Gristle & Bone Page 2

  Candace frowned at it, suddenly certain there'd been something in bed with them last night. A large insect. An animal, even. Had she felt the comforter tug at her feet when she'd awakened? She thought yes. And though it was mortifying, the idea that an animal had slipped into their bed during the night scared her less than the alternative.

  Her mother had suffered from breast cancer, as had her great-aunt: neither instance had been pretty. After three rounds of chemo and a double-mastectomy, Aunt Betsy's cancer had metastasized, spreading through her blood, and soon she'd withered away to nothing. Fortunately, her mother had been spared the same indignity. Beverly Leason's tumor had been benign, a mere fibroadenoma, but the fact remained: breast cancer ran in the Leason family blood.

  Candace raised her arms to check for dimples and "irregularities." Aside from the bruise, they seemed normal, though she hadn't spent much time staring at her breasts in the mirror since puberty. Until her great-aunt's battle with cancer, they'd simply been there, hanging globes of fat and flesh, often an aggravation: the subject of ridicule when she'd blossomed early; having to strap them down and cover them over for business meetings and exercise; then, after Betsy's sickbed death, objects of dread. She'd often considered she would have been better off without them, though Joel probably wouldn't have agreed.

  She squeezed it—Joel had called the right one Monica, the left one Rachel when he was feeling frisky—looking for fluid expressed from the nipple. It remained dry. Sore, but dry. It would always be dry, much as her belly might distend some day from weight gain, but never from pregnancy.

  Born to be a mother, she thought again. What an awful phrase to worm into my head.

  Without the need to primp, she threw on a loose pair of shorts and one of Joel's old sweaters, then went downstairs to schedule an appointment for a breast exam. Better safe than sorry, she thought. Aunt Betsy used to say that, before the cancer had made her sorry, anyhow. They scheduled Candace for the next week.

  About an hour later she had her headphones on, typing away at her desk as an obstetrician's nasal voice droned on about his patient's phantom pregnancy. (Something about the doctor's tone made Candace think he was misogynist; perhaps it was because he'd called it a "hysterical pregnancy," and not in the har-har kind of way.)

  Glass shattered somewhere in the house, startling her out of her chair. She flicked the headphones off her head, thoughts racing.

  "Okay, calm down, Candace. Something fell," she told herself, adding "Don't get hysterical," with a halfhearted chuckle.

  Five breaths, in and out. She thought of Lamaze. And the house remained silent. Thinking she must have imagined it, she put her headphones back on, and was just about seated again when another sound brought her to her feet, heart pounding.

  First broken glass, now the pitter-patter of little feet.

  She called out, "Hello?" aware of how stupid it was after she'd done it. If it was an intruder up there, she'd just acknowledged his presence and announced her rise to the second floor to investigate with one feeble word. The footfalls were too light to have been a man's, though. It could be an animal. Or, less likely, a child.

  Candace took the stairs with caution, though not enough to avoid their various creaks, and saw the mess through the banister: the floor in the spare bedroom looked like the bottom of a birdcage. She ran the rest of the way, creaking be damned, found her scrapbooks strewn everywhere, torn to literal scraps. Jigsaw fragments of her dead ancestors and Joel's in sepia-toned photographs stared up at her from the ruined pages.

  She let out a squeak of dismay. So many months of work, ruined in an instant.

  Glimmers of aquamarine Favrile glass among the loose pages, beautiful and dangerous, had only moments before been a vase beside her scrapbooks, on the dresser where she'd stacked them. The cover of the scuttle hole to the attic, directly above where the empty vase had been gathering dust, lay slightly askew in its base.

  Squatters?

  Couldn't be. She'd been up there when they'd first moved in two years prior. The roof was two feet above the ceiling, maybe less, with rafters and pink fiberglass foam between. Not enough room to kneel, let alone squat.

  Then what?

  A nest. Rats or mice. Some kind of large bird, a murder of crows or a parliament of owls. Or raccoons—whatever more than one was called. She'd heard the Andersons down the street once had an infestation of possums. Two or three years ago one of the neighbors a few blocks south had gotten such a terrible infestation of wasps in the attic, they'd been forced to redo their entire roof.

