by Garth Stein
Evan went home and waited, thinking that perhaps Tracy would call later that day, or maybe the next. She would call and reveal her plan, tell him that he was a part of it, and the two of them would go off with their child and raise him to be smart and kind and well-rounded. But Tracy didn’t call again.
Several days later, he called her house and she answered the phone. She told him her parents had both taken off from work to care for her, so it wouldn’t be a good idea for Evan to visit now. But they were returning to work the following week and he could see Dean then as long as he came during the day and only if he didn’t see any cars in the driveway. So he waited. The following week he went to Tracy’s house with some flowers and a little stuffed bear that played a squeaky computer-chip song when you squeezed its foot. When he knocked on the door, there was no answer. He looked in the window; the house was empty.
Not just empty of people. Empty of everything. Furniture, rugs, wall-hangings. Everything.
Stunned, Evan turned and walked back toward the street.
“You missed them, ” an elderly neighbor called out as he carried boxes of Christmas lights out of his garage and lined them up neatly on the walk next to an aluminum extension ladder.“Moved out over the weekend.”
They’d moved out with Dean.
“You’re a friend of hers?” the man asked.
“Yes.”
“I can see that she gets those, ” the man said, approaching.“The flowers won’t last, of course, but the doll—I can see that the boy gets the doll.”
“Yes.”Evan nodded blankly, handing the things over.“Thank you.”
“A fine-looking baby, ” the man said. “And the little mother is doing well, also. Kind of you to stop by.”
“Where did they go?” Evan asked.
“They’re making a fresh start, son. I have to respect their privacy.”
Of course. Of course you do.
Evan quietly asked around school; he didn’t want to draw too much attention to himself. But no one knew where Tracy’s family had gone.
He was angry with her at first. But over several months, his anger faded into acceptance; if he assumed Tracy knew what she was doing in telling him about Dean, wouldn’t she also know what she was doing by excluding him from her family?
So, he carried with him some resentment. But he also carried the belief that Tracy and Dean had found some kind of promised land somewhere; that they had gotten their fresh start, their picket fence, that they were doing well, and that they were better off without him.
QUIETLY, GENTLY, HE picks his way through the dark edges of Seattle’s midnight, slips down onto Westlake, up and around to Dexter, where he finds his apartment building just where he left it. He pulls into his stall in the garage.
It was originally his grandfather’s apartment. Evan would never have chosen it, nor would he have been able to afford it, a small one bedroom with spectacular city-lake-mountain views and considerable value on the open market. When his grandfather died, he left it to Evan. And for eight years it collected enough rent to cover Evan’s living expenses when he finally moved out of his parents’ house.
It’s a sad low-slung building with damp brown carpeting in the hallways, inhabited mostly by old people and recent business school grads, the equally pungent smells of mothballs and sandalwood incense intermingling hideously in the halls. Still, it’s the perfect place to hide. No one would ever think to look here. No one ever has.
He hesitates. Dean is sleeping soundly in the passenger seat, and has been for the past hour, since somewhere near North Bend. Evan briefly considers carrying Dean upstairs. A fatherly thing to do. Carry your sleeping kid. And if Dean were ten years younger, Evan would do just that. But the image he has of himself—by no means a hulking brute—struggling up the steps while cradling a fully-grown fourteen-year-old in his arms, stumbling into walls, trying to protect Dean’s head from smacking into doorjambs and corners, is almost laughable. Fantasy, after all, is just that. It allows you to see what could never really happen. Indulge in it, but do not cling to it.
“Dean.”
Crouched next to the open passenger door, he pokes Dean’s arm.
“Deano.”
Dean awakens.
“We’re here.”
EVAN’S PAD IS a bachelor pad, plain and simple, not a place for kids. The kitchen cupboards are grossly understocked. The living room (now the guest room), has a hide-a-bed sofa and a TV and is decorated pragmatically for a musician—a couple of amplifiers and a few guitars on stands—but for no one else. The bedroom is small and messy. The only bathroom is accessed through the bedroom, portending privacy issues. Good for a couple of nights at best. Certainly not for a long-term relationship, which, thankfully, this isn’t.
