No Sleep till Wonderland (22 page)

I’m not listening to him.

“You were too embarrassed to ask for help. You were too scared that something terrible was wrong with you. You tried to ignore it. You closed your eyes and wished the bad stuff away. You didn’t tell anyone, not even your best-est buddy George.”

Shut up.

“You didn’t tell him that you’d been falling asleep on the train and the bus and at work. You didn’t tell him, and you drove the van that night.”

Shut up!

“You killed your best friend.”

No, I didn’t. It was an accident.

“The irony is that I was your friend, Mark, that I am your friend, and I tried to kill you. See how that all kinda worked itself out? I think that makes things all square, now.”

“Shut up

               shut up

                                   shut up!”

I take my hands away from my face because I’m screaming into them, but not at them. My fingers are wet with blood, sweat, and tears. It was my fault. No, it was an accident. I cry some more. It doesn’t make me feel any better.

Carter and Gus are dead on the kitchen floor. Gus is done talking. Enough has finally been said.

I slowly stand up because I can. The room shakes and sways under my jelly legs. My clothes are heavy with other people’s blood.

I need to get out. I leave the kitchen and walk outside, onto the porch. Carter’s Lexus is gone. Gus’s Dart is somewhere at the bottom of the hill. The night is empty.

I pull my cell phone out of my jacket pocket and stare at it. The push buttons glow a phosphorescent blue. I hover my finger over the numbered buttons, and the blue light somehow curls around my fingertip. I haven’t pressed anything yet.

Oh, I will use the phone at some point. I don’t know if Ekat’s precious hour is up, and I haven’t yet decided if I care.

“Hey.”

I’m more nervous than I should be. I’m perched on the front stoop, standing as straight as a barber pole, sans stripes, and sweating like a rain forest. It’s too warm for September, and I’m dressed for winter. I shouldn’t have worn my wool sports coat, but it’s my favorite. It helps to give my lumpy shoulders some definition while camouflaging my gut. Image is everything.

I say, “Hey,” back. My conversational prowess is a gift.

Jody wears faded jeans and a tight green Celtics V-neck T-shirt. The collar trim is frayed and stretched out. She doesn’t wear any makeup, and she has taken out the stud from below her lip. Her brown hair is black because it’s still wet. Loose strands cling to her round cheeks. She’s just out of the shower, and she doesn’t look as nervous as I feel.

She says, “Come on up, but watch where you’re walking. The hall light burned out a couple of weeks ago, and the landlord hasn’t dragged his ass down here to change it. It’s like one of those bad jokes: how many assholes does it take to change a lightbulb?”

I say, “I don’t know. How many assholes does it take? Two?” I try to play along, build on her joke, but it’s a house made of straw that crumbles and blows away by the hair on my chinny-chin-chins. I’m the wolf and the pigs at the same time. Jesus, I need to try to relax a little.

Jody says, “Huh? Oh, yeah, maybe. I just know there’s one asshole not getting the job done.”

The front door shuts behind me, and it’s dark, below-deck-on-a-pirate-ship dark. I should’ve brought a parrot and taken my citrus pill. Getting scurvy would suck. Above us, the apartment door is open, our navigating star. I make it up the stairs without falling.

Jody says, “Have a seat,” and points at the kitchen table. I assume she means for me to sit in a chair. “Don’t mind me if I’m a little cranky. I haven’t, you know, drank anything for twenty-four days. That’s a big deal for me. I’ve been drinking since I was eleven.”

I say, “Good for you, Jody. I…uh…don’t mean good for you for the drinking-since-you-were-eleven part. I meant good for you for not drinking. You probably knew that.” Nice. I’m tripping over myself trying to play it cool when I don’t have that setting. It’s hard to be cool when you’re sweating more than Marlon Brando in
Apocalypse Now
.

“Yeah. Good for me. I’m trying to do better, you know? After everything that’s happened, I don’t have much of a choice. I have to do better.”

“Are you feeling okay?”

“Yeah. Yeah, I’m starting to feel pretty good. But I’ve gained fifteen pounds. I’m blowin’ up.”

“I think you look great.” I’m telling the truth, but I don’t know if it sounds right and don’t know if it’s what she wants to hear. No one ever knows the right thing to say. We’re always guessing, and either we have the courage to say something or we don’t.

Jody laughs and says, “You’re such a bad liar, but I’ll take it.”

