by Candice Fox
The phone woke her. She jolted in the sheets, reached out, felt the hard curve of his arm. He was lying turned away from her. Something about that – about reaching to hold his hand or put her hand on his heart or to roll towards him and kiss him and instead feeling his hard shoulder blade, his cold back – made her snap to consciousness with terror.
She didn’t recognise the number. Celine realised she wanted it to be John Kradle. When it wasn’t his voice, she felt the air go out of her, and that made no sense at all. Nothing made sense. She went into the kitchen and gripped the bench, just to get some idea of time and space and reality.
‘Ms Osbourne?’
‘Yes.’
‘My name is Diana Fry. I’m calling from the Bank of America anti-fraud squad in regards to some suspicious activity we have noticed on one of your accounts. Could I please confirm some details with you?’
Celine felt her mouth go dry. She worked quickly through the identity confirmation questions, staring back at the door to the hall, to the bedroom, where Keeps lay sleeping.
‘What kind of activity are we talking about?’ she asked.
‘It’s what we call a “test payment”,’ the woman said. ‘A small amount was transferred from your Maxi Saver account to an account located in Kuala Lumpur. That amount is reading seven dollars and twenty-five cents in US dollars. You didn’t purchase anything online for that amount recently?’
‘No.’ Celine felt her back teeth lock together. ‘I didn’t.’
‘Sometimes these scammers will push the boundaries, try to transfer a small, inconspicuous amount to see what the security is like on your accounts. If the payment is successful and you don’t challenge it, that gives them the opportunity to make a bigger transfer. Then they’ll go for a larger amount,’ the woman said. ‘We’ll shut everything down and ask you to come in to a branch and confirm your identity as soon as possible, ma’am, so that we can reset everything. Is that okay?’
‘No problem,’ Celine said. ‘I’ll get it done.’
She hung up before she could be asked to complete a customer service survey, and put the phone on the counter. In the bedroom, she heard Keeps call her name. She rubbed her face with her hands and tried to focus on keeping her expression neutral, even in the dark.
2000
He considered himself a terrible father to an infant.
It began on the first day, as he carried the baby, squalling and mewling against his chest, from maternity ward to hospital administration, from hospital administration to the security department, from the security department back to the maternity ward, where police were waiting to ask him questions about where Christine had gone and why. On his son’s first day on earth, Kradle sat by his wife’s empty hospital bed, joggling and shushing the fleshy pink bundle, trying to figure out why he kept spitting out the nib of the bottle while officers gazed upon him with their soul-destroying eyes. Half his brain wondered in terror at the spots and blushes of colour in his newborn’s face, at the rise and fall of his chest and the restless movement of his eyes beneath the lids, while the other half struggled to convince the officers that he didn’t know why Christine had run away from him. Why she would climb out of her hospital bed, pull clothes onto her birth-ravaged body and walk out into the sunshine of the day without saying a word to anyone, without even taking her bag with her. Kradle told himself that this was one of her dramas, her ‘attention-seeking episodes’, and she would be back within hours or days, ready to help him figure out how the hell to get the baby to stop screaming and what he was supposed to dress the child in and whether or not he was going to accidentally – terror of all terrors – do something to cause little Mason to die in his sleep.
But she was not back within hours or days.
And she was not back within a month.
There was a flurry of help in the beginning. Friends, quiet and strangely watchful, dropped around to show him how to change a diaper and how to burp the baby and how to figure out if Mason was cold or hot or hungry. The police came, and there were interviews and updates on the search for Christine. The cab company connected to the car she hailed from the hospital parking lot knew she’d been dropped in downtown LA, and that was all. Kradle’s household was a whirlwind of noise and activity.
Christine’s parents visited the baby, and there were weighty questions delivered in deceptively casual voices as they stood in the darkness over Mason’s crib. Had Christine been depressed during the pregnancy? Had he shouted at her? Had he ‘lost his cool’? Had either of them been seeing someone else? Kradle kept it together, because where he came from men were hard and didn’t go to pieces when a woman walked out on them, or a baby shit through his diaper all over a car seat. But when the house was empty and the baby was asleep, Kradle would go out across the back porch and down into the blackness of the furthest corner of the yard and sit on the grass under the stars and cry out of sheer confusion.
