The Phone Company
Page 32
Out in the hallway Barksdale chuffed. The dog had been at Sarah’s side since Friday, lying next to her, licking her hand whenever she petted him. But every time she tried to use her Tether, he’d growl and try to nip it out of her hand. So Sarah had locked him out. All he could do now was paw at her door handle and whine.
Sarah downloaded and opened the app.
“JJ,” Sarah said.
The phone emitted a rapid clicking sound, like old technology attempting to make a connection.
Barksdale began to bark and pound his paws against the door. Sarah screamed and dropped her Tether as it started to vibrate and make a weird sound.
Someone was calling.
The ringtone was strange at first, the creaking of a rocking chair. A lullaby started to bleed through. Sarah recognized the sweet, lilting voice, even over Barksdale’s howl.
Sleep my child and peace attend thee
All through the night.
Guardian angels God will send thee,
All through the night.
Sarah pressed CONNECT.
“Oh my God—Mom?”
CHAPTER 32
“What about this one?” Bill said. He sat in the window booth, which creaked, it was so new. Janice ran a hand across his table but then sat down at a different booth just to spite him. “It’s like a painting,” she said, looking out at the marble angel in the graveyard. She was always saying that. Bill loved it.
She was like a painting, her bare legs tucked up underneath like a doe’s. The sun hit her just right, gilding her hair gold on gold, except for a burst of purple by the ear. Bill’s snapdragon. She hadn’t taken it out.
He wanted to go sit by her, was preparing himself to go sit by her, maybe buy her a milkshake. And then Steve waltzed in with ripped jeans and those stupid black glasses, and that crazy uncombed nerd hair Bill had to admit was pretty cool.
Steve took the seat next to Janice, leaving Bill to glower at the marble angel. And even though Steve called Bill over—“Hey, dunce!”—even though they all got milkshakes and Janice kept the flower in her hair, the cold, lonely angel would stay with Bill the rest of the summer. The rest of his life.
* * *
Friday, one week after the plane hit HMS, Steve went to the diner for . . . normalcy? Camaraderie? A cup of reliably shitty coffee? He didn’t know why. The diner ended up reminding him anyway. PCo had ruined any chance of normalcy.
Instead of the cemetery, there was now the brick wall of the data center. From the booth they’d always sat in, you couldn’t even tell the wall was part of a three-dimensional building. It looked like the end of the world. Or a false front.
“You’re peeling a bit,” Mr. McLean said, sitting down in Bill’s empty seat. He was waiting for a to-go order for him and his wife.
“Yeah,” Steve said, looking down at a picture on his home phone; Janice’s duck face. “It’s from the burns.”
“Ah.”
“They’re better now, though.” Steve put away Janice’s phone.
“Any word on Bill or your boy?”
“Nothing yet.”
McLean shook his head. “Damn shame.”
“Yeah.” Steve tapped the table. Mr. McLean wasn’t being trite; he deeply meant any and all swear words. He especially never took the Lord’s name in vain. You know, unless it was serious.
“It’s been a week,” Steve said.
“Ah, Jesus.”
“A whole week of not having him there. It’s actually not that much different, you know? Kind of keeps to himself anyway.”
“Yeah. Good kid, though.”
Steve nodded. “My mind keeps tricking me that he’s home, he’s up in his room, he’s off doing whatever it is JJ likes to do. But then I don’t hear his chair creaking up there and I remember.”
“I’m sure they’ll show up,” Mr. McLean said.
“Sarah’s been taking it pretty hard. I can’t even get her out of bed.”
“I bet. They close her school as well, or . . .?”
“It’s opened back up.”
“Ah.”
“I just can’t get her on her feet, you know? I can hear her in there, doing things on her phone, talking. I know she’s in there. I know she’s awake. And sometimes crying. I don’t think she wants me to know.”
“They never do.”
“Every time I knock, she goes quiet and refuses to answer.”
“How long you off work?” Mr. McLean asked.
“Till the school finds a place.” Steve stared down at his hands. “I’ve just been floating, you know? Like I’ve been on laughing gas, or . . . I don’t know.”
“Ah, that’s just from being out of work,” Mr. McLean said. “Felt that plenty of times myself. Explains why you’re not eating.”
“Nah. I actually could eat right now. Finally.”
“Ought to. Keep up your strength.”
“I totally would, but . . .” Steve lifted his empty hands in a half-hearted shrug. “No Tether.”
“Ah, well, how do you take your eggs?” Mr. McLean pulled out his phone. It was one of the newest models.
Steve thanked Mr. McLean profusely and tried to give him what money he had in his wallet.
Mr. McLean refused. “Everything you did for them kids? Least I could do. Save that for Mrs. Hayworth, you hear?”
Steve hadn’t really cried yet, not really. Sure, his body had wept, the kind of tears produced mechanically during times of intense denial and shock. But Steve hadn’t really felt it, not in his heart, not yet. What Mr. McLean said, though, gave him a pang sharper than anything he’d felt.
Cathy brought out his to-go sack, and Mr. McLean stood to leave.
“How’s the missus?” Steve asked.
