Every Little Thing in the World (15 page)

There was a moment of silence, the pop and crackle of the fire. Then we all burst out laughing. “You are so full of shit,” Natalia said. Brendan picked up a stick and turned over some of the reddest embers. We watched a new, thin line of smoke spiral up toward the sky.

“I'm not,” Mick said. “It's true. I killed a guy. It was a nigger.”

For a moment the world around us halted. Insects stopped buzzing. My mosquito bites stopped itching. None of us moved. We heard no loons, no frogs, no crickets, no sound.

It seems strange to say it. But truthfully, in some weird, instinctive way, Mick's using the
N
word shocked me much more than his confession of murder—maybe because I didn't quite believe the latter. But I had never heard anyone say that word in real life. It was the biggest language taboo I knew, maybe the only one. The word echoed in the dark woods. It hung all around us, marking Mick—one of us only a second ago—a strange and ominous other.

“You shouldn't say that,” Natalia whispered. “You shouldn't say
nigger
.” She gave the word a shaky, unaccustomed lilt, sounding almost like her parents with their musical, pidgin English.

“Yeah,” Mick said. “You're not supposed to kill them either.”

“That's not funny,” I said.

“Who said it was funny?” Mick asked. Sitting beside him, his elbow hovering next to mine, I wished I could see his face straight on.

“Nobody, man,” said Brendan. “Nobody's saying it's funny.” I thought his voice sounded a little too cool, like he'd been cast as Best Friend in some gangsta movie. All around us, the night had gone back to its usual chorus of wind and wildlife, but everything had turned surreal, artificial. We were all of us suddenly characters. Mick played the hardened criminal, Natalia the delicately aghast hottie. And me, not needing to pretend I wasn't afraid of Mick—because I wasn't—but pretending as usual to be only myself, one person, sitting there among the others.

Mick told us the story. It had happened at the end of last summer. He was walking through Bedford Dwellings in Pittsburgh, late one night with his brother. They had just bought an ounce of pot—“sticky green bud”—when a man stopped them beneath the Cannon Road underpass.

“There were no streetlights,” Mick said. “Totally dark. We could barely see the guy's face, but we knew he must have followed us from the score. It cost us almost three hundred bucks for that weed. We weren't going to part with it easy.”

Mick said that the guy grabbed his brother, who had the bag
of pot in the inside pocket of his jacket. He ignored Mick and pressed his brother up against the damp cement wall, holding a knife to his throat.

“My brother kept fighting. I told him to quit it, that it wasn't worth getting killed over pot. But he was crazed, fighting back, protecting the stuff, and I knew he was going to get his throat slit. Meanwhile I was just standing there.”

The guy had started beating Mick's brother with his fist, hard blows directly to his face, so Mick sprang forward and jumped onto his back. I could imagine Mick's face perfectly in that moment, the taut, electric predator taking the professional criminal by surprise. “I was riding the guy like a horse,” Mick said.

He tried to get the knife away by reaching down over his shoulder, but the guy bucked backward, and the two of them landed on the ground. For a second they were both lying there on the concrete, the wind knocked out of them, face-to-face. “Like we'd been cuddling,” he said. Mick got his breath back first. He grabbed the guy's head and smashed it on the ground. It sounded, he said, like he'd dropped a bowling ball. I imagined the loud, jarring
thwack
of it.

“I didn't mean to hit his head that hard,” Mick said, his voice suddenly more dreamy than proud. “I guess I didn't know how hard the concrete was. I wasn't really thinking. I was just trying to protect myself and my brother. He still had the knife; I was scared he would stab me if I didn't do something. Then his eyes kind of rolled back, and blood started pouring out of his ear.”

For a second it felt like we were all four standing in that dark tunnel with Mick—the kid he'd been last summer. I could see the adrenaline pulsing through his jumpy, sixteen-year-old self as he stood over that not-supposed-to-be-dead body.

“The guy just lay there gurgling,” Mick said. “His feet kicked a couple times and then just stopped. My brother and me got out of there fast as we could.”

“So you really don't even know that he died,” said Brendan.

“Oh, he died.” Mick picked a slim stick up off the ground and put it in his mouth like a cigar. He removed it and blew imaginary smoke rings into the air.

