The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 2003, Volume 14

by Stephen Jones

  “Ample,” Micah says, just to say something different for a change. Every day he says okay, he has got to start being less predictable.

  Except Evan doesn’t appear to have even noticed this break in routine, intent only on tearing paper. He’s not making confetti, either. There’s a deliberate method to it, and quality control – nothing but straight strips, torn slowly to maximize each ripping noise. Only then are they released, to flutter to the floor and join the pile. It’s a new twist in the entity that is Evan, something he took up two or three weeks ago, like he woke up one afternoon and decided from then on that he was going to be a human paper shredder.

  Micah doesn’t know how he can stand it, listening to that steady tearing sound, it’s enough to drive you bugshit – but then, wouldn’t you have to be a little whacked in the head to make such a habit of this to begin with? As far as Micah knows, Lydia has no idea her boyfriend does it.

  Maybe it’s some kind of mystical exercise for finger dexterity known only to jazz musicians. Until Evan, Micah had never met anyone whose entire bodily focal point seemed to be his hands. The rest of Evan, from his lanky legs to his narrow shoulders to his severely clipped hair and small round glasses, is only there to provide a context for his hands. Even if you don’t shake, have your attention called to them that way, you’re still going to end up staring at his hands – larger than you would think, judging by the rest of him, but not in a thick, clumsy way. What swans are to ducks, Evan’s hands are to everyone else’s.

  If there are leg-man and ass-men, surely there must be hand-women, and maybe Lydia’s one of them.

  “There’s something I’ve wondered about, but never got around to asking,” Evan looks up and says. “Do you mind?” He seems to pause, waiting for Micah to say no, leave the room, puncture his own eardrums, something. “Before I moved in, did Lydia give you a chance to vote on it?”

  “Not that I remember, exactly.” How much time were they talking about here? Five or six months, it would be. It’s hot and sticky out now, and when Evan had moved in the day was cold and damp. “More like all she did was tell me it was gonna happen, and that’s all there was to say about it.” After a few moments, he feels compelled to add, “Not that she was mean about it or anything.”

  That brings a sort-of grin out of Evan, even though he directs it at the latest careful strip he’s tearing. “No . . . mean is the one thing that’s impossible to picture her being. You have to have a good heart if you take in strays the way she has.”

  Can’t argue with that, then he knows the question is on its way even before it hits the air, Evan wanting to know, okay, if Lydia had given him the chance to say no, just leave that guy at the jazz club where she found him, what would’ve been the verdict? As if there can be an honest answer to a question like this – Sure, I told Lydia, in fact bring home two or three why don’t you, maybe they can all tear paper together in a disassembly line – when Micah knows he’s under this roof by her good graces every bit as much as Evan is.

  In truth, the relationship they’ve had here has been one of benign tolerance. Having Evan move in was like the arrival of a charmless dog. You don’t want to pet him, and he doesn’t show any tendency to bite, so the two of you wind up leaving each other alone most of the time.

  He’s blissing on the music now, and with most normal people that’s a good thing, but there’s something about the way Evan does it that gives you reason to worry – three parts appreciation to one part smoldering resentment that comes to the surface at all the wrong times. A flurry of trumpet notes terminates in a single tone held for an inhumanly long time, and the way Evan seems to ride it, it’s so obvious he wishes he’d been around to play in some earlier, smokier, more intoxicated and dangerous era instead of now, when all he’s doing is going to the club every night and furnishing wallpaper that you can barely hear above the clink of martini glasses. Micah’s overheard him complain about it to Lydia.

  Evan nods toward the stereo. “Sometimes you hear Miles play and you know he realizes that even though he and the audience may have been in the same room, they weren’t anywhere near being in the same place. You can really understand why sometimes he used to turn his back on the audience and play like that.” Evan scowls and tears another strip. “You don’t have that luxury with a piano.”

  “Maybe you should take up the accordion instead.”

  To look at him, you’d think Evan didn’t realize it was a joke; worse, that he actually thought about it for a moment, then decided no only because it sounded like too much effort.

  “And what you should do is quit school,” Evan tells him. “Quit school and have some real adventure in your life before it’s too late.”

  “And pay for it how?”

  “That’s where the adventure part comes in, I suppose.”

  Sure. Easy for Evan to say, as easy as it is for Micah to dream about roaming free, just him and Charisse, except dreaming is all he can manage to do about it. And if he’s too dumb to know the difference, well then, how convenient for Evan, who gets Lydia and her place all to himself.

  He’s smooth when he wants to be, you have to give him that.

  “Anyway,” Micah says, more to spite him than anything, make Evan look at the prospect of sharing the same shower soap for years to come, “who says it’s not too late already?”

  He leaves the room to Evan and Miles and the abuse of processed wood pulp, taking his bookbag into his room to let it acclimate awhile before he can even begin to consider learning anything else for one day. Once there he realizes he’s left his guava juice behind, where he set it down on a tabletop for a few moments.

  Micah backtracks, but decides to leave the bottle of sweet nectar right where it is as soon as he sets foot in the doorway to the family room, without Evan noticing him, Evan thinking he’s by himself as he feeds a strip of paper into his mouth and chews. Then another. And another.

