Precious And Fragile Things

There was no counting to ten this time, nothing to hold her back from rising hysteria. “Because if you are, you should do it now. Right away! Just do it and get it over with!”

Todd flinched at first in the face of her shouting, then frowned. “I didn’t bring you here to kill you. The fuck you think I am, a psycho?”

Gilly quieted, chest heaving with breath that hurt her lungs. Her throat had gone dry, her mouth parched and arid. Todd stared, then shook his head and laughed.

“You do. You really do think I’m crazy. Fuck my life, you think I’m a fucking psycho.”

Gilly shot her gaze toward the front door and expected him to step in front of her, but Todd just tossed up his hands.

“Go, then,” he said derisively. “See how far you get. People die all the time in the woods, and that’s ones smart enough to have the right gear with them. You don’t have gear, you got nothing. See how long it takes your ass to freeze.”

“The police,” she offered halfheartedly. “They’ll be looking for me.”

“Where?”

He had a point, one she didn’t want to acknowledge. “They can trace things. The truck, for one.”

“The fuck you think this is, CSI?” Todd shrugged. “Maybe. Maybe not.”

Gilly looked again to the door and then at the floor in defeat. “Please. I’ll give you whatever you want.”

“You can’t give me what I want,” Todd said.

Gilly went to the front windows and looked out at the yard. Her truck was there, but she had no keys. The forest ringing the patchy, rocky grass looked thick and unwelcoming, the road little more than a path. He was right. She wouldn’t get far. Running out there would be stupid, especially without shoes.

She had to be smarter than that.

“I need to clean up,” Gilly said finally. “Brush my teeth, wash my face…”

She trailed off when he walked past her. He picked up a plastic shopping bag from the dining room table, and for the first time she noticed there were many of those bags on the chairs and beneath the table. He tossed her the first one.

It landed at her feet, and she jumped. Gilly bent and touched the plastic, but didn’t look inside. He’d bought more than groceries.

“Go ahead.” Todd poked at the other bags on the table. “Look.”

“What’s all this for?” Gilly sifted through a stack of turtleneck shirts, one in nearly every color.

Todd pushed another handful of bulging plastic sacks toward her. “I had all my stuff with me. You didn’t have anything.”

Gilly pulled out a pair of sparkly tights. She said nothing, turning them over and over in her fingers. They were her size. She didn’t even know they made sparkly tights in her size. She looked up at him.

Todd shrugged.

She let the tights drop onto the rest of the pile and wiped her now-sweating palms on her thighs. Her heart began to pound again.

“All of this… You bought enough to last for months,” she said finally.

Todd stubbed out his cigarette in a saucer on the table and lit another, flicking the lighter expertly with his left hand. He sucked deep and held it before letting the smoke seep from between his lips. “The fuck am I supposed to know what a woman needs? You needed shit. I bought it.”

Gilly steadied herself with one hand on the back of a chair. “I won’t be here for months.”

Todd flipped the lid of his lighter open and shut a couple of times before sliding it back into his pocket. Without answering her, he stalked to the woodstove and piled a few logs on the fire it didn’t need. His faded flannel shirt rode up as he knelt, exposing a line of flesh above the waist of his battered jeans.

If she could stab him there, he’d bleed like any other man. The thought swelled, unbidden, in her mind. She could run at him. Grab his knife. She could sink it deep into his back. For one frightening moment the urge to do it was so strong that Gilly saw Todd’s blood on her hands. She blinked, and the crimson vanished.

Gilly sifted through the contents of the bags. He’d bought soap and shampoo, toothpaste. Shirts, sweatpants, socks, a few six-packs of plain cotton underpants in a style she hadn’t worn in years. No shoes, no gloves or scarf, no hat.

She rubbed her middle finger between her eyes, where a pain was brewing. It seemed he’d thought of just about everything. Nothing fancy, all practical, and probably all of it would fit her. She thought she should be grateful he hadn’t bought her something creepy like a kinky maid’s outfit. She thought she should be happy he’d bought her clothes and wasn’t going to skin her to make a dress for himself, that’s what she should be grateful for.

