She hears Maria’s gripes about her many obnoxious boyfriends, enough that she can tell when someone’s about to get dumped. She hears about the fights with the ex, how he lords his custody of Davey over her, how he deprives Davey of things like comic books and field trips just to spite his mother, to show her how powerless she is.
Patsy even hears about the break-ups and reunions with Clive—Maria has never kept this secret, not from her.
And she hears from Barry the bulked-up, hunky weatherman about the annoying and adorable quirks of his latest boy toys. She hears the resentful whispers of the cop’s wife, and many, many more, even sometimes speaks to Lance’s withered and hateful mother, aged to twice her years, about what goes on in that hell of a household.
There is only one person with whom she shares these treasures. Withdrawn, crazy Benjamin, with his fenced-in house on the hill past the dead end. She talks to Benjamin because of all the ones she knows, he’s the one she pities. Because the rest of the neighborhood has forgotten him, the way they’d love to forget her. Because she has vowed to never be what he became, a thing so cut off from the world his blighted soul is barely recognizable as human, the way he eats the morsels of other lives that she feeds him the way a starved dog gobbles leftover fat.
Though he came to see her once in the mildew-blotted house she can’t keep up with, she has never been so naive as to mistake his alien fascination for kindness. Others have shown genuine kindness, Maria for one, Barry for another in his self-indulgent way, sometimes calling her to warn her about the weather when he thinks of it. Even distracted Francene has at times remembered her with tiny gestures, cheap porcelain kittens given at Christmas to match her octet of living ones. Patsy places Francene’s gifts in the living room, under the plastic Christmas tree that she never takes down, set up when she was more mobile.
When the knock comes again, she wonders if one of her occasional benefactors is making a rare house call. Maria, most likely, though she hardly stops by anymore, and she can’t keep from wrinkling her nose when she does. No one ever asks if she wants to live with this stink, no one ever offers to help. She can’t afford in-home care. They look at the stains on the carpet, the turds on the floor, and assume this is something she wants. And if she asks for help, that leads to the cold stares, to the questions, Why do you keep so many cats? Can’t you get rid of them? She doesn’t dare ask for help.
The knock again.
Who is it? she yells, commencing her struggle to get out of bed. Her crutches haven’t slipped out of reach, that’s a good start.
Muffled through the door, It’s me, Miss Hale.
Francene and Clive’s boy has kept his word. He’s really at the door. The depth of her shock can’t be sounded, especially after all that commotion last night, noises like firecrackers and police cars parked out front, their blue rollers bathing the street in submarine light.
She wonders what that was about. She wonders if it’s safe to have that boy on her doorstep. She wonders if Benjamin watched last night, what he saw.
He knocks again. I’m coming, she says, you’ll have to wait.
Okay.
Getting dressed is an ordeal that requires careful coordination. In forty-five minutes, she is clad in slacks, shoes, an oversized, faded floral-print blouse, and rolling her halting way to the door. She hasn’t heard a peep from Shaun, but when she peers through the spyhole, there he is, standing at the top of her ramp, those piercing green eyes gazing off into nowhere, a slight frown creasing his forehead.
Her voice quavers slightly as she unlocks the door. Bless you for being so patient.
Not a problem, Patsy. He slips inside, closing the door behind him, deftly maneuvering around her wheelchair. She rotates the machine to see where he goes but he just stands in the middle of the living room, doesn’t raise his eyebrows at the Christmas tree, doesn’t show any sign he notices the reek.
What a lovely house, he says.
Patsy starts. She could swear that when he spoke, the voice she heard was Francene’s. Yet the illusion breaks when he speaks again. I can get started if you show me where you keep your cleaning supplies.
They’re in the kitchen, beside the sink. You’ll see them right away.
He doesn’t move. Actually, before I get started, there’s something I want to talk to you about.
Now she understands. He wants what everyone wants: to make a confession. Yet still her unease grows, blood rushing in the parts of her that still have functioning nerves to feel. Well, anytime, Shaun.
