by Kris Ripper
“Cam,” Josh said. “What’s up?”
“Nothing. Do you guys want anything to drink? Or no, I don’t—I don’t really have much.”
Keith shifted, pulling his legs up so he could face me. “We don’t want anything. I mean, except for you to look at us and stuff.”
“We finally gained release from the convalescent care of Dr. and Mr. Walker, so we’re heading home. Why don’t you come with us?”
Home. Their apartment, which I’d so vividly pictured when I was in the police station giving my statement. The apartment I’d unwittingly led Joey to. I shook my head.
“I’m so tired. I just—I need to get some sleep. That’s all.”
“Are you sleeping okay?” Keith asked after a few seconds, in which I thought both of them were trying not to argue with me. “I wake up a lot. I really—you know—I really freak out a lot in general right now.”
“It’s not freaking out.” Josh reached across me for Keith’s hand. “The doctor said it would take a while before you were on an even keel again.”
“Yeah, I know. But in my head, it definitely feels like freaking out. They gave me some pills that are supposed to help with sleeping. Do you want a few, Cam?”
“No, thank you.” Because what if I was so deeply asleep I didn’t hear him moving in the apartment? He could kill me in my sleep. No. He wouldn’t be in the apartment. He was in jail. He was still in jail. I had the sudden urge to call the police department and ask someone to confirm.
“Cam,” Josh said. “Come home with us.”
“I can’t.” I wanted to. I’d been waiting all week for them to go home so I could retreat to the security of their apartment, the perfect comfort of their voices, their bodies. But now that it was real, I just wanted them to go, so they’d be safe, so they’d be out of the line of fire. Having them in my apartment felt like tempting the fates to try again.
He reached out with his other hand, and I knew he was about to take mine like he’d taken Keith’s, but I couldn’t let him. I scrambled up, breaking through their arms, heart pounding. Had I heard something in the bedroom? No. No, I hadn’t, I couldn’t have. No one was here but us.
“You guys should go,” I said, with all the firmness I could muster. “I’ve been going to bed early, so . . .” There. That sounded reasonable. Now leave before he comes out here. No, he was in jail. Jail. Jail, damn it. He wasn’t in the bedroom. He wasn’t lying in wait.
He wasn’t going to kill me the second the door shut behind them, but on the off chance he was, I wanted them safely on the other side.
“This doesn’t feel right,” Keith murmured. He stood. “You’re jumpy. Why are you jumpy?”
“I’m just tired.”
“Because I’m jumpy, and I know why, but you’re acting like nothing even happened.”
“I’m trying not to think about it too much. And I’m tired. You know.” Please leave before I disgrace myself. Please leave before he hurts you again.
Josh stood as well, and they moved toward the front door. It took all my strength and resolve not to cry. This was what I wanted, what I needed: them outside and safe. It was my only goal. I couldn’t go with them. I was the one who put them in danger.
“Love you.” Keith kissed me. “And I’m not fooled, like even a little. I know you’re all fucked up. When you want to talk about it, I’m here.”
“Thanks.”
Josh took my face in his hands and said nothing at all. He kissed me, and I couldn’t look into his beautiful eyes, eyes that had reminded me of the kinds of things in my life that had never let me down, never wavered.
I locked the door behind them and utterly lost control, muffling myself in my arms until I was sure they were gone. I took another one of my habitual showers, and when the water went cold, I let it. I couldn’t feel. I didn’t care. Only when I was stiff and shaking did I get out, wrapping myself in a towel. I didn’t hesitate. This time I opened the bathroom door and said, “Kill me if you want to. Go ahead.”
No one was there.
I fell, still wet, into bed.
Three hours later I woke up, panicked, from a dream in which Josh had been awake, and both he and Keith had been on their knees, begging for their lives. I didn’t understand how I could move around but I wasn’t trying to help them—until I realized I was the one they were begging. I was the one trying to kill them.
I got dressed, went downstairs, took a stack of emergency blankets out of the cabinet, and went to sleep in the booth.