The kitchen has been recently cleaned and smells of mass-produced chemicals. I sit at the table and fiddle with the salt and pepper shakers shaped like gingerbread men. The gingerbread men don’t know they are out of season. I accidentally knock over the salt, the shaker with the red scarf around its cookie neck. I sweep up the granules and pocket them instead of throwing them over my shoulder. I’m not some superstitious fob.

“Do you want anything?” Jody stands in front of the open refrigerator. There aren’t a whole lot of choices inside the metal box.

I say, “Water is fine, thanks.”

She pours us both a glass of soda water instead. I don’t like soda water. The carbonation without the caffeine gives me a headache.

“My JT calls soda water garbage juice.” Jody brings our angry, frothing glasses to the table. She sits on top of a folded leg. It doesn’t look like a very comfortable position. “He’s a funny kid.”

I wasn’t planning on asking about her son. I tell myself that doesn’t make me a coward. I say, “How’s he doing?”

Jody looks out the window behind me. Maybe she sees something. She says, “Okay, I guess. He’s out of the hospital but scarred up pretty bad. Might need some skin grafts and some other procedures later. He’s staying with a foster family in Quincy.” She pulls her leg out from underneath her butt, and she sinks lower into the chair. “They seem nice, but they have like eight other kids they’re watching, so I don’t know how much attention he gets. I get one supervised visit a month. I saw him last weekend. Didn’t ask too much about his new family. He didn’t say much about them neither. I don’t know; it’s hard, and it sucks. I can petition or reapply for custody, or whatever they call the flaming hoops of shit I have to jump through, in a year, maybe.”

Jody cut a deal with the DA, cooperating fully with the ID theft, arson, and now double-murder investigations. No jail time, but probation and a parole officer, and I gather that her being granted full custody again is the longest of long shots. She knows this.

She says, “Oh hey, I almost forgot. Jesus, my head spinning with AA meetings and everything else, I almost forgot.” Stops and gives me a smile. “JT said something else that was kinda funny.”

“He likes garbage juice now.”

“No, not funny ha-ha. He says he dreams about the fire a lot, and, um, he dreams about a big, hairy guy in a hat carrying him out of his bedroom, walking him down our old stairs, saving him. Isn’t that something else?”

I say, “That is funny, not ha-ha,” and pretend that there was never any doubt that I’d saved the kid. I hold in the soul-deep sigh of relief and resist the urge to pull out my cell phone and have Jody relate that story to Detective Owolewa or anyone else who’ll listen. Maybe I’ll tattoo
him-I-saved
on my forearm instead. It’d be more subtle.

Jody smiles at me and says, “I hope you get to meet JT someday. He’s a great kid.” She tucks her wet hair behind her ears. Her cheeks and the skin around her eyes are splotchy red. “So are you gonna tell me what you know, or what? Spill it.” She’s practically yelling at me, overcompensating for everything.

The kitchen floor is warped and pitches slightly left. I try to lean away from the subtle slant, but balance is impossible. I sip the garbage juice, and I tell her what I know, which isn’t much.

The Boston police investigated me thoroughly in the month-plus since the night at Carter’s house, stopping just short of a full body cavity search. While they’ve concluded that I am mostly clean, they haven’t been exactly forthright in providing me with further details about everything that happened. I do know Carter is their number one suspect for the fire, but short of my testimony, they don’t have any court-worthy physical evidence. Carter’s Lexus was abandoned in Stamford, Connecticut, found in a train station parking lot. Ekat is still missing. Detective Owolewa, who still checks in with me (or is he checking up on me?), doesn’t say if there are any leads.

I don’t tell Jody that for the first two weeks after the shoot-out at the not-okay corral, I didn’t leave my apartment. I sat on my couch in the dark and stewed about George, the van accident, and the fractured time before it and that has since passed. I stewed about Ekat, where she went, what she was doing. I stewed about Gus, playing and replaying everything he said and didn’t say, connecting and reconnecting the events, trying to figure out exactly when Gus decided he could and would kill me, as if knowing that impossible precise moment would somehow redefine me or represent a measure of my worth.

I don’t tell Jody that after those two weeks of self-flagellation were over, I took five hundred bucks—the same amount Gus paid me to watch Ekat—and sent it to the hotel manager down in Nantucket, the one who used to be Aleksandar’s boss. I asked her to pretty-please pass the money along to Aleksandar’s family.

