No One's Home

by D. M. Pulley

  “You’re saying you found heroin in Hunter’s room?” The adrenaline buzzing in her ears muffled the sound of her own voice. It was the sound of her losing everything. Not my baby. No.

  His malpractice suit all but forgotten, Myron kept driving his nails. “You’re always worried he might be on drugs. Well, there you go, Margot. I guess you were just too drunk yourself to notice.”

  “What?” Hunter, who’d crept down into the kitchen to listen to the argument, appeared in the doorway.

  “Admit it, son.” Myron turned on his boy with an iron stare. “It’s okay to admit it. You have a problem. And we can help.”

  Hunter shook his head. The baggie of weed buried inside the gerbil food loomed in the back of his mind, but then he saw the hypodermic needle. “No way! That’s not mine! I’m not shooting up fucking heroin!”

  “Watch your mouth.” Myron took a menacing step toward him. He wouldn’t lose his life, his career, his son. He couldn’t. He’d make it up to the boy somehow, he told himself. Someday, Hunter would realize that this was the only option. Margot wasn’t fit to be a mother. She hadn’t been fit in years. “We know you’ve been sneaking around here with that junkie girlfriend of yours, stealing things. We know you locked your poor mother in the attic. The first step in recovery is admitting you have a problem, son.”

  “But I don’t! This is bullshit! You’re the one with the pills, Dad. You’re the one. All the articles say when the pills run out, heroin is what addicts turn to next . . . Mom,” he pleaded with his mother, but Margot was lost in her own nightmare.

  “Did you?” she whispered, shaking her head. “Did you do this?”

  “Drug test me! Okay? You might find a little weed, but you won’t find fucking heroin. And then drug test him!” Hunter shouted, pointing a finger at his father.

  Myron cracked the boy across the face with an open palm. “Don’t you dare point a finger at me. You have no idea what the hell you’re talking about. You’re just a kid. And you have a problem, and so help me God . . .” He grabbed Hunter by the shoulders with the look of a man holding on to the edge of a cliff. “You’re not going to lie your way out of this!”

  “Myron! Let him go!” Margot shouted.

  “No. You’re always babying him, but he has got to learn.” Myron pushed the boy against the wall. “Just admit it, son. There is right. And there is wrong.”

  “Myron! Stop!”

  “I want to hear him say it, god dammit. Just say, Dad, I—”

  The crack of a gun shook the room.

  In the utter shock of the blast, Myron lost his grip.

  “Let him go, Myron.” She pointed the gun she’d found in the attic at his head. “I don’t believe you. I don’t. Look at you, for God’s sake. Look at your hands. They’re shaking.”

  Hunter stumbled back, stupefied at the image of his mother with the gun. This isn’t happening.

  “Hunter!” a small voice hissed from the kitchen.

  He turned to see Ava standing in the kitchen. She was holding his cell phone. The numbers 911 glowed on the screen.

  Myron shifted his cornered gaze and saw the girl. The girl. Oh, Jesus. The girl.

  “Come on!” Ava shouted. She grabbed Hunter’s hand and dragged him into the kitchen.

  Dazed, the boy followed her three steps, then turned back to his mother, who was holding the gun in two shaking hands, tears streaming down her face. His father, with his palms up, took one step toward her and then another. “Calm down, Margot. Let’s think this through.”

  Ava kept pulling.

  “Hunter, get out. Get help!” Margot choked out the words, following him with one eye as he slipped out the back door. Run!

  Outside, a patchwork of incandescent lights from the windows lit the yard. Ava dragged him beyond the reach of the house.

  “The police are coming,” she whispered, retreating back into the trees.

  He followed her, legs numb and stumbling, not believing any of it. The gun. The fight. His father’s fingers digging into his arms. The red welt on his cheek. From a distance, the house no longer seemed real. Shadows danced violently in the den windows, and he watched them with detached fascination.

  Ava was crying. “It’s happening again.”

  “What’s happening again?” he whispered.

  Another gunshot made him jump.

  56

  The Martin Family

  December 5, 2014

  A door slammed like a shot.

