Riptide

by Michael Prescott

  “The manager says your rent is overdue,” she said.

  “Fuck him.”

  “It’s March fourth. You’re supposed to pay on the first of the month. We’ve talked about this.”

  “Talk, talk, all you ever do is talk.”

  “We can set up automatic payments from your bank account, the way we discussed —”

  “I don’t want any damn computers digging around in my money. They’ll steal it. Like you want to.”

  “I don’t want your money, Richard.”

  “Like hell you don’t.” He jerked away from her, shoulders hunching. “That’s all you care about. It’s the only reason you’re here.”

  Richard, still unaffected by the disease when their mother died, had inherited the liquid assets and family papers. By now he should have been ruled incompetent to handle the money, but she knew that if she ever tried, it would only exacerbate his paranoia. Anyway, there wasn’t a lot of money left.

  The thought of the family documents in his possession raised a possibility in her mind. “Did you ever look through those old papers? The ones Mom passed down to you?”

  “Maybe I did, maybe I didn’t.”

  “Was there anything in there about our great-grandfather?”

  “Who cares about him? He’s dead, dead as a door nail, dead and buried.”

  The word dead reverberated in her, eliciting a series of sympathetic vibrations that brought up images of the skeletons in the crypt. “I know he’s dead, but...did any of the documents say when he moved into the house? Was he the original owner?”

  He gave her a shrewd look. “Lots of questions. Why so curious?”

  “I found something in the cellar that may have belonged to him.”

  “Found what?”

  “It’s not important.”

  “So it’s a secret.”

  “Richard …”

  He picked up a pair of scissors from a table. Large scissors with long sharp blades. He worked the handles, snipping at the air.

  “You’re always keeping secrets from me,” he said, his voice sliding into a lower register, a dangerous rasp. “Hiding things behind my back.”

  She stayed very still, trying not to fixate on the scissors. “Do you remember anything about our great grandfather? Anything at all?”

  He kept opening and shutting the scissors, snip snip snip. “If I do, I’m not telling. I can keep secrets, too.”

  No help there.

  A wordless interval stretched between them. “Are you sleeping okay?” she asked.

  “What is this, an interrogation? You want a urine sample? Want to run an ink blot test on me?”

  The scissors flashed, catching the light from the window.

  She watched him. He was uncomfortably close to her. He could be on top of her in one long stride.

  In psychology, a variant of political correctness insisted that schizophrenics were less dangerous than the general population. A comforting thought, except it wasn’t true. Schizophrenics were paranoid, and paranoid people could be violent. They could lash out unpredictably, ripping, biting—stabbing.

  She knew the warning signs. Rapid breathing. Loud talk. Restlessness. Richard was showing all those signs now.

  “I’m just making conversation.” She held her voice steady.

  “Mom sent you here.” He waved the scissors, quick slashing strokes. “I fucking know it. Mom’s always on my case, telling me to get it together, take my meds, be a good little boy.”

  “Mom’s dead, Richard. She’s been dead for five years.”

  “Oh...right.” He planted the tips of the scissors on the window sill and twirled them. “Right.”

  “I called you a little while ago. I called three times. Why didn’t you pick up?”

  “Didn’t know who was calling.”

  “The only way to know is to pick up. Or get an answering machine.”

  “Answering machines record your conversations. Not just conversations on the phone. All your conversations, with everybody. It’s their way of keeping tabs on people.”

  She didn’t ask who they were. “If the phone rings, you need to answer it.”

  He took a step toward her. “I’ll answer the phone when I want to. Right now I don’t want to. There’s nothing you can do about it. So just back off.”

  “I’m concerned about your welfare, Richard. That’s all.”

  “Yeah.” He snorted, like an agitated horse. “Real concerned. You care so much.”

  “I do care.” She wanted to reach out to him, but she knew physical contact would be a mistake. “You make it hard sometimes.”

  “Blame me. Always me.” He switched the scissors from hand to hand, back and forth.

