And anyway, small-breasted women are just more interesting. Maybe that’s because they think they have to be, but that’s a whole other story.
“Well, I’m glad you’re glad,” Rose says, turning back, squeezing my knee sarcastically. “Huge load off my mind.”
I turn the heater up. Rose turns it back down.
“Not just yet,” she says. “We’ve got a little moretalking to do.”
“About?”
“The future.” Pause. “What comes next.”
Oh, I think.
“Oh,” I say.“That, ” I add.
“Yes,” she says.“That,” she adds.
Martin, corner. Corner, Martin.
“Um,” I say. And it’s not like I don’t know what I want—or what Ithink I want. It’s just that my penis has decided it’s a turtle, all of a sudden. And I don’t know if it knows something I don’t.
“Um,” I say again.
“I can see you’ve given this lots of thought,” Rose jokes, perhaps as a way to ease the tension. It doesn’t work.
“I was thinking,” I begin, fully prepared tonot tell Rose what I’mreally thinking. It’s the not-dying thing. Theno Till Death Do Us Part part. I’m thinking that every bottle of blood in my refrigerator has an expiration date, that Isuzu will grow up, get vamped, move out. I’m thinking about my mom, and my dad, and how I’mreally not going to tell Rose aboutthat.
Plus…
Plus, I’m thinking about staring at even a freckle I don’t like—forever.
“Okay,” Rose says. “Thinking. That’s a good start.”
“I was thinking that you and I…”
“…yes…”
“…could…”
“Go on.”
“Yes!”I practically squeal this, just like Isuzu did with her“Really.”
“What?”
“I was thinking,” I say, “that you and I could,” I roll my hand like a director telling an actor to speed it up, only with me, it means, “you know. Go on.”
“Our merry ways?”
“No,” I say. “Seeing each other,” I add. “You and I could go on…seeing each other.”
“Oh,” Rose says. “Huh,” she adds.
She turns around again and looks at the streetlights streaming by her window. She cups her chin in her uncut palm.
Sighs.
“Whatever,” she says.
23
Kelly
So, you’re in love, eh?”
That’s Father Jack saying that, and me saying back: “I think so.”
Me adding: “It feels like it.”
We’re sitting in Father Jack’s den. He’s got a fire going in the fireplace, not for the heat, but to look at the flames licking up the logs, to hear the crackle of things consigned to burn. Judas is curled up in the corner, sleeping.
“Must be nice,” Father Jack says, looking at the flames. He’s made a point of looking away from me to look at the flames, before speaking. He tightens his eyelids, narrowing the slit through which light is allowed in. The crow’s-feet around his crow black eyes get deeper.
“I’m never going to see you again,” he says. “Am I?” He pauses. “You’re ditching me just like you ditched Trooper.”
I flinch. And then I remember which Trooper he means. And it’s true. Thisis my have-a-good-life, my don’t-let-the-screen-door-hit-ya-on-the-way-out. It’s just math. And there’s only so much dead time in an evening.
“I would,” I joke, trying to lighten the mood. “But I don’t think the pet store would give me anything for you.”
“You’re probably right there.” Father Jack sighs, his mood not lightened in the least. “Not a lot of call for my kind.”
Oh, so it’s going to be one of those talks full of hints, and evasions, and euphemisms that raise a subject just to avoid talking about it. We do this all the time, Father Jack and I, we who are made of time. But not anymore. This is good-bye. And it’s as good a time as any to bring up all the stuff that can ruin everything.
“We’ve never really discussed that,” I say, because we haven’t. Because I really didn’t want to know. He said he never did and I was only too happy to take him at his word. Denial—that’s what I was in. I accepted his denial, and moved on to that place where I could feel superior by comparison.
“Sure we have,” Father Jack says. “All my advice on your gambling? The twelve-step stuff? That was us, talking about it.”
“We haven’t talked about itspecifically,” I say. “I don’t even know, you knowwhich.”
“Which?”
“Which kind,” I stumble. “Boys? Girls?” Pause. “Both?”
“None of the above,” Father Jack says.
I blink. I look at my empty hands, for effect. For illustration. “What’s that leave?”
“Kelly,” Father Jack says. “It leaves Kelly.” He pauses. Looks away from the flames and back at me. “You think I’m some sort of fiend who’d go around molesting every kid that came my way, if there were any ‘kids’ left to come my way. But that’s not how it is. It’s not how it was. There was just one. Just…Kelly. She was a little girl in my first parish, when I was just out of the seminary.” Pause. “This woman you’ve found. This love of your afterlife. How do you feel when you see her?”
