Skin and Bones Read online

  Bones picked up his pen and forced himself to tell his mom and dad what he was thinking, what he was feeling, really feeling, down in his gut, as honestly as he could. He started by telling them chunky kids were always chosen last for kickball, about cross-eyed Jenny Willendorf and the custard disaster, about the bitch at the department store handing him a pair of Husky jeans, wishing he’d been upfront about the impact these things had on him.

  Writing a letter, knowing he didn’t have to send it, helped him understand what people had been telling him for a long time—he wouldn’t get better unless he worked at it. He had to want it, really want it. He was the only one who could exorcise his demons. He had to learn to do things differently.

  He closed his journal and leaned back, balancing precariously on two chair legs. He knew Alice would have rehearsed with or without him. And she would have found a way to trade menus if he hadn’t done it.

  But none of that mattered.

  Bones had thought he was helping her. But he was really helping her stay sick, because he was just as sick in his own sick way.

  After a long hour of staring at nothing, Lard came in stomping heavily to his side of the room. He set his lunchbox on his desk with a thud. “In case you’re interested,” he said, tossing a piece of paper on his desk. “Here’s more of the story. I found it in an empty Tupperware container.”

  “Have you heard anything about—” Bones tried.

  Lard slugged the question. “Just shut the fuck up before this day gets any worse.”

  Bones read the page in silence.

  Calvin and Lily met like this each night after curfew in the mangled milieu of colorless glass, steel, and concrete that were once museums, libraries, concert halls, and video arcades. He played his guitar while she painted, using the old-world technique of fresco. Tons of plaster littered the ground, so no problem there.

  She lulled him with endearing tales of paintbrushes woven from her own silky hair and tints she mixed from bodily fluids. “I tried state sanctioned art in school,” she said with a lazy stroke. “I prefer Jackson Pollock to Warhol and his soup cans. Don’t you, my love?”

  Calvin nodded.

  “If we’re going to stay together,” she said, her voice no longer frail or tired, gaining strength from his nightly injections. “We can’t keep meeting like this, it isn’t safe. It isn’t romantic.”

  The universe had dropped the perfect woman in his junk heap.

  Now Bones knew what he’d suspected all along. George was writing about the EDU, a place as twisted by rules and rituals as the fictional world he’d created. His Excellence was a metaphor for the supreme self-important authoritarian, Dr. Chu. Bones couldn’t believe he hadn’t figured it out sooner. George had been in love with Alice too. It made Bones crazy to think he might have stuck his tube in her…No, he couldn’t, wouldn’t go there.

  Two days later, Lard was at his desk eating Cheese Doodles with Rachael Ray. Bones was too depressed to crack his new magazine. He bent over his journal writing the type of letter to his family that he could actually mail, telling them some of the things he’d learned in the program, explaining how he’d heard most of it before, but things were going to be different because now he’d started listening and wanted to change.

  “Someone switched our room number from nineteen to sixty-nine,” Lard said, grabbing his lunchbox.

  “That sucks.”

  “Funny, not,” Lard said. “Since I’m not attracted to you in that or any other way. Whatsoever.”

  “Three guesses who did it?”

  “Elsie.”

  Bones nodded. “She definitely spent too much time in the birth canal.”

  “You think?”

  Bones started to follow Lard down the hall when he realized Lard was on his way to the kitchen. Nancy stopped Bones in the dayroom with her usual smile. “Alice is doing much better.” She squeezed Bones’s shoulder affectionately. “Her heart is strong and there doesn’t appear to be any permanent damage to her other organs.”

  Bones let himself breathe.

  “They’re moving her from ICU into a regular room,” Nancy said. “She was lucky this time, real lucky.”

  Luck had touched them both.

  Teresa sauntered over with Mary-Jane and Elsie. Nancy answered the most basic questions. Vital signs, stable. Mom and Dad with her. Field trip to the gift shop to buy her a get-well gift.

  Bones ate dinner alone, his back to the others. And while the skinless chicken breast on his plate didn’t look all that appetizing, it didn’t look entirely revolting either. He reached for the saltshaker.

