Ben is silent as he peers into the window.
“What’s it like in there?” Shelby asks.
“Her room looks the same.”
Ben gets off the ledge and sinks back down next to Shelby, close, so their shoulders touch. Shelby uncovers her eyes. “How is she?”
Ben’s beard is patchy, and he smells like smoke and dirty laundry.
“She looks like somebody in a fairy tale. She’s peaceful.”
“Really?” That’s exactly what her mother said.
“She was beautiful back then, but you had more personality. You had a great laugh. I could hear it down the hall in school and know it was you. Actually I was in love with you both.”
“Yeah, well, that person is gone. I’ve become my own evil sister. You said so yourself.”
“I didn’t say evil. And I like you better this way. Really. But I’m freezing my ass off.”
They’re sitting in a frozen patch of ivy that has broken into shards beneath their weight.
“My ass is numb,” Shelby says. But she doesn’t get up. She sends a silent message to Helene. Say something. Call my name and I’ll rescue you.
“When I get my first job, I’m getting a Volvo. Ever see their safety records? Man, nothing can hurt you in one of those. A truck can hit you and you walk out of there in one piece, every limb intact. You’d be safe with me.”
“Are you coming on to me?” The realization that he is dawns on Shelby all at once. She swears a lightbulb goes off in her head, but her skull is so cold she thinks it might shatter.
“I’m sitting in the fucking ivy with you,” Ben says. “It goes way beyond that.”
Shelby moves closer. She’s not interested in Ben, but she’s comfortable with him. Maybe that’s enough for now. When she whispers her breath is damp and hot. “Should I look?”
“You can if you want to. I’ll tell you one thing—that’s not her in there. So I don’t recommend it.”
Shelby thinks over all he’s said. “How long did you stalk her?”
“It wasn’t stalking her. I told you, I was crazy about her.”
“Did you stalk me?”
“What do you think I’m doing right now? Maybe you’re not as smart as I think you are. It’s like twelve degrees and I’m out here on the Boyds’ lawn with you.”
Shelby starts out laughing and then it becomes something else. Ben covers her mouth with his gloved hand so that Helene’s parents won’t hear anything. “Shelby,” he says.
Shelby hears the way he says her name and she knows that somehow he’s fallen in love with her. She’s so stunned she stops crying.
Ben says, “Okay?”
Shelby nods and he lets go.
“I really am freezing,” Shelby tells him.
Ben stands and helps her up. Shelby could have looked in the window. She could have stepped up and held her gloved hand to the glass; she could have climbed into the room, gotten down on her knees, touched Helene’s warm hand, and begged for forgiveness, the way people do on a regular basis, greedy for a miracle. Helene might have blessed her, she might have changed everything that is about to happen and released her from the punishment of being herself. Instead, Shelby follows Ben across the lawn. They go back the way they came, conscious of the sound of their boots in the snow. Crunch. It’s like a tree being chopped down, like a heart beating. The sky is black. There’s the scent of hyacinths cutting through the cold. That was Helene’s favorite flower, not roses.
“I need something hot to drink,” Shelby says.
“Being bald probably lowers your total body temperature,” Ben remarks. He’s taken every science course available at college, and yet he knows nothing about human emotions. Love is a mystery. It’s like an alien abduction. You think you’re on earth, and there you are among the stars.
Shelby doubles her scarf around her head. “Being an idiot probably lowers yours,” she shoots back.
She smiles, or at least Ben thinks she does. He would do anything she asked. Even something stupid like robbing a convenience store. He’d leave everything behind and follow her to some far-off destination. He’d look for a miracle if he could.
“Probably,” he agrees. “I bet it does.”
