“This is different than where people around here grew up.”
Luckily, it hadn’t rained since Wednesday and the terrain between the maples and the bin would be paved or packed earth. I didn’t ever want to be guilty of underestimating Rudy’s abilities, but I also didn’t want to lead him somewhere he couldn’t go. Victor had said, “He’ll hate needing help,” but he’d been the one helping me.
“You’re pensive,” he said. “That from Chandler or me?”
“You’re strong,” I answered.
“Well”—he beamed—“I work out.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“I knew what you meant.”
“How did you get that way?”
“Cheated the system. I came this way. You cut off my hands tomorrow morning and I’ll figure out how to roll this thing with my chin. Or at least, that’s what I tell myself. Part of being strong is faking yourself out when its necessary.”
“I love that about you,” I said.
“And here I thought you kept me around for a red knitted beanie.”
We changed the subject. I told him about Sunday mornings. How the Hive hummed and buzzed, a symphony of tasks and noisy projects. How at odd intervals, saws turned on and off and woodworking crews set about their crafts and tasks. I told him about building decks and pergolas. How people shared the mowers. And, even though I was supposed to be working alongside people, I often climbed the hill behind the Grable Cabin and took their pictures.
“Sometimes on a Saturday afternoon, you can look clear across the Hive and count twenty people out and about. John Paul and Uncle Ash might be adding gravel to a washed out place in the road. On the big field by the quad, Bill Lovelace and Chan sometimes scrounge a touch football game for anyone interested. And there’s a group of young kids . . . Sophie Grable is their headmistress. Eleven going on forty. She’s gonna be a ballbuster. And right now, much to everyone’s dismay, she’s addicted to remarkably bad music. Not that you care about all that, but these folks made me who I am.”
“Sounds really nice.”
“It’s not an easy place to leave.”
“Because it’s safe?” he asked.
I didn’t answer.
Ivy circled the grain bin like strings of old Christmas lights, and rust covered the corrugated metal roof. No structure was creepier. No structure more gorgeous than this dying tower. When we neared the outer ladder, Rudy said, “I don’t think—”
“I want you to see inside.”
When my photography became more sophisticated, Mom told me it was time to make a gallery. If there was one thing the Hive had, it was room. In a matter of weeks, I transformed the abandoned grain bin into my art museum. Chan did most of the high scaffolding jobs. Affixing cheap eight-and-a-half-by-elevens to the circular walls, rising thirty feet.
I flipped the layers of shop lights Chan and I hung from the roof. Rudy paused by the front door.
“My chair won’t fit.”
The door wasn’t a real door, just a cutout in the metal. I’d sawed the opening myself.
“Oh, God, Rudy, I’m sorry.”
He bent and peered through to see one wall, smiled determinedly.
“If you’ll turn off the light and wait outside, I’ll fix this.”
I did what he asked.
“Okay, come back.”
The chair was parked outside and a scattered trail of hay and grain stretched from the door to the center of the room. He lay stretched out, arms laced behind his head, eyes on the ceiling. “Lights, please,” he said, in the same intonation Linus used when he read the Christmas story to Charlie Brown.
As the lights popped to life, I joined him. My gallery rose in circular rows around us—a library of work. Near the top, some of them were faded or ripped from moisture, but that only added to the effect. We didn’t speak. We spun, observing every angle.
“I didn’t know you were a magician,” he said.
“Only with a Number Three Kodak,” I said.
“You haven’t replaced it?”
“Some things get lost and stay lost.”
“This is your Accelerant Orange?”
His jeans touched the exposed skin of my legs.
“It’s me making sense of life.”
He said, “It’s beautiful,” but his eyes were on me instead of the walls. The air thrummed. Each breath charged and roared with curiosity.
We stared at each other, noses inches apart.
“Thank you,” I whispered.
He used his hands to scoot his leg closer to mine.
“You have words,” I said. “These are my words.”
“How many prints are there?”
“I don’t know.”
He pointed to a photo of Dolly Dodge. “One.” He lost count in the thirties about four rows up. “Why is all of this in a grain bin that no one sees?”
