was across the room.

Gilly went to the window. Crossing her arms over her chest, she rubbed her elbows even though she wasn't cold. He'd filled the woodstove with logs and it had heated the downstairs, at least. Heat was supposed to rise but maybe the vents were blocked or something, because upstairs stayed cold enough to show her breath.

She couldn't see much through the glass. The propane lanterns that illuminated the room didn't quite reach outside. She couldn't see the snow falling, but she could hear it. It sounded like a mother shushing a ceaselessly cranky child.

Shh. Shh. Shhh.

Todd clicked off the radio with an annoyed grunt. “Good thing I got the supplies when I did. Uncle Bill always said to shit when you had the paper.”

Gilly didn't turn. “How eloquent.”

She'd spoken thick with sarcasm, but Todd only laughed. “He had a way with words, all right. He liked 'em. Big ones, especially.”

She flicked a glance toward him. “I wouldn't say
shit's
a particularly big word.”

“Nah. I mean he liked other big words. Like
stygian
and
bumptious
and
callipygian.
” He laughed, shaking his head. “That means you have a nice ass.”

“It doesn't!”

“Sure it does. You can look it up if you want. Uncle Bill kept a list of words he ran across that he didn't know. He'd look them up in the dictionary and write them down. He said a man who could use big words had something over the man who didn't.” Todd paused. “Obviously I don't much take after my uncle. Of course, Uncle Bill always said it was good to know your own faults, too.”

She wasn't sure if he were being self-deprecating or simply brutally honest. “He's right.”

“He
was
right,” Todd said. “Now he's just dead.”

Gilly had nothing to say to that but “I'm sorry.”

Todd snorted. “Why? You didn't even know him. No point in being sorry about something you didn't do.”

“Is that something else your uncle Bill said?”

“As a matter of fact, he did.”

Moments of silence passed with nothing but the sound of the snow outside and her own heart beating its slow tempo in her ears. Gilly stared out into the darkness, seeing nothing. Thinking of everything.

“I'm hungry,” Todd said.

She wasn't, and didn't answer. Gilly shut her eyes and leaned her forehead against the glass. The cold soothed her bruises.

Shh. Shh. Shhh.

“How about some dinner?”

“No, thanks.” Her stomach turned over again at the thought of food, her throat so tight she wouldn't be able to swallow anyway. And even if she did, it felt like all of it would come right back up.

“I meant,” he said, “how about making
me
some dinner.”

Oh, no, he did not just ask me that.

“No.” Gilly twisted to face him for a moment, her face set in the look her husband called Wrath of the Gorgon. It was usually enough to send her family scattering, but not Todd. He just tilted his head to stare.

“No?” Todd said as though he hadn't heard her.

“No,” Gilly repeated, and turned back to the window.

Shh.

Tears licked at the back of her eyelids, burning them. She swallowed another lump in her throat. Her fingers clutched tight into fists, her broken nails digging without mercy into her palms.

“What do you mean, no?”

She heard him get up from the table and braced herself for his touch. She already knew he had no trouble using his hands to get what he wanted. Well, he could force her into the kitchen if he wanted. Make a puppet of her, forcing her hands to cook, if that was important enough to him. Gilly thought about the promise she'd made to herself that she'd get out of this alive, but three months was a long time to serve as someone's slave. She'd be damned if she would. Gilly straightened her spine and kept her face against the glass.

“I'm not hungry. If you are, you can make yourself something to eat. I won't do it for you.”

He let out a low, confused snuffle. She pictured him shrugging, frowning, though she hadn't turned around to see it. “Why not?”

One. Two. Three.

She wouldn't make it to ten. “Because I'm not your wife and I'm not your mother. I'm not here to take care of you.”

“But…” She heard the struggle in his voice as he tried to understand. “But you made dinner for me before, the other day when I came back.”

“I made dinner for
me,
” Gilly said. “And I made enough for you while I was at it. It's an entirely different thing. I was trying to be nice.”

“Why don't you try to be nice now?”

His question was simple, and she had a simple answer.

She turned to look at him. “Because there's no point in it, now, is there?”

She waited for him to speak. Instead, he left the room and went to the kitchen. She smelled garlic and ground beef, good smells that should've made her hungry but only sent bitterness surging onto her tongue. She heard the clatter of dishes and silverware, the sound of the kitchen chair scraping on the linoleum. Later, a belch.

Gilly stayed looking out at the night, eyes not seeing the dark outside or the reflection of her face in the glass facing her. She looked beyond those things to the faces of her children and drew strength from them, and she listened to the soft sound of the snow covering the world outside.

Shh. Shh. Shhh.