Precious and Fragile Things (19 page)

“He's a good man,” Gilly repeated in a low voice.

“What doesn't he listen to you about?”

Gilly picked up the dice, warm from Todd's palm. Her fingers curled over the plastic. “Never mind. Forget it.”

It was wrong to talk about her husband like that with Todd. It was a betrayal. Gilly rolled the dice. They played the game.

She lost.

A
t home, just as it was never totally quiet, the house was never fully dark. Too many night-lights and appliances with clocks. Navigating her house in the night meant hopscotching from shadow to faint green glow. Gilly was the one who rose in the night and paced the floors, listening. Never Seth.

He never listened for the sound of the subtle shift in a child's breath that predicted a cough or a cry, or the dreaded, always-at-three-in-the-morning puke. He never listened for the dog's claws clicking toward the garbage can on the hardwood floor of the kitchen, or the neighbor's revving engine that meant their teenage son had finally returned. Seth went to bed and slept, sprawling and snoring. He probably didn't even know about the nights Gilly spent awake, checking the locks and the stove burners, or leaning over her children's beds just to make sure they still breathed.

He didn't listen to any of those things, and Seth didn't listen to her. Saying it to Todd had been like some bitter confession
she could still taste hours later as she lay in the dark and stared up at a ceiling she couldn't see. Gilly swallowed hard now, her ears popping with the effort. She burrowed deeper into the blankets and curled on her side in a bed that would've been too small to share with her husband and was infinitely too vast when she was in it alone.

She loved her husband. He was a good man. A wonderful father, a loving husband. If he didn't listen to her, maybe it was because she didn't make herself heard. Or he couldn't understand that when she told him something it was real and true, not empty words said for the sake of conversation.

If Seth thought she was joking when Gilly told him she was going to lose her mind if he didn't replace the garbage bag after emptying the trash, or put a new roll of toilet paper on the holder when he'd used the last scrap, whose fault was that? His for not taking her seriously, or hers for not impressing upon him how utterly serious she was? Or hers, for allowing such minor, small things to eat away at her? It didn't matter now. Their marriage was a machine, the gears and cogs turning or sticking. What more could she ask for? What more could she expect?

“How'd you meet him?” Todd's voice parted the darkness.

Gilly lifted her head, turning her face toward him but not her body. “My husband?”

“Yeah. How'd you meet him?”

She settled back into the blankets, shrugging them higher on her shoulders. “A friend introduced us.”

“At a party?”

“Yes.” She paused, curiosity winning. “How'd you know?”

She heard him shifting in his sheets and imagined a shrug. “Lots of people get introduced at parties.”

“It was a barbecue at his boss's house. His boss's wife was my friend.” Gilly paused again, the dark room a perfect screen for the movie of her memories.

Seth had been wearing a pink polo shirt and khaki shorts, a beer in the hand he hadn't held out for her to shake. His hair had been too long for her taste, his smile nice enough, but Gilly hadn't been looking at him “like that.”

“Did you like him right away?”

Gilly blinked away the vision of the first time she'd seen the man she'd marry. “No. God, no.”

Todd laughed a little louder. “Huh?”

“I was with someone else. I thought he was okay, but I wasn't interested in him that way.”

“So how you'd end up together?”

Was this wrong, to talk about this with Todd? She hadn't thought about it for years. The kids weren't old enough to ask about it, and the story had never seemed romantic enough to retell. “We went out a bunch of times with friends.”

“And then you hooked up with him?”

Gilly smiled, bittersweet, at the memory. “Not that first time. I was still seeing the other guy, the one I'd gone to the barbecue with. I thought I liked him, but…he turned out to be sort of a jerk.”

“What did he do to you?” Todd's voice broke on a yawn and triggered one from her.

“Oh, the usual stuff.”

“Knocked you around? Stole shit from you? Ran around on you?”

“No! Is that what you think the usual stuff is?” Gilly shifted in her blankets, indignant.

