Her Husband's Hands and Other Stories Read online

  Were they in the car together, lighting out for parts unknown while wondering which of their two science experiments fell first?

  “You’ll even lose faith in me,” he’d said. “But you’ll know I love you, honey.”

  Unless that was just another part of the trick.

  I couldn’t cry. But there were too many hours between now and morning, and my eyes were burning.

  I don’t think I fell asleep. I think I passed out.

  I saw myself running, the summer Daddy and I spent in the Cascades. I rose before dawn, performed three hundred pushups, then donned my wrist and ankle weights and hit the woods for a twenty mile run. It was the time of day when the chill left over from the night before turned the dew into frost, and the grass into stiff needles. The air ripped at my lungs like fire and my breath trailed behind me in a necklace of little clouds. Daddy had pointed out one ravine that could be leaped as long as I used a fallen tree propped up against a living one as an acceleration ramp. It was a tricky stunt even in perfect light and an almost suicidal one in woods still marked by the failing shadows of the previous night, but I’d mastered it, always landing in a duck-and-roll that plastered dirt and leaves to my back in a mortar of warm sweat. Even a perfect landing was hard enough to knock the breath out of me, but I always got up and kept going, As a younger girl, running other courses in other environments, I’d cracked ribs and once or twice broken fingers, once even run headlong into a low-hanging branch that ripped a gash in my forehead and freed hot burning blood to seep down into my eyes. It hadn’t slowed me down. I’d been blinded but I’d returned home without slowing down. I couldn’t depend on vision when so many possible attacks depended on targeting the eyes.

  When I woke the sun had arrived, illuminating a sky that the wire above us sectioned into little diamonds. I was curled by the concrete steps, my skull pounding, my throat burning, my arms numb from lack of circulation and my jaw aching like a dead thing attached to my skull with six-inch nails. I would have expected Ethan and I to collapse in opposite corners, but instead we’d fallen only a few feet apart, in a togetherness unexpected for two people who wanted each other dead. His eyes were already open, and though it was hard to tell through all the gear on his face, he seemed to be smiling.

  His nostrils weren’t bubbling. I wondered if he was dead.

  I shifted position and prodded him with a toe.

  He blinked. The gagged smile broadened. He murmured a series of vowels that should have been indistinguishable as words, but which his sunny tone communicated perfectly.

  “Unnnh Aww Innh.”

  And good morning to you, too.

  I couldn’t make myself believe that he’d been too injured to chance attacking me as I slept. Or that he’d been too afraid. More likely he’d experienced a spell as lost and as despairing as mine, and had wanted nothing more than to spend the remaining hours of darkness close to another living being. Even if that person happened to be me. Maybe especially if that person happened to be me.

  I wasn’t ready, either physically or emotionally, to take advantage just yet. I just nodded hello, squirmed and crawled my way to a safe distance, and then got to my feet. Dizziness, thirst, and whatever damage the concussion had inflicted made me wobble, but I managed to stay upright.

  I took a deep breath and almost gagged on it. Even with half the pool still in shadow the air was still so warm it felt more like soup.

  We could stay in the narrowing shadows on the eastern side of the pool for most of the morning, moving west when they were replaced by the lengthening shadows of the late afternoon. It wouldn’t protect us from the heat, but it might save us from being burned to a crisp by the sun.

  That was funny. Us. Like we were a team or something.

  And either way, there’d be no shadows at noon.

  We were going to cook.

  The two lifeguard chairs were still unoccupied.

  They’d left. Daddy and the Bitch had patched together their differences and were now sipping champagne in their jacuzzi in some swank resort in Reno. Daddy must be saying, too bad about the kids. Yes, what a shame. They were both so respectful. Do you know, May, I once asked her to go fifteen days without food, as a survival exercise, and she just did it, without even arguing? That’s right. She sat in her room, growing paler and paler, her cheeks growing gaunt and her skin going pale, and in all that time, May, all that time, she never one said, Daddy, I can’t do this anymore, I need something, just a little soup, just a little bread, just something to stop my stomach from cramping? It was enough to make me wonder, May, just what the hell else I could ask her to do. Would she have put out her eyes? Cut off her own hand? Press the right side of her face against a hot frying pan and not move even as she felt her skin scar and sizzle from the heat? We should be proud of ourselves, May. The way we raised them, and all.

