Unseaming

by Mike Allen

  And now, Shaun, their perfect son, their honor-roll-scoring son, is headed down that same route. That special hell paved behind pressure-washed siding and meticulously fertilized lawns.

  The fact is, hollow eyes and needle tracks serve little perfect boy Shaun just dandy, as far as Benjamin is concerned. Benjamin knows the boy was never what he seemed, he saw the backyard parties when mom and dad weren’t home, the toking, the drinking, the groping. Kept a lot of things hidden from his parents, that boy did. Benjamin always had a suspicion that bad things happened to little Denise when Clive and Francene left her alone with their bright-eyed boy.

  Then Denise went missing, Shaun charged off looking for her, and not only did he fail, he came back an utter wreck, a babbling addict, the candy wrapper removed to reveal the turd that was always there.

  But why is Maria so invested in Clive and Francene’s intimate misfortunes? Why the worried frown when she stares at their house?

  There she goes, stealing yet another concerned glance, herself a central pattern in the fabric of that perfect family’s unraveling lies.

  Invisible at the window, Benjamin smiles, witness to the long hours Clive has spent inside Maria’s house over the course of years. He’s noted with lascivious glee the times of entrance and exits, and that sometimes these day-after-day repetitions of arrival and departure occur through the back door rather than the front—usually when she’s between other lovers, and their on-off is on again, and Clive feels pressed to avoid his wife’s gaze. Sometimes he even comes over when her sniveling whelp of a boy is visiting, on loan from his overbearing disk jockey dad.

  Benjamin has devoted much space in his imagination to what happens inside Maria’s house, with its wildflower gardens always on the verge of riot.

  She’s hardly the only sad soul in this neighborhood whose imaginary exploits keep him awake long into the night. There’s the ripening teenage redhead being raised by her milky-eyed grandmother in the fourth house on the right, who Benjamin knows with his own eyes and the aid of his telescope to be turning in the direction that most offspring of strict church upbringings turn. The things she does in her blank-eyed boyfriend’s truck, parked right in her grandmother’s driveway—surely she wants to be caught, surely it will be only a matter of time before she gets her wish.

  And then there’s the cop in third house left who comes home from nights spent arresting drunken and abusive husbands to beat his mousy wife if she doesn’t fix his breakfast fast enough. Or the heartthrob weatherman in second house right with his endless procession of lithe young men brought home well after dark, kicked out in the wee hours of the morning.

  The door opens first house left, and Benjamin’s smile changes, to one of fond indulgence. Here’s scrawny, feisty, nosy Patsy, trundling down her ramp in her motorized wheelchair.

  It’s been years since he was inside Patsy’s house, with its Christmas tree always lit in the dining room and its overpowering smell of cats’ piss. But hers is the only other home in this cul-de-sac he’s ever set foot inside. And she’s the only neighbor he ever speaks to, though it all happens over the phone.

  She has never been inside his residence.

  Afflicted by a cruel degenerative brain disease that’s taken more and more of her mobility away over her fifty years of life, Patsy will never be a part of the harem in Benjamin’s inner sanctum. Yet amidst the dingy rooms inside his mind, he keeps a shrine to her that’s pristine, bathed in light.

  She waves to Lance the white-trash thug, who beats a retreat like a pitbull nailed with pepper spray, unable in his hardwired hatred to cope with his neighbor’s half-paralyzed body and relentless good cheer, not so bold a bully as to mock a handicapped woman when the parents he still lives with might find out about it. To Lance, Patsy is wolfsbane.

  At the window, Benjamin smiles, as Patsy glides her slow and steady wheelchair up the street, to where Maria wipes a towel over her tiny car’s back bumper. She doesn’t seem to mind the interruption at all as Patsy hails her—she stands up and steps over to chat, despite being drenched head to toe from her labors.

  This is the one thing that that raises Maria higher in Benjamin’s esteem than all the other pathetic human lumps making their nests along this street. She’s always kind to Patsy.

  The way both women keep looking over at Clive and Francene’s house, Benjamin guesses they must be chatting in stage whispers about the drug addict’s return. He longs to know what they’re saying, but doesn’t trouble himself. Sometime this afternoon, the phone will shrill, and Patsy’s adenoidal voice will tell him everything.

  And he will share things too, things he’s seen. He will never tell her everything, never that, but enough to keep her coming back.

  They’ve been entwined in this relationship so long, he and Patsy, that he no longer remembers precisely how it started, other than that it must have begun all those years ago when she invited him to her house and he accepted, even then not entirely understanding why. Possibly because no one else had ever asked such a thing of the creepy old man on the hill.

  Though they had almost nothing in common, they immediately recognized the one thing they shared, an outsider’s perspective on everyone else, that delectable twist of longing and contempt. And an unspoken and yet soundly understood acceptance that directed a gentle breeze through the torn rags of each others’ psyches.

