by Bob Bannon
She leaned in over the counter, close to his face. “See that guy over there. At the end of the counter?” she said in a hushed voice.
Jonah leaned in to look, but couldn’t see past the other people at the counter, so he leaned back instead. There was a heavy-set man sitting at the end of the counter. He was wearing a trucker cap and a thick brown sweater and had a thick beard. Jonah leaned back to the counter and nodded conspiratorially.
“He just gave me a ten dollar tip!” she said in a quiet voice, but with a bright smile. She pulled the bill out of her apron and snapped it. “Buys a lot of pie.” And then she leaned back, finishing their secret conversation.
Jonah didn’t know what to do. Agree or disagree. Say yes or no. He purposely looked at the clock this time and said “I have to go meet my dad. His meeting is over by now.”
Jenna looked up at the clock. “Oh. Sorry,” she said. “I guess I didn’t realize what time it was.” The apology sounded sincere. Maybe she wasn’t on to him. “What’s your name anyway?”
“Jonah,” He said. Then thought maybe he shouldn’t use his real name. But it was out there now.
“I’m Jenna,” she said. “Does your dad have a lot of meetings around here?”
Jonah shook his head and then shrugged. “I don’t know,” he mumbled.
“If he does you should come back here. We have hot chocolate here all winter.” She said.
“Um, okay,” was all he managed.
“Bundle up.” She said. “It’s supposed to drop below freezing tonight.”
He stood up and zipped up his coat, then flipped the hood up as well.
Jonah looked up and down the diner. He didn’t really want to go, but knew he couldn’t stay. “Bye,” he said, sounding a little defeated.
“See you later.” Jenna said, and then the bell rang again.
Jonah opened the door and was met by a biting cold wind. He hunched himself further down in his jacket and stuffed his hands deep into the pockets. As he walked, it seemed like the sun was going down early. By the time he was back at his warehouse, it was dark, even though it was probably only five at night.
He retrieved his pack and swung it up on the dumpster. When he climbed the dumpster this time, the cold actually hurt his hands. When he dropped inside, there was no welcome from Grouchy. He probably moved on to somewhere warmer, or was too warm in his litter-nest to risk raising his head.
Jonah kicked a small chunk of concrete across the floor as he went to the stairs, making a little game out of it, like it was a soccer ball. When he got to the stairs, he picked it up and brought it up to the office. He closed the door, pushed the lock, and dropped his pack and the piece of concrete on the desk. He didn’t take off his coat.
He took out the tablet and plugged it in the outlet near the nest, which gave the room a small, soft glow. Then took out his water bottle and put that near the tablet. He thought about going to the bathroom and washing his face, but throwing cold water on his cold face didn’t sound appealing.
Picking up the concrete rock, he turned it over in his hand, then looked at the floor of the office. He was developing a game in his head. He walked over to the far wall, near the office door and used the concrete to etch a large circle into the wood floor. Then he went and sat in his nest, but from there, he could hardly see the circle in the dark, so he moved the tablet up on the control panel and faced it toward that end of the room. That was better.
He then sat down and put the concrete chunk on the floor in front of him. He spun it one way and then the other. Then he looked across at the circle. He shoved the chunk across the room, but he shoved too hard. It passed the circle, hit the wall and spun off toward the corner. He got up, retrieved the rock and tried again. He almost made it in the circle a few times.
He got up and went down to the main floor. “Sorry, Grouchy,” he said in the general direction of his neighbor’s corner. He then went searching around the room for more items for his game. He came up with two smooth stones and three similar chunks of concrete to the one he already had.
He went up the steps, closed and locked the office door, picked up the first rock of concrete from near the circle and sat down in his nest again. He divided his game pieces, the two smooth stones on the right, and the four pieces of concrete on the left. He picked up one of the stones and slid it across the floor. It didn’t make it to the center of the circle, but it did slide into it.
He threw his hands up in the air and half-yelled “And the crowd goes wild!” and hooted and hollered like there was a stadium full of onlookers who were just as excited as he was.
The other stone made it in as well, but he found that the chunks of concrete, with their ragged edges and differing weights, had to be pushed with a little more leverage. He decided the new game would be ‘which team could get closer to the center: stones or chunks’. When he looked at the clock again, he’d found that he’d played for more than an hour and was kind of getting bored with it. He was also getting really cold, even with his coat still on.
He wrapped himself up in his nest and read the book samples on the tablet until he fell asleep shivering.
When he woke up the next morning, the first thing he registered was pain. It felt like the area behind his eyes was on fire. He had never had such a headache. When he opened his eyes, his vision blurred. He rubbed at his eyes until they cleared. The second thing he registered was that he was really warm. No, he was downright boiling.
He sat up and found himself in his boxer shorts, his clothes neatly folded on the control panel. When the cold air hit his exposed skin, he immediately dove back under the furniture cover that he used as a blanket, but it was still much warmer than it ever had been. And much heavier.
