“You can’t use this to prove it to anybody else,” said Step.
“Don’t have to prove it to anybody else,” said Douglas. “I know it. So now I’ll never rest till I find this guy and stop him.”
“And then will Stevie stop having these—imaginary friends?”
“When the source of his affliction is gone, then there won’t be any need for him to deal with it anymore, will there? My wife never dreamed the same dream twice.”
He started to walk toward his car, when DeAnne called after him. “Do you still want us to give you a list of people we think might’ve sent that record?”
“Why not?” he said. “Might turn out to be useful.”
“We’ll phone you this afternoon, OK?”
“Fine,” he said. “If I’m not there, tell it to whoever answers the phone, they’ll be expecting it.”
He got in his car and drove off. DeAnne and Step went back in the house, sat down at the kitchen table, and wrote down their list of names. People who had reason, or thought they had reason, to hate the Fletchers as of the time they got that record in the mail. Mrs. Jones, Dicky Northanger, Lee Weeks, Roland McIntyre. They debated back and forth about including Dolores LeSueur’s name, but they finally did. It was ludicrous to think of Dolores LeSueur as a serial killer—it was ludicrous to think of a woman as a serial killer—but the list had to be complete or why make it?
They phoned it in. As Douglas had said, the man on the phone was expecting them, and he was thorough and businesslike. And then it was done.
Step and DeAnne faced each other across the table. “What a Sunday,” said Step.
“This is going to sound awful,” said DeAnne, “because that serial killer is still out there somewhere, but . . . I feel better now.”
“Me, too,” said Step. And then he laughed in relief. “Stevie isn’t crazy. All that shit from Dr. Weeks—forgive me, but a spade’s a spade—that’s all back in the crock it came from. Whatever’s going on in Stevie’s life, it isn’t made up and we didn’t cause it and he isn’t crazy. It’s the real world that he’s living in, only just as we thought, he sees it more deeply and truly than the rest of us. And when you think about it, it’s kind of sweet, isn’t it? I mean, whatever happened to these lost boys, they still live on in Stevie’s mind. He imagines them and he’s made playmates out of them, he’s made friends out of them. And I’m not afraid of them anymore.”
“I’m still afraid,” said DeAnne. “I can’t help that.”
“Well, so am I—of the killer.”
“I wish we lived somewhere else,” said DeAnne. “I wish we could take Stevie away from this place.”
“Me, too,” said Step. “But this is the place where the doctors know about Zap. This is the ward that fasted and prayed for him. The rest of us can live anywhere, but Zap is already part of the life of this place. Those people in our ward, you think they’re going to watch Zap grow up and think, What a strange-looking kid, why can’t he hold his head up? No. They’re going to say, we know that boy, he’s one of us. We’ll never find that anywhere else, DeAnne.”
“I know,” she said. “I know.” But she was not yet comforted.
“The danger is still here,” said Step, touching the newspaper article again. “But it’s not pointed at us. I mean, it’s like the article says, a child in Steuben is still far more likely to be killed in a traffic accident or a gunshot accident than to be a victim of this killer. Parents have to be less trusting of strangers for a while, that’s all. And we were already nearly paranoid, so I think we’ll be fine.”
She nodded.
“And we can’t afford to move, DeAnne. Unless you think it’s worth abandoning everything and scurrying home to your parents’ basement.”
“I guess I’m just thinking, I don’t want to be a grownup anymore. I want to go home and have mom and dad take care of me.” She laughed at herself. “It’s hard to be mom and dad. Isn’t it? Because anything you decide might be wrong.”
“Heck, everything we decide will be wrong,” said Step, “because no matter what we do, something bad will happen later. So I refuse to regret any of it. I don’t regret taking the job with Eight Bits and I don’t regret quitting. I don’t regret all those expensive tests they ran on Zap, because we had to know. I especially don’t regret that day when I saw you talking on the phone and I thought I had never seen anything so beautiful as my wife being land to someone else who was in need.”
