by Matt Ruff
“Damn it!” I said, setting the phone receiver back on its hook. By the time I got onto Washington Street myself, Warren Lodge was out of sight again. I ran east, uphill, for half a block…and found myself at a five-way intersection.
“All right, Andrew,” my father said. “I want you to go back now, get to the phone—”
“But he can’t have just disappeared!” I said, turning in place, searching in vain for a clue to which way he had gone.
I ended up facing south along the Second Avenue Extension. Most of the block on my side of the street was taken up by a furniture showroom; there was also a bus shelter at the curb about a third of the way down the block. Farther on, the Extension became an overpass that stretched above the railroad tracks, and there were steps leading down to King Street Station.
“The train station,” I said. “Maybe he doubled back there…”
“That’s not possible,” said Adam.
“Why not?”
“Because,” Adam said, obnoxiously, “to double back, he’d have to have gone there in the first place. But he didn’t. You’re the one who’s running in circles.”
“Adam—”
“Enough, Andrew,” my father said. “Go back to the phone in the park; call the police.”
“I will,” I promised, heading towards the overpass instead. “I just want to check the train station one more time…”
Adam called out a warning then, but I was ignoring him and didn’t listen. It took a few more seconds to realize my mistake: I’d thought the bus shelter was empty, but as I started to walk past it I saw that there was actually somebody inside, sitting hunched over…
“Just keep going,” Adam said. “Pretend you don’t see him.” But I’d already stopped moving—and Warren Lodge had finally noticed me.
I was standing almost directly behind him, and the safety glass that formed the back of the bus shelter was between us, but he sensed me there anyway. He straightened up, and his head, still covered by the hood, turned sideways. I imagine he was wondering whether I was the castaway from the park, come to bother him some more.
He stood up.
My father and Adam both started yelling at me to run, and I felt Seferis straining forward, trying to take over the body. The funny thing was, though, I wasn’t scared. I mean of course I was scared, I was fearful, but I wasn’t terrified, the way you ought to be when a child-murderer turns his attention to you.
Maybe I wanted to get his attention; maybe that’s why I wasn’t terrified. I’d told my father I wasn’t going to confront Warren Lodge, but I think now that subconsciously, that was really my intention all along. Not to make a citizen’s arrest, as Adam had suggested, but to be there when he was arrested, and to look him in the eye before he was taken away and punished—to condemn him, and also just to see what there was to see, to satisfy my curiosity, the same curiosity that had made my father want to read Mrs. Winslow’s letters.
Well, I was going to get my chance now: he was on his feet, and he was turning around. The fact that he wasn’t in handcuffs yet didn’t concern me nearly as much as it should have. I stood my ground. And then we were face to face, with only a thin panel of glass between us.
He was a sorry sight for a predator. His eyes were puffy with exhaustion, and his chin was covered with a patchy, uneven layer of stubble, as if he’d started shaving and then thought better of it. The scratch on his forehead—the one he’d supposedly gotten wrestling the big cat—was still there, and it had gone a fiery red. His nose was running.
Some cougar, I remember thinking. Then his lips moved, trying to frame a question—“Who…?” or maybe “What…?”—and I realized he was afraid, much more afraid than I was. For some reason this infuriated me; I wanted to slap him, but instead I shouted his name, “WARREN LODGE,” and I raised my arm and pointed at him and said, “We know what you did.”
Or at least I started to say it. I don’t know if I got all the words out, because when I raised my arm to point, Warren Lodge began backing up. Maybe his eyes tricked him; maybe he saw my finger and thought I was aiming a gun at him. But whatever the reason, he took a step back, and another, and another, and another. The fourth step took him over the curb, into the street, and that’s when the van hit him.
There was no warning, no horn or screech of brakes, just a green blur that came in from the side and swept up Warren Lodge with a loud bang. He never saw it coming; his attention was fixed on me right up until the moment he suddenly went away.
