Precious and Fragile Things Read online

  “I looked, though. I looked hard. Mama left the car running, and she got out once and did something to the tailpipe, but I didn’t know what she was doing. She was laughing and talking to herself, like something was really funny. Then she started crying, too. After a while, we started to get sleepy, and Mama said ‘It’s not enough.’ Then she took out the knife.”

  Todd stopped. His hands drifted up to bury themselves in his hair, like squeezing his head would press out the rotten memories. He let out a low moan, and though it came from a man’s throat, it was a little boy’s cry.

  “There was so much blood,” he said. “And the smell of it, like lightning, like biting on a penny, I couldn’t breathe. She took Katie first, and Mary didn’t even cry when Mama did her, too. Joey tried to get away but she grabbed him by the shirt and hauled him up front, and she did him, too. Right across the throat, like killing chickens.

  “Freddy screamed, and when she was fighting with him, Stevie started kicking at the glass. Stevie was my oldest brother, but he was still just a kid, and that glass wouldn’t break. Freddy fell on the backseat like he was broke, just like the doll Katie got one year for Christmas that fell down the stairs. Mama was reaching for us, and all the time she was singing. ‘Go to sleep, little baby,’ she sang, that song she used to sing when we was wakeful and wouldn’t go down at night for her.

  “She caught Stevie by the hair, but he was near as big as her, and he pulled away. She couldn’t get into the backseat too easy, not with Freddy in the way, gurgling and kicking. Stevie grabbed the jack from alongside us and he whacked that glass window with everything he had. The glass fell in on us. It got in my hair, all sticky and gummy, and all over my clothes.

  “Mama yanked Freddy out of the way and went for Stevie. She looked like she’d dipped herself in black paint, and all’s I could see was her eyes and her teeth as she grinned. She grabbed Stevie by the back of his shirt, but he pushed me through the hatchback like I wasn’t nothing more than air. ‘Run, Todd!’ he hollered. Then he couldn’t say anything else. I fell over the bumper and landed on my head, and that was the only time I saw any stars that night. I was froze to the ground, couldn’t run. I heard her scream, and then it was quiet. I stayed there all night, until the cops came.”

  “Oh…” No endearment seemed right, no matter how much he needed one. “Oh, Todd.”

  She put her hand on him, and it landed upon a piece of lined notebook paper. Todd looked at her, then down to the paper. He took it from her and opened it, smoothed it out, handed it back.

  “She left a note,” he said.

  Gilly didn’t want to see what sort of words a woman who killed her children might have thought important enough to leave behind, but she took the paper. She smoothed it as Todd had done. In the dim candlelight she’d have been happy not to be able to read it, but she could.

  Nothing stays clean. Three words only, written in a rounded, careful hand in dark ink gone faded with time. Nothing stays clean.

  Gilly imagined that would be true for a mother with six children each only a year or so apart. She thought of her own two children and the swath of destruction they left in their path. No, nothing ever did stay clean.

  Gilly didn’t forget what Todd had done. She didn’t forget her vow to escape him in any way she could. She simply put those things aside. She dropped the folder without care, not bothering to notice if the pages in it scattered on the floor. She opened her arms to him in invitation, and without hesitation.

  “Come here, Todd,” Gilly said, and enfolded him in her arms to weep there until his sobs faded away, and at last, he slept.

  33

  The next morning, Gilly helped Todd clean up the mess he’d made. Together they swept up broken glass and the shattered remains of one of the dining table chairs. Gilly piled all the papers, the newspaper clippings and the note, inside the battered red file and handed it to him.

  “Burn it,” Todd told her.

  She did without hesitation. Then she went to the kitchen sink to wash her hands, because touching those papers had left her feeling as though she’d laid her hands down in the fly-blown corpse of something only recently dead. Todd waited until she had washed, rinsed, then dried her hands.

  “I never told anybody that stuff before.” His gaze was earnest, not shifty. “Lots of people knew, but I never told nobody that story. Not the cops, not the Social Services zombies, not the people in the hospital or even my uncle Bill. You’re the first person I ever told that story to.”

  Would she rather have lived her entire life without hearing that? Definitely yes. But she had heard it, and hearing it, could never forget it. Gilly put the towel back on the hanger.

  “Did telling it make you feel better?”

  The shaggy head moved from side to side, then hesitantly, up and down. “I don’t know for sure. I guess so.”

  “Sometimes, getting something like that off your chest can make a world of difference.” Gilly meant what she said but it still sounded wrong. Sort of patronizing, which wasn’t what she felt at all. It was daytime television psychobabble. There was no way talking about what had happened could ever make it better.

  “You ever have something bad like that happen to you?” Todd’s left hand went habitually to his pocket for the package of cigarettes.

  Gilly thought of her mother’s “vacations,” which were better in many ways than the silent dinners or the bouts of screaming that became weeping. At least, when her mother was in the psychiatric hospital or in rehab, life moved in an orderly fashion. With her mother home, nothing was standard, nothing was reliable. Everything was chaos. Time and prescription drugs had cleared her mother’s mind and helped her stop drinking. Before she died of cirrhosis at age fifty-six, Gilly’s mother had actually become a woman she felt she could be proud to call “mom.”

  “No,” Gilly said. “Nothing so bad as that.”

  “Uncle Bill used to say all families had their dirty little secrets.” Smoke filtered from Todd’s mouth while he spoke. “Ours was just dirtier than most.”

  “God gives us what we can handle.” Again, Gilly wished she could say something more meaningful. Something real that would actually help him, not something regurgitated and lame. “It doesn’t seem fair, but that’s how it is.”

  “Pfft. I stopped believing in God when I was five years old. Not sure I can start now.”

  What kind of God would allow a mother to slaughter her children? Would allow a child to witness it? The same God who would allow a man to take a mother from her children, and a mother to let him take her.

  “I guess that doesn’t matter, as long as God believes in you.” Even as she said them the words tasted false. Sanctimonious. She didn’t blame him for rolling his eyes.

  Todd’s laugh was an ugly sound. “Bullshit. God doesn’t believe in fuckall. Do you believe that, Gilly? Really?”

  “I don’t know, Todd.” It was the truth. Gilly’d spent her share of years wondering about the existence of a higher power. She’d decided believing in God was easier than not, but the real truth was, she spent very little time praying. Religion had become a set of holidays and habits, not of faith.

  “You don’t even believe in Jesus.”

  That was true, too. Gilly shrugged. “Yeah, so? You think Jesus is the only way to believe in God?”

  “It’s the only way I know about.”

  “Well,” Gilly said gently, because she wasn’t trying to lecture or condemn him, “it’s not.”

  Todd shook his head and scrubbed at his face with the back of his hand. He wouldn’t look at her just now. Gilly found herself wanting to take his chin in her hand the way she did with Gandy when he’d made a mess and knew he was in trouble.

  “She used to tell us Jesus suffered the little children. Whatever the fuck that meant. I don’t think it meant what she thought it meant, anyway. But we…they…suffered. Didn’t they?”

  Gilly thought the one who’d suffered most had been Todd, the one left behind. The p