He thought of Mrs. Lambert. He pictured the man in the wheelchair at Animal Control. A dog he’d seen on television that didn’t have any back legs, just a pair of strap-on wheels. And then the handicapped man in Terranova.
Kupier breathed hard, suddenly aware of the dusty smells of the floor, the light seeping in under the door, a moth flailing in his trash can.
Of course.
He took a bus to Terranova and walked up the driveway of 2285 Rolling Vista, jack o’ lanterns smiling behind him. The garage was open. For a cat, evidently, the litter box up on the dryer in the corner.
The car was fitted so that all the controls were on the left side of the wheel—accelerator, brake, blinkers, horn, quadrant, lights, everything. It bristled with levers. Kupier opened the door. The key was in the ignition. He advanced it to ACCESSORY, turned the blinker for a right signal.
The wall of the garage before him glowed yellow for three intervals, then the fourth was dimmer, the fifth dimmer, and the sixth just a sound, the battery only strong enough to push the relay, not the bulb.
The car hadn’t gone anywhere for months. Since the drops stopped, probably.
Kupier loosed his gun, closed the garage door. It was so loud, so heavy. But he went in, no warrant, walking slow for his eyes to adjust, feeling for the kitchen counters which were lower than usual—custom—and at last he stepped into the living room.
Leaned against the brick hearth was a man without either of his legs, and with only a left arm. He was chewing the meat of his right shoulder, strings of red connecting him to himself.
Kupier sat down across from him.
They watched each other. The man swallowed. Kupier did too.
The air of the house was fetid, rotting.
The man was eating himself.
Kupier withdrew his gun, laid the cool side of the barrel against his forehead, then closed his eyes, felt for the garage again. The plug-in battery charger. It took all of four hours, but there was still enough time before dawn for Kupier to cradle the man in his arms, place him in the backseat, then drive the one-handed car to the curb in front of his own house. He unloaded the man, locked the door behind him—the phone already disabled—then took the car back, wiped the house down of himself.
In oversize freezer bags in the guest bathroom were other body parts, and a cooler full of gauze and antibiotic and morphine.
Kupier took it all.
By the middle of December, another Narc had seeped into Homicide-Robbery. Kupier heard about it through McNeel. He was the only one who still called. In his living room, the cardboard boxes he’d brought home from his office. The boxes were still packed with cases. He didn’t want to look in them anymore.
“Didn’t they give you a plaque or something?” Ellen had asked, dropping the grandchildren off.
Kupier nodded.
After they left, he called the station house to ask what McNeel was already supposed to be finding out: if Eric Waynes was still listed as a criminal informant. But then Stevenson answered the phone.
The plaque was balanced on the mantel.
“Looking for Len,” Kupier said.
“Detective McNeel . . . ” Stevenson dragged out, then grinned through the phone somehow, hushed his voice: “I think—yeah, I think somebody spilled some Worcestershire sauce or something on him, K, then like just left him in the park, man. Real tragedy.”
“Tell him I called,” Kupier said.
Upstairs, Martin Roche was watching cartoons. Kupier had found a mannequin in an alley, taped the legs and the left arm to Martin, then put him in his own old clothes. It was like dressing a doll. The blond wig he already had leftover in a closet; it just needed cutting into a man’s hairstyle. The sunglasses were because Martin’s eyes were always going everywhere. It made Kupier nervous.
For Thanksgiving, Kupier had cut Martin’s turkey up for him into small portions then pressed down on it with his fork until the meat came up between the tines in a festive paste.
Here, here.
His tongue was gone, of course, chewed off. Probably the first thing, really—the closest. When he talked it was with his tablet, the pen he kept tucked in the back of the leather glove of his one good hand. Sometimes, walking to the store for a paper or some more gauze, Kupier would think about the litter box in the garage of 2285 Rolling Vista, and apologize to the cat. But it was just a cat. No matter what kind of eyes Martin drew it with.
