“She doesn’t need hope. She needs closure.”
“None of us ever get closure. Closure isn’t even a thing, not really. I mean, I was there. I saw Raoul die, but it doesn’t feel closed to me. When I shut my eyes, I can still see that moment, the time cut through like the snake chopped in half with a machete. Death opens things, and once they are opened, they can’t be closed again.
“If I hadn’t been there, if I hadn’t seen him die, if I hadn’t taken his phone and sent those messages, Raoul would still be dead. There would still be no way to fill the place in the world where he isn’t anymore.”
In the silence, the dryer growls on; my adventure towel comes and goes.
“Z, I told you because I needed to tell someone, and you were the only someone I could tell. You are the person I trust.”
I look up at the television. I can’t look at Timmer.
Sallie Lee: . . . abandoned a baby — a baby!— on the sidewalk outside a SpeedyMed emergency room.
Scene: Footage from surveillance camera shows fleeing crowd. After the crowd disperses, there is a bag sitting in the middle of the sidewalk.
Sallie Lee: An innocent baby, left in a plastic bag, and that isn’t the worst of it, you know, Chad? That baby had been drugged. Someone had given drugs to that baby.
Chad Manley: Who would waste drugs on a baby?
Sallie Lee: (Glares at Chad.) Let’s roll that footage again. Viewers, please look closely. We are counting on you to give this baby closure. Somewhere out there this baby has a family.
Scene: Surveillance film plays on a loop.
There’s the moment when the crowd parts and the bag is sitting there. By that time, I was running down the block, not even noticeable because so many other people were doing the same thing.
Timmer touches my shoulder. He looks at me, but he doesn’t say anything. Timmer didn’t know that the plan had gotten so messed up. He didn’t know that I had failed to deposit the bag in the safety of the hospital bathroom. He knew stuff had gone down. Pineapple and Luck knew what they knew, which wasn’t where I was and what I’d done before I showed up tugging on the car handle and yelling at Timmer to Go! Go! Go! But now he knows I failed at my part. I ditched the bag and ran. I’m not the one to trust.
Sallie Lee: Look at this baby’s face. Can you help us bring this innocent baby home?
“The baby’s safe,” I say. “It’s a celebrity. See?” I point at the screen showing Bag Baby surrounded by toys donated by AllMART, because AllMART takes a special interest in the poor thing. Pretty soon the news segment will get to the part where AllMART is going to feature Bag Baby in a series of public service advertisements promoting better parenting. The money will be invested in an account to make sure that Bag Baby has a great start in life.
“And we protected Juliette.”
We stare at the clothes tumbling in the dryer. My adventure towel waves at me. A zipper clicks against the round glass window in the door.
The dryer stops. The clothes fall quiet.
When I get home from work, I watch myself on television while I take a shower under the sprinkler nozzle. I’m running away from the baby in a bag. That’s what I do when I’m on the news.
Sallie Lee: Aside from this surveillance video, there is only one piece of evidence: the AllMART bag.
Chad Manley: The bag?
(Still of bag, spread on black background with a ruler beside it.)
There it is, my bag. There are many like it, but that one was mine. It held my book and underpants. I poked air holes in it with a pen so the baby could breathe. And I let it go.
Sallie Lee: Forensic analysis indicates that bag was manufactured almost sixteen years ago. If that bag were a human, it could have been that baby’s mother.
Chad Manley: That wouldn’t be sexually responsible. A mother who isn’t even sixteen . . .
Sallie Lee: That’s a tangent, Chad. The important thing is that there are fingerprints on that bag.
Chad Manley: Well, we know who did it, then! Evidence! Justice!
Sallie Lee: Not so fast. There are a lot of fingerprints, but only two sets are in the system.
Chad Manley: Sallie, you tease! Who done it?
Sallie Lee: Two names have been released to the public. I can share those now: Jean Brody, age fifty, unemployed public school teacher. Dolly Lamb, age forty-seven. Until recently she was an AllMART employee in the — get this — toy department! Then she failed a routine drug test.
Chad Manley: The teacher. Case closed.
