The Year's Best Dark Fantasy and Horror
Page 36
I put the book down, open to the place he was, and make it back to Sherry fifteen minutes before I’d promised.
On Wednesday I meet Tanya at the regular place, the usual time. Gabe’s with Sherry on our living room floor. As far as Sherry knows, Tanya’s sitting with her pregnant sister at the doctor’s office. Wednesdays are when he sees expectant mothers. It’s a weekly appointment.
As far as where I am, it’s work. The only thing different from every other day is I’m taking my lunch an hour and a half early.
The lie I tell myself in the trailer I have a key to is that the reason I’m not telling Tanya about Quint, reading to Gabe from across the house, without words, is that on Wednesdays we never have time to talk, really. It’s just unbutton, unbutton, lock the door twice then test the knob to be sure.
The truth of it of course is that I don’t have the words to tell her, and that it’s stupid anyway.
A few nights later, Quint’s at my door, baby monitor in hand.
“You didn’t leave him there,” I say, leaning to the side to look past him, for the stroller.
“He’s safe,” Quint says, insulted, eyeballing all my baseboards for an outlet.
I shake my head no, tell him not in here.
On the way to the shed in back, where the light socket doubles as a plug, where Sherry’ll never come because there’s spiders, Quint fills me in on Gabe. It’s been a week of testing. He’s been reading all different kinds of novels, from all different rooms of the house, at all times of the day and night, with all different clothes and jewelry on. What he’s found is that it works best when he’s lying down, the book propped on his stomach. And the book, it has to be bloody of some kind. Haunted houses, werewolves, serial killers, whatever. Nothing sappy or consoling.
“Why?” I say, holding the shed door open against the wind.
Quint shrugs, steps up onto the plywood floor, says like it’s obvious, “It puts him to sleep, man. Keeps him there, I mean.”
I follow him in, nod.
It makes sense is the thing.
“What about science fiction?”
“He likes it.”
“Sex stuff?”
“He’s nine months old.”
I clean a space on the bench for the baby monitor.
“He doesn’t understand the war stuff, either,” Quint adds, tuning Gabe’s distant breathing in. “And . . . I don’t know how to explain it. I think—I think it’s not so much like he’s seeing the words or anything. It’s like he’s seeing flashes of the pictures the books put in my head, yeah?”
“No,” I tell him. “I don’t.”
Quint pulls a thin paperback up from his back pocket.
“This’ll be the farthest away I’ve tried,” he says.
I nod—what am I supposed to say, here?—and he slips into his book, his eyes narrowing with gore, maybe, or a vampire swooping down, and then, just when I think he’s forgetting this is all a big experiment, Gabe lets loose through the static.
Quint looks up, momentarily lost. “Think you can stop now,” I say, pushing the book down so he can’t read it anymore. Gabe stands, the realization washing over him, and then’s gone, sprinting the quarter mile between my house and his. By the time he gets there, he’s breathing hard. He rips Gabe up from the crib, holds him close. “You there?” he says when he can, through the monitor. I nod, walk the monitor down to him.
Over enchiladas Sherry tells me that Tanya’s messing around on Quint. I chew, chew, swallow. “What?” I say, my face poker-straight, another bite ready on my fork, in case I need a stall. “On Wednesdays she drops Gabriel off here, y’know?” I shrug, fork the bite in. “Well,” Sherry says, looking out the kitchen window, I think, “this last
Wednesday, her sister started having contractions, she thought.”
“Her sister?”
“Ronnie—you don’t remember her. She’s having twins too.”
“Ronnie,” I say, swirling the bean juice and cheese on my plate. “But Tanya just had Gabe.”
“You know what I mean.”
She doesn’t know I’m stalling here. Spinning out.
“It was a false alarm,” she goes on. “But Tanya was supposed to be with her’s the thing. As far as anybody knew.”
I nod, chew some more, trying each word out fifty times before I actually say it out loud.
“Does Quint know?”
