The Ones That Got Away

by Stephen Graham Jones

  I shake my head no, that this isn’t what I wanted, and realize at the same time that what I’m doing is trying to talk myself into doing the right thing.

  I drink off all of the beer I can. See that Quint’s last meal was sloppy joe mix on tortilla chips, with three jalapeños, sliced.

  Right about now, he’s down in the parking lot of the grocery store, oblivious, a few pages into his book, his window down to hear the phone ring. Sherry’s at the garage, punching holes in people’s tickets. Tanya on-shift, covering for somebody, and, for me, it’s just another lunch.

  While Quint reads, I make a sandwich from his deli drawer, eat it standing up, and am like that—sandwich in one hand, third beer in the other—when Gabe starts screaming like he’s just seen right into the black heart of evil. Like somebody’s holding his head there, making him look.

  I drop my sandwich, try to pick it up before it’s dirty, end up tipping beer onto it instead.

  “Okay, okay,” I call to Gabe, and then, just as I’m standing, I feel something in my head. It stops me, cranks my head over to the phone. Seconds later, it rings.

  By the third ring I manage to draw the receiver to my ear.

  It’s Tanya.

  When I don’t say anything, she asks if I’m going to get the baby or not. I look through the doorway to the hall, can almost feel the telepathy popping in the air.

  “Q?” Tanya says then, quieter, urgent-like, and there’s a ball in my throat I can’t explain—like I’m betraying her, standing in her kitchen, collecting her kid from his crib. Letting her think I’m Quint.

  I hang up softly, call Quint, get the bagboy, hear Tanya ringing back on the other line.

  “What do you want me to tell him?” the bagboy asks, his voice hushed like he knows more about what’s going on here than he should.

  Behind him is the sound of cars rattling, women talking, doors swishing open and shut.

  Gabe nestles his head into the hollow of my shoulder, gathers the fabric of my shirt in his right hand.

  “Tell him I’ve got to get back to work,” I say, then hold the phone in place long after I’ve hung up.

  It’s a form of prayer.

  As apology or something, I finally take one of the books Quint’s always trying to get me to read.

  “You know why he likes that stuff, right?” Sherry asks.

  We’re in bed, the television on but muted, so we can hear the new squirrels pad around above us.

  “Why he likes scary shit, you mean?” I say.

  “Because it’s at his level.”

  “Hm,” I say, and turn the page.

  The book is that first one I watched him read to Gabe. I spend equal time on the page and television, and fall asleep somewhere in-between, wake deep in the morning, the sheets twisted under my fingers.

  “Hun?” Sherry says, from her side of the bed.

  For a long time I don’t answer, then, once she’s breathing even again, I tell her I’m sorry too, the same way I’m telling Quint: where they can’t hear.

  The talk I have with Quint that Friday night over beers in my garage is stumbling and ridiculous, and I’m embarrassed for him, almost. For both of us.

  It starts with me, explaining that this trick him and Gabe have, it probably isn’t what he thinks.

  What I’m doing is being a good friend. Saving him from himself. Saving Gabe.

  “Then what is it?” Quint says, eyeing me over his beer.

  “You want it to be ESP.”

  “What else could it be?”

  I shrug, rub a spot on my chin that doesn’t itch.

  What I can’t say is what Sherry said, when I explained all this to her: that if she’d been fired from her job, was sponging off her wife’s double shifts, spending all day everyday with her infant son, then yeah, she might invent some special powers too. Just to cope.

  What I really can’t say is that maybe the twin that died’s involved in all

  this somehow. A door I can’t open around Quint, because he’d fall through.

  “It’s like—like those people you see on That’s Incredible, with dogs and horses, y’know?” I tell him instead. “They want so bad for it to be real that they don’t even realize they’re tapping their toe on the ground seven times, after asking what’s four plus three.”

  Quint tips some more beer down the hatch.

  “I’m not saying you’re tapping your foot,” I add.

  His eyes are red around the rims.

  “Then what?” he finally says, for the second time.

