The Wait

by Frank Turner Hollon

  I turned up the hot water and felt it cascade down my back. The rain was probably still falling outside. Kate would need time to gather her things. Maybe she only wanted to stir up her life a little. Keep it from settling in the bottom of the glass. Maybe her reasons for coming to Kansas City on June 10th were very different than my reasons. Maybe it had always been that way, and I was too stupid to know the difference.

  In that shower, praying to walk into an empty room, I was more alone than I’d ever been before. I dried my ugly body and listened for a sound outside the bathroom. Any sound. A door closing. The zipper of a suitcase. I wrapped the towel around my waist, took a deep breath, and walked out of the bathroom.

  She was gone. Her clothes were gone. I was alone in the room, and again, immediately, I regretted my prayer. Wished I could take it back. Unpray.

  The champagne was open. She drank a glass before she left. Next to the rose, at the bottom of the slender vase, was a ring. I picked it up and held it to my eyes. It was my grandmother’s ring. The ring I’d given Kate so long ago. She left it for me. She returned it.

  five

  Nothing compares to the present. Nothing. How could it? Yesterday, how could we possibly possess the imagination necessary to paint the tiny details of today? And tomorrow, how could we possibly possess the memory to resurrect every point of light, every sound, from the exact moments of the day before? Knowing this, I tried anyway, but losing the idea of Kate left me floating out into the universe. Allen was the only person who knew me well enough to notice.

  “Is everything okay with you these days?” he asked.

  My house smelled funny. Like men, we talked around the issues.

  “Yeah. Everything is fine. Just workin’ too hard.”

  “Early wants you to come to his baseball game tonight.”

  Sitting there in my living room, I started thinking about Allen’s father. I started thinking about those last few seconds before I pulled the trigger, standing behind him at the top of the stairs, when his fingers stopped on the computer keyboard. He sensed something in his house, someone behind him, and then the gun went off.

  Maybe there was no justification. Maybe it wasn’t my decision to make, just like it wasn’t my decision to kill Mike Stockton.

  “How’s your mother?” I asked Allen, trying desperately to change the track of my thoughts.

  “She’s doing pretty good,” he answered. “I took her out to the grave…” And then he stopped himself.

  They’d been out to the man’s grave together. They probably brought flowers and talked about things they could never talk about in front of me. I wondered if Early was with them. If they told him it was his grandpa’s grave, and he’d been murdered, and they never caught the person who did it. Murdered in his own house, with his own gun, by a coward.

  When other people complain about being depressed it sounds like horseshit, but something was the matter with me. Nothing seemed good. Ice cream. The beach. A cigarette. Even building something with Early in the workshop. My mind floated from Kate to Allen Kilborn Sr. and back around again in an endless cloudy circle of doubt and regret.

  I think there are still active volcanos somewhere in Hawaii. I imagined planning a trip, flying to Hawaii, staying a week in expensive hotel rooms, eating roast pig and drinking pineapple juice. I could spend every last dime on whatever I wanted to, maybe leaving a small trust fund for Little Early.

  On the last day of the trip I could rent a car to drive out to the volcano. I’m sure there must be tour guides and hiking trails. I could make plans in advance and act nice and normal, like nothing was up.

  Later, people would say, “He acted nice and normal, like nothing was up.”

  But when I’d finally reach the crest of the volcano, and the tour guide would turn his back, I’d jump down into the red molten lava. My body would disintegrate instantly into the intense heat, disappearing for eternity. No bones to find later. No cakes of dried blood. Just a bewildered tour guide standing at the edge wearing a backpack wondering if I’d fallen accidentally or purposefully incinerated myself. There would be no need for explanation. I’d be dead.

  So I asked the question. “Did you and your mother go out to your father’s grave?”

  Allen looked down at his hands. Maybe he thought it was disrespectful to talk about the man in front of me, or maybe he’d just gotten used to the idea of keeping us separate inside himself.

  “Yeah,” he said.

  I wanted to know more. I wanted to know all the details.

  “Do you go there a lot?”

