Precious and Fragile Things

  She turned to face him. “Todd. That’s your name, right? Todd, you have to take me back. Or take me someplace. Let me go.”

  He wasn’t looking at her. He shook his shaggy head and got up from the table to stalk to the living room with a handful of paper napkins he used to build up the fire in the sooty woodstove. He went to the table and picked up a bulging folder, then took it to the woodstove where he crouched in front of its warmth, sifting through the papers. Every so often he threw one of them into the blaze.

  “Please,” Gilly said from the kitchen.

  Todd ignored her, bent to his task with a single-minded self-absorption. He muttered as he worked, but she couldn’t make out the words. Gilly moved to the living room, wanting to draw closer to the fire’s warmth but feeling as though it was up to her to keep a proper distance between them. There had to be something for her to say or do to make him listen.

  If she ran away now, would he chase her? Gilly’s head felt fuzzy, her thoughts mangled, but everything in the cabin seemed too sharp, too clear. Looking at things straight on hurt her eyes. She couldn’t blame exhaustion since she’d had the longest night’s sleep she’d had since before being pregnant with Arwen.

  She’d felt this way before, when the pain of childbirth had made time stretch on into an unfathomable and interminable length. When the drugs she’d been taking for a sinus infection had made her feel as though she were constantly floating. Now it was the same, every minute lasting an hour, her head a balloon tethered to her shoulders by a gossamer thread that could snap at any minute.

  You did this to yourself, Gillian. You know you did. Now you pay the price.

  It was her mother’s voice again, stern and strong. Gilly thought of the dream she’d had while driving. Roses and thorns and blood and love.

  The fire warmed the room and she shrugged out of her coat. She hung it on the back of a chair. “Todd.”

  Todd shuffled his pile of papers together and held them out to her. “Read this.”

  Her first instinct was to say no, but wouldn’t it be better to do what he wanted than to antagonize him? Gilly sat on the plaid couch and took the offered papers. The first was a bank statement. The name at the top of the account was Todd Blauch. The previous balance was for a little more than five thousand dollars. One withdrawal had been made a couple weeks ago for the entire amount. That explained the envelope at the minimart.

  She explained what that meant. He gave her that look again, the one that said he knew she mocked him, he just wasn’t sure how cruelly. “I know that.”

  “You told me to read them.”

  “I know that one,” he said. “I need help with the ones under that one.”

  She took a look. The legal-size sheets would have been incomprehensible to her even without the crumpling and staining. It was some sort of legal document. A will. All she could really make out were the names Bill Lutz and Todd Blauch. There was a bunch of mumbo jumbo about property lines and taxes. Deeds.

  “Is it the will saying you’ve inherited the cabin?”

  Todd sighed. “Yeah. But there’s too many words on that paper. Lots of little words always mean there’s something they can catch you on.”

  “I’m pretty sure that’s all it says,” Gilly told him. “But I’m not a lawyer.”

  “That would’ve been my luck,” Todd muttered. “To get stuck with a lawyer.”

  “You’re not stuck with me.”

  Todd stuffed the papers back in his folder. “Shit, Gilly.”

  “You took my boots.” It wasn’t a question.

  He stared at her sideways, head cocked and his thick dark hair hanging over one eye. “Yeah.”

  “So I couldn’t run away.”

  He shrugged but didn’t answer.

  Gilly screwed up her courage with a deep breath. She lifted her chin, determined her voice would not tremble. “Do you want sex?”

  He looked as stunned as if she’d slapped him across the face. Her words propelled him from the couch. Todd turned from her, facing the woodstove, his shoulders hunched.

  “Jesus. No!”

  “If that’s what you want,” she continued, her voice a calm floating cloud that did not seem to come from the rest of her, “then I will let you do whatever you want…if you let me go….”

  He whirled around, and to her surprise, his tawny cheeks had bloomed the color of aged brick. “I don’t want to fuck you!”

  Gilly shook her head, immensely relieved but inexplicably offended. “What do you want me for, then?”

