She gave him a once over and clasped her hands together. “If you ever need someone to talk, I’ll always be here.”
“Thanks.” He nodded. “I’m good.”
She nodded and sauntered back inside. He swiped the film of perspiration from his forehead with the back of his hand and fired up the lawn mower again. After he finished, Misses Langston kissed him lightly on both cheeks and set a bright blue grocery bag onto his left hand.
He thanked her, pushed the mower back into the shed and locked the door on his way out. He carried the pie inside and, shutting the front door behind him, into the kitchen. He set it on the corner of the countertop, swiped his forearm across his brow and turned on the kitchen faucet to wash his hands.
He shook the excess water from his fingers, opened the cupboard below the sink and plucked a dishtowel from the big ceramic bowl inside. He closed the cupboard, pivoted on his heels and leaned against the sink to dry his hands.
He thought back to the girl with the severed throat and shook his head in dismay. Was she just another figment of his stressed-out imagination like the floating shadow he saw at the cemetery and the other one he’d seen awhile ago? Was it normal to see people bleeding all over the frigging place, too?
It might’ve been the sun playing tricks on him, but as much as he wanted to believe that he knew he couldn’t. There was another reason, however, that he was feeling like this–the anniversary of Terri’s death was just a month away but luckily he was already prepared for that.
After a nice lunch, including a guilt-free slice of Mrs. Langston’s apple pie, he carried a bottle of water into the living room and stretched out on the couch. Gusts of cool air drifted through the house, enveloping him like a blanket and soothing his sunburnt skin; dust motes danced in the shafts of sunlight streaming through the dining room windows. When fatigue started to overwhelm him, he gave a slight twitch and sat up.
He checked the time on the cable box, slid both hands down his face, swung his legs over the side and rose. There was still a little bit of daylight left so why should he spend it cooped up inside.
A thought crossed his mind.
After a few minutes of self-deliberation, it didn’t seem like a bad idea at all.
5
AFTER he washed up and stepped into a fresh set of clothes, Kevin snatched his canvas bag from the art room and locked the front door on his way out. He grabbed a bottle of Coke from a mini-mart and cut across town via the college district, passing a lively throng of college students whose cheery smiles hid the pain of their academic burdens like masks at a Halloween party.
He parked his car in the same spot as yesterday, slid his canvas bag off the back seat and shut the back door on his way across the street. When he stepped past Marilyn’s headstone, the cool summer breeze was like a false promise, dry and mediocre; every breadth of the wind felt just as thick and sweltering as the one before it.
As he stepped past Marilyn’s tombstone, the air didn’t grow cold and consume him with fear. There were no phantom shadows looming over him like a schoolyard bully seeking unjust compensation.
He approached the tombstone on his far left, knelt down in front of it and opened his bag. It was the kerbed type of tombstone (he’d remembered it from the ones he’d seen when he was buying Terri’s), a four-inch thick chunk of marble-gray granite; it was polished to a mirrored shine and the thin metal funnel placed before it was ringed by an array of thin colorful friendship bracelets and packed with dead flowers.
The words chiseled across the face of the headstone in gold Garamond font said:
BURT DANIELS
OCTOBER 5, 1955-JUNE 13, 2008
THE BEST DADDY IN THE WORLD
He fixed a fresh piece of paper across the face of the tombstone, plucked a sliver of stone-gray chalk from the flimsy plastic tray and exhaled. He rubbed it across the paper in slow measured strokes, blew the excess dust away and saw the word UND blooming across the page.
He traded the old piece of chalk for a fresh one of the same color and repeated the process. When the word ERTH bloomed across the page, he tossed the piece of chalk back onto the tray and sighed. What the hell am I doing wrong?, he wondered.
He’d accomplished a lot in the past couple of hours, working on the garden, mowing Mrs. Langston’s lawn and his encounter with the strange girl all of it was bound to catch up with him. He’d been married to a lively carefree woman who always grabbed life by the horns and held on for as long as she could so it was nothing for him to do the same. However, today was not one of those days.
