by Chloe Garner
“I’ll see you guys up at the register.”
Lizzie looked at her wrist.
“Angel wings?” she asked.
“Yup,” Trevor said, touching the red skin next to the brand new black lines, outlining the shape of the wings. “Lara loved these.”
“I never saw them,” Lizzie said.
“I bet you didn’t,” Trevor said. “She and Robbie didn’t think you’d understand.”
“They’re beautiful,” Lizzie said. “Why wouldn’t I understand?”
“That’s for Robbie to explain,” Trevor said, helping her up. “Go pay the man his money and let’s go get the rest of this over with.”
She ran her finger over the skin.
It was her skin.
Angry, red, and hot, but hers.
And there were marks there. Marks she couldn’t feel with her finger.
She took out a credit card and handed it to the man with the braid.
“I’ll bandage it up for you before you go, but I thought you’d want to see it,” he said, his voice quiet. “You knew her?”
“Robbie is my brother,” she said. He nodded.
“I’m sorry for your loss.”
“Thank you,” she answered. “But I’m thinking I never actually knew her.”
The man nodded.
“Sometimes I think I know my clients better than anyone else. Tattoos are truth, man.”
Trevor shook hands with him, and Lizzie took her card back, putting it away and then going back outside with Trevor.
“I can’t believe I just did that,” she said.
“I can,” Trevor said, wrapping his hand around hers. “I think that that’s a lot more of who you actually are than you think.”
“You’ve known me for like two minutes and you already think you know me better than I do?” she asked.
“When you got up this morning, if I told you that you were getting a tattoo today, what would you have said?”
“Not a chance,” she answered, and he nodded.
“And you know what I thought when I first saw you at Robbie and Lara’s house, sitting on the couch next to Dennis?”
“What’s that?”
“That you needed a tattoo of angel wings on your wrist,” he said.
“Bull,” she answered and he grinned, pulling her hand up to his face and bumping her fingers against his chin. The whiskers there were short and sharp, but his skin was warm.
“It’s the truth,” he said, nodding.
“Why would you think that?” she asked. “That makes no sense.”
“It’s what I thought,” he said. She shook her head.
“I can’t believe I did that.”
“But what do you think of it?” he asked, turning her wrist so that she could look at the thick gauze there.
“Kind of clunky,” she said and he smiled. She shook her head. “No, it’s beautiful. He’s an artist.”
“He is,” Trevor agreed. “I always liked that tattoo on Lara. It was the only one she had.”
It was with her forever, now.
Something to remember.
She would learn a lot this trip. Bring a lot back to the office.
A lot of stories.
She hoped she ended up with a lot of new information that they could use. Ideas that actually worked.
“All right,” she said. “Now you get to live up to your end.”
“Man of my word,” he answered with a wide smile. “Though, as you’ve noticed, the four-day scraggly look? It’s not easy to get rid of.”
“For one night, it’s gone,” she said. He shrugged and grinned.
“Just tonight,” he said. “Whatever you say.”
***
They pulled into the driveway and Lizzie was feeling smug, glancing over at the change in Trevor. He was an attractive man with strong features, when they weren’t obscured by that scraggly beard and clothes that didn’t fit. He wasn’t as skinny as he looked, in the giant jacket, and he had clever eyes when his hair wasn’t down across them.
Well, those he had even with the hair across his forehead.
She smiled and stopped the engine.
When she looked up, Robbie was storming across the yard.
“Where have you been?” he asked as Lizzie got out of the car.
“What?” she asked. “All of a sudden you care?”
“I told you to stay away from him,” Robbie said, beginning to pace. He tripped on a root and fell, scrambling along on hands and feet for a moment before he stood again and walked backwards away from her. “Shouldn’t be here.”
“You disappear all day long and never say a word to me,” Lizzie said. “Why do you think I should have to tell you where I am? Ever?”
“He’s dangerous,” Robbie said, pointing.
“Of all the people you spend time with, this is the one you’re worried about?” Lizzie asked. “Looks to me like he’s the least likely to get me arrested, from how all of you behaved.”
Robbie threw his arms up, and Lizzie looked over at Trevor, who was standing next to her.
“He says you’re dangerous,” she said.
“He isn’t wrong,” Trevor observed. She snorted.
“Not dressed like that you aren’t.”
He looked down at his shirt and grimaced. She grinned.
“I’m going to go get started on dinner.”
She hadn’t yet taken her first step toward the door when Robbie grabbed her wrist.
“What did you do?” he asked. She stopped for a second, considering her options. Trevor was watching her carefully with intense eyes.
“It’s for Lara,” she said. “Trevor told me she had one.”
Robbie ripped at the tape to get the gauze off of her wrist and she yelped, jerking away and doing it with more careful fingers. Robbie stood with his arm against hers and his head bent against her forehead, watching, completely unaware of how badly he was invading her space.
She got the gauze off and wrapped the tape around it, tossing it to Trevor. She’d need to redo it so that it didn’t bother her while she was sleeping, but that tape wasn’t going to go on again.