“Sure. If you don't like a dude, yeah, I mean, that's some bad stuff, right?” He paused. “I mean…you don't think that's okay, do you?”

“Of course it's not.
You
don't think that's okay, do you?”

“No. Of course not. A man who hits a woman isn't much of a man,” Todd said in a low voice.

They both ignored the fact they'd hit each other, and more than once.

“He didn't hit me. He probably did run around on me, yes. Mostly he didn't call when he said he would, stood me up. That sort of thing.” Gilly frowned as she remembered. “I didn't even like him that much, that guy. He thought I was in love with him, though, which made it even worse.”

“Huh?”

Gilly sighed. “If he'd treated me badly knowing I didn't really love him, that would've been one thing. But if he thought I was in love with him and he still did that stuff…that's worse. That it didn't matter how I felt about him. I went out with Seth, finally, because that other guy had promised to call and didn't.”

“And you knew he was the guy for you.”

She smiled a little at the certainty in Todd's voice. “Oh…I don't know about that. I didn't know right away, that's for sure.”

“You didn't?”

“No. I don't think anyone can ever know right away.”

More shifting and rustling from his side of the room. “You don't believe in love at first sight and all that shit?”

“No. Do you?”

“Fuck no.” Todd's laugh grated, rusty and sharp. “Love's just another word for sucker.”

“Oh, Todd.” Gilly bit back a laugh. “That's not true. Haven't you ever…haven't you had…?”

She trailed to a stop. They weren't giggling girlfriends at a sleepover. She burrowed deeper into the blankets.

Todd stayed silent long enough Gilly thought he'd gone to sleep. “What? Like a girlfriend?”

“Someone,” Gilly amended at the way he'd sneered the word.

Todd made a low, derisive noise. “Girls like men with money.”

“That's not the only thing women like about men.” The urge to defend her gender was automatic and not necessarily sincere.

“Well, let me put it like this. They don't like guys without money as much as they like guys with cash,” Todd said. “It don't matter if you're nice to 'em. Hell. Some of 'em like it better when you're mean, so long as you've got bank.”

The question tripped off her tongue before she could stop it. “So, no girlfriend, ever?”

“I had girlfriends.” Todd sounded angry at first, then, quieter. “I had one, once….”

She waited.

“Her name was Kendra. I met her at work.”

“At the diner?”

“No.” He sounded gruff. “This was a long time ago, before the diner. I was working for a landscaping company. Planting trees, hauling brush, that sort of shit.”

“Did she work for the landscaping company?”

More silence. She thought he'd fallen asleep. “No. She was…the daughter of a customer.”

He didn't really have to say more than that. Gilly could guess the outcome. She made a sympathetic noise, anyway,
not necessarily to encourage him but not trying to put him off, either.

“I broke up with her,” Todd said.

“Oh.” It was so not the scenario she'd imagined—irate customer waving off “the help” to protect his daughter's virtue.

“Yeah, I know,” Todd said in a voice dripping with sarcasm, showing he guessed what she'd been thinking. “Who'd have guessed it would be me who bailed, huh?”

“I didn't say anything.”

“You didn't have to.”

Another few minutes of silence until Gilly said, tentatively, “What happened?”

“She wanted to get married.”

“Oh.” It wasn't the first time she'd heard about a relationship ending because the woman had wanted more of a commitment than the man. “And you didn't want to.”

“Fuck no!” Todd sounded as thoroughly disgusted as if she'd suggested he eat feces.

There didn't seem much to say after that. Gilly closed her eyes and noticed no difference in the darkness behind her lids than when she'd been staring. During the past few years, there'd been many nights Gilly had greeted her husband at the door with her car keys already in one hand, her purse in the other, so desperate to get out of the house by herself she manufactured errands to run. There'd been far fewer times lately that she'd greeted him the way she had in the early days of their marriage, with a kiss and a hug and questions about his day.

