The Used World (39 page)

Finney sat up but could go no farther. Vernon pushed past Hazel, knocking her against the sink so hard a bright tune sang up her spine. He pointed the crowbar at Caroline as he reached under Finney’s legs and lifted her up. It looked effortless, his carrying her, even though she was such a tall girl. Finney said nothing, just wrapped her long arms around Vernon’s neck and rested her head on his shoulder.

Vernon carried her through the doorway, stepping over Jim Hank as he crossed the waiting room. And then—the strangest of apparitions—Albert was coming through the door of the clinic, just taking off his hat and smoothing his hair. Vernon bulled past him, nearly knocking him off the steps.

“Excuse me!” Albert yelled. “What are you doing with Finney?” He stepped into the waiting room, where Caroline was kneeling over Jim Hank, pressing her bare hand against his head wound to try to stop the bleeding. “What in the name of—Caroline, explain this, please.”

“Daddy, we’ve got to follow them,
please.
”

“Get in the car,” he said. “Caroline, call an ambulance for Jim; that injury is beyond us.”

“I know.” Caroline’s voice was weak. “I know it is.” She picked up the phone just as Albert and Hazel reached the clinic door. Hazel glanced back, a pillar of salt, and she would never forget the look on her mother’s face, never—not if she lived until the end of time. It was the look of a woman watching the village burn, the walls of her own home crashing in the blaze.

“Hello?” Claudia was sitting on the edge of her bed, peeling off her wet socks.

“I’m so glad you’re home.”

“Me, too—it’s crazy, what’s happening outside.”

“Are you busy, though?”

“No, not now. I just helped Millie carry in some groceries. What I mean is I carried in all the groceries while Millie stood looking at the boxes of Rebekah’s things, sobbing.”

“Millie’s there? Good, because—”

“Millie’s always here, Hazel.”

“I just tried—now don’t panic, but—I tried to call Rebekah and the phone’s been disconnected. So I called—”

“The phone’s been disconnected?”

“—Peter’s parents and they said they spoke to Peter three days ago but haven’t heard from his since then. Pete Senior said he had no idea why the phone would be off.”

“Go on.” Claudia pulled out her sock drawer too hard and with one hand, and it came out crooked and stuck. She reached in and grabbed the first pair she could find; she pulled them on, stood, and walked in circles.

“I called Sears and they said he was taken off the schedule as of two or three days ago, the guy I talked to couldn’t remember.”

“I can’t find my—”

“Claudia, be careful driving out there, the roads are—”

“I know, Millie told me.”

“I’ll find you.”

Claudia grabbed a dry shirt, tossed it on the bed. And for no reason she understood, she reached up into the shelf above the closet and took down the box that held the Colt .44. “How will you know where we are? Where will you be? WHY don’t we have cell phones, why?”

“I’ll find you, Claudia. I have something to take care of and then I’ll find you. We don’t have cell phones because we can’t be two places at one time.”

“That’s ridiculous,” Claudia said, hanging up. She ran down the stairs.

Hazel stopped at the end of the lane. The rain was coming down so hard, and in such blowing, twisting sheets, that everything outside the car shimmered indiscreetly, as if in an aquarium. She got out, ignoring the way she was instantly soaked. The hood of her raincoat kept the water off her glasses long enough for her to find the right key. She turned it and disengaged a lock so large it could have served on a pirate’s ship. The heavy chain fell to the ground, and Hazel dragged it behind the stone wall.

“Nice,” she said, hearing the squelching sound she made in the driver’s seat. She drove down the potholed, battered lane, the honey locusts towering on either side of her. The grass in the front acreage was kept cut by a neighbor with a tractor, primarily so that Hazel didn’t face lawsuits, but no one mowed the area right in front of the house, and the grass and weeds there reached, in some places, Hazel’s head.