“Because privacy is the only control I have.”
His hands were no longer pillowing his head.
Mine weren’t in my pockets.
Two fingers crept toward the fabric of my T-shirt.
The choice existed. His hand was there for holding.
I touched my pinkie to his. They overlapped.
I exhaled and pulled my hand back.
He turned his head sideways again. Neither of us smiled. “Am I still a bandit?”
Go on and choose him too.
“Yes,” I told him. “You’re a suitable bandit.”
Rudy’s lips, his breath, were so close. I smelled the banana pudding he’d had for dessert. Sweet. Vanilla. Summer in an upside-down spoonful. One decadent, sugary moment after all the bitter bites. It could be mine. His face was an invitation, a green light to cross the street.
“You’re hurting,” he said.
“Yes.”
“You’re scared.”
“Yes.”
“Me too.”
“I know.”
He cupped my face with his hands. His forehead touched mine. His hair fell across my skin and I put my hands around his jaws. Jaws that were so different than Chan’s. We breathed deep into each other, the moment hanging heavy as overripe oranges in Caroline’s grove.
“You don’t need this right now,” he said.
“No,” I agreed, because he was right. “Pinch me.”
That was all the permission he needed. He kissed below my ear, and around my chin, working his way slowly to my lips. He was confident and soft. When his mouth met mine he said, “No buses. No monsters. No guilt. Okay?”
“No buses. No monsters. No guilt,” I repeated, knowing good and well there would be guilt. There was always guilt.
47. IT’S NOT LIKE A SHERLOCKIAN LEAP.
$88,950.00
Mom fussed over Rudy when we returned. Did he want water? Was the house warm enough, cool enough? Had Pete shown him how to work the shower? “There’s a hidden button behind the nozzle,” she explained. I was mildly annoyed and hoped he understood the excess attention had nothing to do with his wheelchair and everything to do with hospitality. He reveled in her affection. I watched them, their ease with each other, and felt a little envious. She led him to a converted Sunday school room where we sorted our laundry and where the seniors of old used to read their Bibles and say their prayers.
I called, “Eight a.m.?”
He spun in his chair and tipped an imaginary hat. “Wheels up at eight.”
Mom had made Becky and Caroline a blanket pallet on the floor of my room. It was empty because they were in my bed. They wore beanies from my bedpost and huddled together like baby meerkats on the Discovery Channel. They looked like friends. When had that happened, not just to them, but to all of us? Is that what driving did? Or Shoney’s? Or the back of a 1990 two-tone Dodge with transmission problems?
I culled all the strange and improbable events that precipitated Caroline Ascott and Becky Cable cuddling beneath a quilt stitched by my gran, under a roof constructed by the Methodist men of the 1920s, and nearly laughed. I read e
nough fantasy books when I was younger to understand how time folded over on itself like a packaged sheet from JCPenney, and how the really wise characters poked holes in the fabric and rode shortcuts through the middle. That’s what I saw in their clinging bodies. Shortcuts. Friendship could be such a fast thing when it wanted to be.
I knocked on the doorjamb because they didn’t notice me watching. “You two look cozy.”
“What the hell are these pipe things?” Becky said.
“You’re inside an old organ.”
“No way!”
“Yes way. This chapel used to be off property, but when the Methodist church relocated closer to town in the seventies, Gran sold the back acreage of the Hive to buy the place. She wanted to keep the structural integrity. I wanted to live inside the music.”
“It’s damn magnificent.”
“I’m sure that’s what the Methodists said about it too.”
“Jennings, are you going to stand in the doorway all night?”
I was still clinging to the hall. My behavior at dinner felt like a stain they might hold against me. I shoved my toe into the carpet. “Look, I’m sorry about dinner. I didn’t mean to—”
Becky lifted a corner of the covers and smacked the mattress. “Get your scrawny ass over here right now.”
“Are we seriously going to all sleep in—?”
