Delicate Monsters Page 5

  “Where were you?” the girl asked again, twisting her body like a helix as she spoke. Then she flopped beside him with a sigh. Emerson’s breath hitched inward. It was May in fall—pretty as a postcard and then some. She smiled warmly at him then leaned so close that one of her dusky plum-ripe breasts threatened to leap from her tank top and graze against Emerson’s shoulder. But what should have felt like a gift, didn’t. Dead leaves swirled in the wind. Numbness swirled through his veins.

  Emerson shrugged listlessly. “Had to take my brother to the hospital.”

  “Is he okay?”

  “No. I mean, yes. I mean, he’ll be all right. But no, he’s not okay. He never is.”

  She frowned. “What’s wrong?”

  what’s wrong what’s wrong what’s wrong

  A chill slithered up Emerson’s spine. Those two words were the echo of his childhood. They were the ones whispered in hospital corridors, the ones spilled from the lips of social workers and lawyers. They embodied the existential mystery that was Miles.

  “They’re running tests,” he said. “Could be a virus. Could be his allergies. Could be…”

  “Could be what?” May asked.

  “Anything.” Emerson shuddered. The memory of breaking down the bathroom door that morning and finding his brother splayed out on the floor, his heartbeat tachy, left leg twitching, wearing nothing but a dingy pair of briefs with a torn waistband, was a moment he couldn’t stop replaying in his mind. Their mother had been working graveyard out at the home in Napa, so Emerson was the one who’d called for an ambulance. Who’d ridden to the ER with Miles. But what’s wrong wasn’t what he’d shouted at his brother as he grabbed his shoulder and tried to shake him out of his seizing stupor. No, Emerson had demanded to know what happened?

  Which was a different question altogether.

  “He’s sick a lot, isn’t he?” May looped her arm through his. “You’ve mentioned that.”

  “Yes.”

  “Is it serious?”

  “No,” Emerson said. “That’s the thing. He’s sick a lot, but the doctors never find anything wrong.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  Emerson grunted in response. Of course she didn’t. May had moved to Sonoma their sophomore year. She hadn’t been here when his family had been dragged through hell, landing first in the local paper, then the county courthouse. She didn’t know how Gracie Tate’s name had become linked to the cruelest sort of torture. The whole thing had unraveled after a string of hospitalizations when Miles was ten. Emerson grew five inches that same year, slamming into puberty like an ox, but even he couldn’t stop his little brother from wilting into sad bouts of stomach pains and fever spikes. Eventually, a concerned hospital employee filed a CPS report, claiming there was a pattern to Miles’s symptoms, one that indicated he was in urgent danger from the person trusted most to care for him. There was even a name for it, the report said: Munchausen syndrome by proxy. That’s what it was called when doting mothers poisoned their children, injecting them with pus and feeding them actual shit, all so they could make their kids sick with the sole purpose of taking them to the hospital in order to be saved. Their mother had done no such thing, of course, but it turned out proving you weren’t killing your own kid for attention wasn’t so easy, even when you were innocent. It turned out some lies were so lurid everyone wanted to believe they were true.

  “I don’t understand it either,” Emerson said.

  May made a clucking noise of sympathy and brushed her cheek against his shoulder. She was practically nuzzling him now, her nose to his chin, and it seemed like she wanted him to reach out, wrap his arm around her, only Emerson didn’t do that, because the closer May got, the closer that plum-ripe breast came to slipping right out into the open. It bulged from her shirt in a promising way, like a sea creature coming up for air, and Emerson stared. He couldn’t do anything else. He thought if he shifted, just the tiniest bit, then the plum would be resting right in his palm. It was the perfect size for him to hold, the perfect shape for him to reach up with his thumb and forefinger and gently grasp its dark center—

  “I have to go,” he said, getting to his feet so quickly, May collapsed sideways like a house of cards.

  She righted herself, but her expression was one of bewilderment. “What’s the matter?”

