Triptych

by J. M. Frey

  The water grew progressively more violet as Basil’s hands turned white with scrubbing. He watched morosely, eyes dry and sore, the tip of his nose throbbing. Gwen slowly, gently ran the cloth across the backs of his hands, along the tender thin skin under his wrist, between his knuckles and along the fine webbing of his fingers, across the intimate mound that was the base of his thumb.

  Gwen took her time with his nail beds, chasing after every speck before turning his hand over and slowly and just as carefully cleaning out the fingernail wounds. When she was finished, she left the limp rag draped over the side of the white bucket, dripping watered-down blood onto the grey table top.

  Basil had to turn his head away to keep from retching.

  Gwen pulled a small tube from her tactical vest. It was the liquid band-aid that all Special Ops personnel were assigned in their field med kits, the one enhanced with alien technology. Basil hissed as the antiseptic in the opaque jelly went to work first. Gwen smoothed a small amount over each cut with the small brush and Basil refused to whimper. He bit his bottom lip until the sting on the cuts gave way to the warm tingle that meant the epidermis repair nodules had gone into effect. In a few hours, no one would even be able to tell that he had harmed himself at all.

  Make the cuts again, he thought rebelliously, make the pain on the outside match!

  But no, Basil didn’t like pain. Especially the self-inflicted kind. And he hurt so much right now that it seemed redundant to just add more…

  Gwen reached out and took up the cloth again, turned it over, folded the dirty side in, and wiped gently at the salt water dried onto Basil’s cheeks, the leftover snot at the sides of his nostrils.

  She leaned forward and pressed a kiss to the tip of his abused nose.

  “Kalp’s dead,” Basil said softly.

  Gwen paused, lips still touching his skin. Basil felt them stiffen along with the rest of her posture. She pulled back, eyes down, not meeting his desperate gaze. Desperate, yes, for confirmation, for sympathy, for grief, fuck, for some sign that Gwen was hurting as much as Basil was, that she was hurting at all.

  Gwen turned away and dropped the cloth into the bucket. She stood and went over to the door and left it by the corner of the jamb, on the floor. Basil couldn’t help but notice that it was in such a place that made it easy for someone to fetch it and slam the door back closed without opening the door too wide or for too long.

  At first Basil thought that Gwen hadn’t heard him, but then, with her eyes on the door handle, shoulders slumped, she said, “Yes.”

  Basil took this for a good sign, that Gwen had come out of whatever weird stoic shock she had thrown up like a shield, that she was going to start crying soon. Just, any proof that she was grieving, too.

  Basil stood and went over to her, ready for her to turn her face against his neck and weep. He held his arms out slightly, and tried not to think of the last time they’d clung to each other like that, in the graveyard on the night they’d buried Gareth.

  God, Gareth. Kalp would have to go into the plot beside Gareth.

  Wrong, Basil’s mind screamed. It was supposed to be me next!

  What Basil’s tongue tripped out was: “We should…organize…oh God, I don’t know what to do, for the Ceremony of Mourning, we have to…”

  “No.”

  She didn’t turn to face him. She didn’t even sound sad.

  Basil wrapped his fingers around Gwen’s hands, squeezing hard. “Of course we…why not?”

  “No,” Gwen repeated, and pulled her hands away, slowly but firmly. Detaching. “Not for traitors.”

  “Gwen!” Basil gasped, so surprised as to be scandalized. “You can’t really think  —  ”

  “Don’t tell me what I really think!” Fire lit her eyes, flamed her cheeks for half a second and Basil hoped that now was the time when she’d finally start to react…but no. She shut down again, went cold and constrained.

  Basil felt like an MP3 player left on loop. “Gwen!”

  “No.” She moved to the other side of the room, put the table between them. She folded her hands over her stomach and bent her head.

  Gwen stared at him, long and hard, and Basil was startled to see the white lines wrinkling the skin around her eyes, the corner of her mouth. There was silver streaking her temples, the little inlet of hair that peaked around her scar. Basil was sure, so sure that it hadn’t been there at all this morning. Gwen looked weary. Old.

  “He was my husband, too,” she whispered.

