by Tod Goldberg
About Liza, well, that’s more difficult. Terry has always tried not to think about the specifics. Why burden yourself with all that shit? There’s no choice. Your wife is pregnant, you take responsibility. Terry conjures the perfect instance that might have created his cherished five-year-old daughter. He pictures a perfect Sunday morning. He imagines sunlight filtering through plantation shutters and casting slim shadows over their entirely white and blue denim bedroom. Polly wakes him with a subtle kiss on the lips and then rolls over on top of him, the ringlets of her hair hanging over her naked breasts. They make slow, passionate love to each other, their bodies in perfect sync. And when they are finished, they walk hand in hand to the kitchen. They drink orange juice out of glass mugs. They read the New York Times, sharing a laugh over the crossword puzzle question that always seems to appear each Sunday—Spanish Gold—and then they make love again on top of the New York Times, their bodies damp with newsprint when they’re done.
And maybe that’s how it happened, Terry thinks. He hopes, really. Liza should be the product of love and not whatever emotion he and Polly devolved into.
Terry reaches under the passenger seat and pulls out the bolt cutters, then steps out of the car quietly so as not to wake the kids. It’s their first night in Arizona, and Terry thinks he might like to live here one day. He likes the way the stars look in the dense heat of summer. They remind him of a piece of blown glass Polly won at a parking-lot carnival in Walnut Creek. Back when they were kids. It was black with specs of gold and silver and white, and at night, in Polly’s bedroom, they’d place a flashlight behind it, and the entire room would become the Milky Way. What were they then? Sixteen? Seventeen? It should have just stopped right then. One night, one of them should have just said, “Enough,” and then they would have gone on to different lives. They would see each other at a high school reunion, and maybe they’d feel a pang of regret for what was, or what could have been, or what they told themselves they’d never be.
There’s a three-inch-thick padlock on the gate to Sawtooth Mills, but the developers or on-site realtors haven’t bothered to lock it. Developers and realtors are very trusting people. How many must get murdered every year? He checks his watch and figures they have eight hours, tops, before they’ll need to be back on the road. Nine hours if they really want to press it, but after what happened yesterday in Las Vegas, Terry knows he can’t settle for mistakes. He’s never thought of himself as a violent man, but the more time he’s spent running, the more he’s envisioned hurting people who stand in his way. His mother used to tell him that what you let your mind dwell on, you become, though Terry never believed that particularly. Nevertheless, Terry thinks that he’d prefer not to be one of those men who get used to the sight of blood. That’s a choice. That’s something you can control.
Terry shoves the gate open a few feet, enough for his SUV to squeeze through, and then slips back into the driver’s seat. He looks in the rearview mirror and sees that Seth has stirred awake.
“Where are we?” Seth says, his voice dripping with sleep. Terry has been keeping the kids calm by giving them sips from a bottle of cherry-flavored codeine cough syrup he found in a sales office in Winnemucca.
“Home for the night,” Terry says.
“Real home or fake home?” Seth says.
Terry thinks about just turning the car around and heading for the police station in Phoenix. He thinks about dropping the kids off with a note that says he’s sorry, that he didn’t mean to do anything wrong—but the one thing he can’t reconcile with that scenario is that he doesn’t feel sorry. To feel sorry would be to admit that there was a choice in the matter, and that, Terry knows, is simply not the case.
“Fake home,” he says.
After putting both kids to bed—Seth in the football-themed room, with the life-sized poster of Peyton Manning and his offensive line standing guard over the football-shaped bed like Christ and his disciples (except Christ never looked so alive, at least not in Terry’s opinion), and Liza in the Strawberry Shortcake room, its walls covered in pink wallpaper, dozens of stuffed animals and dolls perched comfortably atop the bed—Terry goes back out to the front gate and locks the padlock, figuring that alone will buy them extra time if they need it.
