Flesh Wounds, page 35
As he went out the gate, he looked back, thinking of all the things he had lost and all the things he would lose in the coming years. Would he know the important things?
He knew one.
In all her light would his mother know him? He imagined the blood she would see on his hands. He took the hunting knife and threw it as hard and as far as he could.
Would he have the time to tell her all the things he had yet to say?
He thought so.
Comfortably Numb
Mother and maiden
was never none but she;
Well may such a lady
Goddes mother be.
–English Carol, 15th Century C.E.
“You’ve barely touched your dinner,” said Ian. There was no concern in his voice, only irritation over the thirty-dollar meal gone cold.
Karen set down the lobster fork. If she hadn’t been so numb, so dislocated from the table, restaurant, even herself, she might have wondered how long she’d been holding the small silver fork without using it, poised over the scalded carcass of her dinner.
“We need to talk about this, Karen.”
“Take me home.” She knew she needed to eat. For the sake of the tiny life within her if nothing else. She wondered fleetingly what Ian would say about the child when and if she finally got around to telling him.
“Your dinner—”
“Take me home.”
Ian signaled for the check and asked that the car be brought around.
Moments later they walked out into the December night, she in the full-length sable he’d bought her and he in his Italian wool greatcoat. It was snowing: slow, heavy flakes meandering ahead of an impending tempest, cloaking the filth of New York City’s streets in a clean facade of white. The wind was up. Despite a coat that had once warmed nearly a hundred bright-eyed, black mammals, the cold air struck at her like frozen slivers of glass. She was aware of it on some automatic level, but failed to respond.
Their Mercedes, its exhaust a plume of white in the frigid air, waited at the curb. As Ian pulled away, he tried again.
“Look, Karen. What you saw last night... Well, it didn’t mean anything. It just. Happened.” He waved his hand as if sweeping away an annoying smoker’s exhalation, as if what had happened held no more significance than that. “Jeannie and I have been programming together a long time and something just snapped.” He accelerated to clear the final seconds of a yellow light. “It won’t happen again, babe. I promise. Tomorrow I’ll fire her, and she’ll be out of our lives. Forever.”
“This isn’t the first time,” Karen whispered, watching the wipers sweep clinging flakes from the windshield. Not the first time with Jeannie. Not the first time with another woman.
“Sure it was,” he lied. “The first. Only. And last.”
“It’s only the first time I caught you.” Against her will, she shuddered, revulsion sinking through her shields to rattle at her heart. In her bed. They’d been in her bed! The king-sized four-poster they’d bought just after the wedding. Pale lilac sheets and naked flesh.
The next light caught them. Ian brought the Mercedes to a halt, sliding the last few feet on the icy street. “What are you accusing me of? You’ve no other proof of infidelity! All you’ve got is this one isolated incident.” He let out a sigh that reeked of the garlic butter in which he’d dipped his lobster. “And even if I was playing the field, you couldn’t actually blame me, could you? You’re such a goddamn cold bitch anymore, Karen. How many times have we made love in the past month? When was the last time you came to bed without that stupid grannie gown on, huh? When was the last time you enjoyed sex?”
The questions came so fast all she could do was huddle against the cold window, staring blindly at the falling snow.
“You have no proof,” he finished.
“I don’t need any,” she mouthed soundlessly against the glass.
“What’d you say?”
The light went green. Someone behind them gave his car horn a quick tap. The short blast was followed by a longer one when Ian failed to move. Determined to wait for an answer from her, Ian flipped his finger in the rearview mirror.
The car behind them clunked into reverse, then slewed in the snow as the driver sought to back up and go around. As the car slid, its headlights played across the walls of the buildings on Karen’s side of the street, illuminating a dark alley and huddled shapes within. For the space of a single breath, she glimpsed a face—a pale, slug-like visage against hungry shadows. Then it was lost as the light passed on.
Ian backhanded her across the upper arm. “Answer me! What kind of proof do you have that I haven’t been faithful these last four years?”
