by James Hynes
What Kevin feels like doing, what he wants to do, is start screaming. In fact he can feel a scream boiling up inside him all the way from his bowels, like vomit, and he actually pinches his lips shut.
“Leslie, c’mon.” The guy on the other end sounds impatient. He’s a just a kid, Kevin can tell. Just a boy.
“Lez?” says the boy. “Quit goofing around.”
Kevin unpinches his lips and whispers, “Hello?”
“Hello?” Now the caller is puzzled. Even at a whisper, Kevin’s voice doesn’t sound like the person the guy on the other end expected to hear. “Who’s this?” he says.
“Who’s this?” answers Kevin, stupid as a monkey.
“Where’s Leslie?” Right now the kid, wherever he is, is looking at his own screen to make sure he’s got the right number. “Who is this?”
Kevin’s exhausted. It’s all he can do to keep his head up. He has no idea whose phone this is, for all he knows it could have bounded in from another room, but as he slumps in the dusty ruin of Hemphill Associates, as a sultry breeze blows in from the vast hole of the empty window and courses uphill along the fatally tilted floor, carrying the distant wail of sirens, Kevin figures he has to act on the assumption that the little black phone belongs—belonged—to the girl who just slid over the edge.
“I’m all alone here,” Kevin manages to rasp through his tight, dry throat.
“I’m serious, dude,” says the kid’s voice, trying to sound tough. “Where’s Leslie and why have you got her phone?”
“It was buzzing, and I picked it up.”
“Okay.” The kid’s voice is noncommittal. The boy has decided to bank his anger because clearly he thinks the guy he’s talking to is some kind of moron. “Where’d Leslie go?”
Involuntarily, Kevin’s gaze drifts across the crack and down the tilted floor and over the edge, where, through the haze of dust and the glare of sunlight, he can see the condo tower with a ragged-edge hole in it, two floors laid bare like a doll house, a tangled venetian blind flapping in the breeze forty stories up. A thin haze rises out of the hole, but no gouts of flame or smoke. That’s good, thinks Kevin.
“Where’s Leslie?” the kid demands again, no longer disguising his anger. “Why have you got her phone?”
“She’s gone. I’m all alone here.” Across the street, on an upper floor of the neo-deco building with the Starbucks on the ground floor, a woman in a red blouse stands in a window, looking in Kevin’s direction. She presses both hands to her mouth while someone behind her rubs her neck—Kevin can just make out the flexing hands. I’d get out of there, Kevin thinks, if I were you.
“Where’d she go?” Who is this idiot on his girlfriend’s phone, and what has he done with her?
“Out.”
“Out where?”
Kevin says nothing. He’s not certain of much at this moment, but he does know that he doesn’t want to be the one to tell this guy the worst thing he’s ever heard. He’s not getting this individually from either of his little Animal House familiars, he’s getting it both from the devil and the angel, loudly and simultaneously, cowardice and compassion in equal measure. Keep Your Mouth Shut, they remind him.
“What’s your name?” The kid tries another tack.
“Kevin,” says Kevin, dully.
“Well, Kevin, you’re kind of freaking me out.”
“I’m sorry.” Kevin’s as monotone as a somnambulist. “That’s not my intention.”
“Can you at least tell me, is Leslie coming back soon?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Seriously, dude, who are you?”
Just hang up, say Kevin’s voices, so he says, “I gotta go” and lowers the phone, searching for the End Call button with his trembling finger while the tiny voice of the kid chirps at him.
“Is she okay?” the boy is saying. “Can you just tell me that?” Kevin presses the button, the voice goes dead, the screen tells him helpfully CALL ENDED. He shuts off the phone, flips it closed, and sticks it inside his jacket. He sags back against the wall, bone tired. He closes his eyes.
