by J L Aarne
Don was doing the only thing he knew to do so that he could feel like he was doing something. She got it, but he was limited in what he could do by law, convention and moral restraint. Her mother was just useless. A sweet lady, kind and loving who played the part of a strong woman in her daily life, but who was nonetheless weak in the face of real adversity.
Even with the horrible things Corey had been through, neither of them understood it, and how could Mercy explain it to them? They had forgotten what it was like to be them, to be stuck between childhood and adulthood. They didn’t understand the cruelty of that world anymore, how it made strong people weak and then ate them. How the most beautiful things about a person had to be stamped out, obliterated, twisted to fit into the whole. Outliers were rarely tolerated. In Corey’s world, in the world where Mercy still resided with less and less frequency, people sometimes fell down and didn’t get back up. It wasn’t cowardice, it was survival. In their world, the most beautiful people sometimes disappeared completely.
Corey had kept what was happening to him a secret from their parents because he knew. Pedantic platitudes and trite motivational sayings like “Hang in there,” like “You’re not alone,” like “One day it won’t matter,” like “Be the bigger person,” like “If you’re going through hell, keep going,” like “It gets better” solved nothing, but people sure loved to pass them around and make bumper stickers. It was a way of accepting the abhorrent behavior and pretending to understand while not understanding at all: that where they were sometimes felt like they were clinging to the edge of the world, that there was a steep drop-off and a hundred people dancing on their fingers for them to fall.
You grow up and you forget. Maybe. If you grow up.
How could she begin to explain that Corey probably hadn’t wanted to die? She knew because she had been there before once or twice herself: to where the edge of a razorblade seemed like an answer, where a bottle of pills looked like a chance to rest and the barrel of a gun wasn’t so bottomless after all. It wasn’t death that was so attractive; you just got tired of all the shit. Tired of fighting, tired of the taste of your own blood, of never not having bruises.
Still, leaving the sex video of himself and Aubrey up on his computer as his only suicide note hadn’t been one of Corey’s better ideas. It was a bit too ambiguous and more hurtful to their parents than helpful.
If Mercy and Ezra hadn’t arrived at the house when they had, Corey would have died. She didn’t know how many damn times she was going to have to hear that before he woke up. People around her all felt like they had to say something, do something, but the best thing they could do for her was shut up and leave her alone and they couldn’t seem to do that. Go tell it to my mother, she wanted to say, but she wasn’t cruel enough to actually say it. They would forget about Corey eventually and move on anyway. If he woke up or if he didn’t they would run out of ridiculous things to say, get bored and go away all on their own.
Mercy watched through the Venetian blinds as a man in brown coveralls mowed the lawn around the ugly therapy fountain on a riding lawnmower. The sound of the heart monitor beside Corey’s bed was so continuous and repetitive that she had stopped hearing it at all after the first day. She was still attuned to the sound of his breathing, which came with less regularity than the beep of the machines. She heard his breathing stop for a second, then it resumed.
She glanced away from the man on the lawnmower to look at Corey’s face. “You look like hell, baby brother,” she muttered.
Corey made a soft choking sound and Mercy tensed. He groaned and opened his eyes and she realized that frightening sound had been his laughter.
“I’m the same age as you,” Corey croaked. “Don’t call me that.”
“You’re awake,” Mercy said.
“Yeah, I guess,” Corey said. He swallowed and winced. “Hurts like a bitch. Must be alive.”
“You’re such a stupid asshole,” Mercy said. Then to her embarrassment, she began to cry.
She hadn’t cried in all the time she had stayed with him, not since that first night when they’d had to sedate her, but he was awake and he sounded just like himself and he was going to live, so she cried. Corey was mildly alarmed, but he put a hand on her bowed head, closed his eyes and escaped the awkward situation by falling asleep.
The doctor came in while she was still trying to get control of herself. “Miss Rollins, really, you should—”
“Hartwell,” Mercy said, dashing at her eyes as she stood up. “My name’s Hartwell, not Rollins. He woke up.”