  “Ava? Ava, honey, where are you?” Papa Martin’s voice called out in the hallway below, shaking the timbers of the old house. The hour was late, but her foster mother was out of town at another academic conference. Mama Martin traveled a lot, leaving her husband and foster children to their own devices.

  Ava held her breath in the attic crawl space, praying this would be the time he didn’t find her. Her shadow huddled under the rafters. All the other doors in the attic were locked. He’d made sure of it.

  The weight of the man’s footsteps vibrated up through the walls. Another door slammed open beneath her. The sound of Papa Martin’s voice chilled her blood.

  “Hey, buddy. I’m looking for Ava. Is she in here?”

  She couldn’t make out Toby’s response ten feet below her.

  “I think she ran away. I can’t find her anywhere, champ. Did she say anything to you about it?” Papa was talking loud enough for her to hear. Deliberately loud. “I’m afraid she’s never coming back.”

  Her brother’s muffled answers became wails. “Ava!” the boy cried out, terrified. “Where are you?”

  Ava covered her ears, shaking. No. No. No.

  Mr. Martin had never hurt Toby before. He’d never raised a hand to him, and that had been Ava’s only consolation. Her brother had been safe. Hearing him crying through the floor, hearing him convinced she had abandoned him, was unbearable.

  She squeezed the skeleton key she’d stolen from a junk drawer in the kitchen and set it along the top of the knee wall. Hands trembling, she felt the floor blindly for the loose board.

  Toby cried out again. “Ava, don’t leave!”

  If he cried hard enough, he would start choking. His asthma would tighten his airways down to nothing. She could already hear the rattle in his voice.

  Unable to stand it a moment longer, she pounded the floorboard with her fist and called out. “Toby! It’s okay! I’m up here.”

  The house went still. Listening.

  “I think she’s hiding, Toby. You stay here. I’ll go find her.”

  The door to the boy’s room clicked shut and rattled as Mr. Martin locked it again. Ava’s numb fingers ran along the boards of the crawl space, scrambling for a plan. The social worker wasn’t due back for months. Plenty of time for bruises to fade and broken bones to mend. There was no telling what he might do. The last time she’d run from him, he’d squeezed her neck so hard it left marks.

  Her hand hit a loose board near the knee wall. There it is. She pried it up and dug into the stone wool insulation below until she felt it. Metal. She fumbled the gun into her sweating palms as the weight of the heavy man pounded down the hallway to the attic door.

  The lock gave way. The door slapped open.

  He took the steps two at a time as Ava righted herself. The weight of the gun in her hand still hadn’t fully registered in her mind when he crested the stairs.

  “Ava, honey. What are you doing up here?” the man said in a sickly-sweet voice. He stood there, all six feet five and 270 pounds of him, in his undershirt and boxer shorts. “Toby’s worried sick.”

  The blood drained from her face at the thought of her brother sick and alone and what was coming next. His eyes focused on her mouth, her neck, her breasts. Not her hand. Not the gun.

  His fists clenched, he took a step toward her and then another. “What are we going to do with you?”

  The coming scene played out in his pitying smile and the hard set of his eyes, one ugly image after another—his hand cracking her acro
ss the face and slamming her into the floor (Why do you make me do this?), hands petting her bruised cheek (Why can’t you behave, honey?), hands slipping under her nightgown (Let me hold you), his soft voice muttering consolations in her ear as he took what he wanted (It’s okay, baby, it’s okay).

  Ava shook her head at his smiling face, tears spilling from her eyes. She braced herself and raised the gun. It’s not okay. She squeezed her eyes shut.

  BAM!

  The blast exploded from her hand. The deafening sound reverberated up and down the attic. The world swelled around her, every atom screaming. Then it vanished, taking her with it.

  Then nothing.

  The ragged sound of someone struggling to breathe slowly brought her back into her shaking bones. Air hissed in and out of her throat.

  When she dared open her eyes, she found herself in the diorama of a crime scene. A thin wisp of smoke hung in the air. Sensations registered in the corner of her mind. The smell of something burning. Her shoulder aching as though it had been wrenched loose. Her hand stinging with the burn of gunpowder. The glint of the pistol lying at her feet.

