The Grip of It

by Jac Jemc

  That night, Julie and I play Battleship with our laptops—that’s what we call it when we sit across the table from one another with our screens open. I let myself hunt job listings inches away from her. I have grown bold. We’ve been quiet for so long that when she says my name suddenly, I startle.

  I close my browser instinctively. I look up. She’s staring not at me, but past me. I realize she might have seen the reflection of my screen in the glass of the china cabinet. “What?” I already feel sick at having to talk through this with her.

  Her eyes are not on the cabinet, though, but lower. I turn to look. She whispers, “In the kitchen.” I look at the crack of light under the closed door. Divided into threes, a shadow the width and placement of what one might assume are two feet breaks up the line of light.

  I train my eyes on it. I cycle through answers in my mind. Nothing makes sense. I hold out my hand to indicate she shouldn’t move. I grab the fireplace poker. I try to approach the door quietly. A floorboard creaks. I watch the shadow shuffle slightly. “Hello?” I call.

  I push the door open.

  There is nothing at all on the other side: just the kitchen in the yellow glow of the light above the stove. I look into the pantry. I look down the basement stairs. My sight returns nothing.

  In the dining room, I close the door to the kitchen again. We inspect the crack of light for the shadow. It’s seamless now. Once we’ve confirmed this, I prop open the door. “Why was this closed anyway?” I ask.

  “I didn’t want the heat of the oven to get the whole house hot.”

  I take another lap around. I look in every hiding spot we know of. I punch into the free ceiling tile in the basement. I peer behind the loose brick in the fireplace. I inspect the guest room carefully. We appear to be alone.

  48

  AT NIGHT, I try to sleep, but can’t. I sit by the window, looking for that missing gaze. James says, “Lie down. I’ll tell you a bedtime story,” and he does, but the story lacks a proper ending.

  “Does the man get over the wall?” I ask, but he doesn’t know. “Does the dog live?” He doesn’t know that either.

  “I see some barbed wire or chicken wire or something,” he says, as if the story is coming to him in a vision.

  “Make up the ending.”

  He says it’s not that simple.

  I run my feet along the cool sheets at the bottom of the bed and feel something grainy. “What’s all that grime down there? Are your feet dirty?”

  James says he went to the beach, that he forgets about the spaces between his toes, that more sand is always hiding there.

  “Well, go rinse it off.” But he doesn’t move. “James, I just changed these sheets. Will you go rinse off your feet?” But he’s already asleep, as if nothing I say could even matter all that much. I lie in bed unable to quiet my mind.

  In the story, a man is trying to escape a prison, not a government prison, but more like he’s held captive by a villain and he sees an opportunity to get free, but he’s grown attached to this dog who’s in the yard where he is being held and he wants the dog to be free, too. He’s pulled loose some of the barbed wire lining the top of the fence and thinks he might be able to scramble over the cement wall if he can get enough momentum, but not while holding the dog, so he ties a rope around the dog as a harness, and he ties that rope to his belt and he scrambles up to the top of the fence and starts to haul up the dog, but the dog is frantic, and not interested in being airborne, and the man knows that if he lifts that dog, it will whine and bark, and the villain might emerge at the ruckus and shoot the man or drag him back down into the yard and kill or torture both of them. But the man cannot decide what to do: free himself or take a risk.

  After James falls asleep, I decide I should call the police. I tell myself I should wait until morning, but once I’ve made my decision, I need to act.

  I slip out of bed and into the guest room. I hunt the walls for shadows I don’t want to see. I dial the nonemergency number. “I’d like to report a missing person.”

  49

  I FIND JULIE sitting under a blanket on the front porch. I join her. We are quiet for a long time. We see the lights of the police cars pull up.

  We watch them knock on the neighbor’s door. There is no answer. They let themselves in. They stay inside for a long time. More arrive. We get up the courage to go talk to them.

  “You’re the one who called us?” an officer with a deep scar down his cheek asks Julie. There isn’t an iota of blame in his voice.

