The Listeners (9 page)

“Oh, crap—” I reached for my pack.

“I'm gonna file for Chapter 7. Man, I'm sorry, I waited long as possible to tell you, thought it might not happen, some kind of miracle would—”

“Maybe my parents can loan us some,” I said.

“Yeah, they really have that kind of cash. Mine don't either.”

Scraping the match, I noticed, as if from a great distance, that my thumb was shaking. “How long more will we—”

“Not long.”

“I'm sorry,” I said.

“Nobody's fault,” Ajax said.

SHE HAD BLED
all over herself. Blood fell out in the night. Dumb sister you didn't bandage it up. It goes between your legs and the sheet is red forever and you could've gotten blood on me and you
did
—a little patch.

Our mother said, “Oh Christ” and I looked where she was looking, at my elbow, and licked my thumb but Mert shouted, “Leave it!”

I had my sister on me.

She had her period all over herself, and had gotten some on my elbow.

“It's from between her legs,” Riley said, and our father took his cheeks in his fingers, hard.

“Don't Fod I'm sorry,” he whispered.

Mert said, “Not from
there
, baby—from her head.”

My sister could smell in a girl's mouth if she was bleeding.

The police took the sheets and the pillow. T-shirt and underwear would be cut from her body later. They strung yellow tape around the porch and said to keep away.

“But we have to clean that floor,” Mert said.

“No, ma'am, please don't clean anything.”

“But the floor,” she said.

The detective nodded. “I know, ma'am. There'll be plenty of time to clean it, but please, not yet. Forensics team still needs to get in there.” Puffs of skin were darkening under his eyes. He would be back, he told my parents. “Please try to get some rest.”

“Thank you,” Fod said roughly, and shook his hand.

THE BABY TENTACLE
was swollen today, red at the rim of the nail. The clerk's mood seemed no worse; he rang up my aspirin with his usual tranquil efficiency; but if the tentacle was infected he must have been in some pain.

“How's it going?”

“Fine,” squeaked Two Thumbs, “you?”

“Sick of this rain.”

“Right?” he said but was, as usual, in no mood for small talk, and looked past me to the next customer. I muttered thanks and swung out with my purchases. The old white lady with her red-painted wrinkles nodded as we passed. In all the years I had lived on this street we'd never spoken, but she usually offered an unsteady smile. She had a plastic hood over her hair, face open to the downpour. Why wasn't the blush running down her cheeks? Red stain on elbow. I had licked my finger and gone to wipe it, but Mert shouted No. I'd had my sister on me—a little patch of her.

Before long I was walking into the old neighborhood, where you couldn't spit without hitting a spark or
two. I blinked at the neon sign of a new computer café where the radio station had once stood. Nobody could see me. They all passed without seeing. Umbrellas, running faces. The tether strained, frayed, unraveled; and when I went fully deaf, it would snap. That hitchhiker in Portland had been deaf, but hadn't seemed too sad about it. Had been, in fact, a rather cheerful guy. How the dickens could he have felt cheerful when he went around in a box of silence? But he had laughed freely, offered us pieces of a spicy chocolate bar, and winked at Mink when her shirt caught on the van door
by accident of course
and opened before his very eyes.

My feet kept moving. I was swerving onto Belfry Street. Under the trees the water, gushing off leaves, hit me harder. There were no cactus pots on the porch; the widow's walk railing was bare. Our flag had flown the whole time we lived on Belfry Street, years of comings and goings—only Cam and I had remained constant inhabitants—different bodies in the bedrooms, different snack preferences and television habits and degrees of substance abuse.

I lit one from the new pack. Wet asphalt hissed under tires. The churches waited heavily in their places. I was tired of walking around, but the bar didn't open for another three hours. So I circled back toward the trees. Down in the park, branches guarded against sky. Pine brooms on the gravel path, a piece of string, flares of old weed, a puddle grown over with prismy oil. I sat for a while on a dead tree, its stump sliced to expose a moss-rimmed butthole.

