Glimpse

by Jonathan Maberry

  Both of them were train wrecks, though, for whom the meetings and, more important, the Cracked World Society was as much social as survival. Gay Bob was sixteen months clean from a five-year-long fight with painkillers. He’d been hooked on OxyContin after his slip and fall, and the addiction had cost him a longtime relationship and a good-paying job as a fitness coach. His depression was less obvious and more insidious than Straight Bob’s, because Gay Bob had more practiced social skills and could convince nearly everyone, and sometimes himself, that he was cool, collected, and ready to move forward with his life. Rain had spent a lot of nights taking long and directionless walks with him, talking about different kinds of highs and how much easier it would be to step off the sobriety ledge. She knew how close to that edge he was.

  For his part, Straight Bob had gotten into speed and graduated to cocaine. At meetings, he spoke with that unique pride of the recovering addict of how he’d put $350,000 up his nose over the years. It cost him his marriage, a good job as an actuary, and all meaningful connections with his two grown children. He was not invited to family gatherings, and even his Christmas and birthday presents were returned unopened. He’d been in and out of rehab eleven times but was now closing in on his one-year chip. However, he saw a therapist three times a week following a court mandate after his last near miss with suicide.

  Both Bobs were struggling. So was Yo-Yo. So was she. Being in recovery did not, and could not, mean that there was true recovery at the end. It doesn’t work like that. The addiction was hardwired into each of them, and often a dangerous depression lurked like cancer beneath the skin. It was one thing to be brave and righteous at a meeting, but then they each went home to the wreckage of their lives. Rain knew that it sometimes felt like it would be easier to stop trying to repaint the walls and just burn the house down. Depression was always there, and sometimes it was a more devoted companion than anyone else. Sucked, but there it was.

  Betty brought the coffee. Rain cupped her hands around the heavy white porcelain mug, holding it close to inhale the warm vapor.

  “Rain, my dear,” said Straight Bob, “are you going to tell us why you give every indication of having been dragged by your heels down a flight of stairs?”

  They all looked at her.

  “Believe me, guys, if I tell you what happened to me today, you’ll think I’m crazy,” she said.

  Gay Bob made a face. “Too late for that, sweetie. In terms of sanity, your ship sailed a long time ago, hit an iceberg, caught fire, and sank.”

  Yo-Yo punched his arm. “Don’t joke.”

  “Who’s joking? I mean, let’s face it, none of us are wired all that tight.”

  Rain shook her head. “No, I said it wrong. If I tell you what happened, you’ll think I’ve been using.”

  “Have you been?” asked Straight Bob.

  “No. But I want to,” said Rain. “After the day I had … I really want to.”

  They sat with that, each of them afraid of the statement, each of them nodding because it was inarguable.

  Gay Bob gave her a sad, sweet smile. “Then I guess you’d better tell us about your day.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  She told them everything.

  Almost.

  She did not tell them about Doctor Nine. Or mention him in any way. Everything about him was edited out. She started with thinking there was someone in her shower and ended with the missing persons poster and the glasses. Yo-Yo produced her phone and let the Bobs scroll through the photos of the old woman. They all did a close inspection of the glasses in the pictures and the glasses Rain handed to them. Yo-Yo produced the folded handbill and spread it flat on the table. It was at that point that Rain saw the expressions on the faces of the Bobs change from tolerant acceptance of a troubled friend to confused disbelief to a final acceptance of the inexplicable.

  Straight Bob held the glasses up and studied them from every possible angle.

  “They’re the same ones,” he declared, and everyone nodded.

  “How, though?” asked Gay Bob. He tapped the handbill. “I mean, isn’t it more likely that the storm made this look older than it is?”

  “No,” said Rain and Yo-Yo at the same time.

  “No way this went up today after you saw her,” he declared. “I bet it’s been on that wall for weeks. Maybe a month.”

