COMPANY OF STRANGERS by Aryn Kyle
The only thing my brother and I ever agreed on was that I would die horribly. As a child, I knew that I could be trapped in a tanning bed until my skin bubbled and melted away from my skeleton. I could be swallowed by an earthquake, washed away in a flash flood, eaten alive by rats. I could spontaneously burst into flames or choke to death on a Cheerio. I could catch the Ebola virus and bleed to death from my eyes and nipples.
Our father failed to recognize the seriousness of my impending death. A doctor, he saw only the facts: “Monkeys get Ebola, floods don’t hit the suburbs, and rats are just squirrels with naked tails.”
“Maybe I’ll be kidnapped,” I told my father. “On any ordinary day, I could get stolen and chopped into little pieces.”
He sighed heavily and looked at me over the rim of his glasses. “By whom?”
“By bad men,” I told him and pointed at my brother. “It could happen. Jack said.”
My father glared at my brother, who nodded. “It’s true. She could.”
Bad men were everywhere. They filled the pages of newspapers and monopolized the 6:00 News. It was only a matter of time before one came through my window at night and snatched me from my canopy bed. He would bruise my arms, pull my hair, tear my nightgown. A bad man could fill a child’s mouth with one fist to keep her from screaming, could duct-tape her hands behind her back, could slice her apart and throw her into a river.
“I could be gone in a heartbeat,” I told my father. “And maybe all the police would ever find is a finger.” I wagged my pinky in front of him. “Better take a good look in case you ever have to identify me by it.”
My father took a deep breath. “Let’s not worry about it, shall we? You just be good and safe and remember what they told you in school about talking to strangers.”
“It isn’t always a stranger,” my brother interrupted. “One of our neighbors could lock Lilly up in a cellar and take pictures of her without her clothes on.”
“That will never happen,” my father told me. “But if it does, I will save you.” Then he cuffed my brother on the back of the head and hissed, “For the love of God, Jackson, please don’t make my life any harder than it already is.”
My father’s wife had died young. His job was demanding. His son was cold and his daughter walked home from school ready to accept candy from the first stranger who offered. The women he might have hoped to love moved through his house like a parade, smoked cigarettes in his kitchen then fled the first time they met his children. They left for good when his son looked them up and down and whispered “whore” beneath his breath. They ran from the house screaming when his daughter smeared lipstick across her neck and wrists and lay naked in the bathtub the first time they tried to spend the night. My father’s life was hard. But this was something my brother and I did not agree on.
When my father died, my brother flew into town to stand with me at the bedside and watch him draw his last breaths. I held my father’s hand and thought about how he would never kneel beside my coffin or cry over my tombstone, while Jack used the hospital phone to rearrange meetings and cancel appointments.
“I hope he doesn’t drag this out,” my brother said between calls. “The kids are missing school.”
In the hallway his wife read magazines while his children made trips to the vending machine on the first floor. When I passed by them to go to the bathroom, they stared at me like I was something from a fairytale: a unicorn, a hunchback, a three-headed dog, something they’d read about in books but never thought they’d see in real life. I only knew my brother’s family from the annual Christmas cards my father forwarded to me, photos of the four of them engaging in festive activities, wearing matching holiday sweaters and smiling like a family made by Fisher-Price.
After my father had taken his last breath, I stood in the hallway with my niece and nephew while my brother held his wife’s elbow and whispered into her ear. “We’ll deal with the formalities,” he said when he turned back to me. “We’ll go through the will and take care of the house.” He tossed me my father’s car keys. “You take the kids.”
My sister-in-law made a face like she’d been struck by lightning. “Jack,” she said in a strained voice, and he touched her shoulder.
“Just for a couple of hours,” he told her, then smiled at me.
“You’re going to go through the house?” I asked. “Shouldn’t I help?”
