“Hold on.” He touched her wrist. “Let’s not do anything rash.”
She gaped at him. “What are you talking about? Henry could’ve frozen to death or fallen through one of the holes in the theater and broken his neck.” She was aware of Henry watching her, following the conversation avidly, and tried to soften her tone. “It’s dark out here, Red, and it’s freezing cold.”
“You’re right,” he said. “But if you call the police”—he lowered his voice to just above a whisper—“they’re only going to take him away.”
At this, Sonia felt the boy stiffening in her arms. That’s the idea, she wanted to say, followed by: Since when are you such an advocate of Owen Mast? But neither of these things were what Henry needed to hear right now. As it was, he already looked on the cusp of tears. She could feel him trembling in the Polarfleece blanket that Red had swaddled him in.
“Look,” Red said. He stared at her for a long time before continuing. “Let me talk to Owen first. I’ll pour some coffee into him, sober him a little, and let him know what it’s come to. I’ll bring him around. After that, if you still want to call the cops, okay. But I think …” Red took a breath, and she could see him struggling to arrange the words in his head. Sonia had seen trial footage of him in this exact state after his first wife’s death, a man grown fat on life’s cheerful generalities, now laboring hard to find some precision within the depths of his five thousand—dollar suit. “I think taking his kid away from him might be the last straw.”
“What if it’s the wake-up call he needs?” Sonia asked.
“You said people were there for me when I needed it, and you were right. Owen and I have had our differences, but I owe him this much. At least I have to try.”
“I don’t get this. Why are you sticking up for him?”
“If I don’t,” Red said, “nobody will. I guess maybe I know how that feels.”
Sonia felt all remaining argument vacuumed out of her in the form of a silent sigh. An earlier version of her—the individual she’d thought she was before seeing Scott’s car parked outside the McGuire house tonight—might have put up more of a fight, but at this point, she just didn’t have it in her.
Admitting that to herself, though, was harder than she’d anticipated.
And in the end, she just walked away.
ASLEEP IN THE STOCKROOM of Fusco’s, sprawled out between cases of beer and liquor, Owen dreamed of the Bijou fire.
The dream was vivid enough to send his heart racing, even as he slept. Everything was slowed down, the details sharpened: He could see his mother’s tired face reflecting the colors of the movie and smell his father’s Aqua Velva mixed in with the gassy smell of the old man digesting another dinner. From here and there came the soft crackling of the audience munching popcorn. His father stifled a yawn. Emotionally it was all clearer too, Owen’s anger at having to be here when Scott was free at college, his loathing for this town and his parents and Great-Uncle Butch. Everybody knew that Great-Uncle Butch was a fraud. All missionaries were frauds and leeches; they sucked up money and claimed to be doing God’s work, and if you believed them, well, then you were just another sucker too. Not that there was any shortage of them here tonight, he thought—sheep lining up to be sheared, one after another.
Somewhere in the audience, a kid started crying. Owen tried to ignore it at first, concentrating on his own rage, squeezing it down into a hard black ball in his chest. The pain gave him a perverse thrill, like biting off his nails and pushing the parings up into his gums until they bled. But as the crying got worse, became screaming actually, Owen realized something was going on behind him that maybe didn’t have to do with the movie.
He was going to turn around when he noticed what was on the screen. Instead of missionaries painting houses, there was the figure of a pale girl in a blue dress, standing there with her arms spread wide. Somehow Owen found this seemingly innocent image totally unnerving—and he wasn’t alone. Several rows back, the kid’s wails rose up a notch, as if he were being tortured. All at once, Owen started seeing stars, his mouth filled up with nauseated saliva, and he knew he was going to be sick. Either that or he was going to start crying. To his right, he saw his father covering his eyes, and was he screaming too—or was he yawning again? It didn’t make sense.
