Stay Away

by Ike Hamill

  Instead, he took a different approach to trying to explain it.

  “Don’t you think it’s a little coincidental? I went away and my mother paid the price. Now, Wendell has gone away and my mother’s sister is obsessed with his disappearance?”

  “What mother wouldn’t be obsessed with her son’s disappearance?”

  Eric looked down at his hands. They had flour on them from helping with the pizza. He went to the sink and washed them in boiling hot water. His thumb throbbed.

  “My uncle is convinced that there is some kind of curse on the family. I heard him cursing about it to my aunt the other night. He talked about how they can’t be complete. First, I was gone. Then, the day I showed up, Lily disappeared. The day she returned…”

  “Wendell,” Nicky finished. “Yeah. That crossed my mind as well.”

  “It’s weird, right?”

  “On the surface, yes. But I’ve talked to you and I talked to Lily. There was no rhyme or reason to the coincidence between your return and her departure. She got creeped out by her boss who fired her, and you happened to catch a ride that brought you back into Maine. You think that the timing was somehow orchestrated?”

  Eric considered and remembered the day he had been hitchhiking. When the truck had pulled over, Eric had nearly run through the woods to get away. He didn’t mind catching a ride from a civilian, but he had never had good luck from truck drivers. They drove for a living—whenever they pulled over to offer a ride, there was always an ulterior motive.

  As the saying went, “Ass, gas, or grass—no one rides for free.”

  The only thing that had kept him from running was the stern face of the woman who leaned over to open the passenger’s door. He had never met a woman truck driver before that day. He had a hard time believing that she would offer a ride to a strange man. When he had told her that later, she had laughed at him and told him that it looked like a stiff breeze could have blown him away.

  “Eric?” Nicky asked.

  “Huh?”

  “Was your timing for your trip back orchestrated?”

  “No. Just dumb luck. I happened to get a ride. She took me all the way to Lisbon before she turned south and I asked her to drop me off on a whim. I had been planning to go down to Portland and then farther south. Once I realized how close I was, I just made up my mind to come.”

  “So your uncle is wrong.”

  She opened the oven, checked the thermometer and plugged the pizza into the slot. When the door was shut, the fan came on and Nicky set the timer.

  “Yeah,” Eric said. “I guess you’re right.”

  She laughed.

  “What?” he asked.

  “Don’t say it just to agree with me. You clearly don’t think I’m right.”

  He sighed. “Yeah. There’s something.”

  “Go talk to your aunt then. She’s the one who is really obsessed. Put it in her lap.”

  “I guess,” Eric said.

  They talked for another minute or two before Nicky started to hint that he should get moving. If the Johnsons were in contact with Dottie, she didn’t want them reporting that Eric was hanging around the store for no reason.

  Eric put on his jacket and left through the back.

  He walked back to the house, thinking about how wrong she had been. It was a terrible idea for him to tell his aunt about his speculation. She was teetering on the edge of sanity, barely holding herself together. Wendell, her baby, was the most fragile of all the kids and he was missing.

  There was a strange car in the driveway when Eric got back to the house. He took the back stairs and avoided the voices in the kitchen. Upstairs, he didn’t return to the trim work of the back landing. That work was too precise and finicky for his mood. Instead, he climbed the makeshift ladder that led up to the attic over the wing. He had some more repairs to make to the framing before the insulation could be overhauled. If he finished that, his room below might be a little less drafty.

  # # #

  The hammer glanced off his thumb again.

  “Shit!” Eric yelled.

  “Shhh!” a voice hissed behind him.

  Eric spun around, loosing his footing on the joists. For a moment, he pictured himself falling through the plaster and crashing down into the room below. Miraculously, he caught the claw of the hammer on a rafter and used it to regain his balance.

  “Jesus,” he said.

  Lily was pulling herself up through the access panel.

  “I thought you were doing laundry,” he said.

  “I was. Mom was yelling at the social worker. I came up here to escape.”

