Precious and Fragile Things

Todd had gone outside to bring in some wood for the stove. Now he came in and dumped the logs into the bin. Snorting and stamping, he slapped his bare hands against his thighs and blew into his curled fingers. He looked up at the sound of her curse and raised both eyebrows.

  “It’s dead,” Gilly said in a tone more appropriate to the loss of a pet than an inanimate piece of electronic equipment. She held up the iPod.

  Todd toed off his boots and left them to drip snow onto the floor by the door. He shivered, still rubbing his hands together and shook his hair, coated with a light mist of flakes from the seemingly constant snowfall. “That sucks, huh?”

  “Yes. It does.” Gilly got up, put the iPod on the table.

  She hadn’t wept in weeks, but she wanted to cry now. Instead she scrubbed furiously at her eyes until they stung and her breath caught in her throat. “It’s just an iPod,” she said.

  She felt him watching her but Todd said nothing, just disappeared into the kitchen. She heard him rummaging around in the drawers. He was back before she had time to even turn around.

  “Here.” Todd held out a handful of batteries. “There’s an old CD player in the cupboard. It should work.”

  She didn’t move toward him to take what he offered. After half a minute Todd sighed, shoulders slumping, and rolled his eyes. He went to the cupboard himself, pulled out the boom box. He brought it to the table and set it beside the iPod, then flipped the CD player on its side to pry open the back and fill the empty slot with the batteries.

  “I took them from the flashlight,” he said. “If you don’t fucking listen to something, I’m going to be pissed off.”

  The threat sounded empty. Gilly was too touched by the gesture to do more than stare, anyway. Todd sighed again, heavier this time, and stomped upstairs. She heard the scrape of a drawer, then his feet on the stairs. He brought her the CD case he’d rescued from the truck.

  “Here.” Todd opened it. “Pick something.”

  Gilly unzipped the case and flipped through the plastic pages. The sight of the silver discs, such a vivid link to her life, made her throat burn. She gave herself a mental shake and forced the feeling away. “Like what?”

  Todd took the case from her and looked through the choices. His forehead wrinkled in consternation. “What the hell is this stuff?”

  Gilly bit a smile, knowing instantly the reason for his question. Her taste in music was eclectic, to say the least, her iPod filled with everything from classical to reggae. She rarely listened to CDs anymore except in the truck, and the discs she’d chosen to keep in there had all been chosen for their “singability.” She had to be able to belt out the lyrics, sing with abandon, and generally make the kind of fool of herself that she could only do in the privacy of her vehicle with no one to hear but the kids.

  “Hedwig and the Angry Inch? The Rocky Horror Picture Show? Phantom of the Opera?” He faked a gag. “Don’t you have anything good?”

  “Hey. All of those CDs are good.”

  Todd flipped some more pages. “One Hundred and One Silly Kids Songs? The Wiggles? Jesus, Gilly.”

  She smiled. “You might like it.”

  Todd rolled his eyes and pulled out another disc. “Simon and Garfunkel. Jason Manns, who the hell is he? Oh, hell, no. Spare me that folk shit. Okay, this is better. The Doors. Greatest hits. Sweet.”

  “That’s my husband’s…” Gilly stopped herself. She didn’t want to talk about Seth with Todd any more than she already had. “But we can listen to it.”

  Todd punched the button on the small CD player and inserted the disc. In a few seconds, the first opening strains of “The End” came out of the speakers. He grabbed the bowl of popcorn he’d made earlier and sat down on the couch, long legs stretched out on the coffee table, head back on the cushions.

  “This is good.”

  The music made Gilly restless. At the window, she peered out into the rapidly falling night. More snowflakes, light now but promising to get heavier, drifted down. She hadn’t been outside in nearly a month. Todd’s footprints still broke the span of white, but with the new snow coming down it wouldn’t be long until they disappeared, too.

