Alex

by Adam J Nicolai

  His hands still trembled, but his tears dried. He saved his document, shut off his computer, and went to bed.

  104

  The next morning he stood in the dimness of his shower and realized he just needed to wait.

  Eventually, Eston would give Kelly's last name, or a clue to where she lived. Or Alex would say something else, something more useful, now that he knew Ian was on the right track. Something. He had come too far now. Something would break. He just had to wait it out.

  He bowed his head and let the water run over him, cascading from his hair like a waterfall. He'd slept terribly. That was nothing new, no, but still - it was wearing him down. Alex might not have been screaming every night any more, but Ian still woke up several times every night. He couldn't remember the last time he'd gotten a full night's sleep.

  The water ran until it grew lukewarm. Ian blinked and opened his eyes. He had washed his hair, but couldn't remember if he'd scrubbed all over. He got his pits and his crotch again, just to be safe. The water grew cooler. He turned the knob as far into the hot as it would go.

  Had he washed his feet? God, this was pathetic. Screw it. It was almost time to leave for work. If his feet stunk he'd just be sure to take his shoes off by Sheila's desk.

  He gave a weak chuckle and shut off the water. As he stepped out, something pushed him.

  The floor slipped away, and the corner of the sink lunged suddenly for his temple. He threw out an arm, bounced off the vanity, and felt a singing pain in his neck. The toilet dug hard into his gut before he thudded into the floor, wet and heaving.

  In the sudden, indifferent silence that followed, he stared at the ceiling and wondered if his neck was broken.

  "Ah," he groaned. He lacked even the strength to curse. "Ah."

  He turned his head toward the wall. His neck let him move it, but god, it hurt. His shoulder groaned too, and the side of his stomach felt like it had been kicked.

  Wincing, but fairly sure his neck was in one piece, he tried to sit up. His hand slipped on the glistening bathroom floor as he leaned on it, but he grabbed the rim of the sink and managed to keep his balance. As he sat up, the room spun lazily.

  The shower curtain rod had gone askew when he fell; the curtain twisted from it like a cripple's wasted limb. He stared, panting, daring himself to pull it aside and see what was there. Eston. Don't be an idiot, you know it's Eston.

  He pushed himself shakily to his feet, then sat down hard on the toilet. His neck had the world's worst kink, like it had jagged rocks jammed between the vertebrae. His mind was racing. He didn't know what to think.

  Finally he pivoted his shoulders toward the shower - it hurt less than trying to turn his head - and yanked the curtain aside. The shower was empty.

  What the fuck. He pushed an arm in, waved it around as if he could catch Eston crouching in the murk. Jesus.

  You fell. You slipped in the shower. Jesus Christ, it's not like you're the only one who's ever done it. You're just lucky you didn't knock yourself out.

  He tried to place his head in his hands, then recoiled from the sudden wrenching pain in his neck.

  "Ah, fuck!" He grimaced and faced straight ahead, whimpering and cursing.

  He hadn't fell. Something had pushed him.

  Eston tried to kill me.

  He waited for the reflexive scoff, the litany of reasons why this couldn't be the case.

  Instead, he remembered Eston telling Alex, "I will come to your house, and I will kill your mom and dad."

  The phone rang. The bathroom's silence shattered like glass.

  105

  Ian whipped his head toward the sound, then pulled it back with an agonized groan. He made his out of the bathroom slowly, feeling his way along his surroundings like a blind man.

  "Hello?" He braced himself for Eston's voice.

  "Ian?" A woman's voice. Kelly?

  Ian's hand shook, though with fear or fury he couldn't tell. Maybe both. He clenched the phone like a knife, growled: "Who is this."

  "It's your mother." Like ice. Affronted ice.

  "Oh." He relaxed his hand, slightly. He suddenly felt very stupid.

  "Yeah. Who did you think it was?"

  "I don't.... I don't know."

  "Is everything okay? You sound -"

  "Yeah, everything's fine. I was just getting out of the shower." Inspiration struck. "I've been getting crank calls every morning."

