by Ania Ahlborn
“I had a postcard from there.”
“Yeah?”
“From Times Square. But I lost it.”
“Who sent it to you?”
“I found it in a parking lot,” he confessed, then looked away when she gave him a funny look. A momentary silence passed between them, one that didn’t feel as uncomfortable as the last. Michael let his shoulders slump as he gave her an unsure sort of smile. “Maybe I’ll go there one day. Probably not to live, though; I don’t think I could.”
“Millions of people do it, so why couldn’t you?”
“I dunno.” He rubbed at the back of his neck. “I guess maybe I’d miss this place.”
Alice scoffed. “You’re kidding, right? No way. Even Pittsburgh or Columbus, Ohio, would be better than Daliah. At least there I’d have a chance with this.” She tapped the sketchbook with a finger. “Here? Forget it.”
“What do you mean ‘a chance’?”
“A chance to make this my career.” She flipped through a few of the pages, each one bearing a carefully inked strip. “You know, like get into the newspaper, drawing dailies or something?” She fell silent, flipped the sketchbook closed, looked up at him. “I’m talking too much. You know all this stuff about me, but I don’t know a thing about you. What do you do?”
“What do you mean?”
“Like, for work.”
“Oh.” He pursed his lips, winced when his bottom lip shot a jolt of pain into his gums. “I catch things.” He immediately regretted saying it. It sounded bad. Wrong.
“Catch things? You mean like hunting?”
Yeah, you could say that.
“Yes.” Michael’s nerves buzzed again. “For my family.”
There was no thrill in that confession, no jolt of excitement like he’d felt when he revealed his full name. It hit too close to home, as though at any second she’d come to realize exactly what he meant. Her eyes would grow impossibly wide. She’d open her mouth to scream. She’d gasp for air, and he’d have to lunge over the counter and grab her by the throat before she made a sound. Because if she yelled, Rebel would realize she knew the truth, and that would be the end of Michael and Alice both.
“You mean to eat, right?” Alice looked unsure. “You don’t just hunt for fun.”
His eyes darted to the hall.
How long are they going to be down there?
It seemed like an eternity since he’d last seen Reb. What if Lucy had said something that had made him mad? What if he had decided that going to the movies was a bad idea and snapped her neck instead, pulled out his switchblade and stabbed her in the stomach a hundred times?
Michael couldn’t get a decent breath in. He imagined himself turning blue right before Alice’s eyes, choking on nothing but his own viselike anxiety. And then he remembered what Wade had said while teaching him how to hunt as a kid, and he spit the statement out as his own.
“We don’t have hardly anything,” he recited mechanically. “We gotta make do with what the land gives us.”
Alice didn’t respond.
Michael swallowed against the beat of tension.
He watched Alice put away her receipts and her ledger, Reb’s insistence that he not be weird echoing inside his head. He had said something wrong—he could see it in her face.
He nearly breathed an audible sigh of relief at the sound of Rebel and Lucy coming down the hall, and for a moment Michael was sure Alice looked relieved too. Maybe she had seen something in his face—a momentary flicker of hesitation, a brief pause that told the whole story. He swallowed against the tightness of his throat and turned to face Reb. An unlit Lucky Strike dangled from his brother’s bottom lip.
“You all ready to rock ’n’ roll?” Reb asked.
“Yeah,” Michael said, inching away from the counter and toward the front door.
“Sure,” Alice said, giving the three of them a smile that was a few watts shy of her standard grin.
Michael waited for the group to start moving toward the door, but Reb waved him out. “Be out in a minute,” he said. “Wait by the car.”
Michael’s gaze flitted back to Alice, but she failed to return the look.
He suddenly felt panicky, as though it was the last time he’d ever see her. Something about the way Rebel was leaning against that counter, cocky and as smooth as the Marlboro Man, made him want to scream. It was one of Reb’s personalities—a mask he put on for the hunt. He’d become the suave and seductive Raymond “Rebel” Morrow with the killer smile and the bedroom eyes, the gentle touch and the long eyelashes girls went nuts over. Reb had once told Michael that if he wasn’t so awkward, Michael could have been even better at it than Reb was.
