LaRose(39)

Dougie won’t bother you now, Maggie said. Lemme see your arm.

Maggie put on LaRose’s bedside lamp and studied the arm.

Does it hurt? She touched the spot.

Not no more.

Not anymore, LaRose. You have to say not anymore.

LaRose didn’t say it. Maggie looked at his arm from many angles.

I think it looks cool, she decided. It’s a tattoo. I want one.

She went over to LaRose’s backpack, took out his pencil bag. There was a sharpener on top of his dresser. Maggie sharpened a pencil with great care.

Okay, you’re gonna stick me like Veddar stuck you. Same place. It will be like we’re getting engaged or something.

LaRose was almost six.

I’m only almost six, he said.

Age doesn’t matter.

I mean, I’m scared to stab you.

You mean you’d cry. Maggie studied him sharply.

LaRose nodded.

Okay, watch.

Maggie gripped the needle-sharp pencil like an ice pick. She peered at LaRose’s tattoo and licked her lips. She made a light mark on her arm the same place as his. Then she lifted her hand, drove the pencil into her arm. The tip came off. She threw the pencil across the room and fell onto the bed, kicking, holding her arm, biting the pillow to smother her noises.

After a while she sat up. There was some blood on her hand but the graphite tip stuck in her arm blocked most of it.

That hurt more than I thought it would, she said, wide-eyed, looking into LaRose’s eyes. Now I’m glad Veddar almost died.

Huh?

He choked on that candy bar. I smashed it down his throat. It went down the wrong pipe. He turned blue as a dead person. Even maybe he was dead until Mr. Oberjerk lifted him up by the ankles and shook out Veddar’s puke. You saw it all, right?

LaRose nodded.

So now you know what revenge looks like.

Maggie was apt to say things like that, not only from reading her mother’s discarded gothic romance novels. Peter worried about her when she asked—she still asked—exactly what had happened to Dusty. Specifically, his body. Was he bones? Was he jelly? Was he dust? Air? Was she breathing him into her lungs? Was she eating something grown from his hair? Were his molecules in everything? And why do you still have your guns? she asked. I hate them. You should get rid of them. I’ll never touch one. That, at least, made sense.

Peter worried about her when she kept checking out a book from the library called Dark Creatures. He was relieved when she stopped checking it out. Disturbed when the librarian called to tell him it was mutilated. He worried over how Maggie snatched snakes from the woodpile and let them twine up her arms, how she tamed spiders then casually smashed them. How she opened a neighbor’s brooding chicken egg before it hatched to see how the thing inside was coming along. How she took the dead chick home to bury and dug it up every day to see how the world digested it. There were days when the dog ignored Maggie, even walked away from her, as if he didn’t trust her. These things worried Peter.

Nola, however, was reassured by her daughter’s compulsion to tear aside the plastic wrap that divides the universes. It was only natural, thought Nola, to live in both. When you could see one world from the other world, the world for instance of the living from the world of the dead, there was a certain comfort. It relaxed Nola to imagine herself in a casket. She dreamed variations on her look much the way, during high school, she’d mentally put together the perfect outfit. The jeans, the tailed shirt, the funny socks, the shoes, heart necklace, hair sprayed up or falling loose. Of course, she couldn’t wear those clothes, so out-of-date, when dead. Or maybe yes . . . what a hoot! When all the steps leading to Nola’s death were assembled, her anxiety faded. On the other hand, a blue buzz took hold of her when she went past her death and imagined everyone, everything, going on as before, only without Nola. All of this made her feel so guilty, though. She rarely allowed herself. It was like when she ate the whole stale cake and the sugar put her straight to sleep.

After she ate the cake that time, everything went still. The evening was deep and pure. The lights went out and Peter wrapped a soft woolen blanket around her. In darkness, she wound herself into the blanket still more tightly. She was swaddled, confined, protected from herself—as in a very exclusive privately run mental hospital devoted solely to the care of one person: Nola. She fell asleep bothered only by the nagging thought that she would have to start all over in the morning. Existence whined in her head like a mosquito. Then she swatted it. Rode the tide of her comfort down into the earth.



ON SNOWSHOES OF ash wood and sinew, Wolfred and the girl made their way south. They would be easy to follow. Wolfred’s story was that they’d decided to travel toward Grand Portage, for help. They had left Mackinnon ill in the cabin with plenty of supplies. If they got lost, wandered, found themselves even farther south, chances were nobody would know or care who Mackinnon was. And so they trekked, making good time, and made their camp at night. The girl tested the currents of the air with her face and hands, then showed Wolfred where to build a lean-to, how to place it just so, how to find dry wood in snow, snapping dead branches out of trees, and where to pile it so that they could easily keep the fire going all night and direct its heat their way. They slept peacefully, curled in their separate blankets, and woke to the wintertime scolding of chickadees.

The girl tuned up the fire, they ate, and were back on the way south when suddenly they heard the awful gasping voice of Mackinnon behind them. He was blundering toward them, cracking twigs, calling out for them, Wait, my children, wait a moment, do not abandon me!