The Least of My Scars Read online

  It’s not enough.

  The next morning when the flunkies dolly their precious barrel through the door of the lefthand apartment, I’m waiting for them. Have been all night.

  I come down from the wooden pegs (used to be a closet rod) I’ve set deep in the wall and, before they even understand what’s happening, I have the first one, the protection here, cheekdown against the floor, a ten-inch metal rod about an inch deep into his ear, the arch of my foot at the other end of it, no real weight on it. Yet.

  He pees and the floor’s not level here, so it streams across the linoleum, gets to the dimpled brass edge of the carpet.

  The other guy, the one who inherited the Something-Something & Sons Grease Solutions uniform, he slowly tilts the dolly forward until the barrel’s flat on the ground. Then, his hands laced behind his head, he lowers himself to his knees, places his forehead to the ground, maybe an inch from the pee. Because that’s the very, very least of his worries.

  “Is it in there?” I say to the guy under my heel, but he can’t make words anymore, or maybe can’t hear mine.

  I look to the other one, the Vegetable Ghost.

  “You.”

  He winces, peers up. Not quite at me, but at my knees anyway. Put those in a line-up, yeah.

  I say again to him, kindergarten slow, “Is it in there?”

  “W-What?” he manages. “The—the . . . ”

  “Show me,” I cut in.

  Moving with that same slowness that he thinks is going to save his life, he stands, his back never to me, and pries the lid off, starts to reach in.

  “No,” I tell him, and wave him over.

  He’s there in a shuffling instant.

  Moving with a slowness he’ll understand, I take my foot from the rod in his friend’s ear, nod to it.

  Instead of shaking his head no like I expect, he puts his foot up where mine was, like I’m showing him the first step of a stairway he’s just going to have to trust me about here.

  “You’ve got to give it a little pressure,” I say, touching his knee with the back of my index finger, “just until you can feel—it’s like stepping on a balloon, but you don’t really want to pop it until the lady walks up the path and you can scare her right, see?”

  He does, and steps down a little more, the guy down there squirming, his palms flatter than flat against the linoleum, his lips saying something. Nobody cares.

  “Good,” I say, “now don’t—” but am already at the barrel, in it up to my shoulders.

  There’s the usual—vegetables, videos, baby food, the Sunday paper with all the date corners clipped off, put in a plastic baggie like puzzle pieces—and then, down at the bottom because it’s heavier, a black bag from the electronics store.

  Yes.

  I dump it out on the counter.

  The cover I tore off the manual is there, which means whoever went to the store took it with them. Good. But the charger, it’s not the one specified for Kid Hoodie’s model. I remember. Very specifically.

  I slam my hand into the counter so that everything jumps. Especially the Vegetable Ghost.

  It pushes the rod down deeper into his friend’s ear canal, up against the sac around the brain, I’d guess. Just a touch, but when dealing with the human head, a touch can be a fucking mile.

  “What’s this?” I say, holding the charger up.

  The Vegetable Ghost swallows, balances, tears running down his face now, and finally gets it out: “It has—it has adapters, the sales guy promised . . . ”

  He stops because I’m already studying this wrong charger.

  In the hard plastic at the bottom are a cluster of alternate fittings. Adapters. It’s a universal recharger.

  I huff some disbelief out through my nose.

  “What’ll they think of next?” I say.

  Now Vegetable Ghost shrugs, his eyes closed.

  “So he promised it’d work, you say?”

  He nods the truest nod of his life so far. Enough that I nod with him, even.

  “May be,” I finally say, weighing the charger in my hand then leaning over to him like we’re best friends here, good enough buds that I can mostly whisper the next part: “Let’s hope it does anyway, right?”

  Instead of having him step down on the rod with all his weight like I’d had planned, I let him bundle his friend up, stuff him in the barrel, tamp the lid down. Then I take the rod, set it right at the lip, and tap it down once, hard, for an airhole. Maybe bloodhole too, if my aim’s off. But that’s all for later, and for them to deal with, not me. Right now I just nod to the door, that it’s time to leave, then put all the vegetables in their proper places in the refrigerator, then study the charger some more.

