by Sandi Tan
She shut the window and the curtains. On Rosemary’s neatly made bed sat a red backpack, not one she’d seen. She lifted it. It was fat and heavy, and placed atop the bed with great significance. Was she running away? With Mira? Her pulse quickened.
Its stainless-steel zippers held an infuriating family of padlocks. Nothing budged. The bag itself was made of some heavy-duty polymer, almost metallic, and its back was padded with even tougher fabric, making it impossible to rip. She groped its sides and shook it. Things clanged. Bottles? They sounded like bottles. Certainly glass or china. Her antique vases, maybe taken from one of the shipping boxes? Was Rosie planning to sell them? So she could run away . . . with a boy?
She shook the backpack again. New sounds—the glug-glug of moving liquid. But the contents continued to elude her guesses—she hadn’t a clue. Hot tears rushed down her cheeks. First Kee Hyun and now her precious Rosie. Mira she’d always felt a stranger to, but Kee Hyun and Rosie she thought she knew completely and absolutely. Yet these two whom she’d loved more than anything in the world had secretly plotted to escape her. And she had read no signs. She wasn’t ready to be bereft again, not so soon.
The door creaked. She heard footsteps moving away from the room. She wiped away her tears and darted to the hall. Could the pizza delivery boy have returned to rob her because she hadn’t tipped him?
She rushed to the kitchen and went straight for her sharpest cleaver. There was a strong chemical odor in the air that irritated her throat—industrial cleaner? Was this the termite poison seeping back again?
“Mira?”
She walked unsteadily back toward the bedrooms, holding the knife in the “stab” grip. A shadow flitted across Rosemary’s door, and it closed.
“Rosie?” she edged up to the doorway, and opened the door.
In Rosemary’s room, again nobody. Just the red backpack. The knife she was holding had beheaded geese and severed pork knuckles. It should have no trouble, she thought, slicing open an American child’s satchel.
She stabbed at it, over and over, weakened only slightly by the sobs that had taken hold of her. This was Christmas Eve! She was a widow! Where were her girls? Why weren’t they with her?
There were enough cuts in the bag for her to dig the blade in and rip out bigger holes. She reached inside the biggest opening and plucked out the first thing she could. A clear glass bottle, filled with a red liquid too dark to be wine; it was labeled blood. The other two bottles she extracted were filled with pale yellow liquid and labeled sweat and tears respectively. This had to be some kind of a joke. But what was the joke? And whose joke was it?
“I not understand!” She wept, gripping the bottles to her chest. “I not understand . . .”
Oversized gray hoodie, blue jeans. Slim and spry, probably prepubescent, most likely a fresh inductee or a lookout. Raymond found the hooded figure a few houses down Des Moines. As soon as he realized he’d been spotted, the boy started running. Raymond gave chase. He dissolved into the shade. Still Raymond chased. He needed to scare him, teach him a lesson.
The faceless hood, darting behind trees and bushes thirty yards ahead of Raymond, took him from Atchison to Topeka, Northfield to New York. The irony of these streets, named for the cities of Raymond’s past and located within blocks of his present. He never drove on them, fearing taint. But now he was running at full steam along New York, following a junior gangbanger who was rustling against high hedges, causing dogs to whimper as he passed. He thought of Donald Sutherland chasing a hooded kid around Venice, thinking it was his dead daughter—what was the name of that damn movie now?—only to have a dwarf swivel around and stick a knife into his neck.
Suddenly, silence. No more swishing in the bushes, no more canine protestations. The rascal had vanished.
It was just as well. Three blocks into the pursuit, Raymond was panting. He reminded himself of the pathetic zombies in his books—lumbering, lurching lummoxes that could be outrun by any granny in a wheelchair; they frightened people because they moved with unnatural slowness.
He decided to go home. The Santa Ana winds had picked up again, rustling all the trees and bushes around him. His beard flew up against his face like a deranged octopus.
Something made him turn back for one last look.
The hoodie was twenty or thirty feet behind him, cheekily baiting him.
