Authors: Allen Steele
In that respect alone, we had been lucky. The house had made it through the quake; it was the family living inside that had been destroyed.
After Mike Farrentino dropped me off at the curb, I trudged up the walk and climbed the stairs to the front porch. A downstairs light was on, but the upper floors were darkened. Security lamps hidden beneath the porch eaves came on as soon as I approached the door; I still had a key, but I figured it would be polite if I touched the doorplate instead.
“Mari, it’s me,” I said. “Will you get up and come let me in?”
There was a long pause. I turned my face toward the concealed lens of the security camera and smiled as best I could, knowing that she was rolling over in bed to check the screen on the night table. Probably half-asleep, maybe knocking away the paperback thriller she had been reading just before she turned off the light. Unshaven, haggard, hair matted with rain, and wearing drenched clothes, I realized that I must resemble the bad guy in her latest novel.
“Gerry …?”
Her voice sounded fuzzy with sleep.
“Gerry, what the hell are you doing here?”
“It’s a long story, babe.” I ran a hand through my hair, brushing it away from my face. “I’m sorry I woke you up, but—”
“Are you drunk again?”
Her voice, no longer quite so sleepy, was tinged with irritation.
“I swear to God, if you’ve been drinking, you can
—”
“I’m not drunk, Mari, I promise you. It’s just …” I sighed, half-closing my eyes. “Look, I’m really tired. I’ve just had a helluva night and I can’t go back to my place, so just please let me in, okay?”
Again, another pause, a little longer this time. For the first time since I had asked Farrentino for a lift out here, a disturbing notion crossed my mind: perhaps she was not alone tonight. I hadn’t shacked up with any other women since the beginning of our separation, as tempted as I had been from time to time. The thought had never seriously occurred to me, nor had Marianne told me about any new men in her life. Yet things could have changed; she might have some young bohunk in bed right now, a little lost puppy she had picked up at one of the nearby Webster University hangouts.
I stepped away from the camera to check the end of the driveway next to the house. Only her car was parked there, a power cable running from its battery port to the side of the house. Of course, that alone meant nothing. Postmen walk by every day, and so do joggers in tight nylon shorts.
I heard locks being buzzed open, then the door opened a few inches. “Gerry?” I heard her say. “Are you out there?”
“Right here.” I quickly stepped away from the porch railing. Even when she was practically somnambulant, with her shoulder-length hair in knots and wearing a ragged terrycloth robe, Marianne was one of the most beautiful women I have ever met. Husbands are usually blind to the imperfections of their wives, of course, but that wasn’t the case with Mari; my eyes didn’t lie, and she was still good looking. Thirty years of ofttimes hard living had treated her well; she still looked much the same as she did when I had met her in college. She had regained her figure not long after Jamie’s birth, and even though there were the first hints of gray in her dark hair, she could have passed for twenty-four.
Not that she was in any mood for compliments. “Gerry, what are you doing here?” she repeated. “For chrissakes, I just went to bed … and what are you looking at the driveway for?”
“Just seeing how the car’s holding up,” I said quickly. “You renewed your plates, didn’t you?”
Her expression became puzzled. “You didn’t come all the way out here to check my renewal sticker,” she said. “What’s going on, Gerard?”
She called me Gerard. When she used my full first name, it usually meant she was pissed off. No wonder; for Marianne, getting a full night’s sleep was a serious business, and woe be to the friend, relative, or former spouse who woke her out of bed after eleven o’clock. “I’m sorry if I caught you at a bad time, babe,” I said, “but I need three things from you.”
She let out an exasperated sigh and sagged against the door frame. “Let me guess,” she said. “One of them is money, and the second is sex. What’s the third? The car?”
It might have been funny if it wasn’t true. When we had agreed that a separation was probably the best thing for both of us, after I had moved to a motel and before I had found a new job, those were the three favors I most commonly called to ask of her: wheels to get around in, a ten or twenty to tide me over till the next paycheck, and a quick roll in the hay because I was so damn lonely and because I still believed sex would heal all the wounds. All three she had agreed to, at one time or another, until she hardened her heart and told me that I was on my own. Hell, the only reason why we still hadn’t become officially divorced was because neither of us could afford lawyer bills right now.
