“Yeah,” she said.
“I’m glad you’re here.”
She took a larger swallow. Her head felt light. She felt happy. She knew she shouldn’t feel happy but she felt happy anyway. Did Hector feel happy? She couldn’t tell. She hadn’t looked at enough boys to tell exactly what they looked like when they looked happy.
Suddenly, she was leaning toward him. Their hands were touching, fingers sliding against each other, and she was kissing him.
“Lin,” he said, and she liked the way he said her name, but she didn’t like the way he was shaking his head. She tried again, but this time he jerked his head away from her. “No, Lin. I can’t, you’re … you’re just a kid.”
The happy feeling evaporated. Leah looked away.
“Please, Hector,” she said. “There’s something… .” She paused. Tried to look at him and not look at him at the same time. “It’s not just Inez, okay? It’s me too.”
He shook his head again, but there was a glint in his eyes. Something that hadn’t been there before. It made him look the way that Inez’s mark had with its wide, hollow eyes. Like there could be anything in them. Anything at all.
“I’ve found something. On my skin. We were like sisters, you know. Really. Do you want to see it?”
“No,” he said. His eyes were wide. Inez’s eyes had looked like that, too, hadn’t they? They both had such pretty eyes. Eyes seeded with gold and copper and bronze.
“Please,” she said. “Would you kiss me? I want to know what it’s like. Before.”
“No,” he whispered again, but he did anyway. Carefully. He tasted sweet and sharp. Like pumpkin. He tasted the way the way a summer night tastes in your mouth, heavy and wet, wanting rain but not yet ready to let in October. The kiss lingered on her lips.
Leah wondered if this was what love felt like. She wondered if Yasmine had felt like this, if Hector had made her feel like this, and if she did, how could she ever have left him?
She didn’t ask for another kiss.
The world was changing around them all now, subtly, quietly at first, but it was changing.
The day after the funeral Leah cut her hair and died it black. She wore it in dark, heavy ringlets just as Inez had. She took a magic marker to the space just below the collar of her shirt, the place Inez had showed her, and she drew a face with large eyes. With a hungry mouth.
She looked at forums. They all had different sorts of advice for her.
If you say your name backwards three times and spit …
If you sleep in a graveyard by a headstone with your birthday …
If you cut yourself this way …
Those were the things you could do to stop it, they said. Those were the things you could do to pass it on to someone else.
But nothing told her what she wanted.
For Milo, it started slowly. When Leah tried to feed him, sometimes he would spit out the food. Sometimes he would slam his chubby little hands into the tray again and again and again until a splatter of pureed squash covered them both. He would stare into the empty space and burble like a trout.
“C’mon, baby,” Leah whispered to him. “You gotta eat something. Please, monkey-face. Just for me? Just a bite?”
But he got thinner and thinner and thinner. Her mum stopped looking at him. When she turned in his direction her eyes passed over him as if there was a space cut out of the world where he had been before, the way strangers didn’t look at each other on the subway.
“Mum,” Leah said, “what’s happening to him?”
“Nothing, darling. He’ll quiet soon.” And it was like the dream. She couldn’t move. No one could hear what she was saying.
“Mum,” Leah said. “He’s crying for you. Can you just hold him for a bit? My arms are getting tired and he just won’t quit. He wants you, mum.”
“No, darling,” her mum would say. Just that. And then she would lock herself in her room, and Leah would rock the baby back and forth, gently, gently, and whisper things in his ear.
“Mummy loves you,” she would say to him, “c’mon, pretty baby, c’mon and smile for me. Oh, Milo. Please, Milo.”
Sometimes it seemed that he weighed nothing at all, he was getting so light. Like she was carrying around a bundle of sticks, not her baby brother. His fingers poked her through her shirt, hard and sharp. The noises he made, they weren’t the noises that he knew. It was a rasping sort of cough, something like a choke, and it made her scared but she was all alone. It was only her and Milo. She clung tightly to him.
