December Park

by Ronald Malfi

  I thought my father would become angry when I spoke of the places I went and the things I did, but he said nothing.

  “What happened to Adrian?” I asked the men. When it was clear they didn’t know who Adrian was, I said, “The boy who we went in to rescue.”

  “Oh,” said one of the men. He had a sliver of a mustache and sparkling blue eyes. “He’s still at the hospital, but they say he’ll be just fine.”

  After they left, I expected my father to lay into me for disobeying him all summer, but he never said a word. He poured himself a glass of water from the kitchen sink. Then he poured me one and set it down in front of me at the table, where I remained sitting, seemingly unable to move.

  Later I met with a psychologist—a rotund bald man with wire-rimmed glasses and breath that smelled like onions. Like the men in the suits, he asked me to recount what had happened, though he seemed less interested in the details and more concerned with how I felt about what happened. I couldn’t answer his questions; I didn’t know how.

  After a time, I asked him some questions of my own. They seemed to make him uncomfortable and succeeded in cutting our session short. Afterward, he talked for a long time with my father. I was left with the distinct impression that I wouldn’t see the bald man with halitosis again.

  There were other men who showed up, too—men in military uniforms and stoic expressions. They spoke to my father at the house, and twice they took him someplace else to talk. My father returned from these meetings looking like he’d had blood drawn. He never talked about them and I never asked.

  When reporters from the Caller showed up at our door, my father said to ignore them. When reporters from the Sun and the Capital and the Post and the Times showed up, two policemen were stationed outside our house to make sure we weren’t disturbed. One night, a helicopter hovered over our house for nearly half an hour, its spotlight sweeping across our backyard. When neighbors appeared outside with signs on poster boards, I asked my father if they thought we were somehow responsible.

  “I can’t say what’s in people’s heads,” he replied sullenly. He noticed Tom Matherson from across the street among the mob. “We can’t live here anymore, Angie. You understand that, right? We’re going to have to move.”

  I said nothing.

  Because my father didn’t want us watching the news, or any TV for that matter, he unplugged the set and hauled it down to the basement. I stayed in my bedroom and listened to Pearl Jam.

  Adrian suffered from dehydration, a concussion, various contusions to the head and upper chest, and a ruptured eardrum. (The eardrum thing was from the gunshots I’d fired, which had been close to his head.)

  The day after I met with the men in suits and the shrink, my father took me to visit Adrian in the hospital. Doreen Gardiner was standing outside her son’s room. Her dead gaze fell on me, sending a bolt of electricity surging down my spine, and I felt my body grow cold. Then something in her face softened. For one fleeting second I thought I saw a regular human being behind those sightless, taxidermy eyes.

  “Thank you,” she said simply. “I know what you did for him.”

  It felt like my mouth was full of sand. At my back, my father rested one hand on my shoulder, then urged me forward.

  “Angie!” Adrian beamed as I entered the room. My father waited in the hallway for me.

  “Brought you some stuff,” I told him. I approached his bed and set a few comic books, some mix tapes, and my Walkman on the nightstand beneath a wall of blinking, bleeping machinery. The whole room smelled of antiseptic.

  “Thanks.” His face was bruised and swollen, his lips split and crusted with blood. When he reached out and pulled the comic books into his lap, I saw striated bruises running the length of his arms. He rifled through them, grinning.

  “They’re just some old ones I found packed away in my closet,” I told him. “I don’t know if they’re any good.”

  “They’re great. Thanks.”

  “Can you even read them without your glasses? Did you lose them in . . . uh, that place?”

  “I guess so. I don’t remember a whole lot.” He gestured toward a small television set mounted on brackets above his bed. “Did you see me on the news?”

  “No. Dad took our TV away.”

  “Oh. Cops came and interviewed me. A psychologist, too.”

  “Neat,” I said.

  “You killed him.”

  “Yeah.”

  His gaze hung on me. “Is it true? About . . . about who he was?”

  “Yeah,” I said and looked away from him. My eyes filled with tears, and I didn’t want him to see.

  “It’s okay if you need to cry,” Adrian said. On the wall behind him, machines beeped. “I won’t tell anybody.”

  “What were you doing in there?” I said, whirling around. “If you hadn’t gone in there . . .” I couldn’t finish the thought.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “I would have never had . . . had to . . .”

  A tear traced down his bruised cheek. Slowly, he nodded. “I’m sorry. Don’t be mad at me. I’m sorry, Angie.”

  “You went in there alone. It was stupid.”

  “I know.” Adrian wiped his single tear away.

  I exhaled a shuddery breath. “I’m not . . . I’m not mad . . . at you . . .”

  He was still nodding.

  “I’m not mad at you,” I repeated, my voice steadier.

  “Good. Because you’re my best friend.”

  My anger suddenly gone, I smiled at him. I mopped tears from my eyes and regained some composure.

  “You know, the guys stopped by the other day,” Adrian said once I’d dragged a folding chair over and sat down.

  “You’ve seen them?”

  “Yeah.” He motioned to a stainless steel table across the room where a bunch of plastic army men had been set up. There was a deck of Uno cards there, too. “They brought me some stuff and hung out awhile.”

