by Ronald Malfi
He handed the remote to Ellie—he had to pry one hand away from the shoe box and shove the remote into it—then opened the pink suitcase. He snatched up the gun and ammo that were buried inside and quickly tucked them into his own duffel bag, then proceeded to empty some of the contents of the suitcase onto the bed. An old Chutes and Ladders game, some Harry Potter and Shel Silverstein books, a drawing set with colored pencils and graph paper. They weren’t Ellie’s belongings, but they would suffice. He took out a pair of pink pajamas, suddenly wondering if they would fit the girl. What the hell, it didn’t matter. This wasn’t a fashion show.
“The clicker doesn’t work,” she said, examining the TV remote, which she clutched in one reddened hand. David noticed that her fingernails had been gnawed down to nubs.
“Maybe the batteries are dead. You can change it manually.”
“What does that mean?”
“You can . . .” he began, then leaned forward and punched one of the channel buttons on the front of the set several times. The image on the screen bounced from sitcom to news program to QVC to a tampon commercial. “See?”
“Oh.”
“There’s some pajamas for you.” He nodded toward the bed, where he’d laid them out. “Why don’t you go into the bathroom, wash up, and change?”
She peered at the folded pink pajamas over her shoulder. Then at the books and games. After a moment, she said, “Those aren’t mine.”
“I know that, hon. It’s all we’ve got.”
“Why?”
“It’s just . . . it’s what we’ve got.”
“Where’d they come from?”
“It doesn’t matter,” he said.
“That house?”
“Yes, Ellie.”
“What about a toothbrush?”
He hadn’t thought of that. “We’ll have to skip it for tonight. I’ll buy us some toothbrushes tomorrow.”
“I don’t want to wear those pajamas.”
“You’ll be more comfortable. We can get new pajamas tomorrow, along with the toothbrushes. It’s just for one night.”
“I’d rather sleep in my clothes.”
He sighed. There was no fight left in him. It didn’t matter, anyway. “Okay. Fine. In the meantime, why don’t you go wash up best you can in the bathroom. There should be some soap in there.”
Wordlessly, she set the shoe box on the bed, then got up and made her way to the bathroom. She closed the door, watching him through the narrowing sliver as it closed until the latch caught and he heard the lock turn. A few seconds later he heard the water clunk on in the sink—a snake-like hiss.
All of a sudden, he thought he would throw up. There was a plastic ice bucket on the floor beside the nightstand and he snatched it up while he simultaneously dropped down on the edge of the bed. The mattress springs squealed as if in pain. Clenching the bucket between his knees, he hung his head over it, salivating, waiting for the wave of nausea to either pass or for a burble of acid to come rushing up and out of his throat.
It was the thought of Kathy that eventually had him gagging and vomiting into the receptacle. He did it as quietly as he could, for fear Ellie might hear him, and when he was done he set the bucket outside the door next to a concrete ashtray. In such a short period of time, the night had grown considerably colder.
Ellie eventually came out of the bathroom, her auburn hair damp and down around her shoulders, her face looking fresh and clean. She wore only her undershirt and panties, and she clutched her clothes to her chest. He considered saying that she might be too cold without the pajamas, but in the end, he decided to let it go. He was spent.
Ellie folded her clothes and set them atop the dresser as David grabbed his duffel bag and headed toward the bathroom. “I’m going to take a shower. Don’t open the door for anyone. Understand?”
She nodded.
“If anyone knocks, you come and get me.”
“Who would knock?”
“No one,” he said.
“When you come out, can we call Mom?”
“No, honey. Not right now.”
“How come?”
He considered this. “Because it’s very late,” he said in the end. “She’s probably asleep.”
“Tomorrow, then?”
“Yes,” he said, feeling the word sting his tongue like battery acid. His throat suddenly felt very thick. “Tomorrow.” He blew her a kiss and went into the bathroom, shutting and locking the door behind him.
The water came out of the showerhead steaming hot, which both surprised and pleased him. Leaning toward the mirror, he tugged down one lower eyelid and then the other. The skin underneath looked pink and moist, marbled with a delicate network of blood vessels. He turned on the ceiling vent, checked the lock on the door a second time, then set the duffel bag on the counter and opened it.
Shoving aside articles of clothing, he located the gun and both boxes of ammunition. As he had done back in Burt Langstrom’s bedroom, he lifted it out of the bag almost too gingerly, turning it over with abundant care in both hands. It was a Glock, though he did not know the model. There was a single magazine in the hilt, and it took him only a few seconds to release it by pressing a lever on the side of the weapon. Aside from the trigger, it was the only other lever, and he marveled at the terrible and dangerous simplicity of the instrument. In the movies, it seemed like someone was always cocking back hammers or switching levers. A child could use this.
I’m an idiot, he thought. What am I doing with this thing?
He had hoped to find some instructions for loading the gun on the boxes of ammo, but that was not the case. He opened one of the boxes and pried out the little plastic tray. Each bullet was housed in its own circular well, bottom-up. They gleamed in the fluorescent lights above the bathroom mirror.