But he hadn’t been enough of an idiot to actually open his eyes when he was at Helene’s window. He thought about those times he’d stalked her. Even then it was Shelby he wanted. He was just too afraid of what she’d do if he got caught spying on her. Helene was simpler. One night while he watched, Helene was on her bed, chatting on the phone. She was undressed, lying on her back, one bare leg thrown over the other. All she had on was a bracelet. She was almost too beautiful to be real. His eyes are closed now, and he imagines her as she was. He hears the echo of her voice as she talked on the phone to Shelby, cooking up some plans for the weekend. Her skin was snow-white; her hair was the color of roses. That’s the way she’ll always be to him. Some things are best remembered the way you want to remember them, like this road, these stars, this girl right beside him as they walk into the center of the cold night, looking straight ahead.
CHAPTER
2
On the day Shelby and Ben Mink move to New York City, Ben drops a bookcase on his foot and breaks three bones. They wind up sitting in the ER at Bellevue Hospital for so long someone barges into their apartment with the help of a crowbar and steals their TV, actually Ben’s TV, since Shelby owns nothing. Naturally, it’s Shelby who forgot to double-lock the door. Ben doesn’t blame her. He doesn’t raise his voice even though he now wears a soft cast and can expect to have pain for up to thirty days. He simply says, “Welcome to city living,” and begins to unpack everything that hasn’t been stolen, mainly clothes and pots and pans his mom gave him, along with his great-aunt Ida’s dining room table and chairs, a set so ugly no one in his right mind would steal it. Ben’s kindness only serves to reinforce Shelby’s notion that he’s all wrong for her. Before it’s even begun she knows she’s made a mistake.
She’s moved into a cramped studio apartment on Tenth Avenue with Ben because she was haunted in her hometown on Long Island. Ben is well meaning, with a kind and open heart. For some reason he’s fallen in love with her, so when he asked her to come to the city she said yes before she thought things through. She still doesn’t understand what he sees in her, but she doesn’t bother to ask. They’d been thrown together by fate and boredom. They began their relationship by reading chapters of The Illustrated Man to each other. Shelby blames Ray Bradbury for tricking her into having sex with Ben. His stories made her feel something around the edge of her heart. Still, the intimacy of being scrunched into a single bed in the basement with Ben felt all wrong. She thinks of sex as something nasty, quickly over and done with on a bathroom floor while someone holds you down and treats you roughly. Ben was tender, which was upsetting. Shelby didn’t know how to respond. This was her parents’ house after all. Once, while in bed, Ben was whispering something about being in love with her and she was thinking about the snow falling down, Shelby had heard her mother’s tread on the stair, probably as she carried down a basket of laundry. The washing machine was only a few feet away. Panicked, Shelby had shouted out, “Don’t come down here!” as if she were packaging cocaine or running a house of prostitution. Her mother had run back up the stairs and shut the door.
“It’s okay,” Ben had said, “I want to meet your mom.” He’d patted Shelby on the back to calm her, which only served to make her want to push him away.
Ben had pulled on his clothes. He wasn’t kidding about doing the proper thing. He’d gone out the back door, through the yard, around the house, then up to the front door, where he rang the bell and introduced himself to Sue. Shelby and her mom still laugh about the fact that he was wearing Shelby’s boots, which he’d put on by accident. He’d been forced to hobble around the house while Sue Richmond served him tea and cookies.
&
nbsp; All that spring they were together. Sometimes they talked and sometimes they just had sex. Shelby liked to keep the lights off so she couldn’t see the way he looked at her, love-struck and dumb. Ben is a romantic. He’s a sap. It’s only sex, Shelby always thinks. It’s so different from what the orderly made her do on the bathroom floor, where he said nasty, dirty things about how he owned her ass while he fucked her. That wasn’t sex, it was assault. When she rose out of her body to escape him she thinks that may have been the moment she lost her soul. Somewhere in the hospital her soul is flying above the patients in their beds, trapped inside the ward where Shelby spent those awful months.
