No Harm Can Come to a Good Man

by James Smythe

  June nods. ‘Well, I’m sure … I’m sure that’s all that it is. But listen to me; if you need anything, you know where to come. I was talking to the Hendersons and, as I say, all we want is you all to be safe and sound. We’re open all hours, here. Even if the door is shut, you bang on it, and we’ll come help you out.’ She stands up and smiles at the girls, makes a little wave at Alyx. ‘What can I get you all?’

  They order. Around them, the other patrons of the diner try to not stare, but all glance, turning their heads while they take bites of their pastries or eat their huevos rancheros. Deanna tries to meet as many of their eyes as she can, to hold their gaze.

  It’s only when June brings their own food out – and puts her hand on Deanna’s arm and squeezes it in way of comfort, and Deanna thinks, Another person does that it’s going to leave a mark – that she realizes that she used the S word. She said that Laurence was sick, and that’s because he is. Maybe now is the time to accept it; to embrace it. Call a spade a spade.

  As they’re standing up to leave, Alyx running to the bathroom, Lane asks if they can go to the mall. Deanna asks why.

  ‘I want to finish this off,’ she says. She turns herself slightly, to indicate the tattoo. ‘I’ve got the rose needs doing.’

  ‘What are you having put on it?’ Deanna asks.

  ‘Our names,’ Lane says. ‘The four of us.’ Sean is already there, on her neck, Deanna knows. This is a tribute. ‘It’s not done. There’s more. But I want to remember the four of us like we were.’ She doesn’t say it, but Deanna knows what she’s getting at. This will never be the same again. Even if this ends well, none of this will ever be the same.

  ‘Okay,’ Deanna says. ‘I’ll pay.’ They leave, and everybody still eating watches them. June rushes after them and stands in the doorway as they get into Deanna’s car.

  ‘You remember what I said,’ she shouts. ‘Any time, day or night. You need to protect yourself.’ She waves.

  Deanna slams the car door and starts the engine.

  ‘What did she mean?’ Alyx asks.

  ‘Nothing,’ Deanna says. ‘Let’s go. What’s on the radio?’ She flicks through the stations until she finds one that Alyx likes, signified by immediate and loud singing along. They forget, for a second; or they act as if they have.

  When they park, Deanna has a missed call from her agent. He’s left a message on her machine. There’s been an offer for the book already; a good offer, he says. He wants to tell her more in person. She should call him. He tells her that he hopes she’s all right, that everything hits at once, the good and the bad. He asks her to call him, and she thinks that she will, but another day. There’s no rush, not right now.

  The mall is heaving. Deanna has lost track of what day it is. Lane goes immediately to the tattoo parlour, and she signs in and gets a slot. They have an hour and a half to kill, and then after that the wait while Lane has it done. Four names on a flower. Lane brings a sampler of fonts out of the tattoo parlour and they get a coffee – Deanna’s third of the day, and it makes her jittery, feeling the caffeine in her teeth and her fingertips – and they talk them over. Sean’s name is written in something complicated and conjoined, the letters almost gothic in design, running into each other; the blacks bleeding, leaving the name spelled out in the white spaces between. They go through and choose one for this new design; it’s subtle and classic, like the font from the cover of an old book. Lane circles it, and then they walk around shops. They go to clothes shops and Lane persuades Deanna to try an outfit on. This feels as if they are incognito and she pulls on jeans that she would never have worn before today, and a top that she thinks is too young for her but that Lane assures her she can get away with; and she looks at herself in the mirror of the changing rooms and pulls back her hair from her face. She imagines a different look, maybe dyeing it, getting it cut.

  ‘You look so good,’ the girl in the changing rooms says. She brings the new Deanna a pair of ankle boots and Deanna tries them on; they’re perfect. She stands there for ten, fifteen minutes, until Alyx tells her that she’s bored and starts playing up, and then she takes the clothes off, pays for them, and goes straight back into the changing rooms and puts them on again, tearing off the tags as she puts each piece of the outfit together. When she’s done she puts her old clothes into the bag and walks out, and they all go upstairs, the girls laughing conspiratorially, shocked at their mother’s behavior. Even after Laurence’s actions the past few weeks, the slightest change in their mother amuses them. Lane goes into the tattoo place, and Deanna tells her that she’ll be back in an hour.

