Precious and Fragile Things Read online

  Nobody would blame her. Probably not even Todd. But as she watched him get up from the table and take her plate with him to the sink, Gilly blamed herself.

  “Anyway,” she said. “Thanks.”

  Todd shrugged, his back to her, and put on the kettle. He brought down two mugs, two tea bags. He opened the cupboards, searching until he found a package of chocolate sandwich cookies, the chocolate chip ones they’d made long gone. He opened the package, arranged the cookies on a flowered plate and slid it across the table in front of her.

  “Here,” he said gruffly.

  “No, thanks. I’m not hungry.” Her stomach still hovered on the edge of nausea even as her mouth squirted saliva at the sight of the junk food.

  A faint smile tugged the corner of his lips. “Why aren’t women ever hungry?”

  “I’m really not,” she said, but took a cookie anyway. White frosting edged her fingertip and she licked it off. The sweetness was almost too much, but after a second it settled her stomach.

  “Right.” Todd leaned his rear on the counter and crossed his arms over his chest. “How about just a salad? You want that instead?”

  Gilly frowned. “No. Yuck.”

  He laughed at that and turned off the gas just as the kettle began to whistle. He refilled their mugs, then sat. Today he wore a white tank top beneath an unbuttoned, snap-front Western shirt. He’d rolled the sleeves up to his elbows.

  For the first time, Gilly noticed the tattoo on the inside of his left arm, halfway between his wrist and his elbow. Black ink, stylized numbers. At first she assumed it was a piece of Japanese calligraphy of the sort that had become so trendy over the past few years, people getting inked with words they didn’t know how to read. Or maybe it was tribal ink, another trend she’d never understood unless it was by someone with Native American heritage. Jews weren’t supposed to get tattoos, anyway, but if she’d ever considered getting something permanently embedded in her skin, it would be something that made sense to her personally, not something everyone got just because it was popular.

  She saw it more clearly when he stretched his arm to grab a couple of cookies from the plate. Not calligraphy and not tribal markings, though the numbers had been drawn in a highly stylized form that made them almost indecipherable.

  1 of 6

  It took her a few seconds to puzzle out what it meant, sort of like trying to read a custom license plate, or that funky cross-stitch piece that said Jesus when you looked at it one way and looked like nonsensical blocks the other. As with those things, once she’d figured it out there was no way to not see it, of course. Gilly snorted lightly, feeling stupid.

  “One of six,” she said aloud.

  Todd jumped. His hand hit his mug, sending it to the floor where it shattered. Hot tea splattered. Gilly jumped, too, at the sound, and the sudden motion sent a wave of dizziness through her.

  Todd stood. “Shit. Look at that.”

  He sounded too distressed for a simple accident—even though the mug had broken, the cupboard was stocked with at least a dozen more. It bore the name of a bank and she didn’t see how it could possibly have any sentimental value. Todd kicked at a shard of porcelain, sending it skittering across the floor as he went to the sink for a dish cloth.

  “Be careful,” Gilly said automatically when he bent to wipe at the spill. “Use the broom, first.”

  He paused, head down, shoulders hunched. “I can clean up a broken mug.”

  “I’m not saying you can’t. I just meant…”

  “I know what you meant.” He stood and tossed the towel into the sink while Gilly watched, helpless to understand.

  Todd went through the pantry, out to the lean-to, and came back with an ancient, straggly straw broom. The handle had been painted with whimsical designs and looked utterly out of place here in this cabin that didn’t look like it had seen a woman’s touch in a long time, if ever. In his other hand he gripped a red metal dustpan that looked as old as the chairs on the front porch. He put it on the floor and held it with his boot as he swept up the mug. The straw broom left dirt marks on the floor she’d scrubbed not so long ago, and Gilly made an inadvertent noise of protest.

  Todd looked up at her, brow furrowed. She opened her mouth to complain about the mess he’d made of what had been a relatively clean floor, but stopped herself. He wasn’t hers to scold.

  He finished with the mug while she sipped at her tea and nibbled the cookie his scorn had forced her to take. Sitting while someone else cleaned was such a novelty she had to enjoy it, at least a little, even though she didn’t want to. But when he left again to return the broom and dustpan, Gilly couldn’t stay in her seat.

  She took the dish towel, dampened it, and swiped at the smudges he’d left behind. She looked up at the sound of his boots and discovered him staring down at her. She got up to rinse out the towel, though the water from the tap was too cold to make it easy to clean it.

  “Thanks,” Todd said.

  “You’re welcome.”

  She wrung out the cloth and let it hang over the edge of the sink. “I can make you another cup, if you want. The water’s probably still pretty hot.”

  “Nah.” Todd hovered between her and the table. “I’m good.”

  He’d pulled his sleeves down, a fact Gilly noticed but didn’t comment upon. They stared at each other until he straightened up. He was always taller than she thought he was, probably because he slouched a lot. Taller and with broader shoulders. He took up a lot of space but just now Gilly didn’t feel threatened.

  “Going out for a smoke,” Todd said, though he’d never bothered to either warn her or ask permission in the past.

  She watched him go out the front door. Then she got the broom again and made sure nothing remained on the floor to cut their feet. He’d returned by the time she was rehanging the broom, but if he minded her cleaning up after him, Todd didn’t say.

  19

  She was down to the last few pills and probably didn’t need them, but took them anyway. Medicine that was supposed to make other people wakeful always knocked her out, so she stayed in bed. Besides, beneath the blankets she was warm, and under their protection she didn’t have to face Todd.

  The more she slept, the easier sleep seemed to find her. Gilly, who hadn’t gone one night through without interruption in more than five years, now spent more than half the day in bed, creeping downstairs only to use the toilet and sneak a few slices of stale bread while Todd was outside smoking or chopping wood for the stove. She was back upstairs before he came in, and when he came into the attic to stand over her, staring, Gilly closed her eyes and pretended to be dreaming. She’d always been a vivid dreamer, but now her dreams became more real to her than her life.

  Sometimes she dreamed of things that had already happened. Her wedding to Seth, dancing in a high school musical, falling off her bike and cutting her leg badly enough to need stitches. Other things she dreamed of had never happened and likely never would—appearing on Broadway in the role of Annie Oakley, flying, attending Harvard.

  She dreamed of her children, the sweet scent of their skin and the softness of their cheeks as she cuddled them. The days of nursing them as infants, when their tiny mouths puckered so sweetly against her breast and their fingers curled around hers. Those dreams left her aching and desperate to sleep again, both to escape and embrace the dreams.

  And she dreamed of roses. Always roses, never tulips or daffodils or lilies, all flowers she actually had in her yard. Giant fields of roses and herself in the middle of them, watching them bloom and die over and over while she tried to grab them up and never succeeded. She didn’t know what a dream dictionary would say about the symbolism of roses. She knew what they meant to her.

  When night fell and Todd again climbed the stairs, this time to go into his own bed, Gilly waited until she heard the soft rumble of his snores before she went down again to use the toilet. She was back under the blankets in less than ten minutes.

  As a child it