Threats

by Amelia Gray

  She chewed her toast and thought of her husband on his inversion table, arms loose by his head, the skin of his body sinking earthward. She thought of the image of sweet calm on his face at the moment she told him what had happened to their daughter, her own confusion afterward as he reddened and shouted a series of noises that seemed unlike words, pulling his body toward his ankles, so strong suddenly after years of weakness, the chair swinging forward so violently that she barely had time to jump back as he crouched toward his ankles but overswung his weight and tipped hilariously forward, the entire thing askew—she thought he had been so unhappy—the rear supports tipping into the air and sending the upper piece of the machine back to jam into the wall, trapping him inside, his strangled pleading not unlike the sounds their child had made, her husband wedged there in the wall, the image of him crouched in the corner of their home like some wild creature, blood-bearing veins in his body stretched to capacity around his neck and bursting in his eyes.

  It had been a violent enough reaction that she refused to speak for days, despite her husband’s pleading as to where to send the police. She drove to the motel parking lot and broke into one of the old rooms and took her pitiful few remaining nausea pills and stayed there, horizontal on a mattress, until she heard the sirens and drove home and waited for them to come find her.

  As an old woman, David’s mother felt ineffective at most things. She remembered her daughter floating in five inches of water, stretched in it, fluid seeping into her little lungs.

  67.

  THREE NEW MESSAGES. One saved message. First new message. From, phone number two three four, seven three two, seven eight four two. Received, February fourth at ten-twenty a.m.

  David, this is Aileen at the salon. I want you to know that you know you know what you say you know and I know you know more than you say you know and you know I know you know and—

  Message erased. Next new message. From, phone number two three four, seven three two, seven eight four two. Received, February fourth at ten-twenty-two a.m.

  David, Aileen. I need you to call me. Please call me. Imagine how much better you’ll feel if you do. We’ll both feel so much better. We have to get to the bottom of this, and I think that with what you know combined with what I know, you know, I know, David—

  Message erased. Next new message. From, phone number two three four, seven three two, seven eight four two. Received, February fourth at ten-twenty-five a.m.

  Please come see me. I can’t stay here wondering. I know you’re sitting somewhere wondering what’s going on. We have that in common. I can’t see clients. I can’t see them without seeing her. She’s everywhere.

  Message erased. First saved message. From, phone number three three zero, eight four five, three four three three. Received, October fifteenth at eleven-eleven a.m.

  Hey. Please wash and prep the vegetables before I get home. We’re in a hurry. Sorry. See you.

  Saved. There are no more messages. Main menu. Listen, one. Send, two. Personal options, three. Call, eight. Exit, star.

  First saved message. From, phone number three three zero, eight four five, three four three three. Received, October fifteenth at eleven-eleven a.m.

  Hey. Please wash and prep the vegetables before I get home. We’re in a hurry. Sorry. See you.

  Saved. There are no more messages. Main menu. Listen, one. Send, two. Personal options, three. Call, eight. Exit, star.

  First saved message. From, phone number three three zero, eight four five, three four three three. Received, October fifteenth at eleven-eleven a.m.

  Hey. Please wash and prep the vegetables before I get home. We’re in a hurry. Sorry. See you.

  Saved. There are no more messages. Main menu. Listen, one. Send, two. Personal options, three. Call, eight. Exit, star. To indicate your choice, press the number of the option you wish to select. Whenever you need more information about the options, press zero for help. You can interrupt these instructions at any time by pressing a key to make your selection.

  68.

  AN EARLY THAW CAME. Brown birds alighted on branches and took in the scene. Ice gave way to slush, which chilled the sewer grates as it slipped through and iced again in the old dead leaves hidden underneath. A pregnant deer walked uncertainly through the yard, frowned in a way a deer frowns, and walked up the road. The world uncovered itself. Children who had been born in winter saw the melting world for the first time, and they were wary.

