The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley

by Hannah Tinti

  A group of teenagers with masks walked by on the sidewalk carrying backpacks. Rubber faces hung on their scrawny necks, a collection of adolescent horrors—dangling eyeballs, rotting flesh. One of the boys reached into his bag. Hawley could see the egg there in the teenager’s hand, white and delicate and waiting. Then the boy lobbed it through the air toward them.

  “Trick my treat!” the boy yelled.

  Mabel Ridge turned the hose on them. The kids cursed and ran.

  “Effective.”

  “I don’t need any more nonsense tonight,” Mabel Ridge said. “I just want to clean this up and go to bed.”

  “Let me get this last bit off the driveway,” said Hawley, and he was back on his knees, sponging the asphalt.

  Mabel Ridge watched him work. “You’re not doing her any good skulking around like this,” she said. “You need to move on. She’s got a home here. It’s what Lily wanted.”

  Hawley stopped scrubbing. He looked up at Loo’s window. The room was dark, but he could see the curtains with giraffes printed on them that Mabel Ridge had made for her third birthday, which he had missed. His daughter was behind those curtains and she was sleeping and she was dreaming and she was safe.

  The old woman turned off the water. She started coiling the length of the hose, wrapping it around her elbow. “I think you should go now.”

  “I will.”

  Mabel let out a sigh of relief. She put the hose away. She climbed the stairs of the porch, then turned back and looked at him kneeling in the driveway. “Good night, then.”

  “Goodbye,” he said.

  He took his bucket and sponges to his car and drove back to the motel. When he got there he pulled out the car mats and washed them down and then scrubbed them and then he scrubbed the inside of the car, too, until any trace of his blood was gone. Then he cleaned the walkway that led to his room. He made it to the front door and then through it and closed the door behind him. His fingers reeked of disinfectant. His clothes were all wet and the sponge was black.

  Now there was no trace of Hawley outside. No footsteps leading to this room. But there was still the mess inside. Hawley threw out the sponge he’d been using and got another from under the sink. He dumped the dirty water and filled the bucket again, until the suds were foaming over the top. He could barely feel his foot anymore. He could barely feel his hands, either. Even his fingers seemed distant, as if he were no longer washing the floor but sitting on the bed across the room, watching himself wash the floor.

  This job was easier. The motel carpet seemed built for the aftermath of violence. Before Hawley knew it, he had erased what was left. The blood was gone. Every speck of it scrubbed out of his life, except for what was still pumping through him.

  Hawley went into the bedroom and pulled out the box he’d kept of Lily’s things, the scraps and pieces left behind, after Mabel Ridge had packed up the rest and driven away with Loo in the car seat. There was a photograph he wanted to look at. The one he’d taken on their honeymoon in Niagara, with Lily smiling and the waterfall rushing behind her in a cloud. He found it in an envelope. It was a Polaroid, the edges thick, the layered colors starting to blur.

  He needed pictures now. He was starting to lose the details. The way Lily’s waist fit into the crook of his arm, how he could feel the pulse in her neck when he put his lips against her skin. For months he’d been able to pull these memories out and burrow inside them so completely that he could conjure every aspect of her. The sight, smell, taste, touch, even the sound of her voice. Hawley would lose himself for hours, imagining her in bed beside him. But now the images were fogging around the edges, like an old movie narrowing the lens on a scene that he was still trying desperately to slip through.

  Hawley turned on the faucets and filled the tub. He rummaged through the bathroom drawer until he found some rubber tape he’d bought to seal the drains. He tore off a piece and taped the Niagara picture to the bathroom wall, underneath the showerhead, where he could see it. Then he pulled his shirt off. He got his good leg out of one side of his jeans and then took a pair of scissors from the medicine cabinet and cut the rest away so he wouldn’t have to redo the bandages on his foot. He picked up the Colt from where he’d left it on top of the toilet and lowered himself into the bathtub, keeping his bad leg out of the water, propped along the edge.

