by Jack Ketchum
The current project is some old car. He’s gluing something to the grille.
“Want a chip?” she says.
He doesn’t look up. “No thanks.”
“What’s that one?”
“Flying saucer.”
She laughs.
“Nineteen-fifties Buick Roadmaster convertible. Christmas present from dad a few years back. Been sitting here. It’s not one of the best model companies in the world—real basic stuff—but I thought I’d give it a shot.”
“Looks good.”
He shrugs.
She’s aware as she so often is that this is his room, his space. She wouldn’t dream of sitting down on his bed uninvited, for instance, or browsing through his stuff. Her brother is a private person. Even Caity seems to understand that. Like now. She hasn’t budged from the doorway. And while their mom feels free to barge into Delia’s room unannounced anytime day or night and do whatever she wants in there, she seems content to let the dust bunnies collect in Robbie’s room.
Delia doesn’t know if she envies him for that or not.
She does envy him some things, though.
“Wish I could come to school with you tomorrow,” she says.
“Right. You wanna trade?”
“I would, if mom would let me.”
“You’re not missing anything, believe me.”
She thinks about Mrs. Strawn, her math and science teacher.
“Gotta be better than some old tutor with salami breath,” she said.
He laughs. “I guess.”
To be honest Mrs. Strawn is the worst of them. No sense of humor. No fun. She likes Mr. Jacobsen, her English teacher. But then she likes English. So she isn’t sure how much of that is the subject and how much is him. And she can tolerate voice, though she still thinks Mr. Thatcher is pushing her for the high notes, straining her. He did it again just today running through “I Will Always Love You.” She’s starting to hate that song.
Her mom didn’t agree about his pushing her.
“You’re training a set of muscles,” she said. “They need the workout. Remember, I know. I did this too, way back when. You’ll see.”
And she has to admit she loves dance. That kind of workout she can get behind all the way. Absolutely. Whether it’s classical or modern or even the occasional dip into folk, she loves that feeling of freedom you get after the first half hour or so, that feeling of heat spreading all through your body. And that sense of rightness when the moves all work and came together. Dance is great. Dance is fine.
So she guesses that if you balance it all out she isn’t doing all that bad.
Still, Robbie gets to see a bunch of kids every day. Kids their age. While all she sees are adults. All of whom are focused on her, who want something from her. It’s tiring. She’s tired now.
She’s aware that she’s just standing there. Doing nothing. With not much to say. Robbie’s dabbing some tiny plastic thingy with glue out of a tube.
I must look like a total yo-yo, she thinks.
Time to put it to bed. She’ll read a little first. She’s well into the third book in the North Star series.
“’Night, Robbie,” she says.
“’Night, sis.”
She steps outside and quietly closes the door.
Okay, now where’s Caity?
She’d been sitting right behind her here.
Sometimes that dog is a mouse.
She walks down the hall to her room. Flicks on the light.
No Caity.
Her eyes go to the dollhouse. Her mother’s dollhouse. It’s modeled after some old mansion in Rhode Island, her mom said. Two floors, four bedrooms, two bathrooms. It’s pretty big. Two feet tall, two feet wide and two feet long. And on its built-in wooden table, pretty heavy. They’d had to struggle to get it through the door.
It’s been years since she’s played with the thing. And she’d never really loved it. She’d always found it a little too much somehow. Her mom had made it clear that the furniture and interior were to be handled very carefully. Hand-tooled wooden chairs and beds and sofas. A fireplace of real brick. Tapestries. Paintings on the wall made from a single strand of paintbrush. A kitchen entirely imported from England.
Gramma Atherton had spared no expense on her favorite daughter.
It was pretty to look at. But it kind of sucked when the imaginary kids in the house had to be careful playing with their tea sets and teddy bears.
Where’s the fun in that?
So now it just sits, gathering dust beside her bed. She barely gives it a thought anymore. The dollhouse is just there.
Except the night before last.
Except that the night before last, out of nowhere . . .
She must have been nodding off, half dreaming. But she could swear she saw flickering light coming from the top floor, in the bedroom she used to think of as her own way back when she was little, when in her imagination she still inhabited the place sometimes, when she still liked puttering around up there, rearranging the furniture and stuff.
White light. Pop pop pop. An irregular stuttering. Like some big firefly was trapped inside.
It didn’t last. Maybe two minutes, tops.
But it was weird.
She almost got out of bed to peer inside and get a closer look, to investigate. But truth be told, she was kind of scared.
She wasn’t used to being scared. In fact she couldn’t remember a single time when she’d ever been scared. Not for auditions, not for Mindbender or Wildcat at Frontier City. Not even for Robbie’s DVD of Killer Klowns from Outer Space for god’s sake. Not for anything.
So that chill running down her back had surprised her.
She reached down for Caity at her feet, woke her snorting from her sleep and snuggled along the length of her and they watched together. But there was nothing after that. Before too long she became aware of Caity’s easy, regular breathing, the rise and fall of her strong warm chest beneath her hand and pretty soon she was asleep.
Then last night? Nothing. And she’d sort of tried to stay awake just in case. But yesterday had been the tutors and back-to-back acting and dance classes and by evening she was exhausted. She hit the pillow and was gone.
