The Year's Best Dark Fantasy and Horror
Page 37
Five days from then, it’s Wednesday.
What I say into the damp hair close to Tanya’s scalp is that he knows, Quint. That he knows, and it’s over now, it has to be.
What she says back isn’t in words, so much, but it’s not ESP either. The opposite, really.
We hide in each other.
The mask I wear for the next two weeks is just like my face, only it doesn’t give anything away, is always ready to smile, to take part in a shrug then look away.
The reason for the mask is that Tanya and Quint are talking to a counselor down at Tanya’s hospital.
Sherry watches Gabe while they’re there.
It makes me so tired, controlling my thoughts around him for those hour-and-a-halfs.
One night I finally break down, go to the store for milk we don’t need, and call Quint’s house from the grocery store. The bagboy watches me, his lower lip pulled between his teeth like he knows too much.
“You haven’t told him, have you?” I say to Tanya when she picks up.
I’ve got the phone cupped in both hands, am pressing it into the side of my head.
“Trevor?” Tanya says back, a note of something bad in her voice.
Trevor is her brother. The last any of us knew, he was in Maine.
A muscle at the base of my jaw quivers.
In the background of her kitchen, I hear Quint asking her something.
“Tell me you haven’t,” I whisper.
“Of course not,” she says, distant—to Quint, or me?—“I don’t know who it is.”
I hang up gently, hold the phone there with my eyes closed, then nod, go in for the milk, park in front of my house minutes later, make myself drink the whole half gallon, tell myself that if I can do it, and keep it down, then Tanya won’t tell, no matter how honest their next session at the hospital gets.
Halfway to the door, though, I throw it all up, and Sherry finds me like that, starts breathing too hard herself, the phone already in her hands. Ninety seconds later Tanya is leaning over me, hugging me, helping me to stand, long strings of bubbly white leaking down from the corners of my mouth, from my nose. She breaks them off with the side of her hand, guides them away, slings them towards the street.
“ . . . must have been bad,” I tell her and Sherry, when I can.
At first they don’t respond, and then Sherry laughs a single laugh through her nose—disgust—says, “The gallon of milk, you mean?”
I shrug, caught. Stare at the grass for a lie, finally find one: “That new guy at work.”
“The one from prison?” Sherry whispers.
“He said milk—he drinks it for his stomach ulcer.”
Sherry shakes her head at this.
“And you think you have a stomach ulcer now, right?”
When I don’t answer, she apologizes to Tanya with her eyes. Because I’m one of those people who can get sick from talking to somebody on the phone. It’s a joke, has been for years.
“I think you’re going to be all right,” Tanya says, smiling.
Her hand is on my knee.
I smile, shrug one shoulder, no eye contact.
It makes them comfortable, lets them be moms, me the little boy.
To keep them from digging my hole any deeper, I point to the kitchen to show them where I’m going, then go there, run water over my hands. I can still hear them, though. “So how’s it going?” Sherry asks Tanya, in a way that I can see the parentheses Sherry’s holding around her eyes, like a Sunday morning cartoon. I turn off the water. “Good,” Tanya says, her hands surely in her lap, innocent. I reach for the dishtowel, draw it to my chin.
Good.
I want to laugh. Want my fingers to stop trembling.
I wind them up tight in the dishtowel, follow Sherry and Tanya to the door.
“So where’s the good knight tonight?” I say from behind Sherry.
It’s what we used to call Quint back in high school. From some song.
Walking backwards into the darkness, barefoot, Tanya exaggerates her shrug, says he was going down to the store or something. He didn’t say.
I feel my mask smile, lift the dishtowel in farewell, and, because the kind of telepathy I have makes me see Quint down at the grocery store, offering a cigarette to the bagboy, the bagboy in return pointing to the pay phone, to the redial button, I hear Tanya start running through the wet grass home. To catch the phone or Gabe, I don’t know.
“What?” Sherry says, holding the screen open for me.
