I flipped the windshield wipers on, but the blades got stuck on the fractured glass. I didn’t reply.
Owen flattened his shoulder blades to the seat again. He raked his fingers through his hair and flicked on the cabin light. I felt his attention square on me. I set my jaw and drove faster down the glistening pavement. The neatly hedged community gave way to a long stretch of road where telephone poles stood like sentinels and thirsty grass unfurled over long stretches of flat land. The heat of the small cabin lamp warmed my forehead.
“Have you seen yourself?” Owen asked. I glanced sideways at him. His eyes pinched at the corners, betraying a look of genuine concern. “Because you look like you’ve just survived a bombing or something. Tor, I think you should pull over. I think you may be going into shock.” He reached his fingertip out, and I flinched when he dabbed at the streaks of blood caked at the edge of my hairline. “Did you hit a deer?” He sank back into his seat. “God, you could have died.”
Shock. That was a good one. Perhaps I could be going into shock. I tried that on for size, remembering the feeling of numbness that came over me when I’d … when he’d … God, maybe Owen was right.
“I didn’t hit a deer,” I said. I snuck a glance in the rearview mirror. A knotted nest of hair formed a clump about an inch above my left ear. Then there was the blood. More blood than I’d remembered. It was much worse than the stains left from when I’d swiped my hand over my brow. I must have gotten more on me when I’d put my face to the boy’s chest. Now, his blood smeared over my cheekbone like blush.
I reached up and clicked the light off, bathing the cabin in darkness. We were getting closer to home. The houses got smaller and squatter, though farther apart, and instead of trimmed bushes there were crooked mailboxes and sneakers dangling from the telephone wires.
“Owen,” I said, tightening my grip around the steering wheel. “Something bad happened.” I stated this in the same way a counselor might gently break bad news to a child. “There … was an accident. I’m okay, but…”
This took a moment for Owen to register. His cheeks drooped. His mouth fell open. He turned in his seat again and looked at the backseat as if he had X-ray vision. Then he shook his head. “You…”
“I hit someone.” The words came out totally wrong.
“But, Tor.” He leaned away as though I were suddenly contaminated. “You can’t just—I mean, you called the police, right?” Were there flashing red and blue lights? Were there sirens? Was I in handcuffs? No? Okay, so I didn’t call the police.
“I tried.”
“Tried?” His voice cracked. I kept driving. “There are only three numbers, Tor: 9-1-1. How does one try? Jesus…” He dragged the word along with his breath. The space between us went silent, like a bad phone connection. The question lingered in the air half formed. Finally, Owen plucked it and the words materialized. “Did … this someone survive?”
Survive. The phrasing was so hopeful. He could have asked if the someone died, but he chose to say survive, as though he could will it to be true. “No,” I said flatly. “He didn’t.”
I thought I knew how Owen would react, but when I looked over at him again, it was pure, unadulterated horror that consumed the entirety of his face. The kind of knee-jerk reaction reserved for witnessing a mother strike her child or a man slice off his finger in a meat grinder. Owen cleared his throat and at the same time sewed up the wounded expression on his face so he wore a mask of calm.
Owen sighed deeply or as deeply as he could if he were to try to sigh while being asphyxiated, because that was how he actually sounded. “I’m sorry, Tor.” There was more. I could tell. “We can figure this out. I’ll go to the police station with you. We’ll explain.”
I looked up at him, dry-eyed. “No. We can’t.” It was too late for that.
Bert was already rocking from side to side as the wheels careened into the mud holes that pockmarked the dirt road leading up to my family’s ramshackle, old ranch house. I cut the headlights and eased Bert through the rotting fence posts on either side of the drive.
I pulled up on the right side of the house, the side closest to the storm cellar hatch.
“And what do you want me to do? Tor, we don’t have a choice. Don’t you see that?” He was still trying. He was still at the first stage of grief—denial.
I pushed the car into park and turned in my seat. “There’s no sense crying over spilled milk, is there?” In case he hadn’t noticed, the decision was made nearly an hour ago.