What a perfect neighborhood this will be, Terry thinks. The developers were sparing no expense, what with the redbrick walkways that spiral around the houses and head off toward the luxurious green spaces. He notices that instead of regular streetlights they’ve installed faux lanterns, like alongside Main Street at Disneyland, and that there are benches beneath every third one, alternating back and forth across the street. Terry imagines Seth and Liza riding their bikes down the street at dusk while he sits on one of the benches chatting with a neighbor.
It’s likely that this neighbor would be about Terry’s age and that sometimes they’d talk about work—Terry likes to think that he’d be a fireman in this new life and that his neighbor would be something a little less exciting, like a pharmacist or the owner of a sporting goods store—and that sometimes they’d talk about taking both of their families out to the river to ride Jet Skis to get to know each other a little better, seeing as they lived right on the same street, and that there might even come a time when they’d vacation in Hawaii together.
Terry wonders how long it has been since he’s had a real conversation with another adult. Not a conversation about the weather, or about traffic, or about how he’d like his burger cooked, but about life, about dreams, about the future, about the past, about what happens when you wake up one morning and decide to kidnap your children and then can’t undo the action, in fact don’t even want to undo it, because your love is what they need in their lives right now—though of course you know you’ve fucked them up for the rest of their lives, that their potential for success as adults, their potential to live in a neighborhood just like this, shrinks with every passing second.
Once back inside the house—the sales flyer says that it’s the Palmetto model, 2,500 square feet, four bedrooms, three baths, a great room, a den, a living room, and a pool-sized backyard for just $525,000!—Terry makes his way to the master bedroom and unfolds himself across the California King, flicks on the flat-screen television and watches the fuzz, and wishes (for not the first time) that life was simpler, like when he was a kid, when everyone got the same thirteen channels and that was fine. Who needed eight hundred channels of Food, HGTV, and Discovery? Wasn’t it enough just to have the moving pictures tell a story? Wasn’t it enough to have a cop, a robber, and a conclusion all in one hour? The good won, the bad lost, and the credits ran. Who were the good guys and bad guys on the Food Network? All these decisions, Terry thinks, have made it nearly impossible to be bored anymore.
Terry figures that he spent half of his childhood bored. His mother worked across the bay in San Francisco, so each afternoon after elementary school he’d park himself in front of the TV at home to watch reruns of The Monkees and Lost In Space and The Courtship of Eddie’s Father. He can’t recall a single favorite episode of any of these programs, which he finds troubling. All that time he spent with Micky Dolenz and the Space Family Robinson and Bill Bixby and there’s nothing he can conjure in his mind to fill the void of the snowing (handsomely wall mounted!) flat screen. What he does remember, though, is a sense of vacancy. What did he do for all those hours between when The Courtship of Eddie’s Father ended and his mother came through the door carrying boxes of take-out Chinese? He knows that’s when he began imagining what the people in the other houses on his court were doing, what they were eating, what shows they were watching, and sometimes he thought about sneaking into their houses to watch them, often going so far as to walk around the court peering into windows, inhaling the smells of cooking macaroni and cheese, catching the flickering blue image of local newsman Van Amburg, a man he considered, in retrospect, more of a parent figure to him than his own misplaced father.
Since all the houses on the court were exactly the same
inside, save for the two-story model which was exactly the same only in the downstairs, Terry even knew where he’d hide if given the opportunity: beneath the stove-top was a huge cabinet that everyone kept their pots and pans in, but it was such a huge cabinet that it actually took a dogleg left toward the sink, creating a large cubby just big enough for a child to fit in. He could sit right there all night and no one would ever know.
His childhood is a period of time Terry recalls as being filled with a lingering sense of nausea, as if he were always on the precipice of retching, aware even then that something just wasn’t right in his head. Normal kids don’t think about peeping on other families. Normal kids don’t suffer from ennui. Terry knows Seth and Liza will never have that problem.