She leaned over to him and put her arms around him and rested her head on his chest for a moment. “You make me feel so good.”
“And think of this,” said Step. “We not only got some assurance that nobody in our house is crazy, but we also got our bedroom cleaned for the first time since we moved in.”
She pretended to bite him through his shirt, and then sat back up. “Well, no matter what I feel, it’s time to feed Zap, if I can wake him up. I’m beginning to think if I didn’t wake him up for meals he’d sleep the rest of his life away.”
“I know the feeling,” said Step. He carefully refrained from pointing out to her that she had just called the baby Zap. He did that the first time she called Elizabeth Betsy, and she had made it a point never to call her that again, so the poor kid was growing up thinking that she was one person to men and another person to women. Which might not be that far from reality, of course, given the way society worked. Pretty soon he’d probably give in and stop calling Betsy Betsy, so she’d have the same name to everybody. But he thought Zap was a great name, at least until he was old enough to complain about it, and if he could get DeAnne to slip into using it, too, that would be nice.
Step stayed in the kitchen and looked mindlessly at the newspaper for a moment. Then he realized that they had both lists out on the table—the list of Stevie’s friends and the list of people who might hate him enough to send an anonymous threat. He got up and put them in a high cupboard. No matter what Douglas had said, Step wasn’t really happy with either list. He’d much rather that everybody on both lists just leave his family alone.
Late that same Sunday night the phone rang. DeAnne woke up and sleepily answered it. She listened for a moment. “It’s late,” she said. “I think he’s asleep. Oh, no, he isn’t. He’s right here.” She held out the phone to Step. “’Sfor you,” she said. She was back to sleep almost before he got the phone out of her hand.
“This is Step Fletcher,” he said. “Who am I speaking to?”
“Hey, this is Glass, Step. Remember me? From Eight Bits Inc.?”
“Yeah, of course,” said Step. “Isn’t this a little late to be calling, though? I mean, it’s almost midnight.”
“Well, see, this isn’t exactly a social call. They only let me make one phone call, and I thought about it for a minute, and you were kind of my best choice. Or at least I sure hope you are.”
“Best choice for what?”
“I’m down at the police station. I need a ride home. Can I explain it to you later? I’m not arrested or anything, I just don’t want to be driven home in a police car, you know? It looks bad, people ask questions.”
“If you’re not arrested, then how come you only get one phone call?”
“Oh, like, that was just theatre. You know? Just making it more dramatic than it is. It’s really nothing. Except that I need a friend right now, you know? To pick me up and then not tell anybody where he picked me up.”
“I won’t lie for you,” said Step.
“Oh, right, I knew that,” said Glass. “But see, you don’t work at Eight Bits Inc. anymore and you haven’t exactly been keeping in touch so I figure, who’s going to ask you? And you aren’t going to go calling people up and telling them, right?”
“I don’t know where the police station is,” said Step.
“Well it’s right downtown. Corner of Center and Church. Big city-county building, you can’t miss it. I’ll just meet you out front so you don’t have to park and come in.”
When Step hung up the phone, DeAnne rou
sed enough to murmur, “Who was it?”
“Glass. Roland McIntyre. He’s been picked up by the police for questioning and now he wants a ride home.”
DeAnne’s eyes opened now. “He was on our list.”
“Yeah, well, I guess he was on another list, too, eh?”
Step made it to the city-county building in ten minutes, and, as he had promised, Glass was standing out in front. He looked forlorn in his plaid short-sleeve shirt and thick glasses.
“Nice car,” said Glass as he slid in.
“It takes a lot of hard work to get the rust holes just right,” said Step. “But hey, this one runs and the other one’s always in the shop. Where to?”
“Home,” said Glass. Then: “Oh, yeah, well, I live in the Oriole Apartments, out west on Shaker Parkway. Like you were going to the airport.”
Step drove off.
“Nice of you to come get me,” said Glass. “I didn’t know who else to call.”
“No problem,” said Step. And at the moment he said it, that’s how he felt. He hadn’t felt that way until then, however.