Sallie Lee: Not so fast, Chad. Brody died in an alcohol-related crash on the night of the big haboob. (Camera drops and focuses on Lee’s décolletage for 1, 2, 3! seconds.) And Lamb was already incarcerated when the baby was dumped. Because she’s a drug addict.
Chad Manley: Whoa! My money is still on the teacher.
I can’t guess when Dolly Lamb touched that bag, but I know when Ms. Brody last held it. It was the day she gave it to me. My fingerprints are on there too. And Timmer’s, because he carried it the day he brought me away from Terra Incognita. Juliette held that bag until we got to the drop zone. Maybe Luck’s. Maybe Pineapple’s. Maybe we are all there, waiting to be identified, but as far as I know, none of us has been arrested and none of us has ever taught school. Our fingerprints aren’t in the database.
I take a deep breath. I feel safe — safe enough.
A message from SecurIt Safe-Keeping, to me and to 167 others: I’m about to delete it as old-style zombiespam, but my eye reads the first name on the list of other recipients and overrules that notion. The name is [email protected]. That’s the same Jyll who taught me and AnnaMom how to live like ghosts. She is the one who promised that she understood the story of family fun and could tell it perfectly. She is the one who took my birthday pictures off the wall and put them in a gray storage bin somewhere. She is the one I hate. AnnaMom waved that little wave and left me behind with virgin towels and some Yummy Bunny leftovers in the refrigerator. I blame Jyll for that.
I open the message and read:
The fee for rental on space 1226 is now six months in arrears. This is to inform you that the contents of Safe-Keeping space 1226, SecurIt Storage at 8700 Industrial Ave., will be auctioned on a date not earlier than May 4. This is the final notice that unclaimed items will be auctioned in lieu of rental fees owed. If you wish to claim the contents of storage space 1226, you may do so upon payment in full of fees owed.
I calculate the number of hours I will have to work to pay the total due: 383.3. The auction date will come and go long before those future hours tick away.
“I need help.”
Everyone looks up at me from where they are making s’mores around the chiminea — sort of. They are making s’mores s’more-or-less, which means they are smashing scorched marshmallows between slices of white bread. Timmer is squeezing hot sauce on his. I don’t know if that is because he prefers it or if it is because it is possible.
“Really, I only need Timmer, but now that I think of it, it would be helpful if one of you hung out with 5er for a couple hours. We’ll be back before he goes to sleep.” I don’t know if the others understand 5er’s bad dreams, but I know I hit the right buttons to shut down a lot of Timmer’s objections. “Can we talk?”
Timmer crams the rest of a slice of bread oozing burnt marshmallow and hot sauce into his mouth. He wipes his fingers on the back of his pants. “What?” he says.
I walk away a bit for privacy, then I turn and say, “I need a ride to 8700 Industrial Avenue. And I probably need some tools for breaking locks.”
“You need to break locks?”
“Yeah. I’m going to bring my perfect-score-prize-reward ball-peen hammer, but maybe you know a better way. Like maybe Raoul has the right kind of tool, so we can borrow it from his truck.”
“Raoul usually pulled the door off, you know, with a winch.”
“Will that work if the door is inside a storage unit facility?”
“Don’t thi
nk so, no. But I’ve gotta ask: Why are you interested in breaking locks all of a sudden?”
“I just need to get some stuff, my stuff. Personal stuff.” Then I add, “Useful stuff,” because that sounds more convincing than what AnnaMom is whispering in my head: It’s your nest egg, ZeeZeeBee.
I’m banging on the hasp of the lock because I’ve decided that is the weak point of the system. Timmer holds his phone so I have light to see, and he leans hard against the metal door to deaden the noise. The light is little and the noise . . . the noise is the only result of my work so far.
“Ball. Peen. Hammers. Are. For. Working. On. Metal.” Each time I hit the lock hasp with the hammer, I say one word: “Work. On. This.”
A bouncing light. Someone is coming.
The place seemed deserted and unguarded. The electronic gate was open, since it was a dark neighborhood, so we just breezed right through and headed for Jyll’s unit. It seemed deserted, but that approaching light means someone heard us. We’re caught.
