Logan’s face looked as tight and twisted as a convenience-store Halloween mask. He sat in the far corner of the storage room gouging a circle into the plywood floor with an old tin Christmas ornament. A dented red wise man. I waited a good long time before I came back to see him. Long enough for me to round up and lash down all the escaped emotions running wild in my head. Or so I thought.
“What the fuck?” he said when he got a good look at my face.
“Not so loud, wait—” I started, worrying Marty might still be somewhere close enough to be dangerous.
“I’m going to kill him.” Logan threw the wise man across the room and stood up as much as he could in that cramped space. “Where is he? Where is this asshole? If I’d of known he was doing that, I’d of killed him right then. Even if he is your mama’s boyfriend.”
“Logan, it ain’t what you think.”
This only seemed to make him angrier, if he’d heard me at all. He closed his eyes and sucked in a furious breath. The squeaky fan in the corner did its level best to cool things down. My hands were so slick with sweat they slipped off the little doorframe as I crawled through and I tumbled in with a double thud. Logan clenched and unclenched his fists. His bare toes curled against the floor.
“Anybody who could do that to you don’t deserve to be walking around taking up space. Shit, a man who’d do that to a little girl, there’s bound to be more and worse in him.”
I couldn’t help but cringe at “little girl.”
Logan grabbed a ceiling beam with both hands and pounded his forehead against it.
“Hey, listen to me.” I took his sticky cheeks in my hands and pointed his eyes toward mine. “That wasn’t Hayes. It was somebody much, much worse. He and his are after Hayes for money or pills he owes them. He wanted Hayes. I just had the shit luck to be here when the man couldn’t find him.”
Logan stopped trying to pound his head against the beam and started to pay attention to what I was telling him. “What do you mean, not Hayes?”
It all came out then. The whole pot of shrimp. My head was still a blurry mess of a place, so it was all I could do just to spit the story out in fits and starts, sometimes having to back up to tell him a bit I’d forgotten to tell in its place. Fake dog dope, bloody ears on the door, Hayes’s chopped pinkie, Heckle and Jeckle and Unkie Marty. All of it.
When I’d finished with this sorry tale, I finally looked up to see what he made of it. I’d pretty much kept my eyes pointed at the floor while I’d told him the whys and whats and whos. Now I wanted to know what he’d say. But Logan said nothing. Instead, he cried. The tears drew jagged lines of pink skin on his cheeks. He made no sound. His eyes might of looked red and raw, but they were full of a generous kind of sad. A look that was absolutely new to me. I knew then that whatever else might happen between us after he finally left my attic storage room, good or bad or nothing at all, I would always love him for these ten tears. Ten. I counted five on each side. It didn’t matter to me what I’d just gone through to buy them. Right then, and maybe even now, they seemed to me a bargain.
“What’s his name?” Logan asked, his voice a croak.
Neither of us breathed a word about the tears. I knew this would only ruin them.
“It don’t matter, Logan. He’s gone.”
He stared at me until I looked down.
“What,” he said in slow, careful voice, “is the man’s name?”
I showed him the crumpled card.
Logan glared at it for a long time, his lips moving silently. I sat there blunt-brained. That terrible afternoon had hogged up all the space in my head. There wasn’t room for extra thoughts of any kind. I could of sat there like that for a cat’s age, all nine lives of it. I believe Logan must of said my name a few times before I heard him. He handed back that mean bit of cardboard.
“Why didn’t you tell me all this before? I could of helped. Protected you. If I was worth half a shit, I would of anyway. That fucker was slapping the shit out of you five feet away and I just sat there with my hands under my ass. I’m sorry.”
“There wasn’t a blessed thing you could of done, Logan. And it was me who told you to go back. I thought I could handle him. You ain’t got nothing to be sorry for.”
“Still.”
“You got more than enough problems of your own to sort out. I’ve already caused you plenty of trouble. I didn’t want to give you any more to have to worry over.”
“The one who ought to be worrying is that fat fuck Marty. He comes back while I’m here it’ll be the last time. If I had a pair of pants, I’d—”
“See, that’s what I was afraid of. You’d go out and get yourself in trouble over this, get arrested or worse, and it’d all be my fault. You sure as hell don’t need a dozen more burdens loading you down.”
“You’re no burden, Lynn Marie.”
“And you’re sweet to say it, but I know a burden when I see it in the mirror.”
Logan puffed through his nose and shook his head. I saw something then, maybe in the way he set his lips or the cast of his eyes. I had a feeling I’d made a giant mistake telling him all this. If I’d only waited a half-hour longer or at least until I’d gotten my head together a little more before I came rushing back here, looking for him to say, oh, poor little Lynn Marie, then I’m sure I would of had the sense to keep my mouth shut. Ten minutes ago, these two separate lives of mine, even if they were only about five feet and a piece of sheetrock apart, were completely separate, unmuddled. Each had its own problems, sure, but mixed together as they were now, they were like a lit fuse on an atom bomb. Right as he opened his mouth to keep on with this angry, self-disgusted talk and work himself up into doing something we’d both sorely regret, I cut him off.
“Listen now, Logan, honey, we already said it all. There’s no point in driving ourselves crazy with it. The egg’s been broke, the milk’s tipped over, so instead of smearing it all into a terrible mess on the floor, let’s us see if we can’t bake a cake.” This was something my mom always said and I was shocked it’d come out of my mouth. But he smiled to hear it, so I guess it was okay.
I moved in to kiss him and add a little sugar to this batter I was talking up. It will probably sound more than a tad strange considering the timing, but my body surprised me by wanting to get with Logan’s body in the worst way. But before I could make good on this, something new and drastic happened inside Logan’s head. What little color I could see under the grime on his face fled to some lower portion of his body. The pink tear trails went ashy. He took my hand in both of his. And what cold and clammy things they were, too. He looked about to puke. I feared he must of drawn some fresh and horrible conclusion from all of this crazy shit I’d unloaded on him.
“Lynn Marie,” he said, his voice a rasp so low I had to lean in close to make it out. “I know what it is now.”
“What what is?” I said.
“I love you.” He blinked at me. “So it makes sense now, all the other stuff. The you know …”
“No.”
“Me puking and all the rest.”
“Puking?” None of this made a lick of sense.
“Oh, right, you were at school.”
“What now?” I was truly alarmed.
“Which part, the puke or me loving you?” He coughed out a laugh, looking more surprised by this statement than I imagine even I was.
And I was floored, this having been the absolutely last thing I ever would have imagined coming out of his mouth at that moment.
Seeing my look, he said, “I know, I know, it’s crazy.” Logan laughed again. His color came back and then some. The blush of blood showed in his ears. “For a while I thought I was coming down with a stomach bug.”