Up at the house, a light comes on in the kitchen. Pete stomps out his cigarette. Time to find out Joel’s story.
He returns to the squad, opens the back door. “Hey, Butch? We’re here.”
The big dog rears his sleep-doped head and shakes off whatever he’d been dreaming.
“We’re home,” Pete tells him. “Where we live. C’mon.”
Butch jumps out and heads for his usual tree—the only tree in the yard, actually—to lift his leg.
Pete closes the garage and follows, gets the hose going to refill the dog’s water bowl. He’s kneeling there, side of the dog run, when Butch comes over and sits, head cocked, panting.
Pete finds his own breath catching. Excessive force might be a charge that sticks. Then what happens to Butch? Pete’s the one who got him worked up this morning. And for a moment—the single moment he gave the dog just enough slack on the leash—Pete wanted Butch to get to White. Whether or not White was making a move. Was that based on history?
Of course Butch couldn’t have known any better. He only wanted to please his master.
Pete takes the dog’s head in his hands and whispers in his ear—that he’s a good boy and Does he know what a good boy he is? and that he’ll be okay. He feels like a liar, the reassuring tone of his voice. What if the dog’s loyalty makes him a liability?
Butch nuzzles his chest and Pete sits back and pulls him into a hug. It’s the only affection he’ll count on tonight.
When Butch gets restless Pete says, “Okay, boy,” and ushers the dog into his run. He locks the gate and resets the resting lock numbers; he changes them every night to make sure nobody’s coming around—kids, of course. The tarp over the top is another security measure, because Pete knows of a couple of dogs killed by the unthinkable lobbed-over hamburger patty made of ground beef and crushed glass. Not kids.
Pete rattles the fence, says, “Night, partner.”
Butch blinks a goodbye and noses his old blanket around, making tonight’s bed.
No one is there to greet Pete when he lets himself inside the house. It still doesn’t smell like home—not that a rental would ever feel that way. Still, he thought he’d get used to it, once they moved all their stuff in—like Butch and his old blanket. But every time Pete steps in, he flashes back to a summerhouse in 1978. It was a place his parents rented in Wisconsin. It was down a dirt road and shaded by huge elm trees and it was nowhere near the beach, like they promised, though it smelled of lake water. And also mold. And what he now knows to be death: faint and sweet, occasional but ever lingering.
When they moved in, Sarah made every improvement the landlord allowed—she repainted one room, ripped out the carpet in another, plugged air freshener into every single light socket. Now, the place smells like Lilac Spring. And sometimes mold. And sometimes death.
“Sarah?” Pete says, without much behind it. His mind’s on a meal now, and then maybe a shower, before he’s supposed to play policeman with Joel.
He’s at the kitchen table waiting on a leg of a rotisserie chicken that’s warming in the oven, a box of crackers and a cold beer in front of him, when Sarah finally comes downstairs.
“Hi,” she says, hair up, makeup off. She used to be pretty this way, when she smiled.
“Hi.” Pete used to be a lot of things. He knows that.
Sarah opens the fridge and looks inside and then lets it close. She probably hasn’t had anything for dinner, and she probably won’t. She always looks, and always says she isn’t hungry.
Pete tips the box of crackers.
“I’m not hungry.” She places her hands on the back of the seat across from him, the pose as stiff as her lip. She looks at his beer. “I thought you’d be home this morning.”
“Yeah. You said.”
“Joel’s school called. They suspended him.”
“What for?”
“He urinated on another boy’s uniform.”
“On another kid?”
“On the boy’s clothes. Robert Schnapper. They were in gym class. Mr. Wells caught Joel in the locker room as he was … relieving himself. In Robert’s locker. I’m going to make an appointment with Dr. Drake.…” While Sarah’s talking, she’s so serious, her face a picture of concern and embarrassment and guilt, that Pete half expects her to reveal a prankish smile—a conspiratorial Can you believe it? Joel, the little shit!—because she would have, before.
And then he’s the one with the smile. He can’t help it.
“This is not funny.”
“It’s kind of funny.”
“No, it isn’t.”
“I’m sorry,” he says, but as soon as he says it he realizes he’s trying not to laugh and then he can’t help that, either. This must be a good one, whatever set Joel off? Whatever made Sarah so damn serious?
“I can’t believe you,” she says, and then she’s saying a bunch of other stuff but Pete can’t make out any of it because he’s really cracking up. He tries—he hears her say something about a bladder-control issue, and how Joel could have completely internalized everything that’s happened—but listening to her go on just makes it worse. He puts his head in his hands. It’s not that funny, but something about it, something kills him.
“Pete.”
“Hang on a second,” Pete says. “Just a second.” That extra second is because he had to wipe his eyes after the first one. He says, “This Robert Snapper—”
“Schnapper.”
“I meant Schnapp—” the rest of it lost. His stomach cramping. He doesn’t even know why he’s laughing, exactly, but he might as well fall off his chair.
“You’re an asshole.”
“I’m sorry,” he says again.
And then he realizes he doesn’t mean it, and that what he’s laughing at is her, or to spite her, at least. He never wanted it to be like this, but it is. And it’s his fault, and it’s her fault, and it’s maddening.
