Ninety-Four:

NINETY-FOUR:

Reggie and Jed

Heavy bones wrapped in fifty-five years of worry. Reggie Frost clutched at her nightgown, startled. “Shit, Liz! Do you have to sneak around like that? You scared a decade off my life.”

She smiled, making for the kitchen where her daughter stood. “You’re a bit blurry. I just put my eye drops in.” She stopped at the sink and watched the mess come into focus. “That bloody father of yours. He never washes his dishes.” A sausage finger scratched at the plates. “He knows I hate having to scrub itty-bitty pieces of cornflakes off with the steel wool.”

Reggie threw a dishtowel over the edge of the sink and turned, intercepted by her daughter who crossed the room to kiss her on the cheek. A surge of warmth on Reggie’s skin, gone as quick as it came.

“Bye, Mum,” Liz said, voice soft.

A smile played at the corners of Reggie’s mouth as she watched her daughter stop near the open window and glance outside. The family dog, a large, black Rottweiler named Dog, yapped at the end of its chain, eager to be fed.

Reggie knew that Liz hated Dog and his muscular hind legs and slobbering jowls. Dog bit her once years before and she had never forgiven it.

“We have got to do something about those Christmas decorations,” Reggie said. “I know it’s going on close to the season now, but those damn things have been up since last year. It’s embarrassing. The lights are still in the trees—God only knows how many of the bulbs have busted.” Vague hope in Reggie’s eyes. “Want to help me with them when you knock off?”

Liz stood silhouetted against window light, holding her breath.

A ticking clock. The gurgle of dirty water running down the sink.

“Well the damn things aren’t going to take themselves down!” Reggie snapped.

***

Liz, embarrassed, came outside and found her father troweling the flowerbed near the porch, the burial ground of many unloved dolls so many years ago. Her cheeks burned and whatever words she wanted to say turned to sand in her mouth. She felt icy hands clutch at her bowels.

Under her father’s kneecap were the remains of tiny plastic people, their hair eaten away and eye sockets full of grit. Liz walked away.

***

Wes wiped sweat from his brow, giving himself a war-paint streak of dirt. Were those tears he’d seen glimmering in Liz’s eyes?He wanted to stand and reach out for her but she was already halfway across the front yard, having passed her car and Jed’s battered pickup truck.

The knapsack looked heavy on her shoulder.

He sighed, dug the trowel into the earth again and tilted his head to the faraway perimeter trees. “Damn,” he said.

His girl broke him in a special way, a way only daughters could.

***

Grass crunched underfoot. Liz’s backpack swung on her shoulder. It bore extra weight today, though she couldn’t remember why. She slipped through the shed door and her shadow fell over her brother’s tattooed back, Jed’s ornate rendering of an eagle spread from shoulder to shoulder.

Eagles always fascinated him. The species escaped extinction because of their tenacity and could carry four times their own weight. She knew Jed admired the eagle’s speed and loyalty to its young, he’d said so many times over. He got the tattoo two years ago when he was twenty-three in a cheap Melbourne parlor, and when he came home from his trip, their father said how much he hated it, said it made him look like a thug. However, the eagle was Jed’s baby; the needle and its sting sew them together forever.

Sweat beaded from the bird’s wings. Jed faced his sister. Their eyes locked, shared the same look.

A punching bag strung from the moaning rafters.

It swung on its chain like a corpse at the end of a noose.

Jed moved to the unfinished Volkswagen in the corner of the room and sat on the hood. The car had been their father’s pet project for years. Jed tinkered with it every now and then, a passing hobby. It kept the grease under his fingernails, an issue of pride between father and son.

Tools covered one wall, and on the opposite, were guns upon racks crafted from the antlers and tusks of dead game. Underneath the twisted rack of metal and tooth, a titanium chest of drawers full of nails, bullets, and beetles gathered dust.

Liz stepped forward and watched her brother raise a hand. Even in the dim, she saw the awkward alignment of his knuckles, the blood.

“I caned my hand something shocking, Sis.”

Sis. She loved the word because it was hers and hers alone. Special to them both. This twinge of familiarity pierced deep. She knew he would miss her most.

