by Chris Vola
Hendricks’ eyebrows raise up a little. “John,” he says, “is my name, Josh. You know that. But I’m not from –”
“She told me you were never engaged,” I say. I stare at his flashing BlackBerry. At the pistol-bulge above his waist.
“Excuse me.”
“How long have you been fucking her?”
He stares at me for a long time, then looks down at the folders. He stacks them, places them back into the briefcase. He sighs. “I take it you aren’t going to like the terms, Mr. Bennington. I can see that we might as well skip this.” He shuts the briefcase, stands up, straightens out his pants. “We’ll be back in an hour or two to pick you up.”
“Get the fuck out of here,” I hiss.
He holds up his hands, palms out. “Easy, Josh, you don’t need to –”
“Get the fuck out. Stay away from my family.”
Hendricks laughs. “You’ve got it all wrong, X,” he says. “I’m here to bring us together.”
I’M HOLDING THE shattered cabinet lock in one hand, a hammer in the other. The rows of prescriptions gleam under the warm bathroom light, winking. Xanax, Percocet, Codeine, Ativan, Zoloft, Ambien, Adderall, a couple more I’ve never heard of with Lauren’s name on them, one for Alaska.
Scoop them into my lap.
As I’m shutting the cabinet door I notice a Post-it note stuck to the mirror. Lauren’s handwriting.
BILLY – WALK @ 5
Right. Billy’s coming to take me for a walk to the beach. In less than an hour. Got to get ready. Billy loves taking me for walks. Almost as much as he loves getting wasted.
I press REVERSE, fling the hammer against the wall and watch the tiles shatter.
I’M TWENTY-FIVE YEARS old. I have a house with no mortgage. I have three bank accounts at three government-subsidized banks. I’ve got an Audi A6 coupe. When that car breaks down, there’d be another one sitting in my driveway, then another.
I have the most comprehensive insurance possible.
I thought that Lauren had quit her job to do what I’d imagined she’s always wanted to do – to take care of me, to become the mother I didn’t let her become, to sit on the little beach at the end of the street reading trashy novels, I don’t know. Her life, our life, would be a free ride. The most we’d ever have to worry about is where we’d be going to grab dinner, or what color crayons to pack in Alaska’s Hannah Montana knapsack. We’d have a clean slate. The luckiest family living a perfect dream.
But it isn’t a dream; she and Billy made me a prisoner.
I’m sitting at the dining table in front of three Scotch glasses, a joint laced with Hydrocodone, an unopened bottle of bourbon and a plastic cup filled with grape juice. The bourbon is Old Rip Van Winkle 107-Proof, some fancy hipster shit Lauren brought with her from the City. Perhaps a gift? I’ve emptied out the contents of all the prescription bottles and piled them randomly on a white plastic cutting board. Using a rolling pin to crush them, covering the table and my lap in Pixy Stix dust. Scooping the dust into small piles with one of Lauren’s credit cards, then distributing it evenly between the glasses. I notice what look like two whole Xanax that I must have missed in the last roll-through. I pick them up, pop them in my mouth. Can’t get sidetracked, though. Lauren should have been back and Billy will be here soon.
Billy. Billy, Billy, Billy. I slide the word around my mouth as I swallow another three Ativans I find scattered on my lap. Who does it signify? Billy the Fishing Buddy, the link to a time before time, to the almost-remembered days of muddy shorts and squirt-gun fights. Billy the Absent Soldier, fighting across the sea while I waded through my own booze-soaked collegiate blear. He came back and he was Billy the Cripple, fatter, grumpier, probably more lovable to the casual ironic observer. But he wasn’t lovable because he was really Billy the Seductive Agent, Billy the Liar, Billy the Complicit – I remember. He knew and did nothing. Worse than nothing, I’m just along for the ride. He faded away again, only to appear in shining, bullet-resistant armor and swoop down, ghostlike, at the exact moment I needed him. Billy the Savior. There’s a serious problem with that scenario. Ghosts aren’t real, bro.
His knack for appearing was impeccable, though. Just like it is now. Taking care of Alaska when I was in the hospital, picking up groceries for us, completing heavy-duty backyard projects, a genuine handyman. Keeping company with me on walks to the fucking beach. Like Wilson from Home Improvement, doling out faceless wisdom and cheer from behind the fence. But I’ve seen over the fence, Billy. Your face isn’t a ghost’s face. Davis was never a real issue.
It started with you, Billy.
The sound of the Audi in the driveway. Shit. The porch door opens.
“What do you think you’re doing?” Lauren screeches from across the room. Way to be original.
“I talked to John today,” I say as I grind up the last of the Percocets. “He wanted to know where his dirty cunt was.”
A pause. “Huh? Hendricks. Where did you –”
“He wanted to know where his dirty little cunt was.” No eye contact. Focus on the potion. Pale orange dust cakes my thumbs. I hear her take a few steps closer.