  “She was yelling?” Eric asked, his eyebrows rising.

  “Yeah,” Lily said with a little laugh. “It was pretty incredible.”

  They had been visited by social workers several times since Wendell’s disappearance. Eric had been interviewed by a bald man with breath so bad that Eric could taste it whenever the man asked a question. He gagged remembering it.

  “The lady was asking about the dishes in the sink and Mom just lost it,” Lily said. “She was shouting about how nobody was doing their job, and how if they took all the time they had spent at the house and spent a fraction of that looking for Wendell then they would have already found him.”

  Eric shrugged. “Maybe she has a point.”

  “Does she?” Lily asked. She moved across the joists like a dancer, never hesitating. Lily went over to where the framing for the bell tower started. “Those social workers aren’t, like, police investigators. It’s not their job to find Wendell, it’s their job to find out if there was something off about Mom and Dad that made Wendell want to run away, you know?”

  “I mean, I guess?” Eric said. “But I told them that everything was fine here. I’m sure you and Jessie did the same thing.”

  “Is it?” Lily asked, looking over to him.

  “What does that mean?” Eric asked. He always bristled whenever Nicky had anything bad to say about Reynold or Zinnia. Nicky didn’t know how bad a home could be. But he had never heard Lily say anything disparaging about her parents.

  “We’re a little topsy-turvy, don’t you think? We live in this weird, giant house that’s always under construction. Mom pays for everything and Dad supposedly works on this place, but you do most of the work.”

  “He has a job.”

  “Kinda,” she said.

  “Wait, so you think it’s wrong for your mom to make more money than your father? What about women’s lib? Isn’t that all supposed to be okay?”

  Back in Ohio, his mother had worn a ring. If people even gave her a sideways glance, she had volunteered that she was a widow. Yes, his father had died, but that wasn’t the real story. Eric had always hated when his mom hadn’t stood up for herself. There was nothing wrong with being a single mother, regardless of what other people thought.

  “No,” she said, “you’re not understanding. I’m not saying that I think it’s wrong. I’m saying that it’s the reason why social workers are swarming around. From their perspective, kids go missing from this house all the time, and maybe there’s a reason. Maybe it has a connection to why our family is so… different.”

  “That’s ridiculous.”

  “You don’t have to tell me. Anyway, Mom is shouting at the social worker now. It’s a far cry from how timid she was the first time they came over.”

  Eric sighed. “She has to do something.”

  “The police are on it,” Lily said. “If there’s something to find, they’ll find it.”

  Eric frowned, suspecting that her trust was mostly wishful thinking. She wanted Officer Saunders to be a good guy, so she was wishfully thinking that he would solve the case.

  “Where are you going?” Lily asked.

  “Down to see if she needs help yelling,” Eric said.

  # # #

  He didn’t get the chance to yell at anyone.

  His uncle closed the door behind the woman as she walked out.

  His au
nt was still sitting at the kitchen table.

  Eric stood in the doorway, silently watching as her face dissolved. Anger and determination had been chiseled into her features as the social worker left. As soon as the young woman was gone, his aunt’s face melted into frustrated sadness. She hitched in a breath and let it out slowly. A tear slid down her cheek and she wiped it away with her thumb, regarding it for a second before she dried her thumb on a napkin.

  “Hey, bud,” his uncle said, approaching. “You need help up there?”

  “No,” Eric said. “I might be done for the evening. I was hoping to talk to Aunt Zinnia.”

  His uncle nodded and clapped him on the shoulder before he moved around him to head deeper into the house. There was always something to do. His uncle kept busy, but he appeared to move almost randomly from task to task, like he wanted to finish all the projects at the same time. Eric was the opposite. He preferred to focus on a single task and stay with it until it was completely done. That wasn’t precisely true—he realized it as soon as the thought crossed through his head. Just that day, he had given up on trim to go mess with framing up in the attic.

