Aah. “Aah.”
He guns it in the lot and he beams. “I could tell you stories,” he says. “Just a rotten seed, that Birkus kid, beat the shit out of Bronson on a regular basis for no reason. Scoundrel. Used to call me ‘Penguin.’ Like I was the only fucking barrel-chested kid in our school in a Bruins jersey. Real piece of shit, that kid. Solid gold shit.”
* * *
—
O’Keefe is adamant about establishing the perimeter, closing off the press. He remembers coming here when he was a kid, when Jon Bronson got out.
“Those fuckers didn’t know how to run a scene,” he says. “Kids from my school, they were looting the basement before Forensics even got down there. Fucking mess.”
I let him do his design work, directing his guys with the yellow tape, the orange cones. Not a single TV crew is trying to get here, not a single lookie-loo either. But time is a good thing when you need to memorize your story. I go over it again. And again.
At long last O’Keefe whistles. We’ve got a real team now. We’ve got two buses and six cars. We’ve got beat cops staked out around the perimeter.
“Feels like you should take the lead,” he says.
I nod. I take the lead.
Me, the old guy with the bag, I lead the brigade into the mall. I walk ahead of the coroner and the photographer, the EMTs—I told them, he’s dead—and the first responders, the picture takers, the glove guys, the ones who will bend over and photograph the dried-up frappes.
I did this. Me. I won. Me and my gut.
I reach for the door and I open the door.
“Gonna be a bit of a stench in here,” I say. “As I said, there was a lot of blood.”
I like the sound of our feet, the gentle stampede as we get closer. I picture myself on the news when I hear that unmistakable rumble of a loaded truck. We make it to the door, the entrance to Rolling Jack’s, and the boys behind me back off. It’s me. I go first. We all stand by. We all hear the silence. We all know the body inside is a dead one. We all take this seriously and we all take it together, a man is dead. Dead.
My skin crawls. This is how those Catholics must feel, all the religious people, the high of believing what you can’t explain, knowing without understanding.
It occurs to me now how ill prepared we are, how unprotected, nobody so much as wearing a mask. What if his body is starving for life force, juice, whatever you call it? What if it knocks us all down, en masse?
O’Keefe clears his throat, not in a shithead way. He has a right. This is a job.
I open the door.
We don’t die en masse and a man is dead. The man is on his back, eyes bulging, skyward, homeward. But I can’t look at this man, not really, not fully, because I can’t believe what I see. This man is not the Beard, not Jon Bronson. My heart is racing hard and the blood is on the floor, just as I said, just as I promised, but this man is not the man who’s supposed to be here. O’Keefe is scratching his head. I’m in the same boat, silenced, dizzy. I can’t speak. I can only stare.
“Detective DeBenedictus,” he says. “I thought you, uh, you said this was Jon Bronson.”
“I, uh…” I stammer. “You know, I’m off duty. I’m on medicine for this. Maybe I heard wrong…” I trail off.
I lift my shirt and show my bag. I’ve never done that before. Can’t believe I’m doing it now. But I also can’t believe what’s on the floor right here. Roger goddamn Blair. I know what nobody else knows. I know he came to save Jon. I know Jon is gone.
Out there, alive.
I keep it inside and they excuse me from being in here, they chalk it up to old-man syndrome. He was walking the mall, he’s a sick guy, cancer, you see that bag, he probably just got confused, he’s been off duty for months, you can’t blame a guy for trying, he got mixed up, Basement Boy, kidnapper, who the hell can tell anymore?
* * *
—
Outside, they bring me a bottle of water, the way you do a cripple.
I will never tell anyone about what Jon can do. He’s an innocent; in my gut, I know, that bullet hole, it was closing on its own. He wasn’t doing that. That was something otherworldly, something you have to just accept, at the top of the roller coaster you can’t change your mind. You can, but you can’t do anything about it.
Roger Blair, he’s the criminal. That is what I know.
What I don’t know: How? How the hell did he do it?
