The Wait

by Frank Turner Hollon

  No answer.

  My eyes adjusted. The bed was empty. The pounding on the door came again.

  “Bam, Bam, Bam.” Three times. Even harder than before.

  I heard a noise in the room with me. A low sound. On the other side of the bed, crouched in the corner between the bed and the wall, Gretchen held the gun.

  “It’s him,” she said. Her voice cracked in fear. It was hard to see her face in the darkness, but she was crying, the gun held tight in both hands near her cheek.

  A figure passed the window outside, a shadow from the streetlight across the white curtain of the bedroom.

  I ran through the house, turning off the lights in the office and then the living room. I grabbed the phone and brought it back to the guest room.

  Gretchen was where I left her. I got down beside her, our faces only inches apart.

  “Listen to me,” I said. “Do exactly what I tell you to do. Exactly. Do you understand?”

  She didn’t answer.

  Without raising the volume of my voice, I hardened the tone to get her attention.

  “Do you understand?” I repeated.

  She looked at my mouth, the place where words had come from, and then moved her eyes to my eyes.

  “Yes,” she whispered. “I understand.”

  “Give me the gun.”

  I took the gun from her hand and replaced it with the telephone.

  “Is it loaded?” I asked.

  “Yes, it’s loaded.”

  Slowly I said, “Now listen, call 9-1-1. Tell them what’s happening. Mike’s trying to get in the house. Tell them what he did to you before, and how you had him arrested, and how you got a restraining order. Tell them you came here to get away from him and now he’s tracked you down, trying to break in the house.”

  She waited a second and said, “Okay.”

  “It’s very important, Gretchen, you tell them everything so they’ll understand the seriousness of the situation. So they’ll send someone immediately.”

  I stood up with the gun in my right hand. It was smaller than Allen Kilborn’s gun. It felt like a toy in my palm.

  “Stay here,” I said. “Don’t leave this room until I tell you to come out, or the police tell you to come out.”

  She seemed very much like a child huddled against the wall, small and afraid, waiting for me to fix it all.

  I walked cautiously down the hallway to the living room, listening for any sound, trying to determine if he’d found a way in the house yet. There was nothing.

  The living room was dark. Very gently I turned the knob on the padlock to unlock the front door. Very gently I turned the little button on the doorknob to unlock everything.

  I stepped back from the door about ten feet, careful to negotiate the coffee table, and stood in the small space between the coffee table and the couch, the same couch where Allen and his girlfriend sat when they gave me the news of their wedding, when Allen called me “Dad.” It seemed like a long time ago.

  I could hear Gretchen’s voice on the phone in the bedroom. It was low and muffled, but every few words came clear. She was doing as she was told, and I imagined the dispatcher relaying the information to a police officer on night shift, bored, patrolling the quiet neighborhoods, and now with an emergency call. A home invasion. Blocks away. It was just a matter of minutes, and I waited, the way I’ve always waited, listening to the clock in the kitchen tick and tick. Listening to my little girl’s voice on the phone down the hall. Taking deep breaths to keep my hands from shaking.

  It happened amazingly fast. No warning. No small noise followed by bigger noises. The door just swung open and slammed hard against the wall.

  Mike Stockton stepped into the doorway. He seemed huge, the light behind his back illuminating his frame. Large arms hanging at his sides. Far off in the distance there was a siren. The bored officer, adrenaline now pumping through his veins, on the way. Only seconds now. Only seconds away.

  I raised the gun and fired. The sound was loud, but not like before. Not like the explosion at the top of the stairs that blew Allen Kilborn’s head into small pieces.

  Mike Stockton didn’t move. I fired again immediately, and then a third time after that. Three shots, ten feet away, into the man’s chest.

  I heard Gretchen scream. I saw the body fall to the floor. The flashing colored lights of the police car appeared. Through the open front door I could see the officer exit his vehicle, gun in hand, assessing the situation, wide-eyed.