She smacked the bed again. I crawled in. Caroline tugged another beanie from the post and passed it over. Mom had been practicing Gran’s pattern so Chan and I ended up with three or four of the suckers. We lay in my childhood bed, beanies pulled to our ears, listening to the Becky and Go Go playlist. Neither girl mentioned my leaving with Chan and returning with Rudy. Instead, Becky took to calling the final leg of our quest the Vadering of New York.
“Vadering isn’t a word,” I pointed out.
“Are you kidding? It’s the perfect Star Wars metaphor. You are Luke Skystalker. This Accelerant thing is Vader.” She attempted a Vader-worthy breath, and I resisted the urge to correct Skystalker to Skywalker. “And therefore, we’re going Vadering. Redemption. Revenge. All that good shizz.”
“Have you even seen Star Wars?” I asked.
“I’ve seen all the—”
“Gifs,” we said at the same time.
She clicked the side of her mouth and cocked her hand like a pistol.
The three of us cracked up.
Caroline said, “I don’t remember the last time I laughed.”
“Me either.”
Becky scrubbed our heads, filling my hair with static. “Laugh you will, no choice give I.”
“Oh, stop,” Caroline and I said together.
I loved the hell out of her terrible Yoda, and Caroline did too. We lay there talking and laughing until it was very late. We would have continued all night if I hadn’t said we had a long drive the next day and we should sleep. I think we tried for a little while. But then Becky said, “Go?”
“Yeah?”
“You don’t have to talk if you don’t want to, but you can tell us about Chan.”
Everything I’d held back with Rudy broke. Becky pulled my head onto her chest and I sighed. “He . . . ended things.” Becky’s throat gurgled air. Her heart pounded against my ear. “I probably made a mistake with Rudy. Let’s leave it at that. Sorry I forced you guys to sit through hell at dinner.”
Becky finger-combed the ends of my hair. “Oh, honey, come eat with my family sometimes. You’ll feel better.”
Caroline said, “You didn’t have to protect me when you told the story.”
“Not my piece to share.”
“Dinner tonight brought back a million arguments,” Caroline said.
“He was cruel to you all the time. Wasn’t he?”
Caroline tilted her head away from us and drummed her fingers on her chest. “He told me once I was his remote control car. I didn’t get to decide where I went; he did, and he’d run me into the wall if I tried anything.”
I wasn’t surprised. There were hundreds of other ways he’d kept her speck-size and scared.
“The whole thing with Jim—that was me attempting a new tactic. If I slept with someone else, maybe he wouldn’t want me anymore.”
I stared at the organ pipes so I wouldn’t come unglued.
“I got Jim killed. Jim and eighteen other people.” Caroline started alphabetically. “Anthony Alvarez, Mason Armstrong, Riley Best, Jim Conner, Evelyn Farrow, Sara Hillstead, Neil Johnson, Tim Kraggen, Brandy Marshall, Risha Novell, Johnny Popplewell, Roger Pritchet, Wesley ‘Dozer’ Reston, Oscar Reyes, Tomas Sanchez, William Tackett, Alicia Voyse, Ethan Watchmaker—” She skipped over Simon’s name.
“Thomas Wiggington,” we finished the list together.
She said, “They’re dead because of me.”
“Caroline.”
Becky sat up, staring intently at Caroline’s face.
Caroline waved her off. “I have two therapists who say what you’re about to say. It’s not my fault. I didn’t make that vest. I didn’t choose his actions. And I know, I know, I know. Except . . . I had a front-row seat to his crazy.”
I let Becky handle this.
“That doesn’t mean you’re to blame. I mean, hell, the investigation cleared you.”
“You don’t understand.”
“Try us,” Becky said.
“And have you hate me?”
Becky threaded her fingers into the beanie on Caroline’s head. “I’ll never hate you. I think you’re desperately brave.”
“Yeah, well, I was with him when he bought the dynamite. I drove.”
“So? It’s not like it was your idea.”
“That’s where you’re wrong. Simon wanted C-Four and I told him he couldn’t get C-Four; he should go after dynamite instead. It’s not like I knew what he’d do. I didn’t. But, oh, fuck . . . I knew what he did with a pipe so it’s not like a Sherlockian leap.”
