Precious and Fragile Things Read online

  He shook his head. “Damn. What’s it about?”

  His voice had a smoker’s rasp. He talked slowly, as if choosing each word was a mental strain, but he didn’t slur his words or use bad grammar. His voice matched the rest of him, unkempt and battered.

  “It’s about Bat Boy.” Gilly’s eyes scanned the road signs, looking for one that showed an exit or gas station ahead. “It’s…it’s just fun.”

  “Who the hell is Bat Boy?”

  She hesitated, knowing already how the answer would sound. “He’s half human, half bat. They found him in a cave down in Virginia.”

  “You’re shitting me.” Even his curses were clipped and precise, as though he was speaking written dialogue instead of his own thoughts.

  “It’s a story,” she said. “From the Weekly World News. I don’t think it’s real.”

  He laughed. “No shit.”

  “There’s a gas station ahead. Do you want me to pull over?”

  She tensed, waiting for his answer. He shrugged, leaned forward to check the gas gauge again. “Yeah.”

  She signaled and slowed to exit. Her heartbeat accelerated and her palms grew moist. Anxiety gripped her, and a sense of loss she refused to acknowledge because she didn’t want to think what it meant.

  Apparently he remembered the knife, for now he pulled it up and waved it at her again. “Don’t forget I have this.”

  As if she could. “No.”

  Ahead of them was the parking lot, busy even at this time of night. Bright lights made Gilly squint. She pulled the truck up to the pumps and turned off the engine. She waited for instructions, though normally being told what to do chafed at her. Now she felt as though she could do nothing else but wait to be told what to do. How to do it.

  He leaned close enough to kiss her. His breath smelled like Big Red gum. “Give me the keys.”

  Gilly pulled them from the ignition and passed them into his palm. His fingers closed over hers, squeezing. She winced.

  “If you so much as flick the headlights, I will gut you like a deer. You got that?”

  She nodded.

  “I’ll pump.” He waited, looking at her. She saw a flicker of apprehension flash across his face, so fast she wasn’t sure she saw it at all. He held up the knife, but low so anyone looking at them wouldn’t see it through the windows. “Don’t get out of the car. Don’t do anything. Remember what I said.”

  She expected him to ask for money. “I don’t have my purse.”

  He made that sound of disgust again, and now he sounded contemptuous, too. “I don’t need your money.”

  He folded the knife and put it into a leather sheath on his belt, slipped the keys into his pocket, then opened his door and went around to the pump, using the keyless remote to lock the door. He fumbled with the buttons and the handle, finally getting the gas to start. Then he went inside.

  Gilly sat and watched him. After a moment, stunned, she realized this was the second time he’d let his attention slide from her. She sat a moment longer, seeing him choose items from the cooler, the racks of snacks and the magazine section.

  From this distance she had her first good look at him. He was tall, at least six-two or -three, if she judged correctly. She’d seen his hair was dark, but in the fluorescent lights of the minimart it proved to be a deep chestnut that fell in shaggy sheaves to just below his shoulders. He didn’t smile at the clerk and didn’t appear to be making small talk, either, as he put his substantial pile of goods on the counter. He motioned to the clerk for several cartons of cigarettes, Marlboro Reds. He was spending a lot of money.

  He didn’t hurry. He didn’t look nervous or wary. She could see the knife in its leather sheath from here, peeking from beneath the hem of his dark gray sweatshirt, but this was rural Pennsylvania. Deer-hunting country. Nobody would look at it twice, unless it was to admire it.

  Outside, the gas pump clicked off. Gilly shifted in her seat. Inside the market, her abductor pulled an envelope from his sweatshirt pocket and rifled through the contents. He offered a few bills to the clerk, who took the money and started bagging the purchases.

  This was it. She could run. He wouldn’t chase her. If he did, he couldn’t catch her.

  She could scream. People would hear. Someone would come. Someone would help her.

  She breathed again, not screaming. The white-faced and thin-lipped woman in the rearview mirror could not be her. The smile she forced looked more like the baring of teeth, a feral grin more frightening than friendly.

  Time had slowed and stopped, frozen. She’d felt this once when she’d hit a deer springing out from the woods near her house. One moment the road had been clear, the next her window filled with tawny fur, a body crushing into the front end of the truck and sliding across the windshield to break the glass. She’d seen every stone on the street, every hair on the deer’s body before it had all become a haze.

  Today she’d felt that slow-syrup of time stopping twice. The first when the man slid across the seat and pointed a knife at her head. The second time was now.

  She wasn’t going back. Not to the vet appointments, the ballet practice, the laundry and the bills. She wasn’t going back to the neediness, the whining, the constant, never-ending demands from spouse and spawn that left her feeling on some days her head might simply explode. She didn’t know where she was going, just that it wasn’t back.

  When he opened the driver’s side door, he looked as startled as she must have been when he made his first appearance into her life. “I…I didn’t think you’d still be here.”

  Gilly opened her mouth but said nothing.

  His eyes cut back and forth as his mouth thinned. “Move over.”

  She did, and he got in. He turned the key in the ignition and put the truck in Drive. Gilly didn’t speak; she had nothing to say to him. With her feet on the duffel bag he’d squashed onto the passenger side floor, her knees felt like they rubbed her earlobes. He pushed something across the center console at her: the latest edition of some black-and-white knockoff of the Weekly World News, not the real thing. The real thing had gone out of publication years before.

  “You care if I smoke?”

  She did mind; the stench of cigarettes would make her gag and choke. “No.”

  He punched the lighter and held its glowing tip to the cigarette’s end. The smoke stung her eyes and throat, or maybe it was her tears. Gilly turned her face to the window.

  He pulled out of the lot and back onto the highway, letting the darkness fall around them with the softness and comfort of a quilt.

  3

  “Roses don’t like to get their feet wet.” Gilly’s mother wears a broad-brimmed straw hat. She holds up her trowel, her hands unprotected by gloves, her fingernails dark with dirt. Her knuckles, too, grimed deep with black earth. “Look, Gillian. Pay attention.”

  Gilly will never be good at growing roses. She loves the way they look and smell, but roses take too much time and attention. Roses have rules. Her mother has time to spend on pruning, fertilizing. Tending. Nurturing. But Gilly doesn’t. Gilly never has enough time.

  She’s dreaming. She knows it by the way her mother smiles and strokes the velvety petals of the red rose in her hand. Her mother hasn’t smiled like that in a long time, and if she has maybe it was only ever in Gilly’s dreams. The roses all around them are real enough, or at least the memory of them is. They’d grown in wild abundance against the side of her parents’ house and along gravel paths laid out in the backyard. Red, yellow, blushing pink, tinged with peach. The only ones she sees now, though, are the red ones. Roses with names like After Midnight, Black Ice, even one called Cherry Cola. They’re all in bloom.

  “Pay attention,” Gilly’s mother repeats and holds out the rose. “Roses are precious and fragile things. They take a lot of work, but it’s all worth it.”

  The only flowers that grow at Gilly’s house are daffodils and dandelions, perennials the deer and squirrels leave alone. Her garden is empty. “I’ve tr