I won’t ask. I’ll do what I gotta do. Empty my bag so I don’t leak all over. Count my blessings. Eat a salad when Lo says to eat a salad, crunch and munch with a smile on my face. How? Easily. In my shape, at my age, with my gut being what it is, still, I did it. I saved a girl.
O’Keefe slaps me on the back. He winks. “Go home and see that wife of yours,” he says. “We can take it from here.”
EGGS
I’m an unlucky man, but I see where the absence of luck is, in a way, a lucky thing.
Jon Bronson had the best and the worst of it, the right girl, the wrong timing, the teacher who looked at all the kids in the room and thought, I pick you. And then there’s what he did to the kid. Boggles the mind, Chloe knows it, I know it, and there’s luck in all creation. Sick luck. And it’s always a mix, I’m lucky to have Lo, I’m lucky to know the joy of becoming a father. I’m even lucky for the pain, in the end, because like my dad said, you don’t judge your up.
I see our boy Chuckie for what he is now, our son, a human, born with bad luck. He got the shit end of our genes. It’s a coin toss. You never know. You can’t know. But you can go on.
Lo rubs my shoulder. “How you feeling there, big guy?”
I grab on to her hand. “I’m good. I’m gonna get the mail.”
“Be thinking about lunch.”
“Jesus, Lo, it’s seven A.M.”
She laughs. We’re still in that rounding-the-corner place where every laugh is a relief, an assurance. I treasure them all and I walk out of our house.
I head to the mailbox and we got the usual crap, the bills, the ads, the expenses. But today, today we also have a letter. A thin envelope. No stamp. I open it carefully. Slowly. I see the handwriting. A distinct style, a child’s scrawl, he never grew up, not the way we do. Bronson.
I don’t move. Of course I look up the street, into the holly tree across the way. I let the moment play out in my mind. I prepare myself for what I know is coming, what I’ve always known was coming. I turn the page, and there they are, the names.
Kody Kardashian Bronson (dog)
Noelle Moore-Schulz
Yvonne Belziki
Richie Goleb
Derry Sears
Rita Bolt
Krishna Pawan
Florie Crane
Muse Frontman (cat)
Warren “Double U” Schmidt
Drew Peter-Rieber
Thomas Sciolletti
Adam Ames
Jared Kunkel
Christian Andresen
Rory Shippa
Eddie “Soup” Campbell
Casey Waterman
Roger Blair
And there it is, bird by bird. He’s a good boy, he is. A good man. It must have pained him to write down those names. You can see where the tears dried, smudged. He cares. He knew I needed it in writing. And I know what he needs.
I think of Maddie Goleb, crying over her son. I have the urge to call and tell her she was right. We were right. Her dreams were spot-on. Someone did break her son’s heart. But I’d never be able to explain it to her. I can’t do that to Jon, to anyone. And in the end, it would only add to her frustration.
I dig up a lighter in the kitchen. I go out to the yard. I throw his letter on the grill.
And then it doesn’t exist anymore.
Lo calls out to me. “How’s about
grilled cheese and tomato soup?”
* * *
—
Sometimes the world makes sense. Me and Lo. The cancer that comes when you skip the doctor. Sometimes it doesn’t. It can’t. It’s life. You have to know the difference or you drive yourself nuts. I won’t be in this place again, I am smarter now. Better. I think of Lovecraft’s tombstone, Bronson’s hat, I am Providence. Sure, we’re all masters of our fate. But sometimes you gotta step in, you gotta play a part in someone else’s fate.
I get into my car.
Sometimes you gotta be Divine Providence.
I start my car. Lo pats my leg. “It’s gonna be okay.”
“Of course it’s gonna be okay.”
But on the way there we almost have about fifty accidents. I’m not myself. Not by a long shot. When we get off at the exit she asks me to pull over.
“Jesus, Lo, I’m not senile.”
“It’s just easier if I drive,” she says. “The parking garage and the rigmarole, let me do this.”
