by Vivian Barz
“You think?” It was plausible, he supposed. A lot more plausible than a kid being out there on his own.
“Yes ,” Danica said, optimistic that she might finally be getting through. “And Greg had been shoving photos of his kid in your face all night. Maybe you fell asleep, even if for only a second, and then you woke back up and saw—what did you call him?—Artichoke Head in the road.”
“I think you’re right,” he agreed at last. “That will be our official story, then, okay? That I fell asleep?” More than anything, Derek wanted this to be true. And given all the evidence, he had to believe that it was true.
Still, he couldn’t help thinking about how Artichoke Head was an ugly little twerp, yet the kid he’d seen was cute, with little blue overalls that matched his big blue eyes.
CHAPTER 1
After three and a half hours of standing around in a howling wind, Officer Susan Marlan was finally starting to see an end in sight. One of the R&G Electric guys had fired up the backhoe and was keen to start doing his thing (they seemed to enjoy being out there even less than she did), so if he got down to it, she might be home in bed within the next hour, having a filthy cookie-dough threesome with Ben and Jerry while catching up on Game of Thrones .
She sighed tiredly and gave the back of her stiff neck a quick rub, bouncing at the knees in a fruitless effort to keep warm. It could have been worse, she supposed. At least nobody had been killed or even hurt beyond a few cuts and a probable concussion, a miracle given the state of the vehicle. The paperwork wouldn’t be too much of a headache, either, with it involving just the one driver.
Still, she wouldn’t have even needed to be out in that field freezing her ass off if that pretentious idiot hadn’t fallen asleep at the wheel and rammed him and his anorexic girlfriend into that telephone pole, upending it in such a way that it was deemed an electrical hazard to the public—though the only “public” who really used the road were farmers and teenagers looking to get drunk or laid (or both).
On the bright side: overtime.
As Susan waited, she ruminated on the details of the wreck. During her years on the job, she’d become adept at sniffing out bullshit. Those two, Derek and Danica, reeked worse than a Texas pasture.
She’d initially suspected a case of the old driver-passenger switcheroo: that it had been Danica, her intoxicated dragon breath detectable from five counties over, who’d been operating the vehicle during the wreck and not Derek. However, no matter how many different angles Susan looked at the possibility, it just didn’t add up. No way that guy would have let his plastered girlfriend behind the wheel of his precious BMW (that he undoubtedly buffed every day with a cloth diaper; he seemed the type) when he was perfectly capable of driving it himself. And as he’d blown a clean BAC, he was capable. Also, when Susan inspected the car, she’d found the front seat pushed back from the pedals at a distance more accommodating to Derek’s six-foot-two build than Danica’s tiny five-foot-one frame. Rarely, unless they had a few DUIs under their belts (which Danica and Derek didn’t, not even one between the two of them), would a couple doing a switcheroo think to adjust the seat for height. It was even less likely that they would if their automobile was smashed up as badly as Derek’s Beemer.
Susan thought they’d reacted to her query about the flashlight a little fishily. It was a standard enough question—What were you using it for? —one she’d expected they would provide a simple enough answer to: they’d used it to survey the vehicle’s damage. Which was exactly what they’d said. But there had been a look after. It was the kind of silent exchange couples had when sharing a mutual opinion they did not wish to voice out loud to others. It was guilt or . . . withholding, maybe. Susan had asked them all the appropriate questions, tested Derek’s sobriety, and checked the area surrounding the accident, finding nothing suspicious. There was nothing else she could have done other than let them go with the ambulance.
But it niggled her: What were they hiding?
“Okay, we’re good to go,” the R&G crew leader said to Susan. Was it Gary? Grant? “Sorry it took so long. We had to wait on a power shutoff from central so we wouldn’t be—”
“Zzzzzzzz!” Susan buzzed, her hands clawed out in front of her, making the R&G guy laugh. Gabe . That was it. Gabe.
“Yep. You got it.” Gabe smiled. “Got anything else you need me to sign?”
