Body and Bone

by LS Hawker

  Nessa had been horrified when she’d learned she would be having a boy, because apparently something happened to a woman’s brain when she had a son. She became a servant, hopelessly tied to the boy’s wants and needs. She poured all her energy into this male life, the only one in existence who, for at least a short time, only had eyes for her. These women believed they could mold their sons into the men their husbands could never be.

  She’d been relieved to discover she could love her son but not have that weird, desperate longing for him, to serve his every need.

  Lauren appeared to be the same way with her sons. That’s why Nessa could tolerate her better than most. And Lauren was interesting. She did things, didn’t just follow three paces behind her sons as if they were demigods.

  “Okay,” Nessa said, “we’ll go to the splash park.”

  Daltrey and the boys held hands and danced in a circle. She couldn’t help but smile. He’d probably forget before the day came.

  “How about we pick you and Daltrey up at nine on the twenty-­first for the splash park?” Lauren said.

  “Okay,” Nessa said. But she already had an excuse ready. She’d call Lauren the night before as soon as Daltrey was in bed and say they had sore throats, and she was so sorry but they wouldn’t be able to go after all, darn it to heck.

  “All right, we’re off,” Lauren said, rising from her chair. “Tell DJ goodbye, boys,” she said.

  Nessa hated the familiar use of his initials, but it seemed petty to say so. They didn’t get together with Lauren and her sons all that often, and Daltrey lit up whenever he saw them. Maybe being around them would actually encourage him to talk. Food for thought.

  Lauren gave Declan MacManus a jowl rub, strapped her basket back on, and put on her hat. Her sons ran out the back door.

  “See you the twenty-­first,” Lauren said as she and the boys exited through the open door to their waiting horses. Nessa locked the door behind her and watched through the window as the family mounted their rides and rode west through the woods toward their property.

  Nessa gathered the berry jars Lauren had left. “Daltrey,” she said. “You want to go down to the cellar?”

  He signed “Yes” over and over. He loved the spooky dirt-­walled hole in the ground where she kept canned goods and holiday decorations, and where they’d be safe if a tornado ever came their way. John had made a practice of leaving small items around in the cellar for Daltrey to find. He didn’t want Daltrey to be afraid of dark places, so he would leave a little plastic animal, or a quarter, or a shiny stone, and tell his son the little ­people had left it there for him to find because they wanted him to be happy.

  Daltrey followed her out the back door and down the steps to the side of the house where wooden doors concealed a cement staircase leading down into the earth.

  She had been scared to death of her grandmother’s storm cellar when she was a kid, thinking of it as a tomb, a dark, dank place where she imagined demon hands would reach out and grab her ankles before she could get to the string that when pulled would illuminate a single bulb. Her cellar was much the same, and she still got a creepy feeling going down there. So she was glad to have even little Daltrey with her, because her protective instinct tended to drown out her fear.

  She lifted the heavy wooden doors and then felt her way down the stairs until she found the string and yanked it. Daltrey came down backward, as if descending a ladder, then promptly sat on the damp cement floor while she shelved the berries.

  Daltrey rooted around, looking for his prize, but there would be none this time.

  “Let’s go, honey,” Nessa said. “I don’t think the little ­people have—­”

  But to her utter surprise, he held up a little red die cast car, his face awash in delight.

  Nessa felt unexpected tears spring to her eyes as she took it from his outstretched hand and turned it over.

  “How about that?” she said, handing it back to him. She led him up the stairs and out into the sunshine. She shut the cellar door and they went back in the house.

  Daltrey ran into the living room to show Isabeau his new car.

  “What have you got there?” she said. He placed the new toy on Isabeau’s palm and she looked it over. “This is way cool.” He nodded and ran up to his room, no doubt to put the car with his other “little ­people” treasures on his bookcase. Nessa wiped her eyes and sat down in front of her computer.

  Right. She’d been researching that trivia question. On the screen was the list of words common to all five artists’ songs:

  part

  ground

  roll

  vine

  old

  water

  rosie

  She stared at her screen in disbelief, an electric buzz covering her skin.

