The Show House

by Dan Lopez

  Buried in a purse pocket she finds her pharmacy keys. They confer immense power. These keys allow her to do everything from voiding a transaction on the register to accessing the controlled substances kept behind bulletproof glass. Today, however, their greatest power is one that will be available to any customer in a few hours: they allow her to walk through the front door. These keys give her the power to time travel. Not the kind that allows her to go back and change what happened between her and Alex, or to save her father, or even to set things on a different path with Esther, but it’s the power to do the next best thing.

  When she’s working the keys remain easily accessible in her lab coat pocket, but she won’t be wearing a lab coat today, so the pocket of her jeans will have to do. In they go, distorting the contours of the fabric and digging into her upper thigh. She whispers a quiet apology to Félix; he hated anything that ruined the line of a piece of clothing. A happy tune signals that her coffee is ready. She rushes to silence it, then pours herself a travel mug—cream, no sugar—and secures the lid in place with a quiet hiss. But for the lack of light, today could be a regular morning. She moves through the kitchen amazed at how little thought is needed to go about her routine.

  Patient privacy is paramount, and to demonstrate good corporate citizenship some policies will have to be revised in the wake of the breach. Onerous new procedures that accomplish little will be instituted. With a twinge of regret, she thinks of Cecily at Sanjay’s store and all the other techs in the district, and all those who will one day replace them. They will bear the brunt of it. Her silent legacy shall be a quotidian frustration for these people, busywork in the guise of security. For however comprehensive a policy, nothing can protect against somebody going rogue. She takes a sip to calm her nerves, then walks out the door.

  An early-morning chill slices through her thin hoodie. Shivering, she jogs over the dewy lawn to the parking lot and climbs into her truck. The windshield is frosted over, so she switches on the defroster, which blasts cold air until the engine heats up. While she waits for the view to clear, she tucks her hands under her thighs and calmly watches her breath dissipate in the warming cabin. The important thing now is to stay focused. If she allows her thoughts to wander she might reconsider, and she doesn’t want to reconsider. She wants to carry through with the plan. Nothing but an overwhelming familial obligation can justify her intended course of action, which is to say she has no choice in the matter.

  When the windshield clears she shifts the transmission into gear and presses the gas.

  More than geography, what separates her from the pharmacy resembles a bell curve of anxiety as a function of desire and logistics—the admixture refining with each sip of coffee and every green-lit intersection disappearing in the rearview mirror. The road is never completely empty, however. Even now decisions must be made whether to pass or to fall in line. Those on the road this morning are not commuters but, rather, fellow travelers, spurred on by duty or vocation. Their destinations—like hers—concealed by the darkness. They share a sisterhood of obligation. In solidarity, she breezes through the usual bottlenecks, unobstructed at this hour.

  Out of habit, she parks on the side of the building and walks toward the entrance.

  For a moment, she indulges the fantasy that her actions can remain anonymous, but, of course, she knows better than that. Security cameras along the well-lit perimeter record everything. The silent footage will speak louder than even the slam of her car door, which reverberates off the concrete and stucco of the deserted parking lot before fading into the tangle of foliage surrounding the drainage canal behind the property. The cameras will help create a narrative of intent—evidence already submitted for a crime not yet committed. Nothing she does can erase the footage. Were she to lose her resolve and flee, the footage would remain. Perhaps she should leave. The possibility nags at her with increasing vigor. She could climb back into her truck and go home, retreat under the covers and pretend this was all a nightmare. In a few hours she could call Bill and apologize for her absences and her lack of communication. As a pharmacist she knows of many sudden illnesses that might provide a convenient excuse. Without a crime there would be little chance of anybody checking the cameras. But her presence here, at this hour, remains recorded, suspicious nonetheless. It’s another kind of time travel, a fait accompli initiated by an earlier iteration of herself and carried out by a future version, the present existing only to bridge the gap.

  She sips her coffee and stares beyond her translucent reflection in the glass door.

  As soon as she turns the key corporate will be notified. Rusty, the store manager, will be contacted. Most likely corporate’s call will wake him. He’ll be groggy. It’ll take a moment for him to process what’s happening, to consider whether he forgot to inform corporate that he granted one of his staff permission to enter the store early. That moment won’t last long. Checking the cameras will come later, when the bureaucracy has had time to process the request. In the meantime, alarms do go off for no reason. He lives nearby. He’ll volunteer to drive over and check out the situation. The whole movement will take ten minutes at most.

  She turns the key and the timer starts.

  First she weaves through a snarl of shopping carts clustered near the entrance, a deterrent that fails to slow her down. In less than twenty seconds she reaches the office and punches in the alarm code. Success. The first hurdle cleared. But there’s no time to celebrate. She sprints for the pharmacy at the back of the store, careful not to spill her coffee. In her haste, she drops the keys and they slide across the floor, coming to rest under a shelf of adult diapers. Retrieving them eats up precious seconds. But, at last, she fishes them out and flips through the keys with lightning speed. She unlocks the heavy pharmacy door and slips in, slamming the keys down next to the register, where she’ll remember to grab them on her way out.

