Red Light Run

by Baird Harper

  “A handy-manny!”

  Victor didn’t speak.

  “You’re making this up,” she said.

  “I’m not.”

  She held out her pinkie. “Swear?”

  He hooked her finger with his own. “This was in middle school,” he began, “in the group home. The foster parents in this place were just running a scam to collect government checks. They were never there. They’d hire women to watch the house, but these were people who couldn’t even speak English. It was chaos at that place, so these women were always walking off the job. Then one day, this guy came over to install a padlock on the fridge. He had one of those work shirts with the cursive stitching above the pocket—Roman was his name—and of course the foster mom lady convinced him to hang out awhile longer until she got back from the store. Just like that, he became the new babysitter.”

  “There was a lock on the fridge?” Sonia said. “You poor thing.”

  “No embellishments, please. This is my story.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Roman would keep us busy with experiments, like citric acid and baking soda explosions, toilet cleaner bombs, that sort of thing. It really put the hook in me, you know, the chemistry involved. I think maybe he’d been a science teacher wherever he’d been from.”

  “Was he from Romania?”

  “More jokes?”

  “I’m shutting up now.”

  “That’s okay,” he said. “That was the end of my story.”

  “No it wasn’t.”

  “It was,” he said.

  “Victor . . .”

  He watched her wait, his eyes blinking. “That’s it. Really. It was a long time ago. I remember he had really big hands. And these wooden, old-world tools. Is that enough? Aren’t you supposed to be heading off to Allie’s?”

  “I’ve got time.”

  “Your sister’s gonna call here any minute and yell at me, you know.”

  She unlaced her fingers from behind his neck and put her hands in her own lap. “Keep going.”

  “There were times,” he said, “when the foster parents would leave town and he’d stay overnight with us and sort of stand guard in the hallway, pacing back and forth between our bedrooms. All night long you’d hear him coming and going, the wooden tools on his belt clacking together.”

  “And . . . ?”

  “And what?”

  “What did he do then?” Sonia asked.

  “I think his family must’ve been taken away by secret police or something, to be that paranoid.” Victor shrugged. “Anyway, that was Roman. Later he died. He’s actually in my cemetery now.”

  “That’s it?”

  “You haven’t exactly gone on and on about your handyman.”

  “There was nothing to tell!” she shouted, but then she thought of him, of Mr. Bello. He entered her mind suddenly, with a raw clarity that hadn’t been there before. Not the addled old man she’d seen as recently as last month fixing a downspout on her parents’ house, but the stocky middle-aged man of her youth, pausing in his repair of the playroom radiator to adjust himself beneath his work smock.

  Hours ago she’d referred to her parents’ “perverted old handyman,” and ever since, Victor had been demanding more information. At first, her husband’s concern had seemed almost selfish, like a ridiculous jealousy at not having married her soon enough. “I meant to say ‘creepy,’ ” she’d added at dinner, “not ‘perverted.’ ” But he’d brought it up again and again, and each time he did she felt his concern for the young girl she’d once been morphing into something more like a mistrust of her present self. Simple jealousy after all. But it wasn’t that. It couldn’t be. In all the world Victor seemed to trust only Sonia. So she tried to be casual about it, changing the subject, cracking a joke. Let Victor see her total lack of concern and relocate his compass in time.

  “Raymond Bello,” Victor said, as if spitting the man’s name. “There’s something you’re not saying.”

  Another memory rose and crystallized, an image of his hands—too soft for a tradesman—adjusting the hem of Sonia’s Sunday dress in the moment before her father hobbled into the kitchen. The handyman had always been around in that way, living above the garage, roaming the house at will, always fixing the playroom radiator (broken again!), always smoothing blouse wrinkles and plucking stray hairs off shoulders.

  “Is this how you’re going to be with a child?” she asked. “Endless interrogation over spilled milk? Jesus, Victor, we’re not running a group home here. Sometimes you’ve got to let things go.”

  He straightened, dumping her onto her feet so he could walk to the other side of the room to face her from a greater distance. “You’re always pressing me to be serious,” he said, “but I’ve been asking you one simple question and you’ve done nothing but dodge the answer.”