Ben found the apartment, signed the lease, and hired the moving van. Shelby finally agreed to live with him because she is fairly certain she is a victim of space and location and time, and all she needs is to get out of town in order to escape her past. But it isn’t working out that way. She’s still spooked in Manhattan. She has an eye for tragedy and sorrow. Show her a rose and she’ll see only the wasp in the center of the bloom. On the city streets she finds herself haunted by the smallest thing: a child with a purple bruise on his cheek peering up at her from a stroller. An old woman with papery-thin skin and a huge, ill-fitting coat who cannot go forward without a walker. A cat in an alley, with one torn-off ear. Does no one else see all this pain floating around Manhattan? Shelby sits on the bed in their new apartment and she’s just as haunted as she’d been when she was living in her parents’ basement. She takes Ativan morning, noon, and night. When Ben gets home from pharmaceutical school up on 125th Street, she pretends nothing’s wrong. She’s a Stepford wife and they’re not even married. They smoke dope and order Chinese food delivered and Ben talks about his day and Shelby doesn’t listen. It’s all fine as long as Shelby doesn’t look into the eyes of the deliveryman from the Hunan Kitchen, who always seems in the grip of some great and quiet sorrow, no matter how much of a tip she gives him. She takes the fortune cookies from the bottom of the bag and throws them into a glass bowl she keeps in the closet. She has no desire to know what her future might hold.
“Who made it your job to feel guilty for every bad thing that happens?” Ben says fondly when she begins a litany of the awful things she’s seen in a single day. A man with no shoes. A girl crying as her father drags her along Fourteenth Street. A woman begging people for help in a language no one can understand. They both know Shelby wouldn’t have looked at Ben twice in high school, but she wonders why he doesn’t flee from her. He thinks she’s beautiful, which convinces her that he has not only lousy vision but terrible judgment as well. Shelby still shaves her head and she only wears black; she’s so skinny her veins are luminous under her skin, like the old ladies on the street with their walkers and their plastic bags filled with belongings and trash. Ben, on the other hand, has begun to care about his appearance. He wants to look professional. He bought five white shirts that will need ironing. As for Shelby, she has never used an iron and she hopes to keep it that way.
Tonight as they sit on the fire escape, they’re stoned enough not to care about the heat. It’s ninety-nine degrees, hotter than the human body. The sky is falling and the evening is wet and thick. It’s the kind of humid night when people shoot each other for no good reason. Shelby has wrapped herself in a damp sheet. The desire for an air-conditioned environment has recently led her to apply for and then surprisingly get a job at a pet store in Union Square. It’s disgusting, boring work—cleaning out cages and unpacking boxes of dog food—but fortunately the store is ice-cold. It’s Shelby’s first job ever, if she doesn’t count babysitting in high school. She still can’t believe people actually trusted her with their children. Helene used to come over and sneak out before the parents came home. That is her entire occupational experience other than living off her parents and mooching off Ben Mink. Her parents think the job is some kind of breakthrough, which is just pitiful. Her mother went so far as to send her a greeting card. Congratulations. We’re so proud of you! There was an illustration of a little girl wearing a crown on the card, holding a magic wand and standing on tiptoe as if she were a good little fairy. Shelby can’t bear to look at it. She wishes it had been another postcard from her anonymous correspondent. She’s come to depend on those well-wishes and their strange and beautiful artwork. She crams the card from her mother into the old jewelry box she has where she keeps the postcards. Shelby had thought distance from her hometown would make a difference, but she still feels she’s responsible for everything bad that has ever happened in the world. She has bad karma. Unfortunately, she’s fairly certain that bad karma is something you’re born with and can’t ever change.
“I wonder how it feels to cure someone,” Shelby muses as they have their fire-escape dinner. “Do you feel like a magician or like a god when you save someone? Or maybe you just feel like you’re a plumber fixing pipes.”
“You should go to school,” Ben suggests. “I see you as a healer.” He has a long, skinny body, even more evident now that he’s shirtless. Shelby thinks he’s lost weight since he started graduate school. Even though he’d been a screwup as a kid, he’s surprisingly serious about his studies now. He’s a nerd, falling in love with science just as he had with Shelby, suddenly and for reasons that are impossible to fathom. Plus he’s better-looking all the time, and Shelby doesn’t know how that’s even possible.