  I reached over to the wall and flicked on the living room light. Gretchen was standing by the kitchen, the phone still in her hand. I set the gun down on the coffee table.

  It was done, I thought. It was all done. There was no choice. What choice could there be? All those years of failing my daughter were brought to an end in a few seconds.

  It would be a new beginning. A clean slate, as they say.

  But then I watched Gretchen run to the man on the floor. I watched her wrap her arms around him in a way I’ve never seen, like she could pull him back from death, hold on so tight he wouldn’t slip away to wherever he was going.

  She turned and looked at me with a hatred I couldn’t understand. A black disdain, total and complete, for me and what I had done to the man in her arms bleeding out on my carpet.

  “What did you do?” she yelled. “What did you do?”

  She waited for an answer. Just looked at me and waited for an answer.

  “I shot him,” I finally said.

  The walls of the room seemed to close from all sides. It was just Gretchen looking at me for an explanation, her arms around the dead man on the floor.

  I remember closing my eyes and concentrating on breathing, slowly in, and then slowly back out again. Trying with every piece of my brain to reconstruct the memory of Gretchen outside the ice cream parlor, remove myself back to that certain day, outside of my living room, away from the demand to explain to my broken daughter why a father might kill the man who beat her senseless and tracked her down thousands of miles away, until it dawned on me.

  I opened my eyes and asked her, “You told him where I lived, didn’t you?”

  PART IV

  the golden years

  one

  I found myself alone in a room at the police station. Mike Stockton was dead, three small caliber bullets to the chest and a pond of thick red blood at my threshold. It was done, and I couldn’t say I was sorry, no matter what happened to me.

  Frank Rush came through the door into the cold room. I think I almost saw a smile on his face. He sat down across from me at the table, two files in his hands, one thick and one thin. He placed the files next to each other between us, carefully lining up the edges. I could see the labels. The fat one was the file on Allen Kilborn Sr., and the thin one had “Mike Stockton” written across the top.

  I waited for him to speak.

  “Well, James Early Winwood,” he said, “here we go again.”

  As before, I tried to concentrate on my breathing, in and out, slowly and as deeply as possible without sound or movement. It made me wonder how we are able to breathe at all. What force exists inside us to suck air inward and then push it out again? To regulate the speed and pressure?

  “Usually, Mr. Winwood, I’d let the suspect talk first, tell me what happened, but this time, I think I’ll go first.”

  I chose not to say anything and waited.

  “This is how it looks to me,” he said, “people around you end up shot. Not just random people, but now we have a pattern. Do you see the pattern?”

  I think he just wanted to hear me speak. He wanted to hear my voice in the cold room.

  “No,” I said.

  “Well, I do. Bullies. Specifically men who bully women.”

  He waited for me to say something, but I let the air go a little deeper in my lungs than before. Let it fill a pocket usually left unfilled, vacant.

  “Allen Kilborn bullied your wife—your ex-wife, Samantha. And Mike Stockton bullied your daug
hter, Gretchen. You found a way to bring it to an end each time. A permanent end.”

  He continued, “Now granted, you picked two very different methods, but still there’s common ground. Each was a shooting. Both times you used someone else’s gun. And each time you succeeded.”

  I said, “The man came all the way from California to hunt her down. He beat on the door, came in my house. Gretchen is still black and blue from the last time he beat her up. You would have done the same, Mr. Rush. You would have done what needed to be done in order to protect your child and yourself.”

  We were quiet for a time. I was exhausted, almost a chemical exhaustion. The results of a pill I didn’t take.

  “Maybe,” he said. “Maybe, but there’s a few unanswered questions I have.”

  He leaned back slightly in his chair, an older man now. A little heavier, less hair, more lines around his eyes.

  “Why was the door unlocked?” he asked.

  “I guess I forgot to lock it. I was still awake, sitting in my office, when he started banging on the door.”