Christmas Eve, after the more dutiful of Homicide-Robbery had knocked on his door, caroling, guns at their hips, Ellen showed up with the kids. The presents were under the tree for them already. Kupier sat in his chair watching them. It was a sea of wrapping paper. Ellen got him a small, portable television. She’d already put batteries in it. Kupier turned it over and over in his lap.
“You look good,” Ellen said.
Kupier shrugged. His cancer was upstairs in the laundry corner of his bedroom, the brakes of his wheelchair clamped down.
Rita and Thomas were spitting up bows by now. Rita paused, looked at Kupier and then back, and asked her mother what was that in Grandpa K’s teeth?
“Ketchup,” Kupier said, pulling it in. “Tomato soup.”
Penny was there, her leash hooked under the andirons of the cold fireplace so she wouldn’t go upstairs.
Before bedtime, Kupier got Rita and Thomas to singsong a greeting into his answering machine, then immediately started picturing unnecessary trips to the corner store, dialing his number from the payphone, talking to Martin through the speaker.
This is remission, he might say. This is retirement.
He was in the upstairs bathroom dry heaving when the andirons clunked out of the fireplace, chipping the tile. Penny was loose now, not up the stairs though—Kupier knew every sound after thirty-two years—but at the front door.
Kupier stood, steadying himself on the towel rack, and walked down the hall as if in a dream, looked down onto his lawn.
Looking back up at him, pointing grudgingly up at him, a strung-out Eric Waynes.
Idling at the curb, smiling behind his hand, Stevenson.
Merry Christmas.
The way Kupier looked down the stairs at Ellen made her run up to him, a kid under each arm, her eyes full.
“Who is it?” she whispered.
Kupier pushed her into his bedroom.
“Close it,” he said, about the door.
She did, twisting the deadbolt into the jamb.
Kupier nodded. There was blood still on his chin, from throwing up.
Ellen picked up the phone but Kupier guided it back down.
“What?” she said. “Who is it? Is it him?”
The Maneater.
Kupier closed his eyes, then opened them back. Looked over at Thomas. He was just staring at him, at Grandpa K, his mouth and chin bloody.
“You’re him, aren’t you?” Thomas said, his voice full of wonder, and in answer Kupier held his arm out along his side in the shape of a grandson. Thomas didn’t step into it.
“A misunderstanding,” Kupier said, starting to cough, spattering the wall red, “she said it was just an owl . . . ” and then was just concentrating on trying to breathe air when Rita crossed the room to gather something, one of her mother’s porcelain figurines maybe, that she hadn’t seen for years now. Whatever it was, it made her lead with her hand, the expression on her face the kind you have in a dream: wonder. Until an arm reached up for her from the laundry, pulled her into its lap, and for the next twenty minutes, as long as Stevenson made Eric stand there knocking, the arm drew pictures for Rita and Thomas on a notebook, sketches of all of them up in heaven now, already—Grandma and Grandpa K, Rita and Thomas as bunny rabbits holding hands, Ellen hunched over on the other side of the room screaming, her fists balled at the sides of her head, her toes pigeoned together, knees knocked.
Kupier put his hand on her shoulder and told her not to worry, that this was going to work out, and for an instant saw himself as Mrs. Lambert, gaunt at the edge
of some great light, and he smiled inside, so deep that he crumbled away altogether, everything but the teeth, and the legend he was about to become.
Raphael
By the time we were twelve, the four of us were already ghosts, invisible in the back of our homerooms, at the cafeteria, at the pep-rallies where the girls all wore spirit ribbons the boys were supposed to buy. There was Alex in his cousin’s handed-down clothes—his cousin in the sixth grade with us—Rodge, who insisted that d was actually in his name, Melanie, hiding behind the hair her mother wouldn’t let her cut, and me, with my laminated list of allergies and the inhaler my mother had written my phone number on in black marker. Three boys who knew they didn’t matter and one girl that each of us fell in love with every morning with first bell, watching her race across the wet grass to make the school doors by eight.
