“I guess that explains the Dudley Do-Right look you’re rocking,” she said, grabbing a cloth and wiping down the bar.
“Yeah, how do you think I feel? I got this new job that I don’t actually want. Some stupid corporate-sales bullshit. And my wife is pregnant…” He realized too late that he was oversharing. “Shit, I’m not supposed to tell anyone that. I don’t know why I said that.”
“That’s … Wow, congrats! Hold on.”
Hannah stepped away and returned with a small bottle of champagne. The cork made a hollow noise when she popped it. She poured two glasses. “I won’t tell anyone, Tom. But seriously, that’s great. I mean, I never ever want kids and I think they’re horrible little monsters, but I’m really happy for you.”
Tom laughed and they clinked glasses for a second time. He sipped at the drink, the bubbles going up his nose and making his whole body relax for the first time in as long as he could remember.
“We’re all monsters,” he said as she threw back her drink in a single gulp.
“Ain’t that the truth,” she responded, smiling at him.
“What’s the big celebration?” Malcolm said as he reappeared from the back. Any trace of his previous emotion was gone, replaced by his usual sardonic smile.
Tom glanced at Hannah, silently imploring her not to spill the beans. She winked at him and said, “Tom got a fancy corporate job!”
“Well, hell, congratulations!” Malcolm said, walking over and shaking Tom’s hand. “Pour me a glass of that bubbly.”
His daughter complied and Malcolm held up his glass, smiling at Tom. “Here’s to new jobs, new haircuts, and tattoos that you can hide from your bosses but which will never go away.”
Hannah reached over and lifted her father’s shortsleeve, revealing a slightly faded tattoo on his shoulder that read FUCK THE MAN.
Tom laughed. “Now, that is pretty amazing.”
“I was young, drunk, and on shore leave. I was pissed off at my commanding officer for some reason that I can’t remember.” Malcolm looked up as a few customers walked through the door, people dressed in suits and dresses. “So, does that mean I’m losing my new employee before he even starts?”
“Um…,” Tom said, feeling bad. “Yeah. I think so. I’m really sorry. With a new job, a new house, and … uhh … everything else, I don’t think I can. I mean, if you’re really in a pinch, I can probably—”
“Tom. It’s fine,” Malcolm said, leaning forward. “I’m happy for you. And I’m sure Hannah is, too.”
“Hmph,” she retorted as she moved farther down the bar to serve the new arrivals. But she threw a smile back at Tom as she did so.
“Seriously, Tom,” Malcolm continued, “that’s great. I’m happy for you. And for Jenny. You’re a good guy. You deserve it. But you better keep coming in here! I get the feeling that we’re gonna be great friends.”
“Me, too, Malcolm,” Tom agreed, nodding. “Me, too.”
* * *
Jenny couldn’t stop laughing.
Tom stood in front of her in the kitchen, embarrassed. Her first reaction to his new look had been shock, and she’d nearly dropped the glass of juice she was holding. After a moment, she burst into hysterics, surprising both of them.
“What the hell, Jenny?” he said, a surprising rage washing over him.
“I’m sorry!” she said, placing the glass on the counter and putting a hand over her mouth. “I don’t know why I’m laughing. You actually look amazing!”
“‘Actually’? Whatever,” he said, and turned around, walking through the dining room and outside to the front porch, violent and bloody imagery bouncing around in his brain. He tried to force it out and mostly succeeded by the time he made it to the porch swing.
“Tom!” Jenny shouted, hurrying after him, no longer laughing. “Wait!”
He was sitting on the swing when she caught up with him, rocking gently, eyes gazing off into the sky.
“I’m sorry, honestly,” she said again. “You really do look amazing. I’ve just never seen you like this. It’s so … different. I don’t know why I laughed. It must be the hormones or something, or the exhaustion of everything that’s happening to us. I promise that I wasn’t laughing at you. I was … in shock.”
“It’s fine,” he said, his eyes focusing on her. “I’m just having a super-shitty day. And I look like an idiot.”
“You do not look like an idiot. You look like a super-hot banker guy.”
