by Shari Lapena
Dylan regretted the loss of their escape route—his cash cow— but at the moment, he was more worried that someone was going to mention the ecstasy. Dylan knew exactly what he’d say: he never tried it, and that it came from his mum’s friend Ellen, via her son Terry, who’d stolen it from his mum’s dresser drawer. It was the truth, and—even better—it would immediately divert attention away from him.
But his dad was onto this window thing like a dog on a bone, and he wasn’t letting go. “Did you know about this?” Harold asked again.
Dylan had to think fast, because he hadn’t planned on John getting caught. He was thinking with disgust how lame John was, when he realized that now that John had been caught, he’d almost certainly rat on Dylan about the fifty bucks. Dylan, smart as he was, couldn’t think his way out of this one fast enough. At last, he nodded.
“You can’t blame Dylan,” Audrey said, “for protecting his brother. It’s only natural.”
Harold ignored her. “Do you know where he went?”
Dylan shook his head.
“Are you sure?” Harold said this very quietly.
Dylan caved under the pressure of his father’s gaze and the deadly quiet of his voice. “All I know is that he went to meet a girl.”
“A girl. Who?”
“I don’t know, honest.”
“That’s not so bad,” Audrey said.
Harold turned on her. “What do you mean, that’s not so bad! He’s grounded, remember? He wrecked the car! He came home stinking drunk, for Christ’s sake! What about parental authority? What about respect? What about obedience?” He was yelling now. “We’re running a family here, not a three-ring circus!”
Audrey looked unabashed. “Well, he is seventeen. He’s not going to listen to us for much longer anyway.”
“The hell he isn’t!”
“Well, I don’t know how we’re going to make him do what we want,” Audrey said, exasperated. “Grounding him obviously doesn’t work.”
“It doesn’t work because he’s going out the window!”
“Well what do you want to do? Board up the window?”
“That’s a start!” Harold said.
Dylan was watching the exchange between his parents as if he was watching a tennis match. They seemed to have forgotten that he was there, which was fine by him. Besides, this was really interesting; he could learn something useful.
“Maybe we should try rewards, instead of punishments,” Audrey suggested, grasping at straws.
“You want to reward his behaviour?” Harold said.
“When he does something right—why not?”
“So—we pay him to stay home.”
Audrey thought this through. She knew that she’d heard something about using rewards instead of punishments, but she wasn’t sure how it actually worked. There was probably a book.
“All I’m saying is that if he’s going to defy us by going out when he’s grounded anyway, we might as well stop grounding him.”
Dylan was listening intently.
“You mean just give up,” Harold shouted, “and let him go to hell in a hand basket!”
“I’m not giving up!” Audrey protested, angry now, but at Harold more than John. She thought it was kind of romantic—she was a bit proud—that John, who was so handsome, had snuck out the window to meet a girl. It would be entirely different, of course, if he’d gone out drinking.
“Yes you are.”
“I’m not the one who gives up,” she said, and it was a dig at Harold. Now that it was out, like a big ugly toad, she didn’t even wish it back. They glared at each other over Dylan’s head.
That’s how it happened that Harold sat up alone most of the night waiting for John to come home, and gave in to his ghosts.
• • •
JOHN, UNAWARE OF events at home, was experimenting. From the moment Nicole came up to him, in the dark, it was as if the old John had stepped aside, leaving this body to him. He cuffed one arm around her neck and kissed her, and she kissed him back, just like that. No awkward bumping of noses, no painful small talk. John was learning that there is power in silence, pleasure in not seeking permission.
He stopped kissing her and leaned back against the wall, looking her up and down. She was wearing a short skirt and black tights, and boots with stacked heels. He slipped his hands inside her jacket to her waist and pulled her closer. They smiled at each other—slow, fraught smiles.
“So,” she breathed, “what now?”
He ran his hands up and touched her breasts. He could feel her nipples with his thumbs. Her eyes closed briefly and popped open again. “Not here,” she said, and took his hand.
“Where?” he asked, willing to follow her anywhere, but hoping it wouldn’t be far.
“I’ll show you.”
Hands linked, they walked down the street and veered off onto a path and into the woods. He put his arm around her as they walked toward the ravine, the leaves crunching underfoot, the trees a dark tangle against the sky. He could smell her girl’s skin, feel his own heart beating.
“You don’t talk much, do you?” she said.
Then, because he couldn’t stand the suspense any longer, because he was afraid that the other John would shoulder himself back in before he got his chance, he stopped and pulled her to him. “You’re gorgeous,” he whispered.
They found a bed of leaves under the trees. It was cold, but they didn’t notice.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Harold had played his cards badly. He shouldn’t have argued with Audrey; he needed her to ward off the spirit of his dead mother. For some reason, his mum seemed to flee whenever Audrey was around. From this Harold concluded that his mother didn’t like Audrey.
Well, he thought, Audrey probably wouldn’t like his mother much either.