  He opened the cylinder and checked the bullets, even though he had loaded the gun only a few hours before. He closed the cylinder. Then he opened it again. The brass fittings on the ends of the bullets shone in a ring. A circle of six circles.

  He looked up at the picture. It seemed crooked. Was it? He shifted forward in the tub and reached for the wall, dripping on the tiles, measuring the photo with his finger to be sure. And as he was measuring he remembered another photo that he had, that he liked even better than this one, and he realized that was the photo he wanted to be looking at.

  Hawley got out of the tub and hobbled into the bedroom. He opened the box again. He found the photo strip. It was from their first week together, taken on the boardwalk at Myrtle Beach. His face was hardly in it. Only one eye and the side of his beard. Lily was trying to make him laugh. The first shot she was sticking a finger up her nose. The second she’d blown up her cheeks like a balloon. In the third Hawley was out of the frame completely, and Lily looked surprised, the edges of her mouth starting to soften, because in between those last two pictures, Hawley had taken her hand and threaded his fingers tightly with hers. And in that captured moment, as the light flashed inside the booth, he’d felt a flash inside his own body, striking a spark that turned the rusty gears of his heart, gears that had been frozen for so long Hawley had forgotten they’d even existed, until the parts in his chest groaned and started to move.

  Hawley taped the strip to the bathroom wall, too. Then he went back and pulled everything else he had from Lily’s box. A pink razor blade, the small bag of cosmetics she always carried around but hardly ever used, some old brown prescription bottles with her name on the label from when she had strep throat, her comb and brush, still tangled with strands of her hair. He carried it all into his crummy bathroom, and arranged the objects around the sink and in the drawers. He hung her green kimono from one of the hooks. He slid her toothbrush next to his beside the sink. Set her lipstick by the mirror. He arranged her shampoo and conditioner along the edge of the tile. Then he got back into the tub. He closed his eyes. He opened them.

  It was as if she had only just stepped out of the room.

  The water had cooled but was still warm enough. He wet his hair and then used some of Lily’s shampoo and ran it through with his fingers until his head was white with foam. Lily had always taken showers at night, and she would climb into bed smelling like freshly washed berries. He paused for a moment, inhaling and exhaling her scent. Then he pushed himself down under the water until his lungs burned.

  He came up sputtering, as he always did, full of shame and guilt and self-disgust. He looked again at the pictures he’d taped to the wall. He looked at Lily’s brush on the edge of the counter. He looked at the half-used bar of almond-milk soap he’d placed by the sink, the dragons sewn into the back of her robe on the door, her perfume bottle and its tiny glass stopper.

  He was ready now. He picked up the gun. He pressed the barrel to the soft flesh beneath his chin.

  The phone rang. Hawley sat there in the tub, listening to it ring. He’d conjured Lily so well that he could almost hear her bare feet padding across the rug beyond the bathroom door, the click of her lifting the mouthpiece from its plastic cradle.

  Hello? she said. Hello?

  The phone kept ringing. Urgent and echoing. And now Hawley imagined her voice on the other end of the line, reaching out at last, after all the times he had asked her to come and she had not. Hawley put down the gun. He scrambled out of the tub and went into the living room. He picked up the phone.

  “I’m sorry to wake you,” said Mabel Ridge, then coughed as if Hawley had been the one to ri
ng. “Louise had a nightmare. Too much candy, I think. And now she won’t go back to bed.” Her voice was like Lily’s, or what Lily might have one day sounded like, if she had lived to let the years pass and take their toll. Mabel Ridge cleared her throat. “She wanted to talk to you. I told her it was too late to call. I told her you were asleep.”

  “Not yet,” said Hawley.

  A muffled sound of the phone being passed. Voices low and far away, the mouthpiece pulled across a length of fabric. And there she was.

  “Hello,” said Loo.

  “What’s wrong?” Hawley asked.

  “You’re not outside.”

  “Not tonight.”

  “But you’re always outside.”

