“Sure. Lily, have you seen Jack?”
She was staring, distracted, into the crowd. “He’s around. I’ll go find him for you.” She vanished, leaving me standing stupidly, holding the wine that Joe had given me. For want of anything better to do, I took a sip.
“There you are,” Joe’s voice said from behind me, and I felt his arm snake around my waist. “How’s that wine?”
The party had lost focus. Where was my brother? I moved through the crowd like a ghost. Every face I saw was a stranger’s. None of them was Jack. I wanted to go home.
Then I was in the hallway outside the apartment. Carmichael was at one shoulder, Joe at the other. They were holding me up.
“Where are we going?” I said. My tongue felt foreign in my mouth and the walls around me wouldn’t stay where they belonged. The men carried me down a flight of stairs. My feet didn’t touch the steps.
“Joe’s place,” Carmichael said. We went through a door and Joe fumbled with keys. “You drank too much. You need to lie down.”
“Where’s my brother?” They carried me through a door and I felt myself fall onto a big, soft bed. I could feel the smooth cotton bedspread under my hand.
“He’s upstairs,” Joe said. I heard the sound of a zipper. One of my boots was gone. Then the other. “He knows you’re here. It’s okay.”
“He told us to bring you down here,” Carmichael said from somewhere above my head.
“Where—where is he?” The room was spinning.
“He knows you’re with us,” Joe said. “It’s okay.”
My limbs were leaden as the two men lifted my arms and pulled my blouse over my head.
“Jack,” I heard myself mumble. I was shivering.
“Jack says it’s okay,” Joe said gently. “Don’t worry about Jack.”
“Jack—”
“Jack told us to take care of you,” I heard Carmichael say. “Jack said we could.”
9
E
VERYTHING WAS STILL.
My head felt thick and sore and so did my body, but the room had stopped moving. Carmichael was gone; Joe was sitting on the bed next to me, smoking a cigarette. He was naked. I realized that I was naked, too.
The air smelled bad.
Joe looked down at me and said something about being sexy and seventeen.
“Bathroom,” I said. Croaked.
He pointed down the hallway with his cigarette.
I tried to stand up. My legs were wobbly. Somehow, I made it. I washed my hands and my face and then I looked in the mirror.
There was makeup smeared under my eyes. My hair was a tangled mess and my eyes were red. There was stubble burn on my cheeks and my chin and my breasts, and the hair between my legs was sticky and hard. My scalp was sore, as if my hair had been pulled hard.
My skin smelled of Joe’s cologne.
I splashed some water on my face and then took a towel from the rack on the wall and wrapped it around myself. Things were still dim around the edges, and on my way back to the bedroom I made a wrong turn and found myself staring at a human-sized cage made from chicken wire and splintering wood. It was filled with excited, darting things, all bright little eyes and pointed little ears and snaky little backs.
Paralyzed with horror, I couldn’t breathe.
“You like my ferrets?” Joe emerged from the bedroom, wearing only a pair of tight blue briefs.
“No.” The cage reeked of urine-soaked wood and rodent dirt. It was the source of the bad smell in the air. The mass of ferrets inside it writhed malevolently.
Joe opened the cage and pulled one of them out. It moved sinuously up his arm and curled around his neck. “You want to hold her?”
“No,” I said. I couldn’t stop shuddering. The ferret’s black eyes glittered at me from his shoulder.
“You want to know their names?” Joe pointed at each of the ferrets in turn and said, in a singsong voice, “Lust, Sloth, Gluttony, Envy, Anger, Greed, Pride; and this little darling here is Ingrid.” He reached up behind his head and stroked the ferret’s long body. Grinning, he said, “Here, hold her,” and put the ferret on my shoulder. Its tiny claws dug into my bare skin as it sniffed at my ear and I felt its fur bristle as it investigated the back of my neck.
Then it was in my hair. My mouth opened and I heard myself scream.
The noise was loud and shrill and broke through my daze. I beat at the hissing mass of fur with my hands, still screaming, and then there was a sudden sharp pain on the side of my hand. Joe was shouting, “Don’t hurt her! Don’t hurt her!” and he grabbed me and pushed me fiercely against the wall. He pinned me there with a forearm across my breastbone while he gently pulled strands of my hair away from the ferret. When she was free he lifted her back to his shoulder. She hissed at me again and he held me by the arm and slapped me, twice, hard.
