Last Things

by Jacqueline West

  But she was interested for the same reason as everyone else.

  Because I’m the guy with the guitar.

  I wasn’t going to try to build something real on top of that.

  So I’ve just been walking around with an unzipped chest since mid-December. I’m always kind of stunned that people can’t seem to see straight inside me. That they aren’t backing away, grossed-out and horrified. And I’ve tried to make sure that I’m never alone with Frankie, which, considering her giant circle of friends, is usually pretty easy to do.

  But now, here I am. Here we are.

  “Okay.” Frankie shifts into drive. “Where were you headed?”

  “I was just killing time before my lesson at one.”

  “All right.” She nods. “I like killing time.”

  Riding with Frankie is worlds away from riding with Patrick. Her car is glossy and new and smells like cinnamon, laced with the softer scent of Frankie’s shampoo. A pop station plays on the stereo. It’s all too nice. I feel totally uncomfortable, like I’m sitting on someone’s expensive leather furniture in a pair of soaking wet shorts.

  “Want to go to Roxy’s?” she asks.

  Roxy’s is the town diner. It’s got narrow red booths, sturdy white cups and saucers, and chipped beef on toast.

  “Not really,” I say. And not just because there’s only $3.75 in my pocket. “I don’t feel like just sitting.”

  “We could go to the park,” she suggests. “There’s lots of room to not sit there.”

  I had been headed there, but with Frankie, it seems wrong. Too quiet. Too alone. Too much temptation to lunge across the armrest, cup her perfect face in both hands, and—

  “No. Not the park.”

  “All right.” Frankie stays cool, even though now I sound like a brat. I don’t know if this is because she is so cool, so comfortable just being herself, or because she’s humoring me. “How about we just drive around for a while? I’ll even let you pick the music.” She nods at the glowing display on the dashboard, the hundreds of satellite stations to choose from.

  I click the volume dial to Off.

  Frankie laughs. “Nothing’s good enough for the prodigy behind Last Things.”

  She’s teasing. I know it. She both right and wrong. I’m a total snob. But sometimes everything feels too good for me.

  “That article was pretty amazing,” she says after a minute.

  “You read it?”

  “Sasha and I read it together.” She throws me a coy look, one eyebrow up. “They made you sound like a mysterious musical genius.”

  I don’t even know what to say to this. I almost say, When actually I’m just an awkward musical dork, but I don’t want Frankie to know this. Let her think that I’m a mysterious musical genius. It’s much better than the truth.

  “It’s funny, though,” Frankie is going on, because I haven’t answered. “It made me realize that I don’t know anything about your songwriting. Like, at all.”

  I shift on the seat. “You’ve heard my stuff.”

  “No. I mean, I don’t know how you write your songs. Where they come from. If you start with the melody, or with the words, or with the concept for the expensive music video you’ll make someday, or what.” She pauses again. I don’t speak. “So—this sounds totally corny, but where do you get your ideas?”

  We’re heading past the park, along a road where the houses grow thinner and the trees grow thicker. Green walls surround us.

  “I honestly don’t know.”

  “Oh. So you are a mysterious musical genius.”

  “No. I just—I can’t really explain it.” And then I tell her the truth. Partly. “I’m not controlling it. It just happens.”

  “Hmm.” Frankie lifts that eyebrow at me again. “Maybe you have a muse.”

  “What?”

  “You know, how people used to think that art came from some goddess coming to you and inspiring you. They all had weird names, like Euterpe and Calliope. . . .”

  “Euterpe?”

  “I don’t know why that one hasn’t caught on as a baby name.” Frankie shrugs with one shoulder. “So, maybe you have a muse. Maybe some force is coming in and giving you your songs.”

  There’s a gust of wind around my unzipped heart. I take a deep breath. Maybe some force is coming in . . . Yeah. She’s pretty close. But it’s not like some filmy Greek goddess is slipping into my head. It’s more like she’s breaking in with a sledgehammer. I stare down at Frankie’s bare knee until I can get my thoughts in a row again. Jesus. Even Frankie’s knee is perfect.