  He looked up from his hands. It wasn’t my business. Allen’s relationship with his father, and now with his mother, wasn’t my business anymore, and maybe never was.

  It was that moment I decided I needed to tell Frank Rush the truth somehow. At least Frank Rush, if not everyone in the world. I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life locked in a prison cell, but what was the difference. I had to get it off me somehow, and Frank Rush was a man who might just understand why I did what I did. Maybe he could even help me see things I didn’t see before.

  So when I was alone, I got out my pen and paper again. This time to plan something good. I started a fire in the little fireplace, a tiny volcano, and sat in front in a wooden chair. In longhand I began to write the words I would use to tell Frank Rush the truth. Not just the words, but where we would be for the conversation, and when, and how it would all be arranged.

  If possible, I wanted to confess my sins without repercussion, an unrealistic goal, but a goal nonetheless. I didn’t want to lose Allen or Emily. I didn’t want to die in jail. I didn’t want Gretchen sitting in the back of a courtroom staring at me like I was Charles Manson. I didn’t want to see Kate’s envelope in a stack of prison mail. I didn’t want Early standing over his grandpa’s grave hating me, his namesake, for killing the man he never got to know. A man, so many years later, remembered as someone he wasn’t.

  The planning went on for weeks and then spread into the next month. I decided to learn Frank Rush’s routine. I’d pick the right date to accidentally find myself sitting next to him on a park bench or at a movie theater, away from his office, away from his little tape recorder. He’d know why I was there. He’d know it wasn’t an accident.

  The words would come to me, a combination of all the best parts of each written confession I’d tossed into the fire. And then we’d talk about it. Man to man. Father to father. He’d tell me what he knew, and I’d fill in the blanks, holding back any information that might lead to physical evidence. After that, I was unsure what would happen.

  I’d tell him, “I won’t plead guilty, Frank. I’ll deny we had this conversation. I’ll never tell you where to find the other buried things, or the spare key.”

  On a Tuesday morning I picked up the newspaper at the end of the driveway, like usual. I sat in my office with the door closed, reading. In the obituaries I saw a picture of Frank Rush. It was right there, in color, amongst the other faces. He was smiling. He was dead. Died of a heart attack. The article under his picture said lots of good things about him. Frank Rush was retired. He’d served in the United States Navy, had eight grandchildren, and loved model airplanes. It didn’t say anything about me.

  I suppose, if you wait long enough, everybody dies. It’s just the way it is. Like when I was a boy and asked my mother about my father dying. She told me we never really figure it out. We just become more comfortable with the mystery somehow. I wasn’t comfortable with the mystery at all. I’d never planned for Frank Rush to die. He was like a mountain. He died never knowing. I wondered if he thought about me, and Allen Kilborn, and Mike Stockton, the day before he died. Probably not. He was probably thinking about his grandchildren, or model airplanes, or whether it would rain, leaving me with visions of volcanos and no one to talk to.

  I went to work like normal the next day. Since the night in the bar with Keith Perkins, every time I passed his office he winked at me. We were co-conspirators, foreve
r linked by Gina, the woman he enjoyed, and I couldn’t.

  This time I stopped at his office door. “Keith,” I said.

  His eyes grew wide like he feared I would reveal our secret. Scream across the office, “Keith loves whores,” in my loudest, angriest, stock market voice.

  “Yes,” he said meekly.

  “Don’t wink at me anymore.”

  He seemed relieved and confused. I didn’t wait for him to answer.

  I stopped by the grocery store on the way home after work. I always loved the grocery store. I kept finding myself roaming around up and down the aisles instead of going home to my empty house. The store was so well-lit, and colorful, with the smell of baked bread, and I didn’t have to talk to anybody if I didn’t want to.

  I stood in front of the cheese in the dairy section. My attention was drawn toward a figure to my right. Ten feet away, in front of the milk, stood Samantha. The scene was exactly as we’d stood years ago when I’d orchestrated our meeting. When I went to the grocery store every day for a week at the same time until I saw her, and stood in front of the cheese, and waited for her to turn around and look at me, and then forgot the lines I’d rehearsed. Dumbfounded like a school boy.