Karen’s hand found the smooth cool of the door handle.
“Dammit! You can’t just go accusing someone of sleeping around without proof!”
Wasn’t last night proof enough? She almost laughed, but it wasn’t in her. Hadn’t been for years.
The irritated driver pulled to a halt abreast of Ian’s door. A power window slid down. The driver, ex-wrestler, ex-bouncer, one-time football player and full-time bully—she recognized the type—leaned over and yelled into the snow and wind. “Who do you think you’re flippin’ off?” His piggish little eyes, buried deep in his fat face, were darker than the storm pressing down on their heads.
All this she caught reflected poorly in her window. Unfocused. Distant. Her attention was beyond, on the alley’s dark recess.
Ian rolled down his own window. “Look, pal...” He was using his masculine, I’m-just-as-tough-as-you-are tone, the machismo droll engaged in every male to male confrontation she’d ever witnessed. Whatever else Ian said was filtered as the wind brought another sound to her ears.
There was music coming from Pigeyes’ car: deep, echoing bass; the strains of acoustic guitars; and a haunting, baroque melody. As she opened her car door, the accompanying words assaulted her with a blast of cold air. She recognized the song: Pink Floyd’s “Comfortably Numb.”
Karen very nearly slipped in the snow getting out of the car. Somewhere distant, Pigeyes was ordering Ian out of the Mercedes so he could “kick his goddamn ass.”
Ian made a futile grab for her trailing coat. “Wait! Where do you think you’re going?” And to Pigeyes: “Shut up!”
Not bothering to close the door, she walked woodenly towards the alley. Something pulled her. Something old. Something forgotten. Something that screamed to be dredged up from the bottom of the lake that was her mind.
The alley took her into its dark embrace and wrapped her with tendrils barbed in ice. Like sinking into an abyss, she was drawn down the narrow cul-de-sac towards the nebula at its nether end. Footsteps sounded behind her—Ian in pursuit, leaving the Mercedes on the street. As she passed within, a shadow separated from the total darkness of the righthand wall and interceded between Ian and her back. She heard Ian curse, heard a metallic rasp as if some weapon had been cocked, drawn, unleashed, or slipped ‘tween flesh and bone, heard a hoarse whisper, threatening, promising, checking Ian’s flight down the alley after her.
But none of that held any priority with her.
Blinking tenacious snowflakes from her eyelashes, Karen found a cluster of people at the alley’s dead end. Wrapped in newspaper and rags, the dozen or so homeless were arrayed about an old woman. The woman sat hunched over the blue flames of a can of sterno. Karen didn’t even wonder that the fire’s light hadn’t pierced the veil of black permeating the rear of the alley to be visible from the street. Wonder required thought, deliberation, purpose, and she was running on automatic. She was one of Ian’s computer programs, running start to finish. Neither of which she knew the first thing about.
The old woman was wrapped, head to foot, in the only visible blanket, a ragged, once-padded thing tossed from a moving van God alone knew how many years ago. Her stooped shoulders and lowered head had collected a thin shawl of snow. Wisps of gray hair, alive in the winter wind, trailed out from under the blanket.
Ignoring the others, Karen knelt in front of the old woman. The snow suddenly let up, and the storm hung over them.
“Go away,” the old woman said without looking up.
From her purse Karen pulled out a twenty. She laid it between them and waited. When the vagrant made no move to pick it up, Karen leaned closer, feeling the meager heat of the sterno on her face. “You’ll freeze tonight.”
The old woman looked up then, her head rising slowly as if held down by some immense weight about her neck. Her face read of an ancient struggle with time. Thin, dry lips. Cheeks and nose bitten red. Wattled neck. Fine white hair frozen on her chin. Her eyes were striking, deeply centered in weathered, radial lines. They were gray eyes, flat and silver, like stainless steel in the lambent light of the sterno. Eyes that drank in everything and gave nothing back.
“How much peace of mind will twenty dollars buy you, child?”
