Precious and Fragile Things

Todd blinked. Then grinned. “You’re such a bitch.”

  Gilly wasn’t insulted this time; he’d sounded almost fond. “It’s called social networking for a reason. To be social. I stay home with my kids all day long. If I didn’t do something online, talk to people, I’d go…”

  “Crazy?” he prompted after half a minute when she stalled.

  “Yes. I’d go crazy.” Gilly fussed with her houses again.

  She thought of the sound of muffled sobs behind a bedroom door and the cloying scent of spilled perfume. The sting of splintered glass in her feet. This, like the mysteries of her bank account, wasn’t something Todd knew or would ever know.

  “Who do you talk to?”

  “Oh…family. People I went to school with or used to work with. I belong to a few groups for things I like.”

  “Like what?”

  Gilly looked at him. “Authors. Television shows. Rock bands. Whatever.”

  Todd snorted and rattled the dice in his palm but didn’t throw them. “Huh. That sounds like a fuckton of boring.”

  “Hey,” Gilly said, annoyed. “You asked, didn’t you? I’m not going to tell you things if you’re going to make fun of me once you know.”

  Too late, she’d admitted she’d tell him things. Todd grinned as Gilly scowled. He handed her the dice.

  “Besides,” she added. “It’s not just the people and the groups. There are games to play. And other things to do.”

  “Like what?”

  “Oh. Take surveys. Are you going to roll those dice or what?”

  He rolled, took his turn. “Surveys for what?”

  She didn’t want to admit her shameful secret, that she whored herself for “seeds” in her favorite Connex game, Farmburg. “Anything.”

  Todd nodded and helped himself to two hundred bucks for passing Go. “Yeah, right. For cash. I had a friend who got a bunch of stuff doing that. Crap, mostly. But some money.”

  “I don’t do it for money.” Though she had heard stories about people who’d won big.

  “The fuck would you do an online survey for, if not money?” Todd looked up at her, brow furrowed.

  Gilly sighed. No reason not to tell him. Stranded in a mountain cabin with a stranger who’d abducted her at knifepoint, after tossing her kids out a vehicle window, she really shouldn’t be worried about telling him she had an addiction to a silly online game. “For seeds.”

  “Huh?” Todd brushed hair from his eyes and tipped his chair back, going to his pocket for a cigarette he stuck in his mouth but didn’t light. “What kind of seeds?”

  “For a game,” she said, and took the dice, rolling. She landed on Boardwalk, as-yet-unowned, and crowed. “Yes! I’m buying it.”

  Todd passed her the card. “So you do surveys for…seeds.”

  Gilly settled her card amongst the others and looked up at him. “Yeah. You need seeds to plant, to get crops. To expand your farm and level up.”

  Todd raised an eyebrow.

  “It’s fun,” Gilly said.

  “Sooo…” Todd drew out the word, long and slow. “How many surveys do you do?”

  “I don’t have a lot of time, you know,” Gilly began defensively, and stopped at another of Todd’s raised-eyebrow looks. “Maybe three or four.”

  “A day?”

  “Yes.”

  Or five. Once a memorable ten while Gandy napped and Arwen had a playdate. Her wrist had begun to ache from scrolling through the choices and the seeds had been spent in fifteen minutes. She’d had to filter out junk mail for the next six weeks.

  “I’ll be damned.” All four legs of Todd’s chair hit the floor. “Surveys are your porn.”

  “Shut up!” Gilly gasped, horrified. “Gross.”

  Todd grinned, unapologetic, and pointed at her. “They are.”

  “You’re disgusting!”

  “Well, yeah, maybe,” Todd said. “But that don’t make me wrong.”

  Gilly lifted her chin and gave him a cool glare. “It’s your turn.”

  They rolled the dice, moved their pieces around the board, collected the paper cash when they passed Go. There was a suspicious absence of Go To Jail cards in this set, but Gilly didn’t question it. She played for keeps, though, trying to strategize while Todd gambled his way around the board picking up properties at random without seeming to care about the cost or location.

