by Dean Koontz
13
We heard the siren, but there were always sirens in the city, police zooming this way and that, weaving through traffic in their cruisers, more sirens every year—so my mom said—as if something was going wrong with the country just when so many things had been going right. The worst thing to do when you hear a siren is to go see what it’s about, because the next thing you know, part of what it’s about might be you.
It was Monday evening, eight days after the talk I had with Grandpa Teddy. My mom didn’t work Monday nights, and we were playing checkers at the kitchen table when the siren swelled loud and then wound down somewhere in our block. We stayed at the game, talking about just everything, so I don’t know how long it was until the knock came at our door, maybe twenty minutes. We had forgotten the siren by then. There was a bell, but this caller rapped so lightly we wouldn’t have heard it if our apartment hadn’t been so small. We went into the living room, and the rapping came again, hesitant and timid, and Mom looked through the fish-eye lens and said, “It’s Donata.”
Mrs. Lorenzo stood at our threshold, as pretty as Anna Maria Alberghetti and as pale as Wonder Bread, her hair disarranged, face glistening even though the evening was mild for late June. Body rigid, hands fisted and arms crossed over her breasts, she stood as though she had turned to stone the moment she’d finished knocking. Her face, her eyes were those of a woman lost, struck senseless and uncomprehending by some shock. She spoke as though bewildered, “I don’t know where to go.”
“What’s wrong, Donata, what’s happened?”
“I don’t know where to go. There’s nowhere for me to go.”
My mother took her by one arm and said, “Honey, you’re like ice.” The glaze on the woman was sweat, but cold sweat.
Mom drew her into the apartment, and in a voice colored less by grief than by bewilderment, Mrs. Lorenzo said, “Tony is dead, he stood up from dinner, stood up and got this terrible look and fell down, fell dead in the kitchen.” When my mother put her arms around Mrs. Lorenzo, the woman sagged against her, but her voice remained as before. “They’re taking him now, they say, taking him for an autopsy, I don’t know where. He was only thirty-six, so they have to … they have to … they have to cut him open and find was it a heart attack or what. There’s nowhere I can go, he was all I had, and I don’t know where to go.”
Maybe she hadn’t cried until then, maybe the shock and terror had numbed her, but now the tears came in great wrenching sobs, pent up but released in a flood. She was racked by the kind of grief that is part horror, when the mourner suddenly knows death to be not just a profound loss but also an abomination, and the wretched sounds that came from her made me tremble and raised in me a feeling of absolute helplessness and uselessness unlike anything I’d felt before.
As usual, my mother coped. She brought Mrs. Lorenzo into our kitchen and settled her in a chair at the table and pushed aside the checkerboard. She insisted that Mrs. Lorenzo had to drink something warm, and she set about making tea, all the while commiserating not in a phony way but with the right words that I could never have found and with tears of her own.
Mrs. Lorenzo was gentle and kind, and I couldn’t stand watching her coming apart like that or the thought of her widowed so young. I went to a living-room window and looked out and saw the ambulance still at the curb in the crimson twilight.
I had to get out of the apartment. I don’t entirely know why, but I felt that, were I to stay there, I’d start crying, too, and not just for Mrs. Lorenzo or Mr. Lorenzo, but for my father, of all people, because he had that awful emptiness inside himself, and for myself, too, because my father couldn’t ever be a father. Grandma Anita was still alive, and I’d never known anyone who died. Mr. Lorenzo had been a waiter; he often got home late, and he sometimes carried me up to our apartment when I was asleep and my mom returned from work at the club, and now he was dead. I was glad my father moved out, but this was like two deaths close to each other, one the death of a neighbor, the other the death of my father-son dream, which I would have denied having, if you’d asked me, but to which just then I realized I’d still been clinging. I ran out of the apartment and down six flights of stairs to the foyer and outside to the stoop and down more stairs to the sidewalk.
