Page 61 of You Weren't Meant to Be Human
He reaches up to touch it.
Levi grabs his wrist. “Mm-mm. Nope.”
Stagger doesn’t even have to make a sound before Levi lets go. Just cuts a glance across the tiny nursery. Levi gets the hint.
Twenty-Six
The insomnia is killer. Out of everything, that’s what gets him the most. The practice contractions are bad, and the hip pain, which Tammy explained is the result of ligaments loosening so the baby actually has a chance of getting the hell out, is a nightmare. But the insomnia? Fuck that. The only thing that reliably works is forcing himself to stay up as long as possible, sitting too close to the TV or turning on the terrible “big light,” until he passes out wherever he happens to be. Not that he ever feels rested upon waking up.
When he does sleep, he dreams of finding a knife hidden in the silverware drawer, a knife that Levi must have missed, and sneaking upon him while he sleeps and opening up that scar. In the dream, Crane reaches inside the wound and grabs what he thinks is a worm, but by the time he’s pulled it out, it’s just an unraveled jumble of intestine.
There can’t be any evolutionary benefit to this shit. It’s got to be a mistake, like the whole “human heads are too big to fit through the pelvis properly” thing.
Crane misses sleeping on his stomach. And not getting up every hour to piss.
Levi’s alarm clock says 2:16 p.m., and through the crack in the blackout curtains it’s snowing again, turning the woods beyond the property into a haze of brown and white. Crane is actively attempting to sleep, and failing, so he’s awake when there’s a knock on the door.
It spikes his heart rate. After what happened last time, of course it does. His anxiety is on a hair trigger. He reels, struggles upright, has to stop because the world swims and his vision darkens at the corners.
At the foot of the bed, Stagger sits up too.
Through the bedroom door, voices in the living room:
“Jess.”
“Heyyy. Can I come in? Thanks so much.”
Jess? She’s here. Jess is here.
The front door whines and bangs shut.
“Does Tammy know you’re here?”
“Eh, she thinks I’m picking up a late lunch. Truck came to fill up the gas tanks and it fucked up our morning. I—no, back up. I wanted to see if Crane could chat. Go for a quick walk or something. We won’t go far, just right there, you can see it from the living room.”
“If he wants fresh air, he can open a window. You should probably go.”
“I’ll tell the worms what you did to Hannah.”
There is a long silence, and then footsteps, and then Jess is nudging her way into the bedroom.
She’shere.She’s got the baggy work pants, tan boots, and a blaze orange winter coat she definitely stole from Tammy’s dead husband, snow still stuck in her dark hair. Cheeks flushed red from the cold. In one piece. Alive, smiling apologetically.
“Oh my god,” she says. “You look like ass. Come on, let’s go outside. Let’s go.”
When the apartment complex was originally built just outside Washville, however long ago that was, there’d been a few decent amenities—a tiny pool, a playground, a picnic area. Now, during the summer, the playground is a mess of wasp nests. The pool hasn’t been operational since he moved in, either; used to be that Crane had to walk over to the ugly pool maintenance building every few weeks to reload the cheap plastic card for the laundry room, since that’s where they decided to park the terminal for some reason, and the only water in the pool has ever been shallow puddles stagnating on the tarp. These days, Crane knows the operator code for the washer that runs a load for free (presslight soilandnormal cycleat the same time, thencold temptwice), so he hasn’t checked on it lately.
The complex isn’t doing well as a whole. None of the tenants acknowledge each other, and there’re more empty units every week, less cars in the parking lot. The dumpsters are overflowing, littered with broken glass, and someone left a couch on the edge of the lot last month to get chewed through by rats. The heat still feels like it’s stuckon.The bedroom windows stay open no matter how cold it isoutside, because that’s the only way it’s tolerable. He’s jotted it down in a notebook even though the leasing agent will never see it.
Now Crane is wearing one of Levi’s oversized camo jackets and slogging through the snow toward the picnic area, Jess trying not to laugh at the pregnant waddle.
“It’s notthatnoticeable,” she assures him. She looks to Stagger. “Right? It’s not that bad. Only if you’re looking for it.”
Stagger grunts, and Crane gives him the finger.
The air is crisp and cold and perfect. It’s been a while since he’s been outside, let alone in the sun, and Crane has to squint. Stagger clears off a space on a bench for both of them to sit, but Jess stays standing, breath clouding in front of her face, hands jammed into her pockets against the chill.
While it would be technically true to say that Jess looks better than she did, considering the circumstances under which they last saw each other, almost anything would be better than that. She’s in one piece. She’s alive. She’s not drunk or bleeding out on the bathroom floor.
