Survivor's Guilt and Other Stories

by Greg Herren

  I thanked him and asked, “Do you mind telling me what was so awful about being with Jake?”

  “He was very controlling,” he replied, his face darkening. He shrugged. “He didn’t want me to work—didn’t really want me to do anything besides go to the gym and be there in the house ready to do whatever he wanted me to.”

  “I see,” I replied, trying to summon the nerve to ask the question I really wanted to ask. In my mind I could see the multiple bruises on Sebastian’s arms and legs. Did he hit you? Was he violent? But I couldn’t say the words.

  “Call me.” He reached out and touched my shoulder gently, a smile on his pretty face.

  I nodded and he went back behind the counter. It wasn’t until I looked at the little card when I was in my car that I realized that I still didn’t remember his name.

  Alone, in my house, I wondered what to do.

  It was clear Jake wasn’t right in the head, and I worried about Sebastian. The bruising could only mean one thing. I didn’t believe for a minute he was that clumsy—watching him at the gym I could see he was graceful. Despite the awkward way he stood, his movements were always fluid. Besides, I never once saw him bump into anything at the gym.

  Apparently, he was only clumsy in Jake’s house.

  Would my intrusion be welcome? I was his only friend—he had told me that often enough. There was no one else he could turn to, no one else he could trust.

  But he could just walk out, I reminded myself. No one is ever trapped anywhere, not in this day and time.

  He could always come to my house.

  Tomorrow, I decided, at the gym I will say something, offer him my house.

  But he didn’t show up at the gym the next day, and he didn’t answer when I called.

  It was curious, I thought as I went through my own workout, lost in thought and not really paying attention to what I was doing. It wasn’t like him. He never missed the gym—he’d often said it was one of the few times he could get out of the house. I worried and I wondered, and finally gave up on the workout as a lost cause and went home.

  “Darling, have you heard?” Lorita breathed when I answered my phone later that afternoon.

  “Heard what?” I replied absently, thinking she was slurring her words already and it was only two in the afternoon.

  “Darling, Jake went and shot that boy of his!” Her voice dripped with malice, and as the news went through me I couldn’t help but wonder how long she had hated Jake Lamauthe.

  “Shot him?” I replied.

  “Shot him dead,” she said, not even bothering to hide her glee. “He claims it was self-defense, of course, that he caught the boy stealing from him and he attacked him, but apparently the police aren’t buying his story.”

  “They aren’t?”

  “Supposedly they struggled over the gun, and it went off—at least that’s what Jake is saying.” Her voice sounded smug. “But the police don’t believe it for a moment. Apparently his cleaning woman told them Jake used to smack the boy around.”

  “How do you know all this?” I asked, playing with the pen on the table next to the phone. “And when did all this happen?”

  “Last night, around two in the morning.” I could hear ice clicking together as she took another drink. “His cleaning woman, you know, also cleans for Binky Claypool, and she told Binky everything this morning.”

  And now everyone in Uptown knows, I thought. “I have to go.”

  “But—”

  I pushed the Off button and put the phone back down.

  Poor Sebastian, I thought as I filled a glass with gin. Maybe—maybe I should have said something.

  I drank alone in the dark for the rest of the day, unable to forget that haunted look on his face.

  Housecleaning

  The smell of bleach always reminded him of his mother.

  It was, he thought as he filled the blue plastic bucket with hot water from the kitchen tap, probably one of the reasons he rarely used it. His mother had used it for practically everything. Everywhere she’d lived had always smelled slightly like bleach. She was always cleaning. He had so many memories of his mother cleaning something; steam rising from hot water pouring from the sink spigot, the sound of brush bristles as she scrubbed the floor (“mops only move the dirt around, good in a pinch but not for real cleaning”), folding laundry scented by Downy, washing the dishes by hand before running them through the dishwasher (“it doesn’t wash the dishes clean enough, it’s only good for sterilization”), running the vacuum cleaner over carpets and underneath the cushions on the couch. In her world, dirt and germs were everywhere and constant vigilance was the only solution. She judged other people for how slovenly they looked or how messy their yards were or how filthy their houses were. He remembered one time—when they were living in the apartment in Wichita—watching her struggle at a neighbor’s to not say anything as they sat in a living room that hadn’t been cleaned or straightened in a while, the way her fingers absently wiped away dust on the side table as she smiled and made conversation, the nerve in her cheek jumping, the veins and cords in her neck trying to burst through her olive skin, her voice strained but still polite.