He sat up and moved the furniture cover and found that he was wrapped in a blanket, a hot blanket. His eyes trailed across it and then to the outlet in the wall. There was another plug in the outlet, above the one for the tablet. He had been wrapped up in a heated electric blanket.
He immediately threw it off him and jumped up to his clothes. He hurriedly dressed, bent over to stay as far out of sight of the windows as possible, but kept peering down onto the main floor the entire time. Who would have brought him an electric blanket?
When he was dressed he threw the door to the office open and looked around. It didn’t seem that anything was different. And hadn’t the lock on the knob popped when he tore the door open? Someone brought him an electric blanket but then bothered to lock him back in for safety?
Just then, he fell to one knee and grabbed his head. In his fear, he had ignored the pain behind his eyes, but now it was back, and it was brutal. His vision blurred once more.
He stood up, braced by the stairway railing, and moved back into the office. He was headed for his water bottle next to the nest. What he found was two loaves of bread and a jar of peanut butter. His water bottle was on the desk next to his pack.
He had another moment of panic. He grabbed his coat and put it on then threw the water bottle into his pack and ripped the tablet from the wall. Then he was gripped by another bout of pain and had to steady himself on the desk. When it subsided back to a dull ache, he whipped the pack onto one shoulder and turned for the door.
Something hit the floor next to the desk when he pulled his pack off of it. He moved to that side of the desk and looked down. It was a spiral-bound notebook opened to the first page. Scrawled across the top of the page in black ink were two words:
Better Now
Jonah put the tablet down on the desk and picked up the notebook. He stared at the words. They were outside the lines and weren’t level with each other. He closed the notebook cover and looked at it. He didn’t recognize it. He hadn’t brought it with him. He turned it over and looked at the back. He opened the front cover and stared at the words again. They were true. But that wasn’t really the point.
He went to the windows and looked out again. No one seemed to be hiding downstairs. Maybe they were outside. But why do
this at all? It didn’t make sense.
He opened the notebook and looked at the words again. They were blocky and appeared to be scratched into the paper as if whoever wrote it pushed too hard. He turned the page over to see how hard the indention went through, but then discovered something new.
On the second page, written in a fine, curly print, very neatly and perfectly set within the lines were three short sentences.
You’re perfectly safe. Not to worry. The tablet works now.
He looked at the tablet then at the words. He dropped the notebook on the floor and turned on the tablet. After a moment, the ‘welcome’ screen lit. He didn’t see anything different. What did the note mean? The tablet did work. It had worked since he found it.
Then he noticed. In the top right corner, the wireless internet icon wasn’t red, as it usually was. It was green.
V
Jonah didn’t know what to do. In a panic, he stuffed his belongings into his backpack and took off down the stairs, leaving only the new food, the electric blanket and the nest he had made from the furniture covers.
In what felt like seconds, he was down the stairs and out the window.
When he reached the ramp outside, he had to stop. He doubled over in pain again. It was like a sharp stick was poking his left eye from the inside. His quick pace to get outside wasn’t helping. It felt like he’d never catch his breath.
As the pain in his eye ebbed, he stood straight up. ‘Not to worry,’ that’s what the note had said. Not to worry is what his father always said. His father would never say ‘Don’t worry,’ or ‘no worries,’ he always said ‘Not to worry.’
He spun around toward the dumpster, blinking the rest of the pain away. Then he spun back toward the alley. He looked up the alley and down and saw no evidence anyone had been there. Was it his father? How could anyone have survived that explosion?
“Dad!?” He yelled up the alley. He yelled again in the opposite direction.
He thought about going inside again to look around, but he was almost certain he would have noticed someone inside on his way out, even if he was in a hurry. And if someone was there, wouldn’t they have stopped him?
He had this horrible little daydream that his father was now a horribly disfigured zombie and he probably thought that if Jonah saw what he looked like now, he might scare the boy, so sometime in the middle of the night he bought groceries and an electric blanket and crept in so quietly Jonah would never know he was there.
None of that made any sense at all, so Jonah shook it off almost the moment he came up with it.
Even if his father was a horribly disfigured zombie, Jonah was pretty sure he was better off with him than without him, and he knew his father would feel the same.
It had to be someone else, but to Jonah’s knowledge, no one had ever even seen him in the alley, much less going inside the warehouse.
In the light of day, and feeling at least a little more clear-headed, Jonah looked around once more. Nothing seemed out of place, and the only things that had mysteriously appeared were actually a great deal of help. And the office door was re-locked behind them. Didn’t that mean they wanted him to stay safe?
There were too many questions.
He didn’t necessarily want to go back inside just yet, so he decided he would leave for as long as he could today and if it appeared safe, he might try just one more night in the nest. After all, he didn’t have anywhere else to go.
With some effort, Jonah managed to smash the entire backpack into the small door under the stairs. He took only the tablet and the gem with him. He decided he would debate the situation back and forth and stay away as long as he could.
That meant he was finally going to go to the mall.