Inside the cruiser, Susan called in to dispatch. She let them know she’d finished and gave them an update. Still no location on the property’s owner, one recently paroled sex offender named Gerald Nichol. She craned her aching neck, peering behind her right shoulder as she started to back up. There were lots of deep potholes out this way, and wouldn’t that just be embarrassing if she dropped the cruiser into one of them? At twenty-nine, she was one of the younger officers at the station and had received her fair share of good-natured hazing. No telling what they’d say if—
“Hey!”
Susan nearly jumped out of her skin when Gabe materialized out of nowhere and began pounding on her window. She became more alarmed when she caught sight of his horrified face. She lurched into park and was out of the cruiser in an instant, her hand moving to her gun instinctively. “What’s happened?”
Gabe’s eyes were Frisbee huge. “There’s something over here you need to see.”
Susan frowned. “What? A live wire?” She couldn’t think what else it could be. “I’ll need to call—”
“No, we found a body. A dead body!” He was practically shrieking.
Maybe it was the cold, but it took her a second to process what Gabe was saying. It didn’t make sense; she’d checked the area, wider than she’d needed to, even. “Where?”
“Buried. Right next to the telephone pole!”
“Oh my God.”
“We’re pretty sure . . .” Gabe swallowed hard. “Maybe you should come with me.”
Susan followed him to the broken telephone pole, where the group of R&G workers was clustered together, staring down into a hole. She nudged her way through and understood the reason for their dumbstruck expressions, since she was now wearing one herself. To Gabe she said, “It’s a kid.”
CHAPTER 2
Eric Evans was schizophrenic.
He was also a great many other things—a professor of geology, a heavy coffee drinker, a reasonably gifted drummer, a John Carpenter film enthusiast, an occasional smoker, and the ex-husband of an abstract artist named Maggie—yet schizophrenic was the title he felt defined him most as an adult. Unlike smoker , it was a status he could never quit, no matter how painfully he tried.
Eric did not consider himself an unhinged individual, and he was right in this belief. Despite Hollywood’s negative fixation on a particular breed of schizophrenic, a large majority of those diagnosed with psychotic illnesses are not dangerous. Eric fell within the pacifist range, which, as he frequently liked to point out, validated the old adage about not believing everything you see on TV.
When people asked about his schizophrenia, Eric, who didn’t exactly flaunt his illness but wasn’t ashamed of it, either, offered up the comparison of alcoholism. Not every drunk is a single bourbon away from skid row, just like every schizophrenic is not a tatty-haired, crazy-eyed gunman who delights in murdering alien-people from clock towers. There are functioning alcoholics just as there are functioning schizophrenics, individuals who work, maintain homes, and have hobbies, goals, and relationships like every other slob on the planet.
This was not to say that Eric didn’t consider himself a card-carrying member of Club Crazy. He did. Doctors classified his schizophrenia as residual, which was a fancy way of saying that he intermittently heard and saw things “normal” folks didn’t: flickers of light, whispering, sirens, and, on the rarest of occasions, people. Now that he had a handle on his mental illness, it typically didn’t disrupt his everyday life. Still, as there is no cure for the disease, he would never be perfectly right in the head, a fact he’d come to grips with long ago.
&nb
sp; It was at the age of nineteen that Eric first began to suspect there was something wrong with his brain. An old woman standing next to him at a bus stop thumped him hard with her cane, curtly informing him, “Earth is an experiment,” and then a black hole consumed him. He awakened hours later sprawled in the shower, shivering and alone, soggy jeans pulled down over his sneakers and a videotape resting on his belly. (It was his brother’s borrowed copy of Gremlins .)
After the old woman came the real fun. Paranoia, delusions of grandeur, panic attacks, puzzling gaps of time: insanity to a lucid person but everyday reality to an ailing schizophrenic. The government had implanted a microchip in his brain when he’d gone in to have his wisdom teeth pulled. His family was plotting to kill him. Murmurs in the vents confirmed what he’d suspected all along, that he was the only one who saw the world how it truly was—it was everyone else who needed medicating. When loved ones argued against his delusions, Eric reasoned they weren’t real, that they literally did not exist . They were holograms created by the microchip, obviously. And they were all out to get him.
