She thumped about in the kitchen while I lay there, eyes still closed. Then she was carrying a tray with two bowls of soup and some bread. “You’ll have to sit up. Here. There’s no point hassling with a napkin, I’m going to have to wash the sheets anyhow—I was more worried about getting your cuts clean than the rest of you, so there’s probably still a bunch of mud and leaves in the bed. You should see a doctor.” I said nothing. “Well, it’s your body. Here. Just say something if you think you’re going to throw up, okay?”
Campbell’s split pea soup. I only managed a few spoonfuls, then I slept.
The trailer lights were off, and firelight danced on the wall opposite the window. A stink. Burning plastic. I sat up with an effort, swang my legs slowly over the side of the bed, and panted against the pain. The wrapping on my knee was a big ball of bandage and tape. I tried to pick at the tape, but I was too weak and my right wrist and knuckles hurt. I flexed them. Hitting bone with bone. Stupid.
The door opened and Tammy and more of that stink wafted in with the breeze. She looked different: taller, denser, more substantial. “Don’t like my bandaging?”
“Too tight.”
“Here, lie back, I’ll do it.”
No, I thought, I was the one who was supposed to cope, the one people asked for help. But my eyes were stinging and I found myself lying down while she loosened the bandage.
“Jesus. It’s black.”
I managed to lift my head: puffy, puce mottled with blue-black. I flexed it, very slightly, and hissed.
“Jesus, don’t do that.”
I panted again for a minute, then did it again, just to be sure. “S’okay.” The kneecap wasn’t detached.
“I still think you should get it looked at, not that you ever listen to me.” She stood up. “More painkillers will help. It’s been a few hours.” She brought me Vicodin and ibuprofen, which I swallowed obediently. “So. How did you do it—your leg?”
“I don’t know.”
“While running around with the clothes-stealing ghost?”
“Don’t. Please.”
“Jesus, just asking.”
She went into the bathroom for a while, then fussed with something in the kitchen. The fire outside still burned, and I watched the changing light on the ceiling while the Vicodin eased molecule by molecule into my bloodstream.
“Look,” Tammy said awkwardly, suddenly by my side again. “You know what you said to me a few days ago, about New York? About how I could talk about it if I wanted? Well, you could. If you wanted. I mean, you listened to me.”
“This is different.”
“So?”
She said it just the way Dornan had said, That’s how it works.
“What?” she said.
“I used to think I knew how the world works.” I gestured vaguely between us. I could feel the Vicodin rising like a tide.
“Does that mean you’re going to talk about it?”
Her face seemed a long way off. “Was it the tape you were burning?”
She flushed and nodded. “Did you—I watched it again, to be sure. It made me feel… I hate him.”
“He had a lot of tapes. He was a monster, I think.” My thoughts were bumping together like moored boats.
“If he was here, I’d shoot him like a dog.” Her voice was low and dark and vicious.
“I killed him.” It just slid out.
She stilled. Her face went white, then slowly pink again. “You… killed him?”
I nodded.
“You mean you really… You killed him? Like, he’s dead?”
“I think so.” Slippery words, like eels.
“You’re not sure?” She was looking at me, fascinated, the way you’d look at a just-born freak: should you strangle it before it draws its first breath, or raise it for the geek show. “Did he—Did it hurt?”
“Yes.”
She licked her lips. “You killed him for me.”
“No.”
“No?”
“No.”
She stood up, “I just have to—” and left the trailer abruptly. Images sloshed back and forth in my rocking brain: breaking teeth, sirens, the creak of his shoulder joint, blood-slicked hands…
The trailer door banged open. Tammy, nodding. Maybe I’d dozed off again. “So that’s why you asked if I’d ever told him anything about you,” she said. “Because of the police.”
The fire outside set light dancing around her head, like one of those lurid saint’s pictures. “I would have phoned the police from the airport. I would. But they were already there at—”
“The police were at the airport?”
“—Karp’s apartment and why did I care anyway, that’s something else that was different. I don’t—”
“Wait. I’m lost. What was different?”
“—understand why I cared about whether or not he died. I never did before, they try to hurt me and I hurt them first and no second thoughts, like in Norway, they were going to hurt Julia, and I just do it, I don’t feel bad afterwards, I don’t feel like this—”
“What? Stop. Stop. You went to Norway?”
“—do you know how blood sounds when it drips on ice, it’s like. Nothing you. Ever…” And my brain lurched, turned turtle, and sank.
THREE
imago
imago (from imāgo, L. for representation, natural shape)
1. in Jungian psychoanalysis, the subjective image of someone else (usually a parent) which a person has subconsciously formed and which continues to influence her attitudes and behavior
2. in entomology, the adult or perfect form… metamorphosis is complicated by the fact that the rigid cuticle covering the body is very restrictive…
CHAPTER NINE
Fever is a fairground, full of garish colors and grotesque rides and the sense that the fun will turn to terror any moment. I whirled brightly from one amusement to another. Julia, sitting on my lap, smiling at me while she nodded and talked on the phone. Diving into a glacier lake as a man lifted a rifle to his shoulder. Tammy, feeling my forehead and shouting at me. The sickening creak of Karp’s shoulder joint. Steel at my throat. Julia lying in a pool of blood on an Oslo street. Tammy saying, “Aud? Aud? Can you hear me? You have to take these.” Julia lying in a white-tiled room on a white hospital bed hooked up to white machines. Her mother sitting there, cradling her hand, cradling her with love. My mother sitting by my bed, telling me the story of how trolls always win. A terrible thumping and grinding in my head. Swallowing shiny beetles, purple and green. Back at the glacier again, choking as the lake closed over my head, except somehow I was in a bed at the same time and some woman was trying to drown me in a glass of water. Crawling: crawling on grass, on leaves, on a hard road, underwater, crawling away. Trying to hide. But bright light followed me everywhere, into every corner, under every bed, hunting, until it pinned me down and I opened my eyes. Daylight.
“Open,” Tammy said, as though I were a baby, and pushed something between my lips. I struggled weakly. Her grip on the back of my neck tightened. “Nice pills. Make you feel better. Come on, open up, just one.” I let her get it between my lips, then spat it onto the bed. She sighed wearily. “Your mother must have had fun when you were sick.”
The only time I remembered my mother being with me when I was ill was when I was seven or eight. I had tonsillitis. She told me the story about trolls; the only story, ever.
She picked up the pill. It was purple and green.
“What are you feeding me?” It sounded querulous.
“Aud?”
“Yes,” I said, cross. “What’s the pill?”
She sat on the bed, studied me a moment, then pulled a pill bottle from her jeans pocket. “You’ve been out of your mind with fever. I found these with your other first aid stuff.” She handed them to me. “They seem to work. Your fever’s down, anyway.”