The Listeners

by Leni Zumas

Cam shrugged. “They’re not.”

  I was about to say I’m sorry but decided those were words Cam didn’t need to hear again from me.

  WIPE THE BLOOD down his face. Yes, like that. Good soldier. Make a red handprint. Tell him it came from your downstairs. Tell him he can’t wash it off.

  WE WERE WARM together at the table. The windows were black mirrors. Snack was milk tea and cinnamon toast. The radio played pink-quill music. My sister dipped her nose in the teacup and Riley folded a whole half of toast into his mouth and Mert said, “Pettles, don’t greed.”

  The news, interrupting, said a plane bound for Florida had crashed into the Fourteenth Street bridge immediately after takeoff.

  “Jesus,” Mert said, leaning to turn it up.

  The cause of the accident has not yet been determined. Freezing weather conditions may have been a factor. Investigations are under way.

  “But are the people okay?” asked Riley.

  The radio went back to music. Mert got on the phone to the Walkers, who had a TV. “Mind if I bring the troops over?” We ran next door, without coats.

  I WAS SHAKEN awake into a tearing hangover. Riley’s pea-green eyes blinked above. “You must get away,” I whispered.

  “But the dungeoner,” he said.

  “Get away.”

  “He’s in Mrs. Jones’s. Just went in.”

  “I thought she didn’t open until noon.”

  “It’s two thirty, Quinn.”

  “Why aren’t you at work?”

  “I took a personal day,” he said. “You were making sounds in the night.”

  “I was?”

  “And I thought you might be sick.” He nibbled at a finger. “I think we should follow the dungeoner. Because I have a theory who he is.”

  “Who?”

  “The robber. From the Walkers’. The boy who made Mr. Walker shoot? He’s come back all these years later to apologize, even though it wasn’t actually his fault she got killed, but he can’t muster the courage so he just pretends to get fortunes when in fact he’s watching my apartment.”

  “A convincing theory,” I said.

  “It could be true!”

  “Yes, well, it could. Do you have any aspirin?”

  He scurried off and I wondered, for the millionth time, why my brother was so nice to me.

  I ate four tablets, creaked into sweatpants, and decided it was best not to look in the mirror. “Do you have sunglasses?”

  Riley produced red ones that might have been given away at a children’s water park.

  “Any other sunglasses?”

  “God, Quinn!”

  “Sorry, sorry.”

  “We don’t really have to follow him. But let’s go for a walk anyway.”

  “A walk?”

  He blinked. “It’s good for the blood.”

  Quietly we went west, along the yawning mouth of the park, until we got to the Buffalo Bridge.

  “If you could pick the bridge you jumped to your suicide from, which would it be?”

  “Any in the world?”

  “No,” said the middle, “around here. Because you wouldn’t pay to go to another country to kill yourself.”

  “I might,” said the oldest.

  “Mine would be the Key Bridge,” said the youngest.

  The middle rolled her eyes. “Okay, boring! I would pick the Buffalo. The best-looking and the longest fall.”

  The youngest had once been scared of the Buffalo Bridge, when he did not understand that the giant green animals at either end were stone and could not charge.

  “I’d pick the Fourteenth Street,” declared the oldest.

  “Why?”

  “So I could die in other people’s watery graves.”

  “Maybe we should turn back,” I said, longing for more aspirin. A roomful of aspirin. I nodded at the buffalo statue, huge above us. “Hideous fucker. Check out his beard. Wildlife shouldn’t have beards.”

  “Only sisters,” Riley said, smiling.

  “I do not.”

  “A little bit you do. Some rogue hairs.”

  I reached up for my chin.

  He stopped smiling. “Quinn, look.”

  “Yeah?” I stepped closer to the stone rail, expecting him to point out a beauty or an oddness.

  “You need—” He cleared his throat. “You need to leave soon.”

  “I know, I know. I’ve been hunting. There just isn’t anything cheap enough, unless it’s way out beyond the reach of public transportation. And I’m not getting my license back anytime soon, so—”

  “I mean you need to leave next week. By the end of next week.”

