Dead Time

by Stephen White

  But all that the humble—where dreams are concerned, I include myself in their ranks—know for certain is that dreams don’t play by the rules of ordinary.

  I was hard and in her hand before I was awake enough to recognize that the woman I was about to have sex with wasn’t Lauren.

  And that it hadn’t been a dream. Not completely.

  “Hi, Cowboy,” the woman said when I opened my eyes. She smelled of sweet sweat and flowers. I liked the bouquet. Her voice was husky and playful and more purely lustful than anything I’d experienced since I’d inhaled Ottavia’s perfume in the confines of the narrow hallway of her flat.

  My first thought? I wanted the dream back. I so much wanted the dream back.

  My second thought? Holy shit. Amy.

  Neurochemistry began doing its thing. A jolt of adrenaline agitated my post-REM haze. The mix wasn’t salutary. For a prolonged moment my mind couldn’t decide which Amy was gripping me in her hand.

  Was it the silver-blond-haired equestrian Amy of my youth?

  Or the cute, beguiling Amy of the previous day?

  My brain took over—went all graduate school on me. The theory of dreamwork—that the manifest content of a dream should come from the most recent waking period—argued that either Amy could be the stuff of my dream. I’d spent the previous day hanging with one, musing about the other.

  My eyes, adjusting to the dim light in the room, confirmed that the Amy in the bed had short hair that wasn’t silver-blond. I decided I would go with that reality.

  It was script supervisor Amy, not equestrian Amy.

  She moved her fingers. I gasped, a little.

  Intentionally or not, she was re-reminding me that it wasn’t a dream.

  FIFTY-TWO

  A ramshackle garage sat at the end of the driveway, farther from the road than the back of the barn. One of the original swinging doors on the garage was open almost ninety degrees. The other door was gone. The bottom hinge was still attached to the jamb. The top hinge was history. I didn’t think the building had originally been built to store cars. The pitted concrete on the floor was poured in sections—some recessed—that didn’t correspond to the size of four-wheeled vehicles. I guessed that the structure had once been a milking parlor, or something else.

  My barn outbuilding knowledge was limited.

  In other circumstances I might have been sufficiently curious to explore the space for historical clues about its utilitarian origins. Not in that predawn. I was looking for a quiet place to elude a cute naked woman and to make some calls.

  I sat on the open tailgate of the only vehicle in the garage—a rusty Ford pickup. The truck was one that I would have considered ancient when I was a child up the road in Thousand Oaks. The rear window was tiny, maybe eight inches by twenty-four. I couldn’t see anything through the film and muck that age and neglect had caked onto the glass. Was the truck from the forties? Early fifties? I didn’t know. It was old. From the exterior appearance of the red Ford, I didn’t think the vehicle had been outside the Burroughs family barn since Johnny Weissmuller was at RKO.

  Right behind my perch on the tailgate a stack of old license plates had tipped over and spread out like a hand of cards. The one on top was from Iowa. Nearer the cab, the truck bed was littered with the contents of a fifties-era toolbox. Rusty iron pipe wrenches were scattered around close to the box. The toolbox—I guessed it had belonged to a plumber—was standing on its end, top open. It was from Sears.

  A persistent sough in the distance announced that rush-hour traffic was beginning to assemble on nearby Ventura Boulevard.

  I opened my phone.

  Before my fingers hit the keypad, I heard a sliding sound from the rear of the garage, then a crack/pop. I translated the sliding sound and decided it might have been a scurrying sound. Critters, I thought. Rats? Raccoons? Skunks? I had no idea what varmints inhabited decrepit buildings in the urbanized foothills of the San Fernando Valley.

  My brain registered the fact that the garage reeked. I was pretty sure I didn’t want to meet up with whatever animals were living there. I stood and followed an overgrown stone path that led into the jumble of thigh-high vegetation in the yard behind the barn.

  I stopped in a spot where the weeds reached only to my knees, exhaled softly to settle myself, and held down the 2 key on my phone. Thanks to Jonas’s programming, that solitary, simple motion would connect me with Lauren half a world away.