  “It just makes being praised for it seem stupid,” I say after a minute. “I mean, if something is just giving it to you, then it’s not really your work at all.”

  “I don’t know.” Frankie shrugs lightly. “It’s only stupid if you think muses are real.”

  We skim along the road. The pavement is so dark with shade that it looks wet. Even with the sky bright above, the woods are thick enough to rinse us in their chilly shadows.

  I want to reach over and touch Frankie’s hand. See if it’s as cold as before. I want to run my fingertips up the underside of her light brown arm, where the skin is like silk. I want it so much I can already feel it. I clench my fist instead. I keep my fingernails long, for playing the acoustic. I clench until the fingernails dig into my palm, and I keep my face rock-star blank the whole time, keep my breath steady, even when the pain starts to spear up my arm. I clench until I feel like I’ve paid, at least a tiny bit, for all of this.

  Thea

  Something ticks against the window screen.

  I roll over beneath the quilt and look up. The window is dusted with pale morning light. A moth dangles there. It isn’t outside the screen, it’s inside, caught in an old, matted wad of spiderweb, and it’s thrashing as hard as it can, its wings a blur, its little brown body swinging back and forth against the screen like a tiny wrecking ball. It tires, slows, stops. It dangles there, shifted only by the wind. Then it jerks again, fighting, fighting, fighting against the trap of a predator that was probably dead a long time ago.

  I wait until the moth is still again. Then I detach the web from the window frame, so the moth hangs from my fingertip instead. Its wings are like old paper. Fibrous. Velvety.

  I set the moth down on the windowsill, which is full of black bits, dead leaves, old beetle husks. I manage to peel the thread off its wings. Still, the moth just sits there. Too damaged or exhausted to move again.

  I slide up the screen, just an inch. Enough so the moth can slip out and flap away if it wants to.

  Then I climb out of bed.

  I change into clean clothes—spare pair of jeans, long-sleeved green sweater—before stepping out the door and down the creaking stairs.

  There’s a tiny bit of coffee in the freezer. Enough for two cups, if they’re small. And there are two nubs of bread in the plastic sack in the fridge. Stale, but good enough for toast.

  I start the coffeemaker and stare out the kitchen window as the water in the machine starts to hiss. The day is golden. Dew is still thick on the ground. I can see it on the ferns, on the spiderwebs strung across the grass. People used to call those fairies’ handkerchiefs. Here, under the thick branches, it will stay damp all day.

  The toaster pings.

  There’s a jar of jam in the door of the fridge. I spread jam on both nubs of bread and set them on a plate painted with sprigs of forsythia. I take the robin’s-egg-blue cup and the olive-green mug from the cupboard. There is no milk. We’ll drink our coffee black. I set everything on a scarred wooden tray and carry it into the living room.

  Aunt Mae is lying on the couch. She’s awake, I can tell. But she doesn’t open her eyes all the way until I set the tray down on the coffee table beside her.

  “Sweet girl,” she says. “Bless you.”

  I pass her a glass of water first.

  She takes it. I can see her hand shake. She sips a little.

  “We’re out of bread and coffee
,” I tell her. “I’ll go get some more.”

  Aunt Mae nods. “There’s some money left in the can.” She turns, sitting up slightly on the couch, bunching her cocoon of blankets. I can smell the alcohol. It breathes from her pores. Sharp as pine pitch. “Your father should be sending another check soon.”

  I take the glass out of her hand. “Have you heard from him lately?”

  She gives a little headshake. “We will soon. We need to be patient. He’s got his own demons to fight.”

  Aunt Mae can be patient if she wants to be. I’ve run low on patience, at least where my father is concerned. But there’s not much difference between being patient and expecting nothing.

  I give her the pretty blue cup. Aunt Mae holds it in both palms, like she’s cradling an actual robin’s egg. She looks at me. Her cobwebby eyes try to focus. “Good night?”

  I nod. “It was good.”

  “Music as good as ever?”

  “Better and better.”

  She smiles. “And how was our boy?”

  I smile back. Not answering.

