Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 130, No. 3 & 4. Whole No. 793 & 794, September/October 2007

by Donna Andrews

  She looked unconvinced, but he managed to distract her with a toy fire engine, and soon she was laughing again.

  The strange thing that happened didn’t happen the next day, or the next, and he was too afraid to go back to the pizza place. But on the weekend, when he was pushing Rosie on a tire swing at the park, it happened again. The swing changed to a red crop-duster with a bright yellow propeller. Rosie swooped around in a circle, her head bent low in the cockpit and her ponytail flapping behind her. The jungle gym turned into a blue rocket ship with yellow fins. Two kids in white spacesuits looked out from the hatch.

  This time, Doug wasn’t scared. In fact, he realized he had been secretly hoping it would happen again. The grit and grime of reality returned on the walk home, but he was left with a pleasant feeling, like the buzz from a good brandy. He took the following Wednesday off and took Rosie to the zoo, and while they were there, the concrete walkways faded and they found themselves in a lush jungle, surrounded by animals, but not animals that could bite or claw. These animals were big, fluffy, and friendly, like the animals from her picture books.

  Doug decided he liked Rosie’s world. He started taking off early in the day to do things with her — the mall, where every shop was a toy shop with toys that talked back, the riverfront carousel, where there were horses with manes like silk and hides like satin, and the beach, where dolphins dressed in tuxedos emerged from the surf to tell them stories of the undersea world. The more he did, the longer this wonderful new reality lasted. He saw all of Rosie’s friends brought to life — Marmar, Slow Joe, Big Cat, Little Cat, and thousands of others he didn’t know by name. He was burning through his vacation days, and he wanted more.

  Three weeks after that first experience at Locomotion Pizza, Doug was crunching numbers on a spreadsheet when his boss, Gabe, stopped by his cubicle.

  “You wanted to see me, old buddy?” he said.

  Doug saved the file and swiveled in his chair to face him. Gabe had both hands on the edge of the cubicle and was peering around it, as if he had been passing and remembered Doug’s e-mail at the last moment. They had been friends for years, playing racquetball before their knees gave out, playing board games with their wives before their children devoured their evenings, until now they rarely saw each other outside the office. Autumn used to say — back when she and Doug used to do things like talk — that Gabe looked like a repressed hippie. He wore a white shirt and dark slacks, but his personality still showed in his ponytail, his thick moustache, and his trippy rainbow tie. His glasses had a slight red tint.

  The sounds of the office surrounded them: clicking keyboards, humming printers, and the steady background drone of people speaking on phones. It was a gray world, with gray walls and gray carpet. Even the fluorescent light seemed flaccid and dull.

  “Yes,” Doug said. “I was wondering... Well, I was thinking...” He didn’t realize this would be so hard. “I was thinking, if it’s all right with you, that — that I’d like to take a leave of absence. Unpaid, of course.”

  Gabe had watery blue eyes, the kind of eyes that used to get him laid all the time back in college, or so he said, but they looked purple through the glasses. He narrowed them. “You’re serious?”

  “Yes.”

  “How much time we talking about here?”

  “Um... I don’t know. A month?”

  Gabe sighed and stepped around into the cubicle. He reached for a door, but there was no door, so he turned and sat on Doug’s metal desk. Gabe’s tie-dyed socks had the same swirl of colors as his tie. When Gabe spoke, he lowered his voice to just above a whisper.

  “I talked to Autumn,” he said.

  Doug didn’t understand where he was going with this. “Yeah?”

  “She’s worried about you, man.”

  “Worried about me?”

  “That’s right. She said you’ve been acting strange.”

  Doug felt the cubicle walls collapsing in on him, the same feeling he had back at Locomotion Pizza, but this time it only lasted a second before it was replaced with his rising anger. He felt his jaw grow tight. “She said I’m acting strange? What about her? She’s the one going through some weird, delayed version of postpartum depression.”

  “Doug—”

  “If anybody’s acting strange, it’s her. She... she should see someone. Get some help. It’s ruining our family, what she’s doing. She—”

  Gabe placed his hand on Doug’s shoulder, silencing him. “She is, man. She is seeing someone.”