  It’s always strange to him to consider how he’s lived with Lydia for more years than he ever got to spend with his own mother, and not once during that time has he called her anything other than her name. Probably she’s earned something more by now, but it’s just like that deal with “family room,” nobody’s come up with a better alternative.

  “Do you miss her?” she used to ask him long ago, about his mother, and it wasn’t that Lydia didn’t already know the answer, it was just her way of getting the conversation going when she sensed it was something that had to be gone through. Stroking the hair back from his forehead and listening for as long as it took, or waiting with him through the silence when he had no voice for it.

  Do you miss her?

  A fierce nod against Lydia’s newly damp shoulder.

  Do you miss her?

  Uh huh . . . but it doesn’t hurt as bad as it used to.

  Until the day:

  Do you miss her?

  Sure . . . I just don’t remember her much anymore.

  What a surprise, hearing that come from his own lips. Like he’d gone into a room looking for a big bag of agony that he was certain he’d left in its usual place, only it wasn’t there anymore. Hunt around, but it wasn’t in the corner, either, or under the bed, or in the closet; it was like the most he could turn up were a few photos, already starting to look faded and washed-out. Put together the captions from the photos and maybe you could whip up a little biography: She married Dad and they had a son who for some unfathomable reason they named Micah and she made great spaghetti and meatballs and used to yell a lot around once a month and one day she tripped over a bucket of soapy water and fell down a flight of stairs and she lived in the hospital for a couple of days after but never regained consciousness, just gave in to the skull fracture. A terrible story, really, but it was hers.

  Do you miss her?

  I suppose . . . but why’d she have to be so clumsy in the first place?

  After Lydia had drawn it all out of him, over time, it was as though she knew precisely when to quit asking. She’d never o
nce asked him to call her Mom, even seemed to discourage it when after a year or two, when he was just eight or nine, he was showing signs that maybe he could transfer the title over and no harm would be done. But not a good idea, apparently.

  The best explanation he could ever come up with was that being needed was title enough for her.

  “I need you to do me a favor,” she asks that weekend. “If you’re out today I want you to pick up something to spray at those wasps by the front door and take care of them.”

  “Oh – okay,” he tells her, like it’s the first he’s ever heard of them instead of having expected this for days. Dreading it: becoming a mass murderer. Anthills demolished when he was a kid don’t count. Now he’s old enough to be tried as an adult. “Do you want them to suffer?”

  Lydia pretends to consider it, then shakes her head. “As quickly and humanely as possible, please.”

  Hey, let’s go drown whole families in neurotoxins. It’ll be very humane.

  “And please don’t think you’ll take a shortcut and get after them with charcoal starter instead.” She starts to laugh. “I remember, your dad had a client once, a new listing, and that’s how the man thought he’d get rid of a nest before we started showing the place. He burned out the whole side of it two days before the open house. And then . . . ! Then he had the nerve to suggest we could just knock forty thousand off the asking price and everything would be fine.”

  He laughs with her. Lydia tells a story well, very animated. But it’s the only way she ever brings up his dad anymore: as a stepping stone to something else.

  It’s never hard for him to recognize what his father must have seen in her a decade ago. Since she’s not really his mother, it’s not like the territory is that creepy. She’s blonde like a fading sun, her face softly square, and even though she’s put on a few extra pounds over the last few years it doesn’t detract. She worked in the same real estate agency as Dad, and right after his wife died, sure, everywhere he turned there was a gush of sympathy, but like a watering hole in a drought, that’s got to dry up eventually. Except for Lydia. The way Micah has always imagined it, Lydia’s was the last shoulder left for him to lean on. It took him more than four years to decide he didn’t want to lean there after all, although he could leave his kid behind as a consolation prize.

  “Evan tells me you two had a pretty good conversation the other day,” she says then.

  He tries to remember one remarkable or even above-average detail about it and can’t come up with a single thing. Maybe that’s what passes for good conversation with guys who sit around tearing paper and eating it like potato chips, but Micah supposes he’s got higher standards. Lying back on a blanket spread on thick grass, sharing a contraband bottle of wine with Charisse as they stare up at the stars and talk about what their lives are going to be like, and life on other planets – now that’s a conversation.

  “I guess we did,” he lies. Because at least it makes Lydia happy.

  “I’m so glad. I hope you’re starting to warm up to him.” She says it with such earnest hope that it breaks his heart. “It’s important that my two guys get along.”

  “Do you love him?” Jesus. Did he really say that out loud? “Or, I’m sorry, is that too personal a question?”

  It isn’t, by the look of her, but she sidesteps it anyway, like she’s gotten good at dodging questions from years of showing people empty houses and hearing them ask if the basement leaks.

  “He needs somebody in his life,” she says. “Evan’s had a hard life.”

  Lydia has to know what he’s thinking, hearing her say that.

  “And you’ve had a hard life, I know that. Same as I’ve had a hard life. One way or another, we’ve all had hard lives, okay?”

  He nods. As long as they’re at it, the lives of those stupid wasps out there are about to get a whole lot harder, too.

