“What you saw out there with Bonner?” he said. “We saw it with everyone in the enclave. Killed every last one of them because once they went rabid like that, killing them was the only way we could stop them. When it was over, Harrison told us the rest of what the locals had fed him, the story about the enclave and the Bad Hour. It’s like an infection. You let yourself get too angry or too emotional in general, and it just . . . takes over. The people around Haditha said the Bad Hour was a demon, that once it touched you, it stayed with you always, ready to take over if you couldn’t control yourself.”
“Bullshit,” she whispered, the weight of the story crushing her. If she had heard about it before coming here, she’d never have believed it. But now?
“They also said it was contagious,” Ray went on. He closed his eyes and breathed evenly, and she recognized the effort he made to stay calm. Remembered him doing the same earlier, and Bonner as well.
The ice in her gut grew heavier. Kat stood and grabbed the bars of her cell. “Let me out of here, Ray.”
“In a while.”
She smashed an open palm against one of the bars of the cell. “Let me out, asshole. I can’t stay here!”
Ray pushed away from the desk and walked toward the cell. He stopped a few feet from the bars and studied her with those I’m-sorry eyes.
“You can’t leave, Kat. We’ll let you out in a little while, but the Bad Hour’s in you now. Harrison’s squad killed everyone in that enclave, but we brought it out with us. Some of the guys in that squad are dead. Others are probably out there infecting people the way I did in Chesbro. I didn’t mean to. Even after the times I lost it in Iraq, I chalked it up to the war. PTSD, maybe. But once I came home . . . once I was in one place long enough . . . I started to see it happen to other people.”
Kat remembered Bonner’s face, the way he’d changed, and the strength and rage that had filled her when she had turned on Ray. Then she remembered the day she had seen him go berserk, the day he’d killed that family.
“When you lost it, you didn’t look like Bonner,” she said. “Yeah, you were a fucking lunatic, but—”
“At first, none of us looked any different when it came on. The way I’ve got it figured, once the Bad Hour takes root in a place, it gets stronger. The people in the enclave looked like Bonner when they went rabid—”
“But I . . . This just happened to me. If you don’t look like that at first . . .”
Ray grabbed one of the bars. “I’m explaining this badly. It’s the Bad Hour that’s getting stronger, taking root. Maybe it’s one demon or maybe it’s a bunch of little ones, like parasites, but it gets stronger. Doesn’t matter if it’s your first time giving in to it . . . it’s the strength of the Hour that matters. Not always an hour, either. The stronger it gets, the longer it can hold on to you.”
Kat laughed softly, but it wasn’t really a laugh at all.
She rested her forehead against the bars. Impossible. All of this was simply insanity. For a moment, she wondered if she had fallen asleep on that northbound bus and still sat there, dreaming with her skull resting against the window. But that was mere fantasy.
“What you’re talking about . . . it can’t be,” she said softly.
Ray wrapped his fingers around hers, him on one side of those bars and her on the other. “I’ve seen the way you can rein in your fear, Kat. You can do this. You have to.”
Kat began to tremble. She pressed her lips together, trying to stay in control, but tears welled in her eyes.
“You don’t know what you’re saying. I have to . . .”
Ray squeezed her hand sharply, and she snapped her head up and stared at him.
“Stop. You know what will happen,” he said. “Calm down.”
Kat pulled her hand away and wiped at her eyes. She nodded, took a shuddery breath, and straightened her spine. Another deep breath. Terrified of the Hour taking her over again, that madness . . . She didn’t want to believe, but she could not erase from her mind the things she had seen. The things she had felt.
“I’m all right,” she told him firmly. “But you can’t keep me here. I have to go home, Ray.”
“Kat—”
“I have a daughter.”
He frowned, staring at her.
Kat inhaled. Exhaled. Felt that familiar battlefield chill spread through her. This was an altogether different sort of combat.
“I have to leave,” she said, “but I get it, Ray. And I’ll come back.”
Ray held onto the bars from the outside as if worried he might fall over if he let go. “How old is she? Your girl?”