  Across the way there’s a row of hairdresser boutiques, and Deanna picks the nicest looking one and goes in. They have a free slot, and Alyx sits next to her, rocking on the chair. They offer to wash her hair as well, to keep her involved, and she grins the whole time. Deanna tells them to do whatever. She says, ‘I’m not fussed about it any more,’ and the stylist takes some off and pulls it back and gives her what is almost a fringe. Deanna takes her phone out, taking a photograph of herself. She’s got missed calls from Amit. She didn’t hear it ring, or feel it vibrate. She tries to call him back, but there’s no answer.

  When Lane is done, she comes out and peels off the dressing to show them the tattoo. It’s lovely; the letters of each word spilling over, as with Sean’s name, but they’re piled up on top of each other. Alyx at the top, Laurence at the bottom, the weight of each word scaling to the size of it. The petals of the bud lick Laurence’s name, red tickling against the black of the lettering.

  On the way back to the car, they pass the technology shop. The windows are full of television screens. Lane tries to rush them past, because she knows – as if what happened before was a warning, a prelude to the real reveal – but she can’t, not in time. Every screen in the front window of the shop shows Laurence’s face, a furious rage on it. His whole being is hunched and howling. He drives a car, screaming as it smacks into news vans; as a woman is hit by it, sent reeling; as people on the other side of the vans scatter, some hit by debris, some hit by each other. It’s lucky that there were so many cameras there to capture it all. They get it from every single angle. The cars smash, and the crunch is recorded. Deanna gets closer to the screens and he gets out of the car and he’s dazed. He puts his hand out to steady himself, and then a cameraman comes towards him. On the televisions now, they show this first-person, as if you are there; as if Laurence is in front of you, and you’re the one who is trying to stop him. Deanna watches it and feels dizzy. The urge to fall, to give in, rises inside her. He is so sick. Sick, sick, sick. He is gray and yellow and he is so, so thin; he is a wraith. He reaches for the camera and pulls it from the man, and he bares his teeth and spits garbled words that make him seem alien, as if he doesn’t even understand this language. Here is first contact. Laurence pulls the camera close to him and then swings it out in front of him, as a weapon. It collides with the head of the cameraman, who just isn’t expecting it. Nobody expects it. Around this, the reporters try to record themselves. They treat this as if it’s a warzone and they are crouched behind barricades, under enemy fire. They’re afraid of him, because they know. They have seen him with a gun, threatening his own family; threatening even his youngest daughter. Everybody is afraid, because everybody has seen what Laurence is capable of. He is a man to be feared. He is a man you should stay away from. He is not a good man.

  They scramble on the floor as he comes to them, and he stands in the middle of the fray and he gasps and catches his breath. His shoulders rock up and down in his suit; the colors of ash and lemon yellow, and the tie’s color bleeds onto the near-white of his shirt. It makes his skin worse, echoes of jaundice creeping in. Laurence turns from the cameras and pulls something from his pocket. The crews recoil, but it’s only his keys; a bundle of them, everything that he needs to access all of his life; his car, his house, his offices. He goes into the house and shuts the door behind him. The camera crews and reporters relax. They report wha
t has happened, and it can be seen for itself. What they say is pretty much irrefutable. He was like a man possessed. He was not the man that she knows.

  And then, on the screens, here he comes again, the front door yanked open as he strides. He stops and hurls his keys at the mess of vans and car that he caused in the road, but he doesn’t scream or make any noise this time. Instead, he walks. He turns and he goes, walking off, and then running, as he gets further down the road. The cameras follow him until the road bends, and then they cannot see him. The journalists call the police. They leave it until last, because maybe this was their last. If the cops came, they would have to stop. Maybe, letting Laurence be here and then not, that’s their story. It’s better if there’s a chase at the end. Everything is better with a chase at the end, somebody in a creative writing course once told her. Everything is better when it ends with a bang.

  Deanna looks at her children. Alyx’s face buried in Lane’s hair, the older sister having picked up the younger, mothering her. On the screens now they are showing the video that started this; the little ClearVista stamp on the bottom right, as if that gives it some degree of authenticity. The shop’s staff stands in the doorway watching Deanna. They know who she is, because everybody does.

