Marrow (21 page)

He slows down when he’s next to us, and keeps pace.

“Where were you last night?”

I stop. “What?”

“Last night,” he says again. “I saw you walking home. You looked … strange.”

“Work,” I say, starting to walk again.

“Something keep you late?” he asks. His hands are moving quickly across the wheels of his chair to keep up.

“Huh?”

“It was midnight when I saw you.”

“Oh … yeah. I was late.” I look out at the field across the street. The leaves on the trees are turning.

He’s quiet for a minute, then he says, “They found a body near the harbor this morning.”

“Whose?” I ask. My mouth feels dry. I try to keep my eyes on the road ahead of me, but everything is blurring in and out of focus.

“They don’t know yet. It’s on the news. Someone reported a fire in the woods near the harbor, so the police went out there to check it out, and there was a body.”

“Hmm,” I say. “Whose was it?”

“You just asked me that,” he says. “I told you they don’t know.”

‘Oh,” I say dumbly. I switch Mo to my other hip.

“Let me have him,” Judah says, holding out his arms.

“He doesn’t know you,” I say, squeezing Mo a little tighter.

“And you two are on a first name basis?” He wiggles his fingers impatiently. I reluctantly relinquish the baby to Judah’s arms. My arms are starting to get tired, and I’m not even to the end of Wessex yet.

“You can push me, and I can hold him. Doesn’t he have a stroller?”

“It’s broken,” I say. “The wheel…”

“Bring it over later, I’ll take a look.”

“Ugh, you’re so helpful it’s annoying,” I say.

Judah turns the baby around so they’re facing each other. I notice that Little Mo pulls his legs up instead of stiffening them when held under his arms.

“You don’t look like a Mo,’” he informs the baby. For the next forty minutes I listen to Judah discuss various name choices with the baby, who looks right through him. By the time we reach Wal-Mart, my arms are aching, and the baby is fussy. Judah has somehow renamed him Miles. “Mo Miles, Mo Miles,” he says, and I swear Mo gives him a little smile like he’s approving. Mo’s smiles are rare. I feel jealous.

“I think he needs formula,” I say. We make our way to the baby aisle. I grab diapers, formula, and a pack of bottles. When I turn around, Judah has a colorful toy in his hand; he’s moving it left to right, letting Mo follow it with his eyes. There is a brief moment where Mo lifts his fist as if to touch the toy, and my heart does a little jump.

“We’re getting that too,” I say.

“Your mom leave you some money?” he asks me when I pull a hundred dollar bill from my pocket.

“You could say that.”

“Here,” he says, holding out his hand for my Groceries & Shit bag. “He needs a bottle.”

I hold Mo while Judah makes him a bottle. Two scoops of formula, a bottle of Aquafina, then he shakes it and holds out his arms. I place Mo is his lap, and Judah sticks the bottle in his mouth. As I watch Mo eat, I wonder how Judah knew how to do that. I would have struggled to read the instructions for fifteen minutes, and probably would have dropped the whole container of powder on the ground. While I watch them, I hear Lyndee’s screams. I smell the smoke. I feel her blood. I killed a woman. I planned it all out, and I killed a woman, and here I am at Wal-Mart the next day with my hot cripple friend and the neighbor’s baby. I don’t know which person is the imposter. I am either Margo of the Bone, or this new thing, this murderer. Or maybe I’ve always been her, this vile, wicked person; she was just there, simmering beneath the surface, waiting for me to act on my impulses.

“How did you know how to do that?” I ask.

“Work.”

“You work with babies?”

“I work with children of all ages.”

“Where do you work anyway?”

“Are we friends now?” he asks. “Officially?”

“I guess so,” I say. “We see a lot of each other. We’re either friends at this point or we’re married.”

“Margo Grant,” he teases. “You can be Miles Grant,” he tells Mo. Mo pauses for a minute in his sucking to smile at Judah, while I blush profusely.

“Don’t you buy into his charm,” I tell Mo. “He’s a big flirt.”

The sun heats our shoulders with little mercy. I am wishing I had sunscreen for the baby when Judah suddenly decides to answer my question.

