Nothing to Devour Page 9

  Aunt Sally had dreamed that Ju would never know. Would not need to see. That to Ju, and Ju alone of all living things, Aunt Sally could be something other than slave, master, meaning-maker, monster, deliverer, destroyer. That to Ju, Aunt Sally could simply be …

  Well. That was done, now.

  When she’d finished devouring, Aunt Sally straightened, then stood. She licked her lips to clean them but didn’t bother wiping her dress. The stolen phone lay faceup on Ju’s lap, but the girl wasn’t looking at it. She just sat, her back against the headboard, eyes wide open and full of tears. Her mouth was shut. If she was feeling any surprise, about any of this, Aunt Sally couldn’t see it.

  Stepping carefully over the corpse, Aunt Sally moved to the bed, feeling Ju watching, drinking in her gaze. Did Ju understand the bond of trust they’d just sealed? How Aunt Sally did hope so. For both their sakes.

  Just once, as she lowered herself to the bed next to the girl, stretching out her legs atop the coverings, did she feel Ju flinch. Not away, she just flinched, or maybe that was a shudder. Aunt Sally could understand that. Why shouldn’t Ju shudder? Even if she really had known, or thought she’d known … it was different to see. It had to be.

  Settling beside the girl but not touching her—not yet—Aunt Sally rested her own back against the headboard, which vibrated with the shaking of the girl’s shoulders.

  Still—and oh, how Aunt Sally loved her then—Ju didn’t duck away. She didn’t wipe her tears, and eventually, after a long time, she turned, of her volition, toward Aunt Sally. The full force of those green, winking eyes met Aunt Sally’s.

  I should hold her, Aunt Sally thought. I should wipe her tears. Say, “there, there.” Try to explain. Wasn’t that what mothers did?

  Instead, Aunt Sally reached across Ju’s lap and picked up the phone. Naturally, it displayed one of those purple-bannered, catch-phrase-littered music Web sites she loved. All those brightly colored, spiky-haired, furry-bearded kids waving guitars and middle fingers at a world they’d only begun to realize was way too big for them. This page was regional, apparently, called Pacific Northwest Grrrrrrl-Thing, whatever that meant. Apparently, it meant lots of stage shots of boys with beards and girls with guitars, their lips bared in snarls they would never really own. There were also lots of crammed-together words, as meaningless to Aunt Sally as pebbles from a beach she’d never been to.

  She was in the midst of yet another new feeling, this one without precedent in the entirety of her experience and without any name whatsoever, when for some reason she swiped with her finger and scrolled down the Webpage and saw the giant green headline.

  RIOT GRRRL RIOT!!

  THE NORTHWEST’S SAVAGE NEW DARLINGS TURN ON EACH OTHER.

  Then she saw the photograph, and everything—her thoughts, her blood, the boy’s blood trickling down her gullet—froze inside her. For one moment, for the first time in five years, Aunt Sally even forgot about Ju. She just stared at the picture. Taken with my iPhone 6, it proudly proclaimed. The resolution really was impressive.

  The picture showed a little ropy brunette sailing over the top of a drum kit, her sticks raised like swords, or truncheons.

  The oblivious oriental girl in the stripy dress, in the cone of stagelight, was just starting to turn. Aunt Sally could almost make out startled, dark eyes peering out from under the brim of her hat.

  How many thousand hats in the world were just like the one that girl wore? Yet Aunt Sally knew this one instantly. Would have known it anywhere. Those smudges of Delta earth right where she remembered them, straight across the sagging brim. That particular shapelessness, that droop so utterly akin to its owner’s, mirroring its owner’s posture, which had always masked insouciance as submission.

  That was the Whistler’s hat.

  10

  Shifting her aching body yet again, trying to find an almost-comfortable spot on the closed lid of the toilet, Rebecca leaned into the ice pack the shaggy bartender had given her, wedging it against the side of the stall with her face. The cold seemed to grab the new bruise where her cheek had met crash cymbal on her way over the drum kit toward Kaylene, squeezing it as though it were a tennis ball. Which, Rebecca suspected, was about right, sizewise.

  “Ow,” she said.

  “Hurts?” said Kaylene from the next stall.

  “A lot.”

  “Good.” Of their own volition, Rebecca’s lips twitched, trying to smile, until Kaylene added, “Because I don’t like being hit.”

