A Long Way Down

by Randall Silvis

  He felt he needed to explain himself before making any physical overtures, tell her why touching and sex were important to him and why they meant more to him than she might think.

  “I didn’t get a lot of affection when I was young,” he said.

  She lifted her gaze from the composition book, then turned her head his way.

  He said, “You grew up in a big family. A loving family. We’re not all that lucky.”

  She closed the composition book and laid it in her lap.

  “Laraine was the first time I felt real love in a woman’s touch. Since my mother, I mean.”

  “I can’t believe you didn’t have any girlfriends.”

  “There were girls I dated but…I didn’t really feel anything for them. And never believed they felt anything real for me.”

  “I’m sure they did, though. You just had yourself all locked up back then.”

  He nodded. “For some reason, it was different with Laraine. For a while anyway. Then a few months after Ryan was born, one night after dinner, she was at the sink, cleaning up, and I walked up behind her, put my arms around her waist and sort of pressed up against her, you know?”

  “And?” Jayme said.

  “She spun around and snapped at me. Said, ‘Do you have to be touching me all the time?’”

  “Oh baby,” she said, and laid her hand on his arm.

  “I’ve never forgotten how much that stung. It was worse than a slap in the face.”

  She stroked his arm. And said, “Make you a deal?”

  “Okay,” he said.

  “If I can touch you anytime I want, you can touch me anytime you want.”

  “Sounds fair.”

  “And if one of us just isn’t in the mood and reneges on that deal, the other one promises not to be personally offended.”

  “Like when you have PMS, you mean?”

  “That’s one example.”

  “There is also such a thing as male PMS,” he told her. “Scientific fact.”

  “Oh really? You know when I’ll believe that? When I see you shove a tampon up the little guy.”

  “Ouch,” he said, and squeezed his thighs together.

  She snuggled against him. “You want to get rid of the box for the night?”

  “Only if you do.”

  “I want your hands on me.”

  “Are you saying that just to be kind?”

  She turned her face into his shoulder and bit him through the T-shirt. “Don’t make me ask you twice,” she said.

  Seventy-Nine

  Over the next two days, either Olcott or Sheriff Brinker kept them apprised of developments. Becca’s and Griffin’s corroborating testimonies concerning the use of alcohol and psilocybin mushrooms during the meetings in Dr. Gillespie’s basement convinced the DA to file charges against the professor for the possession of a Schedule 1 drug, and for its dissemination, along with alcohol, to minors. He was booked and released on bail. The university had been apprised of Dr. Gillespie’s activities, and had quietly suspended him pending the outcome of his trial. Kaitlin continued to deny any knowledge of or participation in the monthly meetings, but Sheriff Brinker felt certain she would come around soon; he had suggested to the university that those students who cooperated with the investigation not be suspended or expelled.

  The students’ Twitter and Facebook and other social media accounts were all being monitored by the department, as was Gillespie’s, in hopes that somebody would slip up and reveal a bit of illuminating information about Connor McBride’s whereabouts. Phone records for all involved had been subpoenaed, but it would take weeks to get them. The drug task force was keeping the Lubich-owned service station on route 62 under surveillance; no suspicious activity to report. Ditto the abandoned house and now-empty garage in McGuffey Heights. The police were considering a sting operation to catch Darlene Lubich in an act of prostitution, as a means of getting her to reveal any knowledge of her nephew’s whereabouts.

  No one knew where Connor McBride had gone. His mother didn’t know, Gillespie didn’t know, Connor’s friends and known associates didn’t know, his manager at Hot Heads didn’t know. Neither did law enforcement. An Uber driver had picked him up downtown on the day the Charger was found, and, at approximately 2:20 that afternoon, had dropped him off two blocks from the abandoned house in McGuffey Heights, only a hundred yards from where Officers Blanchard and Simms were then parked.

  “So he probably saw the patrol car and bolted,” Sheriff Brinker said.

  DeMarco said, “I’m betting he climbed into another abandoned house and watched the whole operation. Watched us search the house, open up the garage, find his tool kit, and tow the car away.”

  “So he knows we’re looking for him.”

  “Oh, he knows. He knows.”

  DeMarco sometimes found himself walking aimlessly through the house, pausing at this window or that window to look out, sometimes even stopping in the middle of a room, his gaze fixed on the floor, or on the edge of the coffee table, or at a nail hole in the wall.

  Jayme said, one of those times, “Maybe we should bring Tom’s box down here and work our way through it. There’s no reason we have to wait till night to read, is there?”

  He scrunched up his mouth. “If you don’t mind,” he said, “I’d rather wait.” He was glad she did not ask for an explanation, because he had none. He didn’t want to read Tom’s secret writing with the sunlight coming harsh and full through the windows. Just didn’t want to. It was as simple as that.

  Time moved slowly for DeMarco. Crawled on its belly. Progressed slower than a python digesting a piano.

  On the third day, a Friday, he was awake early after a restless night. He made coffee, and while it percolated into the carafe, he moved through the kitchen as quietly as possible, opened the back door and stepped out onto the porch. He stood with his toes over the edge of the porch and looked at the sun spilling juice from a blood orange over the eastern horizon. It was a pretty sunrise but something told him it was pretty like the eyes of a viper.

