Stay Away

by Ike Hamill

  “Hey, your sister said that it was Jim Saunders who rescued you from the quarry.”

  “Yeah,” Jessie said. He closed one drawer and continued his search in the next one down. He finally found what he was looking for—an old Zippo. Jessie tested the flame with his thumb before he stuffed it in his pocket.

  “I heard he’s able to talk again,” Eric said.

  “Yeah?”

  Jessie straightened up, smoothed his shirt, and then bent to tie his shoes.

  “I thought maybe I would go talk to him.”

  “Whatever,” Jessie said.

  When he stood up again, he locked eyes with Eric.

  “You mind?”

  “What?”

  “You’re in my way,” Jessie said.

  “Oh. Sorry, man,” Eric said as he turned to the side. Jessie was slipping by when Eric put a hand on his shoulder. The way that Jessie spun to face him, Eric almost thought he was going to get hit.

  “Hey,” Eric said, “if you had to guess, why would Jim want to, you know…”

  Jessie shook his head. “Why would he want to do what?”

  Eric took a breath. “You know… drown Uncle Reynold and Aunt Zinnia?”

  “Don’t be an asshole,” Jessie said. He backed away from Eric and then turned to go down the stairs.

  “What do you mean?” Eric asked, following. He finally caught up with Jessie downstairs, in the kitchen. “Wait, Jessie, why is asking that question being an asshole?”

  “Jim didn’t kill anyone. They didn’t even seriously consider that he was to blame.”

  “He was behind the wheel,” Eric said. Eric couldn’t fathom what Jessie was claiming. They all had the same information about the incident. One of the partners at Aunt Zinnia’s law firm had sat them all down and explained everything. The investigation into Officer Saunders had turned up insufficient evidence to prosecute. That wasn’t the same thing as exonerating him, but the police didn’t feel the need to conduct an in-depth investigation on a man who would likely never gain consciousness again.

  “Someone had to drown that day, Eric,” Jessie said. “It wasn’t me, so it had to be someone else.”

  Eric was stunned backwards by that idea. His back hit the wall and he was pinned there as Jessie crossed the kitchen and left.

  Standing there with his mouth open for a full minute, Eric still didn’t know how to make sense of what Jessie had just said.

  Eric returned upstairs slowly and found his way to his bedroom. He grabbed his wallet and then combed the spiderwebs out of his hair. He could only think of one person who might shed some light on the situation. First, he had to find a way to get there.

  # # #

  The bell rang as he let the door shut behind him.

  Drew was behind the counter, reading a newspaper. He glanced at Eric but showed no recognition. Eric grabbed a bag of chips on his way to the counter.

  While Drew rang him up, Eric asked, “Nicky here?”

  Drew scattered change, barely looking at Eric, and yelled, “Nick?”

  She came from the back, wiping her hands on a paper towel. She tossed it towards the trashcan and flashed a quick smile at Eric before her face went flat again.

  “Hey, stranger, what’s up?” Nicky asked.

  “Can we talk for a second?”

  “Sure. Drew, cover for me.”

  His only answer was to rattle the pages of his newspaper. Nicky led the way out to the front porch. It was a little too chilly out front for a t-shirt. Nicky fished a pack of cigarettes out of her back pocket and lit one before she turned to Eric. He was pretty sure that he knew what that meant—he had the length of the cigarette to say what he came to say.

  “I’m sorry about everything,” he said, hoping that a blanket apology would cover it all. Truth be told, he wasn’t precisely sure what she was most angry about. All that was clear was that he wasn’t welcome to wander over and shoot the shit.

  “What do you have to be sorry for?” she asked.

  He didn’t know definitively that the question was a test, but he was pretty sure.

  “Mostly, I’m sorry that I didn’t invite you to the funeral and I told you to stop hanging around.”

  She nodded, taking a long drag as she looked out over the trees across the road.

  “And I’m sorry that I didn’t apologize until now.”

