Her Husband's Hands and Other Stories Read online

  As soon as there were shadows worth inhabiting he stood and nudged me with his toe until I managed to rise. We swayed together, in an inferno, the air rising in waves between us. He was seared black, his face an unhappy landscape of dried blood, blisters, and peeling skin. He had puffy half-moons under both eyes, and a dry scab sealing one nostril: the reason I hadn’t heard any snorking for a while, and the chief reason why, with his mouth gagged the way it was, his ability to breathe at all qualified as a miracle. I didn’t like what his expression had to say about the way I looked, but at least he didn’t try to keep me from seeing it.

  I didn’t have to see what I looked like, though. I could already tell. I could see the baked red of my breasts and the big fat sun blister forming on the tip of my nose. I’d been sick and I’d been feverish and at some point in the last hour or so my bowels had erupted with more liquid waste that hadn’t had anywhere to go but except down my legs. All of it was peppered with grit and sand and packed together with congealing grease. I don’t know how much body weight I’d lost from sweat, stress, and illness, just over the past few hours, but if it didn’t show on my frame it must have shown in my face, and in my eyes, the same way it showed in his. We were both the walking dead, and we both looked it.

  And it was as the walking dead that we shuffled together, across an infinite wasteland of burning concrete, the few short steps to the narrow strip of blessed shade that had begun to swell against the opposite wall of the pool.

  We put our backs to that wall and slid downward, this time sitting side by side, secure in a truce that would last until the sun was no longer a common threat.

  I forgot who said it. Maybe Daddy did. But whoever put the words together knew what he was talking about, when he said that sometimes Paradise can be nothing more than a Hell not quite as bad as a Hell you’ve already known.

  It must have still been well over a hundred degrees in the shade, but I could already feel the temperature start to drop, and that made it Paradise.

  At least until our insides felt the change, and the chills began to wrack us.

  I asked him, all of once, why we couldn’t just hide from her.

  I must have been six at the time. I couldn’t have been much older. I know that I’d been hearing the horror stories of my mother for as long as I could remember, and that it hadn’t been all that long since I’d been able to place her in a category removed from Rumpelstiltskin and the Wicked Witch and the Evil Stepmother and the other imaginary monsters of the fairy tales that I’d somehow managed to pick up without my father’s notice.

  I’d had bad dreams since the night I realized the Bitch was real.

  So I asked him. Did I really have to visit her someday? Couldn’t we just go somewhere far, far away? Wouldn’t she just get tired of looking for us, and go away?

  He’d gotten very serious and very sad.

  “Just how many years do you think you’d have to hide?”

  I felt them burning me before I had any idea what they were.

  I’d spent the last few hours with my back against the pool wall, my legs curled against my chest in what would have been a fetal position had my arms been free to link fingers around my knees. My internal thermostat had been veering from one extreme to the other for some time now, alternating the wonderful sensations of being burned alive with those of everything inside me being turned to ice. I’d popped sweat after sweat, feeling steam rise from my skin as the rivulets of perspiration poured down my sides in waves; and then, reacting, I’d shivered with a fever that turned the world around me arctic. For hours on end my teeth would have chattered if they could have touched at all. My throat continued to ache for water, and the shadows, lurching toward the opposite wall to reclaim our battlefield for night, gained ground in a herky-jerky rhythm that served to emphasize just how much of the day I was spending too far gone to notice the passage of time.

  Sometime after the shadows advanced to within a foot of the opposite wall, I was attacked by balls of fire.

  There were dozens of them, each as hot as molten iron, each as solid as ball bearings, each impacting against my skin at the same instant: most striking my face and legs, but some hitting the top of my head and others burrowing down my back to burn my spine like acidic flame. The agony was so profound that I convulsed, shrieking through my gag, hurling myself against the pool floor with a desperation to escape that superseded any worries over how much the impact was going to hurt. I smashed my head again and didn’t care. I heard Ethan roaring in equal pain, somewhere to my immediate left, his deeper cries as inarticulate and just as uncomprehending as mine.