“My apologies,” murmured the doctor. Dr. Phillips, she thought. He didn’t seem to have heard the second part of what she had said at all. He went around Corey’s bed to check his vitals.
“I said, he woke up,” she repeated.
“Yes, I heard you,” Dr. Phillips said. “When was this?”
“Like two minutes ago. He talked to me, then he fell asleep again.”
“Did you understand what he said?”
“Yeah. He’s fine. He’s fine,” she repeated with defiant emphasis.
The doctor nodded. He picked up the chart and flipped to the second page. The news that his patient would live didn’t surprise him any more than news that his patient was going to die would have.
“Excuse me,” Mercy muttered, and went out into the hallway to call Don.
Don was at work and he did his best not to cry in her ear while he promised to meet her at the hospital as soon as he could. Mercy was returning her cell phone to her pocket when it buzzed in her hand. A text message. She had been getting a lot of them the last few days. Some were condolences and well-wishes from friends and family, but the majority of them were not. Anonymous texts, filled with the poisonous vitriol that one expected from faceless, nameless cowards. Some didn’t even care if she knew who they were. She almost didn’t read it. Corey had woken up, he was okay, he was going to live; it was a good day. No reason to sour her mood.
She looked through the small window in the door of Corey’s room and could see the right side of his body in the bed under the blanket. His hand was holding onto the rail along the side and she remembered his fingers when Ezra had laid him down, how they had been purple. Corey looked small in that bed, the same way he looked small whenever he was still for long, and he was too pale, the dark coffee stains around his eyes faintly blue, the horrible mark on his neck from the rope that had nearly killed him red like a scream.
For some reason, she thought of the tree house in the backyard at home. Don had built it for them when they were five or six years old, and after Corey met Jesse and Jesse started visiting their house every day, Jesse talked Corey into putting up a sign on the door: No Grls Alowd. It had lasted all of five minutes. Corey wouldn’t play if Mercy couldn’t play too, and no amount of whining about her girl cooties would sway him.
She tried to remember the last time they had sat together in the old tree house and couldn’t. They could still see it from the windows in the kitchen at the back of the house. The paint had once been white, leftover from some project of Don’s, but it had almost completely peeled away to reveal the grey, rotting wood beneath.
Dr. Phillips poked his head out the door and blinked at her owlishly behind his thick glasses. “Ah, he’s awake again and asking for you, Miss Hartwell.”
“I’ll be right there,” Mercy said.
“You can visit with him for a few minutes, but I have to insist that he gets his rest.”
“All right.”
The doctor looked like he was about to say something more, but he just cleared his throat, pushed his glasses up on his nose, nodded and left her alone. She listened to the squeak of his shoes on the floor as he disappeared down the hallway, then looked at her phone and opened the latest message.
Is he dead yet??? LOL!!!
Mercy closed her eyes and took a deep breath, the rage that had been on a slow, deep simmer for days was abruptly replaced by a sheet of ice cold resolve.
In
the back of her mind, repeating like a record with a scratch in it, a whining child’s voice asked, Are we there yet? Are we there yet? Are we there yet?
That question… so impatient and excited.
Is he dead yet??? LOL!!!
Is he dead yet???
LOL!!!
She didn’t recognize the number, but it didn’t matter. There were a lot of them just like it clogging up her inbox.
She shoved the phone into her pocket and returned to Corey’s room. His eyes were closed, but they opened when she sat down beside him. He smiled a little. It looked strained and painful.
“Can’t even kill myself. What a loser, right?” he said, his voice ragged.
“I guess it’s not as easy as you think,” Mercy said.
He coughed out a laugh. “Dad?”
“I called him. He’ll be here when he can get away from work.”
“Mom?”
Mercy shrugged. “Later.”
He nodded. Audra wasn’t good in a crisis; they all knew it.
“What happened?” he asked.
“You hung yourself. Your neck didn’t break though, so… You don’t remember?”
“Sure. I mean after that.”