Those silver eyes sucked Karen out of herself, pulled her across the little can of flames and into a vortex that drew her down. She sank through a mercury pool, spinning helpless in some temporal maelstrom, to emerge...
...Eleven years old.
“How much peace of mind will twenty dollars buy you, child?”
Karen looked from the two tens in her outstretched hand to the face of the old woman she’d found huddled against a dumpster on the street. The timeworn face was a blank slate, devoid of answers to questions Karen didn’t know to ask. Karen looked back to her father, but he only shrugged, shivering despite his heavy coat. The sleet was coming down harder, freezing on his shoulders, collar, and hat.
“Can we give her more?”
Father let out a sigh, his face obscured momentarily by foggy breath, and reached into his pocket. He always carried his money wadded into his front pocket, reserving his ancient leather billfold for one tattered, all but faded-out photo of his own parents—her grandparents, long dead—and, of course, Mom’s picture. She’d seen it often, a snapshot of a slender, blond woman, too young to have been married to her Dad until one read the faded inscription and accompanying date on the photo’s backside.
Till time catches up with us
and blinds all our senses...
—Lilith 3/3/66.
In 1966, the same year Karen was born, they’d probably made an enchanting couple. The years since had wrought dreadful changes in her father, chief among them the forlorn expression permanently writ on his face. If not for Karen—and despite her tender age, Karen was as certain of this as she was of her own name—Father would have wasted away and happily joined his dead wife.
Karen often caught him holding the photo or staring at Mother’s paintings and crying softly to himself. He never knew she saw him like that; she was always careful to sneak away quietly. It was his secret pain, which she somehow understood he wanted to bear alone, without her solace, without her tears adding to his own. As young as she was, she respected him for that. There were things a body had to do alone, secret things, things a body kept for themselves, not out of selfishness or greed, but out of... well, maybe out of need. Like the egg she kept wrapped and hidden in her bottom drawer. That egg represented a small part of her mother that was Karen’s alone to take out and hold close, to treasure, and to cry over when the need arose.
Father peeled off another ten and two fives, and handed them to Karen. She added them to the two bills she held and offered them again to the old woman. Forty dollars. More money than the eleven year old had ever held at one time The old woman only stared at it.
Karen looked back at her father. He only shrugged again and nodded his head toward their old Plymouth waiting across the street. Time to be going home, that nod said. Before we both freeze to death worrying about this stubborn old woman.
“Please take the money, Grandmother,” Karen pleaded. Grandmother came out sounding like an honorary title, almost as if Karen had called her Mister President.
The woman reached out and took the now soaked bills. Ice cracked where the sleet had frozen over the ragged blanket wrapped about her shoulders. As the money exchanged hands, they touched for the briefest of seconds. Through the wet and the cold, Karen felt a gentle warmth emanating from the woman.
Father laid a hand softly on Karen’s shoulder. “We’d better go before—” He stopped midsentence, but she knew what he had been about to say. We’d better go before we freeze to death or before we catch our death of cold, or... no matter. What he had been about to admit was that the old woman didn’t stand a chance of surviving tonight’s freeze.
Ten years ago, teenagers drag-racing had side-swiped her mother’s Buick, sending it over an embankment railing. The Buick had tumbled seventy feet to a muddy gulch below, where it had stopped, upside down, Mother hanging out the crushed passenger side. She had been knocked unconscious in the fall. The railing had ripped most of the passenger door down the middle, leaving jagged metal behind. That metal had ripped open Mother’s leg. Unconscious, with no one to stem the flow of bright blood spurting out across the ground, Mother had bled to death.
Maybe no one saw the car go over the railing. (Leastwise, no one except the teenagers who caused the accident to begin with.) Maybe the traffic had flowed by innocently, ignorant of the loving, giving mother and wife lying in the ditch, bleeding her future out on the ground. Maybe.
But maybe the truth was that no one wanted to stop. No one cared enough to help. No one cared enough to scramble down that bank and apply the pressure that would have stopped Mother’s bleeding—and saved her life.
“Karen, it’s time to go home.”
