“This too,” I said and held out the bracelet.
He stared at it for a moment and then reached out to touch it with one finger. “I remember that. Where did you get that?”
“It was Mary’s,” I said. “It’s mine now. You can have it.”
And I gave it to him. He touched the tiny test tube with something akin to reverence and slipped the bracelet carefully into his pocket with the earrings.
“Where have you been?” I asked softly.
He picked up a book and blew dust from its spine. “I don’t think I want to talk about that.”
“I didn’t hear from you. I didn’t think you were ever coming back.” He didn’t answer. “Why did you?”
“Come back? Why do you think?”
I stared at my hands. My thumbnail was ripped down to the quick. “If I knew,” I said, “I wouldn’t have asked.”
“Fair enough.” Jack tossed the book carelessly down onto the couch. “I came back because I needed money, and because I knew there was stuff here I could sell. I came back because I liked the idea of breaking into Raeburn’s house and making off with everything that was worth more than two cents.”
“Did you do the break-ins on the Hill?” I interrupted.
“Have there been break-ins on the Hill?” he said evenly.
I looked at him for a long moment.
“Okay,” I said. “Go on.”
“Go on? There’s nothing left to tell. I came back because of you.”
“But you’re not going to stay.”
He laughed. “Are you kidding?”
“So what’s the point of coming back at all?” I was getting angry.
“To get you,” he said simply. “What did you think?”
I stared at him.
“Unless you want to stay,” he offered.
“I don’t believe you.”
“Then I guess I’m lying.” He didn’t seem to care. “Come or stay. It’s up to you. I won’t be back again.”
“Where would we go?”
“I know people. We’ll have a place to stay.”
I looked around at the study, at Raeburn’s oversized chair and the ugly blue nude on the wall; at his collection of antique sextants and telescopes gathering dust on the bookshelves; at the dark wood walls and the rows of thick, tattered science books. I thought about my own room, which hadn’t changed since I was two. I thought about the long, empty hours that I’d spent sitting in the kitchen, watching the shadows move as the wall clock counted away the hours. I heard Ben Searles saying, “This isn’t the way the world is. You know that, don’t you?”
And then I looked at Jack.
I wrapped my arms around myself, feeling my ribs through my thin cotton shirt. I closed my eyes and thought about the supernova.
“Okay,” I said, without opening my eyes.
The car Jack was driving was an aging black coupe with a rosary hanging from the rearview mirror and a Saint Christopher medal pinned to the visor. It smelled strongly of coconut air freshener and cigarette smoke. I helped Jack load the books and silver into the trunk and then threw in a pillowcase that held a few pairs of my underwear and some clothes.
“Whose car is this?” I asked Jack as we worked.
“Becka,” he said. “You’ll meet her.”
The sun was starting to come up when we hit the interstate. Not long after that, I fell asleep. When Jack woke me, we were no longer moving.
“We’re here,” he said.
“Where?” My mind was logy with sleep and driving and my ears were ringing.
“I told you. Becka’s house. Erie.”
6
W
HOEVER BECKA WAS
, she lived in a small, one-story white box in a shabby neighborhood. Some of the houses that lined the streets had once been perfectly respectable Cape Cods; some of them, like hers, had obviously been built after the neighborhood had started to slip and nobody cared about the details. There were no lawns; the paint was peeling and the bricks were dirty. Becka wasn’t home. The paper towels in the kitchen had ducklings printed on them and there was potpourri in the bathroom, but all of the floors were grimy and there were beer rings on the battered coffee table.
Jack saw my face and laughed. “Nice, isn’t it?”
“We were pretty squalid, sometimes.” I was looking through the pile of dishes next to the sink for a glass that looked relatively clean.
“Sure, but we’re mad geniuses.” Jack threw his coat over the back of one of the chrome-and-wicker chairs in the kitchen. “I can’t help thinking that there’s some merit in the fact that we spilled our ashtrays on the
Principia Mathematica
instead of
The National Enquirer.”
“Where did you meet her?”
Jack shrugged. “I keep telling myself this is temporary, but I haven’t come up with anything better yet.”
He showed me the bedroom. There was only one, with a big, unmade bed in it. Jack’s old leather jacket, the one I’d worn to the bonfire, was hanging over the back of the one chair in the room.