Maybe I should take it apart and have a look, she thinks. Check it out. Three of the sides were removable. One opened to the front hall, stairs, front parlor, and dining room, one to the kitchen, and one to the back parlor, with bedrooms above each. The light had come from the second floor, right over the back parlor.
She considers it.
A funny thought comes to mind. The house looks at rest now.
She decides not to disturb it.
Instead she spoons up the last of her ice cream, puts down the bowl, and turns to go look for Caity and uh-oh, maybe she turned too fast because all of a sudden she feels this tingling, dizzy sensation and she almost loses her footing, she staggers. For a second everything goes black. Then the black is shot with streaks of color and light as though she were in a car racing through the night on some wet city street and all you can see is this weird blur.
Abruptly the racing stops. She sees a hand reach out as through a heavy mist toward something bright and shiny right in front of her, not her own hand, though it could be, it’s that close to her. But she has the spoon in one hand and the ice cream dish in the other so that’s impossible and then the bright shiny thing is a door of some kind only too small to be a door yet it opens like one and inside are small bottles of something or other and then, just as quickly as door, bottles and light have appeared, they disappear altogether.
No tingling. No dizziness. No mist.
Just her room. Her everyday, normal room.
For the second time in two nights she’s scared. Not way scared but scared. Scared enough.
First the dollhouse and now this.
She needs to find Caity. She doesn’t know why but she does.
She walks out into the hall to her parents’ bedroom, the only place upstair
s she hasn’t been in yet, and when she gets to their door, there she is. She can see Caity sitting in front of the open door to their big brightly lit bathroom, sparing a quick glance over her shoulder at her as she approaches.
There you are, she starts to say but just then Caity sneezes. A great big Caity-size sneeze. She does that sometimes.
“Dammit, Caity!” her mom says.
Her mom is standing in front of the mirrored medicine cabinet over the sink. The sneeze has startled her. An empty plastic water glass drains into the sink’s scalloped bowl. There are pills scattered all across the marble counter. She gathers them up, but too quickly, knocks two of them to the floor.
“Shit,” she says.
She’s not aware of Delia yet. Delia’s out of her sightlines.
Caity is watching her intently.
“Headache, mom?”
She startles, recovers.
“I guess. Probably at the computer too long. You need to use our bathroom for something?”
She opens the medicine cabinet door. The mirror flashes. She turns the pill bottle in her hand and there’s something weird about the way she does that, as though she doesn’t want Delia reading the label—which at this distance she couldn’t anyway—and sets it down inside. She closes the door.
“I was just looking for Caity,” Delia says.
“Well, here she is. And she shouldn’t be. Neither should you. Half hour, I want you in bed, young lady. Big day tomorrow. And I told you, no ice cream at nighttime.”
“I didn’t . . .”
She swipes a thumb across Delia’s cheek. It comes away green.
Busted.
Her mom smiles. So no biggie.
“You e-mail me Caity’s pictures yet?”
“I’ll do it now. Twenty-nine minutes, kiddo. I’m checking on you two. Better be tucked in.”
“We will.”
She moves aside and as her mom brushes passed her she gets a familiar whiff of what she knows to be scotch whiskey, mom’s drink of choice. She and Caity follow her into the bedroom and then through, out into the hall, and she turns and sees mom seated at her vanity table, combing out her long beautiful hair.
Bart’s garage—and it’s his garage, make no mistake about that—is easily big enough to house three cars comfortably. But what with the new four-poster lift out there and his bar and workshop there’s only room for one. He likes it that way. Years ago when the kids were little Pat had angled for a playroom but he’d put the kibosh on that one, saying that she wanted to be able to keep an eye on the kids, didn’t she? Especially Delia. And you couldn’t do that readily if they were out here messing around with god knows what. She’d folded pretty quickly at the logic there.
As a mother with the kids growing up, Pat was protective if she was anything. Now, less so. But by the time she loosened up a bit he’d long since laid claim and the deed was done.
He pours himself another Boodles gin into a tumbler of ice and takes a sip, studying the undercarriage.
The undercarriage is a goddamn thing of beauty. All low-sheen black. Wheel arches, suspension, exhaust system, all of it completely free of rust or fluid seepage. So clean you could practically eat off the thing.
The price tag had daunted him a bit at first. Thirty-two thousand. Another three and a half for the upgrades. But he wanted the upgrades, even the little stuff—the leather heated front seats and heated auto-dim mirrors, the rearview camera, the Bluetooth, the Universal home remote. All of it.
If Patricia has any complaints she hasn’t said so. Delia’s been pulling good money. And what with this series hanging fire . . .
They were gambling, he knew that. But gambling ran in his blood, didn’t it? His father had been an Atlantic City card-counter for three-and-a-half years until he got himself banned from every casino in town. As a teenager growing up Bart loved to hear dad’s stories about the perks and the freebies, about the comp tickets to the Beach Boys and the chorus-girl quim, about disguising himself as a rabbi during the 1964 Democratic Convention or a drunken cripple at Resorts International and retiring with a cool five grand nestled in his pocket and a casino flunky pushing him along to his room in his wheelchair.
