The Empty Ones

by Robert Brockway

  And then Carey screamed.

  We were sideways, airborne, upside down, sideways again. I tried to pull back from the window, or duck, or something—anything—but then we hit. The moment froze. I saw the bubbling pattern of the asphalt, with little flecks of sand pooling in the pockmarks. An old beer cap, pressed into the road by years of passing tires. The latex of the passing lines—up close you could see them peeling up at the edges, trying to unstick themselves from the carried heat of the road—and then time caught up to me, and my head bashed into it.

  An abstract impressionist painting. A muted Pollock number. Sun-faded white, denim blue, and bright shining red sliding together across a patch of black.

  I was standing at the edge of a great river, on the opposite bank of consciousness. If I squinted really hard, I could see things happening over there, but they were impossible to make out. I thought I heard my name carried on the wind, but it was impossible to be sure. I could only get a general sense. Swearing, screaming, panic. Something bad was happening over there. Something to do with the shadows, and the way they moved even though it was dark over there, and there was no light to cast them.

  But that wasn’t my problem. I was safe here, on the other side of the river.

  EIGHT

  1998. Barstow, California. Kaitlyn.

  The first thing I do when I get home from school is I take my shoes off. Something about being at school makes me hate shoes. I kick them off right in the hall, as soon as I get in the door. I dig my toes into the backs of them, and I pry them off without using my hands. I have very flexible toes. When Jackie and me went swimming at the pool over the summer, Sierra saw me grabbing the pool floaty with just my feet and said I was weird, so I swam over to her, and grabbed her hair with my toes. I clenched my toes like a fist and she couldn’t get away. She cried a bunch.

  The second thing I do when I get home from school is I go to the fridge and I get out the jug of SunnyD and I drink it as fast as I can. I drink it until the top of my mouth gets so cold it hurts, and I can’t feel my throat anymore, and my stomach feels like a water balloon that got filled too much. Tara came over to my house once, and she said it was gross that I drank right out of the container. I said that she was gross, and she said that I was gross again, so I pushed her, and she went home. Except for Jackie, none of the other girls at school had come over before that, and they wouldn’t come over after that.

  They didn’t like me, and it was because of my finger.

  I wasn’t supposed to have that finger. I had six on my left hand, one too many pinkies. It wasn’t a full finger, just a little one, and it didn’t bend. I couldn’t really use it for anything, and it hurt all the time. Just a little, but all the time. Plus, the other girls said stuff to me about it.

  Brienne was fat, and even she made fun of me. She called me a platypus. I thought that was stupid. I went home and I looked it up in the encyclopedia, and platypuses don’t have extra fingers. I told Brienne the next day, and she said “That sounds like something a platypus would do” and all the other girls laughed. All the other girls were dumb, and Brienne was fat and dumb. I told her so and she pulled my hair, so I punched her in the arm. They sent me home. Then they called my mom. They told her I was starting fights at school.

  If you ask me, calling somebody a platypus is starting it.

  Today was an okay day, though. The girls don’t make fun of me so much anymore, mostly because they don’t talk to me. Except for Jackie, who’s my best friend. The other girls mostly just make fun of me when I can’t hear it—they laugh after I walk by, in that way that you just know is about you. None of the boys talk to me, either, but that’s okay—none of the boys talk to any of the girls. Boys and girls used to talk to each other in second grade, but now it’s third grade and we don’t talk to each other anymore. I’ve heard that in seventh grade we’ll start talking again, but if you ask me, we won’t have much to talk about.

  The only bad thing that happened today was that I heard Emily tell Sarah that her brother told her people with sixth fingers used to be burned at the stake, and they drew a picture of me tied up and on fire, and left it on my desk when I came back from recess.

  I crumpled it up in a ball and I threw it at her during class, but she was too scared to look at me.

  The third thing I do, now that I am barefoot and so full of SunnyD that I can hear it slosh around when I walk, is I go out to the garage to find my dad. I only do that when it is Tuesday or Wednesday, though, because he is off work early on those days. Every Tuesday and Wednesday afternoon, my dad works in the garage. He’s got the door opened all the way, and a big yellow light shining down on the stripped frame of a Honda Elsinore. I know that because I asked him what he was doing last week, and he said “stripping it down to the frame.” I asked him what it was and he said “an Elsinore. That’s a Honda.” I was getting okay at knowing motorcycles, but the Elsinore was new. I had never seen one before. I liked the front fender. It was pointy, and up way higher than fenders on other motorcycles. That made it special and cool.

  Dad was holding a beer and just kind of looking at the Elsinore in a disapproving way. If he looked at me that way, it would mean he was going to explain something that I did wrong. He hadn’t seen me coming yet, so I ran up behind him and punched him in the butt.

  “Hey!” he said, and tried to swat me, but he missed.

  “Too slow!” I said, dancing around so I could hear the SunnyD sloshing.

  “What’re you doing now?” I asked him.

  I went around to poke at the pointy end of the fender. It made a boing sound and flicked up little clouds of dust.

  “I’m about to grind the extra tabs off the frame,” my dad said.