  This time I hoped she wouldn’t look at me, but I couldn’t seem to move. I couldn’t seem to stop watching her as she squinted over her reading glasses to read the labels on the milk jugs. I’d seen her from time to time at Early’s games or other events, but not so close. Her hair was shorter. She’d gained a few pounds around the middle.

  So long ago the sight of Samantha had left me speechless. The thought of her nakedness cleansed my mind of everything. But now it was like we’d never known each other. Like we’d never shared anything at all. Just two people in the grocery store, struggling to read labels on dairy products.

  She turned to see me and for a moment seemed not to recognize my face.

  I spoke first, automatically, without expression. “Hi,” I said.

  She smiled politely, like she promised she would do. “Hi,” she said, and then turned and walked away with a milk jug in her hand. I watched her go.

  I left the store, buying nothing, and drove to the little league baseball park. Early played shortstop and was one of the best kids on the team. He was more aggressive and competitive than his father had been, watching the scoreboard over his shoulder, nervous.

  I waved, and he saw me take my place in the aluminum bleachers next to Allen. Emily was home, pregnant with their second child. A girl. A baby girl on the way into the world. A world that seemed too angry and confusing for a little girl, but who was I to say?

  A ball was hit hard to Early. He dove and missed, out of reach, and then banged his glove on the red dirt, mad at himself.

  “Good try,” a man yelled below me.

  I smiled. It was really a very pleasant place to be, the baseball park. It was well-lit like the grocery store, with kids, and peanuts, and the smell of hot dogs. They smell much better than they taste, the red texture always disappointing.

  I wished my father could be there. He’d be an old man. I did the math in my head, eighty-one years old. If it wasn’t for the train, or any other tragedy between the train and the ballpark, my father would be sitting next to me in the bleachers, probably wearing a jacket, maybe a hat to cover his gray hair, eating peanuts. He would have liked Little Early, the competitive spirit, slamming his glove down in the red dirt.

  He would have said, “Good try, boy,” and patted me on the leg, choosing not to acknowledge the horrible things I’d done after I’d sat down next to him on the park bench and confessed my sins to him. The plan to kill Early’s grandfather. The squeak on the seventh step. The man’s head exploding like a balloon, blood and bones sprayed across the computer screen. Mike Stockton’s black figure in the doorway, the light from the streetlight behind him, maybe just waiting to talk to his wife, straighten things out, apologize.

  But my father would have understood why I did what I did. And in the last inning, when Early hit the ball to the fence and scored the winning run, my father would have stood up and yelled for his grandson, dropping his peanuts, and putting his arm around my shoulder.

  six

  I took the death of Frank Rush as a sign from God. A sign to pursue my childhood vow of being average and invisible. My life became measured by baseball seasons. Going to work, stopping at the well-lit grocery store, locking the door behind me in my little house, not answering the phone, and then going to work again, looking forward to Early’s next game, or even the next season.

  I took to writing letters to Kate about virtually nothing, and she never responded. Usually the letters were written late at night, after I’d had too much to drink.

  Dear Kate,

  Come to my funeral when I die. I don’t know why it’s important, but it is, and I don’t care to figure it out. Just tell me you’ll be there.

  Early

  Most of the letters were never sent, piling up in the bottom drawer of my desk, but sometimes, burdened by the knowledge the sobriety of morning would dampen my courage, I’d venture out late at night to the mailbox. The same mailbox I once attempted to steal.

  Kate,

  Do you remember the time we were at the park for my visitation with Gretchen? She couldn’t have been more than four or five years old. You and I walked away to argue about something, who knows what now, and left Gretchen alone.

  When I turned around she was standing in a bed of fire ants. They were all over her sandals and biting her little legs, her eyes were filled with tears, her arms outstretched to us.

  I remember the helplessness. The total and utter understanding I couldn’t protect her from the bad things in this world.

