Unwind (17 page)

A saleswoman eyes them suspiciously from behind the counter. Lev grabs Cy's shoulder. “C'mon, let's get out of here.” But Cy shakes him off and goes over to a tree that's decorated all in glittering gold. He seems mesmerized by all the bulbs and tinsel. There's the slightest twitch right beneath his left eye.

“Cy,” whispers Lev. “C'mon—we have to get to Joplin. Remember? Joplin.”

But Cy's not moving. The saleswoman comes over. She wears a holiday sweater and a holiday smile. “Can I help you find something?”

“No,” says Lev. “We were just leaving.”

“A nutcracker,” says Cy. “I'm looking for a nutcracker for my mom.”

“Oh, they're on the back wall.” The woman turns to look across the store, and the moment she does, Cy picks a dangling gold bauble from the glittering tree and slips it into his coat pocket.

Lev just stands there, stunned.

Cy doesn't even spare Lev a glance as he follows the woman to the back wall, where they discuss nutcrackers.

There's a panic brewing deep down in Lev now, slowly
fighting its way to the surface. Cy and the woman chat for a few moments more, then Cy thanks her and comes back to the front of the store. “I've gotta get more money from home,” he says in his Cy/not-Cy voice. “I think my mom will like the blue one.”

You don't have a mom,
Lev wants to say, but he doesn't because all that matters now is getting out of the shop.

“All right then,” says the saleswoman. “You have a nice day!”

Cy leaves, and Lev makes sure he's right behind him, just in case Cy suddenly has a phantom urge to go back into the store and take something else.

Then, the moment the door closes behind them, CyFi takes off. He doesn't just run, he ejects, like he's trying to burst out of his own skin. He bolts down the block, then into the street. Then back again. Cars honk, a truck nearly mows him down. He darts in random directions like a balloon losing air, and then he disappears into an alley far down the street.

This is not about a gold Christmas bulb. It can't be. It's a meltdown. It's a seizure, the nature of which Lev can't even begin to guess.
I should just let him go,
Lev thinks.
Let him go, then run in the opposite direction, and not look back.
Lev could survive on his own now. He's gotten street-smart enough. He could do it without CyFi.

But there was that look about Cy before he ran. Desperation. It was just like the look in Connor's face the moment he pulled Lev out of his father's comfortable sedan. Lev had turned on Connor. He will not turn on CyFi.

With a pace and stride far steadier than CyFi's, Lev crosses the street and makes his way down the alley.

“CyFi,” he calls, loud enough to be heard but not loud enough to draw attention. “Cy!” He glances in Dumpsters and doorways. “Cyrus, where are you?” He comes to the end of the
alley and looks left and right. No sign of him. Then, as he's about to lose hope, he hears, “Fry?”

He turns his head and listens again.

“Fry. Over here.”

This time he can tell where it's coming from: a playground to his right. Green plastic and steel poles painted blue. There are no children playing—the only sign of life is the tip of CyFi's shoe poking out from behind the slide. Lev crosses through a hedge, steps down into the sand that surrounds the playground, and circles the apparatus until CyFi comes into view.

Lev almost wants to back away from what he sees.

Cy is curled, knees to chest, like a baby. The left side of his face is twitching, and his left hand quivers like gelatin. He grimaces as if he's in pain.

“What is it? What's wrong? Tell me. Maybe I can help you.”

“Nothing,” CyFi hisses. “I'll be all right.”

But to Lev he looks like he's dying.

In his shaking left hand CyFi holds the ornament he stole. “I didn't steal this,” he says.

“Cy . . .”

“I SAID, I DIDN'T STEAL THIS!” He smashes the heel of his right hand against the side of his head. “IT WASN'T ME!”

“Okay—whatever you say.” Lev looks around to make sure they're unobserved.

Cy quiets down a bit. “Cyrus Finch doesn't steal. Never did, never will. It's not my style.” He says it, even as he looks at the evidence right there in his hand. But in a second the evidence is gone. CyFi raises his right fist and smashes it into his left palm, shattering the bulb. Gold glass tinkles to the ground. Blood begins to ooze from his left palm and right knuckles.

“Cy, your hand . . .”