  “I’ll trade you the Electric Company for Indiana and Illinois.” Gilly already owned Kentucky and was itching to get hotels on those spots.

  “Nope.”

  “C’mon, Todd. When I land on it, I’ll have to pay you four times the number I roll on the dice.”

  Todd snorted, the unlit cigarette still dangling from his lower lip. “Nope.”

  “Electric Company and Water Works. Ten times the roll of the dice when you own both.”

  “No fucking way, Gilly. I’m dumb but I’m not that dumb.” He made another of those jerking-off gestures. “You’ll put hotels on those bitches and I’ll land on them every fucking time.”

  “You won’t,” she scoffed, though she had to give him grudging admiration for outplaying her. He’d been merrily buying up properties, keeping her from owning more than two per set, therefore making it impossible for her to complete them. “It’s statistically impossible for you to land on it every time.”

  “Yeah, well, you can forget it.” His hair fell over his eye.

  “Fine,” she said. “But I’m buying Park Place and putting hotels up, and you can kiss my ass.”

  “Ooh, scary.”

  She was angrier than she should’ve been about a game and understood it wasn’t that at all. Her cheek hurt when she bit it and hurt worse when she rubbed the sore spot with her tongue over and over to keep from saying something she didn’t mean. But to her surprise, the mantra of Count to ten, Gilly, didn’t start. She didn’t need it. She snorted a little under her breath and looked up to Todd’s curious glance.

  “It’s just a game,” she said.

  He studied her. “Well…yeah.”

  She shrugged. “I mean, it’s just a game.”

  She looked around the room, then got up to go to the window. More snow. She snorted louder this time and pressed her forehead to the glass, relishing the chill.

  Just a game. Slow your roll, Gilly. Chill out.

  “Are we gonna finish the game, or what?”

  She looked over her shoulder. “I guess so. Nothing else to do, right?”

  Todd gave her a strange look and half got to his feet. “Gilly, you’re not gonna freak out on me again, are you? Run out in the snow?”

  She shook her head, took her seat. “No. I’m okay. Let’s play.”

  They did for another few rolls of the dice, before Todd said, “What’s he like?”

  “Who? My husband?”

  “Yeah.”

  She shrugged, concentrating on the board to keep emotion from overtaking her. “He’s a good man. He’s a good dad, fantastic with the kids. I love him very much.”

  “You’re lucky, then. Really fucking lucky.”

  “Yes,” Gilly said. They played in silence for a minute before the words rose to her lips, unbidden and undeniable. She’d never said this aloud before, not even to her girlfriends sitting around a coffee table, bitching about their husbands. “He doesn’t listen to me.”

  The dice, tipped from Todd’s hand, rolled across the board and came to rest. Snake eyes. He didn’t move his piece right away; she felt his eyes on her and didn’t want to meet them, but did.

  “I mean, I think he hears me. He just doesn’t listen.”

  Todd moved his racing car to an open property but didn’t look to see the cost or offer to buy it. He didn’t even glance toward the thin piles of paper money he’d carefully laid out in front of him. He gathered the dice again, rolling them in his palm. They clattered like bones against the board and he moved again, this time to one of his own properties.

  “He’s a good man,” Gilly repeated in a low voice.

&n
bsp; “What doesn’t he listen to you about?”

  Gilly picked up the dice, warm from Todd’s palm. Her fingers curled over the plastic. “Never mind. Forget it.”

  It was wrong to talk about her husband like that with Todd. It was a betrayal. Gilly rolled the dice. They played the game.

  She lost.

  29

  At home, just as it was never totally quiet, the house was never fully dark. Too many night-lights and appliances with clocks. Navigating her house in the night meant hopscotching from shadow to faint green glow. Gilly was the one who rose in the night and paced the floors, listening. Never Seth.

  He never listened for the sound of the subtle shift in a child’s breath that predicted a cough or a cry, or the dreaded, always-at-three-in-the-morning puke. He never listened for the dog’s claws clicking toward the garbage can on the hardwood floor of the kitchen, or the neighbor’s revving engine that meant their teenage son had finally returned. Seth went to bed and slept, sprawling and snoring. He probably didn’t even know about the nights Gilly spent awake, checking the locks and the stove burners, or leaning over her children’s beds just to make sure they still breathed.

