by David Beers
“Is it?”
“Yeah, of course. Time is the great healer. It takes care of everything if you give it long enough.” He laughed. “And if it doesn’t, it just kills you so then you don’t have to worry about anything.”
“Jesus, Dad,” she said. “So morbid.”
“Eh, at my age, morbidity is the last great humor left, I suppose. Scares the hell out of you young whipper snappers, doesn’t it?”
“You’re not that old,” Alicia said.
“Feeling older by the day, but that’s alright. Age comes for everyone. What are you doing calling me this late? Don’t you have a husband to tend to?”
Alicia paused for a second, not wanting to bring up the reason she called. She felt mentioning it might bring it to life, like saying Candyman three times or something. And yet, she couldn’t simply not talk about it, not if she wanted to help.
“Has John called you?” she said.
“Today? No, he hasn’t. Why?”
“When was the last time you spoke with him?”
“I don’t know, to be honest. A few weeks ago, maybe?” her father said.
“You don’t call anyone if they don’t call you, do you? It’s ridiculous.”
“Hey,” he said. “I’m the elder here, you guys should pay respect to me.”
Alicia rolled her eyes reflexively. “I spoke to him today, Dad, and he worried me a little bit.” She paused, wanting him to direct the rest of the conversation. Thirty-eight years old, but still a daddy’s girl in her heart. He would always know what to do, no matter how lost she felt.
“Why?” he said, the smile in his voice dropping away and taking on the calm concern he always used when she brought something to him.
“Well, for one, he didn’t even seem to realize it was Mom’s anniversary this week. Like it hadn’t even occurred to him.”
“Everyone deals with this in different ways,” he said. “And sometimes people change the way they deal with these things. That’s okay.”
“Dad … it didn’t feel like he was dealing with anything. It felt like before,” she paused. “Do you know what I mean?”
Her father didn’t speak for a few seconds and the silence that came over the line chilled her worse than any night air could. The heater standing five feet from her held no sway over the cold draping across her body.
“I think I do,” he said finally. “But what makes you think he’s going back there?”
“I don’t know. He said he sounded different because he wasn’t sleeping well, but John always sleeps. If he does anything well, it’s sleep.”
She closed her eyes and could see her father closing his like he always did when he thought. He stayed quiet again, though she wished he would speak. Comfort lay in his words.
“I’ll give him a call and see if he’s okay. Don’t worry about it, though, sweetheart. People get moody and it doesn’t mean the world is falling down. I’m sure everything is fine. Okay?”
“Okay,” she said, holding back tears. “Will you call me once you’ve talked to him and let me know what you think?”
“Of course, honey.”
Scott Hilt hung up his cell phone, though he felt that term was somewhat silly. No one hung up any type of phone anymore, but rather, you touched a screen and the thing ended a call. Old habits, he supposed.
Alicia had always been like her mother, tending to gravitate towards drama and the worst possible scenario. Perhaps Lori had been right (not perhaps, she was, and you know it) and he saw everything from a glass-half-full perspective, but he still preferred that to her and her daughter’s predilections.
You can’t ignore this, though. You said you wouldn’t ignore it anymore. You’ve said that for a long time, too. We don’t even need to ask if you remember what you told Lori, do we?
No, they didn’t.
He remembered that perfectly fine and he also remembered all the times he broke that promise. Why not break it again?
You don’t even know anything is wrong. You have your daughter’s thoughts on the subject, but she worries so much she would have thought the moon landing had a high probability of knocking the moon off its orbit.
Scott stood from his chair and walked across the living room, through the kitchen, and out to his back porch. He looked at the woods in front of him, feeling the bitter air across his arms.
You have to call him before you can make any decisions about this. You can’t do anything until you know that he’s going back there.
Back where? Where in the hell is he going, Scott? You’re listening to the ravings of a sick woman, a dying woman.
Maybe, maybe not. Still, you made her a promise.
And I’ve broken it plenty of times, so what makes this any different?
Because your daughter called this time.
The last thought silenced him. Alicia had never called about John before, and whether because she wasn’t around or hadn’t noticed, it didn’t matter. She called this time. She might be thirty-eight, but he was still her father and she still needed him.
He stood outside for a while, just looking as the moonlight hit the trees in front of him. Thoughts came and went through his head, but he didn’t focus on any particular one for too long. He let the silence of his mind help decide what he needed to do.
Finally, he turned back inside and walked to the ladder that would bring him to his attic. It took him a bit to climb up, having to pull the ladder down then bracing his knees for the bending that came with each step. He made his way, though, finding himself in an attic that he hadn’t seen for years.
He shuffled a few boxes around, looking for the one that held all of Lori’s things. The box wasn’t huge but it was full, everything packed neatly, with care. Scott moved some things around inside it until he found what he wanted, and then he pulled it out. He sat down next to the box, placing the book in his lap.