He bowed his head and, his shoulders slumped, buried his face in his hands. He closed his eyes and took a few deep breaths to fight off the wave of shame washing over him. None of this made any sense, but that was easier said than done.
Had he pushed himself too far? Possibly.
It was turning out to be one of those days where he should’ve stayed home and taken that nap after all. The rubbings were more of an everyday ritual he’d continued in order to honor Terri’s memory, something he used to fill the empty void between night and day when he so desperately missed her. He slid his right hand down his face, cradled it loosely in his palm and let out a harsh breath.
He finished the drawing, set the piece of chalk back inside of the tray and swiped his hands together to shake the dust from his fingers. When he glanced up at the words on the page again, he gave a deflated sigh, leaned in a little closer and blew away the excess dust.
The phrase UNDER THE TWO GLASS DOVES appeared on the page. He caught his breath, sucking mingled plumes of honeysuckle and pine sap deep into his lungs, and repeated the phrase over and over again in his head. His eyes wide, he clamped his hand across his mouth and sighed.
He took his hand away from his mouth, peeled the right side of the paper back from the headstone and glanced at the words that were supposed to be there but weren’t.
“What the fuck?” He scoffed.
His doubts confirmed, he slid his hand away and glanced down at his feet. There was only one conclusion he could come to at this point that would make any rational fucking sense: fatigue.
He peeled off the page, set it on the tray and stuffed both items back into his bag along with all of the others. He zipped it shut, apologized to Burt Daniels’ grave and lifted the strap of his bag over his head and laid it across his chest. He took two steps away from the headstone, the contents of his bag jostling against his right hip when he glanced up at a middle-aged couple standing in front of Marilyn Graham’s grave.
They had the same heavy grief-stricken looks on their faces that he’d seen on plenty of other faces, including his own. Her toffee-brown hair sat in a bob above a round tan face with wide hazel eyes, a broad nose and pointed lips; she wore a flaring sapphire-blue dress over her short willowy frame, brown-leather open-toed sandals and a silver necklace with an oval silver locket. He was a tall beefy man with broad shoulders and a head full of dark hair that sat above a square chiseled face with heavy-lidded brown eyes, a strong nose and thick lips; he wore a button down blue shirt, jeans and gray sneakers with white stripes running down the right side.
He’d slung his left arm across the top of her back below the base of her neck and gently massaged the crown of her left shoulder, his right hand jammed into his front pocket. Her eyes blurry with tears, she opened her mouth to say something when a gut-wrenching sob burst from her lips and cut her off in mid-sentence. She turned and buried her face against his right shoulder and balled her right fist together until her knuckles turned white.
Kevin glanced down to avoid any embarrassment on his part, clenched the strap of his bag in his right fist and sauntered away. Tiny stalks of grass weaved in the breeze as the treetops whispered sweet nothings in everybody’s ears. He’d spent plenty of days kneeling over Terri’s grave, shedding enough tears to go around for everyone.
He approached his car, opened the back door and tossed his bag onto the seat when something clutched the back of his shirt. He w
as spun around with such force that his arms flew out from his sides and he was slammed up against the rear driver-side door. Shockwaves of pain burst through his body, spread across the base of his spine and down the backs of his legs and squeezed the air from his lungs.
The impact sent his head jostling to the left before coming back around. He doubled over, wiped the tears from his eyes and gazed at his attacker.
One minute, the man was consoling his sobbing wife and now he was ready to pound Kevin’s brains into the street for no apparent reason. A loud insistent voice emerged from behind the brute, echoing across the cemetery. Kevin peered over the man’s shoulder and saw the grief-stricken woman sprinting toward them, her sandals slapped against the pavement like wet feet on asphalt.
“What the hell are you doing here?”
“Take your fucking hands—”
“What the hell were you doing around my daughter’s grave?”
“Who are you?” Kevin asked, his face creased with confusion.
When she caught up with them, she panted, “Stop it, Harry. He didn’t do anything.”