“You stupid bitch. You fucking hurt her,” he said and let his arm fall.
My legs gave out and I slid down, crumpling in a heap at the base of the wall. Joe stalked into the bedroom, the ferret twined around his neck, and came back a moment later carrying my clothes.
He threw them at my face. “Here. Get dressed and get the fuck out of here.”
The ferret blinked at me from his shoulder.
I found my underwear in the pile and pulled them on. There were long smears of blood down the length of my thighs.
“It bit me,” I said. “My hand is bleeding.” I held it up.
“Get out of here,” Joe said again and shook his head in disgust. “Fucking pathetic.”
Outside, it was early morning. There was a thick fog clinging to the empty streets and the air was cool and damp in my lungs. I’d wrapped my bleeding hand in one of my Gypsy scarves and was clutching it to my chest. My tights had disappeared and my boots were rubbing painfully against my legs.
Every muscle in my body was tired or sore. My stomach hurt and my head was fuzzy.
Jack said it’s okay. Jack said we could.
No. Obviously that hadn’t been true. I had been calling for my brother; that’s why they’d said that. Because Jack would never.
The doorman in Lily’s building was asleep in a chair in the lobby. I rode the elevator up and let myself in. The apartment was dark. I tripped over Lily’s suitcases. So she hadn’t left yet.
I went to the bathroom and turned the bathtub faucet on, peeling the Gypsy costume off as I went and kicking it into the corner. There was rubbing alcohol in the cabinet; holding my hand over the sink, I poured some directly into the ferret bite. It burned. I hissed and swore.
“You’re back,” Jack said from the doorway.
“I’m back.” I kept my head down. My face was starting to bruise where Joe had hit me. If I turned that side of my face away from Jack, he’d see it in the mirror. If I turned it away from the mirror, it would be facing him.
“We tried to find you before we left.” He moved into the bathroom and closed the door. “Maris said you went off with Carmichael. Lily was thrilled.”
“I want to take a bath,” I said. “Can you leave me alone, please?”
Jack didn’t leave. “Did you go off with him?”
“I want to take a bath,” I said again.
Jack moved forward quickly and grabbed my shoulder, turning me around to face him. His hair was wild and there were deep bags under his eyes. He stared at me.
“What happened to your face?” His voice was emotionless.
I didn’t trust myself to speak. The bathroom was filling with steam that made my eyes water. “Same thing that happened to the rest of me,” I managed to say. “I got hit by a truck.”
We stared at each other for a long moment, and a memory drifted into my mind.
Does your brother do this?
“Some truck,” he said finally and let me go. “Do you want me to stay?”
I told him to go back to bed and sat in the bathtub for a long time, ignoring the sting of the hot water on my hand. Finally I climbed out, dried myself on one of Lily’s thick white towels, and went to bed. The sheets felt clean and smooth on my skin, and the pillowcase was cool under my head. I didn’t sleep.
A few hours later, I heard voices in the living room. Lily was leaving. Not long afterward the door opened and Jack slid into bed with me. I buried my face in the pillow. He didn’t try to touch me.
Jack said, “She’s gone.”
I didn’t say anything.
“I couldn’t read her last night. She was so drunk.” He halflaughed and said, “She said she loved me, do you believe that shit?”
“No,” I said.
I felt him shift.
“I don’t believe it either. You know why?”
I closed my eyes tight.
“Because you’re the only one who’s ever loved me,” he said. “That’s why. You’re the only one who’s ever loved me and Pm the only one who’s ever loved you.” His hand slipped under my neck and pulled me into the crook of his arm. I let myself be pulled. “That’s all there is. That’s all that’s true. Nothing else matters.”
For a long time I didn’t trust myself to say anything.
“Are you okay?” he said.
Does your brother do this?
Jack said we could.
But Jack would never.
“No,” I said. “Pm not.” My throat felt cracked and raw.
“You will be.” His voice was confident and sure. “You just have to move past it. Let it go.”
I wanted to scream.
“I was calling for you,” I said. “You should have been there. Where were you?”
