Precious and Fragile Things Read online

  He did. Gilly found a smaller pan and set it on the floor in front of him. She added enough cold water to make the temperature bearable and got up. “Take off your boots.”

  Todd bent, but she could clearly see that his fingers were too numb to work the laces. Gilly knelt and did it for him. He groaned as she pulled off the battered hiking boots, and then the socks beneath. His toes were ice cubes.

  “I’ll make some more tea.”

  He caught her hand as she turned and tugged her close to him. “Now you’re being nice to me again. I don’t get it.”

  At first, Gilly couldn’t form her answer into words. She held his icy feet between her hands to warm them a bit before she slipped them into the hot water. He hissed and clenched his fists, but didn’t protest.

  “Todd,” Gilly said finally with a sigh. “Being nice doesn’t have to mean…”

  She stopped, mouth working as she tried to put her thoughts into speech. “I can take care of you without caring for you.”

  She raised her gaze to his face and instantly wished she hadn’t. Beneath the ruddy color from the cold, he’d gone pale. His mouth set in a thin line.

  “I guess you can,” he said.

  “I have a home,” Gilly said. “I have a family. And I will get back to them someday. Whether you want to believe it or not. I believe it. I have to.”

  He nodded twice, sharply. “You still want to get away from me.”

  “How can you ask me that?” Gilly reached for a towel, lifted his feet from the water, dried them. “Todd, can you expect anything else from me?”

  He leaned forward, grasped her upper arms. His eyes searched hers. “Yeah. I think I can.”

  Gilly shook her head. “No. You can’t. It’s too much to expect. Even for you.”

  “What’s that mean? Even for me? Even for a dumbass like me, you mean?”

  “That’s not what I meant, and you should know that,” Gilly said. “I meant that no matter what I know…”

  His fingers tightened. She restrained a wince. “You pity me.”

  “I empathize with you, Todd. There’s a difference.”

  His grip softened, but not by much. His gaze did, too. “I ain’t asking for so much. Am I, really?”

  “It’s too much.”

  He shook her a little, and the role of power had shifted. Now kneeling at his feet felt subservient instead of caretaking. Gilly started to get to her feet, but Todd’s grasp stopped her.

  “What can you give?”

  She looked at him, then waved her hand at his feet. “This. It’s all I have for you, Todd.”

  He gave a low, growling laugh. “You want to be my fucking mother?”

  “Interesting choice of words,” Gilly murmured.

  “You shut…you shut your mouth.” He pushed away from her, got up, took long, limping strides to the edge of the room before turning back to her. “Is that what you think of me?”

  Gilly shook her head, her knees hurting on the bare floor. She got up. “No, of course not.”

  He drew a cigarette from the crumpled pack and threw the empty paper to the floor. The smoke seeped from his nostrils in slow, twin tendrils, Fog. He picked a bit of tobacco off his tongue with one finger, turned and spit onto the floor. When he looked at her, Gilly wanted to turn away from the bluntness in his eyes.

  “What, then?” he shouted. “The fuck am I to you, then, Gilly? Because I know I’m something to you.”

  Todd’s voice dipped low and soft. Hopeful. “I am, right?”

  She couldn’t answer and he seemed to take her silence as assent.

  “I never met anyone like you, Gilly.” Todd’s smile was lopsided. “You…you’re clean. When I’m around you, I feel clean, too.”

  “Then let me stay that way,” Gilly said. “Please.”

  Todd shook his head and bent his head to stare up at her through the sheaf of his dark hair. “I don’t think I can.”

  “You have to.”

  He shook his head. “I ain’t that good a person, Gilly.”

  A drop of cold sweat trickled down her spine, but she refused to shiver. “You can be. If you try.”

  Todd drew deep on his cigarette, watching her. Thinking. When she saw he wasn’t going to say anything else, Gilly took the basin into the kitchen and emptied it. They did not continue the conversation.

  44

  What did he mean to her? The answer wasn’t “nothing.” Gilly knew it, even if she wasn’t going to tell him. She thought about what it might be through the night as she fought sleep so she wouldn’t have to face her dreams. She’d sought refuge in them before, but now they only made everything hurt worse.

  For the first time ever, Gilly waited for the sound of her mother’s voice to ring in her head, and it didn’t come. She could hear her mother’s words, but it wasn’t like she was there, speaking them, and they were only memory, time-faded and inexact.

  Roses, she thought, prompting with no response. What had her mother said about roses? What had she said about…love?

  No. Not that. It was impossible.

  Love had many shapes, but this was not and could not be one of them. She couldn’t love Todd. It was wrong. It was a perversion of the very word. Whatever she felt for him—and she could admit it was something, yes, she could do that, it was most emphatically not love.

  She felt as responsible for him as she did for her children, yet she didn’t feel maternal toward him. She believed he knew her as well as her husband did, but she didn’t feel romantic toward him, either. Everything about Todd was chaos and conflict.

  She heard his step on the stairs, the shuffle of his feet along the floor to his bed. The creak of the springs. She waited for the soft sigh of his snore, which she’d missed while he was avoiding her by sleeping on the couch. Instead, she heard him murmur her name.

  “Yes, Todd.”

  His reply came with the shuffle of feet on the floorboards and a shadow standing, hesitating, in the space between the partition. There was no moon, or it hadn’t yet risen, and all she could see was the black, hunched shape of his shoulders. She heard his breathing.

  She tensed.

  He came closer and sat, close enough to touch her if he wanted but not touching her. He was always so warm, tonight no exception. She could feel him even through the blankets.

  “I told you about Kendra,” Todd said.

  “Yes. Your girlfriend. She wanted to get married and you didn’t.” Gilly shifted in the covers, turning onto her side to face him though she couldn’t see anything more than the shape of him.

  “Yeah. See, the thing about Kendra, was that she wasn’t like the other girls I’d ever been with. I mean, I never really had a lot of girlfriends. Just some girls I got with every once in a while when I could. But when I met her, it was different. She was nice. She lived in a nice house. She had a job.”

  “What did she do?”

  “She taught kindergarten.” Todd laughed harshly. “Can you believe that, Gilly? Me with a fucking kindy teacher. She spent all day with little kids. And she went out with me at night. I bet if those parents had known what she was up to, they wouldn’t have been so happy.”

  Gilly was a parent. If she’d found out her daughter’s teacher was dating a convict, she’d have had trouble with it, no doubt. “It was her social life, not any of their business.”

  “Yeah, well. You know how people are.”

  “Yeah. I do.”

  Todd shifted and the bed dipped a little as he half turned toward her. “She had the prettiest laugh. And she laughed a lot when she was with me. I laughed, too. When I was with Kendra, I felt…”

  Gilly waited.

  “Luminescent,” Todd said finally. “You know that word?”

  “Yes. I do.”

  “It’s a good one.”

  She smiled in the dark. “A very good one.”

  “One of Uncle Bill’s favorites,” Todd said off handedly. “But that’s how I felt when I was with Kendra.”

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