Apex Magazine - January 2017

by Apex Publications

  How many parts of you remember being read to at night? The drone of a father’s singsong voice, the sprightly coo of a mother reading Alice or the Grimms? Sharing in your wide-eyed delight with shining eyes of her own.

  This agony in your belly uncurls layer after layer. You are a mask of mourning in a garden of mindless giggles, listening to voices from stolen memories, watching a tableau of unabashed, unselfconscious innocence that you will never belong to, can never be part of again.

  It’s a miracle you don’t sob aloud. You have to get away, get out of this crowd, before someone notices.

  You excuse yourself. Once upon a time, these people would have had to stand up and press themselves as far back against their seats as they could to let you pass. No such problem now, you’re so compact they hardly notice you.

  It’s no matter that you left early; your plans are still on track.

  You know what you’re looking for and where you want to go. But it’s this tide of emotion sloshing inside you, disrupting your concentration, that’s unexpected and unwelcome and potentially dangerous.

  It takes an uncomfortably long time to find the car, and the slice of you that remains in control frets about how you must look, wandering aimless among the rows of spoiled suburbanite SUVs with tears smearing your face. In another life, you might have called the cops on such a freak, or at least run like a goody two-shoes to tell a teacher.

  When you spot that little red hatchback with all its charming dents and rust spots, it’s like the day your father arrived at the park just as the sixth-grade bullies had you cornered, a signal of safety, an end to fear.

  But not an end to sorrow.

  You produce the hand that holds the right key, you open the hatch and swing it up, climb in with a creak of old shocks and seal yourself inside. There’s a thick tattered quilt of yellow and green crumpled behind the back seat, where you knew it would be; you pull it over yourself and squirm into the darkness underneath, as small as you can make yourself.

  But you want to shrink further, crawl into the purest darkness that’s found only in the spaces between atoms and the void outside time and never come out again. The empty places inside you rustle at this longing, trickle echoes down into the sickest pits of your soul, and you allow a sob to escape. But only one.

  You can’t still the trembling, not completely. Though you smother this ghost chorus of despair in layer after layer, you can’t quite force yourself to still, no matter how silent you become, enveloped in warm black misery that doesn’t abate even as the young mother with the hollow stare opens the passenger door. You can’t see her, but you know she’s there.

  Her towheaded daughter chirps Shotgun! as she climbs onto her seat to be buckled in.

  Maddy, don’t be silly, scolds her mom, and hold still, damn it. Hold still.

  Madeleine, you say, too soft for either of them to hear.

  Somewhere inside you, someone’s heartstring stretches past the breaking point.

  The little engine that could starts up after several cough-and-hack tries, and as the asphalt rumbles beneath you, Maddy starts to talk. She tells her mother over and over again about the play’s funny parts, the parts that make her laugh again to think about them, prompted along by her mom’s disengaged Mmm-hmms and Yeahs muttered at the right places. And that little girl’s laughter, that indecipherable Rosetta stone from a land with all its gates barred to you forevermore, makes you want to plug your ears and howl.

  Even in your state, tactile memories tell you when the final turn arrives, when the tires bounce and trundle over the gutter and onto the gravel drive. That’s when you do move, when you sit up, when you stretch out.

  As you draw your magic pouch from your neck, your bulging button sack, and dig fingers into your writhing faerie beads, far more addictive than any crystal Maddy’s mother was ever tempted to try, you glimpse your face in the rear view mirror, so distressed from your pathetic weeping that it’s peeled in strips like wet wallpaper, and the stuff beneath has sagged like softened wax, a paper-mâché horror show.

  You could scream at the sight, as you slide forward. And so could Madeleine and her haunted mother, but soon they have no mouths to open.

  In your hands, it shudders, this thing plucked from a little girl’s limp shell, this eye-searing, beautiful thing.

  You wail as it flutters against your fingers.

  first square

  In the cobweb-garnished shadows of his living room, Benjamin does what he does every morning at this hour, creeps to the bay window where he keeps the gauzelike curtains pulled almost shut but for a gap of an inch or two.

