Chapter 20
Gwendolyn Madsen Gwen wandered through town shivering. Didn't she have a coat? She'd thought that there was one, but she figured she had left it on her father's body when it had been lying on the cold ground, his brains leaking into the pavement. Hadn't she done that? Something had been put on Daddy's face. A mask, maybe. Maybe that's what it was. Maybe, maybe. She giggled darkly. "They used to do that, you know. Put on death masks. Look at the dead man's face one last time." She giggled again, then kicked at a pebble with all of her might. The stone skipped down the sidewalk-free street, getting caught in a clump of weeds ten yards ahead of where she walked. "Dead man, said man, redman--but, no, that's not right to others." She tutted and blinked against the bright sunlight. Walking was a good thing, she had decided that morning. There was a stink in the house--probably Dad, dead in his bed, decaying and rotting and smelling like death--and Gwen had been missing her coat. She would need to find that, if she didn't want to be cold in the winter. The cold, cold winter was coming, it was a-coming. Who wanted to be out in this kind of temperature without a coat? Besides, Dad would need it in the grave he was in, because it was, she had come to understand, quite cold when one's brains were scraped out by the asphalt. Gwen couldn't tell the difference between her spoken and internal thoughts, but she did start when a yelp of pain came out of her own mouth. Or, maybe, that was because she'd kicked another rock, but this one jammed her bare toe before skittering off, its chuckling clatter sounding like mocking laughter. "Well, piss on you, too!" That made her start. Such language. Such bad, bad language. Daddy would be so upset. She made a note, a mental note (Ahahaha, mental) not to tell him, as that might upset him. Not downset. Downset wasn't real, it wasn't a thing. It didn't exist. Like Daddy. The sunlight was bright. A breeze sliced through the tee-shirt she wore--her favorite, the one with Care Bears on it. There was a hole in the armpit of it, which meant that she really should have thrown it away, but instead she'd put her bra on over the shirt. That way, no one would notice the hole. Idly, she reached up to finger the fabric, only to realize that she was still holding the flowers she'd plucked. She looked at them. They were brown, of course, and mostly looked like leaves, but it didn't take too much remembering--good old remembering! That was always the best thing to do, wasn't it?--to see that she was actually holding onto daisies. And roses. And daisies! Good old daisies. Some of her flowers crumpled in her fist, which just meant that she would have to pick them up. They grew in the gutters, and damned--no, that was a bad word, she wasn't damned, no, no--darned if she wasn't going to pick them up. Picking them up would be easy, because she, Gwen, was quite good at it. She'd done it at least a dozen times, she thought, and quite possibly more. Scooping another bouquet of flowers from the black grime that had accumulated in the gutter close to an opening beneath a sidewalk--when had they planted sidewalks here, anyway? She didn't remember that from before, and remembering was always such a good thing to do, so she was certain that she'd missed something--and held it close to her. Black drops of slime fell from the beautiful bouquet, splattering on her bare legs. It was cold, but that fact didn't matter to her too much. She was wearing shorts, after all, so she couldn't stay cold for too long. It was impossible to think that she couldn't wear shorts. Her dad wasn't around to tell her no, was he? Neither was good old Lenny. "Lenny!" She paused in the center of the street, suddenly struck by the possibilities of her brother. "Hey, I remember Lenny!" She resumed her walk. "Yeah, he never decided to come home. Nope, no need. I have everything under control." She giggled. "Yes indeedy." That made her laugh again. The bouquet started to wilt, sadly, the violets turning into dust in her very hands. "That's what happens when you're the age of the universe," she said with a sagacious sigh. "It's unavoidable." To her left, she saw a large building--the largest in the city, possibly the entire world! "Hiya, hospital!" She stopped where she was and waved, a large smile creasing her face and tears streaking down her face. She didn't know where the tears came from, though her feet kind of hurt. She looked down, surprised to see that blood and dirt had combined to make a kind of shoe slurry. The idea made her laugh. Sucking in a ragged gasp, she said, "Maybe the hospital should know about this." Certainly Dad didn't need to know about it. It could be her little secret. She wouldn't even tell Lenny. That would be silly. Stupid and silly. Stilly. Stuply. Something like that. Resolutely, Gwen began to march toward the building. Her brisk attitude made her remember (yes! Remembering!) how easy it had been to come to this conclusion. Some visits from friends--Mrs. Rall had stopped by the night of the accident (certainly not the night of the on purpose, Gwen was certain of that); so had Harmony, plus a couple of other days later--and a couple of confusing moments of people trying to tell her she had to decide what to do with the body (none of them found the idea of skinning Daddy and sprawling him out like a bearskin rug was particularly good, which just went to show how ignorant some people could be), and eventually Daddy was "taken care of", she guessed. She couldn't remember how. Then some people had tried to come to talk to her, but she'd left through the backdoor so that they couldn't find her, couldn't take her away. They were "worried about her" and "concerned about her safety" and "had a wonderful place" for her to visit. Honestly, they sounded a little crazy. That was why she'd snuck free, creeping out through the back of the house and wandering through the neighborhood. Who knows, maybe those people were still in front of her house, tapping on the door, cupping their hands about the sides of