Precious and Fragile Things Read online

  “I know that.” Todd’s quiet dignity was a splinter in her skin, stinging. “Anyway. I figured, if I kept going on the way I was, I was going to get sent back to jail. Guys like me just don’t turn their lives around, Gilly. I’m not smart enough to do it, and I can’t work hard enough, either.” He paused, looking out the window. “A guy like me…I figure I was gypped out of a lot of good stuff, and it really pisses me off.”

  His expression darkened, and his hands clenched on the table. “Seems like I been in some sort of jail all my life, Gilly. And I swore I’d never go back. They…they do stuff to you in jail.”

  He didn’t elaborate with words, only with a shudder and a grimace of disgust. “Worse even than some of the homes I was in. They hurt you in jail. I figured…fuck. I figured there’d been a lot of shit in my life I didn’t get to choose. I thought it was time I got to decide what happened to me.”

  “That’s why you didn’t care about the truck. About being found. You didn’t intend to be caught.”

  She thought he might get angry. Todd touched the knife on the table between them. His fingers tightened on the handle, and he tilted the blade again to catch a ray of weak February sunshine. It was the kind of knife a hunter used to gut a deer. It was the knife he’d pointed at her throat on that evening what seemed a lifetime ago. Now he moved it back and forth and made something pretty with it, sunshine in stripes on the table.

  “You know how easy this knife cuts?” he said quietly. “It’s real sharp. I made sure of that. It won’t snag on anything. It’ll just cut. Human skin’s not even an inch deep, you know that? But most people who cut themselves to die, they do their wrists. The blood clots.”

  He drew the flat of the knife crossways over his wrist, then up from the heel of his hand to his elbow. “You’re supposed to go down the lane, not across the street. You ever hear that?”

  “No.”

  “It works better that way. But you know what works even better than that?” He looked at her.

  She looked back. “Todd, don’t.”

  He put the flat of the blade to his throat, then turned it so the edge pressed lightly. His skin dented. “Cutting the carotid artery would fuck you up pretty good. It’s how I’d do it. I thought it all out. One quick slice, and it would be all over. No coming back from that, really. You’d have to be one lucky prick to get through that.”

  He looked at the knife. “I’ve never been lucky.”

  Gilly had nothing more to say than that. Any words she’d find would be empty. Useless.

  Todd put the knife back in its sheath on his belt and pulled his shirt down over it. He put his head in his hands for a moment. When he looked back at her, his face was bleak. “I figured I deserved it, you know? Just once. To decide what happened to me.”

  She couldn’t disagree with that, but she tried. “It doesn’t have to be…”

  “No. Look at you, sitting there. Tell me I’ll get out of this, Gilly. Tell me you’d be able to convince anyone I didn’t take you on purpose. Hell, see if that even matters if it was by accident. I still did it. I still took the truck, I still took you. Tell me anything you could say would make a difference.” He tilted his head, studying her. “Tell me you’d say anything, anyway. Tell the police you ran away with me, right? You’d never.”

  “I have no idea what I’ll say,” she told him honestly. “But I could tell them it was a mistake. It was a mistake, Todd.”

  “There isn’t any room in my life for more mistakes.”

  She believed him when he said he couldn’t survive another stay in jail. “Why didn’t you do it?”

  “You,” Todd said simply. “I didn’t do it because of you.”

  “I couldn’t have stopped you.” And wouldn’t have, not when he’d first taken her. Now? Now Gilly wasn’t sure what she would do should he take the knife from the table and slash at himself with it.

  She’d bind his wounds, she thought suddenly. She would do what she could to save him, if she could. She wouldn’t let him die in front of her any more than he’d allowed her to perish in what had been as much a suicide attempt as he’d planned.

  Todd shook his head. “At first, you had me so rattled I didn’t know what to do. Then, you were so sick…I couldn’t just let you die up here. Couldn’t have that one more mess on my head, you know?”

  She nodded. “Yes.”

  Todd tugged on his shirt hem, covering up the scars no mother’s love had ever soothed. He went to the window and looked out at the blinding whiteness of the snow. “I’m not so sure I want to die anymore, Gilly.”

  Gilly didn’t ask him what had changed his mind. She didn’t want to hear his answer, didn’t want to accept responsibility for his decision not to take his life. But she thought maybe she already had.

  “Tea?” she asked instead, because that was safe.

  Todd didn’t turn from the window. “Yeah. Sure.”

  Gilly boiled the water, and they sat at the table and drank cup after cup until it was gone. Their silence was not hostile. It was the quiet of two people who didn’t need to speak to know what the other was thinking.

  36

  Todd refused to listen to any more of what he termed “that freaky music.” So they stuck to The Doors, some Simon and Garfunkel, and an old Guns N’ Roses CD Gilly’d forgotten she had.

  Gilly found a thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle in one of the armoire drawers, and she set it up on the dining room table. She didn’t like jigsaw puzzles any better than crosswords, as a rule, having neither the patience nor the time to devote to their creation. But here she had nothing but time, even if her patience hadn’t grown. The puzzle was a hard one, an intricate mess of swirling colors without rhyme or reason. Gilly hated it, loathed it, despised, abominated and abhorred it…but every piece set into its proper place gave her an immense satisfaction that had quickly become addictive.

  She glanced up from the puzzle to see Todd in a corner of the room, whaling away on an air guitar to “Welcome to the Jungle.” His dark hair fell across his face as he strummed the imaginary instrument.

  “Wyld Stallynz,” she murmured to herself, but he heard her.

  With no embarrassment, he turned to her. “What?”

  “You remind me of that movie with Bill and Ted,” Gilly said.

  He could always surprise her. With a cock of his head and a smile, a mere hand gesture, Todd transformed himself into the character from the movie.

  “Bogus! Party on, dude!”

  “You’ve seen the movie, I take it,” Gilly said dryly.

  Todd struck a pose with his invisible guitar. “Yeah. Never thought I looked like Ted, though. That dude is good-looking.”

  “You’re—” Gilly clipped the words and looked down to her puzzle, her cheeks heating.

  She didn’t want him to get the wrong idea, not when their co-existence was so precarious. She picked up a piece, set it against one, fitted it beside another. When she finally looked at him, his face was stormy.

  “Don’t make fun of me,” he said. “I know I’m an ugly cuss.”

  With another man she might’ve thought he was fishing for a compliment or trying to make her uncomfortable. Gilly bit her lip and sighed, cursing her own inconstant tongue. She set the puzzle pieces down.

  “Did someone tell you that?”

  He shrugged in a way that showed her the answer was yes. Gilly tapped her fingers on the table. The people in Todd’s life hadn’t been very kind.

  “You’re not ugly.” Gilly touched the puzzle lightly. “I don’t know who told you that, but they were wrong.”

  “Monkey boy,” he muttered, and the way he said it showed it had not been a term of endearment. “Big hands, big feet. Always tripping over myself. Always making a mess of things. I wasn’t little and blond and cute like Ricky Buckwalter, who stole money from the housemother’s purse and bought weed.”

  “Todd, you aren’t ugly.” Gilly put firmness into her voice, the voice of authority.

  He gave her h