Oh. I understood what she’d been carrying. Her part in this.
Caroline didn’t cry; she did something worse. She gave a sharp inhale of so much air she couldn’t breathe, lungs fully expanded until they literally creaked—then released the air through her mouth. First, a groan. Then a squeal. Like a puppy being kicked in the head.
Becky mothered Caroline after that—hushing and loving—and I lay still, our chests rising and falling together. I held my elbow over my wet eyes so they wouldn’t know I was crying. In an alternate universe, Chan and I sneaked toward the rear of the bus and Simon never saw Chan’s arm around my shoulder or me planting a kiss on his lips; never called us out as a couple; never used us an example. And in that universe, Caroline Ascott lay in someone else’s bed saying twenty-two people died because of her.
She wasn’t totally wrong.
CAROLINE
Secrets are termites. They eat and eat and eat. I hear their buggish stomachs yapping and screaming that they are still hungry. “Shhhhh,” I try to whisper. “We are almost through. They do not need to know.” But there is Becky, and there is Go, giggling next to me in bed. When the room quiets, I think about the organ blaring suddenly and waking us—because we are inside an instrument—but it doesn’t. The only music is the secret termites chewing me apart. Their spit is on my chest.
The mood was so light before . . .
Go waited until it was perfectly quiet and our breathing was in rhythm and then she said in a singsong voice, “Three little monkeys, sleeping in the bed. One rolled over and the other one said, ‘Hey, you peed in my warm spot,’” and the love inside me was hot and melting all over my heart.
I wanted the conversation to continue.
I wanted them to tell me everything, so I could tell them everything about Simon and Z, Elizabeth and Althea. So I did.
They said they understand.
They said I am not to blame.
They said I am a victim.
But that is what people say when they are with someone in person; it is not what people think in their head when they are alone wit
h their thoughts. Their quiet judgment slams into me harder than any of Simon’s pipes.
Becky, who coiled around me at the previous hotel, who told me she loved me hours before, spooned her body around Go’s last night. Even in sleep, I wasn’t safe. And Go is so twisted by Rudy and Chan and her loving family that she spins like a never-ending barbershop pole—she doesn’t have the emotional energy to deal with me.
My plan hurts only me.
I will do the Accelerant Orange thing that is so important to them. And then when we go to Ellis Island, I will wait until the ferry is near to leaving and tell them I’m walking around alone for a minute to clear my head. They’ll listen, because that is who they are. Then, before I climb into the water, I’ll text them a lie: I am on the ferry. I am going home to Keuka Lake.
I will think of Becky saying she loves me and swallow water until I drown.
48. WE HAVE PLANS OF OUR OWN.
$92,110.00
The kitchen was brimming with bodies when the three of us tromped downstairs freshly showered and packed for another day of Vadering. (I gave up on curbing Becky’s use of the word; plus, it always eked out the slightest smile from Caroline.) The room smelled of butter, flour, and bacon, and was a flurry of activity. Dad had the newspaper open at the breakfast nook. Gran poured coffee into her favorite mug and winked at me. Mom zipped homemade biscuits into a bag. Rudy stowed them in a grocery bag.
“There they are,” Mom said warmly. She pointed toward three juice glasses on the counter. “Milk or OJ?”
“Milk.”
Rudy accepted the glass jug from Mom and filled the glasses overfull. “You eating?” I asked him.
Mom slung an arm over his shoulders. “Are you kidding? This strapping young man”—his back straightening with her praise—“has already worked out in the garage and downed an entire plate of bacon.”
“Sorry, we’re late.” None of us slept, and we wore the evidence. But, unless I was mistaken, Caroline hadn’t shaved her head or eyebrows. Part of me hoped talking last night curbed the desire, but it was probably the time crunch. We’d dozed through three alarms.
The cooler we’d taken to Orlando sat on the floor by the fridge. Mom counted a list of items on her fingers, mumbling, “Sandwiches, drinks, pickles; Rudy said he can’t eat cheese.”
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