“Ann and I will make sense of things,” he said. “The sooner we get through this mess, the sooner we can all get the hell out of here.” He put his hand on his son’s head. “The kids have spent all day in the hospital. They’re restless.” He checked his watch and filled my hand with bills from his wallet. “It will be much easier this way.”
I pretended not to notice as Ann slipped some money to her daughter and whispered, “Just in case.” She followed us to the elevator, clapping her hands gaily as she called after her children, “Emma? James? Seatbelts!”
I looked down at my niece and nephew. “What do you want me to do with them?” I asked Jack. “Where should we go?”
He handed me a newspaper from a chair in the hallway. “Take them to a museum or something. Art show, historical exhibit, I don’t care. Just do something cultural.”
We had to drive thirty minutes to get to the Pirate Dinner Theater. Emma played navigator with a map she found in the glove compartment. I turned when she told me to and smoked the cigarettes she’d found underneath the map. From the backseat, James tapped my shoulder several times a minute to remind me that he had to go to the bathroom.
Emma turned in her seat. “You’ll just have to hold it,” she told her brother. “I don’t think it would be a good idea to stop in this neighborhood.” Then she lowered her voice and gave me a sideways glance. “It looks unsanitary.”
We bought our tickets from a woman wearing corduroy pants and eye patch who told us that we were prisoners of the Yellow Pirate and to go on over to our table.
Once we were seated, Emma – who, thanks to her father, has a sense of such things – looked around at the cardboard anchors taped to the walls and said, “I have a feeling that this is going to be terribly over-priced.”
“You can’t put a price on culture,” I told her.
James rolled his eyes. “You can’t,” he said. “It’s Daddy’s money.”
“He wanted to pay,” I said. “But I could have if I’d wanted to. I have money, you know.”
Emma narrowed her eyes at me. “Do you have a job, Aunt Lilly?”
I narrowed my eyes back. “Do you?”
She leaned forward in her seat. “I’m eleven.”
“You shouldn’t think of excuses to fail,” I told her. “You should think of reasons to succeed.” Her forehead wrinkled and she looked at her brother, who cranked his finger beside his temple and mouthed the word crazy.
“For your information,” I said. “I have had many jobs. Most recently, I worked for the Red Cross in rescue relief.” Emma’s mouth pulled to the side doubtfully. “That’s right,” I told her. “Any time there was a natural disaster, they called me and off I went to be right in the middle of it. It was a great job.”
I didn’t tell them that the job was volunteer. The only person who knew that had been my father, who had groaned into the phone and asked to what address he should send a monthly check.
“You don’t need to send money,” I’d told him. “This is very dangerous work. Chances are that I’ll be dead within the month.” When he didn’t answer, I gave him the address of Red Cross Headquarters and told him that they would be able to forward my mail.
“So?” James asked. “How come you’re not doing it anymore if it was such a great job?”
“Well,” I said. “Sadly enough, it turned out that I didn’t have any skills. Everyone else on my team could do important things like CPR or lift fallen buildings off of orphaned children.” I ignored the glance exchanged between them. “I did what I could, though. I held up signs and handed out snack packs to the devastated.”
The Yellow Pirate came to our table with chips and salsa. He was small and thin with a black goatee penciled onto his chin and a yellow scarf tied around his head. After a great deal of grimacing and arghing, he took our drink orders and told us that he would make us walk the plank if we didn’t behave. “You especially,” he added, wagging his finger at me. “I can tell you’re trouble.” James snorted and Emma leaned her head against her hands. “Wow,” the Yellow Pirate said, looking us over. “Who died?”
“Our grandfather,” James told him. “But no one really liked him much, so it’s okay.” The Yellow Pirate stared for a second and then took a step backwards.
“You know what this table needs?” he asked. “This table needs to see my sword.” Emma yawned audibly and the Yellow Pirate leaned down and whispered to her, “This is a big deal. You’ll have to keep it quiet so that the other tables don’t get jealous.” He winked at me. “I don’t show my sword to just anybody.”