Eric now took medication each morning, an antipsychotic and an antidepressant: Minoldezine and Raxin. Like snowflakes, no two schizophrenics are alike. Whenever he was at his sickest, he thought of it as being Inside the Curve. It was a nonsensical phrase, but to Eric it made strange, perfect sense. Though there are some sufferers who grapple daily with hallucinations, he could go years without an episode—if , that was, he stayed on top of taking his meds. The pills made him a little sleepy, but they also made him a lot less nuts, so he overlooked the mild drowsiness. Besides, there was always espresso.
His friends to the end, the proprietors of those soft, rambling voices inside his skull, had been harder to shake—you’re never alone with schizophrenia, hardy-har-har. On the odd occasions that they grew especially rowdy, Eric would whistle to drown them out, his go-to the theme song to The Andy Griffith Show . If there was one positive aspect of growing older, for Eric it was that the voices had softened with age. At thirty-six, he hardly noticed them anymore. They’d become nothing more than background noise, like a TV that had been left on in the other room. He suspected that he might even miss them if they were to ever go away completely, the way a city dweller misses the distant rumble of traffic after moving out into the suburbs.
Like most schizophrenics, Eric found that his symptoms were exacerbated during times of extreme anxiety. Times like last year, when he learned about The Affair.
Eric avoided thinking about The Affair unless he absolutely had to.
Maggie had cheated. Eric considered it a triple whammy because Jim, the other man (a term Eric found as ludicrous as mistress ), was acquainted with him in more ways than one. Jim was Eric’s colleague, his best friend, and also (drumroll, please) his older brother. Now, Jim was only one of three, since the whole brother thing couldn’t be avoided.
Eric had seen them through the window.
Jim, after a sly glance around the shamefully trendy vegan café they were cozily holed up in, slid a hand up Maggie’s sweater and gave her breast a quick squeeze. Maggie playfully swatted Jim on the thigh, and then they pressed their foreheads together, giggling. The two oldest people in the place behaving like teenagers. For over fifteen chilling minutes, Eric stood out in the snowfall while his wife and his brother snuggled. Whispered in each other’s ears. Kissed. He watched their betrayal with unblinking eyes, his heart pounding clear up in his ears, hands fisted into tight balls, fingernails slicing tender flesh, suddenly forgetting how to breathe, how to think rational thoughts, very much wishing he was misreading the situation but knowing deep down that he wasn’t. Even a blind man could see that he wasn’t. And they were doing it right there , right out in the open for everyone to witness, almost as if they’d hoped to get caught.
Totally oblivious to Eric’s spying.
They became less oblivious after he thundered into Moonflower Café and pummeled Jim senseless while Bob Marley crooned messages of peace and love over the loudspeaker. Jim, who had a good 30 pounds and four inches on Eric’s five-foot-ten, 185-pound frame, didn’t fight back, which only fueled Eric’s indignation. Jim didn’t even shield his pretty-boy face, giving Eric carte blanche until he decided he’d had enough.
There was lots of screaming, as one would expect, from both Maggie and the Moonflower regulars. The dreadlocked neo-Rastafarian hipsters—far too traumatized to continue consuming their five-dollar mushroom teas, their seventeen-dollar black bean burgers—weren’t accustomed to such raw violence.
Eric’s own voice hardly rose above a whisper during the attack. “I knew it. Goddamn, I knew it.” The only words he uttered, head shaking in absolute dismay, before he raged back out onto the street like a crazed Night of the Living Dead extra, his clothes stained with his brother’s blood.