  Once inside she makes a beeline for the computer. This is her known unknown, her wild card. Sometimes it boots up instantly. This morning it takes longer and she impatiently glances at the time on her phone. Eight minutes left. The delay gives her time to formulate a defense. As head pharmacist at this location, she can claim prerogative to enter the pharmacy as she sees fit, but her recent absence undercuts that argument even if an utter lack of precedent didn’t. Executive prerogative is perhaps the best she can muster, but it’s far from a good defense. She’ll need to come up with something more convincing for Bill if she’s going to save her job. Confessing the truth occurs to her as the computer wakes up, but she dismisses it as a no-win strategy. Even as her fingers fly over the keyboard pulling up patient files, she knows Alex’s disappearance doesn’t justify breaking into the store and violating privacy laws.

  If she’s honest with herself, she knows she chose to enter now rather than wait till normal business hours because she suspects that she’s already lost her job. Unexplained absences do not bode well for a pharmacist’s career. Everything grinds to a halt without the pharmacist, which means no revenue and angry patients. And the techs who did show up as scheduled? They must get paid, which means the pharmacy actually loses money simply because the pharmacist isn’t here. Imagine several days of that. Imagine if your pharmacist refused to answer her phone, if she neglected to return the district manager’s calls or listen to his increasingly frantic voice mails. If she walked in here during normal business hours they wouldn’t let her anywhere near the computers. Nope, couldn’t risk it, she thinks, pulling up Eddie’s file. This information is too valuable to her. She snaps a photo with her phone of his patient record, including his address, and shuts down the computer. Three minutes left on the clock. Just enough time to lock the pharmacy, engage the alarm, and slip out the front door.

  She guns it out of the parking lot with thirty seconds to spare. The pharmacy recedes in her rearview mirror as the sun breaks over the eastern sky.

  She did it! The celebration is short-lived, however. As the realization of what she’s done fixes in her mi
nd, she feels queasy and her vision blurs. She’s just thrown away everything she’s worked for. And for what? So that she can play Sherlock Holmes with her brother’s lover’s data? Her stomach churns and she veers onto the shoulder, braking hard. She jams the transmission into park and scrambles out of the truck just in time to hurl all over the weeds sprouting through the gravel on the side of the road. Tears stream down her face. Nobody even slows down as they pass the lone woman hunched over by the roadway, shuddering in the first blush of dawn.

  THE ROCK SKIPS FOUR TIMES BEFORE SINKING. A SERIES of concentric ripples upset the otherwise still surface of the lake.

  Inevitability hews a queer course.

  Yo, how can you be so chill about this?

  After everything you still ended up in this park tonight, this park like a forgotten tidal eddy across the highway from the commuter airport. The streetlights burned out long ago.

  What choice do we have?

  How many times have you been here before? How many times has a clueless boy sat where Alex sits now? More than you care to remember.

  “Do you think anybody misses him?” He speaks to the water, his shoulders slumped.

  “What’s that?”

  “Eddie.” In the pale light from the shrouded moon he absently picks at a pimple on the corner of his lip.

  You manipulated him into agreeing that involving the police was a bad idea. Police only complicate matters. Even if they believed that Eddie’s death had been an accident, there would be an inquiry that could turn up troubling facts. Once Alex relented, all that remained were logistics. For that, too, you had a plan. A man found dead in a public toilet would garner a sensational headline or two, but would quickly fade into obscurity. He can’t see that now, but one day he will realize that obscurity is what will save him.

  “It’s too early for that.” You move down the small dock, which is blocked from the road by the restrooms on one side and dense foliage on the other.

  The same foliage hides your car from view. Anybody passing by would have to be looking to find you. You’re potentially visible to anybody driving along the highway, but nobody looks this way as they approach the tollbooth a quarter of a mile away.

  “I bet nobody’ll look for him.” He traces filigrees in the water with a long twig.

  “That wouldn’t be such a bad thing.”

  Several people saw the three of you leave the club together. Your anonymity and his transience can protect you to a point, but sooner or later people may start asking questions. In a sense, questions are exactly what you want, what this work has always been moving toward. Questions lead to outrage, which leads to justice. But how can the work raise a cry for justice while simultaneously creating the very conditions of the injustice it seeks to condemn? The paradox vexes you. Perhaps you came to this place to work out a solution.

  He clicks his tongue and tosses the twig into the water. “That’s fucked up. You know that, right? Please tell me you get that.”

  Overhead stars shine in a patchwork of clouds. Across the lake the blue lights of the airport glow uninterrupted. And all of it reflects on the placid waters, which stretch out from the muddy banks like silvered glass.

  You sigh. “Yeah.”

  “It probably don’t mean shit to you.”

  “That’s not true.”

  “Whatever.”

