by Paul Cleave
He watches them as they walk down the path to their car. He’s always thought that everything started with Ruby. If what Detective Kent told him is true, then it didn’t.
He wonders if Ruby was even his second.
He waits a few minutes until they’re gone. They have no reason to follow him, but even so, he takes an indirect way out to the motorway, checking his mirrors often. It adds thirty minutes to what is normally a forty-minute drive.
The cabin is at the end of an access road that takes a couple of minutes to traverse. Out here it’s mostly beech trees, with the occasional pine tree too. It’s not a rough road, but it is a dirt road that’s been packed down hard, and not impervious to tree roots growing out of it or wildlife burrowing into it, and of course it’s not impervious to the weather. This time of year it’s at its best, but over the years there have been winters when the road has threatened to bog down anything moving over it.
The cabin overlooks the river; their boat is parked up on a trailer next to it. The cabin all those years ago was less than half the size it is now—and really, the most original thing left is the address. Bit by bit most pieces have been replaced, and it stopped being a cabin years ago and became a house—even though neither he nor Simon ever referred to it as such, and he isn’t going to begin now. With two stories and four bedrooms and two lounges and three bathrooms, the cabin looks like a home stripped out of the heart of an expensive suburban neighborhood and planted into the forest. The top floor has floor-to-ceiling windows that face north, looking out over the river, where the sun streams in, and on the balcony up there they would talk about carpentry, about work, about their families, about their school days. They never ran out of stuff to talk about—though they often did talk about the same things. They’d have breakfast up there, and when he comes out here alone, he sits up there with a book and often falls asleep in the sun. Once they spent weeks trying to come up with a way to fish from the balcony, even though there were fifteen yards of dirt and stumps between the cabin and the river, and when they finally devised a way through a series of pulleys wrapped over tree branches, they thought it was cheating so never followed through.
The cabin has a smell that only homes in forests have, the scent of wood and the fresh air moving over the river, and the scent of the forest floor and fallen leaves rotting in the sun. It’s the smell of nature, and it relaxes him. The cabin, at the moment, also has the smell of his fermenting beer. The dog hears him come inside, and she comes crawling out of the kennel in the utility room and sits in the doorway of the hallway. She’s hungry and really thirsty. He should have come out here last night instead of drinking all the beer to take the edge off his grief.
“Hey there, girl,” he says, and he strokes her behind her ear and she says nothing, just looks at him like he betrayed her for leaving her alone so long. “What’s that on your leg?” He crouches down next to her. “Is that blood?”
Concerned, he goes into the utility room. It’s the last room out here they modified. It used to be a boot room, but they extended it to become a combined boot room, laundry, and bathroom a few months back. The kennel is in there too.
There are drops of blood splashed around the entire room. There are pieces of tape on the walls, and torn bits of plastic. This is where Simon brought the woman he killed. He taped plastic up on the walls, and covered the floor, and he probably killed the woman in front of the dog, then cleaned up. What did he do with the body? He looks at the chest freezer and hopes she’s not in there, but when he opens it up, his hopes are wasted. She’s in there, cut up in pieces and wrapped tightly in plastic bags. He’s going to have to get rid of her, and he’s going to have to get rid of all the plastic that was taped to the walls that he guesses is jammed into the garbage bin out back. He has no idea what the hell Simon was planning. Was he keeping her as a souvenir? Was he planning on getting rid of the parts one at a time in dark corners of the city? Toss them into the river? He realizes he’s never going to know.
He uses a towel to wipe down the dog. Then he fills one bowl with water and one with dog meat and watches her eat for a few minutes before spending the next hour cleaning up the mess Simon made. When he’s done, he stands in the doorway staring at the dog, wondering what he’s going to do with her. Getting the dog was Simon’s idea, and now that he’s gone he’s not real sure he wants to keep her. Looking after her now will mean twice the work for him. He certainly feels a sense of contentment having her around—Simon felt the same—and so he decides her future will be a decision for another day.
He hits the bookshelves upstairs and finds the copy of Of Mice and Men that his brother gave him for his birthday nearly ten years ago. He’s never read it. He reads it out in the sun, imagining that he’s George from the book, and Simon was Lenny, but that doesn’t work, because really they’d both be George—both willing to shoot somebody they loved if it came down to it. He closes out day two by falling asleep on the couch in the upstairs lounge.
On day three he leaves the cabin early and goes home and gets changed for work. For the last two years he’s been a courier driver, hauling people’s crap from one side of the city to the other. Before being a courier, he spent a year working in a coffee shop, and before that he spent six months cleaning cars at a car yard, and before that he spent a year stacking supermarket shelves at night. He’s worked in shops, he’s dug graves at cemeteries, he’s landscaped, he’s been a farmhand, he’s spent summers picking fruit, he once worked for a phone company, and his first job out of school was working in a factory that built vacuum cleaners. Simon used to tell him to come and work for him, that with his building skills he’d fit right in, but Vincent never liked the idea of it. He loves building, he loves carpentry, but there’s an intimacy to what he creates that he doesn’t want to share with people he doesn’t know. He’s always been one of those guys who bounce from job to job with few ambitions, and he’s always been okay with that. He doesn’t want to be anything more than he is, because he doesn’t like the responsibility that comes with it. Hell, even looking after a dog is more responsibility than he’s ever wanted.