  “Hard, horrible lives and it’s a miracle we all haven’t hanged ourselves by now.” She starts to grin, to let him know she’s only kidding, even though he caught on to her years ago, the way she gets a kick out of exaggerating in weird moments. Then she turns serious. “It’s what life is. Life’s hard, Micah. I hate to be so blunt about it, but that’s the plain truth of it. And the only way we can keep it from turning us hard along with it is to give of ourselves.”

  He’s already given back both parents – that wasn’t enough? Maybe not, since he never even got a receipt.

  “Give ’til it hurts. Especially ’til it hurts,” she says, sounding like she has plenty of experience at this. “That’s when it does the most good.”

  He has no doubt that she knows what she’s talking about. But is this system of hers even relevant when life hasn’t made you hard, hasn’t even come close – you only wish it had?

  And even though she hasn’t answered his question in so many words, she’s answered it in other ways: No, she doesn’t love Evan. Just the empty spaces inside him, and all his needs that take up residence to fill the empty spaces of her own.

  The next afternoon Micah decides he’s put it off long enough, and borrows Lydia’s car and a few dollars from the grocery money to buy the lethal aerosol can from the nearest hardware store. The label looks like the stuff really means business – extra-strength formulated for hornets, wasps, and yellowjackets. But the art doesn’t take it far enough to show them dead, flat on their backs with Xs for eyes. Instead, they’re drawn to appear as foul-tempered and vicious as alien invaders, like all it’s supposed to take is one look to make you lunge for the can, realizing that these things deserve to die.

  As he stands beside the foundation of the house, shaking the can and looking up at the target zone, he wonders what they would say if they could talk. If all their deranged waspy fury would prove to be an act and they would plead, or if they were too proud for that, just say bring it on. Or do the unexpected and send their finest diplomats, ones who could be counted on not to sting first and ask questions later, to see if they couldn’t work something out.

  Instead, they just buzz around in the heat. Oblivious, you’d have to imagine. From inside the nest comes a lower hum, and he wonders if this might be their way of singing lullabies to the next generation.

  “I know,” he says. “What’d you ever do to me, right?”

  He uncaps the can and raises it and, after a couple of false starts, lets them have it. Nothing personal, just following orders. It comes out in a thin liquid jet, splashing and spattering wasps, nest, and wall alike. He catches some of the airborne troops in mid-flight and they go into death spirals, trying to keep it together but now they’ve got no control, banging into the house on their way to the ground. Others come scrambling out of the nest and tumble straight down, joining the earliest casualties in a litter of twitching legs and spastic wings and throbbing abdomens, while the overall buzzing builds with a heightened new intensity. He doesn’t speak their language but is that even necessary to translate? Probably just choking and coughing, maybe even crying out to him, too – what’s wrong with you, you monster, don’t you realize there are larvae here?

  Which ones are the fathers, he wonders, and would they have left early if they’d known?

  “Do you miss him?” Lydia used to ask long ago, and it wasn’t that she didn’t already know the answer, it was just her way of getting the conversation going when she sensed it was something that had to be gone through. She would try stroking the hair back from his forehead the way she had when he was younger and she’d listened to him talk about his mother, but he was older this time, twelve, and didn’t want her messing with what he’d worked so hard to achieve with the comb.

  Do you miss him?

  Shaking his head no as he glared at the floor.

  Do you miss him?

  Probably more than he misses me.

  Until the day:

  Do you hate him?

  Hell yes, and if he was here, I’d tell him so to his face.

  What a surprise hearing that come from his own lips. Nea
rly as big a surprise as Lydia’s expression, since he’d assumed the question was some kind of contrived lead-in for her to sermonize about forgiveness, but instead she looked as though she not only understood but approved. For the first time he wondered if this sort of thing might’ve happened to her before, if inside her heart she carried around a gallery of photos, kept bright and vibrant by frequent polishing.

  As for their captions and the story they told, he could only be sure about the ones from the last few years: She worked alongside his father and felt sorry for his loss, then for some unfathomable reason maybe even decided that she loved him, and opened up her home not just to him but his son Micah and took care of them, did it for years, until the day there came more yelling than Micah had ever heard at once and the same woman’s name was repeated several times, and within a few days Dad was out the door without a word to anyone, although he’d left a cashier’s check on the kitchen counter for child care, or as Lydia called it, “conscience money,” and eventually she started to date again, always guys who seemed sad-looking no matter how hard they tried to smile. A pathetic story, really, but it was hers.

  Do you wish he was dead?

  He couldn’t recall ever answering that one.

  Micah stoops down to the miniature killing field he’s created, where the struggles are growing more feeble – a leg here, a wing there, one especially tough victim dragging itself in a slow circle. He’s still got plenty left in the spray can and, feeling hugely guilty of genocide already, wonders if using more would be merciful or merely adding insult to fatal injury. Funny, how they never sell an antidote spray in case you should change your mind. Although it’s hard to imagine the wasps coming out of it just laughing it off: Good one, Micah, you really had us going for a few minutes.

  “There’s probably a lesson there to be learned,” he hears from behind him; hasn’t even known that Evan is outside, much less standing a few feet away. He’s always thought of musicians as noisy people, that you should be able to hear them coming from a mile away.