Keeper of the Keys

by Perri O'shaughnessy

  Was his life simply a random series of events strung together but ultimately unrelated? Or did the series add up to something meaningful?

  This red-haired girl on his doorstep tonight-what a time she had picked to decide to make up with Leigh. He hoped she would go home and get laid and forget about them.

  He turned on the defroster to clear the ocean fog off his windshield.

  “So where is she now?” he had asked Leigh once, referring to Kat.

  “No idea. Sometimes people you care about get lost,” Leigh said. She sat on the rug in front of the fireplace in the great room, drying her hair, wearing her pink satin robe. She had given Ray a present that day, a silver-trimmed comb from the thirties. They had been married three months, and he thought he knew her well by then. She had married him on the rebound and he didn’t care because he knew-knew in his gut as well as his head-that she loved him anyway.

  “That’s it?”

  “No, that’s not it, but-off-limits, Ray.”

  Kat’s timing couldn’t have been worse. She had the look of a crusader. She hadn’t liked what Ray Jackson told her.

  Well, what else could he have said?

  He took the off-ramp he had noted on the map, got lost, and had to pull over to figure out his way, stopping on a street like a million streets in L.A., lined with a row of dingy lookalike tract homes built in the early sixties, one-story houses with one tree in front, a wide driveway, and a double-car garage like almost all the houses he and his mother had rented long ago. In the daytime, relentless California sun would keep the shrubs and lawns brown-tinged, and the few living trees struggling for height. At night, residents hid behind blinds, too tired to socialize with their neighbors after fighting the traffic home.

  He found his place on the map and negotiated his way out of the maze of replicant streets. Cruising past the gas stations and the chain-store strip mall that passed for a downtown, he took a left and slowed. The trees on Stokes Avenue had grown a lot-there had only been new twiggy things to protect the bare lawns from the hard sun when he lived there.

  The house, a new color, paler, looked about the same, and good news, showed no lights in its windows. He parked several houses away. As soon as he stepped outside the Porsche he started worrying about the dark clothes, realizing he looked just like a criminal scoping the place out.

  Do it fast. He rattled around in his pocket, searching for his keys, striding swiftly up the open walkway and onto the small porch. He tried key one. No luck. Key two. Nothing.

  Sirens started the neighborhood dogs howling. For one electric second, Ray feared they were coming for him, so he stopped what he was doing, slowed his breathing, and listened. He stood frozen below an aluminum overhang by the front door, grateful for the cover. Fog rippled through the warm night air like steam.

  The sirens got louder. Were they coming here? Was it possible? Bass notes of his heart thrumming in his chest, he peered past a scruffy acacia tree toward the street.

  He closed his eyes as the sirens receded. His breathing once again functioned. As he stood trying to blend into the overgrown juniper bush beside the railing, a memory hit hard.

  They had moved to Downey in September, so he began school toward the beginning of the year for a change, at least one small relief. Still, the strain of his first day at a new school had worn him out. After getting off the bus, he had walked home fast, looking forward to a haven from yet another new place and all new people, making for the first yellow house with faux brown shutters he came upon. He had walked inside the unlocked door, raised his head, and confronted a nightmare.

  Here stood their new place, but wacky, the kitchen on the left instead of right, his mother’s furniture, always lightweight so that you could move it easily, replaced by leaden-looking antiques.

  Shocked, he couldn’t move anything except his eyes for a minute. Here stood his home, reversed. His present life, overhauled in a day. Unfamiliar furniture. Strange portraits on the walls: a man with a mustache, babies in dresses. At first he had shifted his books from one hip to the other, as if adjusting their weight could shift things right, but the setting remained deviant, looking-glass unreal.

  Had his mother moved without him?

  Left him behind?

  She could move very fast but even she couldn’t make a house with a garage on the left into one with a garage on the right. Logic should have kicked in about then, that he had stepped into an identical house with a reversed house plan, on the same street, a few doors down from his own house. He didn’t belong at his new school. He didn’t belong here. Where was his home? Lost like him.