“Pretty baby,” she murmured as she carried him upstairs. “Pretty, little monkey-face.”
It was only when she showed him the little kitten she had tucked away in her music box that he began to quiet. He touched it cautiously, fingers curving like hooks. The fur had shed into the box. It was patchy in some places, and the skin beneath was sleek and silvery and gorgeous. When Milo’s fingers brushed against it, he let out a shrieking giggle.
It was the first happy sound he had made in weeks.
What were the signs of love? Were they as easy to mark out as any other sort of sign? Were they a hitch in the breath? The way that suddenly any sort of touch—the feel of your hand running over the thin cotton fibers of your sheets—was enough to make you blush? Leah thought of Hector Alvarez. She thought about the kiss, and the way he had tasted, the slight pressure of his lips, the way her bottom lip folded into his mouth, just a little, just a very little bit.
Leah checked her body every morning. Her wrists. Her neck. She used a mirror to sight out her spine, the small of her back, the back of her thighs.
Nothing. Never any change.
The stars were dancing—tra lee, tra la—and the air was heavy with the fragrant smell of pot. They passed the joint between them carelessly. First it hung in his lips. Then it touched hers.
“What are you afraid of?” Leah asked Hector.
“What do you mean, what am I afraid of?”
Leah liked the way he looked in moonlight. She liked the way she looked too. Her breasts had come in. They pushed comfortably against the whispering silk of her black dress. They were small breasts, like apples. Crab apple breasts. She hoped they weren’t finished growing.
She was fifteen today.
Tonight the moon hung pregnant and fat above them, striations of clouds lit up with touches of silver and chalk-white. It had taken them a while to find the right place. A gravestone with two dates carved beneath it. His and hers. (Even though she knew it wouldn’t work. Even though she knew it wouldn’t do what she wanted.)
The earth made a fat mound beneath them, the dirt fresh. Moist. She had been afraid to settle down on it, afraid that it wouldn’t hold her. Being in a graveyard was different now—it felt like the earth might be moving beneath you, like there might be something moving around underneath, below the sod and the six feet that came after it. Dying wasn’t what it used to be.
“I mean,” she said, “what scares you? This?” She touched his hand. Took the joint from him.
“No,” he said.
“Me neither.” The smoke hung above them. A veil. Gauzy. There were clouds above the smoke. They could have been anything in the moonlight. They could have just been clouds. “Then what?”
“I was afraid for a while,” Hector said at last, “that they were happy.” He was wearing his funeral suit. Even with grave dirt on it, it still made him look good. “I was afraid because they were happy when they left. That’s what scared me. Yasmine was smiling when I found her. There was a look on her face… .” He paused, took a breath. “Inez too. They knew something. It was like they figured something out. You know what I mean?”
“No,” she said. Yes, she thought.
Her mother had been cutting potatoes this morning. Normally Leah cut them. She cut them the way her dad had taught her, but today it was her mother who was cutting them, and when the potato split open—there it was, a tiny finger, curled into the white flesh, with her dad’s wedding ring lodged just behind the knuckl
e.
It was happening to all of them. When she walked down the street, all she could imagine were the little black dresses she would wear to their funerals. The shade of lipstick she would pick out for them. Her closet was full of black dresses.
“I’ve never felt that way about anything. Felt so perfectly sure about it that I’d let it take me over. I’d give myself up to it.”
“I have,” she said. But Hector wasn’t listening to her.
“But then,” he said, “I heard it.”
“What?”
“Whatever Yasmine was waiting for. That long perfect note. That sound like Heaven coming.”
“When?”
“Last night.” His eyes were all pupils. When had they got that way? Had they always been like that? The joint was just a stub now between her lips, a bit of pulp. She flicked it away.
“Please don’t go away, Hector,” she said.
“I can’t help it,” he said. “You’ll see soon. You’ll know what I mean. But I’m not scared, Lin. I’m not scared at all.”
