Cornerstone 02 - Keystone

by Misty Provencher

  “Rings?” I ask. Everything goes black again as Garrett slips his phone back in his pocket. I focus on him right away, but his gaze is far away and thoughtful, like he’s working through a tough math equation.

  “Yeah, you’ll see. There’s no way to really explain them. You just have to see them.”

  It’s hard to take my eyes off the Fury Man. He hasn’t moved since Garrett did whatever he did to him, but I still can’t look away.

  “You can’t look away, can you?” Garrett says. “That’s instinct kicking in.

  I glimpse at him and then back at the man. The Fury Man is like a bear trap and my gaze is snared. “Huh?”

  “You can’t take your eyes off him, can you? You’re wired to ensure that he won’t be a threat again,” he says. “I’ll show you how to override it…”

  But before he can tell me, someone bangs on the aluminum door. My field orbs around me and I hear a woman’s voice.

  “You in there?” Mrs. Neho calls through the door. My body sucks up my field and I’m back inside myself with such a jolt, that I grab my head. Garrett opens the garage door and I squint to see Mrs. Neho, standing alone, outside.

  “Hi hi,” she says with a quick wave as she steps in with us. Garrett slides the door back down behind her. I focus on seeing and Mrs. Neho pops into my sight. She stands over the unconscious Fury Man.

  “This only one?” she asks. “No other?”

  “He’s it.” Garrett says and then, with pride he adds, “Nali took him down by herself.”

  “Hardly.” I grunt, but Mrs. Neho gives me a smile.

  “Ah. Qweek learner,” she says. She turns back to the Fury Man with a more serious face, even though she is still talking to me. “You see this already, Nalena? What I do? I put energees on man. Rings. And he decide what he do. You don’t put hand in or touch rings, okee?”

  I nod and take a step back.

  “Stand back is smart.” Mrs. Neho says. “Garrett, you back little more too, okee?”

  Garrett and I stand together behind her like trainees at Burger Shack. I wish I could hold Garrett’s hand, but besides the fact that we’re not supposed to touch, he’s mesmerized, leaning in to watch everything Mrs. Neho does.

  “Hee we go.” Mrs. Neho says. She rubs her hands together, fast, as if she’s trying to make sparks. “We see what he want to do, okee?”

  She closes her eyes. I glance around, figuring I’m supposed to be doing something again, but I have no idea what. Garrett doesn’t have his eyes closed like he did during the Memory. I follow Garrett’s gaze back to the Fury Man.

  The man is still passed out on the floor, but his hand twitches. I squint, trying to be sure it’s not my eyes playing tricks on me. But there it is again, another twitch. My eyes go so wide they pull at the corners. The Fury Man’s body begins to roll, one section at a time. It’s like his bones are made of rubber. His limbs keep rolling, pushing his body until he’s finally in an upright position, but his head flops around like a stuffed wet sock.

  My eyes dart back to Mrs. Neho. I expect to see rays of light shooting out of her, but there’s nothing. Her eyes are still closed. The Fury Man’s body wiggles around like a stirred worm, but Mrs. Neho looks so peaceful, she could be sunbathing.

  “Okee. Up you go, Joe,” Mrs. Neho says. Her palms pull back only a millimeter, but the Fury Man’s body shoots up, stick straight, into the air. His head clunks against the ceiling.

  “Whoops,” Mrs. Neho says as he drifts back down a couple inches. His head leaves a greasy little crop circle on the white ceiling and his dirty, untied shoes dangle at eye level.

  “Okee, Joe...hee we go.” Mrs. Neho sighs and closes her eyes. That’s when I see them. The rings are silver and they reach like ribs from behind the Fury Man. When they reach all the way around, touching in front of him, they begin to spin. They pick up speed and when I focus, I hear them hum like fan blades.

  “Not worry this part, okee, Nalena?” Mrs. Neho says. She’s looking at me. I feel my eyebrows bunched up toward my hairline and try to force them back down.

  “Okay,” I say.

  Then the Fury Man’s eyes pop open and his mouth drops and he screams as if he’s being stabbed. Shot. Tortured. Killed. All of it, all at once. I jump back. I know I’m not supposed to be worrying, but I can’t trap the shriek that bursts out of me.