  A quick search confirmed it.

  Norah Jones’s “Rosie’s Lullaby”; Tom Waits’s “Rosie (Closing Time)”; Jackson Browne’s “Rosie”; AC/DC’s “Whole Lotta Rosie”; and Neil Diamond’s “Cracklin’ Rosie.”

  Rosie.

  Nessa’s real name.

  Chapter Eight

  THERE WAS SIMPLY no chance someone out there had figured out who she was. Or, more precisely, who she used to be.

  Nessa had taken every precaution to make sure her photo was nowhere on the Internet, no link between her current identity and her birth name. She had it written into her Altair contract that they were prohibited from using her photo in promotions, using the excuse that it helped retain an air of mystery. If she wrote about John or Daltrey, she referred to them as J and D. She used Hushmail for email, Tor software that allowed her to browse and post anonymously, and the Tails OS, an operating system that prevented anything being written onto her computer’s main drives. Everything was designed to mask her IP and leave her untraceable by anyone except security experts.

  She had a flash of John’s abandoned truck. Were these two things connected somehow?

  She dismissed this as paranoia of the most insane kind—­bipolar, crack-­addict paranoia. No. It was a fluke that the commenter had come up with this particular trivia question. It didn’t mean he knew Nessa had been Rosie in another lifetime. There was no traceable connection between Rosie and Nessa. They were two different ­people. She had to believe that. She had to.

  She looked at the question again, and the name attached to it was of course Anonymous. Maybe she should make signing comments mandatory, but that would cut way down on interaction if ­people had to identify themselves, and it was her numbers that kept her sponsors paying her.

  It was just a coincidence. A very specific coincidence.

  Nessa had to try and work, even though her concentration was shot full of holes. Too many things crowded into her brain. But with or without concentration, Nessa had to finish and put up a post before midnight, and nothing could get in the way of that. Her advertising agreement demanded she put out three posts a week, even if her estranged spouse was missing or dead, even if she was encapsulated in an iron lung, even if she was off-­planet. Advertising marched on.

  She sat down at her desk in front of the window that looked out on the hops vines and opened her laptop. Best thing to do was start typing. But she was interrupted by a quiet gasp from Isabeau.

  “Hey, boss, I need to show you something.”

  Nessa swiveled in her chair as Isabeau picked up her laptop, walked over to the couch, and sat down. She beckoned to Nessa, who got up and sat next to her.

  “What is it?” Nessa said.

  Isabeau set her laptop on the coffee table and tapped the trackpad.

  “Okay, so I know you don’t do social media and all that, but I thought it might be useful to see what’s going on in the ’sphere, see if you’re being talked about out there. I know your advertisers are always looking for ways to increase your exposure, so anyway, I created a ­couple of
Google alerts—­with search terms like Nessa, radio, Altair, deep cuts. That sort of thing. So I got a ­couple of alerts this morning—­”

  Isabeau typed into the address bar and pulled up her Google alerts page.

  “So as it turns out,” she said, “you have a Twitter account. Where ‘you’ tweet all kinds of really idiotic shit. No offense. And from the bad grammar and the weird topics, I don’t think Altair is responsible.” Isabeau typed on her keyboard. “I’m pulling up Twitter and searching for @RadioNessa.”

  Nessa’s cell phone rang. Her contact at Altair. She let it go to voicemail and pocketed it before looking at Isabeau’s screen. A Twitter profile page appeared with the bio: Obamma was born in Kenya. He has no right to be the presdient. Someone should assinate him.

  Nessa whipped her head toward Isabeau, her mouth so wide she could swallow a dinner plate. “We have to delete this.”

  “We can’t,” Isabeau said. “It’s not your account. It’s not, is it?”

  “Of course not! Look at the spelling!”

  Was that really what she was so twisted up about? The spelling?

  “I voted for Obama,” Nessa said, the defensiveness in her voice making her cringe. “Both times.”

