by Julia Hoban
“Well, both actually,” Guy says. This time he’s the one who looks as if he’s going to throw up.
“Mostly on my arms,” Willow says quickly, as if that makes it all right. “And you’re wrong about school. I dodo it there, at home too, if no one is around, but that’s a little trickier.”
“God,” Guy whispers. “And I thought you were safe.”
“I am,” Willow assures him. “I told you that already. I’m very careful to keep the cuts clean. I never do too much at one time. . . .” She stops speaking. Guy’s mood must be contagious, because all of a sudden she can’t bring herself to say the words.
“Oh Willow, the last thing you are is safe.”
Willow doesn’t know how to respond to this. She feels lost in a way that she can’t describe. The stacks seem darker suddenly; their little patch of sunlight is fading. She moves closer to Guy.
“Can I see your bag?” Guy asks suddenly.
Willow doesn’t get why he’s asking, but she gives a little shrug and passes him her backpack.
Guy flips it open and takes out her stash: a used razor and a spare, still in its wrappings, along with the Band-Aids he gave her and some bacitracin.
“Of course it wouldn’t do any good to throw these out,” he mutters, turning the razors over in his hands.
“No,” Willow agrees. “It wouldn’t.”
“Promise me something,” Guy says suddenly. “Okay? Will you promise me something?”
“It depends.” Willow is cautious. “What do you want?”
“You have to call me before you do it the next time. I mean it. Just call me before you do it.”
“So you can talk me down?” Willow asks. She isn’t sure why there’s such an edge to her voice. “I mean, what for?”
“Talk you down?” He shakes his head. “I wouldn’t even know how.” He puts the razors back in her bag reluctantly. “Here’s what for. You’ve got me spooked about calling your brother. I’m sure you’re wrong about him, but I don’t know really, and I’m afraid to take the chance. At least with you, things are fairly . . .”
“Cut and dried?” Willow can’t resist saying.
“That’s one way of putting it.” Guy gives her a look. “I was going to say that things are out in the open between us. Listen, if you call me, at least I’ll know that you’re, well . . . obviously not okay, but at least . . .” He doesn’t finish the sentence.
“At least?” Willow prompts.
“At least I’ll know that you aren’t fucking bleeding to death!”
Willow doesn’t have a comeback for this. His vehemence has shocked her, it seems so out of character. She watches silently as Guy tears a piece of paper out of one of her notebooks and scribbles something down.
“Here, these are all my numbers, okay?”
“Why are you doing this?” Willow finally bursts out. “You don’t have to help me. You don’t have to talk to me. You don’t have to come up with any answers. So why are you doing this? You didn’t have to bandage me yesterday either, but you did anyway. Why? You could just walk away. I’m not asking you to do this. I don’t wantyou to do this. I probably won’t even call you.”
“I can’t just walk away. And you know what? You couldn’t either.”
“Oh yes I could,” Willow is quick to correct him. “I’d never even look back, I’d—”
“Right,” Guy interrupts her. “Just like you did with Vicki.”
It takes a second for Willow to even get what he’s talking about. “You mean that girl in the physics lab?” She is incredulous.
“That’s the one.” Guy nods.
“You’ve got me all wrong,” Willow tries to explain herself. “You think I’m nice? That I’m kind? That’s not the way it was at all. I thought she was pathetic,I thought she was a loser!”
“I know. That’s why what you did was so special.”
Willow is silent.
“You helped her.” Guy’s voice is quiet. “You didn’t have to, but you did anyway. So don’t go giving me some bullshit line about how you’d walk away, because it just isn’t true.
“Look, I have to get going.” He stands up. “Call me, or maybe don’t. Maybe figure out another way to deal with your problems instead of slicing and dicing.” He looks like he wants to say something else. But after a few moments he just gives her a sort of half smile and heads for the elevator.
The doors close and Willow is left alone. She crumples the paper with his numbers into a little ball and throws it as far away as she can.
She’s not going to let him control her like this. How does he know how she’d behave anyway? She would walk away. And she will walk away from Guy’s good intentions.
Willow grabs her bag and hurries down the side stairs—she doesn’t have time to wait for the elevator—right into Miss Hamilton’s welcoming scowl.
“Where have you been?” she asks. It’s clear that she’s upset. “You need to hurry and start shelving, we’re backed up and Carlos isn’t here. I don’t want you taking your break today. Even if you had been on time I wouldn’t have let you take it, we’re simply understaffed. By the way, you made a mistake on the interlibrary loan you requested last time and I had to apologize to that nice old man. Do I have to tell you . . .”
She yammers on relentlessly, her voice querulous and unpleasant. With her scraped-back hair and outmoded dress she’s like a fugitive from a Dickens novel. Willow can hardly bear to listen to her. She doesn’t know how she’ll be able to make it through the next few hours under this woman’s watchful eye. Unbidden an image of Guy flashes before her. His face. His hands. The way he held her father’s book. The way he bandaged her.
“I’m sorry,” she cuts off Miss Hamilton abruptly. “I’ll do the shelving right away.” Willow grabs a cart full of books and races with it into the elevator. She punches the button for the eleventh floor, not noticing or caring where the books belong.
