by Jamie Mason
Carly looked to John, wordlessly pleading for him to say something right, to do something right. He was surprised that she’d wedged her way into the conversation at all. She usually took in everything from the sidelines, pretending not to be paying attention. But she never manipulated a situation. She was easygoing, always looking for the laugh. She didn’t wheedle or angle for advantage. She wasn’t the obnoxious kind of kid who hopped up and down for the pat on the head for being precocious. Thank God.
In truth, he was grateful for her interruption and her suggestion. She’d managed to resupply the choice of exits from this mess. He was wrung out. But a jab of recognition startled him. He saw in Carly something privately familiar, a sense of double exposure when he returned her gaze. She was there in the moment, talking and participating, but she was also separated from them. Even from herself, in a way. She was removed, measuring, watching her influence, gauging her reach. She was both an active player and a fly on her own wall. It was a hard trick to manage, as John well knew.
Impressed and unnerved all at the same time, he hooded his notice of it, giving her the privacy of her newfound dexterity. He threw in his lot with Carly and made a case for the spare bed.
All night long, he never sank deeper than a wheel-spinning doze that kicked him awake every time a thought caught traction. The house sounds in the guest room were different from what he was used to. The clatter of the ice maker down in the kitchen came from the wrong direction. It startled him the two times the ice dropped in the night. The bed was aligned fully opposite from his own that he shared with Donna. The streetlight streaming against his closed eyelids came from a strange angle. No tall dresser loomed by the door, so the air moved through the room in a weird way.
John was also terrible at sleeping in hotels or at other people’s houses.
He cherished the peace and reassurance of predictability. He’d been killing time with it in the marriage and the new house. It was almost two years since he’d met Donna, both of them captive one afternoon in an airless stint in the holding pen of the DMV. She’d made that ugly time evaporate.
He’d had more ugly time to kill.
John still had a long run of hours, days, months, to go before he would feel free to do what he really wanted to, so he’d been inspired by Donna, her spark striking one of his own, to try his hand at being irresistible. She hadn’t resisted, but that wasn’t solid proof that he’d actually succeeded. She was beautiful and busy, quick to laugh and slow to cry. He didn’t want to be needed, but he admired the little tugs of jealousy and insecurity that pushed him to keep wooing her, and also Carly. The whole diversion was in the game to win them.
But he was addicted to fresh starts. He loved being comfortable, but the urge to break things always held the promise of what to replace it with. His will was a hammer.
John had been enrolled in fourteen schools before he graduated, and he’d been a different sort of kid in each one. He’d made a new Jonathan at every chance, on purpose, for fun and profit. A hammer was a building tool, too.
But it always took him ages to get used to a setup, to dig a self-shaped hole into the pattern of days. He was dug in good this time. Jonathan was John Cooper more than he’d ever been anything else.
• • •
The morning after, John knew he had felt worse before, but he’d never been as tired. Donna ticked a glance his way as he walked into the kitchen, but that was all that was on offer—an acknowledgment in place of a greeting. He stopped at the end of the counter, feeling like an intruder with every step into the sunlit room full of everyone else who lived there.
Carly was shoving her quilted lunch bag into her backpack. Her mother fidgeted next to her on the seating side of the kitchen island. Carly, the fact of her and the hope for her safety and happiness, was the only thing that ever rattled Donna. Her only real soft spot.
“Are you sure you want to do this?” asked Donna.
Carly smiled at her mother. “Ye-e-e-e-e-s. Do you believe me yet?” Carly zipped closed her bag. “Hey,” she said to John.
“Hey.”
Carly moved to the other side of the island. “Do you think it’s okay if I go to school?”
The question was on pace. The inflection was right with just enough teenaged exasperation to suit it. But Carly was watching him more steadily than the weight of his answer should warrant. His opinion didn’t matter in this. Everyone knew that. She was well aware that in all things parenting, John was neither qualified nor particularly interested. He was a friend to Carly. Someone to joke around with and get rides from. He was her mother’s husband, not her father. Everyone was fine with that arrangement, and none more than John.