“I know,” she said. She remembered the way Milo had been with the kitten. He had known it was his. Even though it was monstrous, its chest caved in, the little ear bent like a folded page. It was his. She wanted that, God, how she wanted that.
And now Hector was taking her hand, and he was pressing it against his chest. She could feel something growing out of his ribcage—the hooked, hard knobs pushing through the skin. He sighed when she touched it, and smiled like he had never smiled at her before.
“I didn’t understand when Yasmine told me,” he said. “I couldn’t understand. But you—you, Lin, you understand, don’t you? You don’t need to be scared, Lin,” he said. “You can be happy with me.”
And when he kissed her, the length of his body drawn up beside her, she felt the shape of something cruel and mysterious hidden beneath the black wool of his suit.
That night Leah had the dream—they were on the road together, all four of them.
“Listen, George,” her mother was saying. (What she said next was always different; Leah had never been able to remember what it actually was, what she’d said that had made him turn, shifted his attention for that split-second.)
Leah was in the back, and Milo—Milo who hadn’t been born when her father was alive—was strapped in to his child’s seat to her.
“Listen, George,” her mother was saying, and that was part of it. Her mother was trying to tell him something, but he couldn’t hear her properly. So he turned. He missed it—what was coming, the slight curve in the road, but it was winter, and the roads were icy and it was enough, just enough.
“Is this it?” she asked. But her mum wasn’t listening. She was tapping on the window. She was trying to show him something she had spotted.
Leah knew what came next. In all the other dreams what came next was the squeal of tires, the world breaking apart underneath her, and her trying to grab onto Milo, trying to keep him safe. (Even though he wasn’t there, she would think in the morning, he hadn’t even been born yet!)
That’s how the dream was supposed to go.
“Listen, George,” her mother was saying.
The car kept moving. The tires kept spinning, whispering against the asphalt.
“Is this what it is for me?” she tried to ask her mother, but her mother was still pointing out the window. “Is this my sign?”
And it wasn’t just Milo in the car. It was Inez, too. It was Oscar Nunez with his shriveled-up tongue, and Joanna Sinclair, and Yasmine with her black eyeliner, her eyes like cat’s eyes. And it was Hector, he was there, he was holding Yasmine’s hand, and he was kissing her gently on the neck, peeling back her skin to kiss the hard, oyster-gray thing that was growing inside of her.
“She can’t come with us,” her mother was saying. “Just let her off here, would you, George? Just let her off.”
“No,” she tried to tell her mum. “No, this is where I am supposed to be. This is supposed to be it.”
And then Leah was standing in a doorway, not in the car at all, and it was a different dream. She was standing in a doorway that was not a doorway because there was nothing on the other side. Just an infinite space, an uncrossable chasm. It was dark, but dark like she had never seen darkness before, so thick it almost choked her. And there was something moving in the darkness. Something was coming … because that’s what omens were, weren’t they? They meant something was coming.
And they had left her behind.
When Leah woke up the house was dark. Shadows clustered around her bed. She couldn’t hear Milo. She couldn’t hear her mother. What she could hear, from outside, was the sound of someone screaming—or singing—she couldn’t tell which one it was, but she wanted to scream along with it, oh, she wanted to be part of that, to let her voice ring out in that one perfect note… .
But she couldn’t.
Leah turned on the light. She took out the mirror. And she began to search (again—again and again and again, it made no difference, did it? it never made a difference).
She ran her fingers over and over the flawless, pale expanse of her body (flawless except for the white scar on her thumb where she’d sliced it open chopping potatoes).
Her wrists. Her neck. Her spine. Her crab apple breasts.
But there was still nothing there.
She was still perfect.
She was still whole. Untouched and alone.
THE MILLENNIAL’S GUIDE TO DEATH
SCOTT BRADFIELD
Scott Bradfield is the author of The People Who Watched Her Pass By, Dazzle Resplendent: Adventures of a Misanthropic Dog, and Why I Hate Toni Morrison’s Beloved: Several Decades of Reading Unwisely. He reviews regularly for the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and the Los Angeles Review of Books.
