All the Broken Things (12 page)

Morley kept his feet apart and held his hands out with palms to the sky. All the boys found their positions. “Okay, Ernie.” When Ernie stepped toward him on the mat, Mr. Morley wrapped his arms under Ernie’s armpits and came in for a hug. His head tucked into Ernie’s shoulder. He shifted his back foot in beside Ernie’s front foot, so that his feet pinched Ernie’s and held them in place. “I pull my body weight into the ground,” he said. “And sit back.” Mr. Morley flung his head back and twisted then, still holding Ernie, so that together they arced back, flying and then falling, with Ernie somehow landing on the bottom.

Anger contorted Ernie’s face, but it subsided almost before anyone noticed. He laughed. “Cool move,” Ernie said. “Do it again.”

Mr. Morley moved off the mat, nodded to Bo. “You,” he said. He blew his whistle when Bo hesitated.

Bo took his position on the mat, his legs wide and solid, his hands ready to take Ernie’s hands.

“Bo,” said Mr. Morley. “Let him take you the first time.”

Bo let Ernie curl his arms under his own, tuck his head down.

“Feet,” said Mr. Morley.

“Oh, yeah.” Ernie slid his back foot forward, held Bo’s locked, and sat, throwing his head and shoulders into a twist.

Perfect. Bo sailed, and was pinned, breathless.

“See, boys. Greco-Roman wrestling. Counterattack? Anyone know?”

Bo put his hand up.

“Bo.”

“Keep your weight deep down, lean to the opponent’s outside foot, and when his weight follows, drop and roll.”

“Okay. Maybe. Try it.”

So the boys locked again, but this time when Ernie shifted to throw himself back, Bo sank and pinned him instead. Mr. Morley smiled.

He had each boy in the gym class try to make the manoeuvre. “No throw. You are to stay upright. Feel your opponent’s vulnerability. Feel it, and act upon it.”

For forty minutes the class of boys attempted to perfect this. The boys took turns on the mat, half listening for the thump beside them, turning to see who had mastered whom. Bo imagined throwing Loralei, the bear arcing across the mat, flailing fur, even though he knew it wasn’t possible.

R
OSE WAS HOME
—early—and Orange sat in the kitchen sink, frothy suds billowing around her. She slapped the water when she saw Bo so that it crested over the sides and onto the linoleum. She was too big for the sink but Bo knew she was too much for his mother to handle in the bathtub.

“Shh, Sister. She likes to splash.” Rose was drunk, the only time she could be so lovingly fluid, so motherly. Her body swayed.

“Thank you for coming home, Mum.”

“How was school?” she said.

“Good.”

“What did you do?”

“Nothing.”

Rose put her head down on the counter, let Orange splash her. She said, “I gave her medicine to bring the fever down. Hopefully she’ll be better tomorrow. I wonder if she ate something bad. Did you feed her anything strange?”

“No,” he said.

A Host, even if you were not consecrated into a Sacrament, could not give you a fever, Bo thought. It was only flour and blessings. But if God was angry there was no telling what He might do. He was erratic. You never knew what He would like or dislike. If God sought vengeance it would be upon him, though, and not his innocent sister.
If she died
, he thought, and then he stopped himself
thinking. She mustn’t die. He would pray for her tonight, tell God that if He killed Orange, He’d lose Bo’s faith.

“Help me,” said Rose, and Bo lifted Orange’s tangled red body out of the sink.

She did not want to get out, and kicked and thrashed. She liked to make sounds, smacking flesh against the water, ugly music. She made a wet mess of Rose, who laughed at first and then got annoyed, and finally spanked her, holding her with one fist and hitting her on the bottom with an open palm, so that the sound mimicked Orange’s own music. Orange’s little mouth rounded to scream but nothing came out, though Bo knew she screamed with all her body and soul. He saw small pustules along her legs.

“What’s that?”

“It will heal, Bo. No doctors, right?”

Bo said, “I will take care of her.” He had to stay calm or Rose might turn angry, he knew. Or start crying. She had already started crying.

“Sister needs to eat,” Rose said.

Bo said, “I’ll dress and feed her.”

His mother’s face flickered with emotion when she handed Sister over: disgust and misery hidden behind stoicism. Pity mixed in there too, which he could stand even less than disgust. At least disgust did not pretend to righteousness. Orange had come out of her body. It was this creation that formed the disgust, he knew. If it had been someone else’s child, his mother might have had more
compassion. As it was, she simply hated herself for making this. And he hated her for it too, a hate mixed with love.

“I
N THE FOREST
…”

Bo whispered up close to Orange’s malformed ear, bent into her as she rocked herself to sleep. “In the forest you are a princess. It is a beautiful forest—yes, all blue and white, made entirely of paint—and in it there is a grand building. It might be a castle or a palace. For many it looks impossible, all brush strokes and colour. But you live in the palace and are famous for living there.

“There is a horse just your size and you ride upon it. It is also blue and still smells of oil, as if it was just created by the artist, just for you. Your horse is named Bucephalus and it is upon this horse that you carry out your greatest deeds. For you are endowed with superpowers. You are a hero.”