  Garrett moves closer, I feel him there, but he doesn’t touch me. I still feel him, like warm waves of the sun. The Fury Man screams again.

  “Oh now,” Mrs. Neho says. “He extra trouble, this one. He gonna scream lots. He got to get it all out, before he decide.”

  The man shrieks again and my shoulders hit the wall. I didn’t even realize I’d backed up so far, maybe because Garrett is still next to me. His hands are clasped, resting against his body, but when I glance at them, his knuckles are white and his fingers are knotted. I think he’s holding his hands like that so he won’t reach for me.

  “This is normal,” he says, moving even closer. There is not enough space between Garrett and I to squeeze a fist, but we’re still not touching. I want him to break the rules, even if it is just a wisp of his hair brushing my cheek or his breath over my lips or a fingertip on my elbow. But he doesn’t. His hands stay clasped.

  “Is he dying?”

  “No,” Mrs. Neho says. “He reviewing life and the bad choices he make.”

  “Look at his eyes.” Garrett whispers to me. “If you look, you can tell that he’s not really in there. He’s not in physical pain. He’s literally out of his mind right now.”

  “Then why does he keep screaming?” My last word is drowned by another shriek from the man.

  “We seeing he emotion.” Mrs. Neho says. “He reviewing he life. Inside he mind. Selfish make you numb, but now he not numb. He standing in shoe of other people he do wrong and he finally understand consequence of actions.”

  The Fury Man’s face crumples from the last scream, his skin sags, and his mouth quivers open. He begins to sob.

  “Crying good sign.” Mrs. Neho adds pleasantly over her shoulder.

  “Is he going to die?”

  “Maybe.” Mrs. Neho shrugs. “Depend on him. It depend on if he want to face what he done. If he want to try and change or if he got too much to handle. He might decide…pass on. We just here to make sure he go through it and has choice.”

  The Fury Man shrieks again.

  “I’d just die.” I say, rubbing my arms. Some non-existent draft jumps up in the room.

  “It seems like it’d be easier doesn’t it?” Garrett’s eyes travel over my frantic hands and his voice becomes deeper, more soothing. But his face says dying wouldn’t be the easy way out at all.

  The Fury Man suddenly shuts his mouth. His eyelids droop. The rings slow down until they’re wobbling around him like bent bicycle tires.

  “Oh no, Joe. You sure you want go that way?” Mrs. Neho says. Almost in the same instant, the Fury Man drops right through the bottom of the rings and crashes on the floor. Mrs. Neho drops her hands at her sides with a shrug and a sigh. “Guess so.”

  “Is he dead?” I ask.

  “Like doe-nail,” Mrs. Neho says. “Okee. I go now, but you call Emen quick, okee, Garrett? They busy and you don’t want dead guy wreck you rental floor.”

  Mrs. Neho’s gone as fast as she showed up and we’re sitting in the pitch-black storage shed with the body. Garrett gets on the phone the minute she’s gone and calls for the people Mrs. Neho said would pick up the body. I’ve never been this close to a dead body in my life, never been to a funeral with a casket and a dead person inside.

  And the creepy thing is that even though the Fury Man is dead, I still can’t look away. When I try, my eyes rivet right back to the dead guy on the floor.

  “He’s not going to do anything to anybody now,” I say. “How come I can’t look away?”

  “It takes a while to register,” Garrett chuckles. “So let me just teach you how to override your protection instinct, so you’
ll stop looking at other men.”

  I would like to laugh at it, but looking at the guy on the floor, I can’t. All I can do is focus on being sure the dead guy is actually dead and every time I blink I swear he’s twitched, even though I know he hasn’t. Garrett starts talking even though I don’t look at him.

  “You’ve got to see that what you’re looking at is the same as a seashell on the beach,” he says. “From your peripheral vision, look to the right of the body.”

  The body.

  It makes me want to puke, but I do what Garrett says. My gaze seems stuck on the bristles of the Fury Man’s patchy beard, but if I stretch my vision, I see a mist gathering off to the right. The more I focus on it, the more I see it’s not mist at all. It’s the Fury Man, crouched beside his own body, crying. His face is in his hands. It’s more disturbing to watch him sob than it is to have his dead body in the same room with me.

