The Ones That Got Away

by Stephen Graham Jones

  It brings something down from the shelf, something that falls for a long time. Snow chains, I’m thinking, or one of those hanging lamps like old ladies have, with all the stained glass. I don’t look around to see. Just at Quint. He’s crying, trying not to. Not wiping his face, because that would be admitting that there were tears.

  “He grew out of it,” I say, in explanation.

  Quint shakes his head no, settles his eyes on what looks like the Chevelle’s front tire.

  “It’s not him,” he says, then looks up at me. “It’s not him.”

  “Then—what?”

  “You said he was . . . that he was picking up on how this shit made me feel.”

  “The books, yeah.”

  “They just, they don’t scare me anymore, I guess.”

  I smile, cross my arms.

  “Then you grew out of it,” I say. “Sherry always said you would.”

  Quint smiles, rubs it into his face. “Sherry,” he says. “You’re lucky. To have her, I mean.”

  “So are you.”

  “What?”

  “Lucky. Tanya.”

  Quint keeps the same expression on his face, but changes gears in his head. I can tell.

  “So find something scarier,” I say. “Romance. Algebra.”

  Quint doesn’t laugh.

  Instead, he pulls a chain up from his shirt. A necklace, like dogtags, except, instead of a little nameplate on the end, it’s a silver key.

  “What?” I say.

  “In the . . . in the books, it’s all fake. I know that now.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “This is real,” he says, holding the key up before his face.

  I don’t have anything to say to this.

  “Dr. Jak—our therapist,” Quint goes on. “He says it’s Tanya’s symbol that she’s with me again. All the way. Like before.”

  “A key?”

  “She used to it to—to meet her . . . To meet him.”

  And then I get it: the key he’s wearing, it’s the one I had cut for Tanya. It fits the trailer, has unlocked more Wednesdays than I can count.

  He looks up, nods.

  “Yeah,” he says. “I was right. She’s been screwing around.”

  “How long?”

  “Two years.”

  “Who?”

  Quint shrugs one shoulder, looks away. “It’s not supposed to be important who,” he says. “Just that it’s”—he holds the key up, to show—“that it’s over. A name isn’t going to help me move on.”

  “Shit.” It’s the only word in my head. In my whole life.

  Quint nods, does his eyebrows up in agreement.

  “Then . . . Gabe?” I finally manage.

  Quint stands, runs his fingers through his hair, dislodging his cap. It falls down his back. His fingers stay in his hair, his elbows out like stunted wings.

  “Either I’m not—can’t get scared like I used to,” Quint says, his tone all about matter-of-factness, “or . . . or the other guy, he had red hair too.”

  I swallow. My hair is black.

  “So you’re saying she—Tanya—that she was stepping out on you with somebody who looks just like you?”

  Quint doesn’t turn back around to me.

  “It’s my fault,” he says. “If I would have, y’know. Not been out here all the time, I guess. Maybe she was, like, looking for me all over again, yeah? Like, how I used to be?”

  “You still are like that,” I try. “We all are.”

  Quint laughs about this. The kind of laugh you manage when your doctor tells you you have six weeks left to live.

  “You know he’s yours,” I say then, “Gabe. You wouldn’t have been able to do—that ESP shit. It wouldn’t have worked.”

  Quint turns around, his face slack. “How do we know his father isn’t the telepathic one?”

  “His red-headed father?”

  “The one Tanya’s been seeing,” Quint says, holding the key up again, his eyes flashing behind it, “yeah.”

  I stare at him until he shrugs, slams his fist down to the face of his rolling toolbox.

  “You want to go somewhere?” I say. “I can call in.”

  Quint just closes his eyes tight. “How about we go to two years ago? You manage that, you think?”

  “You want to hit somebody then?” I say, stepping forward.

  Quint looks up at me and for a long moment I think he’s going to do it, and that, if there’s any justice in the world, my jaw will crack down some important line, or a sinus cavity will collapse, or a vertebra will snap in my neck.