  May be, yeah.

  Outside, in the hall, the sound of the dolly’s wheels on the carpet are like thunder far away. Something building.

  I count to five three times then duck back through my closet, lock the door behind me.

  In the sunlight, my hands relaxed over the arms of my chair, I hold the little phone to the side of my head, listen to what Dashboard Mary’s given me.

  The manual says to let the unit charge to maximum capacity before operating it, to promote longer battery life. But the manual never allowed for me.

  None of them do, really.

  And it’ll work if you just plug it into the wall. Even a kid would know that.

  For the first ten minutes of sun, the wide dusty beam scanning up from my feet to my fingertips to my bare stomach to the thin skin stretched over my sternum, all I can access on the phone are Kid Hoodie’s phone numbers. A trail leading all the way back to Singer, probably. Stupid fuck. But Dashboard Mary’s in there as well. And the contact “911,” which must have been their code or something. The ringtone associated with it’s the Come-and-knock-on-my-door one.

  I hiss, thumb past it.

  There’s a few songs too, what must be the soundtrack of Kid Hoodie’s life, that he can thumb on each time he enters a room, so that it must feel like it’s washing up behind him, like he’s on some big screen, is doing something grand and noble and just a little bit dirty.

  You tell yourself what you need to, I mean.

  When you’re as empty as him, at least.

  And the music, it’s about what I suspect. No melody, no heart, just a deep thumping in my head. A replacement for the heart he never really had.

  Still, though I warn myself against it, I find my head bobbing with it a time or two, have to pinch my thigh hard to remind myself who I am.

  The next time I forget, lose myself in it, I’m going to get the pliers.

  This is what I threaten myself with. What I make myself stay awake with.

  I haven’t had to use tools on myself for years now.

  But there was a time, yeah.

  If I jam the dull jaws down into the flesh of my thigh now, where the hair’s grown back over wispy and long, I know that what I’ll be twisting will be hard little knots of scar tissue. From when that was the only way I had to get control again. When I knew I couldn’t go down to the streets for another week or two, since the last puke had made the news.

  And what you don’t want to do if you can help it is ever get in a cycle like that. It doesn’t end well. The only good ending to holing up like that, waiting things out, is that you live to do it all over again in some other town, some other state.

  So I listen, and I don’t nod, and I don’t tap my index finger. And I remind myself the whole time that I’m not him, not Kid Hoodie, that listening to his stupid music doesn’t make me him. That that’s not what she’s trying to do here, Dashboard Mary.

  And then the phone serves up something new.

  Not music, but a voice.

  Mine.

  You’re him? I’m saying, two weeks ago.

  I can feel my heart slamming in my chest.

  I lean forward too fast, so that the wall goes splotchy—all the sun-warmed blood rushing up my neck, flooding behind my eyes—and thumb desperately for
the menu behind this one.

  I find it, open one of the arrows that branch off the current track, and there now, flickering from the effort of having to refresh—this is explained in the manual, is nothing to call customer service about—is a line stretching across the bottom of the small screen. A line with a stubby bar at each end, and with a right-pointing triangle way over to the left.

  Because the green button’s the control of about everything, I touch it lightly.

  The triangle stands up into two pause lines.

  I breathe out through my nose, close my eyes once, then open them back.

  This is chapter 6, “Recording Voice Memos.”

  I angle the phone over. Right by the headphone jack is the little microphone grill, like a whirlpool sucking all my air down.

  I push the stop button now and hold it like I mean it.

  That prompts up a save option. I take it halfway, get dropped into all the voice memos. They’re organized by date. A whole stack of them. Enough that they need a scrollbar, even.

  The top one is the most recent.

  I select it, look away.

  To nearly two weeks ago.