  “Good,” says Aunt Mae. She takes a small, slow sip of the coffee, as if it’s medicine.

  “Would you like some toast?” I offer the plate.

  “In a bit, perhaps. Thank you.”

  I read the tremor in Aunt Mae’s hand as she sets the coffee cup aside. Not just a lack of alcohol in the blood. Something bigger.

  “Were the dreams bad last night?”

  Aunt Mae closes her eyes. Nods.

  “Anything nearby?”

  “No,” she breathes. “Too far. And too vague. The worst kind.”

  I smooth the layers of blankets that weigh her down. “Want me to draw you a bath?”

  “No. Thank you.” She smiles, eyes still closed. “You go on. Get on with your day.”

  “I’ll go to town. Get the groceries.” I glance at the floor beneath the coffee table. Glass bottles are tumbled there like spent bullet shells. “Do you need another bottle?”

  Aunt Mae nods. “See Martin. At the Wheelhouse.”

  I take my piece of toast and the green cup back to the kitchen.

  There are six bills in the old tin coffee can in the upper cupboard, floating on a silt of coins. I take a twenty and a handful of change. I open the other cupboard, the one with the jars and pouches and old tea boxes, and pull out a tall glass bottle, one with a metal screw cap, that held whiskey a long time ago. I fill it with water from the tap. I put the bottle in my canvas bag. Then I swallow my toast and coffee, pour the dregs into the sink, and let the rusty tap water carry them away.

  Outside, the air is on the edge of cool. The trees sift the sun so that only the finest fragments tumble through. I walk around to the back of the house, keeping inside the circle of white stones.

  There, beyond the edge of the overgrown backyard, just where the trees start to thicken again, the shed stands in a cluster of young pines. It sags heavily to one side. A few more years and it might tumble straight over, like someone who’s fallen asleep standing up.

  I unlatch its front door.

  No one comes here but me.

  I haven’t cleaned up inside. I haven’t changed anything. I try not even to leave footprints. It needs to look untouched, if they come searching. When they come.

  In the shed’s back corner are a rusted old tub, a few sacks of long-dead seeds, a torn sandbag. I move them carefully aside.

  The door is beneath them.

  It’s almost the size of a door inside a house, the kind of door that could open into any ordinary bedroom. But this door leads down. Into the earth.

  I pry it open.

  The root cellar, like the rest of the shed, had been unused for years. Decades. Now it’s mine.

  The steps are slats, barely broader than a ladder. They groan under me. I climb down into the little bare earth room. It smells like soil. Damp. Deep. If it weren’t for the open door above me and the rickety shed streaked with dusty sunlight, it would be pitch-black. Instead, it’s only gray. Splintering shelves line the walls. I take the full water bottle out of my bag and place it on the shelf, in the row of items I’ve been building, one at a time. Two jars of applesauce. One of peanut butter. Several other old whiskey bottles filled with water. In the corner, a pillow, a few blankets, two coils of strong rope.

  I climb back up the steps. The door has three bolts on the outside. I added two of them myself. They were cheap, at the hardware store, the same kind I drilled to the frame outside my bedroom door. I don’t need to lock them yet.

  I move the rusty old tub and ancient sacks back into place over the cellar door. When everything looks just like it did before, I leave the shed, circle the house, and climb onto the pale blue bike.

  In daylight, the road that leads me to the Thorsons’ house has transformed. The woods are light stunned, lively with birds. Everything else—everything big and dark and terrible—is waiting now, hidden, half asleep. But I feel them there. Patches of prickling darkness. Their deep, thrumming breaths.

  I pedal around a curve, through the ditch, onto the pine needle carpet. I climb down from the seat. The bushes swallow my bike.

  I lean against the big tree and look out.

  A cat pads slowly across the Thorsons’ lawn, his bony shoulders working up and down beneath his dull gray fur. The white car is missing from the driveway. Anders’s bedroom window is dark. This could mean many things, but I know which one it means right now. The room is empty.

  Anders isn’t here. I can feel it now that I’m close, as plainly as you can feel an emptiness on the other side of your own bed.

