FIVE
Dave moved toward the small house. You might have called it a lumber if he hadn’t been so surefooted, so eerily quiet. He stepped over the discarded tennis ball and across a long length of garden hose that had all but disappeared beneath the tall grass like a scar beneath an untrimmed beard. He’d never come this close; on his previous visits, he’d kept to the woods, stayed hidden even during nighttime hours, when it would have been easy enough to spy on the boy and his mother through their drooping window curtains. The place was even shabbier than he’d realized. Scaly paint hung from the siding like loose, dead skin, and a ring of grass and dirt stains around the perimeter spoke of careless weed-whacking and untreated rain and snow damage. Dave climbed a pair of craggy steps to the back door. The weeds growing from the cracked concrete exemplified the home’s pitiful landscaping.
His own home wasn’t exactly a paradise, wasn’t really a home at all (over time he’d gone from thinking of it as a prison to considering it a sort of base of operations), but that was different. This house was meant for a family. Dave had no family. Not anymore. Not yet.
He pulled on the screen door first, spied a simple disengaged hook and eye closure and reached for the knob of the inner door, which was likewise unsecured.
He slipped inside. The knife in his right cargo pocket thunked against the doorframe, but the sound was faint, nearly inaudible even to Dave himself. His footsteps weren’t much louder. A two-person dinette set occupied a shadowy alcove on his left, the table covered in papers and bills, the front leg of one of the chairs splintered so badly it couldn’t possibly have supported an adult. From his place just inside the back door, he saw a sofa and one arm of a recliner in the adjoining living room, but he didn’t give any of those things much more than a casual glance. The dark-haired woman stood at the kitchen sink, not ten feet away, and he’d made it halfway to her before the muscles in her back so much as tensed.
She’d been washing her hands. The splashing faucet sprayed the dish-cluttered sink and most of the countertop around it. A worn washer ring. Dave could have fixed it in a couple of minutes.
The boy must have been somewhere deeper in the house, his bedroom or maybe a bathroom. Dave stopped in the center of the kitchen and watched the woman shut off the water and dry her hands on an incongruously fancy dishtowel. He hadn’t closed the door behind him—the wind blew it all the way open now, and it knocked against the wall with a single sharp tap.
Whether the woman was responding solely to that sound or had also somehow sensed his presence, Dave wasn’t sure, but he watched her spin toward him with ravenous anticipation. He’d never come so close to her, never seen her face from less than a hundred feet away. He’d sometimes wondered if she would be clear skinned and beautiful, or heavily wrinkled and haggish. Blue eyes or green? Brown? He almost licked his lips.
Her nose was a finely shaped wedge, pert with a pair of inconspicuous nostrils, like something out of a fairy tale, elfish. There had been fairy tales when he was very young. They were one of the things he remembered. One of the things he’d been allowed to remember.
If she had kept her mouth shut, Dave would have gone to her for a closer look at the perfect little nose, might even have given it a friendly kiss.
Instead, she screamed.
Her mouth might have been the entrance to a strange miniature cave, her teeth pale, blunt stalactites and stalagmites, her scream the shrill squeal of a million flitting bats. Startled, Dave almost took a step back, but a more basic instinct took quick control, and he stepped forward instead and punched her in the eye.
He’d meant only to shock her into silence, maybe knock her off balance a little so he could sweep in and steady her, soothe her, but his fist seemed to have the effect of something fired from a cannon, and she crumpled to the floor. Her head bounced twice on the cracked linoleum and then lolled. Dave heard footsteps and heavy breathing behind him and turned far enough around to see the boy, standing frozen in the doorway leading into the living room.
“Hello, Georgie.” Dave smiled at the boy and knelt on the floor beside the temporarily silent woman. “Don’t you worry about me and Mommy—we’re just having a little talk.”
The boy opened his mouth in an almost exact imitation of his mother, but the sound that came from his little cave was very different: a single short squeak like the hinge on a rusty gate. On the floor, the woman had come to and gotten herself up on her elbows.
“Run.” She didn’t scream it, just said it flatly, the way she might have told him to finish his broccoli.
“Hey now,” Dave said, “let’s not—”
The boy made a single clumsy move to the right, but Dave flew across the room in two giant steps and caught the kid by his slender bicep before the boy could do much more than shift his footing.
“Zach!” The woman scrambled on the floor, trying to get to her feet, but Dave had definitely done more damage than he’d intended—she got halfway up twice and fell back onto her rear end both times.
“I’m not going to hurt you,” Dave said to the boy, talking quickly, wanting to get the words out before the woman could stand, wanting him to understand. “I’m here to help you. I promise I’ll save you. I swear.”
The look the boy gave him might easily have been confused for fear, but Dave recognized it for what it must really have been: awe.
He led the kid into the kitchen, to the spot on the floor where his mother still lay squirming like a flipped turtle. “We’re all going to be all right now.”
On the floor, the woman said something Dave couldn’t quite hear.
“What’s that?”
“My husband.” She spit the word at him. “Husband…in the other room. We’ve got a gun. He’ll—”
Dave smiled and shook his head. “Oh, Mommy. We all three of us know that’s an outright lie.” He waggled his finger at her, still smiling. “If there was a husband,” he continued, “you wouldn’t need me here at all.”
The woman stared at him blankly for several long seconds and then turned to her son and repeated, “Run,” this time with a little more conviction.
Dave tightened his grip on the kid before he could think about obeying and frowned down at the woman. “I don’t think you understand what’s happening here,” he said.
From the way she looked back up at him, Dave wondered if maybe she really didn’t.
“It’s my birthday,” he said, shifting his gaze back and forth from mother to son, wanting to hug the both of them to his chest and weep into their hair. “Time to take my place. I’m going to make you whole.”
The woman shook her head. The boy went suddenly slack, and Dave had to look to make sure he hadn’t fainted. Except for his single squeak, the boy hadn’t made a sound. He wasn’t a mute, Dave knew. He’d heard him mumbling to himself in the back yard many times, eavesdropped as he called in to an imaginary airfield from the corner of his tree house while he pretended to pilot his way to earth, listened to him back-talking invisible foes between jump kicks and punches. He looked away from the kid. He’d talk when he was ready.
“I know you wish I could have got here sooner,” he said to the woman. “I’m sorry I couldn’t. I had things to do first. I needed to be ready.”
He let go of the boy and reached down to take the woman’s trembling hand. The flesh around her eye had already darkened and puffed. She squinted at him.
“It’s okay,” he said.
“Who—” She coughed, shook her head a little, and tried again. “Who the hell are you?” His fingers brushed against her knuckles, and she pulled her hand away as quickly as if she’d stuck it into a blazing fire.