by Shannon Kirk
“Yes, sweet pea?”
“We’ll need some Nocturne Number 2 in E-Flat Major.”
“Whatever you want, baby doll.”
Jerry proceeds to play Nocturne Number 2 in specific, as commanded, friggin’ E-Flat Major, holy hell, which is a slow, haunting piano song ricocheting around this bone-dead room in a way that, oddly, almost in an instant, compels me to listen, one note at a time. The crystal clarity and volume and the hypnotic, slow timing of how he plays is something I suddenly crave to hear. So I do as Gretchen instructs, and flip and sort. I’m clinging to my intention to do a little and beg out of here as soon as possible—just after a little more of the song.
As I sort, and as Jerry plays, my intention slips. I give myself another couple of minutes. And then, another couple of minutes more. The way he plays the nocturne and the next song and the next song, the very realness of the piano and the live rhythm in the room, intoxicates me, hypnotizes me, makes me feel drugged and slipping. Maybe my brain was primed to guzzle the melody, given how starved it was in the preceding awful background silence. Somehow I feel displaced from my mind, and my physical actions are commanded by the music.
This is what I feel like in working the register at Dyson’s, a sedated physical hypnotism.
Gretchen and I sort and link pieces, and Jerry plays bewitching live classical. His music and our actions form an incredibly intoxicating, addicting bubble, but one edged with black, of darkness and fright. Like an addiction or an obsession you can’t stop, even though it’s bad. A vice. This is what I imagine watching and listening to a train hum and hum on by would feel like, in that rhythmic motion and that constant sound, like constant waves, knowing that, because you somehow know the future, the train is about to collide with a truck full of people. You can’t look away, but you know you should.
At some point, I’m not sure how long I’ve been mesmerized, I notice Jerry has stopped playing his hypnotic songs. My phone is ringing.
“Lucy, your phone,” Gretchen says, but she’s not taking her eyes off the puzzle pieces. About one-eighth of the thing is already complete. Gretchen’s fingers rove and flutter above pieces we’ve sorted, as if furious spider legs working to weave a web.
I answer but need to shake my head to have clarity and switch my thoughts back to reality. I don’t even need to wonder who’s calling. It’s Mom. She says to come back to the house. I hang up.
“I need to go. Can I use the bathroom on the way out?” I say while standing. My legs are cramped, so I bend my knees a few times and shake them. I close my eyes from a head rush.
“Daddy will show you,” Gretchen says. She’s on her knees, leaning over the various sorted piles of pieces, her face scrunched in thought.
Jerry rises off his ivory bench, gently pulls his white gloves on, and walks back through the hobbit door into the cell of a dining room. “Come on, Lucy, bathroom’s this way.”
I follow Jerry through the dining room, down the hall with Gretchen’s “earth collection” puzzles, into the kitchen, take a U-turn at the yellow island, and head back up toward the foyer through the first hall. All of the glass over the puzzles is still glaring and blinding in the bright lights that accent the length of the hall. I wince when I pass the Death March cult puzzle.
At the end of the hall, we weave around Jerry’s weird tower of boxed Crock-Pots. Jerry points across the foyer to a normal-width hall in the right wing of the house. “Bathroom’s at the end,” he says. “You can let yourself out when you’re done. I need to grab something upstairs. I appreciate you giving us a chance, Lucy.”
“Okay, thanks,” I say, not sure what else to say.
As I head toward the bathroom, of course passing many more puzzles on the walls, I hear Jerry climbing the stairs in the foyer to the second floor. Walking down this hall, I note all the doors are closed. At the end, I find the bathroom, and it’s normal enough. Super dated with piss-yellow toilet and piss-yellow sink and piss-yellow tub, but normal. I hear Jerry walking around above me.
I’m glad Mom called. I’m glad I’m leaving. I don’t know why I lost myself in working the skeleton puzzle. I finish and exit the bathroom, intending to walk as fast as possible to the front door, leave, and sprint down the hill in the dark to my house.
But I stall in walking to the foyer because I notice a door closest to the bathroom is painted ivory. All the other closed doors are wood doors. What pulls me to do this, I don’t know, but I set a hand on the gold knob and clench my fist to turn.