“He’s your friend.”
I agree with her about that, study the kitchen window too. Through it there’s the aluminum pole of a streetlight. It doesn’t shimmer or tremble or do anything to warrant my interest in it. Still, without it to lock onto, I’d probably be throwing up.
The next week, a Monday, I’m standing on Quint’s porch, synchronizing my watch with his. What he’s paying me with is two beers. Where he’s going is somewhere past the range of the baby monitor. My job is to record when and if Gabe wakes up, scared, and to somehow pat him back to sleep, or at least hold him until Quint gets back.
Written on the back of my arm, upside down to me, is the payphone number of wherever he’s going. Because he’s trying to follow the scientific method, he says, I don’t need to know where he’s going. It might influence the experiment in some way neither of us could anticipate.
“Okay then?” he says from the farthest part of his lawn.
I nod, tongue my lip out some. Can see the tree in front of my house from here.
Before Quint’s to the end of the block, I’ve got the payphone number dialed in. A kid answers. In answer to my questions the kid says he’s a bagboy, that the phone is by the ice machine, not quite to the firewood—why?
“Where in the larger sense, I mean,” I tell him.
The grocery store.
It’s two miles away.
I thank him, hang up, check on Gabe, finally turn away from him to close the door then come back again, looking at him the way I used to, those first months before his hair came in just like Quint’s. It’s something I can’t bring up when Sherry’s wanting a baby: that I’ve already been through it once. From a distance. That that was why I lost twelve pounds last Christmas, even with all the Thanksgiving leftovers. Praying and praying, and hating myself for each prayer, that the one that was stillborn was the one that could have given us away. Because I saw on the news that it can work like that, each twin being from a different dad. I saw it on the news and knew that we’d been lucky enough so far that this one-in-a-million shot had to be a sure thing, to make up for everything having been so good so far.
Gabe, though, his red hair, it’s a gift. Everything I could have asked for. But still. I stand in Tanya’s kitchen and hold one of Quint’s beers to my forehead like the hero does in the movie he’s trying to get out of.
On the refrigerator is a list of each thing Quint’s eaten over the last ten days. Tanya thinks he’s on a diet he saw on TV. She laughed into my chest when she told me, and I smoothed the hair down on the back of her head, closed my eyes.
The first time with her had been an accident, sure. But not the second, or all the rest. And now this, Quint going telepathic or whatever. Or—or not Quint, maybe, but Gabe. Maybe Quint just has a leaky mind, is one of those people my parents wouldn’t ever play Spades with, and Gabe, because they have the same blood, can tune him in better than anybody.
“Bullshit,” I say out loud, alone in Quint and Tanya’s hall, and peel the tab off the second beer.
Except that when I was twelve, for about six weeks I’d always been able to tell when the phone was going to ring. I didn’t hear it exactly, just kind of felt it in the bone behind my ear. It was just those six weeks though, and I never went to Vegas like my dad kept saying, and some things, if you just ignore them hard enough, they go away.
Like this.
What I could do here, I know, is not write anything down for Quint. Even if Gabe does wake up screaming, pictures of zombies in his head. It’d probably be best for him, even, save him from a childhood stocked with every blood
y image Quint can find on the paperback rack. Because, it’s not like they’re going to take this on the road or anything. You don’t get rich off your father’s dreams seeping into your head. Parlor tricks are supposed to be neat, small. What Quint’s doing requires way too much setup, and looks fake anyway.
I sit down at the table, push the notebook into the napkin dispenser we’d stole one night from some bar, years ago. Tanya still likes to make a show of checking her lipstick in it when we’re over, like this is all a game—the house, marriage, kids. I have to look away when she’s like that, because Sherry’s smart, too smart.
And then I think the thing I always think, when I’m not with Tanya: that this has to end. Not because it’s wrong, but because we’re going to get caught, and then have to live down the road from each other for the rest of our lives.
I shake my head no, that this isn’t what I wanted, and realize at the same time that what I’m doing is trying to talk myself into doing the right thing.
