“You must be thinking of some other family, ’cause my boy is five. You trying to tell me I don’t know when I gave birth to my own boy?” Pam’s voice was tense, past the point where she would back down. Amy would have to, or Pam would hurt her.
He pressed the fork harder; tears burned the corners of his eyes. He wanted to help her. He wanted to yell out, “I’m seven, I’m seven,” but he knew that that would mean pain when he got home. He would have to sit still and quiet and hope Amy would do the same.
“I’m sorry, my mistake.” Her voice was soft like she was talking to a mad dog. He eased the fork out of his leg and looked up just in time to see Amy walking away, her back stiff.
“No tip for her today.” Pam’s voice was loud enough for Amy to hear, but The Boy relaxed. He brought the fork back up to his plate and began toying with the mashed potatoes again.
Soon, Hoyt would reach over and begin scooping the corn and mashed potato mix into his mouth and they could go home.
Tonight he would whisper all that had happened into his grandmother’s ear. He would also tell her how much he hated Pam and Hoyt. She would never tell anyone.
Amy came back with a new bill and set it on the table between Pam and Hoyt. Pam acted like she was Amy’s best friend and told her that she should come by the nail shop and get her nails done. She’d even give her ten percent off.
Amy said something and was gone.
It had worked this time. No one was fighting or crying. The trick was to hurt himself enough that God would feel real sorry for him. Sometimes it worked, but most times it didn’t.
Chapter Four
Light forced its way through the trees and onto Troy’s bare feet. Warmth from the sun kissed the part in her hair and the back of her neck, but she shivered. She was sitting with her knees drawn up, and her face pressed into her forearms. Her head and eyes hurt, but crying had felt good. No, not good, necessary. She needed to cry, and she could think of nowhere better to do it than with Patricia.
She had gone to her small cottage—the only place she had ever felt comfortable calling her own, once, and had stayed no longer than the time it took her to shower and stuff some clothes into her bag. Home reminded her of how lonely she had been without Patricia and of how wrong she had been in thinking things couldn’t possibly get worse. Why return to that when the whole city was full of showers and clothes that didn’t carry painful memories.
For the last two days she had ridden the city looking for any sign that there had been an evacuation, but she had found none. She would look more today, but she no longer held out hope that she would find anyone else awake. The only thing she knew for sure was that something had happened to everyone else and had missed her.
“So this is it, right? This is the price I’m supposed to pay for what happened.” She didn’t expect an answer. She hadn’t gotten one in sixteen months, but sometimes she’d imagine that Patricia was still there with her, rooting for her to continue to live. Not today, though. Today, Patricia seemed to have deserted her, and the hurt of that seemed more tangible than the fear of being left alone.
“What am I supposed to do?” She spoke out loud for no other reason than to disturb the quiet. “I’ve tried calling…you name them, and I’ve tried calling. There’s just no one out there, and I don’t…” She stopped speaking and smiled. “You know, I used to think that I wanted something like this to happen. But I had something more exotic in mind.
“I read this story once about these two girls marooned on an island, and the whole time I was reading it, I kept thinking, you know, I would love that. I would love being alone with you, not having to worry about people bothering us.” Troy laughed. “That would have driven you fucking nuts, wouldn’t it?” She ran her hand along Patricia’s grave marker and sighed, her eyes taking in the cemetery. Small and private, it got a surprising amount of sunlight for Portland. Which is why she had agreed when the Harveys had insisted Patricia be buried there. She hadn’t cared at the time that she would have to cross one of the bridges to visit her, and she still didn’t care. She would do what she had to do to give Patricia the best.
Patricia’s life insurance, and four hundred thirty dollars borrowed from Raife, had gotten her a “desirable” spot. Troy wanted to give Patricia the best. Something she could never do on her messenger’s salary. Not that that had ever been an issue between them.
