The Last Animal, page 5
At first Lucy had been proud to have a real boyfriend, holding hands in the movie theatre, falling down the rabbit hole of delirious make-out sessions, her friends cornering her in the hallways to demand all the details. She spent hours chatting with Xavier, sprawled across her parents’ bed, the phone crooked between her shoulder and chin, one ear slowly going numb. She listened to tales of his alcoholic father, of beatings and neglect. She told him about her own father, his many surgeries. Her father was in and out of the hospital then, her mother half mad with worry, ferrying him to and fro, on the phone with specialists day and night. Xavier said it made them more alike. They were both abandoned children, nearly orphaned—and though Lucy knew, even then, that their situations were not at all analogous, she agreed just to please him. But she did not love him—had never loved him—had never yet loved anyone.
Soon he began to want to have sex. Lucy refused, surprising both of them with her firmness. It is the only place (she sometimes thinks, in particularly low moments) where she has been able to hold her own. Xavier whined and pleaded. After a year of dating, in a burst of annoyance, he even told his buddies that they had done it. Lucy was relieved by this, rather than angry, since it took some of the pressure off. At least he would be able to brag and swagger. At least he would not be able to complain about her to anyone. Every now and then, as the months passed, he would try again to win her over with his powers of persuasion, and Lucy would disingenuously agree to it all without once changing her mind. Yes, they had done everything else, so this last barrier scarcely mattered. Yes, where love was involved, it probably wasn’t a sin. His genitalia struck her as faintly floral, the bi-lobed bud at the top, the strong pink stem, the bulb of the scrotum, all matted with rooty hairs. Lucy was able to please him well enough. Sometimes she even wanted to go ahead and cross that final threshold. But still she held her ground. It was the one blessing of those ubiquitous health classes: The phrase “I’m not ready” had become a powerful weapon, three words that were not to be argued with or comprehended, only obeyed. Lucy was not ready; every so often she would say it again, and Xavier would have to acquiesce.
Over the winter holidays, Lucy and her family load their gear into the car and spend a weekend touring the state, scoping out colleges. The trip is hard on all of them. Her mother is a nervous driver, her knuckles white on the steering wheel as she negotiates around trucks and copes with potholes. Her father fidgets and grumbles in the passenger’s seat. Dharma, who generally loves a good long ride in the car, becomes nauseated after so many days of travel, and sits moaning with his head in Lucy’s lap, occasionally passing gas so foul that the whole family has to roll down the windows, despite the drizzle outside.
On each campus, Lucy gazes up at the ivy-covered dorms and the imposing pillars of English halls and theatre buildings. She watches the students hurrying by her, wearing ripped hoodies and hand-knitted scarves, their hair still mussed from sleep. She sits in on a few classes, her eyes lowered to her desk, expecting at any moment to be called out as a fraud. She makes sure to telephone Xavier every night, aware that he will be waiting anxiously. Her parents, on this trip, seem to fade almost into shadows. Her father’s difficulties worsen in unfamiliar settings. The car makes his back ache, and he has trouble getting any rest on the cots the colleges provide for their prospective students. Her mother is in constant attendance upon him, her usual solicitousness increasing to almost saintlike proportions. When they return home at last, Lucy watches her mother lean over the passenger’s seat, her face filled with gracious consideration, every particle of her being alive to her husband’s discomfort—and Lucy feels an odd shiver, as though she herself is in danger. Something in her mother’s posture reminds her of her own way of moving. That delicate sway of the neck. The shoulders bent in sympathy and concern.
Spring comes in with a thunderclap, bringing days of lashing rain. Undaunted, Lucy and the dog take longer walks than before, crossing to the very edge of the arboretum, where the woods open unexpectedly into a genteel golf course. Lucy gets the sniffles from tramping around in a downpour. Dharma shakes himself dry in the living room, sending out silvery cascades of water. Crocuses shove their determined heads through the soil. Mist curdles out of the gutters. Lucy walks along the highway into unfamiliar neighborhoods. Sometimes she feels as if she is disappearing, a sensation that is reinforced when she and the dog reach the very outskirts of her hometown, staring together down a dirt road that caps a hill and vanishes from sight. Sometimes she loses her way, wandering helplessly down side streets, unable to navigate in the hazy evening. Street lamps shine between the trees, the glow echoing off the branches in concentric circles, so that the bulbs appear to be wreathed in haloes. Lucy rarely makes it home before dark.