  Clyde Martin lay on the ground two feet away from it.

  He’s dead. Her eyes lolled in and out of focus, refusing to see, unable to not see. I killed him. He’s dead.

  Down below, a small voice screamed through the plaster and wood, “Ava!”

  As if in reply, Clyde rolled onto his side and coughed. His face had swelled to the point of bursting. His arms shook as though with seizure. But there was no blood. No blood pooling on the floor. No urine. No vomit. No bullet hole.

  Ava numbly surveyed the spectacle of him convulsing there, searching for fluids, with a detached fear he’d spring up and attack her and also that he wouldn’t.

  He clutched himself under his arm and shuddered again, sucking in air. “A-va,” he gasped, his face puckering in pain. “Call 911. Call . . . ssss. Heart. It’s—”

  Morbidly curious, she scanned the floors and walls until she found it. A tiny hole had punctured the ceiling over the staircase several inches from where he’d been standing. I missed. Emotions failed her. Relief? Despair? She dropped her empty gaze back down to the man on the floor.

  As the shock of the blast dissipated, his words began to make sense. Heart. Heart attack.

  It took several moments for her to think to pick up the gun and keep it out of his reach. She drifted through her next motions as though in a dream, grabbing the gun at her feet, wandering to the hole in the ceiling, picking up a chip of plaster from the floor, squinting at the puncture she’d made out into the night sky. A whistle of cold air fell onto her face like rain.

  The man rolled again, his large belly heaving for air. His face purple now. His lips working the shapes of words but unable to make a sound. Call. Help. She studied him with detached fascination. His heart seizing in his rib cage, his lungs gasping, his arteries bursting—the shape of a man but no longer a man.

  Call. Help.

  Ava slowly considered the gun in her hand, what it meant and didn’t mean, and then her eyes circled the room. How many times had she hoped for a scenario just like this? How many hours had she prayed? A story began to form in her head, a script she would read later. I was asleep in bed and heard a terrible noise . . . Please send an ambulance! He’s not breathing!

  Her foot scattered the plaster dust below the hole she’d made until it was gone.

  She went back into the crawl space to retrieve her stolen key and carried it into the tiny storage room on the right, next to Ella Rady’s old room. Glancing back at the man writhing on the floor, she unlocked the door and stepped into the closet-size bedroom. She carefully wiped her fingerprints from the gun like she’d seen done on TV shows and shook out the bullets. She placed it all inside an old cigar box, burying it under the crumbling newspapers about poor little Walter. She then dusted all traces of herself from the top of the box and the floor. She closed and locked the door once more, taking her time to wipe the doorknob with her nightgown.

  Giving Mr. Martin a wide berth, she drifted past him to the attic stairs, to her brother. She could hear the boy crying, “Ava! Ava, where are you?”

  Toby would need comforting. They would need to get their stories straight. It’s not our fault. There was no gun, sweetie. You never saw or heard a gun, right? She would unlock the doors and return the key to its drawer and wait.

  “A-va,” the man behind her choked.

  She turned to him one last time, committing the sight of him helpless on the floor to her memory, declawing him, defanging him. Crouching down next to him, just out of his reach, she whispered, “It’s okay, Papa . . . I won’t tell anyone. I promise.”

  His skin darkened to a deeper shade of purple.

  As she headed down the steps, she caught a sensation that stopped her cold. A shadow stood in the bathroom doorway at the other end of the attic, just out of reach of the light.

  “Who’s there?” she whispered, eyes darting from the shadow to Clyde lying on the floor and back again. The man’s purple face followed her gaze, searching the bathroom for help and finding nothing but an empty doorway.

  She stared another moment at the apparition, blinking her eyes until it was gone, then headed down the stairs.

  57

  The Spielman Family

  August 11, 2018

  The sirens came two minutes later. Hunter sat on the ground at the back of their lot and watched through the windows as two police officers entered, guns drawn. Ava sat at his side, silently weeping and holding his numb hand.