“Oh,” I said. “I bet you say that to all the tables.”
He made a great show of brandishing the sword before us, swishing it over our heads and growling for effect.
“It’s really big,” I said. “Can I touch it?” He set the gray plastic against the inside of my arm and I ran my finger along the edge. “I bet you can do some real damage with that.” I slid my foot from under the table and pressed it over the toe of his shoe.
“See?” he said to me. “I could tell right away about you.” Before he moved sideways to the next table, he reached down and touched the backs of his fingers to my hair.
When I looked up, James was staring at me. “My dad isn’t going to like that you brought us here.”
“Your dad can bite me,” I told him and his mouth fell open.
“It’s all right,” Emma said nervously and patted her brother’s arm. “She doesn’t know what she’s saying. She’s bereft. Aren’t you, Aunt Lilly?”
I thought of Jackson across town, smoking a cigar and cursing to himself as he leafed through our father’s papers, through his receipts and tax returns and letters, things he never meant for us to see. “That’s right,” I told them and slipped on my complimentary eye patch. “I’m all torn up inside.”
“Daddy says that Grandpa was a bad man,” James said. He glanced behind him and lowered his voice. “Daddy says that Grandpa had girlfriends and it broke Grandma’s heart so bad it killed her.”
I lifted my eye patch to look at him. “That’s why Daddy is a lawyer instead of a doctor,” I told him. “Cancer killed Grandma. Check the charts if you don’t believe me.”
Emma was loading a chip with salsa and she stopped midway to her mouth. “When you and Dad were little?”
“That’s right,” I said.
“What did you do?”
The pirates were gathering on stage and I folded my napkin across my lap. “Well,” I said. “Once I dug my knee back and forth on the sidewalk in front of our house. It bled so much that the cement turned pink and Jack had to bandage me up with dish towels and masking tape.”
“Did he cry?”
“Nah,” I said. “He was pretty used to it.”
“No.” Emma dropped her chip back into the bowl and put her hands flat on the table. “When Grandma died. Did my dad cry?”
“Oh.” I stared at the stage, hoping something would happen. “I don’t remember.”
It was your basic pirate dinner theater scenario. There were two main pirates (the Yellow Pirate turned out to be a marginal pirate figure) and two captured princesses: a gypsy princess and a princess-princess. After various failed escapes, the princesses ended up falling in love with their respective pirates and in between our fish sticks and our ice cream sandwiches, the whole ensemble did a big dance number while the gypsy princess turned a series of back flips across the stage.
Sometime during the curtain call, James lost his shoe under the table and the rest of the audience filed out around us while I scouted on my hands and knees to find it. The cast was lingering in the auditorium, eating chips from abandoned bowls and clearing plates away in plastic bins.
As James was cramming his shoe back onto his foot, the Yellow Pirate sat down on our table and crossed is arms.
“So,” I said to him. “Have you always wanted to be a pirate?”
He cocked his jaw. “Where are you going now?” he asked.
“We’re going back to our hotel,” Emma said and gave me a firm look. “Mom and Dad are expecting us.”
The Yellow Pirate kept his eyes on mine. “I think you should come to my place.”
“I have the kids,” I said, and he poked my hip with his sword.
“I have a TV.”
At the hotel there would be polite conversation. Jack and Ann would talk about their jobs, their kids, their friends. They would talk about the things they’d found in my father’s house and I would sit like a stranger between them while they picked a church and planned a funeral.
I handed my father’s car keys to the Yellow Pirate. “We can take our car,” I said. “You drive.”
As we walked across the empty parking lot, James tugged at the hem of my shirt. “I want to go, Aunt Lilly. I’m hungry.”
“You should have eaten your dinner,” I told him.
He wrinkled his nose. “My fish sticks tasted like refrigerator.”
Emma nodded. “Mine were frozen in the middle.”
