“Jesus Christ, Kay.” She pushed a handful of greasy blond off her forehead. The ruddy bulbs of her cheeks gleamed brightly, filling with embarrassment. “Because I’ve loved you too long. We do anything for the people we love. That’s what I’ve learned from you.”
She woke the next morning in the large house of the Volunteers of America of Greater Ohio sicker than she’d ever been in her life. Vomiting and diarrhea like her insides were unspooling out of her. Her bones and muscles ached so maddeningly that she wanted to scratch her skin open and rip the whole infrastructure out. She itched everywhere. Her vagina felt like an open sore and she wanted to burn it shut. She thrashed in the sheets. She thought she could feel the baby eating her from the inside and dreamt of cutting it out of her stomach. She wanted to stab the nurse when she came by with water, and she puked it all over the floor instead of the toilet just to be spiteful.
And yet.
The morning after that, in the midst of a host of pains so unfathomable she thought they might drive her to permanent madness, she got out of bed and went to the window. The sun was rising. Alum Creek to the east, and the green expanse of the Franklin Park Conservatory to the south. There was a song playing in her head. From Ben Harrington’s second album. This pretty, sad girl, lost for so long even the devil had gone and forgotten her name. She watched the clouds pass over the sun and spears of light pierce through their gossamer veil. The song played and played in her head until she went to the toilet to be sick again.
Bill could hear only the ticking clock in the kitchen and the sound of his own breath.
“You don’t have to be alone with this,” he said, putting his arm around her. “Whatever it is. I can help you.” As he pulled her into his embrace, he wasn’t sure if the pulse was his or hers or the baby’s.
“You don’t understand,” she said again. “I’ve done awful things to people I cared about, people who were my friends, who I was supposed to love. I look back sometimes, and I can’t believe the person I was. Who I am.”
Kaylyn shimmered before his eyes, and there was something always out of his reach, something more to her than the mourning Ohio beauty, more than an unexpected sexual audacity discovered in her grandma’s house in Dover, more than the girl he’d tried to drink away in a dozen countries on a thousand nights. He’d go to the underworld, he’d stand on the bitter rock, he’d eat the sticky bodies of the vilest subterranean insects, and still he wouldn’t have her. Hades abducted Persephone and made her queen, but the motherfucker was the enemy of all life, all gods, all men. How to pull apart a story like hers? He felt in her things he’d never seen, processes of cunning none of them had ever understood, and the way she looked at him, her eyes now black pits with dark tongues lapping in the depths, he wondered if he should fear her. That was her power. That he’d never really know. And even when the waters rose at the end of civilization, he still wouldn’t.
“You need to go now,” she said.
Panic feasted as she led him back through her house. At her front door, he clutched the meat of her bicep. He pulled her into him once more, gripped the bones in her back and felt all of this like he was being buried alive.
She kept her hand on the doorknob. He scrolled through their ancient conversations, searching for an explanation and got nowhere except the memory of her clutching a towel to her skinny, small-breasted body when she emerged from the summer water of Jericho Lake. He couldn’t bring himself to believe all this longing he’d carried was just a well-stretched scam by a cruel, ignorant pill junkie.
“I’m sorry.” He let go of her, sucked in a needed breath.
She smirked, wiped tears from her eyes. “What an un-Ashcraftian way to depart.”
“Maybe a good-bye kiss? Or a good-bye blow job?”
She laughed and wiped a few tears away as she popped the door open, the lamplight spilling over the concrete steps.
“That’s more like it.” She kissed him somewhere on the fringe between mouth and cheek.
She closed the door behind him, and Bill hurried into the night. The whole world felt like a sleight of hand. Their lives: all part of some larger parlor trick, an expert misdirection, and here they were, reeling, grasping. He needed the comfort of the liquor store again and aimed in that direction.
He’d gone only five blocks before he understood how exhausted he was, how strung out and ready to collapse onto the crummy red brick. As he neared the square, he heard a low rumble in the distance. The rumble grew until the sound familiarized: helicopter blades thudding dully at the air as they kept their cargo aloft. The red lights of the chopper cruised up from the south. He stopped in the middle of the street and watched it. It was too low, nearly skimming the tops of New Canaan’s tallest three-story brick edifices, tilting back and forth with uncertain piloting. The nose dipped, as if for a moment it would dive kamikaze straight into the guts of this rank neighborhood, and then it achieved more lift, adding clearance. This close, the blades positively thundered. It passed overhead, weaving chaotically, and Bill got a look at its black belly, tinted blood red by anti-collision lights looking like wet, blinking eyes. Pointed due north, it sped toward its destination, as if drunk and desperate, as if fleeing. Like the angel, the chopper vanished into the same inter-dimensional chute of ashes and blue light.
He heard sirens in the distance, and not just one vehicle. It sounded like a response to a three-alarm fire, and he remembered they would still be looking for him. If they found him, they would lift up his shirt and see the flesh outline of the package and know what he’d done—whatever that was. He did the only thing he could think of, what all children eventually revert to. He cut over to the Dunkin’ Donuts and dialed collect the only adult he could trust. He said, “Hi. It’s Bill. I could use some help.”
Then he sat down on the curb and let darkness close around him.
When he came to, strong hands were hauling him up, guiding him into the backseat of a car. “If you’re gonna be sick it’s gotta be back here.”
He fell into the cushions of the backseat. A car that still had that old man, Barcalounger scent: fake leather and stale, sneaked cigarettes. Through the slits of his eyelids, he watched Marty Brinklan walk around the front and get in the driver’s seat. He looked almost the same, a big unkempt cap of stiff white hair that never receded and the mustache, now more handlebar than walrus. Bill was too far gone to note if he looked any older, any paunchier, any grimmer, but these all seemed reasonable. He still had a busted boxer’s nose, as crooked and malformed as a knot in a tree. He’d broken it four times, most recently when he and Rick were kids and an angry woman beamed him with a flowerpot to the face during a domestic disturbance call. Rick’s mom had to wear earplugs for the snoring. Bill tried to apologize to Marty, but he wasn’t sure of the words he was saying.
“I get it. It was either me or a night sleeping it off in county.” Marty’s baritone had a sandpaper rasp. Bill tried saying something else but an unseen palm held the lids of his eyes. He felt the centrifugal pull of each turn, the rumble of the road. It vibrated inside his teeth.
“Said your parents are gone?” Marty asked him.
Bill wasn’t sure how he responded.
“I’ll take you to the house. You can pass out there. I gotta go back out, though. We got a call. Nasty business out on Stillwater Road.” He sniffed allergies into the back of his throat. From childhood, Bill knew what would come next. Marty cracked the window and sent a loogie shooting off the tip of his tongue. Through the window he could only see dark veins of purple swimming by, and in that purple a mask with bottomless eyeholes that watched him as they drove.