Those days seemed faraway now. All of them. The good and the bad, both. The cliché would've been that if she had the chance to greet him at the door again, she'd choose the kiss
rather than escape, but listening to the soft sound of Todd's snoring slipping through the chill and black, Gilly wasn't quite able to convince herself it was true.

G
illy hadn't watched the television show
Lost
in a long time, not since the end of the second season when the show had totally, well…lost her. Yet there was a moment during the show's first season she would never forget—the part when Hurley's CD player finally gave up and died. She couldn't remember what the character had said to commemorate the occasion, but the words that came out of her mouth were definitely not allowed on network television.

She tugged the headphones from her ears and thumbed the iPod's controls. Nothing. Totally dead. Worse, she'd been listening to a song she didn't even like. She'd wasted the last few minutes of music time on garbage.

Todd had gone outside to bring in some wood for the stove. Now he came in and dumped the logs into the bin. Snorting and stamping, he slapped his bare hands against his thighs and blew into his curled fingers. He looked up at the sound of her curse and raised both eyebrows.

“It's dead,” Gilly said in a tone more appropriate to the loss of a pet than an inanimate piece of electronic equipment. She held up the iPod.

Todd toed off his boots and left them to drip snow onto the floor by the door. He shivered, still rubbing his hands together and shook his hair, coated with a light mist of flakes from the seemingly constant snowfall. “That sucks, huh?”

“Yes. It does.” Gilly got up, put the iPod on the table.

She hadn't wept in weeks, but she wanted to cry now. Instead she scrubbed furiously at her eyes until they stung and her breath caught in her throat. “It's just an iPod,” she said.

She felt him watching her but Todd said nothing, just disappeared into the kitchen. She heard him rummaging around in the drawers. He was back before she had time to even turn around.

“Here.” Todd held out a handful of batteries. “There's an old CD player in the cupboard. It should work.”

She didn't move toward him to take what he offered. After half a minute Todd sighed, shoulders slumping, and rolled his eyes. He went to the cupboard himself, pulled out the boom box. He brought it to the table and set it beside the iPod, then flipped the CD player on its side to pry open the back and fill the empty slot with the batteries.

“I took them from the flashlight,” he said. “If you don't fucking listen to something, I'm going to be pissed off.”

The threat sounded empty. Gilly was too touched by the gesture to do more than stare, anyway. Todd sighed again, heavier this time, and stomped upstairs. She heard the scrape of a drawer, then his feet on the stairs. He brought her the CD case he'd rescued from the truck.

“Here.” Todd opened it. “Pick something.”

Gilly unzipped the case and flipped through the plastic
pages. The sight of the silver discs, such a vivid link to her life, made her throat burn. She gave herself a mental shake and forced the feeling away. “Like what?”

Todd took the case from her and looked through the choices. His forehead wrinkled in consternation. “What the hell is this stuff?”

Gilly bit a smile, knowing instantly the reason for his question. Her taste in music was eclectic, to say the least, her iPod filled with everything from classical to reggae. She rarely listened to CDs anymore except in the truck, and the discs she'd chosen to keep in there had all been chosen for their “singability.” She had to be able to belt out the lyrics, sing with abandon, and generally make the kind of fool of herself that she could only do in the privacy of her vehicle with no one to hear but the kids.

“Hedwig and the Angry Inch? The Rocky Horror Picture Show? Phantom of the Opera?”
He faked a gag. “Don't you have anything good?”

“Hey. All of those CDs are good.”

Todd flipped some more pages. “
One Hundred and One Silly Kids Songs?
The Wiggles? Jesus, Gilly.”

She smiled. “You might like it.”

Todd rolled his eyes and pulled out another disc. “Simon and Garfunkel. Jason Manns, who the hell is he? Oh, hell, no. Spare me that folk shit. Okay, this is better. The Doors. Greatest hits. Sweet.”

“That's my husband's…” Gilly stopped herself. She didn't want to talk about Seth with Todd any more than she already had. “But we can listen to it.”