  House cancer, she thought, and heard herself giggle. I've got cancer of the attic.

  Could an animal do that, though? Gosh, what a mess! What a terrible, awful goddamn mess!

  A raccoon could have easily gotten into the attic crawlspace through the vents or even the chimney, and Candace knew their dexterous claws could get into garbage cans, no matter how well the homeowner tried to protect them. But she had serious doubts even the smartest raccoon could have lifted and removed the attic hatch, made the five-to-six foot drop to the dresser without disturbing the vase, torn her scrapbooks to bits, then climbed back up, smashing the vase in the process, and set the cover back in place.

  Whatever was up there, she steeled herself and made her way to the dresser. Forgot my damn shoes, she thought, walking cautiously on her bare toes to avoid the glass scattered among her ruined pages. It still hurt to look at what had become of her hard work, but with all the glass, she couldn't avoid it.

  Candace climbed the dresser easily. Solid and wide, made of burled walnut, it wouldn't have scooched against the floor even if she'd deliberately tried to move it. Two movers had brought it in here, and the McMurrays had decided, without much choice in the matter, to keep it where it had been left. Cobwebs hung in the high corner. She told herself to remember to deal with them later.

  On her tiptoes, she could just manage to press her fingers against the hatch. Not nearly enough to reach the attic.

  "Wait for Joel, Candy," she told herself bitterly, not wanting to give up so easily, but aware that her husband, whatever his faults, was a good foot taller than her. "Better yet, call a professional."

  Uh-uh. No way she was going to play the Helpless Woman role. There had to be something around the house she could stand on top of the dresser to get a good look in there. The way things were between her and Joel right now, he'd only get angry if she left it for him. Any little thing set him off these days. He'd gotten pissed off at the way the paper had landed in the juniper bush the other day—not that it had landed in the bush, but how it had landed. The paperboy managed it get it into the bush more often than not.

  And I've been pouring all my energy into these pathetic scraps, she thought, looking forlorn at the mess on the floor below. God, what a colossal waste of time! What a fool I've been, Joel. What a sad, miserable fool....

  She had no idea how to cure the cancer that had grown between them, but dealing with this was a good start. If there was a nest in the crawlspace, and she could get someone over to clear them out before Joel returned from work, or at least start the process, he'd have to be happy with her then.

  A scuttling above her. Thumping on the hatch. Plaster dust fell in her eyes and hair. She blinked it away, crying out in fright and anger.

  Determined now, she jumped off the dresser and hurried down to the living room, where she lifted the heavy ottoman onto her knee, then lugged it awkwardly up the stairs, one step at a time, careful not to get her fingers wedged against the stippled wall. She brought it to the spare bedroom before realizing her error: once again, she'd forgotten her shoes.

  More sounds from the attic. Chewing... or tearing. Tearing up the insulation, like they'd torn up her scrapbooks. "Oh, you little bastards are gonna get it," she cursed under her breath, straining to lower the plush ottoman to the floor and let her muscles rest a moment. Lugging it up again, she moved along the wall to avoid the glass, then dropped it solidly on the dresser.


  With the ottoman on the dresser, pushed squarely into the corner where the walls came together, Candace stood with her palms pressed flat against the hatch, arms bent at the elbows. The flashlight slipped a little in the waistband of her shorts, rubbing against her pubic bone, reminding her briefly of Joel.

  Pushing up on the particle-board hatch, she winced at its squeaky grind against the jamb. She gave it a hard enough push in the last few inches that it popped off into the dark of the attic.

  A rush of air met her ears but nothing more. She felt for the 2-by-4 joists on either side of the hatch, nervously awaiting whatever was up there to bite her searching fingers. When nothing came, she pulled herself up into the dark with the ease of the high school gymnast she'd once been. The creak and pop in her hips and shoulders, and the stiffness of her muscles, told her she needed to get back into shape.

