Threshold

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  “It’s my fault, isn’t it?” she asked, and “No,” Chance said, trying hard to sound like she was absolutely certain she meant what she was saying.

  “Yes it is. I know it is. How can you even pretend that it isn’t? If I hadn’t—”

  “Deke’s a fucking drunk, and I can’t deal with it anymore. That’s all the reason I needed.”

  “You had that much reason from the start, Chance. He was a drunk when you met him.”

  “So I’m a slow learner. I’m a masochist. Rub it in, why don’t you.”

  Elise sighed, and “You wouldn’t have ever left him over that,” she said. “Not if I hadn’t slept with him.”

  “If you say so. Fine. But I need to go now. I have work to do.”

  A long pause, and Chance stared at her notes and photographs, listened impatiently to the static and silence as Elise scraped up the courage to finish what she’d begun.

  “Chance, what happened to us in the water works tunnel that night? I’ve been trying to remember, trying to be sure that what I do remember is what really did happen . . . but it’s all so blurry now, it’s all so . . .” and she trailed off, then, running out of words or resolve. Chance kept her eyes on the photos, the incontestable reality of her fossils, the comfort of tangible things, and when she finally replied, she used words that were just as safe, just as black and white.

  “You can’t remember what happened because you were stoned. Hell, Elise, I don’t know. We got turned around in there somehow. We got scared and confused and lost track of the time. It was dark. But mostly, we were stoned.”

  “That’s what Deacon kept telling me,” Elise said, almost whispering. “He doesn’t want to talk about it, either.”

  “I didn’t say I didn’t want to talk about it.”

  “But you don’t, do you? It frightens you just to think about it.”

  “Why the fuck do you bother asking me questions if you already know all the answers?”

  “I know it’s my fault. I know.”

  Chance glanced across the room at the clock beside her bed, the anger too close to the surface now, and she knew if she didn’t get off the phone very soon she’d end up telling Elise all the things she actually did blame her for.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’ve got an important meeting with my major professor early in the morning. I’ll call you tomorrow, I promise,” and “Forgive me,” Elise whispered, and she hung up first, before Chance could say anything else.

  It rained the day they buried Elise, picture-perfect funeral for a girl who swallowed a whole month’s worth of Pamelor all at once, then slashed her arms from wrist to elbow, who died alone in an overflowing tub of bloodcold water in a motel that rented rooms to hookers and crack dealers, pay in cash by the hour, and Elise had paid them for a whole night.

  “You take just as long as you have to,” her grandfather said, one hand resting on her shoulder, gesture they both knew couldn’t comfort, and he gave Chance his big bat-black umbrella before following the others back to their cars; but wrong that she should be dry and Elise in the wet ground, so she let it fall from her hand as soon as her grandfather was out of sight, and the wind snatched the umbrella away, sent it bouncing and rolling off down the hill until it snagged in the lee of a towering granite angel. And Chance sat with her while the late April rain needled Oak Hill Cemetery, persistent drizzle to scrub the old and weathered tombstones clean, to wash clayorange rivulets from the fresh wound in the grass where the workmen had just finished filling in Elise’s grave. They took away the big green canopy and the plasticfalse squares of Astroturf, still another month before her marker would be delivered so there was only the uneven mound of mud, the gaudy flowers left to drown under the gray sky, wreaths of roses and carnations, Styrofoam and wire, baby’s breath and ferns. Took away all the metal folding chairs, too, except the one Chance was sitting on, and maybe they were afraid to ask for it, maybe figured it was better to come back later.

  Nothing left to say, no peace to make with a corpse as dead and still as the earth piled in on top of the casket, just the ugly hole inside Chance and nothing that would ever fill that in. A place in the world where Elise had been and that place left as empty as the moment before she was born, as empty as the moment before the universe. The price you pay for not believing in God, she thought.

  “Is that it, Elise?” and her voice so loud, so big, in the rainhushed cemetery quiet. “Do people believe so this doesn’t have to hurt so much?” and that’s all she could say because she was already crying again, her tears stolen by the rain, salt absorbed, and if only the storm could begin to dilute the drysocket ache trying to take her apart, if only she could crawl in after Elise and let the fucking worms have them both.