The help died away. His friends couldn’t figure out why, if Kradle was the guy they’d all thought he was, Christine would bail on him and go into hiding. Running off was one thing, but completely disappearing was another. Christine’s parents stopped answering his calls, and the police answered every fifth or sixth. They let him know they’d inquired unsuccessfully after Christine with an encampment of artists in Detroit after hearing a rumour that she was there. They chased similar rumours of her as far as Nova Scotia.
For two years, he leaped at every phone call. When there came a knock at the door, his scalp tingled. Sometimes when he was standing in the kitchen in the blue-lit morning, stirring hot water into semolina, or scrubbing food stains out of tiny shirts in the laundry room, he thought he smelled her shampoo or saw her standing there out of the corner of his eye.
When Mason was two years old, Kradle was bent over a garden bed outside a house in East Mesquite, digging irrigation into the soil. The boy toddled across the lawn, crouched beside him and grabbed a handful of the soil in his meaty fist. Kradle watched as the kid leaned back and threw it so that it scattered against the side of the house. Kradle laughed and the boy, cheered on by his father’s amusement, laughed too. Kradle handed the child a little trowel he had tucked into his back pocket, and the boy plopped onto his butt on the dirt and started digging.
That’s when Kradle realised he could not only keep the boy alive. He could also teach him things.
He taught the boy to throw his handfuls of dirt into a plastic bucket, and then to lever them in awkwardly with the trowel, and by the time the kid was three he could be set to digging in one spot so Kradle could plant flowering ground cover in commercial parks in Mesquite. Kradle taught the kid to lay mulch, to water, to weed, to prune, and by the time the boy was ready for kindergarten he could hammer a nail and paint a semi-decent undercoat. Kradle trusted him with a handsaw by the time he was seven, and a nail gun by the time he was eight, and when he was ten the kid was taking all the measurements for the porches, garden sheds, picnic tables and Adirondack chairs Kradle found himself building for strangers who called him up from his ads in the paper. Mason and Kradle lay together on shady concrete under old cars, changing oil filters and replacing gaskets, and they crawled into steamy ceilings, gloved up and sneezing in the dust, to catch families of possums.
Mason had been big when he was born. Boxy-headed, heavy-browed, with roly-poly arms and jiggling thighs and cheeks that bobbed as he rode in the carrier in the car. And he remained big, towering over the other kids at school, busting seams in the shoulders of his shirts, wearing and then growing out of Kradle’s boots before he had entered puberty. While he’d been slightly caveman-esque as an infant, his awkwardly oversized features began to make sense in grade school and then smoothed out and arranged themselves in a way that made women turn their heads in the street by the time he hit his mid-teens. Kradle came around the side of a house on a property maintenance job one day and found the woman who had hired him and her friend sitting on the porch, drinking iced tea and admiring his child, who was
bent over, clearing the pool filter of leaves with his oven-mitt hands.
‘Your buddy.’ The younger of the two women nodded towards Mason. ‘Is he single?’
‘He’s fourteen,’ Kradle replied.
The woman choked on her drink and fell silent.
It was a December morning, before sunrise, when Kradle roused the boy, like he usually did. He walked into Mason’s room and tugged on the toe of the foot that the boy always hung over the side of the bed during his sleep, regardless of the weather. The boy let out a big sigh and buried his head beneath his pillow, thereby completing a father–son ritual that had been in place since the child was big enough to move from a crib to a bed.
‘What is it?’ the boy asked as Kradle headed for the kitchen.
‘Turf.’
‘It’s too cold to grow turf!’
‘Yeah. That’s what I told him.’