  Jim Morrison’s achingly clear voice spouted poetic lyrics that reminded her of college parties, lights dim in the basement of some fraternity house, warm beer and cigarette smoke. The song made her think of Seth, too, who’d owned the CD before they’d met. He’d taken her to see the film The Doors, Val Kilmer playing a perfect Morrison, at some college art department film series on their fourth date. He’d bought her popcorn and nonpareils, and later had licked the salt and chocolate from her fingers before leaning over in the dark movie theater to kiss her. Gilly touched the frosted window and watched her fingertips make small, clear ovals in the rime.

  She missed him. Missed his strength, his quiet humor. She missed the way he put up with her sniping and complaining, and the way he laughed with her at silly old movies. She missed the scent of him, fresh soap and water, and the way he never failed to squeeze her when she passed him.

  She had no tears, not now, not when they would serve no purpose. Watching the snow outside, it seemed impossible it would ever melt. That she would ever be able to get away from this place. It seemed as though she might be here forever, listening to a dead man sing and watching darkness swallow the world.

  “What do you think he means, anyway?” Todd’s voice broke her concentration, and Gilly jumped a little.

  Her fingers skidded in the frost, leaving slashed marks like wounds on the glass. “Who?”

  “Morrison.” Todd crunched some popcorn. “The killer picks a face from the ancient gallery and all that shit. What’s that mean, do you think?”

  Gilly tore her gaze from the window to contemplate the man on the couch. “I suppose you could take it to mean that…well…” She struggled to put her thoughts into words. Her thoughts, not anything she’d read that someone else had postulated. “That there’s a killer in all of us. Or that we can choose our actions. I think he means we can choose the face we wear.”

  “Gilly.” Todd gave her a look. “The fuck’s that mean? Choose your face. You get the face you’re born with.”

  “Not your real face.” She made a circle with her finger, outlining her features. “Not your eyes and nose and mouth, not like that. The face you put on for people. For the rest of the world. I think he meant you choose that face.”

  Todd cocked his head. “Huh. You think that’s true?”

  She nodded. “Yes. I do.”

  Her answer seemed to satisfy him, because he nodded thoughtfully. But then Todd said, “That’s a bunch of crap.”

  Gilly sniffed. “Why’d you ask if you didn’t want to know?”

  “I asked what you thought. Doesn’t mean I have to agree. What about the rest of it?” Todd reversed the CD for a few seconds until the passage started again. “The blue bus and all that stuff?”

  Gilly pondered, aware that for whatever reason, he expected her to have an answer. “Life is a journey?”

  She waited for his scoffing.

  Todd glanced at her. “Hell, it sure ain’t one I want to take on a bus. You ever take a trip on a bus, Gilly?”

  She had, several times, to visit a college boyfriend. “Sure.” The memory made her smile. “Bus stations are scary.”

  “You got that right.” Todd cocked his head to listen to the music. “Morrison was one fucked-up dude.”

  “Some people think he was a great poet for his time,” Gilly said, uncertain why his casual assessment of the long-dead rock star should affect her at all, much less cause her to rise to his defense. Hell, she didn’t even like Morrison all that much, despite his sexy ways and liquid lyrics.

  Todd turned up the volume. “The dude wanted to kill his father.”

  “And fuck his mother,” Gilly said matter-of-factly, and was completely unprepared for Todd’s reaction.

  His face went pale, and his mouth gaped. He turned his attention from the small CD player and stared at her
with stunned disgust. He even went so far as to take a step back.

  “What?”

  Gilly took her own step back from the force of his glare. “That’s what he says at the end there…well, at least, that’s what people think he meant to say….”

  “People are sick!” Todd shuddered. “For crissakes, Gilly, that’s sick.”

  Gilly chewed on her response before saying anything. This was not the first time the topic of motherhood had set him off. And he had mentioned that his mother died. Gilly wasn’t sure what to say.

  Todd shuddered again and ran a hand over his hair. “You think he really wanted to do that?”

  “I don’t know,” she admitted. “Maybe it’s an urban legend or a rumor, but that’s what I always thought he meant. It would fit with the whole Oedipus thing, with wanting to kill his father….”

  She stopped at Todd’s blank look.

  “I told you before, I ain’t smart.”

  She hadn’t meant to throw his lack of education in his face. “Oedipus is an old story about a man who accidentally kills his father and marries his mother.”