“Maybe somebody found him and called an ambulance,” Natalia said.

“Yeah,” said Mick. “Or maybe he sprouted wings and flew up to nigger heaven.”

We had all listened to the cracking head part without flinching, but at the repetition of the
N
word Natalia put her hands over her ears and whispered, “
Shh, shh, shh.
”

“Anyway,” Brendan said. “It wasn't your fault. It was obviously self-defense.”

Mick shrugged. “I don't lose much sleep over it. Me or him, who else am I supposed to choose?”

Natalia took her hands away from her ears and lay them in her lap. Her cheeks looked red and streaky, almost as if she'd started crying.

“You could have just given him the pot,” she said. Her voice sounded shaky and small, not like herself. I felt Mick stiffen
beside me. His elbows went tense, and I saw a vein pop in his neck.

“What does that mean?” he said.

“You could have just given it to him, and none of that would have happened.”

“But his brother had the pot,” I said. I didn't blame Natalia for her reaction. At the same time, I thought she was missing the heroism in the story. Mick could have just run away from that guy, and instead he stepped forward and saved his brother's life. “Mick couldn't have given him the pot even if he'd wanted to,” I said.

“And why the fuck should I give him my pot?” Mick said. “My brother and me worked all August washing Mack trucks for Glosky's Construction. Why should we just hand it all over?”

Mick's eyes looked dark and agitated in the firelight. I could feel his bandanna, wrapped tightly around my head, a strange, tingling warmth knowing that it belonged to him, that it usually clung to his own bare skin. He might have been wearing it the night that this happened. If it had really happened at all.

“I'm just saying,” Natalia said, “I don't think I would kill someone over a bag of pot.”

“Let's just hope you never have to, little sister,” Mick growled. He leaned across me, toward Natalia. His tense body crouched over my lap, but he wasn't aware of me any more than the thug in the tunnel had been of him. His nose was inches away from Natalia's, and I could hear her squeaky little intake of breath. In that moment I felt a strange kind of allegiance with Mick.
I was tired of Natalia's Jiminy Cricket routine, and I wished she could learn to keep her self-righteous mouth shut.

But I hated the menacing way Mick—confessed killer—was facing off with her. So I brought up my arm and elbowed him hard in the solar plexus. He pulled back, away from Natalia, and doubled over for a second. And even though he jumped to his knees and drew back his hand as if he wanted to hit me, I felt acutely aware of two things: one, that Mick wouldn't hurt me. Two, that I didn't care if he did.

Be careful
. All my life I had heard those words, about everything. From the time I was a little girl:
Be careful, Sydney
, when I tiptoed across the low stone wall surrounding the first farm where my father worked. Leaning too close to the flame when I blew out the candles on my birthday cake. Walking out the door for a date with Greg.
Be careful, be careful, be careful
.

I hadn't realized until just then: I was sick to death of careful.

“You're a fucking animal,” Natalia yelled at Mick.

“Me?” Mick yelled back. “She just elbowed me in the gut!”

“She was protecting her friend.”

“I was protecting my brother.”

We all sat silently for a minute. Then Mick bent down, picked up a palm-sized rock, and threw it at the water. I heard it skitter on the dirt just short of the lake.

“Fuck this,” he said. “Fuck all you pansy-ass rich kids. I'm going to sleep.”

We sat there, shaky and quiet, watching Mick storm back
to his tent. For reasons I couldn't possibly explain I felt guilty, and exposed—as if I had been the one to make a shocking confession.

Natalia and I walked down to the water to clean up before bed. We washed our faces in silence, splashing water, then brushed our teeth. After spitting out a mouthful of toothpaste, Natalia said, “Your breasts have gotten bigger.”

“No, they haven't.” I held my toothbrush in one hand and brought the other up to cup my right breast. It felt just the same as always.

“Yes, they have,” Natalia said. “I bet your regular bras wouldn't fit you anymore.” Her tone was flat, almost accusing. It infuriated me that she would decide to needle me after I'd defended her. Why couldn't she mind her own business?

“I was standing in the dark,” I said.

“We could see you perfectly.”

My face flushed, and I wondered if Natalia could see my embarrassment, too. A terrible feeling—finding out something you considered secret had been absolutely visible.

“I think you're imagining things,” I said. “I feel exactly the same.”