  Because of where she has worked and what she has seen. Because she’s Kaylene, and lives to laugh, and spread laughter. And mourn.

  “I’m sorry,” Rebecca murmured again.

  Outside the bathroom, in the Caiman Club’s all but empty main room, Mr. Shaggy Bartender—Sean—had cranked the jukebox again, working through the same shuddery, sensational setlist he always played at the end of the night. Roxy Music’s “The Bogus Man.” The great Kate’s “Hounds of Love.” Some Canadian jazz singer’s version of “Trying to Get to You,” which Joel would have absolutely flipped for. The songs vibrated in the walls, rattled the whole building. Every single one of them, Rebecca realized, was about someone on his way. Someone coming. Hounds hunting.

  It occurred to her that Kaylene hadn’t apologized back. That was okay. This apology had been about Rebecca attacking her—Rebecca going batshit crazy—plain and simple. Kaylene had already said everything that needed to be said, by anyone, ever again, about that goddamn hat.

  The fucking monster’s hat.

  “Oh, shit,” said Rebecca, bolting upright and banging her elbow, now, against the toilet paper dispenser, which brought all-new pain tears to her eyes. “The hat.”

  “What?” Kaylene sighed.

  “The hat! Where’s the hat? We left it out there. It’s loose. Kaylene, we have to…”

  There was a rustling, a sliding sound, and then the hat appeared under the wall of the stall, pinned to the floor by Kaylene’s boot heel. Its straw—if that even was straw, it might have been cheap plastic, but Rebecca sure as hell wasn’t going to touch it again to make sure—had darkened, and it was splitting in several places. It should have seemed menacing, wrapped around her best friend’s foot. Instead, it looked about as threatening as a scrap of newspaper.

  “Oh,” Rebecca said. Her mouth made no move to smile again, but something inside her did. Briefly. “You could have stuffed it in the van.”

  “If I dropped my amp and at least two or three of your drums on top of it, right? Wouldn’t want it attacking the equipment.”

  “You’re mocking me.”

  “You fucking bet. Ow.” Kaylene lifted her foot and stamped down, splitting the hat still more. “God, I miss Marlene.”

  “Oh, me, too,” Rebecca whispered.

  “I want a strawberry Twinkie.”

  “From her backpack.”

  “Nice and squashed, so you can’t even get it out of the wrapper without Twinkie-ing yourself.”

  “Imprinted with her Orgo Chem notes. Like edible Silly Putty.”

  “Silly Putty is edible. God, Rebecca, who even taught you the essential food groups?”

  Sister Dierdre, maybe, from Orphanage Number Three? Mrs. Collins, Foster Mom Number Two, the one with the cauliflower ear and the bipolar son? Rebecca had liked Mrs. Collins, actually. Or felt sorry for her. At the time, she hadn’t distinguished much between the two.

  “Amanda,” she said, after too long a pause.

  “Strawberry Silly Putty…” Kaylene murmured.

  Without intending to, Rebecca had slid sideways on her toilet lid, away from the hat. She made herself edge back, recenter. She was going to stamp her own foot down right next to Kaylene’s, but she couldn’t seem to get her leg to lift. At least she found she could take her eyes off the floor. Briefly. If only to think about Mrs. Collins’s long-fingered hands, perpetually dusted in flour, and her apologetic eyes, which she flashed every time she made chocolate drop he’s-sorry cookies to make up for her son
punching Rebecca.

  Baby steps.

  “I miss Jack,” she said, and for a moment half imagined him bursting into the bathroom, waving a squirt gun or playing a pennywhistle he’d dug up somewhere. Grinning at everything.

  “Fucking Jack,” said Kaylene.

  “Which neither one of us even got to do.”

  “Hey, now! Rebecca! Is that actually you? Wow. I don’t think I’ve ever heard you…” Finally, for the first time since the fracas on stage, there it was. Kaylene’s laugh. Rebecca’s smile got all the way onto her face this time, and clung there for a little while.

  “I really do miss Amanda. Her tea, and her towels. Oh my God, her towels, Kaylene. I swear she had her own private dryer setting. Amanda-warm…”

  “I miss Mrs. Starkey’s pizza.”

  “Her pizza sucked! It had fruit. Canned fruit.”

  “What’s sucking got to do with pizza?”