“I work at Barden’s School for the Disabled,” he says. “It’s also where I went to school. My mom got me a scholarship, somehow convinced them to put me on their bus schedule even though they have to drive all the way out here to this evil corner of the universe. When I graduated, they offered me a part-time job working with the after school kids and as a teacher’s aide.”

I glance down at the top of his head, impressed. It seems exactly like the sort of thing he should be doing. I am just about to say so when he says…

“I hated going there. I already felt so different, then I was forced to go to a school where everyone was different. And all I wanted to do was experience some normalcy.”

I think about my high school experience—the kids with their guarded, worn eyes. Wanting someone to notice you all the while praying no one does. The urgency to find likeness in your peers and knowing you never will. The desperate and clumsy attempts to dress, and speak, act and tolerate what is deemed acceptable. It was the most humiliating, desperately lonely four years of my life. And yet, had Judah’s body been whole, his legs undamaged by the tumor that stole his ability to walk, he would have stood tall, probably played football on the school’s team. Handsome and popular, he never would have been the kind of boy to exchange words with me. How lucky did that tumor make me? How blessed? To get to know a man like Judah Grant without the social barriers dictating our roles.

“You didn’t miss out on anything,” I tell him. “People are mostly just assholes in high school.”

Judah laughs. “Don’t swear in front of the baby,” he says.

“Sorry, Mo,” I say dutifully.

“Miles,” he corrects.

“Sorry, Miles,” I say. “Mo Miles, Mo Miles…”

All three of us are smiling.
So rare,
I think. But I am happy. I feel it all the way to my toes, even though yesterday I killed someone.

JUDAH KNOWS SOMETHING
. I realize this one day as I am hanging clothes on hangers, and arranging them around the store, the musty smell filling my nostrils and making me feel sick
.
He’s been different with me ever since that afternoon with Mo. At first I told myself it was in my head—the assessing looks, the silence, the strange questions, but they come too frequently. He’s on to me. He’s been spending more and more time with his father. I don’t like the look of him, or maybe I’m jealous. He comes to get Judah, patiently lifting him into the passenger seat before carefully loading his wheelchair into the back. I wonder how he and Delaney met, as I watch him climb into the driver’s seat, his russet hair lifting in the wind. He isn’t the type to shoot the breeze and smoke a joint on someone’s front porch. He is a serious man; you can tell by the way he hardly smiles, the pristine condition in which he keeps his truck. Even the care with which he handles Judah’s wheelchair says something of the way he lives. Judah is like him. It is strange to realize that the boy I feel most connected to doesn’t really belong here. His only tie being Delaney, probably the only reason he hadn’t left. My eyes follow the truck and the boy out of Wessex, until they burn from brine.

I wait for him to come back, checking out the window, looking for his dad’s car. But he doesn’t come home until three days later, and he looks different. When I see him after that, he is distant. He locks eyes with strangers more than he does me. He peels the skin off oranges, and does not eat them. He picks up a joint and does not light it. He smiles at Mo, and it does not reach his eyes. Where has Judah gone?

At first, I wonder if it’s because of how much I’ve changed. I’ve lost almost fifty pounds. I’m not the girl he met in either shape or mental form. Perhaps my ability to make this change bothers him. While he is stuck in his wheelchair, I am free to walk off my weight. But, no. That’s not Judah. The fortune of others does not turn him melancholy. He doesn’t wish for what he cannot have. That’s what drew me to him in the first place. So I move on.
When did it start
? I think.
When did he start pulling away?

Was it after I killed Vola? Lyndee? I remember the way he looked at me that day after I came back smelling of smoke, with dirt smeared across my knuckles.

I must have reeked of it that night—death and smoke. I hurried back to the eating house and sat at the kitchen table, staring down at the scars on the wood until I eventually climbed the stairs to my bedroom. The next day it all felt like a dream. Sometimes, I almost forget it happened.

The following week Judah tells me that he’s moving to California. I feel all the blood rush to my head.

“What? Why?”

“My dad is going.” He hands me the bowl of popcorn and wheels himself into the living room. “He said I can live with him while I go to school.”