  “I didn’t want you at all, I just wanted the fucking truck. Jesus fucking Christ. Shit!” He smacked his fist into the palm of his hand with each invective. “What the hell?”

  She pressed her hands tightly together to prevent them from trembling, but nothing could stop the quaver in her voice. “I just thought…”

  He tossed up his hands at her, forcing her to silence. He lit a cigarette, staring at her while the smoke leaked from his nose in twin streams like the breath of a dragon. The steady glare was disconcerting, but she forced herself to meet it.

  “You think I stole you?” Todd said slowly. “I mean, you look at me and you think I’m a guy who takes women?”

  “You did take me!”

  “Yeah, well,” he said, “I didn’t mean to.”

  I didn’t mean to.

  It was one of the things Seth said when he wanted to sound like he was apologizing but really wasn’t. Gilly hated that phrase so much it automatically curled her lip and made her want to spit. The noise forced from her throat sounded suspiciously like a growl.

  “How could you not mean to? I was in the truck. You got in with a…with a knife!” Her words caught, her voice hoarse. “How was that an accident? What happened? Did some big wind come up and just blow you into my car?”

  “I didn’t say it was an accident. I just said I didn’t take you on purpose!”

  “There’s no difference!” Gilly cried.

  Todd stared at her long and hard. “There is a fucking difference.”

  Shouting would solve nothing and might, in fact, make things worse. Gilly made herself sound calm and poised. “I want you to let me go, Todd.”

  “Can’t.”

  His simple answer infuriated her. “What do you plan to do with me, then?”

  He shrugged, sucking on the cigarette until his cheeks hollowed. “Hell if I know.”

  “Someone will find me.”

  He stared at her, long and hard, through narrowed eyes. Todd didn’t look away. Gilly did.

  “I don’t think anyone will find you,” he said. “Not for a while, anyway, and by then…”

  “By then, what?” She stood to face him, but he only shrugged. She softened her tone. Cajoled, tempting that boot-kicked dog closer with a piece of steak. “Look. Just give me my boots. I’ll hike down to the main road and…hitch a ride. Or something. Find a gas station.”

  He snorted laughter. “No, you won’t. You’d never make it. Christ, it’s…” He stopped himself, wary again, as if telling her the distance would give her any sort of clue where they were. “It’s too far.”

  “I’d make it,” Gilly said in a low voice.

  “No,” Todd said. “You wouldn’t.”

  Images of a mass grave, multiple rotting bodies, filled her brain. Gilly swallowed hard. Fear tasted a little like metal, but she had to ask the question. “Are you going to kill me?”

  Todd started. “No! Jesus Christ, no.”

  There was no counting to ten this time, nothing to hold her back from rising hysteria. “Because if you are, you should do it now. Right away! Just do it and get it over with!”

  Todd flinched at first in the face of her shouting, then frowned. “I didn’t bring you here to kill you. The fuck you think I am, a psycho?”

  Gilly quieted, chest heaving with breath that hurt her lungs. Her throat had gone dry, her mouth parched and arid. Todd stared, then shook his head and laughed.

  “You do. You really do
think I’m crazy. Fuck my life, you think I’m a fucking psycho.”

  Gilly shot her gaze toward the front door and expected him to step in front of her, but Todd just tossed up his hands.

  “Go, then,” he said derisively. “See how far you get. People die all the time in the woods, and that’s ones smart enough to have the right gear with them. You don’t have gear, you got nothing. See how long it takes your ass to freeze.”

  “The police,” she offered halfheartedly. “They’ll be looking for me.”

  “Where?”

  He had a point, one she didn’t want to acknowledge. “They can trace things. The truck, for one.”

  “The fuck you think this is, CSI?” Todd shrugged. “Maybe. Maybe not.”

  Gilly looked again to the door and then at the floor in defeat. “Please. I’ll give you whatever you want.”

  “You can’t give me what I want,” Todd said.