Mr. McLean thought about it. “She’s been better.”
“Please tell her hello.”
“I will.”
“And that I’m thinking about her.”
With a curt nod, Mr. McLean smiled in the way only old men could smile. Haunted. Patient. Slightly amused. “Goodbye, Steve.”
“Bye.”
Steve watched him go. He didn’t realize this would be the last time he saw Mr. McLean.
* * *
“Mom?” Sarah said, nearly spilling some of the liquor she’d stolen from her dad’s high cabinet. He’d been hiding it there since she was a kid.
Sarah had almost spilled the booze because The Edison Phone had begun to ring, that creaking rocker. “Mom? Are you there?”
“I tried JJ,” her mother said. “I couldn’t get a hold of him either. I don’t think he’s here. I don’t think he’s home right now. You’ll have to try again.”
Sarah frowned and kind of hiccupped. Some part of her, some obscure, ever-sober part, should have remembered what her mom was talking about. But Sarah had a hard time remembering things lately. She had downloaded some app, something called Forget Me Now, some kind of pill as the icon. It was supposed to help with her memories. Sarah didn’t recall using it, but she must have. Though it hadn’t really worked. Whatever the app had repressed, Sarah still felt incredibly sad. She just didn’t remember why, exactly.
She took another pull from the bottle.
It helped.
“W’as it like there?” Sarah asked her mom. “Where you are?”
“I don’t know. There are walls here. Cubicles, I guess. And phones. I sit here making connections all day. There isn’t much to see. I keep asking for a picture of you for my desk, but . . .”
Her mother’s end of the line was full of static and some sort of constant background noise. Sarah could hear a voice repeating the same thing over and
over in the distance. She couldn’t quite make out what it said.
“Honey,” her mom said, “you know it’s not your fault, right? You know how proud of you I am? You’re so grown up, Sarah, so beautiful, so smart. You know it’s not your fault.”
“What’re you . . . I don’t know.”
“Listen, sweetie, I’m so tired, so exhausted, and it never ends, it never . . . I just want to go home, but it doesn’t matter right now. We’ll all be going home soon. Okay, sweetheart?”
“’Kay,” Sarah said, eyes hooded and barely open. The room had started to spin.
“Someone will be in touch, okay?”
“A’miss you,” Sarah said, but her mom had already hung up, like she always did now. No goodbyes. Just a click.
A second later, someone contacted Sarah like her mother had promised. The tone for the notification was an old popular song, “Call Me Maybe.”
She’d received a love note.
Sarah opened it up.
* * *
In the five years since Janice’s death, Steve had only missed a few visits to her grave, and only once by choice. Last Sunday, directly after the crash, he hadn’t had the will to go. Not without his children.
Operating on a bite of toast and half a cup of coffee, Steve left the diner and drove out to Mountain View above the church. He made sure to park his car so it wouldn’t drive itself downhill this time, then made his way to Janice’s grave.
“Hey, honey. Sorry I didn’t come visit. Everything’s been falling apart.” As he dusted with his little broom, he told her about the plane crash and everything that had happened since. “It’s like everyone’s going crazy. They’ve all changed. I don’t know who half of them are anymore. Sarah, even JJ. He brought a gun to school, Janice. Bill’s gun. I’m pretty sure of it. And I have no clue why.
“I don’t know where I went wrong. I know I haven’t exactly given him the attention he needs, the kind of guidance I think a kid needs. I thought his counselor would help, but I . . . couldn’t talk with him about some of these things. I’m not even sure I did anything wrong. I mean, is it possible no matter what you do, no matter what you say, no matter how well you raise your kids, is it possible for them to end up bad all on their own? Or is this my fault?”
He bowed his head and listened to the wind through the pines. He liked to think Janice could answer him if he listened just right.
If anything, he could hear her in his memories. At times like this, she used to mention God. Janice was the real reason Steve no longer went to church, her death. She was the only reason he ever went. But at some point, they’d just stopped.
Even then, whenever something tragic happened, Janice would chalk it up to the mysteries of God. She believed that, yes, sometimes really terrible things were allowed to happen, but for a greater purpose. She might have used her own death as an example: the only reason Sarah had been spared That Day was because God had taken Janice instead.
If Steve had believed in the same things as Janice, he might have thought JJ, wherever he was now, might have been saved in a similar way. After all, if JJ had been in George Ingram’s classroom where he should’ve been instead standing outside the school with a gun, PCo would have found one more corpse with its horrible app.
Steve looked at the sky through the whispering trees. “It’s all my fault,” he said, certain of it. There was no one else to blame. And he wasn’t about to lie to his wife.
“Howdy there, partner,” Bill said behind Steve.
CHAPTER 33
Bearded, glasses blinking, Bill walked out from behind Steve’s car, holding a bouquet of snapdragons and a gun.
“Whoa there!” Steve said, nearly tripping over another grave marker. “Holster that!”
“Oh,” Bill said, as if just remembering, no big deal. He wriggled and worked the revolver into the holster on his belt. It didn’t fit, not really. It was much bigger than the black toy he usually packed around.