I trip on the rug by the front door, and popcorn goes flying everywhere.

“Jeez, you okay?” Judah bends down to grab my hands. I pull them away from him, my face burning. “You can live with your mom and go to college, too.” I try to say it casually as I scoop kernels from the floor, but there is a slight tremor in my voice. The idea of the Bone without Judah is unbearable. Some days I’m not even sure how I made it through eighteen years of my life without him.

“My doctor thinks it will be good for me to be there. I’ll be in Los Angeles,” he says. “Everything will be easier, even getting from one place to the next without getting soaked.”

“It’s just a little rain,” I say limply. I make to eat a piece of popcorn I find on the floor, and Judah knocks it out of my hand.

“Stop it,” he says. “We can make another bag.” I watch as he goes back to the kitchen. I want to cry. I want to beg him to stay. I eat the rest of the popcorn I find on the floor. When he comes back, I am slipping on my coat to leave.

“What are you doing, Margo?”

“I’m going home.” I reach to open the door, but he throws an un-popped kernel at my head. It bounces off my forehead, and I glare at him.

“We had plans!” I yell at him, and then I cover my mouth with my hand, hoping Delaney didn’t hear my outburst from her bedroom.

“To get out of the Bone,” Judah says.

“Together,” I insist. “I can’t do it alone.”

He stares at the blank TV screen, absently pushing pieces of popcorn into his mouth. I want to confess about eating the popcorn on the floor, but I know he’ll be really upset with me.

“You have legs,” he says finally. “I have to go where I have an extra pair of legs to help me. At least for now … until I’m done with school.”

“I can be your legs.”

“You need to be your own legs, Margo. Look, I don’t want to be a burden on anyone’s life. I want to be able to do things for myself. My dad has money. He said that if I come out to California with him, he’ll pay for my school. He wants to buy me one of those custom cars that I can drive. A cripple’s car.”

When I don’t say anything, he glances at Delaney’s bedroom door and lowers his voice. “He stopped paying child support when I turned eighteen. I suddenly became really expensive. I can’t be a burden to her. I have to be able to work, carry my own weight.”

I look down at my legs, and suddenly I hate them. I hate that they give me an advantage over Judah.

“Stay,” he says, as I turn back to the door.

“Why? You’re just going to leave. Why should I waste my time?”

“You think it’s a waste of time to be with me?”

I don’t know how to answer him without sounding pathetic.

“You can leave too. Anytime you want. I know someone in the city who will give you a job.”

“And where will I live? How will I know where to go and what to do?”

“You learn those things,” he says cautiously. “You don’t have to be trapped here.”

I don’t want to learn those things without him. He’s stolen my dream, and I feel stupid for ever having it. Of course someone like Judah would never run away with someone like me. Of course he wouldn’t want to share a life with an ugly, unaccomplished girl from the Bone. It was all talk to lift our spirits, and now he is going to move away and leave me with a brain high on ideas that will never be fulfilled.

“When are you leaving?” I ask.

Judah looks away. “Tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow?” I repeat. “That’s why you’ve been so weird lately.”

I break our connection. It happens in the blink of an eye. I snap it in two and forget it was there. He calls after me when I leave his house, but I keep walking. I survived eighteen years without Judah Grant. I didn’t need him. I want to be fireproof. Nothing should have the power to break my heart.

The eating house is quiet when I let myself in. I sit at the kitchen table with a glass of milk, staring at the gas stove and entertaining the idea of leaving the Bone. If he can, I can. My milk grows warm, the condensation on the glass long gone. My fingers stay wrapped around the glass, my brain rifling through my options. Every possibility seems bleak without Judah: staying, leaving, living. But, no. I won’t be the type of woman who lacks in courage. I didn’t survive just to fold to the familiarity the Bone offers. I push my untouched milk aside and stand up, my chair scraping loudly against the wood. The house stirs around me. The floorboards above my head creak with the weight of invisible feet, the refrigerator begins to hum, the light bulb on the porch starts flickering in the early dusk.
It’s awake,
I think.
Just like that.