Gossamer: A Story of Love and Tragedy

by Thompson, Lee

  He glanced back said again, “Lost them how?”

  Brooke shrugged, looking helpless, which was unusual for her because she was someone he had always thought to be in control of every situation, and if not in control, then positioning herself to be so. Before Angel could ask me what I meant, Natalie said from the steps, one foot placed on the bottom riser, her thin fingers gripping the banister firmly, “There’s someone upstairs, Angel. It might be her grandson.”

  She tried to sound convincing he thought, but there was doubt over something in her dark eyes.

  “Did you see them?”

  “Not really.”

  I said, in my most menacing voice, “Don’t go up there.”

  Brooke said, “Why?” before Angel could. He studied me like a redneck scientist. A million thoughts were scrambling for space in his head, and he had no idea which one would take the forefront. All he knew was that I was either in shock—which he doubted or he didn’t think I’d be able to speak at all—or I was playing some kind of game with them.

  He thought maybe it was a game for the whole town, whatever was going on. It was that time of year. And the more he thought about it in those few precious seconds he could have been walking away, he smiled to himself.

  Angel had always loved games. It was secretly one of the reasons—another thing he hadn’t told Brooke—of why he’d worked so long for the video store. There wasn’t a whole lot of business. He spent a lot of time playing on the Playstation 3 or Xbox 360; he got to take games home for free and figure them out. He bit his lip, hard, and an empty pang echoed hollowly in his belly. He knew that Brooke wouldn’t like him playing video games in his free time. Not when he was supposed to be a grown up. A husband. A stepfather. It angered him a little. He thought he should be able to do whatever he wanted as long as it didn’t hurt anybody else.

  And, he thought, who wants to work some stupid job a third of their life, sleep another third, and only have a third to enjoy themselves?

  That wasn’t much of a life. That was toil and slumber.

  He swallowed hard, overthinking it, wanting to return to the carousel out front, to turn it on as night drew closer. He thought that if he did that—knew it, deep down in his soul—that the sound of the carousel would draw those hiding from their places.

  He scratched his arm, felt a bit obsessive, much more than normal anyway. He noticed Natalie staring directly at him. The kid didn’t have trouble with authority figures, at least not with staring them in the face. It made him slightly uncomfortable though.

  She said, “Are you going to investigate it?”

  Brooke said, “No. We need to help her find her husband and grandson, then we can all leave.” She turned back to me and said, “You said you’re not from here, didn’t you?”

  “No,” I said, my hands clasped at my waist, looking off to Angel’s right. “We’re not from here.”

  “Where from?” Natalie said, the brilliant child not believing me, and not liking me very much for lying to her mom when all her mom was doing was trying to help me find my family.

  If she even has a family, Nat thought.

  For some reason the child doubted it, and I liked her all the more.

  “We’re from somewhere else,” I lied, thinking, I will get you to stay, just long enough.

  Angel, to his credit, drew his head from his ass, and said, “Can you be any more specific?”

  Brooke draped an arm over my shoulders as if we were sisters.

  Angel cocked his head. He wondered if it was only her police training kicking in or if she actually felt bad for me, a stranger. He didn’t feel bad, not at all. If anything, I was making things harder for all of them.

  Natalie said, “I’m going upstairs. I’m going to see who is up there.”

  Angel looked from her to her mother. He watched how quickly the expression on Brooke’s face changed from sympathy and understanding to that of a tyrant. He sometimes thought she went a little hard on the kid.

  She said to Natalie, “You are not going anywhere until we sort out what to do.”

  *****

  Angel didn’t know why his fiancé was so hard on her daughter because Brooke had never told him, and Brooke hoped that Natalie, so young at the time, only four, failed to remember.

  She had been married to Bill. She worked as a secretary at an attorney’s office. She usually came home from work about five but they closed up early that day, and she was looking forward to having some time to spend with her daughter, who would be starting pre-school soon, and her husband, who went off on his own more than she cared for. She came in the side door off the kitchen, set her keys on the table, smiled to herself because she could hear Bill’s teasing voice in the living room, and Natalie’s occasional giggle.

  Brooke was pulling her jacket off, sunlight glaring across the window on the far side of the house, as she entered the living room. Bill sat on the couch with his pants around his knees. He was aroused, and Natalie was holding his penis and giggling, and she heard her husband say, “See, you made him come out of his shell…”

  And they hadn’t seen her yet, and she couldn’t feel her feet at all and her arms felt numb and slightly weighted. Her heart slammed for four beats in her chest and she blinked twice before she screamed.

  It was deafening, even to her as if the sound of her anguish and the pain and the disgust had washed all other sound from the world, and Bill jumped, jerking at his pants, and Natalie cried, her face terrified, eyes wide, because she was so goddamn little and she had no idea what had happened or what was wrong.

  Bill was trying to placate her, she heard him as she turned her back on him and ran into the kitchen which went against the logical part of her brain that said she needed to grab her daughter and remove her from the house immediately until the police had Bill in custody.

