Among the Dead and Dreaming. Samuel Ligon

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СКАЧАТЬ face. I look for pieces of Kyle woven into the fur of his forearms. I watch his mouth move, Kyle’s mother collapsing, all these millions of hairs reaching out of his scrubs, and all I can feel—all I’ve felt for weeks, really—is Burke out there waiting, a shark in deep water swimming circles toward shore. And I think, Kyle. I sit back in my seat with my face in my hands, trying to hold on to him, the whisper of his breath and the heat coming off his skin, how we’d dance sometimes while dinner was cooking, when the light was just right and the wine was just right and the music was perfect, everything we had and might have had here now with me.

      Mark

      Her father’s voice on the phone was like an infection, my throat catching and closing as I sat trying to calm down, not wanting to calm down, holding onto the loss of her. I didn’t know she died with Kyle, so for a few minutes my grief was all there was—until I got to the hospital and found out they crashed together, bringing on this panic of love and loss and tiny, black-hearted hatred. I couldn’t stand to think of her gone from me, gone with him. I couldn’t stand to think of the world without her. But in the dead air of the waiting room, her presence was everywhere, and then her absence, and then her presence again, so that her presence and absence felt like the same thing. I could smell something that smelled like her, or I could hear—something—a whisper or hum, her voice—somewhere. My breath was too shallow, stuck in my chest, and I heard her whisper, “Breathe,” but when I took a deep breath and held it, not breathing, she didn’t say anything. Nobody did. Everyone was crying and pacing and disappearing and reappearing. No one could comfort anyone else. After Kyle was pronounced dead, Nikki put her face in her hands for a long time. I touched her shoulder and she looked at me with her eyes shot and her face broken, and then she covered up again. I drove to Cynthia’s place under a weak blue sky, the sun still rising behind me. I couldn’t think of any other place to be.

      Isabelle

      Oh.

      2

      Nikki

      At seventeen, I ran from home with a boy named George who left me broke on the street in Providence. I never found another love like we had those weeks before he disappeared, though I looked for it everywhere I went. That was my real problem, all that searching and hunger. I didn’t know you can only fall in love and run from your mother once in your life. George was the best mistake I ever made.

      I stayed in Providence for months after he left, then moved to Austin, where I met my worst mistake—Cash. Maybe I was too hungry, remembering my time with George, or maybe we got together too fast, before I could really know him, but whatever the reason, pretty soon it was just me and Cash and nothing else in the world that mattered. We were happy, too, until I started looking for work. He had plenty of money, he told me, would buy me whatever I wanted. What I wanted, I told him, was my own money. I got a job at a barbecue place and the interrogations started. I wasn’t interested in anyone else, but he’d accuse me of cheating or plotting to cheat. Why else would I talk to someone or look at someone or go to a coffee shop or have ever been born?

      I’d been independent too long to put up with that kind of shit. But I did put up with it—until he called me mouthy.

      “What did you say?” I said, and he said, “I’m tired of the mouth on you,” and I said, “So leave,” and he said, “I don’t want to leave,” and we got into it worse than ever before, fighting all night.

      He said it again a week later—“What’d I say about mouthy?”—and that’s when I knew it was over for good. But he promised to change, and even though I knew better, I forgave him. We lived in a big house on Duval Street, with a lot of other people, him in the basement, and me on the second floor. After I took him back, he started spying on me. “You don’t know what love is,” he told me, before and after I broke it off for good. “You don’t know what love is,” he told me as he stalked me and haunted me for months.

      He’d break into my room, follow me around, and the more cold and pissed off I became, the more threatening he became, unhinged and dangerous, until I finally had to move out of that house. But I didn’t run far enough—only across town, where I thought I was hidden. There was a moment of rest then, maybe a month. I was so young and stupid, so hungry for love, even after all that. Maybe because of all that. I fell for this guy, Daryl, and Cash tracked me down and hurt me more than I’d ever been hurt before. I ran to Oregon, where I waited for Alina to be born, praying she was Daryl’s baby, but the minute I saw her face, blood streaked and furious, I knew she’d come from Cash. She had attached earlobes like his and my eyelids, and she was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen, even if she did come from Cash.

      I never meant to kill him. Or I meant to and couldn’t follow through and then he died anyway, before I ran from Austin with Alina just a speck in my belly. So Kyle wasn’t my first boyfriend to die—just the one I could have made a life with, maybe, if things had been different. What happened with Cash was self defense and another reason to get on another bus and keep moving, always moving from the minute I left my mother in Manchester, always hoping to lose myself completely.

      I didn’t know Cash had a brother until Burke called a few weeks ago. For a second when I heard his voice, I thought Cash was back from the dead. I couldn’t make sense of the moment, because I didn’t know Burke existed. The sound of his voice on the phone stripped me to something I didn’t want to recognize in myself, like I was eighteen again, sprung to run, ready to pop. But I wasn’t eighteen. I was thirty-one. And the only thing that mattered was making sure Burke never found out about Alina.

      Alina

      My mom talks about the mistakes she made when she was young and wild, but she never tells me what I want to hear. My father, she says, died in a car accident before I was born. Other than that, she won’t talk about him at all. Ever. I’ve never seen a picture or met a grandparent. “What about diseases and stuff?” I used to ask. “What about genes?” I knew that would get to her because of her own mother’s death from cancer. And her aunt’s.

      “What about genes?” she said.

      “I should know who he is,” I said, “where I came from.”

      “You came from me,” she said.

      “You don’t know his name?”

      “Jim,” she said.

      But sometimes he had other names.

      That was when we were living in Seattle, before I learned to stop asking. They skipped me a grade, from second to third, because I was bored and getting in trouble and she wouldn’t let them put me on drugs. She was with Hal then, off and on, a guy she met at the restaurant. I didn’t care about Hal. I didn’t care about any of them until Kyle.

      Nikki

      “Make sure Kyle calls and writes,” Alina told me yesterday morning, before I left her at her new school in Michigan. “He will,” I said, so grateful she was gone. Now, I’ll have to bring her home and get her away again safe, but with a broken heart this time.

      Months ago, I was furious with Kyle for encouraging her to attend Interlochen. He knew I couldn’t afford boarding school, that I didn’t want her in a place filled with rich kids, that I didn’t want to lose her so young. But he kept talking about the place. He’d gone to art school himself and it changed him, he said, made him a better person. He wanted to pay her way, whatever wasn’t covered by scholarships. We’d only been seeing each other a few months.

      “She doesn’t have to know where the money СКАЧАТЬ