The back of the gun’s magazine had little numbered holes running in two columns, so he was able to discern that the mag held just thirteen rounds. There was a spring-loaded mechanism at the top of the mag, which gave under the weight of his thumb when he pushed on it. One by one, he loaded thirteen rounds into the magazine, the spring becoming more resistant with each round, until he had capped it off. Then he slammed it back into the hilt of the gun and heard it click into place.
The one move he had seen countless times on television that did prove useful was charging the weapon—pulling back the slide in order to chamber a round. It clanked solidly, and all of a sudden he could feel nothing but the weight of the thing in his hand. It was heavier with the bullets in it. When he glanced up at his reflection in the steamy mirror, he hardly recognized himself. Yet that had very little to do with the gun; he’d stopped recognizing himself weeks ago, when this whole thing had started to get ugly.
He tucked the loaded gun back inside his duffel bag, then checked his cell phone. He’d kept it powered off during the drive, mostly to conserve the battery because he had forgotten to bring his charger—another stupid oversight—but also because he’d once heard that people could be tracked to a specific location by GPS just by pinging their cell phone. He didn’t know whether this was true or not, but he thought it was better to be safe than sorry.
The phone powered up, searched for a signal, then chimed repeatedly to let him know he had unread text messages. He checked the log and saw there were five missed calls with an equal number of voice mails. There were twice as many text messages, too, each one sent from the same person, the most recent sent only an hour earlier. They were from Sanjay Kapoor. And although a white-hot rage rose up through him as he looked at Kapoor’s name, he couldn’t bring himself to delete the messages. Instead, he clicked on the most recent and read it.
Please reconsider your actions, David.
You hold the key that could save us all.
His eyes burned. Without giving the message another thought, he deleted it, then powered down his phone.
He stripped out of his clothes. They were sour with perspiration and fell to the floor in a stiff and smelly heap. When he
climbed beneath the spray of hot water, he tried hard to erase the past several hours from his mind—the past several days, several weeks, several months—but they haunted him. He couldn’t scald those images away.
4
He showered for a good fifteen minutes. When he was done, he toweled off, pulled on a fresh pair of underwear, sweatpants, and an old Pearl Jam T-shirt. Unlike Ellie, he happened to have his own clothes with him, already packed. He had anticipated a longer stay at the hospital.
Back in the room, Ellie was already curled up on the bedspread, asleep. My God, she looks so old. He felt a pang of sadness in his chest. Looking at her reminded him of Kathy, and that hurt, too. It had all happened so quickly, his grief was still confused with disbelief, with anger, with helplessness. He had to keep reminding himself that it wasn’t a nightmare and that it had all actually happened—was still happening. When he closed his eyes, it was Kathy’s face that materialized through the darkness; only his urgency to keep moving was enough to bump her from his thoughts for small periods of time, allowing him to function. Well, his urgency . . . and what had happened earlier that night in the car, that unsettling and inexplicable thing that Ellie had done to him when they first set out on the road . . .
Ellie had one arm draped around the shoe box. David considered attempting to remove it, to set it on the nightstand, but in the end he decided to let it be. What was the harm?
Despite the squealing bedsprings, Ellie didn’t stir when he eased down on the other side of the bed. Thank God for small miracles. He dreaded any discussion with her about the truth of what had happened. But she was a smart kid. A September baby—their Miracle Baby—they had petitioned to have her advance a grade early on, and it was a decision they never regretted. Sometimes, he knew, the kid was too smart.
She knows I’ve been lying to her, he realized now, the notion striking him like a terrible epiphany. Jesus, she’s just been humoring me, hasn’t she? Yes, of course she has. I don’t give her enough credit. She gives me too much.
He turned off the bedside lamp, then reclined on his back, listening to the soft sounds of his daughter’s respiration. As tired and defeated as he was, he thought he would have crashed the second his head hit the pillow, but that was not the case. He stared at the black ceiling, at the border of cold sodium light framing the closed drapes over the window. He counted the seconds between each flash of the smoke alarm’s cyclopean eye.
His thoughts returned, not to Kathy and his final moments with her, but of what had occurred only hours earlier back in the Oldsmobile, as he drove frantically down the highway, his mind a kaleidoscope of nightmarish thoughts, his heart speed-racing in his chest. Ellie had been in the backseat, and had leaned forward at one point and placed a cool hand against the nape of his neck. She had—
It gave him chills.
After a time, he got up and fumbled around in the darkness until he located what he was looking for: Ellie’s stuffed elephant. He crawled back into bed with it, pressing his face against it. There was Ellie’s smell on it, a soft and breathy smell he associated with summer mornings spent lazing in bed. But there was another smell on it now, too—the stink of Kathy’s hospital room, and all the horribleness that had happened there. It was a harsher and more specific smell than Ellie’s, rounded and full in its terribleness.
I should sleep with the gun instead, he thought, burying his face in the stuffed toy.
After a time, sleep claimed him.
5
Twenty-one months earlier
“Well,” said Kathy, rolling off of him. They were slick with sweat and David’s heartbeat thumped in his ears. He grazed his wife’s buttocks with one hand as she rolled off her side of the bed. “I’m going to the kitchen for some water. Want some?”
“Yes, please.” He smiled demurely at her from his side of the bed.