  He bent awkwardly, grabbing for his backpack and stuffing his uneaten lunch in with his books and papers. “I need to call the hospital.” A lie, but Emerson didn’t know what else to say. He couldn’t sit here with her curled against him, fantasizing about grabbing her tits with his dick getting hard. Not with everything that was going on. Not when all this with Miles could be starting over again, and his mom might need him.

  Fuck, he thought. My fucking brother.

  May watched him closely. “Is there anything I can do?”

  Emerson shook his head. Pulled his backpack over his shoulders. Ran fingers through his hair.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  chapter twelve

  It was Friday night, and Chad showed up for his date with Sadie in a black Civic with tinted windows and a fishtail spoiler.

  Of course he did.

  Sadie’s mother peered from the living-room window out to where both boy and car idled. The Honda was lit up by the glow of custom lighting that lined the circular drive and the strands of tiny white bulbs that twined around the massive oak gate leading out to the rest of the property—those sprawling acres that included gardens and grapevines and barrel halls and tasting rooms and even the type of underground cellar that held not just wine or roots but the deepest and darkest of secrets.

  “Great choice,” her mother said. “You sure know how to pick them.”

  Sadie bristled. “I met him at that place you sent me to.”

  “What place?”

  “The wilderness camp. In Santa Cruz.”

  “Interesting. I thought I sent you to an all-girls camp.”

  This made Sadie smile her warmest smile. “You did.”

  “You’d better come home tonight,” her mother warned. “I mean it.”

  Sadie didn’t answer. Of course she planned on coming home, but no one needed to know that but her. She grabbed her coat and skipped from the house to where Chad stood waiting by the driver’s-side door, his best bad-boy scowl punctuating his pimply face. Sadie skipped because her mother was watching, and she skipped because it meant she hadn’t a care in the world.

  She didn’t, after all.

  Care.

  *

  They went to the drive-in out by the community college. Across the road, a football game lit up the field, all Friday-night bright, the air humming with the crush of bodies and bones, the sweet-sick scent of violence.

  A superhero film played on the screen. The men were muscular and bland, the women pale and spiteful, the whole plot nonexistent, but none of this stopped Chad from complaining loudly about the game and the noise and the light pollution while they sat on the hood of his car.

  “Should be illegal to build a football stadium next to the drive-in,” he growled.

  Sadie ran her fingers over the car’s glossy paint job in a swirling motion. Something raw pulsed beneath her rib cage, like her body was sending messages in Morse. She didn’t mind the football game, and she really didn’t get what Chad was going on about. Real violence was preferable to the fictional kind. Real violence told the truth, after all. “Maybe the stadium was here first.”

  Chad looked at her. “Was it?”

  She shrugged. “How would I know?”

  “I want to fool around,” he said, reaching for her tits, and even though they were sitting there, right out in public, Sadie let him. He pinched and squeezed, and she waited, wondering if she would feel something. She did sometimes, her indifference building into want then greed. Other times, though, she just felt disgusted by the effort. Like now.

  She swatted his hand away. “Not here.”

  “In the car then.”


  “Mmm,” she told him, hopping to the ground. “I want to do something.”

  “Come on, babe…,” he whined, but Sadie reached and pulled him down with her and away from the car. Chad wasn’t meek like Roman, but she still couldn’t or wouldn’t explain to him what it was that smoldered inside of her. He needed to fuck. She needed something else. It was like they spoke different languages. Together, they crept down the rows of vehicles, winding farther and farther from the screen. Wafts of pot smoke drifted from open windows. Chad slid a flask from his jacket pocket and drank from it.

  When they reached the end of the narrow pathway that ran between the cars, Sadie stopped. The two of them huddled in the shadow of the snack bar, where the roar of the football game echoed off the cement wall, louder than ever. Sadie pulled out her American Spirits. Lit up.

  “Those make your mouth taste shitty,” Chad said.