“May,” the old woman whispered, the single syllable nearly lost in the wind and the hiss of sleet on the sidewalk.
“Spring,” Karen thought aloud. “Yes, I’ll be glad when May gets here.”
The old woman shook her head. “No. That’s my name.”
“Karen,” the child offered in return. The old woman nodded silent acceptance of the courtesy. No words were necessary; they both understood the simple exchange of names to be of some importance. Karen looked back over her shoulder at her waiting father. “She’ll freeze to death tonight, won’t she?”
Father frowned when he saw the petulant look on her face. His hands were thrust deep in his pockets as if hiding them might somehow keep him from touching the situation developing before him. “You’ve given her more than enough to get a decent room down the street, Karen. She won’t freeze.”
The child screwed her face up in deep thought. Without looking back at the woman, without lowering her voice any, she asked, “Would you rent a room to her?”
Father shifted his weight from one foot to the next, taking a sudden interest in the ice freezing around his shoes.
“And even if someone did rent her a room, what about tomorrow night?”
On the street, above the sound of Pink Floyd on hundred-watt speakers, Pigeyes was yelling for Ian to come out of the alley and “take his medicine.”
In the alley, Ian held up empty hands and backed slowly away from the bright steel waving in his face. “Listen,” he tried to explain, “I just need to get my wife, then I’ll be out of your hair.”
The youth with the switchblade grinned stupidly, his eyes violent. The glimmering steel moved threateningly, cutting intricate patterns in the heavy dark.
“Karen!” Ian called. He rose on his toes to look over his assailant’s shoulder, but the other end of the alley was impenetrable darkness, a rent in the fabric of space.
“This was Auntie Joe’s room,” Karen explained. “She... She died two years ago.” The child’s eyes registered some painful memory which, quick as it appeared, was fast gone. “Hey! Dad’s robe doesn’t look bad on you!”
“It feels good to be clean,” May confessed. Her face had a healthy, damp sheen about it. Her hair was wild from towel drying. The guilty towel was wrapped about her neck. “I really don’t know how to—” May interrupted herself with a fierce cough, doubling over and hacking the way Karen’s grandfather had some years ago.
Lung cancer had taken the kind old man. One more death Karen had never understood; if God must take people to join him in heaven, why not take entire families together? Why make them suffer and miss each other? Father had tried to make her understand that Mother, Grandpa Allen, Auntie Joe, and all the others were happier in heaven. But how could they be happy without her?
“Are you okay?” Karen asked, crossing the room to take May by the arm.
“Just tired.”
Karen led her to the bed. “You’ll feel better when you’re snug and warm under the covers. You’ll feel safe, like I always do. No place safer than your own bed.”
“This was your aunt’s bed?”
“Aunt Josephine. Everybody called her Joe.” Karen fluffed up a pillow and positioned it under May’s head. “I’ll leave you alone so you can get some sleep.”
May coughed again, clutching at her chest. When the fit had passed, she shook her head. “Please don’t go. I haven’t had anyone your age talk to me in years.”
“Okay,” Karen agreed, genuinely pleased that May had asked for her company. “What would you like to talk about?”
“I want to know all about you,” May answered without hesitating.
Karen smiled bigger than ever. “Well, I’m eleven years old. I live here with my father. And of course, my Auntie Joe up until a couple years ago. I—”
“What about your mother?”
Karen’s gaze dropped as if to study the pattern on the bed’s comforter, but not fast enough that May couldn’t catch the sudden pain that leaped to her eyes. “Her name was Lilith. She was an artist,” the child answered, overshadowing the entire sentence with the emphasis she put on was.
“Lilith? A beautiful name. Do you know who Lilith was?”
Karen shook her head.
“Isaiah tells us that Lilith was the first woman, created equal to Adam, before Eve. Because Lilith wouldn’t be ruled by Adam, she fled Paradise. She was a protector of children and the helpless, but patriarchal mythology has since made her out to be a demon.” May seemed to realize suddenly that she was talking over the eleven-year old’s head. “Those are your mother’s paintings in the hall?”