  Hawley did not know how to answer. All this time he had been watching her window, it had never occurred to him that she was watching for him, too. He could hear Loo’s breath, heavy and expectant, blowing hard into the mouthpiece, and for a moment all he could think of was the sound of the whale’s spout—the blast of air and water as the giant rose to the surface, the salted spray that had rained down upon him in Puget Sound and filled him with terror and longing and a sense that he could right the path he was on. He had not realized that he’d been waiting for this sound until he heard it. He knew only that he had been waiting—for something that had never arrived, that had failed him, that had made him rage and murder in the silence it had left. But now here it was again. His daughter, still breathing. And so was he.

  “I’ll come now.”

  “Right now?”

  “Yes,” said Hawley. “Put your coat on. And get your toothbrush. Your real toothbrush.”

  Hawley wrapped the phone cord around his arm, tighter and tighter, waiting to hear what she would say. Instead he heard the sound of footsteps. A door open and close. Then a clattering as the phone dropped to the ground. Hawley called Loo’s name. He pressed his ear tightly against the receiver, straining to listen. Something dragged across the floor. Shuffling. Thumps. A noise like Velcro being ripped apart. And then she came back to him.

  “I’ve got my shoes on,” Loo said. “I’ve got the candy, too.”

  Everything That’s Happened & Is Happening & Is Going to Happen

  WHEN LOO HEARD THE KNOCK on their front door, her first thought was of Marshall—she hated herself for this, but it was. It had been a week since he’d left to join his stepfather’s boat. But today was her birthday. She was turning seventeen. And she felt light, thrilled, as she hurried downstairs, making up a story in her head with each step: that Marshall would be standing there with a present, saying that he’d changed his mind, that the petition didn’t matter, that she was more important than his mother. Instead she found two policemen on the front porch, their faces dour. One of them was Officer Temple, who had pulled Loo over in the Firebird. The other had red hair. Even though it was sixty degrees, they looked chilled, their uniforms buttoned up to the neck.

  “Your father home?” Officer Temple asked.

  She should have known that it was only a matter of time before the gossip about Hawley would lead the police to their door. The bullet, she thought. Could they have traced it to the Beretta? She swallowed hard. “He’s out fishing.”

  The policemen exchanged a look.

  “We need to ask you some questions about Thomas Jove,” said Officer Temple.

  “Oh,” Loo said, relieved. “What about him?”

  “There was an accident,” said Officer Temple.

  “What kind of accident?”

  “The Coast Guard just brought in his boat. It was floating out by the Banks. The guys from Whale Heroes called it in. The sails were up, but no one was on board,” said the red-haired cop.

  “I don’t understand,” said Loo, “where did he go?” She imagined Marshall in the middle of the ocean, climbing onto the Pandora.

  “He might have fallen off.” The redhead coughed. “Or been hit by a wave.”

  It took a moment for her to realize they were saying Jove was dead.

  “But he could swim,” said Loo.

  Officer Temple gave the redhead a nudge. “It’s easy to get turned around, especially at night.”

  And there it was in her mind, already a memory: Jove’s lifeless body drifting beneath the waves, getting caught in a dragnet, bundled with lobsters and crayfish and eels and skates and lifted out of the sea, the creatures around him flapping their fins, their mouths gaping, their gills sucking open and closed.

  “We heard at the Flying Jib that he was staying here,” said the redhead.

  “He’s friends with my father.”

  “When was the last time you saw him?”

  “Three weeks ago. At the launch.” Her voice faltered. “I christened the boat for him.”

  “We can’t find much information beyond his registration with the harbormaster,” said Officer Temple. “Do you know where he used to live? How long he knew your father?”

  “He never said,” said Loo. She could hear the truck coming down the street, its distinctive rattle as familiar as Hawley’s own voice. Her father slowed as he reached their house. He’d left before she got up that morning, and now Loo saw him take in the police car and the men on the porch. He pulled across the end of the driveway, blocking them in.

  “It’s Jove,” she called as he got out.