He sets the alarm on his cell phone for 6:30 AM, though of course he knows he’ll never sleep that late. He hasn’t slept more than four hours in a night in nearly a month, but he can’t be too careful, he can’t get too comfortable, which is why he chooses to get back up and put his shoes on before finally closing his eyes.
Snatching Seth and Liza was remarkably easy. He called Polly and told her that he’d like to take the kids out to dinner so that she and her boyfriend, Landon, could have a quiet night to themselves. Originally, that was all he wanted to do, though as time has passed, Terry has come to believe that he’s been priming himself for this kind of decisive action for years.
“Why are you being so nice?” Polly asked.
“Shouldn’t we start acting like adults?” Terry said.
“That’s your problem, Terry,” she said. “You’ve always acted like an adult. That’s what ended it, you know.”
What really ended it, Terry knew, had nothing to do with him being the responsible one in the relationship. What ended it was that Polly liked to fuck other men and that Terry let her. It wasn’t an explicit agreement, of course, merely a decision made to practice avoidance. Terry understood that they’d married far too young, that their lives had somehow devolved into a Bruce Springsteen song, but that they had Seth to think about, and that meant Terry needed to let Polly do the things she needed to do. He was confident that after she spent some time fucking men who rode motorcycles, or who fixed motorcycles, or who simply dressed like they did either, she’d come back to him and their love would be stronger. He even considered buying a motorcycle at one point. He imagined showing up at the kindergarten she taught at wearing leather chaps, a studded vest, and sporting a Fu Manchu mustache, and she’d just hop on the back and they’d ride off, her co-workers lining the street to clap, whoop, and holler. Instead, he told Polly that he thought it would be great fun to spend the evening reading aloud to each other from The Lord of the Rings, figuring it would take a very long time for them to complete the trilogy and that, by the end, they’d feel like they’d accomplished something together and, maybe, Polly would stop fucking guys who rode motorcycles.
“You’re right,” Terry said.
“Well, anyway,” Polly said. “The next girl might appreciate it, Terry. But spontaneity is good. Adventure is good. There’s no reason you shouldn’t get married again. I’m still very fond of you, if it’s any consolation.”
“I guess it will have to be,” Terry said.
“Have you been dating?”
“Polly,” Terry said, “this isn’t something I want to talk about with you.” The fact was he’d been out on a few dates recently, mostly with women he met on sales or service calls. He was a hero when he showed up in his suit and tie to fix the copy machine; yanking accordioned paper jams out from the broiling hot center, his hands covered in black ink. The women would rush to get him a glass of water or a wet towel to clean up with, and he’d be polite and thank them and smile. In an office, heroism is replacing toner and fixing the collator, but in real life, at the bar or restaurant or bedroom, when your life boils down to the fact that you are an expert at fixing a machine that merely replicates someone else’s creativity, the insignificance can paralyze you. It can stop you from performing even the most mundane task. It can make people not call you back. Or not stay the night. Or just roll off of you midway through, remembering an appointment at 3:00 AM on a Wednesday.
Every Hewlett Packard copier he sold had the equivalent of an airplane’s black box in the center of it, tracking each and every movement of the machine. If need be, Terry could plug his laptop into it and replay weeks’ worth of activity, every single copy that had been created, every jam, every nuance of the machine. With one keystroke, he could reset the machine to the moment before trouble had started, erasing all the activity, clearing the memory, restoring the machine’s settings to what he thought of as the Nirvana Moment, when all things inside and out worked in perfect synchronicity.
His personal Nirvana Moment came a few weeks after Polly had given birth to Liza. Polly caught a vicious cold, and, for the sake of the baby, she went and stayed at her mother’s house, leaving Terry at home alone with both children. He knew then that Liza wasn’t his, but she was Polly’s and that more than sufficed. For nearly a week it was just the three of them, and though at the time it seemed like just a small fraction of life, just an increment of existence, no more than maybe half a sheet of paper if life came in reams of five hundred sheets, Terry latched onto it and kept it apart from Polly. Whenever he felt at a loss for who he was, or about the dissolution of his marriage, or whatever failings he had as a father, he simply performed a system restore on his mind and returned to that week alone.