  More acid fell. It didn’t stop falling. I felt my skin shriveling, turning black, peeling away from the bone, becoming flakes of ash which blew away like little embers.

  Then a little made its way past my lips, somehow making its way past the gag and past my still-clamped teeth, and I found myself sucking at it with something like awe.

  It was water.

  It didn’t feel like water, not against my skin, but against my tongue and dribbling down my throat it was just warm, refreshing water, tinny to the taste but better than wine.

  A dribble went down the wrong pipe and I started to gag. I raged at myself for choking on this wonderful gift I had begun to think I’d never know again, forced the coughs to silence after only a minute or two of nonstop hacking, and stood, raising my face to the wonderful shower. Drops seemed to sizzle as they struck my ravaged cheeks and forehead. They still felt like acid against my burned flesh, but I didn’t care. Thirst trumped Pain. I could feel my strength coming back with every drop I sucked down.

  Somewhere above me, Daddy said, “Don’t swallow too much, little girl. You’ll get sick. Just turn around and I’ll clean you off!”

  I couldn’t see him, as the water had washed the salt caked on my forehead into my eyes, but I staggered about in a circle, as he’d commanded. All at once the flow concentrated, no longer a diffuse spray but a tight, burning stream, battering my buttocks and my inner thighs to force away all of the day’s collected filth. The agony of the moment was enough to make my guts clench. I staggered a step or two away, driven by the instinctive urge to escape the source of the suffering, but Daddy kept the stream focused and on target until every bit of the foulness was gone.

  Then he turned off the water, leaving me wracked and trembling. There was vapor rising from the concrete.

  “There,” Daddy said.

  I could still hear water patter against concrete. Looking up, I saw Ethan, still being hosed off. The current stream targeted his face, in order to wash away all the dried blood. The force of it rippled his cheeks, maybe making it easier for him to drink some. As he turned, the pool dust, washing off his muscled skin in waves, revealed shoulders turned so scarlet from the sun that he might as well have been dipped in blood. The top of his head, and the arc of his shoulders, had become a mass of popped blisters. His nose had swollen to almost twice its original size, and had a distinct blue tinge that worried me.

  I don’t know why it worried me. I should have wanted him to die.

  Daddy said, “Come over to the steps. I want to take a look at you.”

  I pulled my eyes away from Ethan and staggered back to the shallow end, forgetting to duck as the chain-link grew low enough to scrape the top of my head. The contact with it felt like being branded. I groaned, went to my knees, and scrambled as best I could to the Shallow End steps.

  Daddy was kneeling just above the wire. He wore a red-and-yellow Hawaiian shirt, mirrored sunglasses, khakis, and a big straw hat. He looked tanned and rested and proud. When he saw me close up his mouth made a little O of sympathy. “Looks like you had a rough day, honey. I’m sorry to see it.”

  I tried to speak through my gag. “Wheeehhh wuhh oo?”

  He understood me. “This dump has no running water and no well. The Bitch has to drive to town every couple of days, to fill up gallon jugs, and she was already almost out.”

  “Unnh! Wheeh
hhh wuhhh OO?”

  “Calm down, kiddo. You have every right to be a little annoyed. But it’s about a ninety minute drive, each way, and she wasn’t about to go all by herself when she was afraid I’d take advantage of her absence to help you out when her back was turned. We had to be fair about this. So I had to go along to help. And then while we were there we decided to surprise you by renting a tanker and hose, and the place made us wait almost four hours before one was available.” His mouth went grim. “Try to spend four hours with the Bitch trying to be civil in public. Just try. We even had to make nice over lunch in some diner with a one-eyed waitress. That was an ordeal you should be happy you missed.”