The paramedics were loading the body into the back of the van ambulance. A sheet covered Mr. Lorenzo or maybe he was in a body bag, but I couldn’t see him, only the shape of him. Across the street, a crowd of twenty or thirty had gathered, probably people who lived in the apartment houses over there, and they were watching Mr. Lorenzo being taken away. Some kids were over there, too, my age and younger. They chased around and danced and acted silly, as if the flashing beacons of the ambulance were holiday fireworks. Maybe if the death had occurred on the other side of the street, I’d be watching from here with different kids, acting as foolish. Maybe the difference between horror and holiday was just the width of an ordinary street.
At nine I knew about death, of course, but not as an intimate truth, rather as something that happened out there in the world, in other families, nothing for me to worry about for a long time yet. But now people I knew were going away forever. If two could go in just two weeks, three others could go in just three more—Grandpa, Grandma, and my mother—and I would be like Mrs. Lorenzo, alone and with nowhere that I belonged anymore. It was crazy, a little-kid panic, but it grew out of the undeniable realization that we’re all so fragile.
I thought that I should do something for Mr. Lorenzo, that if I did something for him, God would see and approve and not take anyone from me until I was much older. I guess if I hadn’t been so crazy afraid, I might have gone to church and lit a candle for him and said a few prayers. Instead I thought that I should play the piano for him, one of his favorite songs that he listened to on his stereo.
The community center stayed open until 10:30 on Monday because it was bingo night. As one paramedic closed the rear doors of the ambulance and the other started the engine, I turned away and headed toward the Abigail Louise Thomas Room.
Perhaps in my peripheral vision, I saw him moving, paralleling me. But as long as I live, I will credit luck and the feather pendant in my pocket, because I was in a distraught emotional state that made it unlikely that I would have picked up on clues glimpsed from the corner of my eye. My father must have been among the crowd across the street, because now he paced me. When he realized that I had seen him, he didn’t call out to me or wave, which would have been much less creepy. He only walked faster when I did and broke into a run when I ran.
If I made it to the community center, he might come in after me. No one there knew that my mother had thrown him out or that divorce was imminent. Sylvia didn’t wash her dirty laundry in public. They knew me at the center, and they didn’t know him, and if I caused enough of an uproar, they would surely call my mom.
But then I saw that he was glancing both ways along the street as he ran, checking on the traffic, looking for an opening, ready to dash across all three lanes at the first opportunity. The center was still more than a block away. His legs were longer than mine. I’d never make it there before he caught me. He wouldn’t hurt me. I was his son. Grandpa Teddy said Tilton wouldn’t harm me. Might snatch me and take me away. But wouldn’t harm me. To snatch me, he needed a car, surely a car. You didn’t absolutely need a car in the city; and Tilton hadn’t owned one. Maybe he owned one now, but he would have to drag me to it, and I’d fight all the way, and he wouldn’t want that. So maybe he meant to hurt me, after all.
At the corner, one-third of the way to the community center, I turned left, heading for the alleyway behind our building. I glanced over my shoulder and saw Tilton crossing the street, dodging cars as the drivers pounded their horns and brakes squealed. He looked wild. I wouldn’t make it into the back street and half a block to the rear entrance of our building before he overtook me.
Twilight slanted through the streets, fiery in the windows and painting emberglow across tenement walls, purple
shadows swelling, but night already claimed the narrow alley. Not all the buildings had back entrances; some had switchback fire escapes, and where there was rear access, the security lamps above the doors were often broken. On both sides, Dumpsters rose, hulking shapes in the gloom, some lids up, some down, some stuck halfway. I climbed the side of a Dumpster where the lids were open and dropped inside, landing on slippery piles of plastic garbage bags, in a stink of rotting vegetables and God knew what else.
I knelt with my back pressed to the metal wall, trying to be still, cupping both hands over my nose and mouth, not because of the stench but to soften the sound of my breathing. His shoes slapped loud on the blacktop and on the bricks where the blacktop had worn off, and as he passed me, he was panting louder than I was. He came to a halt about where I figured the back door to our building must have been, and I listened to him muttering in frustration and making small noises for which I couldn’t account.
I began to wonder if I had done the right thing by fleeing from him. He was my father, after all, not a good one but my father nonetheless. Maybe I’d misjudged his mood and was mistaken about his intentions.
