“Are you sure you don’t want me to go instead?”
“Thanks, sweetie, but that’s okay. It shouldn’t take long.”
Anxious as Nicky may be, Althea suspects she’s also eager for a brief sojourn outside the house, an iced coffee, and low-impact chitchat with a perky cashier at the liquor store. All the windows are open and the curtains billow in the breeze, but the steady influx of fresh air can’t outmatch the damage done by Nicky’s chain-smoking and the wastebasket in the kitchen, overflowing with moldy coffee filters and the rotted husks of avocados. The most committed agoraphobe would be eager to run errands, too.
“There’s not much left to eat, but go ahead and make yourself tea or lemonade or whatever else you can find,” Nicky says. “I don’t expect him to get up anytime soon; I woke him this morning to have some cereal and—well, you don’t need the details. He should just sleep. Otherwise, I’ll be back as soon as I can.”
Taking off her shoes, Althea plants herself Indian-style on the sofa, fumbling for a nearby magazine—Spirit of Change, a holistic quarterly—as if to demonstrate how comfortable and settled she is and that Nicky is free to go. “It’ll be cool. Don’t worry.”
Nicky hovers over the couch on her way out the door, worrying the frayed leather purse strap between her fingers. “Thanks for doing this.”
“Not a bother.”
Althea is surprised by how empty the house feels after Nicky leaves. Though she has never babysat, this is a lot like how she imagines it would be: a mother reluctant to part with her child; the sleeping charge; the place to herself and the time her own. In the movies, this is when the babysitter makes the clandestine call to her boyfriend, inviting him over for some hushed petting on the couch, but the only boy Althea has ever kissed is the one for whom she is temporarily responsible.
When Nicky called and asked for a favor, she didn’t specify what that favor might be, and so now Althea is marooned at the McKinleys’ without her sketchbook or pencils or any of the things she would normally need for entertainment. While the average babysitter might be content to search the master bedroom for clues to the inner life of its inhabitant, Althea already knows enough about Nicky, and the rest of the house is territory that’s been well covered over the past decade. Every square foot is as familiar as Althea’s own home: the spot on the carpet still slightly matted from an unfortunate Silly Putty incident; the tear across the framed thrift store seascape, where Oliver had thrown an unripe orange at Althea’s head and missed; the pale brown stain on the underside of the very couch cushion where Althea now sits, the first casualty of her menstrual cycle.
She had been mortified nearly into shock that day, unable to answer when Oliver asked why she wouldn’t come outside to ride her skateboard with him; why she, in fact, refused to move from the couch. When she finally revealed the source of her shame, he blanched—she saw it, the flicker of disgust on his face—but recovered quickly, leading her to the bathroom and the cabinet where Nicky kept her “you know, stuff,” hiding Althea’s soiled clothes in the bottom of the trash and lending her a pair of shorts. By the time she finished cleaning herself up, he had flipped the cushion over, hiding the last bit of evidence. “Can we go outside now?” he had asked. It was only later, when Oliver was in his room poring over the periodic table, that Althea had attacked the stain with dish soap, cold water, and paper towels, until at last it only looked as though someone had spilled a weak cup of tea.
This house holds only one mystery that interests her, and she’s alone for barely fifteen minutes before she’s drawn to it. Oliver’s bedroom reeks; she can smell it from the hallway before she even opens the door. The window is cracked but the room is close, the hamper’s odor barely stifled with rosewater and scented candles. And Oliver himself, pungent and jaundiced, sleeps in gray boxers and a dingy white T-shirt, arms around a drool-ringed pillow. His right leg is kicked behind him, his bare foot hanging off the bed, but his left knee is practically at his chin: a freeze-frame of a runner in motion, a single cell of animation out of context.
