Last Things Read online

  Then I stretch out on the bed, on top of the sheets. Goblin’s stinky breath caresses my shin.

  I don’t fall asleep, not the way I used to. But eventually something shorts out. Things go dark. And I’m finally gone.

  Thea

  There’s a pine tree with a trunk so wide that three people could hide behind it, about a hundred feet from the Thorsons’ house. It’s far from the road, so no one driving by will catch me in their headlights or spot my old blue bicycle buried in a patch of shrubs.

  The bark of the pine is rough, jagged, gnawed like a sheet of rusted metal. Gluey sap trails from the knotholes. If I press against it, it will rip out strands of my long hair.

  The tree doesn’t want me here. It would like to scratch me, sting me. It would like me not to be so close. The woods want me gone.

  I peer out from around the trunk.

  There’s enough moonlight pushing through the hazy sky that I can see everything. The woods. The lawn. The low, shingled house. I can see his bedroom window.

  It’s on the very end of the house, the only window in the short stretch of wall. There are curtains, gray ones, but they’re almost never closed. On quiet nights I can hear him practicing. Composing. Fractured bones of music tumbling through the window.

  There’s no music now.

  First he’ll shower. Sometimes he’ll eat, if his mother talks him into it. Then he’ll head to his room. He’ll pet his cat. He doesn’t always turn the lights on. But I know when he’s there.

  I shift my foot on the thick pine needles. Inch forward for a better view.

  The woods watch us both.

  A crunch of tires. Voices in the trees. Car doors slam.

  Someone has parked on the shoulder of the road, out of sight of the Thorsons’ house. I can hear them, two, three, four of them, their running feet on the pine needles as light as a family of deer.

  Gold limbs and sleek brown hair flashing past me. Frankie. Her friends scamper in the trees to my right. One of them holds up a glass bottle, threatening to splash it. All of them laughing. The woods hold their breath.

  I crouch beside the big pine. They don’t notice me.

  Frankie flits to the bedroom window. I watch her climb onto a stump, tap at the glass. A second later the window rises.

  Anders stands inside. I can see the outlines of his face, moon-blue planes and shadows.

  I can’t hear their words. They don’t talk long.

  No, I think. Anders. Don’t go. Don’t go.

  Frankie leaps off the stump. She runs back into the trees, where someone else is shrieking, “Stop it, you lunatic!” and laughing.

  “Let’s go,” says Frankie’s voice. “I want to drive around for a while.”

  I take a breath. He’s not leaving.

  “What, am I just your chauffeur?” says a guy’s voice.

  “Not just my chauffeur,” says Frankie. “Come on.”

  Someone else laughs. Voices evaporating. Slam of car doors. Tires whirring away, away, until the road is quiet and empty again, and the woods come back to life.

  They lean closer now. They whisper to the long, low house. They stroke it with their shadows.

  I keep my eyes fixed on the window.

  Then it starts.

  The music.

  Nothing is born already finished. Already perfect. Nothing should be.

  But this is. Every time.

  I hold my breath.

  They’re here. The dark things.

  No one is around to watch me, to notice what happens to my eyes when I let myself see. No one to notice how they burn.

  I scan the woods.

  Dark things are everywhere. In the shadows. In every trembling needle on every pine tree. Darkness slithers from their bodies, from their too-long, crooked limbs. They’re right here.

  But so am I.

  I stand perfectly still. Until the music stops, and afterward. Half an hour. An hour. The moon combs through the branches above me, reaching down with tiny filaments of light.

  The window stays shut. The light stays out.

  At last I feel the woods shift. The weave unravels. The night sky sifts through. The trees lean back, silent again.

  Anders is asleep.

  He’s safe for tonight.

  For a sliver of a minute, I let myself imagine him in his bed, cotton sheets against his skin, his eyes shut, his lips relaxed, apart—

  I shove myself away from the tree.

  I yank my bike out of the bushes. It’s a very used Schwinn, colored sky blue with matte house paint. Its wheels tick softly as I climb on. I pedal through the woods, weaving between trees, letting the branches touch but not catch me, letting the moonlight lead me back to the road.

