A Hole in the Universe

by Mary McGarry Morris

“Dennis.” Lisa sighed.

  “She’d be someone to do things with, that’s all! Get out of that depressing house and meet people!” Dennis said, not to Gordon but to Lisa, who glared at him.

  “I get out. I meet people. Every day I meet interesting people.”

  “Where?” Dennis smirked. “At the Nash Street Market? Come on, will ya, Gordon! What kind of a life is that?”

  “I—”

  “I can’t believe you’re doing this!” Lisa’s voice trembled with anger.

  “Don’t you see?” Dennis asked, looking at him now. “It’s the same old thing, isn’t it. Just like coming back here. Instead of taking a chance somewhere else, you’ll just keep on settling for less, won’t you?”

  “No!” Gordon spoke quietly but firmly. “I’m just trying to ease into things, that’s all. I don’t want much. I don’t need anything. I’m fine.”

  “But you’ve got to want things! You’ve got to be ambitious! Otherwise you might as well be back in there trying to hold up your pants with your elbows all the goddamn time!”

  Lisa gripped the table edge with both hands. “How can you talk to your brother like that? Who do you think you are?”

  Gordon was shocked. He had seen them bicker occasionally on their visits, but nothing like this. It pained him to be causing this deep anger between them, yet he understood. Dennis loved the idea, the concept, of having his brother back. It was the sweating, grunting, blundering reality of Gordon he couldn’t tolerate. He stood up and said it was getting late; he probably should be going now.

  “No. Please, don’t,” Lisa said.

  Dennis apologized and asked him not to leave. Gordon continued to stand while on either side the children stared up in wide-eyed intrigue. Even for their sake he couldn’t manage a smile. “Actually, I’m really tired. I think that little bit of beer did me in,” he said, stooping to kiss the top of Lisa’s head.

  “I’m just trying to help, that’s all,” Dennis said, hand raised suppliantly.

  “No, I know,” he said as Lisa reached back for his arm. “I just hate causing you two any more trouble, that’s all.”

  “Believe me, it’s not you.” Lisa squeezed his arm hard.

  “She means me,” Dennis said with a rueful smile, then told him again that he was sorry.

  He let Dennis take him only as far as the bus stop. He found himself enjoying the rackety bus ride home. The driver, a woman with an orangy buzz cut, kept smiling at him through the mirror. A white-haired woman in soiled turquoise pants was the only other passenger. Clamped between her legs were three bulging shopping bags filled with smaller plastic bags. When he had gotten on the bus, she’d stared angrily out the window.

  He knew how she felt. The hardest part of prison life had been not the lack of freedom, but being surrounded constantly by people. He’d always thought he would have been one of the few who could have endured solitary confinement without going off the deep end. But then of course he’d never done anything wrong or broken the rules. That was not to say he’d been a model prisoner. Not like Jackie McBride, who worked at improving not only himself, but everyone around him. The old man thrived on the ruthless complexities of prison society. In another time and place, Jackie might have been an inspiring general or congressman instead of a steel-nerved Mob underling. It had taken Jackie a long time to break through Gordon’s reserve. He had admired Gordon’s pursuit of a college education. While other inmates openly derided Gordon as the “spook,” Jackie considered his aloofness a sign of intellectual superiority. The old man had died two weeks before Gordon got out.

  Prison life already seemed so distant that even when he tried to recall them, most details evaded him. The experience had often been so vile that little had seemed real or, in the end, just. What price had he paid? Two lives were lost, yet he still had his. The emptiness and the lost years could not have been the true punishment. Unless it was this constant dread like static in his soul. No.There’s more, more to come, he thought as the bus rattled under the overpass into Collerton.

