by Sandi Tan
Kate paid the tab gruffly. “Could you wait till I get inside and wave at you?” Her driver struck her as sort of shifty-seeming, but at least he was young and had hairy fists.
“No problem. You go. I wait here.” He rolled down his window and lit up his cigarette.
Kate started climbing out of the cab, but was knocked back by her still unfamiliar new center of gravity.
“Could I ask you to do something else for me?”
The driver nodded.
“If you see a man—brown hair, early to mid-thirties—trying to enter the house while I’m in there, could you sound your horn twice, to warn me?”
“No problem, lady. You go.” He exhaled a big puff of smoke. “I have only one question.”
“What’s that?”
He looked at her form, placing her pregnancy at six or seven months, from personal knowledge. “No-good husband, huh? If you want, I have friends who can make him go away.” He mimed a gun.
She smiled wanly. “Thank you”—she glanced at the driver’s ID on the dash—“Mr. Kistorian.”
Five minutes later, Kate gave him the thumbs-up from inside her living room. He waved back and started up the cab.
She made the offer and Mary-Sue jumped for it. Kate had feared conflict, and even worse, mixed signals, but her mother had jumped at the chance to move back to Santa Claus Lane, at least until after the baby was born.
“I’ll be out of your hair as soon as you can manage on your own,” Mary-Sue had said, instantly assuming her old self-sacrificing bossiness even as she hopped along on crutches. Kate found this comical and poignant. Both were new reactions—she’d previously felt only guilt at her mother’s frequent gestures of martyrdom.
Her job now was to get the house shipshape ahead of Mary-Sue’s arrival in two weeks. The empty Scotch bottles had to go. The floors swept, carpets vacuumed. The ironing board taken out of her mother’s old bedroom, along with the piles of clothes she’d been meaning to take to Goodwill for three years.
She began with the bottles—out into the recycling bin. When she reentered the house, she was alight with the euphoria of someone who was finally in control of her life.
“Boo.” It was Bluto.
She shrieked and backed violently into the fridge, bumping her elbow.
“I didn’t mean to scare you.”
He was laughing. His big arms straddled the kitchen doorway and he gazed at her belly with a strident possessiveness. “Your front door was unlocked.”
She snatched a bunch of bananas and hurled it at his face, still hyperventilating.
He—great reflexes—caught the bunch. “Aren’t you even going to say hello?”
“You creep!” Her eyes darted to the counter—the butcher’s block was there, but where were all the knives?
“I put those away.” He gave her a wounded smile and stepped in closer. “Kate, for God’s sake, it’s only me. Me. The only person who ever got you, ever.”
She remembered the delicate high school Bluto, not this corrupted copy, with the crow’s feet and the new facial muscles that gave his dimples a hard edge.
He moved toward her, then passed her altogether to shut and lock the back door behind them. “I’m never going to hurt you. Or our baby.” He watched for her reaction. “I’m not sure how it could have happened, but nothing’s a hundred percent, I guess.”
“Nobody said it was yours.” She heard the lack of conviction in her own voice.
He stretched out his hand, edging closer. “Can I feel it anyway?”
Hold still, she told herself. She stood her ground. “They still haven’t found her, you know. That girl.”
“Who, Brittany?” He let his hand dance in the air like a shadow puppet before his fingers made a gentle landing on her belly, and she held her breath. “I’m long over her.”
His touch gave her goosebumps. She backed away. “What did you do to her?”
“She ran out on me. I misjudged her. She was bad news. I made a mistake, okay? People make mistakes.”
“How can she be ‘bad news’? She’s fifteen years old.”
“Yes, I’m well aware of that. Do you want to go on punishing me or do you want to hear what I’ve come to say?”
“You’ve got nothing to say that I want to hear, Paul.”
“Paul? So now I’m just Paul again.” He took a step back. “Look, I had nothing to do with whatever happened to her.”
She opened the fridge and poured herself a glass of milk. She had to keep moving.
