Cassie had been unwrapping the mandible. She paused, staring down at her hands. Then she stood and leaned forward to kiss Alex. “I must be the luckiest person in California,” she said.
Alex let himself fall into her, grasping at her words and the electric feel of her skin against his. He did not know what to say to her; he never knew what to say; he was used to speaking what others had written. He wished he’d learned long ago how to put into words the feeling that if she was gone, if she ever left, he would cease to exist.
But he couldn’t tell her, so he did what he always did: he slipped into character, the first one that came, willing to do anything other than face the limits of himself.
He broke away and changed the mood: light comedy, now a clown.
Glancing down at the scatter of bones, Alex raised his eyebrows. “You’re luckier thanhewas,” he said.
He left Cassie separating her bones into five lines, plus the mandible, and went downstairs to get the second half of her present: the Durofix and pillars of plasticine, the sandbox she’d use to support pieces of the skull while putting it together. He’d taken all this from her laboratory at the house.
By the time he returned, Cassie had already laid out several pieces of bone, end to end, and Alex could see how they would easily fit together. “The packing label says he’s from the Dark Ages,” Cassie said.
“I’ve named him Lancelot.” She reached into the box Alex held, pulling out the Durofix and laying a thin line of the glue along one edge of bone. Setting it sideways in the sandbox, she affixed the second piece, then built up a buttress of sand to hold the pieces until the fixative dried. “I’m going to put the vault together, and then do the face separately if I can. While they’re drying I can set the condyles of the mandible into the glenoid cavities to see if the teeth occlude correctly before I permanently set the face.”
Alex shook his head. “And they say people can’t understandShake-
speare.”
Cassie smiled, but did not look up from her work. “Well, no one has to understand what I’m saying. He’s my audience”—she ran a finger along Lancelot’s jawbone—”and his hearing is completely shot to hell.”
She worked for an hour, fitting pieces together in a three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle. Alex sat across from her, absolutely stunned.
Cassie peered at him. “Haven’t you ever watched me do this before?”
When Alex shook his head, she grinned. “Do you want to help?”
For a second his eyes gleamed, but then he gently picked up a minute piece of the ancient face and ran his thumb over the spiked edge. “I wouldn’t have any idea what to do,” he said. “I’d be more of a pain in the ass than anything else.”
“It’s easy.” Cassie’s small hands guided his to a second piece, and she fitted the edges together in a way that made perfect sense. “You can glue these two for me.” He stared at the image of her fingers wrapped over his, her palms holding his own, then at the chips of bone. No one would ever think of connecting him with Cassie when they were apart, but once they’d been brought together, they, too, appeared to be an ideal match.
Cassie mistook his silence for confusion. “Give it a try,” she said.
“It’s like a model. You must have done models as a kid.”
As a kid, Alex had spent most of his time alone, daydreaming and exploring his way around the rural outskirts of New Orleans. He preferred to stay hidden, and for hours at a time he’d climb cherry trees to read books he’d pinched from the public library:Huckleberry Finn, The Red Badge of Courage, The Joy of Sex. Alex’s parents hated each other but cared too much about what other people thought to get a divorce. His mother turned away from him because he looked too much like his father; his father turned away from him because Alex was not the sort of son Andrew Riveaux had dreamed of: one who willingly waded the bayou with him, hunting grouse; one who could shoot a perfect round of trap and hold his whiskey afterward with the boys.
On Alex’s twelfth birthday, Andrew Riveaux bought his son a complicated wooden model of a Conestoga wagon, the kind that had crossed the Oregon Trail Alex was learning about in school. “I’ll help you with that, boy,” his father said, and Alex believed that this promise of time spent together was even better than the present.
Alex opened the box and carefully laid out the smooth wooden parts, the metal rings that would brace the covering of the wagon. “Not so fast,” his father said, slapping away his hands. “You got to earn the parts.”
The wagon was built in accordance with the number of times Alex acted, in his father’s eyes, like a man. He shot his first goose, carrying it home by its quivering feet and stopping twice to throw up his breakfast, and in return his father helped him structure the box of the wagon. He sailed a pirogue through the black vines of the bayou after dark, using his sense of smell for direction, and found the shack of the old witch woman his father bought rotgut whiskey from, which won him the model’s front seat and the hitch for the horses. He fell out of a tree and broke his leg clear through the skin and did not shed one tear, and that same night his father sat on the edge of his bed to help his trembling fingers stick spokes into four wagon wheels. Sometime when he was thirteen, he finished the model. It was delicate and perfect, inch for inch a miniature of history. Alex finally glued the muslin wagon cover in place and one hour later took the model out to the woods behind his house and smashed it to pieces with a fallen branch.
“Alex.Alex.” He jumped at the sound of Cassie’s voice. Her eyes were wide, and she was waving a paper towel in front of him. “Here,”
she said. “You’re bleeding all over yourself.”
He looked down at his lap, seeing the fragments of crushed bone and the cut running down the side of his thumb. “Jesus,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
Cassie shrugged, holding the damp towel to his hand, applying pressure. “They’re fragile. I should have told you that.” She smiled hesitantly. “Guess you aren’t aware of your own strength.”
Alex turned away. Cassie had completed the face; it stared up at him through empty eyes from a bed of sand. He sat silently while Cassie put together the back of the skull. Almost all of the pieces were there, and he watched her neatly placing four fragments around the spot where the bone he had broken would have fit.
He stood up, mumbling something even he did not understand. All he knew was that he had to get out of that room before Cassie finished.
He wouldn’t be able to see the skull anymore as a sum of all those parts; instead his eyes would be drawn to what was missing, to what he had ruined.
“WE’RE GOING TO ROB A GRAVEYARD,” CASSIE HAD ANNOUNCED, “ON Halloween.” It was two weeks away, and it was the perfect dare, and Connor never turned those down. She had been trying to find something to get Connor’s mind off his worries—his father had lost his job and had taken to spending his days in the garage with a fifth of scotch, and it was becoming increasingly clear that Connor wouldn’t be able to afford college, although he was desperate to become a veterinarian. Cassie had seen the spark in his eyes, and she knew she’d hooked him. So now, Halloween night, they were sneaking out at midnight. They had done their research: seniors at school told them that the police sat up every year at St. Joseph’s but the pet cemetery off Mayfair Place was unguarded.