“You hurt my little girl didn’t you, you son of a bitch.”
“I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”
Harry reached out with his left hand and clutched the front of Kevin’s shirt. Kevin slapped it away, fired an angry look at him and bunched his fists together.
“Stop Harry. Just stop it.”
“Shut up, Lacey.” Harry said through tightly clenched teeth at her, then said to Kevin. “I saw you here yesterday doodling all over my daughter’s headstone. What the hell were you doing here anyway.”
“I don’t know what he’s trying to insinuate,” Kevin said to Lacey in a calm reassuring tone. “I didn’t do–”
Harry shifted on the balls of his feet, peered over his shoulder and sighed. Kevin glanced at the woman who Harry referred to as Lacey and opened his mouth to speak when he noticed a look of wide-eyed horror forming across her face.
“Please don–”
Before Kevin could follow her gaze to see what she was seeing, it was already too late.
6
WHEN he came to, his body heavy and stiff with pain, Kevin peered up at the ceiling through stuffy-white eyes. He slid his dry tongue slowly across the film of sleep paste clinging to the roof of his mouth and grimaced at the taste. An undulating chorus of soft voices, even softer footsteps and quick sporadic beeping sounds resonated in his ears; waves of lemon-scented antiseptic drifted around the room and stung his nostrils.
He slowly raised his left arm, rubbed the whites from his eyes with the knuckles of his hand and blinked a few times until his vision became clear. A dull ache throbbed across his forehead, pinching his temples hard enough to make him squeeze his eyes shut to avoid the light. He sighed and sat up on his elbows when his left arm buckled and slid out from underneath, slamming him back onto the bed.
The back of his skull bounced off the pillow, whipping his neck to the right and sending a second wave of pain coursing down his spine. A nearby voice yelled for a doctor but he wasn’t about to try that again to find out who’d said it. He bit down on his bottom lip to push through the pain, gripped the metal bed railing in his left hand and rolled onto his side, facing a tall beige curtain that separated his room from the next.
A parade of soft footsteps scrambled across the ER. He heard the quick clang of metal tapping metal as the curtain was flung open, bathing him in a second wave of cool air. He squeezed his eyes shut once more to avoid the overhead glare of the florescent light on the wall behind his bed.
“I need you to stay calm, Mister Perkins.” A rough authoritative voice said. “I’ll explain everything just stay calm.”
He winced and rolled over on his back. A tall middle-aged man dressed in a crisp black policeman’s uniform approached him from the left. He had a clean-shaven head, a strong chiseled face with a hawkish nose and thin pink lips; the big silver badge fixed to his left front pocket glistened in the light. The doctor was a young dark-haired man in a creased white lab coat underneath a blue pin-striped shirt and a red tie; his oval pale face was acne-free and his demeanor was more than cordial.
Now that he knew who the man was, he was glad he hadn’t said what he wanted to say before. A heavyset blonde in bright-pink scrubs and white hi-tops sauntered past the nurses station holding an old brown clipboard in her left hand.
“I’m Officer Ned White.” The policeman said, lacing his arms across his chest. “I’m with The Shallow Rock Police Department. I’d like to ask you some questions?”
“Officer.” The doctor pressed. “I don’t think that right now is a good time–”
“Hey, Doc.” White said in an insistent voice. “You do your job and I’ll do mine.”
The doctor shook his head and sighed.
“Would you like to tell me what happened, Mister Perkins?”
“Sure.”
With the doctor’s assistance, Kevin was propped up in bed with a couple of pillows and slowly reiterated the entire scene from beginning to end; he left out the part where he’d discovered the strange phrase from Burt Daniels’ headstone. White scribbled everything down as quickly as he could on a small notebook and read it back to him for clarification.
“What did you say to Mister Kline to make him strike you?”
“Nothing.” Kevin said, then raised his left hand. “Mister Kline? I thought he was Marilyn Graham’s father. Are her parents divorced or something?”