Every morning, the van is waiting for him full of packages at the depot. There’s no end to his work, because there’s no end to the amount of crap people ship and receive. The truth is that over the last few months he’d been thinking about taking the job Simon was offering. At least being a builder would give him a sense of completion. Now it’s too late, but maybe it’s time he started looking for something else—something that involves the skills he’s developed.
He spends Thursday morning picking up and delivering packages with no sense of urgency. At one o’clock he decides that if people don’t get what they ordered yesterday until tomorrow, their lives aren’t going to end. He drives back to the depot, changes into the black suit he brought, and prepares himself to say good-bye to his best friend.
The cemetery is peaceful. He locks his car and sees there is no sea of people; in fact, the cemetery is so empty he’s beginning to wonder if he got the right day. He walks among the gravestones, sweating in the sun with his hands in his pockets. Up ahead are Simon’s parents and Simon’s sister and her husband and the priest and nobody else. Did everybody else in Simon’s life think so little of him that they actually believe he did those bad things? Of course, he did do them, but why aren’t people doubting that? They can’t know, not for sure, yet they’re quick to believe the worst.
Simon’s dad looks like an older version of Simon, he has the same beard, the same hair, only a little thinner, the same eyes, and he nods at Vincent in the way of a greeting but says nothing. Simon’s mom, the only religious one in the family, won’t even look at him, and nor will Simon’s sister. Her husband gives him a shrug that Vincent can’t decipher. Do they even want him here? Because it’s starting to feel like they don’t. Do they blame him somehow? Or are they embarrassed? He keeps a small distance from them in case they have the urge to throw him in with his best friend.
When
the priest sees that nobody else is coming, he gets the proceedings under way. His name is Father Daniels, and Father Daniels is thin and gaunt and looks more like somebody you’d see on the other side of death. He appears to be in his fifties, with thick, dark hair that’s losing its war against the grays. He doesn’t really have a lot to say. What is there? Simon was a quiet guy? But Daniels does his best, summing up a man he never knew but who did bad things into a eulogy full of platitudes and clichés that avoids mentioning his skill with a power saw.
During the service other people start arriving, not for Simon, but for the story. The papers are starting to call him Simply Simon, because the police say he was simple to find, he simply died, and the case is simply over. Vincent thinks the name is a stretch and doesn’t like it. Those who are now arriving are the people who gave him that name, and they stand thirty yards away speaking into microphones and TV cameras with the funeral as the backdrop. As soon as the service is over, Vincent takes a wide berth to get around them to get back to his car. By the time all of this is over, Simon will be so demonized he’ll be blamed for everything from global warming to the struggling economy.
The parking lot is full now. His car is a dark-blue station wagon twenty years old with stickers on the back bumper and cobwebs in the corners. It creaks as he climbs into it, and things rattle behind the dashboard when he drives. He bought it ten years ago when he was selling cell phones and has never been able to afford anything better. Halfway home it breaks down. He pops the hood and doesn’t know what he’s looking at. When it comes to working with wood, or working on houses, he’s become an artist, but he doesn’t know much about cars. Simon did. Simon would simply . . .
Simply Simon.
Damn it, he has to make sure he doesn’t think of his friend that way.
He pulls the caps off the spark plugs and pushes them back down, wiggles some cables, and whatever he does works because the car starts. He makes it home, promising himself that he’ll go and see a mechanic next week. Or maybe the week after.
He fries up some bacon and some chicken and makes himself a Caesar salad for dinner that night that, reluctantly, he ends up pairing with the last of his dragon beer. He lets day three close out by falling asleep on the couch listening to the radio.
Day four, and the routine of life is kicking in. Breakfast. Work. Lunch. Work. He alters the routine after work and drives to the police station and waits outside. It’s Friday, and Fridays always have twice as many cars on the road for some reason that’s never been explained to him. He sits in his car munching away at a bag of chips and drinking from a can of soda until Detective Inspector Ben Kirk pulls out from the parking lot behind the police station. He’s driving a white sports car that’s low to the ground. Vincent stays a few cars behind. They get caught in traffic. Cars fail to indicate and busses cut people off, but he keeps Ben in sight. Fifteen minutes later, Ben pulls into the parking lot of a restaurant in town that would have been quicker to walk to in this traffic than drive. Vincent parks on the street opposite. The restaurant has large Asian symbols all over the side of the building, as well as pictures of dragons that remind him of the beer he wishes he hadn’t bought the other night. Through the window of the restaurant he sees Ben hugging a blond woman. She’s wearing a tight black dress that doesn’t have any sleeves. She’s attractive. She looks familiar, but he can’t figure out from where.
He watches them talk. He watches them order. He watches them eat. He watches them stand and hug tightly during dessert while everybody else in the restaurant watches. He watches them pay the bill and watches them leave in separate cars.