  “What happened to your gloves?” Elsie snipped. “Did Lard eat them?”

  Bones stared at his bare fingers, struck by the sudden shock of forgetting to put them on.

  After dinner, Unibrow escorted the crew downstairs to the shop. “Five minutes, max.”

  They crammed into a space aglow with too much optimism. Helium-filled balloons skipped overhead. Get Well Soon! seemed overly cheery. Bones blew dust off plastic flowers while Teresa, Mary-Jane, Sarah, and Nicole tried on jewelry. Lard flipped through cookbooks.

  “Rachael Ray may be hot,” he said. “But Julia Child is the bomb.”

  A debate broke out over which stuffed animal to buy. A floppy-eared cocker spaniel or a droopy-eyed basset hound. Bones held out for a bear with marble eyes and a crooked smile. “Perfect,” Teresa said.

  The clerk smoothed out their crumpled bills. “You’re four dollars and sixty-eight cents short,” she said.

  Unibrow made up the rest. Even more surprising, everyone agreed Bones should deliver the bear. But then, he thought, miserable all over again, only Lard knew that swapping the menus had almost killed her.

  Bones slumped limply at his desk. The room was a tomb. Boring and utterly lonely. He didn’t feel like going to the roof, not while Alice was stuck upstairs. TV applause drifted in from the dayroom. A phone rang.

  Anytime he tried talking to Lard, Lard snapped, “What is it about shut-the-fuck-up you don’t understand?”

  It was like trying to communicate with someone onshore from a sinking ship. It was pointless, but Bones kept trying to convince Lard that he’d never hurt Alice on purpose. That he’d never do anything to hurt her, though he was completely aware of how completely and absolutely he had hurt her.

  He spent the rest of the evening at his desk working on a get-well card. He tore pages from an old magazine, cut out words, and pasted them onto a sheet of construction paper he found with the art supplies. Dance. Dream. Hope. Laugh. Get. Well. Soon.

  Sincerely yours and Your friend sounded too impersonal. He signed it Love, Bones. That was the truth.

  The next day Nancy came in to tell him he could see Alice. “Just to deliver the bear,” she said. “Make it snappy.”

  “Okay.”

  He took the elevator to the sixth floor. All this time he’d been dying to see her, and now he stood outside her door afraid to knock.

  “Who’s the bear for?” a nurse asked.

  “For a friend,” he said.

  “Alice?”

  Bones nodded.

  She winked at him. “You go right in, sweetie.”

  Alice was propped up in a chair reading Dance Magazine. Her lips were ripe plums and her hair was brushed to one side in a sloppy braid. She was mummified in wool scarves.

  She looked up and smiled when she saw him. “So there’s this choreographer who asks dancers to improv during auditions. Sixty seconds, anything goes. Nothing can be wrong, I mean, technically. God it would be so scary to have to make up your own steps on the spot like that.”

  “You’d do great,” Bones said, walking around the foot of the bed. “This is from everyone on the ward.”

  Her eyes sparkled. “Look at that crooked smile.”

  Bones handed her the card. “And this is from me.”

  Alice took the card, running her finger over the words. “I love it, Bones.”

  There was that wo
rd again.

  “I’m sorry for—” His words caught, but he had to say it.

  “Nancy said you could have died…like that singer.”

  “Karen Carpenter?” she asked. “I can’t believe they’re still using her like that.”

  He didn’t know what to say.

  “Wait’ll I tell you about this dream I had,” she said.

  “Probably because of the meds, but still, it was like watching an indie movie.”

  Bones knew he’d already been there too long, but he stayed and listened while she described a love affair between two teenagers, Calvin and Lily. He was about to mention her friend from last summer, George, and explain that he’d written the story when her parents appeared in the doorway. They wore heavy make-up like they’d just come from the theater. Their eyes drawn on with thick black pencil, and their mouths formed fake smiles.

  Her mom glided across the room with a bouquet of roses. “How’s our little girl today?” she asked.

  Alice mumbled under her breath, “God I need a cigarette.”

  20

  Another page waited on Bones’s desk, presumably deposited by Lard.