A period of confusion followed. I heard a squeal or a scream, and another bang, and a crash of glass, and some other sounds too, but it was difficult to place them all. My vision became choppy, as if I were watching a movie riddled with bad splices.
The next clear impression I had, I was looking south towards the overpass again. Someone had parked a green van in the middle of the overpass, angling it sideways across two lanes, at the end of a long trail of skid marks; the van’s nose was caved in, and steam hissed from under its crumpled hood. Closer in, to my right, someone—maybe the same vandal who’d trashed the van—had smashed one of the plate-glass windows on the furniture showroom.
I managed to draw a connection between the van and the green blur, but the significance of the broken window eluded me. I kept expecting to see Warren Lodge in the street or on the sidewalk, and when I couldn’t find him in either of those places I got worried that he’d run off again. Maybe he was hiding behind the van. I got down on my hands and knees to see if I could see under it, but I was too far away, so I stood up again and took a few steps forward, and then I heard a sound to my right.
I was in front of the broken showroom window now. Inside, a living-room furniture set had been arranged on a stage; for added realism, a mannequin in a blue jersey had been placed on the sofa in a sleeping posture. It was a nice display, but everything was covered in broken glass, and some of the furniture had gotten wet, so that the colors on the sofa fabric were starting to run.
No, wait, that wasn’t right…I was missing something. “Adam, what am I missing?” I said, and the mannequin sat up, and I saw that it had the head of a cougar, and the cougar’s face was cut up and bloody, and there was a big chunk of glass sticking out the side of its neck, piercing the fabric of the blue jersey. The cougar tried to leap at me, but it tripped over the coffee table, and as it stumbled it opened its mouth to growl, but no sound came out, only a red gush, and then the movie hit another splice.
There was a sound of lapping water that became the growl of a diesel engine. I found myself staring down at my hands, and became aware by slow degrees that my hands were in my lap, that I was sitting down, and that the seat was in motion.
I looked up and saw that I was on a Metro bus. Outside, a familiar stretch of I-90 rolled by; the bus had just passed Issaquah and was headed towards Autumn Creek. The sky, which had been mostly clear a moment ago in Seattle, was now overcast.
I turned my attention to the other passengers on the bus. None of them seemed surprised or even interested by my sudden appearance in their midst.
Maybe I hadn’t suddenly appeared. Maybe I’d simply fallen asleep and was now waking up. Of course, in order to fall asleep on the bus, I would first have to have boarded the bus, something I couldn’t remember doing. Still, the idea was strongly appealing: if I’d slept, I might have dreamed, which could mean that whole incident with Warren Lodge was nothing but a nightmare…
No good. Thinking of the accident I flashed back on it, vividly: I saw the van strike Warren Lodge, heard the showroom window shatter, felt broken glass crunch beneath my feet as I went to look—
I was staring at my hands again.
“Last stop,” the bus driver called. “Autumn Creek, last stop.”
I looked up; the bus was stopped on Bridge Street. I got to my feet and tottered outside. On the sidewalk a cool damp wind was blowing—no rain or drizzle yet, just little bits of moisture in the breeze, like phantom dewdrops—and it cleared some of the fuzziness out
of my head. A dull throbbing replaced it.
I leaned against a lamppost and closed my eyes. “Adam?” I called.
My father answered: “Go home, Andrew.”
“All right,” I agreed, too tired to say anything more.
It was exactly the sort of day when I would have expected Mrs. Winslow to be waiting for me at the Victorian’s front door, but she wasn’t. I fumbled out my key and let myself in.
“Mrs. Winslow?” A television was on, its volume blaring. I followed the sound to the kitchen. Mrs. Winslow was standing in the middle of the room, staring at the TV, her hands gripping the back of one of the kitchen chairs for support. She was crying; but I couldn’t tell from her expression whether they were sad tears or happy tears. “Mrs. Winslow, are you—”
“Ssssshhhh!” Mrs. Winslow hissed, with a fierceness I’d never seen in her before.