Slowly, Owen released the clumps of sandy-blond hair and lowered his hands to his sides. “It wasn’t milk, Tor.”
There was nothing to say to that, so I got out of the car and went around to the back, where I clicked the button on my keys twice.
The trunk opened like the lid of a casket. The boy’s face appeared, looking more corpselike this time. His lips were dry and cracked. The skin underneath his eyes had turned a deep purple. It was way too late.
“Owen,” I said, staring down. “What did you mean when you texted, ‘Eureka’?”
SIX
Applied Research: In the initial experiments of Dr. James Lovelock, a hot metal spoon was used to restart the circulation in the bodies of frozen hamsters. The key was to warm the heart first. If the entire body was warmed through a bath or other total-immersion method, the blood in the animal’s limbs would resume circulation too quickly, thus stopping the heart entirely.
* * *
A night breeze blew the rain’s leftover mist across my cheeks. From its perch on the roof, the old weather vane screeched on its hinges, causing my skin to crawl off the bone. Owen was halfway out of the car when he froze. “No.” He held up one finger. “No, no, no, nononononono.” Then he pushed all ten fingers into his hair and yanked at the roots. “No,” he said one more time before pressing his forehead to the side of the car. There was a pause long enough to hear crickets chirping. “Tor, I was talking about that Bruce Willis movie.” It was as though someone were strangling Owen from the inside. His voice was hoarse and he stammered. “I … I figured out a way to prove you wrong.” My heart tumbled down my rib cage. We’d been debating the plausibility of time travel in that stupid pulp movie for hours last weekend. Owen looked up to the sky and rubbed his hand over his face. “The entire premise of the movie could be fixed if the audience just adheres to Stephen Hawking’s chronology protection conjecture…” The end of his sentence then trailed off into nothingness. “God.”
The metallic scent of blood clung to the air, and my stomach gnawed on itself like a giant wad of chewing gum. “You what? Eureka, Owen! Do you even know what that word means? I thought you’d cured Mr. Bubbles. I thought you’d—”
He spun on me, the darks of his eyes pin sharp with anger as he took accusatory steps toward me. “I’m sorry for not realizing that texting Eureka would give you tacit permission to convert your car into a hearse!” His finger was now inches from my nose when he realized what he just said and looked back at the open trunk.
He made a gagging sound, and his chest curved inward. He covered his nose and mouth with his hand and muffled another heave.
Owen walked in a short loop and refused to look back. “Only you, Tor, only you would do something like this.”
I leaned around the open hood of the trunk and peered up at the house. “Keep your voice down,” I hissed, and listened for the stirring sounds of my mother. I thought back and was comforted by the memory of the open bottle of gas station wine, half empty, and that had only been at nine o’clock. I rested my palms on the lip of the trunk. “This doesn’t change anything,” I said. And it didn’t, because even if I had known that Owen’s breakthrough was not actually the breakthrough, I might have done the same thing. It was the spark of recognition caused by his text that set the wheels in motion, the detection of possibility. “Now, are you going to help me or not?”
“No. No way. I want no part of this.” But his gaze seemed to land instinctively back on the stony face ly
ing at the bottom of my trunk. “Christ, he’s dead,” Owen whispered, and I wasn’t sure why he’d said that.
The boy’s eyes were wide open, and they stared straight back at us. It shaved my nerves down like a cheese grater.
Owen pushed his thumbs into his eye sockets and squeezed his eyes closed like he was trying to gouge the image from his mind. “Think about what you’re doing, Tor. There are … ethics to consider. Even if … even on the off chance that it…”
“That hasn’t seemed to bother you before,” I snapped.
Slowly, Owen raised his head and looked at me. “But this is a human we’re talking about. You have to see the difference. You’re playing God here.”
“I’m not playing anything. I’m being a scientist.” Owen’s face twisted like he’d just bit into a lemon. I relaxed my shoulders and turned from the boy in the trunk-coffin. I moved closer to Owen until I could feel the heat from his chest. I grazed his hand with mine and peered up at him. “We have the chance to save him, Owen. To fix this.” Owen started to open his mouth but I gripped his hand and held it. “You can’t reverse the past.” And Owen understood that I knew this better than anyone.