  And he watches through his remaining eye.

  His living room is dim and cavernous, and yet he never turns on the lights here. There’s no need, because he never has visitors.

  Binoculars rest on a doily atop the lamp table beside the window, next to a telescope on a tripod that bows its heavy magnifying lens in a show of mock shame.

  For now, with the sky cloud-free, he has no need for such tools—perched on the hill at the end of the circle, his house commands an ideal view down the short length of the street, with split-level domiciles lined up to either side, four to the right, three to the left, triplets and quadruplets clad in beige and white vinyl siding. He has a surveyor’s command of the neighborhood, and the people in it, what they do in their yards, what they do in their cars.

  He only needs assistance when he wants his gaze to reach through a few choice windows.

  Already there’s sights to behold. Second house on the left, Maria the single mother is outside washing her car in cut-off jean shorts and a bikini top, a good use of an idle May morning. Her son is probably in school, true, but even if school was out she’d still be idle—her ex has custody on weekdays. A loudmouth talk radio DJ, that pinheaded tub of lard was no prize in any box, but she was the one who got caught cheating. Let her boss’s nephew nail her on top of the manager’s desk in the very restaurant where she worked as a hostess, or so Benjamin heard. Just one unseemly bead on a string of terrible decisions that stretches across her entire life.

  Maria is not a young lass anymore but the wear has all been on the inside. It’s no wonder that even though she’s almost twice his age, Lance the redneck brute has emerged from the first house on the right to make a show of trimming the hedges. He stares at his neighbor whenever her back is turned, sometimes even when she’s facing him.

  Surely she knows he’s there, what he’s doing, but whenever Maria looks up, it’s to steal furtive glances at the house directly across from hers, third house right, where Clive and Francene’s troubled prodigal son has just been returned to the nest.

  Benjamin had been witness a couple afternoons ago to the sad procession, as the unhappy couple brought wayward Shaun home from rehab, rushed him inside like handlers hiding their charge from paparazzi.

  What a delectable mess that household is. Once upon a time they were four, with stiff and proper Francene, demure wife number two, agreeing to help Clive raise a granddaughter produced through his first marriage. So little boy Shaun acquired a niece, Denise, who started as a sweet tomboy in a softball uniform, graduated from there to full-blown teen crackhouse queen, then vanished without a trace.

  And now, Shaun, their perfect son, their honor-roll-scoring son, is headed down that same route. That special hell paved behind pressure-washed siding and meticulously fertilized lawns.

  The fact is, hollow eyes and needle tracks serve little perfect boy Shaun just dandy, as far as Benjamin is concerned. Benjamin knows the boy was never what he seemed, he saw the backyard parties when mom and dad weren’t home, the toking, the drinking, the groping. Kept a lot of things hidden from his parents, that boy did. Benjamin always had a suspicion that bad things happened to little Denise when Clive and Francene left her alone with their bright-eyed boy.

  Then Denise went missing, Shaun charged off looking for her, and not only did he fail, he came back an utter wreck, a babbling addict, the candy wr
apper removed to reveal the turd that was always there.

  But why is Maria so invested in Clive and Francene’s intimate misfortunes? Why the worried frown when she stares at their house?

  There she goes, stealing yet another concerned glance, herself a central pattern in the fabric of that perfect family’s unraveling lies.

  Invisible at the window, Benjamin smiles, witness to the long hours Clive has spent inside Maria’s house over the course of years. He’s noted with lascivious glee the times of entrance and exits, and that sometimes these day-after-day repetitions of arrival and departure occur through the back door rather than the front—usually when she’s between other lovers, and their on-off is on again, and Clive feels pressed to avoid his wife’s gaze. Sometimes he even comes over when her sniveling whelp of a boy is visiting, on loan from his overbearing disk jockey dad.

  Benjamin has devoted much space in his imagination to what happens inside Maria’s house, with its wildflower gardens always on the verge of riot.

