by Paul Cleave
He reaches out and pinches Bower’s nostrils shut, and Bower squirms a little but doesn’t have the energy to do anything more than that. His eyes widen and blood starts drooling from the side of his mouth. Ben lets go.
“You’re probably curious as to why we brought you up here, and didn’t arrest you downstairs. Tell you what, if you tell me where Andrea Walsh’s body is, I won’t let you die wondering.”
Bower manages to raise his hand. He turns his palm upwards and gives Ben the finger. Then he smiles.
“You tell me where her body is, or I’m going to hold a press conference and say we found a hidden directory on your computer that was full of child porn. That’s going to be your legacy.”
Bower lifts his other hand, and uses it to point at the hand that’s giving Ben the finger. His smile widens, and he coughs, and blood comes out his mouth and his nose.
“So be it,” Ben says, and he reaches forward to pinch Bower’s nostrils shut again, but realizes there’s no point. The man is already dead.
He pulls out his cell phone and makes a call.
“Two minutes,” he says, then hangs up.
He wraps polythene around Bower’s neck to contain the blood so he doesn’t get it all over himself. He pulls the nail out of his arm and the blood starts to flow. He hauls Bower up into a fireman’s lift and gets him to the elevator. He calls the station when he’s on the ground floor and tells them what’s happened. He tells them both Mitchell and his killer are being rushed to the hospital. He removes the plastic from around Bower’s neck.
When the ambulance arrives, the paramedics look at the two dead men and don’t try to save them. There’s no point. They don’t make any conversation as they get the bodies loaded into the back. Ben takes Mitchell’s hand and tells him he’ll honor the promise he made him if something like this ever happened, then the ambulance tears out of the parking lot, and a few minutes later police cars tear their way in. A second ambulance shows up. Police officers are ushering back the construction workers and setting up a cordon. A paramedic who smells and sounds like he spends a lot of time hanging out with cigarettes takes Ben into the back of the ambulance. He sounds miffed when Ben tells him he doesn’t want to go to the hospital to have his arm checked out, that all he wants right now is to have it patched as best as he can. Police tape starts going up. There are so many people moving around, dirt and dust is getting kicked into the air.
Detectives start arriving. They have questions for him, and he promises them he will explain everything soon, but right now he has to leave. There’s a clock ticking and a lot that needs to be done. He ducks under the tape, and his arm is throbbing and the paramedic warned him it would only get worse, but for now he wants it to hurt. He wants to suffer. He gets to his car. An hour ago there were two of them, now it’s only him. He sits and stares at the passenger seat, remembering the conversation they had on the way here, remembering other conversations, other times, other close calls and near misses and the adrenaline rushes and the heartbreaks.
It’s always been the heartbreaks that made him and Mitchell try to improve the world.
“I’m sorry,” he says to the partner who is no longer there, and he clenches his jaw and swallows down his anger and his sorrow, because there’ll be plenty of time for that later. Now he needs to stay calm and keep it together. The drive to see Michelle Logan is the hardest he’s ever had to make. Mitchell and Michelle—cute names for a cute couple, he thinks. The kind of meant-to-be names. And they were meant to be. Everybody who knew them knew that. High school sweethearts who have been together for twenty-five years. Ben has known them that entire time—there were four of them who were best friends through high school, Mitchell, Michelle, Ben, and Ben’s brother, Jesse. They were all in the same classes together, they had the same circle of friends, went to the same concerts and drank the same beer at the same parties, they smoked weed and swam at the beach and queued up outside nightclubs and did a million other things together as they grew up.
The partying stopped when Mitchell applied to police college—he went from smoking a little bit of weed to arresting those doing the same thing. Michelle went to university and spent five years studying to become a veterinarian, while Jesse went to teachers’ college for three years, then started teaching. Ben broke up with his girlfriend to go and see the world, working behind bars and doing the minimum to scrape by. He did that for five years, coming back when Jesse got sick, which was around the same time Mitchell’s sister died, sixteen, almost seventeen years ago now. Ben came back unemployed and with no direction. Mitchell convinced him to apply for the police force, and now . . . now he’s turning a ten-minute drive into twenty because that will give Michelle a little extra time of not knowing.