  “You want to taste my mouth?”

  Chad grinned and groped her again. Sadie didn’t push him away, but she didn’t do any groping of her own. Instead she sat stone still as she watched people walking to and from the snack line. It wasn’t crowded, but there was a constant stream—families, married couples, college students on dates. Not who Sadie was looking for.

  Not what she needed.

  Then Sadie saw someone who made her sit up jackrabbit straight. She jumped to her feet, yanking her shirt down and ignoring the way Chad’s eyes flashed with frustration.

  “Trey,” she called out, and when he didn’t answer, she said it louder: “Trey!”

  He turned, swiveling his tall basketball body around. He looked right at her.

  “I want to ask you a question.”

  Trey’s jaw clenched, and Sadie did her best to put him at ease. She smiled as she walked toward him, tilting her head to one side, playing with her hair.

  “Have you seen Emerson?” she asked.

  Trey’s gaze darted to where Chad sat sullenly on the ground, sucking down more of whatever disgusting booze he’d dumped inside that flask of his.

  “What do you want with Emerson?” Trey snapped.

  “I told you at that party. He’s an old friend of mine. We go way back.”

  “He sure doesn’t talk about you like you’re a friend.”

  “Well, I bet I’ve known him longer than you have.”

  “Oh, yeah?”

  “We met right after his dad killed himself in that Mustang. Fourth grade.”

  Trey’s eyes widened at this.

  “You didn’t know?” Sadie asked.

  “I knew about his dad. But not … not the car.”

  “It fucked him up good,” she said. Understatement of the year, of course.

  “His brother’s in the hospital again,” Trey said quickly. “He’s always getting sick, you know?”

  Brother? Sadie searched the depths of her brain until she conjured a faint image of a small boy who had looked nothing like Emerson, but she could remember nothing else about him. A ghost child. Barely there. Had barely mattered.

  “Trey.” A girl with curled hair and red lipstick came out of the snack bar then. She had a soda in one hand, and the look she gave Sadie held the compulsory female blend of fear and challenge. “Let’s go. This movie sucks.”

  “Yeah, sure.” Trey sounded relieved.

  “Where’re you going?” Sadie asked.

  “He’s not interested,” the girl said, reaching to grab on to Trey’s elbow and guide him away.

  The smoldering need inside of Sadie flared hotter, higher. She spun to face Wilderness Camp Chad. He’d set the flask down on the asphalt and was now tracing the scars on his wrist with his index finger. Well, that was sad, Sadie thought, but not in a pitying way.

  More like pathetic.

  “Come on,” she said. “We’ve found our plans for the night.”

  Chad glanced up. “Yeah? Where we going?”

  Sadie waved at the retreating figures of Trey and his girl. “Wherever the hell they are.”

  chapter thirteen

  Miles was stuck in the belly of the beast. That’s how hospitals always felt to him. Like he was actually inside a living creature, dwelling in its bowels or lodged in some drafty airway or circulatory vessel. It soothed him in a way, to be surrounded by such a tight sense of containment and security—that pulsing rhythm of cause and effect; the vital and haunting sounds of other people being kept alive.

  “Miles.”

  He jolted and looked up from the chair where he was seated. A gray-haired woman stood in the doorway to his room. Her white coat told him she was a doctor, but she wasn’t one he’d ever met before.

  She took a step forward, nodding toward the window. “It’s dark out there.”

  “Yes,” he said, because this wasn’t an observation but a fact. It was almost ten o’clock. Night had fallen. That meant visiting hours were over and Miles was alone.

  Or he had been.

  “What are you looking at?” she asked.

  He shrugged. The answer was nothing and everything, but that wasn’t such a comfortable thing for him to say.

  “Do you think we could talk?”

  “Who are you?”

  She came closer and sat on the edge of the bed. She had brown skin and dark eyes, and her limbs were very thin. Miles could see straight through to her bones. They wrestled and pressed at her flesh when she moved. As if her parts craved freedom more than the harmony of the whole.