  The comment derailed Doug. “What?”

  Gabe looked at Doug for a long time with sad eyes, the way someone looks at an old family dog who’s started snapping at invisible squirrels. Did he know about Rosie’s world? Doug hadn’t told anyone yet, not even Autumn.

  Finally, Gabe sighed and headed out of the cubicle. When he’d reached the hall, he glanced over his shoulder.

  “Take all the time you need, Doug,” he said. “But you guys should talk. Really.”

  On the way home, moving from one stoplight to another in a slow waltz with hundreds of other cars, Doug thought about what Gabe had said. He knew he needed to talk to Autumn, that their marriage was disintegrating in a barrage of silent moments, but he just couldn’t bring himself to care about that now. He wanted to spend more time with Rosie. He wanted smiling purple bears and magic-carpet rides, not therapists who talked in monotones and loud arguments about how neither of them knew what the other was feeling. He wanted a world of soft edges and primary colors, not one with sharp corners and a little gray in everything.

  Then, as he was turning onto their street, one lined with pin oaks and leafy maples, the most amazing thing happened. The world changed. It changed, and Rosie wasn’t even with him. The cars parked on the street became green and yellow tugboats, the road a bright blue river twisting through banks lined with palm trees. He turned where their house should be, but it wasn’t a house; it was a white spaceship shaped like a half-inflated beach ball. A door opened in the ship, a ramp extended, and he motored his boat inside. But it wasn’t a boat. It was a motorcycle. It was a horse. It was a leather-bound book with feathered white wings.

  The doors whisked open and he walked into an igloo, the walls made not of ice, but white shiny blocks. Passing the dining room, he saw a sparkling beach and six monkeys in pink dresses having tea around a picnic table. He heard Rosie’s music coming from her room, and her singing along with it. He was turning toward the hall, now a rope bridge across a deep canyon, when Autumn called out to him.

  “Doug,” she said.

  Her voice sounded as if it was coming from the living room. He turned in that direction and he was walking along the deck of a sailboat. The sails fluttered, and he smelled salt water on the breeze. He knew Rosie’s world was becoming more real to him, and he was exhilarated by it. But then he saw Autumn, head bowed, waiting for him at the aft of the ship, and the world around her was the old world, fuzzy at the edges. She sat on their old burgundy couch, piles of unfolded laundry on either side of her. He saw the scratches and the smudges in the off-white walls. He saw the lint and dirt in the taupe carpet at her feet. Autumn — dressed in a gray sweatshirt and sweatpants, holes in the knees — looked up at him and frowned.

  He stopped a few paces away, afraid to go closer. “Something amazing is happening to me,” he said.

  Sighing, Autumn closed her eyes and brought her hands up to her face as if to pray. She breathed deeply for a moment, then stood. When she looked at him, he saw that the shadows under her eyes were so deep they could have been carved with a knife.

  “This has to end, Doug,” she said.

  “What has to end?”

  “This! This... thing you’re doing.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I’m changing, Autumn. I’m changing and I like what’s happening. I’m — I’m seeing what Rosie sees.”

  She bit down on her lower lip, the perfect imitation of her daughter, and closed her eyes again. She tucked
her arms around herself in a tight hug. When she opened her eyes, there was moisture in them, and when she spoke, her voice was so strained it didn’t sound like her own.

  “Doug,” she said. “Doug... I let you pretend. I thought it would help you. But it’s got to stop now. It’s been six months.”

  The fuzzy edges of the grungy living room pushed outward, enveloping a few more feet of the sailboat and the ocean. Doug felt a clamp tightening on his chest, and he took a step backward.

  “What are you talking about?” he said.

  “Doug, listen to me—”

  “Why are you doing this?”

  “I want you—”

  “Can’t you let me be happy? I’m happy. I’m—”

  “Stop!” she cried. More burgundy couch appeared, more dirty carpet. “Just stop! Christ, don’t you remember what happened at the pizza place? For God’s sake, it was in the paper... It happened so fast, you said, just turned around a second... just a second...” Her voice choked on the words. The scuffed walls extended, and he saw crooked paintings and cobwebs in the corner. “Don’t you remember the trial, Doug? Don’t you remember how you screamed at him? Jesus, don’t you remember the funeral?!”