The Yellow Pirate started my father’s car and I guided James and Emma to the backseat. “We’ll stop for food,” I promised. “Just get in.” I held the door open and Emma took a step backwards.
“I think this is a very bad idea,” she said and folded her arms over her chest.
“Well, guess what?” I asked her. “I could care less what you think.” As soon as I said it, I tried to smile, to make it a joke, but her lips froze and her face emptied. She swallowed hard and dropped her chin to her chest as she followed her brother into the backseat.
The Yellow Pirate lived in an apartment with stained walls and concrete floors. In the doorway, James reached for my hand. “Aunt Lilly,” he whispered with his mouth trembling. “I want my mom.”
“Soon,” I told him and shook his hand away. The Yellow Pirate turned on the television and James and Emma stood awkwardly in front of it, looking around at the piles of clothes and empty beer bottles while the Yellow Pirate touched his lips to my neck and breathed into my ear. I slid my fingers into the waist of his pants and over his shoulder, I saw Emma watching. Her face was empty, and our eyes locked for a moment before she turned away. “Wait here,” I said. “We’ll just be a minute.”
He didn’t tell me his name and I didn’t ask. In the bedroom, he shed his pirate garb in a heap on the floor and stood before me with thin arms and a narrow, hairless chest. We lay on his bed, a mattress on the floor next to the water heater, and he ran the palm of his hand up my shin and stopped at my knee.
“Nasty scar,” he said and I looked down. He traced the patch of pink scar tissue with his index finger and smiled. “Did you get it doing something brave?”
I closed my eyes. “I rubbed it on concrete until I saw bone.” His hand fell away from my leg and I tried not to smile. But when I opened my eyes, he wasn’t gaping in horror. His mouth was twitching and his chest was rising and falling in quick, shallow breaths.
“Jesus Christ,” he said into his hand. “You’re a masochist.”
Without the scarf and sword, he had lost a good deal of his mystique. His goatee had smeared up the side of his face like a giant bruise and his hair smelled like sweat and fish sticks. The lights were too bright and I wanted to get up, to get dressed, to get out. But his little face looked so excited. After all his pirate work, his singing/
dancing/table waiting, it seemed rude to disappoint him. “I guess so,” I said.
“Oh God.” He jumped off the bed and began rummaging through his dresser drawers. “I’ve done that show, like, a million times and nothing like this has ever happened!” He turned back to me with a pair of furry rings dangling from his thumb. “Check it out,” he said and shook them in front of me when I didn’t respond. “They’re handcuffs.”
“They’re pink,” I said.
“Yeah,” he nodded. “Pink. You know, for girls?”
I let him move my hands behind my head and snap my wrists to the pipes of the water heater. The television murmured from the other room and I turned my head to the side so that I wouldn’t see the Yellow Pirate’s goatee smear onto my skin.
Jack would have finished with my father’s house. He and Ann would have had a nice dinner in our nice hotel and they would be counting the hours until they could fly back to their nice home with their nice family. We would put my father into the ground and then they would be gone. They would reappear on the faces of future Christmas cards smiling and laughing as they decorated a tree, sat in front of a fireplace, posed on cross-country skis, cards full of matching outfits and warm wishes, cards I would never see. From our family to yours. No one would ask what address to mail them to.
It would have been an easy escape. No police bursting through the door with guns outstretched. No spot on the 6:00 News. No father swinging in like the Phantom of the Opera to save me. The pink handcuffs had a self-release button. And the Yellow Pirate didn’t try to stop me.
The living room looked the same, cluttered with empty pizza boxes and dirty dishes. But my niece and nephew were not in it. The lights were on and the TV hummed in the corner. We looked in the kitchen, in the bathroom. We crawled on our hands and knees to look under the furniture. We looked in closets and cabinets and behind doors. “Enough hiding,” I called. “Emma? James? Come out now. Aunt Lilly doesn’t want to have to beat the hell out of you!” I listened for the sound of voices, of rustling, of breathing. Nothing.