“We’re the only ones who can see us,” Rodge said to me once, watching Melanie run.
I nodded, and Alex fell in. When Melanie burst through the doors we each pretended not to have been watching her.
It was true, though, that we were the only ones who could see us. And there was a power in it. It let us live in a space where no one could see what we did. The rules didn’t apply to us. Maybe that freedom was supposed to balance out our invisibility somehow, even. The world trying to make up for what it had failed to give us. We used it like that, anyway: not as if it were a gift, but like it was something we deserved, something we were going to prove was ours by using it all up, by pushing it farther and farther, daring it to fail us as well.
Or maybe we pushed it just because we’d been let down so many times already, we had no choice but to distrust our invisibility, our friendship. Anything this good, after everything else, it had to be the opening lines of some complicated joke. We were just waiting for the punch line. By pushing what we had farther and farther each day, testing each other, we were maybe even trying to fast-forward to that punch line.
But, too, it just felt so good to be part of something, finally, and then act casual, like it was nothing. Even if it was the rejects club, the ghost squad. Because maybe that was where it started, right? Then, next, weeks and weeks later—homecoming—maybe one of us would understand in some small but perfect way what it felt like at the pep rally, to give a girl a spirit ribbon then watch her pin it onto her shirt, smooth it down for too long because suddenly eye contact has become an awkward thing. Or, maybe one of us would be that girl. Or, just get swept away for once in the band’s music. Believe in the team, that if they can just win Friday night, then the world is going to be good and right.
More than anything, I guess, we wanted to be seen, given a chance. Not on the outside anymore. That’s probably what it came down to.
And the first step towards getting seen is of course being loud, doing what the other kids won’t, or are too scared to.
The days, though, they just kept turning into each other.
Nobody was noticing us, what we were doing. Even when we talked about it loud in the cafeteria, in the hall.
It would have taken so little, too.
A lift of the chin, a narrowing of the eyes.
Somebody asking where we were going after school.
If we just could have gotten that one nod of interest, maybe Alex would still be alive. Maybe Rodge wouldn’t have killed himself as a fifteenth birthday present to himself. Maybe Melanie wouldn’t have had to run away.
Even if whoever saw us didn’t want to go with us, but just had a ribbon, maybe. For Melanie. Because she really was beautiful under all that hair. The other three, then, we would have faded back into the steel-grey lockers that lined the halls, and we wouldn’t have gone any farther, ever.
But we were invisible, invulnerable.
Nobody saw us walking away after final bell. We were going to the lake. It was where we always went.
In a plastic cake pan with a sealable lid, buried in the mat of leaves that Rodge said was just above where the waves the ski boats made crashed, was Alex’s book. It was one of a series off a television commercial; his mom had bought it then forgot about it. And we didn’t hide it because we thought it was a Satan’s Bible or Anarchist’s Cookbook or anything—because it was powerful—we hid it simply because we didn’t want it to get wet. If my mother ever missed her cake pan, she never said anything.
“Where were we?” Melanie said, not sitting down but lowering herself so the seat of her pants hovered over the damp leaves. She balanced by hugging her knees with her arms. She’d told us once that her father had made her take ballet and gymnastics both until the third grade, when he left, and the way she moved, I believed it. We were all invisible, but she was the only one with enough throw-away grace that you never heard her feet fall.
Sitting back on her heels like that, her hair fell over her arms to the ground.
The rest of us didn’t care about our clothes. Just the book.
What we were doing was trying to scare ourselves. With alien abductions, with unexplained disappearances. Ghost ships, werewolves, prophecies, spontaneous human combustion.
The person reading would read in monotone. That was one of the rules. And no eye contact either.
The first entry that day was about a man sitting in his own living room when the television suddenly goes static. He reaches for the mute button, can’t find it, but then the screen clears up all at once. Only it’s not his show anymore, but an aerial view of . . . he’s not sure what. And then he is: his house, his own house. Ambulances pulling up. He opens his mouth, stands, his beer foaming into the carpet, and then doesn’t go to work the next day, or the next, and finally starts getting his checks from disability.