“Don’t, Lucy.” I hear her voice. “Where’s Daddy? He let you down there by yourself?” I look up to see Gretchen standing in the spotlight of the foyer. Light amps the glow of her white and pulsing skin and the red apples on her dress. I’m in the darker end of the normal hall. Her tone is of frustration, and she’s looking up at the ceiling, as if burning anger to wherever Jerry is.
I pull my hand away from the knob. She continues talking.
“That’s my special room. I’m working on something in there,” Gretchen says. She grinds her jaw, again looks at the ceiling. “Daddy? Hello, Daddy, where did you go?”
She looks down to me, closes her eyes three beats, shakes her head, and when she opens her eyes, she smiles. “It’s a surprise. And I want you to see it when it’s all done. Okay?” Her tone is one billion octaves sweeter than when she just maliciously yelled for her “daddy” and said this was her “special room.”
I walk down the hall, nudge past her, open the front door, and step out. Once outside, the alarm lights blaze again. Facing Gretchen in the doorway, I put on my indifference voice and ice my nerves like Mom would.
“Oh, Gretchen, question.”
“Yes?”
“Why so much bacon? Do you always cook so much?”
Her eyes move past my eyes, settle somewhere adjacent to my face, off to a middle space. Her closed-mouth smile spreads. And in a snap, she’s locking her eyes with mine.
“The rest is for my doggo in the basement, Luce! Old Mr. Snoof. He likes to sleep in dark and cool places. Sleeps all day next to my scroll saw. See you tomorrow, friend!”
“Good night, Gretchen,” I say, and run down the hill in the dark.
I’m panting when I enter our rental.
“Mom?” I say, as I walk through the red-and-turquoise kitchen, in which no lights are on.
“Mom?” I repeat, entering the darkened living/dining room area.
Mom lifts off the couch and walks to her own room. “Good night,” she says. And she’s gone. She didn’t wait for a response, didn’t ask for a recap of my night. Nothing.
Why was she sitting in the dark?
I lock my bedroom window, close the curtains tight, grab Allen, curl into him, and hide under the blue-pink covers. I don’t think I’ll sleep tonight.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
MOTHER
Thirteen. Thirteen years of driving. Thirteen. Her baby, her baby, God, her beautiful, violet-eyed baby, is fifteen. Fifteen! Sometimes in the dark dead of night, nights she can’t sleep, she sits in her beast vehicle and stares into the void outside the windshield. She imagines she’s peering into her daughter’s dreams and wishes in doing so, she’s able to push happy scenes and also, lessons on specific self-defense maneuvers. If only she could lord over her baby’s body every single second of every single day her daughter graces this planet.
It’s the summer of 2019, and here she sits again in the dark dead of night, staring into the void beyond the beast’s windshield, wishing, thinking, remembering. She white-knuckle grips the wheel as if the engine is running and her foot is stuck firm on the gas, plummeting herself down the single lane of a rocky mountain road, and not as she is: parked and going nowhere, only racing in her mind.
What was it about Paul? How was it she allowed herself to black out at age twenty and allow him, allow Paul, awful Paul Trapmore, to impregnate her? What was it about all those drastic changes in that one week in that one summer when she was twenty? I was only twenty. What was it a
bout the way she ignored some signs in the beginning? Was it her grief over Laura vanishing and Carly moving to Costa Rica and the Triple C selling that made her fail to see in real time, and only in hindsight, how Paul would suddenly appear after the sale of the camp became common knowledge to assess structures where girls slept and showered? How he took so many pictures of the property, but when girls were out playing. What was it about Paul’s explanations in those few weeks of dating after the blank night, but before she knew she was pregnant, that made sense after a strange event, but were always needed to be given? Every question I asked him, he had a vague answer. Who was his family? They were in a foreign country. Where did he come from? America, but had grown up in a foreign country. Who were his closest friends? Guys from college, they live all over. You’ll meet them soon, babe. What did he do on that silver laptop? Business, nothing. Something I’m working on. Why all the pictures? They’re needed for the redevelopment.