“Hey, if you want to have sex with me and give me some bucks and the car in return—” I began, and she started to slam the door in my face until I pushed my hand against the knob. “Wait, I’m just kidding. Seriously …”
Again the sigh as she opened the door again. “Seriously what?”
Now was no time to bullshit my wife, even if she hated my guts. “I need a place to crash,” I said. “Just for tonight, I swear … and I need to use the computer.”
“Uh-huh.” She gazed at me indifferently. “A bed and the computer. Yeah. What else?”
“Hey, I can sleep on the couch—”
“Damn straight you’re going to sleep on the couch,” she replied. “What’s the third thing, Gerard?”
I hesitated; this was probably the biggest favor of all. “The third thing is no questions asked.” I took a deep breath. “I’m in trouble, kiddo. Big trouble.”
“Oh, Christ.” She sighed as her eyes rolled upward. “You’re running from the cops, aren’t you?”
I almost broke down laughing. “Babe, a cop gave me a lift out here—”
“Uh, huh. Sure …”
I raised my hands. “Believe me, Marianne, if this was going to get you in any trouble, I wouldn’t be here right now. I’m not in trouble with the cops.”
Not technically, anyway,
I thought. “All I need is the couch,” I went on, “and to use the office computer for an hour or so. I don’t want your money, I don’t want to sleep with you, and I’ll call a cab bright and early tomorrow morning. Okay?”
She sighed again, closing her eyes as if she was carrying the burdens of the world on her shoulders. “Jeez, Gerry, why can’t you go bug John for this?”
Because John is dead,
I almost blurted out, but I held my tongue. Telling her would only have prompted all the questions I wanted to avoid, and it was far safer for her to remain ignorant. I was lucky that she obviously hadn’t seen the late news on one of the local TV stations or hadn’t yet received a call from Sandy Tiernan.
“Please,” I said. “Just do it for me, okay?”
She gazed at me for another moment, then she pushed the door open a little wider and stepped aside. “All right,” she said. “But remember … you’re sleeping on the couch.”
The house was a little cleaner than it had usually been before I moved out, yet otherwise everything was much the same. She hadn’t changed the living room furniture or taken any of the prints from the walls; although she had removed our wedding photos, there were still baby and toddler pictures of Jamie on the fireplace mantel. Marianne let me grab a Diet Dr. Pepper from the fridge, then went upstairs to gather some sheets and a spare pillow from the linen cabinet while I retreated to her home office.
The office was located in the rear of the ground floor, in what had been a den before we had put in floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. Before the quake hit, we had shared that space; she had used it during the day to telecommute to her insurance company’s home office in Kansas City, and when she was through at five o’clock it became my study for the writing of the Great American Unreadable Novel. I noticed that she had removed my books and mementos from the shelves, but I didn’t want to make an issue of it. Right now, I was interested in only one thing.
I found the plastic CD-OP filebox on a small shelf beneath the desk; the particular disk for which I was searching was contained in a scratched, often-opened case marked
FAMILY
. Marianne must have been looking at it often; it was at the front of the box, in front of the business disks. I pulled out the case and opened it, and after switching on the computer and opening the
REVIEW
window, I slipped the disk into the optical diskette drive.
Starting shortly after we became engaged, Marianne and I had videoed almost everything we did, using a camcorder one of her relatives had given her at the bridal shower. Hiking in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, summer scenes on Cape Cod, strange little home movies when we were both full of wine and creativity, the wedding day ceremonies, and the honeymoon trip to Ireland … we had recorded everything, and stored the bits and bytes on CD-OP for replay on our computer as an electronic family album.
We had gotten bored of the novelty after a while, and thus there were large chronological gaps on the menu until Jamie was born, when we had rediscovered the camcorder and started making the inevitable baby pictures. As a result, the submenu screen showed a lot of filenames marked
JAMIE.1
,
JAMIE.2
,
JAMIE.3
, and so forth, one for each birthday he had passed. Yet there was one piece of footage in particular, lodged in
JAMIE.6
, that I now needed to see.