  When the tea was finished and the cookies just crumbs on a dirty plate with what looked like egg yolk dried onto its side, she couldn’t get the two of them out of there fast enough. Once back in the sterile safety of their own apartment, she’d taken a long, hot shower—and made him do the same. They’d never gone back there, the neighbor woman’s future friendliness rebuffed politely yet firmly, until they’d finally moved away again.

  “People who keep slovenly homes are lazy and cannot be trusted,” she’d told him after refusing the woman’s invitation a second time. “A sloppy house means a sloppy soul.”

  Crazy as she seemed to him at times, he had to admit she’d been right about that. In school after school, kids who didn’t keep their desks or lockers neat had never proven trustworthy or likable. It had been hard to keep his revulsion hidden behind the polite mask as he walked to his next class and someone inevitably opened a locker to a cascade of their belongings. He’d just walked faster to get away from the laughter of other kids and the comic fumbling of the sloppy student as he tried to gather the crumpled papers and broken pencils and textbooks scattered on the shiny linoleum floor.

  Take Josh, for instance. He’d been cleaning up after Josh for almost eight years now. Josh didn’t appreciate the rule of everything has its place and everything in its place.

  But he wasn’t going to have to clean up after Josh again. Just this one last time.

  Steam was rising out of the bucket, making his forehead bead with sweat. The hot afternoon sun was coming through the big bay windows in the kitchen. No matter how low he turned the air-conditioning, the kitchen never seemed to get really cool. But the heat and humidity was part of the price of living in New Orleans, like he always said, and the floor was a disgrace.

  He lifted the bucket out of the sink after adding more bleach. The fumes made his eyes water and his back was a bit sore, but the floor needed to be scrubbed. That meant hands and knees and a hand brush. It had been a while since he’d taken the time to do the floor properly. He poured some of the water onto the floor and watched as it slowly spread and ran to the left side. The tile was hideous, of course. He’d bought the house despite the green-and-white-and-beige patterned tile in the kitchen, faded and yellowed from years of use. It was one of those projects he figured he’d have time for at some point, either pulling up the tile and replacing it himself or hiring someone to come in to do it. He’d been in the house now for five years and still hadn’t gotten around to it. He pulled the yellow rubber gloves back on up to his elbows and got down on his knees and started scrubbing with the brush.

  He liked the sound of the bristles as they scoured the tile. He’d gotten used to the ugly tile, he supposed as he ran the brush over them, not really noticing when he used the kitchen. Maybe it was time to do something about the kitchen. The
window frames were yellowed from age, and the walls themselves, a pale green that sort of went with the ugly tile, looked dirty. There was no telling when was the last time the kitchen had been done, and as he looked around as he scrubbed he could see other things he didn’t seem to notice before—the thin layer of grease on the stove top around the dials and timer, the filth accumulated under the vent screen over the stove, the yellowing of the refrigerator, the spots all over the black glassy front of the dishwasher. The windows also needed to be cleaned.

  “Your home will never look clean if the windows are filthy,” he heard his mother saying as she mixed vinegar and water to use, “but a dirty house will look cleaner if the windows are clean. And you can’t let the windows go for long, else water spots and the dirt will become permanent, and the dirt will also scratch the glass. And you can never ever rub away scratches on glass.”

  Should have put that on her tombstone, he thought with a smile as he dunked the brush back into the bucket and moved to a new spot.

  Not that she had one.