“I used to have this dream that someday I could save enough to buy in with Raife, and maybe we could buy us a small house in Mount Tabor. We would have the pick of the place now. Everyone is asleep there, too.” Troy leaned back and studied the old-growth trees, the sky, and the clouds. “Why is this happening to me?” Her voice sounded disjointed and curious, but not scared. “What did I do to you?”
She was so tired of it all. So tired of being sad and angry because the world kept moving when she would have preferred it all to stop. Now she had gotten what she wanted. The world had stopped, but it forgot to stop her with it. All of Portland was like this graveyard—everyone dead, at least, to her. What’s the point of living amongst that?
It’s only been two days. They could wake up, but what if they don’t? What are you going to do? Keep riding through the streets yelling for people who can’t hear you? And so what if they do wake up? You’re just doing what you have to do to survive anyway. That’s not living.
Troy straightened. Maybe she had been looking at this the wrong way. What if this wasn’t a punishment? What if this was someone’s way of telling her she didn’t have to fight anymore?
“Even you wouldn’t want me to be alone, would you? Not like this.” Troy stood up, her heart pounding. She didn’t need an answer. Patricia would not want her to be alone. Patricia had told her on more than one occasion that her worst fear was to die alone. Troy liked to think that she was unconscious when she died. But she would never be sure, and that fact haunted her.
Troy jumped on Dite and forgot to say her customary goodbye to Patricia as she allowed the argument to continue in her head. Was she going crazy? Is that what this was? It would make sense.
After Patricia died.
After you let her die.
That particular thought was familiar. It had tormented her since Patricia’s death. She’d started taking the sleeping pills to get some sleep, but she continued taking them when she found that it also dulled her senses. She floated in a haze of bad TV and crying. She left the house to buy food, but even that was rare.
Lack of money and Raife were the two things that forced her to deal with the human race. Work helped with the debilitating guilt during the day, but it did nothing for the nightmares that robbed her of sleep almost every night. The nightmares that Troy had come to depend on to remind her of the promise she had not kept: to be there—as no one had been for either of them. Troy hadn’t realized that she was pedaling faster until her legs were pushing against the pedals like pistons. She wanted every muscle in her legs to scream. She decided she would ride until she couldn’t ride anymore, and then she would settle down in a nice drug store where she planned on taking every pill in the place along with a side of trans-fats. She would wash it all down with a Big Gulp and a bottle of spiced rum.
She didn’t have to do this anymore. She didn’t have to hurt or be alone. She didn’t have to fight. Troy slowed her pedaling as she coasted onto the Burnside Bridge. The water was like glass, though gray clouds on the horizon told her there would be rain soon. A boat bobbed miles off shore, and Troy wondered about the people on board. What would become of them? How long could any of these people last in the elements? Pretty soon the city—all cities—would be a wasteland of decaying corpses. Something in Troy’s core shuddered, and she pushed the thought from her head. Drug store first. You can get all depressed and contemplative later.
The sun was behind her when she noticed the first of four lawn chairs lined up along the bridge, each chained to the other, a rectangular space around them marked off with masking tape. Troy didn’t want to slow dow
n, but she couldn’t help herself. She stopped and turned around. Several sets of lawn chairs lined the street. Most were locked together with cheap U-locks and chains. “Abernathy” had been written with orange chalk on the concrete. Troy shaded her eyes attempting to see further down the bridge, but the shadows kept that area a secret. Back on her bike, she pedaled toward several small clusters of chairs. Johnson, Strasburg, Melville, Dr. J. Smith and family. The Smiths consisted of a man and woman in their mid- to late-thirties and a little girl. Troy pegged her at four, but she’d never been good at guessing the age of children.
Troy glanced at her watch: June ninth. In a halfway normal world, she would be sitting right in the middle of Portland’s Rose Parade. This family was one of the odd few who didn’t trust that their chalk marks would be honored. Maybe it was their daughter’s first Rose Parade, but Troy could think of any number of things she would rather be doing then sitting in a lawn chair waiting for a float covered in wilting flowers and high school cheerleaders.
“Dumb asses.” Troy got off her bike and approached the family.