“But you're not exactly the same,” Natalia said. “You're pregnant.”

Mick had returned to the campfire and I could hear him and Brendan, their low voices, without hearing their exact words. Natalia had spoken very quietly, very discreetly, but I couldn't help worrying that they'd heard.

“Please,” I said, suddenly feeling vulnerable and defensive. “Can we not talk about it? I'm going to deal with it when I get home.”

“Are you?”

“Of course I am.” I scratched at a mosquito bite on my arm hard enough that I felt a warm spill of blood puddle underneath my fingernails.

“I was thinking tonight,” said Natalia. “It's exactly one month since that night in the park, that first night with Tommy. That means you're probably one month pregnant.”

I didn't want to tell her it meant I was six weeks pregnant.

“It seems to me,” Natalia said, “that if you really wanted an abortion, you wouldn't be here. You would have found a way to have one. You would have told your mother.”

I let out a long, slow breath. Why did everyone talk like desire and action were these two absolute companions? Didn't people do things that went against what they wanted all the time? Like eating a doughnut when you wanted to lose five pounds. Even more often than that, didn't people
not
do things, not say anything? Like Margit not saying she was Natalia's mother, when she must have wanted to a million times. It didn't surprise Natalia that Tommy and I hadn't used a condom. Why was it such a shock that I hadn't grabbed my mom's hand and rushed over to Planned Parenthood?

I zipped my jacket to my chin. Here in Canada, we lived in two seasons. By day, on the lake, we rowed through summer in our shorts and bikini tops. Every morning I traded my sweats
for shorts, worried that my stomach would start bulging, straining the buttons, announcing itself to the group. Every day my shorts buttoned easily—maybe even more easily, with all the exercise and rationed camp food.

At night, chilly autumn descended. We bundled up in comforting, protective layers. “Of course I don't want to have an abortion,” I said to Natalia. “Who would? But I don't want to be pregnant, either. And there's only one road back to not pregnant.”

Natalia reached out and took my hand. Her pretty brows knitted together in sympathy and confusion. I tried to remember that she was my friend, that we loved each other.

“If we keep going in this direction,” I told her, “there's no way I can win. First you won't want me to have an abortion because you can't think about Margit aborting you. But then if I don't have an abortion, you won't want me to give it away, because Margit gave you away. You see? You won't be able to forgive me no matter what I do. And how can I have a baby, Natalia? How can I?”

Natalia stepped forward and pulled me into a hug. I hugged her back, my toothbrush still clasped in one hand, a million stars—a trillion stars—decorating the sky above us.

“I don't know what to do,” Natalia whispered, her breath warm and minty against my ear. I patted her back consolingly. It seemed perfectly reasonable that she should share in this dilemma. Because it
was
a dilemma, no matter how much I pretended a decision had already been made. We both knew I
would carry the possibility of a child until the very last second I lay down on a gynecologist's table.

“I don't care if you have it,” Natalia said, testing the words as she spoke them. “Just promise me you'll think about having it.”

“Okay,” I said, although that thought—that idea—seemed as foreign and impossible as buying drugs on the streets of Pittsburgh, or killing someone, or saying the
N
word.

We packed up our toiletries and walked back up to the tent. It didn't occur to me until I was almost asleep that we hadn't said a single word about Mick's story.

Next morning around the campfire Lori announced that she wanted to go home. Brendan and Mick lay sleeping outside, each with a woolen hat pulled down over his eyes. I could see that Brendan—inside Mick's flimsy cloth bag—also wore a thick down coat, while Mick snoozed away in Brendan's cozy Marmot sleeping bag. Except for Meredith, no one ever got up to greet the dawn, and the rest of us sat waiting for Jane to hand out breakfast in bright sunlight, the ground already warm beneath our bare feet. I tried to guess the time and calculate the day of the week. But it was more than my foggy brain could handle, and I ended up settling for
this morning, right now
, as I stared at poor Lori, her toned and skinny legs shaking slightly at the knees. A few days ago Mick had said he'd be glad to fuck her if only he could put a bag over her head. I'd winced at the cruelty but had to admit that I could see what he meant. Perched on top of her perfect body, Lori's head—the
weird, spiky hair and the acne-drenched face—looked perpetually offended by its own unprettiness.