  She wanted to make a point here—the irony of Victor Senn accusing someone else of being flippant and evasive—but it would serve no purpose beyond raising again the notion that she was becoming too much like him. Victor didn’t mind being Victor, but he didn’t want to rub off on anyone else. It was why he didn’t keep friends. She’d seen how, at social gatherings, people would listen to him with a sort of disturbed reverence, how they’d adopt his crass expressions into their own language. It must’ve been why he loved Sonia, his opposite in so many ways—younger than him, popular, religious, firmly possessed of her own separate personality.

  She wanted to say some of these things to him now, but he was already out the door, off on one of his walks. She moved to the window and watched him stride down the block toward Oak Hill, the low August sun crashing in the west. He’d go wash the trucks or sharpen the landscaping tools, and eventually he’d come home ready to apologize, to accept apologies.

  This was how their marriage worked. They kept to themselves mostly, loved and trusted mostly. And when occasionally something ugly came between them, one of them walked it off while the other cleaned the house. And later, they always put it to rest. They’d cook a meal together, drink a good bottle of wine, go to bed. He’d move his mouth over her body beneath the covers, she’d turn and loosen in forgiveness. In the morning they’d go to her church, then his diner.

  But that would need to be tomorrow. Today they had to speed up the process somehow. She was supposed to have left for Allie’s house an hour ago.

  //

  As she got out of the shower, she heard a noise below the window, someone coughing out on the sidewalk, spitting. She dressed quickly and went downstairs. A red shape wavered behind the front door’s frosted-glass inset.

  When she opened the door, a man in camel-colored work pants and a red sweatshirt stood on the stoop with a large deflated duffel bag on his shoulder.

  “Long-Lived Removal Services,” the stranger announced. As he extended his hand, his slender forearm telescoped out of the thick cuff of his sleeve, pale and bony.

  She looked past him, still thinking it was supposed to have been her husband. “Can I help you?”

  The sun had set and the sky smoldered behind him, his face a shadowed blur in the foreground. He finally withdrew his unshaken hand, pulling a binder from his bag, and leaning forward into the brighter light coming out the doorway. The binder’s cover had a picture of the grim reaper holding a chain saw. “That’s a bit dramatic,” he said, apologetically. Then he flipped pages forward and tapped a picture of a beetle.

  “Oak slayers,” Sonia said.

  “Agrilus quercata,” he pronounced with flourish. He sighed, then coughed. He hiked his duffel bag higher on his shoulder and stepped forward.

  “You’re coming in then,” Sonia said, swinging backward with the door as the man pressed into the house. “It’s Victor you want to speak with, but he’s at—”

  The man shuffled past her, through the entryway and into the living room.

  “I was saying that my husband’s the one who runs the cemetery, so you’ll want to come back when—” Sonia watched him sit down on the c
ouch. He pulled out a bandana and coughed into it, the tendons in his neck standing up as he wheezed.

  She said, “Can I get you some water?”

  The man didn’t answer. He busied himself setting his binder out on the coffee table, rifling through his big bag.

  When she came back from the kitchen, he took the water from her, gasping as he swallowed, then set the empty glass on the coffee table.

  “Is this about an order Victor already placed?” Sonia asked, taking a seat across from him. “Or, I’m sorry, what is it you’re selling exactly?”

  “They’re coming,” he said, tapping the picture of the beetle, then turning to a page with a spreadsheet of tree names, heights, prices.

  “Victor’s trees are still healthy,” she said.

  A broad grin bent across the man’s face. “But for how long?” he asked, flipping now to a page full of chemical names, capacities, prices. He had the air of a con man, she thought, pushy and polite at once. How had she let him inside her home so easily? She thought of the adoption papers on the comforter upstairs in the spare bedroom. A proxy for the child they might someday put in that very bed. What kind of mother lets a stranger into the house while the baby is napping? What kind of father invites a con man over to begin with?

  “Did you say that Victor asked you to come here?”

  “I can see the future, Miss Senn.” He put his pale eyes on her directly. “Your husband’s oak trees will be dead in three years.”

  Sonia picked up his empty water glass and motioned to her suitcase by the door. “I’m afraid I’m leaving town, so you’ll have to come back when Victor’s here.” She stood up, but he didn’t stand with her. He was digging inside his bag again, bringing out a slender glass vial. He held the tube out horizontally for her to see the living insect contained within. As he tilted the vial back and forth between them, his colorless eyes warped and twisted behind the glass.

