The Janus Tree: And Other Stories Read online

  At one point, ten minutes or so into first period, with Matt still leaning on my locker, it occurred to me that nothing was over. That he was going to rip the door open now that we were alone and tear me to pieces.

  Except that he didn’t know the combination. Had put me—intentionally, or otherwise—in the one place in Silver City where he really couldn’t get at me.

  Somewhere in that whirl of thoughts, I realized I couldn’t hear his breathing anymore. That there was no one outside. I waited another few minutes, heard footsteps, shouted out. It took Mr. Kellaway four tries, with me repeating that he had to bump it after the ‘38,’ to get the door open. When I stepped out, blinking, he exploded into laughter, shook his head, and walked away.

  There were terrified, stunned stares when I walked into bio a few minutes later. But there were cheers when I got to Spanish. I was shuttled to the front of the lunch line. I kept waiting for that blooming silence, the heavy footfall that would tell me the real consequences had come. But they didn’t come. If Matt was in the cafeteria, I never saw him.

  Somehow, slowly, P.E. and English crawled by. Fifteen minutes from the bell, I realized I was about to go walking, for the first time in two months, with Jill Redround. When we were good and high on the buttes, I was going to kiss her.

  The second the bell rang, I sprinted for my locker. I knew Matt might be waiting for me there. I no longer cared. I just wanted to be waiting when Jill showed up. I didn’t even notice the note taped to my door at first, because I was too busy scanning every passing face.

  The note was handwritten, on the yellow legal paper Jill always used.

  Gone to the Janus Tree. Matt begged me. I told him it was the last time. Call me tonight? Can’t wait to see you, Teddy. RoundRed.

  Dawn, I thought, my hands shaking so hard I tore the note in half. ‘The Dark Lord summoned me to the Janus Tree.’ That’s what Robert had said. Pretty much the last thing he’d said, when he was my friend. The night he’d gone up the hill. Seen what he’d seen.

  Then I was hurling students aside, flying for the front door and out, cutting through the yards toward uptown and the road up the rocks to the Janus house.

  The sun still shone, but snow was flurrying in gray, gust-driven balls like tumbleweeds. Overhead, I could see the Virgin of the Great Divide through the drifts, blank and mysterious as a Sphinx, some other culture’s monument. I was thinking of the vanished Incas, the village Mr. Janus had told us about. Indio Muerto. I could hear his voice. You’re telling me we can’t locate a single dead Indian, in their own village? Most of all, I was thinking of his crooked, decaying fingers stroking Jill Redround’s upper arm, inches from the swell of her breast.

  Everyone has to get old, he’d said. Everyone has to get old.

  Vanished. Where had they gone?

  When Robert had received his summons, Mr. Janus had barely got back from Chile. He must have hardly begun testing out what he’d learned in the village of dead Indians. He might not even have been positive it was working. Or what anyone else would make of the changes, if there’d even been any. Had he picked Robert because he was wacky, vulnerable, the kind of kid bullies always chose? Or because he thought—hoped—Robert was sensitive, and might confirm that something was indeed happening. To himself. To his son…

  I understood long before I got there.

  Inside the Janus house, nothing moved. Nothing would, of course. Why had NO ONE asked whom Matt would be staying with, now that his father and mother were both gone? Because somehow, subconsciously, everyone else already knew, too. Not that anyone would say. And it was too much even to admit.

  Through the snow, in the red-yellow sun, I could see them on the hillside. Matt right under the tree, so that it seemed an extension of his spine, the dead branches to the right and the live ones on the left fanning open on either side of him like wings, the scaly bark so closely resembling his own blotchy, shedding skin. And Jill on her knees in front of him. Screaming.

  I’d gotten within ten feet before I realized even Matt hadn’t gotten that tall, couldn’t have, and finally noticed the wheelbarrow he was standing in.

  “What the fuck?” I screamed. And then, “Jill!”

  Matt kicked the wheelbarrow out from under himself so hard that it swung up and smacked Jill in the forehead. She fell back flat, still screaming, hands at her face and blood spurting into her eyes. So only I saw.