I need to stay awake, he’s thinking. I can sleep later, but there’s something I need to attend to right now, if I could only remember what it is. It’s a mix of feelings he’s had before, a simultaneous urgency and lassitude, sort of like his competing angel and devil, but with no obvious moral component: Get up and do something in a tug of war with Just let me sleep for a minute, like the night his grandfather died on the Quinn family farm west of Lansing, a couple miles of dirt road north of the Grand Ledge Highway. Like courtiers hanging about the death chamber of a king, the family had congregated at Grampa Quinn’s eighty-acre empire, in his sagging old farmhouse where the floors creaked alarmingly underfoot and all the doorways were slightly out of true. Kevin was a new graduate of Michigan and working at Central Café, and he had driven up from Ann Arbor through a late Christmas Eve blizzard in his deathtrap Pinto, braving whiteout on I-96, the snow finally limiting visibility to the fuzzy cones of his headlights. He saw no other cars, coming or going; no one else was stupid enough to be driving in weather like this. He crawled the last few miles up the unplowed county road to Grampa’s at fifteen miles an hour—which was still too fast, but any slower and the Pinto would terminally stall out—and he watched for Grampa’s drive through the snow streaking at his windshield, afraid that he’d never find the farm in the dark, afraid that he might already have passed it. Just when he despaired of ever seeing the mailbox, just when he thought he’d either freeze to death in a snowbank or drive all the way to Mackinac City, out of the blizzard crawled Grampa’s indestructible steel mailbox on its sturdy length of iron pipe, with the family name, missing the Q, in sliding letters across the top. UINN said the snow-covered letters, making the name sound even more Gaelic than it already was. Kevin inched off the road and fishtailed up the snowed-in driveway, squeezing in between the weighty pickup trucks of his farm cousins. The trucks, the lawn, the leafless maples were all thickly blanketed by snow, and more snow fell endlessly through the yard light that hung from the roof beam of the barn.
From his car, Kevin tramped through the drifts in his Converse All-Stars and thin denim jacket. He stamped the snow off his sneakers on the porch and then hauled the storm door aside and pushed open the kitchen door without knocking. The overhead light cast a superfluous yellow glow over everything in the kitchen, all of which was already yellowed with age: the ancient Frigidaire, the Formica-topped table, the patterned linoleum that crackled under foot. The only remotely new thing in the kitchen was a yellowed Mr. Coffee on the yellowed counter, where Kevin’s Aunt Mary, his father’s sister, was fortifying herself with a huge cup for the night’s vigil. She lifted her head at the scrape of his sodden feet on the mat and by way of greeting said, “Take off your shoes.” And then, turning away, “Where’s your mother?”
“She isn’t here?”
“Nope,” said Aunt Mary, evoking with a monosyllable a lifetime of tension between the Quinn and Padalecki families. “Kathleen’s here,” she added, and Kevin found his sister asleep under a garishly orange afghan on the swaybacked sofa across the living room from Grampa’s old black-and-white Motorola. The TV and the little ceramic Christmas tree on top of it provided the only light in the room. The tiny red and white bulbs on the tree cast very little light, while on the screen Alistair Sim was trembling his way silently through A Christmas Carol, the grainy image hauled in through the storm from Channel 10 in Jackson by Grampa’s skeletal rooftop aerial. Kathleen wasn’t the only one not watching the redemption of Scrooge: his cousin Kyle in jeans and a huge cable-knit sweater sprawled snoring in Grampa’s recliner, presenting in the flickering TV light a clear view of his basketball gut, the threadbare soles of his white socks, and his cavernous nostrils. One of Kyle’s kids, whose names Kevin could never keep straight, curled on the ancient carpet before the TV with his or her blond head on an embroidered throw pillow. Standing in his wet socks under the oppressive woodwork ar
chway between Grampa’s dining room and living room, Kevin sensed that the house was murmurous with comatose Quinns; just below the threshold of hearing he was vaguely aware of snores and sighs and farts fumigating the clammy old farmhouse in the middle of the night. Only he and Aunt Mary were awake at the moment, and she touched him lightly on the arm as she passed, startling him a little.