“I told him his little cunt was out buying groceries,” I say, all weird and sing-songey.
She notices the shit stains covering the photographs on the bookshelf. “Sick fuck,” she mutters. More sad than angry. Cliché sniffling, the tears.
Don’t give me this fake pity. I’d be careful. I’d walk away.
Of course she doesn’t. I hear her scurry up behind, feel her tiny clam-fingers latch onto my left wrist. I’m ready. I snatch the nearest Scotch glass and in one semi-circular motion slam the base of it into her hand as hard as I can. It’s not a movie because the glass doesn’t shatter; there’s only the Pixy spray, a dull crunch near her wrist and the shift of something hard under the skin. Oops. Then it goes limp. Squeals, then she runs. I swivel around in the chair and chuck the glass at her, but she’s already out the door and into her car and the glass does shatter this time, but it’s only against some old soiled picture frames with nothing in them.
BEING IN A rush, Lauren’s forgotten Alaska. She must have been on the porch the whole time, because a couple minutes after the dramatic exit, there’s a tug on my elbow. I wipe the Percocet dust from under my nose, place my hand on her teary-freckled head.
“Daddy?” she sniffles.
“What’s wrong,” I ask, gently.
“What did you do to Mommy?” she asks.
I chuckle, lift her up onto my lap. “You’re wrong, honey,” I whisper. “Mommy did something to me. Don’t let her trick you, too.”
She’s shivering, pig tails in a blue party dress. Red ribbons. “Daddy,” she asks, “why is there blood coming out of your nose?”
I jiggle her around on my lap. “You’re getting heavy,” I say, even though I know she can’t feel the weight. “How would you like some grape juice?”
“Why is there a hole in the TV?”
“You like grape juice.”
She nods, unnerved, scans the room. The broken glass on the floor. The half-crushed pill salad. The fizzy brown liquid I’ve been stirring. She looks at me, nods.
“Good girl,” I say. I reach for the plastic cup, press it into her extended hands. “You’ll feel better.” I nuzzle my nose into her hair, mussing it with a few congealing chunks of dust and blood.
“Finish all of it and we can play a game,” I say, wiping the tears out of her eyes as she takes a sip. Her face brightens. Four-year-old's ADD. “That’s right,” I say. “A fun game.”
“What kind of game?” she asks, takes another big gulp.
“Sort of like hide and seek,” I say, “except that Daddy will know where you are the whole time. OK?”
“OK,” she says. She takes another big gulp. The glass is almost empty. I take it out of her hands, place it back on the table.
“You’re a little piggy,” I say, scrunching my nose. She giggles. “Let’s find you a good hiding sp
ot.”
“OK!” She’s excited. She loves games.
I navigate the chair toward the kitchen with her still on my lap. She loves to take rides on it. The chair crunches over more shards of glass and flung dinner plates, oddly bent forks, grapefruit spoons. We take a left into a semi-dark hallway – whitewashed walls, a few random prints of fish and sand dollars. A couple more feet and there’s the outline of a cubby hole, a tiny closet where Lauren stashes the beach towels and other nonsense. I nudge Alaska off the chair.
“Open the cubby.”
She slides down my legs, dress in disarray, tumbles into the wall, squeals happily. She scrambles to her feet, undoes the cubby’s metal latch, just like Lauren showed her. She’s smart. Inside the cubby are folded piles of pink and yellow fabric.
Alaska looks up at me. “I feel sleepy,” she says.
“That’s good. Climb inside the cubby and you can take a nap. Under the towels.”
“But Mommy said –”
“You’re hiding from Mommy,” I cut her off. “That’s why she ran out so fast. She’s counting to a million and then she’s going to try to find you. If you fall asleep, it’s OK because I know where you’ll be. Hurry up and climb in because I need to find my own place to hide.”
“OK!”
She dives into the cubby, squirms around a little until she ends up on her back with her knees pressed to her chest, womb-ish.
“I’m going to shut the door now,” I say. “Then I’m going to hide, too.”
She nods, all serious. “Good luck, Daddy.”
The sound of a diesel engine chugging into the driveway.
“Remember,” I say to Alaska, “don’t say anything, even if you get scared. Whoever Mommy finds last is the winner.”
WE’RE SITTING ON the dock that juts out from the beach at the end of my street. Or, more accurately, I’m sitting and Billy’s behind me, leaning against the wheelchair handles, sucking on a joint laced with Hydrocodone. His stomach is sucking on three ounces of bourbon and a dyslexic elephant’s dose of pill stew. I’m surprised he’s still standing after the first few stereotypical chugs. Didn’t even bother to come inside, I brought it right to the porch door, down the wheelchair ramp he says he built. We clinked glasses and the booze was gone, just like that. Billy loves getting wasted.