I touched it. “Do you like her?”
He put his arms around my waist. “Why do you want to know?” I didn’t answer.
I met Becka an hour later, when she came home from work. She had black hair and huge brown eyes with long, curling eyelashes that she liked to flutter to punctuate her sentences. She called Jack “sweetie” and “honey” and said things to him like, “I picked up some of that ice cream you like, sweetie.” She talked constantly: less than a minute after I met her, I knew that her mother’s name was Susan, that she was one-eighth Iroquois and a quarter Italian, and that she was from West Virginia. Also, that it was okay for West Virginians to tell West Virginia jokes, as long as they were from the city and not from “down the hoot ’n’ holler.”
“How can you tell that the toothbrush was invented in West Virginia?” she asked me, smiling. “Because if it was invented anywhere else, they’d have called it a
teethbrush!”
“Funny,” I said. I was having trouble laughing, because one of the things that I’d learned from Becka was that she was “crazy, absolutely head-over-heels hot” for my brother.
“He called me up this morning from the road and told me he wanted to bring his little sister up for a visit,” she said. “I said sure, honey, go ahead, because I just can’t say no to that man.”
“I know how you feel,” I said.
“He told me once he had a sister.” Those big brown eyes with lashes all aflutter were watching me with sharp intelligent curiosity. “I didn’t know you guys were so close though, but I guess it makes sense. Broken home and all that.” She shook her head. “I mean, my folks are divorced, but your parents sure are a couple pieces of work, aren’t they?”
I looked at Jack, who was sitting on the stained floral couch. He shrugged almost imperceptibly.
“Just my father,” I said.
“But your mother’s the one who kicked you out of the house,” she said.
“Well—” I stopped.
Becka smiled. “Oh, honey, ignore me. I didn’t mean nothing. I never mean nothing. Most things that come out of my mouth you can’t even listen to.”
“Hear, hear,” Jack said. He winked at me and picked up his beer. Becka moved to sit next to him.
“You know, sweetie,” she said. “Maybe while Josie’s here we oughta call up Sharon and see if her kids might want to take her out some night.”
“Who?” Jack said.
“You know Sharon.” She punched him lightly on the shoulder. “Sharon that I work with, Sharon with the red hair.” She turned to me. “How long were you planning on staying, Josie? Sharon’s got kids your age, sixteen, seventeen.”
I wondered how old Jack had told her he was.
“Just a few days,” Jack said and reached an arm along the back of the couch, across Becka’s shoulders. “Just until everything cools off a little at home.”
She shrugged. “Well, I’ll give her a call anyway. You might like to have some fun while you’re here,” she said to me.
“Sure,” I said. “But I think right now what I really want is a nap.”
Becka told me I should go ahead and stretch out on her bed. The bedroom walls were thin, and as I lay in the bed that Jack and Becka had shared for God knows how long, I heard her say, “Might be Becka and Jacky want to have some fun while she’s here, too.”
Jack said something too low for me to hear.
“Oh, for Christ’s sake.” The playful tone was gone from her voice. “I was joking. Can’t a person even tell a joke anymore?”
The sheets on Becka’s bed were printed with faded yellow flowers. Her green shag carpet was matted and soiled, and there was a dead fly on the windowsill. I rolled over and buried my head in the pillow, which smelled like cigarette smoke and shampoo. I didn’t cry.
When I woke, the sun had gone down. Jack was sleeping in the bed next to me, wearing only his shorts, with one arm thrown over the side of the bed and the other hand on the small of my back, underneath my blouse. The night was warm, and the places where his skin touched mine were sticky with sweat. He had opened the windows and pushed my hair up and away from the back of my neck, so that it lay like a skein of silk on the pillow next to me. The cool breeze from the window should have been pleasant, but I was miserable and the breeze smelled of sulfur and stale water.
I stretched slightly. The movement woke Jack. He opened his eyes and blinked.
“Well, hi, sweetie,” he said sleepily, stretching his words in an ugly parody of Becka’s accent.
I rolled over so that my back was to him. Jack propped himself up on his elbow. “What do you think of ol’ Becka?” He tugged on my ear. “Sweet li’l thing, ain’t she?”
“Are we staying here?” My voice was cracked with sleep.
He sighed.