  "Oh, those are the worst."

  He gave a shaky sigh. Crisis averted. "Yeah."

  "Well I'm sorry to call so early, I just wanted to catch you before you left for work."

  Ian stole a sidelong glance at the bathroom. The light was still on, steam curling into the hallway. "Okay?"

  "It's been a long time since you've been over. I thought maybe you could come over for dinner tonight."

  He tensed immediately - he always did at the thought of going to see his mom - but the thought of getting out of the house was intensely appealing. "That sounds nice," he said. The words surprised him. "What time?"

  "Oh, just after you get off work." She sounded pleasantly surprised herself. "I can make tater tot hot dish. Your old favorite."

  Ian grunted acknowledgement. "Okay. I'll be there."

  "All right!" He could hear her smiling, and tried to ignore the vague sense that he was wandering into one of her traps. Maybe it'll be different this time. Maybe she's just worried about me. "I'll let you finish getting ready for work then."

  106

  There was nothing sinister about the bathroom once he got off the phone. His earlier certainty that he had simply fell reasserted itself, and he got dressed as quickly as he could.

  The commute was like trundling through a minefield, as little explosions of neck pain detonated all around him. He winced when he checked his side mirror, hissed every time he had to brake too suddenly. When he reached the office building, the handicapped spots right by the front door beckoned. He weighed the idea of using them, imagined his car getting towed, and drove past.

  The tender space just above his right hip ached as he climbed out of the car, and he wondered how badly bruised it was. He had some ibuprofen in the glove box, but his neck hurt too much to lean over to it, so he walked around to the passenger side door, opened it, and knelt. As he reached for the compartment latch, Eston hissed, "God damn it."

  Ian's heart lurched; he reeled backwards as if he'd touched a live wire. Eston was in the driver's seat, his eyes flicking back and forth from the front window to the rear view mirror. "Right now?" he demanded.

  From the back seat, Alex whimpered, "I really gotta."

  "We'll be at Kelly's place in fifteen minutes," Eston seethed. "Why do you have to piss right now? What the fuck is wrong with you?"

  "I'm gonna pee on the floor!"

  "No!" Eston barked. Something resembling panic flickered in his eyes. "Don't! Fuck!" He glanced over his shoulder, yanked the wheel to the right. "Come on," he snapped. "There's a lake here."

  "Morning, Ian!" someone called from across the parking lot, and Ian jerked again, sending a shock of pain through his neck. Eston was gone.

  107

  He stalked across the parking lot, neck stiff and eyes riveted to the distant door. When he finally got to his desk, he leaned his whole body over to look in his personal pharmacy drawer. He was just throwing four tablets in his mouth when he heard Billi's voice say, "Morning, Ian. This is Kelly."

  Ian turned around, the pills scraping jaggedly down his throat. A thin, mousy woman smiled timidly and extended a hand. Ian stared at it.

  "She's starting in the new training class today," Billi explained. "She'll be on our team when she gets out."

  "'Kelly?'" Ian repeated back. Her smile widened as she nodded. Ian shook her hand once, and dropped it like a used wad of toilet paper.

  A flicker of - dismay? concern? - crossed Billi's face, but she didn't say anything. "And this is Sheila Swanson," she went on, ushering the small woman onward.

  Ian st
ared at Kelly's back until Sheila turned around, beaming with fake welcome, and he was forced to turn away.

  108

  Between calls, he investigated.

  He looked her up in their email system, but she hadn't been added to the group yet. He checked the team roster on the intranet site, but that was worse - it didn't even show Jorge yet, and he'd joined the team nearly a year ago. Finally he found a little faux-news story on the corporate intranet site, announcing the new trainees.

  Kelly Dennon

  Kelly comes to us from Star Pointe Credit Union, where she helped to maintain the Maple Grove branch's computer network and troubleshoot issues as they arose. Kelly has extensive experience in Windows networking. She will be joining Justin Keplin's team in the First Contact Support area.

  The piece included a little picture of her, wearing the same timid smile he had just seen.