  For real. No dreams.

  And no sex. That would, no doubt, be an option in next year’s version of the cell phone. For the present, with current-generation phones and wives on European holiday, the rules of ordinary applied.

  Time-zone arithmetic said that it was midafternoon in Holland. In the seconds that passed while the fiber optics and the satellites and the computers between Tarzana and Amsterdam were doing their things, I recalled Lauren’s tease to me a long time before about being number two on my old phone’s speed dial.

  “I’m number two,” she’d said with faux disappointment in her tone. “Does that mean Merideth is number one?”

  “It’s not about wife numbers,” I’d replied. “Home is number one. Always. You’re next. Merideth doesn’t get a number. Is that okay?”

  She’d kissed me. It had been a sweet moment.

  Lauren didn’t answer. I desperately didn’t want to get kicked to voice mail.

  The yard behind the barn was dotted with holes. Beside the holes were mounds of dirt. The neglected space behind the barn had become a resort village for gophers. Gophers didn’t worry me, but I continued to keep my eyes peeled for other varmints. For some reason, I was particularly concerned about porcupines.

  And skunks. I didn’t want to run into a skunk. I was confident I smelled bad enough.

  I got kicked to voice mail. Maybe Lauren didn’t hear it ring, I thought. I hung up and tried again. It took a minute, but I got booted to voice mail again.

  “Here’s the thing,” I said. “I love you. That’s first.” I paused. I hadn’t prepared anything to say. “I…um…have made some mistakes. I’ve been distant. And I’m sorry. We have some work to do. I have no doubt we can do it. I’m ready to begin to do that the moment you get home. I can’t wait to see you. I love you guys. Call me. Okay?”

  I closed the phone and retraced my steps toward the garage. I had sufficient observing ego to recognize that I was walking in the footfalls of my doing and my undoing. I looked up when I heard a sound in front of me.

  I expected a porcupine. But I found Amy standing near the open door. She was about ten feet away from the pickup. Her purse was hanging from her shoulder. She was wearing big sunglasses, carrying a clunky ring of keys.

  “Wondered where you went,” she said. “So…all-of-a-sudden.”

  “Out here,” I said. “It felt like a good idea to…get away. I was in there at first.” I pointed toward the back of the garage. “But I think there’s something creepy living in that junk, so I went out back. I’m kind of a wuss. I don’t want to meet whatever is camping in the garage. It stinks.”

  I was babbling. She didn’t reply. She sniffed the air. She could smell the stench too.

  “You were terrific last night with Kanyn,” I said. “It was special to watch how tender you were with her.”

  “Kanyn’s a good person. She’s in a lot of pain. I didn’t know about the awful stuff with her family before last night. It’s…unbelievable what she’s been through. But thanks.” She looked at her feet for a moment. “Don’t know if I should tell you this, but I need to tell someone. Kanyn opened up to me last night. It was almost like a confession. Lisa’s been living in the Addams Family apartment for the last few days. Kanyn let her in. Jack knew, but they weren’t supposed to tell anyone else. Kanyn doesn’t know if she did the right thing by helping Lisa hide. Considering what she thought had happened to Jaana after she sent her to Eric, she didn’t think she could say no to Lisa this time.”

  “Okay,” I said. I was beyond judgment.<
br />
  “Kanyn thought all the commotion last night was someone coming to get Lisa. At first she thought it might be Jack, and it was okay. But then she smelled gas from the wall heater. When she went to check on it, it exploded.”

  “Who knew Lisa was there?” I asked.

  Amy said, “Other than Kanyn and Jack? I don’t know.”

  I shook my head. “Someone else had to know. Whoever was sneaking in the back of the duplex. Has Kanyn told this to the police?”

  Amy shook her head. “No, she wasn’t honest with them last night. She’s a mess about not helping Jaana back in the Grand Canyon. She feels so responsible for whatever happened back then that she’s almost paralyzed now. She doesn’t know if she did the right thing by agreeing to help Jack with Lisa. She doesn’t know if Lisa is okay. She’s worried about Jack. She’s afraid everybody is going to blame her no matter what she does now.” Amy pursed her lips for a few seconds. “I don’t know what I’m going to do with this information. I need to get some sleep before I decide. I guess I’ve just given you the same dilemma. Sorry.” She shrugged.