  “I haven’t seen them.”

  “Not at all?”

  “No.” I thought of the mob outside our house and how Mr. Matherson had been among them. My greatest fear was that my friends had backed away from me.

  “Oh,” Adrian said. He sounded strangely disappointed.

  “Are you . . . like . . . in a lot of pain?” I asked.

  “No, not really. Not now.”

  “Do you have to stay here much longer?”

  “I’m not sure. They’ve been taking pictures of my brain in some big machine. They’re worried about swelling.”

  “Michael’s already got the swelled head in our group,” I joked. “We don’t need another.”

  Adrian laughed.

  “What happened to you in that place?” I asked.

  “I don’t really remember. A lot of it’s a blur. But I heard they found the bodies.”

  I nodded. My brother had hidden them beneath the Patapsco Institute in the network of small caves and tunnels that ran beneath it and out toward the cliffs. He had gained access to the institute via one of these tunnels, too—a narrow crawl space in the ground that came up through a broken floor. When I had heard this, I recalled those large craters in the institute’s floor and the cliff face dotted with tunnels. They weren’t tunnels anymore. They were catacombs.

  “What do you call it when you dream about something that’s gonna happen?” he asked out of nowhere.

  “A prophecy?”

  “Yeah, that’s it. You ever have one of those dreams? A prophecy dream?”

  “I don’t know,” I said slowly, recalling the nightmare that had me running through some rain forest while a giant prehistoric creature chased me and ultimately hiding in some grass hut only to find a whole other kind of creature waiting for me inside.

  “After my dad killed himself, I used to have the same dream over and over again about an underground city. Only it really wasn’t just underground but sort of hidden behind and within the other city, the real city. Every building had a secret counterpart,
and every street had another street just like it but with a slightly different name, and they led to slightly different places. Even the people in the dream had twins that lived in this city.”

  “They’re called doppelgangers,” I said.

  “Yeah. In the dream, this whole other city goes on existing right alongside the real one. Thing is, I’m the only person who knows the hidden city exists. I’m the only one who knows the bad things that hurt the people of the real city come from the hidden city at night. That’s why no one ever knows how to stop the bad things or how to fight them or even find them.

  “So I go underground and leave bits of string tied to the entrances that are like these big golden arches, which is weird, right, because you’d think everyone else would be able to see them too and figure out there’s a city under the city.” His eyes grew wide. “But it’s not just a city. Turns out it’s a whole world under there—a world beneath a world and within a world but also somehow occupying the same space as the real world.”

  “That’s some dream,” I said.

  “Don’t you get it? I never knew what the dream meant until all this happened. It was a prophecy.”

  “A prophecy for what?”

  “For what we did. The five of us. We went to the world beneath the world, fought the monster, and won.”

  I smiled. “That would make an awesome comic book.”

  “Yeah,” he said, returning my smile, “it would. That’s a cool idea.”

  “Well,” I said, getting up from the chair, “I should probably go. My dad’s waiting for me. Let me know when you’re back home, okay?”

  “Okay. Thanks for coming by.”

  “No sweat,” I said.

  “Hey,” he called.

  I turned around. “Yeah?”

  “See you later, alligator.”

  “After a while, pedophile,” I said and closed the door on his laughter.

  The next morning, I came downstairs to find Mr. Mattingly sitting at the kitchen table having coffee with my dad. Mr. Mattingly stood up. My dad got up, too, and said, “You’ve got a visitor, Angie.” He rubbed my head on his way out of the room.

  “Your dad seems like a great guy,” Mr. Mattingly said.

  “He’s okay, I guess.”

  “How’re you holding up?”

  “I don’t know. Why’d you come here?”

  “Well, I wanted to see how you were doing.” He came around the side of the table while sliding his hands into his pockets.

  “Is this about the note?”

  “The note?”

  “The note we left on your door.”

  He furrowed his eyebrows and cocked his head. But then his features softened and he actually smiled. “Ah, the note. Yes. That prompted some interesting conversation around the Mattingly household.”

  “I’m sorry. It was a mistake. We thought you were . . . someone else.”

  “No harm done. And, no, that’s not why I’m here.” His smile softened even further. “Angie, I came here hoping you’d make me a promise.”

  “What promise is that?”

  “That you continue down the path you’ve already begun carving out for yourself.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Yes, you do. You know exactly what I’m talking about. That’s just what I mean—you’re a smart kid. Maybe you’re afraid to try for something new because you think that means you have to leave everything you know and care about behind.”

  “Doesn’t it?” I said.

  “Never be afraid of who you are.” Mr. Mattingly picked up a hardcover book off the table and handed it to me—Lord of the Flies. “When I was your age, I wanted nothing more than to be a writer. This was my favorite book. It’s about a bunch of kids who get stranded on a desert island.”

  “What happened?”

  “You’ll have to read the book to find out.”

  “No,” I said. “I mean, what happened with your writing?”

  “I was afraid. I didn’t think I was good enough. After a few rejection slips, I stopped sending my work out. It was easier to quit than to fight through it. And then life just got in the way. It’s so much harder to try and recapture those lost years once they’re behind you. So don’t let them be behind you.”