  But another hour, hour and a half and night coming early, and she got up, shivering, dripping, took one rose from the grave, retrieved the umbrella, and walked away down the deadstudded hill to where Joe Matthews was waiting for her in the car. And the next day Chance turned twenty-three.

  “Forgive me,” Elise says, and Chance is standing alone outside the building where Deacon lives, Quinlan Castle like a bad joke or the entrance to the world’s shoddiest amusement park; bizarre medieval façade wrapped tight around squalid little apartments, cockroaches and one whole side of the building condemned, abandoned to the homeless people who have broken in through first-floor windows and torn up the carpet for their smoky, toxic fires.

  “It wasn’t your fault,” she says, though she knows Elise can’t hear her, says it anyway as she climbs the steps, the mustydark stairwell, and the door to Deke’s third-floor apartment is painted the color of ketchup. Maybe this time she knows better than to open the door, knows better than to look inside. Maybe this time she can just turn around and what she doesn’t know really won’t hurt her, won’t hurt Elise, either. But the door’s already open, even though she doesn’t remember reaching for the handle, doesn’t even remember turning her key in the lock, and nothing’s any different this time than all the times before.

  “Were you raised in a barn?” Deacon asks, and so Chance pulls the door closed behind her. “I can’t afford to air-condition the whole goddamn building,” and she knows the old window unit hasn’t worked since last July, the apartment always so hot, never even a breeze through the open windows, but she doesn’t say anything, stands perfectly still as Elise scrambles for her clothes.

  “I thought maybe you really weren’t coming back this time,” Deke says, lifts Elise’s candypink bra off the back of his sofa and hands it to her. “I thought maybe you and that shitty old car would just keep driving. Hell, I guess I should’ve known better.”

  “You shouldn’t keep coming back here,” Elise whispers, fastens her bra and stands there in her underwear, staring down at her bare feet. “You don’t have to, you know?”

  “I know that,” Chance says, wishing she didn’t always sound so defensive, and she sets the brown bag of groceries she’s been holding down on a chair beside the door.

  “You can’t change what happened,” and the dark blood from Elise’s wrists has made a big, stickydamp stain on the carpet at her feet, and that’s when Deacon always gets up to close the windows, never mind the heat because they can all hear the birds at the windows, the frightened birds trying to get in, and “You’re only making it harder,” Elise says.

  “Time flies,” and Deacon’s speaking so softly now she can hardly hear him over the racket the birds are making, and the sash rattles and the featherhard bodies batter themselves against the glass. She can already see places where their beaks have punched spiderweb cracks, the crooked hairline fractures in between, and in another minute the windowpane will break and the room will breathe them in, all the frantic, tiny bodies, all the stabbing beaks.

  And this is the dream that Chance is having when she hears the telephone ring, and Elise looks up at her, glares out through hungry blackbird eyes, crow eyes in her pale face, and “What are you waiting for, Chance? You’re gonna have to g
o back sometime.”

  Chance wakes up in the house her great-grandfather built, the house where her grandparents raised her, made her something besides an orphan, and the telephone on the gossip bench down the hall is ringing; shrill, insistent bell that has pulled her out of the dream and a world where Elise was still alive. Nothing in the world now but a headache and sore muscles from sleeping all day on the hardwood floor, sore muscles and shadows, and the sense that she’s lost Elise and Deacon all over again. Then Chance stumbles to her feet, bumps one elbow hard against the cast-iron coatrack and it hurts so bad she has to sit right back down. And the telephone still hasn’t stopped ringing.

  “I’m coming,” like the phone can hear her, like it cares if she’s banged her elbow on the damned coatrack, and when she finally lifts the heavy receiver, telephone from a time before she was born, black Bakelite and a tangled cloth cord, someone’s already talking on the other end.

  “Chance? Is that you, Chance?”