Despite his lack of social skills when he comes alive in these episodes, however strangely he inhabits his body, he at least can walk and talk. But asleep like this, breathing shallowly into his fetid pillow, unaware Althea is in the room, he does look—if not sick, if not ill, then at the very least unwell. Even though he’s in here, a living, breathing person with dirt under his nails, sighing in his sleep and rolling over onto his back, the bedroom feels forlorn and desolate. The lamp shade is covered in dust pills and the tape on his Freaked and They Live and Weezer posters is coming undone, losing its stickiness in the summer humidity.
She squeezes her eyes shut and wills the alarm clock to go off, for Oliver to reach out and slap the snooze button and mumble about setting traps for the muskrats. And she would say, Wake up, Ol, you’re dreaming. And he would say, That’s okay, but he’d open his eyes anyway and say, I had the weirdest dream, and she would say, Yeah, tell me about it. He would be back in his body again.
Wresting the pillow from his grasp, she removes the filthy pillowcase and replaces it with a fresh one from his closet. As she slides it back under his head, he nuzzles her hand, smiling. She sits on the edge of his bed and strokes his greasy yellow hair.
She leans closer, moving her hand to his cheek. When she closes her eyes, she can see his face as clearly as if she were still watching him sleep. Every day, she sees him everywhere.
Like a fairy tale.
It had come out of nowhere, this unsettling, inexplicable thing, and every time Oliver went to a new doctor and told the story all over again, Althea thought guiltily of the part he didn’t know—that it was when she realized she wanted him that he had first gotten sick, that as they were wrestling in the rain and she was imagining for the first time what it would be like to be pinned underneath him naked, his sickness was set in motion. And though she knew it was ridiculous to believe the two things were connected, they had arrived simultaneously—her desire, his exhaustion—both as mysterious and unshakable as any evil witch’s curse.
She brings her lips to his, gently, and just for a moment. There’s no magic in it. He’s not there. Feeling ridiculous, she pulls back, but stays where she is. If she went into the living room and tried to read Spirit of Change or go through Nicky’s records, it would be only minutes before she found herself returning to this same spot. Even with Oliver unconscious, there’s still no place she’d rather be.
Oliver opens his eyes. There’s no warning, no twitching lids or soft murmurs to warn her. It’s like the supposedly dead killer at the end of a horror movie abruptly coming to and giving the audience one final scare. Althea gasps.
“Jesus Christ.” It worked. Did it work?
“I’m hungry,” he says.
Not really. She had not succeeded in bringing back the real Oliver, only his fat-mouse doppelgänger.
“Your mom went to get you something to eat. She’ll be back soon.”
“But I’m hungry,” he says.
“Soon.”
“You look nice.”
“You look like shit,” she says.
His eyes are ringed with red, his face creased from the pillow, his white T-shirt pitted and ripe from the heat. It’s not the real Oliver, but he feels real enough, and suddenly her joy is palpable at the sight of his dimples and his blue eyes, the patch of downy hair in the hollow of his throat, that divot of skin and bone she loves so much she would huddle up inside it, she would live there if she could. Stretching out next to him, she rests a finger in that spot and tries to pretend that everything is normal.
He lies there, staring at her. She flushes under his gaze, her hand rising instinctively to fumble with her hair. This is unexpected, to suddenly have his full attention this way, the intensity of his look unabated by their usual jokes and banter. The silence is so complete, it seems to encompass the entire block; she can’t hear any of the
summer noises that should be filtering in through the window.
He pulls her onto him so she is sitting up, straddling his waist. Working his hand underneath the hem of her shirt, Oliver meticulously traces one cold finger up her spine, slick with sweat. She feels him harden beneath her. He loiters over each vertebra, doodling around her bones with the tip of his finger, his chest rising and falling inside his soiled shirt. Althea is holding her own breath, unsure of what will happen when he reaches the base of her neck and finishes his game. She shivers but doesn’t look away.
Cassandra-like, she can see what’s about to happen before it does, but she’s powerless to stop it. Althea’s whole body is waiting for Oliver, and has been, and when he finally pulls her down her eagerness devours her guilt, leaving nothing but the crumbs.