“We found you—me and Ezra—and we… we cut you down. He called 911. I… I… can’t believe you could be so selfish!” She wasn’t expecting the outburst, so she was as surprised as Corey was when she started slapping him, but it still took her a minute to make herself stop.
Corey cringed away from her on the bed as much as he was able and held his hands up, waiting for it to be over. When she was done, he watched her warily for a moment before he lowered them. “Feel better?”
“Fuck no.”
He nodded. Perfectly understandable.
“This wasn’t supposed to happen,” he said.
She didn’t dignify that idiotic statement with a response.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“Shut up.”
“I mean it. I’m—”
“Shut up!”
He did for a few minutes, then he said, “You remember that list we made when we were kids?”
She dragged a hand through her dirty hair and looked at him, waiting for the punch line.
“You know, we were what? Eight? Nine? The World Would Be a Better Place Without… whoever. I don’t remember anymore. I think your first grade teacher was on it—”
“Mrs. Elves.”
Mrs. Elves had been old school, from the days when teachers could still hand out beatings for being bad. In the first grade, Mercy had a hard time keeping up with assignments and Mrs. Elves thought the best way to encourage her was to shame her before her classmates. It had been her first experience with bullying. Mrs. Elves had retired the next year.
“Yeah. And I think I put that guy with the big wart on his nose that used to pick up the garbage—”
“Gavin Lanai.”
“Why do you even know that?”
She shrugged.
“Whatever. Yeah, him. He scared the crap out of me.”
“I remember.” She smiled faintly in spite of herself. “We thought about it really hard, like it would matter. Like it was important.”
“It was just kids’ stuff,” he said. “I just… This all just made me think about it. I don’t know why. Weird.”
“Weird,” Mercy agreed. She stood and leaned over to kiss his forehead. “Go back to sleep, huh? Not too deep, though. Just… you know, rest.”
“You’re leaving?”
She laughed a little and gestured down at herself. “I’m gross right now. I’ve been here for three days. I need a shower and some real food.”
He frowned at her. “Three days?”
“Three days,” she confirmed. “Go to sleep. I’ll be back. Don will be here soon anyway.”
“Is he really pissed?” Corey asked. He fidgeted with his blanket a little. “He saw the… you know. Right?”
“Yeah, he’s pissed, but he’s not pissed at you. Mostly just really freaked out. Can you blame him?”
“No.”
She stood with her hand on the door for a little while. “It’s going to be okay.”
“Yeah,” Corey said.
He looked like he was about to cry, so Mercy left so he could do it in peace. She took the stairs down to the ground floor of the hospital and took her phone out of her pocket as she was leaving the building.
Is he dead yet??? LOL!!!
Ezra’s mother, Lilia answered on the fourth ring and went to get him. When he picked up the phone, he sounded hoarse, like he had been sleeping or shouting at someone or smoking too much.
“He’s awake,” she said.
“You talked to him?”
“Yeah. He’s fine, but Ezra?”
“What do you need?”
“I need your help.”
Ezra
A Bird in the Hand
It was another Monday morning. Ezra rolled out of bed and shuffled down the hall to the bathroom. He pissed into the blue tinted water in the bowl then climbed half asleep into the shower. He could hear music outside through the little ventilation window on the wall coming from Isaac’s car. He showered quickly and slung a towel around his waist to walk back down the short hallway to his room.
His mom’s door was open. She had come home early in the morning from the bar where she worked, almost three o’clock. He had heard her cursing under her breath, her light footsteps on the floor and the creaking hinges of his bedroom door when she peeked in to see if he was home. She was laying on top of the covers in sweats and an old T-shirt of their dad’s, dead to the world.
Good. He closed the door. She needed her rest.
He got dressed, then he got his gun down from the top shelf of his closet, checked it was loaded, put the safety on and tucked it under his belt. He put a light jacket on to hide it and put a box of shells and the spare clip in his backpack. The books he dumped out on the bed. He tossed two flashlights, a box of batteries, three bottles of water and a hunting knife into the bag, too. The knitted winter mask he stuffed in his jacket pocket with a pair of thin leather gloves, then he paused in the kitchen thoughtfully. In the fridge there was a sack lunch for him: turkey sandwich on rye and a Coke. He put that in the bag and grabbed a pack of Pop-Tarts out of the pantry.
