He heard her breathing fade as she left the room. The walls closed in on him. He couldn't breathe. There was silence except for a faint buzz from the receiver. Then he heard the hall closet creak open, the sound of plastic sliding against the wood shelf. She was getting out one of the storage bins?
Confused, he reached to turn up the volume, but then with a sudden horrific epiphany he realized what she was doing.
The gun.
Dad's old gun.
He had kept it at his bedside for years, an old Remington six-shooter, and when he died, his mother wanted Martin to get rid of it. She hadn't liked having it in the house. But it made Martin feel safe, and in a strange way it reminded him of Dad. Instead of getting rid of it, he had stored it at the bottom of one of the cheap blue totes he had bought to store all the miscellaneous crap he had accumulated from his marriage—stuff he couldn't bring himself to trash.
Martin ran to the closet, stumbling in the pitch black, and jerked open the closet door. He yanked to the tote out of the stack so forcefully that the board games and towels also stored in there came flying off the shelf, piling at his feet. The rain pounded on the roof. He had the tote on the floor in seconds and was rifling through the crap, stuff he couldn't see but only felt—manila folders, greeting cards, even candy wrappers, for God's sake—until his fingers closed around the walnut handle. He pulled out the pistol and with a trembling hand popped open the chamber.
Were there bullets? He couldn't see them. He tilted the gun and shook it, his other palm open and—
A loud crack like a firecracker came from the spare bedroom.
—the cool bullets fell into his palm.
He stared at his hand, seeing nothing because of the darkness, but his fingers closed around the bullets, making a fist. This couldn't be happening. She wouldn't do this, not Laura.
He sat in the dark, the thunder a distant murmur, the rain now a whisper. Nothing was coming from the baby monitor but a faint buzz. He held his breath, listening, wondering just how the future Martin would react when he came home. But he never got the chance to find out. The steady buzz became noisy static, the sound a TV makes when the cable has been turned off, the worst sound he had ever heard.
If you listened to it long enough, it sounded like someone screaming.
A Goodwill truck rumbled past, the loose-fitting chains on its tires slapping against the snow. Martin watched the truck circle behind the building. Usually, when a new shipment came in, he would be right back in the store, hoping they would put it all out within the hour, but he couldn't move from the sidewalk. It wasn't really that cold, probably not even thirty degrees; Martin had walked in much colder weather when he lived in the Midwest.
But it felt colder than anything he had known before. He felt as if he was naked—no, worse than that. He felt as if he was wearing clothing made of ice. His teeth wouldn't stop chattering. All feeling had gone out of his fingers and his toes.
After hearing the awful way things had ended, he had vowed that if ever met Laura he would walk away, but it was so much harder to do now. She was real, in the flesh and blood. She didn't seem crazy. What happened on the baby monitor seemed like nothing but a story someone told him once.
And yet, if he turned back, if he followed that path and things turned out the same, wouldn't she have been right? He had gotten rid of the gun, that had been easy, but he knew the gun wasn't the problem. He'd read up on post-partum depression, so he knew what women in the grips of that kind of black mood could do. It wasn't like he could hide all the pillows so she wouldn't smother the baby. And if he got her pregnant, wouldn't he be responsible for what happened? Wouldn't he have made her into a monster?
What would that make him?
The doors whisked open, and he turned, thinking maybe she was coming after him, hoping it was true, and was disappointed when he saw Freddie. He was just a kid, maybe twenty, maybe younger, with oily black hair, red-tinted glasses with thick black frames, and a patchy beard. He held his Goodwill bag under his arm as if it was a purse.
"Hey Martin," he said, "have a happy new year."
"You too," Martin said.
Freddie, taking this as an invitation to engage in a conversation, stopped. "Got any plans for the holiday?"
But Martin wasn't in the mood. He looked past Freddie into the store, through the double glass doors, at the dark-haired woman at the cash register. His lovely Laura. She was ringing up some clothes for an old lady. He watched the way Laura moved, the way she smiled. If he watched her long enough, he could almost forget those awful things on the baby monitor. He could almost convince himself that if he tried hard enough, he could prevent it all from happening.
No future was set in stone. He refused to believe that. He knew the dangers now, the pitfalls, and he could do everything in his power to make life better for her. She could very well have a baby with another man, and the same thing could happen. At least Martin knew what he was getting into. At least Martin could be there for her if things took a dark turn. Maybe they would adopt. Maybe they would go childless. Maybe they would roll the dice and hope for the best, as all couple had to do in the end.
Life was too lonely not to try. There was always a way to make things better.
There had to be.
"Excuse me," he said to Freddie, heading back inside. "I think I forgot something."
About the Author
SCOTT WILLIAM CARTER has been a storyteller since the age of seven, when his second grade teacher published Sucked Into Zaxxon, the riveting, six-page adventure novel that recounted the exploits of a couple of kids transported into an arcade game. Although nothing he has written since has quite given him the same level of satisfaction as that single edition book made of cardboard, orange fabric, and clear tape, he has never stopped writing. He has sold over three dozen stories, to such places as Analog, Asimov’s, Ellery Queen, Realms of Fantasy, and Weird Tales, as well as to anthologies by Pocket Books and DAW. Recently he has turned his attention to novels — even ones longer than six pages. His first novel, The Last Great Getaway of the Water Balloon Boys, was published by Simon and Schuster in April 2010.
Born in Minnesota and raised in Oregon’s Willamette Valley, he continues to make the lush western part of Oregon his home. He graduated from the University of Oregon in 1994 with an English degree, mostly because he couldn’t bear to major in anything useful. Among other things, Scott has been a bookstore owner, ski instructor, and computer trainer, but truly realized he was going to make something of his life when he spent four long nights picking beets off a conveyer belt at a cannery. Tolerating his peculiarities on a daily basis are his patient wife, two young children, two indifferent cats, a faithful dog, and thousands of imaginary friends. You can find out more about his writing at www.scottwilliamcarter.com.
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