by Edward Hogan
I parked the bicycle and we went into the center, the floors shiny and squeaking, the escalators like huge metal caterpillars. The shopping center was on three levels, all built in rings around a central core. The last of the daylight was coming through a glass roof, which looked like the roof of the Dome, except that it was covered in bird muck. A helium balloon in the shape of a tiger was stuck up against the glass. I felt small within the huge curves of the mall. There were plenty of shoppers, but they didn’t pay any attention to us. “People can’t see you,” I said.
“Most people can’t.”
“How come I can?”
“I don’t know. It takes a special sort of sensitivity. Toddlers can sometimes see me, and people who are feeling particularly sad.”
“Well. It should make nicking stuff a lot easier,” I said. “They can’t see your clothes, can they? I’m not walking around with a hoodie and a demin skirt, am I?”
“No. When I’m in contact with an object, it disappears. When I let it go, they can see it again. That’s why those folks didn’t get out of the way when you were cycling. They couldn’t see us or the bike.”
“So I was invisible?”
“Yep. The dad thought a squirrel had called him a moron.”
“Christ,” I said.
We went into a sporting-goods store. “What’s the plan?” she asked.
“Leave it to me,” I said. The saleswoman looked at me like I was weird. I realized she thought I was talking to myself.
“Can I help you?” she asked.
I adopted my dad’s drunk/posh voice. “You certainly may. I’d like to try on a pair of your finest tennis shoes, please. Size eight.”
“OK, take a seat,” she said.
I sat down on the bench.
“What’re we doing?” Lexi said.
“You’ll figure it out. What clothes do you fancy?”
She looked around. “I don’t know. Not my usual style. That red ski jacket looks warm, though.”
“Darling, you can have whatever you like,” I said grandly.
A couple of girls walked by, staring at me. “What a freak,” one of them said.
Lexi tripped her, and she stumbled into a rack of tracksuit bottoms. I laughed and then began to carefully pick my nose.
“That’s not a very pleasant habit, Daniel,” Lexi said.
“Yeah, well,” I said. “It’s for a good cause. Go and choose a coat.”
Lexi walked over to the rack of jackets, keeping a close eye on me.
There were three assistants and a security guard in the store. The first assistant came back with a couple of pairs of sneakers and began to lace them. With a practiced flick of my thumb, I released the dried clot in my right nostril, and the blood began to drip onto my feet and the floor.
“Oh, are you OK?” the assistant asked.
“Yeah, I guess. I feel a bit odd, actually,” I said. I looked over at Lexi, who gave me a disapproving frown. The saleswoman asked one of her colleagues if she had any tissues. She didn’t, and so they called the security guard over. He had a packet of Kleenex. While they were talking, I winked at Lexi and pulled the scab from the other nostril, releasing a second bright stream. “Whoa!” the security guard said. “That’s a lot of blood. Are you all right?”
“I feel strange,” I said. It was true, in many ways.
Beyond the concerned faces of the store staff, I saw Lexi slip on the red jacket, shaking her head. I pretended to faint, and the third shop assistant came over to attend to me. It was the perfect distraction, and nobody saw the red jacket vanish. I lay down on the bench. Lexi walked past me and the group of shop assistants. “I think a nosebleed is a bit over the top, Daniel,” she said.
“I’ll meet you outside, by the Disney Store,” I said.
“The guy’s delirious,” the security guard said. “He’s talking about Disney.”
Lexi grinned. I watched her walk out into the airy light of the shopping center, as bright and flashy as the gold and silver watches in the storefront beyond her.
I arrived at the Disney Store with a piece of tissue in each nostril. Lexi was leaning against the front of the store, the Little Mermaid and Pocahontas behind her in the window display. “Nice coat,” I said out of the corner of my mouth.
“That was a little elaborate, Daniel,” she said.
“Well,” I said, “it worked, didn’t it? Don’t tell me you weren’t impressed.”
“Somebody’s got his confidence back,” she said.
