She wanted to say no, but at that moment she realized with great clarity how much she craved to be taken care of.
“Why would you want to do that?” she said.
His voice rose slightly. “You gave me back my momma’s necklace.” He clutched the pendant at the end of the necklace. “You’re a good person. I want to be your friend.”
She could see ghosts in his eyes. She could see the weight of everything he was responsible for and how he was being crushed underneath it every second. She could see why he huffed himself into a stupor every day. She wouldn’t want to be him either.
From out of his own sack he took a can of tuna, a can opener, and a set of plastic silverware in a cellophane bag. He opened the can and handed it up to her.
“You should eat. And rest. You took a bad fall.”
She wanted to rest. She wanted to lie down for a month. The tin of tuna in her hand made her belly rumble. Lucy began to wonder if that was more than a craving, if it wasn’t the baby, as tiny as it had to be, crying out to her, telling her it needed food. Lucy’s free hand moved to her belly, and she felt a rushing sense of relief that it was the one place on her body where there was no pain. Only warmth. And she began to cry.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered.
“Naw, I’m sorry. I’m sorry,” he said. He began to mutter it.
She didn’t know what he was talking about. She wasn’t talking to him. She was talking to her child. Her baby was okay. She couldn’t explain it; she just knew it with total certainty. This baby inside her was the one good thing she had left, and she would do whatever it took to stay alive.
Lucy ate. The pleasure in her mouth and stomach numbed the pain elsewhere, and her brain began to work a little better. She took in the room, the boy, and the Burnouts with a new frame of mind. Maybe she could milk some more food out of the kid. As long as he was around, the others seemed content to lay off. Even if she got out of the ruins, this boy knew where she lived. She’d have to find somewhere new. She could stay in David and Will’s old elevator home for a while, but how long could she keep making that jump from the top of the elevator to the maintenance ladder without putting the baby at risk? She didn’t even want to do it once.
The boy took his jug of yellowness that he’d protected so fiercely before and dribbled some of the liquid into a rag. He covered his nose and mouth with the damp cloth and took a deep inhale. His eyes unfocused. His hand dropped and the rag tumbled out of it. The tension in his face and in his muscles melted away. His fidgeting stopped, and his mouth drifted open. There was a vacancy on his face, like all brain activity had stopped.
After a little while he drifted back to reality and snuck a glance at her.
“So what, you sit around and sniff glue all day?” Lucy said through a tuna-clogged mouth.
He laughed. It made his teeth stick out. He reached for his jug and tried to pat it, but missed. His dreamy smile faded and his face grew gravely serious.
“Naw, the glue’s all gone,” he said. “The chemicals from the science labs are gone. Most of the markers are dried out.” There was sorrow in his voice, like these were tragic facts. “Every once in a blue moon you’ll find a can of hair spray, or roach killer, that some kid asked the parents for, some aerosol somethin’, but those are getting real tough to find now.” He brightened. “Never figured I’d have gasoline though. Like it was sent from God up in heaven.”
“Where’d you get it?”
“That motorcycle. Boy, that sucker was loud, wadn’t it? I hunted it down to the quad. When I got there, dat fuckin’-sorry, dat Gates kid, he was dead when I got there, and the bike was still runnin’, and I seen you, in the distance, stumblin’ into one of the halls. I had a tube and I siphoned that gas real quick, ’fore anyone else come. I can still taste it.”
The boy turned to Lucy with big, hazy eyes.
“I followed you home,” he said, his voice lilting and far away. “Didn’t want nothing more to happen to you. You’re so good.”
Lucy looked down. How long had he been trying to protect her from the shadows? It freaked her out.
The boy managed to get his fingers around the jug handle and he shook it. The gas sloshed against the plastic.
“Gotta make this last, or it’s back to stinkers,” he said.
“What are stinkers?” Lucy was scared to know.
The boy pointed to the bottles of sewage with the rubber gloves on top.
“That’s a drug?” Lucy said, aghast.
He nodded. “They get stashed on windowsills in the quad. Sun cooks the crap up inside and all them fumes make the gloves puff out.”
Lucy looked at the bottles in disbelief.
“I never tasted nothing worse in my life, but one suck offa that glove, and whoo … you go someplace else, boy. You see people too.”
“That’s disgusting.”
The smile faded from his face.
“I know, but … it’s worth it sometimes,” he said. He looked at her with clearer eyes than before. “It’s the only way I get to talk to Momma.”
Lucy put the empty tuna can on the ground, and touched her belly with both hands.
“I’m going,” she said. She didn’t have to wait this decision out. The baby told her what to do.
The boy struggled to pull himself up and fought his gasoline high with a couple of slaps to his head. Lucy leaned forward and pushed all her belongings and the hydrangea back into the garbage bag.
“You sure?” he said. His face was in a panic.
Lucy felt a chill wash through her. Would he try to stop her? The pain she felt standing up was obstacle enough.
“Yeah,” Lucy said.
She shuffled past him, toward one of the crumbling doorways. With each step, she prayed that her rejection wouldn’t cause him to flip out. Would he get mean and sic the others on her? Would he come up from behind and snake his ropy arms around her neck? She could imagine the dirty satin of his slip rubbing against the back of her neck as he choked her unconscious and tied her up again.
Lucy reached the doorway and took a deep breath.
Cramps knifed her in the side again and she doubled over. The boy ran to her, but she pushed him back with a solid shove. She didn’t look back, she lifted herself upright, and hobbled away from the room.
The fall into the trash had only made the old injuries from her battle with Gates worse. Her body hurt two times over. And her mind hurt from how many times the rug had been pulled out from under her. But her heart hurt most of all. She missed Will. She missed Belinda. She missed having friends. She missed David existing. The world had seemed brighter when he was alive.