He knew one.
In all her light would his mother know him? He imagined the blood she would see on his hands. He took the hunting knife and threw it as hard and as far as he could.
Would he have the time to tell her all the things he had yet to say?
He thought so.
Comfortably Numb
Mother and maiden
was never none but she;
Well may such a lady
Goddes mother be.
–English Carol, 15th Century C.E.
“You’ve barely touched your dinner,” said Ian. There was no concern in his voice, only irritation over the thirty-dollar meal gone cold.
Karen set down the lobster fork. If she hadn’t been so numb, so dislocated from the table, restaurant, even herself, she might have wondered how long she’d been holding the small silver fork without using it, poised over the scalded carcass of her dinner.
“We need to talk about this, Karen.”
“Take me home.” She knew she needed to eat. For the sake of the tiny life within her if nothing else. She wondered fleetingly what Ian would say about the child when and if she finally got around to telling him.
“Your dinner—”
“Take me home.”
Ian signaled for the check and asked that the car be brought around.
Moments later they walked out into the December night, she in the full-length sable he’d bought her and he in his Italian wool greatcoat. It was snowing: slow, heavy flakes meandering ahead of an impending tempest, cloaking the filth of New York City’s streets in a clean facade of white. The wind was up. Despite a coat that had once warmed nearly a hundred bright-eyed, black mammals, the cold air struck at her like frozen slivers of glass. She was aware of it on some automatic level, but failed to respond.
Their Mercedes, its exhaust a plume of white in the frigid air, waited at the curb. As Ian pulled away, he tried again.
“Look, Karen. What you saw last night... Well, it didn’t mean anything. It just. Happened.” He waved his hand as if sweeping away an annoying smoker’s exhalation, as if what had happened held no more significance than that. “Jeannie and I have been programming together a long time and something just snapped.” He accelerated to clear the final seconds of a yellow light. “It won’t happen again, babe. I promise. Tomorrow I’ll fire her, and she’ll be out of our lives. Forever.”
“This isn’t the first time,” Karen whispered, watching the wipers sweep clinging flakes from the windshield. Not the first time with Jeannie. Not the first time with another woman.
“Sure it was,” he lied. “The first. Only. And last.”
“It’s only the first time I caught you.” Against her will, she shuddered, revulsion sinking through her shields to rattle at her heart. In her bed. They’d been in her bed! The king-sized four-poster they’d bought just after the wedding. Pale lilac sheets and naked flesh.
The next light caught them. Ian brought the Mercedes to a halt, sliding the last few feet on the icy street. “What are you accusing me of? You’ve no other proof of infidelity! All you’ve got is this one isolated incident.” He let out a sigh that reeked of the garlic butter in which he’d dipped his lobster. “And even if I was playing the field, you couldn’t actually blame me, could you? You’re such a goddamn cold bitch anymore, Karen. How many times have we made love in the past month? When was the last time you came to bed without that stupid grannie gown on, huh? When was the last time you enjoyed sex?”
The questions came so fast all she could do was huddle against the cold window, staring blindly at the falling snow.
“You have no proof,” he finished.
“I don’t need any,” she mouthed soundlessly against the glass.
“What’d you say?”
The light went green. Someone behind them gave his car horn a quick tap. The short blast was followed by a longer one when Ian failed to move. Determined to wait for an answer from her, Ian flipped his finger in the rearview mirror.
The car behind them clunked into reverse, then slewed in the snow as the driver sought to back up and go around. As the car slid, its headlights played across the walls of the buildings on Karen’s side of the street, illuminating a dark alley and huddled shapes within. For the space of a single breath, she glimpsed a face—a pale, slug-like visage against hungry shadows. Then it was lost as the light passed on.
Ian backhanded her across the upper arm. “Answer me! What kind of proof do you have that I haven’t been faithful these last four years?”
Karen’s hand found the smooth cool of the door handle.
“Dammit! You can’t just go accusing someone of sleeping around without proof!”