Robbie grabbed her wrist and looked at it up close.
Tipped his head up to look at Trevor.
“What did you do?” he asked.
“She did it,” Trevor said. Robbie jerked Lizzie’s arm up and away from her, shaking it at Trevor.
“What are you thinking? How could you do this without even asking?”
“Asking who?” Lizzie asked.
“It was her decision,” Trevor said casually, not looking at Lizzie.
“Like hell,” Robbie said. “She’s got no idea what she’s doing, and you know it.”
He’d continued shaking her arm at Trevor, neither of them looking at her at all, and she jerked her arm away from him, her temper spilling over.
“Enough,” she said. “Enough. You don’t get to tell me what to do, Robbie. I’m an adult and I make my own decisions.”
Both men fell silent for a moment as she steamed at him.
“You see?” Trevor ask. “You see how they react to her?”
“No,” she said, turning on Trevor now. “You don’t get to bring your imaginary world into this. Don’t play games. It’s not funny.”
“Not at all,” he said, unchastened. She wanted to hit him, just enough to let him know that she didn’t like him playing like this, unstabilizing Robbie and using her to do it, but instead she turned to look at Robbie again.
He swallowed.
“I don’t want you here,” he said, a plea. “Will you please go home?”
“What will you do if I go?” Lizzie asked.
“He’s going to fall into it,” Trevor said. “No question.”
“Shut up,” Robbie screamed, trying to get at Trevor through Lizzie. “You shut up. It’s all your fault.”
Lizzie grabbed Robbie around the chest and hauled him back around the huge standing growth of plants approaching the sidew
alk and onto the front porch, where there was a sort of buzzing quiet.
“Easy,” she said.
“Why did you do it?” he asked. He might have been crying, she couldn’t tell for sure.
“It was silly,” she said. “And I really did do it partially because he told me that it was the same one that Lara had. Robbie, do you see what a change she made in you? I will appreciate her for that for the rest of my life.”
He knelt, dropping his forehead onto his knees and holding her fingers against the top of his head.
“He’s going to do it to you,” he said.
“I had lunch with him,” Lizzie said. “Things are hardly that serious. Look, if you don’t want me to get involved with him, I won’t, but he’s your friend and I like him.”
Robbie looked up at her, pressing her fingers against his nose. He was definitely crying.
“I’m fighting him,” he said. Lizzie frowned.
“Why?”
Robbie shook his head.
“You wouldn’t understand.”
“This is about the things that you and he see, that I don’t?” she asked.
“He told you?” Robbie asked, a strangled noise of hope and despair mingled in one.
“I told her a little,” Trevor said. “She knows that I believe that what you see is real.”
Robbie shook his head.
“You shouldn’t be here.”
Lizzie looked over her shoulder.
“Look, maybe we just need to sit down and be calm for a little while.”
“Get out,” Robbie said, standing and growling at Trevor. “You aren’t welcome here.”
Trevor stood where he was for a long moment.
“You know that you can’t do that,” he said.
“I can tonight,” Robbie said.
“All right,” Trevor said. “We’ll be here tomorrow.”
Robbie sighed, caving in on himself, and went into the house without answering.
“What’s going on?” Lizzie asked. Trevor shook his head.
“It’s complicated. Relationship stuff. We’re all stuck together because we’re the same, but it doesn’t mean we always get along.”
She frowned.
“Are you Robbie’s friend?” she asked. He twisted his mouth to the side, eyebrows in tight against each other.
“I am,” he said. “But Robbie isn’t always going to see it that way. I should warn you that there’s a good chance that he’s going to blame me, personally, for Lara dying.”
“How could he possibly blame you?” Lizzie asked.
He shook his head, then dropped his face, looking at the ground for a moment before those sharp blue eyes popped back up to look at her through his eyebrows.
“Let’s just leave it that I can see his perspective. Okay?”
She shook her head.
“That’s a delusion,” she said. “You have to trust me on this. You couldn’t have caused what happened to her, and you couldn’t have prevented it. I asked a lot of questions at the hospital, and they said it was congenital. It wasn’t anyone’s fault.”
“Don’t pick at him over it, if he does say it,” Trevor said. “If he says it, he won’t have been the first. And I don’t blame him.”
Lizzie looked at the inside of her wrist, seeing the tattoo there in the context of her own life for the first time. It wasn’t a silly game, a dare, a thrill with a stranger. It was a mark that represented someone who had meant everything to her brother.
“Because of everything going on,” she said. “Okay.”
Trevor nodded.
“Thank you.” He shrugged. “I’ll see you in the morning.”
“You still owe me dinner,” she said, the fun coming out of it entirely. He grinned, the indefatigable impishness never more intense.
“That I do,” he said. “And I’m sure you’ll hold me to it.”
She nodded.
“I will.”
He winked, then jerked his chin at the house.
“Go make sure he’s okay. Tonight has been a lot.”
She nodded, and waved, and he held up a hand for a long moment, then shoved both fists in his pockets and started down the driveway.
She watched him just for a second, then went into the house.