Kathy folded her arms over her bare breasts, cocked a hip. “What?” she said.
“You’re pretty.”
“Charmer. But you’re supposed to say those things before getting lucky. You know that, right?”
“I’ve been out of practice.”
“Making love?”
“Being charming.”
She laughed as she tugged on her robe and went out into the hall.
David got up and went to the bathroom. He urinated, washed his face and hands at the sink, then returned to bed with a Robert Ludlum paperback. He was readjusting the pillows against the headboard when Kathy returned. She handed him a glass of ice water, then climbed into bed beside him.
“Ellie did the strangest thing today,” Kathy said, fluffing up her own pillows against the headboard. “We were walking through Target, picking up a few things, when she disappeared down one of the aisles. You know how she does.”
David nodded, smiling to himself. Ellie was prone to wandering off when something interesting caught her eye.
“She came running up to me at one point and asked for some money. She said she’d pay me back with her allowance when we got home, but that she saw something and had to get it right then and there. When I asked her what it was, she said she couldn’t tell me, and that it was a surprise.”
“Oh boy,” he said, sliding an index finger between the pages of his book. “Did you give her the money?”
“Yes. It was only five bucks, and she was true to her word, paying me back as soon as we got home.”
“What’d she buy?”
“You’ll never guess. Not in a million years.”
“So tell me.”
“She said it was a present for the baby.”
“Whose baby?”
“Ours,” Kathy said.
“We don’t have a baby.” But then he looked at her, leaning over on one elbow. “Or is this your way of telling me something?”
Kathy’s eyes went wide and she shook her head, laughing. “Christ, no. I’m not pregnant.”
“So what’s the deal?”
“I don’t know. Maybe it was wishful thinking on her part. Or maybe she was trying to tell us something.”
David sat up straighter in bed. He set the book down on the nightstand. “Are you saying you want to have another kid?”
She looked at him, the sweat from their lovemaking still glistening on her face, and smiled. “You know, I just don’t know. I mean, I think about it from time to time, but never really seriously. And it’s not like we’ve talked about it or anything.”
“Is that what we’re doing now?” he asked. “Talking about it?”
“Would you want another baby?”
He thought about it for a second. “I’m forty years old,” he said. “And not to point out the obvious, your highness, but you’re just a few years younger than me. Is it even safe?”
“Women are having babies later in life now,” she said. “There are risks, but then there are risks with any pregnancy. There were complications with Ellie at the end, remember?”
The umbilical cord had gotten wrapped around Ellie’s neck during labor. They’d had a monitor on her, and with each contraction and subsequent push, David had watched his unborn daughter’s blood pressure drop on the computer screen beside Kathy’s bed. In the end, the doctor had to take Ellie out via emergency cesarean. Even more terrifying was that she came out in silence, not making a sound. It wasn’t until she was aspirated that she started to cry, but even then it had been a few short bleats, and she quieted right up to the moment she was placed in Kathy’s arms, those deep obsidian eyes surveying them both from beneath a pink and furrowed brow.
But those complications hadn’t just been at the end. They’d spent nearly two years trying to get pregnant, had visited countless fertility doctors. Kathy had been on a strict regimen of prenatal vitamins. There had been no medical reason why they shouldn’t be able to conceive, yet conception eluded them for the longest time . . . until that one morning when both pregnancy tests turned up positive and a visit to the obstetrician confirmed it. Ellie—their Miracle Baby.
“Sou
nds like you’ve given this more than just a passing thought,” he said.
“What about you?” she said. “Will you give it more than just a passing thought, too?”
He chewed his lower lip for a moment. “Yeah, okay. I will.”
Kathy’s smile widened. David admired the sweat at her temples, dampening her hair. When she eased back down into her pillows, he could smell the sex on her, wafting over to his side of the bed.
“So, do you want to see it?” Kathy said.
“See what?”
“What she bought.”
“I thought she didn’t tell you.”
“Not right away. But when we got home, she wrapped it in construction paper and gave it to me as a gift.” Kathy rolled over and opened the drawer to her nightstand. When she turned back toward him, she was cupping a small, shiny sliver of metal in the palm of her hand.
David leaned forward for a better look. “It’s a spoon,” he said.
“Well, it’s a charm,” Kathy said. “Like for a bracelet. But yeah, it’s a spoon. It was the sweetest thing.”
David smiled and shook his head.
Kathy returned the tiny spoon to the nightstand, then made a sleepy purring sound while her cool foot found one of his sweaty legs beneath the sheet. David opened the book and skimmed the same sentence several times, not really paying attention to it. Deep inside the belly of the house, the furnace kicked on.
“Hey.” Kathy sat up on one elbow. “Do you hear that?”
“Hear what?”
“Shhh,” she said. “Listen.”
He listened but heard nothing.
“Sounds like music,” Kathy said.
“Music? I don’t—” But he cut himself off as he heard it, too: the faint and discordant jangle of chimes set to some familiar tune. It took David just a few seconds to place it—“Yankee Doodle.” But it wasn’t the music itself that he found most peculiar; it was that he recognized where it was coming from, that prerecorded jangling melody, incongruous in the middle of a December night.
