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“Wait,” she says. “Please don’t go.”
“Stay put,” that’s all Curtis has for her. Frank, he doesn’t answer at all.
Amy stands in the doorway. Amy’s head throbs and her back aches, and her palm slips on the doorframe, damp and so cold she barely feels it. Please, please… “But you’re coming back, right?” she calls. Her voice quivers. She sounds like a little girl.
No answer. Frank’s practically in the car already; Curtis shuts the door in her face.
***
For almost an hour after they leave, all Amy does is cry: presses her back to the shelves and then slides all the way down, numb hands clenched to her mouth. She rocks back and forth, back and forth with every sob, until her head spins. Frank hates her. She thought he didn’t anymore, or at least that he was getting there—she thought she didn’t hate him, but she does, because he hates her. And still Amy cries and cries. What if he never comes back? If he leaves her? What’s she supposed to do then?
What she really should do is pack up and get out of here, just run. But every time Amy tries getting to her feet and going to grab the backpack still stuffed under her bed in the crummy little bedroom, her legs go limp-noodle on her again. He’s not coming back. He’s not coming back, and it’s her fault, always her fault— you’re such a screw-up, Amy, no one—
Frank didn’t say that. He never said he wasn’t coming back.
—No one wants—
He didn’t answer her, period.
“A-hole,” Amy mutters. Snot and spit smear over her lips. “A-hole, a-hole, eff—fucking asshole! Fuck you!” she screams. Over and over, she remembers Frank slamming her down like she weighed nothing, like he could snap her in half. She remembers his screaming face over hers and starts to shake, her breath whistling fast as a racehorse’s.
***
Once Amy can finally get up she goes hunting for the bullets. There were two of them, she’s pretty sure—not that she was in any state to be paying close attention—and she’s also pretty sure she heard them bounce off the walls, not shoot through them.
Sure enough, Amy finds both bullets embedded in the carpet. After tossing them in the trash, she flips Curtis’s coffee table right-side up again, then goes to get the shotgun. Her hands are shaking, so she waits a long time before picking it up; she knows it’s already loaded. Amy carries the shotgun back to the couch, sniffling and readjusting her grip on it every ten seconds.
She’s not stupid. She can prove it, if he just comes back.
The couch cushions dip and sag under her, used to Frank’s weight though Amy isn’t even half his size. He’s been sleeping on the couch, and now the pillows all smell like him—B.O. and blood and the shampoo Curtis left in the bathroom, Head & Shoulders.
“Gross.” But after she very carefully lays the gun across the coffee table, Amy grabs one of them and hugs it to her chest. I’m sorry, she wants to say, like he’ll somehow hear her, and somehow care, if he does. I thought—
She lifts her eyes to the windows, settling in for a long wait.
***
Amy never held a gun before yesterday. She knew hardly anything about them before Frank showed her. Back when they were all working for Fiona, one of her best friends, Donnie, used to tell her how his grandad would take him into the backyard sometimes, let him practice his aim on paper targets and empty beer cans.
“The recoil’s what gets you,” Donnie said. “Right in the shoulder.”
When Amy thinks about her grandfather—which is much, much less than she thinks about Donnie—she thinks about jeans held up with a cinched-tight belt, white t-shirts with rusty stains under the armpits, rough hands hauling her up, breath that smelled like cigarettes and Listerine. All that stuff gone years ago, and she doesn’t remember anything else. What he taught her, what they talked about. If Mom was still around then, if Amy’s dad had ever been around. She’s tried to let the memories she has grow, bloom bright and strong in her mind, but there just isn’t much for them to grow from.
Amy used to wish she’d had a grandad like Donnie’s. Someone who’d have taught her how to hit the bullseye and taken her out for ice cream afterwards. Someone who would’ve been proud of her, not because Amy had done anything for him but because she could do something for herself—yeah, that would’ve been nice.
***
Curtis comes back once it’s dark. Frank’s not with him. Amy almost blows the door down.
She ends up glad that she didn’t. At least she has someone to share the pasta with—Frank’s the one who bought all the boxes of noodles, the jars of tomato sauce. He made spaghetti the first night they were in the trailer: tossed the packet away without reading the instructions, boiled the noodles until they were barely al dente and drenched the whole mess in Ragu before wolfing half of it down. Tonight, Amy was hoping to surprise him. “Patience,” she’d have told him. “That was my secret ingredient.”
