Time Release

by Martin J. Smith

  “They didn’t hear it either?”

  “I don’t know. They didn’t go up.”

  “Who went up, Sonny?”

  The young man winced and kept his eyes shut tight. “I found him. Izzy came down, real nervous, tracking something all over the kitchen floor. It was dark by then, and I went up. David was sitting in the big chair when I turned on the light. Oh Christ. For a second I thought he was asleep.” Sonny slammed a fist down hard on the Explorer’s hood. Its report echoed down the snowy street, drawing even more stares.

  Christensen looked again at the house. It was full of demons, all right. They hadn’t even waited for Sonny to open the door. They’d sensed his presence somehow, and had swarmed to the curb to greet the boy who’d ignored them for ten years. “I think we should come back later,” he said, putting a hand on Sonny’s shoulder. “Maybe take this a little at a time. To be safe.”

  “No!” Sonny was trembling. Christensen tried to imagine the emotional toll of confronting for the first time an only brother’s suicide. He’d helped guide others into their minds’ scary places, but he’d always built in time for decompression, time to pull back and think about the confrontation and what it meant. He was well aware that anyone opened up to a sudden onslaught of emotion was in danger. If those wounds weren’t stitched up as they occurred, things could get out of hand fast.

  It was Christensen’s experience that most people could handle it. For someone like Sonny, though, who might never be more open and vulnerable than now, psychosis was a short step away. Some therapists called it the Great Escape, when the cognitive structure collapses completely and reality becomes irrelevant. He had to coax Sonny back toward reality.

  “How about we get a cup of coffee first?” he said. “Must be some place around here.”

  “I don’t want coffee.”

  “You take yours with cream?”

  “No.”

  “Sugar?”

  “No!”

  “Never been able to drink it black myself. Somewhere we can get donuts here?”

  “Look,” Sonny said. “I want to go in. If you’re not coming, just go.”

  “I don’t think it’s a good idea. Not now. We could even come back tomorrow. The house isn’t going anywhere.”

  Sonny started across the street, shifting his daypack to the opposite shoulder as he walked. Christensen’s first impulse was to retrieve Brenna’s gun from under the driver’s seat, but he dismissed his irrational fear that Ron Corbett could be inside. His second impulse, pure habit, was to pull the keys from the Explorer’s ignition. He ignored that, too, and followed Sonny, staying close.

  On the porch, Sonny dropped to one knee and unzipped his pack. He rummaged among what looked like the remains of a lunch and pulled out two sturdy keys held together by a paper clip. Had he carried them all these years? He held the keys in his open right palm for a few seconds, then closed his fingers and raised the fist to his forehead. Suddenly he was up, reeling toward the porch rail along the far side of the house. The guttural roar of his vomiting filled the narrow walkway between his house and the one next door.

  “Leave me alone,” Sonny said, waving him off. “I’m okay.”

  “You’re not okay. We need to slow down, take this slower.”

  Sonny emptied the rest of his stomach onto the concrete below. Christensen watched his shoulders roll with the effort. “Sonny, please,” he said.

  Sonny gripped the railing fiercely, for a long time. When he turned around, a glistening strand hung between the corner of his mouth and his shirt pocket.

  Christensen found the image terrifying. “Tomorrow,” he pleaded.

  Sonny wiped his mouth on his sleeve. “You coming in or not?”

  Chapter 35

  The front door opened unwillingly into a small tiled vestibule just large enough for visitors to leave wet shoes or umbrellas. It had been a craftsman’s house once. The inner-door window was leaded glass, intact against all odds after years of neglect and vandalism. That door opened easily into a foyer behind which rose a two-level switchback staircase. Halfway up, a narrow wedge of sun shone through a milky stained-glass window, a picture of a white-sailed boat against a yellowing sky.

  “I’m okay,” Sonny said.

