“Tanya’s sister finally pop?” I say, chewing.
“Emergency therapy,” Sherry says, stabbing through another layer of pasta. “Dr. Jakobi.”
My keys are in their tin dog bowl on the table by the backdoor.
I go to sleep thinking of them, waiting for the red lights of the monitor to wrap around again, and try hard not to think of Tanya’s nurse shoe pressing against any headliner. Because my head’s leaky, I know, and that’s not the kind of thing a son should have to know about his mom.
In trade for us giving up our Friday night, Tanya leaves a hot meatloaf on their kitchen table for us, and two rented movies on top of the TV, a twelve-pack dead center on the bottom shelf of the fridge.
Quint mopes out after her, his eyes trying to tell me something. I can’t make it out, though. Maybe I’m supposed to be making some excuse for him, saving him from Jakobi. Or maybe I’m supposed to call the hospital if Quint gets scared enough in therapy that Gabe wakes up screaming. Or maybe I’m supposed to be handing him his blue ratchet now, instead of leaving it in my pocket.
I don’t know.
The movies are an even split: one romance, one action.
As soon as Quint’s truck is gone, Sherry has Gabe up from his crib, is cooing to him, pretending. Practicing.
I sit at the table alone, scraping off the ketchup baked onto the top of the meatloaf, listening to this wonderful absence of squirrels, and find myself four beers into the twelve-pack by the time Sherry sits down across from me, Gabe on her knee.
“He’s the one I feel sorry for, really,” she says, halving the piece of meatloaf I saved for her.
“He doesn’t know,” I say, flicking my eyes to Gabe then away.
Hanging from the rusted shower rod in the bathroom, where they don’t have to be, is one of Tanya’s lace-top pairs of hose.
I stand there, stand there, finally have to shut my eyes to pee. Aim by echo location.
In their dryer, still, are half of Sherry’s work shirts.
After dinner I stand in the utility doorway with a beer, watch Sherry fold them into a paper bag, one after the other, Gabe undoing one for every two she can get done.
She’s so patient with him, is making it all into a game.
“You should watch your movie,” she says. “I’ll keep him in here.”
“What about yours?” I say.
“Just go,” she says, already half into some peek-a-boo game with Gabe.
By the time she’s through, she’ll have folded everything in the utility, I know.
I collect another beer on the way to the living room, push my movie into the player, settle back into the couch, and am twenty minutes into it—eight people dead already—when the beer I’m trying to settle into the carpet dings on the firesafe.
It’s like a gong in my head.
And it doesn’t draw Sherry.
Using more beer as an excuse, I get up, deposit my two empties in the trash, carry the last of the twelve-pack back to the living room, and study the street through the gauzy front curtain.
It’s empty. Nobody watching, no Quint-truck idling in the drive, him and Tanya talking about their marriage.
To be sure, I lock the door, then, to be even more sure, ease down the hall.
Sherry’s in the bedroom with Gabe now, dressing him in outfit after outfit.
“We can watch your movie,” I offer.
She looks up to me, her eyebrows drawing together in what I register as earnest consternation—something I don’t think I’ve ever registered before, from anybody—then reaches forward to keep Gabe from overbalancing off the edge of the bed.
“I hope she doesn’t move,” she says.
“Tanya?”
“If they split up, I mean.”
“It’s her parent’s house.”
“I know. It’s just—”
“They won’t.”
“Would you?” she asks.
“Would I what?” I say back.
“If I was, y’know. Like Tanya.”
If she were like Tanya. If I’d been meeting her each Wednesday for two years. If somebody like me had. If I were Quint.
“Trying to tell me something?” I say, smiling around my beer.
This is as serious as we ever talk. As serious as I can ever let it get, anyway. It’s like walking through a field of bear traps.
I tilt my beer to her, a toast, and back out, leave the hall light on behind me so I’ll be able to see her shadow if she’s walking towards the living room.
Still, sitting in front of my movie, the sound turned up as cover, the firesafe in my lap—I don’t know.
Is this a trap too?