I turned to the TV, and saw a black-and-white image of the same downtown Seattle sidewalk where I’d just been. There was the bus shelter, and the shattered showroom window; farther down the street, slightly out of frame, was the van with the caved-in nose.
“—thorities believe that Lodge may have committed suicide,” a voice on the TV was saying. The view switched to a close-up of the wrecked van. “Charles Daikos, the driver of the vehicle, has admitted to police that he was attempting to retrieve his cell phone from underneath his seat when the accident took place, and cannot confirm whether Lodge stepped in front of the van deliberately. Daikos suffered minor facial injuries in the collision but was otherwise unharmed…” The view switched back to the showroom window. Police officers were milling around out front of the jagged hole in the glass, while inside, a pair of paramedics lifted a long gray bag onto a gurney.
Then the TV was off, and I was sitting at the table, warming my hands on a mug of coffee. Mrs. Winslow, her tears wiped away, stirred a spoon in a cup of tea.
“So,” I said, the question feeling strangely out of context as I uttered it, “Warren Lodge is dead, then? Definitely dead?”
“Yes,” Mrs. Winslow said. “Are you hungry, Andrew?”
We ate a quiet dinner together, after which I retreated to my rooms. This was a time of day when I ordinarily would give up the body for a while, so that other souls could play or read or listen to music. But this evening I forgot all about that, and spent hours pacing aimlessly. No one complained about the change in routine, not even Simon.
It got dark out. Around nine o’clock the telephone rang; Mrs. Winslow knocked on the sitting-room door and told me it was Penny calling. “Tell her I’m not home,” I said.
More time went by. At some point I realized that my father was calling my name from the pulpit. He seemed to have been calling it for quite a while without my hearing him, which was strange, because you can’t not hear things said from the pulpit—that’s not even a house rule, it’s just the way things work. My puzzlement at this was displaced by horror as I suddenly remembered how the blood had gushed from Warren Lodge’s mouth.
“Andrew!…Andrew!”
“So much blood,” I murmured. Then: “I killed him, didn’t I? I killed him.”
“No, Andrew,” my father said. “It was an accident.”
“I was chasing him…”
“You were following him.”
“…I chased him into the street.”
“You recognized him, and he got scared. You didn’t push him in front of the van. He stepped back on his own.”
“He stepped back because I scared him. He—”
“It was an accident, Andrew. The only thing you did wrong was to put your own safety at risk—our safety at risk—by confronting Warren Lodge yourself instead of getting a policeman like I told you. That was stupid. That was very stupid, and very dangerous. But it wasn’t evil.”
“I don’t know,” I said. I raked a hand through my hair. “God, the police…I’m going to have to call them, aren’t I? Call them and tell them—”
“No,” my father said, very firmly.
“But they don’t know what really happened. On the news, they said they think Warren Lodge committed suicide…”
“They think he might have committed suicide.”
“But that’s not true!”
“It’s OK, though. They don’t need to know exactly what happened.”
“But witnesses are supposed to come forward. They’re not…they’re not supposed to leave the scene of an accident without telling what they saw.” I faltered, wondering: how did I leave the scene? How did I get on the bus? “It’s a rule.”
“It is a rule, but going back now and trying to unbreak it could cause more trouble than it’s worth.”
I frowned. “Trouble for us, you mean.”
“Yes.”
“So you want me to not tell the truth to keep from getting into trouble. But isn’t that selfish?”
“It’s the best choice, Andrew. What happened today was an accident. An accident.”
I shook my head, but didn’t say anything.
“I think,” said my father, “I think you should try to sleep now.”
“No,” I said. “No, I’m not tired yet.” That was a lie—I was exhausted, the body was exhausted—but the thought of being unconscious frightened me.
“Andrew. You need to rest…”
How did I get on the bus? Why couldn’t I remember?
I must have thought it aloud.