“Not helping.”
He could tell from the look on her face that she was trying not to laugh. Catching on to the absurdity of the situation, he allowed a tiny smile to slip onto his unusually clean-shaven face.
“Super-hot rock-star banker guy?” she tried.
“Better,” he admitted as she wrapped her hands around his arm.
“Good,” she whispered. “I take it the meeting with Kevin went well?”
“Yeah,” he said. “I suppose. I have a job now. I’m starting tomorrow. I already let Malcolm know that I can’t work for him.”
“Was he upset?”
“No. I don’t think so. I think he’s happy for me. It’s weird … he already kind of feels like the father my dad never really was for me.”
“That’s … that’s good, right?” Jenny asked gently.
“I guess so,” he murmured. “I don’t know.”
“Well, I’m proud of you, Tom. And a new job is always kind of fun. Aren’t you at least a little excited?”
Tom didn’t answer; he couldn’t speak. Thankfully, Jenny knew him well enough to know that he needed silence right then. She sat next to him and leaned into his shoulder.
Together they watched the shadows grow across their neighborhood as night descended on them and on the house that rose above them like some sort of insidious protector, like a giant mausoleum built for two.
* * *
At six o’clock the next morning, Tom stood in the kitchen, sweat dripping down his neck and along his back, flesh rippling with goose bumps.
The basement door stood wide open. When he’d gone to bed the night before, later than he should have, that door was closed. Or he thought it had been. Had he visited the chrysalis in the middle of the night and somehow forgotten about it? Had Jenny gone down there and moved the refrigerator and found what was rightfully his? The idea of her touching it filled him with a cold rage. He shook the anger away, looking out the kitchen window over the sink.
Hints of dawn were breaking on the horizon. Already warm, it promised to be a record-breaking kind of day, not a cloud in the sky. Tom was wearing the only suit he owned, the one he broke out for weddings and funerals. He was futilely attempting to tie his one and only necktie, which he had stupidly undone the last time he’d worn it, as he stared at the quiet suburban neighborhood on the other side of the glass, trying not to turn and look at the gaping basement doorway. Straining to hear the wet breathing.
Letting go of the tie, he rotated his body mechanically and stepped toward the basement, wanting to feel the chrysalis against his fingers. Needing it.
“Hey, sexy,” Jenny intoned behind him.
“Jesus!” he said, starting and turning violently around.
She stood in the kitchen doorway, dressed in one of his T-shirts and a pair of light blue underwear, hair thrown back into a messy ponytail, rubbing one eye with a fist. “Shit, sorry,” she said, moving toward him. “Didn’t mean to scare you.” She threw her arms around him and squeezed, putting her head into the crook of his shoulder. “Were you heading to the basement for something?” she asked, sounding confused.
“What are you doing up?” he responded, smoothing her hair down with trembling fingers.
“Mmm … that feels nice.” She enjoyed the attention for a few moments, then disengaged, walking over to a nearby cabinet. “Ah, you know, just another lovely early-morning upchuck. And I wanted to see you before you caught the train. Make you some coffee.”
“No, that’s okay, I don’t think I can h
andle any right now anyway. I feel like I’m gonna upchuck, too.”
Jenny abandoned her coffee mission and walked back to Tom, putting her arms around his shoulder and smiling up at him. “You look so good, baby.”
“Thanks. But I feel stupid. And I can’t figure out this damn tie. I always prided myself on not knowing how to do one of these. Like the hipster idiot I am.”
“Stop,” she said. “Let me.” She stepped behind him and tugged down on his shoulders. In response, he crouched slightly. Her arms appeared on either side of his neck and slowly looped the tie into a professional-looking knot. Tom stared into the darkness of the basement, a blackness that seemed to expand and contract as he watched, as if the shadows were coming to life. Coming for him.
“I used to watch my dad do this every morning,” Jenny said dreamily. “With three women in the family—me, Victoria, and Mom—Dad’s guy stuff was so alien … standing up to pee, the smell of his cologne, wearing a tie every day. Victoria and I thought it was cool. We’d sneak around and watch him when he wasn’t paying attention. I really loved the way his fingers moved when he was tying his ties—he went so fast, they looked almost blurry.