When he began to curse and when my name proved to be part of it, I stopped worrying that I’d been unfair. He rattled the knob and kicked the door hard. I didn’t understand what had foiled him. The superintendent had cut new keys to our apartment; but Tilton still possessed the other key, the one to the back stairs, which unlike the front entrance was kept locked. He became increasingly agitated, cursing explosively, and when he repeatedly kicked a Dumpster—not mine but one nearby—I figured he’d been drinking. The big trash bin gave off hollow drumlike beats that echoed along the alleyway—boom, boom, boom. A man shouted from a high window, “Knock it off!” Tilton shouted back at him, cursed him out, and the man said as if he meant it, “I’m comin’ down there, you bastard.” My father hurried away then, but no one came down to look for him. Comparative quiet settled over the alleyway, disturbed only by the muffled sounds of traffic out on the main street and by music and voices from a TV channeled through an open window overhead.
Suspicious, I waited a few minutes. But I couldn’t spend the night in the Dumpster, and finally I climbed out. I half expected a shadowy figure to break from cover and rush at me, but if there were rats in the alley, they were genuine rodents, nothing more.
Above the rear door to our building, the lamp protected by a wire cage had not been broken, and by its light I saw the bent key protruding from the deadbolt lock. In his eagerness to nab me before I got back to the apartment, my father evidently had inserted the wrong key, and when it wouldn’t turn, he forced it, nearly breaking it off in the lock. I wiggled it, trying to extract it from the keyway. The key was bent not just at the shoulder, but also along the blade, and its serrations were wedged in the pin tumblers. In the morning, the superintendent would need to take the lock apart to remedy the situation. In the meantime, I could return to the building only by the front entrance.
The blush of twilight had faded to maroon, but the streetlamps hadn’t yet brightened. Shadows filled doorways. The headlights of passing vehicles flared off the parked cars, revealing or conjuring sinister figures inside them; it was impossible to tell which. I expected my father to throw open a car door and scramble after me or to rise up from between cars, but I made it to our building and pelted up the steps and into the foyer, almost knocking down Mr. Yoshioka.
He said, “Is it true, is the poor man dead? It cannot be true, so young.”
For a moment, I thought he was referring to my father, but then I remembered, and I assured him that Mr. Lorenzo had died.
“I am so entirely sorry. He was a nice man. Thank you very much.”
I said he was welcome, although I didn’t know what he might be thanking me for, and I ascended six flights to the fourth floor. I didn’t dare to race up because maybe my father was waiting for me around one turn or another, but neither did I proceed slowly, because maybe he would suddenly appear on the stairs behind me.
14
When I let myself into the apartment and closed the door and engaged both deadbolts, I’d been gone no more than ten minutes. Mrs. Lorenzo still sat at the kitchen table with my mother, and she still wept, though the wrenching sobs had passed for now. Neither of them knew that I’d gone out.
At one of the living-room windows, I peered down at the swarming street as light bloomed in the frosted glass of the lamps, and they seemed to float like aligned and miniature moons in the early dark. Every pedestrian interested me, every driver of every vehicle, and though none of them proved to be my father, I didn’t grow bored with sentry duty. If he had come back once, he would come back again, as though a bad-juju penny rattled within the hollow space inside him, a penny with two heads and both of them my face, by its every clink and spin reminding him of me and of how my mother would be devastated if she lost me.
After a while, my mom came to me and put a hand on my shoulder and said, “Are you all right, Jonah?”
That didn’t seem to be the best time to tell her about Tilton. Mrs. Lorenzo needed her.
“Yeah, I’m okay. It’s awful, though. How’s Mrs. Lorenzo?”
“Not good. Tony was an immigrant. He has no family in America. Donata’s father died when she was young, and she has no brothers or sisters, and I gather her mother’s … well, difficult. There’s nowhere she can go but back to their apartment, and she can’t face that right now. Maybe tomorrow. I’ve asked her to stay the night with us. She can have your bed, and you can sleep in mine.”