I felt his arm tighten around me and then relax. “Smaller sister,” he said. “Pm here now.”
Jack’s cure for my ills was the same as it had always been: get good and drunk. But for the first time in my life I didn’t have much appetite for drinking. The smell of alcohol made me think of ferrets. Most things made me think of ferrets. I had nightmares about ferrets, moving over me in a furry gray wave, poking and prodding and biting me.
Two days passed and the nightmares got worse. My hand wasn’t healing the way it should; the initial sharp pain had dulled to a constant hot throb. The edges of the wound were inflamed. When I poured rubbing alcohol into it, it was like putting
my
hand in fire.
The television weathermen were predicting a heavy snowstorm coming in from the west; it would be the first one of the year. A night, a day, a night, another day passed, and no snow.
One night we sat on Lily’s roof terrace, wrapped in coats and scarves from her closet. Jack said, “It’s nice to be alone again, isn’t it?”
I didn’t answer. I cradled my wounded hand and stared out at the cold dreary city.
“She’ll go on more vacations,” he said. His breath made fog in the air. “Hell, I shouldn’t complain. We have everything we want.”
“We have everything she lets us have.”
Jack put his arm around my shoulder and pulled me close. “Why the dire thoughts, little sister?”
My gaze was fixed on the skyline. “Must be the storm coming.”
The street below us was empty. Maybe people were staying indoors, waiting for the snow.
Jack tried to make his breath form a ring and failed.
“No snow yet,” he said.
By nightfall, there was still no snow, but the sky hung low over the city, heavy with cloud cover. The meteorologists assured us that the snow was coming, it was only a matter of time. My sleep, when it came, was fitful. Jack slept next to me but it didn’t help.
When the sun came up on the third day, it was raining. After the rain stopped, Jack found a pair of ice skates in Lily’s closet and decided we’d go skating in the park. They were girl’s skates, with smooth white boots and clean laces. The blades were still sharp and they fit me perfectly.
But the rink was too crowded. The line at the rental counter looped all the way around the rink and people were standing four deep at the rink’s edge. I shook my head. So we walked around the park instead, buying hot chocolate from the snack bar by the zoo. Jack had a little flask that he’d found somewhere and taken to carrying, filled with vodka. He put a little into his cocoa and I slung the skates over my shoulder, tied by the laces. Jack watched me fumble with the knot. “We look like we’ve gone, anyway. Does your hand still hurt?”
The throbbing pain in my hand had become a familiar companion. The pain burned steadily at night, when Jack’s breathing was soft in sleep, and was still there when I woke up in the morning. I’d been keeping it to myself. It had to get better eventually. “It’s fine,” I said.
We walked toward the Ramble, where our stroll turned into a hike. The rain that had come instead of snow had made the steep hills treacherous. Last summer I’d liked the Ramble; if you ignored the dog walkers and the joggers and the distant sound of traffic, it was a little like walking in the woods on the Hill. In the summer, there was the rich green light and the low humming of insects in the air; there were the rough, unpaved paths looping back on themselves and making that part of the park seem larger than it really was. Sometimes it was hard to find the right path out of the woods.
But that afternoon, the leaves were off the trees, the buildings on Central Park West were all too visible through the bare branches, and the Ramble seemed stark and sinister, with its twisted switchback paths that came to sudden dead ends in pockets of marsh. After a few minutes it began to feel like a bad dream, as if we were trying to perform some simple task like crossing the street and couldn’t figure out how to do it. My hand ached, and the skates that I’d slung jauntily over my shoulder were banging heavily against my rib cage.
Jack took my good hand in his.
We turned a corner and found ourselves on a small stone ledge overlooking one of the marshy parts of the lake. In the summer it would have been buzzing with insects. Now it was empty and lifeless. The water was as smooth as glass. The clouds overhead drained the scenery of color. None of the other paths were visible from where we were standing.
My brother stared out over the water. He was wearing the leather jacket that Lily had bought for him. His hands were jammed in the pockets and his eyes were faraway.
“Jack,” I said.
He looked at me.
“Did you talk to Carmichael and Joe that night? Did you—did you say anything to them?”
“No,” he said. “I never even met Joe.” He shook his head. “Every time I look at your face, I want to kill them. You know that.”