Kat embraced the combat chill in her bones. Met his gaze. “She’s four.”
“Four,” he said, a dull echo.
“I wanted to raise her myself,” Kat said. “You were my friend, but I’d seen what kind of man you could be. What kind of father you might be. I thought it would be better—”
“You started writing to me,” Ray said, gaze pinning her to the floor inside her cell. “Then when I stopped replying, you came looking. If you didn’t want me to know—”
Kat approached the bars again. This time, it was she who put her hands over his.
“At first, I just wanted to reconnect. I guess I figured someday I’d tell you. Then later . . . I needed to talk to you,” Kat said. Breathing evenly. “Her baby teeth started falling out at the beginning of this year. That’s early. Really early. The new ones have been growing in ever since . . .”
She breathed. Steadied herself.
“Tell me,” Ray said through gritted teeth, and she saw that he was doing it too. The both of them just breathing. Slow and steady. In control.
But they couldn’t stay in control every second of every day. Not forever.
Nobody could do that. Especially not a toddler.
“The new teeth are coming in and she has too many of them, Ray. They’re tiny things, sharp and black, and there are too many—”
“Kat, no.”
She let the cold fill her, stared into his eyes.
“And, Ray,” Kat said. “Your little girl has such a temper.”
WHAT IS LOST, WHAT IS GIVEN AWAY
JOHN LANGAN
I
My ten-year high school reunion, held in the fall of 1997, was a disappointment. This should not have been a terrible surprise, but I’m afraid I had bought into the scenarios played out in endless movies and TV shows, the ones where all the old animosities, the divisions between jock and nerd, popular and outcast, are put aside, and the former classmates discover that their similarities outweigh their differences—as, of course, they always had. What I found instead was that a decade had not been sufficient time to alter much beyond hairlines and waistbands. I learned other things, too.
The reunion was a two-night affair, with an informal meet-and-greet at the bar of the Castle, a local restaurant, on Friday, and a formal dinner at the Poughkeepsie Tennis Club on Saturday. In between, those who wanted to rekindle their school spirit brighter still could attend Our Lady of Fatima’s homecoming game Saturday afternoon. Starting Friday, I had the sense that the weekend was not going to live up to my hopes for it. For one thing, no one recognized me. To be fair, I had changed more than anyone else there. When I graduated, I was six feet tall, one hundred and fifty or sixty pounds if I was wearing a heavy coat. I had gained another sixty pounds in the intervening years, as well as a beard that was the same light brown my hair had darkened to in my early twenties. None of my old classmates had deviated as dramatically from their former appearances, so it was perhaps to be expected that they would not know me. They were not prepared to.
All the same, I found this disconcerting. I walked past people paired and grouped as they had been in the halls of Fatima, and their gazes slid over me without catching on anything. While I had not been the class president, or captain of the football team, or even the class clown, I had been in the drama club, acting the part of the villainous Jonathan in the senior class production of Arsen
ic and Old Lace; I had lettered in spring track (hurdles) twice; I had played an active role in discussions and debates in our English, social studies, and religion classes. Especially since our graduating class numbered one hundred and thirty-two, I assumed I had made some depth of impression on the people I had spent four years with. This did not appear to be the case.
After an hour of sitting at the bar, nursing a Corona and watching the room fill with people exchanging hugs, handshakes, and backslaps, I decided to leave my stool and introduce myself to my former classmates. Standing directly in front of them, I extended my right hand, calling them by their names and reminding them of mine. Yet even so direct an approach did not yield the look of pleased recognition, the firm handshake, the repetition of my name followed by an exclamation of pleasure. Instead, the men and women I greeted took my hand hesitantly, their faces confused, as if, while familiar, my name was not one they could immediately place. After uttering a platitude about how great it was to see me, they resumed the conversations whose breaks had allowed me to make my introduction. The forty-five minutes or so it took to complete my circuit of the room left me disheartened, depressed, and back at the bar. I had come on my own, so there was no point to ordering anything stronger than another beer. I poked the wedge of lime jutting from the bottle’s neck down into it, and toasted my reflection in the bar’s mirror. Here’s to obscurity.