  Gilly went to the front windows and looked out at the yard. Her truck was there, but she had no keys. The forest ringing the patchy, rocky grass looked thick and unwelcoming, the road little more than a path. He was right. She wouldn’t get far. Running out there would be stupid, especially without shoes.

  She had to be smarter than that.

  “I need to clean up,” Gilly said finally. “Brush my teeth, wash my face…”

  She trailed off when he walked past her. He picked up a plastic shopping bag from the dining room table, and for the first time she noticed there were many of those bags on the chairs and beneath the table. He tossed her the first one.

  It landed at her feet, and she jumped. Gilly bent and touched the plastic, but didn’t look inside. He’d bought more than groceries.

  “Go ahead.” Todd poked at the other bags on the table. “Look.”

  “What’s all this for?” Gilly sifted through a stack of turtleneck shirts, one in nearly every color.

  Todd pushed another handful of bulging plastic sacks toward her. “I had all my stuff with me. You didn’t have anything.”

  Gilly pulled out a pair of sparkly tights. She said nothing, turning them over and over in her fingers. They were her size. She didn’t even know they made sparkly tights in her size. She looked up at him.

  Todd shrugged.

  She let the tights drop onto the rest of the pile and wiped her now-sweating palms on her thighs. Her heart began to pound again.

  “All of this… You bought enough to last for months,” she said finally.

  Todd stubbed out his cigarette in a saucer on the table and lit another, flicking the lighter expertly with his left hand. He sucked deep and held it before letting the smoke seep from between his lips. “The fuck am I supposed to know what a woman needs? You needed shit. I bought it.”

  Gilly steadied herself with one hand on the back of a chair. “I won’t be here for months.”

  Todd flipped the lid of his lighter open and shut a couple of times before sliding it back into his pocket. Without answering her, he stalked to the woodstove and piled a few logs on the fire it didn’t need. His faded flannel shirt rode up as he knelt, exposing a line of flesh above the waist of his battered jeans.

  If she could stab him there, he’d bleed like any other man. The thought swelled, unbidden, in her mind. She could run at him. Grab his knife. She could sink it deep into his back. For one frightening moment the urge to do it was so strong that Gilly saw Todd’s blood on her hands. She blinked, and the crimson vanished.

  Gilly sifted through the contents of the bags. He’d bought soap and shampoo, toothpaste. Shirts, sweatpants, socks, a few six-packs of plain cotton underpants in a style she hadn’t worn in years. No shoes, no gloves or scarf, no hat.

  She rubbed her middle finger between her eyes, where a pain was brewing. It seemed he’d thought of just about everything. Nothing fancy, all practical, and probably all of it would fit her. She thought she should be grateful he hadn’t bought her something creepy like a kinky maid’s outfit. She thought she should be happy he’d bought her clothes and wasn’t going to skin her to make a dress for himself, that’s what she should be grateful for.

  Gilly gathered as many of the bags as she could. “Is there a shower?”

  “Outside. There’s a tub in the bathroom.”

  The plastic shifted and slipped in her fingers as she took the bags and went into the bathroom. She shut the door behind her. There was no lock. The room’s one small window slid up easily halfway, but then stuck. She would never fit through it. And if she did, where would she go? How far would she get with no coat or gloves and nothing but socks on her feet, with no idea where she was or how to get anywhere else? Todd was right, people died all the time in the woods.

  “You didn’t bring any water?” This comes from Seth, looking surprised. “But you always bring everything.”

  Not this time, apparently. Gilly shifts baby Gandy on one hip and watches Arwen toddle along the boardwalk through the trees. There are miles of boardwalk and lots of stairs at Bushkill Falls, and who knew it would take so long to walk them, or that there’d be no convenient snack stands along the way? Gilly’s thirsty too, her back aches from carrying Gandy in the sling, her heart races as Arwen gets too close to the railing.

  Gilly is the planner. The packer. The prepared one. Seth is accustomed to walking out the door with nothing but his wallet and keys, and if he slings the diaper bag over his shoulder it’s without bothering to look inside. He trusts her to be prepared. To have everything they could possibly need and a lot of stuff they won’t.