  His eight-year-old self had stood with the door open behind him for a long time that afternoon, lawn sprinklers fizzing all around the yards behind him. Where was he? They moved so much, he didn’t know. He had walked into someone else’s house and now, unsettled, he doubted everything. Was this the right street? Had he gotten off the school bus at the wrong stop or taken the wrong bus entirely? How would he find their house? He didn’t know.

  Although of course eventually, probably only a few minutes later, he did find his house, this house he was watching now, a few doors away.

  The sirens faded but persisted, fretting, chronic complainers, echoing off the million tons of asphalt. They congregated somewhere nearby, weaving closer from different directions like a bunch of tired kindergartners assembling for snack time. Ray caught a whiff of smoke between hits of smoggy air. The engines were en route to a fire, nearby, upwind, but not near enough to concern him. Good. Maybe the commotion would keep the police busy, too.

  Ray pulled back behind a juniper bush to give himself a minute to organize his keys, putting aside the ones he had already tried, just in time, as it turned out, because across the street, a woman with a blanketed baby snuggled up against her poked her head outside, examining the sky for smoke, sniffing. She stayed for only a few seconds before ducking back inside. She never even looked toward Ray.

  If the police came-but don’t worry about them. Stay loose. Taking advantage of the neighborhood din, he continued sticking various keys in the lock a few times, then twisted the handle to the door, which slipped open with oily smoothness. He stepped inside the familiar foyer, closing the door behind him quietly, and listened.

  Nothing stirred in the living room. He moved toward the dining area, reluctant to turn on a light. Was everyone gone? He didn’t know for sure. He stood for a long time listening, hearing only the creaking of an old house. While he listened, he looked in dismay around the room, experiencing some of the disorientation he had felt that first day of school when he went into the wrong house.

  This house, their house, was all wrong. His mother had arranged the couch in front of the brick fireplace, giving the long room some balance and a focal point.

  Hearing nothing, feeling excited, agitated, he took one end of the unfamiliar leather couch and hauled it, then the other end, until the couch was in position.

  Better. But the two chairs needed to come in, and the coffee table, abandoned across the room, also needed a better home.

  There. In the darkness, he remembered what it felt like to live in this house. He liked watching television in his bedroom. He loved the big backyard, with its yellow crabgrass, that he cut every other Saturday. He liked the way his mom had been at this house. She had a job in the back room of a florist shop. She liked the people there, and came home from work cheerful most days.

  They had lasted seven months here.

  In this house, his mother had hidden things behind some molding in the small back bedroom they had used as a den, where the L-shaped hallway turned.

  The doorway to the hall was mercifully open, so he stepped into its murk, too nervous to use the small flashlight he had tucked into a pocket.

  Feeling his way along the wall, he walked down the hallway, approached the room slowly, silently, and put his hand on the door frame. The door was open. An empty room awaited him. He went inside, needing only a few moments to comp
lete his mission.

  He found it behind the molding, another small plastic rectangle, shocks running up his hand when he touched it. Still playable?

  Back into the dark hallway-

  A light flashed on in the master bedroom to his right. “Who’s out there?” a quavering female voice yelled from inside. “I’ve got a gun!”

  “Don’t shoot!” he cried. “I’m going!”

  A blast whipped through the closed door to his mother’s old bedroom, splintering the wood trim beside him.

  When the front door wouldn’t open, he crashed through the window.

  9

  A t work on Wednesday morning, Ray felt strangely alive. He had been shot at, broken through a window, escaped with a few scratches. He had obtained another prize.

  Martin had greeted him this morning with what might be mistaken for warmth by an observer, but what Ray understood to be a kowtow. “Hey, you look like a guy who could use some TLC.”

  “I’m fine,” Ray had said, not touching a nick from some glass on his cheek that felt particularly painful.

