Through Glass (12 page)

I moved my hand to do the same, my skin pressing against the cold, smooth surface the same way we did every day. I looked at his hand, the forever stained fingertips from his charcoal, the calluses. I longed to touch it, to be with him, but it was impossible.

So many others had proven that.

My eyes moved to meet his, my smile small against my lips as I watched his hand move up to form letters; it was the slow movement of the sign language we’d had to resort to after our markers had dried up.

“How is Frances?” he asked, his lips turning up as if he had discovered a great joke.

“She’s a diva,” I signed back, exaggerating my facial expressions as I played along. “Still pouting that she didn’t listen to my web choice.”

“Diva,” he agreed, his eyes rolling dramatically as he signed the word.

“She is!” I signed quickly through a smile. “Whoever thought an eight legged monster could be a diva?”

“Whoever thought you would make friends with an eight legged diva?”

He raised his eyebrow at me with the question and I rolled my eyes at him, exaggerated enough that he would catch it. He smiled brighter and pressed his fingers to his lips before pressing them against the glass.

“Don’t go, not yet,” I pleaded, my heart thumping quickly at his usual farewell.

“I’m not leaving, Lex.” His shoulders heaved as he signed, his eyes sad. “I just miss you. I wish I could hold you. I wish I could kiss you. I wish…”

I looked away. I didn’t want to see the words that I felt in my heart every day. I didn’t want to feel the twist in my heart at the reminder of the life I was missing, the love I was missing. I wanted to find comfort in what we had. It was hard enough without the twang of loss I felt every day. Every day I fought the need to simply run over there and be with him; not to be alone anymore. I would fight the Ulama to the death to have that opportunity, and after seeing them take the life of everyone around us, I knew that was exactly what would be waiting for me. Death. I looked at the dirty windowsill as I waited for him to stop.

His hands stopped moving and he looked at me with his shoulders slumped. I knew I should have let him finish, but I couldn’t. Not today. Maybe not ever. It hurt too much to wish for something impossible.

There were days when I thought Cohen was right; that things would change, that we would get out of here. Other days, I was sure that this reality was all that there was left; trapped in a house with no way to escape, no way to fight back. Even if I had made enough clubs to outfit a small army.

We merely looked at each other as a million words passed between us; love, loss, loneliness. I let them flow through the air as our hands pressed against the window pane. Nothing other than air and glass between us, a ten foot gap of certain death keeping us apart.

“I miss you, too, Cohen,” I signed back slowly, trying to comfort him, to make up for stopping him.

His lips turned up in a small smile at my words, the overgrown scruff on his chin crinkling his face a bit.

“I started work on your birthday present,” he signed, his smile growing with each word.

It was weird how just seeing those words spelled out, hearing them in my head, made me all wiggly inside. I would be turning twenty in just a few months. Twenty and I still felt perpetually eighteen. I had been trapped in this house for over two years.

Two years that I tried not to think about.

“Yeah?” I signed, not sure if I wanted to hear more, yet unable to keep my morbid curiosity at bay.

He nodded once. “I found some paints.”

My eyes widened as he lifted up a small, cardboard container to eye level. The petite container was bursting with white, metal tubes. As I took in the sight, his grin only increased more, if that was possible.

I couldn’t help smiling right alongside him. It had been at least a year since he had found paints. He had been mixing old medication and gruel into a type of charcoal for quite a while. Cohen needed to paint like I needed the human contact with him. They both kept us sane.

“Can I see it?” I asked, already knowing the answer.

“Not until your birthday,” he scolded, his face a playful jest of parental wisdom.

I smiled widely at the odd way the look contorted his face while covering my mouth in an attempt to keep the laugh inside.

Laughing was too loud, laughing was dangerous. The first time I had laughed after the blackness came, the sound of death had rung through the air in warning and the noise had caught in my chest. It was the last time I had laughed.

Do not make noise.

I knew it was all in an attempt to stifle joy, but I could find joy even without laughing. Although that joy did hurt sometimes.

“I wish I could hear your laugh again,” Cohen signed, a look of joy on his face that took my breath away.

I pressed my hand against the glass, my forehead resting on the cold pane as I looked at him, my eyes meeting his.

“If wishes were horses, beggars would ride,”
I said, knowing he wouldn’t be able to hear me. He smiled as he read my lips, the old nursery rhyme ringing true yet again.

“I would ride right to you,” Cohen signed back as he winked at me. The small gesture sent my heart into a comfortable rhythm that I remembered all too well.

“I would let you.”

He smiled and pressed his forehead against his window, his eyes looking right into mine from across the gap.

We stared at each other for minutes, hours, days; who knew. Time had no meaning anymore. We merely looked; each lost in our own memories, our own fantasies.

Our own wishes.

It had been three days since I had used the last of the food and still they had not come. They had been late before, but not like this. Cohen still had some of the brown packets left, but there was no way for him to get them to me. So I had gotten weaker and weaker as my body resorted to eating itself. My already emaciated body didn’t offer much in the form of nourishment, though.

Everything inside of me hurt; my abdomen ached and throbbed. The dull pulse of hunger had moved into my joints and what remained of my muscle tissue the longer I went without food.

