“Relax, Ben. All of that has already been taken care of. You really think we’d forget something like that? Now answer my question. Why painting?”
“I just—” I shook my head. “I don’t know. It was something to do. I’m good at it.”
“I don’t buy it. There has to be more to it than that.”
The highway stretched out before me. Cars coming in my direction in the other lane, cars in front of me, cars behind me: they were all headed home, to a friend’s, out to eat, to maybe their own work. None were in the same position as me, their family held hostage, some kind of madman on the other end of a cell phone that wasn’t even theirs, that instead belonged to whoever had set this fucking thing up. For some reason, I hated each and every one of them.
I closed my eyes for a moment, pictured the one summer when I was a boy and went up to my father painting the backdoor. Heard the question I asked him, listened to his response.
“You know, Ben,” Simon said, “it won’t do your family any good giving me the silent treatment. I’m just trying to make conversation anyway, to ease the tension. It doesn’t really matter to me what makes you tick.”
“Then why’d you ask?”
Simon didn’t answer, but I could see that grin there on his goddamned face, and it made me grit my teeth. I pinched the cell phone between my ear and shoulder again, gripped the steering wheel with my left hand, while with my right I reached over and found the opened pack of cigarettes on the passenger seat.
Once I had the Marlboro placed in my mouth and lit, I said, “Let me talk to my wife again.”
“I don’t think so. You’ve already talked with her.”
“My daughter then.”
Silence. Then, “Hmm.”
I kept my eyes on the road, following the glow of red taillights, my foot lifting off the gas pedal.
“What?” I asked, my voice all of a sudden more cautious and tense than before. I flicked the cigarette out the window. “What is it?”
Simon said, “It’s just your daughter,” and paused. Took a few seconds, as if thinking of something. There was complete silence on his end, which made me wonder if maybe I’d lost the connection, or if maybe he’d hung up. Finally he said, “You haven’t checked the trunk yet, have you?”
11
There was no real shoulder along this particular spot of 395 but I pulled over anyway. Except pulled over isn’t quite right, seeing as how once I threw the phone down I gripped the wheel tight and slammed on the brakes. The Dodge protested immediately, its brakes screeching, the back of the car fishtailing. Luckily nobody was tailgating me, or else there may have been one ugly crash. As it was, a tractor-trailer was about one hundred yards behind, its driver not at all impressed with my driving skills, because a low horn blasted out right as it passed.
I barely noticed. Instead I just sat there, staring forward at the dash, and wondered just what I really wanted to do now. My mind had been feeding me blurry images since the beginning of what might be in the trunk, and now, with Simon’s help, those images had begun to gain focus.
More cars passed by on my left, what seemed just inches away. I ignored them all, debating what I wanted to do, until finally I cut the ignition and grabbed the key, started opening the door but then heard the rush of oncoming traffic and hesitated. Good thing too, because somebody else decided they weren’t impressed, and another horn shouted out into the night. I waited until there was a break in the cars and got out and started toward the rear of the Dodge.
“Please no, please no, please no,” I whispered.
More cars passed by on the highway, the rush even louder now that I was standing just feet away from them. The sky was clear, the temperature cool, and somewhere in the grass by the trees insects chirped.
And I kept whispering, “Please no, please no, please no.”
Somehow I made myself stop. I don’t know how long it took, how many minutes (or hours) passed, but eventually I fell quiet and just stood there in front of the trunk. The key was in my right hand, hovering just inches away from the lock. Nothing was holding me back, nothing except the images that flashed through my mind. Like a series of jump cuts, I saw my daughter’s battered body, her tangled arms and legs, her smashed face. Like she’d been hit by a tank and then placed in this trunk, just waiting for her daddy to bring her back out.
When I decided enough time had passed that it was clear I was stalling, I lowered my hand holding the key. It slid right into the lock. A second went by, another second, and I turned it. There was an unsatisfying click as it unlatched. I was aware that the trunk had risen just a bit, whatever springs there were trying to force it to lift up into the air.
I wasn’t ready for that quite yet.
And so I stood there, holding it down, traffic sporadically surging past me. There were houses close by, many with lights on in their living rooms and kitchens, and in one of the backyards a dog started barking. The insects in the grass kept up their constant symphony.
I opened the trunk, took a step back, and stared down at the bloodied remains of my three-and-a-half-year-old daughter.
12
When the doctor told us we were having a daughter, I’ll admit that something broke in my heart. Any father who says he doesn’t want a son is a liar. Because there is some part of him, some part deep down inside, that wants his baby to be just like him, to grow up idolizing him and carrying on his name. I’ll admit I was more than just disappointed.
But then the day came when Casey was born. I stood in the delivery room, holding Jen’s hand, and watched as my own child took her first breath. Jen had been too exhausted to hold Casey, so our daughter had been given to me. I remember crying as I held her, wanting to wipe my tears away but at the same time wanting to never let go of my baby girl.
Jen had only been allowed so much time off work, so after a couple of weeks, Casey became my responsibility. I would change her, play with her, even took naps with her. A favorite book of mine growing up had been The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, and I made it a point to read it to Casey at least once a month. I’d read other books, but I always came back to The Little Prince. And, somehow, the book became Casey’s favorite too.