  He didn’t listen to any of those things, and Seth didn’t listen to her. Saying it to Todd had been like some bitter confession she could still taste hours later as she lay in the dark and stared up at a ceiling she couldn’t see. Gilly swallowed hard now, her ears popping with the effort. She burrowed deeper into the blankets and curled on her side in a bed that would’ve been too small to share with her husband and was infinitely too vast when she was in it alone.

  She loved her husband. He was a good man. A wonderful father, a loving husband. If he didn’t listen to her, maybe it was because she didn’t make herself heard. Or he couldn’t understand that when she told him something it was real and true, not empty words said for the sake of conversation.

  If Seth thought she was joking when Gilly told him she was going to lose her mind if he didn’t replace the garbage bag after emptying the trash, or put a new roll of toilet paper on the holder when he’d used the last scrap, whose fault was that? His for not taking her seriously, or hers for not impressing upon him how utterly serious she was? Or hers, for allowing such minor, small things to eat away at her? It didn’t matter now. Their marriage was a machine, the gears and cogs turning or sticking. What more could she ask for? What more could she expect?

  “How’d you meet him?” Todd’s voice parted the darkness.

  Gilly lifted her head, turning her face toward him but not her body. “My husband?”

  “Yeah. How’d you meet him?”

  She settled back into the blankets, shrugging them higher on her shoulders. “A friend introduced us.”

  “At a party?”

  “Yes.” She paused, curiosity winning. “How’d you know?”

  She heard him shifting in his sheets and imagined a shrug. “Lots of people get introduced at parties.”

  “It was a barbecue at his boss’s house. His boss’s wife was my friend.” Gilly paused again, the dark room a perfect screen for the movie of her memories.

  Seth had been wearing a pink polo shirt and khaki shorts, a beer in the hand he hadn’t held out for her to shake. His hair had been too long for her taste, his smile nice enough, but Gilly hadn’t been looking at him “like that.”

  “Did you like him right away?”

  Gilly blinked away the vision of the first time she’d seen the man she’d marry. “No. God, no.”

  Todd laughed a little louder. “Huh?”

  “I was with someone else. I thought he was okay, but I wasn’t interested in him that way.”

  “So how you’d end up together?”

  Was this wrong, to talk about this with Todd? She hadn’t thought about it for years. The kids weren’t old enough to ask about it, and the story had never seemed romantic enough to retell. “We went out a bunch of times with friends.”

  “And then you hooked up with him?”

  Gilly smiled, bittersweet, at the memory. “Not that first time. I was still seeing the other guy, the one I’d gone to the barbecue with. I thought I liked him, but…he turned out to be sort of a jerk.”

  “What did he do to you?” Todd’s voice broke on a yawn and triggered one from her.

  “Oh, the usual stuff.”

  “Knocked you around? Stole shit from you? Ran around on you?”

  “No! Is that what you think the usual stuff is?” Gilly shifted in her blankets, indignant.

  “Sure. If you don’t like a dude, yeah, I mean, that’s some bad stuff, right?” He paused. “I mean…you don’t think that’s okay, do you?”

  “Of course it’s not. You don’t think that’s okay, do you?”

  “No. Of course not. A man who hits a woman isn’t much of a man,” Todd said in a low voice.

  They both ignored the fact they’d hit each other, and more than once.

  “He didn’t hit me. He probably did run around on me, yes. Mostly he didn’t call when he said he would, stood me up. That sort of thing.” Gilly frowned as she remembered. “I didn’t even like him that much, that guy. He thought I was in love with him, though, which made it even worse.”

  “Huh?”

  Gilly sighed. “If he’d treated me badly knowing I didn’t really love him, that would’ve been one thing. But if he thought I was in love with him and he still did that stuff…that’s worse. That it didn’t matter how I felt about him. I went out with Seth, finally, because that other guy had promised to call and didn’t.”

