Save Yourself (4 page)

Patrick changed the channel.

He was watching a slasher flick—
Oh, no
, the group of attractive young people trapped in the department store were saying to each other,
however will we escape the murderous psycho who is creatively and elaborately killing us one by one?
—when he heard Caro fighting the lock on the front door, which stuck. “The minute we have some extra money,” she said, as soon as she got inside, “we’re fixing that door. It’s impossible to open.”

“Keeps out the undesirables,” Patrick said, muting the television.

“That’s the antisocial recluse we know and love. I brought food.” Caro put two foil take-out containers on the coffee table and then flopped down next to him on the couch. She looked like hell. Her makeup was smudged and caked under her red eyes. Patrick knew it was just the long day she’d had, but she looked like she’d been crying. Picking up one of the containers and passing it to him, she said, “That was a day. That was most certainly a goddamned day. Here, eat. I have to go get Mike.”

“No, you don’t.” Patrick peeled the cardboard lid off the container and looked inside: penne and chicken in some kind of white sauce. He picked up a few pieces with his fingers and shoved them into his mouth. “He took an extra shift. He’ll be home in the morning. He said to tell you sorry he couldn’t take you out tonight.”

Caro stuck her tongue between her lips and blew a raspberry. “I’m dead on my feet, anyway. You could use a fork for that.”

“I don’t have a fork.”

“So go get one.” On the television screen, a pretty girl was pounding on the inside of the department store display window, trying to get out. Caro unlaced her shoes. They were the practical, solid, spend-all-day-on-your-feet variety but she still winced as she pulled the first one off. “I hate my job,” she said, conversationally. “My feet
feel like they’ve got nails through the bottoms and I spend all day watching things get boiled alive.” She eyed Patrick, sitting on the other end of the couch. “I don’t suppose you want to move and let me stretch out, do you?”

“I was here first.” He ate another three fingers’ worth of pasta. The sauce was kind of congealed.

“You’re such a youngest child.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Constantly fighting for position.”

“Bullshit.”

“I’m just telling you the theory.” Caro reached down, flipped her shoes upside-down on the floor, and then rubbed the ball of her foot. She had a hole in her sock. “They’ve done studies about this stuff. Like, Mike is solid and respectable, because he’s the oldest, and had the most responsibility growing up, and you’re the youngest, so you always have to prove yourself.”

“Complete bullshit. What about you?”

“Doesn’t apply to me. I was raised by wolves.” She swung her feet up into his lap, narrowly missing his pasta. “If you don’t want my gross waitress feet in your face, you’ll move.”

“I have an unusually high tolerance for gross.” A bucket of acid fell onto the prettiest and most nubile actress in the movie, causing her face to melt with an excruciating slowness. The fake skull under her flesh looked a little plasticky. Caro made a face. “Nice special effect, huh?” he said.

“I wish those lobsters were just a special effect.” Shuddering, she tucked her feet underneath her. “Scrabble scrabble. Can we watch something happier?”

“Like what, sports? Earlier I fell asleep watching a Pirates-Braves game from the ’ninety-two playoffs and woke up to some guy getting his arm torn off on the back of a bull. How is that less horrible than this?”

On-screen, the nubile actress’s boyfriend was wading through the
puddle of her dissolved flesh. Caro stood up. She pulled at the elastic holding her ponytail, and her hair, which was the color of sun shining through a bottle of cola, fell around her shoulders. “Watch your movie, sicko. I’m going to go take a shower and wash the dead fish smell out of my hair.”

“I like the dead fish smell.”

“Nobody likes the dead fish smell,” she said, and went upstairs.

Caro had moved in a month or so after the old man went to prison. Mike had brought her home from a bar, and Patrick had awakened the next morning to a series of unmistakably breakfastlike smells drifting up the stairs. Coffee, bacon, French toast. He’d come down to find the two of them sitting at the table, a third place set for him. Caro had looked vaguely embarrassed and Mike had looked happier than he had since before the accident.

She followed me home
, he’d said with a grin.
Let’s keep her
.