  Eric was chastising himself when his aunt looked up and saw him standing there.

  “Eric,” she said, “what did you do to your thumb?”

  “Oh. Yeah, I hit it with a hammer.”

  “That looks like it hurts.”

  She put her hand out and he went to her. As he sat, she examined his thumb, regarding the blackened nail in the light.

  She sucked in a breath between her teeth. “Yeah, that’s going to fall off.”

  Eric nodded.

  With a big sigh, she let go of his hand and pressed her palms on the table to get up.

  “Wait, Aunt Zinnia?

  She settled back into her seat and regarded him. He could still see part of the track of her tear on her face.

  “I wanted to tell you—I had these dreams?”

  “Oh?”

  “They were about a man who said that I owed him a debt,” Eric said.

  He thought that he saw something dark cross her features, but he wasn’t quite sure. It could have simply been concern for his wellbeing, but he thought there was something more there—a recognition.

  “Who was he?”

  “That’s the thing,” he said. He coughed. Suddenly, his throat was dry. It was difficult to continue, but he forced the words out. “I’m not entirely sure. When I was in Ohio, I had these dreams that he was coming for me to collect his debt. I think my mom ended up settling with him. I think it might be what killed her.”

  “Eric, I’m going to stop you right there,” she said. He saw a flash of the anger that she had given to the social worker. It didn’t stay long though. She looked at him with kind eyes before she continued. “Losing your mom was terrible. I can’t even imagine what that must have been like for you. I will always be here for you, and I’m always willing to listen. Let yourself finish grieving. It takes time.”

  He shut his mouth and decided that it would be best to keep it closed. She hadn’t told him that he was full of shit, but he had heard it anyway.

  Eric started to get up. His legs had a different idea. He thumped back into the seat and stared at his aunt.

  “What if he took Wendell?”

  Mostly, she looked tired, but there was a spark of something else.

  “He followed me to Ohio, Zinnia. He might have followed me back here.”

  “Who?”

  “The man,” Eric said. He closed his eyes so he could picture him better. Eric couldn’t remember if he had seen him in his dreams or just imagined him. It didn’t matter—he described exactly what appeared behind his closed eyes. “He’s bald and not that tall. He was wearing nice shoes and a suit, like he was going to church. Not like Pentecostal Church, like in the photos we found, but a fancy church.”

  “Like a three-piece suit?”

  “Yes, like, with a vest? He also had a watch chain and he had a pretty big stomach.”

  When he opened his eyes again, Eric expected to see more anger. Instead, his aunt was looking far away. She was seeing beyond the walls of the kitchen to somewhere else.

  She shook her head while she spoke. “I… I didn’t want to think about it. I guess…”

  When she shouted, Eric almost fell out of his chair.

  “Reynold!”

  REYNOLD

  HER SHOUT BROUGHT THE whole house. Reynold sat down next to Jessie, who was sitting in the corner. His son looked hollow. His eyes were staring down at the table most of the time, but when Jessie looked up there were dark bags under them. Reynold wondered if he had gotten a single decent night’s sleep since his brother had disappeared.

  Zinnia seemed oblivious to the kids sitting around the table. She only had eyes for Reynold.

  “Listen,” she said, “I’ve been exhausting all the other possible explanations, not because they were leading anywhere but because I had to chase out any rational explanation before I came to this.”

  “To what?” Reynold asked.

  “The Trader,” she said.

  “Trader,” Eric whispered, echoing her.

  Reynold looked back and forth between them, unable to guess at what they were talking about.

  “I don’t under…”

  “When we were growing up,” Zinnia said, “there was a rumor about a guy who lived down on this side of town. We never much walked beyond the school, so it didn’t concern us.”

  Reynold immediately wanted to ask questions to clarify. He forced himself to keep his mouth shut. Zinnia almost seemed like she was in a trance.