  “They were like your second parents, Eric. You’re allowed to be a selfish asshole when you lose both of them. I can take that. What I can’t take is being treated like a freak and an interloper.”

  He opened his mouth to object. He had never meant to treat her like either of those things. When he closed his mouth, it was because he realized that it didn’t matter what he had intended. He knew what she was talking about, and those things may have been unintended, but they had happened.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “Thank you. I’m sorry too. I think a better friend—a stronger friend—would have found a way to be there for you no matter how hard you pushed me away.”

  Eric was surprised to see the emotion on her face.

  “Nicky, is there any chance you can do me a huge favor?”

  She finished her cigarette and crouched down to stub it out.

  “Does it involve getting the fuck out of here?”

  He nodded. “For the afternoon, yes.”

  “Then count me in.”

  # # #

  She didn’t let him say anything until they were underway and had put miles between themselves and Dottie’s Market. He had told her only the town that they were headed to after she started the car. Eric didn’t have to be at work until midnight. Nicky had made an excuse to take the rest of the day. They could have gone all the way to Boston if they had wanted to. Instead, they were headed for a little town just southeast of Augusta.

  The town of Togus was synonymous with the VA hospital there, but that’s not why Eric wanted to go.

  “Who are we going to see?” she asked. “You know a veteran?”

  He skirted the question. “What do you remember about the day that my aunt and uncle died?”

  “That was a crazy day,” she said. “Your cousin almost drowned and we were at the house when your aunt brought him home from the hospital. Everyone was there, it felt like. I remember your uncle had come home early—your aunt called him from the hospital. She wasn’t…”

  Nicky glanced over and saw the distress on his face. He was picturing the whole thing. Nicky had left out a chunk of the story but he couldn’t quite put his finger on what it was. All he could think about was fixing that pipe in the dirty cellar. The cellar was a place for pipes, spiders, rocks, and dirt. It was a place where trees tried to spread their roots and then turned around when they hit the open air.

  “Eric?”

  “Before then. Why were we together?”

  She slowed down and chose each word carefully as she answered him. “I came over because… Oh!”

  “What?”

  “I saw you guys out on the road. You had walked down past the stone wall and beyond the cemetery.”

  “We walked?”

  “Yeah. I thought it was weird too. It was warm enough for the snow to be melting, but windy, and you guys were out walking around like weirdos. I came by your house to see if everything was okay.”

  Eric was about to say that he had no recollection of any of that, but then an image popped into his head. The image wasn’t of that day at all—it was when he was living in Ohio and his mom had to go to the hospital. He remembered a man in a…

  “The Trader,” he said. The words had just popped into his head.

  Nicky slammed on the brakes, pinning Eric against the shoulder belt. She pulled over to the side of the road as a car honked and swerved around them.

  “What did you say?”

  “The Trader. That was who we were looking for, I think.”

  “My brother told us about him, right? Wait….”

  Eric was about to say something, but
she held up a finger for him to wait.

  “Mrs. Bisson told me even more about it because she was the one…”

  “Who told your brother,” Eric finished.

  Everything was coming back now. Eric turned around and saw that the road was clear.

  “Go, Nicky. We have to go see him and find out what he remembers.”

  “Who? You haven’t even told me who we’re going to see.”

  # # #

  From the front, the white building with the columns holding up the porch roof looked like nothing more than a big, fancy house. When Nicky followed the driveway to the right and they parked alongside, they saw that the building stretched far out behind the facade. Every ten feet or so, there was another window. Eric had to guess that behind each one was another person confined to a bed.

  “Are you sure about this?” Nicky asked when Eric opened his door.

  “No. Of course not.”

  He was already halfway to the side entrance when Nicky called something to him. He didn’t slow down. If he did, he would lose his nerve.

  Just inside the door, a woman sat at a desk. She pushed back just as Eric approached and then she saw him. With a sigh, she rolled her chair back up to the desk.

  “May I help you?”

  “I’m here to visit Jim Saunders.”