  “He crying,” I say, choking up as I watch. “Can you see him?”

  “Yes.” Garrett says.

  “How come he’s still here? Isn’t he supposed to cross over or something?”

  “He pulled the emergency lever on the exit hatch.” Garrett says. “He went too early.”

  “But I don’t get why he’s crying.”

  “He’s seen his mistakes,” Garrett says, “but now he has no way to fix them. Dying probably seemed like an easier way out, but he probably didn’t believe that his problems would follow him into the afterlife. But now he’s got to face everything, without any possibility of fixing it. Now that there’s no gain for anything, what’s left is experiencing the emotions of everyone else involved in each situation and how his actions affected them. The consequence of giving up and moving on is that he’s lost his hope.”

  “How do you know all that?” I ask.

  “From the people who have been through the rings and decide to stay,” Garrett says. “Like Zane’s dad. He came back from the rings, straightened himself out, and now he’s one of our best.”

  I watch the Fury Man, sob and sob and sob. Garrett’s right- it’s not like I have to watch anymore, but I’m still fascinated. I’m watching a ghost. I wonder if this was what it was like for my mom when she wrote them. If they sobbed as they stood in line to be written. I watch the Fury Man and wonder, if Roger ever had a moment like this, when he regretted killing my grandfather or my mom. He sure didn’t seem remorseful at all when he plowed his way through our Memory ceremony.

  “We should look for my grandfather’s Memory,” I say, since my eyes are finally off the Fury Man. “What do you think it looks like?”

  “It’d be a piece of paper,” Garrett says as we stare at the heaps and piles of paper all around us. We both sigh.

  As I take a good look around, where I’m at really sinks in. The air is still, but it seems to scrape on my arms. This shed holds my entire life up to a couple months ago, packed into one cold room.

  Our old couch is set on its side a few steps away from me. The end cushion is still sunken down from having milk crates of paper stacked on it for so long. My mom’s shoes poke out of an open box, along with her summer jacket and her purse that always reminded me of a bloated dachshund.

  I pull the box toward me and peer in, pushing the jacket aside. One of her bracelets is at the bottom, one of her treasured pieces of junk jewelry that will probably turn my skin yellow. I smile as I slip it on my arm. I take out her hairbrush, still threaded with her hair, and lay it beside me. And then I spot something that doesn’t belong in this place at all. I lift out the photo of my father, the one in the brass frame that my mother kept hung on our living room wall.

  I’ve looked at it a zillion times since I was little, memorized it, and finally accepted the photo’s presence in our house and in our lives. It is as familiar and meaningful as our couch.

  The photo is a black and white. Roger’s face is a little blurred, as if the focus was too close. His head is tipped down to one side, like he’s trying not to be caught laughing, so his almost-profile fills the whole frame.

  When we lived in our house, my mother hung him on the wall and when we had to move to our apartment, she hung him up there too. I’d pass him on my way to wherever I was going- the fridge, my bed, to go out.

  I’d made up fantasies of him when I was little, nothing too eccentric, because I couldn’t imagine much about him from just his blurry face. I thought up fantasies of how he would come back and how we would suddenly be like the families on TV. Later on, I made up fantasies of him coming back to us with huge apologies for being gone so long and then, probably since eighth or ninth grade, I just passed by his picture and tried not to think of him at all, because I finally realized he wasn’t thinking of us.

  Staring at his picture now, the only thing I see is that he was too much of a coward to show his face to the camera.

  “That’s your dad, isn’t it?” Garrett says from over my shoulder. It’s such an acceptable thing to say, it’s the truth even, but it hits me in a place that isn’t protected by bones.

  “No,” I say. “That’s the guy that killed my mom.”

  A scratchy and uncomfortable silence follows, like I just drew a line down the middle of the shed, with Garrett on one side and me on the other. I didn’t mean to do that. Tears suddenly pierce the corners of my eyes.

  “I just…” The knuckle in my throat cuts me off. Garrett waits for me to finish.