I’m only feeling this way because I’m drunk, he thought remotely. It’s the anniversary of the fire, and I got drunk; I’m having nightmares, some kind of fucked-up posttraumatic flashbacks like those Vietnam veterans, except instead of a war, I got this. I’ll wake up shivering in a puddle of piss and everybody will be laughing at me, but at least I’ll be awake.
Except that, more and more, with every passing second, the nightmare was becoming real. Between the screams of the kid and the image on the screen, some third event was taking place. In chemistry class, they’d learned how certain compounds, inert in themselves, came together to form lethal mixtures, but what was mixing together here? Owen became aware of a boiling cloud of explosive energy, as if the theater were filling with natural gas.
Buried in the dream, the sense of impending doom was more than he could take. He jumped out of his theater seat, shoved past his mother, who scowled at him—“Where do you think you’re going?”—and fell into the darkened aisle, smashed his knee on the armrest, and started scrambling for the red EXIT sign. A few other heads turned at the commotion. Owen ignored them all. He took three steps, and that was when he saw the kid who had been screaming. He was a beautiful blond boy, three or four years old, wide-eyed. He looked more scared than any child had any reason to be. He stood on his seat with his arms outstretched to Owen, the message plain: Get me the hell out of here, mister.
Not even thinking, teenage Owen scooped up the boy, while adult Owen, paddling helplessly through the drunken dream, thought immediately of his son, Henry. Of course, the boy in the theater seat wasn’t Henry—on the night of the fire, Henry wouldn’t even be born for another fifteen years—but the resemblance between them was more than accidental. And the last thing Owen heard the boy say just before the fireball came rippling through the theater, tearing the child from his arms, was the helpless, unfinished cry that came from the boy’s lips, a single word that changed everything:
Daddy.
SONIA BUCKLED HENRY into the back of her car and drove to Fusco’s, slowly and carefully, feeling her back tires slither and twist across the packed snow. In her rearview mirror, she watched as Red followed her in his pickup. When they arrived at the bar, Henry had fallen asleep in his harness. She waited until Red got out and came over.
“We’ll wait here while you go in and talk to him,” she said.
Red nodded and trudged dutifully into the bar like a man going to the gallows, an act he seemed to have perfected just living here in this town. Watching him even now, Sonia felt an errant twinge of genuine affection for him and labored to suppress it. She didn’t need any more emotional attachments, certainly not to married men.
So what’s your next move?
Henry’s chin sagged low to his chest. She didn’t particularly want to take the boy back to Earl’s house, although her options were narrowing by the minute. She tried Scott’s cell phone again, and this time he answered.
“Where are you?” she asked.
“I’m back to the house—Round House.” His voice sounded hollow and hoarse, not like himself at all. “The house in the woods,” he said, and then added: “I’m writing.”
Before she could stop herself, she blurted, “I saw you over at Colette’s tonight.”
There was a long, deep silence. Then: “How did you—” He stopped. “Was that you at the window? Were you spying on us?”
“What were you doing?”
Scott didn’t answer. Neither of them spoke for what felt like whole minutes. In the ensuing silence, Sonia felt that vertiginous slippage between past and present, as if they could just as easily have been talking about what happened sixteen years ago, when she’d seen him at Colette’
s house, up in the window. She had the uncanny sensation that he was feeling the same way: that they’d both stumbled into the exact same chronological wormhole that returned them to the day before the prom. In front of her, snow smacked the windshield, temporarily eclipsing the entire street in front of her. Time is rolling backward in Milburn, New Hampshire, she thought. If you don’t watch out, you’ll get rolled up with it.
She broke the spell first. “I-I came out looking for Red. There was an incident.”
“What happened?”
Thinking of Henry, she lowered her voice. “Owen left Henry in the truck while he came into the bar to get drunk, and Henry ran off. We found him at the old Bijou Theatre, where the renovation’s going on.”
“Henry was inside the theater? Is he okay?”
“He’s all right now,” she said, “but I really don’t want to send him home with Owen tonight.”