  Dearest Patsy, who like him lives off disability checks, who like him has a ravaged face to show the world. When he was younger, he would tell people his eyepatch covered the results of a war wound in Vietnam, where he never served. He would never admit to anyone his puddinglike eye and prematurely arthritis-crimped joints resulted from venereal disease.

  Patsy, for all her chatty nosiness in the neighborhood, showed no interest in learning about his embarrassments. She just wanted him to feel at home, she once said.

  Her empathy had actually freed him to make the play he most desired in the game of human interaction: to drop out, to give up trying.

  Maria turns her head, and Patsy hers. And now Benjamin looks too, and squints his one good eye, and shuffles to grab the binoculars.

  That drug-addled boy, Shaun the Formerly Perfect, has just turned onto the circle from the cross-street, walking with shoulders hunched in a jacket too warm for the weather, like he thinks that will stop him from being seen.

  But when did he leave his parents’ house? And where on earth is he coming from?

  Benjamin presses the binoculars to the window.

  second square

  Maria knows something has gone terribly wrong the moment she spies Shaun trudging up the street, shoulders hunched, the skin around his eyes puffy and raw, his expression unfathomable.

  Speak of the devil.

  He looks like a devil, doesn’t he? Like someone consumed inside by fire, any moment his skin will blacken and the flames lick through.

  Sweet Patsy stops her soft-spoken prattle mid-sentence, thank goodness. She has to sense it too, how wrong this is.

  The boy’s not supposed to be out of the house, Maria knows this. Clive told her last week, during a brief, jittery-nerved visit. It had been a Wednesday before sunup, her son Davey staying with his accursed father, Clive dressed for work in his button-down, her in her violet nightie. They’d shared nothing more than a quick kiss on the lips. Her on-again off-again lover had been wound tight enough to snap a spring.

  That in itself wasn’t so unusual for Clive these days—his family had unraveled, his granddaughter Denise gone without a trace, his son plunged down the same path of addiction and self-inflicted psychosis.

  And worse, Shaun’s stay in rehab had gone about as poorly as could be imagined. His second night there one of his podmates at the Langan Center had gone missing, presumably bolting back to his life of crack and crystal, but the third podmate had made wild accusations that Shaun had assaulted his fellow junkie—they weren’t taken seriously because what the guy described sounded like something straight out of a peyote delusi
on.

  The accusations stopped when the third podmate staged his own disappearing act the next night, but the seeds of suspicion had been irrevocably sown.

  That morning, they sat pressed together on the couch in her den, her shoulders tucked under his arm. They’re kicking him out, he said. I have to go get him today. It’s either that or the streets, and I’m not letting that happen again.

  She frowned up at him, but he was staring somewhere else, staring through the paneled wall.

  Did I tell you about the things he said?

  I remember. Maria shuddered involuntarily, remembering the night Shaun came home, how he’d pounded on the windows of his parents’ house, screaming about things crawling inside him, things like little living needles.

  No. When I saw him yesterday, when the staff called me in.

  She looked into those eyes that weren’t focused on her. No, you didn’t.

  So the director leaves me alone in the pod with him for a couple minutes, and he’s had this hangdog, sullen look on his face the whole time, but then, as soon as the door shuts, he cuts loose with this smile. I’ve never seen a look quite like that on his face before. It’s not a nice smile. It’s like he wants to take a bite out of me. And he says, You don’t have to grieve for Denise anymore, Dad. She’s right here. And he taps his chest. I found her, and you’ll see her again and so will Mom.

  And I’m so freaked out that I don’t know how to even respond to that. And I’m thinking about how when he disappeared, so did one of my handguns. So I ask him, Shaun, do you know where your roommates went?

  And he just smiles that same way and says, They didn’t go anywhere.

  Good God, she said. They can’t let him out. Not like that.

  That’s what I tried to tell them. But they wouldn’t listen. Clive bit his lip like a child. I think they’re as afraid of him as I am.

  They had ended the visit by clinging to each other in a desperate hug. There’d been no closing kiss.

  Shaun trudges down the street between these passive rows of cookie-cutter split levels, a feral dog stalking the hen houses in the open. She knows he’s never been the stand-up chip off the block her lover believes him to be. She’d been the subject of too many more-than-cursory glances from the little creep over the years. How much did he know about her, about her and his father? What did he imagine when he looked at her that way?

  Maria knows something is wrong, and she’s burning to know what, and she is not afraid of Clive’s pup. Hey, Shaun, she says, how’s it going?

  He draws up short, and his face lights up in a manner that makes no sense, like a trapped miner who has just spotted a pinprick of light, but this glow goes out almost as soon as she notices.

  And then he turns to her, to Patsy, and he’s walking over to them with his mouth compressed into an anxious line, and Maria wonders why she couldn’t just leave well enough alone.

  Hi, ladies, he says. He glances over Maria, still dripping from her not quite finished carwash, before he turns to Patsy, scrawny and wide-eyed in her wheelchair, and Maria’s heart starts to pound, her fists to clench.