  And here’s her face, on the television; a close up of the video, where she looks terrified, or what is meant to be terrified. She wonders if that is how she looks now, right at this moment.

  ‘Okay,’ she says, when they are all back in the car. ‘We’re going to see Nana and Pop-pop, okay?’ The kids don’t say anything. Alyx is befuddled, but Lane understands what’s going on. She knows that Laurence is having problems. He’s crashing. ‘We get to the hotel and we pack our bags and we can be there by midnight. Okay?’ She turns, because she wants their permission. She wants them to be complicit in this. She doesn’t want to talk to Laurence, not yet. He needs help, she knows; and all she can think about is the video, as if it knew. Maybe there’s something in it, she thinks. Maybe there’s something true there. The girls eventually nod.

  She drives, and they don’t have the radio on, and there’s silence. There’s only the rush of the outside against the car itself; the slight whistle of the wind at the window. She puts hers down a crack just to have more. The wind outside suddenly ups and starts whipping around more, and it gets into her ears in the front of the car, like it’s beating them, the rush of whatever is outside – trees and bushes and houses – changing the thrum of the wind into a steady beat, beat.

  In the car park of the motel, she parks near the exit, reversing in (the fastest route out), and she tells the girls to go up and get their bags packed, and she stands outside the car and watches them go into the room, and then she calls Amit on the phone. He answers on the second ring.

  ‘Jesus Christ, Dee,’ he says.

  ‘I saw the news,’ she says.

  ‘I don’t know what happened to him. I don’t know. I’m so sorry.’

  ‘Where is he now?’

  ‘Not got a clue. I went to the house after he was there. Got inside.’ He drops his voice, as if he has to whisper; because he doesn’t want anybody to hear. ‘Listen, Dee, did you know he owned a gun?’

  ‘Yes,’ she says. She thinks about it, currently in her bag. ‘Why?’

  ‘It’s what he was at the house for, I think. It was in a shoebox, in the bedroom?’

  ‘Right. A white shoebox.’

  ‘Well, it wasn’t there any more. I found a bullet. But he must have taken the gun.’ He sighs. ‘I thought he would come for you, then. I don’t know why, because he knows what the video showed. I don’t know where he is now, but if the press sees him with that, they’ll—’

  Deanna drops the phone to her side. It clatters to the floor, and it breaks. Cheap; meant to be replaceable. There are two hotels in Staunton. They were such idiots. She looks up at the room that they’ve been staying in, and the door is still wide open. The girls would have closed it behind them. They would have come to look for her after this long a wait. They would. She runs up the stairs. The room is silent. She shouldn’t go in, she thinks. She should call the police. But she hears Alyx’s hard, shocked breathing, and she can’t wait out there one second more.

  There is Laurence, reunited with his gun. Standing at the far wall, back pressed up to it. He is crying. The girls are crying too, sitting on the double bed next to each other. He doesn’t seem to see Deanna for a second. He doesn’t look up as she stands in the doorway. She doesn’t want to startle him. She wonders if she can get the girls out of there. Beckon them towards her and, if they’re quiet, maybe they can make their way out. What’s that game? Murder in the dark? Where you are quiet, and the killer cannot find you in the pitch-blackness?

  But then he speaks. ‘I’m sorry,’ he says to her. ‘Because I had to come here and see you all.’

  ‘How did you find us?’ she asks.

  ‘I went to the front desk. I asked them.’ He holds out a photograph, the one from their fridge. It has been crumpled and folded. His thumb is on Sean’s face, and as he holds it out, Deanna watches his thumb moving against it, worrying the paper. There goes their son, being rubbed away. ‘They said that you were in here. They gave me a key.’ Deanna wonders if the person at the desk recognized Laurence, if they called the police. She prays that they are on their way.

  ‘I think you need help, Laurence,’ she says. She holds out her hands, palms up. This was something Diaz told them, in therapy; palms exposed, and you have nothing to hide. It tricks the subconscious. It’s a mark of trust. ‘I want you back. We can move past this.’

  ‘No,’ he says. ‘I don’t think that we can. I’m Laurence Walker. Everybody says who I am. You know it, Deanna. You’ve seen them. The world knows who I am. What sort of man I am.’