  Luxurious nights passed while Lily ground plaster and mixed pigment in preparation for their journey. Calvin tuned his guitar to her heartbeat. The frequency both soothed and consumed him.

  He picked her up on his ten-speed one exquisite night. The sky was moonless. No stars. No asteroids. Only dust particles and chemical pollutants extending without bounds into the atmosphere. He’d attached a second seat for Lily and a basket for Michelangelo.

  Lily smiled when she saw him, entwining her arms snugly around his bare waist. “Put this on,” he said, slipping the top half of his wetsuit over what remained of her ragged uniform. He wore the leggy part. “So you’ll blend with the darkness.”

  “If only…” she said, then stopped.

  Calvin understood completely. No one could be wholly beautiful in state-issued shoes. Guaranteed ugly for life. He waited a respectful moment and stepped from his boots. “Wear these.”

  Lily smiled, lovely as a cellulose rose.

  Suddenly the whole world opened up to him. He wondered why the terminally ill let themselves be controlled by time and clocks, as if ancient Egyptians monitored the 24-hour cycle.

  Why the diseased and dying didn’t rise from beneath His Excellence’s tyrannical thumb. Break into the state repository and steal bicycles, skateboards, wheelchairs—anything to ride an unbroken line away from the tyrannical dictator to freedom? What did they have to lose?

  Lard came in less noisy than usual. “Why can’t a person cook in the dishwasher?” he asked randomly.

  Bones was so relieved Lard was talking to him, he answered too quickly. “Maybe if you took out the top rack.”

  Lard stared at him, eyes big as oysters behind his glasses. For a microsecond, Bones thought he’d misunderstood the question. “Cook someone in a dishwasher? Isn’t that what you said? Though you’d probably go to jail.”

  Lard looked confused then nearly busted his wide girth of a gut. “I mean a person, like me, could use the dishwasher for cooking, instead of say, an oven, stove, or crock-pot. Think about it. Halibut crimped in foil. Timed cycles. No soap. Steam. It would poach in its own juices.”

  “Seriously?” Bones asked.

  “Maybe I’ll even write a cookbook some day.” Lard grabbed his journal, scribbling. “Go on talk shows—tell people how I was killing myself with food. Think it would help other poor slobs like us?”

  “It might.”

  “You know that guy George?” Bones asked, one-third because the ice wall between them was melting, and two-thirds because he had to know. “What was his diagnosis?”

  “He was on the wrestling team at his school but too heavy to make weight in his division,” Lard said, all without detouring from his task. “Creative guy, but thoroughly gross in his methods, if you ask me. Wore football jerseys. Liked warm beer.”

  “What happened to him?” Bones asked.

  “I heard he quit wrestling after he left here,” Lard said.

  “Went back to being a fun-loving, beer drinking guy. You two have a lot in common.”

  Lard didn’t have to say it.

  Alice.

  21

  It took Bones about thirty seconds to get ready for their next field trip, an undisclosed restaurant downtown. After a steamy hot shower he put on clean sweats, and leaned into the mirror to pick a piece of lint from his head. Maybe he’d let his buzz grow out. Lard tried to tame his mane with hair goop.

  Mary-Jane and Elsie looked like they had coffee stains around their eyes. Some sort of grunge makeup. Their hair was this weird orange color. Tomato juice. Elsie wore cowboy boots and her usual cut-offs. Her shorts were so skimpy the pockets hung out the bottoms like tongues. A T-shirt fell off one shoulder, Feed My Lips.

  Nancy escorted everyone downstairs.

  Sarah wore her sunglasses the normal way, chattering incessantly with Nicole about abdominal bloating. It had taken Bones a while to figure out Sarah. One day she refused salt or caffeine due to migraines. The next day, no gluten. Chronic fatigue. Today she complained of being lactose intolerant. Here was the thing, Sarah wasn’t faking. It was more like some kind of food hypochondria.

  A van pulled up in front of the main lobby. Dr. Chu controlled the wheel, sporting a casual golf shirt sans tie. Lard called shotgun.

  “Buckle up,” Dr. Chu ordered after they settled in.