  “Then…then c’mere,” Basil whispered. He held out his hand. Gwen slowly, as if she feared what the touch of his skin might do, reached out, up. Their fingertips touched.

  She didn’t step into him, didn’t fold her sweet soft arms around him or pillow her cheek against his chest, but for now that little bit of contact was enough. It was better than nothing.

  Basil closed his eyes and wished that he could start this day all over again. What he needed was a cosmic reset. A big red button that he could press or a trigger that he could pull that would let him go back in time and…and…

  Basil gasped.

  “The thingy!” he shouted and clicked his fingers. “Someone get me that metal component thingy from my dining room table!”

  PART I: BACK

  The day dawned crisp and (too early) sweet.

  September light dropped heavily over the stretching acreage of the farm, drenching the quiet world in the warm sepia of all the best nostalgia. The sky was the sort of open blue that prompted content, indulgent thoughts of a step-ladder and a spoon, just to see if it tasted as ripe as it looked. For a breathless second, even the birds and the insects seemed to share in the gentle glory of the early autumn sunrise, too awed to break the hush with the busy matter of attracting a mate.

  It was, of course, promptly shattered by Gwennie’s shrill demand for breakfast. She was always better when someone else did the waking, lazy-eyed and pillowy and pliable.

  “S’comin’, s’comin’,” Mark mumbled into the comforter. He heaved himself upright. His wife cracked a sandy eyelid in sympathy as he poked sleep-warmed feet into the chill morning air. Dawn feedings were Mark’s responsibility. He had to get up to do the milking, anyway. He hinged upwards like a rusty door, legs crooked and then holding him up as if gravity was some sort of recent miracle and he hadn’t quite gotten the hang of moving with it just yet.

  Safe from the comfort of her down duvet, Evvie winced as Mark ricocheted off the corner of the solid wood dresser  —  an heirloom from his own grandfather’s farm, if you could call such a battered and scuffed piece of sturdy wood an “heirloom”  —  as he struggled to pull on a pair of jeans that he’d left crumpled on the foot of the bed the night before. A year ago, Evvie would have appreciated the flex of his biceps, the fact that he’d neglected to put on anything else under the denim; that meant he was feeling frisky and nothing but good things would come of it when he got back in from the chores. Now it meant that he was too bleary to remember anything as banal as underwear.

  The only things Mark and Evvie were doing in this bed nowadays were cuddling the baby, failing to sleep, and cultivating a lovely matched set of shiny purple bruises under their eyes.

  Awake now, Evvie tracked the sound of her husband stumbling downstairs, the clatterbang of the fridge door opening and closing, the gurgle of a small pot being filled with tap water, the metallic swish of it being placed over an element, and the slow crescendo of bubbling as it boiled on the stove. Gwennie’s cries subsided into desperate, miserable sniffles and breathy gasps; it took everything Evvie had to stay in bed, denying the itch in the marrow of her bones to go and gather her daughter up, press her close, and soothe.

  Dawn was for Mark and Gwennie, special daddy-daughter time. They’d agreed.

  The stairs creaked as Mark padded back up them, bare feet on bare wood. The door to the next room made a soft hiss in counterpoint as the wood slipped over the new carpet in the nursery. Mark said something
gentle, his voice a low, crooning buzz filtering in through the wall that separated Gwennie’s room from theirs, repeated in surreal electronic stereo on the other side of her head through the baby monitor. Finally, Gwennie’s hitching wails wound down into even, soft breathing.

  Evvie unclenched her teeth and worked her fingers out of the knots they’d balled into the blankets, amazed that even after so many months Gwennie’s discomfort could cause such acute anxiety in her stomach.

  Selfishly, Evvie considered the day ahead: raspberries to rescue from the cooling nip of nights outside, to wash and sort through and start to mash up for jams; vegetables to pick and preserve; weeds to pull; a garden to tuck in safe under a blanket of home-grown fertilizer and straw for the coming winter. All with a baby strapped to her back. She snuck out of bed, chilly toes creeping along hardwood floors, to steal the first warm shower and a few moments of privacy.

  She loved her husband. She loved her daughter.