Has Quint spit-glued hairs around the edges, so if I open it they’ll break? Was that whole thing about an artifact of Tanya’s affair just something he made up, when what’s really in the box is a picture of me and him, from ten years ago? Did Jakobi slip something therapeutic in there while he wasn’t looking, which’ll get ruined if I see it?
The box is so heavy with all this that I’m surprised I’m even able to lift it. That it’s not already crushing me.
Six times, then, the movie blaring, I count to ten, waiting for truck headlights—any headlights—to wash over the curtains, and six times they don’t. So I ease my key into the lock, twist. The top sighs open.
Inside is a folded piece of paper. It’s been ripped from a small notebook, the kind any good therapist is going to keep handy.
My lips are trembling, inside. Not where anybody would be able to see.
Written in Tanya’s hand, in pencil, a name, not mine, just somebody she made up on the spot, because she’s not stupid.
I close my eyes in thanks, maybe even smile, and when I open them again Sherry’s standing there, Gabe on her hip.
She’s just staring at me. No expression on her face at all.
“He—he gave you the key,” she says, her eyes boring right into me now, and—it’s my only choice, really—I nod, once. Leave my head down.
She knows about the firesafe, the name, the special key. All of it.
“And?” she says.
“What?”
My voice is weak. I’m not built for this.
“Are you going to tell him now?”
I look down to the paper again, then back up to her.
“I don’t want to know,” she says. “It’s none of our business, right?”
Beside her, Gabe is staring at me too. His eyes seeing I-don’t-know-how deep Behind them, guns and a car exploding.
“He’s my best friend,” I say, trying to watch the movie now. Again. Still.
“And you think it’ll be good for him, to know?”
What I’m supposed to say is built into her question, how she asks it. It usually is.
I shake my head no, it wouldn’t be good for him. That, because he’s my friend, I won’t tell, will keep it inside, hold it forever, even if it gives me cancer.
Sherry shakes her head at me, turns on her heel, goes back to whatever she has going on in the other part of the house. I relock the firesafe, push it back under the couch, and watch the movie without seeing any of it. At some point the name Tanya wrote on the paper hits me—Was it a real name, some other other guy?—and then a tank blows up on-screen and Gabe cries in the other room. I turn the movie down, and the next time I move my head, I think, is when Quint’s truck door shuts outside. Just one door. It means Tanya sat beside him for the drive home. A good session, then.
When they come through the screen, they’re holding hands. Or, Tanya’s holding Quint’s. What he is is limp, like he’s being dragged. But that’s better than a lot of the ways he could be. You don’t go to emergency therapy for illegal porn then come home happy, I don’t guess.
Sherry appears in the door, Gabe in outfit number 435, or somewhere up there.
Tanya crosses the room to him, leading with the heels of her hands the ways moms do, and Sherry’s watching me close, I know. Waiting for me to nod or not nod to Q
uint.
Instead, I just try to avoid his eyes altogether. Throw him the second-to-last beer, another impossible spiral.
“He was an angel,” Sherry’s saying above me, on her way to the turn the movie off.
“You like it?” Quint says, unloading his wallet onto the speaker by the door, nodding to the paused movie.
“Which one?” I say, and he laughs in his way, looks into the kitchen for some reason—it’s dark in there—then does the thing that almost makes me forget how to breathe: ducks out of the chain around his neck.
He hangs it from the upslanted peg just under his hat.
Sherry sees this, I know, even directs a question down to me, her eyes hot and sad both, but doesn’t say anything, and, either because she’s smart or by chance—but it can’t be chance—when she comes to bed later that night she’s got those lace-topped hose on, and makes sure I see.
“You like?” she says, and I nod, pull her close, wonder the whole way through if the noises she’s making are hers or what she imagines Tanya might sound like, and then I think that maybe, if she can be Tanya, like Tanya, then maybe she’ll get pregnant like she wants, like she deserves, and then none of this will matter, and to try to make it stick, to make it take, I even whisper Tanya’s name into the pillow at the end, instantly hate myself. And then we roll away to our sides of the bed.