  The boat faded and flickered and then he was just standing in a dim living room, the curtains half open, the weak light cutting across the easy chair and the carpet like a wall between them. And the harsh memories started to return, like unwanted house-guests, and he tried to close the doors of his mind.

  “She’s... she’s not...” he began.

  “She is!” she said fiercely.

  “But she can’t... I’ve seen...”

  “Doug,” she said, with a little more gentleness. “Doug, I know it’s been hard. Especially for you. But — but we can’t... We can’t go on like this. You’ve got to face what happened, Doug. You’ve got to accept it. You’ve got to. You’ve... You’ve...”

  But the rest was lost in a fit of sobbing. She turned away from him, and he stared helplessly, watching the way her shoulders shook. In a daze, he turned away from her, heading back through the living room to the dark hall. Rosie. He had to see Rosie. He saw the flaking paint along the trim, the dead fly inside the opaque light fixture. The walls closed in on him, tightening, squeezing the air out of his lungs. He stumbled, sliding against the wall and knocking off a framed picture of Rosie. When it struck the carpet, the glass cracked. His temple throbbed, pain flaring behind his eyes, but he pushed on, staggering into her room.

  “Da-ee?”

  He blinked away the sweat in his eyes and saw her standing by her bookshelf, wearing her white dress with the red and blue plaid shirt, the Raggedy Ann outfit, his favorite. The one she was wearing the day they went to Locomotion Pizza. It was going to be their day, a special day. She clutched her favorite stuffed animal against her chest, a blue rabbit, and looked up at him with worry. The room around her was clean and tidy. He kept it that way. The rest of the house was a disaster, but not this room. Not this room.

  Behind him, he heard Autumn sobbing in the living room, and he turned and closed the door. He leaned his head against the wood, his pulse like a raging river in his ears. Autumn was right. He had to deal with this. They couldn’t go on this way. He had to be a man now — accept what he’d lost, what he could never get back.

  “Mommy sad, Da-ee?” Rosie said behind him. “Mommy ha’ tears?”

  He turned and looked at her, and just for a moment, in the time it took to blink, he saw the Rosie they found in that man’s van — a dark gash along her forehead, blood covering half her face, her dress covered with red spatters. Then it was gone, and she looked as she had before, only with tears in her eyes. She wrung the rabbit in her little hands.

  “That’s right, honey,” he said. “Mommy’s sad.”

  “Why Mommy sad, Da-ee?” she said. “Why?”

  He opened his mouth to speak but no words came. He felt a cold chill, the coldest he’d ever felt in his life, and he shuddered violently. She rushed to him, hugging his legs. He patted her hair. She was so warm and solid he couldn’t see how she could possibly be fake. He dropped down to her and pulled her away from him, looking into her moist eyes. There were worlds in those eyes. He had seen them.

  “Sometimes,” he began, and he was planning on saying the rest. Sometimes, he was going to say, there is no why. But before he could, her room changed. He saw the rumpled sheets on her bed, the same as they had been the day she left. He saw the books stacked haphazardly on the carpet, the pile of toys by the closet, the dirty clothes in front of the changing table. He saw the dust on the blinds and a spider camped out in the corner. And the smell — the staleness of the air, how it had lost the scent of her over time and now only smelled like death. Even this, he thought. Even this is taken from me.

  He hugged her violently against him. He had to deal with this. But it wasn’t about dealing. It was about deciding. And then he knew what he had to do. He picked up Rosie and ran with her through the house. When he passed the living room, Autumn called out to him, but he kept going. He rushed into the garage, hit the button, and quickly buckled Rosie into her car seat. Never forget to buckle. Never.

  “We going, Da-ee?” she said.

  “Yes, dear,” he said. “We’re going.”

