Eve's Rib, page 18
“Grief counsellors?” Eve stood up from where she was sitting on the stump. Mark hadn’t counselled at the school before, but he’d mentioned a colleague there who’d contacted him about Selena’s accident. They might have asked him to help out. Mark could be in a closed room right now with her daughter, deceiving her with his soothing voice, touching her on the shoulder with a practised hand. The thought of Mark being so close to Abbey brought little beads of sweat up on Eve’s arms. She shivered in the warm sun.
“Is there something wrong, Eve?”
“Nothing’s wrong.” Eve started walking toward the house. “I’m sorry, Pauline, I just remembered I have to be somewhere. I’ll pick up the dog as soon as I can. Thanks for taking care of him.” She hung up and stepped back into the kitchen. Fetching the grimoire, she stored it in a dresser drawer of the master bedroom underneath some faded lingerie she never wore anymore.
As Eve grabbed the car keys from the kitchen counter, she saw something glinting in the sunlight among the blades of shiny wet grass. The pruning sheers. She went outside to retrieve them. Distracted as she was, she didn’t register the quivering leaves of the burning bush, or the flies that buzzed around its base, feasting on a scrap of bloody flesh and torn fur.
* * *
ABBEY WAS SURPRISED TO FIND her mother waiting in the car outside All Saints High School when classes let out later that afternoon.
She opened up the car door and leaned across the passenger seat.
“What are you doing here, Mom?”
“I was in the area and thought I’d save you the bus trip home,” Eve lied. She’d been waiting at the curb outside the main doors of the school for over an hour now.
Abbey eyed her suspiciously. “Okay,” she said, drawing the word out and adding a lilt, which denoted a question that would be thought but not asked. She slung her backpack onto the seat and unzipped one of the outer pockets, searching for something inside. Eve held her hands on the steering wheel and checked the rear-view mirror, getting ready to pull out. Cars filed out one by one from the school parking lot. Young people sauntered by, all dressed the same. They spilled out of the main doors and down the wide stone stairs. Some students got into cars, some made their way to the bus stop or down the street to walk home. Many gathered in clumps on the grass or the sidewalk, chatting and laughing in the June sunshine.
Mark stood to one side of the stone steps in a patch of shade. He appeared as he always did in public, hands in the pockets of his jeans, wavy red hair tousled slightly by the breeze. But then he raised his head, and he and Eve locked eyes in the mirror. She shuddered. Mark looked out at her from a set of deep black hollows in his face. His eyes held no pupils or irises, only the blank one-track glare of a predator.
“C’mon, Abbey.” Eve gripped the steering wheel tighter. She couldn’t tear her gaze from the sight in the rear-view mirror.
“I have to find my earbuds, Mom.” Abbey rifled through the rest of her backpack. “Shit, maybe I left them in my locker.”
Mark stepped out of the shadow of the stairs and started toward the car. The young people ebbed and flowed around him, like a school of fish darting around the steady progress of a shark.
“Oh, wait,” Abbey said, pulling a pair of white earbuds from the bottom of her bag. “Here they are!” She plugged one end of the white wire into the bottom of her phone. Eve wouldn’t buy her the more expensive Bluetooth ones.
“Get in the car, Abbey.” Eve kept her voice even, but insistent. The shark was on the grass now. In a few seconds he’d be in striking distance.
“Okay, Mom.” Abbey picked the backpack up and threw it roughly into the back seat. “I was only trying to —”
“I said get in the FUCKING car!” Abbey dropped into the passenger seat and closed the door, fearful of her mother’s outburst or embarrassed by it. Eve could no longer see Mark in the rear-view. Turning to look out the side window, she spotted him on the sidewalk in her blind spot. He was so close he could have shut the door for Abbey himself.
Eve pulled away from the curb before Abbey could get her seat belt fastened, tires squealing. The dispersing students glanced up briefly then returned back to their conversations when they realized she was just a parent and subsequently of no interest to them.
“Jesus, Mom, what the hell is wrong with you?”