  Star Pointe. The name sounded familiar, so he Googled and found that it had gone out of business during the big banking crisis, while the likes of AIG and Citigroup were raking in federal bailout money. He must've heard the story on MPR or something.

  If that had really been her last job, she'd been unemployed since early 2009. She'd been out of a job when Alex went missing.

  That doesn't mean anything. But he dug further anyway, trying to find out where she lived, and found a Dennon, Kelly; Employer: Star Pointe CU; Location: Zimmerman, MN.

  Zimmerman was north of the Twin Cities, over an hour's drive from Shakopee. Eston had said, "It's a twenty minute drive."

  He stared at this data, his head twitching slightly in denial, ice racing in his veins.

  It's not her. You have no reason to believe it's her.

  But what if it is her, and this is what he's been trying to tell me, and I just ignore it -

  It's not her. All you have to go on is the name. It's not enough. There are a million Kellys out there.

  But this is the one that came right to my desk, this is the one that I've been presented with - maybe he was warning me about her, I can't just ignore -

  Then what are you gonna do? some incredulous part of his mind demanded. Kill her?

  His earpiece beep-beeped. He moved his mouse to the X, and hovered.

  "Hello?" someone on the line said. Ian closed the window with Kelly Dennon's address and asked the caller how he could help him.

  109

  He thought about Kelly Dennon through lunch. He thought about her the rest of the day. As he drove to his mom's after work, he pondered ways to make her confess.

  There was one Law & Order spinoff where the detective always made the perps admit to their crimes. It happened every show, without fail, and all the guy had to do was tilt his head in an unsettling manner. Ian doubted that would work for him.

  On Dexter the main character often made his victims confess before he killed them. But that required stripping them naked and tying them down with plastic wrap; essentially, scaring the living shit out of them.

  Ian pondered this. There were other ways to frighten people.

  He thought of sending anonymous emails ("I know what you did") and immediately rejected the notion as asinine; he considered cornering her in an alley or something and beating her until she admitted what she'd done, but in addition to the moral conundrum of possibly assaulting an innocent woman, there was the simple reality that dark alleys were hard to find in the suburbs.

  This problem made him chuckle once - a sound more closely resembling a grating bark than a laugh.

  He could follow her home. Make sure she really lived in Zimmerman. Or look up the address and see when the property was purchased.

  He glanced in the rearview mirror, about to make a lane change, and saw Alex in his seat. He was still in his funeral clothes, staring at the back of Ian's seat with heavy eyes as he clutched Mr. Tuskers. Something about the sight made Ian feel intensely guilty, which in turn, as always, made him mad.

  "I met a woman today named Kelly," he said. "She came right up to my desk. Is that who you were trying to warn me about? Did she hurt you?"

  Alex was wearing his heavy winter coat now. The stuffed elephant disappeared. "Daddy, please!" he shouted. "May we listen to something else?" It was phrased politely, but it was more of a demand. There was some music that Ian used to play that his son had absolutely hated.

  Ian drew a breath, tried to focus on his son's meaning rather than his words. "You don't like this music?"

  "No." Alex curled his lips in disgust. "No, it's all wrong. I want to listen to Sesame Street Musical."

  Ian's heart suddenly started twanging like a taut guitar string; his hands shuddered. It's all wrong. He was grasping at straws, desperate, and all day he'd actually been thinking about how to corner Kelly Dennon and -

  "All right," he said, as much to stop his self-recrimination as to answer Alex. "All right. Forget it."

  In the backseat, Alex nodded. He stared out the window in silence while Ian imagined headlines.

  HOPKINS FATHER OF KIDNAPPED BOY IMPRISONED FOR ASSAULT

  MURDERED BOY'S FATHER COMMITTED TO STATE MENTAL HEALTH FACILITY

  IAN COLMES, 34, FOUND DEAD IN HOME

  He had imagined this last one as a suicide scenario, but as soon as he pictured it, he realized it could easily have happened this morning in the shower. Or:

  IAN COLMES, 34, KILLED IN COLLISION

  Or:

  IAN COLMES, 34, FOUND DEAD OF CO POISONING IN SMARTLINK PARKING LOT

  He'd had a lot of close calls lately. They disturbed him - they would've disturbed anyone - but it was more than that.

