Her Husband's Hands and Other Stories Read online

  Ethan took the brunt of the impact on his bound arms. Something, maybe an elbow or one of the bones in his hands, made a sound like cracking ice. There was another crack, louder and more final, as his neck whipped back and slammed his head against the concrete.

  I slowed and regained control just a hair too slowly to avoid a painful face-first encounter with the wall. I felt the cartilage in my nose release.

  Behind me, Ethan wailed through his gag, making sounds that could have been words and could have been inarticulate cries of pain. They sounded the same. When he tried to pull his leg out of the drain, something razored ground against something obstinate, and he wailed again, in a voice suddenly gone as high as a baby’s.

  Still dizzied from my collision with the wall, and freshly sickened by the taste of blood, I lurched away, tripped over an invisible Ethan, came far too close to another potentially deadly pratfall, then regained my balance and approached Ethan again, triangulating his position from his moans of pain. When I was sure I knew where his head was, I spun like a top and drove my heel into the side of his face. I felt his jaw leave its track. His cry went wet and bubbling, with a nasty undercurrent of fresh rage, all the shared understanding between us forgotten as I became nothing more than an enemy, beating him to death in the dark.

  I couldn’t see his eyes but I knew they had to be reproaching me.

  We owed each other more than this. This may have been the only currency we’d been empowered to pay, but it wouldn’t settle any of the debts that really mattered. Those would stay on the books forever.

  The Bitch yelled, “Ethan! Oh, please, honey! Get up!”

  Another voice, all but drowning her out, swelled with pride: “Show him who’s boss, Jen!”

  The blood bubbled in Ethan’s throat. His mouth must have been full of it, but there was no place for it to go but down, filling his windpipe and cutting him off from what he needed to live. He would have been fine without the gag, but with it, he was just a man in a noose, struggling for breath a mere layer of skin from all the air he could ever need or want. He was still strong enough. If I left him alone with his will to live he might even manage to keep snatching breath for hours.

  I circled him again, exhausted, unwilling to take the logical next step.

  The Bitch cried, “Ethan! Baby!”

  Daddy yelled, “Jenny!”

  I needed a drink of water so very much.

  “Ethan! Get up! Do something!”

  “Jenny! Finish him! Now!”

  Their voices ran over one another, melding, becoming a single shrill command in a voice that sank knives into the base of my spine.

  Had I been able to say anything intelligible, I might have apologized to my brother.

  Instead, I prodded him with my toe, determining his position, figuring out the most efficient way of doing what needed to be done. He lay on his back, his spine arched because of the bound arms that prevented him from lying entirely flat. His head hung backward, his spasming throat as exposed to me as that of a defeated dog offering itself to the mercies of its pack leader. When he felt the weight of my knee, resting without any particular pressure on his neck, before I made the commitment to bear down, he whipped his head to the right in a final, instinctive attempt to shake me off. I shushed him with a sound my gag transformed into a reptilian hiss, tried to send him the silent message to the effect that what I did now was being done with all possible respect, and bore down, wishing that the knee was his and the crushed windpipe mine.

  The next few days passed in a delirium of shifting light, moist compresses dripping cold water into my eyes, fevers so brutal that I came out of them astonished at being alive, the agony of every glancing touch, and the uncertain comfort of female hands spreading ointment on my face, shoulders, breasts, belly, and legs.

  It must have been two or three wakings before I grew used to the realization that I was in a bed with sheets, and maybe another couple after that before I registered that my arms, while restrained, were no longer drawn behind my back and were instead chained by the wrists to the bed frame.

  Sometimes I heard canned laughter from a nearby low-volume television, other times I heard whispers saturated in venom. Sometimes I vomited. Sometimes, out of sheer malice, I soiled the bed and exulted in silent triumph when the soft, caring hands had to deal with my filth. Sometimes I dreamed I was still in the Deep End with Ethan. Some of the dreams bordered on the erotic, allowing me to have my way with him in every possible position despite a disapproving inner voice that insisted on reminding me that this would now be necrophilia as well as incest. Sometimes, when I told myself that, the dreams compensated by giving him Daddy’s face instead, but I hated when that happened. I’d been there, and much preferred nonsensical fantasies about Ethan, even when those fantasies faded into detailed replays of the battle’s final moments.