  “Oh,” Isabeau said. “I didn’t. Not crazy about his foreign policy. But I definitely don’t want him dead.”

  “How do we get this taken down?”

  “We can’t. Unless we can prove this person meant you harm, meant for ­people to think this is actually you.”

  “Of course I can prove it. Look at my voting record. Look at my spelling, for God’s sake.”

  Again with the spelling.

  “Anyway,” Isabeau said, “I don’t think that’s going to be enough to persuade a judge to issue a take-­down order. But I’m going to report it to Twitter.”

  Who was this girl? Where did all this knowledge come from?

  “Keep reading. It gets worse.”

  Nessa read through some more politically incorrect invective, and then she saw this:

  The earthquake in Java was retribushon for legalizing gay mariage.

  Nessa groaned. “Enough,” she said. “I can’t read any more.”

  “Well, you obviously haven’t gotten to the worst one. You need to see it.”

  Nessa kept scrolling until she got to a highlighted tweet, one that was twice the size of the others, and it was one of “hers.”

  Thanks to vacines, my son can’t speak. He’d be better off dead. Don’t get your kids vacinated!

  Nessa’s skin tingled. She’d never mentioned Daltrey wasn’t talking yet on the blog or on the radio. She was certain of it. She normally didn’t talk family on the radio and only rarely on the blog, and only as it pertained to whatever music she was discussing.

  But . . . John had endlessly speculated on Daltrey’s lack of speech, although he’d never said Daltrey would be better off dead. Had he? Of course not. But John had bought into the whole vaccine conspiracy movement, no matter how many articles she’d shown him debunking this ridiculous myth.

  “You don’t believe that, of course,” Isabeau said, as if to reassure herself Nessa wasn’t a crackpot.

  “Of course not.” Nessa regarded her. Did she think Nessa was doing all this to generate publicity or something? What did Isabeau think, and how could she possibly ask Isabeau to be real with her when she had no intention of being real in return?

  “I didn’t think so,” Isabeau said.

  “Are you sure you didn’t think so?”

  “Yes.” But she wouldn’t meet Nessa’s eye.

  Nessa’s computer dinged from her desk. She brought it back with her to the couch, sat back down, and opened Hushmail. There were several messages from Altair and a ­couple from sponsors.

  She clicked on the one from Rick’s Music Shop and Guitar Ser­vices:

  Dear Ms. Donati,

  We are sad to say we are pulling our sponsorship from your blog Unknown Legends due to the offensive nature of your recent tweets. We wish you the best of luck.

  Nessa typed a reply to Rick’s:

  Dear Rick,

  The Twitter handle is a malicious spoof account. I can see how some ­people might become confused, but this happens all the time. If you’re in the public eye, you attract haters, and those haters do what they can to destroy your credibility. If you’ll notice, the spelling is horrendous, and mine is not. I of course know how to spell Obama and president. ;) As you know, I’ve never made any of these kinds of comments before, and now there are many, obviously an attempt by someone to discredit me.

  I hope you’ll reconsider. If not, I understand.

  Best, Nessa

  Nessa then got on her blog and whipped off a quick note to her subscribers and sponsors explaining what had happened and asking them to hang in there with her while she sorted the insanity out.

  “I have one more thing to show you,” Isabeau said. “So you read about the Air Capital plane crash over South Dakota over the weekend, right?”

  Of course she had. There’d been no survivors, but in a bizarre twist, much of the baggage was intact.

  “Well, as it turns out, you also have a Facebook fan page. And here’s the most recent thing ‘you’ posted.”

  #AirCapital597 Glad the valuble stuff survived!! Who’s going with me to the auction??

  “Good God,” Nessa said. This was the kind of thing that ruined ­people’s reputations forever. She remembered the story of the PR exec who posted a thoughtless tweet and had to change her name and move.