  Something hiccupped in the back of my throat. My vision blurred. I didn’t know whether I was going to throw up or scream until the sound came out and it turned out to be laughter. It was the one-eyed waitress that did it, I think. I couldn’t help picturing a fat woman in pirate gear, complete with patch, parrot, and peg-leg, slinging hash while Daddy and the Bitch exchanged small talk over the menu. I even wondered if they’d tipped well. Probably. I didn’t know my Mom’s custom in that regard, but Daddy knew how to charm the ladies. He just didn’t know how to pick a good one.

  Daddy perked up. “Anyhow, we’re both back for the duration now, and now that we’re here it looks like you’ve given as good as you got. You have a bit of an owie on the back of your head, but it looks worse than it is, and he’s got to be suffering from that mess you made of his face. Plus his burn seems to be shaping up even worse than yours. Pick your moment tonight, or at the very worst sometime late tomorrow, and I’m sure you’ll have no trouble putting him down for good.”

  His eyes softened, turning moist in the way they only did in training, whenever I’d broken some new boundary with sweat and blood and back-breaking effort. He pressed his hand against the chain-link, and extended his fingers through the diagonal windows between the wires; I raised my head to feel the touch of his hand and almost moaned at the way even that soft contact tortured the taut skin of my scalp. He couldn’t tell that I wasn’t craving his love. I was just hoping that if I was nice enough he’d remove my gag and give me a nice, cold cup of water. The few drops I’d sucked down hadn’t come close to satisfying me, and the mere thought of enduring any more time without another taste was almost more than I could stand.

  I argued my case through the gag, but my voice trailed off in a mouthful of dust.

  “I’m so proud of you,” he whispered, turning away all at once so I wouldn’t see him cry.

  The real suffering didn’t manifest until after the air cooled. But as the sky turned purple and then black, every part of me caught on fire, raging at the slightest physical contact. I could avoid most of the pain by simply not moving, but the straps that held the canvas bindings around my arms and the bit gag firmly planted in my mouth both felt like razors heated over an open flame. I couldn’t focus past it. It was like a landscape larger than myself, so vast in every direction that I couldn’t even see its furthest horizons. It only ceased to overwhelm when I moved an arm or leg and in that way distracted myself with some other pain just as large, just as unbearable. Daddy and the Bitch, who had returned to watching the show from their respective lifeguard chairs, must have been bored beyond reason for much of the early evening, as both Ethan and I spent those hours at opposite ends of the pool, unconscious more often than we were awake, trembling with chills even as we panted from the heat.

  We must have resisted the inevitable for hours.

  I don’t know what time it was when I crawled from the Shallow End steps, found the strength to get to my feet again and stagger, in a precarious lurch with only distant relation to the upright, to the invisible line separating the Shallow and Deep Ends.

  Daddy called down from above. “Thattagirl. Show him what you’re made of.”

  The Bitch summoned her own champion. “Don’t give up, Ethan! I’m proud of you!”

  After a long, snuffling pause, my brother shuffled out of the darkness.

  The darkness spared me actual eye contact, or even a clear look at his face. All I saw was a vague, threatening presence, still larger than myself, still more formidable than myself. All I heard was ragged breath and a weak, liquid bubbling that may have been heralded the return of the blockage in his nostrils. The stench was the worst, all sour sweat and festering waste, the perfume of a creature all but dead who had yet to lie down.

  “Come on, honey!” the Bitch cried. “You can do it!”

  Ethan shuffled forward another step, and then stopped, swaying.

  I couldn’t see his eyes.

  But the last day and a half had been a silent conversation between us, punctuated by moments of equally incomprehensible brutality and mercy. I didn’t need to see his eyes to know something I hadn’t really appreciated before.

  He hadn’t ever really wanted to do this.

  He’d offered me a way out, at the start, but I’d imagined it the kind of formality one warrior exchanges with another, in the last few minutes before any duel to the death. I’d believed him when he’d said that he had no other reasons for being born. But now that I’d spent twenty-four hours with him, in the shared hell we’d been training for all our lives, I found I knew differently. He’d meant what he said. He’d taken his last opportunity for escape, and I’d thrown it back in his face.