Now he sat in his reclining chair with an unaccustomed glass of scotch in his right hand, preparing for the inevitable. He was going to get this over with, but only because he didn’t seem to have much choice. Maybe there was something his mother had to tell him. The thought that his mother might have something to tell him that was important enough for her to reach out to him from beyond the grave was absolutely terrifying.
He waited and drank. He gulped his drink and remembered glumly how good Tom had looked in his coffin. Even dead he looked more alive than Harold himself did on a good day. Tom had looked like he was merely faking it and that at any minute he’d jump up and scare the living daylights out of everybody. That would be just like Tom, Harold thought. Such a kidder.
Harold, a man unused to drinking, drank steadily and imagined this scene, perhaps because he so needed to believe that Tom wasn’t really gone. He pictured Tom suddenly bolting upright in the coffin— eyes stretched wide, his arms lifted up like a zombie—and screaming AAHHHHH!! People shrieking, dropping like flies at the dead come to life; the organist keeling over, putting an end to the music; Tom’s laugh, then his “What?” when he realized that people weren’t taking this the way it was meant. The pained confusion of the mourners; the widow who’d spent thousands on the funeral thinking next time it’s going to be [email protected]; his children mortified.
In university, Tom’s motto had been “Damn the torpedoes!” and that’s how Harold remembered him now, Tom who always went after what he wanted, regardless. And Harold, filled with an unspoken admiration, had followed him, carried along in his brilliant, buoyant wake, for as long as he could.
Where the hell was his mother?
Harold shuffled into the kitchen and poured himself another quick scotch, and decided, getting into the spirit of the thing, that while he had her, he should ask her a few questions. Like, what’s the food like up there? And what do you do all day? Do you have to atone for everything you ever did or didn’t do in your whole sorry life? Do they make you sit down and watch the whole pitiful thing over, squirming and cringing at the bad parts, weeping at the missed opportunities, at the road not taken? Do they—torturers—make you watch what might ha
ve been? These are things, Harold told himself, that a great many people are dying to know. Ha Ha.
He rummaged around for pen and paper to jot down a few ideas, fumbling a little in the kitchen, pouring another drink.
Where the hell was she?
Here was a good one: Does anyone ever really come back as a dog or a worm? Do you get to pick?
Can you meet Elvis?
(He was excited now.) What really happened to Amelia Earhart!
The room was spinning as he sloppily wrote:
Can you have sex? With anybody you want?
Is there life on other planets?
What’s God like?
Have you talked to Dad?
How much time do I have left?
This last question sobered him a little. He’d have to shred this paper later, he realized, so that Audrey wouldn’t see it.
Where the hell was everybody? Harold remembered through an alcoholic fog that he was waiting up for John; it was after 2 am and he wasn’t back yet. He was out drinking with a sonofabitch tow-truck driver and that kid was going to have his ass in a sling by the time Harold was done with him.
And his mum was a no-show. It just figured. You really couldn’t count on anybody.
He didn’t feel so good. He wanted to go to bed. But in his drunkenness, he was afraid of the shredder; he forgot about the automatic shut-off, remembering only his earlier thought that he might get his hand caught in it and bleed to death. So he clutched the scrap of paper in his hand and told himself that he’d get up really early, before anybody else, and shred it then.
He fell asleep in his chair, with the lights on.
• • •
JOHN WALKED ALL the way home because the subway was closed, his euphoria tinged with uneasiness. Maybe he’d gone too far, showing off about identity theft like that, like he knew all about it—implying, without actually saying—that it was a racket he was into. But as she’d nestled against him—after frankly mind-blowing sex—he’d dug himself deeper and deeper, unable to help it as he saw her approval rating of him climb.
He remembered how she’d looked at him, all interest and admiration, and decided that it had been worth it.
Now—unexpectedly, and from some distance down the street— he saw that the living room lights in his house were still on. This was alarming, because it was after 3 am. His feeling of triumph twisted in his guts, turning into something else, something small and contemptible. When he got near the house he stood outside, indecisive. He wondered who was waiting up—his mum, his dad, or both. He thought he could handle his mum, but he didn’t want to face his dad. He didn’t want to disappoint his father, who seemed to hold him in such high regard. His mother, he felt, had a more realistic appraisal of him. Also, his dad was the one with the temper.
John’s courage was leaking away. Finally he climbed onto the fence, up the tree, and back in through Dylan’s window, taking infinite care not to be heard. Dylan was sound asleep, snoring. John crept down the hall and slipped into his own bed in the dark.
• • •
ALL AUDREY NEEDED early the next morning was to find Harold slack-jawed and unkempt and stinking of booze in his La-Z-Boy chair, and to read the following appalling note, scrawled in Harold’s familiar hand:
Does anyone ever really come back as a dog or a worm? Do you get to pick?
Can you meet Elvis?
What really happened to Amelia Earhart!
Can you have sex? With anybody you want?
Is there life on other planets?
What’s God like?
Have you talked to Dad?
How much time do I have left?
The regret she’d felt on waking this morning about the way she and Harold had sniped at each other the night before now flew right out the window. What the hell was wrong with him? Should she show this to Dr. Goldfarb?