Why?
Why!
As Mag sits in her beast vehicle, staring into the dark void of night, her baby girl now fifteen, an anger at herself grows so deep, she often finds herself punching her own legs. The answer as to why is obvious in retrospect—blazingly, glaringly obvious—and only a fool wouldn’t have seized the puzzle pieces and built a picture in real time. Although nobody could have predicted the extent of Paul’s evil. But it’s her fault, all her fault, for bringing her gorgeous girl into the world by way of a blank night with a monster. She’d let her guard down, was foolish and young and whiplashed by changes, when she should have had a clear mind.
When Mag told Paul she was pregnant, Paul showed his true colors and solidified Mag’s nascent suspicions that he was a monster. She remembers standing with her back to his bedroom’s glass wall, the one framing a view of the sea.
“I’m pregnant,” she said.
Paul jolted off his white-on-white bed, slapped her across the face, and shouted, “How many men have you fucked in the last month, whore?” Mag kneed him in the balls, ran down his floating stairs, and fled.
That night, Paul, getting nowhere with unrelenting calls and messages in which he spit his cold brutality, demanded an abortion in a very public way. Banging on Mag’s apartment door and yelling he was there to drive her to the “whore clinic”—the neighbors heard, as was his intention. As for an abortion, Mag wasn’t quite sure exactly why she refused, but her true choice in her core was to have this baby.
Mag alerted Camp Director Marianne, who in turn alerted Cord, the Triple C’s retired marine who ran the camp’s archery, tracking, and clay shooting. Cord “ensured” Paul knew he was banned from the camp “forever and irrevocably” and also banned from “any location Mag might be in or thinks she might want to be in or even dreams she’s in.” Cord and Mag were already close; he acted like the father she couldn’t remember having, and with Paul’s swift expulsion by Cord, she felt secure.
Nine months went by, and Mag’s Laura was born.
Paul insisted on paternal visits; Mag insisted they be supervised. Paul threatened a lawyer but never hired one. As time wore on, he spent two hours in a park with baby Laura (and Mag watching nearby) every other Sunday and never demanded more.
Two years burned by, faster than one night.
On the day that monster took Laura, as soon as the cops were done with Mag at the station, while detectives pulled street CCTV and store video, Mag asked if she could please go change her clothes back home. The sheriff said he’d drive her and that forensics would meet them to pull her computer, per protocol.
Of course. Of course. Go right in. My computer’s on my desk in my apartment.
Once the sheriff was done with her apartment, Mag stole away to “walk the beach.” She knew in listening to the sheriff that the cops had called around and found Paul in the ER about to undergo an emergency gall bladder removal, all of which detectives verified with the surgeon herself. One detective would wait in the waiting room, and the team would later convene at Paul’s Carmel house after the one detective acquired Paul’s consent and house keys. This, they said, would be faster than getting a warrant, seeing as they’d already confirmed, in looking through his glass home’s glass walls, that the place was locked and empty. Plus, they’d confirmed Paul was in an ambulance on his way to the ER at the very moment toddler Laura was taken at Bing’s. They didn’t have any physical proof or anyone’s stated concerns about Paul vis-à-vis baby Laura, and so probable cause to enter without a warrant was weak. At that point, he was just the barely present dickhead father of the baby, stolen by a stranger in plain sight.
So. Mag had a short window.
And a mother’s instinct is all the probable cause one needs.
After breaking into Paul’s and finding his laptop, but not knowing the password, Mag hit herself in a fury to find something, anything. She sensed he was involved but had no proof. Every creak, every ocean wind shaking glass, was Paul with baby Laura, hiding in a corner.
And then she saw the note. Stuck under a pile of bills, a Post-it: Saturdays, groceries, Bing’s w/ Laura. Distracted. Crowd cover.
So, yes, she’d been targeted. Tracked, all right. Tracked by her baby’s father. Paul had sold her details, her pattern, the very ones written on the Post-it, to a person—who?—and that person snatched her girl.