  “Friend or family?”

  “Oh. I… Ummm.”

  “It doesn’t matter which, I just have to mark it down.”

  “Friend,” he said. He knew he couldn’t say that he wasn’t either one. She gave him a room number and he thanked her. Nicky came through the door and joined him. When he spotted the number they were looking for, he pointed.

  “Lily’s car is outside,” Nicky whispered.

  Eric’s feet kept moving as he thought about that. Nicky had to be wrong—Lily despised Jim. She blamed him for everything. They turned to the doorway and saw nobody but the man in the bed. He looked nothing like the way that Eric remembered. The shape lying there couldn’t have weighed more than a hundred pounds. It was Jim’s skin, aged and wrinkled, stretched over a skeleton. The lifeless head was pointed towards the window.

  Eric jolted to a stop when the head turned and the eyes fixed on him. One side of the face twitched up into a chilling smile.

  Nicky pushed him closer.

  “Eh-wick,” Jim said, slurring out his name slowly.

  “Hi, Jim. Good to see you,” he tried to say. The words caught in his throat.

  “Here,” a voice said from behind him. Lily put a glass of water in his hand. Slipping between him and Nicky, she took her second glass of water over to Jim. “You sound like you need it more than me. Pull up some chairs.”

  Eric looked around. Nicky had found another chair and was pulling it across the shiny floor for him to sit down. Eric was grateful for it. His legs didn’t feel very sturdy ever since Jim had turned his head.

  “We were just catching up about the old days,” Lily said. She helped Jim navigate the glass of water to his mouth. One of Jim’s hands, shaking violently, moved to assist her. Jim’s other hand was resting uselessly. The dead hand was his left—the same as the dead side of his face. “He was about to tell me about mom, but his throat was dry.”

  When he started to talk, it was hard to understand him at first. Eric found that he received the meaning of the slurred words easier when he looked into Jim’s eyes.

  “I almost arrested your mom,” Jim said with a crooked smile. “She flew across Lewiston Road. Her tires didn’t touch the pavement. I put my lights on but I don’t think she even noticed. I could always tell when a driver had clocked me in the rearview. She only had eyes for the road.”

  “Because she knew…” Eric whispered. He looked to Nicky. It didn’t seem like she had remembered that part yet.

  “When she jumped out of the car, I almost put it in reverse and left,” he said with another crooked smile. “It was like a nature show when a hunter gets between the mother bear and the cub. Her eyes were on fire.”

  Lily helped Jim take another sip of water.

  “I didn’t even think to ask why she was going into the woods. I heard someone calling for help. She got there first, but I went onto the ice. I grabbed your brother, but she was the one who saved both of us.”

  Lily wiped the corner of her eye.

  Eric felt like he was remembering something he had forgotten a million years before. Part of him realized that this was stuff that he could have never known the details of, but he could still picture it like he had witnessed the whole thing from fifty feet in the air.

  “She left her car there and we all went in the cruiser. Your brother’s friends were in front and your mom was in back with Jessie. I called on the radio.”

  Jim swallowed, gagging on his own tongue before he gave them another smile.

  “After all that, Jim,” Lily said. “After the hospital. Do you remember what happened when we went back to my house?”

  A shadow crossed his face and then it was clear and untroubled again.

  “He was there,” Jim said. “He’s probably still there.”

  “Who is?”

  “Lueck,” Jim said.

  The sound could have been nothing more than a collection of malformed syllables, but when Jim said it again, Eric understood that it was a name.

  “Lueck.”

  “Who is that?” Lily asked.

  “The fancy man from the tree. Your dad couldn’t get much out of him. I couldn’t either,” Jim said. The clouds passed behind his eyes again. The sadness didn’t last.

  “Jim, what happened that night at the river?” Lily asked.

  The good corner of Jim’s mouth turned down. He started to shake his head.

  “He wasn’t there,” Jim said. “The fancy man wasn’t there. He must have traded for it.”

  “Jim, tell me what you mean.”

