Every Moment After

by Joseph Moldover

  Matt opens the chain-link gate, and I follow him up three concrete steps and onto the grass. I’m looking around, trying to decide which scene I want my little guy to join, when I’m blinded by a light coming from the direction of the house. I freeze.

  “Hold it right there!” The light drops just a little bit so that it’s not directly in my eyes, and I can see that there’s a figure on the front porch.

  “Where are my other two?”

  Matt and I look at each other. He speaks up first. “We’re not the ones who took them!”

  There’s no response. It occurs to me that this is going to be hard to explain. It also occurs to me that this person might have a gun, and that it might be legal to shoot people creeping around a lawn in the middle of the night. I imagine us lying here dead among the gnomes.

  “We found it,” I call in the direction of the house. “We recognized it, that it goes here. We were just bringing it back.” It sounds unlikely, though probably less unlikely than our stealing three and returning one. The spotlight switches off, and a moment later a porch light turns on, and I can see a woman, maybe in her sixties, in a bathrobe and slippers. No gun in sight. She steps down off the porch and approaches us.

  “That’s so kind of you,” she says. “Thank you so much.” She holds out her arms, and I hand her the gnome. I look over at Matt. He’s standing beside me, but he’s not looking at the woman or at the bizarre gnome garden. He’s studying the house.

  “Would you like to come in for some tea?” she asks us, and before I can tell her no, Matt enthusiastically replies that we would.

  Five minutes later, we’re sitting at her kitchen table, a teapot heating on the stove, a plate of cookies in front of us. Matt is next to me; the woman, who it turns out is named Mrs. Marjorie Ryan (she introduces herself with the “Mrs.”), is sitting across from us. There’s a fourth chair, occupied by the gnome, who is apparently named Jorge.

  Mrs. Ryan has put three teacups on the table. It would have been time to leave if she’d put out a fourth.

  “So,” she asks as the water in the teapot begins to bubble, “where did you find my little friend?”

  I start in on a slightly stripped-down version of the story, omitting the beers and also the fact that we knew who the kids in the woods were. She listens, getting up to pour the tea and then sitting back down. I usually don’t eat sweets in front of Matt, but while I’m talking, he eats one of the cookies in two bites and then helps himself to another. I finish with our exit from the clearing, and Mrs. Ryan shakes her head sadly.

  “Poor little fellows.”

  “Did they have names too?” Matt asks through a mouthful of cookie. I want to kick him under the table, but Mrs. Ryan laughs.

  “No, goodness, no. If I named them all, I’d never keep track of them. Jorge here is special. Mr. Ryan and I purchased him on a trip to Spain for our thirtieth anniversary.”

  “Ah,” I say.

  “He was a bit too big for the airline to let me carry him on my lap, so Mr. Ryan bought a third ticket. I didn’t want him in with the luggage. I so appreciate your bringing him back to me.”

  “Of course.”

  “Mr. Ryan would have appreciated it too.”

  She gets up again to pour herself more tea. Matt reaches for a third cookie. “Take some insulin,” I whisper.

  “Thanks, Grandma.” He takes a giant bite, his eyes scanning the kitchen, leaning over a bit in his chair to peer into the next room.

  Mrs. Ryan sits back down. “Are you diabetic?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “So was Mr. Ryan. He got it toward the end of his life. What a headache, hmm?”

  “He probably had type 2,” Matt says.

  “Yes, I believe that’s right.”

  “I have type 1. It’s a totally different disease.” He finishes the third cookie. Matt hates it when people mix up the types and think that their uncle or sister or someone has the same thing he does. Mrs. Ryan blinks in confusion, and I clear my throat.

  “Well, I’m really sorry about what happened to your other, uh, figures, but I’m glad we could bring Jorge back to you, and now I don’t—”

  “I’ve always wanted to come in here,” Matt says.

  “In my house?”

  He nods.

  “Matt . . .” I say.

  “Did you know,” he asks, “that it was the Keeley place when you bought it?”