He looked away and pinched the bridge of his nose, the fight visibly draining out of him.
There was a long pause and then—“Okay.” It came as a breath.
“Okay,” I replied.
Without another word, we returned to the car. I ducked and slid my hands underneath the boy’s shoulders. My back strained as I heaved him up, and his head flopped backward. His jaw fell open, exposing the roof of his mouth and a pink tongue contracting toward his throat. I grunted.
Owen muttered something unintelligible but reached for the boy’s ankles. We dragged the body out, and his waist plopped onto the ground. Owen and I both shook out our arms and wrists. Silently, we grabbed either end of him. His body formed a swinging arc as it dangled. The stained shirt he was wearing slid up from where I was holding him by the armpits to reveal the bottom of the violent gash. Owen looked away.
We waddled with the cadaver between us to the hatch door and began our descent into the cellar. I picked my way backward down the steep flight of stairs, gingerly feeling for the next step. My grip on the boy was slipping. The belt on his jeans skimmed the edges. Owen had his tongue pinched between his teeth. His glasses were held on by only the tip of his nose.
The boy was heavy. Gravity seemed to be working double to pull him into the earth where he now belonged. With the end in sight, I hiked my knee under his back so I could reposition my grip, but when I did, I lost my grasp entirely. His torso crashed onto the stairs, and his legs were ripped from Owen. It was all I could do to jump clear as the body went tumbling down the remaining steps.
My eyes met Owen’s. He massaged the spots above his eyebrows.
“That wasn’t supposed to happen.”
“None of this was supposed to happen.”
“Right, well, at least we’ve got him down here.” I clomped down after the body and stared at the placid face for a long second before diving into action. The key, I figured, was to act professionally. I’d go about the same preparations I would for any other lab and avoid addressing the reality of working on a human subject until the last second.
In a plastic tub I tossed alkaline, salt, vials, thread, a scalpel, and thin conductor wires—all the ingredients to land me on a TSA watch list for the next twenty years at least.
The variable, I thought now. That was the critical point. The trick was the level of voltage. Surely, Mr. Bubbles couldn’t spring back from the dead because … because why? Because there wasn’t enough power to reactivate the brain patterns. I found a dropper and added it to my collection.
The boy was different, though. There was so much more of him. My brain jumped to the image of his heaving chest. The strong line of his jaw as he clenched his teeth in pain. I shook the thought away. He was substantial. Yes, the brain was bigger, but with a larger proportion of mass located in the rest of the body.…
I jumped at the sound of a howl coming from aboveground. Owen and I shared another look.
Einstein.
I silently pleaded that she would get tired and settle down. But the howl continued like the wail of a werewolf during a full moon, and I knew there’d be no such luck.
“Wait here,” I said, craning my neck to stare up at the cavernous ceiling. I shoved the bin of supplies into Owen’s chest.
He straightened. “Hold on a minute. You can’t leave me alone with … with that.” He pointed at the dead body still sprawled at the foot of the stairs.
I stepped over a leg and climbed up the first few stairs. I could hear Einstein’s bellows become more high-pitched and whinier. “Don’t be ridiculous,” I said. “It’s not as if he’s going to jump up and bite you.”
A glance back at Owen confirmed that this was exactly the sort of thing he’d been worried about. “It’s creepy is all,” he whispered, as if the dead boy might hear him and be offended.
I reached the top of the stairs and pushed open the hatch. “I’ll only be a second.” A wave of fresh air hit me. Above, the stars were beginning to shine through the haze of clouds.
I moved like a cat burglar around the side of the house where inside I could hear Einstein clawing at the back door. My dog was a face full of wrinkles with a brown ring around her eye and a knack for thwarting the pursuit of higher knowledge, despite her promising namesake. She had only two talents: smelling and wreaking havoc.
The growl revved up. It was only a matter of moments before my mother would come looking for me to quiet her down. I tippy-toed over to the back door. Einstein’s paw was splitting through the blinds, and I could see her shiny black nose peeking through.
I opened the door, and Einstein let out a squeal.