Keith texted me all day on Friday. I could tell he was trying to make sure I was okay, so I kept responding, even though every text I sent felt more dishonest. I wasn’t okay. It wasn’t okay to jump whenever someone wanted to buy tickets. It wasn’t okay to dry heave in the bathroom because a car backfired outside and for a second I thought Joey was shooting.
I didn’t have to google PTSD to be pretty sure that’s what was happening, but knowing it didn’t help.
Of course they invited me over. And of course I said no. I went to the grocery store, which was too bright, too loud, with far too many colors, and bought enough almond milk and bread and peanut butter to last me for days. I didn’t have to leave the apartment Saturday unless I wanted to. Or Sunday. We’d show It’s a Wonderful Life at two and White Christmas at six. When it was over, we’d close for the night. But the weekend staff—who’d volunteered to work Christmas Eve and Christmas, same as they did every year—could handle it without me. We had a few gallons of eggnog and dozens of cookies to give out to the people who made our holiday showings a family tradition.
My parents had loved it. All my Christmas memories were in the theater. I’d neglected to decorate this year, but someone had managed it: the ticket booth was bedecked with shiny green garlands, and concessions had had a holiday makeover as well, with little holly berries and menorahs and a symbol I didn’t recognize but figured by process of elimination probably related to Kwanzaa.
The theater, like a living organism, had a life of its own, a role to play in the lives of people, in the town itself. I, Cameron, despite owning the Rhein, was largely redundant.
I told Keith good night early so he’d think I was going to bed, then ate a peanut butter and jelly sandwich sitting at my bedroom window, waiting to see the staff go home. When everyone was gone, I ventured downstairs. The ticket booth was an uncomfortable place to sleep, but at least when I woke up with a stiff neck and an aching back, I knew I’d actually slept.
Saturday. The first Saturday after the Cary Grant Film Festival ended. Christmas Eve.
Hiding in the apartment was a stupid idea. I was growing slowly to hate the apartment, where I never felt safe anymore. I was growing to hate myself.
I dressed in a good suit, put on a mistletoe pin someone had given me as a joke, and made myself a fixture in the lobby. I lingered, hoping to see them walk in. Keith liked Jimmy Stewart; I maintained a fantasy that they closed the drop-in center and came to the theater for It’s a Wonderful Life long after the movie started playing. I drank way too much coffee. I couldn’t find a place where I felt comfortable sitting for longer than five minutes. The ticket booth was off-limits because my staff was using it, concessions was running fine without me cluttering it up, and the back office was so stuffed with boxes and other “storage” items that I couldn’t even get the door all the way open.
I should clean it. Maybe use it as an office again. Or, my mind continued ruthlessly, I could move in there, put up a camp bed and a hot plate. Since it seemed more and more clear that my apartment was about to become a glorified closet and pantry.
In the end, the old projector booth was the best place to hide. It was no good as a permanent living arrangement (the floor sloped, and my parents had been relatively certain that the ceiling was full of asbestos), but I could hide there for a little while.
I fell asleep. Not too long. I fell asleep sitting in my dad’s old chair, drooling on my suit.
When I was somewhat awake and presentable, I went down into
the lobby, but by then White Christmas was clearing out. Eight thirty. I sent Iliana home early and started helping close. I could have sent all of them home and done the rest of the tasks, which would have at the very least killed some time, but I thought they might find it odd. The weekend staff were old-timers, and I didn’t like them to wonder if I was all right, so I put up a significantly better front than I’d been able to for Keith and Josh.
It worked, too. I even fooled myself for a little while. I was on my knees, spraying down the display case, when a perfectly normal thing happened. Someone came up beside me to ask a question. An entirely mundane event: “Do you need anything, Cameron?”
The sudden, unexpected proximity of another human being so startled me—terrified me—that I yelped and fell backward, the spray bottle shooting out of my hands while I scrambled away in a clumsy crab crawl.
Toni, who certainly hadn’t meant to scare me, took a step back. “Sorry. Floors are done. Anything else?” Her eyes took in my sprawl, but she didn’t mention it.