“Like my veins are too small,” I say. “Like my heart’s not big enough. Like I’ve been poisoned and she’s the antidote.” I pause. Listen to myself. Deflect. “Just stop me as soon as I start sounding like an idiot, okay?”
“No. You’re fine,” Father Jack says, back to staring at the flames. “That’s how I felt when I saw Kelly out on the playground. She looked like sunshine in a hand-me-down dress, and I wanted to buy her things. I wanted her to hug me. I wanted to feel her little arms wrapped around my neck, hear her laughter making the world okay.”
I shift in my chair. I’m having trouble finding a comfortable position.
“I’d give her horsey rides around the playground. She’d hold on to my ears, my hair, my collar, always laughing that musical laugh of hers. ‘Father Jack,’ she’d say, tugging on my pant leg, ‘can you get me God’s autograph?’ I didn’t know what I was feeling. I just knew I didn’t feel that way about the other kids, or anybody else I knew.”
A log splits in the fireplace. Father Jack stops talking and watches the sparks riding shimmers of heat up the chimney.
“And then I had a dream,” he says, starting again. “And then I knew.”
Father Jack’s chest rises, falls, waits for me to ask.
“What did you do?”
“Nothing,” he says. One tick. One tock.
“No. That’s not true,” he confesses. Or goes on confessing. “I yelled at her. In front of everybody. I sent her to the principal’s office for talking in class, even though she hadn’t. I kept that up for about a week, finding things to accuse her of, anything to get her out of my classroom and into somebody else’s custody.”
Father Jack squeezes one hand with the other, behind his back.
“I’d see her out on the playground after that, and it was like…I don’t know. It was like I killed something inside her. She’d wander around the playground, kicking at pebbles, not playing, not laughing. I thought I was doing the right thing, protecting her from me, but I betrayed her, instead. I…”
The knuckles of one hand crack in the fist of the other.
“I went to see the bishop,” Father Jack says. “I sat in his office and told him I was having trouble with a child in my parish. ‘Does he want money?’ That’s the first question he asked me. And before I can even say, no, he’s sliding open a drawer. That’s all I can hear, that drawer, squeaking open. Wood rubbing against wood. It sounds like the hinges on the gates of hell. I can’t look at whatever’s in that drawer. I get dizzy instead. And when I try standing up, I just vomit right there, in the bishop’s wastebasket.”
“Why didn’t you just quit?”
“Oh, I tried.” Father Jack laughs an utterly joyl
ess laugh. “I tried killing myself.” Pause. “I was going to be very Roman about it. I lit candles, filled the tub with warm water, turned out the lights. The razor blades were all ready and my wrists were going numb from this cream anesthetic I’d rubbed on. I wanted out, see, but I wasn’t a big fan of pain. I’d already taken six aspirin, to stop the blood from clotting, but for that other thing, too. For the pain.”
“What happened?”
“Seems my parish wasn’t in the safest of neighborhoods,” Father Jack says. “Seems a house with all the lights out during the shank of the evening was pretty much an open invitation.”
“Someone broke in?”
“Someone broke in,” Father Jack confirms. “He finds me unconscious and ends up calling nine-one-one. He’s just a petty thief. He’s no murderer. So…After that, I figured God just had different plans for me.”
“But you never touched Kelly?” I ask.
“Never.”
“And you never touched any other kids?”
I ask that just to have it confirmed. I don’t know why, but I believe Father Jack. I’m not inclined to second-guess his story as I was with Rose and her mother the clown. He could be lying to make himself look good. But if that’s the goal, why’d he tell me about his inclinations in the first place? Maybe I’m being stupid. Maybe I’m being naïve. Or maybe the world where it mattered just got placed in somebody else’s custody.
“AA,” Father Jack says, preemptively. “That’s you’re next question, right? What did I do, how did I cope with my impossible longings?”
I nod.
“They really didn’t have a twelve-step group for my thing, so I became an ‘alcoholic,’ ” Father Jack says. “And I went to meetings. Lots and lots of meetings. It’s really comforting, surrounding yourself with the suffering of others. I’d be at a meeting and somebody’d break down crying at my table. After one of those, I’d go home happy as a clam. It was their happiness I couldn’t take. Whenever too many people started getting better, started coming in with tales of personal triumph instead of tragedy, that’s when I knew it was time to find a new meeting.”
Another log splits, letting go more sparks and ash. Judas’s head pops up, he looks around, settles back.
“That’s why I’m still a priest,” Father Jack says. “Confession. I’m hooked on that laundry list of everyday weaknesses. The worries of people trying to talk their way out of hell.”
I smile, happy to hear that I’m not Father Jack’s only dealer of vicarious thrills.
“So yeah.” He sighs. “Yeah, I’m real happy for you, Marty.”
“You don’t sound very happy.”