I drink off all of the beer I can. See that Quint’s last meal was sloppy joe mix on tortilla chips, with three jalapeños, sliced.
Right about now, he’s down in the parking lot of the grocery store, oblivious, a few pages into his book, his window down to hear the phone ring. Sherry’s at the garage, punching holes in people’s tickets. Tanya on-shift, covering for somebody, and, for me, it’s just another lunch.
While Quint reads, I make a sandwich from his deli drawer, eat it standing up, and am like that—sandwich in one hand, third beer in the other—when Gabe starts screaming like he’s just seen right into the black heart of evil. Like somebody’s holding his head there, making him look.
I drop my sandwich, try to pick it up before it’s dirty, end up tipping beer onto it instead.
“Okay, okay,” I call to Gabe, and then, just as I’m standing, I feel something in my head. It stops me, cranks my head over to the phone. Seconds later, it rings.
By the third ring I manage to draw the receiver to my ear.
It’s Tanya.
When I don’t say anything, she asks if I’m going to get the baby or not. I look through the doorway to the hall, can almost feel the telepathy popping in the air.
“Q?” Tanya says then, quieter, urgent-like, and there’s a ball in my throat I can’t explain—like I’m betraying her, standing in her kitchen, collecting her kid from his crib. Letting her think I’m Quint.
I hang up softly, call Quint, get the bagboy, hear Tanya ringing back on the other line.
“What do you want me to tell him?” the bagboy asks, his voice hushed like he knows more about what’s going on here than he should.
Behind him is the sound of cars rattling, women talking, doors swishing open and shut.
Gabe nestles his head into the hollow of my shoulder, gathers the fabric of my shirt in his right hand.
“Tell him I’ve got to get back to work,” I say, then hold the phone in place long after I’ve hung up.
It’s a form of prayer.
As apology or something, I finally take one of the books Quint’s always trying to get me to read.
“You know why he likes that stuff, right?” Sherry asks.
We’re in bed, the television on but muted, so we can hear the new squirrels pad around above us.
“Why he likes scary shit, you mean?” I say.
“Because it’s at his level.”
“Hm,” I say, and turn the page.
The book is that first one I watched him read to Gabe. I spend equal time on the page and television, and fall asleep somewhere in-between, wake deep in the morning, the sheets twisted under my fingers.
“Hun?” Sherry says, from her side of the bed. For a long time I don’t answer, then, once she’s breathing even again, I tell her I’m sorry too, the same way I’m telling Quint: where they can’t hear.
The talk I have with Quint that Friday night over beers in my garage is stumbling and ridiculous, and I’m embarrassed for him, almost. For both of us.
It starts with me, explaining that this trick him and Gabe have, it probably isn’t what he thinks.
What I’m doing is being a good friend. Saving him from himself. Saving Gabe.
“Then what is it?” Quint says, eyeing me over his beer.
“You want it to be ESP.”
“What else could it be?”
I shrug, rub a spot on my chin that doesn’t itch.
What I can’t say is what Sherry said, when I explained all this to her: that if she’d been fired from her job, was sponging off her wife’s double shifts, spending all day every day with her infant son, then yeah, she might invent some special powers too. Just to cope.
What I really can’t say is that maybe the twin that died’s involved in all this somehow. A door I can’t open around Quint, because he’d fall through.
“It’s like—like those people you see on That’s Incredible, with dogs and horses, y’know?” I tell him instead. “They want so bad for it to be real that they don’t even realize they’re tapping their toe on the ground seven times, after asking what’s four plus three.”
Quint tips some more beer down the hatch.
“I’m not saying you’re tapping your foot,” I add.
His eyes are red around the rims.
“Then what?” he finally says, for the second time.
I shrug, open my mouth like I have something ready, but don’t, finally fall back on a half-baked version of Sherry’s explanation: that Quint’s spent so much time at home lately that he’s cued into Gabe’s sleeping patterns. That sometimes Gabe wakes up when Quint’s not reading, right?