  I saw legs kicking. Not dancing, kicking. Not at the air, but at each other. I saw Matt’s right hand yanking at the noose, his left hand wrenching at the right, all but pulling it off its wrist. Then something in the rope slipped, Matt dropped another six inches, and the snap of his neck exploded off the rocks like gunshot.

  The ambulance and the hearse arrived together. I knew, even as I kissed her bloody forehead, that Jill was gone from me, too. Her mother moved her to Albuquerque for good three days later. I wrote her there. Sometimes, she wrote back. She never returned, and she never invited me down, and I’ve never gone.

  I can’t. Because every time I think of her or see her face, I see Matt’s face. In the noose, kicking and fighting for his life with his father, who’d slipped inside him. Or by my locker, at the moment he directed me into it, when he was just Matt, who’d flung a balrog off a cliff, having lost a battle to a boy who stored magic in a plastic light-saber in his backpack.

  I Am Coming To Live In Your Mouth

  “This must be the very pinnacle of good fortune, he thought. To have every moment of his death observed by those beautiful eyes—it was like being borne to death on a gentle, fragrant breeze.”

  Yukio Mishima, “Patriotism”

  It happened the first time during the 4 a.m. feeding, and Kagome believed she was dreaming. This was not unusual; she almost never slept anymore, and most of her life felt like dreaming, now. She’d already flushed out Joe’s catheter, sponged gently at the pus that dripped incessantly from the tumor that had devoured his upper lip, and replaced the nutrient bag on the i.v. stand. Now she was sitting quietly, holding his skeletal, freezing fingers in her own. Briney, Joe’s Burmese, lay curled in the permanent indentation he’d made for himself across Joe’s thighs. Once or twice, the cat half-raised one nictitating lid, flicked its stub of a tail back and forth as though sweeping the room with radar, and went back to sleep. Out on the deck, the shadows of the oaks swayed in the winter wind spooling silently down the San Gabriels, and the Nuttall’s woodpecker that never left, even in the snow, knocked once against whichever pine or telephone pole it had lodged in this night.

  I am coming, she heard, half-heard, rolling the bones of Joe’s fingers with her thumb.

  It was like the interferon year all over again. In a way, despite the realities of the current situation, watching him then had been worse. He’d slept even more, for one thing, sometimes as many as thirty hours in a row, and never less than twenty. But his sleep had been more disturbed, riddled with tremors that wracked him for minutes on end, haunted by dream-demons Joe clearly remembered afterward but rarely described to her. Tall things, he’d murmur. Whisperers.

  Sometimes, that year, the moments when he wasn’t shuddering or dreaming were more frightening still. His face had been less drastically scarred, then, but also tended to go sickeningly slack, drain of everything that identified that hawk-nose, these flippy ear-lobes, this slightly up-turned mouth, as Joe’s. Looking into it had been like staring at the drawn shades of a house that had been termite-bombed.

  And yet. Back then, there’d also been that one, absurd element of hope. That the interferon regimen might just work. Kill every deadly cell inside Joe but still leave Joe.

  Whereas now, hours or days from the end—not weeks, she’d been assured, not even one week—Joe rarely so much as twitched. Sometimes, as she tended to him, his eyelids fluttered, but contentedly. At least, Kagome insisted to herself that was the case. And sometimes, right at this moment, he’d actually awaken and look at her, and she’d see that formidable engine in there fire one more
time, all that ferocious fight, all those useless things he somehow knew locking into place behind his retinas. Once, he’d told her he loved her, that she was the only reason he was still battling. Mostly, though, he glanced at the feedbag and said, “Kidney pie. Rock on.” Or, if they had a chemo or oncologist appointment later that day, “Shotgun.”

  I am coming to live…

  She was moving his hand against the inside of one of her wrists, now. Feeling the paper-thin membrane against her smoothness, right where the sleeve of her robe ended. Dazed, she moved his hand to her cheek. Held it there. Stroked once, so gently, down. Back up. Down again. Then she slid Joe’s hand to her neck. Down farther, into the V of her robe to brush one nipple. The other. How long had it been now? Two years? Three? They’d had such sweet touching in the eighteen months before what they’d always known was coming—or, coming back—arrived for good. Such patient touching, as though they’d had all the time in the world. Now his skin—what there was of it—just felt scratchy and hard, like a dried-out loofa.