And, sure enough, by the end of that first week, her toothbrush was next to the sink and her tampons were in the medicine cabinet. To his relief, Patrick liked her. She was smart and funny and not obviously crazy; also, she could cook, and she liked folding laundry, and she didn’t ask questions. Or answer them, really. He knew she was from Ohio, and he knew she did strange things sometimes, like turning her shoes soles-up on the floor or pulling her sleeve down over her hand before touching a doorknob. She kept books under the couch cushions not secretively, but mindlessly, as if out of long habit. Once, when he’d asked her about the sleeve thing, she’d turned scarlet and ghost-white in rapid succession and the whole set of her body had changed, curling into itself as if she were trying to shrink. He’d never asked her anything like that again.

She came back downstairs wearing a T-shirt and an old pair of Mike’s cutoff sweatpants, returned to the other end of the couch, and tucked her feet underneath her again. She’d washed off the caked,
smeary makeup, and her cola-colored hair was clean and pulled back in one of those plastic clips. Now she smelled girly, like conditioner or something. Sweet but not cloying.

“Did you really used to take girls to have sex in that graveyard?” she said.

By now, the last two survivors in the department store were crawling through a heating vent. “Not all girls. It had limited appeal, although you’d be surprised how many went along with it.”

“You’d be surprised how little I’d be surprised. When was the last time you were up there?”

“I guess I was—seventeen? Eighteen, maybe.” He hadn’t been to Evans City since high school. After that, he’d just brought his girlfriends back to the house. The old man had never cared.

“Who was the girl?”

“Debbie Mayerchek. She still lives behind us. Me and Mike used to tie her to trees when we played cops and robbers.”

Caro’s eyebrows went up. “Your version of cops and robbers involved tying girls to trees?”

“She was a hostage.”

“And I thought my childhood was screwed up. You guys were into bondage. Was she your girlfriend?”

“Nah, we just went out a couple of times.” And in fact, after the night he’d taken her to the graveyard, he’d never called her again. Or spoken to her in school. Or spoken to her, ever.

“Was she into horror movies?”

“Not really.”

“Me neither,” she said. “Life is horrible enough.” The clip in her hair was slipping. She reached up and pulled it free, then twisted her hair into a rope and pinned it back again. “When I was a kid, my grade went on this field trip to SeaWorld in Geauga Lake. And you know how they have the killer whale shows, right?” He nodded. “So we’re all there, every second grader in school, and we’re all laughing and cheering and having a great time and then—” One of her hands
shot across her body, grabbed the other wrist, and yanked it down, like a crocodile taking down a gazelle. “
Bam
. The whale grabs the trainer by the leg and pulls her right down to the bottom of the pool.”

Patrick stared at her. “It killed her?”

“No. It let her go and she crawled up onto the deck. Smiling, can you believe it? She’d just been munched by a killer whale in freaking
Ohio
and she had to smile because it was her job. We just thought we’d get to see some neat animals, maybe pet a sea urchin in the tide pool, and then suddenly it’s all
Wild Kingdom
.”

“That’s why I like horror movies,” he said. “Every night I wake up and go to work and come home and go to sleep and wake up and go to work and come home and go to sleep. A couple of showers, some pizza, the occasional autoerotic incident—”

“Don’t tell me that.”

“We keep getting eaten by the whale, is my point. Day after day, and day after day we have to smile about it.”

“Patrick, Patrick, Patrick. Sometimes I’m sad for you.” Her face belied her words, though. She understood exactly what he meant. He could see it in her eyes.

“But most of the time you love me,” he said.

“Some of the time,” she said. “Some of the time, if you’re lucky, you grim bastard.”

Soon, they said good night, and went to bed. Not long afterward, Patrick, who was semi-awake and restless, heard a tap at his door. Caro didn’t wait for him to answer. She came in and closed the door behind her. Her hair was down loose around her shoulders again and in the moonlight it didn’t look like cola, it looked like ink.

Half-convinced that he’d fallen asleep after all, he moved over on the bed, and she lay down next to him. She brought her knees up so that her shins pressed against his side. They didn’t talk. The silence was a membrane between them, thick and organic.