Kradle handed the kid a mug of tea when he finally reported for duty, and then sat down to drink his own coffee in the light from the oven rangehood. Mason was a kid who wielded an axe like a lumberjack, stuck his arm fearlessly down rat and snake holes, and could carry six rolls of buffalo grass under one arm, but he liked to start his day with English breakfast tea and comic books at the kitchen table, for reasons Kradle didn’t understand or question. The two sat wordlessly together for a while until Kradle decided he would go ready the truck. He opened the front door of the house just as Christine was raising her hand to knock on it.
For a full five seconds, maybe more, Kradle didn’t recognise her. Her hair was streaked with white in the front and her skin was tanned coconut brown and she was dressed all in black – wispy, wavy, layered sort of stuff that she and other people who believed in fairy magic always wore, but black, which had never been her thing. He stood in the doorway, his brain telling him that something was deeply amiss here but being coy on what it was, and she took a deep breath and held it, waiting for his response to her presence. And then it all came back to his under-caffeinated brain in one compulsive blast – the baby, the blood, the lost hours being questioned by police, the crying, the dark, unsleeping hours, the pointless phone calls – and he knew that Christine had returned and was standing on his porch, and the very fact of it froze each of his limbs in place and arrested the words he’d dreamed of saying so many, many times.
She was the one to speak first.
‘John,’ she said. ‘Hi.’
Kradle wet his lips and tried to speak, but he felt the floor vibrate beneath his feet with Mason’s heavy step, and he turned to put a hand on the boy’s chest only a second or two before he could reach the door.
‘Whoa. Whoa. Just back it up a bit, buddy.’
‘I gotta get my—’
‘You’ve gotta get nothing.’ Kradle pushed the boy away. ‘Go away. Go to the yard. Wait there. Just do it.’
Kradle had said ‘Just do it’ plenty of times in the boy’s life. Mason knew what it meant. It meant put that thing down, or hand me that tool, or stand back, or go away, and do it right now or one of us will get hurt. Kradle was already hurt, and all he knew was that he needed to stop that hurt spreading, so he said ‘Just do it’ and watched his son walk quickly but uncertainly back down the hall. He stepped out onto the porch and pulled the door closed. He faced Christine in the growing light of day, after wondering for a decade and a half if she was even alive.
‘Was that him?’ Christine asked.
‘Yeah,’ Kradle said.
She didn’t say anything else. Her silence made the words, gentler words he’d planned and practised, dissolve in his mind, so that what came out was a vicious, white-hot hiss.
‘Where the fuck did you go?’
She seemed shocked. The shock, the silence, wasn’t helping. He walked to the end of the porch, telling himself not to scream that she hadn’t tottered off to the local mall for an hour without leaving him a note on the fridge. That she had completely missed the childhood of a young man so strong and brave and handsome and smart and funny Kradle could hardly comprehend it; not just missed that childhood but actively avoided it. Dismissed it. Discarded it. That she had made him feel like a failure and look like an abuser and act like a madman over the years, and he was so mad his eyeballs felt as though they were on fire.
‘I went to Tibet,’ she said, finally.
‘Of course you did.’ Kradle almost laughed. He cracked his knuckles, kept his eyes on the grass. He counted his breaths. ‘Of course you did.’
He let her speak. She said some things about needing to find her essence, to discover her spirit, to communicate with the earth and the sky, to drink mountain snow and consult ancient beings, and for once Kradle didn’t give her his attention. He listened instead for sounds of the boy in the house, creeping up to the door to eavesdrop, of which there were none. Then he straightened his cap and put a hand on the doorknob, and she took a step forwards as if he was going to invite her in, and he almost laughed again at the idea that she thought she deserved that. When he didn’t budge she stepped back again.
‘I want to see him,’ she said.
‘Well, if you want to do that, you’ll have to do a lot more talking,’ Kradle said. ‘And not here, either. I’ll meet you tomorrow at the diner. Eight. I’ve gotta go. We’ve got a job.’
He went inside, into the empty hall, and shut the door.
