Precious and Fragile Things

  She was not going to freeze, and she would have a hot bath. Gilly went to the kitchen and filled the largest pots she could find with water. Also the kettle. While the water boiled, she sorted through the last few fresh items in the refrigerator. She took an apple and some cheese and went to the pantry for a box of wheat crackers.

  By the time she’d finished peeling and slicing the apple and cubing the cheese, the water was boiling. Grabbing a set of oven mitts, she carried the pots to the cast iron bathtub and poured them in. She refilled the containers and set them to boil again.

  Todd watched her with undisguised interest. “You going to fill up the whole tub that way?”

  Gilly put her snack on a plate and sat at the kitchen table to wait for the water. “Yes.”

  He snorted. “It’ll get cold before you’re done.”

  She didn’t think so. The tub would hold in most of the heat, and she hoped that by the time the tub had enough water in it for soaking, the boiling water would have become cool enough to bathe in but not too cold. And if it wasn’t, it would be simple enough to add some cold water to it.

  When she dumped the second set of pots, the tub water was still steaming. However, she needed more water, and faster. Gilly dug around in the bottom cupboards while the next batch of water heated. She found several large, deep stockpots. They were incredibly heavy when she finally got them filled, and she didn’t try to put them on the stove. She put them on the woodstove.

  “You’re wasting good propane,” Todd told her.

  Gilly shrugged, an echo of him, not worried now that he’d told her there was enough propane to last until spring. “I need a bath. I want a bath.”

  She ate the rest of her food and took another set of pots to the bathroom. The water in the tub had cooled considerably, but was still luxuriously warm. The pots on the woodstove began to boil next.

  Gilly lugged gallon after gallon of boiling water to the tub. She burned her wrists and hands when the water slopped over the sides, and she hurt her back lifting the heavy pots. But she did it.

  When she finally shed her clothes and sank up to her chin in the water, she was sure she’d caused herself permanent injury. Every part of her body throbbed and ached even worse than after she’d wrecked the truck. To finally feel clean, though…well, she thought the pain was worth it.

  Water had always soothed her. She preferred showers to baths, usually. She loved the way the hot water made steam and pounded down all around her, blocking out the noise of a whining child or the phone or any other of a dozen disturbances. This wasn’t as nice as a shower, but it was wonderful all the same.

  Floating. Gilly was floating. She’d drifted off to sleep, letting her body slip almost completely beneath the water. Only her face stuck out, just far enough for her to breathe. She didn’t dream, wasn’t far enough down for that. Gilly simply floated.

  Sweet summer corn.

  She didn’t know why that came into her mind, but now it was all she could think about. Corn on the cob slathered with butter and salt, fresh from the farm stand. The last time she’d eaten corn, she’d bought it from the side of the road. A young Mennonite girl, hair in long braids, her feet bare, had taken the money and counted sufficient change in her head faster than Gilly could’ve done with a calculator. She’d taken it home and boiled it to eat with burgers on the grill, sliced tomatoes from the garden and home-sliced French fries she’d seasoned with sea salt and fresh-ground pepper.

  Gilly’s mouth watered as she drifted in the bath, eyes closed. Thinking of summer. Heat. Her stomach rumbled.

  Gilly’s mother had loved sweet corn. Even in the worst times, when she insisted all she could drink was cola—heavily laced with rum, but nobody was supposed to know it—her mother could be tempted to eat sweet corn. At the end it was all she would eat. Her mother had loved it so much Gilly sometimes felt she should hate it just to be ornery, be different, or because remembering how much her mother had loved it was too painful.

  But Gilly didn’t hate it. She wanted some, right now, even though it was out of season and she wasn’t at home. She was…someplace else, far away, craving something she couldn’t have.

  The water cooled, and her body protested. Gilly left the haze of sleep to which she’d so gratefully succumbed, and opened her eyes. And screamed.

  Todd stood over her. How long had he been watching? Gilly scrambled upright, sloshing water over the side of the tub, wetting the legs of his jeans. Her hands were inadequate for the task, but she tried futilely anyway to cover herself.

  He stepped back, expression unreadable. “I thought you drowned. I thought you were dead.”