  This is your fault. He was supposed to remain insulated. Your carelessness involved him and now you don’t know how to proceed. Perhaps the best option would be to leave right now, to go home and forget about everything you’ve done, forget about him, reboot and start anew. You could do it. You could start your mornings with a grapefruit and toast and the local paper. You could shower and dress, make plans with your partner that, somehow, overcome your hectic schedules. You could drive your daughter to day care and then arrive at the office with a box of doughnuts for your coworkers. And you could afford to eat them because you spend forty-five minutes of your lunch hour at the gym and the other fifteen eating a cup of cottage cheese, a few points of pita and a dollop of organic hummus. You could go to the grocery store as a family. You could vacation on the coast as a family. You could put your daughter through college, support her as she struggles to make a life of her own and start a family of her own. You could be a grandparent. You could grow old with your partner. You could die and have a minister intone bland niceties: you trimmed the neighbors’ hedges, you beautified your community, you were compelled to civic responsibility. You could do it. You could do it, and after a while you’d go numb and even forget about all of this—about the work. It would be just one more suburban secret. And perhaps that’s another reason you came here tonight. Wouldn’t the narrative of a strangled student in a public restroom resolve neater if the body of a spurned lover were also present—some stranger, a drifter, a kid with no place, someone who a population eager for neat resolutions could believe was responsible for other recent deaths? A brown body to blame.

  “I’m sorry,” you say, and rest a hand on Alex’s knee.

  He turns his head and with downcast eyes asks, “Would you look for me if I went missing?”

  A private jet, edging in between the blue lights, comes in for a shaky landing. Without hesitation you say, “Of course.”

  “You fucking better.”

  How many times have you been on this same dock before this same view, always watching the planes taxi and take off, or the wobbly landings of new pilots mastering their craft? How many times have you drawn inspiration from them, used the display as a convenient backdrop to your work? Other boys have sat where Alex sits now, transfixed and easy prey. The only thing separating them is a nascent empathy in your character.

  “Come on,” you say, “I’ll take you home.”

  “No way am I going back there. I’d rather sleep here.”

  “Listen to me, there’s nothing there anymore. It’s like nothing ever happened. You’re going to have to forget anything did. This is important. Understand?”

  He shakes his head. For a while you both are very still.

  “Okay,” you say. “I know another place.”

  PART THREE

  “You’ll stay with me, Papi?”

  “‘WOULD I LIE TO YOU, HONEY?’” HE CROONS. “‘WOULD I lie to you?’” His face floats in shadow, a stubbled chin and drooping lips suggesting more than is visible. The latter, curled into an exaggerated grin and further distorted by the faint blue glow from the dash, looks cadaverous. “That’s an old Eurythmics tune. Before your time. One of your dad’s favorites as a kid. But it’s true. I wouldn’t lie. Not to you.”

  She yawns, curls her knees to her chest and drapes an arm across her face to block the light from the neighbors’ halogens. Disney World failed, so here they are in the driveway in Apopka. The road was never meant to last forever. It was just a place to work out his next move.

  “Oh, no you don’t,” he says, roughly poking her. “Grandpa promised you an adventure and we’re going to have an adventure.”

  She rolls into the light and frowns at him. He consoles himself with the knowledge that kids don’t have much in the way of attention spans, and it’s been a very long day.

  “So, all right, it’s no Disney World, but this is better, beautiful. Grandpa’s got something even better.” He leans into the light, reaching for her. “How does swimming in the middle of winter sound to you? Pretty special, huh? Not just anybody can give you that.”

  She squirms, and he tickles her chin.

  “Look.” He points at the tent covering the house. There must be something she likes in his tone because she quits fussing and sits up. “It’s just like the circus. Well, the flea circus maybe! Ha! You ever been to the circus?”

  She squints, gives him an embarrassed smile, and shakes her head no.

  “Well, what are we waiting for? You’ll love it!”

  He moves quickly to capitalize on her good graces. Over the course of the day he’s learned how fickle her mood can be. Yanking on h
er arms, he drags her past the gearshift. She howls at the rough treatment, but he presses on. Next door a light flickers, a curtain parts. He smiles, waves at the figure in the window, and the curtains overlap. The lights go dark.

  “All right, settle down.” Once she’s cleared the center console, he sits her on his lap like a rag doll. “See? Everything’s fine. Grandpa’s got it all under control. Sorry I had to be so rough.”

  She whimpers, and he kisses her forehead. “You’re breaking my heart,” he says. “It’s okay. Everything’s okay. You’re just tired, but Grandpa promises it’ll all be worth it.”

  He allows her a moment to calm down before opening the squeaking door and climbing out of the car. Knees crack. Bones ache. No big deal, he thinks, and, anyway, she seems to enjoy his struggle until her feet catch on the running board. She whines and kicks his shin as soon as she’s free.

  Wincing, he says, “That’s some leg you got there. Maybe I’ll tell Stevie to take you out for soccer.” With his other foot, he rubs the sore spot, but she kicks again.

  “Hey, all right, I get the hint.” He grips her firmly by the armpits and with a loud huff slings her over his shoulder like a bag of mulch. Her hip rests against his collarbone. “You’re getting bigger by the minute,” he says, short of breath. “What have those parents of yours been feeding you?”