  He picked up a tool and showed it to me. It was squat and round. The plug came out of one end and the other had a big wheel on it.

  “Why are you doing that?”

  “I moved some parts around, so now I don’t need the tabs. They don’t do anything but look ugly.”

  I felt something build up inside of me. It pushed at the edges of my body and made me feel like I was going to pop and spray SunnyD everywhere.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked.

  “Why do I have to keep my finger, then?” I yelled, too loud. I didn’t mean to, but it flew up out of my insides like a slippery bar of soap.

  “K, we’ve talked about this.…”

  “But you said! You just said you didn’t like the tabs and they don’t do anything anyway except for look ugly. Just like my finger! Sierra said her dad is a plastic doctor and he makes people look better. She said if we paid him some money he could take my finger away!”

  I held it up in front of him, just in case he forgot what we were talking about. I wiggled it. Surely he could see what I meant now, right?

  “You don’t need it taken away, honey. It’s … it gives you personality. It’s part of you. And I think you’re just fine.”

  “But why are you—”

  My dad held up his hands in surrender and laughed. He put the tool down on the floor of the garage.

  “You’re right. I don’t need to grind down the tabs. I’ll leave them just how they are.”

  But that wasn’t what I wanted. I didn’t care about the tabs. I wanted normal hands so I could go back to school and show Brienne. I would hold them up in her face, and I would tell her that now I’m normal, but she’s still fat, and I would use my normal hands to slap her right in her fat face.

  Well, no. I wouldn’t really do that. But I liked to think about it. Even if I knew it was mean and wrong.

  I didn’t know what else to say to my dad. So I said: “I like the pointy fender.”

  “It’s up high because it’s a dirt bike,” my dad said. “Here, do you wanna help me change the grips?”

  “Maaaybe,” I said.

  He handed me a can of WD-40. I loved it because it had a bright red straw coming out of the front. It felt like something you would use at a party. My dad picked up a pai
r of skinny pliers and grabbed the edge of the grip. He pried it up and held it there.

  “Here, you spray inside of it while I hold it open.”

  I put the end of the straw right up inside of the grip and pushed the button until stinky metal liquid flowed out onto the ground.

  I looked up at my dad to see what we were doing next, but he had that look on his face. It was the same look he was giving the bike when I first came out. Something was wrong, and he wasn’t sure how to fix it.

  I didn’t want to help him anymore. I put the WD-40 on the ground next to his beer.

  “I’m going to see what Mom is doing,” I told him, and I started running before he could say anything else.

  He didn’t.

  I hadn’t closed the kitchen door all the way when I went out to the garage, so I kicked it open without slowing down. It banged against the fridge, and my mom jumped. She was reading a magazine at the table by the kitchen window.

  “Kaitlyn!” she said, sternly.

  “Sorry!” I said, “but I was in a hurry. This is important.”

  I had never said things were important before. That was something my mom said to my dad when she wanted to talk about something. Then they would come in here and sit at the table and talk quietly in different voices for a very long time. Important things are taken seriously.

  “Oh my,” Mom said. She tried to sound serious, but I could tell she thought it was funny. “Well, if it’s important.”

  She said it the exact same way I said it. That’s how I knew she was making fun of me.

  “Dad said I could go to a plastic doctor and get my finger removed,” I tried. Then added: “Today.”

  I knew it wouldn’t work, but the garage was pretty far away. Maybe she wouldn’t check.

  “He did?” she asked.

  “He did.” I nodded seriously in an important way.

  “Well, plastic doctors are expensive.” My mom laughed.

  That’s why I didn’t like her as much as dad. She was my mom and I loved her, but she always laughed at me.

  “What’s he going to do that I can’t?” she said, and stood up. She went to the drawer by the sink and got out a big shiny butcher knife. Then she slid out the cutting board. “Just hop on up here and I’ll take it off right now.”

  Making fun.

  I walked up right next to her at the counter. I put my hand on the cutting board, and pushed my extra pinky out as far as it would go. It wasn’t very far. I couldn’t move it much.

  “I’m ready,” I said.

  Mom stopped smiling. She put the knife away and crouched down.

  Here it comes. Here comes a speech. She only crouches down when she’s going to give me a speech.

  “Kaitlyn,” she said, “I want you to know it’s okay to be different. It doesn’t make you worse than other kids. If anything, it makes you speci—”

  But I was already running. Through the kitchen, the bare skin of my feet squeaking on the linoleum. Into the living room, past my kid sister Stacy watching her cartoons, up the stairs, down the hallway, and into Stacy and me’s room. I shut the door as hard as I could. Then I thought it might not have been hard enough. So I opened it and shut it again. I sat down with my back against the closed door and thought about crying. I thought about it for a long time. So long it started to get dark.

  I was thinking so hard about crying, and whether or not I should do it (sometimes my mom and dad see me crying and they do things to fix it. Other times they just get mad at me for doing it and tell me to stop) that I didn’t realize I had fallen asleep. I woke up. Something was wrong. My brain was playing catch-up with my body, so I couldn’t figure out what it was yet.