  She’s hardly the only sad soul in this neighborhood whose imaginary exploits keep him awake long into the night. There’s the ripening teenage redhead being raised by her milky-eyed grandmother in the fourth house on the right, who Benjamin knows with his own eyes and the aid of his telescope to be turning in the direction that most offspring of strict church upbringings turn. The things she does in her blank-eyed boyfriend’s truck, parked right in her grandmother’s driveway—surely she wants to be caught, surely it will be only a matter of time before she gets her wish.

  And then there’s the cop in third house left who comes home from nights spent arresting drunken and abusive husbands to beat his mousy wife if she doesn’t fix his breakfast fast enough. Or the heartthrob weatherman in second house right with his endless procession of lithe young men brought home well after dark, kicked out in the wee hours of the morning.

  The door opens first house left, and Benjamin’s smile changes, to one of fond indulgence. Here’s scrawny, feisty, nosy Patsy, trundling down her ramp in her motorized wheelchair.

  It’s been years since he was inside Patsy’s house, with its Christmas tree always lit in the dining room and its overpowering smell of cats’ piss. But hers is the only other home in this cul-de-sac he’s ever set foot inside. And she’s the only neighbor he ever speaks to, though it all happens over the phone.

  She has never been inside his residence.

  Afflicted by a cruel degenerative brain disease that’s taken more and more of her mobility away over her fifty years of life, Patsy will never be a part of the harem in Benjamin’s inner sanctum. Yet amidst the dingy rooms inside his mind, he keeps a shrine to her that’s pristine, bathed in light.

  She waves to Lance the white-trash thug, who beats a retreat like a pitbull nailed with pepper spray, unable in his hardwired hatred to cope with his neighbor’s half-paralyzed body and relentless good cheer, not so bold a bully as to mock a handicapped woman when the parents he still lives with might find out about it. To Lance, Patsy is wolfsbane.

  At the window, Benjamin smiles, as Patsy glides her slow and steady wheelchair up the street, to where Maria wipes a towel over her tiny car’s back bumper. She doesn’t seem to mind the interruption at all as Patsy hails her—she stands up and steps over to chat, despite being drenched head to toe from her labors.

  This is the one thing that raises Maria higher in Benjamin’s esteem than all the other pathetic human lumps making their nests along this street. She’s always kind to Patsy.

  The way both women keep looking over at Clive and Francene’s house, Benjamin guesses they must be chatting in stage whispers about the drug addict’s return. He longs to know what they’re saying, but doesn’t trouble himself. Sometime this afternoon, the phone will shrill, and Patsy’s adenoidal voice will tell him everything.

  And he will share things too, things he’s seen. He will never tell her everything, never that, but enough to keep her coming back.

  They’ve been entwined in this relationship so long, he and Patsy, that he no longer remembers precisely how it started, other than that it must have begun all those years ago when she invited him to her house and he accepted, even then not entirely understanding why. Possibly because no one else had ever asked such a thing of the creepy old man on the hill.

  Though they had almost nothing in common, they immediately recognized the one thing they shared, an outsider’s perspective on everyone else, that delectable twist of longing and contempt. And an unspoken and yet soundly understood acceptance that directed a gentle breeze through the torn rags of each others’ psyches.

  Dearest Patsy, who like him lives off disability checks, who like him has a ravaged face to show the world. When he was younger, he would tell people his eyepatch covered the results of a war wound in Vietnam, where he never served. He would never admit to anyone his puddinglike eye and prematurely arthritis-crimped joints resulted from venereal disease.

  Patsy, for all her chatty nosiness in the neighborhood, showed no interest in learning about his embarrassments. She just wanted him to feel at home, she once said.

  Her empathy had actually freed him to make the play he most desired in the game of human interaction: to drop out, to give up trying.

  Maria turns her head, and Patsy hers. And now Benjamin looks too, and squints his one good eye, and shuffles to grab the binoculars.