But Carly had removed herself to the far side of the island, and not by accident. That’s what the pointed look was all about. She’d left John and Donna on a level on purpose, with her in opposition.
He held her gaze and slid one symbolic half step toward Donna. “I don’t know, Carlzee. You sure it’s a good idea? Maybe you should take the day off.”
Carly’s mouth tightened down against a flash of a knowing smile. “Oh my God! You guys are impossible. I’m fi-i-i-i-ine.”
John fought his own smile and reached across to the fruit basket for a banana. Donna didn’t move away. It seemed like a good sign. He sent it back over the net one more time for effect. “Are you sure? It was a hell of a night. I don’t think anyone expects you to be there. We sure would understand.”
Whatever her mission, Carly was satisfied and itching to leave. “No, seriously, I’ve got to go. Damage control. I’ve already had ninety-one tags and messages and—” Her phone buzzed and twitched on the counter, and then again before she could pick it up. “Ninety-two, ninety-three . . . See? I gotta go. This is going to get out of control.” But she was smiling.
Donna shook her head at John. “It’s been nonstop.”
Carly swung her backpack onto her shoulder in full stride toward the door. “See ya! It’ll be fine.”
“What do you mean?” John asked Donna. “What’s been nonstop?”
“Mom!” Carly called from the foyer.
John let Donna lead, but they went to the front of the house together.
Carly had gotten all the way to the door. She turned from the narrow sidelight window alongside the stupid dead security panel, with its one glowing, lying green light. John pushed his tongue against his back teeth and looked away.
The high color of cleverness and fizzing excitement drained away from Carly’s face. Her mouth had gone loose, unsure.
“Mom, everybody’s down there by Ada’s block waiting for me. I’m going to make them late. But I don’t want to . . . by myself. Can you just . . .” Carly looked back out the window.
Donna was across the floor and wrapped around Carly in an instant, stroking her hair. “I never got the mail yesterday. I’ll walk out with you. I’ll wait till you get to them,” Donna said against Carly’s ear. “Let’s go.”
John caught up to them as Carly reached for the doorknob. The last time she touched it would have been yesterday, when she ran. Maybe for her life. The thought stabbed him and he darted his hand under hers and gripped it first. They looked at each other.
“Have a good day, Carlzee. Go get ’em,” he said past a tight throat, and kissed her forehead. He caught Donna watching them through tears. He smiled at her, with her daughter wrapped in his hug. She smiled back, thawing.
In the few minutes that Donna took to make a slow circuit of the path to the mailbox and back, while Carly regained her swagger, her boots striking the street in growing determination, the worry came back to him. A big, heaping scoop of it.
“What was she talking about?” he asked when Donna was back inside, pouring more coffee. She slid a mug to him but didn’t put the cream in. Halfway home, maybe. “What you said about it being nonstop? She said it was getting out of control? What is?”
“Oh, the video clip. The police website has a Twitter or Facebook thing. Some of th
e kids’ parents saw it, and, you know, this stuff just flies. I don’t know what’s going to happen with it or how it’s going to go over with everyone. I just hope it’s not too much for her. Do you think I should call the school?”
John would have thought he’d burned through all his control the night before. Standing there as the bottom fell out again, it fell hard, but not far. He found that he owned another level of pushback, another subbasement of resolve. He wasn’t ready for it, but somehow he was ready for not being ready.
He told Donna to wait and see. No need to make a thing of it if it wasn’t going to be a thing. He managed his face. He managed his voice. He showered and didn’t cut himself with the razor. He dressed and set out for a few errands.
He stopped by his office to get the things he needed to work from home for the rest of the week. They understood. They’d seen the video. They told him to take all the time he needed.
Donna was shaken to the soul. She didn’t need a lot. Almost nothing. That’s why he liked her. That’s why it was easy. But she needed him now and that was kind of nice. Or it was convenient. Maybe both. Then John wasn’t sure what the difference between those two things might be.