“We miss you at Eight Bits Inc., man,” said Glass.
“Glad to hear you remember me.”
“Dicky’s got his finger in everything now. He comes in and takes our working disks and fiddles with our code so we come to work in the morning and a program that ran fine the night before now crashes, and we ask him what he did, and he says, “That was the most inefficient code I ever saw, so I started fixing it.’ And when you say, ‘Well it didn’t crash before, and now it does,’ he just looks at you and says, ‘Do I have to do everything?’”
Step laughed grimly. Dicky. He didn’t like remembering Dicky, even to know that he was still widely hated. Dicky was on his list. So Step changed the subject. “What was all this about tonight?”
Glass was silent for a minute, looking out the window. Then, finally, he settled back into his seat. “Well, it’s not like you don’t already know.”
“If I knew, I wouldn’t have asked,” said Step, which wasn’t true, but he didn’t much care. Somehow being honest to Glass didn’t seem to have the same kind of urgency as being honest to, say, his children or DeAnne or Mr. Douglas.
“I mean, you know about me.” Glass sighed. “I’ve never actually done anything, you know? I don’t even want to, really. But some parents complained because one of their older kids told them some cockamamy story, and so I got hauled in when I was sixteen, and that son-of-a-bitch lawyer my mom got for me told me that it was a real good idea to cop a plea as an adult in exchange for no time, instead of doing time as a juvenile and getting my record wiped. Because that’s what the prosecutor really wanted all along—my new lawyer told me that I probably wouldn’t have had to do time no matter what, the only evidence was some kid and he could have torn him to shreds in court and now here I am on their list of sex offenders.” Step could feel Glass’s eyes on him. “I’m on the pervert list. Anytime somebody anywhere near Steuben looks cross-eyed at a little girl, I get a phone call and they ask me where I was. Well, I’m almost always at Eight Bits Inc. with plenty of witnesses and so they don’t actually bring me in very much.”
“So why this time?” asked Step, feeling a little sick; he didn’t know if he liked having Glass tell him this stuff, especially since he knew that Glass was probably still lying and in fact there was more than the one witness and he had in fact molested little girls, and a lot more than once or twice, too. But he let Glass tell his story without argument because why get him mad?
“It’s that serial killer thing, if you can believe it. The SBI is doing a haul of every known sex offender in six counties, and this is when my name came up. It’s completely stupid, it’s complete bullshit to bring me in.” There was real outrage in his voice now. “This serial killer’s been doing little boys, for heaven’s sake. What do they think I am, a faggot?”
Step said nothing, just drove, gripping the wheel.
After a minute or so of silence, Class got back to talking about the gossip at Eight Bits Inc., and then they reached the apartment complex and Glass directed him to the building he lived in. Step let him off and then watched him get safely to the front door of the building. Watching him like that reminded Step of all the times he had walked babysitters safely to their parents’ door, and then he thought of Glass babysitting for people, and he shivered. But I was a babysitter, too, Step thought. When I was twelve. And how did those people know that I wasn’t like Glass? They had to trust me. You’ve got to trust people even though sometimes they’ll betray your trust, because otherwise there’s no life at all.
And then he had another thought. Glass had a mother and a father. A father who loathed him—did that start before or after Glass started messing with little girls? But that mother, she still loved him. She had carried him just like DeAnne carried Stevie and Robbie and Betsy and Zap, she had nursed him or given him bottles, she had gotten up in the night with him, she had dreamed of what he might be when he grew up. And he must have been a really bright kid. She must have been proud of him in school, and comforted him when the other kids made fun of him. And then this happened to her—this boy of hers turned out to have a thing for little girls. Something so dark and awful that even the worst criminals in prison find the presence of a child molester too loathsome to endure. And she has to live with that now—that her son is like this.