  “Like a bum somebody beat, who walked away.” Ray waited for him to ask if Leigh had come home yet, but Martin knew better. He watched silently as Ray turned into his office.

  Odd how, considering the recent brawl between them, the partnership between Ray and Martin continued to operate. Ray supposed you could put it down to the years of practice they had at suppressing their personal problems at work.

  Hair flyaway, pulling at a blouse that didn’t quite cover her firm belly, Denise popped her head into Ray’s office and reminded him to remember to take his laptop home. Her husband was a former linebacker at UCLA and even Martin hadn’t dared to attempt a come-on, not that she would ever bow to his facile charm, something Ray had always admired about her. “I attached the Antoniou presentation on an e-mail. Tomorrow’s so crucial.”

  Ray nodded.

  “Are we ready?” she nervously asked.

  “We will be.”

  Her intrusion snapped him back. Along with whatever Denise had cooked up, he had drawings, schematics, and calculations to assemble. He organized his desk, feeling as immortal as a teenager, and as reckless. His work never stopped. For the first time in a long, long time-since he had built his own house-he was doing exactly what he wanted to do on a design.

  All because he had said to hell with it.

  Although it could come to nothing. No way to tell yet, while they were still in the fantasy phase of the Antoniou project. Strange how it took a crisis to make a person not give a damn, and therefore do some of his best work ever.

  Work was an antidote to anxiety. You could forget things working. Spreading the large prints out on his cherry table, he thought, No mistakes.

  In the afternoon, he hosted a difficult meeting. Four associates, all younger than Ray, in their mid-to-late twenties mostly, three men and a woman, waved their hands above the conference table, wary. News of his fight with Martin had obviously spread, causing universal consternation. Trust Suzanne to regale them with every grisly detail. They had to be wondering if the partners would break up.

  Who would they want to win?

  A delicate seesawing of talent was necessary to make a success of an architectural firm like theirs: on the one side, Martin the sales guy with the accountants, Hal and Gary, who didn’t pay people until they begged, cried real tears, or threatened to sue; and balanced on the other side, Ray and the overblown assortment of tender artistic types.

  The money guys disdained the artists as lightweights with a frivolous disregard for financial realities. The architect/artists hated the money guys back, not so much for forcing them to live within the numbers, but for their contemptible interest in such things. They all needed each other, that was the problem.

  “The museum job is going well,” Ray announced. The amber sunshine was wasted on the people gathered in the white-walled conference room with its framed black-and-white photos of completed projects. Ray had noticed, after spending a few years at grad school in New Haven, that people in L.A. had the same negative moods, suicidal, enraged, frustrated, and were as angry as people in harsher climes, but in his view, they had them less often. He put it down to weather.

  Today, however, the glum faces of his staff did not reflect this mellow summer afternoon. They wanted to know they had jobs. Ray assured them they did.

  Martin entered the room, twenty minutes late. His bloodshot eyes belied the hearty smile. He had probably been fortifying himself at the trattoria next door. He looked good, though, dark purple dress shirt, black slacks, black tie, black Nikes. Suzanne’s face turned that familiar pink. Ray realized that Suzanne had probably been taken in by his son-of-a-bitch partner also, and that catapulted him out of his pseudo-calm.

  “Afternoon, all,” Martin said. “What am I missing?” He didn’t look at Ray.

  “Hey,” they all said back, suddenly less gloomy. Martin had the effect of a person with a golden glow.

  “We’re talking about the firm’s direction,” Ray said. “Sit down.”

  “What a good idea, Ray. I think I’ll sit down.”

  Supercilious asshole. “Let’s keep this short. We all have work to do. Martin?”

  Ears pricked up. Coffee cups clanked on the table.