  He was halfway inside, standing with the toes of his sneakers on the dusty hardwood floor, his heels still on the blue-and-white tiles of the vestibule. Christensen, standing behind him, closed the outer door and waited. They were uncomfortably close, but maybe this way he could get a look at the emotions registering on Sonny’s face. Sonny blocked the doorway, moving at his own pace.

  “Don’t rush it,” Christensen said. “You’ve got options every step you take. Remember that.”

  Sonny moved forward, a single step. The oak floorboard creaked with his weight, flushing something small, furry, and frightening from beneath the front-hall radiator. It scampered along the baseboard and disappeared into a dark-wood gap at the base of the stairs. If Sonny noticed, he didn’t react.

  Christensen fought the impulse to run back outside. “Why’d your father never sell this place?” he asked.

  “Don’t know.”

  “But no one’s lived here since 1986?”

  “Don’t think so. Looks the same. This is all our stuff.”

  Christensen peeked around the doorjamb, noticing for the first time the furniture in the living room to the right. The vandals had stayed outside, for reasons he couldn’t begin to understand. The house had a history, with its frightening record of Corbett family violence, suicide, and madness. But how could an abandoned house full of furnishings apparently remain untouched for more than ten years?

  As Sonny moved slowly into the foyer, Christensen was overwhelmed by instinct. They shouldn’t be here. The risk to Sonny was too great. A visit to one’s childhood home is bound to generate strong emotions, in anyone. A home like this, frozen in time during Sonny’s most difficult years, probably would generate a whirlpool of feelings. The place was full of memory triggers.

  “You hear something?” Sonny asked. He was staring straight ahead, into the kitchen.

  “No.”

  “That scratching.”

  The house was as silent as a tomb. “Sonny, I don’t think this is a good idea,” he said, but Sonny paid no attention to his words or to the hand Christensen placed gently on his forearm. Christensen brushed past, finally getting a look at his face. Sonny’s eyes were wide, like open lenses, as dilated as his pupils. The house was dim, but not that dim. Sonny was taking everything in, letting the light into the corners he’d kept dark for so long.

  A white plaster wall rose directly across the narrow passage at the bottom of the stairs, straight ahead. Sonny ran his flat palm across it at chest level, then down toward the floor. He bent to an indentation about two feet off the ground. Christensen looked closer. The thick plaster was dented smoothly inward, as if something round and heavy had fallen down the stairs and struck the wall. Sonny massaged his fingertips into the bowl like a potter, then looked up the stairs to the landing.

  “Bitch!”

  Christensen jumped. Sonny’s voice, edgy and hard, echoed through the house.

  “What do you see, Sonny?”

  Sonny closed his hand into a tight ball, raised his right arm across his chest, and slammed the fist into the wall, hard. Christensen heard the unmistakable crack of bone, thinking, oh Jesus. He grabbed Sonny by the elbow and stood him up, then pinned his shoulders against the wall. They stood eye to eye, but Christensen felt like he was staring into a void. “We need to leave, Sonny. Now. Come with me.”

  It would have been better if Sonny had shoved him away, called him an asshole, asked to be left alone. Instead, he simply pushed away from the wall, ignoring Christensen’s determined effort to prevent him from doing so. Sonny was young, powerful. It
was one of the few times in his life Christensen had ever felt physically overmatched.

  He backed off, unwilling to force a confrontation. Sonny started up, toward the bedroom he and David shared, then stopped on the second step and retreated. He started up again, one step, then stepped back down and walked into the kitchen.

  Christensen followed, onto the same checkerboard linoleum-tile floor he remembered from the coroner’s photo­graphs. He half-expected to see the bloody paw prints that had once stitched its surface, but they had been cleaned up and the floor was covered by a thick layer of dust.

  Sonny ran his broken hand along the edge of the yellow-tile counter, looked up at the pressed-tin ceiling. His indifference to what surely was intense pain made Christensen uneasy. Could he be watching a mind and body operate simultaneously on two different planes?