“Merry Christmas,” she whispered, perhaps to make up for her brusqueness in the kitchen, and she beckoned him to step carefully through the sleepers in the living room to Grampa’s bedroom door, which stood open and which, in fact, was probably impossible to close in the humidity of all that snoring, sighing, and farting. In the doorway she stopped Kevin with another touch and tiptoed to the bed, bending over the figure on the right side of the mattress. Kevin’s grandmother had been dead for nine years, so Grampa could’ve lain in the middle of the mattress if he wanted to, but even at the end he kept to the side of the marital bed he’d occupied for fifty years. Or perhaps it was just easier for his daughters to tend him there. A lamp on the bedside table cast a nimbus of yellow light around a bent straw in a half-empty glass of water, a little brown bottle of morphine with an eye dropper in it, and a box of baby wipes. The bed’s usual blankets and bedspread were neatly folded on a chair, and its bottom sheet had been replaced with a fitted, rubberized sheet, a reminder along with the baby wipes that colon cancer was not a tidy way to die. Kevin had expected at least an IV drip, but the old man lay untethered under an incongruously new blanket, baby blue. His head was centered on a single pillow, his hands, as pale as exposed roots, curled on his chest, and his feet, in red woolen socks, sticking out beyond the end of the blanket. From the doorway, Kevin could not see or hear his grandfather breathe. In fact Grampa looked like he was already dead, and Kevin realized that his own heart was pounding, perhaps because he was seeing something that had been denied to him the night his father died. On that summer night in Royal Oak, still floating from the weed he’d smoked an hour before, he’d been shuffled into his own bedroom by his mother’s awkward priest while his father’s body had been bagged and gurneyed and wheeled down the hall. The priest hadn’t even let Kevin peek through his curtains to watch the gurney being lifted into the ambulance, and the next and last time he saw his father he was looking surprisingly youthful in the coffin at the funeral home. But now Kevin was standing at the threshold of the inner sanctum, where the thing itself was taking place, where his grandfather’s breaths and heartbeats were counting down to nothing, where each exhalation measured an increasingly large fraction of what remained of his life. Above the bed, at the margin of the dim lamplight, a pointillist blot of green mildew had been spreading slowly across the bedroom ceiling for years, and it looked to Kevin now like the stain of his grandfather’s last, diseased breaths.
“Can you hear me, Dad?” Aunt Mary said, taking one of the old man’s hands in both of hers.
Kevin heard no reply, but Aunt Mary nodded for Kevin to come to the bed, and he jerked into the room as if someone had pushed him. Aunt Mary slipped the old man’s limp, waxy hand into Kevin’s and stepped away. What do I say? Kevin almost asked her, but it wouldn’t have mattered, because his throat tightened and his eyes watered and the best he could do was utter a tremulous “Hello?” Grampa Quinn’s eyelids fluttered open, and his eyes, faded to a milky blue, fixed on Kevin. His face was as pale as his hands, and his lips were papery and blue. His tongue moved weakly inside his mouth, as if he couldn’t even muster the energy to dampen his lips. Then, for an instant, his gaze brightened and his cold hand moved in Kevin’s, and he managed to whisper, faintly but distinctly, “Frank?”
Kevin couldn’t speak. He looked helplessly at his aunt, who slipped in beside him and took the old man’s hand and said, “No, Dad, it’s Kevin. Frank’s son. Your grandson,” and Kevin watched the light in his grandfather’s eyes fade as quickly as a bright stone dropped into dark water. Then his aunt caught Kevin gently by the arm and escorted him to the door, and he left the bedroom feeling worse than he had when he’d come in, guilty that he wasn’t the one his grandfather wanted to see at the end, then angry at his father for letting them all down by dying eight years before, then angry at his grandfather for not hiding his disappointment, then angry at himself for being angry at his father and his grandfather for things they could not control. Through the contention in his head he was dimly aware of Aunt Mary murmuring to Grampa Quinn, lifting his head to offer him water, dropping morphine between his lips with the eye dropper, and he pulled himself together when she came out of the bedroom and led him tiptoe through the living room and the dining room and up the cold, creaking stairs to the last empty bed in the house, in a unheated, high-ceilinged back bedroom, lined with peeling wallpaper and stacked all around with moldering old boxes of God knows what. With a farm wife’s no-nonsense tenderness she turned him out of his denim jacket and maneuvered him onto a canvas cot, tucking him in like a child with a scratchy old army blanket.
“Don’t take it personal, hon.” She cupped his face with her cold hands. “It’s all running together for him at the end. He don’t know who’s here anymore and who isn’t.”
Kevin was still too choked up to reply, so she just patted him and said, “You try to sleep, and we’ll come fetch you when it’s time.”