  Mrs. Ryan sighs and takes a sip of her tea. “Well, yes, we did. The realtor was quite honorable and told us. But we didn’t think it would matter. It’s just a place, you know? People move on, and it’s just a place. And, to be honest, I’m not sure we could have managed to move to East Ridge otherwise. This house probably cost fifty percent less than it would have.”

  “Are you sorry you bought it?” Matt asks.

  She shrugs and sighs again. “I suppose that’s why they took the gnomes, isn’t it? Sometimes people pull up outside and take pictures. Once or twice, people have knocked on the door and I’ve had to tell them to go away. And they filmed the outside once, for that documentary. People are interested. It’s natural, I suppose. You’re interested, aren’t you?”

  “We were in the class,” Matt says. “Both of us.”

  She breathes in sharply. “Oh! Oh, I’m so sorry.”

  I really would like to kick Matt now. Either that or disappear into the floor. My skin crawls as Mrs. Ryan turns her wide eyes to me and then back to Matt. If she recognizes me as the kid from the photo, I’m going to get up and walk out.

  Matt shrugs. “It’s all right.”

  Easy for him to say; he wasn’t there. He’d blow a gasket if I said that out loud, and I’d never do it anyway. It would be cruel. I know how it eats at him.

  “But I was wondering,” he goes on, “I was wondering if we could have, you know, a look around.”

  “Uh, Matt—” I begin, but Mrs. Ryan interrupts me.

  “Of course.” She stands up. Being a survivor gives you a certain level of privilege. We leave Jorge with the cookies and tea, and she leads Matt out of the kitchen. I follow them.

  Mrs. Ryan is right. It’s just a place. It’s a house: walls, floors, ceilings, stairs. Too big for an old woman on her own, but neat and tidy. It looks like she hasn’t changed things much since her husband died; she points out his chair and his guitar in a corner. Sort of like Mom with my dad’s stuff, though not as messy. More like a museum than a house.

  Matt’s phone squawks in his pocket. “Take your medicine,” I hiss at him. He responds with a raised middle finger, discreetly placed behind his back so that only I can see it. We come to an upstairs hallway.

  “My sewing room,” Mrs. Ryan says, directing our attention to a doorway on the left. “And the powder room. And the master bedroom, down there at the end.” There’s one more door, on our right, closed.

  “What’s in there?” Matt asks.

  She lays a hand on the knob but doesn’t open it. “Storage. I don’t need that many rooms, really.”

  “Was it his room?”

  She grimaces. “Yes, I understand that it was. That’s what I was told.”

  “Can I see it?”

  She looks at him for a moment, then opens the door but doesn’t go in. Matt steps past her. I follow him with an apologetic raise of my eyebrows.

  Matt has stepped to the middle of a mostly empty room. I grope along the wall for a switch, find it, flick it on, but get only a pale, sickly light in response. There’s a fixture in the ceiling, but it looks like two of the three bulbs are burnt out. The room is hot and airless, the windows closed, the shades down. For a storage room, there’s not much here. Some cardboard boxes, an old ironing board, a bed frame without a mattress.

  Matt is circling the periphery, looking closely at everything. He opens a closet door and pulls a string hanging from the ceiling. A bare bulb turns on. I walk up and look over his shoulder. Just a few board games on the floor in ratty old boxes: Battleship, Connect Four. He flips a chessboard ope
n with the toe of his shoe. There are a few pieces inside, a knight and some pawns, but most of them are missing. I wander over to the window, pull the shade aside, and look down at our cars.

  This is just a place. It’s just a room.

  A phone rings somewhere in the house, making me jump. “Excuse me for just a moment,” Mrs. Ryan calls from the doorway, and she leaves us alone. Neither one of us says anything as I wander around the room and Matt studies the contents of the closet.

  “Do you smell that?” Matt finally asks.

  I inhale deeply through my nose. “It’s musty, that’s all.”

  “No, there’s something else.”

  “I don’t smell it.”

  “Come over here.”

  I go over and stand next to him in the closet door. Nothing.

  “It’s like in the woods,” Matt says. “I think it might be gunpowder.”

  “I still don’t smell it.”

  “Do you think he kept stuff in here? Like, ammo and stuff?”