Wasn’t last night proof enough? She almost laughed, but it wasn’t in her. Hadn’t been for years.
The irritated driver pulled to a halt abreast of Ian’s door. A power window slid down. The driver, ex-wrestler, ex-bouncer, one-time football player and full-time bully—she recognized the type—leaned over and yelled into the snow and wind. “Who do you think you’re flippin’ off?” His piggish little eyes, buried deep in his fat face, were darker than the storm pressing down on their heads.
All this she caught reflected poorly in her window. Unfocused. Distant. Her attention was beyond, on the alley’s dark recess.
Ian rolled down his own window. “Look, pal...” He was using his masculine, I’m-just-as-tough-as-you-are tone, the machismo droll engaged in every male to male confrontation she’d ever witnessed. Whatever else Ian said was filtered as the wind brought another sound to her ears.
There was music coming from Pigeyes’ car: deep, echoing bass; the strains of acoustic guitars; and a haunting, baroque melody. As she opened her car door, the accompanying words assaulted her with a blast of cold air. She recognized the song: Pink Floyd’s “Comfortably Numb.”
Karen very nearly slipped in the snow getting out of the car. Somewhere distant, Pigeyes was ordering Ian out of the Mercedes so he could “kick his goddamn ass.”
Ian made a futile grab for her trailing coat. “Wait! Where do you think you’re going?” And to Pigeyes: “Shut up!”
Not bothering to close the door, she walked woodenly towards the alley. Something pulled her. Something old. Something forgotten. Something that screamed to be dredged up from the bottom of the lake that was her mind.
The alley took her into its dark embrace and wrapped her with tendrils barbed in ice. Like sinking into an abyss, she was drawn down the narrow cul-de-sac towards the nebula at its nether end. Footsteps sounded behind her—Ian in pursuit, leaving the Mercedes on the street. As she passed within, a shadow separated from the total darkness of the righthand wall and interceded between Ian and her back. She heard Ian curse, heard a metallic rasp as if some weapon had been cocked, drawn, unleashed, or slipped ‘tween flesh and bone, heard a hoarse whisper, threatening, promising, checking Ian’s flight down the alley after her.
But none of that held any priority with her.
Blinking tenacious snowflakes from her eyelashes, Karen found a cluster of people at the alley’s dead end. Wrapped in newspaper and rags, the dozen or so homeless were arrayed about an old woman. The woman sat hunched over the blue flames of a can of sterno. Karen didn’t even wonder that the fire’s light hadn’t pierced the veil of black permeating the rear of the alley to be visible from the street. Wonder required thought, deliberation, purpose, and she was running on automatic. She was one of Ian’s computer programs, running start to finish. Neither of which she knew the first thing about.
The old woman was wrapped, head to foot, in the only visible blanket, a ragged, once-padded thing tossed from a moving van God alone knew how many years ago. Her stooped shoulders and lowered head had collected a thin shawl of snow. Wisps of gray hair, alive in the winter wind, trailed out from under the blanket.
Ignoring the others, Karen knelt in front of the old woman. The snow suddenly let up, and the storm hung over them.
“Go away,” the old woman said without looking up.
From her purse Karen pulled out a twenty. She laid it between them and waited. When the vagrant made no move to pick it up, Karen leaned closer, feeling the meager heat of the sterno on her face. “You’ll freeze tonight.”
The old woman looked up then, her head rising slowly as if held down by some immense weight about her neck. Her face read of an ancient struggle with time. Thin, dry lips. Cheeks and nose bitten red. Wattled neck. Fine white hair frozen on her chin. Her eyes were striking, deeply centered in weathered, radial lines. They were gray eyes, flat and silver, like stainless steel in the lambent light of the sterno. Eyes that drank in everything and gave nothing back.
“How much peace of mind will twenty dollars buy you, child?”
Those silver eyes sucked Karen out of herself, pulled her across the little can of flames and into a vortex that drew her down. She sank through a mercury pool, spinning helpless in some temporal maelstrom, to emerge...
