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"Yeah," Peter said unconvincingly. "Sure."
The afternoon was endless and gray. Peter, who had been through countless of Gwen's hangovers, gave Jane some vitamins and made sure she drank a lot of water. He was depressed and uncommunicative and Jane knew she ought to be cheering him up and coddling him, but the truth was she was feeling kind of bitchy herself. It was something of a triumph that she managed not to make things worse.
To keep herself busy, she set to cleaning the apartment of all traces of its previous visitor. It wasn't easy. Gwen had left a surprising number of her possessions behind, and they all hated Jane. Bobby pins fled from her grasping fingers. A hair dryer sparked and snapped whenever she came near it. The silk scarf she had stolen so long ago whipped itself around her neck and had to be torn away. Fortunately it was weak, for it really had wanted to strangle her. She disposed of them all in the dumpster out back in the alley.
At one point, when Peter was in the shower, she took out the Mother and ran through the clapping rhyme. Every day, Peg had said, without exception. By evening they both had recovered enough to eat some microwave food, and Jane volunteered to go out for wine.
Hurrying back to the apartment with the new jug, Jane was caught by the repeated image of Gwen burning in a bank of television sets in an appliance store window: Gwen upon Gwen upon Gwen twisting in unison in the flames. It seemed to be something that was happening in another world. The empty street, the cement sidewalk, the plate glass window all denied Gwen's reality.
Jane was transfixed. The television screens dissolved in her swimming sight, rising like slim blue tapers and then breaking up into triads of red-green-blue motes. Briefly, the air swarmed with phosphor dots. She felt herself dizzily falling into the broadcast.
She blinked away the tears.
The screens fell back into resolution. Gwen's fire seethed with subliminal scenes of horror, flickering glimpses of prisoners in boxcars, mutilated bodies, children aflame, as if suffering were a universal constant, a flat statement of existence and nothing more.
Hands tied behind her, Gwen writhed, as if trying to shed the chrysalis of her body. Her shoulders moved frantically. Her mouth was open in an unending scream. A small blue flame burned on her tongue. Smoke rose about her like wings.
Something bubbled out of her nostrils.
Horrified, Jane stumbled forward, feeling dried grass scratch underfoot. The telecast was all but silent. All she could hear was the fire itself, the snapping of sparks and roar of heated air. Gwen herself made not a sound. Jane was grateful for that—the images, the sweet smell of flesh like burning pork, and the awful taste in the back of her mouth were bad enough.
The crowd too was unca
Gwen's dress was burned away entirely, its charred remains indistinguishable from her skin, and still she lived. Black specks rose up from her. A flake of greasy soot came drifting down upon Jane and stung her hand. She slapped it away. Her foot felt wrong. She looked down and saw that she'd stepped on a discarded mass of pink cotton candy. Reflexively, she bent down to pull it from her shoe by its flattened paper cone.
When she looked up, Gwen was staring straight at her.
Most of the wicker cage had burned through and fallen away but she was held upright by the armature of high-performance alloys that underwired the structure. The fire had burned her unrecognizable, a thing of agony and black bone. Only her eyes were alive. They stared from the heart of pain and it seemed they knew something awful and simple and true that they wished to share with her.
They stared straight into the core of Jane's being.
"No!" Jane threw her arm up before her eyes and fetched a nasty rap on her knuckles when they struck the plate glass window. She found herself clutching the jug of wine to her chest with one arm. Gwen had finally ceased moving.
When Jane looked away, the air was dark. A light had gone out of the world.
Back at the apartment she found Peter had turned on the TV and was staring, unblinking, at a small figure in gold lamé. The sickle flashed to a roar of applause, and he flung something small and dark into the embers. Hands reached out to seize his falling body.
Jane snapped off the television.
"Have some wine," she said. "It'll make you feel better."
After they'd had a bit to drink, they began to make a few tentative plans. Peter had a standing offer from a local garage for a mechanic's position. Jane could get a job at the mall. It would mean giving up shoplifting, but that was a sacrifice she was prepared to make. The apartment was good enough for now, but when they had a little money saved, they'd want to move to someplace nicer.
"I'm not sorry all this happened," Peter said. "I think we'll be good for each other." He lifted her hands, and lightly kissed the knuckles one by one.
Later they made love for the second time. Jane didn't really enjoy it much because, despite all the water she'd drunk, she was still a little hung over. But she figured it was like the wine, something she could acquire a taste for.
They sat up in bed afterward, fantasizing their future together and drinking more wine. "Now we always have to tell each other everything," Jane said. "Our thoughts, our i
"Yeah," Peter said. "That's right."
Jane was careful not to get drunk as she had the night before. But eventually weariness caught up with her. Her eyes grew heavy and she drifted off.
When she awoke it was dark. The jug was empty and Peter was gone.
Peter wasn't at the school. Jane walked twice around the ashes on the football field, then went around behind the bleachers and called quietly for him. The shadows stirred.
She thought briefly that she'd found him when she discovered that the door by the loading docks into the shop was unlocked. But when she went inside, he wasn't there. She was sure he had passed that way, though, for the repair bay was empty—he had taken Ragwort. "Follow the road out of town," a voice whispered.
She whirled. "Who's there?"
Nobody answered.
"Who's there!"
Her words echoed from the far wall.
In the end she had no choice but to do as the voice suggested, following the main road away from the school, past the miracle mile and into the dark hills at the outskirts of town.
An hour later, she found Ragwort.
He lay in the mud of a ditch, one leg broken, his frame obviously bent. There was a dying light in the eye he turned her way. His battery was failing. "Girlie?"
"Oh, Ragwort." She hugged his neck and began to cry. All the uncertainty and fear for Peter and herself both came out in those tears as well, her guilty feelings for Gwen, all the muddled emotions that were her life.
"Aw, don't go on like that," Ragwort croaked. "I'm just an old hack, without nothing much left to look forward to." He laughed a rusty, choking laugh. "Never honestly thought I'd get out of that fucking repair bay again—that boy Peter did proud by me, he did. Took me out and let me run."
"We'll get you patched up," she promised.
"Bullshit. I'm fucking scrap metal now. But it was one hell of a ride, girlie, one hell of a ride. We was all over the road. I ain't got no regrets. Shit."