This isn’t easy for me. He takes a deep breath. Maybe you can show me around the place, give me a little tour, so I can see what needs to be done. While I think about how to start. It’s a painful subject.
And raw pain wrenches in his voice. Patsy doesn’t know what to say other than, Okay, then.
Go ahead, I’ll follow you, he says.
Well, okay. There’s not much to see. I don’t use the basement much.
He doesn’t laugh at her joke. His red-rimmed eyes glisten.
Oh, Shaun, she says, what is it?
He just shakes his head. She finally pushes the lever to guide the chair toward the hall, and from there into the kitchen. Beneath her the floor creaks. Something is egregiously wrong about all this, his unprecedented frankness, his claims to want to make amends, his presence here so early, but she can’t deny that he’s genuinely upset over something. In fact, behind her, he’s starting to sob.
The kitchen linoleum is as filthy as the living room carpet. Three of her babies hunch under the table, mute witnesses with wide slit-pupil eyes, eager for morsels and charity. Were she alone, they would have it.
She’s almost afraid to speak. He’s crying behind her. Whimpering. Maybe she should suggest he leave, but she doesn’t have the heart. I do have a table in here with a couple extra chairs. I don’t use them much, but maybe you could…sit down?
Then her head snaps back as he shoves her out of the chair, as her chin smashes against the floor, her mouth blooming with agony as she bites her tongue.
She’s spitting blood as he flips her onto her back as if she’s no more than a porcelain doll. Her babies all pitter-patter away in panic as he straddles her stomach. The sounds coming out of him—he’s bawling like a child with his hand slammed in a door.
His face. The skin of his face is sliding loose. And there’s another face underneath. And that too is peeling along a previously invisible seam, splitting to reveal yet another layer that starts to slide free as soon as it’s exposed.
He’s not heavy, not a big man, but her traitor muscles can’t help her, she can never hope to get out from underneath. Her blows against him are kitten-weak and she hates that even more than she hates him.
He claws at his throat, which splits open at the Adam’s apple. His sobs don’t stop as he draws out something like a kerchief that expands into a sack, into a limp mask. He bends toward her, with this mask clutched beneath his sloughing face as if it’s a bag on a necklace, and the mask’s mouth is shaping silent words. The face, it’s familiar, she would know it if it weren’t so distended, if her mind were not on fire with fear and pain.
Stop.
He shakes the mask. Bright beads fall from its mouth, eyes, into his cupped hand.
Stop. Please.
He jerks her up by her collar and shoves his hand with its fistful of bright crawling motes down her blouse. She wails up at him in outrage as her aching chest goes numb. Beneath the peeling onion of his face, the gasping girl mask opens its mouth in a silent scream that mirrors hers as he rips her blouse open, the fabric tearing like tissue paper.
The bright beads have arranged themselves in rows down her heaving ribs. They look like buttons, multihued buttons of all shapes and sizes, but they also look like living things, beetles or ticks, aligning themselves along invisible seams.
His fingers trace those seams. As he gropes, his breath hitches, somewhere deep inside the ruin of his head.
She cannot be seeing w
hat she is seeing. Her flesh parting under his manipulations as if he’s unfastening another blouse.
She swallows a copper gob of blood. Why?
I can’t fight them, he sobs. It’s what they want. I can’t stop.
fifth square
Barry winces as he gets out of the gleaming Volvo he can’t actually afford and limps the six yards from his driveway to his house, still dressed in the sweater and button-down he wore during the early morning forecast.
Sometimes his face aches from the smile he has to hold steady the entire time the cameras are at risk of rolling. He kept it on through the 5 a.m. and 6 a.m. shows. Even sat there grinning beside the anchor, her adipose-padded hips safely hidden behind the counter on the set, as she rattled off a sad script about a young single mom and her daughter reporting missing yesterday, and how police wanted to question her ex-boyfriend, a doozy of a catch with an easily checked-on criminal record who vanished without a trace from a rehab center just days ago.
