She thought I was joking, and we laughed fake laughs together, and then I asked again.
The only thing that consoles me anymore is the blue ratchet that made its way back to my porch somehow.
I hold it by the quarter inch bolt, spin it around seven times to the left, then reverse the head, spin it back the other way seven times.
The sound is like one click, then a series of perfectly-spaced echoes.
In the other room now, Sherry, scrubbing, smart and oblivious.
I spin the ratchet louder.
Because Quint thinks he has telepathy again, he buys a high dollar baby monitor. His old one makes its way down to our house. Like the blue ratchet—holding it in one hand, the monitor in the other, I finally make the association I’m supposed to here: the ratchet, it sounds like a rattle.
The way the monitor made it down is that Sherry asked for it. She thinks we’re going to be needing it.
This makes my face warm, then cold.
Two nights later, snugged in with the groceries I’m carrying in, I see a flat box of lace-top, thigh-high hose. They’re black, not white, and make my heart just thump the wall of my chest. Not because I want them on her, then off her, but because—are they a test? If I like them, will it confirm what Sherry’s maybe suspecting? Or, is this how Tanya reaches me, after a week without a Wednesday: dressing Sherry up in her hose, telling her how guys love those? And, guys, or me in particular?
It’s too much for one three-dollar pack of hose.
That night, the hose thankfully in Sherry’s top drawer, I try to just read a car magazine, so Quint and Tanya can sleep—because what if I’m the one waking him with what I think?—but every caption and every tooltip cuts right to the center of me, until Tanya’s calling again, and I’m walking a load of Sherry’s uniforms down, passing them across to Quint.
“What?” he says, when I just stand there.
Not on purpose, I looked at his couch, at the firesafe tucked under it, and it shut me down some.
I shake my head no, nothing.
“You should see,” he says, trying to lure me in again.
His eyes are bloodshot, his beard growing in scraggly.
“He’s scared of you,” I say. “Fucking zombie.”
Quint laughs, rubs his dry bottom lip with the back of his hand, and joke-punches me on the shoulder, and for a moment it feels like I actually wasn’t lying the other week—that we are all still the same. That our kids are still going to be born the same year, to grow up together like we did. That our wives are going to sit in the kitchen with weak margaritas while we burn things on the grill, one of us always running down to the store for ice and beer. Taking just whichever truck’s parked closest to the road.
Sherry finds me on our porch an hour later.
Instead of asking anything or even saying my name, she just hangs up the phone—Tanya, like always when Gabe’s having nightmares—and sits by me.
When her robe parts over her thigh, I see the silky black hose she’s got rolled up her legs, and Tanya flashes in my head, her white nurse’s shoe pushing hard into the headliner of her car.
I take the corner of Sherry’s robe, pull it back into place.
That weekend, when Tanya won’t, I pick Quint up from the county lock-up.
What he’s in for isn’t owning the kind of pornography he’s been using to try to scare himself, to connect with Gabe, but for getting caught buying it downtown.
Sherry says no wonder Tanya’s been stepping out, right?
I’m at the door, about to leave.
“She told you with who yet?” I say, real casual, no eye contact.
“You asking for you or for him?” she snaps back, smiling behind it so I have no idea what she might be really saying.
I pull the door to, back out of the driveway slowly, obeying every law I can remember.
Two nights ago, waking all at once from a dream, the patter of squirrel feet in my head, the first thing I saw was the baby monitor on our dresser. It was on, the red lights amping up, like someone was running the pad of their finger over the microphone on the other end.
It wasn’t plugged in, but did have a nine-volt battery inside, one that had leaked, scabbed over.
For the rest of the night I stared at it, the monitor, until I could make out some breathing. Gabe’s? This monitor was tuned to the same band or frequency or whatever as the new one, the one that was powerful enough to push the signal all the way down here. That had to be it.
So it would wear out during the day, and because I wasn’t going to be there, I left it on.
Or, really, because I didn’t want to touch it.