  Instead, he just hugs me for the first time since elementary, then holds onto me, his face warm on my chest.

  The spot I stare at on the wall is where a nail is buried all the way to the head, so it’s just a little metal dot.

  On my way out minutes later, I pass Gabe’s room.

  He’s sleeping, unaware. Perfect.

  I am not an antenna. In the breakroom a week after the talk with Quint in the garage, I write this onto the top of the table until it’s a mat of words: I am not an antenna.

  The next day it’s just a blue stain that smells like citrus.

  Instead of the regulation white hose all the other nurses wear, Tanya wears thigh-highs with a lace band at top. They stop just after her skirt starts.

  The number of people I can tell this to is zero.

  The number of people Quint told it to two years ago was one.

  When she steps off the elevator into the garage the following Wednesday, I’m waiting for her.

  She smiles, looks away. Never stops walking towards me.

  After myself, the person I hate most in the world is Dr. Jakobi. In addition to a marriage counselor, he’s a preacher. I tell Sherry that this is a conflict of interest for him, but then can’t stuff it into words, exactly why. It has something to do with his stake in other people’s marriages. Like, if he’d been the one to marry Tanya and Quint nine years ago, then, now, he’d be doing anything he could to keep them together, right? Just to keep his average up.

  Sherry says preachers don’t compare averages and percentiles.

  “Sometimes you should just give up, though,” I say.

  This gets Sherry looking at me harder than I want.

  “You want her to leave him?” she finally says.

  I smile, shake my head no, like she’s talking particulars, friends, where I’m more in a hypothetical mode.

  I don’t want them to break up, no.

  But I don’t sleep so much either. And it’s not just the squirrels.

  Under Quint’s couch now is a slender little fire safe. It has a handle like a briefcase.

  He calls me up on a Tuesday to see it.

  “You’re wanting to test it?” I say from his doorway. I haven’t carried a lighter now for years.

  Quint laughs through his nose some.

  “It’s in there,” he says.

  “What?”

  He chews his tongue, squinches one side of his face up.

  “With the doctor the other day. I wouldn’t drop it, the, y’know. Whoever it was. That’s not supposed to matter.”

  “The other guy.”

  Yes.

  “So?” I say.

  Where I’m standing is half in, half out his screen door. My fingertips holding it open. In any television show or movie, this would be a definite sign of guilt. The audience would be howling with laughter.

  “So we had to move on,” Quint says, the box in his lap now. “Dr. Jakobi said I didn’t really want to know. Who.”

  Because I don’t trust my voice, I don’t say anything. Either that or I can’t.

  “It was her idea,” Quint says. “She wrote it on a piece of paper, folded it up, then Dr. J held it until I came back with a safe to lock it in.”

  He pats the fire safe, the slap of his hand soft, almost loving.

  I swallow.

  “To make it mean something, though, I had it keyed for this,” Quint say
s, holding the key up from around his neck.

  “And you haven’t looked?” I say.

  “It’s not moving on if I do. This way, it’s a . . . what? An artifact, like. An old thing. Part of the past.” He pauses, studies a commercial on TV. “All that matters now is what’s ahead.”

  These aren’t his words.

  I don’t tell them they’re lies, though, and I don’t ask Tanya whose name is written on that piece of paper.

  It’s not because I don’t want to know, but more because knowing will mean a hundred other things, none of which I can face.

  So I walk through my shifts in a trance, and the next Wednesday is just another day, and if I have an extra beer after work, nobody notices, and one night, desperate, I even read Quint’s little horror novel cover to cover, drinking cup after cup of coffee.

  It’s stupid, not scary at all, but still, Tanya calls down to ask if we have any clothes that need drying. Because she’s out of laundry but still needs to run the dryer. It’s where they sit Gabe’s car seat when he won’t sleep. When he can’t.

  I walk down a load of wet colors, pass them through the door to Quint. His eyes are dancing.

  “What?” I say.

  “It’s working again,” he whispers, then hooks his chin inside, like I should come see Gabe crying.