  Brooke careened into the kitchen counter, her fingers closing tightly over a butcher knife that hung in a holder next to the sink. She spun around. Bill, who had been following her into the kitchen, still talking, her still not hearing him, him still buckling his pants, turned and fled into the living room. She chased him, but it wasn’t far and it wasn’t for long. He held Natalie tight to his chest and their daughter was crying into his shoulder because her daddy was scared and her mommy had a knife. And Bill said, “Put it down. Let me explain.”

  There was no room in her heart left for explanations. There was no chance in hell that she could let him even try to gloss it over. She inched her way in, the knife held out in front of her. Bill backed up toward the front door. A horrible, sodden darkness descended. Brooke cried, fearing that he’d make it outside and to his car, carrying Natalie with him. A huge part of her, most of her, feared that once they made it out the end of the driveway and the car was disappearing down the road, that she’d never see her daughter again…

  Natalie Pistil—now on the verge of womanhood and very uncomfortable with it, which made Brooke’s heart hurt terribly sometimes—spoke across the motel’s foyer. “What do you want to do then? Don’t you think we should find out who is up there?”

  Brooke’s mind quickly turned over their options. The first thing she needed was to understand the situation and that only came through communication. But I wasn’t very talkative, since I had my motives. And she did wonder why I offered so little, briefly, but she also had the recent time spent with her own mother clouding her judgment.

  More than anything she needed to assess the situation, though, she knew that. She needed to ask me direct questions and receive direct answers... Where had I last seen them? Why were we here? When did we get here? Have we seen anybody else? Where is my car? Did we have a cell phone on us? Have I tried calling the local law enforcement for help?

  Brooke tried, tried hard for ten minutes to get me to open my trap, but I wouldn’t do it. All I kept saying was, “I lost them,” in hopes that confusion would keep them around until dark.

  To Brooke, and possibly her daughter, I was beginning to sound like
a broken record, but it was getting on Angel’s nerves the most. His face was flushed, he stomped around impatiently, and I can’t say that I liked him very much, even though I myself was not very likable for using them the way I knew I must.

  Brooke felt her own irritation but seeing Angel act like a child set her on edge. Her ex-husband had many childish characteristics when she’d first met him. She’d thought them cute, for a while. Then that same childishness carried over into cruelty, sneaking, lying to avoid trouble.

  Brooke said, “We can’t help you if you don’t help us help you.”

  I nodded, once, decisively. My voice was barely a mouse squeak as I spoke. “We brought our daughter’s son with us. At first we thought this place was interesting and as we explored, we didn’t find anyone. Though there is a street filled with people…”

  “What people?” Angel said.

  “They’re not really people,” I said, offering them a grain of truth that made no sense at all without a concrete context with which to frame it. I brushed hair from my eyes, straightened my back and focused on the carpet’s pattern as I continued. “They, Raymond and Justin, were there beside me. We were a little creeped out that no one was around. I mean, what town, especially one with several hundred houses doesn’t have vehicles? It’s not the eighteen-hundreds, is it?”

  Brooke shook her head. She understood my false confusion. It had unsettled her, the lack of people or transportation, but then I had freaked them out before they had a chance to look around. She said, “Did you see anyone at all?”

  I shook my head. “Nothing.”

  Natalie, sitting on the steps with her back to the wall, said, “What is your name?”

  I smiled at her but the look on Natalie’s face suggested it wasn’t a warm smile, which I did my best to both ignore, and correct.

  “Dorothy.”

  “Dorothy,” Brooke said, thinking about The Wizard of Oz, thinking of saying, There’s no place like home, because truly, there wasn’t.

  She almost smiled but didn’t. Instead, she said, “Where did you last see them? We could start our search there.”

  I shook my head again, looked at my bird-like hands.

  “They’re lost, I already told you that.”

  Angel grunted. He moved toward the front door, peered out the window, stock still and observing the street. Despite Brooke’s rationality, both through her nature and through her training on the police force, seeing him so enthralled by something outside—the damn carousel, she thought—was unnerving.

  I surprised her too, when I stood and approached him, this boy-man, who only saw what his heart desired, thrust into every moment the way all men are by their own lusts.

  I whispered, “It doesn’t look like it’s ever been used, does it?”

  Angel shook his head.

  Brooke looked at Natalie who was moving quietly toward the bench I had departed. Her daughter sat next to her, whispered, “They are creeping me out.”

  Brooke nodded.

  She whispered, “To be honest, they’re making me feel a little out of sorts too. Something here isn’t adding up.”

  *****

  Natalie, not even meaning to, snatched her mother’s hand. There was comfort in it, strength. Brooke squeezed her fingers gently. Natalie said, hopeful that her mother would listen now that it was just the two of them sharing a moment, “There really is someone up stairs.”

  “I believe you,” Brooke said.

  “Then why are we still down here?”

  “Because,” her mom whispered, “we don’t know what’s going on here yet.”

  Natalie thought about it a second. Her mom was right. There could be a serial killer upstairs for all she knew. It could have been a man who was only small in stature, or it could have been something far worse. He could have made noise just to draw them up. He could wait for them all to peek into one of the rooms and split their head open with an ax. Thinking about it settled her down a little.