When she was just two and a half years old she started drawing pictures. She spent hours hunkered over blank sheets of paper with an opened box of Crayolas beside her, until she was finally done and came running to me with the finished product. And each and every time I’d pull her up onto my lap, inspect the latest picture, and say, “That’s a hat,” to which Casey would giggle and say, “Da-dee.” A year passed and the ritual never changed. The only thing that changed was that her pictures got even better, so much so that I hoped she might be a prodigy.
Reading The Little Prince to her at least once a month never changed either. I’d read a little to her before bedtime, while Jen was downstairs working on yet another stack of briefs. Every once in a while Jen would poke her head in, listen while I read, but Casey always nudged me and pointed, letting me know we had an intruder. This was our own special time and Casey wanted nobody else involved, not even her mother. One time Jen actually exploded at me about this, calling me a bastard for trying to take her daughter away from her. But she was just venting, stressed out because of her workload. She knew that wasn’t the case. She and Casey had everything else; besides our ongoing debate of Shrek and Shrek 2, Casey and I only had The Little Prince.
No matter how many times we read it, Casey giggled when we came to the part about the little prince visiting the king, and then the very vain man—she couldn’t decide which tickled her more. Then her smile would always fade when the little prince came to the fifth planet on his journey to meet the lamplighter, who was constantly lighting and extinguishing his lamp.
Like most children her age, Casey couldn’t really read yet, but she memorized her favorite parts of the book. So when we got to the part where the little prince arrived to earth and came in contact with the fox, she wanted to read his secr
et.
“ ‘Good-bye,’ said the fox,” she’d say, her soft voice light but full of energy. “ ‘Here is my secret. It’s quite simple: One sees clearly only with the heart. Anything essential is invisible to the eyes.’ ”
Yet no matter how often she read it aloud, she always had trouble pronouncing essential. I could never decide whether this was really a problem, or whether she did it just so she could get my help.
Then near the end, she’d want to read what the little prince said about how the important thing is what can’t be seen.
“ ‘If you love a flower that lives on a star, then it’s good, at night, to look up at the sky. All the stars are blossoming.’ ”
We’d go on from there to the very end, until that final picture on the last page and the note from the author saying to him it was the loveliest and saddest landscape in the world. Casey would always have tears in her eyes, but they were good tears, happy tears, and I always handed her a tissue, and she always took it from me, smiling. And if the sky was clear and the temperature just right, we’d go outside and stand in the middle of the backyard. I’d hold her in my arms and we would stare up at the sky and the stars and ask aloud, “Has the sheep eaten the flower or not?”
And though I claimed to never hear it (because I couldn’t), Casey always said she could hear the stars.
She said they sounded just like the book said.
She said they sounded like five hundred million bells.
13
I may have cried out, I don’t know. I may even have screamed, though until then I’d never actually screamed a day in my life. Who knows, maybe I did scream but the scream was silent and all that I did was just stand there with my mouth open, my throat making a weird sound where it tried to work but kept failing. Whatever the case, I didn’t do it for long until what little was in my stomach churned once or twice and started up the way it had entered.
I doubled over and vomited into the grass. At first it came out easily, like in a spray, but the longer I stayed doubled over, the longer I retched, and the more the bile became just little bits and chunks. The pretzels, the beef jerky, the two Snickers bars—they were all there somewhere, partially digested, now soaking into the ground.
The images that had risen up in my mind before had ceased. Now I had an actual image of what lay in the Dodge’s trunk. No tangled arms and legs, no head bent backwards. It was just Casey’s body, lying there almost peacefully, except covered in blood.
The traffic continued on the highway, everyone oblivious that my daughter lay dead just feet away. It made me hate those people even more, those people probably waiting to make it home in time to catch their favorite sitcoms or dramas, who maybe picked up a DVD at Redbox and just wanted to relax for the rest of the night. They might have had a run-in with the boss today, who berated them in front of their coworkers, or maybe their boyfriend or girlfriend broke up with them and they were thinking that their life couldn’t get any worse.
No, I wanted to tell them, I’m sorry, folks, but believe me it can. It can get a whole lot fucking worse.
I stayed that way for a long time: doubled over, my hands on my knees, staring at the ground. I noticed, even in the dim light, that some of the vomit had gotten on my sneakers. Something wet was on my face, something I didn’t realize were tears until I started wiping them away. I was crying but I wasn’t sobbing, and I told myself I was a terrible father for being that way. My daughter, my own flesh and blood, was now dead, and I couldn’t bring myself to break down. Instead tears were all I could give her, and that sad simple fact was enough to make me want to rip my hair out.
• • •
EVENTUALLY I GOT myself under control. The trunk was still open, its contents free for anybody to see, and the last thing I needed now was a concerned citizen catching a glimpse inside and calling the police. If that were the case, Simon or whoever it was that did this might as well have thrown Jen in there too.
I wiped at my eyes, at my mouth, then stood and turned back around. I approached the trunk slowly, not wanting to look back inside but knowing I had no choice. One step, two steps, three steps, and I was standing right where I was minutes earlier, the Dodge’s key hovering just inches above the lock.