“I don’t want to debate this,” he said. “You’ve got no one and I’ve got no one. You know me like no other and I know you like no other. Don’t you see the grand sweep of our narrative? Clean slate. Square one. Baby steps.” He reached out again for her belly.
“We’re not sixteen years old anymore. I’ve moved on. I really have.” She brought out a bag of lollipops from the larder and emptied it into a ceramic dog bowl. “Trick-or-treaters will be here any second now.”
He unwrapped one of the candies.
“Think about it, Kate. Clean slate. You and me.” The doorbell rang: trick-or-treaters. He stuck the red lollipop into his mouth and gave her one last look. “The knives are under the sink.”
Their window on the third floor had a view of the parking lot with its charming pair of matching potholes. On the ground floor was an alarmed exit by a dumpster where they’d watched the chambermaids eat burritos and bum cigarettes off two separate delivery boys. Other than that, more rooms, and more rooms.
“Couldn’t you at least have picked a place with a pool?” Mira said.
“You don’t even swim,” said Rosemary.
“I was welcoming the prospect of a glamorous drowning death.” Mira exhaled onto the windowpane and scrawled a skull on the condensation before it vanished.
In the facing wing, a geezer with a sunken chest watched TV in his underwear. Above him, an enormous woman holding a bag of chips in one hand closed the drapes with the other. Three windows from her, a good-looking man in a business suit sat on the bedcovers, clutching his head. Each window was a vignette, limited in narrative scope and yet compelling in its immediacy. They never saw any children.
“Hey,” Mira said, “do you think people are staying here tonight to avoid trick-or-treaters?”
“Maybe. But there’s someone here who’s already in costume.” Rosemary turned to their mother, who was snoring in one of the two queen-size beds—sleeping mask covering her eyes, shower cap over her hair, sheets pulled up to her chin. They cackled.
“Hot damn!”
“Hot damn!”
Raymond bolted from room to room, turning off the lights and checking that every single window and every door was locked. When the house was completely secured and darkened, he activated the alarm system. Armed to Stay, No Delay. He sank into his favorite armchair, whisky by his side, loaded gun on his lap. The curtains remained parted so he could see exactly who or what was coming at him. If he’d simply wished to avoid those candy-grubbers, he would have checked into a motel for the night. No, he was keeping watch. Out the picture window loomed the cropped panorama of houses and hills, twilit guardians of secrets that would never be shared. It was up to him to look out for himself. He knew how tempting a target his home was. It was Halloween.
Then, from somewhere close, the scratching sounds began.
He sat up alert as a hound. With the pistol in his hand, he rose slowly, ears as his guide. Little hands, little fingers, little nails were chipping away furiously at hard wood—a door or a wall, it seemed. Someone was either trying to get in or trying to get out. At the base of the stairs, Raymond realized that the ruckus was coming from upstairs.
He went up the steps steadily, wincing when he released a creak. The scratching instantly ceased. Fuck! He held his breath. Then the scratching resumed, more avidly. He cocke
d his gun at the top of the stairs, and took a deep breath. The sounds were coming from higher still. The attic. There was a swift patter, a movement from one side of the house to the other. Clearly, something was up there, and it sensed that he was coming.
He pulled down the retractable stairway and climbed toward the attic door. Shine little glow-worm . . . glimmer, glimmer . . .
He sprang open the door. Three gray rats the size of pumpkin-bread loaves stood in the threshold on their hind legs, their tiny pink hands perched in midair like Hanna-Barbera cartoons of themselves. One lost its balance and was about to keel forward when Raymond slammed the door against it. More pitter-patter as the rodents dispersed. And then, shrill critter chatter.
“Jesus! Fuck!”
Where the hell had they come from? Raymond backed down the steps quickly. Out a small window he glimpsed the red-and-white tarp over the Parks’ house and instantly became enraged. He’d seen it, yet he hadn’t seen it. He hadn’t been officially notified. Wasn’t that illegal? He would have made preparations against the rodent exodus.