“Nothing,” Eve said, accelerating down the street. “Nothing is wrong.” She wasn’t sure if what she’d seen was a sign or a trick, but she knew either one was a warning to be heeded.
Abbey rolled her eyes before putting in her earbuds. Then she lay back in the passenger seat and relaxed, humming to music her mother couldn’t hear.
Twenty-Three
It was Dylan Penske’s funeral today. A bunch of us skipped school and went. It was held in this creepy windowless room in a funeral home that was kind of like a small chapel but mostly like one of those carpeted conference rooms they have at the library that you can rent cheap. I didn’t tell my mom I was going. She would have wanted to come as well, even though she didn’t know him. She’ll get one of those phone calls from the school with the automated voice, telling her I missed first and second period, but I really don’t give a shit. She’s been acting so weird lately, even weirder than normal. Like how she was waiting for me after school yesterday in the car. I hope she isn’t going to get all overprotective after what happened to Selena. As if she hadn’t been clocking my every movement before this. I thought she was following me that Friday night before Zanax when she turned up at the Delta. I saw her there with Julia. I was in the parking lot, sitting in the car. But she didn’t see me.
My mom never trusts me, and she’ll use Selena’s accident as an excuse to pry into my life even more now. What happened to Selena was crazy. Something like that is never going to happen to me. My mom has no reason to be so freaked out.
Dylan’s casket wasn’t open. Which was good because I am really not into that sort of thing. My dad said he went to an Irish wake once and they had this old guy sitting right out there in his coffin in the living room. The dead man’s daughter-in-law almost spilled a drink on his corpse. But she’d been a bit tipsy.
The funeral home smelled like stale bread and dust. Like a church basement but with less disinfectant. When I went looking for the washroom, I saw the door to where they prepare the bodies. It actually had a sign. Embalming Room. I guess it’s so no one walks in by mistake and sees them draining the blood out of their loved one into that well in the floor. They have to remove the blood to keep the body from stinking. I learned that at science camp too. They fill the veins and arteries up with chemicals and dye afterward to make the person look rosy and alive for the family. Which doesn’t make sense to me, because why the fuck would you want to bury a person who looked alive? I wonder what Dylan Penske looks like or whether they even went to the trouble of using rosy dye. When your kid blows half his head off with a shotgun, it doesn’t seem to me that you’d be much bothered with appearances.
I haven’t been to a funeral since Michael’s. It wasn’t held at the same funeral home, but that one was just as gross. I hadn’t wanted to go, but my mom made me. She said it was important for “closure.” Such fucking bullshit. I knew my brother was dead. That he wasn’t going to pop up somewhere in the living room alive as if he’d been playing goddamn hide-and-seek. I saw his body on the floor that day, his blank eyes staring up before Mom closed them. That empty stare was all the closure I needed. Where Michael was hiding, no one would ever find him. I didn’t need to put on a black dress with scratchy tights to sit in a room full of sobbing adults to seal the lid on that.
Dylan’s eulogy was done by some cousin, I think — definitely a relative. He had the telltale funnel-shaped head, but he was older than Dylan. His face was more fleshed out, making the chin stronger, the forehead less Cro-Magnon. He was actually kind of hot. I wonder whether that’s what Dylan would have looked like if he’d lived to be a man.
After the funeral, all the girls huddled in groups of three or four and cried like they’d never known anyone who’d died before. Which I realize they probably hadn’t. But they didn’t need to make such a big fucking spectacle of themselves. The boys just put their hands on each other’s shoulders a lot and shook their heads. There was a fair bit of vaping, a habit even more stupid than smoking. Honestly, all the kids at my school are uncouth assholes.