  I held my hand up in front of me. I didn’t have any lights on in my room, so it was lighter outside than it was inside. I moved my hand between me and the window and stared at the outline of it. I wiggled my extra pinky. I clenched my fist—that’s what made my finger hurt the most—and I didn’t feel anything. I did it again. And again and again. I clenched my fist so hard I could feel my fingernails digging into my palm. The palm hurt, but not my extra pinky.

  It had stopped hurting.

  It had never done that before.

  Not ever.

  I jumped up and threw my door open and ran into the hallway and down the stairs and through the living room and right into the kitchen. Mom was making something on the stovetop, so the whole house smelled like burning pans. I ran up to her and grabbed her from behind.

  “It doesn’t hurt anymore!” I yelled into her butt.

  She turned around and laughed. She grabbed me under the armpits and lifted me up in the air. She put me on the dining room table and I couldn’t stop giggling. I wiggled my skinny, single-knuckled little digit for her. Her eyes went wide.

  “Are you kidding me? Is this a joke?” she asked.

  I shook my head.

  “That’s great, baby!” she said.

  Her voice was all thick, like she was about to cry or start yelling.

  “I’ll tell you what,” she said, and she smiled funny. “I was making tuna and mac ’n’ cheese…”

  I stuck my tongue out involuntarily. Tuna tastes like Dad’s feet smell.

  “But since it’s a special occasion, and all,” she continued, “why don’t I order a pizza instead?”

  I thought for a minute. I was supposed to be mad at her for something, or maybe she was supposed to be mad at me for something, but I kept opening and closing my hand and it didn’t hurt and I couldn’t remember what we were mad about.

  I nodded a bunch. I couldn’t stop smiling.

  So we had pizza and it was really good. Pizza is always really good, especially when it has pepperoni on it, but not when it has olives. Stacy likes olives, because Stacy is only six and she’s too young to know better. We got to order the pizza in halves, so half was mine. I said pepperoni only, but there were nasty border olives, sneaking over the cheese from Stacy’s side into mine. I made her a deal: I’d pick off her gross sneaky olives and trade her for any pepperoni that tries to get across to her side. She agreed. She thinks the pepperoni is too spicy.

  We even got to stay up an extra half hour watching Power Rangers. Stacy said she should get to be the pink Power Ranger and I had to be the yellow Power Ranger, which is dumb. Why would you want to be the pink Power Ranger? She’s always getting beat up. I said I wanted to be the red Power Ranger, and she told me that was just for boys; so I said fine, if I had to be a girl I’ll be Rita Repulsa; and I made my fingers into claws and chased her upstairs.

  We brushed our teeth. Well, I brushed mine. Stacy just put her toothbrush in her mouth for a minute without moving it, then she spat it out. She said the new toothpaste is too spicy. I stared at her for a moment, then slowly explained to her that it was cinnamon flavored and cinnamon isn’t spicy, like pepperoni. But she wouldn’t listen.

  We got into our pajamas. Mine had motorcycles and cars and trucks on them. Stacy’s had stupid ponies and some stars. I don’t really understand how we can be related. I heard from Jackie that there’s a thing called an affair that means your sister isn’t really your sister, even if your parents say she is. I’m pretty sure Stacy is an affair. But I still like her okay. Dad says I was pretty dumb when I was six, too. Maybe she’ll grow out of it.

  I fell asleep when I wasn’t paying attention. But I woke up because it was too bright. Even for morning. I thought somebody had turned on a light, so I shoved my head under my pillow and looked out through the gap between the pillow and the bed. There was a light out there, all right, but it wasn’t like any of the ones in our room. I tried looking at the light, but it was like looking at the sun. I couldn’t see anything, I could just feel it hurting my eyes. But there was something behind the light, or maybe in it. I knew it was there even if I couldn’t see it, like when you’re playing hide-and-seek and you just know somebody’s in the closet. It was like a bunch of lines that lined up wrong; like corners that ended in themselves, and squares that we
re bigger than they looked. I don’t know. It was just weird, I guess.

  I poked my face farther out the gap between the pillow and the bed to get a better look at what was making the light, and I saw Stacy sitting upright. Her feet were dangling over the edge of her bed, and she was sitting up way too straight. She never sat like that. Her head was bent a funny way, too, like she was listening for something. Now that I thought about it, I could almost hear it too. It sounded like the ocean. Or maybe a bunch of oceans, all together on top of each other. And you could even sort of hear seagulls screaming, or maybe something else screaming, but it was also part of the waves. I closed my eyes and the noise stopped. I opened them and it started again.

  I figured I had to be dreaming. But I think in Freddy Krueger movies they say you can’t be dreaming if you know that you’re dreaming? I don’t know, I always close my eyes when Jackie watches those kinds of movies at her house.

  I decided that I probably was dreaming, so I took the pillow off my head, tossed it on the floor, and sat up all the way.

  The light moved. Or maybe it just changed shape—it was hard to look at it to tell. It seemed confused about the pillow on the floor. It moved toward my bed. I put my hands up in front of my eyes, to block the light but also to push it away if it came too close. But it didn’t seem like it was paying attention to me. Just the pillow, and my bed, and everything around me but me.