  This isn’t happening.

  The thought wrote itself over Margot’s face as the two officers shouted from the foyer. “Mrs. Spielman. Are you alright? If you can hear us, put the gun down and your hands on your head.”

  The sulfur and smoke of the gunpowder burned her nostrils. The gun. Margot searched for it in slow motion, her brain unable to catch up, and found it lying on the ground next to Myron. A puddle of blood was spreading over their carefully selected oriental rug, blood from a small hole in his foot.

  The blast had knocked all thought from her head and left her nearly catatonic, watching from a safe distance as Myron yowled in agony, as Myron screamed at her to call an ambulance, as Myron chewed the insides of his mouth raw to keep from fixing a hit for the pain.

  When the paramedics came, they found him in a shocked stupor, gazing up at the ceiling, unable to comprehend the exact moment when things had taken a turn in this terrible direction. Was it the day Abigail died in his recovery room? Was it the day he found relief in a little white pill? Was it the day he found Margot bleeding from her wrist? Was it the day his daughter, Allison, passed away? Was it the day of her diagnosis? Was it the moment he realized that even with his medical degree, he couldn’t save his own daughter? The dominoes fell over and over in his mind’s eye. So many lost moments when he might’ve stopped it all went careening past him.

  He caught a glimpse of Margot’s slackened face above him. Margot. But then she was gone. A blinding penlight shined into one eye and then the next. Hands checked his pulse and lifted his screaming foot. Can you hear me, Dr. Spielman?

  Morphine, he whispered. I need morphine.

  Hunter watched through the window as the paramedics carried his father out on a gurney. The boy’s body nearly collapsed in relief when his mother stood up and walked out with the police officers. She isn’t dead. He forced a breath past the stone in his throat.

  “He won’t press charges. We won’t let him,” Ava whispered. “It’ll be okay, Hunter.”

  Two flashlights darted through the house, into closets and under beds, searching for him. The back door opened, and a high beam scanned the yard.

  “Hunter? Are you out there? Everything’s going to be okay, son. We just want to talk to you . . .”

  The two teenagers crouched behind their tree and waited for the light to pass them over.

  “They’ll give up in a minute,” Ava whispered.

 
; And they did. After a ten-minute search, the police cars left them in the darkness of the yard.

  Hunter stood up and scanned the back of the house, then squinted down at the girl standing next to him in the slanted dark. She looked more like a faded memory than a girl, a pretty heartache, a bird in a storm.

  “What did you mean, ‘it’s happening again’?” he asked, wiping a stream of tears from her face. “What happened here, Ava?”

  She didn’t answer.

  “What happened to your brother? His name’s Toby, right? He’s the one you’re waiting for, isn’t he?”

  She avoided his eyes and gazed up at the house. The attic light was still burning.

  “You can tell me. It’s okay.” He wanted to fold her into his arms and hold on for dear life. Instead, he squeezed her hand.

  “Toby left. After Papa Martin died . . . they took him away. And, um.” The house wavered in her tears. “He was so messed up by everything, you know? He just wanted a home, but they wouldn’t let me keep him . . . they said I couldn’t take care of him, that I was too young, and, uh . . . the family they found for him didn’t want me. I was too old. But they didn’t get it. He just kept running away. He kept coming back here to find me.”

  “What happened to him?”

  She wiped her face with a shaky hand, unable to say the words out loud.

  “I found an article about a boy in the paper. A boy named Toby. Was that him?”

  She didn’t answer.

  “I’m so sorry, Ava.” Hunter kept his eyes on the ground.

  “They wouldn’t let me see him, not even at the funeral . . . they treated me like we weren’t even related, like I was nobody to him.” Her words jumbled into sobs. “I should’ve run away with him. I should’ve stopped them from taking him. It’s all my fault . . . I should’ve called the ambulance sooner. If Papa Martin hadn’t . . .”

  Hunter went quiet as her voice trailed off, afraid to speak. Swallowing hard, he put an arm over her shoulders. To his utter amazement, she let him. She curled into his chest, and he wrapped himself around her as the grief racked and shook her.