  You’re him? I say again through the headphones, to Kid Hoodie.

  Shuffle shuffle, look around.

  This going to take long? he says back, his voice louder, closer to the microphone. Like he’s meaning to talk into it.

  I lean forward, look back to my counter.

  Like I knew, Kid Hoodie’s staring directly into me. Talking straight into my head.

  Your ride? I say to him, back then.

  Dashboard Mary, sitting down on the street, double-parked maybe, except that would draw too much attention. Circling, then. Over and over. Her phone open on the seat beside her. Her man upstairs, getting into Trouble. Upstairs on the fourth floor, number 39, like the strip of paper read.

  Meaning she saw it, was his safety, Kid Hoodie’s letter-to-be-mailed-in-case-anything-happens.

  And the recording doesn’t stop until the batteries wind down two days later. In voice-activation mode, that comes to about three hours of listening—each time I made a noise, the microphone opened up again, started sucking the sound in.

  Mostly it’s television, shows I recognize, and me asking Kid Hoodie about his cereal concerns. My voice is mumbly and slurred, hard to pick up. Like I’ve just thawed out of the iceberg, haven’t had to talk to anybody for ten thousand years.

  Behind all that, though, when I’m asleep either on the couch or in the bedroom, the recorder blips on for four seconds in the dark of the dining room.

  It’s just the lightest squeak, the slowest rolling.

  Casters, I know.

  The wet-dry vac has four of them.

  “Shit,” I whisper, and then erase it, then stare out my window long after the sun’s been gone.

  If I were some weak sister and going to stage a dream about Dashboard Mary, this is what I figure it’d be: her walking down my hall, up out of the darkness. Normal-length hall, normal no-lights kind of darkness, no invisible orchestra swelling up behind her. She’d just be looking straight ahead, her steps all even, no hesitation.

  What she’d be wearing’s her ruffle shirt, her tight pants, her clacky boots. Something cupped in the heel of her hand, but I wouldn’t know what until later. That it’s already there though would mean that I’m not one of those losers who make the dream up as they go, pulling in the car horns outside, the drippy ceiling, the smell in the air from the closet (decay), whatever they need to random things up. No, mine happen all at once, self-contained, complete, and then unfold as they go, with intention. Rooms exist before I walk into them, I’m saying. It’s all waiting for me.

  But one thing I do the same as everybody else, I suppose—maybe because I’m the one whose head this would be all happening in—is see her when I shouldn’t be able to. In the hall, I mean. Not really through the walls, but clear as day just the same.

  Each time her heel strikes the ground, the little green light on my ankle winks, so that it’s like she’s stomping the bulb out. No, blotting. Like she’s stepping between it and me, even though I can’t get my pinky between the rig and the skin stretched over my ankle.

  And then shuffle shuffle, skip a step, smear a nodded hello past, the way you acknowledge the plague when it comes knocking, and there we’d be in my apartment. No stupid pizza jokes, no fake flower deliveries, no Trouble. Just me trapped now in my chair, the sun so heavy on my skin. Her standing beside me, her left hand on my right shoulder like we’re posing for a portrait, the painter in a window of the building across the street, so he has to study us with a scope on a tripod. Because we’re contagious. But he can’t look away, either.

  Neither could I.

  “Alison,” she would say then, which would mean she was telling the truth now, calling Girl Scouts by their proper names, and I would swallow loud and then forget how to breathe for a moment, sure that I can hear her ruffled collar scrape as her head turns to the left, the kitchen, the counter, her boyfriend there from the neck up.

  “An honest mistake,” Mary would say then about having ever said Megan, gripping my shoulder for emphasis, the way people at church will squeeze your hand a bit harder at the amen part of the prayer. Like it needs that to stick. Like they really meant it, what the preacher just recited into his clip-on mike.

  I wouldn’t apologize to her, though, for Kid Hoodie. For her Jason Pease, her officially missing person. Her reason for being here.

  Right?

