by J. Thorn
Molly swung a pillow behind her back and stared at Drew through bed-tousled hair.
“We met at Sully’s after work. She insisted, and I knew it was not going to be pretty. I ordered a beer, she asked me to leave you, and I told her no. I told her that I love you.”
Drew’s wife took a deep breath and waited, her fingers clutching and releasing the sheet. “And she sent this to Johnson, too?”
Drew exhaled and slid closer to Molly. “Yes. Vivian isn’t stupid. She knows the company policy on harassment, knows what procedures have to be put in play, and knows the amount of pain this is going to cause.”
“Then you need to get into his office first thing in the morning.”
The blaring horn jarred Drew from the memory. The transparent wax paper lay on the passenger seat like the discarded shroud of the bagel. The cup of coffee in his hand felt warm, the bitter tang no longer subdued by the heat. He pulled up to the intersection and turned right, looking at the dashboard clock and realizing that he had driven the entire route to the office on autopilot.
Probably would be safer if I texted while driving. At least I’d still be paying some attention to the road, he thought.
“Hey, D!”
“‘Sup, Charlie?”
The security guard smiled at Drew from inside the frosted pane of the vertical coffin he called a booth. Drew could see the flickering images of the portable DVD player through the icy glaze of the window.
“Same old shit. When we movin’ to Florida?”
Drew chuckled. “Soon as you win the lottery, my man.”
Charlie smiled and hit the button. The red arm rose with a cranky squeal of half-frozen gears until it pointed skyward. Drew drove through the security check and toward his office building in the industrial park, glancing in his rearview as the arm came down again with a forbidding shake.
***
“Did you see her today?”
Drew dropped the messenger bag to the floor and looked over his desk. Brian’s eyes sparkled. “No. I’m not looking for her, asshole.”
“You should be. She’s got this tight, black skirt on. Heels, of course. And her blouse dips low enough to sport serious cleavage. I still can’t believe you passed on that.”
Drew turned around toward Johnson’s office and allowed his eyes to drift left, to Vivian’s cubicle.
Nothing wrong with looking, he said to himself. “You oughta hit that.”
Brian squealed like a kid who already knew what Santa left under the tree. “She ain’t into me, man. She’s into you.”
“Did you forget about the whole shitstorm?”
“My penis has a short memory.”
With that, Brian sauntered toward the coffee machine, leaving Drew with a wink and an opportunity to recall the meeting with Johnson and their discussion of Vivian.
***
“I think I’m going to need to see it.”
“Taken out of context, it could cause me a lot of problems.”
“Seems like you already have a lot of problems.”
Drew snarled at Johnson and swallowed his anger like recurring heartburn. “I showed it to my wife and I told her it’s not true.”
“She believes you?”
“Of course.”
“For now.”
Drew stood and considered dragging Vivian into the room. Johnson stepped in front of the office door and closed the blinds.
“I need to know. Don’t hand me any bullshit.”
“I did not touch her. Ever.”
Johnson sighed and nodded his head. “Then we should probably get HR in on this as soon as possible. After I hear Vivian’s story, of course.” Drew smiled with his eyebrows furrowed and a snarled lip. “Don’t do this to me, Drew. You know I have procedures to follow.”
Johnson opened the office door. Drew stepped close enough to smell his cheap aftershave and the remains of greasy hash browns on his face.
“I’ll forward you the e-mail from Vivian, according to procedure.” Drew spit the last word from his mouth like a swig of sour milk. He walked through the rows of cubicles as if in slow motion, seeing every keystroke on a keyboard and every number punched into a phone. Vivian looked up at him and then back toward Johnson’s office. She dropped her head to her chest.
He returned to his desk and Drew looked at the framed picture of his family. He shuddered and wondered if they could ever be them again: smiling, happy, whole. He clicked through the screens until he came to his password-protected desktop. Drew opened his e-mail in search of Vivian’s message. He scrolled through the list, reordered by sender, then by date, and then by status. Nothing. Her e-mail was gone. Drew scrolled through again, line by line. He picked up the phone and dialed the IT desk.