I let her do this. I look out the window and sweat. I want to ask her what to expect. I want to know what he’ll look like, what he’ll say, what I’ll say, whether I’ll cry, whether or not it’s okay to cry, whether he cries, whether the doctor comes in with you. Will there be one of those double-sided mirrors like we have at the station? Will he know who I am? Will I know who he is?
Lo parks the car. I didn’t even realize we were in a garage.
“You okay, Eggie?”
“You bet,” I say. Fucking liar, but I owe that to my wife, to whistle and act like the whole ride here I wasn’t thinking of faking a bag problem, a sneeze.
And when we get into the hospital, the people who work there are pleasant. They shake my hand. They don’t judge me for being away for so long. There’s a long hallway, which is scary, there is the sound of other kids, other parents. People who know Lo, people who smile at me, meet my eyes. And we go into an elevator and we go up and my gut sinks. Lo squeezes my hand.
We walk down another hallway. Dr. Alice enters a code into the lock by the door.
“Chuckie’s excited to see you,” she says.
And I know that’s nonsense. I know my boy doesn’t experience things like excitement or grief. I know he doesn’t laugh. I know he can’t write a book like Marko or put his hair in a bun or throw a ball or fall in love with a girl like Chloe and get himself kidnapped, fucked for life. My heart is pounding and I’d like to tell Dr. Alice that she said the wrong thing. I’d like to run. I think of that poem in Marko and Bella’s book, my favorite poem, about a bug, I think, and the bug’s first trip into the outside world, there’s a phrase, Off off, on on, stop stop and then, then—GO. I told Lo that the poems were mostly turds, but here I am running those words through my mind, they’re with me forever, which means I’ll tell Lo she was right, assuming I go in, assuming I get out. Off off, on on, stop stop and then, then—GO. That happens to me a lot. I hate things because I think I might love them. I know that now and I think Lo does too, patting my back. GO.
The first thing I see is the red chair, the primary clean color of it, so bold, fire-engine red, lipstick red. In that chair there is a child. My child. My loins. My genes.
He sits up so straight. The back of him could be any kid, a normal kid. Bad word that word, normal.
He looks busy, like he’s doing something. He doesn’t turn around when I say his name. I hesitate but then I walk closer to that red chair, that boy, my child, my kid, our kid. And maybe I’m projecting, but I think he has remarkably thick hair, I think he’s got a nice way of sitting, nice and straight. Did I already notice that? Is that the kind of thing you say to a kid?
There is an empty chair on the other side of the table. A chair for me.
Do I put a hand on his shoulder? No, nobody likes to be startled. I look over his head, down at his table where he draws a blob, a blob of scribbles, thick gray lines, gashes, it’s nothing, but it’s Picasso, it’s my boy’s art, it’s the lines in the sky, in the universe.
“Good job, Chuckie.”
He doesn’t thank me. He keeps drawing. I am ready now. I walk to the other side of the table and I sit in my chair. It’s black, nothing like his red chair.
“Heya, honey, it’s so good to see you, look at you. You look great.”
He doesn’t answer me and he doesn’t look at me. I’ve been so worried about what to say to him, but now that I’m here the words just tumble out of my mouth. “So buddy boy, your mother and I, we painted your room, we figured it’s about time, no ten-year-old boy wants duckies on his wall, no siree, Bob.”
I don’t wait for an answer. I do what feels good. I just keep talking to him, my son, our son, our kid.
And he keeps on drawing the lines, side to side they go, into the gray, over the edge of the paper and onto the table and back again, again, forever, my boy.
CHLOE
They’re always going to have a name for you and there’s always going to be a they. Nowadays, they say I’m growing down. They say you’re supposed to become less narcissistic with age. They look at my new work—self-portraits—and they LOL that I’m becoming even more full of myself.
I’m mellower about the criticism after everything that happened with Jon. They’re a little right, a little wrong. They’re my they, a chorus I carry around in my head because they almost wooed me a long time ago, when I let go of Jon, pushed the art part of myself into the ground so that I could be easier for them, lighter, so that I could play Marco Polo with the cutest guy in school. I need them in my ear so I don’t forget to fight them, so I don’t become them. I do care what other people think. That’s part of who I am. And Jon was never going to care about what other people think; that’s not who he is. But being good doesn’t mean becoming more like Jon or regretting the ways in which we’re different. He saw all of me and he loved me. He cut through the woods with his hamster and I loved flirting at the bus stop and this is who we were, who we are.