  I shrug, open my mouth like I have something ready, but don’t, finally fall back on a half-baked version of Sherry’s explanation: that Quint’s spent so much time at home lately that he’s cued into Gabe’s sleeping patterns. That sometimes Gabe wakes up when Quint’s not reading, right?

  “He’s a baby,” Quint shrugs. “That doesn’t mean it’s not . . . extra-sensory.”

  I swish some spit back and forth between my front teeth.

  “If it is,” I finally say, “it’s not like you think.”

  This gets Quint’s attention. The way he smiles a little, too, I can tell that he can hear Sherry’s voice in mine, knows I’m her sock puppet here.

  “When you read,” I go on, closing my eyes to try to sound only like myself, “I don’t think—I mean, Gabe can’t read, right? Even if he were hearing your little reading voice in your head, the way you say it to yourself, all spooky or whatever, it would just be your voice, not really words. Because he doesn’t understand words yet.”

  “That we know of.”

  “He’s a baby.”

  Quint shrugs, says where I can barely hear, “I did it in Spanish too.”

  I stare at the floor, finally close my eyes.

  “And it worked?”

  “Scientific method,” Quint says, crunching his can against his thigh.

  “Then that proves it,” I say. “Gabe doesn’t know Spanish.”

  “Maybe there’s a language under words? One that we think in or something. A telepathic society might not have any reason to ever evolve more than one language, did you think about that?”

  “Aliens, you mean?”

  “I’m just saying.” Quint shrugs, comes back. “He still woke up. When I did it in Spanish. That means something.”

  “Because he . . . because it’s not thoughts you’re shooting out of your head, or even pictures, that’s what it means. It’s feelings, the shapes of things. Like, however reading about a dumbass zombie book makes you feel—scared, grossed-out, whatever—Gabe’s feeling that.”

  Quint pulls his top lip in for a long time, finally nods whatever, takes another beer.

  “So you calling Child Services on me, or what?” he says.

  I look away, and then he says it: “You were right, though. This does prove it.”

  “ESP?”

  “That he’s mine.”

  What my heart does right then is stop, cave in on itself some.

  “That he’s yours?” I hear myself saying, my voice wooden, hollow.

  In answer, Quint pushes up from the trash can he’s been leaning on, then hooks his head to the door that leads into the house. It’s still closed, Sherry and Tanya in there walking on dynamite.

  “I wasn’t sure,” Quint says, not using his lips at all.

  My heart flushes itself, heats up the back of my eyes.

  “What do you mean?” I say just as quietly. “Tanya?”

  The disbelief in my voice is so real.

  Quint purses his lips out, shrugs once.

  “Been going on for a while, I think,” he says. “If I hadn’t got laid off . . . I don’t know. I never would have figured it out, probably.”

  My mouth is moving to form questions, but I can’t think of the right ones, don’t have time to test them from each angle before throwing them into the ring.

  “She—she couldn’t,” I try.

  “I think that’s what you always think,” Quint says. “What I’m s
upposed to think, right?”

  “Then . . . what—?”

  “Just little stuff,” Quint shrugs. “Like, the other day. She says she called the house, but I wouldn’t talk to her or something. She asked if I still trusted her, if I was just waiting to see who she was going to ask for.”

  “Who else could it have been?”

  Quint shakes his head no, says I’m not getting it: if she thought the guy was there, then that meant that he had been there, right?

  I just stare at him.

  He shrugs, chews the inside of his right cheek the way he’s always done. His mother used to spank him for it in elementary.

  “I was there,” I say, weakly, the blood surging in my neck now, at the chance I’m taking.

  “You would have talked to her though,” Gabe shrugs, not even slowing down. “I told her it was me anyway, yeah?” Then he smiles, covers it with his hand. “She’s acting guilty,” he says between his fingers. “It’s getting to her, I mean. Building up inside her.”

  “What about Gabe?”

  Quint does his eyebrows, bites his lower lip now.