  “The police need to know,” I said. I didn’t need sleep to come to that conclusion.

  “Yeah,” she said. “I’ll take Kanyn down to talk to them.”

  “Jules, too,” I said. “I think there should be a lawyer present.”

  Amy took half a step back down the long driveway. Her CR-V was parked twenty yards away, halfway to the street, directly across from a fat eucalyptus. Stringy bark was peeling from the trunk like old scabs. She stopped her retreat and set her feet. “I’m not Glenn Close, Alan,” she said. “It was only going to be sex.”

  She made the carnal act sound as uncomplicated as a visit to Starbucks.

  One of us was misinformed. I was not at all certain it was she. Sex was among the things I’d expected to get less complicated as I aged.

  Ha.

  I thought about her words for a moment, fought a temptation to get further detoured by the generational and gender irony of it all. I considered explaining that I wasn’t Michael Douglas and my decision to hightail it from the bed wasn’t about whether I could get away with a tryst without entanglements or discovery. Instead I said, “You’re young. Unattached. For me it’s not only about sex, as tempting as the sex might be. Not anymore.”

  She pulled her sunglasses down to the tip of her nose and narrowed her eyes in genuine, or mock, consternation. I found it disorienting that I didn’t know which she intended.

  She said, “Despite what I said at dinner, I…I don’t do this…often. When I do, I’m not used to…” She shrugged, perhaps too modest to finish the sentence that had formed in her head.

  “Having men jump out of your bed?” I guessed. “I bet you’re not. You’re…gorgeous, Amy. Smart, funny, kind. I’m beyond flattered. You…I think you know that the reason I ran isn’t because I’m not attracted to you.”

  “Most men would have stayed,” she said in acknowledgment. She did that smile-with-only-one-side-of-her-mouth thing that I’d first seen the previous afternoon in Mt. Washington. It was part of what had beguiled me. I was wishing she’d stop doing it.

  “Yes,” I admitted. Most men would have stayed. Definitely. “It’s been an uphill battle, but I’m trying not to be most men.”

  “I’m not looking for…a relationship, Alan. I know you’re leaving. Going back to Colorado. You leaving is part of the plan.”

  I said, “I have a family. Kids.” Plural. “A wife.” Singular.

  “I don’t know what that means,” she said. “Right now, this minute.”

  How can you not know what that means? “At dinner you said that you don’t hook up with men who make your heart go flip-flop. Maybe I didn’t know it for sure last night, but…I don’t think I want to sleep with women who don’t make my heart go flip-flop.”

  She put on a face that was all acting-workshop pouty. She said, “And I don’t make your heart go flip-flop?”

  The over-the-top frown made me smile. “You make a lot of my bits go flip-flop. But not my heart. Not yet, anyway.” I considered, then rejected, trying to explain the beguiled thing. She gave me a puzzled look as she ran her upper teeth front to back over her lower lip. When I spoke again, my voice was soft. I was talking to myself as much as I was to her. “I want to wake up every morning and adore the person sleeping beside me. I want to go to bed every night and feel adored by the person sleeping beside me. This—hooking up with you—would have been nice. Better than nice. Maybe great. But it might have poisoned the…whole adored thing.”

  “You have that? The adored thing?”

  “Did once. I’m trying to find it again.”

  “Really? You had it?”

  She was skeptical. I understood that. I said, “I did.”

  “Who had to know about last night?” she asked.

  “I’d know. My truth doesn’t change because I’m out of town.”

  “You’re hopeless, aren’t you?”

  “Maybe.”

  She pulled the sunglasses from her face with her left hand and crossed her arms over her chest. “I know this script. This is where I’m supposed to say your wife is a lucky woman. Yes?”

  “But?” I asked.

  She put her glasses back on her nose. “Is she, Alan?”