“I got the idea for this story a couple decades ago,” he recalls, “when I noticed that my graduating college students were going into ‘careers’ that treated them like I was treated as a part-time, fifteen-year-old gas station attendant.
“Over the years, the situation only got worse, giving me the time I needed to find my first paragraph.”
DEATH STILL DROVE the same 1998 Plymouth Sundance he had received from his parents for college graduation, and lived in the basement of his sister’s central Connecticut marital home—a two-story colonial with dry rot and a leaky septic tank, just a few blocks from his old grammar school. He practiced safe sex with women of known backgrounds and origins, worked out at the gym three times per week, and never drank too much or too little red wine, even when attending upscale social events as part of his job. And on the advice of his broker, he invested exactly one quarter of his annual income into tax-deferred pension schemes and a Silver-Grade Health Plan. But despite these rigorously worked-out living standards, he needed at least two part-time jobs to subsidize his salary as the Prince of Hopelessness, Void, and Despair; otherwise, he wouldn’t have enough left over at the end of each month to cover his share of the rent and utilities.
And no matter how many times he broached the subject of a raise, Mother Nature simply refused to budge.
“Look, Davey,” she told him over brunch at the Hartford Holiday Inn, where she was attending a Heritage Foundation conference on Saving the Ecosphere through Capitalism, “if I bumped up anything—your per diem, your body commission, even mileage—that would reduce your attention to cost-efficiency and time-management. You can’t just throw money at problems and think they’ll get better, Davey. And anyway, if I gave you a raise, everyone would want one. Cupid, for instance. That horny, selfish old bitch hardly gets out of bed until three in the afternoon, and why should I be subsidizing her sloth and wastefulness? But look, Davey, I like you, and I know you’re having trouble managing your finances lately, so maybe I could help you in other, non-remunerative ways, such as in the area of personal management advice. You could even drop by my place later this evening, and we could relax, discuss things further, and maybe try out some of this nice litt
le pinot I brought back from Sebastopol last month… .”
Death was trying to disregard the long, almost prehensile-seeming toes that, under the table, were currently climbing up the inside of his pants’s cuff. It was the only thing he could really count on from Mother Nature—she was just so goddamn natural all the time. It could really get on his nerves.
“Look, Ms. Nature,” Death said, withdrawing his leg while pretending to scratch his thigh, “I appreciate your offer, but setting up another credit card repayment plan isn’t what I need right now. At the end of the day, I simply don’t make enough to live. I work seventy hours a week, hardly get any sleep, and it’s all starting to impair my performance. Seriously, I would do a much better and, as you say, more cost-efficient job, if I could first take better care of myself—”
Thribbbbbb-buh-buh. Thribbbb-buh-buh.
“—and while I realize there isn’t any magic money tree out there—even for you, Ms. Nature—”
(The embarrassing part was that he could never tell which of his pagers was throbbing—the Eternal Contact Device or, nestled right beside it, the Uber Driver App on his iPhone.)
“—but if you could see your way to upping my commission by ten percent or so, and make it retroactive going back to, say, that school bus crash up in Truckee, well, I might actually be able to afford those new tires I’ve been needing. The old retreads are coming apart like vampires in a tanning salon—”
Thribbbbbb-buh-buh.
Mother Nature was sitting up sternly with the deeply unsettling look of a demigod scorned.
“Shouldn’t you get that?” she said stiffly. “Our little meeting here is already over.”
And of course, as always, Mother Nature was right.
Her name was Norah Littleton, and like all of Death’s last-minute clients, she was certain there had been some kind of mistake.
“Look,” she insisted, leaning over from the back seat and shoving her laminated driver’s license in his face. “I’m only fifty-six, for God’s sake. Don’t look at the picture—that makes me look a hundred. Just look at my birthdate. This right here—”
The Mammoth Book of Halloween Stories Page 37