  Sometimes, I returned to rationality long enough to understand that both my Mommy and Daddy were with me, whispering that I’d been a good girl, and that they loved me. I cried when Mommy kissed my forehead and told me I was beautiful. I cried harder when my Daddy told me about Ethan’s burial in the desert, and of the words they’d written on notebook paper and interred with him, as of course there could not be a stone. The paper read, Beloved Son, Beloved Brother. Had I been consulted, I might have added, Warrior.

  When, after a couple of days, I came back to myself long enough to realize that the restraints had been removed, I sat up, reeled from the worst dizzy spell I’d ever known, and somehow managed to focus. The tiny bedroom had faux-wood paneling, aluminum trim, shelving bolted to the faux-wood panel of the walls, and a miniature pop-down vanity complete with a perimeter of tiny light bulbs. The space between the single bed I occupied and that vanity was a narrow strip of floor just large enough to stand in. There were no photos, no personal items anywhere in sight. There was a gallon jug of water. Daylight, though sealed off by the aluminum blinds covering the only window, rested on the opposite wall in a single glowing sliver. The air was warm, but cooler than it had a right to be.

  I looked down at the bed and saw a sheet liberally peppered with flakes of skin.

  I swung my legs over the edge of the mattress, winced at flesh that insisted on complaining from every move, and hauled myself from the bed to the chair adjoining the vanity.

  The mirror depicted a patchwork girl. Some patches of skin were still lobster-red, or tanned to near-blackness, but the worst of the burns had peeled, revealing irregular patches of pale new skin behind the dried flaps and healing blisters. Two even paler bands, reflecting the places where the leather straps of my gag had protected my skin from the sun, extended from the chapped corners of my lips, across my cheeks, and around as far back as I could see. My jaw was a mass of faded gray bruises. My eyes were red and underlined with a pair of gray half-moons. My cheeks seemed gaunt. My hair had started to grow back, though it hadn’t established itself as more than a transparent blonde down, establishing the places where a full head of hair would appear once time and biology had done its work. Right now some of the bristles impaled loose flakes of skin, displaying them like butterflies on pins.

  It could have been worse.

  I drank some water from the jug. Slept. Then drank some more. Then slept.

  After a while, I drifted back to consciousness and heard a woman laughing, somewhere right outside.

  A few seconds of searching and I found the clothes they’d left for me, neatly folded on the dresser, with a note to the effect that I could come outside if I felt up to the walk. In addition to one of my bras and one of my pairs of panties, there was also an oversized white t-shirt that must have belonged to Ethan, an oversized Hawaiian shirt I also identified as his to wear over it, an ankle-length skirt with belt to cinch them tight, the sun bonnet my father had bought for me, and a pair of flip-flop sandals. The gestalt may have been random as fashion but it was all loose, all selected for maximum sun protection while offering the greatest degree of comfort for skin still so se
nsitive that it hated glancing contact with cotton sheets. This struck me as uncommonly thoughtful. I eschewed the bra out of reluctance to feel those shoulder straps but otherwise accepted the rest of the suggested outfit, dressing gingerly and some four times slower than I was used to.

  The screen door slammed as I bopped down the steps of the mobile home. It was still hot outside, but not sweltering: maybe somewhere in the upper eighties, not all that much warmer than that. My parents, who were about twenty feet away occupying a pair of chaise lounges under a huge beach umbrella angled to catch the morning sun, both looked tanned and happy to see me. Both wore oversized amber sunglasses and big floppy straw hats. The Bitch was reading something by Carole Nelson Douglas, Daddy something by John Grisham. Both seemed delighted to see me. They waved.

  “There’s the sleepyhead,” said Daddy.

  “She looks better already,” said the Bitch. To me, she added: “Better hurry up and get under the umbrella. You don’t want to overdo.”