  I thumbed my wrist. “Is that a deadline?”

  “I’m sorry. I know you’re having kind of—kind of a hard time. But you can’t keep staying with me.”

  “Wow.”

  “I’m sorry.” His mouth crumpled; his furry eyebrows scrunched.

  I admired my brother yet again. He was taller, but not by much; I could easily reach the top of his head. I put my hand there and pressed down, wanting to give him a heat of okayness, solidity, love.

  DON’T UNDERESTIMATE YOUR local library, Mert used to say. It was her favorite place to send us when our boredom was on her nerves. Squidlings in a row, she arranged her children from tallest to smallest. My sister held one hand in front and one behind, chaining us, and it was she who liked the library best. I hated her for liking the library and for singing in front of strangers the story of the girl who fell from a cliff and was a miner’s daughter and drove ducklings. I used to wonder—when she broke into public song, or rocked back and forth on the floor—if my sister was going to end up an unbalanced person who had to be placed in supervised care. Riley and I would visit on the weekends, guiltily.

  Black trees, black sky, arms of light on black road. I’d found a decent station, a wee-hours college show to keep me company while the others slept. I strained to see ahead. Lit cigarette after cigarette to stay alert. I had no company but the music, cutting in and out of static, and the occasional whimper of a girl reciting the playlist. And here’s one we really like. The runaway hit by… and “Dear Done For” started and I didn’t want to hear it and I leaned to turn the dial and it was fast and fucked and white and—

  She made us crash, my sister did, lonely and jealous down there in purgastory; she wanted company. She knew the song was about her, and she made the ice slick—and the tires not catch—and the road edge a steep incline instead of a field.

  But her powers weren’t accurate. I didn’t die.

  It wasn’t enough to send the freakeries, was it? To blow out speakers in the middle of important shows? To break strings, spill bottles, claw my throat in the night? She had to have me all to herself. You are Cadmus and I am Europa. You spent years looking, never found.

  I rolled over on the damp sheet and kicked off the blanket it was way too hot for.

  Like a washcloth. My sister hadn’t been mad by the time she fell asleep. Had she?

  I shut my eyes tighter.

  She hadn’t been. Had not. She was pestered by the heat and happy there was no school the next day and smiling under her eyelids. She said how the heat was on us like a washcloth made out of bread, and I—dozy too—said, “That’s gross.”

  “You have to switch places,” Mink said. “Move Cam to the driver’s seat.”

  So will you switch places now? Okay, but only this one time.

  IT WAS MINK’S third outing with the latest guy, and her hopes had not yet been dashed. “He’s nice,” she kept telling me. “Just a nice, regular person.”

  “In other words, dull?”

  “No! He’s cool. I mean, cool in that he’s not cool. He’s not trying.”

  “Remind me what he does, again? Fireman?”

  “Web designer,” she corrected. “He’s a grown-up.”

  “Have a marvelous grown-up time,” I told her. “I’m taking the terror to dinner. Meli,” I called over the roar of cartoon, “we’re eating out.�
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  No response.

  Mink jogged over to shut off the TV. “Quinn has generously offered to feed you tonight.”

  The girl smiled up at us from the carpet. “Awesome.”

  “I was thinking Chinese,” I said. “We can get pot stickers.”

  Meli shook her head. “Can we please go to You Hop, please?”

  “Not tonight, bee,” Mink said quickly.

  “But I want You Hop.”

  “Well, you’re not going there.”

  “But why?”

  “Because you’re not.”

  “But I want chocolate-chip pancakes.”

  “Then you can stay home,” said Mink. To me: “Sorry.”

  “It’s not her fault she likes them,” I shrugged. “How about deep-dish pizza?” I would not let the bloodworm come. I would eat like a regular person. Hamburger nubs were not my sister’s flesh.

  “Oh, yes! Okay!”

  A car horn. “Have a great time, beautifuls!” cried Mink over her shoulder.

  It had crossed my mind to ask her if could I stay here for a little while. She’d have said yes, however reluctantly. But Mink was irrevocably responsible for the welfare of a small human being. She didn’t need me on her couch too.