  “Go away!” Gilly cried, hunching forward to protect her body from his emotionless eyes.

  “Get out of the tub now, Gilly.” Todd left the bathroom.

  There would be no more peace for her here. Gilly shivered from more than the chilly air as she got out of the water and dried herself. Her fingers had gone pruney, but her stomach rumbled. She could still taste the memory of sweet corn, but it had gone sour on her tongue.

  32

  “No more eggs for breakfast. These are the last.” Gilly cracked the last two into the challah dough.

  Todd stubbed out his cigarette into the puddle of tea in is saucer until Gilly, with a sigh, pushed an ashtray from he cupboard across the table at him. “It’s okay. I like your read.”

  “Thanks.” The word slipped off her tongue far more easily than it would have even a few days before.

  She finished kneading the dough and left it on the counter o rise, then went to the sink and cleaned her hands with a cant palmful of soap, mindful of the emptying bottle. Outside, the winter sun glared brilliantly off the still-immense piles of now. No sign of any melting, and the temperatures hadn’t dropped so none seemed likely anytime soon.

  Gilly let out a long, hard sigh.

  Todd got up to put his dishes in the sink. He leaned against he counter and stretched, cracking his neck. “I need a new pillow.”

  The ghost of a grin painted Gilly’s mouth. “Let me run out and get you one.”

  Todd didn’t laugh. He rolled his head on his neck with a grimace and a bit of a groan. “It always kinks up on me like this after a while. It’s from a car wreck I was in. Feels like someone stabbed me with an ice pick.”

  Gilly raised her eyebrows at him and held up her hands, wiggling the fingers. “Don’t look at me.”

  “Wow. Ha-ha-ha. You know you ain’t as funny as you think you are?” Todd rubbed the junction of his shoulder and neck with his fingertips.

  Gilly brushed past him and went to the living room, restless. She’d read all the magazines and finished the crossword puzzles. She picked up one of the magazines anyway and sat down with it.

  “Will you rub it for me?”

  “What? No!” Gilly shrank away from Todd, who’d suddenly appeared before her.

  “Please?” He grimaced again. “It really hurts bad.”

  He sank to the floor in front of her and sat cross-legged. He let his head hang down, and the thick dark hair parted, exposing his neck. A downy line of dark fuzz dusted his skin there.

  Gilly stared at him but didn’t touch him. “I can’t do that. I’m…I’m not any good at massage.”

  He shot her a grin over his shoulder. “I seen you kneading that bread. Just do the same on my neck. C’mon. Right there.”

  He waited, and Gilly faltered. She did not want to touch him. And yet, she was tired of being the growling dog. Her defenses were slipping in the face of Todd’s constant forgiving spirit.

  Gilly put her hands on Todd’s shoulders and felt the knots there. “You’re really tense.”

  “No shit.”

  She spread out her fingers, resting them lightly on the bare skin of his neck. His hair brushed her knuckles. His arms pressed against the inside of her calves.

  Todd let out a low, guttural groan as she began the massage. She faltered a moment at the sound but then continued, working the muscle
s the way she kneaded her dough. He hung his head, allowing her to access the sides of his neck and shoulders.

  “That feels good.”

  Todd relaxed and went boneless under her fingers, but Gilly remained tense. This didn’t feel right. At last she had to pull away. Gilly got up from the chair and surreptitiously wiped her hands on the seat of her jeans as she went to the kitchen.

  Todd followed. “Why’d you stop?”

  “I have to check the bread dough.” A blatant lie. Gilly lifted the damp cloth to peek at the rising dough, which didn’t need her attention. Her face felt flushed with the untruth, her palms sweaty.

  Todd was behind her. She was aware of him, how he towered over her, how the aura of his strength surrounded her. He was so much bigger, taller and broader, that she was made tiny. Gilly turned to leave, to make her escape. His hand on her arm stopped her.

  “What’s wrong?” Todd asked.

  “Nothing.”

  She shrugged the lie and pushed past him into the living room. It wasn’t enough. She needed more distance. Gilly went upstairs and sat on her bed.

  “What’s the matter with you?” Todd had followed her but stopped at the top of the stairs.

  “I have a headache.” The third lie slipped out. She lay down, facing away from him, on top of the covers.