  “Well,” said Yo-Yo, “doesn’t that mean that they found the old lady after this was posted? If Rain saw her on the train this morning, then she has to be back. People go missing and get found all the time, especially old people. Maybe she’s senile or has, like, dementia or something?”

  “I was sitting on the aisle seat,” said Rain. “She would have had to get up past me.”

  “And you only saw the boy out of the broken part of that one lens?” asked Straight Bob. He picked up the glasses and put them on and clicked his eyes back and forth. “There’s a little distortion because that piece of lens is out of true, but I don’t see anything weird.”

  “I did,” insisted Rain.

  “My eye keeps trying to focus on both sides of the crack,” mused Straight Bob. “Uncomfortable. Maybe the old lady was okay passing them on because they were broken.”

  Rain shook her head.

  Gay Bob took them next. “Let me look.” He looked around, winced, and removed them. “Wow … total distortion. It’s a great way to get a cheap high.”

  “If you don’t mind migraines,” suggested Straight Bob.

  “So basically a cheap high for masochists,” mused Gay Bob. “I know people.”

  He handed them to Yo-Yo, who recoiled as she put the glasses on and took them off right away. “Ouch! Felt like my left eye was being spooned out of my head.”

  Rain took the glasses back and held them. “So what’s it all mean?”

  Gay Bob cocked an eyebrow. “Why don’t you put them on? Tell us what you see.”

  “Don’t,” blurted Yo-Yo. Everyone turned to her. “I … sorry. I just don’t think you should.”

  “Why not?” asked Straight Bob.

  “I … don’t know. It creeps me out, is all.”

  Rain put them on anyway. There was no real pain, but her left eye had trouble focusing. She looked around the diner and saw Betty pouring coffee for one of the mechanics, the cook reaching out to set a couple of plates on the counter. Normal stuff. A woman with curly black hair, dressed in a soiled nurse’s uniform, sat in a booth off to the left, away from everyone else, discreetly nursing her baby under a blanket. Two hipsters were looking at something on an iPad and snickering. All completely normal. No little boy, no old woman.

  No Doctor Nine.

  She took the glasses off and put them back into her purse.

  “Okay,” she said, “so maybe this is me being crazy, or maybe it’s a flashback from my old Void days. It still doesn’t explain how I missed all of Friday. It’s like Friday didn’t even happen for me.”

  No one had an answer for her, and that ended the night for them. They were talked out but hadn’t gotten anywhere. The Bobs looked confused; Yo-Yo still seemed oddly nervous, though she tried to pass it off as the effects of a long day and a crazy story and some PMS. Gay Bob had paid the bill, and they headed toward the door. Outside, the heavy humidity had coalesced into a dense fog.

  “Swell,” complained Yo-Yo.

  They filed out with Rain trailing, and as she reached back to pull the door closed behind her, Rain caught the eye of the nurse with the baby. The woman had very green eyes. Cat green. A slow smile formed on the nurse’s face. All Rain could see of the baby was a single tiny pink hand reaching up to grab the frilly ruff around the edge of the reclining seat.

  Rain paused, looking from the smile to the hand to the smile and back to the hand. It may have been a trick of the light, or of the distortion of the heavy glass in the front door of the diner, but that little hand seemed to be clutching the ruff so hard the dimpled knuckles were white. The nurse brushed black curls from her forehead, then bent and arra
nged the covers so that the hand vanished from sight. As she did that, she never stopped smiling.

  “You coming?” asked Yo-Yo, breaking the spell of the moment. Rain blinked and looked back. The nurse was looking at the pale screen of an e-book reader.

  Rain almost told the others about what she thought she’d seen, but didn’t. She’d already told them too much, and her friends, cynical and wary as NA veterans often are, were already giving her strange looks. So she left it. Trick of the light, she thought, end of a bad, crazy day. Only that.

  She turned away and hurried to catch up with her friends.

  INTERLUDE FOUR

  NARCOTICS ANONYMOUS MEETING

  St. Jude’s Catholic Church

  Eleven Months Ago

  “Hi. My name is Rain, and I’m an addict.”