Faggy or not, he had said, chicks dig that long hair.
For a moment, Michael froze with his hand on the doorknob. He was unsure whether to comply with Rebel’s request or refuse to leave the girls alone with him while they locked up the store. Reb noticed his hesitation and chuckled.
“Come on, man,” he said, a little plea in his tone. “I just need a minute. We’ll be right behind you.”
Michael only realized he was scowling after he turned away from the group, the muscles in his face momentarily relaxing as he stepped out of the store and into the early evening heat.
14
* * *
THE DAHLIA CINEPLEX had three screens. The Empire Strikes Back was playing on one. Urban Cowboy was on another. And Rebel’s movie of choice—The Shining—played on the third. Michael inhaled the lobby air, which smelled so heavily of buttered popcorn it made his mouth water as much as passing a McDonald’s did. Reb bought four tickets at the window outside, and they entered the lobby. Fascinated, Michael watched a couple of teens fill drink cups from a soda fountain and scoop popcorn into paper sleeves while his brother stood in line for concessions. Michael wasn’t sure where Reb had gotten the cash, and he certainly wasn’t about to ask.
Lucy giggled beneath her breath and Michael turned her way.
“What?” he asked.
“Nothing,” she said. “Just that you’re looking around the place like you haven’t ever seen the inside of a theater before.”
Michael pushed his hair behind his ears and shook his head. “I haven’t.”
Lucy furrowed her brow, trying to figure out whether he was making a joke. “You’re serious?” She looked over her shoulder just in time to catch Alice stepping out of the ladies room. “Hey Allie, did you know that Michael hasn’t ever been to the movies before? Isn’t that bananas?”
Alice joined them in the middle of the lobby. Her expression matched Lucy’s—intrigued, curious, mystified. “Really?”
Michael raised his hands as if to show them he wasn’t playing tricks.
“Man.” Lucy shot Alice a look. “That means he hasn’t seen Amityville or Alien or anything.”
Reb sidled up to the group, handing out tickets.
“What about you, Ray?” Lucy asked. “This isn’t your first time at the movies, right?”
Rebel gave Lucy a look like she’d lost her mind, and Michael glanced away from his brother to the paper ticket in his hand.
“I love the chick that played the space woman in Alien. I forget her name. CiCi or something?” Lucy shrugged, then looped her arm through Reb’s as they turned toward a door marked SCREEN 3. He squeezed the ticket in the palm of his hand, imagining Reb coming to this very movie theater while Michael was upstairs, or wandering through the woods, or down in the basement, working his knife between the vertebrae of a fresh kill. Brothers united, Michael thought, and something twisted inside his chest.
“Hey.” Michael nearly jumped when Alice’s fingers brushed across his arm. She pulled her hand back as soon as he moved, but rather than appearing afraid, she looked concerned. “You okay?” she asked. Her soft tone was comforting. It pulled him inside an invisible box that only the two of them occupied. When Michael didn’t respond, she offered him a faint smile. “Let’s get some snacks,” she suggested. “
I’ll buy.” And then she grabbed him by the hand and pulled him to the concession stand.
By the time Alice and Michael stepped inside the theater, it was 75 percent full. They searched for Rebel and Lucy for a minute or two, Alice holding a paper sleeve of popcorn and a box of Junior Mints while Michael palmed two cups of TaB. But after a while Alice motioned to the two empty seats closest to them with a shrug. “Let’s just sit here,” she said and slid into place. “They probably want to be alone anyway. Unless you want to sit next to them.” She looked skeptical, and Michael shook his head to say that the two seats Alice had chosen were just fine.
As they settled into their seats, Alice took a sip of soda and tore open her box of Junior Mints. “You have seen movies, though, right? You guys have a TV at least?”
“Yeah, we got one,” Michael said.
“Then what’s your favorite movie that you’ve seen?” she asked.