The girl had on a hat with earmuffs and a pink coat. A pink umbrella was stashed beneath her chair. Troy picked up the umbrella and, feeling awkward and uneasy, opened it and propped it over the little girl’s head. Dark, smoky clouds crouched over the water, and the boat seemed to have grown smaller against the slate backdrop. She looked back at the little girl and considered moving her. She shook her head. Stop it, damn it. If the elements don’t do it, the lack of food will. Something inside of her wailed.
Troy rode away from the bridge, berating herself for the tears that she couldn’t stop. She stopped in front of a liquor store that was situated mere feet from the homeless shelter on West Burnside. There were at least a dozen people sleeping on the sidewalk next to the shelter, but that wasn’t unusual. A large, coal-black man wearing a plaid dinner jacket and a scarf sat with his back to the wall of the liquor store. He gripped an empty can in one of his ash-dry hands. His medicine-ball stomach supported breasts which looked like two wet baby seal pups lolling in the sun. He looks like he’s been breast feeding twenty kids with those things.
Troy shuddered and dropped Dite on the ground, something she never would have done if the world hadn’t gone to hell and then fallen asleep afterward. She unwound her bike chain from her waist and with the lock still clipped to the end she swung it at the window of the liquor store like a chain mace. The first crack to the door took a small chink from the glass. No matter. She had all the time in the world, didn’t she? Of course, she could look for a liquor store that was open 24/7, but what would be the fun in that? She liked the idea of destroying something before she destroyed herself. There was a certain poetic resonance to it. The second and third blow to the door left little damage, but the fourth sent little cubes of glass flying across the sidewalk and all over Troy. Pieces of glass glinted in the cuff of her rolled-up Dickies, but she ignored it as she crouched, then scooted under the metal piece of the door and into the store. A young Asian man, perhaps thirty-two, very clean-cut and—of course—asleep, sat with his head resting on a brown box that had Frito-Lay printed on the side. Troy made a beeline for the numerous bottles beyond the counter. She dumped Anna Karenina, The Known World, and an empty cardboard canister from her burnt-orange and gold messenger bag and replaced them with two bottles of spiced rum. She grabbed a six-pack of cola from the sliding-door refrigerators and was about to add a few bags of sizzling hot corn puffs to her stash, but decided against it.
That’s all I need is to die with heartburn and have to live with that shit for all eternity. The thought made her smile. Patricia had always said she had a dry sense of humor. Now she would either be seeing her soon, or the pain of missing her would be over.
Troy found a bag of clear plastic cups and walked outside to enjoy the last of the sun. She took a swig from the bottle and eased onto the sidewalk, no more worried about the glass than she was about the three-hundred-pound homeless man with no shirt and titties as big as her head sitting not a foot away from her.
Troy frowned. B.O. and lilac emanated from the man like a cloud. She wondered if someone had given him hand lotion to combat the dry skin. It was the kind of thing Patricia would have done. Troy toasted the air. “Thanks a fucking lot for the fantastic company,” she said before knocking back the drink. The slow burn in her chest reminded her that it had been a long time since she’d had a drink. The memory of a voice that could be both beautiful and cruel swept over her and caused her to let loose a choking cry. Come on, Troy, you know you’re a lot more fun when you’ve had a drink. You’re too damn serious. Nobody likes to drink alone.
Troy pulled another cup out of the bag and poured a healthy amount of rum and then colored it with cola. She leaned over and placed the cup in Mr. Big Tittie’s free hand. She didn’t need to put much pressure on his dry fingers for them to grip the cup. She looked at his face. Not an angry face. In fact, he looked kind, and not unhappy.
“You’re welcome,” Troy said, already feeling the effect of the alcohol working its way through her system.
Patricia had been right. Nobody likes to drink alone.
*
Jake was making up for the two days he’d wasted being afraid. Money was no longer a problem. His parents were no longer a problem. He could have anything he wanted. All he had to do was take it.
