The Mortal Sleep (Hollow Folk Book 4)

by Gregory Ashe

  I cleaned up the gravy. I could see Emmett again, standing at the window in my memory, the golden light ringing him with a corona. I shook it off and went to the kitchen. I retrieved the chicken—breaded and fried and cooked through in the oven. I could see him backlit by the ring of yellow light. I ate more than my share. I ate more than just about anybody’s share. I could see him. In that damn photograph, I could still see him with the light picking out the texture of his hair. On the counter, I found the Country Time envelope, and I emptied it into a pitcher. Reddish-brown dust sifted up, staining my fingers, and when I breathed, it was bitter all the way down into my lungs. I could see him with his face in her neck. With his face buried in her fucking neck. I added an extra cup of sugar; Sara didn’t need to know about that. It would only hurt her diet. And, as she predicted, I drank most of the pitcher.

  I could still see him. I could see his hand sliding under the lace of her bra. I hadn’t lied to Sara. That was a poisonous thought, and I tried to push it away. I tore into another drumstick, the skin crackling under my teeth, the hot fat and juices of the meat spritzing the inside of my mouth, and I chewed, and I took another bite. I hadn’t lied to her. Not exactly. That was really important. It wasn’t a lie. I wasn’t lying. I hadn’t lied. I wouldn’t do that to Sara, not after everything she’d done for me. I wouldn’t sneak out of the house. I wouldn’t. I absolutely wouldn’t. Not while she was gone; that was what I’d promised. I wouldn’t sneak out while she was gone. So I wouldn’t. I wouldn’t do it even though at that exact moment, Emmett Bradley was on the other side of town probably raising a hickey the size of Vermont on some new skank’s neck.

  It was a bullshit technicality. It was a sophistry. It was a lie; my throat was still bitter no matter how much fried chicken I ate, and the raspberry lemonade was too sweet, and I dumped the rest of the pitcher down the sink. A window looked out above the sink; beyond, Sara’s trimmed lawn ran for twenty feet before it ended at the wire fence. The wind was strong tonight. It was huge—that was a better term, because it wasn’t just about strength. Not out here. Out here, in Wyoming, wind was more about space, about the thousands and thousands of miles of high plains and buffalo grass and Junegrass and sage. Out in that emptiness, where the wind became bigger than anything I could imagine, the War Chief was hiding, and the Lady was working, and their army was coming together, and—

  Something surged out of the darkness. I jumped back; the pitcher, still in my hand, cracked against the sink. Glass shattered. It didn’t matter; I kept moving back, bringing up the pitcher’s broken handle and the jagged rim of glass still attached. I could take somebody’s throat with it. I could get an artery.

  And then, sweat needling my back, I stopped and let out a sigh. The tumbleweed was about the size of Sara’s Focus, and it slammed into the wire fence again, and the wires bulged in toward the house. But the fence held. And that enormous tumbleweed rolled back and then launched forward again. A tumbleweed. Sweat made my underarms gritty. I dropped the broken pitcher handle in the trash and began scooping glass out of the sink. A goddamn tumbleweed. I focused on that, and by the time I’d finished cleaning, I’d almost convinced myself I wasn’t lying to Sara. Not really.

  Sara had plugged in the phone again. Kaden answered on the first ring.

  “I need to do something tonight.”

  “Oh, cool. Cool, man. I’m so glad you called me. I was worried about you. And I’ve really been thinking that we don’t hang out enough, just the two of us, we don’t—”

  “Run out to Walmart. Or wherever. I don’t know. And buy one of those recorders. The kind that can play a microcassette. Do you know what I’m talking about?”

  “Like a little tape?”

  “Yeah. Then park on the state highway at midnight. Turn off your lights before you get close. In fact, you might want to kill the engine and coast the last half mile.”

  “Uh. Yeah. I want to. That’d be fun. But it’s, like, a school night. And I don’t know if Austin wants me—”

  “Good. I’m glad you brought that up. You absolutely are not going to tell Austin about this.”

  “Sure, sure. That sounds great. It’s just that, well, he was really clear about this. Really, really clear. Like, he ripped an orange in half.”

  “About what? Wait. What? An orange?”

  “About uh. About nothing.”

