Josie And Jack: A Novel Part 13

I shook my head.

There was a mirror over what had once been Crazy Mary's sewing table. He grabbed my arm and pulled me roughly over to stand in front of it.

"Look at yourself," he said.

I looked at the pale skin, the greasy hair, the deep circles under my eyes. It was the same face I'd been seeing for six months.

"Look at yourself," he said again. "You look like a corpse and you're acting like a lobotomy patient. What the h.e.l.l happened to you?"

The man standing next to the wan girl in the mirror was touching her face just as Jack was touching mine.

"Time and s.p.a.ce," the girl in the mirror said. The man's arm crept around her waist and his body curled against hers.

"When I was here, you were always beautiful," he said. "You're the only girl I've ever known who could be beautiful and hung-over at the same time."

I watched the wan girl smile slightly.

"You were alive then." He was crooning now, his voice low and smooth and rich. "You were amazing. We were amazing."

"It wasn't ever me." My voice seemed to come from someone else.

Jack's mouth was close to my ear, against the soft place beneath my earlobe; and when he spoke, his words and his lips were like kisses. He was kissing me.

"My poor little sister," he said. "Poor, pretty little sister. What happened? What happened to you?" His hands were on my stomach, under my sweaty T-s.h.i.+rt, stroking the skin and my thin ribs, and I was s.h.i.+vering, tensing, with each touch. I turned toward him, feeling the desperation in my face and hating it.

"You did," I said.

During the long six months that we'd spent apart, I had often lain curled in my bed at night, imagining the warmth of his body wrapped around mine-of any body wrapped around mine-trying to remember what it had been like to be a person touched by another human being. The feel of hands on my skin. The warm pulse of another heart, my ear pressed close to hear it. A body protecting me from the rest of the world.

It was a simple thing. At that moment, it was all that I wanted.

I was crying. Sitting on the floor of the hallway crying.

"Stop it," he said.

"I'm sorry." I wiped my running nose on the back of my wrist.

"Don't be sorry. Just quit crying." He shook his head and stood up. "I hate it when you cry."

"Then quit making me," I said softly.

He didn't answer. He ran his hands through his hair and then held them out to me. I took them and he pulled me to my feet.

"You're starting to look like you again." He kissed my forehead absently and started checking his pockets, methodically. "Listen, Jo, do you think you could get me those earrings?"

"Earrings?"

"The pearl ones."

Numbly I went to get them. Jack had taken them out of my ears when I was pa.s.sed out after the Christmas party. He'd left them on the dresser and I hadn't touched them since. I stood for a moment with them in my hand. Then I reached behind the headboard and took the charm bracelet out of its box.

When I came back out into the hallway he was gone and my breath caught. Then I heard the Wagner playing downstairs, in the study.

He was going through the books on the shelves, making a pile on the couch of the oldest ones with the most elaborately tooled covers. They were Raeburn's first editions. "Thanks," he said when I gave him the earrings, and stuck them carelessly in his pocket without looking at them or me.

"This too," I said and held out the bracelet.

He stared at it for a moment and then reached out to touch it with one finger. "I remember that. Where did you get that?"

"It was Mary's," I said. "It's mine now. You can have it."

And I gave it to him. He touched the tiny test tube with something akin to reverence and slipped the bracelet carefully into his pocket with the earrings.

"Where have you been?" I asked softly.

He picked up a book and blew dust from its spine. "I don't think I want to talk about that."

"I didn't hear from you. I didn't think you were ever coming back." He didn't answer. "Why did you?"

"Come back? Why do you think?"

I stared at my hands. My thumbnail was ripped down to the quick. "If I knew," I said, "I wouldn't have asked."

"Fair enough." Jack tossed the book carelessly down onto the couch. "I came back because I needed money, and because I knew there was stuff here I could sell. I came back because I liked the idea of breaking into Raeburn's house and making off with everything that was worth more than two cents."

"Did you do the break-ins on the Hill?" I interrupted.

"Have there been break-ins on the Hill?" he said evenly.

I looked at him for a long moment.

"Okay," I said. "Go on."

"Go on? There's nothing left to tell. I came back because of you."

"But you're not going to stay."

He laughed. "Are you kidding?"

"So what's the point of coming back at all?" I was getting angry.

"To get you," he said simply. "What did you think?"

I stared at him.

"Unless you want to stay," he offered.

"I don't believe you."

"Then I guess I'm lying." He didn't seem to care. "Come or stay. It's up to you. I won't be back again."

"Where would we go?"

"I know people. We'll have a place to stay."

I looked around at the study, at Raeburn's oversized chair and the ugly blue nude on the wall; at his collection of antique s.e.xtants and telescopes gathering dust on the bookshelves; at the dark wood walls and the rows of thick, tattered science books. I thought about my own room, which hadn't changed since I was two. I thought about the long, empty hours that I'd spent sitting in the kitchen, watching the shadows move as the wall clock counted away the hours. I heard Ben Searles saying, "This isn't the way the world is. You know that, don't you?"

And then I looked at Jack.