I don’t tell Jody that I’ve spent last month cleaning and redecorating my apartment. I threw out half and scrubbed the other half, focusing the bulk of my efforts in the living room. I went hazmat on that disaster. I junked the crumbling CD and DVD towers and shelves and the coffee table. I peeled away the dust-encrusted blinds and curtains, rods and all. I washed the hardwood floors by hand, twice. Throwing away my old couch was the most difficult part. It had been my only roommate for almost ten years. I tried throwing a white sheet over it so it was disguised as the ghost of my old couch, but it didn’t work. I couldn’t just cover up that corpse. I needed that sucker buried and gone. So I dragged it down the stairs and to the curb. After that, and a long nap, the rest was easy. I painted the walls a light shade of sky blue. It’s kind of goofy, and my mother, Ellen, pretended not to approve of it, but I like it. I still might paint on some clouds or buy large cloud stickers that I can peel off and put back on, depending upon what kind of day it is.

I don’t tell Jody I salvaged a bookshelf that someone left out on Gold Street, but I don’t have any books on it yet. I haven’t put up new curtains or bought a new couch either. Part of me likes the room the way it is: clean but unfinished. Part of me likes the possibilities more than whatever the finished product will be. That and I’m short on funds. I don’t tell Jody that I’m considering putting out an ad (with Ellen’s blessing) for a roommate.

I don’t tell Jody that Ellen and I have patched things up and are back on speaking and visiting terms. I also don’t have to go to group therapy anymore to keep the place.

Jody asks, “You hear anything about how Eddie’s doing?”

Eddie pleaded no contest to a host of charges related to his stealing a car and the Zakim Bridge dumping of my pretty ass. He’s being held without bail, but he’s no longer an arson suspect. I say, “No. You probably know more than I do.”

“I guess so. He wrote me a letter, got it last week, but I didn’t open it. I know he didn’t start that fire, but…I don’t know. Opening that letter would be like going backward, or something. I just want to go forward now.” Jody points somewhere behind me. I presume that’s where forward is.

I concur with my silence.

Jody and I stop talking and not talking about the case, which means we’re done talking, and there isn’t much garbage juice left in our glasses. Ending the conversation with talk of Eddie is the worst possible lead-in to what I want to ask her, to what I was planning on asking her, but I forge ahead anyway.

“Would you like to go out to dinner some night this week? Maybe Friday night?” My hands tap out a rhythm on the kitchen table. I’m a one-man act: spoken word accompanied with free-form jazz percussion. I keep the gig going. “We could go out, or we could go more simple, more low-key. You could come over to my place. I’m teaching myself to cook now.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Yeah. I’m terrible at it. I burned cold cereal yesterday morning, but I’ll get better. I should be decent by Friday night.”

She says, “Sounds like fun, Mark, and I’ll do it on one condition.”

“Okay.”

“As long as it isn’t a date. Call it we’re hanging out.”

“I never said date, did I?”

“No, not exactly.”

“Let’s hang out on Friday night, then.”

Jody stands up and takes my glass and puts it in the sink even though it isn’t quite empty. Her hands are shaking a little, too. She says, “Yeah, okay. Just keep in mind I’m still new to my AA experience, and I’m feeling good now, but I still have bad days. I might have to cancel last minute if it’s a bad day, you know?”

I do know.

Thank you to Lisa, Cole, and Emma, and the rest of my amazing family and friends who’ve been so supportive of me and the books. I’d be dead or crazy or crazy-dead without them. Thank you to my agent, Stephen Barbara, whom we all love despite his two first names. Thank you to my editor, Helen Atsma, who really went above and beyond the call of duty for me and the book(s).

And thank you Laird Barron, Books on the Square (Providence), BPL Copley and South Boston branches, Raymond Chandler, F. Brett Cox, JoAnn Cox, Bill Crider, Nick Curtis, Dave Daley, Ellen Datlow, Kurt Dinan, the Elitist Horror Cabal, Steve Eller, Steve Fisher, Michele Foschini, Lisa Fyfe, Geoffrey H. Goodwin, Jack Haringa, Ron Hogan, Stephen Graham Jones, Brian Keene, Sarah Knight, Matt Kressel, John Langan, Sarah Langan, Joe R. Lansdale, Jason Leibman, lokilokust, Chastity Lovely, Louis Maistros, Newtonville Bookstore, Stewart O’Nan, Tom Piccirilli, the qwee, Jody Rose, Brett Savory, the Secret Group, Charles Tan, Jeffrey Thomas, M. Thomas, Jeff Vandermeer, Your Pretty Name.