I looked out at the street and then at the sofa, to which I pointed. “Can I sleep there?”
“The bed would be more comfortable.”
“Well, sleeping with your parents, a parent, whatever, it’s for scared little kids, it’s little-kid stuff.”
“When did it become little-kid stuff?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know. A while ago, weeks ago maybe. I mean, I’m nine.”
Sometimes it seemed that she could look right into my head and read my thoughts, as if my forehead were glass and my brain a neatly printed scroll. “Are you sure you’re all right, sweetie?”
She never lied to me, but I didn’t always measure up to her when it came to truth-telling, although this wasn’t lying, not really. I intended just to withhold the truth from her for a few hours, until Mrs. Lorenzo gathered the courage to go downstairs to her apartment in the morning.
“See, the sofa is … cool. Not kid stuff.” I sounded so lame, and I could feel the blush burning in my cheeks, but one of the benefits of dark skin is that a blush can’t give you away even to your perhaps psychically gifted mother. “The sofa is like an adventure. You know? The sofa is righteous.”
“All right, Mr. Jonah Kirk. You may sleep on the sofa, and I’ll lie awake all night worrying about how soon you’ll want to drive a car and date grown women and go away to war.”
I hugged her. “I’m never going away anywhere.”
“You go strip your bed and put on clean sheets for Donata. I’ve got to dash downstairs and get her pajamas and some other things she needs. She just falls to pieces at the thought of going back there even if I’m with her.”
Here at the front of the building, they hadn’t heard the ruckus in the alleyway, Tilton kicking the Dumpster and cursing.
“You shouldn’t go there alone.” When she gave me an odd look, I said, “I mean, not this late.”
“Late? It’s twenty past nine and it’s just downstairs. If this was a work night, sweetie, I’d be coming home alone hours later, just me with a pretend gun in my purse.”
“Well, but Mr. Lorenzo died down there.”
Although we were speaking softly, she glanced toward the kitchen and lowered her voice further. “He didn’t die of disease or anything, Jonah. And in this family, we believe there’s only one ghost this side of Heaven, and it’s the holy one.”
Having committed myself to withholding the news of my father’s return until Mrs. Lorenzo
was able to go home, I felt that the manly thing would be to stay the course and not complicate the situation by dumping my fears onto my mom when she still had to help Mrs. Lorenzo get through the shock of being widowed. It made sense at the time. A great many things make sense when you’re nine years old that appear senseless years later. As justification, I can only say that during the eventful summer of 1966, I became concerned for the first time about behaving in a manly fashion, no doubt out of fear that if I didn’t discipline myself, I might wind up like my father, a perpetual adolescent.
“Now go change those sheets,” Mom said, “and I’ll be back in a few minutes.”
She left the front door ajar, and I ran to it and listened to her going down the stairs. When I heard her cross the first landing, I eased the door shut and, just in case Tilton was out there, locked it to prevent him from coming in behind my back. I hurried into my bedroom and tore the sheets off the bed and carried them to the hall closet where the laundry basket was kept and grabbed the spare set of sheets and raced back to my bedroom and made the bed. I returned to the front door and stood on my toes and barely managed to look through the fish-eye lens—nobody out there—and opened the door and stood on the threshold and waited for my mom.
She seemed to be taking forever. I didn’t believe there was a ghost in the Lorenzo apartment. And they had taken away the body, so there couldn’t be a zombie like in the voodoo-in-the-city TV movie that I’d had to turn off. But Mrs. Lorenzo, confused and hurting, might have left her door unlocked, and maybe my father had gone in there for God knows what reason, and then my mother had walked in on him. The rest would be total horror movie.
Maybe the manly thing would be to grab a butcher knife from the kitchen and go down to the second floor to check on my mother, but I couldn’t imagine what I’d say to Mrs. Lorenzo, who was in the kitchen crying again, when I burst in there and snatched the butcher knife out of the drawer. She might think I’d gone mad and meant to kill her, and that would be one shock too many, and she’d have a stroke, and then they’d haul me off to prison or the nuthatch or wherever they took crazed and dangerous boys.