To my left, a voice said my name. Mood instantly lightened, I turned on my stool, and saw Joel Martin—Mr. Martin, I couldn’t help thinking. Junior year chemistry, senior year physics, assistant coach of the boys’ junior varsity football and varsity basketball teams. Disgraced in the closing days of my senior year for an affair with Sinead McGahern, one of my classmates, which left her pregnant and him out of a job at which he had been a favorite. He looked terrible. His hair, thinning when I had sat in his classroom, had largely deserted his head, except for a few spots here and there where he had allowed it to grow long. The lenses of his glasses were scratched and scored, opaque in some places. The heavy five o’clock shadow that had always darkened his jaw had thickened to a heavy beard, which he appeared to have maintained without the benefit of a mirror. Never a big man to begin with—I would have put his height at 5’5”, his weight at one forty—he seemed smaller inside his shapeless black suit, shrunken. A martini glass, full, stood on the bar in front of him.
I was stunned. In the weeks and months after graduation, Joel Martin’s situation had gone from scandal to ongoing catastrophe, ending with him in jail, first in Argentina, then locally. During my first couple of years of college, when I still met some of my high school friends at winter and summer breaks, the latest chapter in the ongoing saga of Mr. Martin and Sinead McGahern was among our immediate topics of conversation. As his actions had progressed—or declined—from the questionable to the out-and-out criminal, so had my mental image of him transformed from intense, affable science teacher to something darker, a seducer, a humiliated and desperate father. To encounter him here, looking different, yes, yet more threadbare than sinister, was a scenario I would not have anticipated. Which may have been why, when he held out his hand, I took it. His flesh was gritty, as if he had come directly from the beach without washing. I wondered if anyone else had identified him. Was Sinead here? I wasn’t sure. I hadn’t seen her, but had I seen everyone?
“How’ve you been?” he said.
“Good,” I said. It was the answer I would have given had any of the people I’d tried to talk to posed the question.
“What’re you up to these days?”
“Teaching,” I said. “I teach college.”
“Oh, yeah? Whereabouts?”
“SUNY Huguenot. Across the river.”
“That’s great,” he said, his voice full of its old enthusiasm. “What do they have you doing?”
“English,” I said. “Freshman writing, mostly.”
“Very nice. Say, you know what I’ve been sitting here trying to remember?”
“What?”
“The prank you guys pulled when you were juniors. Well, maybe ‘prank’ is too strong a word. No one got hurt or anything. Do you know what I’m talking about?”
I did. “The ‘What the hell is that?’ routine.”
He snapped his fingers. “That’s it! Who came up with that?”
“No one. I mean, someone saw it on TV—Saturday Night Live, I think—and we decided to do it in school.”
Joel Martin was laughing now, albeit quietly. “What the hell is that?” he said. Keeping his hand close to his chest, he pointed at a spot above the bar’s mirror. “What the hell is that? What the hell is that? What the hell is that?” He lowered his finger. “You remember the time I joined you guys?”
I nodded. It had been our most successful staging of the bit.
“Long time ago,” he said. “Long, long time ago.”
With sudden and uncanny certainty, I knew that the man who had gotten me through both Regents Chemistry and Regents Physics was on the verge of broaching topics I had no desire to discuss. An emotion halfway to panic gripped me. I decided to forego finishing my beer and depart the reunion early. I was pretty much done already, wasn’t I? Joel Martin saw me withdrawing a ten from my pocket to cover my drink and tip. His eyes widened, but before he could open his mouth, I said, “I have to go. Have a good night,” and slid off my stool.
Excusing and pardoning myself, I navigated the groups and couples standing between me and the front door. The room had grown hot, stiflingly humid. The sports coat and turtleneck I’d opted for were too tight, constricting. I glanced back to see if Joel Martin was still at the bar. I couldn’t tell; there were too many people crowding the space.