She parked in her father’s spot, the one closest to the house. Nature doesn’t intend for us to be out in rain this hard, Hazel thought, but she wasn’t sure why. No thunder, no lightning, just countless gallons of water falling on us, and we run from it. She walked at her normal pace up the front steps, turning away from the formal entrance, which was boarded up (the only way to protect the leaded glass panes), to the one door or window that could still be opened. The screen door was gone and there was nothing in its place, just the gaping hinges, and the original door—the mahogany with the carved scrolls and leaves—was gone, too. Hazel had propped it up against the wall in the dining room when it had to be replaced with what stood in its stead now: a solid sheet of green industrial steel. No window, no mail slot. You either had the key or you didn’t get in.

For so long Hazel had believed there was nothing more dangerous than the past. Then she’d seen the future and realized, oh the past isn’t so bad. Mostly a lot of junk back there, stuff no one should have ever kept. We hold on to the strangest things, and long beyond the point they serve any good. She stepped inside the library, turned on the light. The electricity was still on, that was good. Every couple of years the power company had to come out and investigate an outage; once, Hazel herself had gone back to check the fuse box and discovered a squirrel head down inside it, his body slithered around and between the fuses, still clutching the live wire in his fried paw.

Left alone, a house develops its own smell—it will not hold yours forever. Hazel knew how quickly this happened. Standing here now, she could not have guessed at the richness the air used to carry—floor wax, lemons, laundry, her mother’s L’Air du Temps, the disinfectant from the clinic, all the various subtexts of Edie’s life, too. Now the place smelled like wet plaster, mold, slow decay.

In the library the stained-glass doors still ticked open on their tracks, although the shelves held no books. How it came to be that there was stuff on the floor (there was
always
stuff on the floor), Hazel couldn’t imagine. Pieces of cardboard, empty bags, dirt, leaves, enough twigs to build a new tree—it all just grew there. She kicked her way into the parlor, turned on that light. No down-filled sofa, no floor lamp with the milk-glass globe.
Get rid of it,
Caroline had told her in the hospital,
get rid of it all, I don’t care how you do it.
The light at the top of the staircase revealed just how much mysterious stuff can accumulate in the corner of each step, too. Quite a bit. And what was this tangled up with the leaves?
Fur?

In the wide upstairs hallway there were no longer any eyes to open and close, tell her if she’d gone right or left. That rug had been one of the first things she’d carried out; she’d rolled it up and driven it to the space she’d rented for almost nothing, an empty building that had once been a tractor tire store. The first few trips she drove her car, taking the lightest, smallest pieces of furniture. Then she realized that Jim Hank’s truck was still right there, parked right where he’d left it, and he wouldn’t be needing it anytime soon. Things went more quickly after that.

She took her flashlight out of her belt, shone it in the bathroom. Yep. A bad leak around the window. She’d get the boys to come out, shore that up. Edie’s room was the worst, for some reason. The teenagers and hunters who’d briefly taken over the place, before Hazel had realized she’d need to board up the village to save the village, had gravitated toward Edie’s room so naturally it may as well have been Stonehenge on the summer solstice. They’d torn down the wallpaper, dragged in an old mattress, written on the walls. She always assumed Edie herself, Edie and Charlie and their bumbling militia, had been among the vandals, but she’d never caught them. All she knew is that when the boards and the steel door went up, Edie and Charlie somehow found Cobb Creek, and the break-ins had stopped. “I’m homeless!” Edie had yelled at her, how many times over the years? “And that’s my home, too, and it’s empty—I should call the law.” Hazel laughed at Edie, pitied her. And Edie never pushed, not really. She knew instinctively that whatever lay on the other side of pushing Hazel too far was bad for all God’s children, and she must have known that it
wasn’t
hers, too. At the end of the day—and they weren’t there yet, but dusk was surely falling—it was all Hazel’s. The whole disaster.