“Don't worry about that,” he says. “I want you to do something for me, Fry. Do it before I change my mind.”

Lev nods.

“See my coat over there? I want you to look in the pockets.”

CyFi's heavy coat is a few yards away tossed over the seat of a swing. Lev goes to the swing set and picks up the coat. He reaches into an inside pocket and finds, of all things, a gold cigarette lighter. He pulls it out.

“Is that it, Cy? You want a cigarette?” If a cigarette would bring CyFi out of this, Lev would be the first to light it for him. There are things far more illegal than cigarettes, anyway.

“Check the other pockets.”

Lev searches the other pockets for a pack of cigarettes, but there are none. Instead he finds a small treasure trove. Jeweled earrings, watches, a gold necklace, a diamond bracelet—things that shimmer and shine even in the dim daylight.

“Cy, what did you do . . . ?”

“I already told you, it wasn't me! Now go take all that stuff and get rid of it. Get rid of it and don't let me see where you put it.” Then he covers his eyes like it's a game of hide-and-seek. “Go—before he changes my mind!”

Lev pulls everything out of the pocket and, cradling it in his arms, runs to the far end of the playground. He digs in the cold sand and drops it all in, kicking sand back over it. When he's done, he smoothes it over with the side of his shoe and drops a scattering of leaves above it. He goes back to CyFi, who's sitting there just like Lev left him, hands over his face.

“It's done,” Lev says. “You can look now.” When Cy takes his hands away, there's blood all over his face from the cuts on his hands. Cy stares at his hands, then looks at Lev helplessly, like . . . well, like a kid who just got hurt in a playground. Lev half expects him to cry.

“You wait here,” Lev says. “I'll go get some bandages.” He knows he'll have to steal them. He wonders what Pastor Dan would say about all the things he's been stealing lately.

“Thank you, Fry,” Cy says. “You did good, and I ain't gonna forget it.” The Old Umber lilt is back in his voice. The twitching has stopped.

“Sure thing,” says Lev, with a comforting smile, and he heads off to find a pharmacy.

What CyFi doesn't know is that Lev has kept a single diamond bracelet, which he now hides in the inside pocket of his not-so-white jacket.

*   *   *

Lev finds them a place to sleep that night. It's the best they've had yet: a motel room. Finding it wasn't all that hard to do—he scouted out a run-down motel without many cars out front. Then it was just a matter of finding an unlocked bathroom window in an unoccupied room. As long as they kept the curtains drawn and the lights off, no one would know they were there.

“My genius keeps rubbin' off on you,” CyFi tells him. Cy's back to his old self, like the incident that morning never happened. Only it
did
happen, and they both know it.

Outside they hear a car door open. Lev and Cy prepare to bolt if a key turns in the motel room lock, but it's another door they hear opening, a few rooms away. Cy shakes out his tension, but Lev doesn't relax. Not yet.

“I want to know about today,” Lev says. It's not a question. It's a request.

Cy is unconcerned. “Ancient history,” he says. “Leave the past in the past, and live for the moment. That's wisdom you can take to the grave, and dig up when you need it!”

“What if I dig it up right now?” Lev takes a moment to let it sink in, then he reaches into his pocket and pulls out the
diamond bracelet. He holds it in front of him, making sure the streetlight spilling through a slit in the curtains catches the diamonds so they glisten.

“Where'd you get that?” CyFi's voice has lost all the playfulness it had only a second ago.

“I kept it,” Lev says, calmly. “I thought it might come in handy.”

“I told you to get rid of it.”

“It wasn't yours to get rid of. After all, you said it yourself—
you
didn't steal it.” Lev twists the bracelet so a diamond refracts a sparkle of light right into CyFi's eye. Without the room lights on Lev can't see much, but he can swear he sees CyFi's cheek starting to twitch.

Cy stands up, looming over Lev. Lev stands as well, a full head shorter than CyFi. “You take that outta my face,” says CyFi, “or I swear I'm gonna pound you into pork rinds.”

Lev thinks he might actually do it, too. CyFi clenches his fists; with the bandages he looks like a boxer, hands wrapped before putting on the gloves. Still, Lev doesn't back down. He just dangles the bracelet. It sends little twinkling lights flitting around the room like a lazy disco ball. “I'll put it away if you tell me why this bracelet and all those other things wound up in your pockets.”

