Chapter Thirteen
THIRTEEN
“I can’t take responsibility…,” Ted whispers at the train station twenty-five years later.
He’s holding his suitcase in one trembling hand, the ashes of his best friend in the other. When he backs away from her, Louisa notices for the first time that he’s limping.
“Okay,” she says quietly.
“Okay?” Ted repeats in surprise, wiping his eyes behind his crooked glasses, deeply ashamed of his tears.
“Yes. Okay. I won’t bother you anymore,” she says, and turns around.
“Okay…,” he nods in confusion, because the strangest thing that can happen to a middle-aged man in the middle of an argument is for him to suddenly win.
She casts a final glance at him and says: “Don’t hurt yourself.”
Ted really does try not to show that he can hear the artist in her then, dear God, how he tries. He collects himself, like a serious adult would, and mutters curtly:
“Sorry… sorry I raised my voice.”
He stretches his neck, tries to make himself as tall as her, as if that would make him seem more adult. It reminds Louisa of a small giraffe, which puts her in mind of angels. That might not appear to be the most natural connection in the world, sure, but she doesn’t believe in angels, and Fish was obsessed with angels. When they first met, Louisa would never draw people, just animals, and most often giraffes, because their bodies looked the way Louisa felt: really tall and really wide, but in all the wrong places. Fish always said that if she died, she would come back to Louisa as an angel, only in the form of a giraffe, so that Louisa would recognize her, and obviously that made Louisa laugh hysterically. A giraffe in the middle of town—even as an angel, Fish couldn’t be discreet. She’d be an idiot, forever.
Louisa smiles sadly to herself as she picks up the box containing the painting. She turns toward the other side of the platform where a group of young men dressed in black are smoking uneven hand-rolled cigarettes and drinking from bottles wrapped in paper bags. Then she says:
“Don’t worry. You go. I’m just going to go and ask those nice guys over there if they can help me sell the painting instead. They look pretty trustworthy…”
Ted sighs so deeply that you really wouldn’t want him in the vicinity if you were building a house of cards.
“But… no! What are you doing? Don’t go and…”
He takes two steps after her, and Louisa turns around dramatically.
“Excuse me? Aren’t you in a rush to catch your TRAIN?”
Ted hyperventilates, trying to hold back his frustration.
“Are you insane? You can’t just walk up to a group of strange men with a painting worth this much!” he hisses.
“Why not? Because they might kidnap me?” she snorts.
Ted can’t quite figure out a smart way to reply to that, so on pure instinct he says the only thing that every middle-aged man on the entire planet can think of to say to an annoying teenager:
“Aren’t you… supposed to be in school? Or something?”
She screws her nose up.
“It’s Easter.”
“Okay, okay, but you’re just a child, someone must be missing you, surely?”
“I’m eighteen. No one’s missing me.”
“I’m just trying to help you!” Ted persists, and puts down his suitcase and the box of ashes so he can massage his temples.
She nods quickly:
“Okay? So help me, then! You said you were going home, and that there’s someone there who can help me sell the painting! Take me with you, we can sell the painting, and then I’ll come back here after Easter! No one will even notice I’ve been gone!”
Ted throws his arms up in a gesture of such resignation that he accidentally hits himself on the back of the head, which is quite a talent, being so clumsy that you’re your own most likely cause of death.
“What about the foster home, then? You mentioned that, didn’t you? You can go there, can’t you?” he tries.
Louisa’s eyes darken: “Just help me sell the painting and I’ll be gone from your life, I promise! I’ll do whatever you want! But I’m never going back to that fucking place!”
Ted is rubbing his eyelids now, he really doesn’t even mean to say the thought out loud:
“Once you’ve sold the painting you can buy that whole place.”
She replies so quickly that her words are like a slap:
“I’d only buy it so I could burn it down.”
It’s hard for Ted not to think of Joar then, sitting on the pier with a lighter in his hands.
“But you must have some sort of caseworker at Social Services that you could call? Or however these things work?” he tries, but Louisa shrugs.
“I don’t think they’re at work right now.”
“Why not?”
“Because it’s Easter!”
“It’s Easter ,” Ted echoes, frustrated, rubbing his whole face now.
“Are you a bit slow or something? Not that there’s anything wrong with that, I’m just wondering,” Louisa says, very considerately.
Ted sadly doesn’t have time to think of a smart insult to say in reply, because a voice behind them suddenly demands:
“You two! Do you have tickets?”
Ted turns around to find an angry man wearing a thin tie, he has a name tag on his chest that he adjusts as if it were a sheriff’s star in an old Western movie.
“Tickets?” Ted says in confusion.
“I saw that girl there push through the ticket barrier with you! Does she have a ticket?” the sheriff grunts, and puts his thumbs in his belt as if he were about to draw an imaginary revolver.
“You can take this as payment! It’s worth—” Louisa immediately says, holding the box containing the painting out toward the sheriff.
