by James Smythe
But it isn’t. The rest of the parking lot is nothing but empty cars and they all look the same to him: all darkened windows, nobody sitting in them, nothing at all to see. ‘I’m sorry,’ he says to his daughters, as they pull out into the sunlight. He puts the window down because he still feels sick, but the air outside is so warm it doesn’t really help.
Amit’s phone buzzes the arrival of an email, waking him up. His hair is still damp from last night’s rain, that’s his first thought, and he didn’t brush his teeth when he got in. He can still taste the pizza and the familiar fuzz on his gums. He rushes to the bathroom, desperate to piss, and hears his phone buzz again as a reminder, and again. It’s incessant.
‘All right!’ he shouts. He finishes in the bathroom and goes to the phone, picking it up and silencing the alert. ‘Fucking idiot thing,’ he says to it. He sees the notification: the new video from ClearVista. He presses play and waits a second while it streams to him; and then he watches Laurence and the gun and his terrified, huddled family. He doesn’t know what it is, or how this has happened, but it’s worse. It’s gotten worse, and there’s no way that can be.
He tries to call Laurence, to see if he’s seen this yet – and praying that he hasn’t, because maybe he can still manage this – but the phone goes straight to the answering service; so he calls Hershel instead, who answers without a hello, acting as if their conversation hasn’t stopped.
‘Amit,’ he says, ‘long time no see.’
‘I just had another email,’ Amit replies.
‘What?’
‘I got ClearVista to make another version of the video. To run the data again, in case there was a mistake.’
‘You have to send it to me.’ Hershel sounds annoyed; as if this challenge has been stolen away from him in its prime.
‘On it as we speak.’ He pings it over, and then he waits while Hershel watches it: listening to Hershel’s reaction as the sound – the sobbing that runs through the background, and the crack at the end, loud and jarring – fills the room and the phone call; and then Hershel comes back on the line.
‘Holy shit,’ Hershel says. ‘Holy shit.’
‘You have to help me,’ Amit says.
‘Doing my best,’ Hershel replies. Amit hangs up and tries Laurence again, but there’s no answer; so he calls the Walkers’ home line, but again there’s nothing. He thinks about driving up there, because he’s worried. He imagines a worst case, what could have happened. He tries not to think about it.
‘You left them alone, Laurence. Lane said you smashed your phone, then chased after this man?’ Deanna says. She has shut the bedroom door, keeping the pair of them blocked off from the rest of the house. He fidgets on the bed, looking at the wardrobe, the window, the door: all the points of exit. ‘Show me the video,’ she says. He lies to her and tells her again that it’s nothing. She shakes her head and walks out, down the stairs. He chases her, begging her to stop. He’s in tears. She tells him that she has to watch it, or they can’t move past this. There’s just no way past it if they aren’t in this together.
He shows it to her on her tablet. He explains that the first video was different. She doesn’t speak, so he talks more, filling the air between them, because he feels that he has to say something. Her face is rigid after she watches it and he can’t gauge how she feels. She doesn’t touch him, or look at him. He shows her the results from the report, and he talks to her about those – how they cannot be correct, they simply can’t, and how he answered the questions truthfully, and how there’s never been anything like this in his life before. She still doesn’t talk. She watches the video again. This time she zooms in on it to get a better look at her own face, at the faces of her daughters.
‘It isn’t real,’ he tells her, over and over.
‘I know,’ she finally says. ‘Of course it isn’t.’
‘Because it can’t be.’ He sits next to her, and he tries to take her hand. She flinches, shifting away from him, but doesn’t stand up. ‘I don’t know what to say. Only, this isn’t my fault,’ he insists.
‘Maybe it is,’ she replies. It’s cruel to say that when he wants reassurance, but she means it, and not just this video: that his distractions, his desires for his career … maybe she can go back in time and pin Sean’s death on them, somehow, because maybe he was distracted when Sean died, thinking about anything other than his family; and now this, the fact that he’s one of the highest-profile politicians in the country right now, and the fact that he advocates things that maybe aren’t popular, and how that is always going to lead to reactionaries and people trying to drive their concerns home. She tells him that he’s not here, she says that much, and he says that it’s for all of their futures. He asks her why she suddenly doesn’t understand that, because she used to. She used to absolutely get that.