  Anyway, I don’t apologize. That’s another dead-end road there.

  And that she’d cue into the way my hand on the arm of the couch would be balling into a fist would be a given here, I think. All her attention, I mean, it’s on me.

  “Can’t be too careful,” she’d say from above, her eyes unfocused too, to try to see farther through the window, through our sudden reflections—it’s night for a few moments—and then reach down to cover my fist with the porcelain white of her hand, and pat it twice, like consolation. Like we agree on this, like we have agreed, like we’ve been agreeing, like it’s settled now.

  And it would work. It would flush straight through me, my pores opening to drink her touch and pull it into the branchwork of my blood vessels, my capillaries surging a thousand ways at once, deeper and deeper, until it’s as if she’s reached in, wrapped her fingers around the flare of my ulna.

  At least until she lifts her hand.

  That’s when everything slams to a standstill.

  If not for the sunlight, I never would’ve seen it.

  But now I can’t unsee it. Should have been seeing it the whole time. That way I might be prepared.

  Glinting on her wrist, dangling on a bracelet, is what she was holding on her walk up the hall, what she’s learned to keep quiet. It’s the smallest little bottle. One of those little old prescription bottles like you find if you’re running around the backwoods and stumble onto a fallen-down old house that everybody gave up on fifty years ago, that the great grandkids will never know to come look for, even.

  About ten yards away from the back porch will be a mound of sorts. At first you’ll think it’s a cellar, that you shouldn’t step there, but then it’s the trash pile. Dig down far enough through the grass and wire and your fingers come up black from fires a century old.

  In that black you can usually find the prescription bottles, the ones that were glass so didn’t burn, and that didn’t have big vulnerable sides to crack open every time the bucket or barrel was emptied.

  It feels like stealing from the past, a little, can be beautiful, and that’s why a woman would want to tie one around her wrist. Especially if the house had been her grandmother’s.

  The one on Dashboard Mary’s wrist, though. The one she couldn’t know to wear unless she’d seen the underside of my trapdoor, my mom upside down there, watching for me even when I sleep, because that’s what moms do.

  What I would do in response to it, to this chrome marble tinkling
around in the bottom of the bottle like the most impossible pearl, would be to push myself as deep into the chair as I could, away from her touch, and then, when there’s the smallest knock, from the cutaway in the pantry that leads to Riley’s, I would wake gasping at the kitchen table, fall onto the floor and push myself with my heels into the corner by the front door, the new carpet coming with me, bunching up behind me, beside me, all around me.

  If I was all weak sister like that, I mean.

  If I gave in to that kind of shit.

  I’d have been burned a long time ago, though, were that the case. Staked out on a stick and left for the birds.

  What I do instead is just stand in the kitchen and stare into the stainless steel of the sink for a personal best, four hours. Then, to prove that the world’s still on my side, I stuff my hand as deep as I can down into the middle disposal. All the way up to the forearm, baby.

  You don’t just hope the teacher’s going to see it in your eyes, that you know that answer. You fucking stand up and scream it at her.

  “Okay,” I say, and lean over, flick the power switch.

  The disposal under the third sink whirs on, grinds air.

  “Exactly,” I say to it, then push the couch up against the front door, go to sleep for real.

  The next morning I hear the metal numbers on my door changing.

  I have no idea where I live, nothing more specific than fourth floor, Chessire Arms. What some would call hell, I suppose.

  Hey, I try.

  But the Number Ghosts, they’re not due for another week.

  Does Singer think the Girl Scout’s going to rat me out? Scurry back to her den mother with . . . what?

  Like she was even a Girl Scout in the first place.

  The more I think about it, the more I see Dashboard Mary down in the lobby, winding some fist-sized key into the back of this little toy she’s made, so she can march her up to my floor, usher her down the hall.

  Maybe it’s what I get for not getting a little girl mannequin to go with the family downstairs. For putting the sister’s head in the stove. Never mind that it was accurate.