  David took a long walk around the neighborhood. His neighbors were out shoveling rotten leaves. Everyone was still in their winter gear but seemed more optimistic about things.

  One of the houses that had been up for sale all winter had been quietly bought. It was different from the others, single story, and set back from the road, taking advantage of the deep lot. There were five workers on the roof when David walked by. It was hard to see what they were doing and he stood at the end of the driveway, watching. Three of the workers slopped sealant from buckets while the other two spread it thin. The sun glinted off their long rakes.

  There was a woman at the front window. David had not immediately seen her, because she was as large as the window itself, which seemed like an illusion with the house set back so far. She had looked like a curtain in the window, wearing a dark dress or a robe. If he were closer, he could more clearly see the expression on her face.

  Before he could register that the woman had Franny’s build and height, a man opened the front door and emerged on the front step, and David saw that it was the man from the bus stop a month earlier, or three months, his direct copy, the same glasses and jacket and sneakers and stride. He held his hand up to shade his eyes from the sun, and David realized he was also holding his own hand in the same way. He lifted his other hand and waved once. A nerve ending fluttered over his lower left rib. He thought of the time he and Franny stayed in a cabin in the woods and walked until they found a pond and looked at it, not holding hands or even standing near each other, so a stranger approaching from the trail would see two additional strangers, three strangers total meeting at a pond and looking into it.

  The man waved back, and the woman was gone from the window. The man walked forward and David felt himself walking back as if pushed, as if the world’s balance now required that the two men remain a precise distance apart. The man had opened his mouth and was saying something, gesturing; David was gesturing behind himself toward the road, and with no small effort he turned away from the man and walked briskly and then jogged and ran, slipping on the slush and startling another deer that had been prodding leaves with its snout, sending the deer bounding into the woods, ash trees falling away by the time David reached the road and kept on running, the wind’s chill mixing with the sun on his face and in his eyes.

  69.

  AILEEN PUSHED the metal extractor into the face of one of her younger clients. The woman’s skin had been so clogged that she seemed to have pinpoint black freckles. Still, as she worked under the examination light, Aileen marveled at the smooth skin in the usual trouble spots, the calming sense of a flawless palette between the eyes. She directed the steam wand at the girl’s face and readied her tools while the pores bloomed.

  Her extractor resembled a dentist’s device, which is to say it resembled a torture device. The sharp edge on one side was designed to slacken the skin so that the scoop on the other side could coax out the offending oil plug. With the steam wand, Aileen didn’t often need to use the sharp side on young skin. She would simply press the scoop gently and collect the emerging waste. The skin of older women tended to be more set in its ways.

  She began the process of extracting the pores, wiping the waste onto a towel beside her. Her client was a regular, and Aileen knew that she had one extraction point to save for last. The woman kept a blackhead tucked at the corner of her lip, cradled by a protective layer of skin that fed and supported it. The skin folded over the concealed blackhead and hid it. The woman was largely ashamed of her skin’s texture and quality, as sh
e well should be, but she had a strange pride in the single blackhead. Instead of treating it with the acids Aileen prescribed, the woman layered the area with oil-based makeup, nourishing it, growing it like a seedpod covered by a warm layer of earth. When Aileen birthed it into her metal scoop, the woman sighed with the effort and release of it. Aileen brushed the lancet blade of her extractor over the edge of the woman’s lip with a surgeon’s precise motion. The woman’s lip twitched at the housefly feeling of the blade caressing her vellus hair.

  Aileen walked the woman to the front desk and found David standing there. The skin on his face was dull and curled up red under his nose and at the corners of his mouth. She thought of the collected years of dead and dying bacteria on the man’s face at that moment.

  “We need to have a conversation,” he said.

  “Come on back. I’ll give you a freebie.”

  She hadn’t cleaned the room after the previous client. David climbed onto the reclined chair without removing his boots. Aileen switched on the light, and his face gleamed with clotted oil. He tipped his head back like an obedient child when she applied cleanser with a cotton round. He murmured his approval. “Franny did this at night sometimes,” he said.