  The policemen turned and walked toward Hawley’s truck. Loo watched his face as they told him. Hawley listened and ran his fingers through his hair. Officer Temple asked him something and he shook his head. Then he asked him something else and Hawley nodded.

  The police walked back to their cruiser and got in. Hawley opened the back of his truck and grabbed three bags full of Chinese takeout. He carried the bags up the steps and set them on the porch.

  “I’m going to the station,” he said.

  “I’m coming, too.”

  “Like hell you are.” Then Hawley softened. “They’re only going to ask me some questions.”

  Loo reached out and took hold of his sleeve. She did not want to be left behind again. The policemen had rolled down their windows. They were watching them both. She could hear the static of the radio, the squawk of strange voices.

  Her father gently removed her fingers. He squeezed her hand once, then let it go. “Stay here,” he said. “Start packing.” And then he walked back down the driveway and got into his truck. He pulled into the street and the cops followed, creeping slowly behind, lights on but siren silent.

  Loo had not heard Hawley say those words in more than five years. But they were hard-wired to her nervous system and she felt a shock all the way down her spine, as if she’d been shot through with electricity. She carried the Chinese food to the kitchen, then went straight to the closet and grabbed their old suitcases. The ones they had crisscrossed the country with long ago. She threw one bag onto Hawley’s bed and the other across her own and undid the latches. Back when they were on the road, Loo and her father could pull up stakes and be away in under an hour. It was a game they played. Who could pack the fastest. Hawley had always won, until he taught Loo his trick: to always take the same things. Everything else got left behind. She would run around and grab the items from her list: toothbrush, comb, underwear, socks and her planisphere. It had been years, though, and Loo was out of practice. Everything seemed important enough to take.

  Would it be cold where they were going? Would it be warm? Cold, she decided, and filled the suitcase with long underwear. There was no room left for any pants or shirts or shoes. She turned the suitcase over and started again. Hangers came out of the closet and her clothes were strewn across the bed. She could not bring herself to choose between them. In the end she packed only a pair of jeans, a T-shirt, a sweater, her new telescope, her mother’s gloves, the Carl Sagan book, Mabel Ridge’s scrapbook and the planisphere. She brought the suitcase downstairs and put it next to the door.

  It was only after seeing her belongings set firmly on the threshold that she began to have second thoughts. She’d grown used to
living in Olympus. To the beach outside their door, to seeing the same people year in and year out. She loved their house, and even the Sawtooth had become a place where she felt that she belonged. She was supposed to be working a lunch shift, right at that very moment.

  She considered calling in sick. The summer tourists had all left town and once that happened the Sawtooth was usually half-empty. But there was a paycheck waiting for her in Gunderson’s office. If she hurried, she could get there and back in half an hour on her bicycle. So she pulled on a sweater and left Hawley a note, then rode her bike downtown and chained it to the fence. She opened the door to the Sawtooth and the first person she saw was Mary Titus.

  Marshall’s mother was wiping down a table near the back. Loo watched her replace the silverware and set the napkins. In her apron she looked less triumphant than she had wearing her orange robe. None of the fishermen would eat in her section. They were all crowded around the bar.

  “Where’s Agnes?” Loo asked.

  “She started having contractions, so Gunderson drove her to the hospital,” said Mary Titus. “I’m filling in.”

  “Did anyone call her boyfriend?”

  “Brian?” Mary Titus plucked a fork from a bouquet of silverware clutched in her fist. “He walked out on her two months ago.”

  Loo glanced at Agnes’s section of the restaurant. It made her uncomfortable to know that she’d been too caught up in her own misery to notice anyone else’s. In all the weeks and months they had worked together, Agnes had been carrying her own troubles. And she had never missed a shift. The child she was delivering now—all alone, her feet in the stirrups—would share a birthday with Loo. I will send him a card, Loo thought. I will mail him one every year.

  “You better get to work,” said Mary Titus. “Nobody here wants me to serve them.”

  “I can’t stay,” said Loo. “I just came to pick up a check.”

  Mary Titus folded a napkin and slipped it under a fork. “You’ll have to wait, then.”