C’mon, c’mon, hurry!
Willow flings the cart aside and runs over to where she and Guy had been sitting. The paper isn’t there. For God’s sake! She’s only been gone a few minutes! Who else has been up here? Who would even take a crumpled-up piece of paper anyway? She drops to her knees and begins crawling around. How far could she have thrown it? Willow looks under the metal stacks. Nothing but dirt.
What’s that?
She sees something small and white among the dust bunnies and scrabbles after it with her hand. Willow can barely reach it and she feels as if her shoulder is about to be dislocated as she stretches her arm as far as she can under the shelving unit.
Got it!
She uncrumples the paper and refolds it smoothly, but she’s not sure what to do with it. She left her bag downstairs, and she’s wearing a skirt today, so . . . no pockets. After a second Willow sticks the folded-up square in her bra.
She’s not sure why she wants his numbers. She won’t call. But really, what harm can it do to keep them? She likes the way the paper feels against her breasts. Scratchy, not painful like the razor, but not something she can just ignore either.
It stays there all day, until she gets undressed for bed.
She falls asleep easily. No problem, she’s exhausted. But staying asleep—that’s another matter.
Willow doesn’t have nightmares, not exactly, at least not that she can remember, but something usually manages to wake her up at night, shivering and shaking. Maybe it’s a car outside her window that reminds her of the accident, or maybe it’s the sound of the rain pattering against the window.
She’s not sure what it is tonight, some shadowy fragments of a dream come to her: the sound of broken glass, the feel of broken glass, is that what’s making her tremble? It doesn’t matter. Willow grabs her stash from under the mattress. She squeezes the blade convulsively.
She lies there, but she’s not cutting, not yet. Suddenly she reaches out, knocking the phone off the bedside table. She roots around on the little nightstand until her hand closes over the piece of p
aper that she left there earlier. She never lets go of the razor, but she does take the paper and the phone back with her under the covers.
The phone’s not a cordless, and the dial tone fractures the silence. The noise is comforting, though, and so is the ideaof calling Guy. She’s not going to call him, she’d never do that. But her hand grasps the paper tightly, as if it were a lifeline, as she cradles the phone next to her chest, its insistent buzzing echoing the beating of her heart.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Willow hums a little tune as she roots around the various beauty products on offer at the drugstore. For once she’s in a good mood. And why not? School had let out early today and she doesn’t have to work at the library. She has almost a whole day to do whatever she wants.
She wants to buy more supplies.
So she’d gone back to the shop that she’d passed on her walk with Guy and Laurie. Buying razor blades wasn’t always so easy. They were usually confined to art supply stores, but since she’d given up watercolors, she didn’t like frequenting them, so finding a new source was particularly gratifying.
Of course any sharp edge could do in a pinch, and Willow has used them all: nail scissors, a steak knife, a man’s razor—if he doesn’t use safety blades—that’s what she’d been carrying when Guy discovered her. But Willow is a purist. She likes to reserve her cutting implement for cutting herself alone. She just can’t see hacking her flesh with the same razor she slices her dinner with.
Willow pauses near the boxes of Auburn Flame. Should she buy some? Not that she has any desire to color her hair, but she always gets a few things, just so she won’t raise any eyebrows at the cash register.
She must have a dozen sketch pads at home. All with blank pages.
This time Willow grabs some shampoo—at least it’s something she’ll use—and hurries over to the cashier. Asking for the razors always makes her nervous. Why do they have to be behind the counter anyway? Her heart beats a little faster as she lays her things down. She tries to look as innocent as possible, but she can’t help feeling like a criminal.
“Can I please have three boxes of the razor blades?”
“Three boxes? Why do you want threeboxes?” The clerk gives her an odd look.
Twenty to a box, sixty razors! He has to know!
“I, well, I just . . .” Willow doesn’t know what to say. Should she just get out of there? Make a run for it? Could he do anything anyway?
I mean, he’s not going to call the police, is he?
“Because they’re priced four for two dollars,” he continues, unperturbed.
Oh.
“Right, I mean I knew that, I just . . . Sure. Four boxes, that would be great. Thanks.” The worst is over. She feels almost light-headed with relief, she’s back to humming to herself as she pays for her purchases and heads out the door.
Now what?
Willow stuffs her new provisions into her backpack as she starts walking down the street. She’s not sure where she’s headed yet. Maybe she should go up to campus to hang out on the lawn. Bad idea. She shakes her head as she recalls what happened the last time she did that. She could just go home and do some work, finish the Bulfinchand get started on that paper she’s supposed to write for class.
That’ll happen.
Of course she could always go to the park. That’s a lot nicer than the campus lawn, and no bad associations either.
Funny how she thinks of Guy finding out as bad, but his bandaging her as . . . well, not something bad, anyway. Willow rubs the bandage absentmindedly. It’s getting a little dirty, she should really change it. Somehow she hasn’t had the time.
She heads in the direction of the park, but she’s a little uncertain. Going to the park by herself . . . She’s been so alone these last few months, and a lot of that by her own choice, but still. . . . Willow remembers the other day in the stacks with Guy. Even though much of their discussion was painful, there was a lot that was interesting. Certainly the pleasure of her own company is starting to wear thin.