  He could sense something hidden behind that sunrise, could feel something coming toward him from every edge of the sky, something ponderous moving in. It wasn’t visible, wasn’t audible, wasn’t yet in any way knowable. It was like a snow leopard crawling through the snow toward its prey, but bigger than that, darker than that. It was like a great black thundercloud full of lightning and drowning rain, but deadlier, angrier. It was the void preceding time, the darkness preceding light.

  You’re losing your mind, DeMarco told himself. For chrissakes, man, find something to do.

  Eighty

  He was on his knees in the yard when Jayme came to the door. Still in his boxers and a T-shirt, a trowel in hand as he lifted bricks from the half-completed path, smoothed out the layer of sand, sometimes added more sand from the bag he had dragged from the garage, then replaced the brick and used the trowel handle to tap it flat and even. Jayme watched him reset half a dozen bricks this way, then called to him. “You want some breakfast?”

  When he looked up, his face without expression, as blank as a brick, she thought, He doesn’t even recognize me.

  Then he blinked, smiled sheepishly, and asked, “What time is it?”

  “Time for a man in his boxers to come inside.”

  He looked around, embarrassed. Then climbed to his feet and strode onto the porch.

  He cleaned up and dressed while she scrambled eggs and fried a ham steak for them to share. They ate in relative silence, though he told her twice how good the food was and thanked her for making it. The taste registered in her own mouth too but his excessive politeness soured every bite so that it sat heavy in the center of her chest, and the sound of their forks scraping the plates set her teeth on edge. She had something she wanted to say but there was too much sadness in the room, too much uncertainty. The ro
om was full of light but there was no illumination in it.

  “You’re more than what you do,” she told him.

  He was bent over his plate, taking one slow forkful of food after another. Now he turned his head to look her way.

  She said, “You have to stop being like this.”

  “Like what?” he asked, not angry or defensively, but gently, so that it sounded almost as if he were encouraging her to criticize him.

  “You started out worrying that you weren’t doing any good, that one more bad guy in jail didn’t matter. And now that it’s practically over, you’re depressed. Like unless you’re chasing after some murderer, your life has no meaning. But that’s selfish thinking, Ryan. Can’t you see how selfish that is?”

  He had listened attentively, and now answered with a little nod. Very quietly he laid the fork on the edge of the plate, leaned back in his chair and let his hands fall into his lap.

  She said, “Your father did terrible things to you when you were a boy. The war did terrible things to you. Two wars. Then you lost your boy, your marriage…you lost your best friend. Yes, life has done terrible things to you.”

  “I’ve done terrible things,” he said.

  “And it is what it is. Done is done. We all have regrets, Ryan. But no amount of beating yourself up is going to change a second of it.”

  He said, “You’re right. I know you’re right. I just don’t know what to do about it.”

  “You can start by being aware of how your moods affect me.”

  “I am aware. And that’s one of the things that makes me so sad.”

  “You get sad because you blame yourself and go into yourself and don’t want to come back out again.”

  “I know I do. I don’t know where else to go.”

  “In a strange, unhealthy way,” she told him, “you only feel good when you’re making yourself feel bad.” Then she paused and thought for a few moments. She wanted to be gentle, but she also needed things to change. There was change coming whether he liked it or not, and she needed him to make the necessary adjustments to accommodate that change. A moody, silent man was not going to cut it.

  She said, “You know that I always put us first—right?”

  “I know you do.”

  “I need for you to do that too.”

  He nodded.

  “Aren’t you always saying that people have to take responsibility for themselves? I’ve heard you say it a dozen times.”

  Again he nodded.

  “If you make yourself think about other people first,” she told him, “about how sad your sadness makes me feel, you would stop yourself. I know you would.”

  Several seconds ticked by before he spoke. When he smiled, his mouth looked crooked and pained. “Have you ever been driving along thinking about something, and then you look up and realize you’re miles from where you want to be?”

  “So you turn around, babe,” she told him. “You just hit the damn brakes and turn yourself around. Because if you don’t, you are never going to get where you want to be. And where I need you to be.”

  He lifted his arm, reached out across the table and took her hand. He held to it firmly but delicately, the way a person would hold to a fragile crystal thread when falling out of a plane. “I’ll try,” he said.

  She shook her head, and squeezed his fingers so hard that somebody’s knuckle cracked. “No, damn it. You won’t try, you will do it. You will do it or else you will lose me and everything we’ve made together.”

  He closed his eyes and nodded, and kept nodding, quick little nods at first but then slower ones as his resolve gelled. Finally he opened his eyes and looked at her and said, “I’ll do whatever you want me to do.”

  “You promise?”

  “Just not drugs. Don’t ask me to take anything.”

  “I don’t want you taking anything. I don’t want you numbed. I want you whole.”

  “I’m in your hands,” he said. This time his smile was not crooked, but the helplessness in it nearly broke her heart.

