Captain Quad

by Sean Costello

  But Peter had never believed it.

  Blank, he commanded himself now, repeating the word like a mantra.

  Blank. . . blank. . . blank!

  The hot water was heavenly, skilled fingers working the wire-drawn muscles of her body. First the back of her neck, where tension had tied crazy-knots, then the base of her skull, that creaky, ringlike joint that bore the weight of her worldly concerns. The smooth cliff face of her back came next, down that bony range of peaks to the twin round swells of her buttocks. Turning now, inching closer to the steamy spray, letting it riddle her face like a million Cupid's darts.

  Eyes closed, Kelly plucked the soap from the dish and, turning, ran the bar over the dome of one shoulder. Her thoughts were a sleepy jumble, and she knew that if she were lying down right now she'd probably fall fast asleep. She focused on nothing, but was aware of a hundred dangling thoughts, like threads in a waiting loom. When the whiff of cologne struck her nostrils, she at first dismissed it, writing it off as a fragment of memory wafting up from a chamber in her mind where the lid had worked itself loose. It was Old Spice, her favorite, the brand she had bought for—

  Then a sound jerked her back to full alertness—a creak of floorboards? a footfall?—stealthy and close, and that scent of cologne was still in the air.

  Oh, Christ, there's someone in the house!

  Every fear Kelly had ever had about living alone fell on her now in an avalanche of grisly images—rape, murder, buggery, butcher knives, good old Normy Bates—and she parted the shower curtains and stepped out, flung a towel around her body and began searching in the fog for a weapon.

  Soap-on-a-rope, club him with that. Spear him with the curling iron. Squirt hair spray in his eyes and run like hell.

  Then Fang pushed his way into the bathroom, bushy tail up, green eyes lidded with contentment.

  "Oh, you scuzzy little shit!" Kelly roared, causing the cat to cringe. "You scared the crap out of me."

  What about that cologne?

  Nudging the cat out of the way, Kelly clasped the Wella Balsam hair spray in one hand, her heated curling iron in the other, and swung the door open with her knee.

  Aloft above her on the steamy air, Peter looked on with a mixture of amusement and forgotten arousal. Seeing Kelly's naked body—trim and more lithe than he remembered it, slick and shiny-wet in the rattling pulse of her shower massage—made him realize what a pitiful boor he'd been reduced to. Fantasizing about self-involved scrags like Shawna Blane or any one of a hundred other bimbos that had come his way, passing themselves off as nurses; lusting after their slightest touch, sneaking into the toilet to catch a glimpse of naked flesh. The depth of the bond he and Kelly had shared, the coal-furnace heat of their union—that was what he needed. That was what he wanted back again.

  She'd been easy enough to find—one call to directory assistance on his voice-operated phone had done it. The listing was a new one, and Peter's polite inquiry regarding her address had been courteously indulged. "Is that the Wheeler on Gloucester?" he'd asked. "No, sir," the operator had said. "We're not supposed to give out that information. . . but this listing is for Lake Point Drive."

  There were only about a dozen scattered dwellings along Lake Point Drive. Kelly's had been the third one he checked.

  There was no one else in the house, no masked bandit or drooling rapist, and he wished he could tell her that. Truth was, she'd just have to find out for herself.

  Cold and still dripping, Kelly returned to the bathroom. Fang had set up shop on the back of the toilet, and his look as Kelly strode shivering into the room like some freaked out graffiti artist, spray can in one hand and cattle prod in the other, seemed to Kelly a trifle sardonic. She'd been through the entire house, all three stories of it, right down to the unheated cement-floored basement, and had encountered nothing more sinister than a scuttling spider. In an uncharacteristic display of violence, she had killed it. With the hair spray. Let it rain.

  Shedding the towel, Kelly hurried back into the shower—the place was serviced by a quirky well and an even quirkier water heater—blaming her overwrought nerves and mulishly persistent memory for calling up that phantom whiff of Old Spice. As she shampooed her hair, heaping its shoulder-length thickness into whorls on the crown of her head, she decided that maybe she shouldn't wear that maroon dress after all. Enough memory-stirring for one night, thank you kindly. Altogether too much.