She and Xavier have been fighting worse than ever. First he accused her of scoring too well on her SATs; then he accused her of looking down on him because he had no desire for a college degree. How will it be, he shouted, when they are married and have kids who watch and learn from their parents’ attitudes? Will she continue her snobbish, self-absorbed behavior then, or will she be able to consider the greater good? Sometimes, during these squabbles, Lucy will literally begin to pass out, so wearied by his circular logic that her eyes grow heavy. Xavier’s “accidents” have become more frequent as well. He kicked the wall at his father’s shop and busted his toe, limping around for the next few weeks. (Lucy took it upon herself to drive him everywhere he needed to go.) He bruised his elbow in gym class, falling against the mirror and leaving a flower-shaped series of cracks in the glass, the petals expanding outward in a glittering ring.
One day, while he and Lucy are on their way outside for lunch, Xavier pauses by the vending machine. As Lucy watches, he grows increasingly frustrated. The mechanism spits his money out, then jams, so that his treat dangles tantalizingly over the void. Xavier shakes the machine and swears at it. Finally he punches the plating, hard enough to leave a dent. Lucy looks wildly around for a security guard, but as a rule there is never one nearby in a crisis. Xavier leads her outside to a sheltered spot beneath a tree, waving his candy triumphantly, as though he has just pulled Excalibur from the anvil. Before long, however, his hand begins to swell. The knuckle blooms into a taut purple grape.
At the hospital, the doctors tell him that he broke the vein, not the bone. As long as he is careful not to hit anything else, it will heal on its own. For weeks, Xavier walks around with his knuckle swollen, unable to hold a pencil or make a fist. Even after the vein returns to a normal size, the bruise remains, like a splotch of violet paint on the back of his hand.
At last Lucy’s acceptance letters begin to arrive—big, fat packets from schools all over Ohio. Her parents are overjoyed. Lucy is a little startled by their enthusiasm, unaccustomed to having their full attention. Her father claps her on the back, his weary eyes watering. Her mother pulls her into an impromptu waltz around the living room, keeping time in a jubilant hum. Even Xavier gets into the swing of things. He is proud of his brilliant girlfriend. He is gentle with her, forgiving. He comes over whenever he can get away from the garage, poring through her letters and playing with the dog. (Xavier once had a dog himself and likes to wax poetic about how close they were. “When we’re married, we’ll have a whole bunch,” he says, and Lucy’s mother, overhearing, smiles indulgently.) At school, no one can talk about anything else. People throw their arms around each other in the hallways, squealing with delight, or burst into tears in the student lounge because they were rejected from their first choice.
Lucy finds herself somewhat numb. Her hopes for college were modest all along: the chance to take a few classes Xavier might not approve of; the chance, perhaps, to make a friend. It has been a light for her at the end of a long, dim tunnel. But now she can picture herself there in earnest: Xavier walking her to class and back again, lurking outside her dorm, and sharing her bed whenever her roommate is away. “Yes, that’s me and my bodyguard,” she will say to her teachers, to her new classmates, who will give her the pitying, bewildered look she is accustomed to and turn away.
In the last week of school, Xavier disappears. Lucy picks him up in the morning, as always, but when she goes to their usual rendezvous spot before second period, he never shows up. She does not think much of it at the time. The hallways are in an uproar. Banners are hung every few feet, celebrating school spirit, only occasionally vandalized or torn down out of spite. Classes are canceled for graduation rehearsals. Xavier could be anywhere, now that the routines have changed. After third period, Lucy hurries into the courtyard to meet him in back of the Art Wing. But again, he does not appear. She waits for a while, confused. By fifth period she knows something is wrong—she checks her cell phone, but there is no message from him. She goes to his locker and stands there idiotically, as though waiting for him to throw open the metal door and climb out.