  “Yeah,” and she’s trying to recognize the voice, old woman voice and too much of her head still stuck in her dreams, the rolling kaleidoscope of faces and wings and bird-eyed Elise standing on the bloodstained carpet.

  “I was starting to get worried about you, Chance. You didn’t come by after the service, and we were getting worried.”

  Her Aunt Josephine, then, grandmother’s sister, and Chance sits down by the phone, the little brocade and mahogany gossip bench too small for her, but squeezing in anyway, and she rubs at her elbow, tries to filter the voice through the throb at the base of her skull.

  “I’m sorry, Aunt Josie,” and “I just drove around for a while. I needed some time alone, to think, you know.”

  “Well,” she says, disapproving tone, and Chance doesn’t have to see to know the way her aunt’s frowning, the deep creases on her forehead. “We were worried, that’s all. You should’ve called. We worry about you, Chance.”

  “I’m okay,” and it doesn’t matter whether or not that’s the truth, it’s what she’s supposed to say, what Aunt Josephine needs to hear to let her off the telephone. But there are still more questions: “Are you eating? Have you had your dinner, Chance?” She tries to remember the last time she ate, and her stomach makes a hollow, rumbling sound for an answer, rumbles so loud she’s afraid Aunt Josie might have heard, and so she says something quick, “I just put a potpie in the oven,” but Chance can still hear the silent disapproval through the receiver, somehow the wrong answer, but all Aunt Josie says is, “Well, you gotta take care of yourself. You have to eat. And you know that me and Walter are here if you need us. You will call us if you need anything, won’t you, Chance?”

  “Yes, but I’m okay, really,” and a few more seconds, obligatory and genuine concern, Yes, I promise I’ll call if I need anything at all, and You know we’re here, you know we love you, and then she’s hanging up the phone, receiver back into its cradle, and her stomach growls again.

  There’s a lamp on the bench and she switches it on, squints at the 40-watt brilliance filtered through the cloth shade, and it only makes her head hurt worse. Small pool of light now against the hallway gloom, and Chance glances up at the grandfather clock across from the bench; a quarter before ten, so it hasn’t been dark long, but she’s slept the whole goddamn day propped up against the front door, sleeping off the drunk, sleeping off exhaustion, and it’s a miracle she doesn’t feel a lot worse than she does. Another stomach rumble, but she’s a lot more interested in aspirin than food, a lot more interested in brushing her teeth, Colgate toothpaste and Listerine to get rid of the soursweet bourbon taste. Maybe then she’ll think about food. One thing at a time.

  Half an hour later, and Chance is sitting on the floor in the study, cross-legged on the rug and her headache a little better, but she’s still not up to chairs and tables. She’s switched on one of the Tiffany reading lamps near the back of the room, dustyellow light spilling from beneath stained-glass branches, stained-glass wisteria drooping in luminous purple bunches. And all the shelves rising up around her like the book-lined walls of a fortress, safe in here, always safe in here from the world, guarded by books and all the secrets inside them, all the things hardly anyone else will ever care to learn.

  Chance takes a bite of her cheddar cheese and mustard and tomato sandwich, chews slowly as she stares at the lamp, at the books, all these things that are hers now. Her study because her grandparents are dead and that’s what the will said, her house, her half acre perched on the side of Red Mountain. “So you’ll always have a place to live,” her grandfather had written, words put down on paper in life and sent back to her from a dead man. Chance takes a sip of root beer, the aluminum can sweatslicked with condensation, corn syrup and sassafras to wash away the sharp tastes of cheddar and mustard.

  Another bite of her sandwich, and I’m an orphan again, she thinks, if you can even be an orphan when you’re twenty-three years old; something worse, perhaps, when you’re twenty-three, something there isn’t a specific word for, so there can’t be a specific solution, either. She glances up at a tall curio cabinet, shadowy things inside, only a little light from the lamp getting in there, and she wouldn’t know what any of it was if she hadn’t spent so much of her life hiding in this room. The lumpy, indistinct silhouettes that she knows are diamond-blade sliced and handpolished chunks of Ordovician algae, Devonian corals, Paleozoic treasures salvaged off this very mountain or from quarries and road cuts as far away as Georgia and Tennessee. Treasures from lost and ancient seas that Joe and Esther Matthews taught her how to read as plainly as the books on the library’s shelves, taught her how to understand, when anyone else might only see a rock—perhaps a pretty or unusual rock if they bothered to look closely enough, but still just a rock. That cabinet is locked, and Chance wonders if she can remember where her grandfather kept the key.