  A sensation like a kiss touched Kelly Wheeler on the nape of the neck, high up, in the downy hair that grew there, and she screamed—a high, throat-slashing scream that sent the cat vaulting off the toilet lid and made her eyeballs throb as if molten. She thrust her back against the tiles and raked insanely at her neck, a child with a bat snagged in its hair. Blood from a period that was five days early coursed down her legs in thin crimson rivers, blood mixed with water that had suddenly gone cold.

  When her screams died away, Kelly scrambled out of the tub, threw the door shut, and locked it.

  She could still feel those lips on her neck.

  Jerked out of his trance to the drab white walls of his hospital room, Peter Gardner discovered that the hollows of his eyes were flooded with tears. Sick with remorse, he turned his head to one side and let the salty pools leak out.

  He hadn't meant to frighten her, God, no. He'd meant only to. . . to. . .

  To what?

  The truth was that he hadn't meant to do anything but look at her, just. . . see her again. The urge to kiss her had simply come, and he had acted on it without thinking.

  But, Jesus, she felt me. . . Yes. She had.

  And what did that mean?

  But the answer was obvious. It meant that he wasn't merely a phantom, a flying consciousness that could in no way affect its surroundings. He was something more than that.

  Perhaps much more.

  Peter looked up at the ceiling with dry eyes, his remorse receding into a sense of awe that was bright, arresting. . . and faintly sinister.

  "Hi, Will?"

  "Kelly?"

  "Yeah."

  "Hi! I was just about to jump into the shower." He paused. "Hey, are you all right? You sound kind of flaky."

  "Yeah, you're right. I've got my period, and it's hitting me pretty hard." She sniffed. "Would you mind if we put things off for tonight?"

  "No, not at all," Will said, but his voice was flat with disappointment. "Is there anything I can do? Anything you need?"

  "No, thanks, Will. I just need to lie down. I'll be fine by tomorrow."

  "Are you sure that's all it is? Your period, I mean?"

  "Yes, Doctor." She hated to lie to him, but what was the truth here? That she was losing her mind? "That's all it is."

  "Okay, babe. When will I see you?"

  "How 'bout tomorrow?"

  "Sorry, I'll be doing my hair." He sounded relieved. "I'll be there with bells on."

  Will, I'm scared. "Bye for now."

  "Take care."

  She waited until he hung up, then softly cradled the receiver.

  TWENTY-TWO

  The next day, Thursday, was a light one for Kelly. Her morning roster was full, but her only obligation for the afternoon was a grade eleven health-ed class at one o'clock. So far this term she'd spent the free time marking papers or supervising members of the gymnastics team who had study periods. But today she slipped quietly out of the building, leaving her back tomorrow sign in the gym office window. She wanted to get over to the university before classes let out for the day.

  She made the crosstown drive in ten minutes, thankful that a speed cop had not been waiting at the end of the long, ice-patched straightaway before the university turnoff. The day was brisk, the sun a cold white spot bright enough to make her eyes water, and Kelly nagged herself for having left her sunglasses at home. The backs of her eyes had taken up a dull ache, and it was spreading to the rest of her head.

  In the parking lot outside the biology building, Kelly leaned against her red Subaru, examining each face in
turn as groups of winter-clad students filed out. Although Sudbury was a relatively small city—about a hundred thousand people—she hadn't seen Sam Gardner in at least four years. The last time had been in the Regent Street Mr. Grocer. Sam had been strolling down the frozen-foods aisle one way, Kelly the other. When he spotted her, he had glowered angrily, pulled a rattling 180 with his cart, and then stormed off in the opposite direction. Stung and bewildered, Kelly had only stood there, sobbing back tears. She had always liked Sam, the admiring little brother, and in a girlish way had been flattered by his obvious crush. His reaction that day still baffled her—and it doubled her apprehension at approaching him now.