I shake my head no, nothing. Duck back through the door.
Three days later my phone rings, and I beat Sherry to it. It’s nobody. My lips are shaped around the sound of a whispered, desperate T? when Quint says something into his end. I can’t make it out.
“What?” Sherry says, stepping half out of the bedroom, her work shirt most of the way on.
“Quint,” I say, then pull the phone deeper into the kitchen. Quint’s not saying anything else. But he’s not hanging up either. Finally I thumb the dial tone button, say, loud enough for Sherry, “It’s in the shed, I think. Want me to walk it down?”
When I step into the bedroom then, to say it—Quint needs his quarter-inch ratchet back, that one that’s spray-painted blue so nobody’ll steal it—Sherry’s buttoning her shirt, her eyes already settled on me.
I tilt my head up to tell her where I’m going but then see how close she is to the nightstand. Where the other phone is.
“Quint,” she says, her voice artificially light, I think. Maybe.
I tell her to have a good day at the garage, then hold her side as we touch lips, and talk to myself the whole way down to Quint’s. How the only part of the conversation Sherry could have heard was me, saying that about the shed. But—would it sound different to her if the line was dead? Would it have been louder in her ear, my voice closer, because half of it wasn’t getting sucked down the line?
Partway to Quint’s, I remember the blue ratchet, go back for it, find it on the coffee table, Sherry already gone.
I reach for it like maybe it’s hot, or electric, and, when I have it, it’s light like old, dry paper. What I do with it is sit, and hold it hard to my forehead, my eyes closed, and make myself breathe, breathe. Tell myself that, whatever else, Sherry can’t know anything for sure, and that Tanya’s not going to tell. That Quint’s not waiting in his own living room down the street, a pistol in his lap, Gabe crying in the other room.
I’m half-right: Quint is in his chair, just not the new one Tanya financed for him two birthdays ago. Instead it’s the ratty one, out in the garage.
He looks up at me when I step down onto the stained concrete.
His eyes are red around the rims, and the hand he has wrapped around his paperback, the knuckles are scraped raw. The kind of rash you get from punching sheetrock, over and over.
I feel along the side of the Chevelle, lift my chin to him.
“I thought you were choking or something,” I say, “on the phone, I mean.”
He smiles without looking at me, says, “So you brought my ratchet down to work on me?”
I look at it blue in my hand, and see it in an evidence bag.
It makes a solid thunk when I toss it into his tool drawer. With the wrenches instead of the sockets, but Quint doesn’t notice, is staring at something I can’t see.
“What’d you want, then?” I say.
Quint laughs as if just now returning to the garage, shrugs, throws me the magazine I was looking at last time I was here.
I unroll it, study it too long, come back to him.
“Thanks, I guess,” I tell him. “I can’t take it home, though, y’know?”
Quint smiles, shakes his head no, says, “You’re an antenna, I think.”
“A what?”
“It works best when—I don’t know. When you’re around. Involved.”
“With you and Gabe?”
Quint nods, his eyes suddenly glossy wet.
“What’s going on?” I say.
Quint doesn’t answer, just shakes his head no, brings his paperback horror novel up to his face, starts reading hard enough that his lips move.
“I’ve already seen this—” I start, but Quint interrupts by holding his hand up. I stare at him like that for maybe four seconds, then lean back against the Chevelle again, open the mag, see the same barely-legal girls in the same unlikely positions. Soon enough I’m watching the tiny bulbs on the baby monitor. They’re black, don’t even remember red.
Quint swallows loud, pulls the book closer to his face, reading as hard as he knows how, then finally closes his eyes, slings the book past me.
It brings something down from the shelf, something that falls for a long time. Snow chains, I’m thinking, or one of those hanging lamps like old ladies have, with all the stained glass. I don’t look around to see. Just at Quint. He’s crying, trying not to. Not wiping his face, because that would be admitting that there were tears.