  The road is deserted. Still, I stick to the pavement’s very edge, balancing the bike on the weedy shoulder. At County N, I turn.

  Our road is narrower. Twistier. There’s nothing on it, not for two more turns. Nothing but Aunt Mae’s place.

  Aunt Mae’s place is an old farmhouse, although the woods have already taken back whatever fields once surrounded it. It’s pale blue and very used, just like my bike. There are no lights on inside. I leave the bike on the porch and unlock the front door with my key.

  Just down the short hallway, in the living room, the TV mumbles to itself. Faint pulses of blue light wash the walls. Aunt Mae leaves the TV on almost all the time. For company. She rarely has any other kind. Now and then someone will leave a bottle or some home baking in a bundle on the porch. Every once in a while, an old lady will drive out for a visit, the kind of old lady who carries a rosary and a bottle of holy water and saints’ medals in her purse, whose eyes never quite focus, who asks Aunt Mae to sit and pray with her. And sometimes kids from town come out here, too. They smash pumpkins on the driveway. Toss toilet paper into the trees. Leave nylon witches’ hats on the mailbox.

  But now she has me.

  I tiptoe far enough down the hall that I can make out the shape of Aunt Mae on the couch, her head on the armrest, her body covered in blankets. I watch until I see her eyelids flicker, her chest rise and fall. Then I head the other way, quietly, into the kitchen.

  The kitchen smells of lemon balm and rust, with a light layer of mildew. I pull one of the empty jam jars from the cupboard and run the tap until the water is slightly less than warm. I drink. Wipe my mouth with the back of my hand. It was a long night.

  It isn’t quite over.

  I climb the narrow staircase. My room is to the left, above the kitchen. The eaves are low. Slanted walls, two windows, iron-frame twin bed. On the dresser, a row of ten votive candles in little glass cups. I strike a match on a sandpaper strip and light them all.

  On the wall above the candles hangs a picture. It’s smaller than a postcard, smaller than a photograph printed at a drugstore. It was posted on a metal music blog last fall, taken by someone with a decent camera. I printed it out at the public library.

  In the photograph Anders is onstage. Lips parted. Eyes almost shut. The fluttering wicks turn his image to oily black and gold.

  I close my eyes.

  Anders. Anders. Anders.

  I repeat his name like a chant. Like a song of my own.

  Anders. Anders. Anders.

  We’ve lasted one more night.

  Around the house, the woods creak and whisper and groan.

  But they are shut outside. Anders is asleep, in his own quiet house. And I am here.

  I blow the candles out. I fold back the blue cotton quilt with its yarn knots and its fading flowers, untie and pull off my shoes. Then, at last, I climb into bed. The woods will whisper to me all night long.

  Anders

  There’s not much more pathetically lonely than a bowl of milk with just three Cheerios floating in it.

  I reach across the breakfast table and grab the yellow box. Now I run the risk of overcompensating, having to add more milk and then more cereal in a never-ending downward spiral, but I can’t face those three drifting Cheerios any
longer.

  Dad watches me pour. His eyes are tired.

  “You were up early today,” he says.

  I have a flash of those minutes sitting on the end of my bed, morning sun sieving through the pine needles, the guitar in my hands. Even the memory makes my heart lift. Suddenly I can’t wait to be playing again, making the lines a little smoother, the notes even cleaner. God. I’m such an addict.

  “Sorry,” I say through a mouthful of Os. “I just played the acoustic. I didn’t think I’d wake you.”

  “I was already up,” Dad says. “What was that? Pink Floyd?”

  I shovel in another mass of cereal. “Yep.”

  Dad nods. He rubs his head with the flat of one hand. Dad’s hands are like baseball mitts, broad and tough enough to grab a flying fastball or hoist a splintering beam without flinching. His face is permanently sunburned. The bottoms of his feet are like cement. He is his own protective gear.

  “Your mom said you had a good show last night,” Dad goes on as Mom drifts back to the kitchen table with a fresh mug of coffee. Goblin twists through her ankles, begging for scratches.

  “Yeah,” I say, swallowing. “They want us to add a second night. Be the regular Friday and Saturday thing.”