  “He’s mine,” he says, “right? I mean, if he wasn’t, we wouldn’t be able to—we wouldn’t have this connection.”

  I nod, try to blink in a normal fashion.

  “So now I know whose side he’s on,” Quint adds, raising his beer to me, holding it up like that so it’s the only thing in the world I can see, that I can allow myself to see.

  Five days from then, it’s Wednesday.

  What I say into the damp hair close to Tanya’s scalp is that he knows, Quint. That he knows, and it’s over now, it has to be.

  What she says back isn’t in words, so much, but it’s not ESP either. The opposite, really.

  We hide in each other.

  The mask I wear for the next two weeks is just like my face, only it doesn’t give anything away, is always ready to smile, to take part in a shrug then look away.

  The reason for the mask is that Tanya and Quint are talking to a counselor down at Tanya’s hospital.

  Sherry watches Gabe while they’re there.

  It makes me so tired, controlling my thoughts around him for those hour-and-a-halfs.

  One night I finally break down, go to the store for milk we don’t need, and call Quint’s house from the grocery store. The bagboy watches me, his lower lip pulled between his teeth like he knows too much.

  “You haven’t told him, have you?” I say to Tanya when she picks up.

  I’ve got the phone cupped in both hands, am pressing it into the side of my head.

  “Trevor?” Tanya says back, a note of something bad in her voice.

  Trevor is her brother. The last any of us knew, he was in Maine.

  A muscle at the base of my jaw quivers.

  In the background of her kitchen, I hear Quint asking her something.

  “Tell me you haven’t,” I whisper.

  “Of course not,” she says, distant—to Quint, or me?—“I don’t know who it is.”

  I hang up gently, hold the phone there with my eyes closed, then nod, go in for the milk, park in front of my house minutes later, make myself drink the whole half gallon, tell myself that if I can do it, and keep it down, then Tanya won’t tell, no matter how honest their next session at the hospital gets.

  Halfway to the door, though, I throw it all up, and Sherry finds me like that, starts breathing too hard herself, the phone already in her hands. Ninety seconds later Tanya is leaning over me, hugging me, helping me to stand, long strings of bubbly white leaking down from the corners of my mouth, from my nose. She breaks them off with the side of her hand, guides them away, slings them towards the street.

  “ . . . must have been bad,” I tell her and Sherry, when I can.

  At first they don’t respond, and then Sherry laughs a single laugh through her nose—disgust—says, “The gallon of milk, you mean?”

  I shrug, caught. Stare at the grass for a lie, finally find one: “That new guy at work.”

  “The one from prison?” Sherry whispers.

  “He said milk—he drinks it for his stomach ulcer.”

  Sherry shakes her head at this.

  “And you think you have a stomach ulcer now, right?”

  When I don’t answer, she apologizes to Tanya with her eyes. Because I’m one of those people who can get sick from talking to somebody on the phone. It’s a joke, has been for years.

  “I think you’re going to be all right,” Tanya says, smiling.

  Her hand is on my knee.

  I smile, shrug one shoulder, no eye contact.

  It makes them comfortable, lets them be moms, me the little boy.

  To keep them from digging my hole any deeper, I point to the kitchen to show them where I’m going, then go there, run water over my hands.

  I can still hear them, though.

  “So how’s it going?” Sherry asks Tanya, in a way that I can see the parentheses Sherry’s holding around her eyes, like a Sunday morning cartoon.

  I turn off the water.

  “Good,” Tanya says, her hands surely in her lap, innocent.

  I reach for the dishtowel, draw it to my chin.

  Good.

  I want to laugh. Want my fingers to stop trembling.

  I wind them up tight in the dishtowel, follow Sherry and Tanya to the door.

  “So where’s the good knight tonight?” I say from behind Sherry.

  It’s what we used to call Quint back in high school. From some song.

  Walking backwards into the darkness, barefoot, Tanya exaggerates her shrug, says he was going down to the store or something. He didn’t say.