  “What, when he was a little kid?”

  “They said he must have been born like that. He was probably always fucked up.”

  “Where would a little kid get ammo? And how would a closet still smell of it all these years later? A bunch of families have lived here since then.”

  He shrugs and continues to study the empty interior. “It smells like piss, too.”

  “I don’t smell that, either, but it makes more sense. There might be mice.”

  His phone rings and he takes it out of his pocket, looks at it, and hands it to me. “It’s my mom. Would you answer it?”

  I roll my eyes and swipe the screen. “Hi, Mrs. Simpson . . . Yeah, Matt’s right here. Well, not right here; he’s in the bathroom. He left his phone . . . We’re, uh, just hanging out at a friend’s . . . You got an alert? No, he’s fine . . . He probably just ate something and forgot to dose . . .” I glare at Matt. “I’ll tell him to take some as soon as he comes out.” I hang up and hand the phone back to Matt. “What’s the matter with you? Take your goddamn medicine.”

  “I will. Soon as I get back to my car.”

  Mrs. Ryan returns and clears her throat from the hallway.

  “We should go,” I say.

  Matt turns off the closet light and closes the door. He looks around the room one more time, breathing deeply as though he’s trying to take it in. “He was here,” he says. “For, like, a year. This is where he slept every night.”

  “Yeah. But he’s gone. It’s just a room. It’s just a room full of junk.”

  He shakes his head. “No,” he says, “it’s not.” Then he walks out without saying anything else.

  We thank Mrs. Ryan for showing us around, and for the tea and cookies, and she thanks us once more for bringing Jorge back to her as she shows us to the door. We cross the yard, passing through the assorted gnomish scenes, and let ourselves out through the front gate.

  “You working tomorrow?” Matt asks as I open my car door.

  “Yeah.”

  “So, listen—​good luck the day after, okay?”

  “I’ll need it.”

  He grins and cuffs me on the shoulder. “Just be your usual self. Only better.”

  “Right.” I smile back. “I’ll let you know how it goes.”

  “You better. And don’t worry, I’m working on our problem. Eddie’s going to be fine.”

  “Thanks,” I say.

  Matt winks at me and gets into his truck. I start to get into my car, and then I remember something. I walk up to his driver’s-­side window and knock on the glass. He rolls it down.

  I pause and stare at him for a moment, suddenly struck by something. “You look just like your father.”

  “What?”

  “I’ve never seen it before, but you do.”

  “You came over here to tell me that I look like my father?”

  “No, I came over to tell you to take your insulin. Then I noticed that you look like your father.”

  “Cole, brother, two things. First, I am absolutely nothing like my fucking father, and second, you worry too much.” He winks once more, puts the truck into drive, and pulls out, leaving me standing alone on the curb.

  I turn and contemplate the house and the yard for another moment. I don’t know when Matt started hating his dad. Mr. Simpson has always seemed like an all-right guy. He does stuff with insurance, and I know that he helped my parents with paperwork when Dad was sick. He and Matt were close when we were little, or at least I think they were. They played ball together all the time. And then, at some point, Matt seemed to lose faith in him. He decided his dad was some sort of a fake. Basically, I think he figured out that his dad wasn’t the person Matt thought he was when he was a little kid, and he couldn’t stop being disappointed in him. I wonder if that’s part of growing up for everyone. I wonder if I would have eventually looked at my own father that way.

  I turn away from the gnomes, get into my car, and drive away.

  Six

  — Matt —

  Chris Thayer is waiting for me in his driveway. “Can you come inside?” he asks.

  I raise my eyebrows. “Do you—”

  “I know where it is, but I need your help getting it. And we have to be quiet; my mom’s asleep. She was working last night.”

  I seem to remember that Mrs. Thayer is a nurse. I nod and follow him up the driveway and onto the metal ramp. From up close, I can see tons of rust spots, and it feels a little bit rickety. I’ve never walked on it before, never been up to his house.

  The place is a mess inside. Piles of stuff, clothes and medical gear, with a path through the living room just wide enough for his wheelchair. I try not to stare, but it’s hard not to. My mom would go nuts if our house was one-tenth this bad.