At lunchtime, Lucy is alone for the first time in her memory. She is baffled by her strange new freedom. She can sit anywhere she likes. She can eat the contents of her lunch all out of order, without comment—she can throw her food away, opting not to eat at all. She wanders across the grassy lawn, kicking up twigs and leaves. Eventually she climbs halfway up an apple tree and swings her feet in the breeze. The day is unseasonably warm, and students are settled around the grounds in knots, like flocks of migrating birds at rest. Every so often, as Lucy watches, someone will suddenly leap to his or her feet and begin to do the Bee Dance—darting away from the invisible assailant with arms flailing. Hidden among the branches, Lucy contemplates what it would be like to join one of these groups. She could do it; she remembers how. She could plunk down with her bright smile, pushing her hair out of her face, and say, “God, it’s hot. Hey, did you understand that part about cloud formation in fourth period?” She does not do any such thing, of course—it would be a kind of betrayal—but still, she could.
After eighth period she pauses at the drinking fountain and splashes water on her face. There is still no message from Xavier, though she has been checking her cell phone obsessively, earning herself a reprimand from her English teacher. A group of boys is gathered nearby, and Lucy hesitates, wondering whether she ought to ask if they’ve seen him. They stand with their heads close together, their jeans slung low around their hips, tossing a ball of tinfoil back and forth. They are discussing the various pranks they might play for graduation—hilarious tricks like going without pants beneath their robes and thereby obtaining their diplomas while wearing boxer briefs, or else taking a hit of acid before the ceremony and hallucinating all the way up to the podium. Lucy rolls her eyes, smirking. Reflexively, she hears Xavier speaking in her mind, his sputtering strictures on their stupidity and inferiority. Then one of the boys lowers his voice, asking whether anyone else heard about that thing in the locker room.
Lucy holds still, her heart beginning to pound. No one seems to know quite what took place, but apparently there was a lot of blood on the floor, a crimson spray across the wall. The boys laugh, deciding that probably someone was murdered. Lucy gasps for breath. In that instant she knows exactly what happened. She has been expecting this moment for years.
The bell rings, and the boys jump and begin to scatter. Gathering her wits, Lucy reaches out and plucks one of them by the sleeve—she knows him by sight, but is not sure of his name.
“Which locker room?” she asks. “I heard you talking.”
“What?”
“Which locker room did—”
“Oh. It was the one by the small gym, out in the East Wing.” He leans in curiously, his eyebrows raised. “Why? You think Xavier had something to do with it?”
Lucy flushes—she may not know the boy from Adam, but of course he knows who she is dating.
“No, no,” she says quickly. “Just curious. It’s nothing.”
She ditches her last period, slinking quietly through the halls. When classes are in session, the high school changes. The hallways darken perceptively, empty except for the occasional scuffling footstep, a janitor or teacher heading off for a coffee break. Sounds drift, muffled, through the heavy doors. Lucy catches the monotonous drone of a teacher lecturing on free market economy as she slips into one of the stairwells. She will avoid the security guards, if she can—though they are easy enough to deceive; all she has to do is blush shamefacedly and say that she needs to see the school nurse, and they will back away without asking too many questions.
She finds the gym deserted. The wood floor gleams. The windows show a cloudy sky, and dust motes twirl in the uncertain light. Lucy crosses the basketball court, clutching the straps of her backpack. The door to the boys’ locker room stands ajar, outlined by a sharp fluorescent glimmer. Lucy can see a stain of red on the floor. Someone evidently began to clean up the mess but stopped in the middle of the task; a mop stands abandoned against the doorjamb. The blood is still there. A pool beneath the sinks. A smear heading out into the gym. The bristles of the mop caked in it. Lucy stands in the doorway, shaking. She can see how he did it—the razor blade is sitting where he dropped it beside the garbage can. There is a spatter across two of the mirrors. The moldy green towels that the school has reused for years are heaped against the wall, and Lucy can see that they are soiled as well, speckled with dark blotches. She knows that the blood is Xavier’s, as surely as though she can smell his own distinctive musk in the crimson puddle on the tile. He might as well have signed his name.