“Tor?” There was a voice in the darkness. I stiffened. “Is that you?”
“Yes, Mom?” came my tentative reply.
“It’s late, idnit?” she asked. Her speech was throaty, and it came from the living room. There was rustling, and then she appeared in the doorframe of the kitchen still dressed in jeans and a moth-eaten sweater that hung off one frail shoulder. Her stringy hair was slept on, and she had that sluggish, hollowed-out look in her eyes that came from hours of television and too many glasses of wine.
“Sorry, Mom. I’ve been working.” I held on to Einstein’s collar while she wiggled her army tank of a back end and licked what was most likely blood off my jeans. Mom hadn’t been the same since my father died. Sometimes it seemed like she’d died right along with him and left the shell of her body here to tend to me. It was like living with a ghost.
She smacked her lips and ran a finger over the cracked bottom one. “You know, young lady … God … punished Adam and Eve,” she said slowly, as though she were sounding out the words. “… For eating an apple … from the tree of knowledge…” She wagged a floppy finger at me before dropping it limply to her side. “He could, Tor, you know he could.” She was babbling her usual confused prattling of words when we crossed paths late at night, or sometimes not so late, sometimes already by dinner. Mom’s church shows had been her refuge since my dad died. Sometimes she even joined ladies’ Bible study on Sundays.
“Go to bed, Mom. It’s late.” At no point did she register my own state of disrepair, probably because I fit right in with the rest of the house we shared like two messy college roommates. A half-eaten piece of dried toast lay next to the sink, where dishes were piled up to the faucet. In the living room I could see a shirt flung over the back of a recliner.
“You go to bed.” Her brow lowered over her eyes, and she looked like she was trying very hard to concentrate on this one specific thing she remembered, in her more lucid moments, that she was supposed to be doing—parenting.
“I’m going to bed,” I lied. But Mom didn’t budge, and I was beginning to conjure up some awfully creative curse words for my meddling canine. “Fine,” I said. “We’re going.” I dragged Einstein p
ast her to my bedroom, where I left the door open a sliver. My heart sank when I saw her sink back down onto the couch.
I lowered to the floor and waited to hear sirens. Sirens I knew must be coming. But all was eerily quiet except for Einstein’s soft snorts. Every second I spent in my bedroom was agony.
After what felt like an eternity, my mother’s snores filled the house. “Come on.” I patted my leg, and Einstein waddled after me. We left Mom sleeping openmouthed on the couch with one arm dangling on the floor.
I had to carry Einstein like a sack of potatoes down the cellar stairs to the boy’s body. It was exactly where I’d left it, which seemed to be fairly normal corpse activity. The only difference was that Einstein crouched to her belly and began growling in his general direction.
I patted her head. “Cut that out,” I told her.
Owen emerged from the shadowed corner. “I don’t know, she might have the right idea if you ask me.”
“I’ll make sure not to ask then.” Retrieving the tub of supplies, I set to work, kneeling beside the boy. Transferring our methods from mouse to human anatomy wasn’t an even swap. We’d need more of everything. I bit my lip, mind churning. “He should go in the brine solution,” I nearly whispered. I twisted to look at Owen. “More of the conductor. He needs to be submerged.” The brine—a solution of 26 percent sodium chloride and water—had been proven to act as a conductor. Each time we used the brine water the rat had moved a bit more than without. We had gotten the idea from Professor Giovanni Aldini, who began dabbing the inside of convicts’ ears with salt water before trying to reanimate them.
“Are you—”
“I’m sure.” I wasn’t sure, but, in moments like this, it didn’t help to be wishy-washy. “Help me move him,” I said.
More obediently than I’d expected, Owen crossed the room, this time taking the upper load of the boy’s body. I grabbed the ankles, and together we transported the corpse to the empty claw-foot tub. We gave ourselves to the count of three before hoisting him into the porcelain basin. His solid back made a hollow echo as he flopped to the bottom. Streaks of rust crawled up the sides of the bathtub and cascaded toward the drain, which I plugged with a rubber stopper.
Teen Frankenstein Page 3