  “Trolls, right?” Isabeau said. “Nothing to do but sit in their parents’ basements and smoke weed and anonymously heckle ­people who are actually trying to create something. I’ll bet this guy’s some jealous asshole who’s trying to spook your sponsors. He probably has a shitty music blog with two subscribers—­his mom and a girl named Desiree who keeps asking him if, for just $24.95, he’d like to take a look at some of her nude photos.”

  Nessa laughed. “You really think that’s all it is?”

  Isabeau rolled her eyes. “Probably,” she said. “If you ignore him, he’ll probably get bored and try to find somebody more fun to flame.” She stretched. “Hey, I’m going into town here in a little while—­meeting some friends for dinner and a movie. I should be home about ten. Cool if I bring my stuff with me and do a little move-­in?”

  “Oh, sure,” Nessa said. “Have fun.”

  Isabeau closed up her laptop, slung her purse over her shoulder, and went out the back door.

  Nessa spent the rest of the afternoon calming nervous and angry sponsors and her Altair bosses, then made a stir-­fry for herself and Daltrey for dinner.

  After they ate, the two of them went out back to walk their property with Declan MacManus. The dog cavorted happily, running to and fro, barking over his shoulder at them as if they were an irritatingly slow tour group and he was their guide. They walked into the wooded area beyond their outbuildings, and Nessa pointed things out to Daltrey as they passed them. “Look,” she said. “A sunflower. Sunflower. Tree. That’s a tree. It’s an oak. Weeds. Those are weeds.”

  The sun dipped below the horizon, and Daltrey looked happy to be outside in the warm dusk later than she normally let him stay out.

  Finally, what she’d been waiting for happened, and a tiny light ascended from the tall grass.

  “Look, Daltrey! A firefly! Can you say firefly?”

  His eyes grew bigger and his mouth dropped open, as more and more of the lightning bugs appeared and rose in the air around him.

  Daltrey and Declan MacManus chased after the fireflies and leaped at them. Daltrey finally twirled, his arms overhead, never letting go of the toy car, his eyes closed in rapture as the tiny lights floated all around him.

  She wished Isabeau were here to see this. She wished John were. And she was crying agai
n.

  After Nessa put Daltrey to bed, she sat at her desk and paid bills until Isabeau returned at nine-­thirty, suitcases and a few boxes in tow for her move-­in.

  “You should have let me help you do this,” Nessa said.

  “I only have a few things,” Isabeau said. “No biggie.” She dragged everything up to the guest room and Nessa could hear her putting things away in dresser drawers.

  Nessa felt relief at having another adult in the house, and she knew she’d made the right decision. She went upstairs and knocked lightly on the guest room door. Isabeau opened it and threw her arm out wide as if she were welcoming a treasured guest.

  “Do you have everything you need?” Nessa said.

  “I think so. You going to bed?”

  “Yeah. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  Nessa closed Isabeau’s door and went to check on Daltrey. He was sound asleep, still clutching the car. She eased it from his hand and looked at it. It was a Hot Wheels replica of a Tesla Model S, which had been John’s current dream car.

  “Good on the environment,” he’d told her, “but still hot.”

  She placed the Tesla on the top shelf of Daltrey’s bookcase next to the Fender guitar pick and the other artifacts John had hidden for him.

  She gazed at Daltrey’s lovely face, thinking, My dad went out of his mind and all I got was this lousy toy car.

  Chapter Nine

  Sunday, June 5

  NESSA SAT AT her desk after dinner while Daltrey and Isabeau played Legos and wrote her Monday blog post.

  The Disintegration Loops is a four-­volume album by William Basinski, and I don’t know when I’ve been so disturbed by a piece of music as I was when my friend Marlon, who knows all the freaky stuff out there, even though he’s middle-­aged (or maybe it’s because he’s middle-­aged) played it for me. . .

  She gave herself a chuckle, calling Marlon middle-­aged even though he was only in his thirties. She knew he’d have plenty to say about that at their next sponsor meeting.

  She finished up the post, proofed it, changed a few phrases, and cut a few words, then attached The Disintegration Loops’ cover art as the featured image, added tags, and posted it a day early. Good for her.