Bill came over and set the flowers on Janice’s grave, and Steve got a whiff of him.
At first he had been relieved to see Bill alive, despite his gross beard. Now Steve was certain of where his friend had been all week. It was like Janice all over again: Bill never there, especially when Steve needed him.
“Where the hell have you been?”
“Undercover,” Bill said.
“Why didn’t you tell me? Everyone thought you were dead.”
“Deep under.”
“JJ had your badge,” Steve said. “At the school. I’m pretty sure he had your gun. He’s been missing. I really needed your help, Bill.”
“I know. I need to talk to him as well.”
“You know where he’s at?”
“Where?”
“I don’t know,” Steve said. “I thought you might.”
“I would, if she’d show me everything. That’s why you’ve got to come with me. I need your help.”
“With what?”
“Fighting it,” Bill said.
Steve frowned.
“I don’t know, it’s like a party line,” Bill said. “Except inside my head. Everyone talking and I can’t shut them up.”
“You’re drunk,” Steve said.
“Just come on, all right?”
“No.” Steve stared at him, evaluating him. They were facing each other, but something on the lens of the glasses kept catching Bill’s attention. He wouldn’t even meet Steve’s eyes.
“Did you kill Marvin?” Steve asked.
“Yes.”
“Bill, what the fuck?”
“You don’t understand, I keep fighting it—”
“You need to turn yourself in.”
Bill met his eyes. “Then you’ll never find him. You’ll lose your son, and for what? She’ll win.”
“Who? Who are we even talking about here?” Steve said. He had started to gesture with his hands. Not a good sign.
Bill opened his mouth, but a voice in his earwig interrupted. Steve could hear it, but not what it was saying. Just the
“Steve, look, I’ve got a lead on your boy. You have to come with me, all right? It’ll all make sense, I promise. But if you turn me in—”
“I didn’t say that.”
“—the crash at HMS will look like child’s play compared to what she’s got planned, I promise.”
Deep in his guts Steve felt something changing, like he was being slowly pitted, the biggest and deepest core of him removed at the slowest possible speeds, the membranes snapping until the whole mass was ripped out, leaving him empty and easy to smash.
He realized on some level, in his paranoid reptilian brain, he was afraid Bill might be right. Ever since The Phone Company had blown into town like some weed, everything had started to fall apart. Steve had been the only one to see that, until now. So Bill seemed to be on his side. But at the same time, Steve knew Bill was totally insane.
“And just what are they planning, can you tell me that?” Steve asked.
“There’s no way you could even believe. Look.” Bill pulled out a purple Tether. Onscreen, they were looking through the windshield of a car—at themselves.
Familiar scuffs on the wheel; same dust patterns over the gauges: it was Steve’s car. He could even see his little Buddha glued to the dash.
Steve flinched when the car roared to life and, Buddha grinning, ran over a few graves.
“Stop it,” Steve said.
The wheels spit up grass and mud toward Janice’s grave.
“Stop!”
Thumbing around the screen, Bill said, “I’m trying.” The car parked itself, then shut off. “Do you see now? That plane? Wasn’t an accident.”
Steve couldn’t stop trembling. He remembered the rumor Aaron had told him, recalled what Marv had said about Steve’s car, how it had tried to kill his kids on purpose.
“Don’t believe me? Take her for a spin,” Bill said, offering him the purple phone. Through
the bug spatters on the windshield, and the sticky thumbprints on the touchscreen, Steve could still see himself from inside the car.
“No,” he said, nearly shoving the phone away. If the Tether had the capacity to hijack cars and possibly aircraft, he didn’t want that kind of power, not in the palm of his feeble old butter hand.
“Come with me if you want,” Bill said. “I’m going to find him.” He started walking off.
“If I go with you, and you get caught . . .”
“Yes?” Bill said. “What.”
“They’ll charge me with aiding and abetting.”
“No, they won’t.”
“Regardless,” Steve said. “I don’t think it’s fair for me to somehow land on the hook for whatever you did.”
Bill shrugged. “I’ll just tell them I kidnapped you.”
Somehow that plan made Steve feel worse. Bill’s actions were wrong, killing Marv, but Steve didn’t want to be the reason his friend went to prison. His best friend.
“Look, Steve, I wouldn’t involve you if I didn’t need your help. You know that, right?”
“Yeah.”
“I love you, man. Otherwise, I wouldn’t ask.”
Steve nodded, finally reaching a decision, but not lightly. “All right. But I’m driving.” In his head he added, Straight home, because that was his plan.
He didn’t want to deceive Bill, but he refused to be a conspirator. He’d be the DD and call it a night.
Bill looked at Steve’s car. “We need something they can’t control. Come on.” He started off toward the woods, but then Dragnet flashed in his eyes and Bill looked back at the snapdragons.
“She can hear you, you know. All of them can.”
The trees whispered as Bill led Steve out through the graves.
* * *
Rusty body, deeply fissured seats, an 8-track player playing Jim Croce’s “Operator” in the background: the moving van must have been fifty years old. It coughed and sputtered up the road.