  She turned her attention to me and Angel. We were standing so close to each other, the light coming through the window as we peered outside at the carousel, that our bodies seemed fused together. Shadows and beams of sunlight flicked across our hands and faces and it appeared to the child that we seemed to sway slowly, as if dancing together even though we weren’t, even though there wasn’t any music playing, and she found that most unnerving.

  Her mother was staring at Angel and I, working the possibilities of what was happening, the kid figured, but she didn’t count on her mother sharing whatever she came up with. If anything, Brooke tended to keep her cards tight to her vest. It was okay, she told herself, okay because there wasn’t any way to change that part of her mom, and she didn’t like herself very much when she tried to change her. Actually, it made her feel awful just thinking about it.

  Natalie glanced back toward the stairway and the landing above. Nothing moved up there that she could see or hear. In fact, she couldn’t hear anything except Angel and me laughing softly, as if the whole world had paused. She strained to hear what we were saying but couldn’t.

  *****

  Angel listened, quite intently. He hadn’t expected to. He couldn’t say that he knew me at all, and usually he had to have some kind of bond with a person to hear a word they were saying, whether he pretended to or not.

  But he was listening, attentively, longing for me to hurry along and yet frightened of my reaching the end.

  I said, If you ride the carousel you will be a child forever. Free of obligations. Free of fear. One ride is all it takes. Counterclockwise. Let the music carry you back to before you found out life was boring and drab and painful. Let yourself be yourself and not feel bad for doing so. Take the ride of your life. Take it because it’s yours. It’s been here waiting for you since before you were born. Waiting patiently, but it won’t wait forever. You need to ride it before dusk. Ride it before he comes back.

  “Before who comes back?” Angel whispered.

  His heart pounded and his palms grew slick with sweat and he didn’t know where to put his hands, but he knew where he wanted to put himself, put all the hopes he’d ever had that he’d been destined for something incredible, something not everybody would ever taste, or touch, or see, or hear.

  He said again, “Before who comes back?” because there was an edge to my voice when I mentioned the mystery man, and it worried him, it made it sound as if there was a chance that he might be robbed of what had been here waiting for him his entire life.

  *****

  Brooke released Natalie’s hand. She said, not in her motherly voice, but in her annoyed I’ve-had-enough-of-this tone, “Stay here. Don’t go upstairs.”

  Natalie nodded. “I won’t.”

  But she looked in that direction as if she expected to see someone hurtling down the steps, perhaps a large man, his face lost in shadow, the ax in his right hand like Death’s mighty scythe that cannot be stopped once it’s begun its descent.

  As if sensing her uneasiness, Brooke rubbed her shoulder for a second and said, “We’ll be out of here and home soon enough. Okay? I promise.”

  After Natalie nodded again, frowning a little more than was necessary because she knew what promises led to—disappointment—Brooke pulled her hand away and approached Angel and me. Neither of us turned toward her but both of us fell silent and stood rigid as she neared. It made her angry that we knew she was there behind us and refused to turn and acknowledge her. She could understand my doing it, some people were just rude, hell, family could be rude, but Angel had no excuse and it was very unlike him.

  She said, “Show us where you last saw your husband and grandson.”

  I turned, color in my face, my expression downcast as if the mere mention of them broke my heart. But that wasn’t the impression that Brooke thought I was projecting a moment ago, even with my back to her and Angel listening in rapt attention. It was easy to see where Natalie inherited her better qualities.

  Brooke said again, “Show us whe
re you last saw them. Right now.”

  “Right now? But—”

  “No buts. Right now. We don’t have all day and if you seriously need help, we will help you, but don’t jerk us around. Deal?”

  I searched her face. Brooke could feel it, and recoiled as if my sight had invisible tentacles that ran across the planes and valleys of her flesh, around the rim of her eyes, around the fleshy area of her vile mouth, probing ever so softly to avoid notice.

  I nodded to Brooke. “Okay,” I said. “But it won’t do any good.”

  “Then what are we still doing here?” Natalie said from where she sat on the bench. Brooke could have smiled at her but she didn’t. She pointed to the door and waited for me to take them to the last known location of my husband and grandson. The suspicious part of her, the part she didn’t like to acknowledge very often, but knew to trust when it was up in arms like it was now, made a racket.

  She thought, She’s not going to be able to show us anything and she’ll have to come clean, and then what?

  *****

  Natalie thought, We shouldn’t even be hanging around.

  And of course, again the child was right, but children can’t do what they want in the company of adults. She’d found her ability to change anyone’s mind lacked any force. It wasn’t even worth trying. And Angel, he’d do whatever he was told by a grownup, which didn’t make a whole lot of sense, other than he seemed unable to make his own choices, and that made it difficult for Natalie to see him as any type of father figure even though she secretly longed for such a person.

  On her way out the door she spotted a cane by a coat rack in the corner. She grabbed it, figuring that if anybody did attack them then it’d better be handled with a weapon. And thinking about weapons made her glance at her mother and the purse she had draped over her shoulder. She doubted if she brought her gun along, but hoped she at least had mace.