She says, ‘You brought this into our home, Laurence. It’s your fault, that’s how I see it.’ She wants to call the police, she says. She wants to get to the bottom of it. He says that they can’t, because of what it will do. Doesn’t she understand? Their privacy is the most important thing and this will be all over the Internet. It’s not a threat, it’s a mistake. It’s something that barely even exists. They have to keep together and keep themselves to themselves. This family is all that they’ve got left. This is an argument. A rarity: it’s one with no possible resolution, shouting for the sake of breathing in the air and then getting it exhumed.
In Alyx’s bedroom, Lane sits with her on the bed. She plays her songs, telling her why she should listen to them, and failing to persuade her younger sister. They put on videos on the computer, watching cats jumping into boxes and people dancing to stupid songs, and they both cackle with laughter, laughing loudly because neither of them really wants to hear the argument happening downstairs.
Amit sits alone in his apartment. He watches the new video again. He rubs his face in his hands. He tries to sleep, but it’s hard: because he sees their faces and the gun and he wonders what it actually means. He wonders if the video might somehow be right.
8
Laurence turns the living room into an office, of sorts. He sets his laptop up on the coffee table and puts his telephone next to it, and then a pad of A4 paper, the top sheet torn off. He writes Agenda on the first ruled line, and then makes bullet-pointed notes beneath, one by one. He hasn’t Googled himself in a few days, so that’s the first thing on the list. He has to see whatever is being said about him and he has to take control of this situation, he’s told himself. He has a career to think about, and a family.
Alyx is sitting next to him on the sofa playing a game, where she has to build a castle and try to survive an assault from cartoonish animal enemies. She presses the screen to construct ramparts and battlements and hire soldiers. Laurence watches this over her shoulder and wonders if he shouldn’t hire some security for the family, to keep them all protected. Maybe it’s ridiculous, this early in his campaign, but there’s likely a fund for it, an amount in the senatorial coffers to put into that. He thinks about the man in the jacket, and how the video must have been altered or tampered with, because that’s something that resembles logic; and he thinks that maybe those things are reason enough. He has enemies. He’ll have to sell it to the delegates well enough that they’ll authorize the spend, and sell it without mentioning the video – so far it’s only three of them who know, him and Deanna and Amit, and none of them will tell another living soul. The threat of the press seems like the most viable excuse. He can be vague about what the threats are; the delegates will certainly understand that, in this media climate.
Lane comes into the kitchen. She’s in a T-shirt and shorts and she yawns and stretches and waves good morning to Alyx, who waves back.
‘What are you doing today?’ Laurence asks.
‘I’m going out,’ Lane says.
‘You should stay around here with us. I’ve called Alyx in sick and we’re having a sofa day, aren’t we, Pumpkin.’ He pokes Alyx in her belly and sh
e giggles and flops to one side.
‘I’m getting inked again.’
‘More?’
She nods. ‘Here.’ She lifts her T-shirt at the side, showing him the plant. It’s stretched around towards her back, and there’s the trace outline, in black, not yet painted in, of a flower on her shoulder blade; only it’s not a flower he knows, instead being made of a sharp geometric pattern, almost as if it were created with a gyroscope, all looped, intersecting lines. ‘I designed it,’ she says, ‘to remind me of now. I drew it, and I thought it would look good.’ She’s defensive, because she’s used to answering questions about this stuff. She’s got her guard up in advance of being told that it’s bad, or embarrassing, or that she’ll regret it later in her life.
‘It’s nice,’ he tells her. He thinks that he’s telling the truth, even: it’s a good design, and complicated, but executed well. ‘You should do more of that, you know.’
‘The ink?’
‘No! Maybe not that. I meant the art. Did you draw it?’
‘On the computer.’
