Page 58 of The Last Stars in the Sky
Oh great, I think,is he going to try to make meth in my kitchen? Just what I need—an amateur episode ofBreaking Bad, Armageddon-style.
“What did you want from the chemistry lab?” I ask him, and he shrugs, seeming abashed.
“I got a microscope and a fire extinguisher,” he says proudly, holding them up. “I don’t know, I thought they might be useful.”
Kerry shakes her head. “Never the sharpest tool in the shed, were you, Kyle?” she says again—something of a family joke, I gather—but she’s smiling, and he smiles back. As for what we’ll do with a microscope or a fire extinguisher…well, I guess they can’t go amiss.
“Anything else?” Mattie asks, and Kerry shoots her a grin.
“Did you think I forgot about you? We got some books. Textbooks, seventh-grade stuff. For Ruby.”
“Oh, great,” Mattie exclaims, sounding genuinely pleased, and this little exchange is enough to make my throat tighten.
We don’t talk on the way back to the cottage; after the exuberance of getting the stuff from the school, everyone has turned solemn. Maybe the events are catching up with us, or maybe it’s the fact that, after living in that crap-filled apartment for three weeks, Kyle smells vile and no one wants to breathe it in. Kerry ends up opening the windows to get some fresh air, freezing as it is.
“Dude,” Kerry says when we finally, thankfully turn onto the dirt road, not having seen a single car all the way from Corville, “you need a shower when you get back.”
“There’s no running water,” Mattie reminds her in a muffled voice. She’s brought her sweatshirt up to cover her mouth.
“Then I’ll pour a bucket of water over his head,” Kerry states flatly. “You smell, literally, like shit.”
Mattie laughs at this, and I give Kerry a stupidly reproving look, which she shrugs off, obviously unrepentant.
As the cottage comes into view, I exhale quietly in relief. We’re home. We’re safe. Sort of. I have a wounded shoulder, and we have no truck and no gun, but we’re back, and I’m very glad for it.
It’s not until I walk inside and feel the silence like a tangible thing, a shroud hanging over us, that I sense something is wrong.
“Ruby?” I call, as I come into the living room, one hand pressed to my shoulder, which has started to bleed again. “Darlene?”
They are both there, Ruby sitting silently on the sofa in the twilit, shadow-filled room, Darlene stretched out next to her. Ruby is holding her hand, and Darlene is clearly dead.
NINETEEN
Outside, beyond the pump house, Kyle is digging a grave. The ground is frozen solid, iron-hard, and he’s barely managed to dig a hole big enough to bury a hamster, never mind a well-proportioned woman like Darlene, but at least he’s trying.
Kerry comes to stand next to me by the kitchen window, watching him silently. Last night, when we came home, she didn’t even seem surprised that her mother was dead. For a long moment, she simply stared at her slack face, her skin already turning waxy and gray, before she said flatly, “I guess she had another heart attack, huh?”
I would have believed she didn’t care at all except for the sheen of tears in her eyes, the tremble of her lips. She didn’t speak about her mom again.
Kerry and Kyle carried Darlene out onto the porch, to keep her body cold until it could be buried; it reminded me of the only time I’d touched a dead person, when I kissed my father’s forehead, right after he died. I remember how strange it felt, like kissing marble. You don’t realize how alive someone feels until they’re not. There’s no breath, no warmth, no movement at all under the skin, just this absolute, utter stillness. It was unsettling, that kiss. I wished I hadn’t done it. I wished I’dbeen like my mother, who hadn’t wanted to stay in the hospital room for another five seconds after my dad died. She knew well enough he wasn’t there anymore; I’d had to be convinced.
Well, Kerry clearly didn’t need to be convinced as she hefted Darlene’s body, with Kyle taking her feet. There’s a reason they call it dead weight. As they positioned her as carefully and respectfully as they could by the woodpile, I saw Ruby standing in the doorway, watching.
She hadn’t said a word since we’d come home an hour before; her expression hadn’t even changed, her face as opaque as the surface of the lake on a gray day, revealing absolutely nothing. In some ways, she felt as unreachable as Darlene was, and that scared me.
“Rubes.” I went to her and gave her a one-armed hug, but she didn’t lean into me the way she normally would have, arms wrapped tight around my waist, head burrowed into my chest, which was probably a good thing, since it would have killed my shoulder, but I still craved a connection.
She simply stood there, completely still and straight, and waited until I released her. “It’s going to be okay,” I said, knowing what a banal platitude that was even as I said it, yet right then, I had no others. Ruby, of course, did not reply, her gaze moving from beyond me to where Darlene lay on the floor, next to the wood. Catching her gaze, Kyle covered his aunt with an old tarp that had been on top of the woodpile.
Now, a day later, Kerry stands silently next to me, both of us watching Kyle work.
“He’s a good boy,” she says finally, the words escaping on a sigh as she shakes her head. “Hopeless, though, in a lot of ways.”
“His parents were the ones who went to Florida?”
“Yeah. They never really had time for him, to be honest. He flunked out of school and never held down a job, except on the highway.”
I know that around here the government offers people ten weeks or so a year working on the highway, in construction. Sometimes, like Kyle, it’s the only job they have.