  Daddy wouldn’t talk that way. The Bitch would, but Daddy wouldn’t.

  Daddy was better than that.

  Daddy loved me.

  The world grayed. I shook the spots away and stumbled forward, walking the perimeter. I noted the drying blood stains on the floor and on the walls, I found a crack emitting a battalion of ants and, at the moment I entered the Deep End, a dead rattlesnake, its head and midsection crushed almost flat. It puzzled me for a while until I figured out the story. The concrete of the patio above, with its talent for sucking up heat during the day and radiating it slowly at night, rendered it a natural beacon for snakes. They must have loved the place, and with the empty pool considerably warmer, it must have been just as natural for them to crawl in, from time to time, their idiot reptilian brains too shortsighted to realize that once they made the drop they would not be up to the task of finding a way out. Ethan and the Bitch must have had their hands full, clearing the place of pissed-off rattlers without getting bitten themselves. And of course, they hadn’t bothered to warn us of the danger: not when a fortuitously-stranded snake could spell defeat for a girl who hadn’t been told.

  This one must have taken Ethan by surprise.

  Had it bitten him?

  I couldn’t be that lucky.

  I looked over my shoulder and confirmed that he was still curled by the Shallow End steps. The sweat and the grease had plastered the sand to his body, giving him a white, powdery appearance. But he didn’t seem sick. He’d rolled over and was watching me with a calm, unbothered curiosity.

  My eyes burned.

  I went deeper, not knowing what I was looking for. The deep end was just a filthy oval, covered with dust and bird shit and brilliant in the morning glare. When I reached its lowest point I caught a whiff of something foul, and followed the odor to the drain hole, where I found pretty much what I should have expected to find. Removing the grate had been doing Ethan a favor. It had given him a place to do his daily business without having to worry about stepping in it. Looking closer, wrinkling my nose as I was hit by the awful rising stink, I further noted that he’d suffered diarrhea. This was disgusting, but good news for me, as the single greatest factor in living through this was probably surviving dehydration, and he’d have no chance to replenish what he’d lost.

  As if on cue, my own stomach gurgled.

  Christ.

  The heat and the conditions were doing the same thing to me that they were doing to him.

  I considered making use of the drain, decided not, and went back to the Shallow End.

  The sun was higher in the sky now. The shadows cast by the pool’s eastern curve now covered less than a third of the pool bottom. I made the mistake of glancing at the sun and recoiled, my vision a purple blob. That sun wasn’t golden. It was white. It was pure, malevolent heat, pounding down on us like a thousand hammers. How high was the temperature going to rise today, before the shadows came back? A hundred ten? More?

  Ethan had settled in under the shadows, his bound arms against the convex wall, his knees curled up against his chest. He looked at me, then at the empty space beside him, and then at me again
. He repeated himself, and when I failed to get it, repeated himself a third time.

  I got it.

  It was stupid to fight now. Not with shelter a more immediate need.

  Might as well wait out the day, survive if we could, and make another go at each other tonight. We’d both be weaker then, but that only meant that we’d both be that much closer to finishing this.

  If there was a finish. If Daddy and the Bitch came back.

  I selected a spot two body-lengths from Ethan, put my back to the wall, and lowered myself into a bent-kneed squat. It was as relaxed a position as I was willing to attempt, around him, one that would allow me to jump away in a heartbeat if he went for me.

  I didn’t think he would.

  If we couldn’t outlive the day, what was the point?