The dream I was waking from wasn’t a dream either, really. More like a nightmare. It involved the Wednesday trailer somehow, but our stubby attic too, and Gabe at twelve years old, his hair dyed black to match his clothes, chains and anger seeping off every angle of his body. The only chain that mattered was the one around his neck, though. The one Tanya’s Wednesday key was hanging from.
And maybe it wasn’t a dream, even.
When I woke, anyway, it wasn’t like I opened my eyes to the baby monitor. More like I realized I’d been staring at it.
Getting into my truck in the parking lot of lock-up, all his possessions in a manila envelope, Quint asks what’s wrong?
I just look over at him.
He’s still smiling. How he lived through booking and sixteen hours in lock-up is a complete mystery. That’s the kind of oblivious he can be, though. The kind of focus he’s always had.
Instead of going back to our houses, he directs me downtown. Because they confiscated his cardboard box of illegal porn, wouldn’t even let him tear any of the pages out.
Because his cash is all in the form of a city-issued check, I have to give him the thirty-two dollars it costs for the cigar-box of photographs he buys from a guy I try hard not to be remembering.
“Don’t,” I say, holding the lid of the box down when he starts to open it.
He hisses a laugh through his teeth, pours his possessions out from his manila envelope. Last, because it sticks on the brad, is Tanya’s key to Wednesday.
“You should chuck it,” I say as he’s ducking into the chain. “Temptation, all that.”
“I get points for it,” he says, pulling the chest of his shirt out to drop the key down.
“Points?”
“Dr. J. It’s one of the things I have to show each week. Whoever has the most points gets to go first.”
“So show him a different one,” I say, my arms draped over the steering wheel so I’m driving with my forearms and elbows. So it would be awkward to look directly sideways anymore.
Quint considers this.
“What if I want to know someday?” he says.
“You don’t,” I tell him, wincing inside because I’m agreeing with Jakobi. “I mean, what would you do, if you knew?”
Quint stares at my dashboard. “Something bad,” he finally says.
I pooch my lips out, nod. “Leaving Gabe where?” I tack on.
Quint nods, keeps nodding, then reaches over to my keys, thumbing through for one that’s properly silver, and small enough that it could fool Jakobi.
The first thing I think, his finger suddenly on the key to the trailer, about to hold it up to his, to compare, is to haul the wheel over, like his hand at the ignition’s scared me somehow.
We might crash into a bridge abutment or concrete pylon, yeah.
But he wouldn’t find the key.
He sees it all coming though, nods ahead to the wreck I’m about to involve us in, and I veer back to my side of the road, a film of sweat breaking out all over, the cigar box of illegal porn spilling down from the dash so that I have to see splashes of skin I could probably go to jail for transporting.
What I tell Quint as he’s trying to collect all his porn is that I need all my keys for work, then, after I drop him off, I vacuum the floorboard on his side for three seventy-five cent cycles. The soun
d of the vacuum is strong and institutional, and I think I could do this for a job, maybe. A career.
With that kind of sound in your ears, it’s hard to think, I mean.
I finally come home at dark.
Sherry’s waiting for me on the porch, and it’s good at least not to have to make some excuse to take a shower. Instead of Tanya, I just smell like the carwash.
We eat lasagna again, forking in bite after perfect bite. Somewhere in there Sherry informs me that we’re watching Gabe tomorrow night.
“Tanya’s sister finally pop?” I say, chewing.
“Emergency therapy,” Sherry says, stabbing through another layer of pasta. “Dr. Jakobi.”
My keys are in their tin dog bowl on the table by the back door.
I go to sleep thinking of them, waiting for the red lights of the monitor to wrap around again, and try hard not to think of Tanya’s nurse shoe pressing against any headliner. Because my head’s leaky, I know, and that’s not the kind of thing a son should have to know about his mom.
In trade for us giving up our Friday night, Tanya leaves a hot meatloaf on their kitchen table for us, and two rented movies on top of the TV, a twelve-pack dead center on the bottom shelf of the fridge.
