The Devil's Alphabet

pitying, motherly sounds. Hands brushed the hair from his eyes, caressed the welts on his face.

Pax pushed himself onto his back, groaned. A voice like chocolate said, “There there. We got you.”

Small hands slipped under thighs and waist-“One, two…”-and then he was off the ground and swaying. Bruised skin awoke. Nerves totaled up damages.

“Wait,” he said. His voice cracked.

He forced open one eye. Two beta children cradled him between them, moving sideways toward the house. The girls were identical, with placid faces the color of wine.

“I can walk,” he said.

“Are you sure?” the girl to his left said, and the other one said, “We got tired of waiting.”

The sky vanished as they carried him inside the house. His father’s house; even with his eyes closed he would have known it from the smell.

They lifted him easily onto the couch. They carefully peeled off his shirt, damp from dew, and tsked at his bruises. They found washrags and dabbed at the crusts of blood on his face, then plastered him with Band-Aids. He asked for aspirin and they brought him two ancient powdery tablets and a water glass. The water pinked with his blood.

They tucked a blanket around Pax, then one of them sat next to him while the other attended to him. The girls traded places every ten or fifteen minutes. Sometime in the early afternoon they brought him Campbell’s tomato soup and packets of Lance crackers they dug out of their backpacks.

The girls seemed most comfortable when Pax was asleep; several times he dozed, and he’d wake to hear them babbling to him and over him-about his injuries, or what was on TV, or some minor adventure they’d had in the woods-but when he spoke or asked them a question they would go silent, change the channel, or slip from the room to bring him Ziploc bags freshly packed with ice cubes.

He woke once to the phone ringing. He shouted for them not to answer it, and the girls obeyed: They looked at the phone as it rang seven, eight times before going silent. A few minutes later it rang again and he told them to unplug it.

Sometime before dusk they said that they had to leave, but they wouldn’t stop fussing over him.

“Girls,” he said. He still couldn’t tell them apart. Was it Rainy in the jeans with the torn knee, and Sandra in the dress? “Thank you. I’m fine now.” His lips were swollen and his jaw ached, so the words came out glued.

“We’ll be back in the morning,” one of them said, and the other said, “Don’t you worry.” They slung their packs onto their shoulders and slipped out the door.

***

The nightmares woke him, or else it was the pounding headache, or the stale scent of his father lingering in the air. He tried to sit up and his ribs scraped painfully. It took him many small movements to ease onto his side, then lever himself onto his feet. He shuffled to the bathroom, edged past the gigantic toilet, and flicked on the light above the sink. He opened the mirrored door to the medicine cabinet before he could look too closely at his reflection.

He turned on the faucet, splashed water onto his face and let it run down his neck. He pushed a handful of aspirin into his mouth and bent, wincing, to drink from the tap.

He’d been dreaming of fists, and elbows, and knees.

It had taken him only seconds to surrender everything, to submit. One punch, really. He was on the ground, his cheek scraping the pavement, before he registered the blur of the fist that struck him. He raised his hand as if signaling, Yes, that was a good one, you got me. Then Clete began the beating in earnest.

Pax didn’t even try to fight back. When he was on the ground he tried to curl into a ball. When they held him against the car it was all he could do to raise his forearms to deflect some of the blows, but even that token of defiance seemed to anger Clete more. At first Pax had tried pleading with them-God knows what he tried to say-but soon he gave up trying to speak. He didn’t disassociate. He didn’t retreat to some safe place in his mind. He didn’t endure. The pain seemed to turn him inside out like a reversible coat. All the nerves on the outside. Every thought was the same thought, over and over: I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.

He walked back past his old bedroom to the guest room. Without turning on the light he found the bed and gingerly lay down. Sleep seemed impossible now. Each strained muscle insisted on reporting in, each cut and bruise jostled to inscribe its name and serial number on his brain. His head throbbed. Incredibly, none of these sensations drowned out the ache he felt for his father. The craving was still there, skulking like a coyote outside the circle of a fire.

We don’t live in our bodies, he thought. We are our bodies. A simple thing, but he kept forgetting it.

In the morning he heard someone rummaging through the kitchen, clinking dishes and closing cabinets. He managed to walk down the hallway and found them setting out bowls and pouring candy-colored cereal from a box he didn’t recognize. A plastic gallon jug of milk sat on the counter.

“Don’t you guys ever knock?”

One of the girls yelped in surprise; then both of them erupted into quacking laughter. It was the first time he’d seen either one of them laugh.

“You scared us!” one said, and the other said, “We’re not ready! Go back!”

He raised his hands and stepped back around the corner. “I hope you’re not using milk from the fridge,” he said. “I can’t vouch for anything in there.” Come to think of it, there hadn’t been anything in the refrigerator but condiment bottles. The girls must have brought their own milk and food.

After a few minutes they ushered him into the kitchen and sat him down at the table. One of them-the one in the yellow floppy dress-tucked a napkin into the neck of his T-shirt. The napkin dropped off a second later and he put it in his lap.

The cereal was generic, some kind of Froot Loops knockoff. “I hope you didn’t steal this,” he said.

“It’s ours as much as anyone else’s,” the other girl said. She wore a red T-shirt and jeans torn at one knee.

“Tell me, which one are you?” he said to the girl in red. “Sandra?”

“I’m Rainy,” she said.

“Okay, red shirt Rainy, yellow dress Sandra. Whatever you do, don’t change clothes.”

He chewed the cereal, the pain in his jaw and the alarming looseness of two of his teeth making him go slow.

“You know,” Pax said to Rainy, “you’re named after my mother.”

“Lorraine,” Rainy said. “She died in the Changes.”

“That’s right,” Pax said. “You know, my mom loved your mom a lot. Like a daughter.”

“We know,” Sandra said breezily.

After perhaps a minute Rainy said, “You said you could tell us stories about her,” she said. “At the funeral.”

“Oh, right. Your mom.” He started to beg off, but then he got an image of Jo Lynn at these girls’ age, eleven or twelve years old.

“Once we were at the Bugler’s,” Pax said. “The checkout woman accused me of trying to shoplift a Chunky candy bar. Do you know about Chunky’s? They stopped making them for a while.” The girls looked at him. Quizzically? Patiently? He couldn’t tell. “Anyway, I’m standing there petrified, but your mom got mad- so mad. She lit into the woman, whipping out words I couldn’t even pronounce.” He shook his head. “It was like watching Jesus in the Tabernacle. The clerk didn’t know what to say back, she was just sputtering.”

“What happened then?” Sandra asked.

“Jo slapped down a dollar and didn’t even wait for the change. And then-” He shrugged, smiling. “Then we just strolled out of there.”

Rainy said, “But you were trying to steal it.”

“No! Well, okay, yes. But that was stupid; I shouldn’t have tried to do that. The point is, no one was going to accuse one of her friends of a crime. Your mom would have defended me either way, because she’d already decided-”

He looked down at his cereal bowl, a sudden emotion closing his throat.