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Buckshot dents still pockmarking the door, cans of Pringles and boxes of breakfast cereal scattered across the kitchen floor, one of the cabinets blown to wood chips—Curt’s trailer is a wreck. But for tonight it’s all they have.
“Whoa, looks like you’ve got a bat in that cave.” Amy bends closer, frowns. “Wait—nope—more blood. It’s more blood.” She grabs a paper towel. “Blow.”
Frank blows. When Amy pinches the paper towel away it’s speckled dark red-brown, and something pokes its head out of his nostril like a bloody worm. “Oh, yeesh. That is gross.”
“What is it?” Frank’s face is so swollen up, bruised and split, that she can’t tell if he’s ticked off at her again or just tired; his voice sounds like it got worked over as completely as the rest of him, pounded down to something ground-up and raw. He shifts on the chair. It groans.
“I don’t know. It’s like this long thing—”
“Yeah?” Frank says. “Probably a blood clot.”
“In your nose?”
“You never got nosebleeds when you were a kid?” He grabs at the end. Amy grimaces. “Get another tissue.”
“Wait,” she says. “I’ll do it.” Amy rips another paper towel off the roll, then fumbles around in Frank’s first aid kit for the tweezers. The box rattles—her hands are starting to shake.
“Second compartment,” he says. “You know that.”
Amy steadies her hands. At least she tries to. “Give me a second, all right?” Finally she leans close, grasps at the clot’s head with the tweezers. “Ready?”
“Kid, it ain’t brain surgery,” Frank says, but when she tugs he jerks his head back. “Jesus Christ—”
“Okay, okay!” Without thinking Amy reaches out, curls her hand around the base of his neck. Holding Frank steady she says, “I’m going to pull again.” She does; Frank winces and grits his teeth, though the clot’s sliding out slick and slimy, much easier than Amy thought it would. She stops suddenly, nagged by a sharp little fear. “Is your nose broken?”
“What?”
“Did you break your nose?” The rest of him’s so banged up, and his nose is already such a mess, that she never thought to worry about that.
Frank shakes his head. “Nah.”
“Really?” Her hands are shaking. Again. An hour ago Amy thought he was gone, that she’d never see him again, that this time Frank really would die. Now she’s teasing out a blood clot so long it’s hard to believe it wasn’t something alive once, curled up in there. “Then maybe stop acting like I’m pulling your teeth out. It’s not doing wonders for my concentration, Frank!”
“Just pull it out.” It’s dangling down to his chin. “Just finish the job.”
“Okay.” Steady hands, steady hands. “One more pull, okay?” Amy squeezes the back of his neck and pulls, and the clot trails out with another dribble of dark brown blood. It’s longer than a worm and thick as a leech. If it weren’t for everything else that’s happened over the past few weeks—Amy’s gotten pretty jaded at this point—she’d gag. “I’m going to flush it.”
“Hey. As long as you quit waving it in my face, huh? Give me that,” Frank growls, and when she hands the roll over he tears off a wad of paper towels and mops under his nose, wincing. “Jesus Christ.”
“It hurt that much?”
Frank pauses. He grunts, then tilts his head back with a snort, probably sucking what’s left of the blood down his throat.
“That’s going to make you sick,” Amy says. But her voice sounds small, even to her.
“My whole head hurts, kid,” he says, lowering it. Frank wipes his nose one last time, then drops the crumpled paper towels on the kitchen table. “That’s the problem.”
“So—”
“Don’t worry about it. Go throw that thing away. Go on.”
Amy shuffles towards the bathroom, the clot still pinched between the tweezers, which she holds straight out in front of her like she’s competing in the world’s most disgusting egg-and-spoon race. Behind her, she hears the chair groan again and Frank bark, “What’re you—Jesus.” But she doesn’t worry about that until his little buddy is swirling down the toilet. Then she comes back to the kitchen. “What?”
Frank’s gotten up—somehow—and hobbled over to the counter. “Look at that mess.”
Amy looks down. Drips and splotches of blood mark her trail to the bathroom, little stringy bits sloughed off the end of the clot. Awesome. Peachy. “I’ll wipe it up.”
“You better.” He swigs from the one unbroken bottle of Jack Daniels left on the counter.
Her fingers clench. “Could you at least hand me the washcloth?”
He does. It’s damp. Amy wrings it out and wets it again in the sink, then crouches down, duck-walking to the table and then back to the bathroom, wiping as she goes. There’s a rancid, coppery old blood smell wafting under her nose and crusted under her fingernails—while she’s wiping Frank grabs the trash can and steps over her, going to sweep all the bloody paper towels off the table before bending down (and the sound he makes when he bends is not reassuring) to pick up a blasted-off chunk of cabinet door.
“You know,” says Amy, “you did just get beat to heck, so...maybe sit back down?”
“It’s all right,” he grunts, his back to her.
“No. It really isn’t.” Amy straightens, tosses the washcloth into the sink. “You had me fooled a couple of times, but you’re not the Incredible Hulk. Go put your feet up.”