  Someone had emptied the kitchen of its furnishings, but it had been orderly, not the work of thieves. A few cupboard doors hung open enough that Christensen could see the bare shelves. Four small dents in the linoleum suggested where the kitchen table might have been. At the sink, Sonny, without wincing, turned the ancient faucet with his right hand. Something groaned in the wall behind the basin, but nothing came out. The pipes couldn’t have survived all these winters unless Corbett had shut off the water, Christensen thought.

  A small window above the sink overlooked a rotting wooden porch, and Sonny’s eyes fixed somewhere on the other side. Christensen peeked through the back-door win­dow at the same scene. The porch’s battleship-gray paint was cracked and flaking, and what had once been a handrail leading down the steps to the small backyard had collapsed. Beyond that, the bare branches of an apple tree rose from an otherwise empty patch of fenced ground.

  “David! Trooper’s sick!”

  Sonny was on his tiptoes, pointing through the window at the porch floor. His eyes were open, but he was watching something Christensen couldn’t see. Sonny lurched for the back door, shoving Christensen aside, and tugged at the knob. He stopped, twisted the dead bolt, then tried the knob again. The door opened with a dried-paint crack and a rush of cold air. By the time Christensen followed, Sonny was on his knees at the center of the porch. He looked up, helpless and panicked.

  “What’s wrong with him?” he pleaded.

  “With who, Sonny?”

  “Trooper! He was just eating, then he fell down.”

  Trooper. One of the Corbetts’ dogs. “Tell me what’s happening, Sonny.”

  “Convulsions or something. I don’t know. Why are his legs doing that?”

  Christensen flashed on a scene: a dying basset in the snow.

  “What’s wrong, David? Help him!”

  With a chill, Christensen realized Sonny wasn’t talking to him, but to his older brother. Sonny had fully regressed to a moment long ago; beyond simply remembering an event from his childhood, he was reliving it. And Christensen knew Sonny wasn’t ready to handle that level of emotion.

  “I can’t, Sonny,” he said, testing the theory. “I don’t know what’s wrong either.”

  “He’s gonna die!” Sonny screamed. Crying now, head down, watching something awful, apparently hearing sounds Christensen could only imagine. “Get Dad!”

  “Where is he?”

  Sonny saw someone come out through the back door, waved whoever it was over with his broken hand. With his other hand, he seemed to be cradling something. The pose reminded Christensen of the famous photograph of an Ambassador Hotel busboy kneeling over a fallen Robert Kennedy.

  “What’s wrong with him? Do something!” Sonny’s head snapped to one side, like he’d been struck across the face. “Please!” he screamed through his tears. “Just try! Rachel? Somebody help him!”

  “Is Aunt Rachel here. Sonny? Dad, too. Who else?”

  “Stop smiling!” Sonny screamed. “He’s dying!”

  “Everything okay over there?” A voice from the alley, across the backyard. A heavily bundled man was watching them, a look of genuine concern on his face.

  “My dog’s dying!” Sonny sobbed, gesturing to the empty porch floor. Christensen waved the man away with confidence, hoping the stranger would perceive him as someone perfectly in control of the situation. Without the illusion, the man might call the police. It worked, or at least seemed to. The man kept walking.

  Christensen focused again on Sonny. “Why is Trooper dying?” he said.

  “Why is this happening?” Sonny screeched. In grim pantomime, he gently laid the dog’s head back on the porch. He stroked it again and again as a tear tumbled from his cheek and became a tiny wet circle on the painted floor­boards. He looked up, as if listening to someone on the porch, and suddenly covered his ears with his hands. Emotion swept across his face like a prairie storm—despair, disbelief, and, finally, rage. “But Trooper didn’t do anything to you! He’s a fucking dog!”

  Sonny turned, addressing someone else on the porch. “You never do anything!”

  “Maybe they can’t,” Christensen said vaguely.

  “Who can?” Sonny demanded.

  “Your mother?”

  “For shit. If she was ever fucking here when it happened. She’s so goddamned worthless, what could she do?”

  “What do you mean, worthless?”

  “Like trying to get a turtle out of its shell.”

  “So your mother can’t help you?”