The veterinary clinic she co-owns is in the north of the city. It shares its parking lot with a hairdresser and a pharmacy and a clothing outlet store. He parks next to a red BMW in which a woman is having a conversation with something in a cage that he can’t see. He gets out and leans against his car and considers how he’s going to break the news. He’s done it before, but never to anybody he knows. A guy in a shirt and tie walks out of the front entrance of the clinic carrying a cat’s cage at arm’s length. His sleeves are rolled up and there are fresh claw marks up and down his arms. The man notices Ben’s bandaged arm and nods at him, sharing a cats, huh? look, and Ben finds himself nodding back.
He can’t put this off any longer.
He’s most of the way to the door when it opens again. Michelle comes outside. At five feet nine, and with wavy red hair that reaches below her shoulders, Michelle always drew a lot of attention back in their school days, and is more beautiful now at forty than she was at twenty. This is going to destroy her. It already is. She’s already crying, and he knows she must have seen him through the window with the blood on his shirt and the bandage on his arm and that’s all it takes for the partner of somebody in law enforcement to know that her deepest fear has caught up with her.
“How bad?” she asks.
“I’m so sorry,” he says, which tells her everything she needs to know. He wraps his arms around her and tries to hang on tight, but it’s not tight enough and her legs go out from under her and she sits on the step and he sits next to her. He can see people staring out the windows at them, some with hands to their mouths. She sobs into his chest. He can feel his own tears on their way but he hangs on. He has to.
“How did . . .” she whispers, and the words get stuck and nothing else will follow.
He tells her how it happened, all the while looking down at the hot, gray asphalt.
He wipes a finger at his eyes. “There’s something else.”
“What kind of something?” she says.
He tells her about the promise Mitchell asked him to keep, with the hope she will agree to it.
THREE
Joshua doesn’t know why he’s cursed, he just knows that he is. He doesn’t know how many generations back it goes, but he does know he’s inherited it. Inherited it from parents he never knew. His dad jumped in front of a bus a few months before Joshua was born. He did it to save a small girl he’d never met who had slipped away from her mother’s grasp and had stumbled into the street. This selfless act made his dad a hero, but he was a hero who wasn’t around because of it. His mother, on the other hand, was in his life for five months before meeting a bus of her own, in the form of a brain embolism. Joshua was in a bouncy harness hanging from a doorframe when it happened, his feet barely touching the floor. Not that he remembers it. She strapped him in, and somewhere between Joshua and the hallway, everything in her head switched off. She was dead before she hit the floor. It was one of those things that the curse had placed on their road map. He bounced and cried and filled his nappy and went hungry as the afternoon turned to night turned to morning, and that’s when a neighbor came over to see why the baby wouldn’t stop screaming.
Predestination. It’s been a long time since his mind has churned up those chestnuts, b
ut right now his mind is playing an automatic form of word association because of what Mr. Fox, his science teacher, is lecturing about. He’s talking about eye color. He’s talking about genetics, which is a word that always makes Joshua think of the curse, because family curses are in the DNA too—Mr. Fox may not agree, but Joshua sure knows it’s true. Mr. Fox is talking about how eye color is passed down from parent to child, what the combinations are, but really, it’s a hard topic to care much about when you don’t know what blue or green or brown even means. Joshua’s eyes are blue. So he’s been told. He knows the ocean is blue. He’s been to the ocean, but he’s never seen it. He’s played in the sun and sand, and sometimes the water is warm and sometimes it’s cold, sometimes he’ll stand on a stick or a seashell and it’ll hurt like crazy, sometimes he’ll lie on the sand and feel the sun on his face, but none of that tells him what blue is. The sky is blue. Smurfs are blue. When people are sad, they feel blue. But Joshua’s world is black. It has been his entire sixteen years. The curse made sure of that.