their heads so that they could peer into the house and look at her. As if she were some animal in a zoo, that was what that felt like. No thank you, Mr. President. Gwen wasn't interested in that kind of attention. But going to the hospital? Well, that would make sense, wouldn't it? After all, Dane was in there, and Daddy, too. "No, wait." She paused in the mostly empty parking lot. "No, that doesn't work. Daddy isn't there. He's dead." She looked at her assembled flowers. "Well, darn it. Now what am I supposed to do with these? Just give them away?" No, they were looking a bit dried out, especially the rue. "That rue is different," said Gwen to herself, plucking the brittle oak leaf from the rest of the lot and setting it carefully behind her ear. She smoothed out her greasy hair--she hadn't washed it since whenever and it was, honestly, starting to smell. Not as bad as Dad, who was dead and rotting and probably the reason the house stank like unwashed dishes and spoiled food. Very, very inconsiderate of his daughter, dying was. And spoiling the food. Both of those were bad. With new vigor, she started toward the hospital again, only to notice something in the distance: The creek. "That creek," she said to her bouquet, "runs down from the mountains and out here to Creek Street. The hospital is next to it because the hospital needs water, you see." She marched toward the creek, flowers tight in her fists. When she got close enough, she clambered over the wrought-iron bannister, keeping herself steady with one hand while leaning out over the water to get a better view of the water. It was low--"Winter will do that to you," she said with a tsk--and ran in lazy brown streaks, it seemed. Gwen didn't think the city was doing a very good job of making the creek big, and she thought seriously for a moment about writing to her congressman. But who was that? Well, sometimes, she decided, a citizen had to take matters into her own hands, even if they were filled with flowers. She would fill the creek herself. First step: Get some water. Gwen turned and started. "Oh!" She stared at the man who stood in front of her, on the other side of the bannister. "Howdy, partner." She giggled. "I'm not really a cowgirl, you know, I just play one on TV." She giggled again. "Except that's stupid. Who watches TV nowadays?" "Gwen?" "That's my name, don't wear it out!" She rolled her eyes. "Never mind. You can't do that to a name. See? Gwen, Gwen, Gwen, Gwen, Gwen, Gwendolyn, Gwen. I said it a bunch and it hardly matters. Gwendolyn Rose…that's my middle name, too. Some girls don't have middle names, since they're expected to give up their maiden names when they marry, so the maiden names just--pop--slide right into the middle name slot, easy peasy lemon squeezy. Of course, that's kind of sexist, right? I mean, why don't the guys have to change their names? Rude, really, if you think about it. Like, we don't even have a word for 'maiden name, but for guys', and if we do, I certainly don't hear about it." The man stared at her with a mixture of shock and pity on his face. Or chauvinism. That was possible too. Maybe he didn't like the idea that a woman could keep her own female name, though now that she thought about, basically no one had a name from a mother, since a mom's last name was the same as her dad's, meaning it was inescapable. "Gwendy, are you okay?" He had salt-and-pepper hair, a tight goatee (Gwen had always thought facial hair was attractive, which was only one of the many reasons why she'd been willing to hop in bed with Dane--and, boy, was that an experience…whooo!) and a windbreaker on. "Oh, hey, have you seen my coat? It's missing." He glanced away, as if looking to see if anyone was around. "Are you feeling okay?" "Fit as rain, right as a fiddle, as my dad always said." She paused. "He doesn't really talk too much anymore. Kind of lost his mind." "God, Gwen! What are you doing?" She shrugged. "Harvesting. You want one of my flowers?" She held it up, only to have a gust of wind tug some of them free of her hands. "No!" she shouted, reaching out for them. The man gasped as Gwen started to pitch forward, snatching at her flailing hand. His warm fingers wrapped around her wrist just as she thought it had been too much and was about to plunge over the side. It was a ten-foot drop, she'd guess, maybe twenty. Perhaps as much as thirty. She didn't really know, in all honesty. They'd probably told her in school, but that was such a long time ago. "Who can remember these things?" she asked as the guy grunted. She turned around as a wave of shock and distress flooded her system. This guy was grabbing her! Maybe trying to rape her! "Get off of me! I'm pregnant! I'll tell my dad!" Gwen swung her open hand at the crazy guy--and he must have been crazy to try to grab an innocent girl like that, some stranger who walked up out of nowhere and started making a grab, snatching and grabbing--and popped him a good one. Pop! A good one, right in the left ear. The guy grunted and his grip loosened enough that Gwen's momentum pulled her free and she began to pitch backwards. "Flying!" she cried as the world spun. The fall was quick. Gwen gasped as her body landed on a larger-than-the-rest rock, her neck twisting painfully against it as her head plunged into the shallow water. The rest of her body flopped to one side, but the cold water was hardly even felt now. Warmth radiated out from her neck in sharp spikes of heat, running down from the base where she'd struck the rock and down to the fingers first, then meandering down to her middle. Water rushed into her mouth, coating her throat and worming its way down her nose. A flash of worry about being eaten by a shark now that she was in the water went away as she started to sing "Baby Shark" as loudly as she could. The words came out as a gargle. A worried thought about what this would do for the baby couldn't materialize beyond the fact that she'd heard someone joke about how "It's a 'uterus', not a 'uter-you'," and that made her laugh. She laughed until she couldn't laugh any more. |