  Why is it our minds hold certain moments, certain conversations, certain words spoken, or visual images like Gretchen’s outstretched arms, and yet dismiss huge pieces, events, entire years of our lives? Why is it we’re not allowed to forget certain moments, and then not allowed to remember others?

  Early

  At first, when I sent the letters, I spent time wondering about Kate reading my words. Standing at the mailbox on a beautiful California morning. Smiling, or not smiling, as the case might be, alone in her bathroom, door locked, afraid of what I didn’t mention. But slowly, as the years passed along, I didn’t think any more about Kate reading the letters. It didn’t much matter. They weren’t for her anyway.

  On a Monday morning I went to work as usual, and as usual, the office door was locked and the lights were out. Most of the time I was the first to arrive. On this particular Monday morning, I flicked on the lights to see my co-workers standing in the lobby around a large cake on a table. Balloons were tied to the four corners of the table and somebody had written on a white poster: HAPPY BIRTHDAY OLD MAN.

  It was my sixtieth birthday. I was sixty years old. Sixty years had passed since my moment of mis-conception.

  They began to sing, off-beat, awkward, most of them wishing they were still in bed. And as they sang, I thought about how much I hated everyone in the room. Keith Perkins with his nasty little secret. Debbie Cunningham with all those extremely black nose hairs. Chad Driskall and his political comments on everything under the sun. “I believe beavers would be Republicans if they had a choice, don’t you? I mean, they’re industrious, conservative creatures.”

  I didn’t really hate them, and so we all stood in the lobby at seven in the morning celebrating my sixtieth birthday and ignoring the absurdity of it all.

  I turned my head away from Debbie Cunningham as she gave the obligatory birthday hug, and then as we parted, tried to stare directly into those dishwater eyes and keep myself from glancing at the newest nose hair sprouted overnight. Keith Perkins wanted to wink at me so badly his face twitched, and I swear to God I heard Amber Sullivan pass gas standing next to the cake during a quiet moment. I imagined her stink absorbing into the white frosting and almost dry-heaved at the idea.

  I had dinner that night with Allen and his fam
ily. Emily cooked a grand meal. Little Early was a young man, grown up before my eyes. His sister, Jessica, looked just like Gretchen to me, which was genetically impossible of course, and made me feel I might be losing my mind.

  During dinner, I started to think again about killing Allen Kilborn Sr. It would flash in my mind, and I’d try to switch quickly to something else, but it would come back again and again, making my head actually hurt. There was really only one question left. Would I tell Allen I’d killed his father or not? Would I go to my grave unforgiven, or risk losing the love of the person in my life who probably loved me more than anyone ever had?

  How would Allen react if I told him, and would his reaction be a product of who he was born to be, or who I made him? After all, ultimately, don’t we become a combination of every important person in our lives, taking pieces of them as we go?

  I looked around the dinner table. They had no idea who I was. To them I was Early Winwood, old man, builder of doghouses, stockbroker, ex-savior. They didn’t see me at night at my desk next to a glass of brown whiskey, scribbling pitiful letters to a woman who never loved me. Or sitting in my office wishing Keith Perkins was dead. Or remembering my fingers on the inner thigh of the whore in the motel room. They didn’t know how much I missed my mother and needed my father. They didn’t know because I didn’t tell them, and there was no way for them to know such things.

  For days after my birthday I sat around thinking about telling Allen. I decided it wasn’t a choice. It had to be done, maybe more than anything I’d ever done before. So I smoked and thought, thought and smoked, and tried to work out the details of my confession.

  It would be done in person. A letter would be too cheap and easy. I should leave out gruesome details and not provide too much explanation either. It wasn’t a moment for justification or self-pity. It was my gift to Allen, for him to do with as he chose, and I would need to be prepared for the worst. Prepared to spend the rest of my life without him, or Emily, or Jessica, or Little Early’s baseball games. In some regard, it was much like one of my suicide scenarios, with less finality and more serious consequences. It also happened to be real life instead of volcano fantasy, and for months I couldn’t think of anything else.