  They clicked their seatbelts.

  The sky was dark and foggy, like clinical depression. Bones hated that Alice wasn’t with them and worried constantly that her parents would check her out of the program as soon as she was strong enough. They were take-charge kind of people, that was obvious.

  Dr. Chu drove a couple of miles down a two-lane boulevard over newly painted crosswalks, passing endless strip malls. Half-dead palm trees busted sidewalks with their roots. Billboards advertised used car lots. Fluorescent tubes on liquor store windows touted Lotto tickets.

  There was an abundance of hot-looking girls with flesh screaming between layers of spandex. A fat mother yanked two fat kids down the pavement. In spite of the heat, a homeless guy wore a miner’s helmet and heavy jacket covered with pennies. A scrawny dog tagged behind him. Typical Los Angeles.

  Dr. Chu lectured them via the rearview mirror. “Feel free to ask the waitstaff questions.” He’d cranked the AC to keep their nerves in check. “But make an effort to keep them within the bounds of propriety.”

  Bones tried and failed to ignore the endless string of ethnic restaurants, all with the same smoky glass fronts. He slid lower in the seat but they taunted him. Chinese. Japanese. Korean. Filipino. Thai. Vietnamese.

  Twenty minutes later, Dr. Chu was ushering them to a long table in a restaurant called Mustache Pete’s. Bones couldn’t believe he’d picked a place with hair in its name. He wasn’t sure if the dining room really smelled like sauerkraut or if he’d been in the hospital too long.

  They chose up sides of the table and read menus uncertainly. Teresa picked at her nails. Even Lard looked uneasy. He blinked too fast. Bones had a nervous urge to use the bathroom—like now—and since he hadn’t eaten since breakfast, meaning there wasn’t anything to throw up,

  Dr. Chu said he could go alone.

  “Five minutes,” Dr. Chu said, a wary eyebrow rising.

  “Then I’m sending in the troops.”

  Bones stood up and sucked in his gut, squeezing by a table of women in suits, maneuvering toward a lit bathroom sign. A payphone hung on the wall in a corridor between His and Hers. He looked over his shoulder to make sure he couldn’t be seen, then slid quarters into the slot and dialed his sister’s cell.

  “Are you okay?” she asked as soon as she heard his voice.

  Bones heard Pink Floyd in the background and pictured her sprawled on her comforter, World Peas travel mug in hand. “Just missing you guys,” he answered.

  “I miss you
too,” she said easily. “I thought it was against hospital rules to call home.”

  “I’m at a payphone in a restaurant.”

  “Restaurant?”

  “A field trip, but don’t worry. I’ll live through it.”

  Dishes clanked and a blood-curdling cry radiated from the direction of the kitchen. Bones peeked around the corner. Apparently everyone at his table had heard the sound as if puppies were being slaughtered.

  “How’re mom and dad?” he asked, turning back to the phone.

  “Mom’s still doing a lot of reading about, you know—”

  “Anorexia?”

  Jill suddenly got quiet. “I’m not used to hearing you say it.”

  Bones got quiet too. “How’s Dad?”

  “Busier than usual.” Her voice smothered him in a hug. “We got your letter yesterday. God, Jack, I wish you would’ve told us about that stuff before. Little kids can be such pricks.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I was Jill the Sour Dill in kindergarten,” she said. “The damage isn’t too deep.”

  “I’d better go, sis. Love you.”

  “Love you too, weirdo,” which wasn’t a bad thing to hear.

  The color of his pee had gone from root beer when he’d first checked in to the program to herbal tea. Now it was as light as fresh squeezed lemonade. Bones washed his hands vigorously and used a paper towel to open the bathroom door.

  The middle of the table had grown condiments since he’d left. Catsup (1 tablespoon, 12 calories), mustard (1 teaspoon, 3 calories), pickle relish (1 tablespoon, 20 calories). Some with zero calories: hot sauce, salt, pepper.

  Nadine, their server, wore a bolo tie and a plaid blouse that looked like packets of sugar had been sewn into it. She made everything sound like a question, as if she was apologizing. Bones half expected her to throw in a y’all.