  Eighty-One

  She went online and found the phone number for a local PTSD support group with weekly meet-ups not eight miles away. She punched the number into her phone, and handed the phone to him as he stood on the back porch looking at his unfinished brick walkway.

  “It’s up to you to press the call button,” she told him.

  He made an exaggerated grimace. “This is going to hurt.”

  “So does resetting a fractured bone so that it will heal straight.”

  “Do I at least get a lollipop afterward?”

  “No,” she said, and kissed his cheek. “That’s all the sweetness you get.”

  She went back inside then and left him alone to make the call. The man who answered had a gruffer voice than he expected, not polished and condescending but the kind of voice that came with a scruffy beard and dirty tennis shoes and a faded Grateful Dead T-shirt. So DeMarco stayed on the line and listened. And agreed to attend the next meet-up.

  He stood there on the edge of the porch then, palming Jayme’s phone, and reminded himself of how lucky he was to have her on his side. She had more balls than a pool table, and every one of them was pure ivory.

  The sun was bright and the sky clear and the day felt promising. Warm but with a hint of coolness, and now and then even a freshening wisp of breeze. A neighbor two houses down was mowing his yard already, even though the last of the morning’s dew had not yet burned away, and the old woman who lived next door on his left was on her hands and knees at a flower bed, pulling weeds and coaxing the summer blossoms to linger awhile longer. Her wide-brimmed straw sun hat made him smile, though he could not have explained why. The top was rounded like a pith helmet, but the brim held a bend in the front like the one in Indiana Jones’s fedora, and a wide blue ribbon with a bowknot caught the sunlight and sparkled with the bits of glitter embedded in the cloth.

  The woman was eighty-six but still working hard and even dressing to catch the light. He thought about how pretty and saucy his mother would have looked in a hat like that. Told himself to not think about her never owning such a hat, but about how she loved to look her best no matter what. Even on her last night in this world she had fixed herself up first. Did her hair and nails and put on a fresh coat of mascara and lipstick, a pair of nylon stockings and heels and her favorite thrift-store dress. When he thought of her that way, all dolled up, as people used to say, kneeling beside the bathtub and leaning over the rounded edge with her arms in the water, he almost had to laugh. She wanted to look good for the undertaker. How could you not love somebody like that?

  And with that thought, another memory rushed forward from out of whatever place in which memories hide. Maybe it was because of the glitter in his neighbor’s hat ribbon. The glitter made him remember the Christmas angels.

  When he was a boy, there was no room in the trailer for a Christmas tree and no money to buy one even if sufficient room existed, so his mother would set six cardboard Christmas angels on the windowsills every December. They were a dirty white, with cardboard bodies and wings with cotton glued to them, each with a golden halo, all identical, maybe six inches tall. Through the chest of each was a hole in the cardboard so that a branch on the Christmas tree could be poked through, leaving the angel suspended as if hovering in the air. Gold glitter lined the wings and the halos, and if you touched the angel, a bit of glitter would stick to your fingers. His mother would prop the angels up on the narrow windowsills, leaning against the dirty glass, two in the kitchen, two in the living room, and one each in her and Ryan’s bedrooms. During the day the light would shine through the gray windows and out the holes in the angels’ chests, and at night the darkness would make a black oculus through the very hearts of the angels. Yet DeMarco had loved those cardboard angels, especially during the day. Sometimes at night they frightened him.

 
It was at night that his father destroyed the angels. Came home drunk and angry, flew into a rage over something DeMarco’s mother had said, gathered up all six angels and set them aflame in the sink, filling the trailer with acrid smoke. DeMarco couldn’t remember his age that Christmas, probably eight or nine, but he remembered the flames and the stink of smoke and the way his mother had sat at the table and cried after flushing the ashes down the sink.

  And now DeMarco stepped down off the porch and started through his yard, meaning to say good morning to his neighbor and tell her how much he admired the hat, how much it reminded him of his mother. But he was only halfway there when Jayme’s cell phone vibrated in his hand. He looked at the screen and read the name of the caller. Stopped moving and read the name a second time. Then tapped the phone icon, put the phone to his ear and said, “Daksh. What’s up?”

  Eighty-Two

  “Where is Jayme Matson?” Daksh asked. “I would like to talk to her, please.”

  “I’m walking toward the house right now. What’s going on?”

  “It is her number I have. Her phone I call.”

  “It’s okay; you can talk to me,” DeMarco said. He stepped onto the porch, pulled open the screen door and stepped inside. Jayme turned away from the sink, saw the look on his face, and cocked her head in question.

  He put the call on speaker, then said, “I need you to calm down a little, Daksh. Just tell me what’s going on.”

  “I wish to speak with Jayme Matson,” Daksh said. “It is her number I call.”

  She grabbed a dish towel and quickly dried her hands, then reached for the phone.

  “She’s right here,” DeMarco said, and handed the phone to her.

  “Hi, Daksh,” she said. “You sound upset. What’s going on?”

  “You gave me your card and you told me to call you anytime.”

  “I know I did. Tell me what’s wrong.”

  “It is about the man the police are hunting. I remember him.”