Harlan Coben

by The Best American Mystery Stories 2011

  When Gerald got home, the house was empty and quiet. Upstairs Dolores’s clothes, the ones that Audi had worn, were scattered across the floor. The bed was unmade. He left it all there. In the kitchen the remains of the biscuits sat in the sink. His Christmas present, Audi’s artwork, audacious, lay on the kitchen table. He picked it up and carried it into the living room and propped it on the TV.

  He looked at his gift. The colors were still vibrant and glowing beneath the glass. The lines were fine but dark where Audi had traced. He pictured her small fingers, spending hours meticulously following the paths already set into the paper. Her lines followed those paths, the ones that split out in a thousand directions, one way leading to three more, each of those three leading to three new ones, on and on, the paths circling each other and spreading out and falling together again, a patchwork of possibilities spread across the once-blank field of the paper.

  He had thought of the other possibilities, of course, all the other paths. The other lives that he might have lived had always hidden somewhere in his subconscious, specters of other Geralds in other worlds where things were not the same. Worlds where he did other jobs, lived in other cities, married other women. Worlds where Dolores wasn’t dead, worlds where he’d never even met her. All the different paths, and now these new ones: he catches Audi out there in the snowy night, before she disappears into shadow, and she sobs into his chest, and they get back into the car. They go on living together, but for how long and for what purpose and under what pretense, he doesn’t know. Or maybe he adopts her, but that one could never be. Her parents would keep looking for her. They’d never allow it.

  And the last one, the one he felt in his stomach and pushed aside with his brain. Her leg wrapped so tightly around his. Her lashes on his chest. No, he thought, shaking his head. No.

  All those different paths, traced so carefully with delicate fingers.

  The wind had died down, and the snow was falling again. He wrapped himself up in a blanket and sat down on the couch and closed his eyes. The heater clicked on. Gerald listened to its ticks and pings and rumbles as the heat moved through the empty rooms.

  Something Pretty, Something Beautiful

  Eric Barnes

  FROM Prairie Schooner

  WE DIDN’T START breaking into houses to steal things. The four of us started breaking into houses simply to see what would happen.

  By the time we were eighteen, we were still doing it because none of us had found any reason to stop.

  ”Now,” Will Wilson whispers, waving me forward, then silently pushing me over the high windowsill of another house we’ve broken into in Tacoma.

  When we were little kids, like eight or nine years old, my friend Teddy and I would walk home from Sherman Elementary together collecting bottle caps and Popsicle sticks and cigarette butts. We searched the grass and the sidewalks, under bus stop benches and around paper boxes, keeping what we found in secret pockets we made in the lining of our jackets. Teddy and I would walk home in the rain, racing the cigarette butts and Popsicle sticks along the narrow streams of water in the gutters; then days or weeks later, when it was dry, we searched for the butts and sticks in the stiff, matted mess around the sewer drains.

  Teddy and I were best friends.

  On rainy days back at Sherman, Teddy and I built dams during recess in the dirt near the long-jump pit. The rainwater ran through the pit in a shallow, foot-wide stream as it flowed along the far side of the schoolyard toward a big iron drain. Other kids came out to make dams too, but Teddy and me were always the first there, building the main dam, a tapering arc six inches high and five feet across, leaving the other kids to make small dams and beg us to release some water.

  I remember being out there in my corduroys and nylon coat, wet like everyone else. None of us wearing raincoats. It’s as if it rained so much no one bothered to fight it. Except Teddy. Teddy always wore one of those bright yellow slickers, curls of black hair bursting from beneath the yellow hood. Scraping more dirt toward the dam with his yellow rubber boots.

  And as recess went on and our dam got to be seven and eight inches high at the front, now ten feet around, the kids below would always start their really loud yelling, wanting us to break our dam, to let the water rush down and wreck theirs. But Teddy and me always held out, even when one of the kids tried to kick a hole in our dam—one of the hyperactive kids, usually, the ones that every day had to go to the nurse’s office to take their medication. The ones like Michael Coe, who we weren’t friends with then and didn’t ever want to have to talk to.