“NO!” Ted protests.
Louisa turns toward him with a look of perfectly feigned surprise.
“Are you still here? I thought you had a train to catch?”
Ted clenches his fists so tightly in his pockets and screams so loudly inside his head that all his internal organs probably age at least ten years. The sheriff doesn’t quite seem to know how to interpret this, so he decides to take charge of the situation by grabbing Louisa’s wrist.
“Listen! Do you have a ticket or not?”
Louisa shrieks so loudly that half the people on the platform turn around, she pulls free as if he were burning her. Her sleeve slides up and Ted sees her arm, it’s so covered with bruises and scars that even the air must hurt her skin.
“Don’t touch me!” she snaps, and backs away, feeling for the screwdriver in her bag.
Ted recognizes the look in her eyes, sees the artist in her, and it weighs so heavily on him it’s a wonder he doesn’t leave footprints in the concrete platform. All Ted wants in the world right now is to be left alone, but the problem with never wanting to disappoint your friends is that when your friends are in Heaven, they can see everything you do, the bastards. So when the sheriff takes a step closer to Louisa, Ted steps in between them, extremely reluctantly, with his hands raised and his eyes screwed shut.
“Okay. Okay, okay. I’ll pay for her ticket!”
The sheriff stares at him in surprise, Ted hunches up as if he’s expecting to be hit, the sheriff doesn’t seem to know how to react to that.
“Oh? Well, okay then…,” the sheriff mutters, slightly disappointed, as if he had been quite looking forward to the chance to give a public demonstration of his authority.
“Okay?” Louisa asks brightly.
“Okay!” Ted repeats, not at all brightly, and searches for his wallet.
The ticket is paid for, the sheriff lumbers away, and Ted could topple houses of cards a mile away with his sighs. He picks up his suitcase and the box of ashes and limps onto the train, but Louisa doesn’t follow him. Ted turns in the doorway and grunts:
“Are you coming, then?”
Louisa looks skeptical.
“So I can come with you? Just like that?” she wonders.
“It’s exactly what you wanted!” Ted snaps.
Louisa rolls her eyes.
“Oh? So now I’m supposed to just TRUST you all of a sudden? What if you murder me?”
“I’m not going to murder you,” Ted groans.
“That’s exactly what a murderer would say! I don’t even know your name!” she points out.
“Ted.”
“I’m Louisa.”
“I know.”
“Okay.”
“Okay?”
“Okay! Now we know each other! Stop being so weird!” she shakes her head irritably.
“Because I’m really the one being weird…,” he mutters.
Louisa lifts the box onto the train, then climbs into the carriage, looks around, and immediately blurts out: “Wow! These seats are really soft! Fish should have taught me how to break into trains instead of cars!”
Ted blushes and avoids the gazes of the other passengers. Louisa seems to think deeply before she adds: “Do you know that women are most likely to be murdered by someone they know, Ted? So if anyone’s going to murder me now, it’s most likely that it’s going to be you!”
Ted closes his eyes and counts to ten at least ten times, then he finds two empty seats, and Louisa follows him, to a chorus of “ows” from strangers hit in the head by her backpack. Ted tries to put his suitcase in the overhead luggage rack, but can’t quite reach, so Louisa asks if he needs help and of course he absolutely, definitely doesn’t, because he’s a grown man. His suitcase hits him in the head three times before he gives up and squeezes himself, the suitcase, and the box of ashes into the seat closest to the window.
“Are you sure you don’t want to put your bag up there?” Louisa wonders helpfully, able to reach the rack without even stretching.
“This is fine!” Ted snaps, with his suitcase on his lap.
“It certainly looks super comfortable,” Louisa notes.
She only gets an affronted grunt in reply, so she lifts her own backpack up into the rack and puts the box containing the painting on the floor by her feet. Then they sit there side by side, and in her defense, at least twenty seconds pass before Louisa gets bored and asks:
“Do you like riddles, Ted? Do you know how you get a one-armed man out of a tree?”
Ted closes his eyes and looks like he really wouldn’t have anything against falling out of a tree himself, right now. This is going to be a long, long journey, he thinks.
And Heaven laughs. Oh, how it laughs.
Ted takes a small roll of tape out of his suitcase and mends his crooked glasses. Louisa tells riddles and jokes the whole time until the train starts to move, but then she suddenly does something very unexpected: she falls silent. She sits there and stares in wonder at her hometown through the window, this is the first time in her life that she’s left it. She blinks hard and takes deep breaths, and just as they reach the end of the platform, she catches sight of it. It happens so fast that at first she’s sure she must be imagining it, but there it is, sitting calmly on a bench and looking at her condescendingly. It must have had a bath since she saw it in the alley, because its fur is shiny, but you can’t wash away arrogance. Their eyes meet for a moment, and no one will ever believe Louisa if she tells them, but she could swear that it raises its right paw and waves.
Typical Fish humor, to come back as a cat.