CHAPTER 30
It was the neon blue that pulled him in. Kradle saw the tech store from the end of the street, a glowing artificial sapphire wedged in a tiara of white-lit stores. On the right of it sat a pet supply store, on the left a massage parlour and a deep, narrow place that sold socks for fifty cents a pair and big novelty sunglasses inset with plastic rhinestones. He stood for a while on the sidewalk, looking through the windows of the tech store at shelves crammed with devices he didn’t recognise in white boxes and shrink-wrapped plastic. Everything seemed to come with some sort of garden-themed name. There were buds, pods, seeds, stems. When he walked inside the store with the dog, a buzzer announced their presence. It was the same kind of buzzer used at Pronghorn to indicate that the door to the shower room had been unlocked. For a moment he reeled, trying to get a grip on where he was, the young man at the counter ignoring him completely as he pushed aside lank black hair to read his phone. Kradle tugged up the hood of the sweatshirt he’d stolen from a clothesline, found it tighter around his head than the last one.
‘I’ve got a question,’ Kradle said.
‘Shoot,’ the kid said, reaching for a huge lime green can of soda without lifting his eyes from the screen.
‘Is there a way I can make phone calls from a phone without the device being traceable?’
He was expecting an upwards glance. A quizzical frown. A flat-screen TV mounted on the wall was playing footage of the breakout and now and then showing his mugshot in the collection of carded fugitives. MOST DANGEROUS flashed on the screen as the mugshots were shown – Schmitz first, then himself. He remembered having that picture taken. How weird it was, the instinct to smile when it was the last thing in the world he wanted to do. Carrington’s mugshot didn’t appear on the screen. Kradle guessed that his death would be public knowledge by now.
The kid flicked a hand at a rack of black phones sitting in little plastic stands.
‘Buy a basic burner,’ the kid said. ‘Download an onion router to hide your IP and use an app to make the calls. Switch or Neevo or one of those. Something with end-to-end encryption.’
‘Man, you’re speaking Greek to me,’ Kradle said.
‘I’m not Greek, I’m Korean.’ The guy finally looked up. He had some kind of piercing at the corner of his eye, set into the skin. The neon blue light from the front of the store was bouncing off it, making it look like the point of a laser. Kradle saw no recognition in his face. He took some bills out of his pocket and lay them on the counter.
‘Can you set up all that stuff for me? Just make it so I’m using the right programs.’
‘Programs.’ The kid smirke
d. He took the bills and slipped them into the cash register sitting on the glass. Kradle wandered the store while the young man unboxed a phone. He kept one eye on the store clerk and the other on the television screen. Soon he recognised the porch of Shelley Frapport’s house on the late news, the lanky figure of Tom Frapport huddled in a crowd watching a stretcher being lifted down the stairs. A huge shape encased in a black body bag. Homer, or maybe the male cop, the one who had held Kradle down. He realised he’d never learned the guy’s name. The scrolling text under the news anchors said something about the announcement of rewards for inmates from Pronghorn, but Kradle saw nothing about how much or a person qualified for a reward.
The kid whistled after ten minutes and Kradle went to the counter.
‘Okay.’ The clerk leaned lazily on the glass, pointing at the phone screen. ‘You open this guy up. Type in the number you want to dial here. Press the green button and you’re good to go.’
‘Thanks,’ Kradle said. He reached for the phone, tried to take it, but the kid held on. Kradle looked at his eyes, followed their gaze to the handcuff dangling from his wrist.
Kradle saw the nose of the revolver emerge from behind the glass. He could do nothing but watch as the kid lifted it, extended it and pointed it right at his face with the confidence of someone who had grabbed that same gun from its holster under the counter and aimed it at three or four scumbags a month who were trying to rip him off for burner phones. Kradle looked at the gun, looked at the kid, looked at his own hand and the kid’s hand both still gripping the phone. Finally, he looked at the dog, sitting by his side, watching the whole exchange with the tired scepticism of an animal who had already run for its life once in the past few hours and didn’t feel particularly enthused about doing it again.
On the screen above the store clerk’s head, Kradle’s face was showing again.