He would write about Orange for his assignment What Is a Hero? He would write about how daring it was for her to allow herself to be born, and maybe Teacher would understand about Orange, then.

“Once there was a man riding through the forest who came upon you. He thought you the most hideous creature his eyes had seen. He called you ‘loathly.’ The loathly lady.” Bo was stealing from King Arthur but he didn’t care. Stories wanted to be stolen.

Orange stopped rocking to listen.

“It was Sir Gawain. Another one. A future one,” Bo said. “He did not know your powers. He found you seated on a log in the forest and asked your hand in marriage. You thought it was a joke!” Bo looked up at the ceiling and then around the room, stopping here and there at the scenes on the wallpaper. “And then Sir Gawain kissed you,” he said, and turned to kiss Orange.

She flailed her arms, wildly, so he caught them and held her. He looked right in her eyes. “He kissed you and you stayed just the same.”

A
FTER
O
RANGE HAD FALLEN ASLEEP
, Bo found his mother at the table, asleep over her evening tea. Bo woke her by gently touching her back.

“Bo,” she said.

“Go to bed.”

“I need to talk to you. That man Gerry made me nervous. What if you get hurt?”

“I won’t get hurt. And maybe he won’t come back.” Bo wanted him very badly to come back.

“Remember, I need you.” She wrapped her arms around herself.

“It’s not real fighting, Mum. It is like a show except there are some people in the audience who don’t realize
it’s not real. A person could only get hurt if they made a mistake. And I won’t.”

“Bo—”

“Mum, it’s like a puppet show, nothing more than that. If I make enough money, you can stay home. You can take care of—”

He stopped because she had got a look in her eye. He had wanted to say,
take care of us
.

Rose’s hand lifted and she slapped his face. He blinked from the sting of it, but said nothing.

In the night, he woke to his mother wailing. When he went to her room, he found her crouched on her bed, tearing her face with her nails. She’d gouged long wounds into her skin, and beneath her nails was her own blood.

“Mum,” he said. “Mum.”

She was asleep. She didn’t wake up as he pulled her hands down and pinned them until she relaxed. She didn’t wake up until the morning.

“Who did this?” she said, bewildered, gesturing to her face as she came out of the bathroom.

“You were dreaming,” Bo said.

She started, then said, “I remember a nightmare.” But she would not tell him how it went.

She went back into the bathroom and powdered over the rents in her face, but it was easy to see them. They ran like frozen tears down her cheeks and her neck.

I
T WAS
F
RIDAY
after school and Rose was at work. Bo wished Gerry would come by. He had memorized the phone number from the contract but didn’t dare dial it. He was playing with Orange on the floor in the small living room. He galloped her stuffed donkey toward her and then, just as she grabbed it, he pulled it away. He crouched for a long time playing this game, sometimes letting her win, and then his legs cramped and he stood. A shadow fluttered at the window and he looked out at the porch.

It was Emily—her hand made a tiny nervous wave, her manic smile was painted on too late. She’d seen. Bo slammed himself in front of Orange anyway, to hide his mother’s
shame and now, perhaps—and this feeling grew—his own shame, as Emily witnessed the horror of his sister, her skewed self, her snot, her ugly. In the tiny unwinding moment, Orange
was
. Emily tapped at the window, and Bo shook his head, even though she surely could not see him.

“Let me in, Bo,” she called, the glass shunting the words off into watery dreaming. “Open the door, for heaven’s sake.” She was banging on the door.

“Don’t move,” he whispered to Orange, but as soon as he got up, she began to flipper around the living room, throwing herself over and over, in her new freedom. He thought of seals, and then gathering fishes, and then tried not to think. “Please, Orange. Be still. Jesus.”

She looked up at him, swinging her head. She made a face and he was chastened. Then, just as suddenly as she had made the face, it was gone and she was a seal again and then she was a cow or a horse, always some sort of animal, transforming. Some aberration of an animal. Some wrong-beast. Orange had become wild from playing, and then being held down—this had only exacerbated her need to move.

Emily tapped on the pane and demanded he open up, for crying out loud.

Bo belly-crawled to the hall and stood to open the door, first brushing down his clothes, straightening things. He peeked around the jamb before Emily saw the door had in fact been opened for her.

He said, “How can I help you?”

“What?”

Bo blinked. Emily pushed in and dropped her rucksack. She moved past him and turned to the living room, looked down on Orange, who was now sitting, flipping her head side to side, tossing her arms around herself in a rough hug.

“Wow,” Emily said. “The rumours are true.”

“Rumours.”

Emily shot him a look. “Cool,” she said.

“It’s a fucking freak show,” he whispered.

Emily made a face to indicate to Bo how incredibly stupid he was, then said, “Freak show is cool,” and looked back at Orange.

A hole had been cut from under him. Not a hole through the floor, like in the cartoons, but a hole in the Earth, a hole in the universe, and this hole was pulling a portion of his body into it; it was not unlike a punch, but a punch that takes forever to land, and then as it does it thins all the flesh around it into a long elastic bubble. Nestled inside this bubble in his gut was Emily, and nestled in with her, Orange.
Freak show is cool
.