He needs to come back. Frank needs to give her the chance to explain, except even if he does come back, he won’t; he’s Frank. The Punisher doesn’t let his targets take their sweet time explaining themselves. Now that she’s screwed up, why would he treat Amy any differently?
Because you’re trying to save me, she thinks, and that means you think I’m somebody worth saving. Don’t you?
I wanted to show him I learned. I wanted him to be proud of me, she almost tells Curtis. She doesn’t, but he looks at her like she has.
When they hear footsteps, Amy can tell right away that they’re too light to be Frank’s. She reaches for the gun.
***
“God. What’s she doing here?” Amy wasn’t waiting for Curtis. She’s glad he’s here now, though—she wasn’t waiting for Madani, and she really wishes Madani would give up and leave. And stop sniping at Amy like she’s Shotgun Barbie, like she doesn’t know what on earth she’s doing….When fine, technically she doesn’t, since she forgot to reload the stupid thing.
But Madani doesn’t leave. She and Curtis both stay, and they wait, like they’re sure Frank’s going to come back, and that makes Amy feel a little better, a little steadier. Seems like even Madani just assumes Frank cares enough to walk right into a trap.
“He’s not going to come with you.” Amy sits on the couch like she sat against the shelves, her knees pressed to her chest. “Whatever you say, he’s not going to listen.”
Madani’s eyes gleam over the rim of her red plastic cup, sharp as razor blades. “We’ll wait and see about that, won’t we?” she says.
***
“Kid! It’s Frank.”
***
Amy reloaded the gun. She’s got it in her hands; her hands are steady. She’s steady—she’s got the gun. She’s steady.
“Just give me the gun, kid,” he says, low.
I’ve been waiting for you all night, Amy wants to say. I was up all night. She says, “She’s gonna sell you out,” glares at Dinah while Dinah, blinking awake on the couch, glares right back.
“Hey,” says Frank, and he reaches out to her. “Give me the gun. It’s okay,” he says, like she’s an animal about to spook.
Maybe he’s not far off, because nothing about this is okay, and nothing has been okay since Amy went for takeout that night, since long before then.
“It’s okay, kid.” Frank’s voice is soft. His eyes might even be sorry.
Amy gives him the gun.
***
It’s too much. She really did wait up the whole night, or most of it, and after Frank and Curtis and Madani’s little powwow, which Amy knows she was allowed to sit in on mostly as a courtesy—a “sorry-I-flipped-you-over-and-shot-at-you-and-almost-made-you-pee-your-pants-and-then-disappeared” courtesy—she tells them all good morning and goes back behind the bead curtain to the bedroom crammed up at one end of the trailer. Without changing out of her clothes or shoes, Amy crawls under the bed. She curls up, knees to chest again, right along with the power cords and dust bunnies. Closing her eyes, she does her best to drift off.
She manages pretty well until the talking in the living room dies down, and the door creaks open and closed once, then twice. Amy hears Frank moving around in the kitchen and squinches her eyelids open. She hears his boots treading down the tiny bit of hall and closes them.
The bead curtain clinks. “Kid?”
Whatever zen he found in the graveyard, Frank sounds beaten into the ground. Something about his worn-out rumble hooks a memory from the depths of Amy’s head, a sentence she didn’t remember she remembered: Come on, Ames. Your daddy had a hard night.
Deep inside her, a tiny girl sasses right back: I had a hard night. “How’d you get rid of them?”
“Curt’ll be back in a few hours.” Amy hears a groan, joints popping.
She opens one eye. “A few hours, huh? That makes one of you.”
From her vantage point flat on the floor she sees Frank’s boots, his knees, his hands linked between his knees; he’s crouched down, wobbling just a little on the balls of his feet. Wiped out, even more than she is. “The hell is this?” he asks. “What are you hiding under there for?”
“It’s called a coping mechanism, Frank. You know, when you’ve been traumatized?”
He unlinks his hands, holds one out. “Come on.”
Amy opens the other eye. She stares at Frank’s hand, broad and rough and torn up, dirt or gun oil or something still embedded in the creases of his palm. Finally, she takes it.
He pulls her out and back onto her feet, straightening up himself. Amy lets go of him as soon as they’re both upright, picking a dust bunny out of her hair. “Open spaces, you know?” she says.
