They’d stolen it, almost shamefully easily, their stifled laughter the only real threat to getting caught. They’d lifted the infant out of the manger, surprised at its lightness, and carried it, barely able to contain their hysteria, back to Gudmund’s car. They’d been so nervous in the getaway that a light had come on in the Fletcher house as they peeled down the road.
But they’d done it. And then they’d driven out to the head cheerleader’s house as planned, shushing each other vigorously as they snuck Baby Jesus out of the backseat into the middle of the night.
Where H dropped him.
It turned out that Baby Jesus wasn’t, in fact, made from Venetian marble, but from some kind of cheap ceramic that broke with astonishing thoroughness when it came into swift contact with the pavement. There had been a hushed, horrified silence as they stood over the bits and pieces.
“We are so going to hell,” Monica had finally said, and it sure hadn’t sounded like she was joking.
Seth hears a sound in his chest and realizes with surprise that it’s laughter. He opens his mouth and it comes out in a horrible, painful honk, but he can’t stop it. He laughs and laughs some more, no matter how light-headed it makes him, no matter how he still can’t quite stand up from the countertop.
Yes. Hell. That’d be about right.
But before he starts to cry again, a feeling that has threatened behind every second of his laughter, he realizes he’s been hearing another sound this whole time. A creaking and groaning, like a baying cow lost somewhere in the house.
He looks up.
The groaning is from the pipes. Dirty, rust-colored water is starting to dribble from the kitchen tap.
Seth practically leaps forward in his desperate rush to drink and drink and drink.
The water tastes awful, unbelievably so, like metal and mud, but he can’t stop himself. He gulps it down as it comes, faster through the tap now. After ten or twelve swallows, he feels a churning in his stomach, leans back, and throws up all the water he just drank into the sink in great, rust-colored cataracts.
He pants heavily for a minute.
Then he sees that the water is running a little clearer, though still not exactly drinkable looking. He waits for as long as he can bear, letting it clear some more, then he drinks again, more slowly, this time taking breaks to breathe and wait.
He keeps the water down. Feels the coolness of it spreading out from his stomach. It feels good, and he notices again how warm it is in this place, but especially in this house. The air is stuffy and oppressive, tasting of the dust that covers everything. His arms are filthy with it just from leaning against the counter.
He begins to feel slightly better, slightly stronger. He drinks again, and then again, until the roaring thirst is finally satisfied. When he stands up fully this time, he does so without feeling dizzy.
The sun through the back window is bright and clear. He looks around the kitchen. It’s definitely his old one, which his mother never stopped complaining about being too small, even after they moved to America, where kitchens tended to be big enough to seat a family of elephants around the breakfast nook. Then again, in his mother’s eyes, everything in England compared unfavorably to America, and why shouldn’t it?
After what England had done to them.
He hasn’t thought about it, really thought about it, for years. There was no reason to. Why dwell on your worst memory? Not if life had moved on, in a brand-new place, so many new things to learn, so many new people to meet.
And though it had been terrible, his brother had survived, hadn’t he? There had been problems, of course, as they watched to see how bad any neurological damage might be as he grew, but his brother had lived and was usually a charming, functional, happy little kid, despite any difficulties.
Though there had been that unthinkable period when they all thought the worst, when they all looked at Seth and while saying over and over that they didn’t blame him, still seemed to think –
He pushes it out of his mind, swallowing away the ache in his throat. He looks out toward the darkened sitting room and wonders what he’s supposed to do here.
Is there a goal? Something to solve?
Or is he just supposed to stay here forever?
Is that what hell is? Trapped forever, alone, in your worst memory?
It makes a kind of sense.
The bandages don’t, though, smudged with dark, dusty stains but stuck fast to his body in an arrangement that covers all the wrong parts. And for that matter, the water – now running almost clear – doesn’t make sense either. Why satisfy his thirst if this is a punishment?
He still can’t hear anything. No machinery, no human voices, no vehicles, nothing. Just the running of the water, the sound of which is so comforting, he can’t quite bring himself to turn it off.
He’s surprised to feel his stomach rumbling. Emptied twice of all its contents, he realizes that it’s hungry, and rather than give in to the fear that this causes – because what do you eat in hell? – he almost automatically opens the nearest cabinet.
The shelves are filled with plates and cups, less dusty because shut away, but still with an air of abandonment. The cabinet next to it has better glasses and the good china, which he recognizes, most but not all of it surviving the shipment to America. He moves quickly on, and in the next cabinet, there is finally food. Bags of desiccated pasta, molding boxes of rice that crumble under his touch, a jar of sugar that’s hardened into a single lump that resists the poking of his fingers. Further searching reveals cans of food, some of which are rusted over, others bulging alarmingly, but a few that look okay. He takes out one of chicken noodle soup.
He recognizes the brand. It’s one that he and Owen used to be unable to get enough of, used to ask their mother to buy over and over again –
He stops. The memory is a dangerous one. He can feel himself teetering again, an abyss of confusion and despair looking right back up at him, threatening to swallow him if he so much as glances at it.