  “As you all know, Achilles Antoniou, the main donor to the museum project,” Martin said, “also wants to build a dream house in Laguna. He has three acres of land with an ocean view and no idea what to do with it. After a lot of legwork on my part, he agreed to a set of preliminary designs, which I know Ray and Denise are working up. We’ve got a meeting coming up on Thursday, tomorrow, and I’m feeling very optimistic. I’ve told him Ray’s a genius, and the rest of us are, too. I think he believed me about Ray. He had seen some articles-anyway, if Denise and Ray need help, you guys get on it, okay? This could solidify our name in the business, and that’s good for all of us. Plus-money. We all like bonuses, don’t we?”

  They almost jumped up and down like cheerleaders at the thought, even though Ray noticed Martin hadn’t, in fact, offered any bonuses. As a partner, he had no power to offer bonuses on his own. You had to hand it to Martin. He had probably lavished a good five minutes of brainpower on this latest manipulation.

  “If Ray lands this project,” Martin went on, “we’re all safe for the next year. Better than safe. We can expand.”

  “If Antoniou likes what we do for him,” Ray said. Only he and Denise knew what a stretch that might be at this point.

  “If you do your job,” Martin said, staring him down, “he will.” Excusing himself, he left the room.

  They were all looking at him. “He seems to have the firm well in hand,” Carl, a junior associate and provocateur, said with a crooked smile. “So you entirely with us, Ray? Not planning to jump ship? I mean, there’ve been rumors.”

  “Obviously, it’s too early to get into this discussion, Carl.”

  “When would be good for you, Ray?”

  “I’ll let you know.”

  “Because we have a right to know what plans you and Martin have for the company.”

  All heads nodded somberly.

  “We should talk.” Martin opened Ray’s door without knocking.

  “Not now.”

  “Come on, Ray, lighten up. I took my punch like a man, didn’t I? And I apologized, but if I didn’t apologize enough I’ll get down on my knees and kiss your loafer. Listen. I’ve been thinking about Leigh-wait-wait, I just want to say, I know you’d never hurt her. I’m sure she’s fine. You still haven’t heard from her?”

  “No.”

  “I’m sure she’s fine,” Martin repeated. He essayed a small smile. Ray was struck by a vision of Martin and Leigh at the cheesy motel, the way the cheap bed would have creaked, the way Martin would have taken her every which way. That last image Martin had left him with-

  Turning his chair toward the window, he didn’t answer. Whatever Ray said would be very, very final, and a part of him didn’t
want all this to fall apart, the business he had sweated and put his soul into for six years.

  Eventually, the door closed. But Martin had brought up Leigh. Of course. Thinking about Leigh made him feel crazy, like throwing himself out the window. What should he do? The clenching tension that gripped him whenever he thought about her took over once more. Every muscle in his body fought every other muscle in an internal death-struggle. He stayed like that, jaw tight, eyes squeezed shut.

  What should he do?

  After a while, relief came as his thoughts drifted back to the tapes.

  Two tapes now. Thinking about the tapes was a way to manage the unmanageable tension of Leigh’s absence. He could mull over them endlessly, the tapes, the models, the keys, the memories-all these things at least were in his control, susceptible to analysis.

  He replayed part of the tape in his mind, the second one. It was just a fragment of a conversation, like the first tape. He knew his mother’s voice.

  “Stay away! How did you-”

  “I’m giving you one more chance. I don’t know why I should. I loved you once, I suppose that’s it.”

  “I hate you!”

  “Yes. Hate. It all turns to hate. So you won’t do it?”

  “I’ll never do it. Never!”

  Ray’s mother, still young then, ran as fast as a spider. Ray admired how spiders run. So small and smart, they instinctively sense danger. A light comes on, freeze. A nearby movement, run for a dark crack in the cupboards. Why hadn’t they run to Canada, to Maine? He had figured that out. He and his mother had hidden far away in the anonymous, huge Los Angeles suburbs because Esmé’s beloved mother was in long-term nursing care in Montebello.

  Some bastard had, meanwhile, stalked his mother. Esmé had always conveyed that impression, now that he thought about it. She kept few photos of his childhood, telling no happy stories, and remained mum on the subject of men, probably to spare Ray’s feelings.