“He’s a baby,” Quint shrugs. “That doesn’t mean it’s not . . . extra-sensory.”
I swish some spit back and forth between my front teeth.
“If it is,” I finally say, “it’s not like you think.”
This gets Quint’s attention. The way he smiles a little, too, I can tell that he can hear Sherry’s voice in mine, knows I’m her sock puppet here.
“When you read,” I go on, closing my eyes to try to sound only like myself, “I don’t think—I mean, Gabe can’t read, right? Even if he were hearing your little reading voice in your head, the way you say it to yourself, all spooky or whatever, it would just be your voice, not really words. Because he doesn’t understand words yet.”
“That we know of.”
“He’s a baby.”
Quint shrugs, says where I can barely hear, “I did it in Spanish too.”
I stare at the floor, finally close my eyes.
“And it worked?”
“Scientific method,” Quint says, crunching his can against his thigh.
“Then that proves it,” I say. “Gabe doesn’t know Spanish.”
“Maybe there’s a language under words? One that we think in or something. A telepathic society might not have any reason to ever evolve more than one language, did you think about that?”
“Aliens, you mean?”
“I’m just saying.” Quint shrugs, comes back. “He still woke up. When I did it in Spanish. That means something.”
“Because he . . . because it’s not thoughts you’re shooting out of your head, or even pictures, that’s what it means. It’s feelings, the shapes of things. Like, however reading about a dumbass zombie book makes you feel—scared, grossed-out, whatever—Gabe’s feeling that.”
Quint pulls his top lip in for a long time, finally nods whatever, takes another beer.
“So you calling Child Services on me, or what?” he says.
I look away, and then he says it: “You were right, though. This does prove it.”
“ESP?”
“That he’s mine.”
What my heart does right then is stop, cave in on itself some.
“That he’s yours?” I hear myself saying, my voice wooden, hollow.
In answer, Quint pushes up from the trash can he’s been leaning on, then hooks his head to the door that leads into the house. It’s still closed, She
rry and Tanya in there walking on dynamite.
“I wasn’t sure,” Quint says, not using his lips at all. My heart flushes itself, heats up the back of my eyes.
“What do you mean?” I say just as quietly. “Tanya?”
The disbelief in my voice is so real.
Quint purses his lips out, shrugs once.
“Been going on for a while, I think,” he says. “If I hadn’t got laid off . . . I don’t know. I never would have figured it out, probably.”
My mouth is moving to form questions, but I can’t think of the right ones, don’t have time to test them from each angle before throwing them into the ring.
“She—she couldn’t,” I try.
“I think that’s what you always think,” Quint says. “What I’m supposed to think, right?”
“Then . . . what—?”
“Just little stuff,” Quint shrugs. “Like, the other day. She says she called the house, but I wouldn’t talk to her or something. She asked if I still trusted her, if I was just waiting to see who she was going to ask for.”
“Who else could it have been?”
Quint shakes his head no, says I’m not getting it: if she thought the guy was there, then that meant that he had been there, right?
I just stare at him.
He shrugs, chews the inside of his right cheek the way he’s always done. His mother used to spank him for it in elementary.
“I was there,” I say, weakly, the blood surging in my neck now, at the chance I’m taking.
“You would have talked to her though,” Gabe shrugs, not even slowing down. “I told her it was me anyway, yeah?” Then he smiles, covers it with his hand. “She’s acting guilty,” he says between his fingers. “It’s getting to her, I mean. Building up inside her.”
“What about Gabe?”
Quint does his eyebrows, bites his lower lip now.
“He’s mine,” he says, “right? I mean, if he wasn’t, we wouldn’t be able to—we wouldn’t have this connection.”
I nod, try to blink in a normal fashion.
“So now I know whose side he’s on,” Quint adds, raising his beer to me, holding it up like that so it’s the only thing in the world I can see, that I can allow myself to see.