  She almost missed him. She saw him all right—her view of the exit was unobstructed—but at first she failed to recognize him. Six feet tall, trim and swift-moving, his broad shoulders and long legs hinting through his winter fatigues at a well-toned body, the young man who breezed out alone through those big orange doors bore little resemblance to the scrawny, pimple-faced kid Kelly remembered. Gone were the bottle-thick glasses that had made his eyes look like single-celled sea creatures viewed through a microscope, replaced, Kelly assumed, by contacts. His once rampaging acne had retreated into a hale, ruddy complexion, and Kelly thought he looked more like a woodsman than an aspiring physician. He moved with the cool self-assurance of one whose life, though fast-paced, was focused and well ordered.

  Kelly would soon learn differently.

  "Sam?" she called. "Sam, over here."

  Sam braked abruptly as he wound his way through the milling students, and when he turned his face was a blank. Kelly knew then that his life was not so full as it might at first have appeared, for that blank look was one of total surprise. A girl hadn't called after him like that in years—or perhaps ever.

  Kelly's throat grew parched. She'd come out here to ask Sam a question, one born of her terror of the night before, and as he approached her across the ice-patched tarmac, that question reared up again.

  Is Peter dead?

  Some years ago Kelly's mother had told her of an incident, the truth of which Kelly had always secretly doubted. Not that she felt her mother had lied—Irene Wheeler, who pounced like a lioness on even the most innocent of fibs, truly believed the incident had occurred. It was the improbability of the event that made Kelly doubt her mother's perceptions, and in the end she'd chalked it off to a coincidental dream her mother had had and then later confused with reality.

  "Gramma's died," Irene had said as she hung up the phone that early spring morning, her eyes as dewy as the grass outside. "I knew it before I picked up the phone."

  Kelly had hugged her close, knowing how deeply Irene had cared for her mother. "How did you know?" she'd probed, her own eyes brimming now.

  "She came to me last night," Irene said. "While I slept. Touched my foot and said good-bye." A fit of weeping had beset her then, and that was the last time the incident was mentioned. Kelly had not believed it then. . . but she thought she might now.

  Sam stopped several feet shy of her and began shifting from foot to foot, as if preparing to bolt. A dozen emotions seemed at war in his eyes: mistrust and remorse, bashfulness and a terrible caged anger, delight at seeing an old friend and a callous self-reproach for feeling it.

  Sensing her reading him, Sam looked away. Vapor jetted from his nostrils.

  "What do you want?" he said coldly.

  Suddenly Kelly felt ridiculous. Surely if Peter had died Sam would have said so by now. She'd spooked herself in the shower, that was all. She'd been overtired, nervous, and, God help her, still a little uncertain about her decision to sleep with Will, and her imagination had run away on her. And on the basis of that she was standing out here in a cold November wind, mute as a Trappist monk, face to face with a living fragment of a past she had vowed never to acknowledge again.

  Still, to dismiss what had happened the night before—and the ensuing, almost blind compulsion to find out if her intuition was unerring—meant ignoring every instinct she possessed.

  "Can we talk?" she said, giving a nervous snort of laughter at the absurdity of the phrase.

  The corners of Sam's mouth curled into a grudging half-smile. . . and for a second it looked so much like Peter's lazy, lopsided grin that Kelly wanted to fling herself into his arms. The truth of what that urge meant seeped through her like a slow poison, withering six years' worth of carefully constructed lies, and for an instant she glimpsed that old and dread darkness again.

  "Sure," Sam said, stepping closer but still not meeting her gaze. "What about?"

  "Where were you headed?" Kelly asked.

  "The Sandwich King. On Paris Street."

  "Come on," Kelly said, opening her car door and sliding in. "I'll give you a lift."

  With a nod, Sam strode around to the passenger side and unlatched the door. He tramped the snow off his boots, tossed his knapsack in ahead of him, and climbed inside.

  They drove mostly in silence, Kelly giving up early on the small talk, Sam suspending judgment until he'd heard what Kelly had to say. When they pulled up in front of the Sandwich King, a cheerful little restaurant bookended by a beauty salon and a Laundromat, Kelly had still not asked her question. She decided to soften it.

  "How's Peter?" she said, doing her best to sound casual.

  Sam retrieved his knapsack from the mat between his feet and, preparatory to getting out, cradled it in his lap.

  "What do you care?"

  "I care," Kelly said, feeling slapped, guilty, alien. "I just. . . I wanted to. . .” A fugitive tear appeared, and she cuffed it away.