  But God, did Evvie Pierson love hot showers, too.

  ***

  They had a brand new cordless telephone.

  They’d made good on the spring’s run of calves, and indulged in the expense of the unit because of the baby. It was top of the line, and Mark had been very proud when he had installed it last month. Very few people around them had cordless phones. Now Evvie could go up or down stairs while talking any time she liked. She could keep the phone with her even when she was in the nursery, in the pantry, or downstairs folding the laundry. If she activated a feature on the base, it acted as a two-way walkie-talkie. Mark took the handset out to the barn every morning in case there was a call or an emergency with Gwennie.

  Knowing Mark was just a button-push away, Evvie spent the early morning cleaning and preparing bottles, using the food processor to mash up some vegetables into a glutinous mass soft enough for Gwennie to smear artfully on every surface except her own tongue, and preparing lunch. Gwennie was very tactile, loved touching things, brushing her fingers against the tails of the barn cats, the trunks of the trees, curling sweetly in the ends of her mother’s hair. Evvie made grilled cheese sandwiches for the adults. Waiting for Mark to come in to eat his lunch, she passed the time — far more time than she’d probably like to admit to her circle of friends — playing a game of dishtowel peek-a-boo that Gwennie tired of before Evvie did.

  Mark appeared briefly for the sandwiches and some underwear  .  “Zipper’s rubbin’,” he complained, this time with a hint of the smirk that his wife remembered so well  —  then struck out again to finish clearing all the bales out of the hayloft before dark. The boys from the neighbour’s farm would be by tomorrow afternoon to help Mark pull up the moulding floorboards and replace it; wet hay caused everything else around it to go off, and paradoxically, started fires. It was the MacKinnons who’d bound and stacked the hay before it was properly dried in the first place in their haste to get the work done last year, and their father said they owed.

  The MacKinnons were good for that  — paying back.

  When Mark had disappeared, Evvie washed each dish carefully and stacked them in the plastic drying rack under the window. The sun glanced off the rapidly evaporating water, filling the small kitchen with light. Gwennie tried to grab at a reflection of the sun off Evvie’s watch, patting her fat palms against the wall beside her high chair with futility. They played that game for a while, too, Gwennie laughing, trying to smack the light between her hands or grasp it with fingers still smeared with green paste.

  Evvie moved Gwennie into her carrier at noon and they spent the next hour shuttling baskets, garden tools, water pitchers, a soft, much-gummed plush frog, and a wheelbarrow of fertilizer out to the garden at the bottom of the backyard. It butted right up against the marching line of corn stalks gone golden with the end of summer. That would be Mark’s next task, ploughing under the stripped stalks. The world smelled of clean dark soil, the faint perfume of the apple orchard belonging to their neighbours far upwind, and the crisp lingering after-scent of the morning’s brief hoary dew.

  With Gwennie content with her frog, Evvie bent to her task, old gathering baskets dappled with the brownish and pink stains of many years duty at hand, carefully reaching around the thorny tendrils of the raspberry bushes, plucking the dark fruit away from the leaves and lifting them gently into their new homes to keep her fingers mostly free of sticky juice. She had to reach and stretch carefully so the prickly edeges of the leaves never got to close to Gwennie.

  And then.

  The buzzing sound was soft enough that Evvie didn’t notice it right away. She flapped a glove-clad hand at her ear, hoping it wasn’t a late-season mosquito trying to get in one last meal, or a fly bothering Gwennie. It grew louder, too loud to be an insect, too large. She thought maybe it was Gwennie, making sounds with her chubby baby lips, and Evvie craned her head around to smile at her.

  What she saw was Gwennie looking up, mouth open in awe, wide blue eyes reflecting the sky and…

  The aircraft swooped down so low that Evvie couldn’t deny the urge to duck. It buzzed the top of the corn, sending the crowns of dried seed husks flying in clouds of pellets. The plane turned in midair, belly up like a swimmer at the end of a pool, then waggled and flipped upright with a barrel roll straight out of the movies, sharp nose pointing at them. What the hell kind of plane looks like that? Evvie thought. What aircraft can even manoeuvre like that?