  “Yes, I’m Julie.” She shakes his hand.

  The officer lifts his eyes over Julie to me. “You’re another neighbor?”

  “I’m Julie’s husband.” I try to stay friendly. I hold out my hand. “James Khoury.” The officer doesn’t break eye contact. I never know if I’m supposed to do the same or look away. Which is more confrontational? Is this a moment to abide or resist?

  “When was the last time you saw him?” the officer asks.

  Julie pauses. She feels guilty, but not of a crime. “Friday. I saw him Friday by the beach.”

  “He seemed well?” the officer asks.

  “I think so. As well as well was for him. Obviously, he’s old.”

  “And it’s unusual that you wouldn’t have seen him for as many days as this?”

  “I thought he was homebound before I saw him the other day.” She pauses, then absently adds, “He watches us. From his windows, and he hasn’t been watching lately.”

  The cop lifts an eyebrow. The situation shifts. “If we don’t find anything inside, we’ll search the woods and the lake, too. We’ll locate him.”

  The cop looks back at the house, now a blaze of light. We see men appearing in the windows, rooms we’ve never viewed before, dulled by the layers of curtains: dioramas thinly veiled. It’s impossible not to think of our own home. Its bare glass showcases everything we do.

  The labor of this night wells up in us. Julie thanks the officer. “We’re going to head back inside, but please let us know if there’s anything you need.”

  “Will do, ma’am.” The officer tips his chin at me.

  We climb our stairs. We step through the front door. We hide behind a wall that is more keeping us in than keeping anything out.

  50

  “YOU CALLED THE police?” I ask Julie. “I wish you’d talked to me about it first.”

  “You would have stopped me.” Her mouth forms a loose grin she can’t help. It shape-shifts into apology.

  I deny this. “Maybe. I’d like to be involved, though. How will we go back to the cave now that a bunch of police are swarming the area?”

  Julie’s face flashes between regret and indifference. “We can still hike up there. Maybe the police can tell us more about what’s going on in the cave. They must know about it already, or if not, they should. Maybe this will help us make some progress.”

  “You think they’re going to share what they find with us? You have a lot more trust in law enforcement than I do, I guess.”

  Julie winces. She has never had a run-in with the law. She has never been targeted because of her looks. She has never felt betrayed by a lack of action. To her, calling the police is the right thing to do. She doesn’t question it.

  I hug her. I apologize. This is the Julie I love. She tries to solve every issue immediately. She calls her clients to tell them the problem will be fixed before they even know it exists. She is always a step ahead. I know waiting even this long to call the police or to return to the cave herself has required a gargantuan patience of her.

  “But you’d like some answers, too, right? That’s what you said. It’s not just me?”

  “Yes,” I admit. “But I don’t know if I can trust the answers coming from someone else. I want to find our own.”

  “And if that’s not possible?”

  “Then maybe I can live with the questions.”

  51

  THE POLICE GIVE some of Rolf’s bedsheets to a hound. It turns up nothing.
A day later, a neighborhood dog returns home with the last two joints of a pinkie. The dog’s owners call the police. The process starts again. The hound hunts through the woods. It finds a patch of matted blood and protein left behind in a hollowed tree trunk, covered in insects. The police set up lights inside the tree to photograph the clump of evidence. They move carefully around the area looking for clues. If it were a case of Rolf’s having been disoriented or drunk, they’d have found him by now. If he’d been attacked by a dog or another animal, they’d have found him. They would have found him in his house or at a hospital or sprawled somewhere in the woods. All they find, though, are these meager traces.

  We knock on the window of the car and the plainclothes detectives who never leave our street now listen to our questions. “Seems like Mr. Kinsler doesn’t want us to find him,” they say. We ask them if they need anything: drinks or snacks or a clean bathroom.

  The police think in pictures. They think of guns and rope and wire and knives. None of this can be determined with so little evidence. They reenter the man’s home. It presents a smell and suggestion of its own. This man had worked his way to the bottom of his quality of living: a slump.