  “How in the hell do you accidentally kill your father to marry your mom?”

  On the CD, “The End” became “Touch Me.” She wished he’d asked about that song. It would’ve been way easier to interpret.

  Gilly sighed, not sure she remembered all the details and not up to the task of teaching the Greek classics. “It’s complicated.”

  “Yeah, I bet.”

  “It’s Greek,” she said, like that made a difference.

  Todd rolled his eyes. “They have good salad and shitty stories.”

  It took her a minute before she realized he was making another one of his jokes. A giggle almost squeezed out of her throat, but she pinched it off. She might not be able to hate him, but Gilly wasn’t ready to laugh with him.

  “It wouldn’t kill you to laugh,” Todd said, as if reading her mind.

  But Gilly thought it might do just that. She got up and turned off The Doors and slipped in Hedwig and the Angry Inch. “Enough Morrison.”

  Todd listened to the first few words of the song that came on, and looked as shocked as he had when she told him what Jim Morrison wanted to do to his mother.

  “What the…?” He was too stunned even to utter his favorite curse word.

  Gilly had chosen the track on purpose to shock him. She felt another giggle coming on, a nasty one this time, but she satisfied herself with an evil grin. “His sex-change operation got botched. It’s pretty self-explanatory.”

  Though she’d removed the CDs from their plastic jewel cases to put them in the travel case, she’d also put in the inner sleeves. Todd pulled out the one for Hedwig and stared in utter amazement at the photo of the man in a bright yellow wig and tons of glam makeup screaming into a microphone.

  “Is that a dude?”

  “Yes,” Gilly said. “I guess you’ve never seen the movie.”

  Todd gave her a look. “This is from a movie? Figures.”

  “It was a good movie,” Gilly replied somewhat wistfully. It had been a long time since she’d watched a movie.

  Todd waved the travel case. “Why do you listen to this shit. You got a thing for guys in makeup, or what?”

  “I guess I have a thing for the underdog.” The self-assessment surprised her. Bat Boy. Hedwig. Even poor, misunderstood tragic antihero Frank-N-Furter. All underdogs who met bad ends when the world they lived in rejected them for being who they were.

  “If you like the underdog,” Todd said, “then you should practically be in love with me.”

  Without looking at him, Gilly took the CD out and put it back in the travel case. She slid another into the player and hit Play. She thought he’d grumble, but she didn’t care. When the music began, she went to the window and pressed her face against the glass to look out at the snow. It was the same view. The same snow. Constant, not changing. As was all of this.

  Todd, quiet, took a place beside her at the window. Gilly straightened up, her forehead cold from where it had rested on the glass. They stared out into the darkness, but all Gilly could see was their reflection, blurry. Her and Todd.

  “This song,” he said, after it had played nearly all the way through.

  She looked at him, not in the mirror made by the light inside shining to the outside, but at his face. His real face. “What about it?”

  “This one’s right,” Todd said. “The part where he says I told the truth, didn’t come here to fool you. That’s a good song.”

  It ended. Todd left her side and messed around with the CD player’s buttons. It was a song Gilly loved, though not the lyric he’d quoted. She thought of the part that made the most sense to her—love was not a victory march.

  “C’mon,” she told him as the song began again. “I’ll make us something to eat.”

  31

  Board games and their dozens of tiny pieces were scattered all over the place. Gilly looked around the room and frowned. “This place is a pigsty.”

  Todd looked up from the couch, where he’d been silently contemplating the ceiling for the past fifteen minutes. “So clean it up.”

  Her fingers itched to do just that, but she refused to be a slave to this house. “You clean it up.”

  “I’m relaxing.”

  “Relaxing implies rest,” Gilly said sourly. “Like you’ve been actually working.”

  Todd scratched his head with his middle finger, and Gilly fumed. She envied him the ability to sit and stare at nothing for an hour at a time. She crossed her arms and glared.

  “Is it nice?” she asked another fifteen minutes later when Todd hadn’t moved and she’d been unable to stop herself from putting away the Monopoly game.