They all head west, taking the road that cuts through the center of the biggest park in the city, Hagley Park. Every time he drives past it, he’s reminded of the fact that his first kiss took place on the bank of the Avon River in Hagley Park. He was fourteen years old and had to pay the girl five dollars for it, but it was worth it because she charged the other kids in their class ten. They continue east into Riccarton and into a nicer neighborhood than the one Vincent lives in, with nicer-looking houses with nicer-looking cars parked out front and up driveways. The houses in the street they end up in are all less than twenty years old. Both cars pull into the driveway of a redbrick townhouse with large windows and a well-kept garden, but not one as well kept as his own.
He writes the address down on the back of his hand and leaves.
Day four ends with him back out at the cabin with the dog tied to a tree while he digs a hole for the body parts being stored in the freezer. He’s happier having her out of the cabin, as if the freezer were a gate through which she could haunt him, but later that evening he thinks that before winter arrives he will bury her farther away. He decides to spend the night at the cabin. Day five, and there will be more driving, more packages, more knocking on doors and getting people to sign for things because people want their shit on Saturdays, too. But day five is also the first day of the rest of his life.
Day five, he has decided, is the day Detective Ben Kirk starts to suffer.
TWELVE
Joshua imagines the air in the room must be thinning out as everybody takes a deep breath in anticipation. All the sadness at what happened, all the fear and the excitement of what might happen, it’s all lead to this moment. He sits on the edge of the bed with his mom next to him holding his hand. His other hand is shaking a little.
“I need you to stay still, okay?” Dr. Toni says.
“Okay,” he says.
“You don’t need to hold your breath.”
“I can’t help it.”
“Here we go,” Dr. Toni says.
There’s a hand on the back of his head, then pressure as a blade goes between layers of the bandaging. It sounds incredibly loud as the scissors go through it. It’s pulled away. The pressure on his eyes relaxes.
Slowly, he opens them.
Nothing but darkness.
He tightens his grip on his mom’s hand so hard she cries out. “I can’t see anything,” he says.
“There’s still padding on your eyes,” Dr. Toni says.
“There is?”
“There is,” she says, and then she starts to remove the tape that’s been crisscrossed over the padding. It tugs at his skin but doesn’t hurt and is as loud as the scissors were. “Almost there,” she says, and then something wet is on his skin, it’s touching the side of the padding, loosening it from his face.
“You’re doing good, honey,” his mom says.
“I want you to keep your eyes closed,” Dr. Toni says. “Okay? It’s important.”
“Okay.”
There is more tugging at his skin, it hurts but he says nothing, and then . . . then the darkness out to the left isn’t as dark anymore. It’s lighter, a shade of . . . he doesn’t know. A shade of something he’s never experienced. The same shade as the sun, maybe. It’s warmth. It’s a glow. He’s smiling now. He has the urge to laugh. More tugging, and then a similar sensation in his other eye. Something wet is wiped in downward motions over each of them. Then something soft to dry them. He’s holding his breath again.
“Okay, Joshua, I want you to try and open your eyes, slowly, okay? Really slowly.”
“Okay,” he says.
He opens his eyes.
He doesn’t know what he’s supposed to see, but there’s light and color and there is so much of it he has to close them again, and when he opens them there’s nothing more than what he previously saw. There are no sharp lines, no edges, no detail. Is this vision? Is this what everybody sees? Dr. Toni is standing in front of him.
“Give it a few moments,” she says.
“For what?”
“For them to adjust.”
“Adjust in what way?” he asks, and she doesn’t answer, nor does she need to, because he sees in which way as the shapes in the room sharpen. Dr. Toni comes into focus, and within seconds he knows he can never go back to the dark from which he’s emerged. He will fight tooth and nail to keep what he’s bee
n given.
He turns to face his mom. She’s wearing a shirt the same color as Dr. Toni’s jacket, which he thinks might be white, because that’s what doctors wear. His mom is smiling so much her face looks like it’s going to break, but perhaps that’s how people always look when they’re happy. He’s always wondered what she looked like, and yet she looks like how he imagined. How he knew she would look. He can’t explain it.
“I can see you,” he says.
She tries to say something but can’t. She wipes at her tears. He tightens his grip on her hand.
“Joshua?”
“I can see you,” he says, louder this time.
He looks at Dr. Toni. She has long hair that comes to her shoulders. Her skin looks soft. He wonders if she’s beautiful. To him she is. She’s the most beautiful woman in the world because she’s made it possible for him to see. He realizes he’s smiling so much his face might break too. When was the last time he felt like laughing out of sheer happiness?
“Tell me what you can see,” Dr. Toni says.
“Everything,” he says, and he can’t hold back the laughter. “I can see everything.”
“That’s good, Joshua, really good. Now I want you to tilt your head back for me so I can put in some drops. These will help with the itching.”
He tilts his head back. She puts a thumb on his eyelids one at a time and lets a couple of drops fall in. They’re cold and make him flinch. He blinks a few times. The itching is disappearing. He straightens himself up. He holds his right hand in front of his face. Four fingers and a thumb and the palm of his hand, life lines going across it, fingernails and hair, and he looks at his wrist, he’s always thought he’d be able to see his pulse, but he can’t see it moving. He’s been able to see for barely a minute and he’s learned something new. He lowers his hand and Dr. Toni raises hers.