Gilly gathered as many of the bags as she could. “Is there a shower?”

“Outside. There’s a tub in the bathroom.”

The plastic shifted and slipped in her fingers as she took the bags and went into the bathroom. She shut the door behind her. There was no lock. The room’s one small window slid up easily halfway, but then stuck. She would never fit through it. And if she did, where would she go? How far would she get with no coat or gloves and nothing but socks on her feet, with no idea where she was or how to get anywhere else? Todd was right, people died all the time in the woods.

“You didn’t bring any water?” This comes from Seth, looking surprised. “But you always bring everything.”

Not this time, apparently. Gilly shifts baby Gandy on one hip and watches Arwen toddle along the boardwalk through the trees. There are miles of boardwalk and lots of stairs at Bushkill Falls, and who knew it would take so long to walk them, or that there’d be no convenient snack stands along the way? Gilly’s thirsty too, her back aches from carrying Gandy in the sling, her heart races as Arwen gets too close to the railing.

Gilly is the planner. The packer. The prepared one. Seth is accustomed to walking out the door with nothing but his wallet and keys, and if he slings the diaper bag over his shoulder it’s without bothering to look inside. He trusts her to be prepared. To have everything they could possibly need and a lot of stuff they won’t.

“I can’t believe you didn’t pack water,” Seth says, and Gilly fumes, silent and stung, her own throat dry with thirst.

That had been an awful trip. Walking for miles to see the beauty of the waterfalls that she’d have enjoyed more without the rumble of hunger and a parched mouth distracting her. And that had been along set paths, no place to get lost, in temperate autumn. What would happen to her if she set out without shoes into the frigid mid-January air and tried to make her way down a mountain, through the forest, without having a clue about where she was going?

No. She had to plan better than that. Be prepared. Because once she started, there’d be no going back.

First, she’d get cleaned up. The tub, a deep claw-foot, was filthy with a layer of dust and some dead bugs. The toilet was the old-fashioned kind with a tank above and a pull chain. It would’ve been quaint and charming in a bed-and-breakfast.

Gilly set the bags on the chipped porcelain countertop and pulled out a package of flowery soap. Her skin itched just looking at it. Further exploration brought out a long, slim package. A purple, sparkly toothbrush. The breath whooshed from her lungs as if she’d been punched in the stomach. Gilly let out a low cry, holding on to the sink top to keep her buckling knees from dropping her to the ground. Shudders racked her body, so fierce her teeth clattered sharply.

He’d bought her a toothbrush.

The simple consideration, not the first from him, undid her. Gilly pressed her forehead to the wall, her palms flat on the rough paneling. Sobs surged up her throat and she bit down hard, jailing them behind her teeth. She cursed into her fists, silent, strangled cries she didn’t want him to overhear. She didn’t want to give him that.

Count to ten, Gilly. Count to twenty if you have to. Keep it in, don’t let it out. You’ll lose it if you let it out.

You’ll lose you.

Gilly clutched at her cheeks and bit the inside of her wrist until the pain there numbed the agony in her heart. He’d given her opportunity to escape, and she hadn’t taken it. Had been unable to take it.

She was crazy, not him. She was the psycho. It was her.

Quickly, she ran water from the faucet. It was frigid and tinged with orange, barely warming even after a minute, though it did turn clear. She splashed her face to wash away tears that hadn’t fallen. When she could breathe again she forced herself to look in the mirror. Her eyes narrowed as she assessed herself.

She’d dreamed of her mother speaking words she’d never said. Never would’ve said. Gilly didn’t need a dream dictionary to parse out what the dream meant, her mother with the flowers that had sometimes seemed to mean more to her than her family. Blood. The responsibility of roses.

Looking at her face now she saw her mother’s eyes, the shape of her mother’s mouth. She’d heard her mother’s voice, too.