Dean props himself against a wall, drunk with sleep, while Evan makes the bed. It hasn’t been slept on in years; it smells musty. Evan hopes Dean doesn’t have any environmental allergies which are so common in today’s youth, due largely to trigger-happy doctors and their misguided policies of over-vaccination.
“Maybe we can find a mattress cover for this thing, but I doubt it, ” Evan says.“We’ll go out tomorrow and get you a toothbrush.”
Dean mumbles a response.
“Your grandmother’s going to call once the coast is clear, ” Evan says, though he isn’t really sure what a clear coast might look like. “I’ll drive you back.”
More mumbling.
“Right. Here you go.” He picks up the living room phone and turns off the ringer.
Dean falls face first onto the bed, tries briefly to straighten himself out, but gives up, his legs dangling toward the floor. Evan looks down at him, unsure of what to do. He can’t very well undress Dean; there would be something creepy and inappropriate about that. But he can help him onto the bed. And he can throw a blanket over him. He can watch over him for a second or two. And he can say, “Good night, son, ” as he retreats from the room.
IT’S PAST MIDNIGHT when Evan lies back on his own bed, exhausted. Out of habit he opens The Stranger and glances at the listings. He pages through the tabloid for a few minutes, not really paying attention to the words, until he finally gives up and sets the paper down. It’s no good. He isn’t going anywhere. Not with Dean in the next room. And it’s just as well. There’s nothing quite like ending up on the sticky beer-glazed floor of a bar with some idiot trying to shove a spoon down your throat.
He takes off his shoes and closes his eyes. He’s beat. Beat down, beat up, beat in. Driving a ten-hour round trip in one day to attend the funeral of the mother of your estranged child is not something your neurologist would recommend. Nor would he recommend confronting the aforementioned child’s violent grandfather and then fleeing with said child. Too much stress, and you know what stress does to your blood levels. Is that an aura I’m feeling, or are you just glad to see me?
He reaches for his stash, which he keeps not-very-discreetly hidden in an old Dunhill cigar box next to his bed. He slips across the floor to the window, opens it a crack and lights his pipe. A gram of prevention. He closes his eyes and exhales the sickly sweet smoke.
He hears Dean snore softly. What a world. He was seventeen when Dean was born. Three years later, he was the lead guitar player for a hot new band with a single climbing the charts and a platinum future ahead. A week after that, he was an out-of-work slacker with decent chops and a pleasant-enough demeanor to teach middle- aged rich guys how to coax music from a Fender Strat. And now, fourteen years after Dean was born, Evan is just fourteen years further down the line, and nothing more. He’s grown out, not up.
He’s grown tired. He slides back onto his bed and lies down. The ceiling is doing a dance for him. A stoned eurythmics. Ten hours of driving. If that isn’t stupid, what is? He’s lucky he’s still alive. He could have had a seizure, rolled his car into the median, become partially ejected and then cut in half by the door as the weight of the car settled on top of him. That would have been nice. Maybe they would
have buried him next to Tracy. HERE LIE THE MOTHER AND FATHER OF DEAN, the marker would read. THEY MISSED THEIR CHANCE.
EVAN WAKES UP in the middle of the night in a sweat. His mouth is parched. His sheets are cold and damp. He feels sick.
Water. He needs a glass of water.
He starts to get out of bed, when he realizes that his left leg feels strange. It must have fallen asleep. From the middle of his thigh on down, he feels nothing; it’s just numb. Above the numbness, he feels a peculiar pins-and-needles sensation.
He shakes his leg sharply to jolt it back to life, but it doesn’t respond. So he starts to massage his thigh to get the circulation going again, coax the blood to flow. He kneads at his quadriceps, working his way down his thigh toward his knee.
But as he gets closer to his knee, his leg seems to change consistency. It doesn’t really feel like his leg any more. It feels more like modeling clay. His fingers press into the flesh, but the flesh doesn’t spring back, it retains the finger and thumb impressions he’s just left.