  52

  I SIT SOLID, hands in my lap, head down, as the sorrow wraps itself tighter around me. If they find Rolf, it won’t be a solution so much as a red herring. The questions we ask are breeding. It’s hard to focus on just one. My hope dips again. My mood sketches itself on the wall in primitive, toothy grins, as James tries to draw me out of myself, but I am reluctant to go. I am accustomed to being prepared and solving problems. I am starting to think this mess will not transform into memory. I feel envy for people with ordinary lives. My analytical mind ties itself in knots trying to reason through our situation, almost as if trying to understand what’s happening is making it worse.

  I hear something below James and me, something like a thump and a creak. A muffled thud and then the slide of metal against metal. “Did you hear that?”

  James pours cereal into a bowl. “This?”

  “No, something downstairs, like furniture being moved or a hinge flexing.”

  “Do you want me to take a look?”

  I don’t want him to put himself in danger, but I want to know. “Yes.”

  I listen to him open the door to the basement and head down the stairs. I brace myself for the sounds of a struggle or a scream. I hear another creak and then his footsteps are climbing again. The door to the basement closes and James enters the room. “I think that metal cabinet down there needs a new handle and maybe a new shelf. The door was open and some of the stuff had fallen out. I put it back, but the door doesn’t properly close. I’m not sure it will hold.”

  I can’t help but think about The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. I want to ask if James checked to see what was behind the cabinet, but I stop myself. “Stuff fell out of the cabinet on its own.” I don’t add a question mark to the sentence. I speak it like a fact. I try it out.

  “Weirder things have happened.” James spoons cereal into his mouth.

  “And they do, all around us, every day it seems.” I look into James’s cereal bowl, almost empty, all milk until a piece of wheat surfaces from nowhere and James captures it with his spoon and fits it into his still-full mouth.

  “Julie, do you want to move?”

  That is not a question I am expecting and I feel myself start to speak, but I am still on the ground and I would need to drift above myself to get the words out.

  There are times when saying nothing means nothing, and then there are times when nothing holds an answer. Pathetic distractions pull James away from me, and he thinks my silence is without substance, but I think it means the world.

  This house is sapping us, pulling out our cores. Our filthy roots expose themselves, but our faces are clean and wide. “Maybe we could stay somewhere else for a little while. Even a night or two,” I say. I am reluctant to give up my vigil. Staying seems like self-inflicted distress, but I also don’t believe I’d be able to leave for good. With all the financial gymnastics we’d have to perform, favors to ask, possible habits that could reawaken, the defeat of it feels larger than the threats we face if we stay. I know the bulk of the work will fall on me. I stare at the middle distance between those points.

  James says, “Tell me when and where.”

  Normally I flare at having a task to tackle, but today I wear down. I sag. I sully.

  53

  THE DETECTIVES KNOCK on our door this time. Some new questions have come up around Rolf’s disappearance. The minutes feel smooth when they are out of our control.

  The officers settle themselves. Julie brings us all cups of coffee. “I’m so sorry,” I say. “I don’t remember your names.”

  “O’Neill and Poremski,” the taller detective says pointing first to himself and then his partner. He’s the only one who ever talks. “How well do you know Rolf Kinsler?”

  I’ve told Julie not to say too much. Risk wraps all of our stories.

  Julie says, “Not very well. We introduced ourselves when we first moved in. He wasn’t interested in getting to know us, but I had a dream about him last night, that he was growing extra fingers, first on his hands, but when the palms and backs of his hands were covered, they started growing up his arms, until he looked like some kind of anemone.”

  I take her hand. “Julie, stick to the questions.” I hope to call up the Julie that knows better from deep inside her.

  “Do you have an idea of what this dream might mean, Mrs. Khoury?”

  “Are you a dream interpreter, Detective?” I ask.

  “Might be. Depends on what her answer is.” He sneers at me. I can tell he’s not impressed with what I think I know.

  “We’re not going to find him,” she says frankly.