The first thing he took was a pair of jeans exactly like the ones Sully Tolliver wore on the last day of school. They were frayed, boot cut, and two sizes too big. Gold stitches on the pockets gave them that retro look. But unlike Sully, he knew how to complete the outfit. He found a leather belt that was so big it almost didn’t fit through the belt loops. He was on his way to Toppers. Everyone knew they had the best caps, and then he would go in search of the new Aaron Austin sneakers that he’d been saving his money to get.
Jake thought about getting into one of the numerous cars with its owner still in it, but Dad had refused to teach him to drive until he was fifteen. He wasn’t scared of hurting anyone. They all might as well be dead anyway, but he didn’t intend to kill himself. Not now when he was free of them.
His parents claimed they weren’t filthy rich. But he knew they could afford to buy him almost anything he wanted, but didn’t. They said he needed to “learn the value of a dollar.” Yeah, right. Like they’d had to. He knew for a fact that both sets of their parents had been rich, and that neither of them had ever wanted for anything. He was, he knew, an experiment to them. Just like everything else. They were insistent on doing it all by the book. “The book” said he couldn’t wear colorful shoes or baggy jeans because people might confuse him for a gang banger. That same book said that he had to save his allowance for ten weeks in order to buy his iPod. By the time he’d bought it, there was already a newer, better model on the shelf. He clenched his jaw as fresh anger coursed through him as he remembered taking his brand new iPod to school to show it off, and then Sully Tolliver shows up with a better model the next day. He hadn’t said anything to them about it. He’d just bided his time, and now, none of it mattered. He could pick up the new iPod after he got his shoes, if he wanted. Jake smiled as the cuffs of his pants swept along the sidewalk. Maybe he would pick up a frozen pizza and some beer while he was out.
Chapter Five
By the time Troy finished shoplifting from the drug store, her ears, lips, fingers, and toes were rum-numb, but her brain refused to fog. The messenger bag that had held everything from chocolates sent by apologetic husbands to a huge box of maxi pads for the CEO of a floundering dot com, now held Percodan, Paxil, Ambien, and something she was pretty sure was just a sinus medicine, but she decided to take it anyway.
She careened through the streets no longer bothering to look for oncoming dangers or to bother with the lights that seemed to turn yellow just when she reached an intersection. Her plan was to find one of those ritzy downtown restaurants that she had never been comfortable going to and pop pills and drink until the sun c
ame up. And then, she hoped, she would sleep. Just like everyone else.
Troy’s pedaling had slowed, and she found herself looking up at the brick facades of the buildings she passed. She wondered what kind of people had lived in them. She wondered if death would keep her from missing her rides along these streets. She didn’t see how it could. A tear crept down her face and ended up at the corner of her mouth where it tasted a lot like spiced rum and cola. A flash of light caught the corner of her eye. Troy flinched and braked hard.
She had been blinded by sudden glares enough times to know that they could be caused by glass, mirrors, or anything shiny. The one constant was movement, and that was one thing, aside from a slight breeze that managed to snake its way down the city streets, she had not seen in four days.
“You’re just seeing things because you want to see something,” she said, but hope was already welling in her chest like the rum tears that had spilled moments before.
Ah, what the hell. Troy cupped her hand over her mouth and bellowed. “Hey, anyone up there?” Her voice sounded high pitched, scared, and drunk. She shivered and laughed. You fool; you’re seeing things. You haven’t found anyone awake in days. It was the wind.
“So, that’s it then. Either I kill myself, or I go crazy.” Troy’s voice sounded thunderous in the silent city.
“Hey!” Troy called out again. This time, she heard the element of anger in her voice, and she welcomed it. Anything was better than just lying down, wasn’t it? She got off Dite and stood glaring up at the window. “I know you’re up there. I know you’re up there, and you’re looking out here thinking ‘look at that loon,’ but I’m not crazy. I just want to talk to you. I’ve been in an accident. I…” Troy’s words hung in her throat. “Hey? Damn it, you could at least acknowledge that you’re up there. Tell me to go to hell, or something.”
Never Wake Page 5
