The Listeners (5 page)

“Look, I'm not about to let them think it's acceptable to leave you tied up in a closet.”

“But I wanted them to,” Riley shrieked. When he heard our reluctant feet on the stairs, he began to cry again.

THE RING WAS
louder than usual, a stinging drone, shiny larvae trapped in the canals try to scream their way out. The only way to halt the ring was sleep. Please fall. Please fall. I smoked in the dark, ashtray cold on bare belly, picturing a hard green cliff soundless but for the wash of the sea. Please, please fall.
So will you switch places now? Okay, but only this one time.

But it was not naptime; it was family-dinner time.

Put your boots on, Quinn.

They waited dutifully next to a red chip can on the kitchen floor. But my socks were too big, or the leather had shrunk. Shove, shove. Fuck. Wait—
there
. Yes. Now the laces. I wrapped one around my finger, tighter, tightest, the fingertip bursting. A gorged red nub. If all the blood stayed in the finger, it couldn't run down the thigh.

The last frost was over, and my father was busy planting. In non-football months, his passion was the garden. He squatted on the gray dirt, looking thickened, old. I did not want him ever to die.

I would eat for my mother's sake three bites of bread, nine bites of potato, and no bites of baby sheep. Couldn't let her know I was counting again, that the worm was here again, or that all the wisdom I'd gotten from the good doctor felt iced over like a museum sword. The worm, which had been gone for years and years, was sniffing again. Looking for blood. And why? The sudden hot fear of Cam being back? But he wasn't even back. Some little pinstripe had just seen his double.

I dried my hands on the reindeer towel.

Mert called, “I'm doing asparagus. You like that, don't you?”

“I…”

“Quinn?”

“Yeah.”

Twelve bites, but small.

We were not religious, had never gone to church except for funerals, but on this Easter Sunday our mother had seen fit to roast a lamb and unscrew a jar of mint jelly.

“
My
, this is Christian!” bellowed daughter. Silence. She tried again: “What did the moneylender say to Jesus?”

Son smiled.

The platters of food to bring out.

“I can help,” Riley said, rising to follow. “You could help too,” he called over his shoulder at me. “…”

“What's that?”

“
Beverages
.”

“Okay, well, what does everybody want?” I asked without getting up.

Fod said, “I haven't had lamb in God knows how long. Have you?”

“I'm a no-flesher,” I reminded him.

“Still? Well, good for you…”

I dipped a finger in the jelly jar, licked it.

“That's pretty disgusting,” he said.

My mother brought a plate of bright stalks. Our pee was going to smell.

Dark on my underwear—the fifteen-year-old Quinn had hoped it was from asparagus. Please be the asparagus. No, it was blood. At first it made no more than brown breath on the cotton, but by morning it was falling red and real. Oh no oh no oh no.

“Mert forgot napkins,” explained Riley, throwing them at me and Fod, who wasn't looking—his hit him in the face.

“Jesus,” he said mildly.

In the day, there would have been consequences. A slam of the table and a raised voice; or, before my sister died, a slap. Time had diluted all of Fod's intensities. He still loved football, but not in that maniac way. Every autumn Sunday of our childhood he had been at the bar or next door at the Walkers'. If the team lost, family dinner could be expected to be awful. I don't understand, Mert would say, what's so fascinating about men jumping on top of one another; and Fod always answered, Then I feel sorry for you.

It was a sore subject too because I'd never liked football and had resisted my father's early attempts to school me in it. Come watch with me! Mrs. Walker has the good
kind of chips—No thanks, Fod. Oh, it'll be fun, I'll explain everything—it can be a little confusing at first—No, Fod. I was a bad child, I knew; other children were not bored by football, and could enjoy it with their fathers, could impress their fathers with memorized statistics and game analysis.

When I tried to swallow, the wedged potato resisted. One mouthful of water forced it down the esophagus, another into my stomach.

Mert was watching with the old worry, from the bad times. “Are you feeling sick?”

I nodded and tapped my forehead.

“Well, at least try some more potato.”

I goaded a small bite onto my fork. Two more made three. Six more made nine. If I only ate nine, the worm couldn't come.
Worm you are banished
. Stop and breathe, the good doctor had said. When you start counting or listing, fill your lungs with air. But if I breathed, I would eat, and if I ate, the blood-logged worm would come sniffing.

Mert clamped a hand on my elbow.

“Sorry,” I said, “what?”

“Back to Earth, pettle! I said do you want pistachio or chocolate?”

“Neither.”

“Oh, but it's the brand you like, just have a little bit—”

“No
thank
you, Mert.”

“So kids,” Fod cut in, “have you been reading about the torture in the army prisons?”

Mert said, “Let's not talk about the war, please.”

“But the war is happening.”

“So is dessert, and we don't need to discuss torture while we eat.”

“Yeah, well, we're fortunate to have the luxury of—”

“Stop it,” she said.

“But—”

“I
said
—”

I scratched my wrist, hard, while my brother built a sculpture of lamb bone and jelly.

“NO IT IS
not
yellow, it's silverish and a girl.
Eight
is yellow.”

“Eight is yellow?”

“Of
course
, Fod.”

He shrugged. “My eight's red.”

“Mine too,” my sister said and I was alone; then she reminded me, “But our sevens are both purple and boys!” and I was not alone.

“This conversation is boring for some of us,” said Mert, whose numbers did not have colors.

“Is your nine green?” continued Fod.

“Yes,” I said happily. “Also three is green a little, but mixed with blue.”

“Hmm, my three is orange,” he said.

“No, black!” my sister shouted.

“How can three be
black
?”

“It just is,” she said.