  I stuffed my hands into the back pockets of my jeans. I looked at her. She lowered her chin so I could spy her eyes over the top of her shades.

  “She wasn’t yesterday,” I said. “Or last week. She may be tomorrow. There’s still a chance I can do something about tomorrow.”

  FIFTY-THREE

  Amy took two steps forward. I mistook her move as evidence of carnal persistence. I’m sure I looked befuddled.

  She shook her head, dismissing my interpretation of her movement with another of those half smiles of hers. She pulled the glasses from her face and walked to the side of the truck. “What is that?” she asked, pointing in front of her with the eyepiece of the shades. “There. Is that…” I turned. “Could that be…?”

  Morning light was infiltrating the garage.

  A dark stain about the size and shape of one of Grace’s soccer shin guards interrupted the dust near the front wheel of the truck. The dust around the dried pool was disturbed by dozens of footprints and scuff marks. Beyond the stain, a wash of teardrop shapes the same deep color had pebbled the dust in a pattern that extended along the floor until the droplets got lost amidst the tall jumble of junk where I feared the critter was living.

  The clear outline of the toe of a shoe was preserved in the large stain.

  My eyes settled immediately on the door handle on the driver’s side of the truck. On the dirty chrome lever was another stain. The color was redder, more bronze.

  “I think it might be blood,” I said. My pulse accelerated from the implication. God, don’t let it be Lisa. Please, please.

  Amy moved up next to me and leaned in for a closer look at the door handle.

  “The stain is dry,” I said. “Whatever it is, it’s not an emergency. We should be careful about what we touch.”

  She moved within an inch of the door glass. “I can’t see. It’s too filthy. Yuck.”

  I cupped my hand above my eye to peer into the cab. “Me neither.”

  I lifted the door handle, using the hem of my T-shirt as a barrier. I didn’t want to leave my fingerprints. Nor did I want to disturb the stain. “It’s locked,” I said. “We should call someone.”

  She had her phone in her hand before I finished the sentence. I held up mine. “I have a friend in town. With me. He’s a cop,” I said. “He’ll know what to do.”

  “So call him,” she said. “I only know people who play cops on TV.”

  I speed-dialed Sam. He wasn’t going to be happy to be woken.

  Before he picked up, someone behind us said, “Oh heck, don’t do that.”

  FIFTY-FOUR

  The voice—it was a man’s voice—came from the back of the garage. From the general direction of
all the junk. Amy and I would have had to turn around to see him.

  I froze. Amy did too.

  “Close that. Both of you put your phones on the floor. Kick them this way.” At that point he added—I thought reluctantly—“I have a gun. If I have to use it to shut one of you up, I will.”

  I closed my phone.

  Amy and I followed his directions, scooting our cells behind us on the concrete. I could hear him collect the two phones. It sounded as though he turned them both off before he dropped them into the same pocket. They clacked together.

  “Now your keys.”

  We skidded our rings of keys toward him. They clinked as he lifted them, clattered as he examined them. He said, “Girly? That old Honda is yours?”

  “Yes,” Amy said.

  “You. The rental car, what kind is it?”

  I said, “A Camry. It’s on the street.”

  “We’re going to leave,” he said. “All of us.” He tossed some keys to the floor of the garage.

  Leave? I don’t think so. I wasn’t planning to go anywhere.

  I couldn’t guess who the man was. I could tell from a quick glance at Amy’s face that she didn’t know who he was either.

  I wondered if he was part of the family dispute that Jules was having with her brothers about the future of the barn. I said, “We’re guests. We’re here at the invitation of the…of one of the owners…of that barn. The house. They’ll tell you.”

  “Jules,” Amy said. “She’s inside. She’s my friend. She’ll—”

  The man said, “Shut up. I don’t care.”

  He moved behind me. I could hear him come close. His shoes made a distinctive clicking sound on the concrete. I told myself it was an important sound. I tried to remember it. After he took three steps, he emitted a satisfied sigh. I could feel his breath on my neck. He was that close to me. I waited for him to grab one of my wrists.