THE SUMMER WENT
on, even though her body had stopped. The leftover children were amazed to watch the air get wetter and the trees greener; to hear cheers from playing fields; and to see the yellow moon.

Three weeks after the middle's funeral, they drove downtown for fireworks. The oldest had her period. She thought about how this very same gloppy red mucous had been inside her when her sister was alive, growing dark on the walls of the bag only inches away from her sister's gang of eggs when they lay together on the porch. In those eggs had been the nieces and nephews the oldest would have taught to play guitar.

She hoped a misaimed rocket would explode into the statue of the famous explorer, killing at least a few of the crowd.

The mother handed her a plastic pouch of juice with its own puncturing straw. Fifteen is too old for juice, thought the oldest, sucking, shame a gray sleeve on her lung. Red broke in the black air. The youngest asked,
“Can the fireworks fall on us?”

The family was four.

“QUINN, I KNOW
you don't love to talk about this, but I've noticed, we've both noticed, that you've dropped a little bit of weight recently. I'm only bringing it up because I want to—to—to check in with you. Is everything all right?”

Mert had learned
check in
from the good doctor during the bad times.

“Yeah fine,” I said.

“Really,” I said.

“I've been walking more,” I said, “now that the weather's nicer, maybe that's—”

“Well, you want to keep an eye on it, right?”

“An eye is being kept.”

My parents smiled and sipped their waters, but in the bad times, they had screamed:
You will
. I won't. You will. I won't. Yes, Quinn, you will. No I fucking
won't
. What did you say to me? Nothing, Fod, I'm sorry. You're going to eat what is on that plate. No. Goddammit, Quinn, put it in your mouth and chew. No. Why are you doing this
to yourself? Answer me!
No
. Yes. No. You—will—put—this—in—your—mouth—
Leave
it, Will! from where she'd stood at the stove; Mert hadn't even wanted to be in the same room. Just leave her alone. But later, in the night kitchen, she had said, Darling girl, what goes on inside your head? in such a wrecked voice my eyes ached. I'd said, My thoughts, I guess. If you don't eat, you are going to die. I eat, I shrugged, which launched a fresh surge of scream:
When?
When do you eat? At school? On the bus? I certainly never see you do it! Your father never sees you do it! When could you possibly be eating if you look like—Mert stood back, bumping hard into the stove—
that
!

At first the good doctor, who I went to after those failed sessions with the dink, had been barking up the wrong tree. “Does being thin make you feel powerful? When your mother tries to make you eat, and you refuse, how do you feel?” I answered every question truthfully, and the good doctor seemed confused. When the first visit ended she told me she was most intrigued, and at the next appointment, instead of hammering away in the same old direction as the dink had, she switched tacks.

“And who is the bloodworm?”

“Worm who eats blood and is made of blood.”

“Where does the worm come from?”

“Underneath,” I said.

“Underneath what?”

“Just underneath.”

“Why are you afraid of the bloodworm?”

“It ate my sister.”

“How do you know?”

“I see it.”

“You mean you saw it?”

“No,
see
.”

The good doctor paused, then said, “You have recurring mental images of this worm consuming your sister's flesh?”

I nodded.

“And where else does the bloodworm live?”

I shook my head.

The good doctor asked again.

“Down there,” I said. “It eats the blood.”

“Down where, Quinn?”

“When your period comes,” I hissed.

“Does the worm live in your vagina?”

“
No
!” I was furious but couldn't explain. In and out of my sister's holes. Eyes, mouth, ears, downstairs. A snail shell isn't big enough for your whole ear—you can't get the ocean. Try with two.
I still can't.

 

“Please don't worry,” I told my mother now. “I'm eating enough. I seriously am.”

Mert smiled faintly. “Okay.”

“
Promise
you won't worry?”

“Promise,” she said.

“Death tolls went up again this month,” Fod said.
“November can't come soon enough. Get that lunatic out of the White House…”

“He might win again,” I said.

“There is no way that imbecile—that
ambulatory lobotomy
could win again.”

