Lurkers

by Sandi Tan

  “Her parents think she’s on a camping trip with the Girl Scouts.” He smiled. “I know, I know, it’s not exactly legal, but I thought my secret would be safe with you.”

  Kate felt like slugging him and fleeing the place, but she didn’t want to make a scene. She played with her lettuce, while her insides grew queasy. When it came time for dessert, all three ordered hot fudge sundaes, but when they arrived, Kate couldn’t touch hers. Bluto gave the girl his maraschino cherry, which sent her into nauseating spasms of gratitude. It was the only time Kate would see her mad, crooked grin.

  “What do you want to be when you grow up?” Kate asked the girl.

  The girl shrugged, knowing that her devil-may-care attitude was the privilege of youth. “Movie director?”

  Kate snorted. She couldn’t help it. Bluto warned her with a look to Be Nice. “It was Brittany here who wanted to see you, you know. Honestly, I was just going to take her straight to Disneyland. I wasn’t even going to call.”

  Kate got her purse and stood up. “You know what, Bluto? You’re sick. Fuck you.”

  “Well, it was very lovely to meet you,” the girl said.

  Bluto draped a protective arm over the girl and stroked her porcelain chin. It was two against one.

  “I suppose it’s my fault. I talk about you way too much,” he said. “I kept telling her she reminded me of you. And so she got excited by the idea—”

  “Not excited, curious,” the girl corrected him.

  “Either way, she wanted to see the genuine article. So here we are.”

  Kate pulled out money for her share of the food and slapped it down. “I don’t know why I even bothered to come.” She was beginning to shake. “I mean, my dog is dying at home!”

  “What kind of dog is it?” the girl asked, just as Kate was walking off.

  Kate turned and growled: “He’s a German shepherd.”

  The girl clapped her hands. In derision, Kate thought.

  “What?” she snapped.

  “I’ve got a German shepherd, too,” the girl said. “What’s your dog’s name?”

  “Bluto.”

  The next day, Bluto phoned Kate and asked how her dog was. She should have hung up on him that second, but she’d just returned from the vet, where the other Bluto had been put to sleep. She agreed to meet him for a drink, provided the girl didn’t tag along. She picked a cheesy sports bar in Old Town, a place she was certain they wouldn’t run into anyone she knew.

  She found him nursing his second beer, slouched at the counter so his shoulders formed angel wings inside his shirt.

  “I thought you’d be flattered,” he said, “that I picked someone so nakedly based on you. A virtual carbon copy.”

  “Obviously, all Eurasians look alike to you.”

  “Very funny.” He gave her arm a little pinch. “If we’d fucked back then, we might have a kid her age today.”

  “Hah!”

  He laughed. “Now you sound exactly like your mother. Hah!” He took her hand and fed her a jalapeno popper. “Ah, old times . . .” He sighed dramatically. “How’s Santa Claus Lane? Still suffocating?”

  “Pretty much,” Kate said, quietly. She freed her hand from his.

  “And yet you never left.”

  She was silent.

  He tried again: “We were given legs, you know, so we can move around.”

  “Why exactly did you come back here?”

  “I turn thirty-three soon. They say thirty-three’s a pivotal age. I’ve realized that over the years, I’ve never been able to recapture the kind of . . .” Just like that, his eyes turned to water. “You travel four thousand miles to seek perfection when all along it’s sitting right here . . .” He leaned toward her, and his words fell to a whisper. “I’ve emerged from my years in the wilderness. Now I need to cleanse myself of the darkness and reclaim the innocence of my youth.”

  She grabbed her keys. “Fuck you. Maybe you should’ve joined an ashram or the Peace Corps, not stolen somebody’s daughter.”

  His eyes flared, but cooled off in seconds. “Maybe. But I guarantee—the daughter’s more fun.” He gestured for more beer, one for him and one for her. “After our first meeting, Brittany and I went back to my car and fucked our brains out. There was no hesitation, no awkwardness whatsoever. She was clearly . . . educated.” He gave her a tender smile. “I did to her everything that I should have done to you, when we were fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen. Heck, twelve. All those opportunities we had, you and I, and we just blew it. Did you have any idea how hard you got me?” Another look. “Anyway, Brittany and me, we went on and on till all the windows steamed up and my dashboard smelled like her pussy.”