  She puts the uneaten half of her sandwich down on the rug, no one left to yell at her about the crumbs now, anyway; she takes another sip of her root beer and lies down, stares up at the ceiling for a moment before she closes her eyes, then stares at the nothing behind her eyelids, tasting the pastysharp ghost of her cold supper and wishing that she could stop thinking about Elise. That she could stop thinking about the dreams of her, the loss of her, and feeling guilty because she’s hardly even cried for her grandfather, Elise still too fresh to grieve for anyone else, anything else; surely only so much hurt she can feel, can be expected to feel. And then the sudden, uninvited image of a train derailing and everything spilled out along the tracks, broken bodies in tangled, smoking wreckage, and that’s exactly what it feels like, to be here, alive and alone and no idea how she will be able to stand waking up tomorrow.

  “Stop it,” Chance says out loud, angryraw, scornful voice that she hardly recognizes. “Jesus, just fucking stop it,” but she’s crying again, and her eyes burn, and she’s so goddamn sick of the sound, the smell and saltbland flavor of her own useless tears. She covers her face with one arm, hiding from no one but herself, making a little more dark, and in a few minutes she’s asleep again.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Dancy

  THE albino girl is reading National Geographic, alert pink eyes scanning the bright and sparsely worded pages—Ethiopia, Taiwan, Cro-Magnon cave paintings in France. She’s been coming here for almost two weeks now, only a few blocks from the shelter, and the librarians usually leave her alone, as long as she doesn’t fall asleep, as long as she doesn’t forget where she is and start singing or whistling or put her feet up on the tables. They stare at her, when they think she isn’t looking, scorncold faces for her dirtywhite hair and ragged clothes, the old women in their cat’s-eye spectacles and the young gay men in their cheap suits meant to look expensive. But the teenagers are worse: black kids hiding from the projects one block east, all snickers and pointing fingers, mean whispers, hey freak, hey, white girl, how’d you even get so white? and she’d rather have the librarians’ sidewise glances and dirty looks, thank you very much.

&nbs
p; Dancy Flammarion turns another page, and there’s a big photograph of some place very, very far away, brooding, bruisedark clouds and foamwhite waves crashing down on a rocky beach, jagged rocks farther out to sea, and a few gray gulls wheeling against the stormy sky—Ireland, Oregon, Wales—someplace she’s never been and will likely never go, so it’s all the same. At least she has the pictures. At least someone bothers to take pictures of faraway places so she can know that this isn’t the entire world, the summerparched streets of Birmingham, Alabama, the swamps and pine thickets of Okaloosa County, Florida, the wild and worn-out places in between—what she’s been given of the world. And she might have been given less, she knows that, might have spent her life like her grandmother, like her mother, never going far enough from home to know that there were places without alligators and Spanish bayonets.

  And then the sudden certainty that someone’s watching her, that someone is very close, and she looks up, and it’s one of the gay boys, blond hair and a sprinkle of freckles across the bridge of his nose, nervous hands playing with themselves. Nervous boy standing at her table so she has to look away from the stormshadowcool beach on the magazine page, squints up at him even though the fluorescents make her eyes hurt, make her wish she hadn’t lost her sunglasses. The nervous gay boy looks like he wants to say something, but he’s just standing there, staring at her.

  “Is there something you wanted to say?” Dancy asks him, voice low so no one can shush her for talking in the library. And he looks over his shoulder, guiltyquick peek back towards the stingy corral of desks, and Dancy figures he’s afraid he’ll get in trouble for whatever it is he’s about to do, maybe just for talking to her, and for the moment that’s more interesting than the magazine.