He continues kneading his leg above his knee until it’s become quite narrow. Actually—and he’s not even sure how he can be so calm at a time like this, so clinical about what’s going on—it would be very easy for him to detach his leg at this point, simply by pulling it free, which he does with a quick twist, and as soon as he does he realizes he’s just pulled off his own leg and he panics, dropping the lower part of his leg in shock. He forces himself to lift the sheets and look down, and he sees that what’s left is the round stump of his thigh and nothing below. What has he done?
Frantically, he reaches for the rest of his leg—it must still be there—maybe it’s not too late to reattach it, maybe he can knead the clay and stick it back on. His hands fly through the blankets, feeling for the amputated foot and shin. He’ll call the hospital. He’ll put the leg in a garbage bag full of ice and go there and they’ll sew it back on.
Ah. He finds it. But suddenly the leg jerks away from him and scurries off, burying itself at the bottom of the bed.
Evan screams in shock. It moved! It moved on its own! Holy shit. The hair rises on the back of his neck. His leg is moving by itself. He can see it shifting around under the sheets; his leg is crawling on its own.
Desperate, panicked, his heart thudding in his chest, he throws back all the sheets and blankets, exposing the entire mattress, and he dives for his leg, which he sees huddled in the corner, suddenly naked and exposed to the cold air in the room. He dives for it and grabs it, but it isn’t trying to escape any more. It’s frozen in fear, shivering, scared half to death. It doesn’t know who Evan is. The poor thing is petrified. Evan lifts it out of the sheets. It’s not his leg. It’s a baby. Such a pretty baby boy.
Carefully, Evan holds him up. He looks fine. Healthy and fine. He’s got a head of raging black hair. His eyes are squinty, his mouth opens and closes like he’s an alien, an appropriate image considering he was born from Evan’s leg. Evan wraps the tadpole in a blanket so he’ll stop shivering. And then he brings the little monster close to him, his tiny hands gripping the air as if he needs something to hold onto, some mama’s fur to grasp, a strange anachronistic instinct harkening back to when we were all simple apes swinging from the branches with our pups clinging to our breasts, desperate not to be dropped to the jungle floor.
Evan kisses the munchkin on the forehead. And the funny Turkish Delight looks up at his father and says, quite simply and quite clearly, “Da.”
Da.
I’m your Da.
So Evan hugs junior, and the clammy goober hugs back, and Evan closes his eyes because he’s so happy, so overjoyed to be the proud father of a freak of nature. And Evan closes his eyes and sings a quiet lullaby for his babe, sleepy-time music to send the booger off to meet the Sandman for some well-deserved rest before the little tyke has to wake up and face the rest of what will turn out to be his sad and miserable life.
LONG AGO, WHEN he was still a child, Evan learned that if something seems good, it can actually be bad, and that if something seems bad, it might actually be worse. He learned that there is danger lurking behind every corner, that in the darkness of every closet hides a monster. Evan knew. He’d been ambushed by the monster before. He’d felt the creepiness, the cold clammy hands on the back of his neck. He’d felt the fear that rises up in his body so fast it makes his gums tingle. He had known the monster, had intimate dealings with it, as it crept out of its closet and attacked.
So when he wakes at six in the morning with that familiar queasy feeling—familiar not because it was so frequently felt but because it was so distinctive—and with the memory of his odd but extremely vivid dream fresh in his mind, he knows what has happened. In the night, the monster came out of the closet and set upon Evan, shaking him about in his bed, leaving him groggy and spent. Evan has had a seizure.
He pushes off his bedspread and sits up. Where was Dean for all this? Was he awake? Had he heard anything, any strange gurglings or thrashings about? No. All kids sleep hard and long. That much about adolescence he knows. He swings his aching legs over the side of the bed and places his feet on the floor. The carpeting has an uncomfortable feel to it. An itchiness he doesn’t usually notice. He stands up. A little spin to his vision. And strips off his clothes; he had fallen asleep fully dressed. He plods into the bathroom and checks himself in the mirror. A crusty trail of drool runs from the corner of his mouth across his cheek. His eyes are baggy and dark. He opens his mouth. The inside of his cheeks are bloody. At least his tongue was spared. You can’t swallow your tongue, but you sure can chew the hell out of it. He turns on the water in the shower and stands under the burning hot ribbons, hoping to wash away the crawly sensation on his skin.