But only a zero could be black, not any of the regular numbers. They were talking about something else now, but my head kept pounding on the fact of the black three.

“Remember you've got the—”

Triplet prongs dripped with melted night: a gruesome, furious three.

“Back to Earth, Quinn!”

I turned glazily to my mother: “What?”

“I said I'll pick you up at two thirty tomorrow.”

“Why?”

“The
dentist
. So all those aspiring cavities can get their due.”

I BROUGHT THE
cigar box to work to rake through my trove, the yellowed sheaf of old mail—too embarrassed, of course, to read it when anyone was around, so I waited to pull the box from my bag until Ajax had gone out. “Defend the compound,” he instructed as usual, and saluted.

Ah, Dagger, dear stripling. Ours forever. I rubbed my wrist. And the Neptune Beach letter, another favorite:

You stood on a stage and people loved you. You yelled for thirty minutes and they knew the words better than you did. You drank for free beforehand, and during, and after. Liquor was plied; necks were slavered upon. The crappy sadness of a sports bar in a midwestern city on a Tuesday could be concealed, even changed by the slavering and plying. We had met with luck in the hospitality department. Local outcasts, who relied on music for their reason to wake, welcomed us to their hamlets in the manner of younger cousins at a family reunion, escorting the more august relatives to the best lawn chairs, bringing them extra helpings of slaw. Eat with us tonight? Drink with us tonight? Sleep with us tonight?

Nobody had come through the door in two hours. I'd counted the ceiling tiles many times but began again, certain not to be interrupted. The string of bells on the door clinked softly in a push of wind; an ambulance shrieked from Wisconsin Avenue; I counted and counted and lost my place and had to start over. A beef patty abandoned by Ajax had drawn a spider, who made a methodical journey across the cold meat. We're in trouble, Ajax had told me the day before. Revenue was taking
a serious dive. But revenue had been taking dives for such a long while that I couldn't bring myself to be concerned; the store would prevail, as it always had, in the face of corporate cupidity and the Web. The city's loyal sparks and mock intellectuals, along with isolates who liked to mail order, would keep us clinging to life.

At the clinkle of bell string I glanced up, ready to chuck a hollow How's it going? at whoever had wandered in at day's end; but it was, to my surprise, my brother. Behind him stood a long, milk-colored girl.

“This is Pine,” rushed Riley, “and this is Quinn…”

I shoved the mail into its box, dropped the box under the counter. The girl shook my hand with a papery palm: “Pleased to meet you.” She had a husky little British accent.

Riley added, “We just stopped by to say hello.”

He never stopped by. Was this his
lady friend
? Or was she merely a fellow picture-filer at the archives who liked to sit quietly among dead people's faces? She was so pasty you could see the veins in soft blue strings down her arms. Her garb—khakis and accountant vest—was even more gruesome than my brother's. They hunched daily in the same bunker. Once in a while Riley must have come across a weird one, an interesting one; these maybe he showed to Pine before filing; but the archive photos on the whole were unremarkable documents to be sorted and stored and never looked at again. The chief, catching them bent over a streaked shot of two women in wheelchairs holding either end of a banner—
Mr.
President how long must women wait for liberty?
—hurried to scold: You are paid to be meticulous, not to frolic. He put a warning hand on Riley's shoulder. Pine stared at the hand. Riley stared at the photo—
Suffrage march, 1917
—until the fingers went away.

“Hello,” I said.

“Nice shop,” Pine said.

“Quinn doesn't own it,” Riley was quick to assure her. “Just an employee.”

“Assistant manager,” I said.

FOD EVENTUALLY STOPPED
asking if I wanted to go next door to the Walkers' for the game. I figured he was waiting for Riley to be old enough to appreciate football. It was hard, even then, to imagine Riley appreciating football.

One day my sister said, “I'll go.”

Fod, shocked: “You really want to watch the game?”

“Sure, why not,” she said. She was already getting into her coat.

And she smelled like trees.

 

And she loved Cadmus and Europa, would bribe me to play it: a marble, a dollar, some chocolate. I waited while she tore a sheet from the bed to wrap herself in.

“Oh Cadmus, what shall become of me?”

“Who cares,” I said.

“No,” my sister whispered, “you have to say:
You are lost and gone forever, dreadful sorry, Europa mine!”

I repeated the sentence without enthusiasm.

“Again,” she ordered. “Say it again.”

“WAS THAT YOUR
girlfriend?”

“Shut up.”

“Was it?”

“Shut up.”

“What are you,
twelve
?—was that, or was that not, your girlfriend who came with you to the bookstore?”

“No it was not,” Riley said.

“Okay then.”

“Why do you ask?”

“
Out of curiosity
.”

“Did . . . ?”

“What's that?”

“Did we look like a couple?” he hollered.

“Not especially, no.”

The eggs on my plate were blisters of pus and my throat was shutting, but I managed a few mouthfuls so Riley wouldn't notice. A bullet was a mouthful of pennies. My brother was done with his oatmeal. The waitress refilled our coffees. I watched him pour white blood into the cup.

“She grew up in a remote village,” he said.

“Who?”

“My
friend
. Pine. She's kind of different because of being English but also from a village.”

“Hmm.”

“And she wants you to come for dinner.”

“Me?”

“Us. She invited us. She likes to cook.”

“But I don't know her,” I said.

“She's my friend. Please?”

Remembering what I was about to ask for, I said, “Sure, of course. I'll check my schedule.” I straightened up in the booth. “Also. I was wondering something.”

Riley narrowed his cute eyes. He knew I was about to beg. It was not hard to guess: I was wearing the fake-nice face. The face bothered him more than the begging.