“Frank. Hey, it’s Drew in design. I’ve got a really important e-mail that’s disappeared.”
“They don’t do that on their own, Drewy-boy.”
Drew winced. “Listen to me, Frank. I had an e-mail in my in-box and now it’s not there.”
“Hold on.”
Drew heard the phone clink off a hard surface, followed by pounding keys begging for mercy under the plump fingers of the head of IT.
“Got a retraction on your account.”
“Frank?”
“Right. Dumb it down for ya. Whoever sent that e-mail pulled it back. Our system gives you twelve hours to do that as long as the recipient is on our network.”
“You mean interoffice.”
“Yeah.”
Drew sighed. “Can you tell me if the message was retracted from all recipients, or just me?”
“C’mon Drew. You know I can’t breach privacy—“
“All or just me, Frank,” Drew said, cutting off Frank’s canned response.
“All. Two recipients, two retractions. Don’t bother asking who the other recipient was.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it, Frank. You’re such a champion of privacy.” He heard the huff through the phone before the line went dead.
***
Vivian walked past Drew’s desk. He inhaled her perfume, making the memory of that day visceral. She dropped a manila folder on his desk from an elevation that caused other papers to flutter.
“Johnson needs your signatures on these before the end of the day.”
Drew tried making eye contact with her, but failed. He wondered how many more years it would be before they would speak again. “Thanks, Vivian.”
She paused, opened her mouth, and then closed it before walking back to her desk. Drew flipped through the folder and counted the number of lines requiring his signature before he shut it and walked across the row to Brian’s cubicle. Brian held one finger up to him with a handset tucked under his chin.
“The CSS code. Yep, got it. How about the link tags? Good? Okay. Yep, will do.” Brian hung up the phone and leaned back in his chair.
“Can I talk to you?” Drew asked. Brian twirled his fingers while sipping bottled water. “It’s not work related,” Drew added.
“Never stopped us before.”
“Did you ever think someone was in your apartment?”
“Once I thought I had two women in my bed, but it was just a dream.”
“Never mind,” said Drew as he turned back toward his cubicle.
“Sorry. Sit down, man.” Brian kicked the edge of another chair, which sent it flying toward Drew’s knees. He stopped it with his left hand and sat down at the desk opposite Brian. “You mean like ghosts?”
“Not exactly. A feeling like someone else is in the room with you.”
Brian tilted his head toward the panels of the suspended ceiling dotted with emergency sprinkler heads.
“Honestly, I don’t think so. I remember being scared shitless as a kid when my folks made me go upstairs to bed. We had a family room in the basement with our television and toys. My parents would stay up watching shows and at my bedtime they’d send me upstairs to brush my teeth and go to bed. I used to leap over steps on the way up, convinced something was going
to get me. I’d run down the hall and turn on my bedroom light. I felt safer under the covers, but getting there was always a bitch. And it was the same thing, night after night.” Brian paused and smirked at Drew. “You looked serious. I didn’t want to fuck with you.”
“Sorry, man. I’m not used to seeing this side of you.”
Brian shrugged and tapped a pencil on his phone. “What’s going on, Drew?”
Drew took a deep breath and placed his elbows on his knees. He hunched over and looked left to right before replying. “Had a strange feeling last night.” Brian waited, pencil tapping. “I was on the computer around 3:30.”
“First mistake.”
Drew ignored the comment and continued. “It felt like there was someone else in the room. I felt different. The shadows didn’t act like normal shadows do.”
“Gimme the money shot,” said Brian.
“I heard words. Something about ‘short,’ but I fucking heard them, man. I am not kidding.”
Brian whistled and made the loco gesture next to his right temple.
“I knew you’d be an asshole about it,” said Drew.