I saw Stephanie Roberts sobbing her face off in the parking lot. She has those really badly done eyelash extensions and they clumped together when she cried, like a wet feather boa stuck onto her eyelids. Stephanie is such a two-faced bitch. She would never have gone near a guy like Dylan Penske when he was alive. Of course, there was that time last year when she started talking to Matthew Crenshaw in French class. Nobody talks to Matthew Crenshaw. For one thing, his stutter makes two-way conversation a chore, plus his clothes smell of French fries. He works part-time at McDonald’s in the back where he doesn’t have to deal with the public. But Stephanie batted her feather eyes at him and asked him to explain conjugation to her in class. She waited patiently while he stammered out the verbs. J-J-Je vais. T-T-Tu vas. Honestly, it was painful to watch. I had to dig a fingernail into my bare thigh under my kilt just to keep from screaming. Stephanie must have done this bit for a whole week, smiling wide with a mouth full of veneers as Matthew tortured the French language. Then one day when he walked in and said hello to her, she acted like she didn’t hear him. Each day, he tried to strike up a conversation with her, forcing out the words like chunky soup stuck in a pipe. Stephanie just acted completely confused, shrugging her shoulders to the rest of the class, like she couldn’t understand why the hell he would be talking to her. It took him a week before he stopped stammering out hello, a few more before he gave up smiling in her direction every time she turned around to work on conjugating verbs with someone else.
We learned about this in our advanced science class, in the neurology section. It’s called “extinction.” You give a rat a food pellet every time he pushes a lever in his cage and then one day you just stop giving him pellets. It takes a long time for that rat to stop pushing on the lever. He’ll push it until his little pink rat paws go bloody, our teacher said, especially if every hundred pushes, you fool him and actually give him a food pellet.
It’s sort of brilliant what Stephanie Roberts did. I think she must have taken the same science class. Because a couple of times during the semester she behaved like she had before with Matthew, asking him questions, flipping her long honey-blond hair, and laughing like he was the most amusing fucking guy on the planet. But the next day she’d be back to being the ice queen again. Movies and books always show mean girls doing such over-the-top acts of cruelty, like pouring pig’s blood on a prom dress or calling a guy a loser to his face. They don’t realize that the whole point of being a mean girl is the quiet subtlety of it.
I wanted to talk to Selena about Stephanie Roberts’s eyelashes, and about what Dylan Penske would look like if he’d grown up instead of shooting himself. But I can’t. She’s still in the hospital and I’m still not allowed to see her. I think her mom has taken her cellphone or something, because she’s not responding to any of my texts. I even tried to phone her, but it went straight to voice mail. My mom said to leave a message, but nobody leaves messages anymore. People can see that you called. What’s the point?
I’m afraid Selena’s mad at me about the kombucha, or maybe she’s mad that I might be given the scholarship if she can’t get better in time to take final exams. I want to say I’m sorry I ever bought that dumb drink. And I’m really sorry she got hurt. I’m even sorry about her goddamn cat. I want to tell her that I don’t even care about the Thompson scholarship anymore. She can have it. My parents will probably not even let me accept it, because after this glass thing my mom is never going to let me out of her sight again to go away to university or anywhere else. Everything is so fucked up.
I just want things to be like they were before. When Selena and I were laughing in her bedroom, sitting on the floor eating microwave popcorn, making up crap poetry to put in Dylan Penske’s locker. Back when Dylan was still alive and not a boy who we wanted to get back at for having a boner. A boy who’ll never grow up now to have a chin. I don’t know what I’m going to do if Selena doesn’t come back to school. I’ll be alone with all the assholes, with no one to compete with but Ashley Stravinsky, who gets decent enough grades but is so clueless she thought Elon Musk was a rapper. My parents don’t give a damn about me, and what’s worse, when I finally found the washroom at the funeral home, I looked in the mirror and I had a huge throbbing pimple on my forehead. I always get one just before my period. Now I won’t be able to go swimming at Stephanie Roberts’s pool party on the weekend. She invited me after the funeral, and I’ve got a new bikini and everything, but tampons never work for me.
My life completely sucks.