“That’s it?” Alex said, when Rodge was through.
“What’s the question?” Melanie said.
Part of the format of the book was that the editors would ask questions in italic after each entry.
“Was he stealing his cable?” I offered, my voice spooky.
Alex laughed, not scared either.
“Was it a warning?” Rodge read, following his index finger. “Was TJ Bentworth given that day a prophecy of his own death, and the opportunity to avoid it? And, if so, who sent that warning?”
Melanie threaded a strand of hair behind her ear, shook her head, disgusted.
The test now—and we’d sworn honesty, to not at any cost lie about it—was whether or not, that night, alone, we’d think twice with our hands on the remote control. If we thought, even for a microsecond, that that next station was going to be us.
Melanie shrugged, looked away, across the water.
“This is crap,” she said. “We need a new book.”
I agreed.
Alex took the book from Rodge, buried his nose in it, determined to prove to us that this book was scary.
I left him to it, was prepared to go to Rodge’s house, raid his pantry before his brother got home from practice, but then Alex looked up, said it: “We should tell our own stories, think?”
Rodge looked down, as if focusing into the ground.
“Like, make them up?” he said.
Alex shrugged whatever, smiled, and clapped the book shut.
He was three hours from the Buick that was coming to kill him.
The story I told was one that I’d already tried hard enough to forget that I never would. It was one of my dad’s stories. I was in it.
The first thing I told Alex and Rodge and Melanie was that this one was true.
Alex nodded, said to Rodge that this was how they all start.
“It should be dark,” Melanie said, swinging some of her hair around behind her. Their were leaf fragments in the tip-ends. I looked past her, to the wall of trees. It was night, in a way. Not dark, but still, with the sun behind the clouds, the only light we had was grey. It was enough. I nodded to myself, started.
“I was like ten months old,” I said.
“You remember?” Alex interrupted.
Rodge told him to shut up.
�
�My dad,” I went on. “He was like, I don’t know. In the bedroom. I think I was on the floor in the living room or something.” I shrugged my shoulder up to rub my right ear, stalling. Not to be sure I had it right, but that my voice wasn’t going to crack. The first time I’d heard my father tell this, I’d cried and not been able to stop. I couldn’t even explain why, really. Just that, you look at enough pictures of yourself as a baby and you imagine that everything was normal. That it doesn’t matter, it was just part of what got you to where you are now.
But then my dad took that away.
The story I told the three of them that last afternoon we were all together was that I was just sleeping there on the floor, my dad in his refrigerator in the garage, getting another beer or something, my mom asleep in their room. The television was the only light in the room. It was wrestling—the reason my mom had gone to bed early. Anyway, there’s my dad, coming back from the garage, one beer open, another between his forearm and chest, when he feels more than sees that something’s wrong in the living room. That there’s an extra shadow.
“What?” Melanie said, her eyes locked right on me.
I looked away, down. Swallowed.
“He said that—that—” and then I started crying anyway. Twelve years old with my friends and crying like a baby.
Melanie took my hand in hers.
“You have to finish now,” Alex said.
Rodge had his hand over his mouth, wasn’t saying anything.
When I could, I told them: my dad, standing there in the doorless doorway between the kitchen and the living room, looking down into our living room, past the couch, the coffee table, to me, on my stomach on the floor.
Squatted down beside me, blond like nobody in our family, a boy, a fourth-grader maybe, his palm stroking my baby hair down to my scalp.
My father doesn’t drop his beer, doesn’t call for my mom, can’t do anything.
“What—?” he tries to say, and the boy just keeps stroking my hair down, looks across the living room to my father, and says “I’m just patting him,” then stands, walks out the other doorway in the living room, the one that goes to the front door.
The Ones That Got Away Page 16