Ten Thousand Saints - Eleanor Henderson [59]
When they said nothing, made no move to cajole her, she sighed. She looked as though she had been in this bed for a long time. Jude smelled the familiar sour-milk smell of body and bedsheet.
He said, “You’re the one who gave Teddy the coke.”
In the other room, something expensive collided with the floor. The vacuum cleaner squealed, purred, and died. Slowly, nearly undetectably, Eliza nodded. Jude looked at Johnny: his face registered nothing.
“I’ve stopped using it, though. Not right away, but I’ve stopped. As soon as I knew for sure. You don’t even have to say anything, because I know. I’m already being punished.” She was sniffling repeatedly. “I didn’t want to stop but I stopped! That must mean something, right?”
She reached for her bottle of Yoo-hoo and took a ravenous gulp, spilling the milk down her chin, down her throat, following the silver chain into her cleavage. It was a little girl’s nightgown, white, cotton; at the neckline was a bow with a pearl in the center. Maybe it was that pearl, maybe it was just seeing her again, maybe it was the consolation of having an accomplice, but even before she started to cry, Jude felt an empathetic loosening in his own chest. Johnny sat down beside Jude, and they dabbed her gingerly with tissues, mopping up chocolate milk and tears. She covered her face with her hands, talking into them as she cried.
“What are you saying?” Johnny said. “What’s she saying?” he asked Jude.
“All I want is Yoo-hoo!” she yelled, removing her hands. “Why does it have to be Yoo-hoo? Why can’t I crave something that won’t make me fat? And I don’t have any friends!”
“I don’t think it’ll make you fat, necessarily,” said Jude helplessly, inspecting the label.
“I feel enormous. I’m enormous.”
“You’re not enormous,” Jude said.
“I’ve been studying. I got a ninety-nine on my British Lit midterm!”
“Eliza, is there something else?” said Johnny. “Just tell us.”
“I didn’t think it would show this quickly,” she whispered, very still now, her eyes very wet. “It was practically overnight.” She pushed back the covers and lifted her nightgown enough to reveal her belly. She stared down at it, her hair veiling her face. It looked like his sister’s belly, only plumper. Eliza’s belly button was stretched wide.
“You can’t tell?” Eliza asked.
Jude and Johnny both began to stand. Then they lowered themselves again. Jude thought of Ingrid Donahoe. He thought of his birth mother.
“You’re not . . . ?” Johnny said.
Eliza covered her belly.
“Jeezum Crow,” Jude whispered.
Later, Jude and Johnny would admit that they’d thought the same thing. Jude had looked at Johnny, and Johnny had looked at Jude, and for a moment each was certain that the other was the father. And then as quickly as this thought had appeared, before Eliza could withdraw from her nightgown the subway token, dangling from her necklace among the other charms like a hypnotist’s watch, another thought, awful, miraculous, displaced it.
Nine
The furnace ticked, then hammered, then moaned, then ticked. From the street, the metallic thud of a Dumpster lid, a distant horn. Les, on the futon below, snored through it. Jude was so distracted by his thoughts that the sounds seemed to visit from someone else’s dream.
One-armed, he climbed down from the loft, wrestled on jeans and shoes and sling, gathered skateboard and watch and keys in the dark. By the glow of his father’s barbecue lighter, he found the slim black case under the kitchen sink. In it, blank-faced as a power drill, sleeping on its side on a bed of eggshell foam, lay McQueen. Jude slipped it into the pocket of his jacket and left his father alone with the furnace.
In the park, a boom box was blasting Warzone:
Don’t forget the struggle
Don’t forget the streets
He did not intend or wish to put the pistol to use as he coasted across St. Mark’s, along the lightless Avenues A, B, C, but he was glad for its leaden company. The shadowed figures he passed did not disturb him. No light showed at the bottom of Johnny’s door. Jude