  I am coming to live in your mouth.

  She jerked upright and dropped Joe’s hand to the hospital bed that had taken the place of their couch and swung around.

  Screaming, she thought. I should be screaming.

  She couldn’t see his face. He was standing in the corner, just where the shadow of the tallest oak spilled through the glass sliding door. His stained tan overcoat hung too low, all but brushing the tops of his galoshes, which looked shiny and wet, though there hadn’t been so much as a mist out there yet this fall. He had his head bent low, the brim of his trilby completely shading his face.

  “Get out of my—” she started, and his voice overrode her though it was barely a whisper, hollow as respirator breath in an oxygen mask.

  I am coming to live in your mouth. Because you never have anything to say.

  Then she was screaming, crying, too, “Out! Get out! OUT!”

  The figure in the corner didn’t even lift its head, but it was still speaking, or else those words had rung a resonant spot inside her, because she could hear them over her shouting. Coming to live. Never have anything…

  “What in sweet God’s name?” Mrs. Thiel snapped from the stairway, and Kagome whirled, her own voice choking to silence but that other’s still echoing.

  At least the mask was down, Kagome thought, watching Joe’s mother’s razor-thin eyebrows squeeze together like crayfish pincers. For a long moment, she just held Mrs. Thiel’s gaze, then remembered and leapt to her feet, swinging around.

  By the sliding glass door, she saw the shadow of the oak shaking slightly, as though ravens had just sprung from its branches. Bare floor. The boxes of sterile needles and spare tubing tucked neatly against the breakfront. Nothing else.

  I am coming to live in your mouth.

  When she turned once more, she found Joe’s mother smiling. The eyebrows hung in their carefully separated spaces like precisely hung photographs. The mask, in place once more.

  “Jasmine?” Mrs. Thiel said brightly. “Help us greet the new day grinning?”

  Moving to the stove, ignoring Kagome’s elegant tetsubin tea things arrayed on the shelf by the sink, she filled the utilitarian silver kettle she’d brought with her when she’d finally dropped the pretense and moved in a few weeks before. The kettle made an ugly, banging sound as Mrs. Thiel settled it over the burner.

  “Think the newspaper’s here? I’ll get you your crossword. Or is it more a sudoku kind of hour?”

  Instead of answering, Kagome gazed down again at what was left of her husband. Her screaming hadn’t roused him. Would today be the last day? Would the next time he opened his eyes be the final one? Good God, had she already had the final one? When had it been? She couldn’t even remember.

  She watched Joe’s chest, which just lay flat.

  Lay flat.

  Lay flat.

  Lay flat.

  And finally, fitfully, inflated, as though some small child were shoving at it from inside. Joe’s mouth didn’t exactly open anymore, but part of his lower lip quivered as air slipped past it. He gurgled once, and pus ran down his teeth onto his tongue. Then his chest clamped down again.

  Kagome glanced toward the corner. With a brief, discreet brush of her husband’s palm with her fingertips, she turned to face Mrs. Thiel. She had no smile in her, and managed one. At least, it felt like she did. “Sudoku, I think,” she said. Without even slipping her fuzzy robe over her robe, she crossed to the front door and stepped out into the icy mountain air to wait for the paper she knew wouldn’t come for at least another hour.

  But the cold didn’t help. Nor did the shower when she came inside. Nor Mrs. Thiel’s superb slow eggs and salsa. The final proof for just how unsettling her 4 a.m. encounter had been came as Mrs. Thiel was clearing the breakfast dishes, leaning over her shoulder while Kagome tapped the last unfilled boxes of the Thursday Times crossword with her pencil eraser.

  “Mulliner,” Mrs. Thiel said suddenly, and Kagome stared at the puzzle. The answer was correct, of course. 65 down: Old hat, at the Angler’s. Jobs misspelled to make Wodehouse characters, the theme of the day. When, exactly, had Mrs. Thiel started nailing crossword clues like that? Never before, in the time Kagome had known her.