  “Then, the trading started,” she said. “None of us had money. Back then, all the poor kids went to Mount Hope and the rich kids were bussed across the river. So, we all noticed when Frank Libby showed up with a new bicycle. For a couple of days, he wouldn’t tell anyone where he had gotten it. Bruce Hanson threw a rock at him at recess because he was so jealous. Rose was the first one who got the story from him. Frank said that he had traded for it.”

  “What does a kid have worth enough to trade for a bicycle?” Reynold asked. When they were kids, bikes had been the ultimate status symbol, and they had been incredibly hard to come by.

  “He wouldn’t say precisely, only that he had put a downpayment on it. Bruce Hanson overheard and demanded to know who had sold him a bike on layaway. Frank probably would have told him, but he was still mad about the rock. Instead, Bruce had to follow him for days to get the answer. Bruce Hanson liked to pretend that he was a spy for the government back then. He was always playing spies. He finally followed Frank and spotted him making a payment to a man down by the cemetery.”

  “Wait, are you talking about the same Bruce Hanson that was Wendell’s teacher?” Reynold asked.

  She nodded. Reynold was always surprised by the roots she had in the community. He wouldn’t have been able to stomach it. Everywhere they went, ghosts from her past were always cropping up. Reynold didn’t even like to return back to his home town for reunions. He had left that place for several reasons, not the least of which had been to get away from all the familiar faces from his childhood.

  “That day, Rose and I happened to be following Bruce. We thought it was quite a stitch to be spying on the spy. He ran down through the cemetery and it looked like he was going to interrupt the transaction between Frank and the old man, but Bruce stopped suddenly and waited his turn. Back then, kids didn’t just walk up to adults and start talking. They called it respect, but it was really fear.”

  Reynold gave that a dry laugh. Zinnia didn’t seem to notice.

  “I could almost hear what the old man was saying to Bruce. There was something about a coin and a trade. Bruce was stammering, and that was a little frightening. In kindergarten, Bruce had shown up with the worst stutter, but he had long since gotten control of himself. To hear him stymied like that—it was a quick reminder of how frightened he must be.”

  “Zinnia,” Reynold said, trying to softe
n his voice, “I don’t see what this has…”

  “You know about the Monkey’s Paw?” she asked, interrupting him.

  Reynold shook his head. There was some memory rattling around in his brain, but it didn’t have any significance to what his wife was talking about.

  “It’s a parable, almost, about being careful what you wish for. The wish comes true, but it comes with terrible consequences. The theme is that life can be hard and terrible, but you have to take every tragedy as best you can because things could always be worse.”

  “And Frank’s bike was like a…”

  “No,” she said, locking eyes with him. “It wasn’t like that at all. The old man was offering fair trades—no tricks. What if Wendell went to trade with him and that’s the reason that he’s gone?”

  “You said there were no tricks. If that’s true, then where is he?” Reynold asked.

  “I don’t know. We have to find him—the Trader—and force him to tell us,” she said.

  “No,” Reynold said. “You’re upset at the social workers and you’re desperate to find some new approach. Get a good night’s sleep and everything will make more sense in the morning.”

  “I haven’t gotten a good night’s sleep since that day, Reynold. What we need to do is start with putting ourselves in Wendell’s head. What would he have traded for? Jessie, I know it’s hard, but you have to tell us again what happened on that day.”

  Jessie looked like he wanted to shrink into himself and disappear.

  “Zinnia, don’t do this.”

  “We’re not blaming you, Jessie. It’s perfectly natural for you to want to have some time with your friends without your little brother hanging around. It was wrong of me to push him on you like that. You’re not to blame,” she said.

  Jessie looked up with miserable eyes. Reynold had gone back and forth on his opinion of Jessie’s story. Sometimes, it seemed like he was being completely forthcoming. Other times, it seemed like he was hiding details of that day.

  With their daughter Lily, Reynold had never told her that he knew that she was smoking grass or having sex. He hadn’t wanted to signal that those things were okay. Just an acknowledgment that those sins existed seemed like a terrible idea.