  “Maybe you should put those down.”

  “I’m not a kid anymore. It’s not like I’m running with scissors.” He clicked the blades like castanets. “You’re dirty,” he added. “All scuffed up, like an old shoe.”

  Cobwebs and dust were all over her. “I was in the cellar. There was damage from the quake.”

  “Damage to the seller. What was he selling?”

  “The basement. Of our house.”

  “Yeah, like I don’t know what a cellar is. Like everything has to be explained.” He set down the scissors on a table. “I’m a doctor, you know. I’m an MD. That’s more than you are.” He’d been halfway through his first-year residency when his life went off course. Medication had only slowed—not halted—his decline. “You can’t even stand the sight of blood. That’s why you quit.”

  “It wasn’t blood. It was a cadaver. A dead body.”

  “Dead body? Where? In the cellar?”

  She looked at him, startled. “Why would you say that?”

  He ignored the question. “You found something that belonged to our great-grandfather in the cellar. Damage down there. What kind of damage?”

  “Part of a wall fell down. Just some old bricks.”

  “Bricks. Bridge. London Bridge.” He sang tunelessly. “London Bridge is falling down…”

  “Why did you ask about a body in the cellar?” It had to have been one of his quirky associative jumps. He said so many crazy things that sometimes he hit on the truth by chance.

  “Belonged to our great-grandfather,” he repeated. “He came over from London. Falling down, falling down …”

  “Stop that. Answer me. What do you know about him? What made you say what you said?”

  “London Bridge is falling down, my fair lady …!” He fixed her with his stare. “Was it a fair lady in the cellar? Did she fall down?”

  “Richard,” she said slowly, “if you know anything about the cellar or our great-grandfather, I want you to tell me. Please.”

  “What’ll you give me if I do?”

  “Anything, whatever you want.”

  “I want the house.”

  “You know you can’t live there. You can barely manage this place. Just tell me whatever you know.”

  “I know it should have been my house. That’s what I know.”

  She decided he had no secret information. He was only free-associating, riffing on her own conversational tacks.

  “You know how that worked,” she said. “You got the money, I got the house. You thought it was fair at the time. You didn’t even want the house, remember?”

  “Bullshit. Why wouldn’t I want the house? Think I want to live here? Like this? In this shit? You took everything from me. It all worked out pretty good for you, didn’t it?”

  She felt a burning pressure behind her eyes. “I’m not happy about—about how things have worked out.”

  “Save it. I know you’re lying. You think I’m stupid, but I have news for you. I’m smarter than you think. I know things you don’t.”

  “Richard...”

  “I’m an MD.”

  “I know you are.”

  “I was a better doctor than Dad ever was. Him with his walk-in patients with no insurance, and then he puts a gun in his mouth. Right after I was b
orn. Guess he really didn’t want a boy.” He laughed, an awful sound, empty of amusement.

  “It’s not funny,” she said.

  “Sure it is. Everything’s funny. Because we think we’re always going to be the same person. But then you get older, and your brain...it changes. And suddenly you’re somebody else.”

  The pressure on the backs of her eyes burned hotter. It pained her to know that he understood this much about himself. “Yes,” she whispered.

  “Maybe you’ll change, too. Like Dad. Like me.”

  “That’s not going to happen.”

  “If you were an MD, you’d know about genetics.”

  “I do know about genetics, Richard.”

  “Then you know it runs in the family. Like father, like son. Maybe like daughter, too.”

  “I’m thirty, Richard. The...change typically starts by the mid-twenties. That’s how it was for Dad. And you.”

  His face changed. He picked up the scissors again. The cutting blades gleamed with dangerous scintillation. “Numbers? You’re counting on numbers to save you? What we have, the thing that changes us—it’s in our blood.”

  “Our father was twenty-five when he began to show symptoms. You were twenty-six. I’m thirty.”

  “It’s not too late for you.”

  “I think it is.”