That can be for later, he tells himself. You’re hungry. Everything else can wait.
Even thinking it, he doesn’t believe it, but he forces himself to read the can again. “Soup,” he says, his voice still little more than a croak but better now, after the water. “Soup,” he says again, more strongly.
He starts opening drawers. He finds a can opener – rusty and stiff, but usable – in the first one and lets out a small “Ha!” of triumph.
It takes him seventeen tries to get the first cut into the top of the can.
“Goddammit!” he shouts, though his throat isn’t quite up to shouting yet and he has to cough it away.
But at last there’s an opening, one he can work with. His hands are aching from the simple act of twisting a can opener, and there’s a terrible moment when he thinks he’s going to be too weak and tired to get any further. But the frustration drives him on and eventually, agonizingly so, there’s enough of an opening to drink out of.
He tips the can back into his mouth. The soup has gelatinized and tastes heavily of iron, but it also tastes of chicken noodle, a flavor he’s suddenly so grateful for that he starts laughing as he’s slurping down the noodles.
Then he also senses that he’s crying a bit more, too.
He finishes the can and sets it down with a firm thud.
Stop this, he thinks. Pull yourself together. What do you need to do here? What’s the next thing to do? He stands a little straighter. What would Gudmund do?
And then, for the first time in this place, Seth smiles, small and fleeting, but a smile.
“Gudmund would have a piss,” he croaks.
Because that is indeed what he needs to do next.
He turns back toward the dark, dusty sitting room.
No. Not yet. He can’t face that quite yet. Definitely can’t face stumbling up the darkened stairs to the bathroom at the top of the first landing.
He turns to the door to the backyard – back garden, he remembers
, that’s what the English call it, what his parents always called it. It takes him a few frustrating minutes to get the lock unstuck, but then he steps out into the sunshine again, across the deck his father had built one summer.
The fences of the neighbors on either side seem amazingly close after all the space his family had ended up with in their American house. The lawn itself is now a forest of wheaty-looking stalks and weeds nearly as high as Seth’s head, even as he stands on the low deck. At the back fence, Seth can only just see the top of the old concrete bomb shelter, standing there in its brave arch since World War II. His mother had turned it into a potter’s shed, which she never used all that much, and it quickly became a place to store old bikes and broken furniture.
The embankment beyond the back fence rises up to a gnarled wall of barbed wire. He can’t see any farther than that because of how the land angles down behind it.
But Seth doesn’t think this would be hell if the prison weren’t still there.
He averts his eyes and steps to the edge of the deck. He leans forward a bit and waits to pee out into the tall grass.
And waits.
And waits.
And grunts with the effort.
And waits a bit more.
Until at last, with a heartfelt cry of relief, he sends a poisonously dark yellow stream into the yard.
And almost immediately calls out in pain. It’s like peeing acid, and he looks down at himself in distress.
Then he looks closer.
There are small cuts, small abrasions and marks all across the skin of his groin and hips. He finds a stray piece of white tape tangled in his thickest body hair and a larger one farther down his exposed thigh.
With a wince, he finishes urinating, and starts examining his body more closely in the sunlight. There are numerous cuts and scrapes in the crooks of both his arms, and a line of them up the side of either buttock. He starts pulling at the bandages around his torso, trying to see underneath them. The adhesive is strong, but it finally gives. There’s a strange metallic foil on the inside of each bandage, and it comes away in a sticky mess, tearing off a few chest hairs he never thought much of anyway. The same is true for the bandages on his arms and legs. He works and works at them, leaving behind painful bald spots and finding more abrasions and cuts.
He keeps at it until he completely rids himself of them, coiling them there on the deck, dirty from the dust but the metallic bits catching the sunlight and reflecting it back at him sharply, almost aggressively. There’s no writing on them that he can find, and the metallic part is like nothing he’s ever seen before in America or England.
He steps away from them. There is something alien in the way they look. Something wrong. Something invasive.
Seth crosses his arms tightly against himself, and he shudders, though the sun is beating down clear and hot. He is completely naked now, and that’s the next thing that has to be remedied. He feels unbelievably vulnerable like this, more so than the literal fact of it. There is threat here, somewhere, he’s suddenly sure of it. He glances back to the fence and the prison he knows lies hidden beyond, but this place is more wrong than even all that’s obvious. There’s an unreality under all the dust, all the weeds. Ground that seems solid but that might give way any moment.
He keeps shivering under the heat of the sun, under a clear blue sky without a single airplane in it. All at once the energy he spent on eating and drinking catches up with him, exhaustion settling over him like a heavy blanket. He feels so weak, so unbelievably, physically weak.
His arms still crossed, he turns back to his house.
It sits there, waiting for him, a memory asking to be reentered.
I’ll have to see, Seth tapped onto the screen of his phone. U know how my mum is.
It’s mOm, U homo, Gudmund wrote back. And what’s her problem now?
B in History.
Ur mom gets upset about GRADES?!?! What f-ing century does she live in?
Not this one & only girls text this much, U homo.
Seth smiled to himself as his phone immediately vibrated with an incoming call. “I said I’d have to see,” he whispered into it.