  The hours crawled. The sun rose in the cloudless sky. The air grew hot, then sweltering, then brutal, then hellish. Our refuge of shadow narrowed, the razor-thin line between mere unbearable heat and deadly sunlight drawing closer to our curled legs. The sweat pouring down my face collected against my lips, investing the rubber bit with a foul, salty taste. My tongue swelled. I tried not to look at the opposite wall, already so bright from reflected glare that my eyes compensated by conjuring gray spots at the edges.

  The shadow wasn’t protecting us enough.

  Sunburns don’t only happen to those who expose themselves to direct sunlight. Sometimes it’s possible to hide in the shade, all day long, and still suffer painful burns. It all depends on the reflectivity of the surrounding surfaces.

  Ethan and I were in a big white bowl, facing one of its big white walls. Spared the worst of the sunlight, we were still absorbing enough reflected radiation to cook us more slowly. Ethan, who was darker than me and had the base tan one would expect from a boy who had spent years training under this sun, would tolerate it better than I would, with my much fairer skin. But we were both burning. By the time the zone of shadow came within a finger’s-length of his knees, his face had turned lobster-red, and sprouted the first of what would soon be many sun-blisters on his forehead.

  He didn’t move, though. He didn’t shift position, to protect the parts already burned with the parts that had spent these hours protected by canvas and shadow. He didn’t even lower his head. He just faced forward, his eyes closed, his expression serene and confident even as his lips cracked and the sweat pooled in the furrows between his muscles began to shine like tiny sun lamps. Not once did he let me see that it was bothering him.

  By then I already knew that I was losing.

  My skin was on fire. My tongue was a dry, swollen worm scraping the roof of my mouth like sandpaper. Something had gripped my bowels and twisted, turning everything inside me to acid. I’d fouled myself and not even realized it. When I moved, I could feel the stored heat rising from me in waves.

  I felt snakes crawling over me. They were burning snakes, with razors instead of scales, and when they slithered over my breasts they left gaping wounds behind. They went away and were replaced by flies, each as hot as embers snatched from a fire, each with little buzzsaw wings that, twitching, shredded whatever remained. Then came the worms and the maggots. I threw up, choked on it, managed to get it down again, decided that the long day had to be over after all these hours of hell and looked down to see that the cutting edge of that line of direct sunlight hadn’t moved any closer to me in the year or so I’d been hallucinating.

  I cried. I don’t know how many tears came out, but I cried. I didn’t care if Ethan heard me. He knew how much this was hurting.

  I couldn’t fool him about that.

  Even if I’d lied to him about Daddy.

  “You have to be a rock,” Daddy said. He had come to me early in the morning of my twelfth birthday, his eyes dark and his thing dangling from his thatch like a blind, rooted worm. “You have to take whatever happens to you. A broken nose is nothing. A broken leg is nothing. A broken rib is nothing. A lost eye is nothing. Days without sleep or rest, more pain than you can imagine, it’s all nothing. He will hurt you any way he can, everywhere that you’re soft enough to be hurt. He can even try to rape you, if he wants—after all, he’s a boy, and that’s always been one of the best ways for boys to hurt girls. It’ll be even worse for you if it happens, because you’ll know all along that it’s your own brother doing it. Of course, if you’re strong enough, he won’t be able to. You can make it more work than it’s worth. You might even make it the last dirty thing he ever tries. But even if he does manage to pin you down, and hurt you in that special way, you’ll have a chance as long as you know that you can get past it. And the only way to know that is to know that you’ve been past it before.”

  He’d only done it that one time.