  I had to push Coe away once, after he tried to kick at our dam. He was a low, heavy kid with a buzz cut and tight T-shirt. I knocked him into a small mud puddle, and he went into this frenzy, whipping himself in circles and screaming and his face turning red. Coe told on me, and the teacher made us put our desks together for a week, and that, we always said, is how we became friends. Although, really, that is how Coe started following Teddy and me to my house after school, showing up uninvited when me and my babysitter and Teddy were playing Wiffle bat baseball or eating bologna sandwiches. How, after a while, Coe started bringing his new friend Will Wilson over to my house.

  But on those rainy days in the dirt, when the bell to end recess would finally ring, on those days Teddy would only then begin to smile, carefully moving to the very front of our big dam, the other kids now yelling happily and jumping up and down and Coe and the hyperactive ones turning in fast circles, flailing their bodies onto the hard, wet ground, the teachers a hundred yards away, screaming at us from the dry doorways, and Teddy with the tip of his round, brightly booted yellow foot, he’d make just a nick in the dirt of our dam and the water would begin to trickle out.

  And Coe and the other hyper ones would be breaking their thin little dams even before the water had reached them, the water flowing faster through the now bigger break in ours, Teddy pacing back and forth, staring and watching and smiling.

  And sometimes I thought I wanted to smash the wall of our dam, jump on it with my wet sneakers and let the water rush down. But I never did that to Teddy.

  And I remember now a day when I looked past the kids around us, seeing some new kid leaning against the high chainlink fence, watching us all and smiling too. Smiling like Teddy was. Smiling like he understood something more. Although now, when I think of him, I think of Will Wilson in that first moment, and he had a lean face, older, eighteen, not eight.

  Will Wilson did look young then, I know. He’d been just a child. But I can’t remember that so well.

  But I remember standing next to Teddy, so satisfied with him. Teddy, my best friend, dry beneath his coat, me wet and warm in the rain, both of us watching our dam in the schoolyard, smiling as it went through its slow self-destruction.

  Old Town was the wealthiest area of Tacoma, an area that we sometimes drove through just to look at, to see it. And as I cross that sill into the darkness of this house in Old Town, I see the black shapes of unseen furniture, gray light from a window. Touch my feet to a wood floor, then carpet, feel around me the full and spreading silence, and even then I can’t explain it, can only sense it and want it, but from that moment, like the first moment we ever entered a house, the break-in is about the violation itself, the entering of a space that isn’t ours, that is protected not by guns or bars or even locks but by an assumption of safety. An assumption that we—with one easy motion—have taken hold of and destroyed.

  And like most every time before, I now turn to Will Wilson, standing with him in the shadows of a wall, the two of us smiling as we think of the owners and their children upstairs asleep. Oblivious to it all.

  When we were seventeen and eighteen, we’d wake up at Will Wilson’s house. It was a house on an empty road between two neighborhoods, some unplanned midpoint between subdivisions. It was like a lot of places I remember in Tacoma, one of those forgotten roads lined by high fences and tall, overgrown bushes and lit just barely by intermittent streetlights. Sometimes the
re’d be a store, a corner store with faded advertisements for cigarette deals and inexpensive beer, and in a few places there’d be duplexes or old storefronts, doors that faced these forgotten roads, dark doorways that looked abandoned until you looked close and you saw something, mail in the mailbox or the flickering blue light of a TV behind a curtain or a tricycle pressed against the side of the building, and you realized that someone was home.