  There was a mesh folding chair just inside the umbrella’s oval shadow.

  I winced as I sat down, winced again as I edged the chair a few inches closer to my parents.

  “You want something to eat?” inquired the Bitch. “I can fix something. You’ve been off solids for a bit, but you look like you’re ready to keep something down.”

  My stomach bubbled dangerously. “Maybe later.”

  “Don’t wait too long,” she advised.

  “I won’t.”

  “You have to keep up your strength.”

  “Why?” I asked. “The fight’s over.”

  “Just to take care of yourself,” the Bitch said. “We care about these things, even if you don’t.”

  Daddy winked at me, retrieved his own mimosa from the gutter between their lounges, and sucked a single dainty sip through a bent straw before returning the glass to its resting place. “You listen to your Mom,” he advised. “She knows what’s best.”

  I swallowed, wincing at the sudden surge of pain from a throat still too dry and raw. “Does she?”

  The Bitch looked away, her right hand covering the fresh scowl twisting her lips. Daddy sighed, sat up, and removed his sunglasses so I could see his eyes, which were very pale and very blue and so very much like Ethan’s that everything since my birth took hold of my heart and twisted hard. “Now, pumpkin,” he said. “I thought you knew better than that. Your mother and I did need to settle our differences. We couldn’t do it by ourselves. We know that because we tried, again and again, and the more we argued the more we kept going over the same patches of ground. We couldn’t move on without settling who was right and who was wrong. It’s too bad about Ethan, of course, but now that everything’s resolved, there’s no reason for any more pointless animosity. We can get along. We can even be a family again, if you’d like. We could move your Mom out of this place and get a nice house somewhere with trees and a lake. We could even get a dog. You like golden retrievers, don’t you? I thought so. Just like I always promised you, I’ll get you anything you want. We’ll make it work.”

  The impossible fantasy loomed before me, beautiful and horrifying and irresistible and repugnant all at the same time, drawing me in with a gravity greater than my own capacity to resist it. I’d missed so many things, but I still had a couple of years left before I turned eighteen. Maybe it wasn’t too late for me, to have the things other kids had.

  I couldn’t help it. I wanted to cry. Daddy had been rough on me during my training, but if he’d been less demanding I might not have survived. And Mommy might not be such a Bitch anymore, now that Daddy and I had established the order of things. I could love them and they could love me. It could happen. Stranger things had.

  Thirsting for more than just water, I licked my lips and felt the sting as they cracked. “What if you two have another fight?”

  Daddy winced as if stung. “We’ve taken that into account.”

  Mommy retrieved her mimosa and treated herself to another dainty sip, before returning the glass to the paving-stone by her side. “I went through the change already,” she said, with what seemed infinite regret at the lost opportunities of her youth. “But you can still bear children. And twins run in the family.”

  I didn’t know I’d risen from my chair with enough force to tip it backward, until Daddy said, “What?”

  Then I moved.

  Seven hours later, with the afternoon dying, the desert far behind me, and the approach of night turning the sky a shade of indigo, I pulled the rental up to a diner marked by a twenty-foot neon cowboy whose right arm wobbled to and fro in perpetual friendly wave. I would have preferred to drive still further, putting even more distance between myself and the struggle now taking place in the swimming pool, but the hunger I’d denied all day long had just settled in for good. I had to feed it or risk going off the road.

  The waitress must have gotten her hair and her lipstick out of the same bottle. “I’m sorry to ask, honey, but what happened to you?”

  “My ATV broke down in the desert,” I said. “I couldn’t get a signal on my cell, so I had to walk about twenty miles for the nearest tow truck.”

  She clucked. “People have died that way. You should have taken cover under the vehicle and done your walking at night.”

  “Yeah, well, that’s what they told me at the Emergency Room.”

  “Are you sure you’re all right to travel?”

  “They said I was fine when they released me,” I said. “Won’t be winning any beauty pageants for a while, but I’ll be good as new in a week or two.”

  She shook her head. “I gotta hand it to you. You’re one tough kid.”

  “Believe me, not as tough as some.”