  “Sorry about the clutter,” Chris whispers. “My parents would have cleaned up—”

  “Don’t worry about it.” We’ve reached the kitchen. A table is pushed up against the wall. It’s covered with papers. Three places are cleared on it, and there are two chairs.

  “Up there,” Chris whispers, nodding toward a cabinet above the microwave.

  I step forward and open it. There are little plastic baskets inside, all of them filled with pill bottles. I take them down and put them on the kitchen table, at the open spot that doesn’t have a chair. Chris starts to sort through them with his one mobile hand and tells me to get a gallon-size plastic bag from on top of the fridge.

  I stand next to him and watch as he looks at the bottles one at a time. He replaces some in the baskets and drops others into the plastic bag as I hold it open. He cautiously shakes one bottle by his ear and then hands it to me. “Open this one up.”

  I do, and he peers inside.

  “Okay, you can take about a third of these.”

  I pour the pills into the bag, probably closer to a quarter than a third. I don’t want to leave him without meds he probably needs.

  “What are these, Chris?”

  “Muscle relaxants. Really strong stuff.”

  I nod, and glance at the nearest pile of paper as he continues his sorting. It’s some kind of medical bill. I absently scan the lines of mysterious charges until my eyes arrive at the bottom, at a number that I literally cannot believe. I whistle softly. Chris looks up and follows my gaze.

  “And that’s just one of them.”

  “Jesus. They actually want you to pay that?”

  “That’s what a bill means. My folks would have been better off if Keeley’s aim had been just a little bit sharper.”

  “Dude!”

  “Joking. You’ve got to be able to joke, right?”

  “Chris?” The voice comes from the back of the house. We both freeze.

  “Just heading out, Mom,” Chris calls softly.

  We both wait, but there’s no response. After a moment, he nods toward the table. “Put it back.”

  I quickly put the baskets back in the cabinet and take the plastic bag from the table. Chris turns his chair and
leads me back to the front door and down the ramp. I breathe a sigh of relief as I tuck the stash under the driver’s seat in my truck and return to Chris, who’s waiting beside his van.

  “Boys!”

  Mrs. Thayer is coming out of the house. She’s hurrying down the ramp, wearing slippers and a puffy pink bathrobe. Her hair is all over the place. Thoughts of a call to my parents and summer-long rehab flash through my mind.

  “Hi, Mrs. Thayer.”

  “Hello, Matt.” Mrs. Thayer gives me a warm smile as she approaches. “Chris, honey, you need to bring in a check today.” She reaches down and tucks the folded paper into his chest pocket. “Just remember to tell her it’s there.”

  “Okay, Mom.”

  She studies him. “Your dad get you ready before he left?”

  “Yeah, of course.”

  “Hmm.” She reaches out to smooth his hair. “I got in around three. What time did he leave?”

  “Um, I don’t know. Around six?”

  She rolls her eyes. “Which actually means five. Which means that he got you up at four.”

  “It’s fine, Mom. I got a lot of reading done.”

  I shuffle my feet and study the ground. You’d think that my dad, or one of his fellow assholes at the top of the company, would tell Mr. Thayer that he can come in late.

  “How’s your arm, Matt? Working hard in PT?”

  “It’s getting better, Mrs. Thayer.”

  “You’ll be ready to play in the fall?”

  “I’m sure I will be.”

  “That’s good. Thank you again for driving Chris.”

  “I don’t mind at all,” I say.

  “He gets tired of his mom driving him everywhere he has to go, don’t you, baby?”

  “Never, Mom. You’re the Tonto to my Lone Ranger. You’re the Robin to my Batman. You’re—​um, who was the sidekick, Laurel or Hardy?”

  She laughs. “You’re very funny.” Mrs. Thayer reaches out and squeezes my hand. “Take good care of him.” She bends, adjusts Chris’s glasses, and kisses him on the forehead.

  “Mom . . .”

  “I’m sorry. I know. Not in front of the guys.”

  She smiles and winks at me, then turns and walks back to the house. I get him into the van and start it up.