In the newspapers, it was why Nicholas’s mom left Nicholas’s dad: because what he did to the drugged-up kid who broke into their home, he did while Nicholas watched, transfixed, his fingertips to the pear wallpaper so he wouldn’t fall down.
It involved a kitchen chair, some tape, a hammer. Pliers for the teeth, which he pushed into Tim’s earholes and nostrils and tear ducts, just making it up as he went.
How long I was in the truck was forty-eight minutes.
It’s better if Tim was knocked out the whole time.
What people say now—it’s still the worst thing to have ever happened—what they say now is that they understand Nicholas’s dad. That they would have done the same thing. That, once a person crosses the threshold into your house, where your family is, that he’s giving up every right to life he ever had.
This is what you do if you’re a traitor and in the same break room with people saying that: nod.
This is what you do if you hate yourself and can’t sleep and have your hands balled into fists under the sheets all night every night: agree with them for real. That, if anybody tries to come in your door one night, then all bets are off.
And then you’re a traitor.
Nevermind that, a few months before Nicholas’s harmless juvenile delinquency bloomed into a five-year stretch with no parole, you went to his apartment, to buy a bag. He was Mark all over, right down to how he narrowed his eyes as he pulled on his cigarette, right down to how he ducked his head into his shoulders like his neck was still remembering long hair. And you didn’t use anymore then, hadn’t since the night before your wedding, would even stop at the grocery store on the way home, to flush the bag over and over, until the assistant manager knocked on the door, asked if there was a problem.
Yes, there was.
It was a funny question, really.
The problem was that one time while your friend’s head was floating across a lawn, a machete glinting real casual in the doorway behind it, a thing happened that you didn’t understand for years: the life meant for Nicholas, you got. And he got yours.
That’s not the funny part, though.
The funny part, the reason the assistant manager finally has to get the police involved in removing you from the bathroom, is that you can still smell the pizza from that night. And that sometimes, driving home to your family after a normal day, you think it was all worth it. That things happen for a reason.
It’s not the kind of thing Nicholas would understand, though.
Nevermind Tim.
Crawlspace
Quint calls me up on a Saturday afternoon and tells me to watch this.
I stand in my kitchen and study the stove I put in last Christmas, all my tools on the counter, and all the ones I’d borrowed from Quint. It’s still crooked.
“What channel?” I say.
This is different, though.
Twenty minutes later, Sherry at home with my promise to be back before ten, I’ve eased down to Quint’s, a broken six-pack on the seat beside me, the sole of my boot skimming the loose asphalt gravel between his house and mine.
He’s waiting for me on the porch, smoking like he’s twelve years old again and we only have five minutes before his aunt comes home.
“What?” I say, arcing a beer across the yard to him in a spiral so perfect it should be in a commercial.
He takes it, doesn’t crack it open.
That more than anything tells me something’s up.
“Is it Tanya?” I say, looking behind me for some reason.
Tanya’s Quint’s wife. Sunday nights she’s usually on-shift at the hospital.
“Inside,” Quint says, and holds the screen door open, ushers me in.
I shrug, duck into the cat smell of his house and run my finger under my nose.
Quint places his hand on my shoulder like a priest and guides me past his television through the dead part of the kitchen to the hall, then down the hall. The only room this deep into his house is Gabe’s. He’s six months old, maybe. Born just before Christmas. The twin that lived, big tragedy, all that. One that’s supposed to be already over, that Quint’s supposed have dealt with. Not so much gotten out of his system—Sherry says things like that never get out of your system—but at least grown enough scar tissue over it to function.
Until now, too, I’d assumed that was the case. That Quint was functioning.
But now. Being led back to Gabe’s room.
None of the pictures I have in my head are good. Better than half of them involve me lying to the police. Or, worse, to Tanya. So, when Quint palms Gabe’s door open, spilling a wedge of light across his stained crib, Gabe just sleeping there, his thumb cocked in his mouth, I relax a bit.