  And then he was in his Ford Explorer, starting the engine. As he was backing out of the garage, Autumn appeared at the door, her face red, filled with confusion. She said something, but he couldn’t hear her over the engine. He was in the street, and he shifted into gear. Autumn followed him, shouting, and now he could hear her. We’ve got to deal with this! Don’t run away! But he pressed down on the gas pedal and sped away from her. He glanced in the rearview mirror and saw her in the middle of the street, running after him. Only it wasn’t her anymore. It was the horrible vibrating ball that Rosie hated, the one someone had given to her on her birthday. It bounded after them, but they were too fast. They were getting away.

  “Where we going, Da-ee?” Rosie asked.

  Instead of answering, he stepped on the gas, speeding up the car. Only it wasn’t a car. It was a giant eagle, but plush, with feathers as soft as Rosie’s hair. The wings flapped and they leaned low, racing over the road. Only it wasn’t a road. It was a runway, with a bright yellow control tower at the end, a smiling blue cat inside giving them the thumbs up. The eagle lifted them up into the sky, high up over the neighborhood. Only it wasn’t the neighborhood. It was Rosie’s world — a world with soft edges and primary colors, a world with no gray in it at all.

  Camera Guy

  by Mark Barsotti

  © 2007 by Mark Barsotti

  Department of first stories

  Mark Barsotti lives in San Diego, where, he says, he “keeps [himself] in ink and paper selling life insurance.” He first attempted to write fiction when he was about ten years old. Most of his work contains elements of the fantastic, but with “Camera Guy” he stuck closer to mystery and suspense and got his first professional sale. We hope he’ll write more in our field.

  ❖

  I hate doors without peepholes. Not only have I always been an unabashed voyeur, but the lack of a peephole led me here: scribbling in a notebook while hunkered in the last row of a midnight Greyhound, wheezing out of the San Diego bus station for points east and unknown.

  Has it only been a week since Camera Guy came knocking at my door? Just drifting off for an afternoon nap, I pulled a pillow over my face and ignored that knock. It persisted, probably my grumpy, ex-Marine landlord badgering me about the rent. No. The check, for once, had been mailed on time.

  “Go away,” I grunted. Then it struck me that it could be a FedEx from Sal, my agent, or maybe — my groggy mind leapt wildly toward wish fulfillment — it was an exotic woman in peril. Playing white knight might not only get me laid for the first time in ages, but the lady-in-peril’s story could be the Big Idea I needed, a tale soon transformed into a comeback screenplay that would have Hollywood clamoring for my services again.

&n
bsp; A fantasy, sure, but they’re my stock-in-trade, so I got up and shuffled through my apartment. It’s a great space: four rooms a mile from the beach and dirt cheap for San Diego (a grand a month), since the six-unit building is tucked along a cul-de-sac in a light industrial area. The perfect refuge for an artist on the skids.

  Perfect except for a door without a goddamned peephole, leaving me no way to scope the owner of that insistent fist without opening up.

  So I opened up.

  And I got my story, all right, a whopper delivered by one Jay Maxwell Marshall, black-sheep scion of a blueblood Boston clan, steeped in old money and exotic vice. Ignorant, at that point, of Jay Max’s pedigree, I took my unkempt caller for a panhandler, more ambitious than most, working door to door.

  “Yeah?” I asked with a yawn, but my sleepy writer’s mind noted details. My caller had an old hippie’s wild mane of graying brown hair. Shirtless, khaki shorts, orange Chuck Taylor sneakers. He was rail-thin, save for a little potbelly, and had leathery skin the color and consistency of an old catcher’s mitt. The big, sad eyes were a hazy green, like the surf at OB. A beach boy gone to rot.

  “I need help,” he said.

  My slam-the-door impulse was stayed by an odd, altruistic twinge, solidarity with the downtrodden, perhaps, since my career freefall threatened to land me in their ranks. Sal fed me occasional hackwork like the “Alan Smithee” script for My Mother the Car, but I hadn’t had a fresh idea in months. And only a killer concept could resurrect me from Tinseltown oblivion.

  “Uh, sure,” I said, fishing for pocket change. “But I don’t have much.”

  “I don’t want money,” he said, peering past me into the apartment.

  “No?” Stepping out onto my balcony, I eased the door almost shut behind me, not so much concerned about my caller as sullen that all this was cutting into nap time. “What then?”