  His knee brushed against Kate’s thigh—and she felt herself shudder. She got up and walked away without looking at him.

  A minute later, she returned. “Since you’re here . . . Could you do me a favor?”

  “Same as it ever was,” Bluto said, when they pulled into Kate’s driveway on Santa Claus Lane. “The light. The paint. Every blade of grass. The same.”

  “Except my Mom’s moved to Florida.”

  “I know.”

  Kate looked at him but decided to let it go. As they got out of the car, she saw Mr. Park, the slab-faced Korean pastor, watering his lawn across the street. It was something he did about once a month with remarkable half-heartedness. He looked at her and Bluto expressionlessly, but was obviously passing some judgment inside his warped head. She pointedly didn’t wave—there was no point in acting friendly.

  There was the spot at the back of her yard, under a shady oak tree, earmarked as her dog’s final resting place. She watched as Bluto worked silently with the shovel, making a hole in the ground and excavating old hamster bones. His big arms glistened with perspiration. Then, just as wordlessly, he set the shovel down and lifted the dead German shepherd up from the turf. Without waiting for a final word from her, he dropped the lifeless body into the void and began methodically covering it with dirt. Kate’s heart thought it heard the dog whimper, but her head knew it to be untrue. When the ground became level again, she got choked up.

  “Thanks.” She handed him a towel. “Thanks for coming here and doing this.”

  She showed him to the shower. He shrugged off his clothes and didn’t shut the door. She watched, noting how the rest of his body looked compared to his arms. He also had an outsize, TV anchor’s head, matched by an outsize dormant penis. When he finished showering, she toweled him dry and found him ready for sex. He found her, with a quick thrust of his fingers, to be the same.

  “You have to use a condom. I don’t want that girl’s cooties.”

  Surprisingly, he came prepared.

  Kate plucked off her clothes while they kissed. Before she could replace her oily smelling pillowcases, he’d grabbed her from behind and plunged himself into her, stopping her in her tracks. Carefully, they moved themselves down to the mattress as one. He opened her up with each stroke. Then he placed her on her back and fucked her steadily, grabbing her breasts and staring into her eyes. She tried to give herself over to the moment but her mind kept racing: Was this what he did with Brittany? The same moves? Would he go back and report it so they could desecrate this moment by reenacting it?

  “Where are you?” Bluto sounded impatient. He jerked her down to the carpet with him and pinned her under his thighs until she surrendered with moans. Then very roughly and very suddenly, he rolled her onto her front and took her, his chin digging hard into the back of her shoulder. She screamed. His intensity threw everything into focus: she’d waited half her life for this. They were together at last, whole at last—at least until he pulled out, ripped off the condom, and came.

  They showered together afterwards, sneaking in another round while soaping each other. He rubbed her clit while biting her neck, and she stunned herself with her continued
ability to climax—intensely—while standing. She reciprocated, pleasuring him orally as his fingers found traction on the tiles.

  They smoked a joint together in the nude, not exchanging a word. Whoa, it was stronger stuff than they used to know. By nine that night, they were both dressed but had done it so dancingly, so leisurely-ly, they seemed teleported into her car with no memory of how they got there, and were now backing down the driveway like a make-believe married couple. Would this be their life if they’d gotten romantic decades ago? Would they have had kids? Nah, no kids. No kids. They’d prefer continuous fucking. The condom, what a wonderful invention.