  “She’d be ashamed of this kitchen,” he said aloud into the silence. His iPod had reached the end of the playlist and he hadn’t stopped what he was doing to cue up another. He’d wiped dust off the iHome stereo system on the kitchen counter before starting the music up in the first place. “But she didn’t work full-time, either.”

  That made him smile. His mother hadn’t worked nine to five, maybe, but she had worked.

  She was always very careful to make sure she wore gloves when she cleaned, and to make sure she wore a gauze mask over her face, her hair pulled back and tucked into the back of her shirt. Cleanliness might have been next to godliness, but she wasn’t risking her skin or her hair to do it. His earliest memories of her were of her brushing the thick bluish-black hair that she always wore long before going to bed, putting cleansing masks on her face and creams on her hands. Her beauty rituals were almost as complicated as her cleaning habits. Every night without fail, she sat at her vanity and removed her makeup before putting on the mask of unguents that she claimed kept her skin youthful and her pores clean. When money was tight she made it herself, from cucumbers and aloe and olive oil and some other ingredients he couldn’t remember—but when times were good she bought the most expensive products at the most expensive department stores. Once the mask was firmly in place she brushed her hair exactly one hundred times, counting the strokes as she went. Once her hair was lustrous and silky, she rubbed lotions and oils into her hands, trimming her cuticles and filing her nails, and then retreated to the bathroom to scrub the mask from her face. Her skin always glowed as she got into bed.

  And she was always able to find some man willing to help out a pretty widow lady and her son.

  “I do what I have to do,” was all she would say to him when she went out for the evening, lightly scented, with minimal makeup applied, just enough to hide some things and draw attention to others. “Remember to not let anyone in if they knock, okay?” She would kneel down beside him or, when he was older, go up on her tippy-toes to give him a kiss on the cheek.

  He only met the ones who lasted more than a few dates, the ones who had money or might lead to something. He was never sure—still wasn’t—what exactly she got up to with the men. She wasn’t a prostitute, or at least didn’t consider herself to be one. But she hustled the men somehow, got money and jewelry and presents from them, certainly enough for them to live on. She always had cash, never had credit cards. Sometimes the men would give her a car to use, but they never took it with them whenever they moved on. Sometimes when they moved on it was in the middle of the night, in a rush, hurriedly packing everything they possibly could and heading for the train station and catching the next train out of town. They never wound up anywhere that didn’t have a train station or an airport.

  She wouldn’t ride the bus.

  “Why do we have to change our names every time we move?” he’d asked her once, on a late night train out of St. Louis, as the cornfields of Illinois flew past, barely visible by the light of a silvery half-moon. He was maybe nine or ten at the time, old enough to ask some questions, old enough to start wondering why they moved around so much, old enough to wonder why they had no family, no roots, no credit cards, no home.

  She’d smiled at him, leaning down to kiss his cheek, smelling vaguely of lilies-of-the-valley. “We don’t want people to be able to find us, do we?”

  “I don’t even know what my real name is anymore,” he’d grumbled.

  She laughed in response. “I think in this next city you’ll be David,” she tapped her index finger against her pointed, catlike chin, “and I’ll be Lily. What should our last name be?”

  They’d settled on Lindquist that time, for some reason he couldn’t really remember now, and they’d chosen Pittsburgh as their new home, their new city, their new adventure. They’d rented a little two-bedroom cottage in a suburb, and she’d put him into the local school. There was enough money so they didn’t have to worry for a while, and he liked it there. He liked the cozy little suburb with the nice kids in the neighborhood and the nice teachers in the school and the friendly neighbors who liked to give him cookies when he brought them their newspaper up from the curb. He liked it there so much that he hoped they’d stay there for a while. He liked being David Lindquist. He was making friends, and sometimes, after he’d gone to bed and turned out the light, he’d pray to God—any god—that they’d be able to stay there, put down roots, and not ever move again.