Quint mopes out after her, his eyes trying to tell me something. I can’t make it out, though. Maybe I’m supposed to be making some excuse for him, saving him from Jakobi. Or maybe I’m supposed to call the hospital if Quint gets scared enough in therapy that Gabe wakes up screaming. Or maybe I’m supposed to be handing him his blue ratchet now, instead of leaving it in my pocket.
I don’t know.
The movies are an even split: one romance, one action.
As soon as Quint’s truck is gone, Sherry has Gabe up from his crib, is cooing to him, pretending. Practicing.
I sit at the table alone, scraping off the ketchup baked onto the top of the meatloaf, listening to this wonderful absence of squirrels, and find myself four beers into the twelve-pack by the time Sherry sits down across from me, Gabe on her knee.
“He’s the one I feel sorry for, really,” she says, halving the piece of meatloaf I saved for her.
“He doesn’t know,” I say, flicking my eyes to Gabe then away.
Hanging from the rusted shower rod in the bathroom, where they don’t have to be, is one of Tanya’s lace-top pairs of hose.
I stand there, stand there, finally have to shut my eyes to pee. Aim by echo location.
In their dryer, still, are half of Sherry’s work shirts.
After dinner I stand in the utility doorway with a beer, watch Sherry fold them into a paper bag, one after the other, Gabe undoing one for every two she can get done.
She’s so patient with him, is making it all into a game.
“You should watch your movie,” she says. “I’ll keep him in here.”
“What about yours?” I say.
“Just go,” she says, already half into some peek-a-boo game with Gabe.
By the time she’s through, she’ll have folded everything in the utility, I know.
I collect another beer on the way to the living room, push my movie into the player, settle back into the couch, and am twenty minutes into it—eight people dead already—when the beer I’m trying to settle into the carpet dings on the firesafe.
It’s like a gong in my head.
And it doesn’t draw Sherry.
Using more beer as an excuse, I get up, deposit my two empties in the trash, carry the last of the twelve-pack back to the living room, and study the street through the gauzy front curtain. It’s empty. Nobody watching, no Quint-truck idling in the drive, him and Tanya talking about their marriage. To be sure, I lock the door, then, to be even more sure, ease down the hall. Sherry’s in the bedroom with Gabe now, dressing him in outfit after outfit. “We can watch your movie,” I offer. She looks up to me, her eyebrows drawing together in what I register as earnest consternation—something I don’t think I’ve ever registered before, from anybody—then reaches forward to keep Gabe from overbalancing off the edge of the bed.
“I hope she doesn’t move,” she says.
“Tanya?”
“If they split up, I mean.”
“It’s her parent’s house.”
“I know. It’s just—”
“They won’t.”
“Would you?” she asks.
“Would I what?” I say back.
“If I was, y’know. Like Tanya.”
If she were like Tanya. If I’d been meeting her each Wednesday for two years. If somebody like me had. If I were Quint. “Trying to tell me something?” I say, smiling around my beer. This is as serious as we ever talk. As serious as I can ever let it get, anyway.
It’s like walking through a field of bear traps. I tilt my beer to her, a toast, and back out, leave the hall light on behind me so I’ll be able to see her shadow if she’s walking towards the living room.
Still, sitting in front of my movie, the sound turned up as cover, the firesafe in my lap—I don’t know. Is this a trap too? Has Quint spit-glued hairs around the edges, so if I open it they’ll break?
Was that whole thing about an artifact of Tanya’s affair just something he made up, when what’s really in the box is a picture of me and him, from ten years ago? Did Jakobi slip something therapeutic in there while he wasn’t looking, which’ll get ruined if I see it?
The box is so heavy with all this that I’m surprised I’m even able to lift it. That it’s not already crushing me.
Six times, then, the movie blaring, I count to ten, waiting for truck headlights—any headlights—to wash over the curtains, and six times they don’t. So I ease my key into the lock, twist. The top sighs open.