‘It’s good.’
‘Okay,’ she says. ‘Thanks.’ She pours herself a drink and goes to leave the kitchen.
‘Listen, you have to be careful, okay?’ He looks at her as she stands in the doorway, and he tries to imagine her in ten, fifteen, twenty years time. He wonders if she’ll ever look like her mother; settle down, grow her hair, get past this phase – which, he tells himself, is surely all it is.
‘I am.’
‘No, I’m telling you. You have to be. This is all getting serious.’ She looks at him blankly. ‘This is all getting serious. There are nut-jobs out there, Laney.’
‘I know. I’m fine. I’ll be with William.’ Laurence hasn’t met William, but he’s seen pictures. He’s huge. Were he not with Lane’s crowd, he’d be on some football team somewhere, getting every football college scholarship scout in the US drooling. But as it is, he’s got a shaved head and thick-rimmed glasses, plays bass in a band, and has the words Straight Edge printed across his thorax. Recent changes, by all accounts, in order to impress Lane.
‘Okay.’ He doesn’t say: I’d give anything to keep you safe. He lets her go upstairs and get dressed, and when she reappears, barely wearing any more clothing than she slept in, he’s lost all track of time and he’s just been standing there, thinking about when she was a little kid. They’ve had her for seventeen years now. She’s essentially indelible. Some days – and it’s rare that this happens, but – some days he forgets about Sean for a few hours, and then the memory is back, that he was once there; like a word on the tip of the tongue, waiting to be uttered. But Lane … She is their tattoo.
Deanna’s feet hit the pavements hard. She sticks to the residential roads, which all look similar. The rain started as soon as she left the house, violent and pounding, so she spends most of the time looking down, avoiding both puddles and cars pulling out of driveways. The rain makes it hard to hear, it’s so heavy, and the cars are getting quieter, hybrids pulling backwards with a creepy silence. She runs to clear her head, to put everything out of her mind.
She runs through puddles on purpose, splashing the water out, seeing how hard her sneakers can collide with the surface of the water. She wants to tell Laurence that this needs to be over. She doesn’t know what the video is – it makes her head hurt to even think of it, almost, because it makes so little sense to her – but she knows that they wouldn’t have been sent it were it not for who her husband is now. He’s not the man that she married. That man worked long days and the occasional weekend, but he was present. So, he can leave the race now with no shame at all. He can, she thinks with something approaching guilt, blame it on Sean. He can say that their son’s passing is hanging over them; a dark spot that they cannot erase.
She crosses an intersection and watches the kids going to school, walking along hand in hand or in gaggles of three or more, or waiting for the bus that comes along to take them off. She turns the corner, back onto the main road; and there’s the church, Staunton’s sole house of prayer. The doors are open. She takes this as a sign.
The church is an anomaly in the town: it’s Catholic, one of the first buildings built here, and preserved because of it. Eschewing the modern facelifts that many buildings are getting, unwilling to succumb to technology, it instead relies on a single new beam of wood to act as a joist where the ceiling is slightly bowed. The pews are the originals, cracking and chipped and even prone to rotting in the humid summers, but still here. It’s not like the church is rich, but the town gives where it can. After Sean’s funeral, which was held in one of the larger churches outside town – they discussed it, and decided that it was better that Sean wasn’t buried on their doorstep, crammed into the small lot that the church owned (and part of the reason would be the draw of his body on their doorstep, so close that they could never forget it, that they would be able to see him whenever they wanted) – they gave money to help. Their priest, Father Caulk, performed the rites for them, at their request, because he knew Sean. Deanna has always loved this church, ever since she came here as a kid. The community barely uses it, and she sort of likes that. It’s peaceful; and while she might not be religious, or not as much as her mother would have had her be, she likes the peace of it, and the smell. It’s usually quiet enough; only ever busy on Sundays, and even then it’s still not exactly crammed.