And Step thought of little Zap and he realized that there were worse things in the world than having a child whose body isn’t working right. You can have a child whose soul is worthless. And Step thought of this serial killer loose in Steuben. If somebody forced Step to trade places, either with the father of one of those lost boys, knowing that somebody had taken him and used him and killed him, or with the father of the monster who had done the taking and the using and the killing, it wouldn’t be hard to choose. The parents of those lost boys must feel the most terrible rage and hate and grief, and such a desperate sense of failure for not having protected their sons. But the parents of that serial killer would have most of that and one thing more: They would have the shame of having loosed a monster upon the world.
No matter what else happens, Step thought, all of my children are good. And even if something happened to them, if one of them was hit by a car like Rob Robles in fourth grade or got leukemia like Dr. Duhmer’s little boy in Vigor, at least Step would know that every year of life that they lived was a gift to the people around them, their memory would be one of love and joy, not shame and despair.
I don’t think it’s you, Glass, thought Step. I don’t think your monster has grown so large yet. But you were lying to me, you were trying to hide the monster from me, you aren’t even the tiniest bit repentant about it, and that means that the monster has room to get bigger and more powerful inside you and you’ll keep on plotting your little opportunities to possess the bodies of helpless children, and it might be kinder to everyone in the world if I went out tomorrow and bought a gun and came to Eight Bits Inc. and shot you dead, right in front of everybody. Could God call it murder if I did that, to protect all the children you might harm?
Yes, it would be murder. Because maybe the monster won’t grow. Maybe somehow you’ll get control of yourself. And if somebody killed you before that happened, you’d lose the chance to repent and be forgiven. If there is such a thing as forgiveness for the things you do, or want to do. God lets the guilty live right among the good, hurting them all they want; he lets the tares grow amid the corn. And all that the decent people can do is teach their children and try to be good to each other.
When Step got back into the house, he started to go to bed, but then he went to the kids’ rooms and saw each one lying there asleep, and he kissed them, each one of them. Robbie, Stevie, Betsy, so familiar, he had seen them sleeping so often, he knew all the sweet beauties of their faces in repose. And little Zap, the helpless troubled stranger, his legs drawn up in frog position, his mouth open and his cheek always wet. All of you, Step said silently
. I love all of you, I’m glad for all of you. I have so much hope for you. Even for you, Zap, with your reluctant body. Even for you, Stevie, though evil has sought you out. The world is better because you’re in it, and though I want to hold you forever, I still know that even if I lost you, my life would always have joy in it because you were ever, ever mine.
13
GOD
This is how they finally found a name for Zap’s condition: All through the autumn, every month they had a visit from Jerusha Gilbert, the nurse from the county high-risk baby clinic. Jerusha found on her first visit that everything she normally checked on, DeAnne and Step were already doing. She still stayed her full hour, however, and came back every month; as she told DeAnne, most of the kids she was tracking had fetal alcohol syndrome or prenatal care problems, so it wasn’t hard to imagine that the homes Jerusha visited weren’t usually the most pleasant places. And because she didn’t have to do the usual remedial work, she began to research more advanced ideas that DeAnne and Step could be trying with Zap.
It was Jerusha who first said cerebral palsy. “It’s not a diagnosis, of course,” she said, “because it never is. Cerebral palsy isn’t a medical term, it’s a catchall basket in which we throw all the conditions that seem to be related to some kind of brain dysfunction. The rigid kids, the floppy kids, some retarded, some bright as can be. Some who walk, some who ride in motorized chairs, some who lie in bed emitting a continuous high-pitched whine the whole time they’re conscious, if you can call it consciousness. At some point everybody sort of agrees that this particular condition is CP, and then a certain system takes over. So it’s really your decision, you know. Start calling Zap’s condition CP, and nobody’s really going to argue with you.”
“What if it’s really something else?” asked Step.
“It’s always really something else,” said Jerusha. “The CP label just means that we all agree that we don’t know what it is, but the kid needs help with a certain group of activities. And you’re very lucky, if you decide that it’s CP, because Steuben has one of the four or five best facilities for cerebral palsy in the United States.”
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