  The pleated door closed quickly behind him. The tall arc lamps spilled a lavender glow over the dingy streets. Bradley Hill had once been one of the more desirable neighborhoods in the city. Now most of the large Victorian homes had been partitioned into apartments like this one on the corner, its massive oak doors flanked by rows of mailboxes and doorbells. Spray-painted on the porch wall was the word Aurora. Unmatched colored curtains hung in the windows, some too short, others knotted and wafting in and out over the sills. Leaving gaps like missing teeth, balusters had been wrenched or kicked out of the railing. Where the wide front lawn had once been green with tended grass and neat hedges, now six cars were parked on paving laid from the sidewalk right up to the granite foundation. The front door opened and a plump, bare-armed woman in baggy jeans came onto the front porch, carrying a bottle of beer by its neck. She sat on the top step and lit a cigarette. She stared down as he walked by. He remembered going to Joan Kruger’s seventh-birthday party under the pear tree in the backyard there. Mrs. Kruger had silvery frosted hair, a fur coat, and a cleaning lady who came every week. A cleaning lady, and she didn’t even have a job, which to his mother was the epitome of privileged indolence. In the front hall there had been an enormous mahogany hat tree, in its center an etched mirror surrounded by brass coat hooks, ivory hat holders, and a purple velvet bench flanked by two ornately carved receptacles, one for umbrellas and the other for walking sticks.

  When he was curled up on his bunk with his back to the cell door, such recall of detail had been a vital nightly ritual. Under the constant glare, sleepless with the stink and groans and snoring around him, he would try to visualize each room he had ever been in, the furniture, where doors and windows had been, the color of walls and carpets. The one room he could never recall had been that room that night. It had been too dark, a hellish cave of lumpy shapes and shadows in the glowing red numbers on a clock radio by the bed: 9:16, that’s what he remembered, that and her damp hair. The hiss of a startled cat. The rug sliding under his braced feet. The pillow feathers flattening until through them he could feel her jaw struggling against his palm. Her fingernails had been painted a bright red, but this he knew from the blown-up photos on the courtroom easel, showing two nails torn to the quick. The heartbreaking proof of a young woman’s desperate fight to live, this delivered with the snap, snap, snap of the prosecutor’s pointer on the glossy paper accentuating each word.

  Gordon turned the corner and then stopped, toes curling in his shoes. The spinning blue light lit up the peaks and angles of the crowded rooftops. A cruiser was parked in front of Mrs. Jukas’s house. The old woman’s shrill voice cut through the night. “They were selling drugs. Right down there on the sidewalk. Right in front of my house. People kept pulling up and the girl, she’d go over to the cars and give them the drugs right there, bold as brass, then she’d come back and give the money to the one I told you about.”

  “Which one?” asked the bony-faced, older cop, his flat tone only fueling the old woman’s agitation.

  “I already told you! The one they call Feaster!”

  Gordon had made it halfway up his walk when the cop called out, asking his name. Gordon, he answered. The cop asked if he knew Feaster.

  “No, sir. Not—”

  “Yes, you do! I saw you talking to him!” Mrs. Jukas shouted with an angry gesture over the railing. “Just last week! I saw you! With my own eyes I saw you!”

  He wiped the sweat from his cheeks and explained that Feaster had spoken to him, that was all. He didn’t know him.

  “You new here?” the cop asked.

  “I grew up here,” Gordon said, eyes wide, waiting.

  “You grew up here and you don’t know Feaster?” the cop said.

  “I just moved back. A couple weeks ago.”

  “Right when Feaster started coming around again!” Mrs. Jukas called out angrily. “The same time he came back.” She pointed at Gordon.

  Light flare
d behind her house. A second cop emerged from her backyard, crisscrossing his flashlight’s grainy beacon from the foundation up to the roof. “There’s no fire,” he told the old woman. “Believe me, I checked everywhere.”

  “They were just trying to scare you, that’s all,” the older cop said. “That’s what they do.”

  “Just trying to scare me!” Mrs. Jukas hit her breast. “He threatened me, that’s what he did! And I want him arrested! You can arrest him for that! I know you can! Threatening a senior citizen’s against the law, and I know that for a fact!” Chest heaving, she eased into her bent aluminum porch chair.

  Both officers leaned close. Was she all right? Could she hear them? Was she having the chest pains again?

  Gordon slipped onto his own narrow, little porch, his grip tight on the doorknob.

  “Mr. Gordon!” the older cop called. “No need to call anyone! She says she’s fine.”

  “Oh,” Gordon said, turning.