But then they didn’t. Aunt Mary, God bless her, had too much on her mind, and no one else knew that he’d arrived. Ever since that night Kevin has lacerated himself for not being present when his grandfather died, for sleeping through it. He could have stayed awake, he could have offered to sit up with his grandfather, but instead he’d let himself be stashed out of sight like one of those mildewed old boxes, so that when Kyle, who was awake at the time, said, “He’s going,” and a dozen Quinns all over the house rose from their beds or sofas or recliners like vampires from their coffins to troop into the bedroom and witness Grandfather Quinn’s last, stertorous breaths, Kevin was fitfully asleep on the stiff old cot upstairs, still humiliated by his grandfather’s undisguised disappointment. For years afterward Kevin was angry at himself, because out of all the nights he’d stayed up for no good reason—to finish a paper in college, to party until dawn, to fuck, to restlessly channel surf because he couldn’t sleep even if he wanted to—this was the one night when he should’ve made the effort to stay awake and he didn’t, and the old man died without his witness. And the worst of it was, he’d known that night, as he let Aunt Mary steer him upstairs and onto the cot, that it was his responsibility and nobody else’s to keep himself awake. In the end his body betrayed him, clouded his consciousness, dragged his eyelids down, lied to him like a seducer by saying, “Just rest your eyes for a minute, you’ll feel better afterward,” so that when Aunt Mary finally remembered and shook him awake in the leaden dawn of Christmas morning, Kevin woke up angry at himself, at her, at the world.
“Why didn’t you wake me?” he’d whined as he thundered down the stairs in his stocking feet, and Aunt Mary had said, “I’m so sorry, hon, I forgot all about you upstairs, I’m so sorry,” leaving Kevin to face a houseful of cousins, glum and smug in equal measure, while Kathleen lifted her eyebrows at him, saying only “Hello.” But the voice he’s hearing now is louder, practically shouting, and the touch is rougher than his Aunt Mary’s, fingernails digging into his arm. “Hello!”
“What?” He opens his eyes and clenches his stinging fists. A woman is squatting next to him, not his Aunt Mary, not Kathleen, but someone else. Disheveled brown hair, watery blue eyes, cracked lipstick.
“Are you hurt?” says the woman, gripping his shoulder. Her skirt is a little too tight for her to be squatting, and her touch is as much to steady herself on the toes of her pumps as it is to reassure Kevin.
“No,” he says. Then, wincing and opening his fingers, “Yes, a little. I picked up some glass.”
She lightly cups one of his hands with one of hers, and her warm touch thrills Kevin like a lover’s. He’s seen her somewhere before, but where? He doesn’t know any
one in Austin. The woman says nothing, but looks away through the ruin of the outside wall and into the hazy glare. She tightens her grip on his hand and says, “Where did you come from?”
“Ann Arbor, Michigan.”
The woman winces. “No. I mean, where did you come from in this building?”
“Oh.” Kevin doesn’t want to disappoint her. He doesn’t want her to let go of his hand. “Nowhere. I mean, I was right here, on this floor, with…”
“With whom?” Ever the copy editor, even now Kevin notes the correct use of the objective pronoun. Then the full horror of what just happened jolts him again, an electric shock to his heart. “There was a girl,” he says. “A young woman, I mean.”
The woman glances around, still cupping his bleeding hand, still steadying herself on his shoulder. “Is she going for help? Did she find a way down?”
She did, thinks Kevin, but not what you have in mind. “No.” He wishes he hadn’t mentioned her. “She’s gone.”
“Gone?”
Kevin lifts his chin toward the gap, over the edge. “I didn’t know her name.”
The woman closes her eyes and sighs, twisting slowly down on the toes of her pumps as if she’s deflating, ending up next to Kevin against the wall. There’s soot on her face and her brown hair is tousled. She’s his age, maybe a little younger, though it’s hard to tell—she’s a little too made-up for him to be able to see the woman underneath clearly—and now he remembers where he’s seen her before. She’s the woman from Starbucks, the woman with the laptop and the little suitcase on wheels, the woman who asked his opinion about letting some guy down gently. The woman with the fancy coffee who’d never heard of Damon Runyon. The Yellow Rose.
Kevin starts to speak, but his throat tightens up. She turns her wide, cornflower blue eyes to him, not seeing him, her gaze entirely inward. He notices that one of her false eyelashes lies like a caterpillar just under her eye. “Where did you come from?” he says.