Father Jack turns away from the fire so I can see the weary smirk on his face. “I’m bursting at the seams,” he says in the deadest dead-pan I’ve ever heard him use. He turns back and pokes at the fire with the poker.
“Now get your happy ass out of here,” he says, “before I have Judas rip you a new one.”
24
Your Worst Nightmare
We’d seen too many made-for-TV movies in which somebody introduces himself as “Your worst nightmare.” That’s how it got started. We looked at each other, having heard the same line delivered the same way too many times, and we just started giggling.
“Hello,” I said, giggling, offering my hand. “Allow me to introduce myself. I’m your nightmare.”
“Would that be myworst nightmare?” Isuzu asked.
“Why yes, it would.”
“Pleased to meet you.”
“Likewise, I’m sure.”
Followed by more giggling and the birth of an inside joke.
“Hello. It’s me. Your worst nightmare. I’m home.”
That’s how I’d announce myself, returning from work, a date, whatever. And Isuzu would run up from wherever she was, give me a quick hug, and then launch into the events of her day—the fly she stalked through the apartment for over an hour, what Bobby Little was doing in his room now, how far she’d gotten in reading through theEncyclopedia Vampirica.
That’s how it worked—right up until it didn’t.
The front door and windows—that’s what I worried about. How easily jimmied, how quickly smashed—and all the things that might crawl in through the holes that were left. I imagined coming home one night to splinters or shards, but never guessed that the biggest threat to our way of life was as thin as a wire. As tiny as electrons.
As untouchable as loneliness.
I should have known something was wrong when Isuzu stopped complaining about my seeing Rose and being out all night. I should have known something was up when she cheerily saw me to the door, hoped I’d have a good time, assured me she’d be fine—fine!—on her own.
“Reading.”
That’s the answer I got when I asked her what she did while I was out. And it wasn’t a lie, exactly. It just wasn’t the whole truth. Reading was part of it, and typing was another part. There were also digital stills, followed by “live” video feeds—none of which was covered by the answer I’d been given.
Maybe it was just tit for tat. I’d lied to her about Rose, and this was the payback.
Oh, what a tangled World Wide Web we weave.
Digital proxies. Avatars. Cyber masks. The idea’s always the same—just so many pixels wrapped around an animated frame, brought in to bolster the lie of whatever online persona you’ve adopted. Taller? No problem. Darker, more handsome? Prettier, blonder, bigger tits, more slutty? Perhaps you’ve always fancied yourself another species. Go for it. Everything is negotiable. Everything’s up for grabs and nothing is what it seems. And so you run into Rex_260 on Afterlife Online one night, Rex turning out to be an impeccably digitized web-surfing German shepherd.
“Are you for real?” you type, and Rex types back, “I’m a metaphor.”
“You mean like that bug in Kafka?” you type, and Rex types back, “Woof!”
You can also change your age. Of course.
You don’t have to be an old lech or a little squirt. Not in cyberspace. You can change your age to reflect how young you are at heart. You can change your age to seem more mature than you are. Or you can change your age to match the age of whatever it is you’re into—whatever it is you’re looking for, under all these cyber rocks, in all these dark, anonymous corners.
Hell, changing your age is as easy as changing a bloodstained shirt.
Hello,” I call out. “It’s me. Your worst nightmare. I’m home.”
Nothing.
“Hello,” I repeat, only to be answered by my own echo.
Maybe she’s taking a nap, I think. Or hiding as a prank, or in the bathroom, or so caught up in all that “reading” she’s been doing lately that she just doesn’t hear. But by the time I call out a second time, I know it’s none of these.
There’s a kind of silence that says “gone.” You recognize it by not having heard it in so long. I haven’t heard this silence, this loud, since just before bringing Isuzu home for the first time. And here it is again. And just like that, I know that the nightmare that just walked through my door is my own.
I begin checking for clues.
There’s no broken glass, no sign of a forced entry. There’s blood, sure, but nothing I can’t explain away as just proof of my own sloppy eating habits. Rings on the coffee table, a few drops on the kitchen counter, but no Rorschachs splattering the walls, no runny asterisks footnoting some larger mess waiting to be stumbled upon.
Her bed is made.
That’s the first bad sign. The last time she made her bed was a few years ago, when she’d decided to hunt down her mother’s killers.
Her pillow is fluffed. The comforter is drawn up over the pillow, and the spread drawn up over the comforter.
It’s just a bed.
Just a made-up bed.
So why does it look so funereal?
I rifle through her desk, her closet, her sock and underwear drawer. I peek under that neat coffin of a bed. I don’t know what I’m looki
ng for, but I look anyway, finding nothing in particular out of place, or missing, or terribly helpful.
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