  “It’s just hard for me to believe, Early, that a man like you, a cautious man, a smart man, knowing what Mr. Stockton did to your daughter, would leave the front door unlocked at two-thirty in the morning. I checked. All the other doors were locked tight. The windows were all locked. But somehow you forgot the front door.”

  “I guess so,” I said. “I guess I forgot to lock the front door.”

  Frank Rush raised his arms and put his hands behind his head.

  “I’m curious how he found the house. You’re not in the phone book.”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “Gretchen says she didn’t talk to him. She says the only people who knew where she was were you, her mother, and her stepfather. If we take a look at your home phone records, will it show any calls to Mike Stockton’s phone?”

  “Not from me,” I said.

  “You didn’t call the man and tell him where she was, did you, Early? You didn’t lure him down, leave the door unlocked on purpose, make sure the gun was loaded, tell Gretchen what to say when she called 9-1-1, did you?”

  I listened to his words. We knew each other better this time around.

  “No, Mr. Rush, I didn’t.”

  “Because Gretchen says you were very calm. She says you brought her the phone and told her exactly what to say. You calmly turned off the inside lights, told her to stay in the bedroom, and went to the living room alone to wait. All while a crazy man was beating on your door and circling your house.”

  I wondered how he knew Mike Stockton circled the house, leaving the front door for awhile. I didn’t have to ask the question.

  “Gretchen wasn’t the only person to call 9-1-1. One of the neighbors heard the banging, watched out their window, saw Mike try the doorknob, walk around the back of the house, and then come back to the front door. Only this time, the door was unlocked. He was able to step inside. Into the dark room. Where you waited for him.”

  I asked in a monotone voice, “Am I under arrest?”

  Frank Rush stared at me, and I stared back. I think he wanted to rip my head off and look inside, like the answer would be floating around in there, easy to see.

  “No, you’re not under arrest. Right now, you’re free to leave any time you want.”

  “Is Gretchen here?” I asked.

  “No.”

  “Where is she?”

  He said, “She gave a written statement and asked if she could go back home. I told her yes. She packed up her things and left in a taxi.”

  I suppose it was unrealistic to believe Gretchen would stay with me in the house where I killed her husband, but I hadn’t imagined her leaving, either. The sun was probably rising outside. A new day beginning.

  “It must be difficult,” he said.

  He wanted me to respond, but I didn’t. I also didn’t get up to leave.

  “It must be difficult,” he repeated, “doing something to help someone else and having them not appreciate you. I mean, you kill the man who abuses your daughter, and she hates your guts for it. You kill the man who makes Samantha’s life hell, and she divorces you anyway. Kicks you out of the house where you paid the bills.”

  Sometimes you can’t see how much open space there is down below until you get up in an airplane. I started to rise above myself and look down on my situation. The balance is delicate between who we are and who others believe us to be. It is the greatest struggle a man faces between birth and death, the endless process of separating the threads of your individual identity from the expectations, needs, demands, and imaginations of all other humans. Who would I be if I was the only person in the world? Who would I have killed, and who would I have protected? Would the open spaces be so much easier to see?

  There was the possibility I’d been used, by Gretchen, or more likely Kate and Russell Enslow, purposefully or subconsciously, but used nonetheless, to accomplish a purpose. After all, it was my fault. Everything was my fault. Gretchen’s father issues. Kate’s lifeless marriage. Samantha’s intolerance. They were my problems to fix, and so I fixed one, at least temporarily, but then again, everything is temporary, isn’t it? Sticking band-aids on the cracks in leaking dams, each leak proof of the impossibility of permanence in this life, a reminder that everything we care about goes away, as well as everything we don’t care about.

  I started to get up from the chair to leave the ice-cold room, but my legs were hollow, the physical weakness beyond anything I’d ever experienced. It was like I was Mike Stockton, all the liquid from my body drained dry. I kept my hand on the table to steady myself.