When he’d driven up to his office, he hadn’t seen the coin on the ground on his way in. But he might have been lost in thought, or a cloud may have passed over the sun, tamping down the glare off its shine. If it was there when he arrived, he must have stepped right over it.
When he came back into the parking lot with the papers and his laptop and the midday sun blazing down, a quarter, heads side up, lay centered on the curb directly in front of his car. Precisely set and never to be confused for dropped change.
He straightened up and swept the full circle around him. How in the hell would Roy Dorring have found out about this so soon? He lived in his truck, for God’s sake.
John’s first thought was that it was the last thing he needed. It’d taken just about all of what he had left to hold it together with everyone in the office wanting to relive the video with him. They wanted to add their upset to what they assumed was bothering him. His escape from their sympathy had been a fine performance. He was practically vibrating with the need to stop pretending.
John Cooper was the box that held Jonathan Spera, the careful veneer that kept Jonathan distanced from his troubles. John Cooper was nice. Responsible. Easygoing. Patient. Very patient. Jonathan Spera was angry and bored and stuck waiting to resurface.
Jonathan wanted daylight. He wanted his space and his freedom, and nothing so much as to let other people know what he thought of them. And Jonathan Spera didn’t have to hide from Roy Dorring. If the sniveling little shit was going to be a problem, it might be nice to let loose on the one person who never fought back and couldn’t say a thing about any of it. But it might be disastrous, too.
John was definitely pent up from all of his playing nice, day in and day out, even when it felt actually nice, as it so often and so surprisingly did these days. He wished he knew if Roy had been skulking in the cypress hedges when John had driven up, watching, cowering in the shadows like an oversize rat. Like an ugly-ass opossum. Goddamn Roy. Seriously, goddammit.
John gave the trees the finger anyway and drove off.
CHAPTER FIVE
* * *
A lifetime ago, after high school graduation, while all the other kids his age were tending to their mullets and switching out their music collections to cassettes, Roy Dorring had been persuaded that three milk crates full of 8-track tapes were worth almost half the money he’d saved from stocking the shelves and cleaning the Slushee machine at the Q-Mart. The fourth time he broke the Slushee machine was the end of that job. His grandmother, brandishing a broom handle she’d used on him before, threw him out to go learn the world. He never did learn what to do about the world. But he’d kept the 8-tracks for years.
Long after his 8-track player finally died, he discovered that the miles of polyester tape inside them were good for creative repurposing—for braiding up replacement straps for overstuffed duffel bags, for holding together bundles of curtain rods or rags or whatever needed bundling, and for tying down his possessions in the backs of borrowed pickups when he had to move again.
He’d once even used a length of 8-track to splint his broken index finger to its neighbor when he couldn’t afford a doctor’s bill. It had worked, too, more or less. He never could make a proper fist with his left hand after that, but he’d never really been a fighter anyway.
Roy didn’t throw things out. He wanted, with a faintly hollow ache, almost whatever he could gather and keep. He liked having stuff in the way some people liked a big meal. He liked the feeling, the ambient pressure of plenty. It didn’t matter if it was frayed or dented or obsolete—he wanted it. You never knew what might grow a purpose when the going got odd.
But everything he owned these days had to fit into an old Ford Explorer with enough room left over to put the seat back so he could sleep. The mess was piled roof high and axle wide, but everything in there was only waiting for the right run of happenstance to be just what somebody needed.
That he was smelling bacon frying this morning was proof that he was right. And if that alone weren’t enough to renew his faith in his philosophy of keeping stuff (which it totally was), Roy sat up and stretched and discovered that his back felt like—well, like nothing. It felt like a plain old back, not a web of knots and fishhooks.
After a decent night’s sleep, he didn’t feel young, exactly, but he couldn’t feel every second of the hard fifty-seven years in his body either, and that was near enough to bliss to make him smile.