“You fell into the lake,” my father said.
“What?”
“When Warren Lodge…when he got up and tried to climb out of the window, you left the body and fell into the lake. Seferis had to take over. He got us away from the accident, got the body safe onto the bus.”
“I fell?”
“…into the lake. It’s why you don’t remember what happened. You were asleep under the waters. I had to get Captain Marco to fish you out.”
“Are you saying I lost time?”
“A little more than an hour. You weren’t in the lake that long, but it took a while to wake you up, and to keep you awake.” He sighed. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you this earlier, but I thought it would be better to wait until after you’d had a chance to rest.”
“But it can’t be. I can’t lose time.”
“You aren’t meant to,” my father corrected me. “But what happened to Warren Lodge…that was an awful thing to have to see, an awful shock.”
“This is terrible,” I said. “Terrible. If I start losing time—”
“I’m concerned,” my father admitted. “But it wasn’t your fault, Andrew. You’ve never seen anyone d—”
“It’s my responsibility to run the body. You told me a thousand times: I’m not supposed to give up control, no matter what.”
“I know, but—”
“No matter what. You told me.”
There was a long pause then. When my father spoke again, he said: “Tomorrow, after you get home from work, I want you to call Dr. Eddington for an appointment.”
“Dr. Eddington?”
“Dr. Grey was right,” my father said, as if it cost him something to admit it. “You do need somebody to talk to, somebody professional I mean.”
I thought about it. “Could I…could I tell him about Warren Lodge? About what happened today?”
“Yes,” my father said. “And about anything else you wanted to…Penny, Julie, whatever.”
“All right.”
“You should try to sleep now, Andrew.”
“No.” I shook my head. “I don’t think I can. It, it’s too much like blacking out again…”
“Just try. Lie down. Don’t worry, I’ll stay with you.”
“All right.”
I put the lights out and lay down, thinking I’d never be able to sleep now—and, as often happens when you think that, I soon became very drowsy. My father stayed in the pulpit, talking softly with me as I began to drift off.
“Father?” I asked at one point, very near the edge of sleep.
“Yes?”
“It was an accident, wasn’t it?”
“Yes, it was.”
“OK,” I said, finally believing it. But then another question came to me, why and from where I don’t know, and even now I can’t say whether I really asked it or only dreamed that I did: “Father?…Did Andy Gage’s stepfather have an accident, too?”
And to that, no answer, only the lapping of the water on the shores of the lake, as I slid down imperceptibly into sleep.
15
I woke the next morning wondering for the second time whether I’d dreamed the whole thing, whether Warren Lodge’s death had just been a nightmare; but an uncommon silence from the pulpit and the house told me that I hadn’t, and it wasn’t. When I went into the bathroom to start the morning ritual, Jake wouldn’t come out to do the tooth-brushing; Seferis, running through his exercise routine, twice lost count of his sit-ups; and Adam and Aunt Sam, while still insisting on their shower privileges, didn’t try to wheedle extra time the way they usually did.
Even Mrs. Winslow was acting out of sorts: I came out to breakfast to find she’d fixed us a single large helping of scrambled eggs and toast. “Oh goodness,” she exclaimed, realizing her mistake even as she set the plate down in front of me.
“It’s all right,” I said. “I don’t think the others are that hungry this morning.”
“Are you sure, Andrew?”
“Yes.” In fact Adam was already objecting, but when I ignored him he quickly gave up, and nobody else made a peep.
Mrs. Winslow sat down to her own breakfast. We chatted while we ate, same as we always did—about what, I honestly can’t say, only that Warren Lodge was never mentioned—and after I cleaned my plate, my father came out for his usual mug of coffee. So that much at least was normal. But still there was something else missing, and as I was getting up to go I realized what it was: Mrs. Winslow had never turned on the morning news.
“Do you think she knows?” I asked Adam.
“About what really happened yesterday?” Adam snorted. “How could she?”