  “That’s what you’re supposed to tell your husband, not me.”

  She didn’t look at him, just made a disgruntled sound.

  Todd sighed. He wasn’t wearing boots and his tread was lighter than usual across the bare floor. “Sorry. I know that wasn’t funny. Hey, Gilly, c’mon. Look at me.”

  She refused. “I’m tired. Let me take a nap.”

  His weight dented the bed. She still didn’t turn. Gilly closed her eyes, willing him to go away. His hand weighted her shoulder, but his touch was gentle. Inquiring, not demanding.

  “What did I do?” he asked, in a low voice unlike his normal tone. “Talk to me. Please?”

  “You didn’t do anything.” Gilly rolled into a tight ball, knees to her chest. “I told you, I’m just tired. I have a headache. That’s all. Let me sleep.”

  He sighed and did not remove his hand. “You’re acting like I done something real bad to you. Something scary. And I didn’t even touch you.”

  Gilly sat, twisting her body away from him and scooting across the double bed as far as she could to get out of his reach. “No, I touched you.”

  Todd rolled his head on his neck again. No popping or cracking of the joints this time. No grimace of pain. “Yeah, thanks. It was great.”

  She shivered. “You don’t understand.”

  His gaze flickered. He tried to joke. “I got cooties, huh?”

  She didn’t even smile. “I don’t want to touch you. Anymore. Ever.”

  “It’s okay to hit me, but not to help me,” Todd said, with a touch to his cheek where the faint line of the earlier injuries she’d inflicted still remained. “Making me bleed is okay, though, huh? That’s just fine?”

  She looked down at her betraying hands. “You couldn’t possibly understand.”

  Todd’s mouth thinned. “Christ, Gilly. I didn’t ask you to give me a hand job.”

  “Stop it!” She clapped her hands over her ears. “Stop!”

  She could still hear his voice, low, and angry. “Still got to be that growling dog, huh?”

  She took her hands away from her ears. “Can you blame me?”

  He was not, she realized with some alarm, angry. Todd was upset. His mouth trembled, and did she see a glint of tears in his eyes? He hung his head, making it impossible for her to be sure.

  “You act like touching me was going to burn your hands or something.” Todd splayed his fingers on his thighs, then gripped the denim of his jeans as though he was trying to stop from clenching his fists. “Like I’m dirty.”

  Touching him with compassion had made her feel dirty. Gilly didn’t deny it. She watched him with wide eyes, waiting to see what he would do.

  “Is that what you think?” He looked at her with naked honesty in his face. “I’m dirty to you?”

  Gilly remained silent. Todd sighed again. He set his jaw, waiting for her to talk to him.

  “You ain’t going to say anything?”

  She shook her head slowly. Todd got up from the bed and left the room. A few moments later, she heard a tremendous crash that nearly startled her into falling off the bed. More crashes followed, interspersed with cursing.

  Gilly crept beneath her covers, shaking, and tried to warm herself. She could close her eyes, but even putting the pillow over her head wasn’t enough to drown out the noise. She bit her lip to keep from crying out at every bang and crash.

  The silence that followed was worse than the crashing. She waited, aching from breathlessness, to hear the sound of his footsteps on the stairs. She fell asleep waiting for it.

  A cry woke her from another dream of roses. Gilly shot straight up in bed, heart pounding so hard she saw bright flashes of light in front of her eyes. The room had fallen into blackness while she slept.

  She pressed her hands to her mouth, shaking, listening for the cry to come again. In the first few moments of wakefulness she’d again thought she was home, listening for one of her children. Maybe she would always think that. Now she remembered where she was, knew it couldn’t be Arwen or Gandy, but still strained to hear the cry.

  It came again from downstairs, lower this time, a sound so filled with grief and agony it brought sympathetic tears to Gilly’s eyes. She swung her legs over the bed, waiting to hear it again. It did, the low, destitute cry of a child who’s given up on his mother ever coming to comfort him.

  It was Todd.

  She did not have to go to him. It would’ve been easy enough to close her ears to his anguish, to roll over in bed and force herself back into sleep. His suffering did not have to become her own. She owed him nothing. Yet she got out of bed and sought him, because listening to his pain without offering solace went against every instinct she had. Gilly couldn’t close her heart.