  Jim only shook his head harder. The sagging side of his face flopped and swung.

  Behind them, the man came through the door without knocking. Eric jumped up and pressed himself against the wall.

  “Okay, Mr. Saunders. Time for our exercise.”

  Jim gave the man his same crooked smile.

  “We’re going to be a while, folks. You probably want to come back again tomorrow to talk with Mr. Saunders.”

  The man herded them towards the door.

  # # #

  In the parking lot, Nicky leaned against her car and lit up a cigarette. Lily paced back and forth, looking towards the window that belonged to Jim’s room.

  “I can tell he remembers more, but it’s so difficult to get it out of him,” Lily said. “He’s perfectly lucid one minute and then he seems like he just resets. That stuff he was saying about the quarry—that was the third time he told me that in the past couple of hours.”

  “He won’t say anything about the river?” Eric asked.

  Lily shook her head. “He just insists that the man wasn’t there. I don’t have any idea who he’s talking about.”

  “Lueck,” Nicky said.

  Lily stopped pacing. “Who is Lueck?”

  “The fancy man, remember? The guy with the suit?”

  “No,” Lily said. “I have no idea who that is.”

  “I do,” Eric said. It was a strange sensation that passed through him. It wasn’t like he was remembering. Instead, it was like he always knew but he had forgotten that he knew. Not like remembering—uncovering.

  When he tried to explain that, Lily just looked at him impatiently.

  “The man from the tree,” Eric said. “Your mom and I went to try to trade with him but we couldn’t. Oh! I traded with him before.”

  “Yes,” Nicky said. “You thought he killed your mom.”

  “He did!” Eric said. It was all there. All the pieces of a puzzle that he had already worked out where back in his mind. “Yes. That’s who Jim is talking about. The Trader is the fancy man, and his name must be Lueck. He knew what happened to Wendell and Uncle Reynold wanted to beat it o
ut of him. Then, Jim took him away.”

  Lily shook her head. “This is all new to me.”

  “Your mom didn’t want to involve you,” Eric said. “We have to… I don’t know… Tell someone? Who would we tell?”

  “Nobody,” Nicky said. “There’s nobody to tell. Your aunt confronted him directly. She got Brett to call him out and then we caught him. We can do it again.”

  “This time we don’t let anyone take him away,” Eric said. “We get the answers ourselves.”

  “Yeah,” Nicky said.

  “I wish I knew what the fuck you guys were talking about,” Lily said.

  Nicky glanced at her and then turned her attention back to Eric. “You’ll need to get Jessie and maybe Brett too. Anyone who was involved. Don’t talk to them at the house.”

  “Yeah,” Eric said, understanding without her having to say it. “Anyone who might come along and mess things up. And we have to plan it somewhere he can’t hear.”

  Nicky agreed.

  LILY

  LILY COULD TELL THAT they had seen her. It would be impossible not to. Her car was a bright yellow beacon and it was the only one in the lot. When she got out and walked towards the two of them, Eddie was the only one who met her stare.

  “Turn around and let me see that cherry bomb,” Eddie said, tilting his chin at her.

  Brett didn’t say anything. He made Eddie shut his mouth with a glance.

  “Did you talk to my mom last year?” Lily asked.

  Eddie rolled his eyes. “Bitch, everyone talked to your mom last year. She went around with those notebooks, talking to everyone who had a pulse.”

  “I wasn’t talking to you,” Lily said.

  She waited until Brett looked up. Lily was still amazed at the power he had over her. He never came on strong, like Eddie did, but he held back and made her pursue him. That had been her downfall every time, no matter how much she tried to remind herself of what an asshole he could be.

  “Brett, did my mom come and talk to you last year?”

  “I’m sorry what happened,” he said. “I talked with her that day.”

  “That’s what Eric told me. What did she want?”

  Brett looked at her, holding her eyes for a moment, and then looked away as he shook his head.

  “I don’t know. Nothing, I guess.”