It’s a vicious kiss that meets her there, none of the hesitation or tenderness that was under the tree that night. It’s greedy instead; they both are. In the past Althea has wondered: If she had never seen people kissing, would she have thought of it herself? She has never understood the instinct that makes a person want to take hold of someone else’s head and try to get as far inside as possible, but here she is, whimpering for more of his sour, filmy tongue in her mouth, his hands skating up beneath her tank top, climbing her rib cage like a ladder to her breasts.
She thought she knew his body. Their wrestling matches and their naps—none of it prepared her for this, for discovering all the other parts of him she can finally, finally access. And she’s always been stronger, but now under his weight, she understands how his boyness trumps her girlness, that he doesn’t have to be stronger, he just has to be what he is now—hard-driven fingers and shoulder blades winging furiously inside his skin—and he would best her every time. He has a fistful of her hair and a mouthful of skin and she can’t focus, can’t think. Althea names his bones to herself as she runs her hands over them—scapula, clavicle, hyoid. Humerus and sacrum and mandible. This is no wrestling match, this isn’t even really Oliver, she thinks, only his cranium, his femur, his radius. It’s not Oliver pulling off her black cotton underwear, not Oliver inside her up to his knuckles as the medical terms all fall away.
She gets to work taking off his boxers, but he flips her over onto her stomach and pulls them off himself. Wedging his arm between her waist and the mattress, he grabs her hip bone and uses it to draw her closer, jostling her legs apart with his knees, and she lifts herself to meet him.
When it’s finished, he strips the pillow and uses the fresh case to wipe the mess from the small of her back. This time it’s up to her to hide the evidence.
She isn’t bleeding. For some reason she always thought she would.
Oliver rolls over onto his back and she curls up beside him, head resting on his shoulder, her palm idly drifting across his stomach. She hopes he’ll say something but he doesn’t, so she closes her eyes and tries to ignore the way his breathing slows and deepens. He is already falling back to sleep.
“Ollie?” she whispers.
“Mmm?”
“Can’t you wait? Just a little longer?” But she knows she’s only talking to herself.
• • •
Later that week, Althea is dangling her feet off a dock above the river while Minty Fresh and Valerie swim in the water below. Coby sits beside her; she ignores him as best she can. Shirtless, he looks even skinnier. There’s a slight concavity to his chest, a permanent slouch to his narrow shoulders, a fragility about his wrists and ankles.
“Get in here,” Valerie yells up.
“I’m busy,” she says, and she is, tending to a bottle of Fighting Cock and a cigarette, observing the others with the same casual, removed interest she might afford a group of strangers at a party while deciding whether to approach and introduce herself. The night is hazy but the moon is out, illuminating the water like a lightbulb through a sheet. Earlier that day, after watching Rollerball on cable, Valerie found two pairs of skates in her garage and decided she wanted to reenact her favorite scenes. She and Althea spent the afternoon wiping out and knocking each other down, skinning their knees and elbows, while the boys, shirtless, sipped sweet tea and sprawled out in lawn chairs, cheering them on.
“How you feeling?” Coby asks.
“Like I took a real beating,” says Althea.
“What are you doing tomorrow?”
“Probably drive over to Val’s and do it again.” She dips her hand into the river and uses two wet fingers to snuff out the cherry of her cigarette. Water runs blue down Coby’s legs, the hair straightened and pasted to his skin. For a second she’s tempted to reach over and squeeze his thigh, just to watch him get hard inside his shorts, to drag him off into the woods or straddle him awkwardly in the backseat of her car or send Minty and Valerie away and do it right here on the dock. And then for the rest of her life, in dorm rooms, at dinner parties, she could lie and say that was her first time, something proper and suburban—the bottle of brown liquor, the boy who had wanted her for ages, the summer before her senior year of high school, losing her virginity under the stars with someone who would remember it later. Why can’t I have a do-over? she wonders. Why can’t I have a stupid story like that one? Slapping away a mosquito, Althea watches Val and Minty play together in the water.