Deanna picks a pew and sits down, and she looks at the altar and the crucifix that hangs behind it, and the gold-paint that’s fading from the pillars. She shuts her eyes and says a prayer that she remembers, that’s wound so tightly into her subconscious that it spills out without her even thinking. She’s not sure that she believes in this God, not specifically; but she has faith in something. It’s a faith that has been tested the last couple of years – she has wondered, as everybody who suffers loss wonders, what sort of God would have taken Sean, who was young and innocent and a good boy – but there’s something there. Because she needs to believe that there’s something after this. Sean has to be somewhere else.
Father Caulk comes out of the side room and sees her, and he raises his hand in a wave. He doesn’t want to interrupt – not everybody who comes here wants to talk – but Deanna waves back, and she starts speaking immediately, almost as if she’s apologizing for being in here. For being caught.
‘I didn’t mean to disturb you,’ she says.
‘You didn’t. Take your time,’ he says.
‘Okay,’ she replies. ‘Thanks.’
‘Do you want to talk?’ He stands at the end of the pew. Deanna stares past him at the confessional box. She wonders if she has anything to confess. He follows her gaze. ‘You want me to open them up?’
‘No,’ she says. ‘But thank you.’
‘How are your parents?’ he asks.
‘Fine,’ Deanna says. ‘Dad is fine. Mom’s bored.’
‘More or less than when they still lived here?’ He grins. ‘You wish them the best from me.’
‘I will.’ He puts his hand on her arm and squeezes it, the universal sign of condolence, and then he opens the door to the confessional, to the side that he is meant to sit in. She sees a bottle of water in there, in case he’s there for the long haul.
‘I was opening it up anyway.’ That’s a lie and Deanna knows it, but he steps inside and pulls the door shut, and there’s a little light above the other door that comes one. Green, beckoning her towards it. She’s still sweaty from the run and she needs a shower; but she sidles along the pew and opens the door and climbs in, taking a seat on the small wooden stool. In front of her, grated metal, hiding them from each other, as if he won’t know who she is. Neither of them speaks for the longest time, and then he clears his throat.
‘Do you know what you’re meant to say?’ he asks. ‘Can you remember?’
‘No,’ she says.
‘Bless me Father, for I have sinned. It’s been … Then you say how long it’s been since you last confessed.’
‘Bless me Father, for I have sinned,’ she repeats. ‘I haven’t been to confession since I got pregnant for the first time. Seventeen years.’
‘That’s a lot to cover in one session,’ he says and she laughs. ‘Let’s start with what’s on your mind today.’
‘I’ve kept secrets,’ she says, ‘from my husband. I’ve been writing a book about our son; about me, as well. Laurence isn’t in it, because … I don’t know.’
‘That’s not such a bad secret,’ Caulk says.
‘No, I suppose not.’ She can’t see him through the mesh, only the shape of a person, dark and mysterious. It’s easier this way, she thinks.
‘Will you tell him about it?’
‘Yes,’ she says, ‘eventually. I think I want to publish it.’
‘That’s good, isn’t it?’
‘I think so.’
‘There’s a “but” there.’
‘Laurence is having trouble. This is between us, isn’t it?’
‘Of course, everything here is. But I don’t even know who you are to tell anybody if it wasn’t,’ he says. She hears the smile on his face.
‘He’s been suffering. He’s been sick.’ Such a relief, to use the S word; and here, out of her lips, it sounds appropriate. As if she’s been searching for the right word for so long, and it’s been there, trapped below tongues the entire time. ‘He’s been getting thinner, and he’s been sleeping badly.’ He is unraveling, she thinks.
‘What do you think’s caused it?’
‘He’s under so much pressure. He shouldn’t be doing what he’s doing. And now this video’s appeared, and it’s not fair. It’s not him.’
‘A video?’
She sighs. This is private, and yet this is also catharsis. ‘A mock-up, a thing about whether he can be president: and the video is scary. It’s not a man that I know. It’s not my Laurence. It’s like when somebody sees something you just have never seen in another person? It’s like it’s lifted a veil, so that I can see it as well. It’s forced me to look at him, really look at him.’