“I’d be a terrible student,” she remarks. She blew off NYU, and now she’d be two years behind. She’s pretty sure it’s too late for everything. “Plus I’m too poor.”
She’s earning minimum wage. She eats noodles and tofu and spicy eggplant for dinner only because Ben is foolish enough to take care of her. Caring about things doesn’t come easy to Shelby. She can hold her hand over the lit burner of a stove for the longest time and not feel a thing. Sometimes she sticks pins into her flesh just to make certain she’s alive.
“City College is nearly free. You can get a scholarship for the rest. And you won’t be poor when I get my degree. We’ll be borderline rich. That’s the whole point of becoming a pharmacist. People always need drugs.”
It seems Ben has plans for the future. Shelby assumes he’ll dump her by the time he succeeds at anything. She’s stoned most of the time, and she’s haunted, but she isn’t stupid. Ben latched on to her when he was a loser; once that changes, everything else will too.
“You’ve got a lot to give, Shelby. You can save the world.”
“Right.” Shelby feels a deep bitterness inside her. He doesn’t know her at all. She ruins whatever she touches.
On this evening the air smells like sulfur. Lacy pieces of black dirt float through the air as if the two of them are trapped inside an upside-down snow globe. Ben can think whatever he wants. Shelby has absolutely nothing inside of her. She’s a black hole. A sinkhole. A whole lot of nothing. She’s told Ben that, but he doesn’t want to believe her. Who would have imagined he’d turn out to be such an optimist? Maybe that’s the reason Shelby has sex with him whenever he wants her. She has to give him something in return for his devotion. She makes certain to imagine she’s somewhere else when they’re in bed so she won’t be haunted by his desire and the sounds he makes, as if he’s drowning and expects her to save him.
Shelby hasn’t told Ben anything about her job. She doesn’t tell him much. She keeps things inside. She usually wears a hooded sweatshirt; that way everything in her mind is packed away where it belongs. At work, she prefers stacking dog food to manning the cash register. Fewer interactions with people equal fewer complications. She likes to feed the birds. Already, the parrots know her and do little dances when they spy her; the parakeets go wild when she approaches their cages. She loves birdsong; it clears her head. Or maybe it fills it. With all those chirps and trills ringing out, she doesn’t have to think about what she’s done and how she can never be forgiven.
The one area she can’t stand is the puppy department. The poor things are so cheerful a
nd hopeful. She avoids that section, as she avoids her co-workers, who are equally friendly, although more bored than hopeful. They order pizzas delivered at lunch and give each other nicknames as if they’re in a fraternity. Juan is called G-man because he’s determined to one day join the feds, a whacked-out dream for someone in charge of lizards who sells weed on the side. Maravelle Diaz is known as Mimi because she sings and has a five-octave range reminiscent of Mariah Carey. Their supervisor, Ellen Grimes, who manages the store as if it’s a small, corrupt country, is called Hellgirl or the Grimester behind her back of course. Shelby was dubbed E.T.—the bald head, the big eyes, the silence—her nickname is a no-brainer. G-man called her that the very first day. Shelby refused to answer at first, but after a while it’s easier not to fight it. Hey, E.T., give me a price on the birdseed! E.T., stack the Science Diet.
Shelby does as she’s asked no matter what they call her; there’s less human contact if you don’t argue or give your opinion. At lunch she goes off on her own. She usually picks up a packet of cheese and crackers at a deli, then goes to Union Square Park. She’s there even on rainy days, and there happens to be rain on the day she becomes a thief. It’s summer and hot, and the sudden shower is a surprise. While the rain pours down, she skitters toward an overhang of the subway, squeezing up against a wall. Union Square smells sweet and green on days like this. Petals and leaves from the Greenmarket are scattered about, and the scent of mint mixes with the hard smell of hot concrete. People dart about, trying to get out of the rain. Everyone is walking so quickly Shelby can’t pick up on anyone’s despair. The truth is, she feels empty without it. Maybe she’s empty if she doesn’t latch on to sorrow. She’s beginning to wonder if perhaps she’s haunting herself.