We walked over to the drinking fountain, where Lexi bent down and wet her hair, stroking the water through the strands. When she stood up, she looked so small against the huge backdrop of white pillars, steel, and glass. Despite all the cuts and bruises, that was the first time I saw how vulnerable she was.
I bought us two cups of tea from the Baskin-Robbins grotto, and we dipped into a secluded corner, where nobody would see the cardboard teacup disappearing into thin air as she took it or hear me talking to the wall. Lexi stood by the heating vents, warming up. She asked me about the nosebleeds, and I told her about the Lauren Harket letter. I felt like I could finally laugh about it. I was just telling her about the toddlerbody incident when her face changed completely. She flinched and took a quivering breath.
“What’s wrong?” I said, but she wouldn’t look at me. She was staring over my shoulder. “Lexi?”
She began to shiver again. I turned and followed her gaze. Through the meld of shoppers walking across my sight line, I could see a man on the other side of the mall. He had dark, neatly trimmed hair and was wearing a sharp suit and a silver tie. One side of the suit was dark and shiny. Wet. He had a long coat folded over his arm. Gleaming at his neck was a bloody hole. His expression was knowing. He did not look at me. Only Lexi. A second later, he had disappeared back into the crowd.
“Let’s go,” I said to Lexi, and took her arm. She was rigid. “Quick!”
She dropped the tea, which spread across the rubbery floor. Then she turned to the wall and vomited. “Jesus,” I said. I looked back into the crowd, but I couldn’t see him. “What do we do, Lexi? Talk to me.”
She straightened up but was still woozy. “We have to go,” she said.
We stumbled toward the exit. I turned and saw the man ambling casually in our direction. He didn’t seem in any sort of hurry, but that didn’t make me feel any better. Lexi stopped. “Come on, Lexi,” I said. I put out my arm to support her and took her weight. She began to walk again. “Good,” I said.
We made it to the exit, and when I looked back, he was lost among the shoppers.
I made sure we were out of sight and then put Lexi on the seat of the bike. She held on to me as we pushed off. I got up some good speed. I had to. The gravel rasped and pinged beneath the wheels, and the bike’s light shone.
As soon as we got out on the main path, I felt Lexi relax. “It’s OK,” she said. “He can’t follow us. He can’t come for me. Not yet.”
“What’s going on?”
“This always happens, near the end.”
I stayed quiet then. The images of what he must have done to her — and what he was going to do again — kept flashing through my mind. Part of my brain was calculating his actions from the injuries on her body. I willed it to stop.
I pulled up by the Pancake House. “Where are you going?” she asked.
I remembered what she’d said about eating for pleasure and comfort. And I was hungry, too. “We need food.”
I went inside and got two cheese-and-mushroom pancakes to take out. I watched Lexi through the big windows. She stood shivering, looking out on the lake, half of her body lit by the orange glow of the outdoor heaters next to the tables. Even standing this close, I felt nervous that something might happen to her.
Back at the clearing, we ate the pancakes and sat around the fire she made. We soon cheered up, and she put the Native American headdress back on. I washed the grease from my hands in the lake, and my foot slipped into the water. Lexi
laughed. “We’ll dry your sock by the fire,” she said. I took off my shoe and then the wet sock. As I turned it inside out, the folded newspaper articles fell to the ground. Lexi picked them up and I froze. “This is what you were doing at the Internet café, I suppose?” she said with a smile.
She read through the first couple of articles, making various sarcastic comments. “Huh,” she said. “I used to love that blue dress.”
“How come you’re not wearing it now?” I asked.
“That would be a bit morbid.”
“So where do you get your clothes?”
“Girls’ changing rooms, lost property box,” she said. “I stole the swimsuit from a shop, for hygiene reasons.”
“So I’m not the first person to think of nicking clothes for you, then?” I asked.
“No. But it’s much more fun with you.”
She stopped when she got to the more recent stories. The appeal made by her parents. She placed the article on the ground and smoothed the slightly damp paper. She looked at the photograph of her mother and father for a long time. “He’s going gray,” she said. “Is that possible?”