“You motherfucker!” Raymond cried, tugging the beard away from his face.
The kid went sprinting. Raymond sighed, and followed, the sweat soaking through his wifebeater and pooling down the cheap polyester fibers of the Santa suit. In his books, Raymond usually described nights like this as “voluptuous,” “doom-coated,” or “unrepentantly black.” But the night was merely inert, uncooperative. It obscured his vision. He paused to wheeze at the base of Mount Curve, grabbing onto a white picket fence for support. His heart was ready to explode.
The kid stopped, too. For a second he almost believed the kid would come over and offer him a sip of water. But the boy started running again.
“Stop, I said!” Raymond picked up his pace, but the fiend continued to elude him. His rapidly diminishing form was at the top of Mount Curve, and Raymond knew he’d soon be out of sight.
He fished the gun out of his pocket—it’d been pounding against his thigh as he ran, a persistent reminder of its availability.“Look at me!” He cocked the gun, his hands shaking from the excitement of holding it. Nobody had told him it’d feel quite so sweetly sexy. He put his finger on the trigger. “Look at me, I said!”
Miraculously, his tormentor stopped, in the front yard of a pretty blue cottage. Nobody appeared to be home. He had his back to Raymond. Slowly he turned.
Out of the black, a snarling white mass of dog shot into the air like a marlin. Its jaws snapped, inches from the hoodie, hoping to find a mouth-hold to propel its ascent. It fell, cursing gravity. A split second, and the dog leapt skyward again. Raymond aimed, and pulled the trigger.
The shot kicked the pistol back, striking his nose, hard. His nose registered the pain before his ears registered the piercing bang.
“Holy . . .”
The smell of burnt gunpowder hung treacherously in the air. He ducked and peered around, expecting a roar of sirens. Some neighborhood mutts started barking, agitated, then lost interest. To the world, it was just another casual gunshot.
His hands were shaking. He slipped the gun back into his pocket and jumped when he felt the barrel burning through the cloth. He looked up Mount Curve.
The hoodie was gone. As was the dog. He edged up the hill slowly to see if he could retrieve the bullet casing. Where the kid had stood was an inert gray lump, a mass of dead skin whose owner had taken flight.
He walked closer, but slow.
He yanked a sprinkler spike out of the wet soil near him and wrenched off the snaking hose attached to its side. In medieval times, a stake this firm would have been dipped in poison and rammed into the heart of a witch.
Fifty feet ahead, the lump of gray cotton and blue denim began to morph. As it moved it took on the shape of a girl, with thighs, breasts, dainty ankles. A slip of a girl. The hood slipped off, and long black hair tumbled down. Twenty feet, a crimson roadmap extended from a hole on her sleeve, expanding street by street like veins. She turned toward Raymond, her eyes flashing with outrage and hurt, her breath jagged. Ten feet, he saw the metal braces glinting from her mouth as she formed the words: “You . . . killed . . . me . . .”
He knew her somehow, from somewhere. The fire in her eyes was perhaps unfamiliar to him but he’d definitely seen her face—and those braces—before.
“I know you!”
At that instant, echoing his eureka moment, the entire night sky flashed white. They both gazed up, expecting thunderclaps. Instead, seconds later, their ears went deaf from an immodest, crackling boom. The ground rumbled, and the vibrations shook their bones
. Apparently, some kind of fireworks had gone off close by, fireworks that gave out big noise but forgot to deliver on the goods. A dreadful hollow in its wake. Raymond dropped the sprinkler stake in active surrender, and when he heard it strike the ground with a metallic ping, knew his hearing had returned. In that moment, too, the girl was gone.
Down the hill was the kind of stillness that came only in the wake of a horrible scare. The white dog whimpered squeakily nearby, cowering by the post it was chained to. It wasn’t going anywhere! And it was unscathed—he must have missed it and struck the girl instead.