“He grew out of it,” I say, in explanation.
Quint shakes his head no, settles his eyes on what looks like the Chevelle’s front tire.
“It’s not him,” he says, then looks up at me. “It’s not him.”
“Then—what?”
“You said he was . . . that he was picking up on how this shit made me feel.”
“The books, yeah.”
“They just, they don’t scare me anymore, I guess.”
I smile, cross my arms.
“Then you grew out of it,” I say. “Sherry always said you would.”
Quint smiles, rubs it into his face. “Sherry,” he says. “You’re lucky. To have her, I mean.”
“So are you.”
“What?”
“Lucky. Tanya.”
Quint keeps the same expression on his face, but changes gears in his head. I can tell.
“So find something scarier,” I say. “Romance. Algebra.”
Quint doesn’t laugh.
Instead, he pulls a chain up from his shirt. A necklace, like dogtags, except, instead of a little nameplate on the end, it’s a silver key.
“What?” I say.
“In the . . . in the books, it’s all fake. I know that now.”
“What do you mean?”
“This is real,” he says, holding the key up before his face.
I don’t have anything to say to this.
“Dr. Jak—our therapist,” Quint goes on. “He says it’s Tanya’s symbol that she’s with me again. All the way. Like before.”
“A key?”
“She used to it to—to meet her . . . To meet him.”
And then I get it: the key he’s wearing, it’s the one I had cut for Tanya. It fits the trailer, has unlocked more Wednesdays than I can count.
He looks up, nods.
“Yeah,” he says. “I was right. She’s been screwing around.”
“How long?”
“Two years.”
“Who?”
Quint shrugs one shoulder, looks away. “It’s not supposed to be important who,” he says. “Just that it’s”—he holds the key up, to show—“that it’s over. A name isn’t going to help me move on.”
“Shit.” It’s the only word in my head. In my whole life.
Quint nods, does his eyebrows up in agreement.
“Then . . . Gabe?” I finally manage.
Quint stands, runs his fingers through his hair, dislodging his cap. It falls down his back. His fingers stay in his hair, his elbows out like stunted wings.
“Either I’m not—can’t get scared like I used to,” Quint says, his tone all about matter-of-factness, “or . . . or the other guy, he had red hair too.”
I swallow. My hair is black.
“So you’re saying she—Tanya—that she was stepping out on you with somebody who looks just like you?”
Quint doesn’t turn back around to me.
“It’s my fault,” he says. “If I would have, y’know. Not been out here all the time, I guess. Maybe she was, like, looking for me all over again, yeah? Like, how I used to be?”
“You still are like that,” I try. “We all are.”
Quint laughs about this. The kind of laugh you manage when your doctor tells you you have six weeks left to live.
“You know he’s yours,” I say then, “Gabe. You wouldn’t have been able to do—that ESP shit. It wouldn’t have worked.”
Quint turns around, his face slack. “How do we know his father isn’t the telepathic one?”
“His red-headed father?”
“The one Tanya’s been seeing,” Quint says, holding the key up again, his eyes flashing behind it, “yeah.” I stare at him until he shrugs, slams his fist down to the face of his rolling toolbox.
“You want to go somewhere?” I say. “I can call in.”
Quint just closes his eyes tight. “How about we go to two years ago? You manage that, you think?”
“You want to hit somebody then?” I say, stepping forward. Quint looks up at me and for a long moment I think he’s going to do it, and that, if there’s any justice in the world, my jaw will crack down some important line, or a sinus cavity will collapse, or a vertebra will snap in my neck.
Instead, he just hugs me for the first time since elementary, then holds onto me, his face warm on my chest. The spot I stare at on the wall is where a nail is buried all the way to the head, so it’s just a little metal dot. On my way out minutes later, I pass Gabe’s room. He’s sleeping, unaware. Perfect.
I am not an antenna. In the breakroom a week after the talk with Quint in the garage, I write this onto the top of the table until it’s a mat of words: I am not an antenna.