“I know,” says Coby out of nowhere. “They seem so virtuous sometimes.”
“Minty Fresh has been leaving Bread and Roses pamphlets on my windshield when I’m not looking. Trying to get me to join up, spend the rest of my summer digging in Dumpsters and feeding the homeless. Whatever, I probably should.”
Coby groans. “Don’t. Why would you do something like that?”
“I don’t know. Penance, maybe?”
“For what?”
Not wanting to share the extent of her sins with him, she searches for an answer that will satisfy. “For not being virtuous, like they are.”
“Virtue is for pussies. I hope you’re not losing sleep over this.”
“What about you? Do you ever lose sleep over anything?”
“You know. The usual. Politics. I worry about global warming. The rain forests. Baby dolphins strangling in the plastic thing from one of my six-packs. Guilt over my support of the tobacco industry. That shit takes a big toll on me.” He snickers.
“Come here. We’re going to play a game.”
“What game?” he asks, scooting over. “How do we play?”
She presses her left forearm against his right, sealing up any space in the middle. His skin is rough against hers, swathed in dark, bristly hairs.
“If you move first, you lose.” She strikes a match. Dangling the flame for a second, she meets his eyes, daring him to beg off. There’s no hesitation in his stare, just a greedy acceptance of the challenge. “Ready?”
“Go.”
She drops the match into the shadowy crack where their arms meet. Instinct takes over and they both jerk away as soon as the fire hits.
“That was totally pathetic,” Althea says.
“I’m embarrassed.”
They wrinkle their noses at the smell of singed hair.
“Let’s try that again,” she says, lighting another one. He nods resolutely and extends his arm.
This time she is prepared for it—the white-hot sting of the initial landing, the flare of pain that follows as the match sears her skin. She inhales sharply, whispering a profanity and balling her other hand into a fist, pounding her thigh, ragged fingernails pressing into her palms as she squeezes her eyes closed, clenching every muscle in her body so tight she’s afraid they could crack the very bones wrapped inside them. And then it’s over—Coby has pulled his arm away, examining the spot where the flame erased his hair and a smart red welt has flowered.
She rests her forehead on her knees, laughing into her thighs. The pain in her arm worsens as the nerves realize what happened, but with the discomfort localized to
one spot, the rest of her body feels loosened, stretched out, as if it’s suddenly roomier. The relief is even more intense than the burning was. Adrenaline and alcohol mingle in her blood, singing a strident fight song. Her nose runs; she swipes at it absently with the back of her hand.
Breathing heavily, Coby puts a hand on her shoulder in an almost brotherly gesture. “Do you feel better now?”
“Let’s do the other arm,” she says.
Minty Fresh swims over, treading water right beneath the dock. “Get down in here,” he says. “We’ll baptize you. Cleanse you of your sins.”
“I was baptized once,” Coby says. “It didn’t stick.”
“What,” Althea says, “you don’t believe in God?”
“I believe in God. But I don’t think he believes in me.”
“That’s about the saddest fucking thing I ever heard,” Valerie yells, laughing, sweeping her arm across the surface of the river to splash the two of them on the dock, soaking the matches and rendering them useless. Setting the bottle aside, Coby dives in after her, leaving Althea alone to watch the others cavort. Minty Fresh glances back at her, something sad and knowing in his look. She wishes he did have the power to absolve her.
Coby’s alcohol has failed to smother her senses. The woods are exceptionally loud, not just with her friends’ shouting, but the vibrations of the crickets and cicadas, the resonating belches of the frogs, the whispers of the leaves overhead. The water shimmers beneath her feet, and across the river is a hinterland of blackness so dark it pulsates. Woozily lying back, she throws her burned forearm over her eyes.
“Are you okay?” Valerie asks, placing a hand gently on Althea’s ankle.
Althea leaps up, sprinting off the dock and into the woods. They call for her—“What happened?” “Is she sick?” “Where did she go?”—shouting her name, pleading with her to come back.
Althea and Oliver Page 8