  “She’s never here!” Sonny protested.

  “Your father? David?”

  “She’s got the spirit! She’s stronger!”

  Christensen tried to make sense of it. Things were moving too fast, and nothing fit. He imagined the people on the porch, taking a head count.

  “Your aunt?”

  Sonny stood, hands still over his ears, and reeled back into the house, swept away by his own emotional dam-burst. Christensen followed, stopping abruptly when he collided with the young man standing motionless at the center of the empty kitchen. Sonny didn’t flinch as Christensen’s full weight crushed against his swelling right hand.

  “Don’t,” Sonny said, his voice almost a whisper. “Please don’t.”

  He seemed transformed in an instant from manic to morose. His shoulders slumped, and as Christensen squeezed past he thought he heard a low whimper like that of a frightened puppy. Sonny’s wide eyes were fixed on the opposite wall, on a white door that seemed too large for that of a cupboard.

  “What is it, Sonny?”

  “Not down there.”

  The basement. The water dreams. “Someone wants you to go down there?”

  Sonny collapsed to his knees on the checkerboard floor. “I don’t want to pray!”

  “Who wants you to pray, Sonny?”

  “Rachel!”

  “Aunt Rachel wants you to pray?”

  “But I didn’t do anything!”

  Sonny’s head hit the floor with a sickening thud. He kept it there, submitting to some greater, malicious power. He looked like someone had a foot on his neck.

  Christensen fought the impulse to turn away. Who the hell was Rachel? Her name threaded in and out of Sonny’s stories, but she remained, to Christensen, little more than a bit player. As far as he could tell, she didn’t even exist, since no one on either side of Sonny’s family knew who she was.

  “Forgive me, Father”—Sonny choked off the words as he struggled for breath—“for I have sinned.” He rose to all fours, head bowed, then stood and walked unsteadily to the basement door.

  When he turned around, his face was vacant, accepting, without fear. He twisted the knob with his broken hand. The door opened silently into darkness, and Sonny started down. “Lord have mercy.”

  Chapter 36

  In the pale light of a side-door window, Christensen looked for a wall switch. He groped into the collection of winter coats in childr
en’s sizes that hung on pegs just inside the basement door, but it wasn’t there. He reached again into the dark wool mass, and again found nothing. “Where’s the light, Sonny?” he said, thinking about rats.

  Sonny was moving down the stairs slowly, like he was walking underwater. If he heard, he didn’t answer. Christensen creaked halfway down and squinted into the cellar room, his head numbed by the coarse smell of mildew. It wasn’t pitch black, as he’d imagined, but dimly lit by daylight filtering into a basement window-well and through a grimy pane just above the laundry sink.

  The center of the room was a tangle of garden tools, hoses, clotheslines, overturned bikes. In the far corner, a table saw and lathe, someone’s small wood shop. A Ping-Pong table, folded for storage, leaned against the back wall. Christensen listened hard for the skittering rush of rodent feet, but heard only Sonny’s labored breathing.

  Sonny was at the sink now, running his ruined hand along the empty countertop that stretched five feet in both directions from the basin. The hand cut an irregular trail through the collected dust, which swirled up into the shaft of light like an apparition.

  “Why are we here, Sonny?”

  Sonny’s hand continued its methodic passage across the countertop. “To be closer to God.” His voice flattened into recitation: “I am baptizing you in water, but there is one to come who is mightier than I. His winnowing-fan is in his hand to clear his threshing floor and gather the wheat into his barn; but the chaff he will burn in unquenchable fire.”

  “Who told you that?”

  “Rachel.”

  Rachel again. “Wait. She brought you down here to be closer to God?”

  “To wash our sin away. Make us pure. We were con­ceived in sin.”

  “Who’s we? David, too?”

  “You. Me. We have the stain.”

  “Who else has the stain? Our mother?”

  Sonny nodded. A knowing smile. “He used her as his vessel. Rachel says she’ll be forgiven.”

  “Who, Sonny? Who used her? Dad?”