  I nodded and looked down at the book. My vision threatened to blur, and it was all I could do to fight off tears.

  Mr. Mattingly held out one hand. I shook it . . . and he drew me closer and hugged me with one arm. To my surprise, I felt myself hug him back. Hard.

  “So?” he said once he let me go.

  “So what?”

  “Do you promise to keep fighting for it?”

  “Yeah.” I touched my nose. “I promise.”

  Mr. Mattingly laughed. He laughed so hard that tears sprung from his eyes. I felt a tear escape one of mine, though I was only chuckling along with him.

  After he left, I took the book up to my room, sat Indian-style on my bed, and flipped through it. I paused when I came to the title page, where Mr. Mattingly had written me a note. I’d grown accustomed to seeing his handwriting in red ink in the margins of my papers, but the context of this note was altogether different.

  To Angelo,

  My life goal for you.

  Your friend,

  David

  Your friend, I thought and began to read.

  My second visitor showed up the following day, as I sat on my bed reading Lord of the Flies. When my father’s voice boomed up the stairs, I set the book aside and moved down the hallway to the stairs with mounting agitation. I hoped to find Peter, Michael, and Scott on the front step. I hadn’t spoken to them since that night at the Patapsco Institute. Their sudden and inexplicable absence from my life filled me with a fear that caused me to question who I was as a person. Not until that moment did I realize how much I had relied on my friends to define who I was.

  Rachel Lowrey stood on the front porch. “Hey,” she said, smiling. She had her hair swept back in a ponytail, and there was the faintest hint of rouge on her cheekbones. As I came out onto the porch, I caught the scent of her perfume—honeysuckle and warm bathwater. There was a car idling in the street, Rachel’s mother behind the wheel. “I wanted to come see you.”

  “I’m glad you did. I haven’t seen anyone. Well, Mr. Mattingly came by yesterday.”

  “You haven’t seen your friends?” she said. “The Goon Squad?”

  “No. I guess they’re just . . .” I shrugged. “Busy, I guess.”

  “I’m sure they’ll come around.”

  “We’re gonna move,” I blurted out.

  “Oh. Where?”

  “I don’t know. We’ve got family in New York.”

  “That’s far.”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “Listen,” she said. “I just wanted you to know that I was thinking of you. I’m sure this is really hard. That’s all.”

  “That’s enough,” I said.

  “I wish you weren’t moving.”

  “Me, too,” I said.

  Rachel’s mother honked the horn.

  Rachel glanced at the car, then back at me. “She didn’t want me coming here.”

  “I understand.”

  “It’s not that. She didn’t want me bothering you.” She smiled softly, her cheeks dimpling. “But I wanted to.”

  “Thanks, Rachel.” My heart was racing. “If I send you my address in New York, will you send me more poems?”

  A brief sadness rippled across her otherwise happy face. Her eyes grew glassy. “Only if you send me stories.”

  “Deal.”

  Mrs. Lowrey honked the horn again.

  “I gotta go,” Rachel said, backing down the porch.

  “Wait.” When she paused, I said, “One, two, three, four, I declare a Kiss War,” and I leaned in and kissed her gently on the lips. Her fingers found mine and she held my hand. When I finally pulled away, I could see my heartbroken reflection swimming in her eyes.

  “Good-bye, Angie,” she said
and left.

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  The World beneath the World

  My brother’s second funeral was held on August 22 after the US Army and the FBI finally surrendered his body to us. It was a private ceremony held far from Harting Farms. Time, date, and location were kept out of the newspapers. Aside from the police officer who drove us there in a shiny black car, no one else attended, which was exactly how it had to be. Charles’s body was interred in an unmarked plot far from the other graves. The day was bright and hot, and I perspired in my black suit and tie. It was a wool suit, the only one I owned.

  The police officer who chauffeured us was the one who had been following me around town for the past several months. As we walked back to the car after the graveside service, he was standing beside it in full uniform, smoking a cigarette. When my grandparents approached, he opened the door for them. He caught my gaze lingering on him and nodded.

  It had been my intention to mention this to my father once we arrived home, but as the policeman pulled into our driveway, I saw three familiar shapes sitting on the woodpile in the backyard. I opened the door before the car came to a complete stop, then jumped out and ran around the house.

  Peter’s smile was as bright as his shock of red hair, his eyes greener than I had remembered. Michael’s hair was perfectly combed, and he had on a pair of Blues Brothers sunglasses. Scott had his Orioles cap on backward and was shuffling a deck of Uno cards. Leaning against the woodpile was the samurai sword.

  “Will you look at this guy, all dressed up?” Michael said, peering at me over his sunglasses. “You look like a used car salesman.”

  “Hey,” I said. I wanted to ask them where they’d been and what had kept them away for so long—I wanted to ask them a million things—but I found it impossible to organize even a single thought.

  “We’ve been sittin’ out here for over an hour,” Scott said, still shuffling the cards. “We gonna play some Uno or what?”

  “Or what,” Peter, Michael, and I responded in unison.

  Then we all broke up, laughing.