  They all said, “Hi, Rain!”

  “I guess most of you know I’ve been away for a while. I think about half of you were here when I last got up to share. That was a show, right?”

  A few people laughed. Not real laughs, though.

  “For those who weren’t or who don’t know what happened,” Rain said, “I had a heart attack right here on this spot. Yup, there was me actually dead. Right here.” Rain moved to where her body had fallen. The newbies in the crowd craned forward as if they could somehow see the ghost of her crumpled body there at the feet of the living woman who’d gotten up to share. “But the funny thing is … it’s not the first time I died.”

  Every pair of eyes in the place snapped toward her.

  “When I had a heart attack here,” said Rain, “the lady who used to run this meeting did CPR and then the EMTs came and shocked me back. The first time, though, there was a light and I followed it. That’s what saved me. Not the doctors. That light. I think the light was my baby.”

  In her head, the parasite snickered in a voice that sounded more like Doctor Nine’s. The hinges on the Box of Rain creaked. A pin drop would have sounded like a piece of heavy pipe crashing to the ground.

  Rain turned to her friends. Yo-Yo turned away, looking embarrassed. Straight Bob studied the hands he had folded in his lap. Only Gay Bob stared straight at her and nodded. A small nod, but there. It helped. Rain took her lifelines wherever she could get them.

  “I think the light I saw,” Rain began awkwardly, “was my baby’s heart. Alive. Beating. For me. I know it sounds goofy. It sounds like I was tripping, but no. I wasn’t using back then. Not yet. Not while I was pregnant.” She sniffed and fished for a tissue, wiped her nose. “I think it was my baby, the baby a monk in Central Park told me was special. A baby that I was supposed to take care of. I think it was my baby calling for his mother. For me. Calling me back from the dark. Helping me find my way back to being alive.”

  She blotted the tears in her eyes.

  “And I came back. Wasn’t easy. I’d already gone a long way, you know? I came back for my son. My baby saved me. My baby brought me back. Don’t ask me how because I don’t know, and I don’t think it’s some Disney happy ending shit. This wasn’t a Hallmark special. It’s not the feel-good movie of the season. ’Cause you know why?”

  There were too many tears for the sodden tissue.

  “Because you know how I repaid my baby for saving me and pulling me out of the dark?” She looked around, and she knew her eyes were wild. Her heart hurt in her chest, but not like she was having another heart attack. No, it hurt because it was breaking in a fresh, new place, cracking off from the fragile spots where it had begun to heal. “I still gave my baby up for adoption. After all that, I gave him up.”

  She looked out at the faces. Saw shock, saw horror, saw those who nodded because they saw that ending coming.

  “I saw my baby for one second. It was after my heart attack, after the C-section. They revived me, but I was still half-dead. Everything was messed up. Too much noise, people yelling, my mother staring at me. Don’t know why they hadn’t thrown her out. Maybe they forgot she was there, or maybe seeing her was more of me being screwed up. Everything was broken and wrong. The only thing I remember with perfect clarity was my baby. He was still there. They hadn’t taken him out yet. Maybe it was because it all happened so fast. My mother later told me that the nurses had taken him away before I ever woke up. They all said my baby wasn’t in the room when they revived me.” Rain took a breath, held it, blew out her cheeks, and shook her head. “I know he was there. I know it. No one will ever be able to tell me different. I saw my baby open his eyes and look at me. We looked at each other. Do you understand? We saw each other. And … and … I gave my baby a name. I told him his name.”

  Yo-Yo and the others exchanged confused glances and then turned back to Rain.