He’d had something useful in the truck the night before. Of all things, this time it was an old board game. Inspiration wasn’t a familiar feeling to Roy, but it had come and goosed him in a moment of need and he’d gone scrabbling around next to the fifty-five-gallon fish tank he kept near the bumper end that held his clothes and important papers.
Because he’d had it, he’d been able to avert a fight between two men he barely knew. In reward and celebration, they’d given him a number of beers that he’d lost count of.
And for a whole night there had been laughter and no fear. Roy had slept a full nine hours on sofa cushions instead of waiting out the darkness in a restless doze on a cold, cracked vinyl bucket seat. He’d had a pillow and everything.
He’d tagged along with Mikey and Byron and the other guys from the worksite, a corporate landscaping project so vast that Roy could reasonably hope for cash under the table for weeks. The guys were headed out for a beer or five to close out the workday. He hadn’t exactly been invited, but he wasn’t expressly uninvited either. He’d been feeling the blues coming on. He couldn’t afford to waste money on bar beer, but he was afraid to be alone.
Roy had been scraping by for the last few years with day work and side jobs and the occasional extra $20 or $50 from John. He’d leave a quarter where John had told him to—in front of John’s car by his office, or on the curb where he parked at the YMCA—the old signal between them. It was a pointed joke. Painful, but Roy was a good sport. He wasn’t mad. He wasn’t.
Shortly after they’d met, he’d won a coin toss for the chance to do some side work for John, to earn some extra money. That moment was so far away it felt like a different life. A different Roy. He’d aged a lot in five years.
And it had all gone completely old-dynamite wrong, as Roy’s mom used to say.
Roy and John were bound up together in the long fuse of that old dynamite.
John figured that Roy owed him and reminded him of it often. You lost big when you won that coin toss, Roy. And isn’t that just like you? Lose every time, even when you win.
Roy did owe John, from one way of looking at it. The woman who died was Roy’s fault. It was an accident, but it didn’t change the truth of what Roy had done.
But when Roy downed enough vodka and energy drink, he could admit that John, after a fashion, owed him, too. It wasn’t a safe case to make,
especially when asking for money. No matter, though. It was true. John owed Roy just as much as the other way around.
Roy was tired all the way through. Things were hard. Life. Work. Hanging on. He hated asking John for anything. But he wasn’t getting any better at being hungry, cold, and sliding into the lonely groove that led him to watch the oncoming traffic from the sidewalk and wonder if it would hurt much to step off.
So Roy would have to withstand John’s eyes glittering in hateful hope for Roy to get lost or get dead. It didn’t matter to John how things went for Roy. Or maybe, more likely, it mattered to him a lot, just not in a way Roy wanted to think about. He’d seen the sparks of temper in John.
Sparks, fuses. Old-dynamite wrong.
But this last night, with a little bit of patience and a fierce grip on his nerves, Roy had found the sweet spot between being needy and being invisible. Roy had taken care of the night, then the night had taken care of itself. Things were looking up.
Mikey and Byron had asked the four guys standing around to come back to Mikey’s place to play video games and drink more beer. Three guys declined, and Roy, the only one arguably too old to go with two twentysomethings to play video games, was included only by accident of his standing there within earshot. He’d said yes before they could bend the conversation away from him, and finished the dregs of the warm pint he’d been trying to make last for better than two hours.
But a single flipped light switch and two steps into Mikey’s nasty little hole of a house and the plan was undone. The pride of the house (there was no reason to think any of the other rooms held more promise) was a seventy-five-inch TV. It had probably been top-of-the-discount-store-line right up until someone had put a roundish cave-in into the screen with shatter cracks flung to every corner of the glass.
Mikey threw a fit and cussed the walls over who might have done such a thing, while Byron scratched at his scalp and tried not to laugh, which didn’t go over well. Roy watched between them both, counting in his head to keep the anxiety pushed down, listening hard to figure out whom to side with to keep the night from going over to fists and ending too soon.