  They were there three months before she started getting itchy, when afternoon coffees with the neighbors and discussions about what was happening on Days of Our Lives and gossip about other women in the suburb began to bore her. She’d said they wouldn’t have to worry about money for a long time, but he should have known better than to think she would become another housewife, that being the widowed Mrs. Lindquist who kept such a clean house and was raising such a nice son and always had time to listen to anyone who had a problem would begin to bore her. She started going out in the evenings, after he’d gone to bed—she never said anything, always checked his room before she left, so he would pretend to sleep until he heard the front door shut, then he’d look out the window and see her getting into the taxi waiting at the curb. Maybe it was because she had money socked away that she got so careless this time, that she didn’t cover her tracks as well as she usually did.

  It was three in the morning when a cry woke him from a dream about Star Wars, when he got out of bed and went into the living room where a big man he’d never seen before had his mother pressed up against the wall and was choking her. She was trying to get away.

  He didn’t mean to swing the baseball bat so hard.

  “You’ve killed him,” she said finally, her throat raspy and her neck bruised from his thick hands. She staggered a bit as she stepped over to the body, kneeling down and feeling for a pulse in his neck. She looked up at him, her hair disheveled, her face wild. “I’m glad you killed him.”

  “We need to call the police—”

  She pressed her index finger against his lips to stop him from speaking. “We never call the police,” she whispered, a half-smile on her bruised lips. “Never call the police.” She staggered into the kitchen and came back with one of her kitchen towels. She wrapped it around the man’s head, tying it into a knot. “Help me drag him into the bathroom.”

  The little cottage had two bathrooms, one in the hallway that he used and a private one off her bedroom, which he never got to use. It seemed to take forever, and the dead man seemed to weigh a lot more than he should, but they finally got him to the hall bathroom and into the tub. “There,” she panted, “we can leave him there for now.” She pushed him back out of the room and into the hallway, shutting the door behind her. “You can shower in my bathroom tomorrow morning. We need to clean up the living room.” She laughed, a harsh, cynical laugh. “Thank God I didn’t pick a house that’s carpeted.”

  More of her wisdom—never pick
a home with carpet.

  “I haven’t thought about Pittsburgh in years,” he said with a laugh, as he dumped the dirty bucket of water back into the sink and reached for the mop. He dragged the mop through the bleach water on the floor, wringing it back out into the sink before mopping up more of the water. The floor where he hadn’t mopped yet looked even dingier in comparison to where he’d already cleaned, and his back was already starting to ache a little bit. But now that he’d started, he couldn’t not finish.

  “Always finish what you’ve started” was another one of her sayings.

  He’d come home from school that next day to find her sitting in the living room, coolly cutting up credit cards into a big mixing bowl sitting on the coffee table. A leather wallet was on the table next to the bowl, along with an expensive-looking gold watch and a man’s ring, also gold. A wad of cash was on the other side of the bowl. “Almost finished,” she said, her tone almost gay as he shut the front door. She nodded toward the wad of money. “Almost two thousand dollars, David!”

  He didn’t say anything, just walked down the hallway to the bathroom. The door was open, but there was also a horrible antiseptic smell coming from there he could smell long before he got to the doorway, where it was so bad his eyes watered. But the bathtub was empty.

  “Caustic lye,” his mother said from the end of the hallway, her hands on her hips. “You’ll want to stay out of there for a few days. You can just use my shower until it’s safe.”

  “What—what happened to him?” He managed to stammer the words out.

  “I told you, caustic lye,” she replied with a roll of her eyes. “Now do your homework, I’m going to start making dinner.”

  No one ever came looking for the man, and after a few more days of terror whenever he saw a police car or heard a siren, he began to settle back into life as David Lindquist. He never knew who the man was—he stopped at the library on his way home from school for a couple of weeks to look through the newspaper without her knowing, but there was never anything in there about him, or if there was, there was no picture. It was almost like he’d never existed, and there were times he wondered if the man ever had, if he hadn’t maybe dreamed hitting a man in the head with a baseball bat to stop him from strangling his mother. But then he would remember the sound of the bat connecting with bone, the way the skull had given, the gurgling sound the man made in his throat as he went down.