  “Oh god Quinny! Come here quick!”

  “You’re not allowed to cause catastrophe on my watch,” I shouted back.

  “But spider! By the terlet!”

  Last summer, in the park, when the girl had been reduced to spasms by a web hanging across our path, was the first time I’d regretted that a dad was not around—to brush the web back with his powerful forearm and boldly decree: Can’t hurt you, sweetheart! Where could Mink have bought such a father? During her recent stint with a flower-shop manager, I’d noted that his voice was too high to qualify for the position. His forearms—slimmer than my own—had had little power in them. He’d played cards with Meli, but I wanted him to wield a knife. Slit the necks of encroaching wolves, laugh at their blood tracks on the snow, on his shoulder lean an ax for the wood. Meli’s biological father had been a one-week stand whose name Mink had practically forgotten by the time she found out she was with child. He moved to Los Angeles before the baby was born. Meli had been told he was a good person, someone good who was far away now and could not live near them. That paltry line had, miraculously, sufficed. It wouldn’t always. Soon she would start asking, But who was he? How did you know him? Did you love him? Did he love you?

  I wadded up paper towels and slammed them down on the creature, telling myself not to be such a girl.

  She whined, “But what if his brothers . . . ?”

  “Then we’ll kill them too. First, however, we have an appointment with hot cheese. Get your shoes.”

  “I’m wearing shoes,” she pointed out.

  THERE ONCE LIVED a girl who had lost a leg in a Ferris wheel accident and was unfit for all the jobs of work available to her. This girl could not pay the weekly attention required of her by law of the village where she resided. From her red hill she watched the ocean and longed to disappear under its waves where it made no difference if she had one knee or two.

  AFTER THE ACCIDENT, and after the flight home from Minnesota, and after a plastic surgeon had tidied up the four holes on his hand, Cam left town. Nobody knew where he went. I called his parents’ house and his mother told me Cameron preferred not to have contact and she would appreciate it if I didn’t call again.

  And when, after what seemed like forever, my period still hadn’t come, I concluded I was pregnant. The pee sticks were negative, but those foggy lines are so hard to read in the first place and my blood kept not coming, not coming, same as in high school, only this time I rubbed my belly every night and whispered to the baby: Grow well! I didn’t drink a drop of alcohol for three weeks. It would have Cam’s black hair and height and smartness; it would have my, what, I didn’t know—maybe the freckles—but most things, I hoped, would come from him.

  THE HOSPITAL SMELLED sad. All hospitals were required to. The one in Minnesota had still been decorated, on the sixteenth of February, with paper Christmas trees along its salmon halls. This one featured a pamphlet tacked to an otherwise empty corkboard: DOES THE PERSON YOU LOVE MAKE YOU HATE YOURSELF? We were directed to a distant floor, the chemical dependency unit, a hall of smudge-eyed shufflers in gowns and a guy crying into the pay phone: “But you said—but you said—”

  Geck’s skin was a little gray, the acne scars more pronounced, but otherwise he looked good for someone who had almost died. His shirt was off, the sheet bunched at his waist; I hoped he wasn’t naked under there.

  He rasped, “Wow, my first visitors, other than those whose loins I sprang from!”

  “Here,” Mink said, thrusting forth the box of chocolates.

  “Thanks, valentine.”

  “Why’s your voice all . . . ?”

  “They ram this tube down your throat,” he explained, “when they’re plucking you from the reaper’s jaws. I don’t remember the tube, but it still hurts like fuck, so I guess it happened. Awesome-town, let me tell you. Heart?” He held out the opened box. I shook my head, but Mink took a chocolate. She’d gone to the gym four times last week.

  “So how long do you have to stay here?”

  “It’s like this fourteen-day program. Standard fare.”