“I’m not sure about that. However, they wanted to talk to you as soon as you woke up.”
The doctor came in a few minutes later to check on Kevin whilst firing angry scornful looks at Officer White from the corner of his eye. He diagnosed Kevin with a mild concussion and prohibited him from any and all activities for the next twenty-four hours. Kevin sighed and rolled his eyes at the “good news” especially when the doctor emphasized that he wasn’t allowed to drive himself back home.
“Get a ride from someone, Mister Perkins.” The doctor said, patting Kevin’s shoulder on his way out.
Kevin thanked him, signed his discharge papers and rose slowly out of bed. He leaned against the bed railing and waited for the lingering effects of vertigo to fade away before moving another muscle.
He stuffed his papers into his right front pocket and followed Officer White down an open marble-gray corridor that stretched past the nurses’ station. Men and women in sharply creased medical scrubs either hurried off to other rooms or huddled around each other, carrying large electronic tablets inside the crooks of their arms in the same manner they used to carry their books back in high school.
They exited the ER through a metal door with a tall rectangular glass window with a thin wire-black screen and stepped into a large waiting room with gilded picture frames speckled across its rough white walls and small cushioned chairs sitting on soft gray carpet. Stacks of month-old magazines were scattered across knee-high wooden tables; an array of puzzles, coloring books and kid’s toys were clustered along the far-left corner of the room. Two flat-screen televisions were fixed to the left and right corners of the ceiling by large L-shaped brackets screwed into the wall; one was showing a news report about a missing boy and the other was playing a rerun of Spongebob SquarePants.
An old couple in hand-me down clothes occupied the three chairs on the left, mumbling to each other and shaking their heads about the missing boy. White waved to a trio of teenage boys sitting on the far-right corner; two of them chuckled as if one of them said something funny to the other.
The tallest of the three boys sat in a chair underneath the television, thumbing through a slim-black cell phone gripped loosely in his right hand. He wore a white muscle-tee, black sweat pants with the high school’s logo (SHALLOW ROCK STALLIONS) in bold yellow font streaking down his right leg and gray sneakers. He had short spiky-black hair above a strong boyish face and steel-blue eyes that must’ve sent the girls at school into an hypnotic daze.
&
nbsp; The tall heavyset kid sitting to his right had a saggy pale face with slanted dark eyes and a thick mouth; he wore a tie-dye shirt with the number 44 plastered across the front in bleach white letters, gray sweat pants and black leather sandals with thick Velcro straps that pressed into his fat doughy feet. The skinnier one of the group wore a slate yellow jersey with black shorts and different colored sneakers; his Utah Utes ball cap perched on his head shaded his tan square face and spread a thin black visor across his deep-set green eyes.
The woman Harry Kline had referred to as Lacey observed them from across the room and rose out of her chair. Harry snatched her wrist out of the air, whispered something in her ear and nodded; his face looked heavy and apologetic.
When he was done, he held her hand and walked alongside of her. She tossed a ball of spent tissue into a nearby wastebasket and smoothed out the wrinkles in her dress; her eyes and cheeks were red from crying. Under the recessed lights, tiny creases of sadness hugged the corners of her mouth and eyes, making her face look more heavier than it seemed.
As they approached each other, they shook hands.
“I just want to apologize for what I did.” Harry said in a slow remorseful voice. “It was immature and uncalled. I know it doesn’t make up for it but things haven’t been going good as of late.”
“I’m sorry about your daughter.”
“I’m actually Marilyn’s uncle.” He said. “Ever since her father killed himself, I’ve treated her like she was.”
“Marilyn’s been dead for quite some time and it hasn’t been easy, Mr. Perkins. ” Lacey explained. “I assume you don’t know what that’s like.”
Kevin raised his left hand and, without saying a word, tapped his thumb against the faint white halo hugging his third finger. An uncomfortable silence permeated around the waiting room as Harry sighed and bowed his head to hide the shame on his face. Lacey shook her head, her face crumbling under the weight of a shared burden.
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