  Are you feeling okay? he says to Patsy. You look pale.

  Patsy, bless her heart, recovers quickly from the shock of being addressed by the creep she was just whispering about. I don’t feel any worse than I usually do, Shaun, but I appreciate your concern.

  I know you’ve both heard things about me, he says.

  Maria sees her own cold trepidation mirrored in Patsy’s round face. Her wheelchair-bound neighbor’s thick glasses, framed by graying curls, magnify her pop-eyed shock.

  I’m sure everybody heard me screaming the other night. I don’t even know what I was saying. He hangs his head. I know Mom and Dad had to tell all of you why. I didn’t leave them a choice. And that’s no one’s fault but mine. Everything that’s happened to me is all my fault. All of it.

  The pain on his face is so frank that Patsy has gone misty-eyed. Maria feels that urge, too, gathering behind her own eyes, but it doesn’t gain momentum, because something in her doesn’t believe in what she’s seeing, as if it’s staged, a movie trick, as if she’s staring at the most perfect rubber mask ever molded.

  I know I frightened everyone, he goes on. And I know I caused my mom and dad a lot of pain and confusion and worry. I have to make it up to them. And I want to make it up to all of you.

  How are your mom and dad, Shaun? Maria doesn’t think she kept the suspicion completely out of her voice.

  Oh, man, he says. They’re so unhappy right now. Unhappy as they can be.

  The way he looks at her, when he says it.

  I know dad helps you around the house sometimes, he says. Maybe I can do that for you. Help out some.

  The thought makes her skin crawl. She’s shaking her head before she even comes up with words to blurt out. I can always lean on my ex if I have to, she says, with what she hopes is a jaunty smirk. He doesn’t know jack about squat, but he can afford electricians and plumbers. And the courts made sure he has to pay for them. Don’t you worry about me.

  But he’s already turned to Patsy. Same offer stands for you, he says. My mom’s told me about how much trouble it is for you, keeping things up inside your house. I know I can help. I want to help. His voice grows even more urgent. I’ve been so selfish. Putting my needs above all others. That needs to stop. I want to do something that I know is worthwhile. Give to a good person.

  Oh, Shaun, poor Patsy stammers, that’s, that’s so sweet…

  He keeps speaking to Patsy, even though he’s looking at Maria sidelong. Mom told me what she said to you. About talking to myself all night. In different voices. How they could hear me through the floor. About the fight I had with Dad. How they locked themselves in the bedroom to keep me out. I know. Yes, it’s all true.

  This is exactly what Patsy had been telling Maria about when Shaun walked up. The things she’d heard from Francene.

  But I’m done with that. I’m done with the DTs. Too much has happened to me these past few weeks, and I’ve made a lot of mistakes, and I can’t take any of them back. But I want to make good now. I want to show everyone that I can.

  Maria has backed away a little. You don’t need to try so hard, she says. Just be the person you want to be. And quit being bad to yourself.

  He ignores her, kneels beside Patsy. Come on, Patsy, please. There’s got to be errands I can help you with. Chores?

  The sheer force of his need bends her will. She nods, flashes a nervous smile. Sure. Sure. Tomorrow. Let me think about it.

  And he takes her hand. Thank you. Kisses her fingertips. Then stands, and grins radiantly at both of them, a smile so heart-breakingly genuine that Maria feels ashamed for a moment that her hackles were ever raised.

  And then he turns to his house, and goes inside, without knocking—the door isn’t locked.

  Immediately she’s at Patsy’s side. I don’t think you should do it. Don’t let him in your house. It’s not…he might be looking to steal something. For money. For drugs. It’s what happens.

  She fears something worse, but she can’t imagine or articulate what.

  I want to help him, Patsy says.

  No, no, you don’t have to do that.

  It’ll be fine, she says. I feel so bad for him.

  Well, If you notice anything funny, you call.

  A shy smile. I will. Don’t you worry.

  third square

  Lance crouches behind the peeling picket fence that stretches from the side of his parents’ house like a molting wing, and peers between the slats, watches the woman in the wheelchair roll back home, watches Maria finish up her chore, plucks idly at the crotch of his jeans.

  He doesn’t know which of the two women he hates more, the freakish one that gives him the willies with her cheerful, slurring speech and owl eyes and spindly frame slumping all the wrong ways, or the sad sexpot bitch who thinks she’s too good to give him what he wants.

  That latter hate has been with him a l
ong time, planted in puberty, growing poison vines. A tower of athletic-numbered-and-school-lettered muscle in high school, he never had trouble reeling in pussy at the rich-kid parties despite his own humbler origins—and he couldn’t count how many times, when he’d had some dumb bitch squealing beneath him while he hammered her with his hips hard enough to leave bruises, he’d shut his eyes as he spurted and groaned and pictured his neighbor across the street in all her latté-skinned glory.

  As for the former, he’d only ever imagined choking her to death.