I wrapped my arms around myself, feeling my ribs through my thin cotton s.h.i.+rt. I closed my eyes and thought about the supernova.

"Okay," I said, without opening my eyes.

The car Jack was driving was an aging black coupe with a rosary hanging from the rearview mirror and a Saint Christopher medal pinned to the visor. It smelled strongly of coconut air freshener and cigarette smoke. I helped Jack load the books and silver into the trunk and then threw in a pillowcase that held a few pairs of my underwear and some clothes.

"Whose car is this?" I asked Jack as we worked.

"Becka," he said. "You'll meet her."

The sun was starting to come up when we hit the interstate. Not long after that, I fell asleep. When Jack woke me, we were no longer moving.

"We're here," he said.

"Where?" My mind was logy with sleep and driving and my ears were ringing.

"I told you. Becka's house. Erie."

6.

WHOEVER BECKA WAS, she lived in a small, one-story white box in a shabby neighborhood. Some of the houses that lined the streets had once been perfectly respectable Cape Cods; some of them, like hers, had obviously been built after the neighborhood had started to slip and n.o.body cared about the details. There were no lawns; the paint was peeling and the bricks were dirty. Becka wasn't home. The paper towels in the kitchen had ducklings printed on them and there was potpourri in the bathroom, but all of the floors were grimy and there were beer rings on the battered coffee table.

Jack saw my face and laughed. "Nice, isn't it?"

"We were pretty squalid, sometimes." I was looking through the pile of dishes next to the sink for a gla.s.s that looked relatively clean.

"Sure, but we're mad geniuses." Jack threw his coat over the back of one of the chrome-and-wicker chairs in the kitchen. "I can't help thinking that there's some merit in the fact that we spilled our ashtrays on the Principia Mathematica instead of The National Enquirer."

"Where did you meet her?"

Jack shrugged. "I keep telling myself this is temporary, but I haven't come up with anything better yet."

He showed me the bedroom. There was only one, with a big, unmade bed in it. Jack's old leather jacket, the one I'd worn to the bonfire, was hanging over the back of the one chair in the room.

I touched it. "Do you like her?"

He put his arms around my waist. "Why do you want to know?" I didn't answer.

I met Becka an hour later, when she came home from work. She had black hair and huge brown eyes with long, curling eyelashes that she liked to flutter to punctuate her sentences. She called Jack "sweetie" and "honey" and said things to him like, "I picked up some of that ice cream you like, sweetie." She talked constantly: less than a minute after I met her, I knew that her mother's name was Susan, that she was one-eighth Iroquois and a quarter Italian, and that she was from West Virginia. Also, that it was okay for West Virginians to tell West Virginia jokes, as long as they were from the city and not from "down the hoot 'n' holler."

"How can you tell that the toothbrush was invented in West Virginia?" she asked me, smiling. "Because if it was invented anywhere else, they'd have called it a teethbrus.h.!.+"

"Funny," I said. I was having trouble laughing, because one of the things that I'd learned from Becka was that she was "crazy, absolutely head-over-heels hot" for my brother.

"He called me up this morning from the road and told me he wanted to bring his little sister up for a visit," she said. "I said sure, honey, go ahead, because I just can't say no to that man."

"I know how you feel," I said.

"He told me once he had a sister." Those big brown eyes with lashes all aflutter were watching me with sharp intelligent curiosity. "I didn't know you guys were so close though, but I guess it makes sense. Broken home and all that." She shook her head. "I mean, my folks are divorced, but your parents sure are a couple pieces of work, aren't they?"

I looked at Jack, who was sitting on the stained floral couch. He shrugged almost imperceptibly.

"Just my father," I said.

"But your mother's the one who kicked you out of the house," she said.

"Well-" I stopped.

Becka smiled. "Oh, honey, ignore me. I didn't mean nothing. I never mean nothing. Most things that come out of my mouth you can't even listen to."

"Hear, hear," Jack said. He winked at me and picked up his beer. Becka moved to sit next to him.

"You know, sweetie," she said. "Maybe while Josie's here we oughta call up Sharon and see if her kids might want to take her out some night."

"Who?" Jack said.

"You know Sharon." She punched him lightly on the shoulder. "Sharon that I work with, Sharon with the red hair." She turned to me. "How long were you planning on staying, Josie? Sharon's got kids your age, sixteen, seventeen."

I wondered how old Jack had told her he was.

"Just a few days," Jack said and reached an arm along the back of the couch, across Becka's shoulders. "Just until everything cools off a little at home."

She shrugged. "Well, I'll give her a call anyway. You might like to have some fun while you're here," she said to me.

"Sure," I said. "But I think right now what I really want is a nap."

Becka told me I should go ahead and stretch out on her bed. The bedroom walls were thin, and as I lay in the bed that Jack and Becka had shared for G.o.d knows how long, I heard her say, "Might be Becka and Jacky want to have some fun while she's here, too."

Jack said something too low for me to hear.

"Oh, for Christ's sake." The playful tone was gone from her voice. "I was joking. Can't a person even tell a joke anymore?"