  Out in the club, Shaggy Sean had Joy Division rumbling. Some ghostly, tumbling, gorgeous thing about walking in silence. In the next stall, Kaylene was no longer laughing, but possibly still smiling.

  It’s still okay, Rebecca was thinking. She wasn’t just wishing it, either. We’re still okay.

  “I miss my mom,” Kaylene murmured. She rarely said that aloud, though Rebecca knew she felt it constantly. To be thoughtful, Rebecca realized, and was amazed to be realizing this only now. Because of my mom …

  “I wish I missed mine,” Rebecca said. Mostly to make it okay for Kaylene. “I wish I remembered mine, actually.” After a while with neither of them talking, she added, “I miss Danni. That girl the Whistling Asshole snapped in half. She was awful to Trudi, but I think she was all right, really. I think she was going to be. I think she was on her way to being … amazing…”

  More silence, now, terrible and sad and comfortable enough. The silence they always shared, when they weren’t Sock Puppet, and screaming.

  “I miss Oscar,” Rebecca said.

  “Who’s Oscar?”

  Here were her tears again, massing, as usual. A few even crept out. “No one. Grounds crew at UNH-D. Just a guy I knew.”

  The next silence lasted longer. Eventually, Kaylene stirred, stood up but didn’t exit the stall. Rebecca imagined her standing there, hands flat on the wall as though searching for a secret panel. “My dad,” she whispered. “I can’t believe how much I miss my dad.”

  “You almost never mention him.”

  “I know,” said Kaylene. “My mom always pops up first. She’s the one who calls. But … his laugh, Rebecca. Someday, I need to get you in a room with him—or, no, in woods, where there’s packing snow—so you can hear what he sounds like when you bean him in the face.”

  The next question came effortlessly, bubbling out of her UNH-D Crisis Center training or maybe just her own still-twitching instincts. “What else about him?”

  The litany spilled from Kaylene’s mouth as though she’d been chanting it all along. Storing it up for years. Baseball gloves, a lavender tie that went with nothing else he owned and that her mom hated, a viola he never played but played astonishingly, a handful of stolen, predawn diner breakfasts they were supposed to pretend Mom of Warm Bao didn’t know about at the IHOP around the corner from their house, where they got cardboard American pancakes and coffee the color of cheap engine oil.

  Even after Kaylene went quiet, Rebecca suspected that her mouth was still moving, still chanting. Weirdly, Kaylene’s chant was proving at least as comforting to Rebecca as it hopefully was to her.

  Eventually, after who knew how long, Kaylene sighed. “Thanks, Rebecca. Thanks for letting me talk about him.”

  “Thanks for talking about him.”

  “I miss him. I miss them. I’m too old to miss my parents this much.”

  “I’m pretty sure they miss you that much, too.”

  “I miss you,” Kaylene whispered, and Rebecca startled, sat up straight.

  Then she stood. “I’m right here.”

  And I’ve forgotten again, she realized, her glance plummeting to her feet as she took an instinctive hop back. But the hat was gone. Retracted. As if on cue, Rebecca heard the rustling of a paper bag as Kaylene squirreled the hat away again.

  “At least, I think I am,” she murmured.

  “Well, come on out, then,” said Kaylene, and popped open her stall door.

  When Rebecca emerged, there was her friend, paper bag half stuffed in her pocket, lips swelling where Rebecca had inadvertently driven her shoulder into them in her headlong grab for the hat. Reaching out slowly, Rebecca put a finger near but not quite on Kaylene’s mouth, then brushed matted strands of hair back behind her friend’s ear.

  “I’m so sorry,” she said again.

  “You should be,” said Kaylene. And then, “Me, too.”

  They looked at each other in the mirror. “Good God. We’re going to have to explain this to Jess.”

  “Can we do that tomorrow?” Rebecca whimpered, and Kaylene actually laughed, then winced as her own fingers flew to her mouth.

  “That sounds like a plan.”

  “Except we don’t have any money.”

  “We have a little. From the club tonight.”

  Glancing up at the mirror again, Rebecca found that she didn’t even want to meet her own eyes, let alone Kaylene’s. “I’m surprised they paid us.”

  Kaylene shrugged. “Sean says if we ever play here again, we’ll probably sell out, after tonight. He said it was no skin off his face, only ours.”

  “Still. We’ll barely have enough for gas.”

  “Yet another thing I miss,” Kaylene muttered. “Having a little money.”

