Precious and Fragile Things Read online

  He wet his lips, thinking. Then he scoffed. “No, you wouldn’t have.”

  His easy dismissal irritated her. “Yes. I would.”

  He stared at her, frowning. “You have no idea how hard it would be to kill somebody. You’re not hard like that, Gilly. I can tell.”

  Under any other circumstances, his comment would have been a compliment. Now she was as insulted as if he’d called her a vile name. Her eyes bored into his. “If you hurt my children, nothing in this world could have kept you safe from me.”

  Todd’s gaze flickered. He put his hands on the table, too, and leaned to look into her eyes. “You’re full of shit.”

  He was wrong about her—she did know how hard it was to kill. Her mother, at the end, had begged for Gilly to put a pillow over her face, to give her pills, to turn up the drip on the morphine until it sent her off to sleep for good. Her mother, sallow and scrawny by then, with nothing left of the beauty Gilly had always envied, had wept and pleaded. She’d called Gilly names and raged with breathless whispers, the loudest she could make. She’d demanded.

  Gilly hadn’t killed her mother, but she’d wanted to.

  Gilly leaned forward, too. She could’ve kissed him, if she’d chosen. Or bitten him. “I’m a mother and I would do anything for my children. I would kill you. Believe it.”

  She had never meant anything more.

  “Mothers don’t love their children that much.” Todd stood and shrugged. “It’s something they made up for TV. You don’t have a clue about killing.”

  “Do you?” she shot back, and was instantly afraid of the answer.

  “Are you asking me if I ever killed someone?”

  Did she want to know?

  “Yes,” Gilly said.

  Todd gave her no answer other than a shake of his head.

  Gilly swallowed hard, choking for a second on the breath she’d been holding. “Would you kill me?”

  “Aw, hell! I already told you that’s not why I brought you here, Jesus.”

  “I didn’t ask if you wanted to kill me. I asked if you would.” She didn’t like this side of herself, the relentlessness, but she didn’t stop herself. “If I run away again, and you catch me, will you kill me? Will you kill me anyway? Because someone will come, Todd. Someone will find out where I am, and come for me. You know they will.”

  He ran both hands through his hair, gripping his head for a moment before replying through gritted teeth. “Shut the fuck up, okay?”

  She moved closer, tiny compared to his height, but pushing him back with every step she took. “I want to hear you say it. I want to know. I deserve to know!”

  “Why?” He backed away, shaking his shaggy head, the dark hair swinging like the mane of some wild stallion. “Why the fuck do you deserve a fucking thing from me?”

  “Because you took me!” The words tore her throat.

  “At the gas station I thought you’d leave and it would be all over. You’d call the cops, they’d come, whatever. I figured that was it. I went in the store and bought my shit, the whole time thinking I was gonna come back out and find you gone. I thought for sure I was screwed, but you stayed in the truck. Why didn’t you get out? Why the hell didn’t you get out?”

  “Why didn’t you make me get out?”

  “Fuck if I know. I figured…what the hell, if you didn’t get out, you wouldn’t tell the cops…I dunno. Christ, you scared the shit out of me, Gilly. That’s all. I didn’t know what the hell to do with you. You had the chance to get out and you didn’t….” Todd’s grin reminded her of the Big Bad Wolf. All teeth. “You’re as crazy as I am.”

  Crazy meant medication, hospitals, long narrow corridors smelling of piss and human despair. Crazy was her mother, locked away in a room with only her mood swings for company. It was the grit of shattered glass underfoot and the smell of spilled perfume.

  “No, I’m not.” Her words weren’t as convincing this time.

  Todd snorted and turned back to the window with the same easy knack he had of pushing away the tension, making it appear that it hadn’t happened at all. “Man, it’s really coming down. We might get another foot, at least.”

  Gilly stood and took her bowl to the sink. She had to push past him to get there, but he stepped aside and didn’t crowd her. Side by side they stared out the window.

  “So,” she said. “What happens now?”

  Todd shrugged again. “I don’t know.”

  Gilly wanted to slap him. Instead, she rinsed her bowl and spoon and set them to dry in the drainer. He didn’t move, only watched her.

  “I won’t stop trying, you know,” she whispered. “To get away, I mean.”

  “I’ll always stop you.”

  “No,” Gilly said. “One day, you won’t.”

  10

  Short days passed into long nights. Gilly’s body ached, but she forced herself to appreciate every ache and pain and hobble around the cabin to keep her stiff muscles limber. She didn’t think there’d be another chance for escape, but if one came she didn’t want to be too disabled to take it.

  Todd didn’t say much to her, and if he noticed Gilly keeping her distance from him, he didn’t show it. Again, she was struck at how easy he was about all of this, how commonplace he made it. While every gust of wind scraping a tree branch on the house startled her into jumping, Todd barely glanced up. When she padded past him to the kitchen to forage for something to eat, he called out casually for her to grab him a beer.

  She did, not sure why. The bottle, a longneck, chilled her palm as she brought it to him. She watched while he took a pocketknife, much smaller than the one he’d threatened her with, and used the bottle-opener part to open it. He tipped it to his lips, drinking it back with a long sigh.

  “Want one?” he said. “There’s a couple in the fridge, couple of six-packs on the back porch in cans. I should’ve bought more.”

  “No.”

  Todd lipped the bottle’s rim and drank again. His throat worked. She was looking at him but her gaze fell on the knife on his belt. He watched her looking and tipped the bottle at her.

  “Might be good for you,” Todd said.

  Gilly felt her mouth go tight and hard. “To get drunk?”

  “Might loosen you up.”

  “I don’t need to be loose,” Gilly muttered, and turned her back on him.

  In the kitchen she opened drawer after drawer. He’d taken away all the sharp knives. She went through the cupboards, too, aware he’d come to watch her. Todd leaned in the doorway, one ankle crossed over the other, beer in his hand.

  “What are you looking for?”

  She slammed a drawer, making the silverware inside jump. She shrugged. She didn’t really know. Todd laughed, and Gilly glared at him over her shoulder.

  “Have a beer,” he said. “It’ll make you feel better, really.”

  “I don’t drink.” She pulled down a glass and filled it with cold, clear water that must’ve come straight up from a hundred feet underground. It went down the back of her throat like a shot, delicious, and sent a spike of pain to the center of her forehead.

  Todd took a long pull from the bottle and set it on the counter next to him. “How come?”

  Gilly blinked slowly and rinsed her glass from the faint imprint of her lips. She dried it with a hand towel and put it back in the cupboard. She didn’t answer.

  “Whatever,” Todd said, and went back into the living room, where he lit a cigarette and fiddled with the small radio he’d pulled from someplace when she wasn’t watching.

  At first it blatted static interspersed with gospel music. Finally, after several minutes fidgeting with the knob, Todd tuned in a station playing some contemporary music. The song ended and the disc jockey came on.

  “…worst blizzard in twenty years…” The static broke the words into burps and fizzles, but the message was clear. More snow had fallen on the region than in twenty years, and more was predicted.

  “Fuck me,” Todd murmured. “More damne