“Do you need me to come get him?”
Activity flittered in her peripheral vision: Sonia turned and saw the front door of the bar open and Red lumber back out again, his boots already caked with snow. “One second.” She pressed the tip of her thumb over the cell phone’s tiny mouthpiece and waited for him to come up to the driver’s side, rolling down the window. “Well?”
“Owen’s completely blitzed,” Red said. “I’m talking totally comatose. Lisa had a couple of the guys haul him into the stockroom to sleep it off.” He shook his head. “I’ll talk to him in the morning.”
“I’m on my way,” Scott’s voice was saying through the cell phone as Red turned and started to walk away.
“Hold on.” Having seen what she did through the curtains at the McGuire house tonight, she realized she didn’t feel comfortable turning Henry over to Scott. He didn’t even sound like himself now, over the phone. His voice was stilted and mechanical, as if he were reading lines off cue cards only he could see.
“What’s the matter?” he asked.
“It sounds like Owen’s drunk himself into a coma.”
“Goddamn it.” Scott made a noise that sounded almost like an animal’s snarl. She’d never heard him sound like that before. “Let me get my fucking keys.”
“Wait, Scott. Are you sure—”
“He’s my nephew, Sonia.”
“I’ve got Henry with me,” she said. “I’ll bring him to you.”
“You know how to get here?”
“I was there with you the first time you saw the place,” she said. “Remember?”
“Oh, right.” He let out a breathless little laugh, more of a nervous chuckle, some of the tension easing from his voice. “I’m sorry. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. You sure you don’t want me to come out there? I don’t mind.”
“I’ll just bring him. We can talk then.”
“Great.” Scott said. “I’ll be waiting.”
COMING BACK FROM COLETTE’S, the last thing on Scott’s mind had been writing. It was late, and the headache had become a hallucinogenic marvel of pain so rarefied that it felt like a kind of religious trance, the kind that Dostoyevsky described before his visions of God. Maybe it wasn’t a migraine—he’d never had one before—but it had to be close. If anything, he’d anticipated popping some ibuprofen and lying in a dark room with a cool washcloth over his eyes to wait it out.
But the moment he stepped inside Round House, his headache disappeared.
It was almost as if the house had eaten it. In its place he discovered an idea for a new scene in The Black Wing—effortless, again, it had appeared in his consciousness, fully formed. Was this how real writers did it? Maybe sometimes you just got lucky. Or maybe this was what they meant about good writing stemming from pain.
Bypassing the ibuprofen entirely, he switched on his laptop, not pausing to bother with the lights, and sat down at the settee and jumped right in:
Chapter 21
The sheriff knew.
Faircloth somehow knew that he knew. It was in the polite but inquisitive way that the lawman asked about Maureen’s absence and changed the subject and then came back to it with exaggerated casualness. He was trying to catch Faircloth in a lie.
The sheriff, a genial fellow named Dave Wood, had dropped by a half hour ago. The conversation had started out in the entryway, and after a few minutes, Faircloth had invited him back to the kitchen for a cup of coffee. Sheriff Wood had admired the house, its size, and the way the hallways turned without angles, creating the peculiar sensation of moving even when you were standing still. Had Faircloth actually found that feeling disquieting at one point? He couldn’t imagine a time when he hadn’t thoroughly enjoyed it.
He gave the lawman an obligatory tour, showing Wood all the little side rooms and corridors as they came along in a clockwise direction throughout the first floor.
They were standing in the dining room when Faircloth decided he would have to kill him.
“Well, this is quite a place,” Wood was saying into his empty cup, and then he raised his head upward. “Not a sharp edge in the whole house.”
“That’s right,” Faircloth said. “Even the electrical outlet covers have rounded-off corners. They had to be specially constructed.”
“I bet you’ve got a lot more room up there too, don’t you?”