  “I’m sorry,” she said gently. “I should’ve introduced myself. I’m Dr. Sahota. The attending pediatrician tonight.”

  “The last doctor that was here said I could go home in the morning.”

  “I saw that in your chart. Do you want to go home?”

  “I want to do what I’m supposed to.”

  “That’s not what I asked.”

  Miles pulled his knees to his chest and hugged them. He knew that wasn’t what she’d asked, but he didn’t intend to answer what she had.

  Dr. Sahota cleared her throat. “The chart also says that your mom was working when you got sick this morning.”

  “Yeah.”

  “So you were by yourself?”

  “No, I wasn’t by myself. My brother was home. He helped me.”

  “What’s your brother’s name?”

  “Emerson.”

  “How old is Emerson?”

  “Eighteen.”

  “He must have been scared.”

  “I don’t know about that.”

  “Why?”

  Miles considered this. “Because my brother is strong.”

  “Being strong doesn’t necessarily mean not being scared.”

  Didn’t it, though? Somewhere above them someone flushed a toilet or turned on a shower because a great whoosh of water suddenly tumbled through the pipes with a rattle, and to Miles it felt like a white dove of fear had awakened inside his chest. The dove fluttered and scratched and cooed against his rib cage, making it hard for him to breathe.

  Dr. Sahota watched him closely. “Do you ever feel scared, Miles?”

  The dove’s wings beat faster, harder, stirring up his pulse, his nerves. His sick, wild thoughts. This doctor was clearly here because she believed something was wrong with him, something worse than the electricity in his brain or the chemicals in his blood, and for a moment Miles longed to open up, to tell her everything: about how he was always scared, every minute of every day. About how the hospital was the one place he felt safe from his fears, wedged as he was in these beast-belly walls. About how he liked the safety but didn’t like the fact that he couldn’t access his visions here. About how he worried the darkness he saw in those visions meant there was darkness inside him, too, but that in a way, he longed for darkness, because even he hated his own weakness sometimes.

  But Miles knew if he said any of these things that Dr. Sahota would think differently of him. That she’d want to keep him here and ask more of him than he was willing to give. And then he wouldn’t know. That was unthinkable. His visions, t
hey were his for a reason.

  And they were the only reason he had for living.

  So Miles shook his head and hoped the nice doctor with the thin skin and moving bones couldn’t see through to the sadness that welled inside him, like reluctant rain clouds gathering for a coming storm.

  “I’m tired,” he lied. “I want to go to bed.”

  She nodded, gave a tight smile. “Okay, then. Sleep well.”

  chapter fourteen

  Emerson stood barefoot in the musty first-floor laundry room of his apartment building as he pulled clothes from the overworked dryer and stuffed them into a plastic laundry basket. He was alone in his Friday-night mundanity. A caged lightbulb hung from the ceiling. The air smelled of hot lint and static.

  When the dryer was empty, Emerson checked the floor for stray socks, then gathered the basket in both arms. He made his way into the darkness outside, walking along the edge of the crumbling parking lot and steering clear of the sagging carport. The stars were out, and a harvest moon hung low in the sky. It prowled close to the hilltops like a great amber beast hot on the heels of its unlucky prey.

  Back inside the apartment, Emerson found his mother sleeping. She lay curled on the couch in gray sweats and slippers, with the television on. He glanced at the screen. It was one of those housewives shows. Emerson hated the people on those shows, what with their designer clothes and vapid lives, but he thought maybe he could understand why his mom liked to watch. No one on those shows ever worried about paying bills on time. Plus, they complained so damn much, they made it easy to forget your own problems.

  He set the laundry basket down on the carpet near the window and pulled a faded quilt over his mother. Then he switched the floor lamp off, but left the television on. The noise would be a good distraction from the yelling that would start up once the neighbors got drunk enough to stumble home from the bar in a bad mood.