  “What did he say?”

  “I think I got confused. What were we talking about?”

  An orange? “So you’re coming over at midnight.”

  “The thing is, though, it’s really dark, and if I coast without my lights on, somebody might run into me, and it’s a good plan, Vie, like, a really good plan, and I’m so glad you called me—”

  “Kaden.”

  On the other end of the call, a woman’s voice hummed, and Kaden said, “Yeah, yeah, Mom. God, I know. Just let me talk on the phone, all right? Yes. Yes. Oh my God, yes, kids still talk on the phone. God, Mom. It’s Vie. He doesn’t have a phone, all right. Yes, he has a phone, but I mean, he doesn’t have a phone with texting and—God, I said I’d do it already.” Then Kaden’s breath chuffed across the mike, and he said, “My mom says hi.”

  “Midnight.”

  “I can’t—”

  “Don’t tell Austin.”

  I hung up.

  The rest of the night passed slowly. I turned off the lights downstairs and went to my room. I tried to read, but I’d never really been much of a reader, and I didn’t want to watch TV. When I heard Sara’s car in the drive, I turned off my light. She came into the house slowly. She came up the stairs slowly. I closed my eyes, and when the door creaked open, I smelled the remainder of her perfume under the hot oil smell from Bighorn Burger’s fryer.

  She was breathing funny. Heavy breaths. Irregular. A heart attack? Had the stairs finally done it? But she was still breathing, and I kept waiting for her to fall, for her to moan, for her to say my name or something like, “Oh God, my heart.” Nothing. Just that harsh, irregular breathing. And then she sniffled, and I realized she was crying.

  Never in my whole life, not that I can remember anyway, was someone so careful about closing a door quietly. I thought about that after she left, with darkness carpeting my eyes, as the digital minutes on the clock formed and reformed until it was midnight. Then I kicked off the quilt, dragged on my sneakers, and grabbed my backpack with the stolen pages and the microcassette. I left through the window. I climbed down the side of the house on the same trellis that Emmett used. Halfway down, the wind just about knocked me loose. That giant tumbleweed creaked and scratched as it pushed at the fence. The black cup of the sky didn’t have a single star.

  On the highway, Kaden’s yellow Camaro sat a hundred yards down from Sara’s house, tucked off onto the shoulder. Even from a distance, I could see the paint blistered from the heat of Becca’s burning car. I guess he really was worried about someone crashing into him, even though this particular road didn’t get much traffic. I jogged. The air smelled fresh: wet sage and gravel and the fabric softener Sara used on my shirts. I wasn’t excited. I wasn’t. I had to keep a cool head about this. I had to think clearly. A hundred percent clearly. No emotions, not tonight. I had to be perfectly, completely, totally rational about Emmett-fucking-Bradley sucking on that bitch’s neck.

  When I popped open the Camaro’s door, the dome light sprang on, a vibrant LED white, and I slid onto the seat. Leather. Nice, new, still had the smell. And something else. Cedar. Maybe even something like tobacco—not smoke, but tobacco leaves crushed in the palm of the hand. I glanced at Kaden, and his eyes had white rims and he was trying to shrink into a ratty cardigan that had a bumper sticker pasted on one sleeve: Free Love; Ask Me How.

  Kaden was already shaking his head when I figured it out.

  “Hi, babe,” Austin said from the back seat. He was just a shadow with the dome light glaring in my eyes. A big shadow. A huge shadow, with his legs spread wide, his hands on his kn
ees, his jaw ready to take a punch. “Are we in a fight?”

  YOU ARE A FUCKING RAT.”

  Kaden squirmed deeper into his cardigan. He had nice shoulders; tonight, they were so high they buried his ears. “I had to tell him, all right? I—”

  “Shut your mouth or I’m going to shove that bumper sticker down your throat. Free fucking love. Hipster son of a bitch.” I turned to Austin. “Hi.”

  He cocked his head. I couldn’t see anything, not his eyes, not his mouth, nothing but those hands on his knees, the fingers spread, each digit dimpling the denim. I slapped at the dome light, and it took two tries before I decided to shut the car door, and then the only illumination came from the red flush of the dash.

  “This isn’t a big deal.”

  “Good.”