Scott didn’t open it, only looked at it. The front cover had her handwriting sprawled across it, an elegant cursive that made Scott tear up as he sat alone in his attic. He hadn’t seen her handwriting in years and had forgotten how beautiful it was. How her hands were able to scrawl something so perfect, he would never know. His own hands never listened to him much, preferring to do their own thing rather than write a single neat letter.
She told him to read this. He promised that he would. Scott promised he would figure out the best way to help his son if he went into one of those dark places again. But his son had gone into them plenty of times since her death and he never once opened this. A sick woman said all those things, not the one he married or who raised their kids.
So now you have it in your hands. That doesn’t mean you open it yet. It means you call your son and you make up your own mind what’s going on. Hell, his mother had died this week, any number of things could be going through his head. It doesn’t mean he’s going back there.
“The kids come home at five on Monday,” Diane said. The two boys were on a few days vacation with their friends and friend’s parents to the beach.
John nodded, chewing his food but not looking up from his plate.
Diane waited a few more seconds, watching him eat, knowing he had no idea she did so. He hadn’t spoken much since getting home, and now at dinner, she felt like she was almost eating alone.
“Something happen at work today?” she said.
“No,” he said, shaking his head and stabbing the steak on his plate with a fork. Still didn’t look up.
“Seems like something might have? You certainly aren’t talking much tonight.”
His eyes met hers then, and she saw him finally recognizing his distance. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Just thinking a lot, I guess.”
“Well, what are you thinking about? Not going to lie, I’m kind of bored right now,” she said, smiling.
John sighed. “You wouldn’t be interested in any of it. Just spreadsheet stuff at work. Numbers that aren’t working the way we hoped they would.”
“Hey, that’s
better than silence. What are the numbers about?”
John didn’t say anything for a second. Instead his eyes flashed to the window on his right, and while she had no proof, Diane knew whatever came next would be a lie. She didn’t know if the spreadsheet problem existed, but she knew that whatever he said about it in his next sentence certainly wasn’t the truth.
“It’s okay,” she said. “We don’t have to talk about it.” She didn’t know if she didn’t want him lying to her or she didn’t want to force him to lie, but either way, she would rather him keep telling the truth even if that truth came through his silence.
John looked back to her. “We can talk about it; I don’t mind.”
“Don’t worry about it, honey. I can always tell you about my day. You know there’s no shortage of things for me to talk about.”
He smiled but looked back down at his plate. Yeah, something was definitely wrong with him tonight. He was hardly ever this distant.
Not true. You know he’s been much more distant than this in the past.
Those days were gone, though. At least she hoped they were because she didn’t know if her or the family could take another bout of them. That wasn’t happening now. He had a bad day at work, or—and much more likely—he was dealing with Lori's death, which was always one of the toughest times of the year for him. He wouldn’t go back to that dark spot, though.
“Hey,” she said. “You sure you’re okay?”
“Yeah,” John said, looking up and smiling.
She wanted to avoid a lie, but she hadn’t. Even as his mouth said the word, his eyes told her that he wasn’t okay.
“I need you to shut up,” John said. “I can’t pay attention to both of you at the same time.”
Harry sat to the right of John, pulled up at the dining room table. He hadn’t been a fat kid by any means, but his flesh was now bloated, swollen from the hours it spent soaking in water. John kept his eyes facing down at his food because he didn’t want to look up and see Harry’s rotting, disgusting body. John was already acting weird enough at dinner and if he lost his appetite, that would set alarms off everywhere.
“So pay attention to me,” Harry said. “She’s always here and I only hang out some of the time.”
“You’re out of your mind.”
Harry laughed. “Come on, I’m half way joshing here. I know we have to play it cool. All I’m asking for is a little view into what you’re thinking, into who you’re thinking about.”
John heard Diane say something, though the words passed right by him as if he was in a bubble that blocked their meaning. He nodded, keeping his head turned down to his plate.
“Look, I don’t know. I haven’t thought about this at all in the past five years, not since you showed up blabbing. It’s not like I sit here waiting for you to show up, with some kind of grand plan. We don’t have to do this.”
Harry reached over to his plate, and John looked at his fingers as they grabbed a piece of steak. Fat, blue tinted things, fingernails missing on two of the five digits. John followed the hand as it brought the food back to Harry’s mouth, where he popped it in with a smile.
“She’s a good cook.”
John sighed and leaned back in his chair.
His wife was speaking to him now, though he didn’t have any clue as to what she said.
“Focus, John. Focussss,” Harry said, still smiling as if this was the biggest joke in the whole damn world.
John tried to pay attention to Diane, he truly did, but he couldn’t pull himself away from the fat, dead man next to him. Sitting at the table and grinning like a demon at the very fact that John couldn’t pay attention.
“You wouldn’t be interested in any of it,” he said. “Just spreadsheet stuff at work. Numbers that aren’t working the way we hoped they would.” He thought she was asking about his distance, though he wasn’t completely sure. Asking her what she meant, however, would show how far away he was.
“John, why don’t you just tell her?” Harry said. “Why don’t you just tell her I’m sitting here and then we can finally be one big happy family. Her, you, and a friend of Christmas’ past. Don’t you think that would be easier than all this?”