“You know what,” Terry said. “I could take the kids for the whole weekend if you like. It would be no trouble.”
“Really, Terry?” Polly said. “That would be so great. Landon’s been bugging me for the last month about going to some B&B in Napa, but I didn’t know how to ask you.”
“Go,” Terry said. “Have a great time.”
“You are sweet,” she said. “You know that, Terry, right? You were always sweet.”
When Terry hung up, he wasn’t precisely sure where he was going to take the kids, or even why he felt so strongly that it was the only way to save them from a life of replication, or even if he was actually going to take them anywhere at all. He’d have two days of lead time to make sense of it, and by then he was confident it would become clear. And if it didn’t, well, he could just keep clicking that button in his mind, restoring things to a point more favorable.
Terry opens his eyes and checks his watch. It’s 6:15 AM, exactly one hour since the last time he opened his eyes and checked his watch, and the only noise in the house is the faint hum of electricity. In the last month, Terry has begun to notice how much noise electricity makes. Minus major appliances and air-conditioning, most houses just have a faint, haunting din caused by plugged-in lamps and televisions, not even a sound so much as it is feeling, a magnetism not unlike the sensation Terry gets when he knows someone has just departed a room he’s recently entered. During the first night Terry and the kids spent in a model home—a 1,900-square-foot two-story in a development called Manor Creek just east of Reno—he was constantly checking over his shoulder for other people, certain he felt someone staring at him, positive that he’d caught a whiff of cologne or perfume. He even went so far as to look inside the kitchen cabinets in case a child had found a cubby, but no one builds cabinets with that kind of depth anymore. Eventually, even the kids began to notice how different the empty houses sounded, so when he could, Terry would plug in the refrigerator, dishwasher, and the washing machine just for the electrical comfort they seemed to give the children.
This morning, though, the silence feels encouraging, especially in light of the fuck-up the previous morning in Las Vegas. They’d spent the night in a beautiful golf course home at a country club with three names—The Lakes at The Resort at Summerlin Commons—which Terry felt was the kind of home he’d live in after he retired. He could see himself playing gin rummy with the boys at the clubhouse, could see Seth and Liza and their spouses and their children sitting poolside, sipping drinks, tanning themselv
es. He’d fallen asleep that night on the plush leather sofa in the home’s library and only woke up when he realized someone was shaking him. It was Seth.
“What’s wrong?” Terry asked without opening his eyes.
“I can’t find Liza,” Seth said.
Terry spent the next three hours frantically searching the house and the surrounding golf course and vast grounds, sure that Liza had simply wandered off as small children sometimes do, but he was also equally plagued by the very real fear that she’d been kidnapped by some wacko pederast and was only moments from certain death. The country club was gated, so he was sure she couldn’t have gone far, but a gate doesn’t stop a psychopath from moving in.
Calling the police was the right thing to do, the only thing to do, but that just wasn’t possible. How do you explain to the police that the child you kidnapped has been kidnapped?
Terry finally determined that the best thing to do was to simply sit with Seth in the living room of the home they’d spent the night in, just like anyone who was considering the home might, and see if Liza came wandering back through.
It was 9:30 at this point, and already prospective homeowners were piling through the six models named after famous golfers—Terry and the kids had spent the night in the Nicklaus without even considering the Trevino and Snead—and after giving Seth two big swigs of the codeine cough syrup to calm him down, Terry tried to relax by watching the touring families and imagining who they were, what they did for jobs, what their private secrets were; except that there weren’t any families, just older couples who arrived in their Mercedes Benzes and Lexuses, and younger couples in Escalades. To each new couple, Terry said the same thing: “We don’t come with the house.”