He zipped up his coat and made his way around the corner to the street, making sure to look to see if he could spot someone watching him. He checked the rooftops of the surrounding buildings. He tried to see inside the farthest windows. He spun around and around to see if anyone was following. Once on the street in front, he continued scanning the area until he was sufficiently assured he was alone. He put the tablet under his arm, jammed his hands in his pockets and began to walk toward Main Street.
A while later, walking down the street full of people crossing this way and that, he began to feel a little more anonymous. No one seemed to be looking at him in any particular way, if they acknowledged him at all.
Window shopping took on an entirely new meaning. This time when he looked in the windows, he wasn’t looking inside. He was looking at the reflection of anyone nearby.
He finally came to the road he knew would take him down toward the mall and he walked across the street at the crosswalk. As he made his way, he looked down the street one final time and came to the conclusion that he wasn’t being tailed.
It was another five uneventful blocks up to the mall and when he finally reached the parking lot, he stopped just as his shoes hit the asphalt.
This was the place he and his father came to. The only place in town they ever actually went. That kind of made this place special. It didn’t really look special.
There were several entrances, but Jonah chose the one he knew best. Just on the inside of this entrance was a sports collectibles store. Jonah would beg his father to park on this side of the mall every time they came. They never went in, but Jonah loved to stop and admire the merchandise. There were all sorts of autographed items in the windows – posters, baseballs, bubblegum cards. His father would say all of that stuff was just far too expensive and the collectible value was never worth the prices they were asking. It never hurt to look though.
The mall was made up from three very distinct sections. The section Jonah walked into seemed to be the original mall. This end didn’t have any of the new or flashy name brand stores, it held older stores that looked like they’d been around for ages. Next to the collectibles store was a sporting goods store, and then a sewing outlet and then a small barbershop.
Jonah hated that barbershop.
Every time they came to the mall, Jonah got a haircut there before shopping for things he’d out-grown, like shoes and jeans, and every single time the barber would buzz his hair almost impossibly short. His father called it a ‘military cut’. It seemed to be the guy’s specialty, since even the old guys who came out of that shop had the exact same cut.
He knew all of this would eventually get to him. Being at the mall made him miss his dad. He’d even volunteer to get his haircut if his dad were just here again. Then he had a passing vision of Zombie Dad buying sneakers at the discount shoe place three doors down and he decided to head for the Promenade.
The Promenade, which served as a food court, was completely open to the outside except for the various restaurant awnings. The whole walk was cobblestone that matched the slate stone exteriors of the restaurants here. There weren’t too many people out here today though. It did much more business when it was warm.
Oh, food! Jonah hadn’t remembered this place smelling so good. His stomach started rumbling. Maybe he should have eaten.
He turned left and went toward the newer area. This was a much larger construction and the exterior paint didn’t necessarily match the older section of the mall. When you walked in this section from either the Promenade or the parking lot, you got blasted with air. Depending on the season, it would be warm or cool, but Jonah never quite understood why that happened. As he approached the sliding doors, they opened and, sure enough, there was the gust of warm air.
As he walked in, he unzipped his coat. He wasn’t quite sure what to do with the tablet, so he slid it inside the back of his jeans. It wasn’t totally uncomfortable, and it did make him stand a little straighter. His father would be happy with the idea.
They only came to this side of the mall when his father needed to go to the electronics store for something for the lab. Jonah didn’t mind. He used to run through here looking at everything that time would allow. There were the expensive name-brand clothing stores
, the high-end sneaker stores, there was even a store that sold musical instruments. Jonah would run through them all, admiring all the things his father felt were too expensive but Jonah had seen on TV. It was kind of a tease, but they seemed far more real when they were within reach.
Jonah’s one luxury item on those special occasions when his father had to go electronics shopping was a single CD of his own choosing. Jonah always chose very carefully, knowing that it was a rare occasion. He would usually settle on a compilation CD of recent radio hits. It made him feel like he was kind of putting one over on his dad, since he usually got a good selection of a lot of songs he liked, as opposed to songs from just one artist that you may never hear on the radio.
He had just reached the center of this portion of the mall. Here, the mall opened up to the second floor and you could look all the way up to the large glass dome at the top. There was a round stone tri-level fountain here. The water would collect in the pool at the bottom and then get funneled up through the center spouting from the top in big gurgling arcs which fell into a second tier and then over-flowed back into the pool. There were miniature versions of this fountain at the three other entrances to this part of the mall. Jonah remembered people throwing coins in to those as he passed by. He’d never seen anyone throw money in this one. This seemed to be a central waiting area where people could sit and rest while whoever they were with could take off for either floor of the mall using the escalators.
It was here that Jonah decided to sit on one of the many wooden benches and fire up the tablet.
He took his coat off, looking around to see if anyone was looking at him curiously, and then took the tablet out from behind him.
He turned it on and, after a moment, the screen lit up as usual. The internet connection signal glowed red, but then flashed to green, meaning he was online.