Val watches his stubby fingers open his wrapped presents. A toy boat from Samuel, although his playmate is as surprised as Val at what was in the wrapped package. A pop-up picture book of skyscrapers from Samuel’s mother. Little Val can’t read most of the words in the book but sixteen-year-old Val peering out of Little Val’s eyes can.
“Let’s have your cake now and open presents from Mommy and Daddy after you blow out your candles,” says his mommy.
Val’s and Samuel’s eyes grow wide after Samuel’s grandmother turns out the kitchen lights. There’s enough September evening light coming through the mostly closed blinds to keep it from being totally scary, but Val feels his younger self’s heart pounding with excitement and anticipation.
“Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you…” His mommy and Samuel’s grandmother are both singing. The candlelight is magical.
Val blows out the candles, getting some help from his mommy on the last one, and he points to each candle as he counts. “One… two… three… FOUR!”
Everyone applauds. His mommy turns the lights back on and there standing in the kitchen in his gray suit and red tie is Daddy.
Val raises his arms and his daddy sweeps him up into the air. “Happy birthday, big guy,” Daddy says and hands him a clumsily wrapped package. Whatever’s inside is soft. “Go ahead, open it,” says his daddy.
It’s a baseball mitt. Kid-size but real. Val tugs it on his left hand, his daddy helping him get it right, and then buries his face in the cupped and oiled palm of the mitt, smelling the leather.
His mommy hugs him and Daddy at the same time while his daddy is still holding him high against his chest and for a moment Val is almost squashed as everyone hugs everyone, but he keeps the sweet-smelling leather glove over his face—because for some reason he doesn’t understand he’s crying like a little baby—and Samuel is shouting something and…
Val came up out of the twenty-minute flash to the sound of sirens, helicopters, and gunshots somewhere in the neighborhood. The air coming in through his bedroom screen smelled of garbage.
You are such a total pussy, he told himself. Sixteen years old and flashing on crap like this. You are a total pussy.
Still, he wished he’d used a thirty-minute vial.
Val rolled over in bed and reached behind his old dresser to the hiding place behind the loose board in the wainscoting.
He removed the two items there and rolled onto his back.
The leather mitt—darker and tattered, the leather laces replaced and rewoven a dozen times and the webbing torn—smelled almost the same. The leather had a deeper, more knowledgeable smell now. He held the glove, too small to get his hand fully into, over his face.
Total pussy, he told himself. This was one of the reasons he kept his bedroom door locked. And, truth be told, he felt the same guilt with these two talismans as he did when he downloaded porn from a stroke site. But different… different.
He set the old mitt next to him on the pillow.
The other object was an old blue phone. His mother’s. He’d taken it and hidden it away the day after her funeral and although his old man had eventually gotten around to searching for the thing, he hadn’t searched very hard.
The phone was useless as a phone since its phone and access functions had been cancelled by the Old Man and shut off by Verizon shortly after his mother’s death. But there were invaluable things still on it.
Val tapped an earbud into his right ear and thumbed the controls. His mother had used the voice-memo function for three years before the accident that killed her and he knew his favorite dates by heart. One of them from September six years ago was a list of possible gifts for him… for Val’s tenth birthday. There were similar notes from that last Christmas just two weeks before the accident.
But the voice memos didn’t have to relate to Val to be wonderful. The notes to herself could be about dental appointments or school conferences… it didn’t matter. Just the sound of her voice allowed him to fall asleep on these nights when he couldn’t sleep. Usually she sounded busy, distracted, rushed at work, sometimes even annoyed, but still… the sound of his mother’s voice touched something in the core of him.
There was a text section to the phone, of course, and large files there the last seven months of her life, but they were encrypted and after a few lazy attempts to break the cipher, Val left those text files alone. It might be a diary she’d been keeping, but whatever it was, his mother had wanted to keep it private. If his parents’ marriage was in trouble or if it were some other grown-up angst that she’d used an encryption file to keep anyone from overhearing, Val thought it was none of his business.
He just wanted to hear her voice.
You are such a pussy, Val Bottom. Less than a year away from getting drafted into the army or marines, and here you are…
Val ignored that voice and listened to his mother’s, his cheek and nose against the flattened baseball mitt.
Even with tomorrow and the Omura thing hanging over him like a black-garbed ghost, the soft voice and the leather smell cleared his mind and allowed him to fall asleep within ten minutes.
His last waking thought was I have to pack these two things at the bottom of my duffel tomorrow where Leonard won’t find them…
“You motherfucker!”
“Motherfucker yourself, Coyne,” said Val. “And fuck you too.”
Val was ten minutes late for their rendezvous at the Cigna Hospital entrance to the storm sewers. He almost hadn’t come at all but—in the end—knew that he’d always doubt his own courage if he didn’t show up.
“We were just leaving without you, Bottom-wipe,” snarled Coyne. The leader was wearing a leather jacket open to show a squinting, scowling Putin. Coyne already had his ski mask on, although the balaclava was rolled up high on his head.
“Did you bring your gun, Bottom-wipe?” asked Gene D. with a high, almost hysterical-sounding giggle.
Val slapped the taller boy across his cheek with a flick of two fingers.
“Hey!” screamed Gene D.
Coyne laughed. “I get to call Bottom-wipe here Bottom-wipe. Nobody else does. Zip up your fly, pimple-head.”
Gene D. looked down and the other boys laughed too loudly. Everyone sounded like they were wound too tight.
“Got your flashlight?” asked Coyne. He was carrying the bulky OAO Izhmash right here in the open behind the hospital medical-waste Dumpster. It was twilight, but not really dark yet. Anyone driving into the parking lot could see it.
Val held his flashlight up.
“Let’s go,” said Coyne.
Dinjin banged the storm sewer cover open and one by one they slid down into the dank and dark passageway. Coyne led the way as they walked the half mile or so to the downtown through the labyrinth of twists and turns they’d memorized rather than marked. No one spoke as their flashlight beams danced across the moldy, heavily tagged concrete walls. Once in the tunnels near the Cigna entrance, flashback vials crunched underfoot and the floor of the tunnel—dusty and dry—showed a litter of toilet paper, old mattresses, and used condoms that the boys fastidiously avoided.
Val was amazed that all eight of them had shown up. Did the younger kids like Toohey, Cruncher, Monk, and Dinjin have any sense of what they were getting into?
Did the older kids—Sully, Gene D., even Coyne?
Did he himself have a clue? wondered Val. If he did, why was he here?
They reached the Performing Arts Center outlet sooner than Val wanted.