Todd punched the button on the small CD player and inserted the disc. In a few seconds, the first opening strains of “The End” came out of the speakers. He grabbed the bowl
of popcorn he'd made earlier and sat down on the couch, long legs stretched out on the coffee table, head back on the cushions.

“This is good.”

The music made Gilly restless. At the window, she peered out into the rapidly falling night. More snowflakes, light now but promising to get heavier, drifted down. She hadn't been outside in nearly a month. Todd's footprints still broke the span of white, but with the new snow coming down it wouldn't be long until they disappeared, too.

Jim Morrison's achingly clear voice spouted poetic lyrics that reminded her of college parties, lights dim in the basement of some fraternity house, warm beer and cigarette smoke. The song made her think of Seth, too, who'd owned the CD before they'd met. He'd taken her to see the film
The Doors,
Val Kilmer playing a perfect Morrison, at some college art department film series on their fourth date. He'd bought her popcorn and nonpareils, and later had licked the salt and chocolate from her fingers before leaning over in the dark movie theater to kiss her. Gilly touched the frosted window and watched her fingertips make small, clear ovals in the rime.

She missed him. Missed his strength, his quiet humor. She missed the way he put up with her sniping and complaining, and the way he laughed with her at silly old movies. She missed the scent of him, fresh soap and water, and the way he never failed to squeeze her when she passed him.

She had no tears, not now, not when they would serve no purpose. Watching the snow outside, it seemed impossible it would ever melt. That she would ever be able to get away from this place. It seemed as though she might be here forever, listening to a dead man sing and watching darkness swallow the world.

“What do you think he means, anyway?” Todd's voice broke her concentration, and Gilly jumped a little.

Her fingers skidded in the frost, leaving slashed marks like wounds on the glass. “Who?”

“Morrison.” Todd crunched some popcorn. “The killer picks a face from the ancient gallery and all that shit. What's that mean, do you think?”

Gilly tore her gaze from the window to contemplate the man on the couch. “I suppose you could take it to mean that…well…” She struggled to put her thoughts into words.
Her
thoughts, not anything she'd read that someone else had postulated. “That there's a killer in all of us. Or that we can choose our actions. I think he means we can choose the face we wear.”

“Gilly.” Todd gave her a look. “The fuck's that mean? Choose your face. You get the face you're born with.”

“Not your real face.” She made a circle with her finger, outlining her features. “Not your eyes and nose and mouth, not like that. The face you put on for people. For the rest of the world. I think he meant you choose that face.”

Todd cocked his head. “Huh. You think that's true?”

She nodded. “Yes. I do.”

Her answer seemed to satisfy him, because he nodded thoughtfully. But then Todd said, “That's a bunch of crap.”

Gilly sniffed. “Why'd you ask if you didn't want to know?”

“I asked what you thought. Doesn't mean I have to agree. What about the rest of it?” Todd reversed the CD for a few seconds until the passage started again. “The blue bus and all that stuff?”

Gilly pondered, aware that for whatever reason, he expected her to have an answer. “Life is a journey?”

She waited for his scoffing.

Todd glanced at her. “Hell, it sure ain't one I want to take on a bus. You ever take a trip on a bus, Gilly?”

She had, several times, to visit a college boyfriend. “Sure.” The memory made her smile. “Bus stations are scary.”

“You got that right.” Todd cocked his head to listen to the music. “Morrison was one fucked-up dude.”

“Some people think he was a great poet for his time,” Gilly said, uncertain why his casual assessment of the long-dead rock star should affect her at all, much less cause her to rise to his defense. Hell, she didn't even like Morrison all that much, despite his sexy ways and liquid lyrics.

Todd turned up the volume. “The dude wanted to kill his father.”

“And fuck his mother,” Gilly said matter-of-factly, and was completely unprepared for Todd's reaction.

His face went pale, and his mouth gaped. He turned his attention from the small CD player and stared at her with stunned disgust. He even went so far as to take a step back.

“What?”