  It surprised Rebecca how quickly she nodded at that. “Yep. That’s getting old.”

  “My God, Bec. Are we here?”

  Rebecca knew immediately what Kaylene meant. But it felt better, just for a few seconds longer, to pretend she didn’t, even as she felt her heart thump. Her blood actually leapt down her arms and legs. “Where?”

  “At the night where we come back? Meaning, the night we don’t go back? The night we finally start life over?”

  Kaylene’s voice had broken, but whether from excitement or terror or pain or plain old exhaustion, Rebecca could no longer tell. She’d lost at least a few of her instincts, at least for tonight. But she touched her friend once more, gently, on the elbow. “I’m not. Not quite. Based on the evening’s evidence.”

  That earned her one more chiming Kaylene laugh. “Got to agree with you there. But … let’s stay in Canada tonight, okay? Even if we have to find a park and sleep in the van. I’m too tired to deal with Jess.”

  “Me, too. We better call her, though.”

  So that’s what they did, once they got out in the main room. When Rebecca told her they’d decided to stay over somewhere and would be home tomorrow, Jess sighed.

  “Be safe,” she said. Not quite like a mom. But not like she was kidding, either.

  “Everything okay there?”

  “It is now. Eddie got out again after dinner. Disappeared for almost an hour, I had to go corral him near those crazy trees on the cliff. He’s doing that almost every damn night, all of a sudden. It’s like he’s got a secret okra girlfriend.”

  Rebecca grinned. “I wouldn’t put it past him. He’s a resourceful little bugger.”

  “Dugger,” Kaylene corrected, staring out the front window of the club at the rain that seemed to hang permanently from every awning in Vancouver like translucent curtains.

  Already, the two of them were the last ones left except for Shaggy Sean and the hulking Tsimshian bouncer who always grooved, with his shoulders, to whatever music was playing, whether live or recorded, and never seemed to look anyone fully in the face. Right now, he was at the bar, dipping and bobbing to “Dancing Barefoot.”

  “This song always scares me,” Rebecca said after hanging up.

  “Hell, yeah,” said Kaylene, dropping the hat bag onto the top of the table nearest the window. “All-time
fave.”

  “The part about being taken over. Spooky.”

  “Yeah. But then she comes on. Like a heroine.” They hummed the chorus together when it came.

  When it was over, Rebecca ran her fingertips over her bruised cheek. “We need to ask where there’s a rest stop. Or a campground.”

  “We will,” said Kaylene, and sat down.

  Rebecca joined her. After a few seconds, her own shoulders started to dip and bob to the music, and Kaylene’s did the same. In the window, just hovering there, was her friend’s reflected face. And there was her own, bruised and shadowed.

  For way too long, until Shaggy Sean asked if they were really okay and then kicked them out, they just sat together, holding hands across the table, watching themselves in Canada, alone and bereft and free, floating in rain.

  11

  The night before, as usual, Sophie had followed the two of them all the way to the ferry. As usual, the one in the stripes sang as she moved, swayed more than walked, while Rebecca, the Little Orphan That Could—and had—trailed behind, hands and drumsticks in her pockets. Even now, Sophie sometimes had trouble believing that those compact, girlish hands had killed the Whistler. Or finished killing, after Sophie had done the hard part. The pouncing and skull-sucking.

  Sophie’s plan, as usual, had been to follow them to the show. As far as she knew, she’d been to every single Sock Puppet performance without ever being seen. At least not by Sock Puppet. She’d been seen plenty by the moshy, screaming, fist-pumping girls and their sweet, reedy boys. They all considered themselves so next-gen evolved, immune to their longings, at least until Sophie made eye contact with one or five. Just for fun. By this point, going to Sock Puppet shows had become practically a ritual. A way of marking time. By most measures, after all, Rebecca and her striped, long-haired bandmate constituted Sophie’s closest remaining friends on this planet.

  True, as far as she could remember, she’d never actually spoken to the stripy one. And true, Rebecca had tried to kill Sophie after she’d bashed in the Whistler’s head. Except, maybe she hadn’t. Maybe, as she’d slammed that shovel down over and over, onto and through both faces until Whistler-pulp positively floated like mist above the forest floor and shaded the scent of all that pine resin even sweeter, Rebecca had simply considered Sophie collateral damage, expendable in order to achieve the desired end. Sophie could respect that.