I knew it would make the rounds of the weekend staff, but hoped it wouldn’t penetrate all the way to the relatively newer (more in awe of me) weekday staff.
“No. Thank you.” I got up and brushed myself off, heart pounding, aware that now the red Sandwiches and Snacks sign was a dirty gray. My skin was tingling and saliva flooded my mouth. “No,” I said again, and bolted for the bathroom.
Since I hadn’t eaten, there wasn’t much in the way of stomach contents, just bile and acid. When the wave passed, I dried my eyes as well as I could (I hadn’t cried again, but being sick brought on its own kind of tears), and made my way back out.
They made a good show of not having been talking about me, but of course they had been. I pretended not to notice the extra attention of their looks. Ten minutes later everyone was gone and I was standing outside my securely locked theater, wondering if I should give up and go back inside.
My apartment. My parents had helped me paint it. The window in the bedroom still had a roller mark from where Mom had slipped while doing the wall. There was a scuff on the hardwood in front of the fridge where Dad and I had come down too hard when sliding the fridge into place and gouged the floor. Suddenly I was bitterly angry that the safest place in my world was now the most frightening.
I had to take it back. I unlocked the outer door (and shut it firmly behind me). I walked up the stairs. I unlocked the inner door. I locked it behind me. I stood there in my living room, damn it, full of my things, my gorgeous red velvet sofa, my deep-indigo curtains—
And started hyperventilating almost immediately. I’d stood here. He’d come in through the door, at first standing in the shadows, then emerging, right there. He’d had a gun, and I’d seen it so close I could still picture it, I could still remember how it smelled when it fired. Even better than the sound, I remembered the slightly acrid smell, the way my taste buds wanted to recoil from it.
I held him down right there, right there, near the dining table, behind the sofa. I could almost still see us. I could almost still see Keith with Josh’s head in his lap. I could still hear him crying.
Something moved. No.
Yes.
Something moved in the corner of my eye and I spun around, but nothing was there, of course nothing was there, but something had moved, hadn’t I seen something move?
I slid to the ground and pulled my knees to my chest, too afraid to go anywhere else.
I couldn’t do this. I couldn’t do this right now. I couldn’t stay here, hiding in a corner of my own apartment.
Back to the theater, then. The booth. I knew I should eat. I hadn’t eaten. I could make a sandwich. Or I could drive somewhere. What was open Christmas Eve? Not much. I could drive around. I could drive out to the pier and stand there and think about Josh, and Keith, and how we’d walked there once, weeks ago. It would be cold and dark and I wouldn’t be distracted by the lack of color in the world.
Or.
I could go to them.
My chest began to loosen up at the thought. I could go to them. I knew they were not overly religious about the holidays (I’d asked Josh), so it wouldn’t be like I was intruding on traditions.
Maybe it would be.
It was a bad idea. It was a bad idea, the worst, far worse than going down to the drop-in center in broad daylight, a plan I’d made and scrapped so frequently in the last week that all the arguments played out in my head without meaning.
I should go. I can act normal for an hour, then they won’t worry.
I can’t go. I’ll lose it if I even see them. I’ll lose it if they hug me. If they even come near me.
I have to go. I have to show that everything’s fine.
I can’t go. Everything isn’t fine, and the minute they see me, they’ll know.
I was ruining my suit, sitting on the ground, crying on it, puking while wearing it. Sweating the ugly sweat of fear and despair. I shoved my fist in my mouth to keep from screaming—for a second I didn’t think I’d be able to stop myself—and once I’d bitten down, I couldn’t help biting down harder.
I needed it all to stop. Biting helped, but I couldn’t chew on my hand all night.
This was bad. But I needed to see them, and if I couldn’t hold it together, I’d have to hope they would be too kind to kick me out. It was barely 10 p.m. and I couldn’t stand the idea of an entire night, an entire twelve hours, with nothing in the middle of it except nightmares.