He sits back, sobered. “What did Joel say?”
“I don’t know, Pete. He came home with a headache. He looked awful. I put him to bed.”
“You didn’t talk to him?”
“I’m his mother. Not a cop.”
“You’re not a doctor, either, but I’ll bet you gave him pills.”
“You’re not going to make me feel bad. I’ve been trying to tell you something’s going on with him for months and you refuse to hear me.”
“I think you’re making too much of this.”
“I think you are making a mess of it. Like everything else.” She finds the back of the chair again, this time for balance, because now she’s not looking at him.
Not looking at him is what she does to drive him insane. She knows it drives him insane, and yet at times she acts like it’s simply impossible to face him. During a heated argument not too long ago, Pete held her head and tried to force her to look at him directly. She wouldn’t. Short of torture, there is no good way to induce eye contact.
So fuck it. “I’m tired,” he says. “I’m done talking about this.”
The stove timer goes ting and Sarah responds on reflex, an oven mitt, tongs. Pete would get up and fix the plate himself but then it would turn into a whole thing about how he should have barbecue sauce or a napkin when he really just wants to eat the fucking chicken leg with his hands and wipe his hands on his pants and throw his pants in the laundry and take a shower but it can never make simple sense like that, can it?
She gets another dish from the fridge and says, “There are beans. Do you want beans?”
This is the other thing Sarah does that drives him insane: she changes the subject. Even though he just said he was done talking about it, he knows she’s not done talking about it, and the ease with which she acts like she gives a shit whether or not he wants beans makes him want to choke her. Because he knows her agenda isn’t to feed him beans. It’s to drive him insane.
He says, “There is nothing wrong with our son.”
“I made them with bacon.”
“Je
sus, Sarah. Say what you want to say.”
She puts the beans back, the chicken in front of him. “He has trouble with social cues. Difficulty making friends.”
“He’s in a new school.”
“He has unusual and all-absorbing interests. An inability to cope with change—”
“You might as well be talking about me.”
“That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you, Pete! God, I don’t know why I bother. You tell me to speak and then you don’t listen.”
“I listen. Your problem is that I don’t agree with you.”
“I don’t need you to agree. I need you to help.”
“What is it you want me to do?”
“Before,” she says, her grip firm this time on the back of the chair, “Joel was acting out because of you. Now, he’s acting like you.”
“You say that like I’m a bad guy. You say that like I haven’t done everything possible to make things right. But goddamm it, I asked you what you want me to do. You won’t ever tell me that.” He pushes back from the table.
She looks at him. It drives him more insane.
“Sarah. Say something.”
She very carefully pulls out the chair and very quietly sits and then very evenly she says, “Katherine called.”
“She called here?”
“Well, you don’t answer your phone.”
“Hah,” he says, so that she knows she wasn’t funny. “She must’ve heard about what happened at work today.”
Sarah looks away. “She’s the one who told me.”
“You knew.” Pete sits back and watches her watch the table and he wishes she had served him beans and barbecue sauce and a napkin so he could push it all back at her, make a scene and maybe a real mess and get up and storm out—yes it would be childish but so what?—she knew what to expect tonight. She knew the shit Pete was carrying when he walked in. And she chose to play it this way.
He pushes his plate aside, the uneaten chicken leg, and he finishes his beer. Then he says, “I think you want me to be the bad guy.”
She half opens her mouth, lip quivering, and if she has something to say the house phone stops her, an interruption even though she lets it go on ringing and he lets it go on ringing and they both wait for it to turn over to voice mail.
Once it does she says, “What now?”
And she means about White, of course, but the damn phone starts right up again and this time Pete says, “I’ll get it,” because he’s already so tired of lying.
4
The downstairs phone rings and Joel snaps awake, his joints dream-locked.
It’s dark outside his bedroom window, so it’s either getting late or it’s really early—impossible to tell which from the sky or a phone call.
He gets up and turns on his desk lamp, a swatch of light over last year’s Cook County K9 calendar—Butchie the dog of the month in July—and this season’s bullpen-autographed Cubs pendant, July the month his dad says they blew their playoff chances.
Then there’s the plate of cold chicken tenders, another wake-up call—this one as to why he was asleep in the first place. His stomach still feels greased, like after a large popcorn at the movies, except what he saw today wasn’t a movie, and nobody had to explain how they made it look real.
He switches off the light and jumps back into bed.
When he got home this afternoon his mom asked, “Do you have something to tell me?” like she was psychic, so he lied and said, “Yes, I have a headache,” which was true often enough to get him sent up to his room. At one point she came in to check on him and he pretended to be asleep. She left the chicken and a glass of milk and a plastic cup of applesauce. She also left a real bad feeling in Joel’s heart because she knew something was wrong. Said so. Said, “Jo Jo, I don’t know what I’m going to tell your dad.”
Joel studied the back of his eyelids as long as he could, then made up a cough and turned over.
After a while he got tired of pretending to be asleep, and that must have been when he actually fell asleep.