The next day it’s just a blue stain that smells like citrus.
Instead of the regulation white hose all the other nurses wear, Tanya wears thigh-highs with a lace band at top. They stop just after her skirt starts. The number of people I can tell this to is zero. The number of people Quint told it to two years ago was one.
When she steps off the elevator into the garage the following Wednesday, I’m waiting for her.
She smiles, looks away. Never stops walking towards me.
After myself, the person I hate most in the world is Dr. Jakobi. In addition to a marriage counselor, he’s a preacher. I tell Sherry that this is a conflict of interest for him, but then can’t stuff it into words, exactly why. It has something to do with his stake in other people’s marriages. Like, if he’d been the one to marry Tanya and Quint nine years ago, then, now, he’d be doing anything he could to keep them together, right? Just to keep his average up.
Sherry says preachers don’t compare averages and percentiles.
“Sometimes you should just give up, though,” I say.
This gets Sherry looking at me harder than I want.
“You want her to leave him?” she finally says.
I smile, shake my head no, like she’s talking particulars, friends, where I’m more in a hypothetical mode.
I don’t want them to break up, no.
But I don’t sleep so much either. And it’s not just the squirrels.
Under Quint’s couch now is a slender little fire safe. It has a handle like a briefcase.
He calls me up on a Tuesday to see it.
“You’re wanting to test it?” I say from his doorway. I haven’t carried a lighter now for years.
Quint laughs through his nose some.
“It’s in there,” he says.
“What?”
He chews his tongue, squinches one side of his face up.
“With the doctor the other day. I wouldn’t drop it, the, y’know. Whoever it was. That’s not supposed to matter.”
“The other guy.”
Yes.
“So?” I say.
Where I’m standing is half in, half out his screen door. My fingertips holding it open. In any television show or movie, this would be a definite sign of guilt. The audience would be howling with laughter.
“So we had to move on,” Q
uint says, the box in his lap now. “Dr. Jakobi said I didn’t really want to know. Who.”
Because I don’t trust my voice, I don’t say anything. Either that or I can’t.
“It was her idea,” Quint says. “She wrote it on a piece of paper, folded it up, then Dr. J held it until I came back with a safe to lock it in.”
He pats the fire safe, the slap of his hand soft, almost loving.
I swallow.
“To make it mean something, though, I had it keyed for this,” Quint says, holding the key up from around his neck.
“And you haven’t looked?” I say.
“It’s not moving on if I do. This way, it’s . . . what? An artifact, like. An old thing. Part of the past.” He pauses, studies a commercial on TV. “All that matters now is what’s ahead.”
These aren’t his words.
I don’t tell them they’re lies, though, and I don’t ask Tanya whose name is written on that piece of paper.
It’s not because I don’t want to know, but more because knowing will mean a hundred other things, none of which I can face.
So I walk through my shifts in a trance, and the next Wednesday is just another day, and if I have an extra beer after work, nobody notices, and one night, desperate, I even read Quint’s little horror novel cover to cover, drinking cup after cup of coffee.
It’s stupid, not scary at all, but still, Tanya calls down to ask if we have any clothes that need drying. Because she’s out of laundry but still needs to run the dryer. It’s where they sit Gabe’s car seat when he won’t sleep. When he can’t.
I walk down a load of wet colors, pass them through the door to Quint. His eyes are dancing.
“What?” I say.
“It’s working again,” he whispers, then hooks his chin inside, like I should come see Gabe crying.
“Maybe he’s sick,” I offer.
“C’mon,” Quint says, and jabs the screen door more open for me, turns before it can swing shut.
I don’t follow.
Their lights are on until two, when I stop looking.
“What?” Sherry says, passing through the living room, on a cleaning jag.
I don’t answer. My mind is shaped like a fire safe, though. One of the letter-sized ones, just for documents.
There are no people with red hair in my family.
I’ve even called my mom to be sure.