  She looked at the cotton round coming up black and brown in the soft light. “Your skin is filthy.”

  “She took care of me.”

  Aileen spread an acid enzyme mask on his face using a brush. He winced, and she knew the pain he felt. “So talk,” she said.

  “I think she’s been living in a house down the street,” he said. “There is a house that looks like ours, and a man lives there. It’s possible she has been living there.”

  She pointed the jet of air from a steam machine toward his forehead, which seemed to be the worst offender in terms of congealed cells. She became distinctly aware of his clothes. They were soiled to the point where the filth of his body had its own texture. She lowered her lips to his ear, where the hair curled in long ringlets and tucked over the tips of his earlobes. “I see her everywhere,” she said.

  “My face stings.”

  “Just a few more minutes.”

  She heard another noise over the hiss of the steam machine and realized it was David sighing through his nose. He sighed until the air seemed to leave his body completely, and then he was still for a moment, and then he breathed in again, taking the moist, warm air into his body. “I don’t think she ever left,” he said.

  “I saw her on the bus,” Aileen said. “I saw her walking. I thought she had decided to take a break from our friendship. I called after her, but she didn’t turn around. Her body shifted five degrees to the left. I saw her walking up a side street three blocks from where we usually walk. She stood at a wall at the end of the street and pressed it as if to move it.” Her eyes were wild. “She didn’t turn around when I called.”

  Without opening his eyes, David reached both hands up and grasped Aileen’s face. He pulled her toward him and kissed her, his mouth so wide that it seemed more like his mouth was in a competition with hers, his tongue a wall on her lips, spackling their gloss, removing her lipstick and absorbing it. The acid mess on his face smeared her cheeks and immediately melted the first two layers of her makeup through the foundation, leaching the color off her face. She pressed her face down with the idea of crushing him and kissed his tongue and teeth, sucking the fluids there, tasting bitter coffee and mouthwash, internalizing his mouth, pressing her face harder and licking the strangely flat surface of his back teeth, wishing for a moment that she could take his teeth in her mouth and chew on them, feel the foreign against familiar, his teeth embedding in her cheeks like cloves in an orange. She kicked back her rolling chair and moved to the center of the reclined treatment chair without separating from his mouth. She unbuttoned David’s pants, straddled the chair, tugged her underwear to the side under her skirt with her thumb. It was old underwear, she remembered while pulling him out of his pants, the kind that was once an optimistic deep purple and had since bleached out, slackening elastic at the edges, like webbing between the fingers of the retired women who came in for bleaching and injectables, their hands puddled together on bloated bellies, smiling into the light. He was almost completely soft, but she stuffed him into her with sticky fingers. He groaned, and instinct bucked his hips. The acid that had been on her hands burned their genitals. They were still kissing, eating bitter enzyme. She spit onto his shirt. Her eyes stung. He tried to shift their position but couldn’t move in the small chair. He slipped out of her and she piled him back in, squeezed his body between her legs, held him completely still, digging her nails into his stomach. One of them was crying. She kissed his neck and left a trail of slime. When she bit him he cried out and looked up at her for the first time, his eyes red and swollen nearly shut.

  She climbed off and left the room without comment. He lay on the table waiting for her to come back, but she didn’t. After he was sure she wouldn’t come back, he buttoned his pants and stood.

  He couldn’t find her in the lobby or at any of the hair stations. One of the girls told him that Aileen had gone home early for the day. “She’s not here,” the girl said, “right hand to God.” She was twisting and pulling at the twin lumps of fat above her hips, pinching her body like an unbaked loaf.

  70.