He shifts his legs and straightens himself behind his desk. His back is getting sore, and his legs are becoming numb and this lesson has slipped beyond boring and into the realm of pointless. Others in the classroom are repositioning themselves too. It’s not unheard of for students to fall asleep in Mr. Fox’s classes. Rumor has it a kid even wet his pants while taking a nap a few years back. Joshua stifles a yawn. He stayed up late listening to a horror novel about a guy who could put his fingers into his victims’ eye sockets and see everything they have ever seen. It made Josh wonder what he would see if he could do the same thing, only he wouldn’t know what he was seeing. It would be like learning a new language.
There’s a knock at the classroom door, and Joshua is grateful because the sound stops him from falling asleep. Hopefully it will be somebody coming to say that school is finishing early for the day. “Excuse me for the interruption,” a woman says, and it’s the school secretary, Mrs. Templeton. “I need to borrow Mr. Fox for a moment.”
There’s the sound of shifting chairs and turning bodies as all fifteen students follow the sound of footsteps across the room. She says something else then, something too low for Joshua to make out, but then the door closes, and when there are no more footsteps he figures that Mr. Fox and Mrs. Templeton are out in the corridor discussing something. He’s always wondered what she looks like. Mr. Fox too.
All at once, different conversations in the classroom start up. His friend next to him, William, says that Mr. Fox is probably being fired for being too fat. Pete says he bets they’re out in the corridor with their hands all over each other. Others laugh and agree, then they all go quiet when the door opens back up.
“Joshua?” Mr. Fox says. “I’m going to need you to get your bag and go with Mrs. Templeton.”
At first it doesn’t register that he’s the one being spoken to. Why would Mrs. Templeton want him?
“Joshua?”
The others make a collective ooh sound. Mr. Fox tells them to be quiet. Joshua grabs his bag and uses his cane to guide his way to the front of the class. “Have I done something?”
“Everything will be explained,” Mr. Fox says. “Please go with Jenny . . . I mean, Mrs. Templeton.”
He makes his way out of the classroom.
“This way,” Mrs. Templeton says.
“Can I ask what it is I’ve done?”
“You haven’t done anything,” she says. “Principal Anderson needs to talk to you.”
“About what?”
She doesn’t answer. She starts walking. He follows her. With the hallway empty of students, the sound of his cane echoes as it taps against the ground. Whatever it is they think he did, it’s all a big misunderstanding. A school of blind kids also means a school full of mistaken identities. Sometimes you can’t know who pushed you over or stole your lunch. Yesterday somebody pulled the fire alarm, which always gets a laugh in hindsight, but isn’t funny when you can’t see the flames that may or may not be coming for you, flames that you might not hear over the sound of the alarm and stomping feet, smoke you might not smell until it’s too late. Is that what this is? They think he’s the one who pulled the alarm?
He has to use his cane more when they go up a flight of steps. This is new territory for him. This is bad-kid territory. He’s never been to the principal’s office before. It smells of books and old cigars, and the door makes a creaking sound when it closes behind him. It reminds him of his dad’s study—though he’s not technically his dad. Technically his mom and dad are his aunt and uncle—they took him in after his parents died, and his last name was changed to their last name. His biological mom was his dad’s sister.
“Please, take a seat, Joshua,” Principal Anderson says. His voice is deep and slow, and Joshua can tell from its direction that he’s standing. It’s the first time the principal has ever addressed him.
“Is this about the alarm?” Joshua asks, then immediately wishes he hadn’t. Asking about it makes him look guilty.
“If you take a seat I can explain everything to you.”
“It’s going to be okay,” Mrs. Templeton says, which doesn’t feel like a good thing to hear. It seems the kind of thing one would say when the opposite is true. He finds the chair. He sits down. He holds the cane tightly. Something is wrong here. None of this . . . none of this feels right.
“I’m not sure how to . . . This . . . this is going to be hard,” Principal Anderson says, “but I’m afraid . . . I’m afraid I have to give you some bad news, Joshua.”