I took a breath, braced myself, and peered again into the trunk.
This time it wasn’t my daughter that lay in there amongst all the blood. My mind was able to contemplate that in the matter of only seconds. Before, I’d just glanced, and my mind had already known it was Casey, so Casey was what I saw. Now, after accepting that the body was my daughter’s, my mind wasn’t working in the same way. Instead it was working properly, and it told me, Sorry, Ben, guess I was wrong on this one.
Yes, I thought, standing there and staring into the trunk, I guess you were.
It wasn’t my daughter’s body lying in there at all. It wasn’t even a real body. The only light there belonged to the dim bulb hanging just within the trunk, but staring long enough made me see that what lay inside was maybe four feet long from head to toe. And plastic.
“Oh my God,” I breathed, and took a very long, deep breath.
It was a mannequin. Nothing more than an oversized doll. The pink fake flesh stood out among the blood ... which, I started to think, wasn’t really even blood at all.
I started to reach forward, to touch the stuff I’d first thought was blood but couldn’t be blood because it looked like some of it was still wet, and that couldn’t possibly be so if I’d been driving this car for almost eight hours already, and the car had been in the parking lot for God knows how long before that.
But before my hand could lower itself any further—it was about twelve inches or so from being swallowed by the trunk—headlights splashed the back of the car and trunk, headlights so bright that it made me realize they didn’t belong to the traffic out on the highway.
And along with the headlights, other lights as well. Flashing blue and red lights, a kaleidoscope of patriotic colors that filled the night.
• • •
WITHOUT THINKING I lifted my hand and grabbed the top of the trunk and slammed it shut. I turned around, raising my other hand to my face to shield my eyes from the blinding glare of all the lights. An unmarked police car was parked just twenty yards away, the cop inside already opening his door.
Oh shit, I thought, and continued it in a kind of mantra: oh shit oh shit oh shit oh shit oh shit oh shit.
I remembered Simon’s first rule, no talking to the police or the FBI or even the boy scouts, was I seeing a pattern?
The cop stepped out and shut his door. He glanced out at the traffic and started walking toward me. I couldn’t really see his face, which was nothing more than a circle of darkness, but from the size of him he looked to be about six-foot. He walked slowly but steadily, his one hand on his belt—what at first I thought was his gun but realized a second later was his nightstick—his other hand holding a flashlight. Its beam was shining right at me.
“Evening,” he said, his low voice coming to me above the rush of traffic and insects and the dog, which continued to bark nonstop. “You realize there’s not much of a shoulder here, don’t you?”
“Yeah, I do,” I said, nodding, thinking to myself come on come on come on think. Then, all of a sudden, I said, “It’s just that I popped a tire about a quarter mile back. Tried to ride it out to the next gas station but I got too nervous. I wanted to change it now. You know, better safe than sorry.”
The cop had stopped walking about five yards away. He still stood in the same position, with his right hand on his nightstick, his left hand holding the flashlight, but instead of the flashlight’s beam striking me right in the face, it was doing an entire sweep of my body. Shirt, jeans, shoes, back to jeans ... and then back to shoes.
“What’s that?”
The beam was centered right on the few spots of bile that had splattered there.
“It’s vomit,” I said, as casually as possible. “Had some fast food earlier today. Wasn�
��t settling too good with me, and got even worse in the past hour. I would have taken some Tums or something had I had some on me, but as it was I just wanted to keep going. Then after I changed the tire, it really hit me and I ... well, you know.”
And I pointed, almost as an afterthought, to the side, where the bile had begun to dry together with the grass, looking like some poor kid’s failed science experiment.
The beam swung over there, only briefly, then came back, this time at my face. I raised my hand again to shield my eyes.
“Look, officer,” I said, really feeling the part I’d created for myself now, “I’m sorry if I shouldn’t have pulled over here. I kind of figured there wasn’t much room, but the tire that blew was on the passenger side, so I knew my ass wasn’t going to be sticking out in traffic. If you need to give me a citation or something, I completely understand.”
Traffic continued to rush by on the highway, this time a tractor-trailer that sounded like it was shifting gears. The dog, which had been barking this entire time, was now silent.
The cop stood there for a moment, considering, then clicked off the flashlight. From the light of the oncoming cars, I saw him shake his head. “No,” he said, “I’m not going to give you a citation. But just be more careful next time, okay?”
I nodded. “Thank you, officer.”
He stood there, as if waiting on something, and it didn’t occur to me until a second or two later that he was waiting on me. And so I nodded once more, told the cop to have a good night, turned and waited for a break in traffic before I started toward the front. As I did I wiped my hands on my jeans, as if wiping away grease, something that had been absent on my hands but which I hoped the cop had missed. A moment later I was inside the Dodge, turned on the engine, and waited for another break in traffic before pulling out. In the rearview mirror the unmarked car had turned its flashing lights off. But it just sat there, waiting, until the car was nothing more than a dot in the mirror, and then gone.
Man of Wax (Man of Wax Trilogy) Page 5