  It was always damp in Will Wilson’s house and it smelled bad, and you’d wake up on the thin hard carpet feeling sick and like you’d never slept at all. His stepdad was always teaching himself to play the guitar, this bright pink guitar he’d bought at a pawn shop and that he’d rigged up to run through the old console stereo that filled one wall of the living room, which was one of only a few rooms in that whole house, so a lot of the time I’d end up sleeping against that hard wooden stereo with the tan cloth over the speakers. I’d wake up hearing the feedback still ringing quietly from the speakers, my face against the floor and having to pee, feeling cold and wet in my jacket, wet maybe from the night before out in the rain or just wet from the air in the house, with the curtains pulled shut and the floor and couch almost damp when you touched them. I’d wake up in the silence, turning over and staring up at that gray ceiling sprayed rough with texture and mixed with the thousand glimmering bits of pink and green and gold, lying there feeling so gray through my body, hurting, and wanting to throw up, and staring up at that ceiling and now hearing the buzz from the speakers next to me and hearing the others sleeping in the room and remembering all that beer we’d drunk and the half gallon of gin and the dope his cousin’s friend had had, because you couldn’t not remember it, every drink and all that smoke now so deep in every part of your body, turned sick now and dying, and for me staring at that ceiling glimmering pink and green, I could remember every drink and every breath of smoke and would feel it still, wondering now if I was really sick or just stoned or drunk, all of it turning bad through the end of the night, that fight in your mind that you’d forgotten in the drinking and smoking and that had finally just sunk you, so you’d only known to drink more, drinking through the smoking hoping another drink would make you feel like you had when you’d started, that soft, warm moment of the first hit of the pot and the first sip of the first drink. But now it was lost, everything awful, and worn, and gone. And I’d sit up finally, among my sleeping friends, finding Will Wilson sitting up, on the couch, sipping a beer, staring at me, gray eyes in a leathered face, nodding at me like he’d never gone to sleep.

  Bad things had happened. I’d feel my hand then and know we’d gone out and fought. Know we’d driven to each corner of Tacoma. I’d close my eyes and see dark figures tearing at each other, hidden faces in the black backyards of the houses we’d passed, faces turning gray as they ran in groups through the pale white light of empty parking lots.

  And I’d blink my eyes and know there’d been a dream I’d just woken up from, that I couldn’t quite remember, a dream of the hidden faces in groups, in backyards, roaming.

  Bad things had happened. We’d started here and ended up here, on this floor, in the quiet of this small, forgotten, almost unidentifiable home.

  “What happened?” I’d ask Will Wilson then, my mouth hurting just to speak.

  And he’d sip beer. “Fuck you,” he’d say, swallowing. “You know. You know what happened.”

  “Hung over,” I’d say, and close my eyes, touch them lightly with one hand, then another, pain shooting through my eyes to the top of my head, my neck, the front of my chest.

  “Fuck you,” he’d say. “You were right there.”

  And I’d still have my eyes in my hand, pressing just that bit harder, the pain going white, with the other hand finding a Valium in the pocket of my jeans, slipping it across my lips, biting it once before swallowing it down.

  And I’d be nodding now. Saying, “Right,” realizing my face was damp too, like the carpet and my jacket and the insides of my jeans, and I’d know that I was damp from this house we were in and from the rain we’d run through and from the sweat of all that we’d done. “Yes,” I’d say. “Yes, you’re right.”

  Coe’s low, heavy body is moving so gracefully in the dark, silently bouncing on couches, stretching out easily on carpets, walking quietly across dining room tables. He is trying to circle the room without stepping on the floor, hiking up his badly fitting jeans as he noiselessly leaps from a piano bench to a radiator to a TV on a rolling stand that he uses to pull himself three feet before the cord goes tight. And only when he seems on the verge of thrashing about and finally making noise does Will Wilson step in front of him and grab his face at the jaw, shake it: No.

  Often the four of us don’t speak at all. We just move our lips or point.

  The guy was still smiling as I broke his first finger. My hand already holding his thick, wet hair, pulling his head back and another finger back, and I was pulling him to the ground, the side of his head smacking loud against the sidewalk, the second finger breaking easily in my hand.

  When I was a child, one night I watched my dad lean over the kitchen sink, washing blood from his swollen face as I stood near my babysitter. There’s nothing you can’t do in a fight, Brian, he said to me quietly, his voice slowed and heavy. Long hair in his blue eyes. Pushing his fingers along the thin lines leading to his lips. Twenty-two years old. Maybe twenty-three. You just want to win, Brian. You just want to hurt him.