  “Maybe he’s sick,” I offer.

  “C’mon,” Quint says, and jabs the screen door more open for me, turns before it can swing shut.

  I don’t follow.

  Their lights are on until two, when I stop looking.

  “What?” Sherry says, passing through the living room, on a cleaning jag.

  I don’t answer. My mind is shaped like a fire safe, though. One of the letter-sized ones, just for documents.

  There are no people with red hair in my family.

  I’ve even called my mom to be sure.

  She thought I was joking, and we laughed fake laughs together, and then I asked again.

  The only thing that consoles me anymore is the blue ratchet that made its way back to my porch somehow.

  I hold it by the quarter inch bolt, spin it around seven times to the left, then reverse the head, spin it back the other way seven times.

  The sound is like one click, then a series of perfectly-spaced echoes.

  In the other room now, Sherry, scrubbing, smart and oblivious.

  I spin the ratchet louder.

  Because Quint thinks he has telepathy again, he buys a high dollar baby monitor. His old one makes its way down to our house. Like the blue ratchet—holding it in one hand, the monitor in the other, I finally make the association I’m supposed to here: the ratchet, it sounds like a rattle.

  The way the monitor made it down is that Sherry asked for it. She thinks we’re going to be needing it.

  This makes my face warm, then cold.

  Two nights later, snugged in with the groceries I’m carrying in, I see a flat box of lace-top, thigh-high hose. They’re black, not white, and make my heart just thump the wall of my chest. Not because I want them on her, then off her, but because—are they a test? If I like them, will it confirm what Sherry’s maybe suspecting? Or, is this how Tanya reaches me, after a week without a Wednesday: dressing Sherry up in her hose, telling her how guys love those? And, guys, or me in particular?

  It’s too much for one three-dollar pack of hose.

  That night, the hose thankfully in Sherry’s top drawer, I try to just read a car magazine, so Quint and Tanya can sleep—because what if I’m the one waking him with what I think?—but every caption and every tooltip cuts right to the center of me, until Tanya’s calling again, and I’m walking a load of Sherry’s uniforms down, passing them across to Quint.

  “What?” he says, when I just stand there.

  Not on purpose, I looked at his couch, at the firesafe tucked under it, and it shut me down some.

  I shake my head no, nothing.

  “You should see,” he says, trying to lure me in again.

  His eyes are bloodshot, his beard growing in scraggly.

  “He’s scared of you,” I say. “Fucking zombie.”

  Quint laughs, rubs his dry bottom lip with the back of his hand, and joke-punches me on the shoulder, and for a moment it feels like I actually wasn’t lying the other week—that we are all still the same. That our kids are still going to be born the same year, to grow up together like we did. That our wives are going to sit in the kitchen with weak margaritas while we burn things on the grill, one of us always running down to the store for ice and beer. Taking just whichever truck’s parked closest to the road.

  Sherry finds me on our porch an hour later.

  Instead of asking anything or even saying my name, she just hangs up the phone—Tanya, like always when Gabe’s having nightmares—and sits by me.

  When her robe parts over her thigh, I see the silky black hose she’s got rolled up her legs, and Tanya flashes in my head, her white nurse’s shoe pushing hard into the headliner of her car.

  I take the corner of Sherry’s robe, pull it back into place.

  That weekend, when Tanya won’t, I pick Quint up from the county lock-up.

  What he’s in for isn’t owning the kind of pornography he’s been using to try to scare himself, to connect with Gabe, but for getting caught buying it downtown.

  Sherry says no wonder Tanya’s been stepping out, right?

  I’m at the door, about to leave.

  “She told you with who yet?” I say, real casual, no eye contact.

  “You asking for you or for him?” she snaps back, smiling behind it so I have no idea what she might be really saying.

  I pull the door to, back out of the driveway slowly, obeying every law I can remember.

  Two nights ago, waking all at once from a dream, the patter of squirrel feet in my head, the first thing I saw was the baby monitor on our dresser. It was on, the red lights amping up, like someone was running the pad of their finger over the mic on the other end.