She looked again. “It’s stress, I suppose,” she said. “It says here they’re still looking for me.”
“That’s from last year,” I said.
“Oh,” she said.
“What are they like, your parents?”
“Oh, they’re great. Just great. My dad carves wooden sculptures. Animals mainly. He makes cots as well, for babies. He has a workshop at the back of the house. I used to love the smell of that place. Such a dry, good smell. Mum’s a teacher. She’s the breadwinner really.”
“You miss them,” I said.
“Bad enough to go crazy. My sister, too. She’d be sixteen now. She’s catching up. No photos of her. She’ll be a beauty.”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“Don’t be sorry. I was lucky to have them,” she said. She poked the fire with a stick. “Sometimes I get glimpses, you know. Just details of what it used to be like. When I go down in the water, I can see things at the bottom. I swear I can. On our front door, we used to have a piece of glass, with this colored design. It was a ship. Like those ones they used to have in the Armada. Red sails, blue water. You know the kind of thing. The light used to come through it when we were playing in the hall. It looked like the ship was rising up out of the carpet.”
She was smiling now, her eyes watery and red. “Sometimes I swear I can see that glass at the bottom of the lake, with the light shining through. But it’s too deep — way down beneath all the reeds. Too far away. I guess I’ll never get there.”
I turned away from her tears. I felt my own sadness turning to anger. “I hate him,” I said.
“Who?” she said.
“The bastard who did this to you.”
She shrugged. “On Sunday, when it’s over,” she said, “I won’t feel like this anymore. Not for a while, anyway. It’s like waiting for an operation.”
“No, it isn’t,” I said.
“No,” she said. “It isn’t.”
I pressed my hands into my eyes. Lexi smoothed over the photograph of her father. I heard that voice again. You have to do something, it said. I could hear her breathing, trying not to cry. She was getting weaker.
“I want you to do something for me,” she said.
“What?” I said.
“Call your mother,” she said.
“Why?”
“Because you can.”
I nodded. “Can’t you come home with me? Back to the cabin? You could sleep there.”
“It doesn’t work,” she said. “I always end up back here.”
“Can’t I stay with you?”
“Your dad will worry about where you are,” she said.
“I don’t care,” I said.
“You bloody well should care,” she said. The photo of her own distraught father was still visible in the firelight.
“But what about the man? What if he comes here?”
“He won’t. He will wait. Call her. Call your mother.”
I took my sock and rolled up the leg of my tracksuit bottoms to put it on. Blood trickled down onto my foot. The gash was back. I turned away, half pleased, half scared to death, and hid the wound from Lexi.
I was standing in front of the bathroom mirror snorting nasal spray when I saw the small hole in my side. It was just below my ribs. Although it wasn’t a big wound, it felt deep. I looked at it and wondered if it might be the one that eventually killed me. I put a Band-Aid over it, knowing that by lunchtime the cut might have outgrown the dressing.
“Daniel? Can I have a word?” It was Dad, shouting through.
I pulled on my T-shirt and went into the living area, thinking all of a sudden of its logical opposite: a dying area. Dad was sitting next to a skinny man with a beard who had his hands clasped at his knees, as though he was trying to pray without anyone seeing.
“Daniel, this is Mr. Evans, who’s the community, um . . .”
The man intervened. “I’m the community welfare officer for Leisure World. You can call me Greg,” he said. He held out his hand, which I shook. I recognized his tone of voice and his “I-don’t-patronize-young-adults” handshake from all the counselors at school.
“Right,” I said. “Community welfare. God. What is this place?”
He smiled. “Sports and leisure are an important part of child welfare, but we don’t want to neglect the other issues,” he said.
“So what’s the problem here, Greg?” Dad said, doing his best to be good-natured.
“Let me explain. Do sit down, Daniel.”