He looked down at his soda and pursed his lips, not sure whether he should be honest or make something up that sounded at least a little cooler than the truth. She smirked, noticing his hesitation.
“Come on,” she said. “Out with it.”
Michael squirmed and took a breath. “I like The Wizard of Oz pretty well.”
She gave him a look—another one that assured him he was too weird to live. “What do you like about it?”
“I dunno. I guess I like that Dorothy gets to escape to a place where it’s colorful and magical instead of livin’ in Kansas all her life.” He paused, then added, “Those flyin’ monkeys were pretty good too.”
Alice looked thoughtful, as though considering just how good the monkeys had been. She met his gaze a moment later. “But you realize that isn’t what the movie is about, right?”
“What do you mean?”
“Dorothy thinks Oz is amazing until she realizes it’s full of danger and sadness and evil. In the end, she’s happy to go back to her old life on the farm.”
He couldn’t help from frowning at that. Whenever Michael would watch that movie with Misty, they’d turn off the TV before Dorothy went back to Kansas. For them, the mantra of there being no place like home meant something entirely different.
“Oh no. I didn’t ruin it for you, did I?” Alice matched his frown with her own. “I mean, it’s just my interpretation. It doesn’t mean you have to watch it like that. It could mean whatever you want it to, I guess.”
Michael wondered if there was some truth to Oz. Perhaps longing for his own escape seemed full of wonder because it was nothing more than a pipe dream. Maybe if he ended up going out in the world, all he’d want to do was crawl back to Momma and Wade.
Alice opened her mouth to say something else as Michael held fast to his silence, but the lowering house lights cut her off.
He sat through the majority of The Shining with his eyes wide and his mouth slightly open. The movie itself paired with the scope of that massive screen transported him to the Overlook Hotel. For nearly an hour he sat motionless, having forgotten all about his TaB and the beautiful girl on his right. She nudged him, holding out a half-empty sleeve of popcorn, her own gaze fixed forward. When he turned to look at her, the way the lights danced off her face, the way he could see the movie reflected in her eyes, overwhelmed him with the sudden urge to kiss her. His heartbeat drifted down his chest and settled low in his stomach, throbbing like an electric pulse. His face flushed at the memory of one particular girl—not nearly as pretty as Alice, but the prettiest one he had seen up until then. She had smelled of oranges and pine and had given fourteen-year-old Michael an ache at the very base of his guts. It had been an urge that he soothed by standing in the farthest, darkest corner of the basement, snuffing it out with anxious abandon, his eyes fixed on her dead and naked frame.
Alice noticed him staring. She pulled her attention away from a wild-eyed Jack Nicholson, and gave Michael a faint smile. Leaning in, she whispered into his ear. “Are you having a good time?” Michael nodded, and her smile brightened a notch. “Me too,” she murmured, catching her bottom lip in her teeth. And then she slid her hand into his.
• • •
The credits rolled and people began to shuffle out of the theater. Some were grinning and chatting. Others looked dazed, like they’d just sat through a three-hour lobotomy that would leave them forever changed. Michael couldn’t believe it was over, which was part of the reason he hesitated getting out of his seat. He wanted the projectionist to play the movie again so he could figure out exactly what he had watched. Part of him loved the fact that Wendy and Danny had escaped Jack’s wrath. But the other half of him—the darker half—couldn’t help but think their escape was nothing but wishful thinking.
“Bullshit, right?” Rebel asked with a laugh, suddenly standing next to Michael and Alice’s seats with Lucy hanging off his arm. “There ain’t no way those two would get out of there alive. No way. That Wendy was too stupid.”
Michael looked over to Alice. She shrugged, but she was grinning. He grabbed his nearly empty cup of soda and took a watered-down swig.
“So, what did you think?” Lucy asked, her gaze fixed on Michael. “First time at the movies. . . .”
“I wanna see it again,” he said. Lucy and Reb laughed at his response and exited with the rest of the crowd, leaving Michael and Alice alone again. When Michael glanced over to her, Alice nodded at him.