  “In life,” he said, “we don’t usually get to see the trouble coming.” He unscrewed the top of the vial and dumped the silver beetle onto the coffee table, then took the empty glass from Sonia’s hand and turned it over to trap the creature inside.

  She glanced at the door, desperate now to have her husband back, to offer him apologies for what she’d said. Just her own reservations about motherhood, she’d tell him. Look at how easily I let this strange man into our house! She thought of Bello then, his fleshy hand up under her hair, the warm pads of his fingers on the back of her neck as she’d hunched over a work sheet. The stranger on her couch didn’t look dangerous at all, and this fact made her suddenly afraid.

  “I have to go,” she said, thrusting her hand out to end things with a shake.

  The man’s head hung low, wagging slightly as he made a tsking sound, until finally he’d urged the insect back into the vial. When the cap was on again, air began flowing back into Sonia’s lungs. Then a shape appeared in the opaque glass of the door, footsteps scraping up the front walk.

  Something flooded into Sonia then, relief and panic at once. She stood there, frozen by it, her hand still levered out toward the stranger, with the soft shape of her husband growing larger in the clouded glass. But the panic kept flooding in, as if these were the most precarious moments of a prisoner exchange or a hostage release, as if she’d let a killer into her home, or a kidnapper, the child they’d not yet had in such danger.

  “I really do have to go,” she repeated.

  Then her balance disappeared, and the stranger’s hands were wrapped around her own as he hauled himself up off the couch. “Yes,” he said, not yet letting go, holding her gaze with his empty white eyes, his crooked grin, his dry bony hands around her own. “Yes, you do have to go.”

  The door opened and Victor stepped inside.

  “This man came to speak to you about your trees.” Sonia felt breathless, harried. There’s a killer in the house, she wanted to scream. There’s an oak slayer in his bag. “But he was just leaving.”

  “My trees?” Victor asked.

  “But he’s already on his way,” she insisted.

  The stranger set his bag down again. He took his binder back out. He said, “Ma’am, would it be too much to ask for one more glass of water?”

  As Sonia entered the kitchen, her phone was buzzing on the counter.

  “Tell me you’re not still at home?” her sister whined on the other end of the line.

  “I’m waylaid, Al. Something’s come up.”

  “Come on, Sonia, we’re entitled to a girls’ night out.”

  “I’m hurrying, Allie.”

  “Well, hurry faster.”

  Sonia hung up.

  In the living room, the men were sitting. Victor leaned forward, staring at the glass vial. He said, “Three years?”

  “I can see the future,” the stranger said.

  Sonia’s cell phone buzzed again. Allie. Ignore. She brought the water glasses out into the living room and set them on the coffee table.

  The stranger was saying, “. . . In life we don’t usually get to see the—” Then he turned abruptly to Sonia. “Am I delaying your wife’s departure?”

  “Give me a moment.” Victor rose and ushered Sonia back into the kitchen.

  “I’m really sorry,” Sonia whispered. “He just invited himself in.”

  “It’s okay,” said Victor.

  “I’m calling Allie to cancel.”

  Victor took her phone. “Don’t do that. We’re fine.”

  She lowered her voice even further. “I’m freaked out, Victor.”

  “Why, what happened?”

  “I just have this awful feeling.”

  “It was only a fight,” he said. “It’s over. I’m sorry. You’re sorry. Come home tomorrow and we’ll drink wine together.”

  “Tomorrow—”

  The phone buzzed in Victor’s hand. Sonia could hear her sister’s voice.

  “I’m not holding her here, Allie.” Victor rolled his eyes. “I thought the show doesn’t start until ten. Okay, okay. She’s getting into the car right now. Yeah, I get it, great seats. She’s on her way. Bye.”

  “That man is strange,” Sonia whispered. “Don’t let him kidnap you or anything.”

  “What?”

  “And don’t drink your water.”

  “What?”

  “I can’t remember which glass is which. Don’t drink either.” She looked at her husband desperately. She felt desperate. She couldn’t say why, except that her breathing wouldn’t calm and the stranger’s waxy handshake still clung to her flesh. “Victor . . .” she began. There seemed to be more to say. “Tomorrow . . .” she began again.

  But her husband only smiled, tender and patronizing, and said, “Would you get out of here already?”