  I glance around, checking the woods in every direction. Nothing but singing birds and rustling leaves and creaking limbs.

  But I’ll find him. I can always find him.

  I pull the bike back out of the bushes and jump on, steering for town. Not by the road. Through the woods.

  There’s no one around. No one to see me if I move as fast as I can move.

  Too fast. Impossibly fast. Like Anders’s fingers on the guitar strings.

  I fly through the new green leaves, weaving past twigs that lash at my eyes, ducking the branches that want to rip out my hair. My tires barely touch the ground.

  I hit the pavement again at the west edge of town. I ride, slower now, along Main, past Franconia and Jackson and Pierce Streets, past offices locked up for the weekend, past the Laundromat and the library, past Oak and Pine and Maple Streets, back into narrowing streets and thickening trees. I keep my eyes sharp for him. For the white car.

  Almost no one is out this early. One little girl is sitting on the uneven cement of a driveway, busy with two big lumps of chalk. My shadow glides over her as I ride past. She’s drawing a bird. Its blue and pink chalk wings open wide. I would tell her that it’s pretty, but she doesn’t look up.

  The houses begin to dwindle. Trees push up between them, forcing them even farther apart.

  I ride on, past Founders Park Road.

  Founders Park is huge, more than fifty acres. It slides away from the edge of town, plunges into a ravine, and trails away like a knife slash into the woods, dragging the river with it. The river gets wider and deeper in another mile, where Main Street turns back into the highway and crosses the water at Miniska Bridge.

  The woods don’t like the river.

  The river moves and shifts and swells and shrinks. It nibbles at banks. It unravels roots. It swallows trees whole. From the side of the bridge, you can spot the trees about to fall, huge trunks leaning farther and farther over the water until they are nearly horizontal, hanging on by a single stubborn foot. Death in slow motion.

  Woods hide things. They keep things forever. Rivers carry things away.

  I ride along the narrow margin of the bridge, past the patches of wild raspberries and grapevine and sumac, past a slough already greening with duckweed. The Wheelhouse, a tumbledown bar and liquor store, hunches here, in a scrubby grove of box elder trees. I leave my bike behind the store, where
the few passing cars won’t see.

  It’s barely noon. No one is inside. Only Martin, who has just unlocked the doors, still holding the ring of keys in his hand. He looks up at me.

  Martin’s hair is like steel wool. One of his eyes droops. His smile is warm.

  He doesn’t say good morning. He gives the shop a quick once-over, checking the door and out the windows. Then he heads behind the counter, drops something that thuds into a narrow brown paper bag, and twists the top of the bag shut.

  “How’s she doing?” he asks, handing the package to me.

  “Not so good,” I say. “Bad nights.” I put the wrapped bottle in the canvas bag. I reach into my pocket, but Martin backs away, holding up both hands.

  “Next time,” he says. “You two take care.”

  I climb back onto the bike, the canvas bag slung over my shoulder. The whiskey thumps against my ribs.

  Johnsons’ Market next. On the way I’ll check the music studio. The Smiths’ house. The Murrays’ house. In a town this size, there are only so many places to check.

  I pedal through town, along the other side of Main Street. A few people are out now, heading to the diner. Running errands. Ducking into bars. I scan their faces. No one looks back at me.

  And then, just as I pass the post office, I see a car slowing down on the other side of the street, across the tree-dotted meridian. Dark blue. New. Expensive.

  Frankie Lynde is in the driver’s seat. I can see her profile through the sunny streaks on the glass. She’s laughing.

  Someone climbs out of the passenger side.

  It’s him.

  I brake, pulling the bike to a stop between two parked cars. For a blink, I see myself reflected in the rear window beside me. I’m nothing. Just round shapes. Long, curling, pale hair.

  Anders pulls a guitar case out of the backseat. He leans back into the car. Says something else to Frankie. I watch his lips. He smiles at her. For her.

  Something painful opens inside my chest. I slam it shut again.

  Keep my eyes and my mind clear.

  Anders turns around. He opens the glass door that leads down to the music studio. The panes flash with reflected sun, and he disappears into the brightness.