That feeling is only intensified as she watches a group of girls from her school drift by and head their way into the park. Vicki is among them. Willow wonders what Vicki would do if she went up and tried to join them. Would she be nice, or would she just say something hurtful again?
Well, she has no desire to hang out with Vicki and her friends anyway.
Willow turns away from the park and walks back toward school. There are a lot of outdoor cafes scattered around the area, and maybe getting a drink at one of them wouldn’t be such a bad idea.
She stops outside one with a pretty green and white striped awning and studies the menu. She doesn’t have much money. She gives David and Cathy almost everything that she earns, but still, she has enough to get something.
“Willow!”
David?! What is he doing here?
Shouldn’t her brother be teaching a class, or working at home? What is he doing sitting with an iced coffee at a sidewalk cafe in the middle of the day?
Willow’s first thought, after she gets over the shock of seeing her brother at one of the tables, is that of course, of course she’d be likely to run into him. The reason that school had let out early was for those parent-guidance counselor conferences. The same ones that David had gotten a letter about.
Even as Willow thinks this, she notices other students walking by with their parents, stopping at other cafes.
“David,” Willow says uncertainly as she goes over to where he’s sitting.
How to play this? Should she let on that she knows why he’s in the neighborhood? She’s sure that he doesn’t want her to know. If he did, he would have just told her about the whole thing. She would have been in the meeting with him.
“Don’t you have a class or something like that now?” Willow asks. David removes his jacket and a stack of books from the other chair and she sits down next to him. “I mean, what are you doing over here?”
If he’s not straight with her, then she’ll know how to handle the conversation. She’ll simply go on the way they have ever since the accident, speaking without saying anything.
“No, no class right now. . . .” David doesn’t look at her as he says this. He fusses with his napkin, hands her a menu, does everything except meet her eyes. “I should be preparing a lecture, but I needed a break. So I just sort of wandered down here . . .” He trails off. Willow nods understandingly as if she totally buys into his explanation. Sighing deeply, she opens the menu.
“So, how are your classes going?” she says, after ordering an iced cappuccino.
Great, now you sound like you’re trying to be the parent!
“Fine.” David shrugs.
And a fabulously witty comeback from David in the righthand corner!
“What are you teaching this year anyway?”
“Oh, you know, same old, same old.”
How the hell would I know?! You never tell me anything anymore! And howsame old could it be? You haven’t even been teaching that long!
“Right.” The waiter places her drink in front of her and Willow takes a long time adding sweetener, stirring it, trying to come up with something to say. But she doesn’t have to worry, because David is ever ready with his topic of choice.
“How was school today?” he asks. “What happened with that French test? You must have gotten it back by now. Any problems, or did it go well? And what’s going on with that paper you mentioned? The one on the Bulfinch?”
Why don’t you tell me how school was today, seeing as how you were there too!
Willow has to bite her lip to keep from saying the words out loud. Why is he sitting there pretending to enjoy his drink, pretending that the only reason he came downtown was because he needed a break?
She knows why he doesn’t want to talk about it. Maybe he’s equipped to deal with all the stupid details of her education like papers and quizzes, but to have to sit through some parent-teacher conference, to have his face rubbed in the fact, that yes, he is
the parent now . . .
Willow gets it. She gets it totally. But still . . .
Yell at me! Hit me! Do anything! But stop being like this!! Stop acting like nothing’s happened! Stop acting like you’re okay with it all!!
“So, did you get your test back?” David looks at her expectantly.
Willow doesn’t even bother to answer. She’s not going to sit there and continue this farce, and if she can’t talk about what’s really going on, then she’ll at least talk about something more interesting. She casts about for something to say, she doesn’t care what, as long as it isn’t this meaningless chatter between two strangers.
She glances at the stack of books next to his elbow, hoping for some inspiration. “What are you reading these days?” Willow asks, and for the first time in the entire conversation her voice is natural. This is safe. Better than safe. This is familiar. This is the talk around the dinner table throughout her entire childhood. Why has she never thought of this before?
“Well, you know.” David’s face lights up for a second, looks, just for a moment, like it used to. “I’ve been doing some digging, going back and questioning some theories. Remember that journal I was looking for the other day? I wanted it because I’m fairly certain that some new finds completely contradict the accepted view regarding burial rites.” He’s more animated than she’s seen him in ages, so interested in his subject that he doesn’t even notice that she didn’t answer his question.
Willow can’t help laughing. She knows that if any of her old friends were with her, they’d be squirming in their seats, dying to get out of there. All of them used to beg to come into the city with her and do something with David. They all had a crush on him because he was so cute, and well, older. But once they got there they were inevitably bored by her eccentric, brilliant brother.
Willow isn’t bored at all. Maybe burial rites aren’t her first choice of topic, but who cares? He’s talking, talking about something real to him, and she’s happy about that.
“That’s so funny.” Willow leans forward. “Because you know what I’ve been thinking of reading again? Tristes Tropiques. I haven’t looked at it since . . . in years.” She carefully avoids any mention of their father. “But the other day I thought that I should read it again. It’s such a beautiful book.”