The tide is up, slushing over the top of the salt-stained concrete seawall behind us, drowning the wooden posts that are the only remainders of a private jetty that’s been disassembled for the winter. Brown reeds, dead tidal grasses, and errant pilings of filthy snow bristle and cling to the sandy earth. It’s after 6:00 and the sinking sky is grimy, a colorless cavity dipped in a vague apricot blaze. Black wood-smoke from a nearby cottage drifts out over the water.
“We should be able to see the plane in a minute or two,” Billy says in between hits.
“Your dad’s lucky,” I say.
“We’re all lucky,” he says. I can’t tell if he’s being sarcastic. I’m so high.
I’d forgotten that the reason he wanted to walk to the beach is because of his old man. Duh. Billy’s just gotten back from dropping him off at the airport. Fred Whitmire is currently on a Navy cargo plane headed to a laboratory tucked away somewhere in Wyoming or Nevada. All expenses paid. According to Billy, they’ve got a team of doctors who have been working for decades on developing a series of anti-chemical vaccines. Saviors of the coming biological apocalypse, fighting back the camel jockeys with microscopic needles and Petri dishes full of pond scum. “Great stuff, this latest batch!” One of its most interesting, and unexpected, properties has been its uncanny healing potency in soldiers who were exposed to the less frightening, now-obsolete chemical agents du jour – Agent Orange in Vietnam and VX nerve gas in Desert Storm. Billy’s old man’s going to be the third or fourth human test subject, and the others are all disease-free so far. Lucky. Or the logical result of another bald-faced exchange. Compensation for services rendered.
Billy coughs, stomps out the joint. “Heard you were at Wal-Mart,” he says. He’s wearing a camouflage jacket and steel-toed boots. Rugged strength. Never crippled. The words flame-resistant fabric scream like a digital banner.
“Today’s most viewed headline.”
A plane engine rumbles somewhere far away.
“She’s in the emergency room.”
I shrug, reach for the REVERSE button.
“They wanted me to talk to you before you’re taken. Get you out of the house so they could take some pictures, make sure Alaska’s OK.”
“Take me.”
He takes a BlackBerry out of his jacket pocket. Starting to sweat. “I thought I could take care of you like the first time,” he says. “It’s worse.”
The sound of cars coming up the road, fast. I swivel around and there’s Agent Hendricks’ Ford Explorer, trailed by a Black Range Rover. The doors swing open and two men get out. Navy suits, aviators, slick hair. Agent Hendricks gets out of his SUV, says something to them, walks into the house. The other two men are staring at Billy and me. One lights a cigarette. The back doors of the Range Rover open – younger guy with dark skin in an impeccable gray Fiovarati suit, the other one old, mangy gray hair and beard in a red polo.
“Thirty months inside must have been tough,” Billy says. He coughs, looks at his hands. “The surgeries, the induced coma. Fuck, man, no one should have to go through that. But you’re lucky to be alive after…flipping that many times. Volvos weren’t meant for that kind of shit. And then to be stranded on the highway for almost an hour before Davis found you. Fuck. Stupid to keep saying, but I wish I’d been back from Iraq. Maybe I would have been driving.
Wake me up.
“Hoped it wouldn’t be like before, obviously, but at least... No one – me, Davis, Lauren, your mother – none of us want to see you go back to Virginia. But now it’s a question of control. One you can’t answer, and I’m sorry it took all of us this long to admit it.”
As Billy’s jabbering, teary even, I notice his pupils are dilating. His face is flushed and he’s sweating. Thin strands of foam appear on both sides of his mouth. His arms convulse and he sort of crumples over, leans on the back of my chair for support. Finally.
The two men from the back seat of the Range Rover are walking toward us. One’s holding a camcorder, raised in front of his face, the RECORD light gleaming.
“Not going,” I say.
“H-h-huh-hu…” Billy’s hyperventilating, going into respiratory shock.
I press REVERSE. The chair scoots back and he collapses on the dock, his left side dangling over the freeze-lined water. The plane is loud now, directly overhead. It’s a black helicopter. The men from the Range Rover break into a sprint. The one with gray hair is holding a large syringe.
“W-Wh-Wh,” Billy stutters, looking at me, crying. Convulsing hard. Drool on his camouflage jacket.
“Because we died, Billy.”
He tries to grab my leg. I press FORWARD and the chair’s wheels nudge him into the water without much effort. There’s a big splash and my legs are soaked, but I can’t feel anything. Gargling below the water line, a last raspy struggle.
Yes, Billy, it’s because we died.
I was forced into the dark and wallowed in that mind-pit. I saw the monkey trainers and the monkey killers, the wolves in red shirts camouflage, the agents of the (mis)informed. And also the casualties. In joining the dead I exercised control, you saw it, made my mark from behind the curtain. By returning to the living, I forfeited that control. You remember.
You knew what the good times cost. Hendricks was wrong. Lauren was wrong. You were wrong.
It wasn’t my choice.
I can’t take it back.
17
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