  “Can you come here a minute?” the older cop asked, gesturing.

  “Yes, sir.” Gordon hurried over. He stood in the shadows, shocked by the debris piled in the corners of her once-immaculate porch—leaves, papers, plastic cups, fast-food bags, empty cigarette packs.

  The younger cop looked like an infantryman with his combat pants tucked into his boots. He shook his head in disgust as Mrs. Jukas described coming home last week from the doctor to find Feaster stretched out on a lounge chair in her backyard. He had refused to leave.

  “You should have called us.”

  “I did, but you never came!”

  “We told her we’ll keep going by all night,” the older cop told Gordon in a low voice. “But I think she’ll feel better if she knows you’ll be keeping an eye on things, too.”

  Gordon doubted that, but he nodded, then asked what had happened.

  Apparently Mrs. Jukas had told Feaster and his driver to stop having that girl sell drugs in front of her house. They said if she didn’t shut up and go inside, they’d burn her house down. She told them she was going in all right, but to call the police! Which she did, but when they arrived, no one was here.

  “Because it took you twenty-five minutes to get here!” the old woman shouted from her chair. “Twenty-five minutes! Next time I’m taking pictures. And I told them, too. That way I’ll have proof!”

  The older cop rolled his eyes at Gordon. The younger cop was trying to explain that for her own safety she shouldn’t rile these people up. They could be very dangerous. Especially Ronnie Feaster, who lately thought he had free rein in this part of the city.

  From now on, she should stay inside and just let the police handle it.

  “Handle it! You call this handling it?” she said in a tremulous voice. With her arms crossed and hands clasping her shoulders, she looked frail and drained. “What good are you?” she asked wearily. “The minute you’re gone they’ll be back.”

  “Mrs. Jukas!” The older cop sounded almost irritated. “Your neighbor here says he’ll keep an eye on things, so it’s not like you’re going to be alone or anything. Right, Mr. Gordon?”

  “Yes, sir, that’s right. I will. I’ll keep an eye on things,” he said.

  “His name is Loomis.” She stared at the cop.

  “Sorry, thought you said Gordon,” the cop said on his way down the steps.

  “I did. Gordon’s my first name.”

  As the cruiser pulled out, she looked up wanly at Gordon, the devil she’d been left with. She shrank deeper into her lopsided chair with its frayed and dangling nylon strips.

  “Here.” Gordon picked up a McDonald’s bag and tore off a piece. He wrote down his telephone number. “You know, if you’re afraid, or if you just hear something and you want me to take a look.” He held out the paper. “Well, anyway.” He laid it on the very end of her chair arm and took a step back. “It’s good to have. Just in case.”

  Her stricken face belied the certainty that the very last thing on earth she’d do would be to call Gordon Loomis in the middle of the night to come murder her in her own bed.

  It was the most vivid dream. He was in the Market, naked, stacking an applesauce display. Customers were pushing carts past him, up and down the aisles, but no one seemed to care. Suddenly, the entire pyramid began to shift. He threw out his arms to stop the rolling, tumbling jars, but they kept shattering all around him. He sat up, confused, then leaped out of bed with the alarm of breaking glass and a piercing wail. He opened the window and leaned over the sill.

  “Help! Help me! Please help!” a woman pleaded through the leafy darkness.

  He pulled on pants, then grabbed the Corcopax flashlight and ran outside. Mrs. Jukas clutched her porch railing. “They broke my window!” she cried as he ran up the steps. “I was sound asleep and then the window broke.”

  He said he’d look, but she wouldn’t go inside with him. She stayed by the front door while he checked the three rooms downstairs. None of the windows were broken. Both kitchen doors were locked, the back door dead-bolted, the cellar door with a flimsy hook and eye. As he came through the dining room, she called in to ask about her Hummels. Were any broken? Were they still there?

  “They look fine to me,” he said, peering through the glass door of the floor-to-ceiling curio cabinet, every shelf crowded with the small ceramic figures of children with dogs, cats, umbrellas in the wind, buckets of flowers, musical instruments. For all his disciplined recall, he’d forgotten about her collection. These, his mother used to say, were the only children Mrs. Jukas could tolerate. He went back into the living room and asked if she’d called the police.