  We stood uncertainly by his bed. He coughed and sipped from a plastic cup. Finally: “You just missed my nidget roommate. He’s at group. Already tried to poach my wallet. I wake up from a nap, right, and first thing I see is his withered hand in my personal-items drawer—but anyhoo, you guys want to admire my cane?” Geck reached for the long stick leaning next to the bed. “This here is made from a bull’s pizzle. I asked my mother to bring it to cheer me. She has no clue what it’s made of. Other than my dad’s and mine, I am pretty certain this is the only penis she’s ever laid a finger on!”

  “Don’t talk about your mom like that,” Mink said.

  His belly and biceps were flecked with little white slashes. I’d seen stretch marks on Mink’s bubs when she’d aired the dairy, and on my own thickening hips; but they were surprising on a guy-body. Sad white body, inflating, deflating, drawing on ever-shrinking puddles of strength to bounce back from years of chemical dousing. Body that had once put itself into my body. Sex with Geck hadn’t been bad. He’d shown a lot of enthusiasm.

  In childhood, he had not dreamt of being jobless, carless, and poonless at forty, overdosing in his parents’ ranch house. The boy Geck had had more interesting plans for himself. A hot stripe ran from my ribs up my throat, opening at my teeth like a flower. I didn’t want him to die. He might not have been the most luminous bulb in the chandelier, but he was a full-knit body of fibers and cells, skin that bled if you ripped it, hair that came out in the shower. He had a mouth that kissed well, even with its roan tooth. First time I ever saw the tooth up close I had laughed, and he’d said You’re chuckling at my dental burden aren’t you.

  Now here he lay, pantless under a sheet, pretending to enjoy the piffle we’d bought at the hospital gift shop—acting unbothered by the fact that he was on a bed with metal sides. Well, I was bothered. A person could slide off the earth in one second, never to return.

  Mink leaned back in a chair with the penis cane propped between her knees, clicking her long nails along its shaft. “So what happens after fourteen days? Outpatient again?”

  “Uh, sadly, no.” Geck coughed again and I handed him the water cup. “My counselor doesn’t think I’m a trustworthy candidate for outpatient. Wants me to go to a halfway house—”

  “Great!” we said together.

  “In rural Pennsylvania,” he hissed. “I’m supposed to get away from my usual persons, places, and things. But what am I gonna do all day, milk Amish cattle?”

  “Think of it as a vacation,” Mink said.

  “Plus you’re too old,” I said, “for this crap. OD’ing is a young man’s game.”

  “I’m young,” he said irritably. �
�Look at my hair.”

  THE MIDDLE OPENED her notebook. “Here is the first question: If you were sentenced to death but could pick the method, would you rather be drawn and quartered or killed by necklacing, which is a form of punishment used in South Africa by blacks against blacks thought to be government sympathizers by which a petrol-soaked tire is placed around the victim’s neck and ignited?”

  “What’s drawn and quartered, again?” asked the youngest.

  “Where you get each arm and leg tied to its own horse and they all gallop in different directions.”

  “Oh yeah,” said the youngest.

  “Necklacing,” decided the oldest, “because you’d die quicker.”

  The youngest had to agree.

  MOST OF MY earthly possessions lay stowed underneath Observatory Lane, so there wasn’t much to pack. Cigarettes—underwear—Octy—and the old notebook, in a ziplock.

  “You found a place?” said Riley, barging in with Pine, who looked milkier than ever.

  “Uh, yep!”

  “Where?”

  “Secret,” I said.

  Pine inclined her head Britishly. “Nice to see you, Quinn.”

  “And you.” I rubbed my low back, ablaze from stooping. “How were the salt mines today?”

  “The chief was in an extrarude mood,” Riley said, “but I…”

  “What’s that?”

  “I remained sanguine.”

  “You guys making, um, any tea?”

  They looked at each other.

  “Only because—you sometimes have afternoon tea. And snacks.”

  “You want a scone,” Riley declared.

  “I could murder a scone,” I admitted.

  Pine said she would be happy to make some, if we had any flour.

  “You really don’t have to,” Riley said.

  “Great!” I shouted.

  “Settled,” she said.

  I was starting to like her.

  While she whipped up her batch, Riley watched me push small items into bags.