“Say his name,” Quint says.
“What?”
“Try to wake him up. Just not very hard.”
“Quint, man—”
“My responsibility.”
I turn to Gabe, his lips moving, back rising with breath, and shrug, fill my mouth with beer, do what I know’s an annoying-as-hell little gargle.
Gabe shifts position but doesn’t wake.
“What?” I say. “You gave him some Benadryl?”
My voice makes Gabe roll over, his head screwing around on his pudgy neck, his shoulder blades drawing together.
Quint crosses the room, places a hand on Gabe’s side until his breathing’s even again. Before he leaves he angles the baby monitor a little bit closer to the crib.
We walk back to the kitchen.
“Sherry put you up to this?” I ask.
Quint laughs without any sound, tells me to wait.
Again I look over my shoulder, for Tanya maybe, coming home early in her nurse whites, or for Sherry, waiting for me see how cute Gabe was. How we need one.
It’s just us, though.
I push off the counter with my butt, follow where Quint leads.
It’s to the garage, the old recliner Tanya told him he couldn’t keep in the house even one day longer. Even one minute. It’s in the corner by his toolcart, surrounded by the ashes of ten thousand cigarettes.
“Real nest you got here,” I say, drawing my lips back from my teeth, not in appreciation.
Quint doesn’t say anything, just settles down into it.
On the makeshift table beside his recliner is the listening end of the baby monitor. Gabe’s breathing comes through it like he’s right here with us.
I settle back against the Chevelle Quint still hasn’t fixed up.
“Just watch,” he says again, and takes a paperback from the stack by his chair. It’s a horror novel, like all of them. I can tell by the full moon on the front, the red lettering on the spine. And because I’ve known Quint for nearly eighteen years now.
He settles back into what must be reading position #1, starts reading.
I lean forward, look side to side again, this time for candid cameras, then come back to him.
“Quint, dude—”
He never looks up from the book, just holds his finger up for quiet.
I shake my head—this is what I had to talk my way out of the house for, what I’m going to be paying for for the rest of the week—dig through the bottom drawer of Quint’s toolcart for the magazines he’s always kept there. They’re legal, I’m pretty sure, but still, you wouldn’t want the cops stumbling onto them.
For maybe four minutes I lean against the Chevelle, study the girls in the classifieds ads after I’ve studied all the girls in the main part of the magazine, and Quint just sits there, hunched over his damn book.
Finally I hiss a laugh through my front teeth, roll the magazine into a tube to hammer down through my fist, and am already pushing off the Chevelle to make for the door and whatever I can scrounge from his fridge when the monitor’s lights pulse red, from left to right. Like a tachometer, I think, Gabe really winding up.
“Shhh,” Quint says, still reading the book, his eyes narrow from the effort.
Gabe’s voice comes through the
monitor. A moan, I’d call it.
“Listen,” I say, “this has been exciting and all, and it’s not that I’m not thankful, but—”
Gabe interrupts, screaming, all the monitor’s lights flashing red now.
Quint stands, his bottom lip between his teeth. He’s nodding, as if waiting for me to agree that it was worth coming over here.
I just stand there.
“Like clockwork,” he says, then passes his little horror novel over to me, his index finger holding his place. Without even meaning to, I put my finger there too, and then he’s gone, to Gabe.
The monitor’s close enough to the crib that I hear the springs in the miniature mattress when Quint picks him up, hear what he’s saying, that’s it’s all right, buddy. That it’s not real, it’s not real. Daddy just had to show his friend.
I study the red lights on the monitor, then the book in my hands. Read where Gabe must have been.
It’s scene where a guy’s sleeping in a bed with his wife, and this guy, he’s watching his doorway like it’s the most important thing in the world. But still, he’s not watching close enough. He blinks once, twice, and then on the third blink—ten, twelve minutes of sleep—he wakes to a dead little kid tugging on the covers, then trying to crawl in. Then crawling in anyway.