“What’s the matter with her?” Gudmund said. “Doesn’t she trust me?”
“Nope.”
“Ah, well, she’s smarter than I thought.”
“She’s smarter than everyone thinks. That’s why she’s always so pissed off. Says she’s lived here eight years and everyone still talks to her in a loud, slow voice, like she’s a foreigner.”
“She is a foreigner.”
“She’s English. Same language.”
“Not really. Why are you talking so quiet?”
“They don’t know I’m awake yet.”
Seth took a moment to listen from his bed. He could hear his mother stomping around, probably trying to find Owen’s clarinet. Owen, meanwhile, was in the next bedroom over, playing a computer game that involved lots of dramatic guitar solos. And every once in a while there was a banging from the kitchen downstairs, where his father was ten months into a three-month DIY project. Typical Saturday morning stuff, so, no, thank you, he’d stay here as long as no one remembered he –
“SETH!” he heard shouted from down the hall.
“Gotta go,” he said into the phone.
“You have to come, Sethy,” Gudmund insisted. “How many times do I need to say it? My parents are out of town. It’s like a commandment to party. And we’re not going to get many more chances. Senior year, dude, and then we’re out of here.”
“I’ll do what I can,” Seth said hurriedly as his mother’s feet came pounding toward his door. “I’ll call you back.” He hung up as she flung the door open. “Jesus,” he said, “knock much?”
“You have no secrets from me,” she answered, but with a forced half-smile, and he could tell she was trying to apologize, in her bizarrely hostile way.
“You have no idea what secrets I have,” he said.
“I don’t doubt that for a second. Get up. We have to go.”
“Why do I have to come?”
“Have you seen Owen’s clarinet?”
“He’ll be fine for an hour –”
“Have you seen it?”
“Are you even listening to me?”
“Are you listening to me? Where’s Owen’s goddamn clarinet?”
“I don’t goddamn know! I’m not his goddamn butler!”
“Watch your mouth,” she snapped. “You know he loses track of things. You know he’s not as on the ball as you. Not since –”
She didn’t finish her sentence. Didn’t even trail off, just stopped dead. Seth didn’t need to ask what she meant.
“I haven’t seen it,” he said, “but I still don’t see why I have to come and just sit there.”
His mother spoke with angry patience, enunciating every syllable. “Be. Cause. I. Want. To. Go. For. A. Run.” She dangled the running shoes she was holding. “I get precious little time to myself as it is, and you know Owen gets upset if he’s left there alone with Miss Baker –”
“He’s fine,” Seth said. “He puts it on because he likes the attention.”
His mother sucked in her breath. “Seth –”
“If I do it, can I stay over at Gudmund’s tonight?”
She paused. His mother didn’t like Gudmund much, for reasons she couldn’t quite explain herself. “I don’t even like his name,” he’d overheard her saying to his father one night in the next room. “What kind of name is Gudmund? He’s not Swedish.”
“Gudmund is a Norwegian name, I think,” his father had said, not paying much attention.
“Well, he’s not that either. Not even in the way Americans go on about being Irish or Cherokee. Honestly, a whole population who refuse to call themselves after their own nation unless they’re feeling threatened.”
“You must hear them calling themselves American quite a lot then,” his father had said dryly, and the conversation had soured somewhat after that.
/> Seth really didn’t understand it. Gudmund was damn near the perfect teen. Popular enough, but not too popular; confident, but not too confident; nice to Seth’s parents, nice to Owen, and always got Seth home by curfew since he’d gotten his car. Like all of Seth’s classmates, he was a bit older, but only by ten months, seventeen to Seth’s sixteen, which was nothing. They ran on the cross-country team together with Monica and H, which couldn’t have been more wholesome. And while it was true that Gudmund’s mother and father were exactly the sort of scary American conservatives that tended to horrify Europeans, even Seth’s own parents had to admit they were pretty nice people one-on-one.
And though they clearly suspected, his parents had also never found out about any of the trouble he and Gudmund got up to. Not that any of it was actually all that bad. No drugs, and though there was more than occasional drinking, there was definitely no drunk driving. Gudmund was bright and easygoing, and most parents would have been happy to have him around as a friend for their son.
But not, it seemed, Seth’s mother. She pretended she had some sixth sense about him.
And maybe she did.
“You’ve got work tomorrow,” she said now, but he could already tell she was on her way to a yes in the negotiations.
“Not ’til six,” Seth said, keeping his tone as unargumentative as possible.
His mother considered. “Fine,” she said curtly. “Now, get up. We need to go.”
“Close the door,” he called after her, but she was already gone.
He got up and found a shirt to pull on over his head. An hour sitting through Owen’s torturous clarinet lesson with onion-smelling Miss Baker so his mother could go run furiously along the coastal path in exchange for an evening of freedom which included a stash of beer forgotten by Gudmund’s father (though not behind the wheel of Gudmund’s car; really, they were good kids, which made her suspicions all the more infuriating; Seth almost wanted to do something bad, something really bad, just to show her). But for now, it was a fair enough trade.