The phone rings again and pretty soon he hears his dad start up the stairs. He knows it’s his dad because the third step creaks under the stress of his weighted boots; so will the ninth, and the tenth. The house is old—“vintage” is what Joel’s mom kept calling it when they moved in last year; “bullshit” is what his dad said to that. He didn’t seem to want to move from their old newer house in Edison Park, but everybody kept saying this older new one would be the fresh start they needed, though it turned out there wasn’t much fresh about this house at all.
Mike said they moved because they needed money and the old-lady landlord offered it cheap. His mom said the old lady was lonely after she lost her husband and she wanted to move to an old-ladies’ home so she needed the money. Either way, here they are, his dad coming down the hallway, passing by Joel’s door to knock on Mike’s.
It’s a cop knock, backhanded. “McKenna,” he says, like he’s said it for the third time. This is probably because ever since his parents put something called smart limits on her phone, they play operator every night after nine.
“Yeah?” Mike says, sounding like the smart one.
“Telephone. A boy from school, something about math homework.”
Her door opens.
“You’ve got five minutes.”
Five minutes? That’s a long time for a girl who doesn’t ever do homework to talk about homework.
“Fine, Pete.” Mike shuts her door and locks it.
His dad starts back toward the steps and stops in front of Joel’s room. Joel tries to keep his breath even, to relax, to empty the expression from his face, but he shakes from the core, and there’s no way to hide that. He waits for the twist of the knob, the sticky latch, the leaky truth, but nothing happens; instead, his dad moves on down the hall without even trying the door. The tenth, ninth, and third step confirm he’s going, going, gone.
And then there’s Mike, from the other side of the shared wall: her cutest voice, every word sounding like me. Joel can’t make out what she’s saying but he’s not really trying, because lately all she ever talks about is how nobody lets her do anything—nobody being their parents and anything, whatever rule she feels like ignoring. Joel can’t sympathize because it seems like she gets away with everything.
“Me me me me-me,” she says, like some robot on the fritz. It’s so weird; they used to be friends. She never locked her door and she was always willing—interested, even—in explaining stuff. Like about their dad’s job when he had to protect the judge. And about how to take a joke. But since Mike started high school, it seems the only things they share anymore are two parents and a wall.
“Me me me,” she says, “Me ME, Zack.”
Joel sits up. Wants to throw up. Zack Fowler. Calling his sister.
He presses his ear to the wall and the muscles in his legs feel like they’re coming unstrung and it’s all he can do to hold himself there, still enough to listen. He waits for her to say something that will break through the panic; maybe she isn’t talking to Zack, but about him. Or maybe there is a different Zack in her grade, or at her new school.
Or else, what seems more like the truth—what Joel feels in his bones—is that it is Zack Fowler and there is no homework, just more trouble.
Joel slides down the wall. He always thought of Zack Fowler like one of his Most Wanted characters—the mythical sort people only tell stories about. Joel had only heard stories until he ran into Zack over the summer, and that sure gave him a story to tell: it started when Joel took Molly up on the tracks to prove he could squish coins on the rails. They’d climbed up through a hole in the fence at Bryn Mawr and knew it was off-limits, legal-wise, but they didn’t know access was forbidden to them specifically on account of Zack Fowler being up there with a girl named Linda Lee. When Zack saw Joel and Molly, he wanted to know if they’d gone up there to make out. They said no; Joel didn’t say he wasn’t even sure how that worked. Zack said they had t
o make out right there or else hand over all their money. They had nearly three dollars between them.
Molly was the one who really paid for it because she’d swiped her share of the rail money from her grandma’s change purse. Molly didn’t believe they would dent a single dime and had planned to return the change. When she went home broke, she wound up telling her grandma the whole thing. She was grounded for a week, and since her grandma wasn’t about to canvas the neighborhood looking for Zack Fowler and her two dollars, Molly had to make back the money by rubbing the old woman’s swollen, purple feet. Later, Molly told Joel it would’ve been less gross to just make out.
Joel gets up, straining to hear Mike from another spot on the wall, but all he can make out is me, me, me. After running into Zack today—a story he isn’t ever supposed to tell—he’s got to know if his name is part of the conversation. If this call is some kind of sideways threat.
He pulls on his school pants and sneaks out into the hallway to listen at Mike’s door.
She says, “Oh right, I’m a fucking cop’s kid so I never lied before.” To their mom’s horror, Mike says fuck a lot these days, but with enough spirit to make the word sound like a compliment. Or a nice surprise.
“I don’t know,” she says, “someone broke in?” Her laugh is nervous, voice strange, like she’s doing an imitation of herself. “It’s a dangerous neighborhood, Zack. Fucking cat burglars. Yeah, right? Aw, you’re terrible. Poor cat.”
Joel’s legs muscle up this time and he abandons Mike’s door, skips the creaky steps, and stops when his bare toes touch the family-room carpet, and that’s because he knows better than to interrupt and also because he hears his dad in there saying, “… Or that Butch was provoked. I don’t know the details of the suit yet but I bet they’ll try to take us out of service.”
“Where does that leave you?” Joel’s mom sounds like she’s been crying.
“I don’t know. Patrol. Unless White gets what he really wants—I’ll be lucky to get security work in Lincolnwood fucking mall.”
The Good Boy Page 6