That poor woman and her kid, last seen at a school play, probably already dead at the hands of psycho Romeo. How is it that people never have their guard up, never recognize the signs, he wonders.
Of course, the cheerful weatherman act was even trickier this morning, thanks to that beautiful peacock of a hookup from the night before. An exquisite young buck from the club with plush pouty lips and not an ounce of cellulite on his slender frame, with cheekbones high and sleek as an elf’s. But he’d pleaded an over-reactive gag reflex, insisted on sucking and chewing only on the very tip of Barry’s cock and making up for it with his hands. Oh, they did the trick, yes—his thighs were still sore—but he’d also woken up with the tip of his penis bruised purple as a plum. He had to look forward to an entire day pretending in front of a camera that every step wasn’t accompanied by an excruciating pinch of pain.
Ordinarily, he would head straight for the basement and the free weights, to pass the couple hours before he had to drive back and prepare the noon forecast. Instead, he fills a sock full of ice from the fridge and climbs straight to bed. He doesn’t know if the ice will help, but he has to try.
He lies there in a fugue, mind shifting between the day’s labor and the not at all unpleasant memory of the face of that evil Adonis bobbing at his groin. He sits up with a yell when the scratching at the window starts.
Obscured by the shade, there’s a dark shape in the window’s bottom corner that could be the curve of a head in silhouette.
Get out of here, he hears. Get in your car and never come back here.
Patsy?
Barry’s window is at the back of his house, on the second floor. There’s no deck, no tree, nothing below it to stand on for support. And Patsy…
I’m sharing a secret, she says. He wants to fight it but he can’t stop. He’s too weak. You have to go.
He springs to the window, jerks the shade handle. It slams up onto its roll, flapping hard against the wall, one, two, three.
Nothing out there but the sun dappling his tool shed and the tiny square of his vegetable garden.
Before he gets back in his car, he notices a curtain moving in Clive and Francene’s bedroom window next door, the fabric stirring as if caught by a breeze, even though the sash is closed.
sixth square
Late for work, Maria freezes with the side door to the carport half open. Clive stands by her Hyundai, clean-shaven in a short-sleeve button down and tie, face vacant as a zombie’s.
Then he sees her, and that square-cornered grin of his brings all his smile lines out.
Inside her the spike of alarm melts, and for a moment she doesn’t care that they’re out in the open. Oh, baby, she says, where you been?
His smile falters. I’m so sorry I haven’t been in touch. I swear, that crazy kid’s going to be the death of me.
No he won’t. You’ll get through to him. She knows this role, the comforter. She’s played it for him many a time. She locks the door behind her. Your timing’s terrible, I have to get to the restaurant, I’m going to be late.
I know, I just…I had to get out of there a minute. I had to see you. He stares hard at the ground as he says this.
Now she’s beside him. He happens to be blocking her driver’s side door. It’s okay baby. I was worried, really worried, you’ve been silent as the grave. I just can’t do this right this minute. She holds up her car keys in a clear I’m-about-to-unlock-the-door gesture. He doesn’t move, just studies her face. His Adam’s apple bobs up and down above the knot of his tie, as if there’s a word stuck there that won’t come out.
Um, baby? I have to go.
He reaches up, strokes a warm finger under her jawline. She leans into his hand out of reflex a split second before her brain kicks in. Then she recoils. Clive, what the hell are you doing?
He grabs her shoulders, pulls her in for a kiss.
He’s never done this before, not this way, and not where everyone can see. His fingers dig in hard enough to bruise, and with a hiss she punches him in the solar plexus. Jesus fucking Christ!
Her knuckles sting from the impact. He doesn’t flinch but he lets go.
What the hell are you thinking? You want Francene to see?
She’s never seen his face assume a configuration like this before, a snake flickering its tongue above a quivering mouse. You really think she doesn’t know, Maria?