She put the disturbing paper in her housecoat pocket and prodded Harold awake, none too gently. She had to get him moving; she didn’t want the boys to see their father like this.
“What?” Harold muttered, squinting in confused alarm at Audrey.
“Harold—listen to me.” She bent over, gripped his chin in her hand, and looked directly into his bloodshot eyes. He looked back at her like one of those sad kinds of dogs, the ones with too much skin on their droopy faces, their eyes partly lost in pockets of flesh. She had him there, literally in the palm of her hand—she had his full attention—but what was she going to say?
She realized she couldn’t stand there poised to speak forever. For one thing, she could tell his attention was already starting to wander. “You’d better have a shower, shave, and put on some decent clothes,” she said at last. “I’m going to make coffee.” When he didn’t budge she said, “You have ten minutes!” which got him moving.
Once Harold was in the shower, Audrey went into John’s room and bent over him to check his breath. Only he had his pillow over his head, so she had to tap him on the shoulder and then feint and dart around for a whiff as he moved. She didn’t smell any alcohol. John was basically a good boy; Dylan was the one she worried about.
Make that Harold, she thought as she stepped back out into the hall and heard the shower running.
• • •
THERE WAS A poisonous atmosphere at breakfast. Harold, John, and Dylan were at the kitchen table furtively eyeing one another, full of suspicion, each wondering how to play his hand. Much was unspoken. No one was clear what the hell was going on, and therefore, there was a great hesitation in the room.
John didn’t know for sure if his absence last night had been noticed, but the living room lights had certainly been on, and something had to account for the tension in the air.
Dylan knew that John was in trouble, but Dylan was worried because nobody had mentioned it yet; he feared that it had all been thrashed out last night while he’d slept, that John had ratted on him, and that now the only remaining issue to be addressed was his own status as a blackmailer and the fifty bucks.
Harold was badly hung over. He knew Audrey was mad at him, he knew John had snuck out the window last night, but his most pressing concern at the moment was that he remembered that there was something vital he was supposed to do first thing, before anyone else got up, and he’d forgotten what it was.
Each one of them had the same strategy: volunteer nothing and try to figure out what was up.
In deference to Harold’s condition, Audrey hadn’t put the radio on. She was, however, being rather careless about how she put the plates and cups down, banging away regardless. Audrey knew John had been out last night but didn’t care. What she worried about was the escalating conflict between Harold and John, that Dylan was into drugs (but at least they now knew he wasn’t stealing to pay for them), and that Harold was almost certainly having some kind of nervous breakdown. If Audrey had a strategy, it was to prioritize. The truth was there was just too much here for her to deal with all at once. She needed to make a mental list.
The immediate problem was what to do about Harold. She’d been watching Dylan for signs of ecstasy use—insomnia, thirst, mood swings—and so far she hadn’t seen anything like that. She’d also taken to looking under his mattress twice a day and counting the pills, so she knew they were all still there. She was on top of it.
Harold, though. The bizarre note seemed to smoulder in her housecoat pocket, the paper that read like it was written by a madman, or at least a crackpot. No normal person, even if he were drunk, would write something that weird. It was especially weird for Harold. She looked at her husband across the breakfast table and wondered if he even remembered writing it, whether he wondered what had happened to the note. She drank her coffee and decided that after breakfast, she would get him alone and talk to him about it. She would show him the paper and insist on his seeing a professional. She expected him to put up resistance, but she would have to be firm.
In the meantime, she’d have to keep Harold from going after John about last night. She l
ooked at Harold again, fidgeting weakly with his toast. Fortunately, it didn’t look like he was in any shape to go after anybody about anything. Well, she certainly wasn’t going to bring up last night. The godawful silence was putting her on edge. She got up and turned on the radio.
John wolfed down his second bowl of Cheerios—he was ravenous—and tried to analyze the atmosphere in the kitchen. His dad looked miserable. His mum was holding herself so tightly that it made him afraid for his dad somehow. John was beginning to think that maybe this wasn’t about him. As he relaxed, he was able to pick up details that he hadn’t been able to appreciate before, when his perception had been narrowed by fear. For one thing, Dylan looked nervous, which wasn’t like him at all.
John finished his second bowl and still no one had spoken, other than to ask for the milk. He said, “Can I go?” Normally he would have just got up, but this morning everything felt different. His mother was vibrating like a tuning fork.
“Go,” she said.
“Can I go too?” Dylan asked.
Audrey nodded, getting up and starting to clear their dishes away. “Don’t be late for school,” she said automatically.
John and Dylan left the kitchen, relief in their spines and shoulders, and went upstairs to get ready for school. Dylan followed John into his bedroom and closed the door behind him. Now they were staring at one another edgily.
John waited—he’d learned that there was power in silence.
Dylan, not used to John’s silence, figured the jig was up. John had either told on him already, or he was certainly going to. “Did you tell him?”
“Tell him what?”
“About the fifty bucks.”
From this John deduced that his dad must know about his going out the window. But that didn’t make sense; his dad hadn’t said anything. John realized uneasily that things must be more out of whack around here than he’d thought.