“What do you want me to say? What if I had come to you with this story?” Brian’s extension buzzed and lights flashed across the surface of the phone. He reached out with the left hand and snagged the receiver. “No. No, I have not gotten to the CSS code yet.”
Brian looked at Drew and shrugged his shoulders. Drew stood and walked back to his cubicle.
***
He cranked the radio the entire way home. As “the big 4-0” came closer, he found himself splitting time between heavy metal and afternoon talk shows, an unthinkable compromise to the teenager he once was. The clouds suffocated the landscape, swallowing the snow-covered lawns of suburbia. Spring would arrive in less than forty days through the seemingly eternal vise-grip of winter. As the disembodied voices continued to chatter through the stereo speakers, Drew’s mind floated back to her.
“Why did you do that?”
“Retract it?”
“No. Send it. Why did you send it in the first place?”
Vivian pushed a strand of dark hair behind her ear and crossed her legs in the chair. “I was hurt. I lashed out.”
“You could have ruined my career, my marriage, my life.”
Again, Vivian uncrossed and recrossed her legs. Drew caught glimpses of the garter straps at the top of her thighs. He looked around as if he could will another human to enter the break room. The microwave and mini-fridge sat silently, offering no help.
“I’ll be here,” she said.
“You have to let this be, Vivian. Please.”
“You and I are fated, Drew. I felt it the first time we met. You’ll come to me and I’ll be here. I promise.”
She stood and placed a benign kiss on his left cheek. He felt the moist, warm touch of her lips, which made his entire upper body twitch. She let her breath linger on his skin long enough to raise the hairs on the back of his neck, before she tossed her hair to the side, opened the break-room door, and strutted back to her cubicle.
Chapter 4
“You’re sitting in the driveway?”
Drew looked out the driver-side window at Molly, standing there in the snow-packed driveway, her coat pulled tight to her chest with her left hand. The engine was still running, the radio personalities still arguing.
“Yeah. Didn’t want to miss the end of this segment. Interesting stuff on global finance.”
Molly gave Drew a halfhearted smile and then climbed through the snow to the garage door. She kicked the clinging ice from her boots and stepped inside. Drew turned the volume knob to the left and winced at the sting of the little white lie. He turned the ignition off and sat in the car listening to the engine block ping and crack where extreme heat met extreme cold.
Gotta quit looking over my shoulder, he thought as he reached to the passenger seat to grab his messenger bag and gloves.
***
“Are you okay?” Molly asked.
“Yeah, hon. I’m fine,” replied Drew.
“You seem to be a bit out of it recently. I was just mentioning it in case you thought it might be wise to see Dr.—”
“I said I’m fine,” replied Drew, cutting off Molly’s sentence.
“I can’t go through that again. I mean I would, ‘cause I love you, but I just don’t know if I have the strength.”
Drew looked at Molly and saw the scars on her psyche caused by his breakdown. He thought about her coming out to the driveway this evening, and could not remember how long he had sat there once he shoved it into park.
“I’m fine, really. I’ll go and have them double-check the dosage if you think I should.”
She reached across the table and placed her hand on his. He saw the sparkle of her grandmother’s engagement ring in the light, and the way it reflected off her eyes made his heart flutter.
“With the kids now, it’s just that—”
“I fucking heard you the first time!”
The wall shook from the force of Drew’s chair smashing into it. Several glasses on the table toppled and rolled to the edge, dispersing milk to the floor below. Billy and Sara came running into the dining room. Molly clutched the collar of her shirt to her neck and ushered them up the steps and into their bedrooms.
Drew walked to the living room and collapsed on the couch. He felt the walls closing in, his vision narrowing with the onset of the migraine. He thought about his outburst and the look on Molly’s face for a split second before seeping back into his anger. The television war between Tom and Jerry continued as Jerry shoved a bomb into Tom’s mouth. Drew fumbled for the remote control and pushed buttons until he could no longer hear the commotion. He turned to his side and buried his head in a pillow on the couch. Drew laid there for a few minutes before he opened his eyes. The room sat under a blanket of solitude. The only light came from the VCR clock, which read 2:29. He had slept for the better part of four hours.