  “I don’t want to be part of him,” I finally say. And then everything tumbles out of me. “He’s killed my family…and he is my family. He’s part of me and there’s nothing I can do about it. Parts of him are parts of me.”

  “Nalena,” Garrett’s voice is soft. “You’re not a duplicate. You’re you. And your dad wasn’t some bad seed. He wasn’t born evil. I’m sure he was a good man once, but he just ended up making a lot of wrong choices…”

  “Wrong choices?” I jump to my feet, the frame in my hand and the tears streaming down my face. “Murder isn’t a wrong choice, Garrett! He killed people! He wanted to kill me! If he wasn’t evil to start with, than the same thing could happen to me! Roger was a coward and a murderer and I DON’T WANT TO BE HIS DAUGHTER!”

  I reel back and whip the frame as hard as I can, across the shed. It hits the wall and explodes, the frame and the glass scattering on the storage-shed floor.

  Paper flutters down on top of the broken pieces. Garrett reaches for me and I throw myself into his arms. In this moment, I have to touch him because there’s no other way out of this moment for me, unless I do. I don’t care if he drains away every last ounce of my energy. I just need to feel like there’s someone else who believes that I will never end up like Roger.

  Garrett rubs my back as I hiccup and sob and make horrible noises that he should never hear me make. But the indigo feeling of his touch slows me down and the grief trickles away, leaving behind a wide, damp ring on Garrett’s shirt. We step away from each other.

  “Sorry,” I say.

  “For what?” he says, as if it’s nothing. As if I wasn’t just sniveling on his chest. He walks to the wall where the broken frame landed and squats down, grabbing some paper to use as a makeshift dustpan. He sifts through the glass and frame bits and looks up at me. “Nalena, did you know there were other things in the frame, behind that picture?”

  “What things?” I drift over to him. He holds out a picture and a business card that I’ve never seen before. The picture is an old black-and-white with white milky dots on it, like something dripped on it, but I can still make out most of what’s in the photo. There’s an old fashioned black car that looks brand new. It has a slashy, silver stripe racing down the side and a bunch of teenagers are lined up and leaning on it. I recognize my mother instantly, right in the center, young and lit up with a grin. Her arm is around a young Roger—I recognize him from the only time I saw him in person, rather than his picture. He is leaning on one hip, his arm slung over her shoulder like he owns not just her, but maybe even the entire world.

&nbs
p; My mom’s angled, with her back to another boy. He’s looks to be about the same age as Roger, but taller. His lips are pulled into a smug, reckless smile aimed straight at the camera and his thumbs are hooked into his front pockets with shotgun fingers, pointing at his crotch.

  Beside the reckless boy is a blond girl. I can only tell it’s a girl because she’s wearing a long skirt. One of the white drips covers most of her face, but she’s plastered against the boy’s side and has one knee, beneath her skirt, overlapping the boy’s leg. One arm is thrown back in the air, another white drip cutting a half circle out of her hand, and her other arm is looped through his, as if he’s a pole that she’s dancing on.

  On the other side of Roger is a third girl, the youngest looking of all of them, with a slouchy boy next to her. The girl is gangly, with a limp ponytail and a face like the tip of a pencil, leading out to the sharpened point of her nose. Even though her face is pointed toward the camera, leaning against the front fender with her hands behind her back, her gaze is actually sideways and glued to the side of Roger’s face. The boy next to her isn’t looking at the camera at all. He’s got one hip on the fender of the car, leaning toward the pencil-faced girl, as if he’s impatiently waiting to talk to her.

  The only thing written on the back of the picture is in my mom’s writing and it says: The gang and Dad’s new car.

  The business card is yellow and smudged on one corner and says Big Dog’s Junkyard followed by an address I don’t recognize. When I flip it over, the unfamiliar scrawl on the back says:

  angie—

  Call me. PLEASE.

  Ig

  “Who’s Ig?” Garrett asks.

  “No idea,” I say. I race through everyone my mom knew, but there’s not many people. My mom didn’t have friends. She didn’t hang out with anyone but me. We didn’t have any family, alive or dead, with that name or even those initials. None of the social workers or office supplies clerks or grocery store cashiers even had names that started with an I and I doubt they’d give my mom a junkyard card or that she’d keep it.