“I know what you mean,” she said. “I want to see it again too.”
• • •
Lucy and Reb debated about it the entire way back to the Dervish. Was Jack Torrance insane, or were the things he had seen real? Was it all in his head, or was the Overlook actually haunted? Michael and Alice sat quietly in the backseat, listening to them banter back and forth. Two blocks from the record store, Alice scooted more toward the middle of the seat, letting her thigh press against Michael’s leg.
• • •
Rebel flipped down the driver’s seat and left the door open for Michael and Alice to crawl out, then followed Lucy across the parking lot to her car. When Michael made a move to step out of the Delta, Alice gently caught him by the wrist to stop him. Her eyes lingered on Reb and Lucy in the distance before they focused on the boy beside her. Michael’s pulse whooshed against his ears, her touch electrifying him, making every hair on his body stand on end.
“I had fun,” she said softly.
He looked down at the seat, his hair curtaining the sides of his face. She leaned in, her hands rising to pull his hair back, her fingertips sweeping across each cheek with a butterfly’s touch.
“I like that you’re shy. It makes you special.” Her lips grazed the corner of his mouth, her warm spearmint scent drifting across his skin. His fingers curled against the upholstery of the backseat before daring to graze a denim-covered knee. And for a flash of a moment, he pictured her dead on the basement floor, stripped and cold-skinned, her eyes wide open, her lips a grayish-blue. He pulled back, simultaneously revolted and undeniably turned on. He yearned to touch her, but the idea of doing it while she was breathing scared him. It was different when there was potential for humiliation, rejection, disgust.
Alice nodded faintly when he pulled away, as if to say she understood. “See you soon, I hope?”
“Yeah.”
She hesitated, as if contemplating something, then slipped out of the Oldsmobile without another word.
• • •
When Rebel finally slid into his seat, he smelled like Lucy’s perfume. Michael had switched back to the passenger side. He had watched his brother kissing and groping through the windshield while Alice waited in Lucy’s Honda hatchback. He couldn’t shake the fact that he had pictured Alice dead—a murder victim laid out on the basement floor.
“What’s wrong?” Reb asked. “You say something stupid?”
“I don’t think so,” Michael murmured.
“Then what?”
Michael shook his head, not daring to explain.
Reb rolled
his eyes and slid the key into the ignition. “Yeah, bet you said something dumb, but whatever—she likes you.”
Something fluttered inside Michael’s chest—hope, elation, an eagerness to come back and see her again, even though they had yet to leave the parking lot.
Reb gave Michael a skeptical glance. “You like her?”
“Yes.” The word was almost breathless.
Reb pulled the Delta onto the road, smiling to himself. “Good,” he said beneath his breath. “Glad to hear it, brother. Glad indeed.”
15
* * *
MICHAEL SPENT NEARLY all of the following day sitting at his desk, scribbling pictures into the margins of old newspapers. He used whatever blank space he could find to draw panels like the ones he had seen in Alice’s sketchbook while music cut through the silence of the upstairs rooms. Neil Diamond’s “Cherry, Cherry” filtered through the wall on what seemed like endless repeat. His sketches weren’t much more than crude line drawings, like primitive art scratched onto a cave wall. Because Alice had drawn her own life at the Dervish, Michael decided to follow her lead and draw things about himself as well. They were things he’d never be able to show her, but putting them on paper made him feel closer to her. He sketched himself sitting in the Delta with Rebel behind the wheel. He drew them both lying on their stomachs on top of a hill, spying on the next mark. There was the farmhouse and Misty Dawn dancing in the backyard, Momma with an angry face, looming in the background, watching her from the shadows.
By the time he had switched from sketching the subtle horrors of his own life to the tall buildings of New York City, Reb barged into his room. The smells of that evening’s dinner drifted in behind him. Michael jerked his head up from its unnaturally bowed position and winced at a sudden bite of pain. He’d been huddled like that for so long his poor posture had given birth to a wicked crick in his neck.