  “I can’t believe you didn’t pack water,” Seth says, and Gilly fumes, silent and stung, her own throat dry with thirst.

  That had been an awful trip. Walking for miles to see the beauty of the waterfalls that she’d have enjoyed more without the rumble of hunger and a parched mouth distracting her. And that had been along set paths, no place to get lost, in temperate autumn. What would happen to her if she set out without shoes into the frigid mid-January air and tried to make her way down a mountain, through the forest, without having a clue about where she was going?

  No. She had to plan better than that. Be prepared. Because once she started, there’d be no going back.

  First, she’d get cleaned up. The tub, a deep claw-foot, was filthy with a layer of dust and some dead bugs. The toilet was the old-fashioned kind with a tank above and a pull chain. It would’ve been quaint and charming in a bed-and-breakfast.

  Gilly set the bags on the chipped porcelain countertop and pulled out a package of flowery soap. Her skin itched just looking at it. Further exploration brought out a long, slim package. A purple, sparkly toothbrush. The breath whooshed from her lungs as if she’d been punched in the stomach. Gilly let out a low cry, holding on to the sink top to keep her buckling knees from dropping her to the ground. Shudders racked her body, so fierce her teeth clattered sharply.

  He’d bought her a toothbrush.

  The simple consideration, not the first from him, undid her. Gilly pressed her forehead to the wall, her palms flat on the rough paneling. Sobs surged up her throat and she bit down hard, jailing them behind her teeth. She cursed into her fists, silent, strangled cries she didn’t want him to overhear. She didn’t want to give him that.

  Count to ten, Gilly. Count to twenty if you have to. Keep it in, don’t let it out. You’ll lose it if you let it out.

  You’ll lose you.

  Gilly clutched at her cheeks and bit the inside of her wrist until the pain there numbed the agony in her heart. He’d given her opportunity to escape, and she hadn’t taken it. Had been unable to take it.

  She was crazy, not him. She was the psycho. It was her.

  Quickly, she ran water from the faucet. It was frigid and tinged with orange, barely warming even after a minute, though it did turn clear. She splashed her face to wash away tears that hadn’t fallen. When she could breathe again she forced herself to look in the mirror. Her eyes narrowed as she assessed herself.

  She’d dreamed of her mother speakin
g words she’d never said. Never would’ve said. Gilly didn’t need a dream dictionary to parse out what the dream meant, her mother with the flowers that had sometimes seemed to mean more to her than her family. Blood. The responsibility of roses.

  Looking at her face now she saw her mother’s eyes, the shape of her mother’s mouth. She’d heard her mother’s voice, too.

  “I am not my mother.” She muttered this, each word tasting sour. She didn’t believe herself.

  Her ablutions were brief but effective. Staring at the clothes in the bags, Gilly felt herself wanting to slip into disconnectedness again. It was tempting to let the blankness take over. She forced it away.

  She changed her panties but kept her bra on. Apparently he hadn’t thought to buy her one. She put her own jeans back on, her own shirt. She didn’t want to wear the clothes he’d bought her. She wanted her own things, even if the hems of her jeans were stiff with dirt and her shirt smelled faintly of the juice she hadn’t realized was spilled on it. She folded the rest of the clothes and shoved them back in the bags.

  Gilly combed her hair and tied it back with the ponytail holder from her jeans pocket. It was Arwen’s. Her fingers trembled as she twisted the elastic into her hair. They’d stopped by the time she finished using the sparkly toothbrush.

  Todd had put more wood in the stove, and now the room was almost stifling. He sat on the couch, staring at nothing. Smoking, tapping the ashes into an old coffee can set on the table in front of him.

  “Feel better?” he asked without looking at her.

  “No.”

  Todd sighed. “I’m not an asshole, Gilly. Or a psycho. Really.”

  She didn’t say anything.

  He looked at her, anger smoldering in his dark eyes. The sight made her step back toward the insignificant safety of the bathroom. Todd got up from the couch and made as though to step toward her.

  “You afraid of me?”