He even liked the yarns about those mornings his dad had found himself lying face-down in some gutter somewhere, felled by bad luck and free whiskey.
So they were gambling a little. So what? It made life interesting.
What you didn’t gamble on was quality. And the Firebird here was definitely quality. The real deal.
He eases himself down into his canvas-backed director’s chair, fires up a Winston with the Zippo, and admires her.
Robbie checks out his work.
On the actual vintage 1950s automobile, the “sweapspear” side molding was a chrome-plated strip that ran from just above the Roadmaster’s front wheel, curved down through the body to the top of the rear wheel and then curled in a quarter-circle straight back to the taillight. But on this shitty model they’ve broken the plastic strip into two parts, one that runs from wheel to wheel and the second that circles the taillight. Okay. Bad enough. But on the right side of the car they’d gotten the measurements off, just enough so that you practically had to break the thing in half in order to fit it around the taillight.
It’s practically finished. That big grille in place, wheels in alignment.
But that strip. That damn strip.
He’s super-glued it down, so there it is. It is what it is and what it’s going to be ever after.
And what it is . . . sucks.
He sets the car down and rolls it a few times across his worktable. Then just stares at it a moment, its pale gray body awaiting a paint job.
I don’t think so, he thinks. Not today, not ever.
He raises a fist, brings it down hard and smashes it all to hell. Watches a whitewall tire roll across the table.
When the tire shudders to a stop he opens the deep drawer beneath his table and uses the palm of his hand to slide all parts of a would-be Buick Roadmaster convertible off the desk and into the bin below—a bin which already contains the various parts of a Viking warship, Lon Chaney’s Wolf Man, the White House, a Boeing B-52 Stratofortress bomber, and various other models which over the years have never quite met with his approval.
You’re either worth it or you’re not, he thinks.
He turns to his computer and boots up Resident Evil 4 and settles in.
Delia plops down on her bed and takes off her sneakers and socks and jeans and the Lady Gaga Local Crew T-shirt and slips her plaid L.L. Bean nightgown over her head. Socks go in the hamper. T-shirt and jeans she drapes over the dollhouse, covering up all the front windows and the paneled front door.
Ghostie-lights, gotcha.
Caity’s at the bedroom window.
“You want out, girl?”
The tail starts going.
She slides off the bed to the window just beyond and folds together the three-paneled screen and sets it on the floor. Caity’s out like a shot, her nails clicking along the rooftop. Delia hoists herself up and out.
The night is warm and the breeze light. Together they walk the gentle slope until they’re beyond the window’s sightlines and sit there and she feels that good sense of privacy she’s always felt, that the roof belongs to them and them alone, undiscovered. Down below past their gated yard the streets are silent, winding along in wide lazy semicircles past the houses of neighbors she’s never met aside from glimpses on lawn or sidewalk from their passing car and probably never would meet.
People keep to themselves here. They know the Gilmores and the Levys on either side and the McBrides across the street and that’s that. And the Levys only to wave hello to in the driveway. Nobody else has kids and nobody has a dog. When she and Robbie were little they used to pretend that they were the only two kids in the world, searching the half acre or so of lightly wooded land beyond their house for others. Finding imaginary traces of them. A broken branch. A depression in the tall grass. A
candy wrapper they’d tossed themselves months before.
“Watcha got, girl?” Delia says.
Caity’s rooting around in the old faded baby blanket they keep up there to sit on. She comes up with a small green stuffed dragon, pushes it out from between the folds of the blanket with her snout. A favorite toy. She snorts. Exactly when the dog has snuck it up there Delia has no idea.
She reaches for it.
Caity lowers her chin, protective, and stares at her balefully. Right. She’s soooo scared.
“You crack me up, wiggle-butt,” she says.
She leans back against the faux-wooden siding and gazes up at the stars through a night without a hint of clouds and a waxing crescent moon.
“One of these nights, girl,” she says. “You’ll see. I mean, go figure, eleven years old and never yet saw a shooting star. That’s not right. Not fair. But when I do, you’ll be a witness, won’t you.”
The dog stares up at the sky. The dragon lies between her paws.
Delia scratches the scruff of her neck.
“Yes you will,” she says.
“You like the pic?”
Patricia waits in front of the keyboard until Instant Message bloops her.
“I do,” Roman writes. “Hot.”
“Hot? Gross,” she writes. “She’s eleven years old.”
Bloop. “You know what I mean. She sells the photo. Hot.”
“Of course she does.”
She waits. “Hubby there?” he writes.
“Out playing with his car. Gotta sleep. Can’t. Not tired.”
“Magic beans?”
“How long do they take? Not feeling them yet.”
“Patience, Prudence.”
She doesn’t know where he’s gotten the Lunesta and doesn’t care. One of his buddies in LA she figures. Some client’s doctor. They came in an unmarked bottle and there were fifty of them. A good supply. Now if they just work. It’s been half an hour already.
“Need my sleep,” she writes.
“She ready for producers tomorrow?”
“Yeah. Just have to keep her focused.”