A seizure. He hasn’t had a big one in quite a while. The little ones don’t really count. He has those more often, like on the porch of the Smith house. Little ones are annoyances, mosquito bites on the arm of life. Big ones are to be feared. He felt this one coming, even though he pretended he didn’t. He felt it at the Whitman Memorial, and again when he got home. He tried to fool himself and he succeeded, so who’s the idiot? Stress, fatigue, not eating properly. He thought maybe if he ignored it, it would go away. He smoked his pot, usually a cure-all. But this one got through the defense grid. Dilantin, Tegretol, marijuana—it doesn’t matter. Sometimes the fuse just blows and nothing can stop it. Kind of inconvenient, when you think about it. Kind of a nuisance to carry around the knowledge that at any moment your brain could rage out of control and you could wake up anywhere. And you wouldn’t know what was going on until it was too late. As if there were anything you could do to stop it. No. You would see the monster, you would feel its clammy palms, and then darkness. And if you were lucky, you’d wake up where you started, or even—not so good— you’d wake up in a hospital with tubes in your arms. Or, worst case scenario, you just wouldn’t wake up at all. Pack up your troubles in a Glad trash bag and smile, smile, smile.
He shuts off the water, still itchy so he doesn’t put on any clothes. The smoothest satin feels like wool after a seizure. He tiptoes through the living room and into the kitchen, where he scoops coffee into the coffee maker and turns it on, something to shake the quease, then he stands at his window in all his glory, observing the morning dawn over Lake Union.
The water is quiet and the sky is dull as the morning clouds, portending rain, hunker down over Seattle. A lonely seaplane circles over Fremont and prepares for landing. It looks like a toy plane landing on a toy lake. Everything looks fake to Evan. Plasticky. Like two-dimensional cut-outs pasted on invisible wires, worked by elves from behind a cardboard photo of the city.
The coffee machine heaves its steamy sighs, the seaplane buzzes over the lake. And all is more or less the way it should be.
“You’re completely naked.”
Evan jumps. His heart nearly stops. He spins around. Dean is standing in the doorway.
“Why aren’t you asleep?” Evan asks, brushing by him. Not only was Dean
not asleep, he wasn’t even rumpled.
“I’m not tired, ” Dean says.
Evan darts into his room, throws on jeans and a T-shirt, and returns to the kitchen.
“Don’t they sleep where you’re from?” he asks.
“Not at this hour, ” Dean replies.
“What, you’re usually out picking apples by now?”
Dean doesn’t respond. Probably because it was such an asinine comment.
“Sorry, ” Evan mutters, pouring himself coffee. “I didn’t mean to—” He hears a phone ring quietly, distantly, unreally.
Suddenly Evan is very afraid. Dean awake and fully dressed shortly after dawn is strange, but the distant ringing in his ears simply isn’t right. His skin crawls as he realizes that maybe he hasn’t awakened after all. Maybe the shower and the coffee and the plane are all part of a dream in which he is still trapped. It is perfectly conceivable that he is in a coma this very second, having seizure after seizure in some hospital while doctors pump gallons of sedatives into his veins in their attempts to stay the evil affliction.
Ring. Ring.
Wait—that’s a real ring. A phone. From his bedroom. Right. He’d shut off the living-room ringer. The bedroom phone is ringing. Mystery solved.
But there’s another mystery. He glances at the kitchen clock. Six o’clock. That doesn’t make sense. He woke up after having a seizure while he had slept. That would make this six A. M. Right? Or not? He looks out the window again. Jesus, it isn’t six A. M. It’s six P.M. Six P. M. and Evan can’t tell the difference!
He can tell now, though. He hadn’t noticed before because the clouds were so thick and diffused that he couldn’t see where the sun was. But the traffic on the street below, the cars on the freeway across the water, Dean: all clues that now tell Evan that it is evening, not morning.