  “Get the crazy glue,” Mrs. Thiel said, and Kagome grabbed her hand and almost made her drop the dishes. She could feel Mrs. Thiel’s scowl on her shoulders—God forbid either of them should actually show any emotion other than radiant, resolute hopefulness—but Mrs. Thiel held on, too. For one second, no longer.

  Get the crazy glue. It was what Joe said when he turned away from a ball he’d bowled immediately after bowling it, before the ball was halfway down the lane. When he knew he’d rolled a strike, and that the pins would be flying. In the three, maybe four times Kagome had gone bowling with Joe, she’d never seen him guess wrong. “‘Cause there’s no guessing involved,” he’d say. And touch her cheek gently with one finger as he returned to his seat.

  I am coming to live in your mouth…

  The doorbell rang at eleven while Kagome was still combing out her long, black hair and beginning to weave it into the complicated sakkou fashion she’d learned from her mother, and that had always hypnotized Joe. Fascinated him. “Like a wild knot,” he’d said once, slipping his long fingers in and out of the whirl of loops and crosses she’d made. Then, when she’d lain still long enough, he told her what that was, as she knew he would. A knot built out of infinite sequences, with a seemingly infinite number of edges. “In the actual universe—the physical one—” Joe told her, “there’s no such thing.”

  Abruptly, she came out of her reverie. Hospice. She’d blocked that out. Forgotten they were coming. Then she heard the door opening, a single strum of out-of-tune ukulele, and her first real smile of the day spread over her pale, exhausted face. Pinning the last twist of her hair into place, she stepped into the hall and caught a fleeting glimpse, galoshes sliding silently around the corner, into the guest room they never used, who would come?

  Sprinting for the room, she threw open the door—closed? It was closed?—and found the erg machine Joe had ordered to keep his muscles in shape while his skin rotted off and his lungs shriveled and his organs imploded, one by one. Beyond the bare windows, she saw the tops of trees, all but bare now, swaying.

  More ukulele strum from downstairs, and Ryan’s ridiculous, keening laugh, and his croak of a voice. “Going down, chum. Going down hard.” And then that roaring, ripping cough—the cancer growling as it fed—that told her Joe was awake.

  Kagome hurried downstairs, ignoring the urge to swing around, just once, to make sure. She’d made sure. And already knew, anyway.

  “How long has he been awake?” she asked Mrs. Thiel, who was wiping down the kitchen counters, having already washed every dish and tucked away the supplies from last night’s feeding. Only occasionally did the woman allow herself a glance toward the couch, where her son, propped up, was trying to get his fingers around the Playsta
tion controller and his thumbs into place. Finally, Mrs. Thiel looked at Kagome. And grinned.

  Kagome smiled back. They stood together and watched.

  Ryan, in his usual holey black Warped Tour skateshirt and Vans, was alternately flipping at his mop of brown hair and fiddling with the television controllers. Eventually, the screen burst into color, and pumping techno music thudded through the room. Returning to his seat, Ryan spied Kagome, waved the ukulele he was still holding by its neck in his free hand, and settled in the chair closest to Joe. On the screen, twin rocket-propelled race cars approached a starting line as the riff in the music repeated itself, then froze as the START NEW GAME? message appeared.

  It was hard to remember, watching them, that Ryan had started out as Kagome’s friend. He’d been her intern at Mountain Living. In some ways, he fit the copy editor stereotype even more closely than she did: glasses, nervous twitch to his fingers, permanent pale-yellow cast to his skin. Computer tan. Except he also wore Vans and played the ukulele, told invented shaggy dog jokes that made Kagome laugh—no mean feat, in this particular era of her life—and kick-boxed.

  Four months ago, out of nowhere, hunched over his computer in the midst of a particularly gnarly edit, he’d mentioned his Boggle prowess. She’d said nothing, but brought Joe’s travel set the next day and set it wordlessly before Ryan at lunch. It had taken her two rounds to realize he hadn’t been kidding, and seven for him to win the match. Which made him exactly the second person she’d ever met to take one from her. She hadn’t so much invited him to dinner as thrown down the gauntlet. He’d shown up singing “Tiny Bubbles,” Joe had skunked him at Boggle but lost every Playstation game they’d tried and also computer Jeopardy, and that had pretty much been the last time Kagome had spent with Ryan except at work.