“I’m sure they didn’t go far,” the Yellow Pirate said when I went onto the porch. “I’ll help you find them. Just let me get dressed.” I left him there and ran into the street. There was no traffic, no light, no children. I checked inside the car, but there was no movement, no sound, no children. I yelled their names then screamed them. I stood in the center of the road, trying to be logical. If I was a kid, which way would I go? Which direction would I run to escape the lair of the Yellow Pirate, to get home, to get safe, to leave me behind?
There are rules for crises, codes for danger: starve a fever; feed a cold; stop, drop, and roll; stay with a buddy. But there was nothing useful. So I ran. I circled one block and then the next, calling their names until my voice went hoarse and the words fell dull and dead in my mouth. Until I couldn’t remember which street I’d been down or which direction I’d come from. I passed three payphones, or maybe one payphone three times, and each time I did, I thought about calling the hotel. They might have gone back, might be in the arms of their parents, explaining the horrors which had driven them to venture alone into the night, into the cold, into a city they didn’t know. I held the receiver in my hand and let my fingers shake over the keys. In the face of danger, what were you supposed to do? Call 911. Kick and yell. Scream fire. Scream rape. Make a scene. This is not my father!
But if they were back, then they were fine. And if they weren’t. I hung up the phone.
I circled blocks of dark buildings and empty streets until I found myself at my father’s car, back in front of the Yellow Pirate’s apartment where I sat down on the curb and let my feet sink in the gutter mud. I smoked my father’s cigarettes with fingers numb from cold and stared at the dark sky. Around me, the city stretched into state, into country, into a whole world of strangers. The sphere of the earth was crowded with people who would never know me, would never look for me, would never try to find me if I disappeared. I wrapped my arms around my knees. A person is only missing if another person misses them.
I smoked and waited. I waited for hypothermia or lung cancer or morning. Stay where you are and someone will find you. And someone did. I heard a door open behind me and the Yellow Pirate came out of his apartment with James and Emma on either side.
“Where have you been?” he asked. “I told you they didn’t go far.” They stood, the three of them, silhouetted in the light of his doorway.
“Where?” I said and tried to stand. But my ankles were numb and my legs felt stiff and heavy.
“Burger King around the corner.” They moved down the steps and into the street in front of me. “They’d said they were hungry.”
Emma was chewing on the straw of her paper cup. “We were hungry,” she confirmed. “You said we’d get food and we didn’t and we were hungry.”
The Yellow Pirate helped me to the car and held the back door open for James and Emma. “Come see the show again,” he said, and I nodded mutely. “Bring your friends.”
I drove the car down the street, the same street I’d walked, but it didn’t look familiar. “I don’t know where we are,” I said. Emma didn’t offer to help with the map, so I just drove, working my hands around the steering wheel as the feeling came back into my fingers. In the backseat, James’ body slumped sideways into sleep while Emma sat rigid, staring out the window and squeaking the straw in the lid of her cup.
“Some night,” I said finally.
“Yeah,” she said. “Some night.”
“You know,” I told her. “Maybe we shouldn’t tell your parents everything that happened tonight.” The squeaking stopped.
“Are you saying to lie?” she asked. “We should lie to Mom and Dad?”
“No,” I said quickly. “It’s just that sometimes, the truth makes people upset. And it doesn’t do any good to make people upset. So maybe we could avoid the truth. Just a little bit.”
“Aunt Lilly,” she said slowly. “That’s the exact same thing as lying.”
“No it isn’t,” I told her. “It’s like, when someone asks you how you are and even though you want to say that you feel like shit, that you’re miserable, that you cry until you gag and spend most of your time imagining ways to kill yourself, instead you just say, ‘Fine, thanks.’”
“I don’t think it’s like that at all,” she said. “I think that’s just good manners.”