...Eleven years old.
“How much peace of mind will twenty dollars buy you, child?”
Karen looked from the two tens in her outstretched hand to the face of the old woman she’d found huddled against a dumpster on the street. The timeworn face was a blank slate, devoid of answers to questions Karen didn’t know to ask. Karen looked back to her father, but he only shrugged, shivering despite his heavy coat. The sleet was coming down harder, freezing on his shoulders, collar, and hat.
“Can we give her more?”
Father let out a sigh, his face obscured momentarily by foggy breath, and reached into his pocket. He always carried his money wadded into his front pocket, reserving his ancient leather billfold for one tattered, all but faded-out photo of his own parents—her grandparents, long dead—and, of course, Mom’s picture. She’d seen it often, a snapshot of a slender, blond woman, too young to have been married to her Dad until one read the faded inscription and accompanying date on the photo’s backside.
Till time catches up with us
and blinds all our senses...
—Lilith 3/3/66.
In 1966, the same year Karen was born, they’d probably made an enchanting couple. The years since had wrought dreadful changes in her father, chief among them the forlorn expression permanently writ on his face. If not for Karen—and despite her tender age, Karen was as certain of this as she was of her own name—Father would have wasted away and happily joined his dead wife.
Karen often caught him holding the photo or staring at Mother’s paintings and crying softly to himself. He never knew she saw him like that; she was always careful to sneak away quietly. It was his secret pain, which she somehow understood he wanted to bear alone, without her solace, without her tears adding to his own. As young as she was, she respected him for that. There were things a body had to do alone, secret things, things a body kept for themselves, not out of selfishness or greed, but out of... well, maybe out of need. Like the egg she kept wrapped and hidden in her bottom drawer. That egg represented a small part of her mother that was Karen’s alone to take out and hold close, to treasure, and to cry over when the need arose.
Father peeled off another ten and two fives, and handed them to Karen. She added them to the two bills she held and offered them again to the old woman. Forty dollars. More money than the eleven year old had ever held at one time The old woman only stared at it.
Karen looked back at her father. He only shrugged again and nodded his head toward their old Plymouth waiting across the street. Time to be going home, that nod said. Before we both freeze to death worrying about this stubborn old woman.
“Please take the money, Grandmother,” Karen pleaded. Grandmother came out sounding like an honorary title, almost as if Karen had called her Mister President.
The woman reached out and took the now soaked bills. Ice cracked where the sleet had frozen over the ragged blanket wrapped about her shoulders. As the money exchanged hands, they touched for the briefest of seconds. Through the wet and the cold, Karen felt a gentle warmth emanating from the woman.
Father laid a hand softly on Karen’s shoulder. “We’d better go before—” He stopped midsentence, but she knew what he had been about to say. We’d better go before we freeze to death or before we catch our death of cold, or... no matter. What he had been about to admit was that the old woman didn’t stand a chance of surviving tonight’s freeze.
Ten years ago, teenagers drag-racing had side-swiped her mother’s Buick, sending it over an embankment railing. The Buick had tumbled seventy feet to a muddy gulch below, where it had stopped, upside down, Mother hanging out the crushed passenger side. She had been knocked unconscious in the fall. The railing had ripped most of the passenger door down the middle, leaving jagged metal behind. That metal had ripped open Mother’s leg. Unconscious, with no one to stem the flow of bright blood spurting out across the ground, Mother had bled to death.
Maybe no one saw the car go over the railing. (Leastwise, no one except the teenagers who caused the accident to begin with.) Maybe the traffic had flowed by innocently, ignorant of the loving, giving mother and wife lying in the ditch, bleeding her future out on the ground. Maybe.
But maybe the truth was that no one wanted to stop. No one cared enough to help. No one cared enough to scramble down that bank and apply the pressure that would have stopped Mother’s bleeding—and saved her life.
“Karen, it’s time to go home.”
“May,” the old woman whispered, the single syllable nearly lost in the wind and the hiss of sleet on the sidewalk.