“I was determined to figure out how he did it and used to practice on myself when I was home sick from school. There…,” she said, walking back around Tom and giving the tie a pat. “Were you … down in the basement this morning?” she tried again.
“Yeah, I was … looking for a briefcase … found an old one … probably full of spiders…,” he said, pulling his gaze away and looking down at the tie, which gently, perfectly hugged his neck. “Wow. Nice work.”
“You are going to do great,” she whispered emphatically, and kissed him on the mouth.
He kissed her back, trying to close his eyes, trying not to look at the basement doorway.
And failing.
* * *
The people who stood on the train platform at seven o’clock in the morning seemed to Tom like an entirely different species altogether. Chatting loudly, most holding iced coffees, they huddled in small groups. It was as if they had appeared in prearranged clusters, a post–high school nightmare come to life. Tom bit down on a yawn as he walked past them, attempting to make his way to the middle of the platform without jostling anyone. Holding the battered, mostly empty briefcase that he had found a day earlier, he felt like a fraud.
He thought about smoking a quick cigarette, but just as he remembered that he was all out, the train showed up and the perfectly placed groups of commuters boarded with well-oiled efficiency. The pinched-faced conductor nodded smugly at the men and joked with the women. Tom was the last one on, barely avoiding the closing door. The conductor smiled nastily at him.
Conversation inside the train car was even louder than on the platform. Tom managed to find an empty seat—a middle one, between two older women. Behind him sat two men in crisp business suits and a woman in a dark dress. They spoke loudly about a drunken night they’d recently had, in tones that Tom recognized from his bartending days as intended to be overheard, and they all laughed after almost every sentence. The guy directly behind Tom was a big, beefy fucker well over six feet tall, his dark hair combed and parted with military precision; his knee was shoved into the seat in front of him, and directly into Tom’s back.
As the same conductor made his way along the aisle, Tom realized that he’d forgotten to buy a ticket, which surprised him. He had never forgotten while he was still bartending in the city.
“Shit,” he whispered loudly. The woman to his right shifted uncomfortably.
The laughter behind him hit a climax as the conductor checked the group’s tickets and chatted with them about things and people that all four of them seemed to know. Finally, the man in the uniform and hat stood over Tom and his seatmates. The two older women flashed digital tickets on their phones.
“I … uh … forgot to get one,” Tom said, his voice breaking midsentence.
The man sighed and pulled out an oversized ticket book. “Where you going? Penn?” Tom nodded. The car seemed to have gone silent. “There’s a five-dollar surcharge when you buy tickets on the train,” the conductor said, violently punching holes in a long green sheet of paper. “That’ll be … fifteen fifty.”
Fifteen dollars. It seemed outrageous. He should probably swallow his pride at some point and just download the train app, or whatever it was. He tended to be a proud luddite, which was starting to feel like a dumb thing to take pride in. Tom swallowed his anger as the trio behind him burst into another obnoxious swell of laughter.
Tom reached into his pocket, his elbow accidentally jutting into the already-annoyed woman next to him, and withdrew his beat-up wallet. It had been a gift from his mother when he graduated high school—the last gift he’d ever received from either of his parents. It was falling apart and Jenny kept offering to buy him a new one, but he couldn’t bring himself to part with it.
He flashed an apologetic smile to the woman on his right. Her lips peeled back, revealing black teeth filed to points. Blood began to ooze from her eyes. Tom blinked several times. No, her face was fine, totally normal, though annoyed. He must have been more exhausted than he realized.
“Sir!” the conductor said sharply. The people in the row behind them were still laughing, a horrible sound. How long had Tom been staring at the woman’s mouth? “Fifteen. Fifty,” the conductor repeated as if talking to a child.