  She made her way down the dark stairs. He’d lit candles, not a propane lantern, and the flickering light turned his skin to gold. Todd sat in front of the fire, his familiar pile of crumpled and stained papers in front of him. He held the red folder, creased and also stained, and bulging with what looked like newspaper clippings. The scraps of yellowing newsprint fell from the folder to his lap, covering his knees. Todd rocked from side to side, muttering.

  “Todd?”

  He whipped around to face her. His eyes were red rimmed and awful looking, like pools of blood surrounding the darkness of his pupils. His cheeks, grown pale from so many days without the sun, had bloomed with two red roses. His mouth worked, and his hands opened helplessly. The rest of the folder fell to the floor. He pressed the heels of his hands to his eyes, fingers tipped with raw, chewed nails.

  “Oh, Todd.” She said his name softer the second time. Gentler.

  He held out the papers to her, a sheaf of clippings falling to the floor like dirty snowflakes. He didn’t speak. Gilly forgot all that had passed between them and went to him, knelt beside him. She took the papers.

  Squinting in the candlelight, she read the first article. A black-and-white photograph filled most of the page. Five children encircled a woman whose mouth twisted in an insincere smile. She held the sixth, smallest child, a small boy with smooth dark hair and wearing bibbed overalls, in her lap. The headline above the photo didn’t match the picture of familial bliss.

  One of Six Survives

  Gilly was slammed back in time to elementary school. The story had been huge back then with its gruesome details and tragic ending. The worst kind of legend, based on truth but grown from repeated whispers in the hallway, the bathroom, the playground. Everyone knew what had happened. They said if you went up to the church where she’d done it, you could see their ghosts.

  “Oh, my God,” Gilly breathed. “You’re that boy?”

  She sifted
through the rest of the pile, catching bits of the story here and there. Though she’d been too young to follow the story in the papers or on the news, what she’d heard in school had been pretty accurate.

  Boy survives mother’s wrath. Five children slain. Mother dies by own hand.

  “She said we were going to see Jesus,” Todd said in a voice filled with rust and razor blades. “I thought she meant church. She took us there sometimes, when she thought we were being bad, and she’d make us sit in those little benches and pray. The little church back there in the woods. The one her family built way back a couple hundred years ago.”

  Gilly knew the place. It had always had a reputation of being haunted, even before Todd’s mother had killed her children there. A set of famed murderers, the last criminals to be hanged in Pennsylvania, had been buried in the cemetery. It had been a place to go at midnight on Halloween, a place to scare yourself stupid.

  “She put us in the Fuego, even though there wasn’t enough seat belts for us all. She always made us wear our seat belts. But not that night. Katie and Mary sat in the front with her. Stevie, Joey, Freddy and me were in the back. Stevie was my oldest brother.” Todd pointed to the tallest boy in the photo.

  “My Grandma Essie sometimes called Mama Fertile Myrtle, because she had us six kids in ten years. Daddy left around the time I was born, just run off with the truck-stop waitress from Ono, but we all lived with Grandma and Uncle Bill.”

  He took a deep, shuddering breath that didn’t seem to calm him. Gilly’s legs had gone to rubber, and she was thankful she was already kneeling instead of standing. The details of the story had rushed back to her as soon as he began speaking. It had been told in horrified yet fascinated whispers, passed from mouth to ear like a game of telephone. Particulars had been exaggerated, some lost, but the sadness of it hadn’t been diluted. Even as a kid Gilly had wanted to cry when she heard it.

  “She told us to be real quiet, and we’d get to see a star shower.” Todd looked into the fire, the flames reflected in his eyes. “‘Hush up,’ she said. ‘You’ll see Jesus in the stars.’ Katie started to cry because she had to go to the bathroom, and Mama kept telling her to hush up, hush up now. It was cold out there in the dark, and spooky, too. Stevie held my hand because he knew I was afraid. He was always good like that, I remember. He’d push me on the swings when nobody else would. He let me lay down next to him under the old blanket that still smelled like puke from when Freddy threw up on it, and we looked out the big glass hatchback up to the sky. But I didn’t see stars.