  //

  Outside, full dark had fallen over Wicklow and it seemed too late all of a sudden. A light rain spat on the windshield. Inside the car, Sonia felt vaguely surreptitious, as if she were leaving Victor for good. This is how it would feel, she thought. A bag of clothes on the passenger seat, a sister on the other end of the highway making up a spare bedroom. As she backed down the driveway, the sensation intensified. This is what life was like without children. You had only one person to betray in order to cut yourself loose. She thought of Allie’s two girls, of her husband, Andrew, of the way, whenever they went out together, Allie would drink too much and say, “I love Andrew, I do, but if we didn’t have kids I honestly don’t know whether I’d go home to him tonight.”

  This was the relief of having no children, and the terror too. A car ride was never just a car ride. It was a test of your commitment to the man you found yourself constantly trying to rationalize to others. Trying to humanize. Maybe she was leaving him, for a night anyway. And tomorrow she would reassess things honestly. Tonight she would go out and speak like Allie spoke. I love Victor, she’d say, but I honestly don’t know if I can continue to put up with his abandonment issues. And tomorrow she’d wake up and say to herself: You don’t have to go back
if you don’t want to.

  She said these words aloud now, in the car. She was on the highway already. She was merging onto the tollway, bending around the city. The sun disappeared and the darkness came on. She dug her cell phone from her purse.

  “I’m freaking out, Allie.”

  The other end of the line was cluttered with background noise. The twins were singing in British accents, over a clanking sound. “Traffic,” Allie said. “You should’ve left an hour ago.”

  “Traffic’s okay,” said Sonia. “It’s other stuff.”

  The background clanking grew louder, higher pitched, like a wrench on pipe. “Andrew’s got a secret route I bet. I can call him and ask—”

  “It’s Victor.”

  “Hold on,” Allie said, muffling the phone. “Girls,” she shouted, “it’s called dress-up, not dress-down.”

  The clanking stopped.

  “What’s going on over there?” Sonia asked.

  “My girls watch one music video and their hoopskirts turn into hooker wear.”

  The background noise was gone entirely now. A widening, anxious silence.

  One of the twins could be heard asking what hooker wear was.

  “It means put your clothes back on,” Allie said. “Mr. Bello doesn’t want to see your underwear.”

  The clanking resumed abruptly.

  “Allie . . . ?” Sonia said.

  “Girls, seriously, get your pajamas on. Aunt Sonia’s going to be here soon.”

  “Allie . . . ?”

  The phone unmuffled and her sister came back on. “It’s that British singer, what’s her name, the one who’s always getting out of limos without any panties. Honestly, it’s impossible to shield your kids from all this—”

  “Is he there right now?” Sonia asked. “Mr. Bello?”

  “Mom sent him over. He’s fixing the radiator. If I need to meet you there, he can watch the girls until Andrew gets back from—”

  Sonia ditched her cell phone onto the passenger seat. Her foot grew heavy on the accelerator. A truck fell past on the right and shrank in the rearview. The speedometer needle traced an arc over the top of the dial. Seventy-five, eighty, eighty-five. The car struggled to find more power. The dashboard hummed. She wove around a van full of elderly people, a red sports car, a motorcycle. Someone honked. She put the wipers on. She put more weight on the pedal, thinking hard about the past, about the movements of Bello’s hands, the way he would hold one so gently inside the other, then switch, and back again, as if wringing them, or keeping them occupied lest they wander. She drifted right and roared up the off-ramp into Tower Hill, whipping through the darkened downtown full of banks and boutiques. Just a mile now from Allie’s kids, just a minute—when a light changed color and a car appeared and the world suddenly turned over and her teeth all came loose at once and she thought of herself at that age, of Bello tending a fresh scrape on her knee, his free hand sliding up her thigh as she’d wept. She remembered thinking he was almost handsome underneath the soft fat, that he was probably very sorry for having done it just then, brief as it was. She’d seen, in that moment, the self-hate of a grown man who knew better but still couldn’t not reach the extra inch. Just to know he’d gone for it the once was probably enough for him to never go again. He’d certainly recoiled from her, from what he’d been trying to do to her, and it was then that she’d felt a wave of sympathy for the man, not so ugly with his glasses off, his big soft hand pinching the bridge of his nose. “It’s okay,” she’d said to him, thinking she’d rather save him than ruin him further. He was already ruined, it seemed. “It’s okay.”