  Something hard and sharp welled against the underside of her ribs.

  She flattened herself against the ground, tugging desperately at the straps of the carrier, wriggling to pull Gwennie around, shield her under her body as the craft came at them again. Thoughts of sprays of bullets and missiles pressed fervidly against Evvie’s forehead, and she felt her face get hot, heard Gwennie squeal. Blood pounded against Evvie’s skin, and she could taste her heart in the back of her throat.

  What the hell was happening?

  The world erupted in a bang.

  Evvie squeezed her eyes shut, but she could hear the skidding slide of the aircraft digging into the turf of the backyard, some sort of scream, the shrill protest of metal being bent away. There was a vicious tug on the baby carrier and she felt the straps tear. It took Gwennie, ripped her out of the carrier, a foot on the strap, slamming Evvie’s chest back into the ground.

  “Gwennie!” Evvie screamed.

  Suddenly Evvie was flying through the air. As soon as she had registered the cold pull of bare, dry fingers  —  too long, too thin, too strange  —  on her arms, they were gone. Tossed away like an empty corn husk.

  “Gwennie!” she shrieked again, then “oof!” as all of the air was driven out of her lungs, her ribcage coming up hard against the ground.

  Stars sparked against Evvie’s eyelids. Blackness swooped up but she pushed it away, desperately, everything burning as she tried to suck in air, tried to flip over, to push herself up, to crawl, but she had no air, couldn’t move at all…

  Gwennie! Gone, gone.

  Evvie’s vision swirled into single focus. The craft was…it…

  There was a flying saucer in her strawberries.

  Gwennie screamed.

  God, screamed and Evvie…

  She reached out, up; she was still on the ground, legs too shaky to support herself. Evvie sucked in a breath and suddenly it was like the stones had been lifted away from her limbs, and she had the ability to move again. She pushed onto scraped hands and knees, scrabbling to get close, arms up, and no, please, a knife, it has a knife and…against her little throat, pale and…her chest heaving, jerking, and it was holding Gwennie by her arm, like it…

  That’s not how you hold a baby!

  Evvie swallowed, trying to work up the spit to speak, to scream, to beg, oh God, and it tasted like ash. “Give her back! Please!”

  The thing looked at Evvie, only looked at (through) her.

  What the hell is it?

  The short snout wrinkled, the bat-wing ears flattening against
its head, like the barn cat’s. The ears were ridges of articulation, fingerling joints, a yacht sail of flesh and bone, but oh so very expressive. Angry.

  A flash of fangs and the knife and Evvie screamed too, because you can’t  —  someone can’t cut out your heart without making you scream.

  She’s a miracle, look at those little fingernails, Mark had once said, and the words rang between Evvie’s ears like a frosted gong. Can you believe we did that?

  We didn’t invent it, Evvie had replied. But it sure as hell feels like it.

  Then.

  Evvie sensed, suddenly, someone behind her.

  “Please, please, no!” and the knife flashed again, only it wasn’t a knife flash, it was an explosion, just a small one, and the air reeked suddenly of cordite and fireworks and copper. There was the flat crack of a gunshot.

  The thing’s head ceased to exist.

  The long padded fingers spasmed once, went limp, trailed behind the body as it slumped backwards. Evvie reached out, still kneeling, and grabbed her daughter out of the air where the thing’s hands used to be.

  Relieved, she said, “Mark!” Because who else could it have been?

  Gwennie howled again and Evvie tucked her in close to her chest, running a hand over the baby’s shoulder, her throat, looking for blood, for broken bones, just to feel Gwennie’s skin (hot and tingling, whole, alive) against her own. Something red and sticky on Evvie’s fingers, but she couldn’t see where it was coming from. Whose was it?

  Was Evvie hurt? Would the adrenaline fade and would some bone suddenly protest its previous ignored agony? Her ribs, her whole side throbbed, raw and scraped and bruised, and she spared a second to hope that bruises were all she’d gotten.

  “Mark,” Evvie said again, and stood up, turned to him, to bury herself in his arms, to hold Gwennie between them and shelter her. “Something’s wrong. Call an ambulance!”