Inside is a folded piece of paper. It’s been ripped from a small notebook, the kind any good therapist is going to keep handy. My lips are trembling, inside. Not where anybody would be able to see. Written in Tanya’s hand, in pencil, a name, not mine, just somebody she made up on the spot, because she’s not stupid. I close my eyes in thanks, maybe even smile, and when I open them again
Sherry’s standing there, Gabe on her hip.
She’s just staring at me. No expression on her face at all.
“He—he gave you the key,” she says, her eyes boring right into me now, and—it’s my only choice, really—I nod, once. Leave my head down.
She knows about the firesafe, the name, the special key. All of it.
“And?” she says.
“What?” My voice is weak. I’m not built for this. “Are you going to tell him now?”
I look down to the paper again, then back up to her.
“I don’t want to know,” she says. “It’s none of our business, right?” Beside her, Gabe is staring at me too. His eyes seeing I-don’t-know-how deep Behind them, guns and a car exploding.
“He’s my best friend,” I say, trying to watch the movie now. Again. Still.
“And you think it’ll be good for him, to know?”
What I’m supposed to say is built into her question, how she asks it. It usually is.
I shake my head no, it wouldn’t be good for him. That, because he’s my friend, I won’t tell, will keep it inside, hold it forever, even if it gives me cancer.
Sherry shakes her head at me, turns on her heel, goes back to whatever she has going on in the other part of the house. I relock the firesafe, push it back under the couch, and watch the movie without seeing any of it. At some point the name Tanya wrote on the paper hits me—Was it a real name, some other other guy?—and then a tank blows up on-screen and Gabe cries in the other room. I turn the movie down, and the next time I move my head, I think, is when Quint’s truck door shuts outside. Just one door. It means Tanya sat beside him for the drive home. A good session, then.
When they come through the screen, they’re holding hands. Or, Tanya’s holding Quint’s. What he is is limp, like he’s being dragged. But that’s better than a lot of the ways he could be. You don’t go to emergency therapy for ill
egal porn then come home happy, I don’t guess.
Sherry appears in the door, Gabe in outfit number 435, or somewhere up there.
Tanya crosses the room to him, leading with the heels of her hands the ways moms do, and Sherry’s watching me close, I know. Waiting for me to nod or not nod to Quint.
Instead, I just try to avoid his eyes altogether. Throw him the second-to-last beer, another impossible spiral.
“He was an angel,” Sherry’s saying above me, on her way to the turn the movie off.
“You like it?” Quint says, unloading his wallet onto the speaker by the door, nodding to the paused movie.
“Which one?” I say, and he laughs in his way, looks into the kitchen for some reason—it’s dark in there—then does the thing that almost makes me forget how to breathe: ducks out of the chain around his neck.
He hangs it from the upslanted peg just under his hat.
Sherry sees this, I know, even directs a question down to me, her eyes hot and sad both, but doesn’t say anything, and, either because she’s smart or by chance—but it can’t be chance—when she comes to bed later that night she’s got those lace-topped hose on, and makes sure I see.
“You like?” she says, and I nod, pull her close, wonder the whole way through if the noises she’s making are hers or what she imagines Tanya might sound like, and then I think that maybe, if she can be Tanya, like Tanya, then maybe she’ll get pregnant like she wants, like she deserves, and then none of this will matter, and to try to make it stick, to make it take, I even whisper Tanya’s name into the pillow at the end, instantly hate myself. And then we roll away to our sides of the bed.
“Gabe?” Sherry says after a few minutes of fake breathing.
“Share,” I say.
There’s nothing to say, though.
It took, I know. She’s pregnant now, has to be. It’s the only thing that can stop me from being me, the only thing that can turn me into something else, something better. A dad.
For a few tense moments there’s a tremble in the bed, and I think she’s crying but lie to myself that she doesn’t want me to reach across, touch her thigh, her hip, her hand.
And then nothing. Sleep. Me fixed on those dead lights of the baby monitor on the dresser, waiting for them to wind up.
The Year's Best Dark Fantasy and Horror Page 38