For a couple months I didn’t do much but move out of Carrig’s and field phone calls about what the hell happened. Nobody could figure out what happened that night. Officer “Penguin” didn’t put the pieces together, the reports of a gunshot, the blood splatter on the carpet. No one wandered into a hospital with a gunshot wound. There was only Roger Blair on the ground, dead of a heart attack.
No one knows the whole story. Nobody ever will. I wouldn’t know how to explain it, and I’ve tried to make sense of it in my mind. I spent some time in the library to add a layer of seriousness to the research, I read The Dunwich Horror and I tried to wrap my head around what Jon might be doing, where he might have gone. But one day I woke up and I wanted to paint. I wanted to go back to doing what I do, being myself.
I do self-portraits now, the thing most people do when they’re young, when they’re trying to figure out who they are, who they want to become. When I was young, I wanted to know where Jon was. Now I want to believe in myself.
I live in Queens now. It works. It’s almost a relief to be out of Tribeca, out of that view. You can only get your breath taken so many times. Sometimes you want to live in a shit hole, trudge up the stairs, realize you forgot milk. Fuck.
Carrig did move back to Nashua. He’s a trader and he works from home. There are rumors about him, but nobody knows what really went on that night. No one but me and the old detective. Supposedly Carrig doesn’t go out much, except to hunt with his dad, to pick up weed from his dealer and hit on chicks at shady bars, bars that made me want to leave Nashua even before I was old enough to go in them. Sometimes I think I should have told someone about what he did. Sometimes I wake up sweaty.
He shot Jon.
But I never called the police. Inevitably they would want to know where Jon went. I would have to tell them I don’t know. They would look at hospital records. They wouldn’t understand how someone who got shot jus
t disappeared.
Carrig only emailed me once: Address where I can ship your things.
I sent him back the name of a storage facility.
I still can’t get over it, how you can be in a bed with a person, in a life with a person and then not.
His family unfriended me on Facebook.
That nice old cop came to the hospital. He closed the door. I told him some of it, not all of it. He said we should probably never tell anyone. I said he saved my life. He smiled at me. “You saved his life.”
I think of us on the floor in Rolling Jack’s, back-to-back. He saved my life too.
I stare at my unfinished painting. I’m thirteen in this one. I’m thirteen in most of them lately. Same age I was when I lost my best friend, when I picked up a paintbrush. There’s a new jar of fluff on the windowsill in my apartment, and there’s a jar in the painting too. I look from one jar to the other, from the real thing to the other thing. After a while it’s hard to tell the difference.
And then my phone beeps. My heart becomes the kind you read about in love stories, in poems, this thing that beats for another, not just for me. We’re all wired to react to that sound. The dopamine rush that follows a notification. Someone wants you. Someone’s thinking of you. This feels good to us. It makes our bones tingle. It’s universal.
But we all know there’s more to it too. Things no one understands. I trip on my own foot as I cross the room. My body knows. That beep was different even though it was technically the same as every other beep. Sometimes you feel it before you know it.
JON
I’m a paperboy again, but not in Providence.
I am Providence. Magnus was the monster. That’s what he was trying to tell me when he mentioned Wilbur Whateley, right before he died. He chose The Dunwich Horror because while Wilbur wreaks havoc on the townspeople, he does pay for his sin. What Magnus told me isn’t a fix. It wasn’t a cure. But it was a reassurance. I had just been going down the darkest road, terrified that I was Wilbur, that my suspicion was right and there was no humanity left in me. But then I read his letter again. I understood things from his perspective. He was Wilbur and I was the townspeople. He didn’t do well in the world and he was isolated. In his depraved mind, power would be the inability to connect with anyone. It would mean rising above the need for affection, for human touch.
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