Isaac was sitting on the hood of his car in the driveway when Ezra left the trailer. There was a cigarette dangling from the right corner of his mouth and he held something cupped in his hands. He didn’t look up until his brother leaned against the car beside him and took his cigarette.
“What’ve you got there?” Ezra asked. He put the cigarette in his own mouth, smoked and offered it back to him.
Isaac shook his head for him to keep it. “Bird,” he said. “Hit the big window in the kitchen. You’re supposed to hold them. Keeps them from going into shock.”
“That true?” Ezra asked.
Isaac shrugged. “Its heart’s beating about a million miles a minute,” he said. “I can feel it.”
Ezra tilted his head to look. The bird was some kind of grey and black finch, tiny, but alive and blinking up at them with oil drop eyes. It didn’t even look hurt.
He opened the Pop-Tarts and offered one to his brother. Isaac opened his mouth and clamped it in his teeth, then slid off the car and gently set the bird down on the hood. At first it didn’t seem to want to stand on its own, its little clawed feet curled beneath it, but Isaac poked it and it hopped once, looked around at them then flew away. It didn’t go far, only to the tree on the other side of the trailer, but it wasn’t in shock.
Looking pleased with himself, Isaac sat back on the car and took a bite of Pop-Tart. “He’ll be fine now.”
Ezra nodded. “You ready for this?” he asked him.
Isaac was quiet for a minute and ate his Pop-Tart. It was blueberry flavored. He shrugged again. “Sure.”
“It’s kind of a big deal,” Ezra said. “You better be sure.”
“I know,” Isaac sa
id. “I am.” His own backpack was on the hood of the car beside him and he glanced at it, then away.
Ezra flicked the burned down filter of their shared cigarette away and they watched the cars going by on the road. They lived in a trailer on the south side of the railroad tracks. Literally, the other side of the tracks. Lowtown. Poor Town in a town that was largely poor. A train was approaching now, warning lights flashing, candy cane striped barriers lowering, and the cars started to back up on the road that ran beside their place.
There was a little kid, maybe two or three years old in the back seat of the nearest car with his face mashed up against the window, peering out at them. Ezra and Isaac watched him back like he was something weird in a cage at the zoo. The little boy stuck his tongue out at them, pressed it against the inside of the window.
“So, you got the stuff?” Ezra asked.
“Yeah,” Isaac said, then listed it all for him: “Gun, extra clip, extra bullets, mask, gloves, three bike locks, knife, black spray paint, two bottles of water, and Mom made us lunch, so that, too.”
Ezra gave him a silent thumbs-up and one of Isaac’s rare smiles flicked in and quickly out of existence.
Isaac was sixteen and shy. He looked a lot like his older brother and they shared many personality traits in common, but he liked animals better than people and sometimes said things that had people looking at him funny. He liked Mercy a lot, he could relax around her like he did their mom—and their dad on the rare occasions he made the trip from California to visit—but Ezra was pretty sure Isaac didn’t like girls. It wasn’t a problem for him yet, but it would be, or it would have been if Isaac was less of an introvert. If he was lucky, his sexuality—or lack of one—might go completely unnoticed through high school.
People in small towns liked to speculate though. There wasn’t a lot to do, so they liked to talk about people which, when they didn’t have many facts to go on, led to stories and rumors. To their mother having the reputation of a streetwalker because they lived in a doublewide trailer on the wrong side of the tracks, but they weren’t dirty and they had nice enough clothes. Ezra drove a truck that was only a few years old and Isaac’s car was almost brand-new and neither boy had a job. People were nosey. They noticed such things and they wondered where the money came from, which led to speculation, which led to rumors about Lilia, the pretty dark-eyed bartender at Granger’s bar, fucking for money on the side.