When he put his arm around her it felt like something they had done before. When he kissed her it felt like he was crawling inside
her, down her throat and into her chest, where there was a warm quiet place that was safe and private and only his. She put a hand on his stomach, under his shirt. He tasted salt on her face but her neck was sweet and mild under his tongue and when he closed his eyes and touched her, the world slipped away and it didn’t matter what he did, it didn’t matter what they did. So they did it all.

He awoke to find her sitting on the edge of the bed, not looking at him. The sky was lighter than it had been and he must have been holding her because his arms felt conspicuously empty. The place on his chest where she’d been sleeping seemed to ache.

He reached for her. She stopped his arm in midair. “Don’t.”

Confused, not fully conscious, he sat up. Put his hands on her shoulders.

She jumped as if he’d burned her. “Jesus. Leave me alone. Can’t you just leave me alone?”

Then she was gone, and if not for the inexorable
oh-fuck-what-have-I-done
ringing through his brain, he would have thought he’d dreamed it all.

TWO

Once, when Verna Elshere and her sister were children, their father took them to a place in Janesville where someone he knew was erecting a church. He showed them piles of waiting materials: huge sheets of glass, rolls of pink insulation, shining aluminum ductwork. After the church was built they attended the consecration. In the sleek lobby, redolent of paint and new carpeting, Dad reminded the girls that everything they saw had been built by man, not God. They’d seen the building half-formed, he said, so they knew what he said was true. The building was nothing but a clever assemblage of goods. It was the spirit that made the place holy, and the spirit was in the people, and that was why he held his worship meetings in their basement, and not in a church.

Ratchetsburg High School, too, was nothing but a building. The doors were only doors, and behind them were only hallways and classrooms and lockers and drinking fountains, all of it—every hinge, every rivet—built by man. There was nothing permanent, nothing that could not be thrown down. Nothing to be afraid of.

“Hey,” the boy behind her whispered. “Hey, Elshere.”

She didn’t want to turn around, but she had to. You always had to turn around.

This was only the first day, but the two boys sitting at the table behind hers in the biology lab clearly knew each other well. They were handsome and healthy-looking, with clear skin and muscular arms. The one on the left, the one who’d tapped her shoulder, had nearly black hair and striking blue eyes. At the table with them sat a girl with the kind of face that came preinserted in picture frames, her gorgeous red hair styled like that of a movie star from a grocery store checkout magazine. Verna wondered if there was any chance that she could change seats, or schools, or selves.

The striking boy gave her a dazzling smile. “What kind of freak are you?” he whispered.

His voice was loud enough for everyone around them to hear, but quiet enough to blend into the general murmur. At the front of the room, Mr. Guarda was working his way through the class roster. Verna didn’t want to answer, but she had to. You always had to answer.

“What are you talking about?” she whispered back, trying to sound contemptuous.

The boy’s lovely smile broadened. “I said, what kind of freak are you? Are you a Jesus freak, like your sister used to be, or are you a vampire freak, like she is now?” His blue eyes were sparkling, his voice friendly and musical. “Or are you some new kind of Elshere freak we haven’t heard of yet?”

In the open collar of the boy’s shirt, Verna saw a gold saint medallion on a chain. Verna’s father said Catholics prayed to saints because they didn’t trust God. She wondered if there was a patron saint of torturers.

“What was your name again?” he said. “Venereal?”

The redhead giggled. Grinning, the less remarkable-looking boy said, “Venereal Elshere. She’s a sex freak.”

Verna’s arms and legs felt very heavy. She turned around.

Mr. Guarda passed out the textbooks. The covers were new and bright, but the spines were uniformly broken. Instead of sitting stable and strong, they slumped to one side.

The redhead raised her hand. “Yes, Calleigh?” Mr. Guarda said.

“Somebody cut out a hunk of my book, Mr. Guarda.” Her voice was cool as cream.

“I’m aware of that. We’ve decided not to teach that chapter in this school district.” Did Mr. Guarda’s eyes flicker toward Verna, or did she imagine it?

“Why not?”

“Would you like me to write you a pass to the principal’s office so Mr. Serhienko can explain it to you?”

“Why don’t we ask Verna Elshere to explain it to us?” Calleigh said.

The class made gleeful
oooooh
noises. Mr. Guarda sighed. “That’s enough, Calleigh.”