“But he might.”

“I assure you, kid, he won't.”

I said, “You know who would've loved that term, ambulatory lobotomy?
She
would have.”

Mert said, “I think that's enough, Quinn, don't you?”

“I've only had two glasses!”

“Three, in fact,” she said.

“Wine is good for you,” I pointed out, continuing to pour. “There was this study that said it prevents heart disease.”

“I just think”—Mert's voice was at its carefulest—“that you're going through a challenging time, with the job loss, and it might be a good idea not to drink so much.”

I laughed. “I
don't
drink that much. You should see some of my associates! Like remember Jonathan Geck? By the way, thanks for dinner, it was really good…” I itched to be gone, but there was still the after-meal tea.

“Earl Grey or English Afternoon?”

“Shock me,” I said.

The lagging hours of
being together
. God bless them, they tried, but the trying felt sad. Why?—because I was supposed to have a family of my own by now, or starting one? Because I came by myself across town for these
dinners, a stunted oldening girl who still wished the television were on as a buffer? I had broken my rubber-band bracelet on the bus and was reluctant to hunt for another in the kitchen with Mert around. She might have offered some comment on my life, how it was not much of one. Instead I latched myself into the hall bathroom and held my wrists under the cold until they were gone. Only boring people get bored, Mert used to say when we complained how long Saturday was without TV. My sister said, But that's an
ipse dixit
! Dogmatic and unproven statement, she added to me, and I yelled, You mean they made up a whole term specially for Mert? and Mert sneered: Do you even know what dogmatic means? Yeah, I said, it means the way you talk.

“Squidling?” she called. “Milk or lemon?”

“Lemon,” I shouted, wiping numb fingers on the reindeer towel. How could they still have this ancient rag? Riley had worn it as a cape when our sister made him be demented elf.

Mert watched me slurp at the kitchen table, her own teacup untouched. I wondered where my brother was—must've had better things on tap tonight, though what that little monk could possibly have had on tap was a mystery. Fod? Out plucking a few more hairs from his garden. And where was
she
? Like smoke around us, sighing at the crinkled shells of our ears.

“Please let your father drive you back,” Mert said and I nodded, even though it meant twenty more minutes of eyes. If Riley had been here we would have dropped him
off first (the paranoia law didn't count for short trips inside the city) then continued on to my neighborhood where my father always locked the car doors. After our sister died, no more than two of us—one parent, one kid—could take a car journey or fly in a plane together. It had made vacations complicated. We'd bought a second car, a used hatchback whose seats had smelled like guinea pig. I'd hated the law, but Riley had agreed it was a good idea to make sure some people were left over.

Tonight the streets were quiet, traffic lights changing without any cars. I turned on the radio hoping to find noise that did not demand attention—a newscast, for instance, in a foreign language. I stopped on an army recruitment commercial.

“Why didn't Ri come tonight?”

“He already had plans with someone,” Fod said. “A classical music concert, I think.”

“A
date
?”

“Is that so outrageous?”

“Well.”

“Your mother mentioned a girl who…”

“What's that?”

“A girl who works at the archives.”

We were nearing the intersection where Fod would press the automatic lock. The radio said “And now a blast from the past!” and out jumped the opening bars of “Dear Done For,” clackety drums, ping ping ping of guitar, slim thump of bass.
Fod, this is us!
I wanted to
reach for the dial but my arm wouldn't. My father didn't recognize the song. The music coiled into a long, narrow tube. My vision was zooming. If your head lost enough blood, you passed out. The lack of oxygen turned off the brain, and a fight-or-flight response kicked in: all blood rushed to the torso to protect your heart, so you had no blood in your legs either, making a collapse even more likely. The remedy the good doctor had taught me was to stick my head between my knees, as if bracing for a plane crash. But I couldn't do this in front of Fod. I couldn't see except straight in front. My blood was marching for my heart, leaving the brain dry and alone. My sister had lost all her blood too. Her skull had been drained of gore, membrane shriveled, salt gone.