Quint says it again to Gabe: “It’s not real, buddy. It’s just nothing, man. Nothing at all . . .”
I put the book down, open to the place he was, and make it back to Sherry fifteen minutes before I’d promised.
On Wednesday I meet Tanya at the regular place, the usual time. Gabe’s with Sherry on our living room floor. As far as Sherry knows, Tanya’s sitting with her pregnant sister at the doctor’s office. Wednesdays are when he sees expectant mothers. It’s a weekly appointment.
As far as where I am, it’s work. The only thing different from every other day is I’m taking my lunch an hour and a half early.
The lie I tell myself in the trailer I have a key to is that the reason I’m not telling Tanya about Quint, reading to Gabe from across the house, without words, is that on Wednesdays we never have time to talk, really. It’s just unbutton, unbutton, lock the door twice then test the knob to be sure.
The truth of it of course is that I don’t have the words to tell her, and that it’s stupid anyway.
A few nights later, Quint’s at my door, baby monitor in hand.
“You didn’t leave him there,” I say, leaning to the side to look past him, for the stroller.
“He’s safe,” Quint says, insulted, eyeballing all my baseboards for an outlet.
I shake my head no, tell him not in here.
On the way to the shed in back, where the light socket doubles as a plug, where Sherry’ll never come because there’s spiders, Quint fills me in on Gabe. It’s been a week of testing. He’s been reading all different kinds of novels, from all different rooms of the house, at all times of the day and night, with all different clothes and jewelry on. What he’s found is that it works best when he’s lying down, the book propped on his stomach. And the book, it has to be bloody of some kind. Haunted houses, werewolves, serial killers, whatever. Nothing sappy or consoling.
“Why?” I say, holding the shed door open against the wind.
Quint shrugs, steps up onto the plywood floor, says like it’s obvious, “It puts him to sleep, man. Keeps him there, I mean.”
I follow him in, nod.
It makes sense is the thing.
“What about science fiction?”
“He likes it.”
“Sex stuff?”
“He’s nine months old.”
I clean a space on the bench for the baby monitor.
“He doesn’t understand the war stuff, either,” Quint adds, tuning Gabe’s distant breathing in. “And . . . I don’t know how to explain it. I think—I think it’s not so much like he’s seeing the words or anything. It’s like he’s seeing flashes of the pictures the books put in my head, yeah?”
“No,” I tell him. “I don’t.”
Quint pulls a thin paperback up from his back pocket.
“This’ll be the farthest away I’ve tried,” he says.
I nod—what am I supposed to say, here?—and he slips into his book, his eyes narrowing with gore, maybe, or a vampire swooping down, and then, just when I think he’s forgetting this is all a big experiment, Gabe lets loose through the static.
Quint looks up, momentarily lost.
“Think you can stop now,” I say, pushing the book down so he can’t read it anymore.
Gabe stands, the realization washing over him, and then’s gone, sprinting the quarter mile between my house and his.
By the time he gets there, he’s breathing hard.
He rips Gabe up from the crib, holds him close.
“You there?” he says when he can, through the monitor.
I nod, walk the monitor down to him.
Over enchiladas Sherry tells me that Tanya’s messing around on Quint.
I chew, chew, swallow.
“What?” I say, my face poker-straight, another bite ready on my fork, in case I need a stall.
“On Wednesdays she drops Gabriel off here, y’know?”
I shrug, fork the bite in.
“Well,” Sherry says, looking out the kitchen window, I think, “this last Wednesday, her sister started having contractions, she thought.”
“Her sister?”
“Ronnie—you don’t remember her. She’s having twins too.”
“Ronnie,” I say, swirling the bean juice and cheese on my plate. “But Tanya just had Gabe.”
“You know what I mean.”
She doesn’t know I’m stalling here. Spinning out.
“It was a false alarm,” she goes on. “But Tanya was supposed to be with her’s the thing. As far as anybody knew.”
I nod, chew some more, trying each word out fifty times before I actually say it out loud.