Frank says, “Curt told me you got a bad bruise on your back.”
If he’s sorry, he doesn’t exactly sound it. His voice isn’t as soft as it was when he took the gun from her, just gruff. Amy shrugs. “That’s what happens when you get slammed into the floor,” she says.
“Let me see it.”
She thinks about saying no, but what the heck, Amy’s already seen his butt. Privacy isn’t exactly their first priority. She turns around, slipping off her overall straps so the top of it flaps down to her waist, then hiking up the hem of her t-shirt until she figures Frank can see the mess of blue and purple splotched under there. After they left and before Curtis came back, she spent a good long time craning her neck around, studying it in the bathroom mirror. Now it throbs, like it knows Frank’s eyes are on it. “Admiring your handiwork?” Amy asks.
“I’m sorry, kid.”
“Yeah?” A stinging sludge collects in her throat.
“Get on the bed,” Frank says.
Amy drops her shirt down, hooks the overall straps back over her shoulders. Then she obeys him—she’s too tired not to. That, and she’s not ready for more yelling. The thought of Frank yelling is enough to make her sick. Cold palms, pounding head.
He comes to the foot of the mattress. Part of Amy doesn’t want to look at him, wants to hide her face in the pillow and sleep for days and days. The other part of her watches him, waiting.
“You want your shoes on?” he asks.
“No.”
Frank unlaces her converse, his movements quick and practiced. Like he’s done the same thing hundreds of times before—but of course he has.
Amy asks anyway. “Did you do this for Lisa?”
He pulls of one shoe, then the other. Amy hears the thunk when he sets them down beside the bed; she’s turned her face to the pillow.
Such a screw-up, Amy.
No one wants—
“I wanted to show you I’d learned the move,” she says. “That was all.”
It’s not all, and it was one the stupidest things she’s ever done, barring getting involved in any of this in the first place, but either Frank knows she’s on the edge of crying—again—or he figures she’s learned her lesson, because all he says is, “I know.”
“Sure you do,” Amy snaps. That’s why he left without telling her when he’d be back or if he’d be back, right? That’s why he let her worry herself stupid all night? Who’s Amy supposed to be like, his dead wife who apparently loved him when she knew he was a psycho? Is she supposed to take all his crap, take it and take it and take it, just because he’s been hurt worse than her?
She hears him circle around to the head of the mattress. Hears Frank and pictures Frank, all the huge, creaking weight of him that came bearing down on her, and almost flinches when his blunt, callused fingers settle on her head. “Kid,” he says.
Amy blinks. The bruise on her back twinges. “When you were in the cemetery,” she says, “did you talk to Lisa, too?”
He combs a couple loose curls off her face, behind her ear. “That girl,” Frank says, “when she got riled up she had a mouth on her. Like you.” It’s all he says, with no softness except when his voice cracks a little at the mention of his daughter, but his hand slips down to Amy’s shoulder and squeezes it for a second, hard and warm. “Get some rest,” he says, and turns to move away.
Away from her—Amy isn’t ready for him to go. She never was. “You wouldn’t have shot me,” she says to Frank’s back, his slumped, exhausted shoulders.
He stops and throws a look over one of those shoulders, his face hard. “Don’t be stupid, kid.”
***
In her dreams, Amy and Lisa Castle are aiming BB guns at a flimsy paper target—first her gun pops off, then Lisa’s. Two holes ripped through the dead center, and the other girl turns to Amy, smiling. “See?” she says. “He came back.”
Amy wakes up blinking the dream out of her eyes along with the sleep crust. She pads through the bead curtain, rubbing her face. She doesn’t feel great, since her head’s all muzzy, and it could be three in the afternoon or three in the morning for all she knows (at least until she sees the strips of light still slanting through the blinds), but she does feel...better. A little trembly, a little damp, like she’s been left out in the rain. Washed clean.
Frank’s cleaning his guns at the table. Hearing her, he looks up and pushes the shotgun across the table, towards Amy.
She reaches for it. “What?”
“You’re cleaning this one from now on,” he says.
“Um, okay.” He’s kicked out one of the two chairs. Amy takes a seat beside him. “Does that mean it’s mine now?” she asks.
“Yeah,” Frank says. “You’ve earned it.”