“You off to work then?” His shiny face, dust in his buzz cut. He twitched and clenched his jaw. His long arms flexed, muscles rolled into prominence.

“Maybe,” Liz said, voice cracking. “You should see a doctor or something.” She fought the urge to tell him everything, to tell him about The Beast and about how much she wanted to run away with him and make new lives, to piece themselves together as new people like the Barbies and Kens in her room. “Y-y-you should come with me, and I, well I can drop you off at the depot and you can leg it in from there and I’ll spot you enough money to catch a bus back and Mum and Dad aren’t working so they can pick you up from The Bridge—”

Liz said anything that came to mind so long as it wasn’t truthful.

Jed laughed. “It’s not that bad.”

Silence fell. His comment forced her into uselessness again.

“Well.” Liz tapered off.

“Yeah?”

“Well, I came in to say—” She searched for the right word. “Goodbye.”

He snorted again, shaking his head.

“Ah, Sis, you’re—” He was going to say ‘weird’ and stopped, jumped off the hood and bounded over to her, radiating energy and heat. “You want me to get you more stuff?”

“What?”

“You know, stuff.” That’s what he called the powder in the white vials. Phencyclidine, ‘angel dust’, PCP. Jed bought it and cut it with ether. He would roll himself a joint, slice fifty-twenty hash and tobacco, and dip it in the solution. Jed called it ‘getting wet’. PCP numbed the senses, punctuated with fireworks of high-energy bouts. Some users, but not all, turned violent whilst high on the drug. Liz had read about it.

“No.” She almost laughed. “I’m okay for now.”

“All right. Just don’t say I didn’t try.”

“You’re sure about not going to the doctor? I don’t mind, I got the time—”

“Really, let it go.” Jed stepped closer. “I may have busted my knuckles but it’s okay. I’ve got brother bones. They grow back strong when they need to.”

Their gazes latched together again, twin sets of stars—at once dead and alive.

***

Jed was nine years old, his hands covered in blood. He stood at the bottom of the stairs in the shadow of the man who had cut him. Each gash a drooling, puckered mouth. Too shocked to cry.

Liz saw Jed’s vacant expression from the living room floor where she lay covered in bruises, the left buckle of her suspenders broken at her side. Rage ripped through her.

“You hurt him,” she screeched, pulling herself up. “You hurt my brother.”

The man turned to see the girl launch at him and snatch the knife from his grip. She dropped it and the tip of the blade impaled carpet they had walked across for years, carrying meals to the living room, carting presents to sit under the Christmas tree. Liz glared through the shadow, through memories, and saw the man.

His tears terrified her.

Jed never forgot his sister’s defiance. Like scars, his love and respect for her never faded.

***

Liz’s ’89 Mitsubishi Colt pulled into the bus depot parking lot in Maitland. She only had a vague recollection of the twenty-five-minute trip from James Bridge to work. Flashes of images—passing trees and recollections. A gray blur.

The highway out of James Bridge.

Gray.

Her mother opening the living room door as Liz edged towards the kitchen, her father on his knees in the dirt, her brother.

Gray.

The bus had a distinct smell before a shift, one that would recede as the day progressed. Disinfectant and shoe polish. Light beamed through the windows in shafts, struck the railings and handlebars. Fifty plush seats awaiting passengers.

As Liz guessed, she was on Route 243. The Sunday ‘back-road’ valley transit, with two rarely frequented stops along Wollombi Road to James Bridge, followed by the same return trip, an outskirt detour designed specifically for The Bridge Folk. “Easy money, little dice,” her boss often said about the shift. Liz suspected that given time, the route would go the way of the Tasmanian tiger.

Gray.

The bus roared to life. Vibrations ran through her body. From her pocket she took a small glass diamond strung on a chain. She bought it for two dollars at a flea market. Liz slipped the trinket over the rearview mirror, movements robotic and sluggish. The diamond hung just above her eye line. She wound the Route and Destination signage into place with a manual crank.

Next to the diamond, on the same silver thread, a second twinkle caught the sun, this one old yet polished. Her mother gifted her the Saint Christopher medallion on her first day of work. To keep her safe.