  “Never too late. It’s in our blood.” He punctuated the last word with a swing of his hand that passed the scissors within two feet of her. She shrank back. She couldn’t help it.

  He would never assault her. He was her little brother.

  Except he wasn’t so little anymore. He was six inches taller than she was, and he was paranoid, delusional, crazy.

  He stepped closer. The hand holding the scissors was tightly clenched, the knuckles squeezed white.

  She reached for the door. “I need to be going.”

  “You’re afraid. Afraid of me.”

  “I just have things to do.”

  “Afraid,” he said again, and with his free hand he grabbed her by the wrist.

  “Please let go of me,” she said without inflection.

  After a long moment he released her. “Don’t let me keep you. I never wanted you here. You’re a nuisance. Get out. Run away.”

  She opened the door and stepped into the hall, daring a backward look. “Take care of yourself, Richard, okay?”

  “Fuck you.” He filled the doorway, his face distorted. “You took the house from me. You took everything and left me to rot in hell, so fuck you, bitch, fuck you!”

  He slammed the scissors into the door frame, planting them in the cheap wood. She recoiled, stumbling. He laughed, a raging idiot laughter that echoed down the hall, pursuing her as she fled.

  She didn’t start crying until she was on the stairs.

  six

  By the time Jennifer left the lobby she had composed herself. Whatever Richard had been thinking, she was still sure he would never harm her, or anyone.

  “Checkin’ up on him?”

  The voice came from behind. She turned and saw the building manager, a heavyset bald man with a perpetual stubble of beard.

  “I told ya the goddamn building didn’t fall down,” he added as he walked up to her, his mouth working on a wad of something black.

  “I needed to see for myself.”

  “Right. You don’t trust me. Hey, if you’re so concerned about your crazy-ass brother, why ya got him living in this pile?”

  It was uncomfortably close to what Richard himself had said. “He likes it here.”

  “Yeah? Well, I wish he didn’t. The rest of my tenants ain’t too wild about him bein’ around. ’Specially the ones in number twenty-two, right below him.”

  “What complaint could they possibly have?”

  “Only that he makes a racket late at night. Every night, at least recently. We’re talking two, three in the A.M., okay? He comes stomping in, all agitated. It drives ’em crazy, hearing all that shit from upstairs.”

  “Richard goes out at night?”

  “That’s what I’m tellin’ ya, genius. He’s a fuckin’ tomcat, always on the prowl.”

  “I had no idea.”

  “Yeah, I guess it would be asking too much to have you keep an eye on the crazy son of a bitch.”

  “I do keep an eye on him. He’s always around whenever I come by.”

  “Try coming by at night. Or in the morning, early. That’s when he hangs out at the graveyard.”

  “Graveyard?”

  “The one on Pico and 14th. You know it?”

  “I know it.” Her voice was low.

  “Lady in number sixteen goes jogging every day. Runs through the cemetery. Says he’s there a lot, just standing around, talking to himself. Or maybe he’s talking to the dead, for all I know.” The manager spit out a chunk of whatever he was chewing. “She wants him outta the building. Everybody does. I’d kick his ass out on the street in a minute if the law would let me. Speaking of which, he don’t pay the rent, I’m having him evicted, okay?”

  “He’ll pay you. He’s just...forgetful.”

  “He’s non compost mentis, is what he is,” he said, getting it wrong. “He’s a freakin’ nutjob, okay? You shoulda had him committed a long time ago.”

  “He’s my brother.”

  “So what?”

  Jennifer turned away without answering. She was halfway down the front walk when she heard him call after her.

  “Hey. He ain’t violent, is he?”

  “Why would you ask that?”

  “Some of the women, they say he gives ’em the evil eye. Hostile. Real scary.”

  “He’s not violent.”

  He couldn’t be.

  ***

  When she got back to the house, her phone was ringing. She picked up before her machine could intercept the call. “Hello?”

  “So you survived the quake.” It was Casey.

  “Still have all my fingers and toes. You?”

  “I’ve got all my appendages. And I do mean all.”