“Can’t you please go away, just for a few minutes? Just let me have a few moments here and we can talk about this later.”
Harry sighed. “No, man. No. That’s not happening. I’m not going to be pushed to the side for however long you want to play house. You’ve had plenty of time to do that. You said it yourself, five years. It’s my time. It’s our time. So get to thinking about how and when you want to do this.”
John looked back down at his plate, and put another piece of food to his mouth, though he tasted nothing. He could have been chewing a piece of cardboard for all the interest he held.
He and Diane didn’t say much the rest of dinner.
Harry did manage to talk about something else besides his plans, though. He spoke about the past some.
“I have to sleep.”
Diane was already snoozing next to him, a light snore breezing through her nose every once in awhile.
Harry, unfortunately, wasn’t.
“Why do you need to sleep, John? Mind telling me that?”
“What, are you fucking kidding?” John said, his voice raising, echoing in the otherwise silent room. “I have to sleep because I’m alive, Harry. Because I’m actually here and have to go to work tomorrow. What do you plan on doing, just talking to me throughout the night?”
“I don’t remember you being such a bitch.”
“And I don’t remember you being so persistent,” John said.
“You’re avoiding the situation! I’ve been here twenty-four hours now and not a word about when we’re going to do this and how we’re going to do it. I’m annoyed, John, and if you think I’m acting bad now—it can get a lot worse.”
John swallowed. He wasn’t … scared, exactly. Harry never scared him, not after the initial shock of what his arrival meant. Harry was too close to John to impart fear, but he certainly created … caution.
Because Harry could pick up the intensity, whether or not John wanted to imagine what that looked like. Intensity was something to fear, even if Harry wasn’t, because that’s how you got caught. Intensity bred franticness, and franticness bred carelessness, and carelessness bred arrests.
That’s what could not happen in all this. John couldn’t get caught. Not just for himself, though. He had to think of Diane and the kids. Intensity could wreck them, their whole lives. If John went to jail, or ended up with a few tubes poking his skin and pumping in poison, he could deal with it—didn’t want it, of course not—but he could deal. His family, though? No. No. No.
“You don’t want anything happening to them, do you? To be honest, I don’t either. I’ve grown pretty fond of them over the years. Don’t make the intensity grow, John. Keep it at this low burn, let you and I do our thing, and then you go back to playing daddy and businessman. How does that sound?”
What choice did he have, sitting here in the dark with a dead friend speaking to him? Could he say no?
Have you prayed?
“Damn that to hell,” Harry said. “Don’t even start about picking up the God nonsense, not right now. You can pick that up as soon as we’re done, have your soul forgiven yet again. Now, though, you need to start realizing the Big Man is taking a break for a few days. Okay?”
John turned on his side, his back facing Diane. He didn’t want to look at Harry anymore. The moonlight struck his head right where the large swath of hair was missing, ripped off years ago by sand and animals. A piece of scar tissue, the moonlight showing every nook and cranny in it.
“Okay,” John said. “Let me get some sleep, please.”
He heard Harry move to the foot of the bed. “John, you know I love you. Why make this so hard? It’s what you were made for.”
John said nothing, and after a few seconds, he heard his bedroom door shut. It took him a long time to fall asl
eep, though.
A Portrait of a Young Man
Years Earlier
Lori sat down on the couch, and Dr. Vondi followed his normal protocol of closing the door before making his way to his chair.
Lori’s hands were shaking. They had been since this morning and at this rate, she didn’t know if they would ever stop. She was lucky she had the appointment today, or lucky that the call which preceded it happened on the day she saw Dr. Vondi—though she didn’t think the word luck should be associated with this call.
“What’s going on?” Dr. Vondi said. “You don’t look well.”
“It’s happening,” she said. She folded her hands into her lap, trying to stop the constant shake.
“What is?”
“Clara. She’s coming back. She’s showing up, just like I thought she would.”
“Breathe, Lori,” Dr. Vondi said. “Breathe for me. Just take a few deep breaths in and out. Don’t worry about talking.”
Lori listened to him, breathing in through her nose and letting it back out of her mouth. She did it five or six times, her hands cold and her eyes blurry from tears. After a few seconds, she reached over the table on the left side of the couch and grabbed a tissue. She dabbed at her eyes.
“What happened, Lori?”
“The school called a few hours ago, about John. He … Oh, Christ,” she said, tears flooding out her eyes and down her face. “He hurt someone. He hurt them bad.”
She couldn’t hold the tears back any longer. She managed to hold it together at the school, had even kept from breaking down when she called Scott. She hadn’t cried since the call came in but she couldn’t help it now. All the emotion, the fear, the outright terror poured through her body and into the room.
“Three kids cornered him in the bathroom, and he took one of them, one of their faces, and bashed it against the bathroom mirror. They said he kept hitting it over and over. He hit the mirror until it broke and the kid’s face was bleeding. Jesus ….” She cried into her tissue.