“Does Quint know?”
“He’s your friend.”
I agree with her about that, study the kitchen window too. Through it there’s the aluminum pole of a streetlight. It doesn’t shimmer or tremble or do anything to warrant my interest in it. Still, without it to lock onto, I’d probably be throwing up.
The next week, a Monday, I’m standing on Quint’s porch, synchronizing my watch with his. What he’s paying me with is two beers. Where he’s going is somewhere past the range of the baby monitor. My job is to record when and if Gabe wakes up, scared, and to somehow pat him back to sleep, or at least hold him until Quint gets back.
Written on the back of my arm, upside down to me, is the payphone number of wherever he’s going. Because he’s trying to follow the scientific method, he says, I don’t need to know where he’s going. It might influence the experiment in some way neither of us could anticipate.
“Okay then?” he says from the farthest part of his lawn.
I nod, tongue my lip out some. Can see the tree in front of my house from here.
Before Quint’s to the end of the block, I’ve got the payphone number dialed in. A kid answers. In answer to my questions the kid says he’s a bagboy, that the phone is by the ice machine, not quite to the firewood—why?
“Where in the larger sense, I mean,” I tell him.
The grocery store.
It’s two miles away.
I thank him, hang up, check on Gabe, finally turn away from him to close the door then come back again, looking at him the way I used to, those first months before his hair came in just like Quint’s. It’s something I can’t bring up when Sherry’s wanting a baby: that I’ve already been through it once. From a distance. That that was why I lost twelve pounds last Christmas, even with all the Thanksgiving leftovers. Praying and praying, and hating myself for each prayer, that the one that was stillborn was the one that could have given us away. Because I saw on the news that it can work like that, each twin being from a different dad. I saw it on the news and knew that we’d been lucky enough so far t
hat this one-in-a-million shot had to be a sure thing, to make up for everything having been so good so far.
Gabe, though, his red hair, it’s a gift. Everything I could have asked for. But still. I stand in Tanya’s kitchen and hold one of Quint’s beers to my forehead like the hero does in the movie he’s trying to get out of.
On the refrigerator is a list of each thing Quint’s eaten over the last ten days. Tanya thinks he’s on a diet he saw on TV. She laughed into my chest when she told me, and I smoothed the hair down on the back of her head, closed my eyes.
The first time with her had been an accident, sure. But not the second, or all the rest. And now this, Quint going telepathic or whatever. Or—or not Quint, maybe, but Gabe. Maybe Quint just has a leaky mind, is one of those people my parents wouldn’t ever play Spades with, and Gabe, because they have the same blood, can tune him in better than anybody.
“Bullshit,” I say out loud, alone in Quint and Tanya’s hall, and peel the tab off the second beer.
Except that when I was twelve, for about six weeks I’d always been able to tell when the phone was going to ring. I didn’t hear it exactly, just kind of felt it in the bone behind my ear. It was just those six weeks though, and I never went to Vegas like my dad kept saying, and some things, if you just ignore them hard enough, they go away.
Like this.
What I could do here, I know, is not write anything down for Quint. Even if Gabe does wake up screaming, pictures of zombies in his head. It’d probably be best for him, even, save him from a childhood stocked with every bloody image Quint can find on the paperback rack. Because, it’s not like they’re going to take this on the road or anything. You don’t get rich off your father’s dreams seeping into your head. Parlor tricks are supposed to be neat, small. What Quint’s doing requires way too much setup, and looks fake anyway.
I sit down at the table, push the notebook into the napkin dispenser we’d stole one night from some bar, years ago. Tanya still likes to make a show of checking her lipstick in it when we’re over, like this is all a game—the house, marriage, kids. I have to look away when she’s like that, because Sherry’s smart, too smart.
And then I think the thing I always think, when I’m not with Tanya: that this has to end. Not because it’s wrong, but because we’re going to get caught, and then have to live down the road from each other for the rest of our lives.
The Ones That Got Away Page 24