  “This is how they came up with the expression, call someone who cares.”

  “Harsh, Pee-wee. Very harsh.”

  “But accurate. And don’t call me Pee-wee. According to the news, Pacific Area got the worst of shaking. How bad is it?”

  “Well, it’s not Northridge, but way worse than Chino Hills. A lot of old buildings are gonna be red-tagged. Hopefully not yours.”

  “This house is solid,” she said with pride. “It’s survived a century of seismic events.”

  “You’d better hope your luck holds. Anyway, I’m riding patrol for the rest of the day. Emergency protocol. You know the drill, nobody on patrol side goes home. My advice is to stay off the streets. Traffic’s a mess.”

  “It didn’t seem too bad to me.”

  “You’ve been out already? Gawking at the damage like every other lookie-loo?”

  “I had to check on my brother.”

  “I didn’t know you had a brother. He okay?”

  “Yes, he’s...fine.” As fine as he ever was.

  “See, I’m learning more about you every day.”

  “I’m endlessly fascinating.”

  “You are,” he said over a crackle of radio crosstalk. “You’re an exotic riddle, like the Sphinx. A woman of mystery and intrigue —”

  “Enough with the compliments.”

  “It’s never enough. Just give me time. I’ll wear you down, Silence.”

  “Don’t count on it, Wilkes.”

  “You know you want me. You’re just making me work for it.”

  “Self-delusion is a terrible thing.”

  “You should know. So you’re sure there was no damage to your place? Did you check everywhere?”

  “I checked.” She decided she had to tell someone and it might as well be him. “Part of my cellar wall crumbled. And you’re not going to believe what I found.”

  “I’ve been wearing a uniform for eight years. There’s nothing I haven’t seen or won’t bel
ieve.”

  She told him. When she was through, there was a brief silence on his end.

  “Shit,” he said finally.

  Childishly she was pleased to get a reaction out of him. “Is that your professional opinion?”

  “How the hell did they get there?”

  “Maybe it’s some kind of family crypt from way back when.”

  “I’m coming over.”

  “It’s not necessary.”

  “I think it is. See you in five.”

  “Really, I —”

  Dead phone.

  It was nice of him to worry, she guessed. But she wished he wouldn’t.

  With a dustpan she swept up the mess under the fireplace. Shards from the decorative jars were intermingled with the sea glass. She would have to sift through the fragments later. It was easy enough to tell them apart. Sea glass developed a frosted patina of minute crystalline formations. What began as a fragment of an ordinary bottle underwent a magical transformation into a gem. A sea change.

  Next she tackled the family photos on the stairs. Most of the glass plates had cracked, but the frames were undamaged. She gathered up the pictures, stacking them neatly. It was funny how rarely she noticed these photographs, though she passed them several times each day. There were shots of her mother on Santa Monica Pier and at a picnic in the Angeles National Forest. She had been a small woman, like Jennifer herself, with the same fragile doll-like quality, but without the assertiveness to compensate for it.

  And there was her father, a harried, rumpled man in a loose-fitting suit, his gaze far away.

  She had just one memory of her father. She couldn’t even be certain it was a real memory, and not some trick of the mind. She saw herself as a very little girl, riding the carousel on Santa Monica Pier in her father’s lap. The horses whirled, and she was laughing, her father’s strong arms around her waist, holding her tight.

  She didn’t want to think about her father. Yet she couldn’t help it. He was so much a part of her life, this man she’d barely known.

  Aldrich Silence graduated from USC’s School of Medicine near the top of his class. Though he could have had his pick of lucrative positions, he chose to open a small private practice in Venice. Most of his patients were uninsured, impoverished, or actually homeless. He didn’t make a lot of money. He didn’t care.

  He met Marjorie Taylor on a blind date arranged by friends. Unlike other women he’d met, Marjorie didn’t try to convince him to better himself by moving to Beverly Hills. She didn’t think he needed to better himself. She liked him the way he was.