  “What makes you say that?”

  “That man had loads of secrets, more than we’ll be able to figure out, but I’m curious what else you can tell us about him,” my wife says, artfully trying to turn the tables, to test whether this exchange is as one-sided as I predicted it would be.

  “With all due respect, ma’am, we’ll ask the questions.”

  “Can you tell us more once his body is found?” I ask.

  “Why are you so sure he’s dead?” the detective asks.

  “I assume. We know he was seriously injured because of what you found in the woods. He hasn’t been located. With that much blood, how could he survive?”

  “It’s incredible what the body is capable of, so we’re not calling his life lost quite yet. Tell me, Mrs. Khoury, I’m told that you said something about him watching you to one of the officers. Can you tell us more about that?”

  Julie glances at me looking for approval. I pretend that she is pausing before she decides how to respond. I don’t react. The officer notices, though. I’m sure they’re convinced I’m responsible for something and I’m forcing Julie to help me cover it up.

  “You can be honest with us, Mrs. Khoury. You don’t have to ask your husband’s permission.” He says the word husband in a way that implies I’m nothing of the sort, but instead a trickster or a con artist using her for who knows what.

  “We were suspicious of him. He was nosy in a far-off kind of way,” she says. “Often when we were getting home, I would see his face staring at us from behind his window, and I can’t say we welcomed that.”

  “How did you respond?”

  “Honestly, I stared back hoping he would stop, but it rarely worked.”

  “Mr. Khoury, did you also see Mr. Kinsler spying on you?”

  “Not as much as Julie. She would call me over to look. He often disappeared before I made it to the window.” While this answer is true, I regret making a comment that would call Julie into question.

  “And can you think of anything you were doing that might have made Mr. Kinsler suspicious of you? Like he had to keep an eye on you for his own safety?”

  I fear she might tell them about the way we dug around the yard
looking for bodies. I worry she’ll reveal all the objects I pulled inside out. I’m concerned she might say that the man knew something about the house. He might have had answers about why it was so strange and full of folds. He might have been waiting to watch us get driven out. I jump in before Julie can answer. “I don’t think so, Detective. We’re pretty boring people. Tried to be friendly. He wasn’t having it.”

  “But you didn’t go over there and ask him to leave your wife alone?”

  I stay calm. I try to ignore the insult to my masculinity. “Now that you ask, yes. I did go knock on his door. He didn’t answer.”

  “And when did you say you last saw him?”

  “Friday,” Julie answers.

  They look to each other to see if either has anything else to ask. “Okay, that’s it for now. If you think of any additional information, please contact us right away.” The detectives rise and head to the entryway. As we shut the door behind them, Julie tells me her stomach is cramping up. I lean her into me. I kiss her cheek. I tell her we’re alone now as if it were a comfort.

  54

  I ARRIVE AT the doctor’s and strip down and slip into a gown the consistency of a cheap bedsheet washed too many times and I crinkle up onto the paper-covered examination table. After a night of no sleep, crimped with sharp intervals of pain, I woke early to see if the office had an opening.

  The doctor tells me to lie back and begins pressing on my abdomen and I recoil, and she says, “That hurts?” I say it does, trying not to be a wimp about it. “What about here?” She presses on the other side, but again, the pain flips itself through me, and my legs curl to block her. “Okay, sorry for any discomfort. I’ll let you relax for a second. Why don’t you sit up, and I’ll do the rest of the exam?” She looks in my eyes, ears, nose, and down my throat, and she tests my reflexes and my muscle strength. “Let’s try the pelvic exam again,” she says, trying to sound as confident as she can, and I agree because I don’t know what else to do. “Your reaction leads me to believe there could be some sort of infection, so I’ll go slowly and we’ll try to figure out what the trouble is, okay, Julie? Was anything bothering you before you phoned?” She has an ease and natural beauty that makes me wonder why anyone wears makeup or colors her hair, why everyone doesn’t covet a motherly belly showcased in high-waisted pants.