  Cool up here. A musty smell. The sour stench of old rat turds and the thick smell of cooking grease clotted in the range hood's exhaust pipe. She lay on her front across the rafters, bare legs dangling out of the hole, and shone the flashlight into the dark, illuminating boards stained black from years of dampness, the brick exterior, puffy clouds of pink fiberglass. Six joists from where she lay, whatever lived up here had pulled up and torn the insulation, fluffy cotton candy bits piled up as if it had dug itself a nest.

  A chill ran up her legs. Feeling suddenly vulnerable, she tucked them up into the crawlspace, lying on her side in the fetal position for a moment to ease the strain in her stomach muscles from pulling herself up here. The air conditioning hummed. Congesting from the dust, her left nostril whistled. She stretched out her legs, ankles cracking, then pulled and shimmied herself to the next joist, and the next, ready to strike out with the flashlight if something came toward her.

  As she approached the nest, the chewing resumed—except that from where she lay, with her butt hunched up like a caterpillar's, it seemed to be coming from behind her.

  She rolled onto her back, heart thumping, joist pressed hard against her spine as she shone the light at her toes.

  The creature was on her in an instant, trailing a knotted cord like a tail: a purplish thing with four inchoate limbs, a monstrous flat head and beady black eyes, crawling up her leg as she screamed, its tiny, slick fingers with little pink nails grabbing raw hunks of her flesh—and as it wriggled up under her sweatshirt, she noticed two things.

  The first was that it was human.

  The second, that it had teeth.

  JOEL GOT HOME a little after six. His keys were still in the door when he spotted mud on the kitchen floor, streaked and splashed across the tiles. "Candace?" he called out, dumping his bag. Not mud—blood, and lots of it.

  "Candy!"

  He left the door open, keys still in the lock, hurrying through the kitchen now, slipping in the blood as someone—not Candy, no please, not my Candy—had already slipped before, grabbing the counter for support, then righting himself and continuing on to the stairs. Candace's computer was on in the living room, cursor blinking mid-report. Her headset lay on the floor.

  He felt terrible having neglected her for so long, that he'd let their lack of intimacy come between them, that he hadn't fought harder against her depression, worried now that something terrible had happened to her, something they couldn't come back from. Bloody footprints on the carpeted steps. He took them two by two.

  "Honey?"

  "I'm in here!" she called from the bathroom. Relief was momentary, as he recognized the sharp edge of fear in her voice, then registered the mess in the spare bedroom through the bannister: her scrapbooks in shreds, the broken glass. Thoughts racing: Signs of a struggle? What happened here? More blood tracked pink toward the open bathroom door. He saw her bare legs, with blood, her blood, running down them like tear-streaked mascara. Nobody in there with her, unless the intruder stood in the bath, which was unlikely. Some relief, at least.

  He rushed up the last few steps, then stopped dead in the doorway. Stricken by what he saw, he gripped the doorjamb, on the verge of fainting.

  Candace stood on the bare tile, legs apart as if she were about to squat. On the lip of the tub, her good pair of scissors, shiny and wet, still dripped on the bathmat. In her left hand, red and slippery, she held a sewing needle. Pubic hair matted with crimson. Thread from the needle pulled taut, ending somewhere between her labia.

  It had put up a struggle, only wanting the comfort of her breast, to feed from her. Her nipple had been dry, but as its three jagged, underdeveloped teeth worked at her areola, as it suckled, she'd begun to feel a tremendous tingling pressure build beneath the flesh. There had been pain, and then a sort of euphoria had washed over her, prolactin and oxytocin, the pain dissipating as the ugly little creature drank from her greedily. It had fallen asleep with its lips still on her numbed breast.

  Standing before Joel, Candace's right hand held her belly, rounded and taut as if she were deliberately sticking it out, trying to hold in its contents. She admired her pallid reflection in the full-length mirror, the reflection of an ecstatic young mother.