  Dad’s eyes don’t exactly narrow, but I can see the eyelids around them tighten, like he’s bracing for a blast of sawdust. “And he’s still not paying you? That Ike Lawrence?”

  “He gives them dinner,” Mom puts in. “Right, Anders? And free drinks.”

  “You draw crowds for him every week,” Dad goes on. “Now two nights a week. And he still expects you to do it for free?”

  The tendons along my neck go tight.

  Ike has been offering to pay us for months. I remember him striding toward us across the Crow’s Nest after a set last summer when we had completely packed the house. Ike could win a Henry Rollins look-alike contest any day of the week without even changing his clothes. He smiled his dry little hint of a smile. “With the way you’re pulling people in, I think the time has come for me to start paying you.” He looked around at the three of us. “You’re not open mic material anymore. You’re a draw. And I know it.”

  Ike had been there for us, given us a stage and support and free sandwiches ever since we were the sloppiest of open mic material. I didn’t want to take more. Not from him.

  “We want to keep things pure for now. You know?” I said. “Get in our ten thousand hours of practice before we make the jump to pro.”

  Behind me I heard Jezz suck in a breath.

  But Ike just grinned. “So you’re not ready to sell out yet.” He folded his beefy arms. “Just make sure when you do that you do it for the right people. Or at least for the right money.” Then he turned around and strode away.

  “Dude,” Jezz had said, jabbing me in the side. Patrick had just stared.

  We had a fight about it later, but at the end we all agreed that we wouldn’t sign any contracts or take any official payments until we had graduated, just to make things clean and simple. I kept up the lie about wanting to keep Last Things pure for now. Because I couldn’t tell them the truth: that I didn’t really deserve any of this. That the way everyone saw me was based on a lie. I couldn’t tell Ike Lawrence, and I couldn’t tell my own band, and I sure as hell can’t tell my dad.

  I just shrug, looking down into my cereal bowl.

  “You know, pretty soon, you’re going to have to stand up for yourself. Declare that your time has value.” Dad turns his coffee mug in a little circle. “You’ve made it clear that that’s your plan.” His voice gets harsher with each sentence. We’ve had this fight so many times, it’s like one big patch of scar tissue. “If you’re going to try to do this music stuff for a living, even as a side job, you’re going to have to stop letting people talk you into giving it away.”

  I should defend Ike. But it’s easier just to shrug again.

  “You put it to him this way,” Dad plows on. “You tell Ike Lawrence he can at least cover your expenses if he wants you three to be his unpaid house band.”

  I glance at Dad sideways. “Expenses?”

  “Your equipment, for starters. Transportation. Music lessons. It all adds up.”

  There it is again. A familiar push on another familiar bruise. “Yeah,” I say. “I know it does. This summer I’ll mow lawns again, and—”

  “Summer,” Dad cuts me off. “Sure.” He turns to Mom, his tone shifting. “Did you say you were heading to Halmstad today?”

  Mom nods, happy to have things moving into a lighter key. “I have to return those shoes to Petersons. They just weren’t—Anders.” Mom stops me before I can push my chair back and walk away from the table. “What happened to your hand?”

  “Oh.” I hide the carpet-burned knuckles against my side. “I scraped it on the stage when we were loading up last night. No big deal.”

  “You look tired,” says Mom. “Did you get enough sleep last night?”

  I look past her at the old cuckoo clock with the pinecone pendulums that hangs on the kitchen wall. It’s almost nine-thirty. “Yeah. I’m fine.”

  “You don’t think two shows a week will be too much for you?”

  “No. I’m fine. Really.” I set my bowl in the sink. “I’m going over to Jezz’s before my lesson. That article is supposed to get posted this morning. We said we’d read it together.”

  Mom’s face goes from worried to bright again. “Which article?”

  “The one in Urban Planner. That arts magazine.”

  Dad’s eyes are on his plate. “How are you going to get there?”

  “. . . My car.”

  “Your car? You mean the Nissan?” Dad says pointedly. “Your mom needs it for errands. I’m going to be changing the oil in the wagon today. It’s overdue. And it’s been awhile since you’ve filled the tank, by the way.”