  I feel my mask smile, lift the dishtowel in farewell, and, because the kind of telepathy I have makes me see Quint down at the grocery store, offering a cigarette to the bagboy, the bagboy in return pointing to the payphone, to the redial button, I hear Tanya start running through the wet grass home. To catch the phone or Gabe, I don’t know.

  “What?” Sherry says, holding the screen open for me.

  I shake my head no, nothing. Duck back through the door.

  Three days later my phone rings, and I beat Sherry to it. It’s nobody. My lips are shaped around the sound of a whispered, desperate T? when Quint says something into his end. I can’t make it out.

  “What?” Sherry says, stepping half out of the bedroom, her work shirt most of the way on.

  “Quint,” I say, then pull the phone deeper into the kitchen.

  Quint’s not saying anything else. But he’s not hanging up either.

  Finally I thumb the dial tone button, say, loud enough for Sherry, “It’s in the shed, I think. Want me to walk it down?”

  When I step into the bedroom then, to say it—Quint needs his quarter-inch ratchet back, that one that’s spray-painted blue so nobody’ll steal it—Sherry’s buttoning her shirt, her eyes already settled on me.

  I tilt my head up to tell her where I’m going but then see how close she is to the nightstand. Where the other phone is.

  “Quint,” she says, her voice artificially light, I think. Maybe.

  I tell her to have a good day at the garage, then hold her side as we touch lips, and talk to myself the whole way down to Quint’s. How the only part of the conversation Sherry could have heard was me, saying that about the shed. But—would it sound different to her if the line was dead? Would it have been louder in her ear, my voice closer, because half of it wasn’t getting sucked down the line?

  Partway to Quint’s, I remember the blue ratchet, go back for it, find it on the coffee table, Sherry already gone.

  I reach for it like maybe it’s hot, or electric, and, when I have it, it’s light like old, dry paper. What I do with it is sit, and hold it hard to my forehead, my eyes closed, and make myself breathe, breathe. Tell myself that, whatever else, Sherry can’t know anything for sure, and that Tanya’s not going to tell. That Quint’s not waiting in his own living room down the street, a pistol in his lap, Gabe cr
ying in the other room.

  I’m half-right: Quint is in his chair, just not the new one Tanya financed for him two birthdays ago. Instead it’s the ratty one, out in the garage.

  He looks up at me when I step down onto the stained concrete.

  His eyes are red around the rims, and the hand he has wrapped around his paperback, the knuckles are scraped raw. The kind of rash you get from punching sheetrock, over and over.

  I feel along the side of the Chevelle, lift my chin to him.

  “I thought you were choking or something,” I say, “on the phone, I mean.”

  He smiles without looking at me, says, “So you brought my ratchet down to work on me?”

  I look at it blue in my hand, and see it in an evidence bag.

  It makes a solid thunk when I toss it into his tool drawer. With the wrenches instead of the sockets, but Quint doesn’t notice, is staring at something I can’t see.

  “What’d you want, then?” I say.

  Quint laughs as if just now returning to the garage, shrugs, throws me the magazine I was looking at last time I was here.

  I unroll it, study it too long, come back to him.

  “Thanks, I guess,” I tell him. “I can’t take it home, though, y’know?”

  Quint smiles, shakes his head no, says, “You’re an antenna, I think.”

  “A what?”

  “It works best when—I don’t know. When you’re around. Involved.”

  “With you and Gabe?”

  Quint nods, his eyes suddenly glossy wet.

  “What’s going on?” I say.

  Quint doesn’t answer, just shakes his head no, brings his paperback horror novel up to his face, starts reading hard enough that his lips move.

  “I’ve already seen this—” I start, but Quint interrupts by holding his hand up. I stare at him like that for maybe four seconds, then lean back against the Chevelle again, open the mag, see the same barely-legal girls in the same unlikely positions. Soon enough I’m watching the tiny bulbs on the baby monitor. They’re black, don’t even remember red.

  Quint swallows loud, pulls the book closer to his face, reading as hard as he knows how, then finally closes his eyes, slings the book past me.