  ‘No,’ she tells him.

  ‘Have you seen the news?’ He looks at the girls. ‘So I think I should protect you. I should take you away from here, and then I can protect you.’

  ‘You think you’re protecting us?’ she asks. Laurence touches Alyx on her head. It doesn’t matter that he is her father; she is already afraid of him. She flinches, and he persists.

  ‘It’s okay,’ he tells her. He turns back to Deanna. ‘What if I change what it showed?’ He switches on the television, and there he is, assaulting the cameramen again, his trail of havoc. But then he changes the channel, and it’s Homme and his ClearVista video. But Deanna watches it and sees that it’s different. The soldiers aren’t generic faces; his smile is no longer a rictus grin made by composite images.

  This is real.

  He is stepping down from a helicopter and running to shake the hands of soldiers, who all smile and greet him. They have their guns at their backs and their boots polished. He turns to the camera and smiles, a brief, half second of glory. This is a shared understanding; he’s telling the audience that they asked for this, and lo, it has become true. The prophecy is realized. Back in the studio, they talk about how accurate the software from ClearVista was, and they mention Laurence again. They talk about this as something that is going to come true. Laurence and the Walker family, they have a destiny.

  ‘But he staged that,’ Deanna says. ‘He staged that, to make it what the video showed.’

  ‘Yes,’ Laurence says. ‘But maybe the video wasn’t me threatening you, Deanna. Maybe I am protecting you, because you are scared of something else entirely. You are scared of them or of what could happen. But not of me.’ He smiles at her. It doesn’t work on his face; his new face, so gaunt and drawn, that the smile almost looks as if it’s been designed.

  He takes them to the car that Deanna bought, and he opens the doors for them, and he takes the keys from Deanna’s hand. She stops to tie her shoelaces, which aren’t actually untied and she picks up the fractured shell of her phone from the tarmac and puts it into her pocket. He doesn’t see. It’s something, she thinks.

  He drives. His knuckles are white on the wheel and his fingers flex as they go. Constantly, like the ha
nds of a pianist, they move left to right, little runs of movement, kinetic energy transferred from one finger to another. On the back seat, the girls are terrified; Lane staring at the back of her father’s head, her sister quietly crying. She knows to not push this, Deanna thinks, but she cannot help herself. The sobbing is like a noise from far away. Deanna thinks about the girl who was crying in the hotel. Girl, woman, she doesn’t know; crying through the walls. She wonders what was wrong with her.

  They drive across the freeway, not turning off, and then back towards the house. She sees the stretch of shops: the diner, and June inside it; the garage, her old car in the forecourt, the bodywork now patched up; the grocers, Trent serving customers, sweeping the floors; the church, and the priest inside, listening to confession, doling out punishments to be self-administered; and the bar at this end, the regulars already drinking, that same old nineties rock music on the jukebox; and then the road down towards their house, the residential housing, this place that they have loved for so long; this place that they have called home.

  ‘We’re going to the house?’ she asks, but Laurence doesn’t answer. He indicates and turns the car off, down the dirt track that runs to the woods. This car doesn’t have the suspension for this. They all shake. Deanna feels the car in her teeth, making them chatter. ‘The cabin,’ she says, realizing it. ‘We’re going to the cabin.’

  ‘Only for a few days,’ he says. ‘It’s clean. I’ve been down here, earlier. It’s clean enough.’

  Deanna doesn’t say anything. Not about what’s down here, or why they haven’t been. She knows. They all know; it’s been implied the whole of this year, even if they haven’t spoken about it. Because it’s stupid to not come here because of what happened. They drive down the path, and then it snakes through the field and into the woods itself. It all falls dark, the tree canopy overhead blocking the sun; and it only stops when it reaches the lake. There it is, in front of them, a mass of water that just goes on and on, and their cabin, perched on the edge of it. They haven’t been here in over a year. The land will take it back, they were told when they bought the place, and it has happened. Grass as high as the windows alongside the car, which almost runs up to the waterline. Here is where, when it happened, the reporters stood; in this grass, on these fields, with the woods around them, and the lake, and the house framed behind them: an old, wooden building that’s now haunted.