“I’m fine standing,” I said. Nobody tells me to sit down in my own living area. Besides, I thought he might see the gash on my leg when my tracksuit bottoms rode up.
“OK. Daniel. Mr. Lever. Two days ago, one of the lifeguards from the Tropical Dome reported that a boy had been seen swimming with fairly serious and uncovered wounds. A Leisure World guest had complained that there was blood in the water, which is obviously unhygienic.”
I thought of Ryan and hoped he wasn’t the lifeguard in question.
“We later identified the boy as you,” Mr. Evans said.
“Look,” said Dad. “He’s a youngster. He’s been hanging around with some pals here, and they’ve been roughhousing. It’s perfectly natural behavior for lads to get into scraps.”
“Is that your version, Daniel?” Mr. Evans said.
I nodded. “Roughhousing, like he said.”
“You realize the importance of pool hygiene, I’m sure. But what’s more important to us is that you — as our guest — are OK. Physically and mentally.”
“There’s nothing wrong with him mentally,” Dad said.
“There are top-notch first-aid facilities and fully qualified doctors here,” Mr. Evans said. “There are also people like me, whom you can talk to in confidence about any injuries you’ve sustained. And how you sustained them. Do you understand?”
“Is that all?” Dad said.
“Mr. Lever, I’d like Daniel to answer, please,” said Mr. Evans.
“Is that all?” I said.
“Actually, no. There’s something else.” He pulled a DVD out of his leather satchel. “May I?” he asked, kneeling down in front of the TV.
I thought it might be some instructional film about “How to Cope with Stress” or “Ten Facts about Depression,” both of which I had seen already. But as soon as I saw the black-and-white picture and the date and time in the corner, I knew I was done for. It was the security video from the shopping center.
“After a strange encounter at Sports Soccer yesterday, a security surveillance officer brought this footage to my attention.”
We watched in silence as I trotted through the mall, chatting happily away to the blank space next to me. Groups of people (I hadn’t even seen at the time) looked back at me and pointed. A woman diverted her pram away from my mad ramblings.
The camera angle switched
and the time jumped forward as I took my two cups of tea round the corner into the alcove. My back was to the camera, and I was throwing my arms out and laughing. I saw myself turn to look across the mall and saw the terrified look on my face. I looked at the TV, trying to pick out the man, but I couldn’t see him. Suddenly, in the video, there was tea all over the floor and I was running. I put my arm out to the side, and then I disappeared from the screen.
In the living area, I could feel Evans watching me. The footage was on a loop, and after a few seconds it began again with me chattering away to nobody. Mr. Evans paused the DVD, with me laughing in the center of the screen, completely alone. It was a compelling case for insanity. I was pretty convinced myself.
It took some courage for me to turn and look at Dad. He was still staring at the screen. This is going to be bad, I thought. I’m in serious trouble. This is the sort of behavior we’d come on holiday to avoid. I prepared to be outraged. “Get out,” Dad said.
“What?” I shouted.
“Not you. Him. Mr. Evans.”
“Pardon?” said Mr. Evans.
“Very simple instruction,” Dad said. “Get your scrawny arse outta my cabin.”
“Mr. Lever. I came here with the utmost concern for your son. It’s clear that his behavior is quite troubling, and I’m trying to —”
Dad stood up from his seat very quickly, and Mr. Evans flinched. “All these bloody cameras,” Dad said. “Of course you catch the lad doing something weird. Same for anyone. If I watched you all day, Greg, I think I’d find that you might be doing the odd strange thing, too. Like watching videos of young boys and seeing what they’re up to in the swimming pool.”
“Now, Mr. Lever —”
Dad made a faint gesture toward Mr. Evans’s chair, and the man stood hastily and started making his way toward the door. “I must say, Mr. Lever, I do think you’ll be hearing from us again. This is not the way to treat —”
“Bugger off out of my house. I mean cabin. Or whatever the hell it is.”
Mr. Evans skipped out of the door a half second before Dad slammed it. Dad put his hands on his hips and then turned around.