The key to the lock on the nursery door slipped in and turned easily; she’d been wise to buy a good one. She opened the door, stepped inside without turning on the light. It wears off, it wears off after a while, that’s what Caroline told her. Your mother or your father dies and the first time you walk past his favorite chair or pick up her hairbrush, you think the planet has spun off its axis. And it hurts every time you walk past the chair, if you leave it there,
every time
until one day you don’t notice it at all and you’re sitting in it talking on the phone. The gray walls, the elephants marching, the braided rug. I don’t care what you do with it, Caroline had said, I will not live in a crypt. Practical, her mother. Hazel stepped into a cobweb, brushed it off her face. And she had been obedient, yes. Sold everything in the clinic to a new GP just opening his practice (except for a couple things that she kept in the storage place and would not sell). There was so much money, savings accounts and insurance policies, money to burn if handled right, and Caroline and Hazel knew how. Even here, her own room, she’d carried down to the truck the toys and rocking horses Nanny used to arrange for a different sort of little girl; the bookcase with her favorite books; her desk, her rocking chair, her clothes. Caroline didn’t know—didn’t need to know—this: the iron bed, still turned to face the window, made up in its white coverlet.

The light in the room was silver, it flickered as rain poured down the casement window. Hazel took a step toward the bed, jarred by the sound of her own breathing. For the first fifteen, twenty? years she’d come out every few months and wash the linens on this bed. Once a year for the coverlet, even though nature itself seemed to avoid the room; the windows stayed true, no wildlife had found a way through the ceiling or up through the closet floors. But it had begun to seem, even to Hazel, strange to care. No one was hurt if she did it or didn’t do it, and one fall afternoon, during the time of year she usually tended to the house, she looked at herself in the mirror, gave a shrug, skipped it.

Now, approaching the bed, she wondered if she’d been wrong. It wasn’t…the coverlet wasn’t as she’d left it, it seemed dingy and mussed, as if someone had sat down on it. The rain fell so hard on the slate roof above her it sounded like marbles being dropped on the house. Hazel sat down. The bed groaned beneath her in its usual way. She felt dizzy—closed her eyes—this bed, she thought, stayed right here, just like this, with no purpose since the last night I slept in it, not knowing it would be the last. It just waits.

And there, too: the sweater tossed casually across the bed. The first time she’d done it, Hazel had to pretend she’d just taken it off, that she was changing for dinner or to go out with Finney and Jim Hank. She pretended to take it off and toss it on the bed, pretended to turn to her closet, which was, of course, completely empty. The next time she did it, it was easier; she skipped the fantasy of dinner and went straight to the tossing and the closet. Then no fantasy, and finally no closet. Not her sweater. Finney’s. Well, not even Finney’s—it had begun life as Malcolm’s cardigan, but Finney had worn it for so long it had become hers, just the same way Jumpin’ Bean became Claudia’s dog, or Oliver belonged to all of them. No one knew as well as Hazel the shifting boundaries of ownership, how little it mattered in the scheme of things. A wiser woman—a much wiser woman—would have let the bed go, too, and the sweater, and the house, the land. Caroline did.

Hazel picked up the sweater, which was damp, lifeless, and buried her face in it. Nothing. She had so long ago emptied that sweater of every part of Finney, she might as well have eaten it. One day there had been the last trace, elusive and faint, and Hazel had hunted it down and devoured it, not knowing it was the last. But that was okay, she thought, dropping the sweater beside her. If she’d known, she would have done it anyway.

A tap-tap at her bedroom window: Hazel looked up, but it was just a tree branch. She waved her hand at the window, dismissing it. Thirty years. Thirty years since her world had collapsed, and in that time? Nothing. No owls in Jonah. No owls on campus. The windows at her new house? Aluminum, double-paned, diddly for predator birds.

She straightened the coverlet, locked the bedroom door behind her. Two, three, four steps down the hallway, a third key. Hazel unlocked the attic door, turned on the light in the stairwell that was no color, just the remnants of what someone long before her had to spare. She climbed the stairs.

Claudia leaned over the steering wheel, ground her teeth. The radio had bothered her so much she’d slammed her palm against the on/off knob and knocked it to the floor. She needed new windshield wipers and wasn’t it always the case that you need new windshield wipers and you don’t think of it or notice it until monsoon season? Every mile or so she passed a car off the road, someone who’d tried to drive through standing water and only succeeded in flooding his engine. “Idiots,” Claudia muttered, turning the wipers up on high, which streaked the windshield and lowered her visibility. She also turned the defroster on high, in a vain attempt to turn the rain to steam.