  “And you knew he was the guy for you.”

  She smiled a little at the certainty in Todd’s voice. “Oh…I don’t know about that. I didn’t know right away, that’s for sure.”

  “You didn’t?”

  “No. I don’t think anyone can ever know right away.”

  More shifting and rustling from his side of the room. “You don’t believe in love at first sight and all that shit?”

  “No. Do you?”

  “Fuck no.” Todd’s laugh grated, rusty and sharp. “Love’s just another word for sucker.”

  “Oh, Todd.” Gilly bit back a laugh. “That’s not true. Haven’t you ever…haven’t you had…?”

  She trailed to a stop. They weren’t giggling girlfriends at a sleepover. She burrowed deeper into the blankets.

  Todd stayed silent long enough Gilly thought he’d gone to sleep. “What? Like a girlfriend?”

  “Someone,” Gilly amended at the way he’d sneered the word.

  Todd made a low, derisive noise. “Girls like men with money.”

  “That’s not the only thing women like about men.” The urge to defend her gender was automatic and not necessarily sincere.

  “Well, let me put it like this. They don’t like guys without money as much as they like guys with cash,” Todd said. “It don’t matter if you’re nice to ’em. Hell. Some of ’em like it better when you’re mean, so long as you’ve got bank.”

  The question tripped off her tongue before she could stop it. “So, no girlfriend, ever?”

  “I had girlfriends.” Todd sounded angry at first, then, quieter. “I had one, once….”

  She waited.

  “Her name was Kendra. I met her at work.”

  “At the diner?”

  “No.” He sounded gruff. “This was a long time ago, before the diner. I was working for a landscaping company. Planting trees, hauling brush, that sort of shit.”

  “Did she work for the landscaping company?”

  More silence. She thought he’d fallen asleep. “No. She was…the daughter of a customer.”

  He didn’t really have to say more than that. Gilly could guess the outcome. She made a sympathetic noise, anyway, not necessarily to encourage him but not trying to put him off, either.

  “I broke up with her,” Todd said.

  “Oh.” It was so not the scenario she’d imagined—irate customer waving off “the help” to protect his daughter’s virtue.

/>   “Yeah, I know,” Todd said in a voice dripping with sarcasm, showing he guessed what she’d been thinking. “Who’d have guessed it would be me who bailed, huh?”

  “I didn’t say anything.”

  “You didn’t have to.”

  Another few minutes of silence until Gilly said, tentatively, “What happened?”

  “She wanted to get married.”

  “Oh.” It wasn’t the first time she’d heard about a relationship ending because the woman had wanted more of a commitment than the man. “And you didn’t want to.”

  “Fuck no!” Todd sounded as thoroughly disgusted as if she’d suggested he eat feces.

  There didn’t seem much to say after that. Gilly closed her eyes and noticed no difference in the darkness behind her lids than when she’d been staring. During the past few years, there’d been many nights Gilly had greeted her husband at the door with her car keys already in one hand, her purse in the other, so desperate to get out of the house by herself she manufactured errands to run. There’d been far fewer times lately that she’d greeted him the way she had in the early days of their marriage, with a kiss and a hug and questions about his day.

  Those days seemed faraway now. All of them. The good and the bad, both. The cliché would’ve been that if she had the chance to greet him at the door again, she’d choose the kiss rather than escape, but listening to the soft sound of Todd’s snoring slipping through the chill and black, Gilly wasn’t quite able to convince herself it was true.

  30

  Gilly hadn’t watched the television show Lost in a long time, not since the end of the second season when the show had totally, well…lost her. Yet there was a moment during the show’s first season she would never forget—the part when Hurley’s CD player finally gave up and died. She couldn’t remember what the character had said to commemorate the occasion, but the words that came out of her mouth were definitely not allowed on network television.

  She tugged the headphones from her ears and thumbed the iPod’s controls. Nothing. Totally dead. Worse, she’d been listening to a song she didn’t even like. She’d wasted the last few minutes of music time on garbage.