A buzzing sound came from the end table where Drew’s phone sat.
Text or e-mail? he wondered, while reaching for it. He could not remember setting it to vibrate, but that’s what it was doing. The vibration ceased as Drew turned it toward his face. When he touched the screen, there was no message.
He dropped the phone on the table hard enough to register disgust, but without enough force to break it. Drew sat and rubbed a hand through his hair. He heard Sara snoring and smelled the sour milk that had congealed on the floor underneath the dining-room table. He had lost the evening to rage and a migraine, a couple that liked to go out together at his expense.
The old refrigerator buzzed and popped while the amber glow from the streetlamps returned to the room. A few random toys lay scattered on the floor, novelty pencils and scraps of notebook paper scribbled with the broad strokes of a permanent marker. The winter wind grabbed the wooden storm doors and shook them to the core. Drew stood and felt the floor shift beneath his feet. He sat back down on the couch.
“Prison.”
He turned to face the gaping maw of the doorway leading to the stairs. Shadows wavered like a mirage on a desert highway. Drew slid a finger between the blinds and scanned the front yard for a sign. Nobody outside the house and nobody at the door.
“It’s all a prison.”
The sentence could not be mistaken for random noise. Drew sat back on the couch and closed his eyes. He felt swirls of red passing beneath his closed eyelids and a slight buzz in his extremities that caused his fingers to tingle. His mouth went dry and his tongue turned into a wad of cotton.
“What is?” He heard his words, but could not tell if they originated from his mouth or from the charged ether of the room.
“All of it.” The voice delivered the words with perfect diction, but as if spoken from the bottom of a well. Each syllable resonated and reverberated with mathematical precision.
“I don’t understand,” Drew replied, this time certain he had spoken the words and not thought them.
“You will. Now that we have been introduced, there are important things that must be done.”
Drew put both hands on his ears. He had to convince himself that he was not wearing headphones, listening to a psychedelic recording that pushed the audio back and forth across the stereo field. The voice bounced from left to right as if a cyclone of sound swirled around his head. “I’m coming apart. Again.”
A slight sigh brushed past Drew’s nose. His eyes saw nothing but the darkness of the witching hour holding dominion in his living room.
“I can help you.”
“Where do I begin?” Drew asked.
“The temptress,” replied the voice, the last syllable trailing away like the hiss of a serpent.
***
Drew awoke by leaping out of bed. He leaned over and kissed Molly on the cheek, something that had all but been extinguished around year seven of the marriage. She opened one eye and smiled before turning over and hitting the snooze button on her side of the alarm.
He smoothed down the collar and fixed his tie in the mirror. A set of bright eyes and a slightly upturned smile looked back. Drew pulled Billy’s and Sara’s doors shut to give them another thirty minutes of sleep before they had to prepare for school. He bounced down the steps, mumbling the melody of a long-forgotten tune from the 1940s big-band era. He never listened to the Benny Goodman stuff, but his grandfather loved it. Drew remembered going to his grandparents’ place every Sunday and thumbing through his grandfather’s record collection. The album covers intrigued him more than the music. The big band and jazz records celebrated sadness that promoted a good mood, a paradox lost on children.
***
The sedan cruised toward the off-ramp like it had hundreds of times before. Drew steered the vehicle with the slight guidance of his left hand while the right fumbled through the controls on his MP3 player jacked into the car’s stereo system. He scanned through the folders and hit the play button on the Dropkick Murphys.
Irish punk-drunk rock, he thought.
He ripped the volume knob to eight and basked in the fast-paced, bagpipe-laden motif of Boston’s finest. With Bob Marley and the Dropkicks on his player, it was difficult to feel down for long.