Gilly took her own step back from the force of his glare. “That's what he says at the end there…well, at least, that's what people think he meant to say….”

“People are sick!” Todd shuddered. “For crissakes, Gilly, that's sick.”

Gilly chewed on her response before saying anything. This was not the first time the topic of motherhood had set him off. And he had mentioned that his mother died. Gilly wasn't sure what to say.

Todd shuddered again and ran a hand over his hair. “You think he really wanted to do that?”

“I don't know,” she admitted. “Maybe it's an urban legend
or a rumor, but that's what I always thought he meant. It would fit with the whole Oedipus thing, with wanting to kill his father….”

She stopped at Todd's blank look.

“I told you before, I ain't smart.”

She hadn't meant to throw his lack of education in his face. “Oedipus is an old story about a man who accidentally kills his father and marries his mother.”

“How in the hell do you accidentally kill your father to marry your mom?”

On the CD, “The End” became “Touch Me.” She wished he'd asked about that song. It would've been way easier to interpret.

Gilly sighed, not sure she remembered all the details and not up to the task of teaching the Greek classics. “It's complicated.”

“Yeah, I bet.”

“It's Greek,” she said, like that made a difference.

Todd rolled his eyes. “They have good salad and shitty stories.”

It took her a minute before she realized he was making another one of his jokes. A giggle almost squeezed out of her throat, but she pinched it off. She might not be able to hate him, but Gilly wasn't ready to laugh with him.

“It wouldn't kill you to laugh,” Todd said, as if reading her mind.

But Gilly thought it might do just that. She got up and turned off The Doors and slipped in
Hedwig and the Angry Inch.
“Enough Morrison.”

Todd listened to the first few words of the song that came on, and looked as shocked as he had when she told him what Jim Morrison wanted to do to his mother.

“What the…?” He was too stunned even to utter his favorite curse word.

Gilly had chosen the track on purpose to shock him. She felt another giggle coming on, a nasty one this time, but she satisfied herself with an evil grin. “His sex-change operation got botched. It's pretty self-explanatory.”

Though she'd removed the CDs from their plastic jewel cases to put them in the travel case, she'd also put in the inner sleeves. Todd pulled out the one for Hedwig and stared in utter amazement at the photo of the man in a bright yellow wig and tons of glam makeup screaming into a microphone.

“Is that a dude?”

“Yes,” Gilly said. “I guess you've never seen the movie.”

Todd gave her a look. “This is from a movie? Figures.”

“It was a good movie,” Gilly replied somewhat wistfully. It had been a long time since she'd watched a movie.

Todd waved the travel case. “Why do you listen to this shit. You got a thing for guys in makeup, or what?”

“I guess I have a thing for the underdog.” The self-assessment surprised her. Bat Boy. Hedwig. Even poor, misunderstood tragic antihero Frank-N-Furter. All underdogs who met bad ends when the world they lived in rejected them for being who they were.

“If you like the underdog,” Todd said, “then you should practically be in love with me.”

Without looking at him, Gilly took the CD out and put it back in the travel case. She slid another into the player and hit Play. She thought he'd grumble, but she didn't care. When the music began, she went to the window and pressed her face against the glass to look out at the snow. It was the same view. The same snow. Constant, not changing. As was all of this.

Todd, quiet, took a place beside her at the window. Gilly
straightened up, her forehead cold from where it had rested on the glass. They stared out into the darkness, but all Gilly could see was their reflection, blurry. Her and Todd.

“This song,” he said, after it had played nearly all the way through.

She looked at him, not in the mirror made by the light inside shining to the outside, but at his face. His real face. “What about it?”

“This one's right,” Todd said. “The part where he says I told the truth, didn't come here to fool you. That's a good song.”

It ended. Todd left her side and messed around with the CD player's buttons. It was a song Gilly loved, though not the lyric he'd quoted. She thought of the part that made the most sense to her—love was not a victory march.

“C'mon,” she told him as the song began again. “I'll make us something to eat.”