In that way, she was trapped. She knew a lot about traps. The only way to get out of one was to fight and accept the wounds that came with it.
She had the first aid kit’s scissors in her hand. It was there to cut the medical tape. But in that moment, she could see herself plunging its blades into the center of the gauze, maybe the pulsing brown sack of the skinner’s heart, perhaps the softness of its neck. Hate returned. It had been waiting behind three small, unimportant sounds that bore a vague resemblance to English. Liv slapped the tape on the skinner’s bandage, but did it unkindly, and when she next glanced at Doug, he looked proud of her.
He went outside to fetch the hose. This was a responsibility, he’d said, and he didn’t shirk it. He came back and started to spray, creating a pink tide that sent clots of flesh like bitsy rafts into Liv’s shoes. Doug’s loathing of the skinner was all over him, and Liv was jealous. They ought to bear equal loads. There were, after all, two of them involved here. In Lee Fleming’s words: a conspiracy.
16.
They had only finished the hosing and floor scrubbing when they heard the gravel crackle of Aggie’s car pulling in. Liv and Doug had discussed this possibility before and switched into damage-control mode, turning off the shed light and huddling in shadow until the kitchen light turned on and another ten minutes passed. Only then did Doug and Liv slink around to the front of the house so that, when they did make their presence known, it would not bring attention to the backyard.
Doug got into his car, fired its sputtering engine, and drove off. There was no quiet way to do it. Her mother, of course, had eyes and ears, but Liv dallied outside anyway, muscles throbbing, hoping she might still evade conversation. She waited another fifteen minutes, listening for the clatter of a toilet seat so she might dart into her bedroom, shut the door, and get to the hard work of pretending to sleep.
It didn’t work. Aggie was a mother, and Liv’s sneaking appeared to remind her of it. What Liv had thought was the thunk of the toilet seat was the settling of a plate. Her mother sang out from the kitchen.
“I’m making you cookies.”
“I don’t want cookies,” Liv said.
“You love cookies.”
“It’s ten o’clock.”
“The perfect time for cookies!”
This felt to Liv like a penchant Aggie attributed to a long-gone child, one who could be appeased with easy remedies of cookies, dolls, park visits, and fairy tales. Instead of feeling irritated, Liv felt a dragging sadness. She’d give anything for all of it to be true.
The microwave kicked in. The realization that these were store-bought cookies took Liv’s sad heart and dropped it. She’d wanted to grow up so fast for so long, but it seemed that exhaustion was even more endemic in adulthood. Well, she’d got what she wanted: She was stuck in a deep, adult hole now, the crawling from which seemed impossible.
How could a plate of cookies mean so much?
Her mom set the plate on the table along with a jug of milk. Liv couldn’t believe it. No wine. Just milk. Aggie poured two glasses and brought hers to her lips. She was trying. Tonight, at least. Liv’s throat filled with the sticky raw materials of tears she no longer felt young enough to produce.
“Okay, I warmed up cookies. Eat them anyway.”
Liv picked up one. It melted to her fingers.
“School going all right?” her mother asked.
Liv knew the thin, worn pages of this script.
“Yeah.”
“They’re still doing Oliver!?”
“Yeah.” A word as short as car, or bow, or hole, containing even less meaning.
“You want to talk about it?” The subtext: While I’m sober.
“It’s fine. It doesn’t matter.”
Aggie chewed a cookie and nodded.
“That’s a good attitude. Few more months, all this”—she waved the cookie at the disheveled kitchen, but also at Bloughton—“will be in the rearview mirror.”
Liv knew it was college that Aggie spoke of, and she tried to visualize it, the independent future that, only a few weeks ago, had tantalized her. Now all she could picture were the shiny college brochures that kept coming in the mail, plastered with multicultural mixes of young people with smiles that were easygoing, inspirational, and determined. Such glossy dreams now felt out of reach. Her story was doomed to dead-end with her in handcuffs, juvie, prison.
“Is that your dad’s compass you’re wearing?” Aggie asked. “Where’d you find it?”
Liv shrugged. So many lies would suffice. “The garage.”
“Huh. That’s nice. He’d be glad to see that.”
Would he? Everything Liv was doing out in that shed was for her dad, though increasingly, it had begun to feel like it was just as much for Doug, and for her. Liv glanced at her mother. The loss was all right there, in the lines of her face, the unchanging apologetic slant of her eyes. Liv could tell her. Right now. How the thing that took her husband was a few hundred feet away. Only Doug’s warning about adults halted her: They did things in ways that might account for laws, but rarely justice.
“Yeah” was what Liv said instead. “Still works.”
Aggie wiped chocolate from her chin.
“So,” she said. “You and Doug are spending a lot of time together.”
Liv set down the cookie and took hold of her glass of milk. Chocolate smeared across it like blood on pale flesh.
“Not really.”
“Not really? I hear you guys tromping around; I see his car.”
Now it made sense. The soothing setting. The comforting cookies. She thought Liv and Doug were fooling around, possibly out back in the shed. It was so unimaginatively romantic: childhood friends finding love right under their noses. Liv’s stomach hurt as it had while Doug clobbered the skinner’s hip. Her mom, after all, was right. She and Doug were experimenting, just not how she thought.
“It’s just—you know. We’re just friends.”
“Well, either way. I want you to know that I’m not a shrew. I’m a modern woman and all that. If you need advice about anything or whatever, I’m here. I’m right here.”
Her mother wanted so badly to give that advice—Liv could tell. It would be proof that Aggie’s existence had meant something, that all her upheavals and losses weren’t in vain. Liv thought of her mother’s photo albums, now missing pictures of her husband Liv had used to taunt the skinner. Aggie had been in plenty of those old pictures, wild haired and red lipped and short skirted, ravenous in a way Liv thought she herself had never had the chance to be.
The problem with her mother’s advice was that it came too late. If it were indeed sex, and not violence, that she and Doug were sharing, they’d be far beyond the sort of innocent bumbling Aggie was imagining. They’d be engaged in the filthiest of perversions, past rescue of any mother-talk chat.
“Got it,” Liv said. “Thanks.”
“You tell Doug he doesn’t have to speed off like he’s not welcome. He’s welcome. He’ll always be welcome here.”
Liv wasn’t hungry—she felt, in fact, like she might be sick—but she picked up another cookie and pushed it into her mouth in self-punishment. What if it was inevitable? What if the secrets Liv and Doug shared, deepening by the day, locked the two of them together forever? Maybe this was it. Maybe he was it. Maybe, once you crossed certain thresholds, there were no more options left. No cars, no bows, only a hole.