Joshua says nothing. How ironic, he thinks, that five minutes ago he was thinking about the family curse. Is that what has happened here? His memory reached out and woke it up?
“It’s about your father,” Principal Anderson says, and of course it is. The principal puts his hand on Joshua’s shoulder. He crouches down so he can face him. “There’s been an incident.”
“No,” he says. “Please, don’t tell me. Don’t—”
But Principal Anderson does tell him. All Joshua can do is sit silently and listen, his hands shaking as he cries.
“It’s going to be okay,” Mrs. Templeton tells him, only it isn’t going to be okay.
How can it be?
FOUR
Joshua can’t process the words. He can hear them well enough, but there’s something about them that don’t add up. Despite having accepted that the curse is real, despite knowing that his dad’s job is dangerous, he can’t believe that what he’s hearing is true.
“I’m so sorry,” Principal Anderson says. Some of the students here call Principal Anderson Pineapple Andawoman. There’s no way somebody with such a stupid nickname can be telling him that his dad—his second dad—is dead. Something inside Joshua’s body is getting smaller, a piece of him shrinking up and dying.
“Everything is going to be okay,” Mrs. Templeton says.
Joshua stares in her direction. He’s trying to put what she’s saying into a narrative that reverses everything Principal Anderson has told him. Everything is going to be okay? How? In what way?
“We’re here for you, Joshua,” Principal Anderson says. “In any way you need us.”
“I don’t . . . I don’t . . .” Joshua says, and he doesn’t. He doesn’t know what to do. Doesn’t know what to say. Doesn’t understand how this can be real. He is, he realizes, halfway to becoming an orphan again, and if the past is anything to go by, his mom now has a clock hanging over her. “He can’t be dead,” he says. “I was with him this morning. How can he be dead when he dropped me off at school? How can—”
“Joshua—”
He shrugs the principal’s hand off his shoulder. “He can’t be, that’s how,” he says, which is as true as everything else that is going on, and, when you boil down the facts, a curse is nothing more than paranoia and ignorance and superstition mixed into one.
“It’s going to be okay,” Mrs. Templeton says.
“Stop saying that,” Joshua says. He stands up. He has to
get out of here. Has to get some air. He moves towards the door and bumps into the side of the chair and drops his cane and keeps moving forward without it. He puts his hands out to guide the way, to where he isn’t sure, and he trips over something, hits the ground and gets right back up. That’s the trick to this—keep moving forward fast enough to stop the bad news from catching up.
“Joshua,” Principal Anderson says.
“I have to go.”
“Joshua . . .”
He gets his hands against the wall. The door should be to his right . . . but it’s not, and then it is, and he’s getting it open and a hand falls on his shoulder but he breaks free of it. He has to get downstairs. Needs to get outside. Once he finds his dad he can prove these people wrong. The hand he shrugged off grips him around the arm. Tight. He’s turned around, fingers crushing into him, a grip he can’t break.
“Joshua, please, please, I know this is difficult, but you have to try and calm yourself down,” Principal Anderson says.
“I am calm.”
“We’ll help you through this.”
“I don’t need your help. I just want my dad.”
“Your dad . . . your dad died,” Mrs. Templeton says. “I’m so sorry, Joshua, but that’s what we’re trying to tell you.”
No. His dad didn’t die. If it were true, it wouldn’t be Pineapple Andawoman telling him. It wouldn’t be the school secretary trying to comfort him. “I don’t want to talk to you anymore,” Joshua says. “Either of you.”
“We’re going down the stairs now,” Principal Anderson says, and a moment later that’s what they do, the arm around him guiding the way.
The grip is still strong on Joshua’s arm, and now it’s starting to hurt. He knows it’s going to bruise—he doesn’t know what a bruise looks like, but he sure knows how one feels. All blind people do. The truth of what is happening is starting to set in. He could run as fast as humanly possible, and it wouldn’t change what’s happened.