  Todd looked at her, then. “Is what nice?”

  She gestured at the ceiling. “Being entertained by the ceiling? Is that an advantage to being a meathead?”

  “I guess it is.” Todd smirked.

  A strand of hair had come loose from her ponytail, and she grimaced as she tucked it back. She’d bathed every day since he’d forced her out of bed, quick rinses bent over the tub, using tepid water. Nothing thorough or luxurious.

  “I want a bath.”

  Todd flapped a languid hand toward the bathroom. “Go ahead. Who’s stopping you?”

  In the bathroom, door closed, Gilly flipped him off but felt no better for the gesture. If anything, she felt petty and stupid again, which only made her grouchier. A hot bath would fix her temper. Hot baths could fix a lot of things.

  She turned on the taps, which sputtered and spit and groaned but let loose a flood of water that rang against the bottom of the iron tub like Jamaican kettledrums. She grimaced as she stripped out of her clothes and felt the prickly stubble of her armpits and legs. Greasy hair, unshaven legs, no wonder she felt gross and grumpy.

  The water had filled the tub only halfway when she thought to run a hand under the stream. It would’ve been generous to call it lukewarm. Gilly wilted and dipped her fingers into the water in the tub’s bottom. That was hot enough, but not deep enough.

  She turned off the faucet and yanked on her clothes, then opened the door. “Todd. The hot water’s not working.”

  He looked over his shoulder at her. “Oh. Yeah.”

  “What do you mean, ‘oh, yeah’?” She put her hands on her hips.

  He gave her a shrug that had become familiar. “Water heater’s probably fucked. And shit, Gilly, it’s not like we have a fuckton of propane. Maybe we’re running out. In which case we really are fucked.”

  She swallowed a bitter retort at that. “Really?”

  Another shrug.

  “Todd!” she cried, exasperated, and left the bathroom to face him. “Are you serious? Why didn’t you say anything?”

  She hated the grin and the wicked glint in his eyes that told her he enjoyed teasing her. She hated the fact he knew he was getting under her skin even more. She tried forcing her expression to smooth with little succ
ess.

  “You said you wanted a bath. What was I going to do? Tell you no?”

  “I don’t want it,” she said with tense jaw and narrowed eyes, “if it means we’re going to run out of propane. I’ve suffered with sponge baths up to now. I could get by with it.”

  Todd got up, stretching to his full height and looked down at her. “This is a hunting cabin. Dudes mostly don’t go for long bubble baths. We always had enough hot water for a couple of showers. The water heater’s small and it’s old. It probably needs time to refill, that’s all.”

  She wanted to punch his arm. Or someplace more tender. “And if it’s the propane tank?”

  He shrugged a third time. “Then we go without lights and have to use the hand pump outside for water, if that bitch hasn’t frozen solid. Heat’ll be fine so long as we have wood for the stove.”

  “You don’t sound too worried about it!”

  Todd looked at her this time. “Would it matter if I was? Nothing I can do about it. You can’t, either.”

  “How do you check?”

  He jerked a thumb at the window. “Tank’s out back. There’s a gauge.” He paused. “Last time I checked, there was plenty, should get us through until spring anyway. Uncle Bill always made sure to top off the tank before winter.”

  Her mouth tightened. “The last time you…so you know how much we have? We’re not close to running out?”

  “Nah. I don’t think so.” Todd grinned, eyes glinting again.

  “You’re an asshole,” Gilly muttered, arms linked tight across her chest.

  “Aw, hey.”

  “Hey, nothing! I was…worried,” she admitted, hating it.

  “I’m sorry,” Todd said.

  He sounded as if he meant it, but Gilly wasn’t going to take his apology. “You could’ve told me that before I tried filling the tub.”

  Todd’s brows went up as the corners of his mouth turned down. “How was I supposed to know the hot water’d run out before you could fill the tub? The fuck you think I am, psychic?”

  “Well, I know you’re not as funny as you think you are!”

  Todd’s frown tightened. He slouched back to the couch, feet on the table. “Fuck you. Go take a bath. Freeze your tits off. The fuck I care?”