“Gabe?” Sherry says after a few minutes of fake breathing.
“Share,” I say.
There’s nothing to say, though.
It took, I know. She’s pregnant now, has to be. It’s the only thing that can stop me from being me, the only thing that can turn me into something else, something better. A dad.
For a few tense moments there’s a tremble in the bed, and I think she’s crying but lie to myself that she doesn’t want me to reach across, touch her thigh, her hip, her hand.
And then nothing. Sleep. Me fixed on those dead lights of the baby monitor on the dresser, waiting for them to wind up.
They do.
Just a weak glow at first, but then that first bulb’s on, and the red’s climbing, wrapping, opening some connection, a conduit, a fissure.
I shake my head no, please. No no no.
But then there’s a touch on my thigh, my hip, my hand.
I look over, am thinking of my old German Shepherd growing up, how he’d always nose me in the morning, just nudge me awake.
This isn’t my dog, though.
It’s a boy, maybe three years old already—time moves different over there—his hair long and wild on his shoulders, glinting with fiberglass. Too dark to see his face, quite, but his mouth, the lower jaw, it’s just hanging, so there’s just this black oval. A void.
And he’s tugging at my hand, like he should be.
It’s Tanya’s other twin. The one she buried. Mine.
He pulls on the side of my hand and I let him, stand, follow. He looks back once to be sure and I’m reaching ahead, for his tiny shoulder.
I lose him in the hallway, though, step into the kitchen where a little black body would be stark against all the white cabinets.
I open my mouth to shape his name, whatever I would have named him, but look to the phone instead.
The bone behind my ear, it’s alive again.
My hand stabs out, pulls the receiver to the side of my head before it can ring.
It’s Quint. He’s breathing heavy, guilty, wrong.
“Hey,” he says, his whole body cupped around his phone, I can tell, so Tanya won’t hear, “hey, yeah, you’ve got to come down, man, see this. It’s, it’s—”
I balance the receiver on top of its cradle without hanging up, so that the connection’s still there.
I came the wrong way, that’s it.
There was fiberglass in his matted hair. Fiberglass.
From the attic, the crawlspace. Insulation.
Of course. Footsteps in the attic, not on the roof.
I feel my back into the hallway, see the silhouette of Sherry sitting up in the bed, and she sees me too, I think, but I’m just a shadow, less. I open my mouth to apologize to her, for everything, but all that comes out is the blue ratchet sound. One click, a thousand identical ones tumbling into place behind it.
It’s better this way.
At the other end of the hallway is the only ceiling vent in the house. So the attic can breathe. It’s ten inches by six inches, and just a cut-out in the sheetrock now, the vent already pulled up, balanced on two rafters.
Ten inches by six inches.
Just enough for me to reach up, grab onto each side, try to force my head in.
In a rush of shadow, my son pulls me the rest of the way through.
Story Notes
Father, Son, Holy Rabbit
Cemetery Dance #57, Spring 2007
This is one of those wrote-in-one-sitting affairs, though in the version that got published first, I never really felt like I found the proper end, the one that would both tie up the dramatic line and kind of open the narrative up, like horror’s supposed to do. Like stories are supposed to do. I mean, it was doing what I intended, showing how much a father could care for his son—a story I’d been carrying around already for years, until it was so pure and perfect I never thought I’d get it written down to match—but that’s kind of all it was doing, showing that. And stories have to be more, have to actually do something.
Years later, now, revisiting it, I can finally feel out some of the repercussions of that experience this kid had in the woods. Or suspect them anyway. How a story like that, it never goes away, quite. And, as bad luck or fate would have it, the same year this story ran, I got seriously lost in some big grey woods on the reservation, and was carrying around this white rabbit that was bleeding all over me, and there was bear and wolf sign everywhere, like a joke almost, like they were playing a game with me, and then my fancy compass broke, and I managed to lose my walkie-talkie. But my dad, he knew that when I’m this many hours late he should shoot his gun three times fast. Which, evidently he did for a while. Me, though, I was in some other place altogether, was walking through all these upturned trees I’d never have guessed could exist, their root pans three times as high as I could reach, blood all over me, and I kept seeing footprints that I knew had to be mine, but didn’t look like it, because I’d never been to this place, had I? So, yeah, if I knew my story elements were going to pop up, take shape around me, I’d have written about a nice unicorn with a flower in its mouth, framed by a rainbow. Maybe a mermaid back in the surf, singing. Still, though, I found my dad at last, which I guess is another way this story—“Father, Son, Holy Rabbit”—could have ended. Or maybe the way it finally did.