Twenty-Four
Tuesday morning, Richard woke up early and left the house before either Eve or Abbey was awake. He should have been used to deceit by now, but he couldn’t bring himself to face the two of them at the breakfast table and pretend he had an office to go to. At least it was only for a few days. That was unless this business with Julia and the budget numbers didn’t put him out of a job on a more permanent basis. He felt like an impostor donning his pressed khakis and slinging his laptop bag over his shoulder. But he couldn’t stay at the house. That would require explanations, ones he was not prepared for and would have found too uncomfortable to make.
“Large coffee with milk and sugar,” he told the barista behind the counter, a heavy-set, blue-rinsed woman wearing a kid’s uniform. She was probably one of those retirees whose pension investments had been fucked over by the downturn. A lot of seniors were forced into menial jobs so they had enough scraps to feed the wolf at the door.
“Dark roast or medium?” she asked mechanically, eyes focused on the till.
“Dark.”
“Steamed milk or regular?”
“Regular.”
She grabbed a cup from a stack marked Tall and lifted up a black Sharpie. “Name?”
Richard couldn’t remember when ordering a coffee had become such an interrogation. But he felt for the old woman. It wasn’t fair that she was forced to pull espresso shots and learn latte art when she should have been doting on spoiled grandchildren and catching up on her soaps. He decided to try and make her laugh, something that usually endeared men to women, old and young alike.
“Hey, remember the days when you could get a hot beverage and still remain anonymous?” he said, chuckling. But it came out all wrong. She considered him with rheumy eyes, gave him no laugh, not even a smile. Although her upper lip twitched a little, revealing pink lipstick she had stuck on one tooth.
“I don’t make the rules, buddy.”
“I know,” he said. “I was just making a joke.”
The woman looked back at the coffee cup and sighed. “Name?”
“Richard,” he told her, aware that the lineup had grown exponentially behind him. She scribbled on the coffee cup with the Sharpie, handing it off to a skinny kid down the line, who filled it with hot black liquid.
“Next,” she called out, watery eyes back on the till. Only when he picked up his coffee at the end of the counter did he notice she’d written Dick on it.
Richard located a table away from the window that looked out on the street. He didn’t want anyone to see him here. Although it was early and he could still be a guy catching up on emails over a cup of java before work. He took out his laptop and typed in the Wi-Fi password the skinny kid gave him when he’d handed over Richard’s coffee with a smirk. The password was Coffee. Their originality was only surpassed by their lack of internet security in this place.
He checked on his emails, reading each one although he couldn’t respond to any of them. To do so would, technically, be seen as working, even if he wasn’t at the office. More than once, he found his itchy finger poised above the left clicker of the mouse, the screen arrow hovering dangerously over the reply button. The situation gave him the sensation of being gagged, even if his enforced silence was only a virtual one.
But in the coffee shop, he noticed that most communication was virtual. The only words spoken seemed to be at the cash register. Once served, everybody sat glued to their phones or their laptops, “talking” to people who weren’t there, ignoring the people who were. Richard remembered when coffee shops had been lively, a place to gather with friends in between classes during his university days. There’d be half a dozen of them huddled together, their lettered jackets slung over chairs as they discussed the profs they needed to impress and the girls they wished they could.
Grant Saunders had been his best friend back then and had served as best man at his wedding. But the two of them had been reduced over the years to sending an annual Christmas card or the occasional LinkedIn message. That was pretty much the case when it came to all of his old friends. Richard wasn’t sure how he’d lost touch with all of them, except that it had been a gradual process. These days, his socializing consisted mostly of work events — team-building exercises where the camaraderie was forced like toothpaste through a corporate tube. He supposed Julia had been a friend of a sort, but that was all over now.
Richard closed his work email and tried to focus on other things. He looked up some rugby scores, then viewed some trailers of movies he might see in the afternoon. But he kept getting drawn back to the siren song of his inbox. Work had always been his drug of choice, flooding his brain with soothing data that insulated him from deeper thoughts. About Julia. About his family. About Selena and the hospital, and the monotone voice of Sanjay Patel when Richard called him this morning for an update. Selena was stable but in serious condition. Patel hadn’t offered up much more beyond that. And Richard hadn’t pressed him.