“Spring,” Karen thought aloud. “Yes, I’ll be glad when May gets here.”
The old woman shook her head. “No. That’s my name.”
“Karen,” the child offered in return. The old woman nodded silent acceptance of the courtesy. No words were necessary; they both understood the simple exchange of names to be of some importance. Karen looked back over her shoulder at her waiting father. “She’ll freeze to death tonight, won’t she?”
Father frowned when he saw the petulant look on her face. His hands were thrust deep in his pockets as if hiding them might somehow keep him from touching the situation developing before him. “You’ve given her more than enough to get a decent room down the street, Karen. She won’t freeze.”
The child screwed her face up in deep thought. Without looking back at the woman, without lowering her voice any, she asked, “Would you rent a room to her?”
Father shifted his weight from one foot to the next, taking a sudden interest in the ice freezing around his shoes.
“And even if someone did rent her a room, what about tomorrow night?”
On the street, above the sound of Pink Floyd on hundred-watt speakers, Pigeyes was yelling for Ian to come out of the alley and “take his medicine.”
In the alley, Ian held up empty hands and backed slowly away from the bright steel waving in his face. “Listen,” he tried to explain, “I just need to get my wife, then I’ll be out of your hair.”
The youth with the switchblade grinned stupidly, his eyes violent. The glimmering steel moved threateningly, cutting intricate patterns in the heavy dark.
“Karen!” Ian called. He rose on his toes to look over his assailant’s shoulder, but the other end of the alley was impenetrable darkness, a rent in the fabric of space.
“This was Auntie Joe’s room,” Karen explained. “She... She died two years ago.” The child’s eyes registered some painful memory which, quick as it appeared, was fast gone. “Hey! Dad’s robe doesn’t look bad on you!”
“It feels good to be clean,” May confessed. Her face had a healthy, damp sheen about it. Her hair was wild from towel drying. The guilty towel was wrapped about her neck. “I really don’t know how to—” May interrupted herself with a fierce cough, doubling over and hacking the way Karen’s grandfather had some years ago.
Lung cancer had taken the kind old man. One more death Karen had never understood; if God must take people to join him in heaven, why not take entire families together? Why make them suffer and miss each other? Father had tried to make her understand that Mother, Grandpa Allen, Auntie Joe, and all the others were happier in heaven. But how could they be happy without her?
“Are you okay?” Karen asked, crossing the room to take May by the arm.
“Just tired.”
Karen led her to the bed. “You’ll feel better when you’re snug and warm under the covers. You’ll feel safe, like I always do. No place safer than your own bed.”
“This was your aunt’s bed?”
“Aunt Josephine. Everybody called her Joe.” Karen fluffed up a pillow and positioned it under May’s head. “I’ll leave you alone so you can get some sleep.”
May coughed again, clutching at her chest. When the fit had passed, she shook her head. “Please don’t go. I haven’t had anyone your age talk to me in years.”
“Okay,” Karen agreed, genuinely pleased that May had asked for her company. “What would you like to talk about?”
“I want to know all about you,” May answered without hesitating.
Karen smiled bigger than ever. “Well, I’m eleven years old. I live here with my father. And of course, my Auntie Joe up until a couple years ago. I—”
“What about your mother?”
Karen’s gaze dropped as if to study the pattern on the bed’s comforter, but not fast enough that May couldn’t catch the sudden pain that leaped to her eyes. “Her name was Lilith. She was an artist,” the child answered, overshadowing the entire sentence with the emphasis she put on was.
“Lilith? A beautiful name. Do you know who Lilith was?”
Karen shook her head.
“Isaiah tells us that Lilith was the first woman, created equal to Adam, before Eve. Because Lilith wouldn’t be ruled by Adam, she fled Paradise. She was a protector of children and the helpless, but patriarchal mythology has since made her out to be a demon.” May seemed to realize suddenly that she was talking over the eleven-year old’s head. “Those are your mother’s paintings in the hall?”