  Had I accepted his offer of a quiet afternoon together, on our last day before our descent into the pit, he wouldn’t have stopped the jeep at those rock formations twenty miles away. He would have kept going, picking up a main road and staying on it until long after we’d left the State and the swimming pool behind. Daddy and the Bitch would have set up the chain-link barriers together, waited in vain for our return, and then come to the shared conclusion that we weren’t coming back. They might have been upset and they might have been disappointed and they might have been relieved that the contract between them had finally been broken by somebody other than themselves. They might have flayed each other with recriminations, each blaming the other for raising a child disloyal enough to break free. They might have parted as bitter enemies who no longer possessed the weapons they had honed to hurt each other. Or they might have descended into the pool themselves, with or without the hobbles they’d chosen for us, to finally face each other without proxies, on a battlefield that would have put a period to everything that had turned the air toxic between them. Whatever happened to them, I realized, would not have mattered. Not with Ethan and I already miles away, and adding more distance between our lives and theirs with every moment we breathed free.

  He had tried to shock me awake, asking questions he’d already known the answers to.

  I just hadn’t been ready to hear him.

  We shuffled the last few steps toward each other. I rested my forehead against his shoulder and murmured something useless. He made a noise no more articulate.

  “What the hell is this?” the Bitch demanded.

  “Come on, kids!” Daddy urged. “Mix it up already!”

  We were both sorry.

  But we both knew this couldn’t end until it ended the only way it was allowed to.

  I reared back and slammed my forehead into Ethan’s broken nose, feeling it collapse again under the impact, hearing the crunch of cartilage and the gasp of pain.

  “Good one!” Daddy yelled.

  Ethan staggered back a step, but recovered quickly, advancing with a speed I could not have expected, to drive his knee into my gut. It hurt even more than most belly-shots because my gag cut off most of my air’s natural escape route, making my cheeks balloon from a mouthful of exhaled breath unable to leave as fast as its force demanded. I doubled over, spun, and fell over on my side, hitting the pool bottom with a thud that rattled my entire spine. My spine exploded again as he spun and slammed his right heel against my lower ribs. I felt something crack, as my eyes tried to well with tears but couldn’t come up with the moisture they needed to cry.

  The Bitch yell
ed, “Finish her!”

  Daddy screamed. “Get up, get up, get up!”

  I arched my back, whipped my legs up and around, and delivered a pile-driver kick to Ethan’s crotch. I would have recognized the impact as solid even if the pain of impact hadn’t rebounded all the way to my waist. I would have heard it in his liquid gurgle and in the blind thud of his next clumsy steps.

  From the way he staggered, those stunted balls of his were just as sensitive to pain as the normal kind. It’d only take him another second or two to shrug it off, and come after me again, but I had no intention of giving him that much time.

  I pinwheeled my legs, flipped to my feet, lowered my head, and charged him, striking his midsection with my right shoulder. He was already off balance and struggling to remain upright. The tackle drove him off his feet, his legs flailing against the pool bottom, his arms straining at their canvas binding as his body obeyed the urge to regain balance.

  We both screamed through our respective gags: Ethan because he knew what was happening and myself because a tidal wave of white agony had flared down my back at the moment of impact. Daddy and the Bitch were screaming too, but at the moment I no longer gave a shit about them. I no longer gave a shit about anything.

  The only thing that mattered, in this last second before the ground gave way, was driving Ethan back, further into the Deep End.

  Then his left foot sought solid ground where there was none.

  He didn’t fall backward right away, which might have been better for him. He had just enough balance left to compensate as the pool bottom disappeared beneath him. His left leg sank into the drain hole, and his right slipped out from under him.

  He took the bulk of the initial impact just under his left knee.

  Even as I heard the wet splat of the first blood freed by the break, he was still off-balance, still falling backward.

  I spun away and lost track of up and down as my feet pounded concrete trying to use up the momentum that remained. I tipped over and started to fall.