  I was hitting this guy in the face now, striking his nose, his eye, his cheek. We were in front of a mini-market near school, and it was raining, hard, after school and this guy, eighteen, he’d pushed Teddy hard into a door, being cool in front of his friends, this guy from school who’d tried to push Teddy around a few times that week, and today I’d told him to fuck off, and he’d turned to me, smiling, leaning close and pointing his finger in my face, smiling down at me, a foot or more taller.

  “Fucker,” I said quietly, feeling the light rain against my lips as I spoke. Breathing steadily, finding a rhythm between my words and motions. Feeling all that anger, feeling it run through my chest and arms and hands.

  And I turned slightly as I swung, seeing Teddy standing near the window of the store. Watching.

  And the guy’s friends, they hadn’t moved.

  Will Wilson had shown up. Standing near Teddy. Not smiling, just watching. He carefully sat down. Cross-legged on the wet sidewalk. Watching.

  The guy rolled away from me, standing and turning and trying to find me, his right eye covered with blood and the left side of his face bleeding too, his twisted hand wiping at his good eye, and when he saw me he came at me. Not wildly. Moving forward, saying, “No,” and breathing hard. Swinging straight and almost hitting me again. “No.”

  I hit him in the throat and he leaned over. I moved to my left. Watching him gag. I kicked him in the chest.

  “Don’t ever,” I said. Spitting blood from my lips. Tasting blood in my throat. “Don’t ever fuck with my friend.”

  Teddy had stepped forward. Standing on the curb, a few feet away. Watching.

  The guy’s nose poured red and yellow. He sat up. I knocked him onto his back.

  My hands were wet with spit and blood and rain.

  I was tired. I was mad.

  The guy looked toward his friends, three of them standing on the sidewalk. He stared at them for a moment but didn’t ask for help. Didn’t expect them to do anything.

  I hit him in the ear. His face hit the street. He was laid out on his side. In a moment, he asked dully, “Why won’t you stop?”

  I was tired. I was mad. I didn’t know why exactly.

  Will Wilson stood up now. I turned to look at him, and behind him, in the window of the store, I could see my reflection. Hair so wet in the rain. Hair that hung straight past my eyes.

  Will Wilson was standing. It was time to go.

  The guy was screaming, blood and spit spraying across the street.

  I walked to the curb and kneeled at a pu
ddle, rinsing my hands in the cool rainwater. Two fingers on my right hand were numb and bent. I turned my face to the sky, let the rain run down my eyes and neck. Wiped the water away before again rinsing my hands in the puddle. Again wiping at my face before the three of us met up with Coe and we all walked home, fourteen, and none of us had a car.

  Teddy is standing at a window. With his curly hair turned gray in the darkness, his soft and round face turned pale by a streetlight outside, Teddy looks like an aging man. Some old guy at his window. With nothing to do but stare. For a while I’d thought Teddy stood at the windows because he was watching for the police. But one time he tells me he is just seeing what this family looks at during the day.

  Will Wilson is going through cabinets, drawers, seeming to count the forgotten records and books.

  Coe is rolling, on his side, across the couch.

  And years later, when I find myself thinking about the break-ins, I know that what I liked most was watching the three of them in a house that was ours. I bounced soundlessly on chairs playing tag with Coe, stood next to Teddy staring out at the night, searched through closets and drawers with a smiling Will Wilson. But I now mostly remember watching through the shadows, seeing my three best friends doing a careful and silent nighttime dance.

  Maybe because they’re too small to park in or too far from the house, but the garages behind a lot of the houses in Tacoma’s blocky, sprawling neighborhoods often stand unused, the swinging door left open, the small panes of the windows broken by neighborhood kids. And beginning in the middle of our senior year, Will Wilson, Coe, Teddy, and I had started burning these garages down. At two or three in the morning, we’d sneak along a dark alley with a can of gasoline, pouring it against the inside base of the wooden walls, making a big pool in the center of the smooth, concrete slab. Lighting the gas, the four of us throwing matches while watching the alley and the surrounding houses, the garage igniting in front of us like a huge gas oven, the walls burning with low flames, the pool in the center burning with flames three feet high.