It was simple after that. Had Paul not required an emergency gall bladder removal, the authorities might never have known. Might never have gained access to his damn computer, which showed quite clearly what Paul had done. He likely was on his way to toss the laptop and rip up his notes but doubled over in pain and was rushed to the hospital.
The timing was shocking.
Still.
How? How could someone be so evil?
Why?
Thirteen years she’s been asking herself these questions, and now her baby, her baby girl, is no baby. She’s fifteen. My baby, my baby, my baby is fifteen. It’s my fault, all my fault. I should never have trusted Paul. Never. I am a monster for being so oblivious. Knowing I was falling for a dangerous temptation, but going forward anyway. Ignoring signs like a fool.
This merry-go-round with herself, these unanswerable insomniac’s questions and self-recriminations have gone on unabated for thirteen years. And so, Mag once again exits her beast vehicle with no relief and no promise for sleep. She chooses instead to train her body, her only way to take her mind off horrors, and drops to her palms and toes to hold a three-minute plank. She breathes in the damp dirt; she listens to crackling fireflies and chirping crickets.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
LUCY
It’s noon on a Saturday, and I don’t have a shift at Dyson’s today. Gretchen has dragged me back to her creepy house, through her front door with the weird metal shields around the doorframe, and insisted on showing me her lab in the basement where she makes jigsaws. A week has passed since I had dinner here, and I haven’t been back since. I told her we can go to her basement as long as we spend the rest of the day in the summer field in the out beyond, painting, playing Scrabble, or doing puzzles. She’s agreed. She even packed us a picnic basket, which waits for us in the fossils-puzzle foyer beside Jerry’s box tower of Crock-Pots.
“Why are the bags under your eyes so dark?” I ask her.
“Oh,” she says, squinting in the bright light of her own foyer, “couldn’t sleep last night.” She doesn’t expand with a litany of unnecessary facts or lessons, like usual.
We proceed down the back hall off the foyer and walk down a normal set of stairs into an unfinished basement, which is mostly huge open space—the length and width of the whole gargantuan brick fortress—except for two sealed-off rooms on each end. The lighting down here is minimal, so although the space is open, shadow pockets and draping blackness close in the sides. Feels like we’re walking down a narrow hall under the line of tiny bulbs in the ceiling. Of course one bulb is buzzing and zapping and flickering. Of fucking course.
Gretchen, who is again dressed in her apple-print dre
ss, leads me to an area under the left side of the house. Here’s her lab. On a worktable is a flattened, blown-up picture of deconstructed arm bones, which are yellowing and some parts crumbly, on a gray background. Next to the picture is a dry-mount press like we had in media club at my first high school. Also on the table: several plastic jars of Mod Podge (“sealer, glue, and finish,” the label says); a line of mason jars full of wide bristle and foam brushes; apothecary jars, each with different-size blades; a gigantic pair of murderous silver scissors; several X-Acto knives; a metal squeegee thing; a can of polyurethane; and rulers. A pegboard serves as the headboard to the worktable, and on the pegboard hang at least a hundred rolls of blue painter’s tape, one roll per peg. Beside the worktable is a gunmetal-gray, industrial-looking mechanical tool with one blade, which looks like a buck tooth. Leaning against the metal legs of its support stand are several cuts of thin plywood and foam boards.
“Here’s my scroll saw. A vintage Rockwell with a twenty-four-inch throat,” she says, indicating how past the buck-tooth blade, the space goes twenty-four inches to where the neck of the arm curves and bends to hold the blade. Looks like a skinny-headed, alien-type creature in a Star Wars bar folding his head to his chest.
“Need the long throat to be able to turn, turn, turn a mounted picture and cut puzzle pieces with loops and voids.”
“Oh.”
“Don’t put your fingers under the blade. That’s a fine but sharp blade. You’re too smart for that, right?” She gives a malicious grin, like when I left her house a week ago.
I scrunch my face and steel myself to not flinch. “You know, Gretchen, here’s a rule to follow if we’re going to be friends. Don’t give me that creepy look anymore. And when you say creepy things, like how you’re good at cutting, and how I shouldn’t put my fingers under your saw blade, those things don’t help our friendship.”