  “We had that one moment. I never told anyone else that I named my baby. No one. And I won’t mention his name now, either. It’s a secret, and I’ve kept it all these years, and I guess I’ll always keep it. I don’t expect anyone else to understand why that’s important. It’s mine to know.” She paused, sniffed, tried to smile. “I used to think that if I ever met him again, no matter where he grew up or even if the people who raised him never told him that he was adopted, that he would know who I was. And I’d know him. All either one of us had to say was his name. And he’d know. Even if the adopting parents gave him a new one and raised him as someone else. He’d know and I’d know. That was part of our secret. We’d both know. I made that promise to him. In that one moment, I gave him his true name and made that promise. Then they took him away while the doctors were still not sure if I was even going to live. I saw my son for one second. One fucking second. And then he was gone.”

  Rain stood there, trembling, as naked as a person could be.

  “I got out of the hospital three days later. I never saw my son again,” she said. “The day I got out was the day I started using.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  They stopped by Straight Bob’s car to finish talking. As always, the group lingered past the point of useful conversation. Rain knew that the others were as reluctant to go home to empty apartments as she was. That’s how it worked. Companionship was a kind of drug; you take painkillers until the pain stops.

  Gay Bob was telling a story about a tourist who came into Pornstash to use the bathroom without knowing what kind of bar it was. The tourist was from somewhere in the Bible Belt and apparently thought he’d stepped into one of the outer rings of hell. “He stood there twitching and twisting, needing to pee so bad he was ready to burst but terrified of going into the bathroom. Not sure what he thought would happen. Maybe he figured we’d gangbang the straight out of him or something.”

  “Probably thinks you can catch being gay from a toilet seat,” suggested Yo-Yo.

  They all laughed, though Rain’s attention was split, as she saw the nurse come backing out of the diner, pulling the stroller. A car idled at the curb, but it was blocked by a parked panel truck. All Rain could see was the back of a man in a black topcoat bend and take the baby from the stroller and wait while the nurse collapsed the device. The man held the baby oddly, though, using his hands to cradle it but keeping the baby away from his body. She’d seen some people do that before, of course; people who didn’t know how to hold a baby. This looked different; and even though she couldn’t see the man’s face, there was a sense of revulsion in his stiff posture. As if he did not like touching this child. Or any child. The nurse took the baby from him and cuddled it, then disappeared as she ducked into the car. The man put the folded stroller in the trunk, then vanished as he walked around to the other side. There was a chunk-chunk of doors closing. A moment later, the car rolled quietly past where Rain and her friends stood. She stared at it. It was the same old-fashioned car that had driven slowly past her and Yo-Yo earlier.

  Rain tapped Straight Bob’s arm. “What kind of car is that?”

  Straight Bob stared at it, eyes wide, mouth agape as the car went past. “Holeeee shit. That’s an absolutely mint Cadillac Series 80 V-12 Fleetwood-bodied town cabriolet. A 368-cu
bic-inch engine and 150 horsepower.”

  Gay Bob nudged Yo-Yo. “I think he just came in his pants.”

  “Maybe I did,” said Straight Bob, leering at the car.

  “Hey, wait a sec,” said Yo-Yo. “Rain, honey, isn’t that the same one we saw earlier?”

  “I think so,” Rain agreed. “I mean, how can there be two like that?”

  The car vanished into the pale gloom, whipping curtains of heavy mist around it like something out of a horror movie. They all stood watching the empty street as if expecting something else to happen. There was nothing left to say about anything, so they shared hugs and split. Gay Bob jogged off. Straight Bob drove home alone after having his offer of a ride declined by the women. Yo-Yo walked with Rain because her place was that way.

  When Straight Bob’s taillights faded into the mist, Yo-Yo gave a sad shake of her head. “You heard what happened, right?”

  “No, what?” asked Rain.

  “His ex-wife’s getting remarried. She’s moving to Akron, and the youngest son is going with her.”

  “Oh, shit.”

  “And you know the older one hasn’t spoken to him in like forever.”

  They glanced back at the empty night where Straight Bob had vanished.

  “Getting worried about that boy,” said Yo-Yo.

  “Uh-huh,” agreed Rain, though she was worried about all her friends.

  The two women began walking. “Tell you something, girlfriend,” said Yo-Yo philosophically. “When you get weird on us, you really bring game.”