Outside, the night air was blessedly cool. I pulled off my jacket, tugged my shirt out of my slacks. My car was in front of the restaurant, at the concrete divider separating the parking lot from the main road. I was unlocking the driver’s-side door when I heard my name shouted. I looked toward the Castle’s front door, and there was Joel Martin holding it open. I raised the hand holding my jacket in what I hoped was a noncommittal wave. From within the doorway, he called, “See you there tomorrow?”
I motioned with the jacket again, ducked inside my car, and almost broke the key off jamming it into the ignition. I was positive I was going to hear a tap on my window and see my former teacher’s smiling face leaning toward me. When I stole a look at the front door, however, it was, though still open, empty. It was as if I had just missed Joel Martin stepping away from it to return inside. I had the impression of something within the lighted rectangle, a cloud of dust or sand, but I was too relieved at my good fortune to pay much attention to it. I shifted into gear and drove out of the parking lot.
II
The following night, I spent the car ride from my apartment in Wiltwyck to the Poughkeepsie Tennis Club narrating Joel Martin’s fall from grace to Linda, my date for the evening. She was a former girlfriend who had broken up with me in order to pursue a relationship with one of her professors at NYU. They had split when she became pregnant, and now she was the mother of a two-year-old daughter, Elaine, whose father had visitation rights alternating weekends and two weeks during the summer. She managed a bank in Wiltwyck and lived with her dad, a retired cop who spent his days watching his granddaughter. Long past our post-relationship bitterness, we had lunch every few weeks, trading news about our latest romantic prospects and complaining about our respective jobs. After my most recent relationship petered out, Linda had agreed to accompany me to my reunion dinner as, she said, a psychological investigation into the forces that had shaped me. While she might have anticipated a certain level of pre-event nervousness on my part, she was unprepared for the agitation that had hold of me—that had not released me since the previous night. We hadn’t been on the road two minutes when she said, “All right. You better tell me what’s going on with you.”
The first part of the story was related quickly enough. Having lived her own version of it, Linda wa
s less shocked than she might have been. “I take it things didn’t work out between this guy and the student,” she said.
“To put it mildly,” I said. “From what I understand, Sinead’s parents wanted to press charges against Martin—statutory rape, contributing to the delinquency of a minor. The problem was, she had turned eighteen the previous December, and both of them swore nothing had happened between them until the end of January. I think her mom still wanted to go after him, legally speaking, but her dad was less gung ho. This was the father of his first grandchild, and Martin was saying all the right things, how sorry he was, how much he loved Sinead, how he intended to do right by her and the baby. Plus, Sinead kept insisting she was in love with him. Eventually, her mom cooled off, especially when Martin proposed to Sinead at the end of the summer. That was the news in the fall, when I was home for Thanksgiving break. Mr. Martin and Sinead McGahern were engaged, with a wedding planned for sometime in the spring, after she’d had the baby and regained her shape. Martin had a job at a gas station, which sounded like a bit of a comedown after having taught high school, but maybe not. Supposedly, he was saving to rent a house for them.”
“I want to say they didn’t go through with the wedding,” Linda said.
“No, they didn’t. Sinead had the baby the day after Christmas, a little boy, Sean. Apparently, Martin was in love with the kid the moment he laid eyes on him. I heard that was part of what broke them apart. One look at his child—his son, right?—and he’s all ready to settle down with Sinead and start working on baby number two. Her, not so much. She’d been accepted to Penrose, and they’d agreed to defer her admission for a year. This was something she was not willing to give up.”
“Plus,” Linda said, “the bloom was off the rose, for him as well as for her. You start seeing someone in secret like that, someone who’s off-limits to you, who embodies, I don’t know, a certain kind of authority for her, a certain kind of youthfulness for him, and let me tell you, it’s pretty heady stuff. Forbidden fruit and all that. It doesn’t take long, though, for the fruit to spoil. What they had was a fling. Their mistake was in trying to prolong it—which, I understand, they did because of the kid. They would’ve been better hiring lawyers and drawing up a custody agreement. Did they?”
What the #@&% Is That? Page 15