I grab Timmer’s hand and press his phone screen against my soft body over my heart. That is how to hide a phone in a hurry: faster than fumbling for a switch, just bury the light. Zoë-babykins? Are you sleeping? You should be sleeping. It is the middle of the night, and all the good girls are sleeping. All their phones are sleeping too. It must be a spark of starlight or a little glowworm I see flickering in the crack under your bedroom door.
Hiding the phone doesn’t matter. The heavy boot steps are still coming. The main passage is filled with the shaking beam of light. Barking coughs, the raking gurgle, “Little Zombie Titties! Whatcha doin’, Zombie Titties?”
“Hi, Kral,” says Timmer. He doesn’t try to pull his hand away from where I’m holding it tight, but now I throw him away from me like it was his idea to be touching.
“Trouble with the lock?” says Kral. “I can fix that.” He is only a step away from us. He lifts the heavy tool in his hand and pushes the long lopper handles together. The bladed jaws nip right through.
“Whatcha got in there?” Kral throws the lock. It clicks and skitters away into the shadows. Kral flips the handle and the door to the unit rumbles up. His headlamp shows me what he sees: stacks of gray storage bins. Kral reaches out and pulls one down, tipping the stuff inside to the floor.
All of us freeze. There’s a snake. Kral drops his long-handled lopper and pulls out his gun and shoots it, three times. The sound echoes. The bullet fragments ricochet. Timmer turns and wraps his arms around me, curls around me, like that is going to protect me.
When the noise stops, Kral is snorting laughter. “The snake is a fake. Dead as a doorknob.” He pushes it with the toe of his boot and scans the rest of the stuff that fell from the spilled bin: framed pictures of strangers, a flyswatter, a mug that says World’s Best Hookup. “Junk!” he says. “You shoulda picked what’s behind door number three, kids. Tell ya what, you come give me a hand, and I’ll give you something worth the time.” Kral turns and heads down the passage. Timmer follows. And I follow Timmer.
When the unit door rattles up, I recognize the logo on the packing. The unit is full pretty much top to bottom of boxes of ammunition.
“I need to load this up,” says Kral. “Got me a hand truck, but now I got me some hands.”
Timmer doesn’t say anything. He just starts loading the boxes onto the hand truck while Kral supervises. Or maybe Kral is just making sure Timmer has light to see by. When it’s full, Kral and Timmer head off down the passage, and I’m left there, in the dark.
It seems like a very long time before I see the jumping light and I hear them coming back. Them. Both of them. Timmer and Kral.
“This is going to take a while,” says Timmer. He hands me his phone. “You can use this to look for your stuff.”
“Okay, but I can use my own phone. You keep yours.”
I wait until Timmer has filled the hand truck with another load of ammunition and they leave me alone in the dark again. Then I touch my phone and hold it out so it can make its small light in the dark place.
Jyll’s Safe-Keeping unit is larger than Kral’s. Toward the back there is a stack of crystal-clear coffee tables and a rack to hold large artwork. I recognize the frame of the painting that used to hang over the fireplace in my home in Terra Incognita. I pull it out and lean it against the stack of tables. I have seen this every day for most of my life. Or I could have seen it, if I had looked at it. I haven’t looked at it for a long time. That’s the way it can be with familiar objects.
It is a painting about Africa. The sky is full of storm clouds, blue so dark it has turned black. The earth is tender yellow green. Six white birds fly overhead, because they can fly. The ostrich, which is what the painting is really about, cannot. It is posed on one foot; the other leg is lifted in the air like a ballerina’s. White plumes frill out in a tutu. The bird’s neck curves gracefully. It has long eyelashes and enormous eyes. It is the eyes that terrify me, black and empty and bottomless.
Or those painted eyes did terrify me when I was little. If I am terrified now, I can’t tell. I live in fear. I am a chick in an egg, and fear is the slippery, clear goo around me. I stand eye to eye with the ostrich, and my heart, that stubborn muscle, just keeps hammering on inside me like it wants to escape.
Jyll was big on organization. Jyll was proud of her skills. So I know everything in this unit is in a logical place; I’m just not sure what logic Jyll was using. The gray bins are labeled, but they aren’t addresses, just numbers. It takes me a while to figure out the numbers are dates. Some of the bins have been in the unit for more than four years. Our bin has been stored and waiting for nine months.