She does not sleep at all that night. Her bed is hot, then cold, and the dog is restless as well, clambering around on her calves and trying to cram his furry body in between Lucy and the wall. Eventually she gives up and goes downstairs, wrapped in her blanket. The windows are open, letting in the spring air, a wet wind smelling of freshly cut grass. Her parents are sound asleep in their bedroom at the back. She does not have to worry about waking her father—his pain medicine knocks him unconscious, sometimes zonking him out during the daytime as well if he sits still for too long—but her mother, if aroused by any small sound, has a nasty habit of marching around for hours, neurotically checking that the oven is off, the toaster unplugged. Lucy does not wish to talk to anyone. Xavier called earlier, just briefly, from the hospital, sounding thoroughly drugged. In a slurred voice he explained that they were keeping him overnight. The gym teacher had found him. He told her he was sorry; he might have been crying. He told her not to try to visit, as she would not be allowed to see him. Only family were allowed in. Lucy promised to come by in the morning and got off the phone as fast as possible.
She knows the routine by now, exactly how it will unfold. She and Xavier have it down to a science. Once he is discharged, she will wait outside the emergency room, in the hollow of the driveway, squinting through the glass doors. She will bring the dog in the back seat, for company and to make Xavier smile. He will show her his wounds. It is her job to wince, and shudder, and shriek with dismay as he explains exactly what the doctors did to him. Xavier will be pale and noble. He will describe some quarrel with his father, some apathetic jibe on the part of his mother. He will explain how he lost control. For the next few weeks, the two of them will be closer than ever. Xavier will need help with unexpected things, ordinary things—tying his shoes, turning a doorknob. Lucy will leap to answer the phone when it rings. She will check on him five or six times a day. She will sing him to sleep, cut up his meat for him, rub his back gently to relieve the tension. For a while, it will be as though she gave birth to him herself.
By 3:00 AM, she has given up any hope of sleep. She suits up, putting on her walking shoes and her jean jacket, muffling Dharma’s enthusiastic whining by feeding him a lump of peanut butter to stick his jaws shut. The neighborhood is absolutely still. Most of the houses are dark, each pane a black and shuttered eye; occasionally one upper window burns with a muted glow, a fellow insomniac whiling away the witching hour with a book or a pornographic website. Lucy sniffs the air. The dog seems unusually sober, marching importantly ahead of her as though they are on a mission together, his tail waving in a plumed salute.
Above the treetops, the sky is a great bowl of stars. The moon, as thin as a fingernail clipping, hangs low in the west. Lucy takes the shortest route to the arboretum, walking along the highway. A few trucks lumber past her. Now and then Dharma growls threateningly into a bush or ditch—unusual behavior for him—and Lucy wonders if, because of the strange hour and her own black mood, he feels a burgeoning need to protect her from danger.
At last they reach the woods. Lucy blunders around for a while, unable to locate the trail. In the gloom, everything looks different. Light comes in shifting patches between the trees, so that the underbrush is as shadowy and chaotic as the deep ocean. Lucy skids down an unfamiliar hill, catching her feet in brambles and mud. When she laughs in helpless amusement, the dog pants approvingly. She keeps him on the leash, and he manifests no desire to leave her, though usually by this point he would be bounding around like a rubber ball, mouthing the rope. Together they find the stream. The water rushes like black ink between the boulders—an occasional flash of silver indicates foamy rapids. Lucy settles on a cold, flat stone. Dharma leans against her shoulder, sniffing maniacally and following each new sound with a lift of his ears. As soon as they are done crashing around, the forest returns to business as usual. An owl cries. A fish jumps clear of the water. The trees surge overhead, moving in unison like kelp in a current. Lucy shivers, tugging her coat more securely around her shoulders. The dog lies down, gazing into her eyes.