“Put it away first, then I'll tell you.”

“Fair enough.” Lev slips the bracelet back into his pocket and waits, but CyFi isn't talking. So Lev gives him a little prompt. “What's his name?” Lev asks. “Or is it a she?”

CyFi's shoulders slump in defeat. He crumples into a chair. Lev can't see his face at all now in the darkness, so Lev listens closely to his voice. As long as it still sounds like Cy's voice, he knows that Cy's okay. Lev sits himself on the edge of the bed a few feet away from Cy and listens.

“It's a he,” Cy says. “I don't know his name. He musta kept
his name in another part of his brain. All I got was his right temporal lobe. That's only an eighth of the cerebral cortex, so I'm seven-eighths me, and one-eighth him.”

“I figured that was it.” Lev had realized what was going on with Cy even before he stole the bandages from the pharmacy. Cy gave him the clue himself.
Do it before he changes my mind,
Cy had said. “So . . . he was a shoplifter?”

“He had . . . problems. I guess those problems are why his parents had him unwound in the first place. And now one of his problems is mine.”

“Wow. That sucks.”

CyFi laughs bitterly at that. “Yeah, Fry, it does.”

“It's kind of like what happened to my brother Ray,” says Lev. “He went to this government auction thing—ended up with ten acres on a lake, and it cost next to nothing. Then he finds out that the land came with a bunker full of toxic chemicals seeping into the ground. Now he owned it, so now it was his problem. Cost him almost ten times the cost of the land to clean up the chemicals.”

“Sucker,” says Cy.

“Yeah. But then, those chemicals weren't in his brain.”

Cy looks down for a moment. “He's not a bad kid. He's just hurting. Hurting real bad.” The way Cy's talking, it's like the kid is still there, right in the room with them. “He's got this urge about him to grab things—like an addiction, y'know? Shiny things mostly. It's not like he really wants them, it's just that he kind of needs to snap 'em up. I figure he's a kleptomaniac. That means . . . ah, hell, you know what it means.”

“So, he talks to you?”

“No, not really. I didn't get the part of him that uses words. I get feelings mostly. Sometimes images, but usually just feelings. Urges. When I get an urge and I don't know where it's coming from, I know it's from him. Like the time I saw this Irish
setter on the street and I wanted to go over and pet it. I'm not a dog person, see, but all of a sudden I just had to pet that pooch.”

Now that Cy's talking about it, he can't stop. It's all spilling out like water over a dam. “Petting that dog was one thing, but the stealing is another. The stealing makes me mad. I mean, here I am, a law-abiding citizen, never took nothing that didn't belong to me my whole life, and now I'm stuck with this. There's people out there—like that lady in the Christmas store—they see an umber kid like me and they automatically assume I'm up to no good. And now, thanks to this kid in my head, they're right. And you wanna know what's funny? This kid was lily-sienna, like you. Blond hair, blue eyes.”

Hearing that surprises Lev. Not the description, but the fact that Cy can describe him at all. “You know what he looked like?”

CyFi nods. “I can see him sometimes. It's hard, but sometimes I can. I close my eyes and imagine myself looking into a mirror. Usually I just see myself reflected, but once in a while I can see him. It's only for an instant. Kinda like trying to catch a bolt of lightning after you've already seen the flash. But other people—they don't see
him
when he steals. It's me they see.
My
hands grabbing.”

“The people who matter know it's not you. Your dads . . .”

“They don't even know about this!” Cy says. “They think they did me a favor stickin' me with this brain chunk. If I told them about it, they'd feel guilty until the end of time, so I can't tell them.”

Lev doesn't know what to say. He wishes he'd never brought it up. He wishes he hadn't insisted on knowing. But most of all, he wishes Cy didn't have to deal with this. He's a good guy. He deserves a better break.

“And this kid—he doesn't even understand he's a part of me,” Cy says. “It's like those ghosts that don't know they're
dead. He keeps trying to be him, and can't understand why the rest of him ain't there.”

All of a sudden Lev realizes something. “He lived in Joplin, didn't he!”