After a while, dogs barked neurotically behind fences. The sirens he’d been waiting for finally faded in. Then came the buzzing of a chopper’s blades—which, like a fire truck’s siren, could be heard for miles before it entered the frame. A thick cloud of gray smoke crawled up the hill toward him, against the pitch-black sky. Intermittently, the gaudy crackles of a large bonfire. Yet the accompanying scents were not the woodsy, wholesome smells of burning brush. Raymond detected the melting of civilization. Television cinders, crisped box springs, disintegrating linoleum.
From the shadows of the cloud, a man appeared. No, Raymond adjusted his eyes, it was only a skinny young boy in a black T-shirt with a screen-printed Day-Glo skull. the misfits, it said. The boy marched uphill with his hands shoved into his pockets, the only other person on the street. As he neared Raymond, his bruises became visible—there was a violet hemorrhoid under his left eye and the lid was swollen and droopy. The deadened expression on his face did not match the ferocity of his words: “You fucking homo perv!”
The boy took his hands out of his pockets long enough to shove Raymond onto the grass, then he picked up his pace and ran the rest of the way uphill, yelling: “You sick old fuck!”
Seconds passed in shock. He was shaking all over, but he was in no way damaged. The red on his hands, he realized, came not from blood but from sweat leaching the cheap dye off the Santa suit. He staggered to the sidewalk and sat down on the curb to take in the unfolding drama down the hill.
He heard something collapse, like an avalanche, followed by a (euphoric?) wave of bystander exclamation. Over the roofs, he glimpsed embers fluttering like fireflies and the occasional shot of brilliant orange flame. Except for the aberrant, acrid smells, it was really kind of wonderful.
An ambulance slowed down as it approached him, its siren so unnaturally loud that he barely heard it.
“Are you hurt, sir?” a young man yelled out the window. Raymond shook his head and the driver instantly hit the gas.
Too late to request a free ride. He pulled himself off the ground and hobbled down toward Santa Claus Lane, toward home.
The haze thickened into monumental plumes of smoke. Through the gray, he saw churning red lights and shiny patches of wet asphalt. The fire hoses had won. The street was a tangle of emergency vehicles and gawkers, and it was hard to get a view of anything. As he approached the center of Santa Claus Lane, the locus of the excitement seemed to him sickeningly familiar. His spine tingled and his head went numb.
“My house!” He found in himself the energy to sprint.
Two pairs of arms seized him as he ducked below the yellow tape that was stretched across the sidewalk.
“Sir, you need to stay out of there!”
“But that’s my house!” he wailed, through the dark fumes. The smoke put tears in his eyes.
“That was your house.” A consolatory pat on his back.
The clouds lifted, unveiling a crater where the house once stood, now filled in with rubble. When Raymond saw the singed open house sign on the lawn, he gasped.
“That’s not my house!” The sudden shift in emotions violently unsettled his stomach—he vomited on the grass in relief.
“Merry Christmas, Santa,” somebody said, as an army of firefighters wearing headlamps jumped over his puke and descended into the heart of the darkness.
Two hours later, a young Latina officer was assigned to escort Raymond home. As they walked, he tried hard not to stare at the smoldering wreck next door.
“What happened, do you know?” he asked.
“Chemical or gas explosion of some kind.”
“Big hole for a gas explosion.”
“Yeah. Homeland Security’s been notified.”
“And will they send someone to investigate?”
“Honestly? I doubt it.”
“Was anyone home?”
“They found one fatality.”
“Good Lord.”
“A woman. Did you know her well?”
Raymond shook his head.
“Well . . .” The cop trailed off, not knowing what else to say.
She watched Raymond unlock his front door, and showed no intention of leaving until he was safely inside.
“If you have any animals, sir, please keep them indoors until further notice.”
Raymond nodded.
Stepping off the porch, she said, “You may find some of your windows shattered from the blast but I strongly suggest you don’t try to pick up the pieces tonight. You can deal with all that stuff tomorrow, once the sun’s up.”
Locking himself in, Raymond did see shards of window glass on his floor. He didn’t activate the alarm system, well aware of the ridiculousness of arming the house when so many of his windows were broken. Then he went to the bathroom to wash the grime off his face.