  And I knew almost immediately that it hurt him as much as much as it hurt me, because when I tiptoed to his room the next morning, clutching the carving knife I’d plucked from its rack in our kitchen, thinking only of not letting him do that to me again, planning to separate him from the thing he’d jammed up inside me, I’d found him sitting on the edge of his bed, his head in his hands, his shoulders wracked by convulsive sobs. He hadn’t seen me as I’d padded up behind him, not so fired by certainty now, my right arm trembling as the knife grip grew heavier and heavier and the sobs coming from the broken figure before me resolved into self-recriminations about what kind of monster he was. And I’d thought about burying that knife between his shoulder blades and watching his life blood seep into the sheets as he fell over dying but not dying so fast that he couldn’t turn his head and gaze at me and see that I was the one who had done this to him, his stunned expression betraying a hurt a thousand times worse than the pain of the wound or the violation I’d suffered for a few short minutes in the middle of the night. He really did love me. He was my Daddy. And so I dropped the knife and threw my arms around his shoulders and wept, “I’m sorry, Daddy, I’m sorry, I didn’t know,” and he grabbed me back and buried his head in my shoulders and cried, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I had to, I didn’t want to but I had to, you had to experience it once,” and I said, “I know, I know, I know,” and then it was all about him feeling bad and me trying to make him feel better, because I loved him, as he loved me, which meant that I would have to let him do it to me again if he thought it would help. He just wanted to make me strong, that’s all.

  I was a rock. Nothing could hurt me.

  I looked down through the haze and thought I saw little plumes of steam rising from skin that now seemed scarlet enough to have been dipped in blood. I recoiled, gasped as the burns I already had chafed against the concrete and the sodden canvas of my arm restraints, and shifted position to pull my knees a few inches further away. It wasn’t much of a reprieve, I knew. It would give me, at most, a few extra minutes of relative protection.

  The line advanced, and touched skin again.

  I hadn’t seen Ethan move, but he was lying down now, pressed against the curve of the wall with the paler skin of his back, partially obscured by the canvas restraints binding his arms, presented to the sun that would soon be attacking both of us with all its considerable force. The skin on the top of his head was also fire-engine red, and popping with blisters. He was so still that he could have been dead. But I could tell from the corded tension in his shoulders that he was still alert, still strong, still aware of the toll this was taking on me. I should have been mad at him for not grunting or something, just to make sure I followed his example, but I couldn’t blame him. He was my brother.

  I lay down and rolled against the wall, pressing my face against the gentle curve that marked the junction between pool wall and pool floor. The seam, seen up close, turned out to be littered with the curled, blackened forms of ants, similar to the living ones I’d seen before, these baked to a crisp by previous mornings or afternoons. Their thoraxes pressed against their abdomens in pretend fetus positions, their little legs outhrust as if in protest. If they all came from the same colony, which was likely, then they all had the s
ame mother, and they’d all died here, as we were dying here, as the siblings they were.

  Ethan and I had more in common with them than with anybody else on the planet.

  My throat thickened.

  When the line of fire touched my skin again, there was no longer any safe place to retreat.

  I don’t know how long I was unconscious, but as I came to there was a dead weight, several times my size, pressing down on me.

  I didn’t care. If I was buried alive at least I’d soon be dead. If I was being attacked at least I’d soon be dead. If I was being raped at least I’d soon be dead. I was beyond feeling or wanting anything at all.

  After a long time I registered the slippery feel of bare flesh, slick with sweat. It took me a while to identify it, because my nerve endings were all on fire, but eventually I registered as a naked human being, taller and broader than myself, covering me, shielding my head, my torso, my bound arms, and most of my legs, from the direct rays of the sun. I was still burning alive, and still dying of thirst, but the sun itself was no longer touching me, not even in reflection.

  The weight made me protest. “Unnnh!”

  The heavy body bore down, pinning me, but not making any further move as long as I refrained from struggling.

  I passed out again.

  My mind wasn’t working very well, because it wasn’t until much later that I realized it was Ethan protecting me.

  It didn’t make any sense to me. He had tried to kill me last night. If we survived the day he would no doubt try to kill me again. The sooner I fell, the better off he was—at least, as long as Daddy and the Bitch intended on ever coming back for us, which was far from certain.

  Had I been able to talk, I would have asked him just what the hell he thought he was doing. Had he been able to talk, he might have told me.

  I might have thanked him. I might have called him stupid.

  But we weren’t able to talk. And I was in so much pain by then that I might not have made any sense anyway.

  The sun climbed as high as the sun ever goes, and began to climb back down.