  There’s no use asking to take the truck. Dad’s let me drive his pickup twice in my life, always with him in the passenger seat, his work boots pressing phantom brake pedals the whole time.

  “Fine,” I say from the kitchen doorway. “I’ll see if someone can pick me up.”

  Mom says something to Dad as I leave the room, but I’m heading down the hall so fast that I can’t hear it.

  Patrick pulls into the driveway half an hour later. The thing he drives and the thing my dad drives are both called trucks, but in the same way a champion German shepherd and a twenty-pound junkyard mutt are both called dogs. Patrick’s truck is mostly rust, with some black paint in between. Its prickly fabric seats are exploding with split seams and cigarette burns. The interior smells like oil, old coffee, cut grass, and feet.

  “Thanks for driving all the way out here.” I lift Yvonne’s case into the cab. No way I’d let her slide around back there in the bed. “I’ll pay you back.”

  “No problem,” he says.

  Even though I know it is kind of a problem. Even though Patrick with his job making pizzas at Papa Julio’s doesn’t have much more money for gas than I do.

  Patrick turns up the radio, which just barely picks up the rock station from the Cities.

  “FFDP,” I groan. “God. They’re still playing this song?”

  “Only every twenty minutes,” says Patrick.

  “I need a Five Finger Death Punch in my ears.”

  “You’re such a snob, man.” Patrick is wearing his tiny half grin, which is how I know he doesn’t really mean it. Everything Patrick does is so dry and understated, you have to look for little clues to decode what he’s actually thinking. I know him well enough that I can usually catch the truth. “Sorry there’s no Scandinavian death metal station we can pick up from here.”

  “Hey, I’m impressed that this thing has a working radio at all,” I say. “What did it come with, an eight-track player?”

  Patrick’s half grin curls a tiny bit higher. “Phonograph.”

  I crack up.

  We stream around a curve, past a riverbed, through a spread of thick old pines. A waft of
air sweeps up over my leg. I glance down. There’s a hole in the floor near Patrick’s left foot. Through it, I can see straight down to the asphalt streaking below.

  “Holy crap, dude,” I say. “There’s a hole in your floor.”

  “Yep.” Patrick’s face doesn’t even change. “I was listening to System of a Down the other day and tapping my foot—”

  “Tapping your foot?”

  He shrugs with one shoulder. “Guess I tapped a little too hard.”

  “Guess you’re driving the Flintstone mobile.”

  One corner of Patrick’s mouth grins higher. He cranks up the Five Finger Death Punch.

  Jezz is waiting for us in his room, which is half of his parents’ entire basement. He even has his own bathroom down there. It’s pretty sketchy, with a flimsy tin-walled shower and a utility sink with a mirror hung over it, but at least it’s private. His actual bedroom is big enough that there’s space for an old couch at one end. There’s a long built-in desk in the corner, cluttered with cords and iPods and discs and empty Mountain Dew cans. Jezz is sitting at the desk when we come in. He does a slow twirl in the chair, grinning at us the whole time.

  Patrick and I flop down on the couch, which is covered with so many layers of Jezz’s clothes that you can’t even tell what color it is.

  “Is it up yet?” Patrick asks.

  Jezz does another spin in the desk chair. A Slayer T-shirt flaps on the chair back like a flag. “Yep. Twenty minutes ago. Already two hundred thirty views and thirty-five comments.”

  “There’s video?” I ask. “Which song?”

  “‘Superhero.’” Jezz’s smile gets even wider. “It’s good. The sound’s decent. And you can see the crowd going nuts.”

  “You already read it?” says Patrick.

  Jezz’s eyebrows shoot up. “No. I waited. I said I would.”

  I feel that buzzing electric feeling, that mixture of nerves and adrenaline and dread and hunger that comes on before a show. Nothing to do but dive in. “Okay,” I say. “Let’s read it.”

  “I’ve got it up on my phone,” says Patrick.

  “I’ll read it on mine,” says Jezz, getting up. “Here. Anders. You take the computer.”