  Frank Rush pulled a piece of paper from the file. It was my written plan, left on the desk in my house, found by Frank Rush, and a now a part of the permanent file. As permanent as a file can be.

  With his stubby hand the investigator pushed the piece of paper across the table in front of where I stood. He turned it around so I could see my words right-side up. They were written left-handed. Words used in place of other words. A code.

  “I found this,” he said, “in your house, at the desk, the ink pen still on top.”

  I worked very hard at not letting my knees buckle. I leaned over, pretending to look at the piece of paper, transferring part of my weight onto my hands, braced against the tabletop. The weakness had nothing to do with what he showed me or the conversation. It was an independent weakness.

  Frank Rush looked up into my face. “Does M.S. stand for Mike Stockton?”

  The code was no code at all. I had written the words expecting them to burn long before any other eyes would search the page. But they were the words of a different plan, a plan never to be executed, in a faraway place.

  He began to read, “M.S., CAL., Kate, miles, time, ice cream, R.E., Kate again, weapon?”

  I needed something to drink. Maybe orange juice would replenish the blood.

  “What do the numbers mean, Early?”

  I looked from the paper to his face and said slowly, “They don’t mean anything, Mr. Rush. Nothing does. Just scribbles. Can I go now?”

  Allen was waiting in the lobby. He stood when I came to the door, and I wanted to collapse in his arms like a child. Like I was sick, and he was my father, strong and sure, and I could fold into his arms and sleep it all away.

  He led me to the car, and we started the drive back to my house. I wondered if it would be surrounded by yellow police tape. I wondered how I would step across the stain of blood into my home, if I had a home at all.

  “Who called you?” I asked.

  “The lady across the street. She said you shot somebody. By the time I got there, they’d already taken you to the station. The investigator told me it looked like self-defense. He just wanted to ask you a few questions.”

  There was still no strength in my legs. The weakness was an actual feeling, its own separate, dull ache centered in the knees.

  Allen said, “What happened?”

  Looking out the window a
t a girl riding a red bicycle, I said, “I killed a man. Gretchen’s husband. He beat her up. She came to stay with me. He found her, and I killed him.”

  The girl on the bicycle was pedaling like mad. She was late for school. Maybe fourth grade, or fifth. Her hair was very black, tied in a loose ponytail up top near the crown of the head. She wore dirty tennis shoes. The girl saw me look at her and looked away in the direction she was going, down the sidewalk.

  “I didn’t even know you had a gun,” Allen said.

  I looked at him and said, “I don’t. It was Gretchen’s.”

  We rode along. I didn’t pay any attention to our

  direction.

  “Where is Gretchen?” he asked.

  “She’s gone. She went back to California.”

  We rode along in silence. It was a beautiful morning. I noticed things I never noticed before. It seemed like I’d been gone a long time, and while I was gone they planted new trees and built new houses in empty lots.

  We pulled up in front of Samantha’s house. The house I’d lived in for years, helped raise Allen in, paid to update, then renovate, in order to keep up with people I’d never met.

  “What are we doing here?” I asked.

  “Mom’s out of town. You don’t need to go back to the rental house right now. I’ll go there this afternoon, clean up, get some clothes. You can stay here a few days.”

  “Where’s your mother?” I asked.

  There was hesitation. He didn’t want to say. She was probably with another man. On a trip with another man to some Caribbean island covered with palm trees and surrounded by water the color of emeralds. In fact, as we sat out in front of the house, she was probably down on her knees in the bathroom of a beach bungalow giving the man great pleasure. I smiled. After all, she was no longer my wife. I was a man without a wife.

  “Nevermind,” I said.

  It was strange being in the house again, especially without Samantha’s permission. After Allen left, I crept around like a burglar. On the screened-in back porch, behind the potted plant above the door, I found my stale cigarettes. The matches were damp. I had to light the cigarette off the stove and run outside to make sure the smoke didn’t seep into the flowered wallpaper and raise Samantha’s suspicions.