“The thing is,” he said, “I really do need money. I can sell the stuff we brought with us, but it’ll take a few days. This is a small town. People get suspicious. Now, Becka”—the blouse that I was wearing didn’t have any sleeves, and he slid one hand into the armhole so that he could rub the tense place next to my shoulder blade—“Becka makes money. Tons of it. Cash.”
“How?”
“Stripping. Sleazy, but lucrative.” He half-laughed. “After you went to sleep, her first question was whether you’d need a job and her second question was how old you were.”
“Am I old enough?”
“Nope. And it would be over my dead body, but I didn’t tell her that.” As he spoke, his hand moved down my arm to cup my elbow.
“God, I missed you,” he whispered.
I pulled away.
He looked hurt and surprised. “Ouch.”
I refused to feel guilty. Instead I said, “What’s that smell?”
“We’re about half a mile from the sewage treatment plant. Welcome to Erie’s low-rent district. I’ll take you out to the lake sometime. You’ll like that.” Now he was playing with my hair, stretching it out on the pillowcase, combing it smooth with his fingers. Despite its awful smell, the breeze felt good on my skin.
“I thought Lake Erie was toxic.”
“It was. It’s better now. I think they even do some fishing in it.” Jack pulled at the back of my blouse, moving it up close to my bra strap. I felt him trace our initials on my skin.
“Just because there are fish doesn’t mean you should eat them,” I said. “Are you sleeping with her?”
He sighed and flopped over onto his back. “What if I am? It’s a roof over my head. Yours, too, now.”
I shrugged. The only sound that I could hear was Jack’s shallow breathing.
“I’m glad you’re here,” he said. “I really did miss you.”
I turned to look at him. “It’s a lot. This is a lot.” In the glare from the streetlight outside, I could see him gazing thoughtfully at me.
He got to his knees on the bed. “Take off your shirt.”
“Why?”
“Just do it.”
I let him pull the blouse over my head, leaving me in my bra. Then he knelt behind me and began to rub my back, slowly and precisely. While he kneaded my muscles and stroked the outlines of my bones, he said, “Look, we’ll get out of here soon. I promise. But Becka can’t know we’re planning to leave. She’ll flip out, kick us both out on the street. She thinks she’s my goddamned girlfriend, for Christ’s sake.”
“How long?” Jack’s hands were starting to make all this mess seem very far away.
“Soon.” He leaned down and kissed the skin between my shoulder blades. “We’ll go somewhere good, a big city. Get our own place, nobody to bother us. Nobody who knows anything about us. Maybe New York.” He sighed. “I was drifting, and this was where I washed up.”
“I don’t know where I am,” I said, and he said, “You’re with me.”
We were curled together, our arms and legs intertwined, like two starfish at the bottom of the ocean.
“I promise you,” my brother said. “I’ll get you out of here. I’ll take care of you. I promise.”
At five in the morning, the alarm clock went off and I stumbled to the couch before Becka came home. When the front door opened, I pretended to be asleep.
When Jack left, later that morning, I stirred enough to open my eyes and see him standing at the open door, wearing jeans and a black T-shirt, staring down at his upturned palm through a pair of sunglasses. Then he closed his hand and stuffed it into his pocket. I heard the soft clink of coins sliding against one another.
The world on the other side of the door was glaring white in the sun. My heavy eyelids closed. When I woke up, he was gone and Becka was sprawled out on her bed in a bleary tangle of limbs and sheets and carbon black hair.
She cooked me breakfast after she woke up, around two: bacon, sausage, French toast soaked in egg and deep-fried in oil until it was crisp and golden. The kitchen was already thick with humidity and I’d woken with damp and prickly skin, but the hot food was good and I ate until my face was sticky with syrup and grease and my body felt heavy.
“Sweetie,” Becka said, “you ate that like you ain’t seen home-cooked food in about a million years.”
That accent is a put-on, I thought. “It feels like it.”
She started to clear the dishes. “Shame your brother had to run off like that this morning.”
“Where did he go?”
“Don’t know. I don’t bother asking anymore.” She dropped the last of the dishes in the sink and let the faucet run over them for a minute. “None of our friends are awake that early, I can tell you that much. They’re mostly night people. ” She was twisting her long hair into a ponytail. There was a small, spotted window above the sink and her eyes were fixed on something outside.