  She brought me a turkey sandwich and threw in a slice of apple pie out of sympathy.

  I didn’t need the charity. Between what I’d taken from Daddy’s wallet, and the cache I’d found in Mommy’s underwear drawer, I had a couple of thousand to fool around with. The burns, the buzz-cut, and my physique would help, too. They made me look older than I was, which would free me of any embarrassing questions about family.

  I’d been better than them, in the end. I’d shown enough mercy to leave them the umbrella, and five one-gallon bottles of water. I’d also left them ungagged, with one free arm apiece, so they could drink as much as they wanted for as long as their supply held out. Of course, that gesture had been less about indulging their thirst than respecting their right to therapeutic communication. Now that they were speaking again for the first time in almost sixteen years, it would be a shame to deny them the time and voice they needed to catch up. There would be some awfully entertaining discussions going on between now and however long it would take for their voices to fall silent, and since I’d taken care to secure each of them well out of reach of the other, those conversations would all have a chance to play themselves out at proper length. It would have been interesting to stick around and listen, just to hear how often my own name was mentioned, and in what context, but I reasoned that they’d be more likely to release their inhibitions without me around. I was sure the privacy would lead to any number of fruitful epiphanies, some appreciated and some not.

  I wished them well. At least, in the short term.

  In the long term I hoped they fried.

  Midway through my second cup of coffee, a family of four came in. Daddy was a scrawny thing with a prominent chin and weary blue eyes. Mommy, who was shorter, with frizzy blonde hair and a pointed nose, bore the grimace of any woman who had endured too many complaints for too many years. The boy and girl, who were six and five, didn’t want to eat anything but french fries and had to be seated on opposite sides of their booth when the boy persisted in tapping his sister on the shoulder, again and again, a crime she found unbearable and which made her screech, “Mo-OMMM! He’s touching me!” Daddy ended up slapping the boy and Mommy ended up informing both kids that were in big trouble if they dared make another noise: a disciplinary measure that lasted all of thirt
y seconds before wails and spilled water escalated the warfare, and the noise, to the next level.

  As soon as I could I paid the bill and drove away, the lights of nearby homes blurring in the distance.

  Maybe someday I’d be done with missing them.

  Pieces of Ethan

  Ethan’s condition swallowed him whole on the day of his sixth birthday. You could say that he was dead from that moment on, though he lingered for many years afterward, dragging all of us into the same black hole with him. Maybe we were entitled to hate him for what he became, and what that did to us: but how was he entitled to feel about us, the ones who would go on after he was gone?

  It happened at the place on Sunny Creek where the river turned wide enough and calm enough and deep enough to become our natural playground on those days when the afternoons were more generous with hours than chores. This was of course still many years before that creek was dried to a fraction of its former glory by the dams greedy developers constructed upstream in order to turn our little valley from a refuge on the edge of wilderness to yet another overcrowded place for city folks to breed their litters of vacant-eyed suburban tots. We could splash around in our underwear or even outside of it without fear of offending neighborhood prudes or attracting neighborhood pederasts. Until that day Ethan changed we considered the site one of the great landmarks of our childhood, and I suppose we still did after Ethan, though what it meant to us had irrevocably changed by then.

  I returned to the spot just once within the last couple of years, just to see if it had continued to get worse after Ethan died and our family moved away forever. I found rust on the rocks, stagnant water that stank of sewage, and abandoned crack pipes in the dirt. Highway traffic was audible over the trickle that remained of the waterfall. The ruination of our childhood playground made the lives we had lived before Ethan’s transformation look even more like what it was: an idyll we had known but lost.

  But back then, it was still a family refuge beloved by all of us. And so Mom had felt no misgivings over asking me to take him there and keep him occupied until it was time to get him dressed for his party. He’d been driving her crazy for hours with his constant talk of the presents to come, and she needed him taken out of the house as acceptable alternative to strangling him. It was a choice between watching him or helping her clean the living room, so I agreed. She packed some sandwiches and sodas, and let me take Ethan and our middle sister Jean out to where the water was cold and white.