  "If you cared," Sam said harshly, his fingers suddenly scrabbling at the door panel in search of the recessed latch, "you'd visit him. You dumped him, Kelly, just like all the rest. You—where's the damned handle?"

  Then he found it and kneed the door open, ducking his head to storm out—but the door came sweeping back at him, cracking his knuckles and hammering his knee. Cursing, he shoved the door open again—and Kelly had him by the coat sleeve.

  "Wait," she commanded. "I never dumped your brother. I loved him, Sammy."

  "Yeah," Sam said, his voice husky with emotion. "Some great way you've got of showing it."

  Then Kelly understood. "Is he all right?"

  "No, he's not all right," Sam shot back, turning with blazing eyes to face her. "He's crippled! Or had you forgotten?"

  Not dead, Kelly's mind sighed. Thank God he's not dead.

  "What did he tell you?" Kelly said, her fear giving way to pity for this hurt, angry young man.

  "The truth!" Sam shouted in the closeness of the idling car. "His great true love. You walked out on him without so much as a fuck you or a fare-thee-well. 'Sorry, pal. If I need some vegetables, I'll get 'em at the supermarket.'"

  "That's a lie, Sam. A dirty, malicious lie."

  Sam groped again for the door latch. "I'm late for work."

  "No," Kelly said, the quiet force of the word freezing Sam as effectively as a gun muzzle pressed to his skull.

  Then she told him the truth, the real truth, each word a razor-slash in the meat of her heart.

  "And I never went back," Kelly said, more of her seemingly endless reserve of tears tracking her cheeks. Beside her, Sam sat staring at the floor mat, his jaw rippling rhythmically. "I came close. Got as far as the door maybe a dozen different times. But there was no way I could face those empty eyes again." She dug in her pocket for a hankie.

  "He told me you dropped him," Sam said, uttering his first words since Kelly had begun her story. "He said you came in that day and told him you'd found someone else. Someone. . . whole." Sam looked up at her, his own well of tears long since dried up. "I hated you for that, Kelly. Hated you and those three football fucking jerk-offs he called his friends. I hated you bad."

  "I don't blame you, Sam. I hated myself for not trying harder. Maybe I should have gone back. . . but I could see it was killing him. I could feel him drying up inside."

  She reached over and
touched Sam's hand, wanting to comfort him, needing it herself.

  Sam withdrew his hand. "Why did he lie to me?"

  "Because he didn't want to lose you," was all Kelly could think of to say.

  "I gotta go," Sam said, and opened the door again, more gently this time. He started to get out, then turned back to Kelly. "Why now?" he said. "Why after all this time did you come looking for me now?"

  Kelly considered not telling him—he'd probably think she was nuts—but he deserved the truth. "I was alone last night at home," she said, "taking a shower, and I thought I could smell. . . Old Spice. It was the brand I used to buy for him." She tugged self-consciously at her hair. "It gave me a fright. I thought someone had broken in. . . but then I felt"—Kelly shuddered—"a kiss, right here, on the back of my neck. It's—"

  Pretty nuts, she intended to say. Just my imagination.

  But something flashed across Sam's face. Not doubt's shadow, not even surprise. Something else. Some internal circuit had snicked shut with her words, and as crazy as it seemed Kelly felt suddenly certain that Sam knew something about what she was saying.

  "Sam?"

  "I gotta go," Sam said again. And climbed out of the car.

  It took a long time that busy day to sort it all through in his mind, but in the end Sam thought he understood. Kelly was right: Peter had lied to him because, once Kelly was gone, Sam was all he had left. Peter's fear of abandonment had blinded him to Sam's devotion, and the deceit was intended to kindle Sam's pity. It hurt him that Peter had believed such a deception necessary. But he thought he understood. He had not told Kelly about Peter's new. . . what? Power? Yes, that was what it was. What Peter had acquired was a kind of power, a triumph over impossible odds. To Sam it proved yet again what an extraordinary person his brother was. Fate had brought down its cleated fist and flattened him, and after six desolate years Peter had found a way out. What Kelly would undoubtedly attribute to an overactive imagination had in all probability been an actual visit from Peter, from his mind.