I moved aside another pile of trash, hoping to find something, anything, to eat. I had known it was hopeless before I even came down here. Anything that I would find would be two-years-old and, besides, anything that would have been left would have been carried away by the rats before they had moved on.

It was pointless, but I was desperate. The pain in my stomach grew and I winced, the air hissing through my teeth as I tried to cope with the pain.

I pushed through the trash pile that spilled its way out of the refrigerator, trying to ignore the occasional graduation announcements that were piled with the rubbish.

Bills, pictures, rubber bands, screwdrivers. Random things that were all useless to me. I pushed them aside, my vision fading as I searched, my head spinning with each movement.

I had searched each pile of rubbish one by one as I became more and more desperate for food, finding less and less. Now, I was at the last pile. At least, what I thought to be the last pile. I may have lost count, but I wasn’t going to start over.

It would be a miracle if I didn’t fall over right now.

I pushed another large pile of wrinkled invitations aside, letting my fingers trace the letters of my parents’ names for a moment before throwing it into the heap of junk I had already sorted through.

The invitation fell down amongst the others and I couldn’t help smiling at the memory of Cohen sitting at my counter. The touch of his lips. My smile grew as the memory came back strong, surprise filling me at how vivid it felt; as if it had only happened yesterday. It took the pain in my stomach away for only a moment, the swoop of joy replacing it.

“Cohen,” I whispered his name aloud, not knowing why. Was it a farewell? Was it a plea? A call to the memory?

His name was like warm honey on my lips, the flavor as foreign to me as he was in many ways. I saw him every day, yet it wasn’t the same. The touch and the taste of him was as distant as the sunlight now. At least his memories were stronger than the others.

I moved away from the pile, my body heavy and pained, to push my back against the kitchen island while hundreds of old spider webs fell around me as I collapsed against the wood paneling. I pushed the cobwebs out of the way, letting the sticky things fall over my clothing and attach themselves to my skin.

Two years of confinement in this house, of trying to find a way to fight back, of being trapped, and this is how it was going to end? Starving to death in my own kitchen.

The irony was not lost on me.

I suppose it was better this way than turned to ash. It was still a victory over them. The thought brought a smile to my lips, the need to laugh coming on strong. I wanted to let one good guffaw out, one last laugh. To say, at least once, that they didn’t have control over me.

I smiled and let the chuckle escape, throwing my head back against the paneling of the kitchen island as the rippling happiness swept over me. The feeling leaving quickly as my vision dimmed to black.

I shook my head, trying to wake myself up. My eyes opened to the kitchen and my mother’s face swam before my eyes.

My eyes widened at seeing her there, surprise rocking through me. I sat up, but her face faded at my movement, her smiling face fading into the grey. Great, I was hallucinating. As if I needed more of a reminder about what was coming for me.

“You come to get me, Mom?” I laughed as my vision faded, only to return with another faded memory of my mother. Her, looking out the window, scolding me not to hide in shadows. If only she knew how true her words were and how little there was that I could do about it.

I was stuck in the shadows.

I looked away from my hallucination, my eyes scanning the darkness almost waiting for the rest of my brothers to appear.

“I guess this is it, Frances,” I whispered as I turned my head toward her web that occupied the now bare shelf. “I told you, you should have taken the chandelier.”

I wanted to imagine her looking at me, her laughing and saying something wise.

I should have named her Charlotte.

I grinned at the memory of my mother reading that story to me after my brother, Travis, was born and I was feeling exceptionally alone. She would do all the voices and she was terrible at it, which was probably better. I laughed more when she read that book rather than cried. Charlotte’s Web was a comedy to me. I was in Junior High before I realized that the spider actually died.

My vision faded in and out as I watched her web; as my face burned and my body ached.

“I’m sorry, Cohen,” I said, wishing I could at least make it up the stairs to see him one last time. I would just have to make do with ghost mom.

I had barely gotten his name out before I saw it. My eyes focused beyond Frances’s web to the brown packet she had enclosed in her web.

Food.

My body jumped in a mad dash to get at it, arms flailing and legs moving, only to collapse right back to the ground as my legs forgot how to support me. I scuttled across the floor as I brought myself back up, ready to try again. This time I hoisted myself up, my arms clinging to the counter as I pulled myself up in a desperate attempt to get to the food.

I didn’t even watch where I was reaching. I simply plunged my hand through the web, ripping it apart as my fingers curled around the brown packet of gruel.

My body collapsed to the ground the second I gripped it in my fingers. I sunk against the piles of trash on the floor, bringing the packet to my lips and ripping it open with my teeth. I didn’t look for a bowl. I just pressed my lips to the small opening and squeezed, sighing as the disgusting material hit my tongue.

It tasted like vomit and smelled like sewage. It was probably a few months old, however I didn’t care. It was food. I sucked and squeezed until every last drop was gone and then I ripped the packet open to lick the slimy contents off the silver lined paper.

I licked and, with each lick, I sighed while letting the grit hit my tongue to slide down my throat. I licked until the paper was clean and the ache in my stomach wasn’t as bad. I felt the residual twinge rumble through me as I looked at the packet; the brown paper of other packets littered the floor below it.