  “I’ve got something I need to take care of.”

  He gestured with an open hand: Go right ahead.

  “And I asked Kaden to do this one thing without bothering you.”

  “I wasn’t bothering him. I just—this is a big deal, Vie. Oh, and I got that microcassette player you wanted—”

  “It’s not a big deal.” I snagged the player and shoved it in my bag. “And I fucking told you what I’d do if you didn’t keep your mouth shut.”

  Austin’s hand closed over mine. “So?”

  “What?”

  “Are we in a fight?”

  “That’s up to me?”

  “Feels like just about everything’s up to you these days.”

  I swallowed. The red glow of the dash painted everything in the car at an angle, and I had to close my eyes for a moment. Just a moment. Because what he’d said, the way he’d said it, made me dizzy.

  Then the table saw whirred to life, bright and white as the moon in the spotlight at the back of my head. And I could breathe again.

  “It’s nothing,” I told Austin.

  “Good. This’ll be a fun drive then.”

  But it wasn’t. I told them where to go, and Kaden drove too fast. Austin, taking up almost the entire back seat, was too quiet. I was too damn stupid to figure out why I had ever thought I could trust Kaden, and I spent the drive thinking of inventive ways to hurt the hipster. Smashing his fingers in the Camaro’s door would be pretty satisfying; I’d like to see him roll a joint when I was finished.

  Before long, Vehpese shrank behind us, a grimy, dishwater bubble of light at the base of the Bighorns. Ahead, the world unfurled like a great black canvas. Roadside thistles with heavy purple crowns flickered in the Camaro’s lights, and a cat’s paw of wind played with the Camaro, hitting hard enough that the car drifted on the asphalt, and the double yellow disappeared under its wheels. When that cat’s paw hit us, it was almost the same sound as the thrum of the tires, and the two noises hummed in my head. Like the whine of a drill. Or the thrum of gears. Or the cry of a saw—

  The Camaro thumped onto the gravel shoulder, and I touched Kaden’s arm, stopping him before he could turn down the drive. Emmett’s house stood at the edge of a sea of buffalo grass and sage and dirt bleached to gray by the moonlight. It was huge; the architect had taken the building blocks of a log cabin and blown them up into a McMansion: lots of timber, lots of glass, lots of light cutting amber rectangles in the lawn. His bedroom, on the far side of the house, wasn’t visible from the road, but it didn’t matter. I could see it in my mind, on the top level of the house, an entire wall of windows looking out onto tumbleweed and sage. I could see him. His head bent. His face turned in. His mouth on her neck.

  Kaden drummed his thumbs on the steering wheel. “So we’re here. And you know what? I think we should head back. Right, Austin? I think we should head back because this is kind of a bad idea. It’s late, and they’re probably asleep—”

  “The lights are on.”

  Austin didn’t say anything.

  Swallowing, Kaden nodded. “Yeah. But. It’s really late. And I think, um, Vie, I think you’re still maybe a little worked up. About this afternoon, I mean. And nobody would blame you. I don’t blame you. It was . . . it was messed up, what happened. So I think you’re totally right to be angry.”

  “I’m not angry.” I undid my seat belt. “And I’m not worked up.”

  Austin still didn’t say anything. He didn’t even blink.

  “Sure. Of course not. I didn’t mean you were angry. Not like that. I just meant, well, think about it like this: we go home. You get a good night’s sleep. You come at this thing tomorrow, from a fresh perspective.” He glanced back. “Right, Austin? I mean, tomorrow, Vie, it’s Saturday, it’s—”

  “It’s just another day. One more fucking day. Same as every other day.” I popped the door open. The wind caught it, cranked it wide, and weeds streamed and hissed toward me. They’d grown long at the side of the road, and I doubted the Bradleys were happy about that. “Stay here. I’m just going to look around.”

  “I don’t think—I mean, Austin, just, will you tell him, I mean, will you ask him—”

  Austin hit the latch on the seat, and it slid forward. He climbed out of the car, stretched, and the cedar smell, the crushed-and-dried tobacco smell spun on the wind and was gone. He put his hands on his hips. Those arms. Those goddamn arms. His eyes, hard as turquoise again, were waiting.