Jim and Eric had engaged in their fair share of fights as kids, petty scuffles rooted in harmless sibling rivalry. But the incident at the café, an event Eric would forever recall as the Great Moonflower Ass Kicking of 2018, was the only time in his entire life that he’d truly intended to cause his brother bodily harm. And he did. Jim suffered two cracked ribs, a broken nose, a dislocated jaw, and a cut above his brow that required five stitches. Eric wasn’t a bit sorry, and Jim didn’t expect him to be. Jim knew he was a bastard. The police were never called, despite Maggie’s insistence. Jim swore he wouldn’t press charges even if they were.
Jim and Maggie’s lack of discretion, while infuriating, wasn’t what had galled Eric into beating his brother until his knuckles split like overripe tomatoes. It was the way they had exploited his schizophrenia to their advantage, wielding it to maim a man who was already mentally crippled.
Eric listened to his gut above all else. With a mind as screwy as the one he possessed, he had to in order to survive. He’d had a feeling something was amiss long before fate stepped in and ruptured the waterline that ran underneath Wills Avenue, altering Eric’s usual route home from work so that he’d walk past Moonflower Café. The truth, as it so happened, had been a rotten splinter festering beneath the fragile membrane of their marriage. Suppress it as Maggie had tried, it eventually found a way to drive itself out, as the truth inevitably does.
And did it hurt like hell once it surfaced.
There had been small deceptions that Eric had picked up on along the way. Lies that he couldn’t prove were lies, but lies just the same. Details from one story that contradicted another. Where Maggie had been, whom she’d been with, how long she’d stayed. Fishy, wide-eyed absentmindedness. Gee, I guess I must have gotten the days mixed up. Well, now, I just can’t remember where I was Wednesday afternoon! Sudden and perplexing changes in the manner in which she handled her cell phone: password protection; an urgent need to take it everywhere, even into the bathroom when she showered; calls fielded by voice mail when she and Eric were together. Sneaky, slippery paltering:
Is there something going on that I need to know about, Maggie?
I thought you were happy with me, Eric.
I am, but have you ever cheated on me?
That would be wrong.
Have you?
We’ve only been married a few years.
I understand that, but have you been with another man?
It sounds like you’re trying to start an argument.
Never real answers. Only circles, circles, circles.
Eric had approached Maggie and Jim separately on the subject of their flirting, which had been eyebrow raising in the beginning and downright shameless toward the end. He’d informed them that while they might not “mean anything” by it (their words, not his), it made him uncomfortable. It embarrassed him, he’d said, especially when they did it in public, and it was disrespectful to him and the marriage. Jim and Maggie both accused him of being paranoid, had even gone as far as suggesting that he was imagining things. And he’d had a hard time disputing their claims.
He was, after all, crazy.
Jim and Maggie knew that
accusing a schizophrenic of being paranoid was as damaging as telling a man who is morbidly obese that he should really consider laying off the Ho Hos just as he’s raring to blaze into 7-Eleven for a midnight snack. They yanked Eric up short, shamed him into submission, made him question his own reasoning. By doing so they threw him off their scent for the better part of a year. Eric and Maggie had only been married for a little over three; it hadn’t been lost on him that approximately one-third of their marriage had been a sham.
Eric understood that if he’d wanted a woman no other men looked at, he shouldn’t have married Maggie. He may have been plagued with a lot of useless and unpleasant human emotions, but dumb jealousy wasn’t one of them. He was also aware that few men are as uneasy as the husband who has landed himself a wife he believes is well out of his league, as Eric had thought of his Maggie.
Still. There was something in Jim and Maggie’s interactions that never sat right with Eric, something about the way their eyes would go just a little too soft.
At the start of his marriage, his brother’s interest in Maggie had given Eric a perverse sort of pride. Even as kids, Eric and Jim had been opposite in so many ways. As adults, the story was no different. Eric was vintage rock T-shirts, comic books, obscure horror films; Jim was $200 designer jeans, men’s fitness magazines, action blockbusters. Thus, it had amused Eric—thrilled him, even, much to his chagrin—when he’d come to realize that he’d captured the heart of a woman so universally appealing, that his girl had been branded with his brother’s discerning seal of approval.