Tom handed over a twenty-dollar bill, the only cash he had on him. There went his lunch. They didn’t have much money left at all. After that expensive haircut, all their credit cards were nearly maxed out, and they were still waiting on Jenny’s last check from the Swiss bank. The conductor looked at the limp bill, then finished punching the piece of paper and handed it to Tom, along with four singles. He made a big production out of dispensing a pair of quarters from the coin changer attached to his belt. As he walked away, rolling his eyes, the knee shoved even harder into Tom’s back.
Tom craned his neck around, giving the tall, muscle-bound asshole the evil eye.
“What?” the man said, matching Tom’s hard gaze and raising a single manicured eyebrow. “What?” he repeated when Tom didn’t answer, leaning forward as a malicious smirk crossed his giant face. Tom quickly turned back around. The people behind him laughed again, the knee digging in even deeper. Making eye contact with an older man across the aisle, Tom made a Can you believe this guy? face. The older man averted his eyes without responding, as if embarrassed on Tom’s behalf.
Closing his eyes, Tom tried to ignore the seemingly endless, mocking laughter behind him and the growing pain in his back.
In his mind, he found himself in that dark hole again, the one that he had imagined when he first accepted the stupid job that he was now hurtling toward. He tried to claw out of the dirt that surrounded him, but its weight grew heavier, driving him farther and farther into the ground, his insect limbs shuddering uselessly before going completely still.
* * *
Jenny stood at the top of the basement stairs, surprised by how little light the overhead bulb threw off. She’d only been down there a couple of times but had never stayed long. The amount of junk was too overwhelming for her even to contemplate, not to mention the spiders and millipedes she saw furiously trying to escape from the light. She’d been fine with the idea of Tom getting at least some of the initial cleaning up out of the way.
But now that she had more free time on her hands, she was excited to poke around down there, see what kind of treasures she might find.
Tom always acted weird when they talked about the basement, and she thought maybe he was afraid to go down there, not that she could blame him. It was creepy, with the bad lighting and the shadowy mountains of stuff. She’d decided today to at least start making her way through the mess. Maybe once she got started, Tom would muster up the courage to pitch in.
Let’s do this, she thought, and headed down the steps. As she reached the fifth stair, the wood gave way with a
loud crack; her slipper-covered foot crashed through the resulting jagged hole. She fell, hard, feeling the sharp edges of the wood rip into her shin. She struggled to find something to grab on to, hands slapping the concrete wall to her left, trying to stay upright. Blood burst from her rent flesh, spilling onto the stairs and immediately sluicing down to the next step, and the next.
“Ow! Fuck!” she yelled, trying to pull her leg free without doing any more damage.
Below her, the basement waited in darkness as her blood dripped down, stair by stair, until it spattered on the dirty gray floor, reflecting Jenny’s writhing figure and the dim, inky light from the naked overhead bulb that barely made it past her trapped body.
* * *
Kevin’s boss, Pete Kroll, was a sweaty bulldog of a man, not an inch over five-six, who sported a buzz cut directly out of an inspirational sports movie. He wore a rumpled suit and a rumpled tie, and sat behind a giant faux-oak desk that was overflowing with papers, files, what must have been hundreds of fast-food and candy-bar wrappers, multiple crushed and leaky cans of diet soda, and several framed photos of him and a woman Tom assumed was his wife, whose hair was as tall as her husband’s was short.
Pete stared at Tom for a full minute without saying anything. Tom shifted uneasily in his seat. Kevin, sitting inches away from him in a matching visitor’s chair, was tapping playfully on his knees, apparently unconcerned with the silence. Tom wanted to run away, wanted to tear off his suit and race to the nearest bar, where he’d inhale an ice-cold bottle of beer.
“So,” Pete said, rubbing his chin with a calloused hand as if he were considering the mysteries of the universe, “Kevin here says the two of you grew up together.”
“That’s right,” Tom answered. “But don’t hold that against me.”
If the man was amused, he gave no indication of it. Instead, he snorted deeply, filling his mouth with phlegm, then spat into an unseen garbage can behind the desk. At least Tom hoped there was a garbage can back there. The sound of salespeople on phone calls echoed through the closed door behind Tom, its sole window frosted.
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