  As she drove, high, fighting the giggles, she imagined she was chauffeuring him to the late shift, brown-bag supper in his briefcase, change for the pop machine in his pocket. Nah, nah, nah, to read the ten o’clock news at KCAL. Nah, nah, nah, to his high-paying job measuring earthquakes at Caltech. It felt true, for one, two, three minutes. They were time travelers. They’d dipped backward and bent the clock, broke it maybe. How could they possibly be thirty? That was old. They smelled of the same soap, the same shampoo. They were passing through the same streets they knew. Come on. Really. They were fifteen, playing house. That thing with the other girl, whatshername—that wasn’t real. This thing, this was real. They were destined, him coming back just when she most needed a big bump in her life. Like that guy in Terminator. What was his name? What was his name? Oh . . . Kyle Reese! she shrieked. What? he said. It’s like she’d conjured him up with some kind of voodoo. Wait, had she though? Honestly she couldn’t even remember. So what if she had? He was looking so damn cute she had to lean over to french him.

  He tasted like soap. Floral, but bitter. Huh. She turned back to the road. Huh. There was something not right with her passenger. He seemed replaced, like an artificial breast grafted from a thigh. The effects of time travel, she supposed. It changed you from minute to minute. She peered in the rearview mirror: oh whew, she was still fifteen . . . ish.

  When she pulled into the Slumber Inn lot, Bluto was fast asleep, his fingers draped over her knee. She woke him by blowing air across his lashes.

  Outside room 105, he lifted a hand to wave goodbye but it appeared to take a great deal of effort. His arms, those heavy arms, were slack. His face, on the other hand, was waking up, and growing gently confused.

  At three in the morning, Kate was awakened by the phone. She expected to find Bluto in his doggy bed when she opened her eyes, but seeing it empty, she remembered with a jolt that he was dead—and buried. Never again would he sit on the bathroom floor and gaze up at her blankly while she shaved her legs.

  It was the other Bluto on the line. Crying. In her sleepy haze, she thought he’d picked up on her sadness about the dog. It dawned on her that he was talking about something else.

  “You gottahelpme, Kate . . .” His words grew increasingly incoherent. “Don’t leavemeherealone, please . . .”

  She told him to be calm. She grabbed her keys and, still in her flannel jammies, drove back to the Slumber Inn. This better not be a prank or a trap.

  Outside room 105, she tapped on the door quietly, just as he’d instructed. After some rattling of locks, the door opened and she saw Bluto, his face funereal. She felt a queasy chill when she heard him quietly close the door behind her.

  “I was asleep when it happened.” He gestured at the bed. King size, she noted. There was a humanoid lump beneath the floral bedcovers. “She’s gone.”

  “What do you mean, gone?” Kate backed away. With one swift motion, he yanked off the covers. Girlish clothing scrunched together there, molded into a human form. Kate spotted the “Kiss Me I’m Irish” T-shirt from their first meeting, as well as the jean shorts. There was a lot of skimpy underwear—price tags were still on most of them.

  “She’s gone,” Bluto repeated, more bleakly than before. “We went to sleep. And when I got up to pee—she just wasn’t here.”

  A pink gym bag sat unzipped, emptied out, on the carpet. Glossy flip-flops lay splayed nearby. Her monogrammed gold necklace was draped around a lampshade.

  “Is there a pool here? Maybe she went swimming.”

  “No, there’s no pool here.” The life had gone out of his eyes. “She just vanished. I don’t know what to do. I mean, she’s got no clothes.”

  Kate moved around the room, peering under the bed, opening closet doors and ripping aside the shower curtain. Could this be their idea of a prank? Was she hiding somewhere, videotaping this and giggling? She grabbed the empty pill bottle on Bluto’s side of the bed. Sleeping pills, prescribed for him by a Dr. Yamasato.

  “What did you do, Bluto?”

  “Nothing!” He raised his hands, like a perp proving he wasn’t armed.

  Kate made for the door, “All right. I’ve had enough.”

  “No! Please, don’t go . . . You have to help me find her.”

  When she turned back, he was crumpled on the floor, holding his knees to his chest, despondent.

  She moved a stack of dirty underwear and sat him down in the room’s lone chair. Motels like this made no bones about their purpose: if you were traveling, you checked in to sleep; if you were local, you checked in to fuck. You certainly didn’t check in to sit around with an old friend.