Till the Morning Comes
The Storysteller Speaks: Rare and Different Fictions of the Grateful Dead, eds. Gary McKinney & Robert G. Weiner (Kearney Street Books, 2010)
Completely did not plan to write this story. Never would have either, except my good friend Rob Weiner called me up, said he was doing this horror anthology, could I write a story for it? Sure, of course, always. But then he hit me with the theme: the Grateful Dead. Which, I mean, “Touch of Grey,” that’s my complete warehouse of Grateful Dead knowledge. So, my first step was to wait until the very last possible minute, Rob telling me the deadline’s here, it’s here, me thinking It’ll pass, it’ll pass, but then I accidentally looked up the Dead’s discography, seeing if I knew any more songs by them—nope—and I cribbed down three or four titles. But the only one that seemed to have some horror possibilities was this “Till the Morning Comes”-one. I mean, “night,” it’s practically there already, yeah? And night’s always the worst for me. Then I looked up some of the Dead artwork, on purpose, and, man: these are all the posters I was so terrified of, growing up, the ones my uncles—we all lived in my grandmother’s house—the same ones my uncles used to have in their bedrooms. So, that kid, stifflegging it past that hall, man, I know that hall, I know what watching your uncle’s door all night’s like. Still terrifi
es me. I so hope those posters are really burned. Or, this story, it’s me, burning them, trying to. Please.
The Sons of Billy Clay
Doorways Magazine 4, January 2008
I won’t watch poker, can’t watch golf, can hardly sit still through an NBA game, even—it has to be recorded, so I can cue through the free-throws and analysis and commercials—but bullriding, man, I can watch that all day. Probably because in high school a lot of my friends were getting into it, bullriding, but somehow I floated out of that scene. Which is definitely for the best: tall, lanky, uncoordinated guys with poor self-preservation instincts tend to bash their faces open on the horn boss, never be the same again. Closest I ever got was strapping ropes on show steers, on concrete, and getting thrown off, stomped over. And riding so many mechanical bulls to a standstill. Because I wanted to be Debra Winger, yeah. But mechanical bulls, they’re miles away from the real thing, I know. There’s things that are more real than bull riding, too, though. There’s me, a week or two before I wrote this story. I’m on this big group camping trip out in the mesquite and scrub, and it’s after the kids are asleep, so all the men are gathered around the fire, drinking beer and telling stories. Except me, of course; I’m in my tent, reading John Grisham by secret flashlight, because I don’t drink beer. But the stories the guys were telling out there, it was hard not to tune in. One was how they knew this prison guard who, when the inmates wouldn’t sleep, what he’d do was lug this chainsaw or lawnmower into the cellblock, put his standard-issue gas mask on, and fire it up, let the fumes put the prisoners down for the night. Cue impressed laughter from around that campfire, yeah. Kids faking sleeping all around. But that guard, he’s the one who kind of has the bad ending in this story. The one I served the bad ending too, I guess. Which is definitely a proper use of fiction, I think. And, the illustration Doorways did for this, it’s so cool, is exactly the bull one of my uncle’s friends (they were sixteen, seventeen; I was six, maybe) would always draw on my grandmother’s napkins, leave on the counter for me to steal, hide in my books. The bulls were from a beer can, I think. I saw one of those cans in an antique shop a few years ago, sitting back on the deep sill of the window, all faded, not for sale, just there, and man, it was like going home. But still, I couldn’t reach out, touch that can, touch that bull. Except in a story.
The Ones That Got Away Page 27