Exactly seven years ago this hour, he was driving back to his hotel from the Wichita funeral home where he’d bidden farewell to his mother’s body. Plastic skeletons colonized every housing tract, taunting him with their gap-toothed grins, offering no solace, no dead man’s wisdom. He recalled the hotel valets—willfully ignorant numbskulls—hiding their inbred pug faces behind rubber devil masks and mistaking his black cloak for a costume.
“I vant you to believe . . . to believe in things that you cannot.” They quoted Bram Stoker at him in Bela Lugosi-ese.
Out Raymond’s picture window, the ragtag Halloween parade was just starting up. Pint-sized monsters and fuzzy-wuzzy animals trailed behind taller chaperones. A towering Statue of Liberty waited for a junior hobbit to finish tying his shoelaces. Bevies of grade-school princesses teetered on heels like pygmy whores, their mothers egging them on. This was the twilight crowd, gormless blackmailers who wanted little more than petrified fruit chews and praise for their crayon whiskers. He didn’t have to worry about them calling at his door—they never did. He’d tucked his Jaguar in the garage and turned off all his lights. As far as the outside was concerned, nobody was home.
In this “changing neighborhood,” as his realtor had termed Santa Claus Lane, the night folk were what people had to worry about. Hooded teenage boys roaming the streets, their faces shadowy, anonymous. He remembered the uproar the previous Halloween when a band of ruffians, all minors, assaulted three women in neighboring Sierra Lucre—the only time he’d ever felt sympathy for soccer moms. These fiends had no respect for boundaries, not on a night like this. These were trickster lords who cared nothing for sweets; they’d scratch obscenities on your windowpane with switchblades and piss on your doormat without so much as a “trick or treat?”
He’d seen these boys prowling in packs on Halloween nights past, swigging from plastic bottles of rum, clucking, whistling, hollering, strutting down the center of the street in their oversized pants like kings of the netherworld, all cheekbones and demon eyes and not a shred of soul. These kids had no code of honor; they shot babies and slashed old men. With them it was all death, all darkness, all the time, and they spooked him no end. When he was writing his Deathwatch books, his flesh-eating zombies were bourgeois, milquetoast innocents, wronged by the indignity of death. Every time he saw one of these street hoods he was reminded how fey and parochial his imagination had been. How could he return to writing horror when he no longer understood the form?
He took a gulp of whisky and tried to think of jollier things—spending the rest of his life in flannel pajamas, watching Law & Order reruns.
The sun was gone now. The little ones had taken their costumed selves home, laden with teeth-rotting loot. A while later came a burst of three separate sirens: one fire, one cop, one EMT. Living in the neighborhood, Raymond had learned to tell them apart. Then they, too, faded.
A hooded figure came up to the porch. He rang the bell with a long, thin, green finger, then stood with a solemn watchfulness. The blade on his scythe glinted.
“Optimist,” Raymond hissed and crouched out of view. He gripped his gun.
An old nursery chant slipped off his drink-slicked lips:
Hinx, minx, the old witch winks.
The fat begins to fry.
Nobody’s home but Jumping Joan,
Father, Mother, and I.
Stick, stock, stone dead.
Blind men cannot see.
Every knave will have a slave,
You or I . . . must . . . be . . . he.
The hood, the Reaper—whatever he was—slinked away.
IV.
BLOOD EPIC
—
November 2006
to
January 2007
– 13 –
LIGHTS UP
It had to be done—this was tradition. Every Saturday morning after Halloween, the gnomish retirees and elfin Boy Scouts of Santa Claus Lane peeled themselves out of bed and got to work, undetected and without fanfare, driving trucks, snipping foliage, hiding cables behind thickets.