I’d take them their Project Runway DVDs. I could return them, and they’d have me in, and maybe I could find a way of asking if I could stay the night on their sofa. I knew I’d actually sleep if I wasn’t in the apartment, and while I could stay in the booth again, it was cold, and loud, and I was afraid to stand up or move around, because I didn’t want anyone to see me and call the police. I couldn’t crouch on the floor of the booth for twelve hours, anyway.
It would be fine. Once they were asleep I could have my little fit, quietly, and they wouldn’t have to know. I just needed to keep it together until then.
But a blanket, and a sofa, and a place where there were other people nearby, where there had never been a man with a gun. Where every sound didn’t remind me of him, where I didn’t see things out of the corners of my eyes.
I had a plan. I dusted myself off and splashed water on my face (in the kitchen, because I couldn’t afford to be stuck in the bathroom right now). I put the DVDs in a cloth grocery bag. I had my keys. I put on my overcoat.
My eyes teared up as I went down the stairs because I so clearly remembered the first time I’d let them in, the first time they’d come over, when we’d lit candles in my mother’s candlesticks. They’d fit perfectly into my space, not disrupting it at all. I’d seen it as great tidings that I had friends who so eased into my life that I couldn’t remember the line, before which they had been strangers and after which they were friends.
It all seemed innocent and lost now. I started the Volvo with shaking hands and waited until the heater was blasting hot air to pull away from the curb.
They weren’t there.
I slid in the door when someone else went in. I was grateful for the suit, and the coat, and my general appearance as “unthreatening middle-class white male,” and I wondered, if I’d been Josh, if I would have received the same smile, the same “Oh, of course, go right ahead.” I went right ahead, to their door, where I knocked again in case they hadn’t heard the buzzer.
I didn’t text. I leaned, then I sat, and I considered texting or calling, but no, the moment I did that I was committed.
They weren’t home, which might be a sign that this was a very bad idea. It was almost certainly a sign. QYP had been closed for over an hour. There was no reason for them to be gone right now. So. This was a sign.
But still, I waited. I had nothing else to do. Nowhere else to go. I waited until eleven. Then I waited until it was nearly midnight.
They were at Josh’s parents’, of course. They were probably spendin
g the night. Mr. and Mrs. Walker (or was it Dr. and Mr. Walker?) were the type of people who really did Christmas. Maybe they had some grand breakfast planned, all hands on deck, everyone with a job to do, gathering at the same moment to share in a feast at a big table, with more food than the four of them could eat. No, wait, hadn’t they said there was more family than that? Josh probably had cousins and aunts and uncles, all of them gathering at this table, taking part in the holidays, in tradition, in ritual.
In family.
I rubbed my eyes again and finally forced myself to stand. I couldn’t sleep in the hallway leaning against their door. It was pathetic, and eventually someone would call the police. I’d find myself in the conference room again, trying to explain myself. Trying to tell the story in a way that didn’t make me seem desperate and crazy, though it was coming up on an hour and a half of sitting there, so “desperate and crazy” was, at this point, the baseline of my behavior.
I’d managed to create a bubble of heat with my body hunched over my knees. It popped the second I stood up, and I was shivering as I walked two flights of stairs to the ground floor. Slowly. I shuddered when the first blast of wind hit me. This was it. I looked both ways down the street, but no, they weren’t just now approaching.
They weren’t coming home.
I could text, but at this point I needed to forget I’d ever been here if I wanted to maintain any shred of dignity still remaining. I braced myself and made slow tracks down the sidewalk. Parking was about the same as always in downtown La Vista; I was a block and a half away, but grateful to not be on some side street up a hill.
I could sleep in the Volvo. The Volvo was safe. But no, too cold. And while in the ticket booth I was a little cold and a little worried someone might see me if I moved around too much, I still had access to a bathroom, to running water. In my car I wouldn’t have any of that, and I was pretty sure I’d end up in the conference room at the police station if I was busted on Christmas, asleep in my car.
The keys were warm in my hand for half a block. Then they were cold, so cold, like they sucked in the chill wind and transmitted it through my fingers. I’d be numb by the time I finally got to where I’d parked. Numb, and trying to unlock the car, though at least the heater still worked—