  That drug-addled boy, Shaun the Formerly Perfect, has just turned onto the circle from the cross-street, walking with shoulders hunched in a jacket too warm for the weather, like he thinks that will stop him from being seen.

  But when did he leave his parents’ house? And where on earth is he coming from?

  Benjamin presses the binoculars to the window.

  second square

  Maria knows something has gone terribly wrong the moment she spies Shaun trudging up the street, shoulders hunched, the skin around his eyes puffy and raw, his expression unfathomable.

  Speak of the devil.

  He looks like a devil, doesn’t he? Like someone consumed inside by fire, any moment his skin will blacken and the flames lick through.

  Sweet Patsy stops her soft-spoken prattle mid-sentence, thank goodness. She has to sense it too, how wrong this is.

  The boy’s not supposed to be out of the house, Maria knows this. Clive told her last week, during a brief, jittery-nerved visit. It had been a Wednesday before sunup, her son Davey staying with his accursed father, Clive dressed for work in his button-down, her in her violet nightie. They’d shared nothing more than a quick kiss on the lips. Her on-again off-again lover had been wound tight enough to snap a spring.

  That in itself wasn’t so unusual for Clive these days—his family had unraveled, his granddaughter Denise gone without a trace, his son plunged down the same path of addiction and self-inflicted psychosis.

  And worse, Shaun’s stay in rehab had gone about as poorly as could be imagined. His second night there one of his podmates at the Langan Center had gone missing, presumably bolting back to his life of crack and crystal, but the third podmate had made wild accusations that Shaun had assaulted his fellow junkie—they weren’t taken seriously because what the guy described sounded like something straight out of a peyote delusion.

  The accusations stopped when the third podmate staged his own disappearing act the next night, but the seeds of suspicion had been irrevocably sown.

  That morning, they sat pressed together on the couch in her den, her shoulders tucked under his arm. They’re kicking him out, he said. I have to go get him today. It’s either that or the streets, and I’m not letting that happen again.

  She frowned up at him, but he was staring somewhere else, staring through the paneled wall.

  Did I tell you about the things he said?

  I remember. Maria shuddered involuntarily, remembering the night Shaun came home, how he’d pounded on the windows of his parents’ house, screaming about things crawling inside him, things like little living needles.

  No.
When I saw him yesterday, when the staff called me in.

  She looked into those eyes that weren’t focused on her. No, you didn’t.

  So the director leaves me alone in the pod with him for a couple minutes, and he’s had this hangdog, sullen look on his face the whole time, but then, as soon as the door shuts, he cuts loose with this smile. I’ve never seen a look quite like that on his face before. It’s not a nice smile. It’s like he wants to take a bite out of me. And he says, You don’t have to grieve for Denise anymore, Dad. She’s right here. And he taps his chest. I found her, and you’ll see her again and so will Mom.

  And I’m so freaked out that I don’t know how to even respond to that. And I’m thinking about how when he disappeared, so did one of my handguns. So I ask him, Shaun, do you know where your roommates went?

  And he just smiles that same way and says, They didn’t go anywhere.

  Good God, she said. They can’t let him out. Not like that.

  That’s what I tried to tell them. But they wouldn’t listen. Clive bit his lip like a child. I think they’re as afraid of him as I am.

  They had ended the visit by clinging to each other in a desperate hug. There’d been no closing kiss.

  Shaun trudges down the street between these passive rows of cookie-cutter split levels, a feral dog stalking the hen houses in the open. She knows he’s never been the stand-up chip off the block her lover believes him to be. She’d been the subject of too many more-than-cursory glances from the little creep over the years. How much did he know about her, about her and his father? What did he imagine when he looked at her that way?

  Maria knows something is wrong, and she’s burning to know what, and she is not afraid of Clive’s pup. Hey, Shaun, she says, how’s it going?

  He draws up short, and his face lights up in a manner that makes no sense, like a trapped miner who has just spotted a pinprick of light, but this glow goes out almost as soon as she notices.