His nose was swollen from the gun’s recoil, but not broken. He took a long, hot piss. He was alive; his neighbor was dead.
He stripped off his clothing and ran the bath. All hot water. He wanted a deep cleansing. He wanted a new wakefulness to sear into his flesh, then his entire being. The room steamed up quickly. Turkish bathhouse. Russian sauna. Japanese hot spring . . . He plunged one foot into the tub.
“Jesus fucking Christ!” The water was boiling hot. He withdrew his foot, pink as shrimp and trailing drip all over the tile. He reached, burned foot in the air, for the tap. And somehow, because his legs were still wobbly from all that running or because he was getting old and imprecise, he lost his balance. The entire world toppled over with a tremendous crash. As he fell, he pulled the shower curtain down with him and the crummy rod, offering no resistance, came off the wall altogether.
Now he lay on the cold marble floor. Naked, shriveled, the dead nylon skin of the shower curtain lying atop him like a shroud.He screamed, “No more! No more! No more!”
In the silence that followed, he heard the bathroom door squeak open. His heart stopped. From the floor, he gazed upward and saw—upside down—feet first, then the legs, bodies and faces of a pair of little girls. Oriental. Twins, it seemed like. One was wearing jeans. She propped up her smaller clone in a shapeless, bloodstained hoodie—her!
The Korean daughters. From next door! He’d never been able to recognize them when they weren’t together, yet had never taken the time to tell them apart.
Without a word, both girls got down on their haunches dutifully and helped him to sit up. Both had soft, nimble hands—the hands of children who never had to do any housework. All his muscles were in working order. He’d screamed for nothing. Oh, mortification. He held the shower curtain fast over his trembling privates.
“Thank you,” he murmured. “Thank you.”
It was not the time to shout at anyone for breaking into his house.
“You shot me,” said the smaller girl with the tear-stained face. She seemed sad rather than angry. She seemed not to be in any serious pain. “I’m okay though.”
“Except we’re not okay,” said her sister. “We’re orphans now.” Her words were harder, non-negotiable. Once out of the bathroom, she tipped her head toward the squad car parked out on the street, making it clear that it was in everyone’s interest not to get the cops involved. “They’re going to try and take us away. You have to help us.”
– 15 –
SINKHOLES
It was Kate who had called the police.
After the two Bills left the house, Mary-Sue and Larry lingered downstairs washing dishes and swaying to Handel’s Messiah on the kitchen radio. Kate went up to her room with a glass of milk, hollowed out after her talk with Bluto. She paused at the landing, thinking it might cheer her up to see what Raymond was up to. His house was dark, and she remembered—he was on Santa duty. The street was so crowded with cars and carolers that no one but her saw the figure climbing out of the Parks’ window. It was a teenage boy whose appearance made her hair stand up: he was the ghost of Bluto, crystallized and preserved at age sixteen, except Bluto would never have worn such a corny Misfits T-shirt.
She noted the bruises on the left side of the boy’s face. She would share these details with 911.
A few minutes after he slipped away, there was that monstrous bang. Kate felt her entire house shake. Glass broke. Before she could get downstairs, her mother was already hurrying up the staircase, asking if she was all right. Together, they stood on the landing watching the Park house being engulfed by a fireball, too transfixed to worry about whether the flames would leap across to them. Miraculously, the blaze stayed hermetic. Neither house next to it received much more than a minor scorching. In a matter of minutes, the Park house caved into itself as if some dark centrifugal force had sucked the fire down a secret drain.
The next day, Kate, her mother and Larry channel-surfed local news for information, even though the drama was unfolding right across the street. The hazmat crew picking its way through the wreckage had refused to answer Mary-Sue’s questions. News vans double-parked on the street made it impossible for them to get a good look at anything, even from the upstairs windows, on tiptoes, with binoculars.
“A vintage Craftsman house on historic Santa Claus Lane in Alta Vista was devastated by a fire Christmas Eve. Witnesses reported a loud blast at around 10 p.m. and fire rapidly gutted the house . . .” Shaky cellphone video showed flames shooting out the roof of the house.