Another grunt.
“Frank,” she says. “I mean it.”
He drops the trash can with a clatter.
Amy swallows. “I didn’t ask you why you let that psycho get away, all right?” she says, imagining Pilgrim hobbling off into the night, full of buckshot and whatever holy-roller thoughts kept him going, let him lay his head down and sleep when he killed almost everyone she’d ever cared about, then tried to come back and finish the job. “I’m just asking you this, Frank. Rest. Come on. Just rest.”
He turns to her. “You never had anyone teach you not to dribble shit all over the floor?” Frank asks, like that’s the biggest issue here. “Jesus, kid, what’re—” he shakes his head.
“What?” Amy asks. Her gut prickles hot.
“Nothing.” It’s that voice again, hard and critical, the one she thought he was done using on her. She thought they were beyond all that now, the screaming, the ugly looks, the ugly words. Apparently not. Frank starts to hobble away. “Okay,” he says. “I’m getting my ass to the couch, all right?”
“You better,” she snaps.
Amy clears up the rest of the kitchen as best as she can, the whole time listening to the groaning—couch springs and otherwise—as Frank gets himself situated. She tries not to think about the millions of things that could still go wrong tonight: hemorrhages, infected bullet wounds. TBIs, though for a while she was convinced he’d gotten one of those already. How many beatings can one skull take before it...splinters? She’ll wake up in the morning, and he’ll be stiff and cold. More blood crusted under his nose. In his ears, maybe. Gone.
She kicks the trash can under the sink, then stands there, her back to the living room and the couch, for a good five minutes. Amy breathes slowly, evenly. In through the nose, out through the mouth. She washes her hands, then her face. She breathes again, wipes her eyes. She goes to the living room.
Frank’s sprawled on his back, on the couch that’s really too small for him. He looks exhausted, and the exact opposite of comfortable. Amy taps the toe of his boot. “On or off?”
She isn’t looking him in the eyes, but she feels them anyway, darkened up with bruises, considering her. “Off,” Frank says. “Appreciate it.”
Afterwards, Amy slips out of her own shoes, and her jacket. She flicks off the lights and feels her way back to the couch.
“Get to bed,” Frank tells her. He sighs through his teeth, trying to shift around. “Go on.”
“I’m staying.” Amy says. She lays down beside the couch.
“Sleeping on that floor’s gonna make your ass go numb.”
“My arms went numb when you zip-tied me. I think I can deal.”
“Suit yourself,” Frank says, just like he did then. The couch springs squeal as he grabs a pillow and practically beams it at her head.
She catches it. “Be careful.”
Maybe he laughs. The sounds Frank makes are getting harder and harder to distinguish, swollen, slurring a little. Thick-tongued.
“All I’m saying,” Amy presses, “is that it would be...it would be really messed up if you saved my life and then just decided to die on me in the middle of the night.”
“I don’t have any control over that.”
Her gut’s still prickling. “You said you’d do anything. Whatever it took.” Amy sits up. Her vision fizzes for a second, that last little bit of lightheadedness she can’t shake. “I never had anyone who taught me much of anything,” she says, and for the second time tonight Amy’s voice sounds so small to her, echoing in the cramped trailer. “Except for Fiona. And then you.” She reaches out. “Don’t die on me, Frank. Please.”
She feels his fingers, already thick, swollen even bigger and clumsy, fasten around her wrist, then slide up. Frank runs his thumb across Amy’s knuckles, over and over, and when he answers his voice is so tired, so weighed down, that she feels it swell into a lump, block her own throat; she wants to cry, and this time, she won’t be able to stop. “Shit,” he says. “Goddammit, kid, what would you do without me?”
The hardness is still there. Sanded down, though. Amy figured it’d have to be all gone, for it to mean that he cares about her, but that doesn’t actually make sense, not for them. There’s always going to be something snagging out, sharp—that’s how he is, how she is. They can’t move past that, or at least Frank can’t, but they can learn to live with it, to do better.
Right?
She leans her cheek against the couch. “Yeah, well, I could ask you the same thing.”
He presses his lips to her temple.
“I don’t know,” Amy says. She squeezes her eyes shut, the lump as big as her fist now, throbbing. “Don’t make me know.”
“Hey. It’s okay. Hey, hey—stop it. Stop it.” He says, quieter, “You’re okay now. You can go to sleep.”
She lies back down, swallowing, scrubbing at her eyes. She remembers running, breath ripping out of her in hot knife-bursts, she remembers the bar, she remembers Frank at the bar, she remembers him tying her up and cursing at her and using her for bait; she remembers him locking her in the bedroom, ignoring her, slamming her to the floor. She remembers him facing Pilgrim, sending her back to the car, remembers him standing up straight and alone. And she remembers him bloody, remembers him beaten; she remembers him slumped over a sink or in a chair: Do this for me. I’m gonna need you to do this for me.
“Amy,” Frank rasps into the dark. “Go to sleep.”
And she does.