After we had moved back to St. Louis, there had been a rash of kidnappings in the city. Children were vanishing from schoolbus stops and playgrounds and shopping malls, rarely to be seen again by their parents, and then sometimes not alive. The police never caught the evil bastards who had stolen these kids, and only God knows what happened to the ones who were not found, but Marianne and I did what the local authorities suggested parents should do: videotape their kids in advance, so that the footage could be used to identify lost children should the unthinkable happen to them.
It had taken me a while, but something about the weird phone call I had received just before the ERA soldiers broke down the door of my apartment had jogged an old memory. After I opened the
VIDEOVIEW
window on the computer screen, I moused
JAIME.6
and the
REPLAY
command; it took me only a couple of minutes to find the footage I remembered shooting of him, just a few weeks before he was killed.
And now here was Jamie, very much alive and well, sitting in his child-size rocking chair in the living room. He was wearing blue jeans and his favorite St. Louis Cardinals sweatshirt; just a cute little kid, both bored and embarrassed to have his dad making yet another video of him.
My voice, off-camera:
“Okay, kiddo, what’s your name?”
Jamie, pouting, wishing to be anywhere but here:
“Jamie
…”
Me again:
“And what’s your last name?”
Jamie looks down at the floor, his hands fidgeting restlessly on the armrests of his chair:
“Jamie Rosen, and I’m six years old …”
My voice, prodding him gently from behind the camera:
“That’s good! Now what’s your mommy’s and daddy’s names?”
His face scrunches up in earnest concentration, the child who has only recently learned that his folks have names besides Mommy and Daddy:
“My daddy’s name is Gerard Rosen … Gerry Rosen … and Mommy’s … my mommy’s name is Marianne Rosen
…”
Me, playing the proud papa:
“That’s good, Jamie! That’s very good! Now, can you tell me what you’re supposed to do if a stranger comes up to you?”
Jamie dutifully recites everything I had just told him:
“I’m not supposed to talk to strangers, even if they ask me if I want a present, and I can … I’m supposed to run and get a p’leaseman or another grownup and tell them to take me to you, and
…”
There. That was it.
I froze the image and marked its endpoint, then I moved back to the beginning of the video. When I had reached that point and marked it, I opened the menu bar at the top of the screen and selected the
EDIT
function. Another command from the submenu caused a window to open at the bottom half of the screen, displaying a transcript of the conversation.
I then began to work my way through the transcript, highlighting certain key words. It took me a few minutes, but when I was through I had a couple of lines I had pieced together from the videotape. I took a deep breath, then I moused the line and tapped in commands to verbalize those lines.
Jamie’s voice reemerged from the computer, speaking something he had never said in life, but which I had heard over the phone earlier that night:
“Rosen, Gerard … Gerard Rosen … Gerry Rosen … can I talk to you, Daddy?”
And on the computer screen, Jamie’s reedited face was exactly the same as I had seen it on the phone.
“Gerry, what the hell are you doing?”
Startled, I jerked away from the keyboard and spun around in the office chair to find Marianne standing in the doorway behind me.
Her arms were crossed in front of her robe; she had a look of horror on her face, as if she had just caught me trying on a pair of her panties. Maybe reality was worse than that; after all, she had just discovered me in the act of editing one of the last tangible memories of our son.
I lay back in the chair, letting out my breath as I rubbed my eyelids between my fingertips. “Part of the deal was that you wouldn’t ask me any questions,” I murmured. “And believe me, if I told you, you’d just think I was crazy.”
“I already think you’re crazy,” she replied, her voice harsh with anger barely kept in check. “Leave Jamie’s video alone. I mean it …”
Before I could do anything, she stalked across the room and began to reach for the computer. “Okay, okay,” I said, putting my hands over the keyboard. “I’ll get out of this, so long as you answer one question for me.”
She stopped and stared at me, not pulling her hands away. “What is it?”
“Did you load this disk into the hard drive?” I asked. “This file in particular?”