Here is the genuine ostrich feather plume, framed. The repainted china plate where the ostrich looks up from a circle of old-fashioned roses. There are the framed pictures of me, each year on my birthday, and in each photo I have the photos from the year before until the last one, where it is me, sitting at the kitchen island, with fourteen frames and a piece of special cake from the Casa de Cake Haus. And, wrapped in bubble wrap for safekeeping, the big egg that can be filled with water and buried in the sand of the desert . . . because water in the desert is like a treasure once-upon-a-time, Zoëkins. Kiss it! Kiss it, ZeeZeeBee. We can fill it up with love just in case we ever need it, just in case we are ever in the desert and we need to drink up some love.
I can’t stop the tear. It falls right into the hole on the top and disappears. The egg only pretends to be safekeeping. It isn’t a bank for kisses. The weight of a tear, the weight of all those kisses, amounts to nothing. When I hold the shell, it only feels empty.
ZeeZeeBee, don’t you cry. Girls like us, we don’t cry. I love you and you love me. . . .
“Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!” It’s a wonder the egg doesn’t crush in my hands. My fingers are turning into claws. The egg holds firm. I lift it over my head and throw it — spike it — right against the cement floor of the storage unit. That’s when it cracks. I stomp on it. It crunches like broken china bowls. I stomp on it a lot.
When I look, I see the broken shell, dry as bone, the color of bone. And I see something else.
It’s a photograph, printed out on shiny paper, suitable for framing, like my birthday pictures. It’s a guy with a little girl riding on his shoulders. The guy and the little girl are both smiling. I turn the curled paper over. “Ed and ZeeZeeBee.” It is my mother’s precise handwriting. There is a date too, printed by the photo shop in pale blue ink and diagonal lines. Funny thing, it is dated my own birthday, when I would have been three years old. I can’t remember being three. I mean, I can’t remember anything about being three that my AnnaMom didn’t tell me with the pictures she showed me. She never showed me this picture. I do know that Ed Gorton, who is the only Ed I know about, was already dead by ostrich a long time before my third birthday.
I see light bouncing in the dark hallway. I put the photo in my back pocket.
“You find what you needed?” asks Timmer. I look past him. K
ral doesn’t seem to be with him.
I pick up my tiny, tarnished silver spoon. “I found this.”
“That’s something,” says Timmer. “Do you need to look some more?”
“No. I’m done.”
“Kral gave us this,” says Timmer, and he points to the headlamp he’s wearing. “And this too,” he says. He reaches around his back and then holds out a gun, small and dark. It’s an inexpensive but popular model. It is the darkest thing in that lightless place. “Ammo included,” Timmer says. Then he pauses and looks up at me. The headlamp blinds me when he stares at my face. “Kral says he’s willing to take you if you want to go with him. He’ll wait for fifteen minutes. Kral always liked you.”
“No,” I say. “He can wait all night.”
“Okay.”
“Shut the door, please,” I say.
Timmer turns, reaches up, and pulls the rattling metal panels of the storage unit door down.
“All the way,” I say.
“Sorry, it got hung up on this tub that spilled,” Timmer says. He moves to pick up the overturned bin.
“No! Don’t touch it. The snake is under there.”
“The snake is a lie. It can’t bite,” says Timmer.
“Just shut up and turn off that light.”
“Then we will be in the dark.”
“Shut up and shut it off.”
The light goes off. There is that sudden feeling of my eyes opening desperately and looking so deep that I can feel the gaze sliding back into me. It sneaks up invisible and swallows itself.
In the dark, blind fingers resort to reaching out. Which is why Timmer touches my nose but then jerks back, because it’s very . . . it’s socially unheard-of to walk up and touch someone on the nose.
Even on Mars, they shake hands instead of that.
Then Timmer is actually close to me and he puts his arms around me and hugs me. His shirt is damp from the work he did for Kral. The signal for hug:ended never happens. I’m surprised how his bones stick out. I am surprised by his body. I am surprised by the sound of my silver spoon ringing on the floor when I open my clenched fist.
MARTians Page 13