  He chewed on it as he made the last turn toward his mom's house, rolled up the quiet street, and crunched into the snow of her unplowed driveway. As he knocked on her door, he finally figured it out.

  On Sunday morning, Leroy Eston had looked at him and said, "Well, well."

  That day and every day since, Ian had nearly been killed.

  110

  It was amazing how quickly the old superstitions tried to come back.

  He sat at his mother's table, while the gentle but condemning eyes of Jesus Christ gazed out at him from a portrait on the far wall, and mercilessly smothered the urge to tell her he was under spiritual attack.

  She would believe him, at once. That's exactly why the idea was so enticing. She had never doubted the existence of demons and angels, never for an instant believed that anything they said at the local Assembly of God might only be metaphor.

  But he wouldn't be willing to accept her solutions. And his refusals would only pile tinder on the fire of her convictions, sparking a new battle in the War For Ian's Eternal Soul that he simply didn't have the energy to wage.

  The last round of combat had ended in an uneasy truce; she had sworn to pray for him every day, and to be there for him if he needed her, but she conceded that Jesus would need time to "work on his heart." Exhausted from a grueling year of fending off her constant church invitations and fervent letters, Ian had gladly agreed to this logic. If the truce were still valid, he sure as hell didn't want to be the one to break it.

  She said grace. Ian closed his eyes and clasped his hands, feeling like a hypocrite.

  "It's been years since I made this," she said afterward, nodding at the pan brimming triumphantly with tater tots.

  "It's been years since I had it."

  She scooped out a serving for him. "How is the counseling going with you and Alina?"

  He bit his lip, then carefully chewed through a bite of food to give himself time to think about how to answer. "Not great," he finally admitted. "We had a fight last week. I don't even know if she'll be at the session tomorrow night."

  She looked genuinely concerned. "Oh, honey, I'm so sorry."

  "Me too. The stupid thing is that it was all me, being stupid. She's been wonderful with me. Very patient. I need to meet her halfway." He was surprised to hear himself telling her so much.

  "I thought you said before she was rushing you?"

  She had good re
ason. She's pregnant, he almost said. But he didn't want to tell his mom that much. It would result in too many questions Ian wouldn't have the answers to. "I think she had good reasons. And it doesn't matter. I don't like the way I've been treating her, so it's going to stop."

  She had a quizzical look on her face, but she let it go. Behind her, Jesus gazed on.

  "Well, I've been praying for both of you. I know this has been really hard."

  They ate in silence. Ian wanted to say "thank you," because he knew praying was her way of expressing support, but he didn't want to encourage her, either. So he said nothing.

  "I miss him, too, you know. Every day," she said finally.

  Ian was surprised by this. He hadn't let Alex near his mother, except on holidays and family events. The prospect of the boy coming home, spewing some nonsense about how he or his family would be going to hell if they didn't start speaking in tongues, repulsed him. And he'd known that trying to bring up his reservations with her was a lost cause.

  "I'm sorry you didn't get to see him more often," he said. That was safe, wasn't it? Even if it wasn't completely true.

  She gave him a sad smile. "He had your father's eyes, you know. That's where he got that blue."

  Ian returned it. "I know." She'd told him this theory before.

  The whole time growing up, Ian hadn't cared that his father had left them. It was irrelevant. The man hadn't been integral to their lives, obviously. Ian had never met him. He hadn't harbored a secret grudge, or a fuming inner heart of rage, or an unfulfilled longing to meet him, or any of the other clichés. He simply hadn't cared.

  One night when he'd crept in to check on Alex, he'd promised the sleeping boy he would see him in the morning. Suddenly, he'd realized what his own father had truly done. It was like driving headlong off a cliff. How could you do that? he had wondered. He'd gazed at his son, small and vulnerable in the dark, and his heart frothed with outrage. What kind of asshole would you need to be?