  It wasn’t plugged in, but did have a nine-volt battery inside, one that had leaked, scabbed over.

  For the rest of the night I stared at it, the monitor, until I could make out some breathing. Gabe’s ? This monitor was tuned to the same band or frequency or whatever as the new one, the one that was powerful enough to push the signal all the way down here. That had to be it.

  So it would wear out during the day, and because I wasn’t going to be there, I left it on.

  Or, really, because I didn’t want to touch it.

  The dream I was waking from wasn’t a dream either, really. More like a nightmare. It involved the Wednesday trailer somehow, but our stubby attic too, and Gabe at twelve years old, his hair dyed black to match his clothes, chains and anger seeping off every angle of his body. The only chain that mattered was the one around his neck, though. The one Tanya’s Wednesday key was hanging from.

  And maybe it wasn’t a dream, even.

  When I woke, anyway, it wasn’t like I opened my eyes to the baby monitor. More like I realized I’d been staring at it.

  Getting into my truck in the parking lot of lock-up, all his possessions in a manila envelope, Quint asks what’s wrong?

  I just look over at him.

  He’s still smiling. How he lived through booking and sixteen hours in lock-up is a complete mystery. That’s the kind of oblivious he can be, though. The kind of focus he’s always had.

  Instead of going back to our houses, he directs me downtown. Because they confiscated his cardboard box of illegal porn, wouldn’t even let him tear any of the pages out.

  Because his cash is all in the form of a city-issued check, I have to give him the thirty-two dollars it costs for the cigar-box of photographs he buys from a guy I try hard not to be remembering.

  “Don’t,” I say, holding the lid of the box down when he starts to open it.

  He hisses a laugh through his teeth, pours his possessions out from his manila envelope. Last, because it sticks on the brad, is Tanya�
��s key to Wednesday.

  “You should chuck it,” I say as he’s ducking into the chain. “Temptation, all that.”

  “I get points for it,” he says, pulling the chest of his shirt out to drop the key down.

  “Points?”

  “Dr. J. It’s one of the things I have to show each week. Whoever has the most points gets to go first.”

  “So show him a different one,” I say, my arms draped over the steering wheel so I’m driving with my forearms and elbows. So it would be awkward to look directly sideways anymore.

  Quint considers this.

  “What if I want to know someday?” he says.

  “You don’t,” I tell him, wincing inside because I’m agreeing with Jakobi. “I mean, what would you do, if you knew?”

  Quint stares at my dashboard.

  “Something bad,” he finally says.

  I pooch my lips out, nod. “Leaving Gabe where?” I tack on.

  Quint nods, keeps nodding, then reaches over to my keys, thumbing through for one that’s properly silver, and small enough that it could fool Jakobi.

  The first thing I think, his finger suddenly on the key to the trailer, about to hold it up to his, to compare, is to haul the wheel over, like his hand at the ignition’s scared me somehow.

  We might crash into a bridge abutment or concrete pylon, yeah.

  But he wouldn’t find the key.

  He sees it all coming though, nods ahead to the wreck I’m about to involve us in, and I veer back to my side of the road, a film of sweat breaking out all over, the cigar box of illegal porn spilling down from the dash so that I have to see splashes of skin I could probably go to jail for transporting.

  What I tell Quint as he’s trying to collect all his porn is that I need all my keys for work, then, after I drop him off, I vacuum the floorboard on his side for three seventy-five cent cycles. The sound of the vacuum is strong and institutional, and I think I could do this for a job, maybe. A career.

  With that kind of sound in your ears, it’s hard to think, I mean.

  I finally come home at dark.

  Sherry’s waiting for me on the porch, and it’s good at least not to have to make some excuse to take a shower. Instead of Tanya, I just smell like the carwash.

  We eat lasagna again, forking in bite after perfect bite. Somewhere in there Sherry informs me that we’re watching Gabe tomorrow night.