“Sure,” Faircloth said. “More than we’d ever need. It’s a big place.” He chuckled. “I haven’t even looked in some of the rooms.”
They both laughed, and then the sheriff turned and looked at him. His face was calm and without expression.
“Which one is she in, Karl?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Your wife.”
Faircloth smiled. “Oh, she’s not up there.”
“No?”
“No.” He allowed the smile on his face to widen. “I put her in the wing.”
“What wing?” The sheriff frowned, his mouth starting to form a question, when Faircloth swung his
“Scott?”
He jumped and shot a look over his shoulder so hard that something popped in his neck. There were footsteps coming down the entryway. Standing up, sliding the computer from his lap, he saw Sonia at the far end of the foyer with a bundle in her arms. The bundle was Henry.
“You scared me,” he said.
“I’ve been out there knocking, but you didn’t answer.”
“It’s a big place.” He was aware that he’d just spoken a line of dialogue from the book, Faircloth’s line to the sheriff. “I was just … working.” He tried to smile, but it felt ridiculous, so he quit. “It’s going really well.”
Sonia was looking at him expectantly, as if awaiting permission to come closer. In her arms, Henry groaned and shifted, one small hand clutching her jacket in his sleep, the way an infant would reach for his mother.
Scott forced his voice to sound normal. “Thank you for bringing him over. Is he all right?”
“He’s fine. He could use a hot bath and a meal, but that can wait until morning.”
He nodded and smiled. That was what people did when they were agreeing, he told himself, they nodded and smiled—the normal behavior patterns were returning slowly. “Listen, Sonia, I really appreciate what you’ve done. Here.” He reached for his nephew and felt her hesitating before she passed him over. “I’ve got an air mattress and a sleeping bag…” He carried Henry into the dining room and laid him down, the boy wrestling with something inside himself on his way into the lowest levels of sleep. “You want a drink or something?”
“No thanks.”
“Listen,” he said, “I wanted to tell you, that thing at Colette’s—”
“None of my business.”
“She had that movie that Great-Uncle Butch showed at the Bijou the night it burned. They just found it in the wreckage. Owen found it, actually. It was … I didn’t understand it.” The light of the laptop screen caught his eye, a rectangle of pure, expectant blue—a swimming pool waiting to be jumped into. “Tonight of all nights.”
Sonia was still looking at Henry, fast
asleep on the air mattress. “Red was the one that found him there.”
“Red Fontana, the football player?”
“He’s overseeing the construction project. It’s a McGuire project, so …”
“Right, right. I get it.” Scott felt himself itching to get back to the scene that he’d been writing. It was as if Faircloth were still right there, frozen in space with the cup he was going to smash down on the sheriff’s head, just waiting for—
“Scott?”
“Yes?”
“Is something wrong?”
“No, why?”
“You keep staring over at the computer screen. It’s like you’re not even here.”
“Where else would I be?”
Her eyes flicked at the laptop.
“Sonia …” Before he could stifle it, that same dry, tired laugh escaped. It seemed to startle her. “Look, I’m sorry if I seem distracted. It’s just—If you had any idea the kind of day I’ve been having …”
She came closer, blocking his view of the computer screen. “Did you pick up your medication from the pharmacy?”
“I told you I’m fine without it.” He almost told her about how he’d conquered the headache and the electrical feeling in his head, but it would mean explaining them in the first place, and he was fairly positive that would be a bad idea. “It’s actually helping not being on it. Look.” He faced her straight on and held up his hands, perfectly steady, as if that proved anything. “Let me finish the scene I’m working on, okay? Then we’ll talk, I promise.”
Sonia was looking at him as if he were a stranger.
“Sure, Scott,” she said without inflection. “Whatever you say.”
The sheriff frowned, his mouth starting to form a question, when Faircloth swung his cup down, smashing the man’s skull. The handle broke off and good old Dave Wood looked at him with a dazed expression. Did you just do that? the lawman’s expression asked. Did that just happen?
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