  While the creature slept, she'd cradled it gently under its bottom. Slipping down through the hatch had been difficult, but making room for the hatchling (since it had come from the hatch she'd begun to think of it by that name, at least until she thought of a better one) had been much harder. Her garden scissors had done the trick. The euphoria had heightened, oxytocin killing the pain as her vaginal tissue split against the sharp steel blades in two quick snips. The sight of all that blood hadn't worried her. She was used to seeing blood there.

  Once it had realized what she meant to do the hatchling had struggled, but with great effort—the sort of hysterical strength attributed to mothers whose children were in danger—Candace had managed to work it up inside her while its tiny limbs flailed. They were still kicking now, in fact, while she sewed.

  And here was Joel, home to share in her joy.

  She peeled his hand from the door jamb and placed it on her distended belly.

  Joel felt something push against his palm, as if whatever she had inside her wanted out. He tried to jerk his hand away but she held it firm, her grip surprisingly strong. He looked up then, startled to see Candace smiling for the first time in months, with lips as blue as the wallpaper.

  "We're pregnant," she told him.

  VIRAL

  THE VIDEO HAD been uploaded for seven hours before the title surfaced on Tara Maxwell's social media feed: DEPRESSED TEEN GIRL DISAPPEARS! 100% REAL!

  Catchy, she thought with a smug grin. Roll over, Hitchcock.

  By the time she got around to clicking the link, the view count had surpassed 500,000—the equivalent of a Gold record in the music biz, and since Tara Maxwell wrote the music column for the Herald (a column purporting to study the trends of the recording industry, which in Tara's opinion trended steadily downward), it was often hard for her not to think in industry terms while at her desk.

  She waited until noon, then skipped out back for a smoke, tilted her phone on its side, and played the video full-screen.

  At first glance, it appeared to be just another girl in a long line of teenagers reaching out to the internet for sympathy—and if the World Wide Web was known for one thing, it was compassion. Videos of its kind had been made so often they could easily have their own category at the MTV Awards: "Best Teen Cry for Help." Not half as memorable as "Best Scared-as-Sh*t Performance," Tara considered, but it was a work in progress. She'd never been very good at ledes, as a firm believer that the steak should sell itself. Let her editors worry about its sizzle.

  Watching halfheartedly, glancing up here and there to scan the faces of fellow smokers, Tara, who'd once thought she had seen it all, slumped back against the brick wall suddenly, exhaling a lungful of smoke.

  Fake, she thought. It's gotta be faked.

  An interstitial ad played before the video reloaded, suggesting that a diamond engagement ring guaranteed orgasms. Only if they teach husbands-to-be oral,
Tara mused as she moved toward a picnic bench, waiting for the commercial to end. When the video began again she was seated, ready to be blown away afresh.

  The girl's straggly, mousy-brown hair fell in her face, eyes underlined by deep blue-black pits of fatigue, an overlarge striped hoodie suggesting chubbiness beneath. Behind her, a Paramore poster graced the wall alongside Jared Leto's 30 Seconds to Mars. Stuffed animals covered her bedspread, on the pillows and tucked between books in the bookcase headboard. She was a typical Millennial girl in her preferred milieu: not in the mall, or outside playing, but sitting in front of a computer. Her appeal was less moving than the lifetime of hurt welling from her large brown eyes onto her cheeks. What she had to say, which at least gave the impression of being improvised, had been voiced a thousand times before—a million—and certainly more articulately. But those eyes spoke words beyond the girl's vocabulary; they filled in the blanks with bursts of eloquence, punctuating it with unspoken poetry.

  The pain was no act. No one her age could have acted it so well. But when the girl began to scratch the second time, and the flesh beneath her fingers began to vanish, the only thing Tara could be absolutely certain of was that this girl's story had to be told—and Tara herself would be the first to tell it.

  HAL WATERMAN, EDITOR-IN-CHIEF for the Toronto Herald, sat in his frosted glass office, hands folded, elbows on the glass and brushed steel desk. Above a gray three-piece without the jacket (Like Phil Collins, Tara thought, Hal Waterman firmly believes no jacket is required.), he wore a dubious look which, along with mild exasperation and sour disappointment, were the only expressions he seemed familiar with in her company.