For a moment, his eyes are green, like his son’s, like Francene’s. She blinks and they’re dark brown, like they should be.
She grips her ignition key like she’s holding a knife. I need to go.
She vowed a long time ago not to let men bully her any more, not to let them use her, not when she has a choice. She’s not going to tolerate this kind of bullshit, not anymore, least of all from Clive. She’ll do what she has to do, even if it hurts.
He’s not moving. For a breath-stopping moment she’s certain she’ll have to make good on her threat. Then he shudders, and gives way.
A higher power blesses her at that instant, keeps her from fumbling at the lock, lets her hop into the driver’s seat in a fluid motion without ever having to look at him, even though he’s just inches away. She pulls the switch that locks all the doors.
As the car coughs to life, he starts shouting. Maria, I’m sorry. I’m sorry.
She floors the accelerator, screeches straight out of the driveway. At the end of the street she checks her side mirror. He’s still standing in the same spot.
seventh square
Binoculars pressed against the window, Benjamin witnesses the whole brouhaha, Clive the Perfect Husband attempting to draw Maria the Single Mom into a kiss right there on the front lawn, his not-so-secret lover-on-the-side responding by thrashing out of his grip and holding her car keys like she intends to stab him in the eye.
Obviously having Junior home has pushed Mr. Perfect Husband and Father over the edge. Benjamin can’t help but feel little thrills, of titillation, of anticipation.
It makes up some for not having seen Patsy out and about today despite the sunny glow outside. It’s not time for her to call yet, though. When she does, he’ll learn what’s happened, what new twist in her ailment has laid her low. And he’ll listen as if he’s interested, because sometimes one must make an investment to keep the returns you want coming in.
Clive the Perfect stands in the driveway as his mistress zooms off. This Benjamin can actually hear, the sulky tramp lead-footing the engine. Surely all that noise has brought meek little Francene or even wild son Shaun who caused all that police ruckus last night to come to a window, to see.
Maybe they’ll have a confrontation right in the street. Benjamin can only hope.
He watches Maria’s car disappear around the corner at the far end of the circle, then turns his attention back to Wayward Daddy.
Who is staring right back at him.
Benjamin utters a little girly shriek and stumbles back from the window.
Then he pulls himself together, because it could only have been coinc
idence. He did not see Clive the Perfect Father with a smile like a serpent about to swallow a nest of eggs, looking not at his house or even at his window but right at him, meeting his single-eye gaze across the distance. It did not happen. No one ever looks at him in the slit between the bay window curtains. He’s never caught the neighbors doing more than idly scanning what little of the overgrown yard they could see behind his fence.
He returns to the pane, puts binoculars to the glass.
And finds himself looking right into bright green eyes, glistening mad eyes, eyes like aurora fire.
Clive hasn’t moved an inch, except he has to have moved, and with astonishing speed. Because it’s not the father standing there now, in his bland blue button-down, it’s the son, the drug addict, in an unwashed black print t-shirt, standing in the exact same spot in Maria’s driveway, in the exact same hands-in-the-pockets pose, staring at Benjamin with the exact same predatory smile.
Where has the father gone? Benjamin doesn’t know and he never finds out. He can’t look away from those green eyes. Seconds turn into minutes.
Shaun winks. And blows Benjamin a kiss.
And the old man cries out, and pulls the curtains shut.
eighth square
Lance doesn’t understand the place where he’s been, or the condition he now finds himself in.
If his mind ever connected to the concept of a card catalog, he might have explained the raw sensations in those terms—he had been as a sheet of flesh compressed against other sheets in a claustrophobic drawer, waiting for fingers to pull open the narrow space, page through the pink membranes of exposed nerves. But Lance lacks the vocabulary to explain how it felt, just as he has no words to articulate how awareness, sight, smell, and hearing have returned to him as abruptly as a sack pulled over his face.
Apex Magazine - January 2017 Page 12