Mary-Sue arrived just in time to see these Christmas lights go up. Five years away and she’d almost forgotten how much she liked it here as the holidays approached. Santa Claus Lane seemed even more out of place and time—with its shaggy firs, wood cottages, and view of purple mountains. It was the only time of year the deodars were completely appropriate and not just endlessly shedding nuisances. Her lair in Homestead was so set apart from its neighbors that she’d forgotten what a normal street was like. The memories of raising Kate in her house came rushing back, brought on by cooking smells from next door. But of course, Kate was no longer her little girl, generous with hugs and laughter. Now, there wasn’t room enough in Rome; Mary-Sue found herself stepping out for air. She had to remind herself why she was back: it wasn’t Kate, it wasn’t California—it was the baby. The baby was going to reset everything.
Still on crutches, she hobbled along Santa Claus Lane, watching over the volunteers as they pruned the deodars, and shouting alerts to them whenever they missed a branch or something was dangling funny. She’d made herself enough of a nuisance that a smiling delegate from the neighborhood Holiday Committee approached her the next afternoon with a “very important” task: procuring a new Santa for the festivities now that Mr. Shields, the longtime go-to, had died. Mary-Sue was about to volunteer Larry, then remembered he was on the other coast and ached a little.
“I’ll find you a Santa,” she told the committee. “So long as you promise me his sleigh won’t be one of those electric cars. If he runs somebody over, you’ll have a public relations catastrophe on your hands.”
The final week of November—voila!—the deodars of Santa Claus Lane were completely trimmed with colored bulbs and the street itself lined with inflatable snowmen, those cheery apparitions best savored with mulled wine and an SUV. The ordinary became sublime. Everybody dimmed their headlights, and cruised the street like U-boats in the ocean deep.
The Santa deadline loomed.
Raymond felt as though he’d been on the phone with Dartmoor since the summer ended.
“Your dad has SAD,” said the nurse. “Your father has been diagnosed with SAD, seasonal affective disorder. The doctor’s put him on paroxetine and we need your approval for the light therapy. We’d like to install full spectrum bulbs and a dawn simulator in his room, which brightens his existing lamps to simulate the sun about an hour before he wakes up.”
“Sounds reasonable. Bill me.”
Then the doorbell rang. Out his picture window, he spied an aged bird in a lumpy sweater standing stiffly on his porch like one of those Salvation Army grifters outside the supermarket—except for her crutches. Those crutches dignified her. He combed his hair.
“Raymond?”
“Yes?” He saw now that it was Kate
Ireland’s mother, the one he assumed had died when he stopped seeing her poking around years ago. “Oh, hello, it’s you!”
“Listen, would you like to be this year’s Santa Claus?” She didn’t beat around the bush, this one. “Every year, as you know, we have a Santa on the street. And I’m thinking you’d be a great candidate.”
She was met with Raymond’s stunned silence.
“I was going to ask Silas Brown at 1041 but that’s a huge way to hobble for Tiny Tim here,” she lifted up her crutches. “Silas was actually my top choice because those nazis on the committee told me it would be upsetting for young children to see a Santa of color. Can you believe it? Those fuckers actually said that out loud!”
“And I’m your second choice, why? Because I’m a member of another oppressed minority?”
“Oh, for crying out loud, it ain’t brain surgery!” She thumped her right crutch impatiently. “Look, you want to do something good for the goddamn world, don’t you?”
The twitch in her lip as she said goddamn warmed his heart. “So, just fat suit and ho, ho, ho?”
He was actually entertaining the idea. Mary-Sue smiled. “There’s a booth where you’d sit and have those rug rats come up to you. They no longer have them sit on your lap. That’s now considered unhygienic, etcetera.”
The phone started to ring. He left her at the door to get it. It was the nurse at Dartmoor again.
“Mr. van der Holt, I’m so sorry for calling back. But your father’s just said that he wants very much for you to visit at Christmas.”
He put the receiver down and ran back to Mary-Sue at the door: “And what do I get out of this?”
“Well, let’s see, a momentary sense of goodwill? Free cocoa?”
Raymond was back inside and on the phone. “Look, tell my father I’ve got a professional engagement at Christmas. I’ll see him later.”
He hung up the phone hastily and returned to Mary-Sue with a slight shortness of breath. He stretched out his hand to her: “I’m all yours.”