  DAVID didn’t like going into the backyard. Stickers burred into his ankle hair. Franny had always done the work of clearing brush and splitting fire logs, and there were times when she vanished out into one of the two acres beyond and returned with a handful of berries or a flattened soda can. Sometimes she found slivers of stone that she thought were arrowheads, though it seemed as if she had never seen an actual arrowhead. The rocks she brought in had been smoothed by time. She kept them in a bowl on the bathroom counter.

  Out back, the earth looked differently trampled. A gum wrapper fluttered in a spiny bush, silver paper shivering against the red berries. He thought of what Aileen had said about all the people who had died in the history of that place, after the spiny bush had grown there but, more important, before the bush and the stream beside it and the house and the old farmer’s fence made of barbed wire and splintered posts that rotted lower every year. David had been meaning to remove the old fence. He had not gotten around to it. Before the fence and the ash trees, or when there were different trees, or perhaps when it was all underwater, when strange and ordinary aquatic creatures floated and consumed one another and left their remains buried under five to ten feet of silt that hardened into stone and was covered with pieces of flint and slate, which his wife mistook for arrowheads but were wholly unremarkable rocks after all.

  On the far side of the farmer’s fence, he found a frozen pear and beside it a sock trampled into the ground. It was one of David’s gym socks, mealy from the earth that had been pushed into it, half hidden under a root. He bent to pick the sock up and found that it was folded around its mate. He used the toe of his shoe to unearth them and found another pair nestled alongside. Crouching down, he found another pair underneath, black dress socks next to a larger pink-striped variety. A sandwich bag stuffed full of hosiery lay underneath and under that, a pair of insulating socks David had been missing for years. He dug away at the top layer of earth, thinking about stopping and going to the garage for a shovel but certain that if he returned, the socks would be gone, hundreds of them, the collected effort of many years. There were his father’s trouser socks with their gold-stitched toes. He found a shoebox underneath a stratum of unpaired single socks. Moisture and age had worn away the box’s distinguishing marks. There was some difficulty in clearing it from the frozen earth, which hardly yielded against his digging gloved hands. He wedged the tips of his fingers against the side of the box and then got a grip on the side of it and pulled it out. The box had been laid over three pairs of small faded pink lace socks. They looked like mice huddled together. He could hold all three pairs in the palm of his hand.

  David put the baby socks in his pocket and laid the shoe
box beside the shallow trench. In it he found the pair of woolen socks he had bought Franny for one of their anniversaries, the anniversary when one buys wool. She had bought him a leather-bound desk set for his office at home, with a leather tray for papers and a pencil holder and a protective desk cover and a small file cabinet that also was somehow leather, the stitches so fine he could barely see them. He had put it at the reception desk at work, and the receptionist said she felt like she was less of a receptionist and more of an executive secretary, so fine was the leatherwork. The receptionist’s demeanor improved over the phone, and patients seemed more relaxed when they got to the chair. Franny’s gift to him had been the best gift he had ever received, and in return he handed her a pair of socks, because he was confused, and he thought it was to be the anniversary when one buys wool. It was a gift he had been ashamed of, but she wore the socks faithfully for years. She washed them carefully in the sink and wore them for anniversaries in the years following, until one year when she did not wear them, and David felt a secret sense of relief and didn’t mention it out of fear that she would apologize and bring them out. He had forgotten about them. But there they were, alone in the box. They were a speckled gray and black with points of white. He thought of her burying them. If she had been sitting next to him at that moment, he would say a great many things, but he was alone. There was a page in the sock, but he was tired of knowing how to read, so he opened his mouth and inserted the page. The paper he had packed into his teeth rolled up and allowed for the new intrusion. His jaw popped and widened farther. The page was warm on his teeth and felt natural against his tongue. His lips cracked and bled into it, but he kept opening his mouth wider, pushing it toward the back of his throat, twisting the paper to corkscrew it in farther, breathing hard through his nose as it reached the back of his throat, pushed against his soft palate, caressed his palatine uvula. He gagged and clenched his teeth, and the page compacted and became a part of him, there in his mouth.