  “Fine,” I said. “But Kaden stays.”

  He just shrugged. “Duh.”

  Together, we jogged the length of the drive. A tall iron fence surrounded the lot, following the division between trim, lush grass and tangles of scrub. The fence, however, was purely ornamental; it was tall, but it didn’t have a damn thing at the top, so I boosted Austin—I was still taller, even if he’d decided to pack on muscle—and then jumped, caught high on the fence, and shimmied the rest of the way up.

  We landed together on the other side, where dry, brambly creepers tangled around the fence. The Bradleys had been cheaping out on their landscaping; somebody wasn’t keeping up with his job. Moonlight caught Austin’s face in profile, and it was a hard face. Without the baby-fat that had bled away over the last few months, the strong lines that made him rugged instead of pretty were inked bold and true. It was the kind of face that could stare into the Chinook for fifty years and the wind would blink first. And this guy, this guy with a face like that, with a heart like that, this guy was here with me. Tonight. After all the shit I pulled.

  “Austin, I just want to tell you . . .”

  “What?” One of those thick, dark eyebrows curved.

  “Nothing.”

  “You hurt your ankle?”

  “No, I’m fine.”

  A beat passed between us. The other eyebrow shot up. “You’re thinking about Valentine’s Day.”

  “I’m not fucking thinking about Valentine’s Day. Never mind. Forget it.” I took off at a trot, cutting away from the drive so that the house lights wouldn’t pick me out against the night.

  Coming after me, Austin said, “You were all misty-eyed. If you didn’t hurt your ankle, then you were probably thinking about Valentine’s Day.”

  “I was thinking about how I can’t go anywhere without my jealous boyfriend following me.”

  “You were probably thinking about those teddy-bear boxers I got you. The most romantic gift of your entire life. You get tears just thinking about them.”

  “You’re out of your damn mind.”

  When I glanced at him, he was grinning, and then he tweaked the soft skin at the back of my arm hard enough to make me yowl. He jetted ahead of me, his sneakers leaving tracks in the wet grass, curving around the side of the house toward Emmett’s room at the back. I followed him. I didn’t mind Austin teasing me. I kind of liked it, in fact—most of the time he was so serious, most of the time he was so earnest, and I liked that too, but the teasing was fun. He wasn’t like Emmett. Emmett could hardly say two words without one of them making him an asshole. Of course, most of that was Emmett’s defense mechanism; he was just about the most vulnerable human being I knew, and he hid
it behind the armor of being an unbearable shit.

  And the thought flashed through me that maybe Austin’s teasing, when he saw me looking at him in the moonlight, was because he felt vulnerable too. He had watched, earlier that day, as I exposed how much I still cared for Emmett. I had lied to Austin today. I had pushed him away. I had tried to go behind his back. But he was still here; no matter how hard I pushed, I couldn’t seem to budge him. The teasing tonight, when I looked at him, when I wanted to tell him how I felt about him—was he worried? Was he afraid? I wanted to laugh. Afraid of what? Of what I’d do?

  Clear as crystal, I could see it in front of me: Emmett’s lips on her neck, his hand between the folds of the blouse, that inch of black lace riding up over his fingers. What would I do? I wasn’t sure. Burning down Emmett’s house felt like a good place to start.

  I tamped down the impulse. Following Austin around the house, I snaked a path through the grass. It was long here, where the house’s shadows fell thickest. It was so long that it slipped wetly against my jeans at the knees, the blades rasping against each other. I got my first glimpse of Emmett’s bedroom. The lights were on. Like the rest of the house, the windows blazed with a warm glow, and I shivered as the wet, Wyoming wind cut through my jacket. Austin watched the wall of windows, and I joined him, slipping my arm around his waist.

  He glanced at me; his surprise was almost comical.

  “I, uh, love you.”

  “What?”

  “You heard me.”

  “Yeah, Vie. I know you love me.” He kissed my cheek, nuzzling against me until I laughed and pushed his head away. “I love you too.”

  “That’s why I got all, um, quiet. After we got over the fence.”

  “You didn’t get quiet. You got teary-eyed.”

  “I didn’t get teary-eyed. I’m just saying, that’s what I wanted to tell you. When we jumped down. I was just thinking about it.”