The car was quiet for a moment and then I heard the sound of Emma’s seatbelt unhooking. There was a rustling noise and she was beside me, leaning between the two front seats. She touched my arm lightly. “Aunt Lilly?” she asked. “Are you miserable? Do you think about killing yourself?”
“Of course not.” I tried to laugh. “I was just using that as a for instance.”
“Oh.” She touched the side of her face to my arm. “How was the Yellow Pirate?” she asked and I glanced down to see if she meant something by it. But her eyes were half-closed and her face looked soft.
“Kind of boring,” I said, and she nodded as if she’d suspected as much.
“Your voice is scratchy,” she said. “Have you been crying?”
“My throat’s just dry,” I told her.
She climbed into the front and I put my hand on her back to steady her as she crawled into the passenger seat. “It’s mostly ice,” she told me and held out her soda cup. “But there’s a little left.” I reached out to take it and she touched her hand against mine on the cup. “Hey,” she said. “Our fingers are the same.”
I glanced down at our hands, at our square knuckles and oval nails. “How about that,” I said.
She squeezed my finger and pointed ahead. “Turn here.”
When we got to the hotel, James wouldn’t wake up, and I had to carry him across the parking lot by one armpit and the crook of one knee, hiking him up by his clothes when he slipped. My brother and his wife were alone in the hotel lobby, pacing in front of the desk. Their heads snapped towards us when we walked through the front doors and my brother dropped his chin to his chest and exhaled slowly. Ann ran forward and snatched James from my arms, pulling his head to her shoulder and his legs around her waist. Her eyelashes were wet and I could see the veins throbbing in her neck as she kissed James’ ear and touched her hand to Emma’s hair. She wrapped both arms around James and rocked him back and forth, whispering, “My God, my God.”
When she looked at me, her lip was quivering and her mouth opened and closed with each jagged breath.
“Well,” she said finally. “Don’t you have anything to say?”
Next to her, Emma’s body jerked like the question had been directed to her. “Thank you, Aunt Lilly,” she said politely. “We had a very nice time.”
Ann looked at the carpet and held one hand up to Jack. “I’ll be up in a minute,” he told her, and she gave me a narrow stare before taking her children into the elevator.
When we were alone, Jackson stood in front of me with his hands in his pockets and his jaw flexing. “Well, Lilly,” he said. “Ann hates you now.”
“She hated me before,” I told him. “I’ve just given her an excuse to say so.”
He leaned towards me and sniffed. “What’s that I smell on you?” he asked, and I shrugged.
“Pirate?”
“It’s cigarette smoke,” he said. “You’ve been smoking in front of my kids.” He closed his eyes and shook his head. “God, Lilly.”
“I’ve had a rough night,” I told him, and he held his hands up.
“I can’t do this now,” he said. “I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”
“Wait,” I said and caught the sleeve of his shirt. “I thought we could talk a little bit, get a drink or something.”
He stared at my hand on his arm until I let it drop. “The bar closed an hour ago,” he said and stepped into the elevator.
“Just for a minute, Jack. Please.” I pressed the heels of my hands into my eyes to stop them from burning and swallowed hard to release the tightening in the back of my throat. “I’ve had a really terrible night.”
Jack’s face went hard and as the elevator door began to close, his hand slammed out and held it open. “Let’s hear it, Lilly,” he said through the clench of his jaw. “Give me one reason. Just one reason why I should feel sorry for you.”
My whole body felt weak and hollow, like in one moment it might forget how to move, how to stand, how to breathe. I touched my fingers to my lips in hope that they would remember my voice and say something, say anything. “My father died today.”
Jack watched me for a moment. He blinked several times, then looked up at the ceiling and laughed. He pulled his shirtsleeve up and lifted his wrist so that I could see the face of his watch. Then the doors closed between us and he was gone. The hours had crossed over the day my father died. And I was standing in a hotel lobby on just an ordinary day.
Aryn Kyle has stories forthcoming in The Atlantic Monthly and in Best New American Voices 2005.