Robbie was standing in the middle of the kitchen, just standing there. Too motionless to even look lost.
“You all right?” Lizzie asked, walking cautiously across the front room to come lean against the counter.
Robbie shook his head.
“You didn’t cry when Lara died,” she said.
“How do you know?” he asked.
“I was here so soon after,” she said. “And there was no sign you ever grieved at all.”
He shrugged.
“We knew,” he said.
“You knew what?” Lizzie asked, surprised. He shrugged.
“We knew one of us would die,” he said, the flat, factualness of it chilling. Lizzie wanted to ask how, but she knew he wouldn’t tell her.
“But this upsets you?” she asked, turning her wrist over. He came across the warped linoleum to put his fingers gingerly under her arm and ran his rough thumbs over the mark.
“It’s beautiful,” he said. “It’s everything about her, just…”
He dropped his head and put his forehead against her arm.
“Why does it upset you?” she asked. He shook his head, talking to his own elbows.
“You wouldn’t understand.”
“Trevor is trying to explain it to me.”
He looked up sharply.
“I know,” he said, pleading again. “I know. Can you just… not?”
She sucked on her bottom lip.
“No,” she said. “I can’t. You’ve told me our entire lives that I wouldn’t understand, and now he says he can explain it, and… Robbie, I have to know.”
“She was the angel,” he breathed.
“What does that mean?” Lizzie asked. Robbie looked at her with soft brown eyes, hair in them for a moment before he shook his head to make it fall somewhere else.
“She saved us all,” he said.
“She was only married to you, right?” Lizzie asked. He laughed helplessly, just one sound, and dropped his face back onto her arm.
“She only loved me, but she saved us all,” he said. “Now we’re fighting, but we don’t have anyone on our side.”
“Please,” Lizzie said. “If you don’t want Trevor to explain it all to me, will you try?”
He shook his head, and then he shook his head again, and then he stood.
“Lara could see it,” he said finally. “I couldn’t, but she could. I thought she would want to tell you, but she always threw out all the food and cleaned the whole house and put on makeup on her wrist, and we were just normal for you. She never wanted to tell you, but Trevor does. Don’t you see?”
She didn’t want to say it, didn’t want to put up a wall, but the question was so simple and so clear.
“Explain it to me,” she said. He shook his head.
“He’s the demon,” he said.
“He isn’t evil,” Lizzie said. “I don’t believe that.”
Robbie shook his head.
“No. Not evil. Not him.” His eyes got distant for a moment. “He’s the best demon any of them have ever known. I’ve only ever known him, but I know he’s good. He does his best…”
Lizzie tried not to look as lost as she felt. He was beginning to spin off into nonsense again.
“What happened, outside?” she asked. “When you told him that he couldn’t come in?”
“This is our house,” Robbie said. “Mine and Lara’s, but the rest of them, too. This is where we all come. I can’t… I shouldn’t just send them away. We need a place…”
He looked lost and confused and he turned to her.
“Do you remember,” he asked, “when we were little? The game?”
The growing pit in her stomach went ice cold.
“I do,�
�� she said.
“You could control them, even back then. I didn’t even know.”
“What didn’t you know?” Lizzie asked.
“What it meant,” he said. “And then I met Lara, and she could do it, too, and she knew, and she said I was safe, now, and I was. I was safe from the day I met her. They stopped messing with me, showing me terrible things just to watch. Well, sometimes, but I was safe.”
Lizzie swallowed.
“And I can do that?”
He shut down, physically throwing his hands down at the floor and turning away.
“No,” he said. “They killed her. They killed the angel. I don’t want you here.”
“Are you protecting me, Robbie?” Lizzie asked.
He leaned face-first against the refrigerator.
“I’m trying,” he said. “Lara did it, too.”
“If I can help you, I want to,” Lizzie said.
“No,” he said, standing. “No. I don’t want you to. I want you to go home. I don’t want you here.”
He walked away and closed the door to his room behind him.
Lizzie stood at the counter for a long time feeling lost.
***
She heard the door open and close several times the next morning, and she just lay in bed listening, thinking.
Her wrist had bothered her several times during the night, and she’d had intense dreams about angels and demons and invisible things, just ideas, untouchable and fragile like dry sand. She looked at the tattoo now, in the soft light that came in through the drapes as the sun came up, and she shook her head.
She hadn’t really looked at it, yesterday. Not really. She’d been so abuzz with the excitement of getting it that it was just amazing to her that she had, and it was amazing and pretty and… It was like she’d wanted it her whole life, and just hadn’t known it.
Today, though, she could pick out the way the feathers curved out and away from the wings, soft and strong at the same time, clean lines and complex at the same time, with such a strong shape where they joined at the center.
It wasn’t a lot taller than a quarter, and only a little bit wider, but she couldn’t imagine she’d never seen it before on Lara’s wrist. It would have captivated her, she thought.
There were voices, now, soft, quick, like they were trying to fight without waking her. She arched her back and stretched her arms, and then settled back onto the mattress for just another moment before she got up.