  “Yes!” she answered immediately.

  “I wonder what’s taking so long.”

  “I’ll call again,” she said, hurrying into the kitchen.

  She hadn’t really called, he realized as he tiptoed up the stairs. She’d only said so to curb his homicidal impulses. The small front bedroom and bathroom were intact and empty. The next door creaked open into her bedroom. He flipped the wall switch and splinters of light glittered everywhere. On the floor beside the glass-sprayed bed was a brick. He peered from the shattered window into the new leaves of the old maple, so big now that it shaded both yards. Only a strong arm could have thrown the brick up into the branches and through the window. Another few inches and it would have landed on the bed, perhaps even on the old woman. Leaning closer, he saw a ladder propped against the house. His hand jerked back against the jagged glass edge with the sickening realization that someone had climbed up here and aimed the brick right at the sleeping old woman. He shone the flashlight on the ladder. LOOMIS, said the faded stenciling down the side. It was his father’s old wooden extension ladder. His grip felt sticky on the flashlight; he’d cut his finger. He put his knuckle in his mouth and sucked on the cut. His ladder. His blood on the windowsill and floor. He tried to rub it away. Gordon Loomis, convicted killer, first on the scene and bleeding. A siren swelled in the distance, growing louder. Closer. Is this the way it ends? he wondered, looking wildly between the door and the window. As stupidly as this?

  “The police’re coming!” Mrs. Jukas called up, looking past him warily.

  “There’s nobody up here, but I just cut myself,” he said, hurrying downstairs.

  She turned on the water in the kitchen sink and told him to hold his hand under it. “It’s not my fault. You should’ve been careful. I hope you don’t need stitches,” she fretted from behind.

  “No, it’s just a cut, that’s all.”

  “Because I can’t have any more claims on my homeowner’s.”

  He shut off the water and told her about the brick, the explosion of glass, the ladder.

  “Oh, my God!” Her mouth dropped open. “They were right out there, then, weren’t they? Looking in! Watching me.” Her eyes darted from window to door, ceiling to floor, as if they might still be watching. “They’re here!” she cried.

  The blaring siren filled the house. “It’s my father’s ladder,” he shouted, licking
his cut and following her onto the porch, repeating it until she turned. “But I don’t know where they got it from. It wasn’t where it used to be, in the garage.”

  “No, it’s mine!” She said Dennis had given it to her a few years ago. She kept it out back in the bushes against the foundation.

  Searching the yard, the police found only flattened grass directly below the broken window. These were different cops from the earlier pair. One was black and the other Hispanic. Sleepy-eyed neighbors watched from their porches and open windows. The few who came out onto the sidewalk were men.

  “Just in case,” Mrs. Jukas said as she put a nitroglycerin pill under her tongue. She’d had a heart attack last Christmas Day, she told Officer Pierce. He was black, a short, trim man whose erudite manner and hint of a British accent seemed to calm her. He suggested she spend the rest of the night with a friend or relative. “If I leave, they’ll be in here like rats.” She gestured down the street. “That’s what happened on the corner.” She told them how old Mr. Velez fell and broke his hip in the first snowstorm last winter. After a month in rehab he came home to find junkies cooking coke on his table, his kitchen ankle-deep in garbage.

  “Yes, well, as they say, nature abhors a vacuum,” Officer Pierce conceded wearily.

  Mrs. Jukas’s head snapped up. “That’s not nature! They’re worse than animals. They’re dead inside. In here,” she said, tapping her chest, “they’re dead. My husband used to tell me what the war was like. And now I look around, the house on the corner, the two behind me. And now even my own bedroom, and it’s just like he said, the fires and the glass breaking in the middle of the night. It is, it’s like a war, and here I am in the middle of it. Never ever in a million years did I think I’d end up like this.” A sob tore through her voice. “I’m afraid to leave my house, and I’m afraid to stay.”

  Officer Pierce put his hand on her shoulder. “Maybe if someone could stay with you, for the rest of the night, anyway.” He raised his eyebrows at Gordon. “Maybe your neighbor here.”