  “When I came back from your house, she made a big stink about being left here all by herself. She was jealous, clearly . . .”

  “Did anyone see her when you checked in?”

  “No, I always made sure she stayed inside the car with her head down low. And she knew about stranger-danger. If anyone talked to her, she’d give them a fake name. Like Kate.”

  “Kate?”

  “It’s a common name.”

  “Does she have friends or family out here? People she could’ve run off to?”

  “I was her only friend. If she was a well-adjusted girl she’d never be with me, let’s just put it that way.”

  Kate surveyed the room and returned to the clothes on the bed. The queasy feeling returned. Why had Brittany left all of her stuff?

  “Why don’t you go and take a shower while I think of something.”

  Bluto nodded obediently and rose from the chair, wobbly on his feet. Lumbering forward like a zombie, he gave her a final pleading look before disappearing into the black hole of the bathroom. “You have to help me, Kate . . .”

  When she heard the shower running steadily, she let herself out of room 105 and raced to her car, heart pounding. Her hands were icicles and she panicked that her engine wouldn’t start, the way it would have stalled at precisely this point in a movie. But the car did start and she backed out of the lot with her headlights off. She kept her head low until she reached a major street, and then hit the gas with a vengeance.

  As she sped home, she felt the unflappable eyes of the missing girl on her. She looked up at the rearview mirror—they were her own eyes, of course. Bluto hadn’t lied. She and Brittany looked almost exactly alike. Separated by a lifetime, and now, by the inscrutable night.

  She made a left onto Santa Claus Lane.

  III.

  GIRL ON THE BED

  —

  August 2006

  to

  October 2006

  – 7 –

  MAGICAL THINKING

  Mr. Z pulled down the projection screen. Rosemary noticed he behaved very differently with this class, maybe because there were now twenty-two of them and not just four. He was less intimate, more formal, as if some of these kids had parents he needed to impress. In other words, he acted exactly like a schoolteacher.

  “I want to show you two of my favorite paintings in the world. They’re both created by an underrated nineteenth-century Frenchman named Hippolyte Delaroche, known to his friends simply as Paul. Paul Delaroche was a Romantic, with a capital R.”

  He clicked on the first slide. Two little girls with page-boy haircuts perch
ed on the edge of a creepy-looking four-poster bed. One looked off to the side with vivid dread on her face, and she had an illuminated manuscript in her hand. The other girl leaned on her companion for support, staring back at the viewer with a nauseated expression. Near them was a lapdog peering into the void beyond the bed.

  “Can anyone tell me what this is?” Mr. Z asked. Blank stares. He answered his own question: “The Princes in the Tower.”

  Oh, thought Rosemary, so they’re boys.

  “This was painted by Delaroche in 1830 and it now hangs in the Louvre museum in Paris.” He turned back to the image. “Can anyone guess what’s going on here? Come on, people. This is not an art history class. I want your emotional response, not your intellectual response. Remember, heart, not head.”

  “Are they . . . lovers?” a boy named Arik asked. Nervous giggles.

  “Are you saying that because they’re sitting on an unmade bed?”

  Arik shrugged.

  “Good guess, though, because something unholy is definitely going on here. One of these boys is Edward V, aged twelve, and the other one’s his nine-year-old brother, Richard, the Duke of York. They’re in the Tower of London because why? Anyone?”

  “Somebody put them there.” Smart-ass laughter.

  “That’s right, Charles. Someone did put them there. And that someone was their uncle, Richard III. Edward was made king of England when he was twelve and his wicked uncle didn’t think a kid deserved that title. So he decided to get rid of him. By the way, you may know Richard III as the hunchbacked king from Shakespeare.”

  Murmurs of recognition. Alicia Hwang raised her hand:

  “He was played by Ian McKellen in that movie.”

  “Yes, Alicia. Very good.” Mr. Z turned back to the screen. “Look at this. The tension in the frame. At any moment now, some muscly henchman is going to come up those stairs, burst through the door and haul them away to have their heads chopped off.”