“What happened out there?” I asked.
“I dunno. I just lost it when I couldn’t get the door open. And then one thing led to another, and—”
“No,” I said. “Not that. I saw that. How did I get back in here?”
I knew the answer, or at least part of it, but I wanted to hear it from him. I wanted to know what was happening inside his head.
“I came back,” he said as he stared at the ground.
“Back?”
“Yeah. That’s the only way I can describe it. It was like I knew what I was doing, but I wasn’t really the one doing it. I knew it was wrong, is what I mean. But…” he glanced back up, “I didn’t want to stop. That door. It was like it was alive. I felt like it was laughing at me.”
“That’s ridiculous.”
“I know that!” he said in a sudden rush of anger. “I’m not stupid. That’s just what it felt like.”
“So what made you stop?”
Again he stared at the tops of his feet, an embarrassed look in his eyes.
“You,” he said finally. “I saw you. What I had done. And it brought me back.”
My head felt suddenly heavy as a dull throb grew behind my eyes. “You got this?” I asked.
“Yeah. We’re good.”
“Good. I’m going to lie down. Wake me up by four,” I said. “We need to think what we’ll tell Dad about… all this.” I motioned to my cheek.
“Okay. I’m sorry. I hope you know that.”
My head was hurting too bad for me to really know anything. “Sure. Four. Got it?”
He nodded and I slipped away. Despite everything that had happened in my room, I still felt safe once I was under my sheets. It wasn’t the room, or even the bed. It was because I was alone. Andy was out there, and a thin, hollow door separated the two of us. That alone was enough to put me at ease, and I slipped quietly into sleep, leaving the pain safely behind.
Chapter Thirteen
They let Andy out about five years back. He told them how sorry he was for everything he’d done, about how it was all a mistake, even the stuff with me, which couldn’t have been an accident. They knew all about his troubles at school, the outbreaks of violence before and after his arrest. There was quite a list. Still, he’d been a boy when it happened, and he was in jail for a long, long time. I don’t know that anyone in charge actually believed he was what you would call rehabilitated, but it didn’t matter. He’d served his time, so he walked out.
They started him out in a halfway house, a little shithole with four tiny rooms, each home to a pair of work-release guys. There were drug addicts, DUIs, wife beaters, the whole deal, but only Andy had nearly killed anyone. That made him sort of a twisted little celebrity, at least that’s how he told it. I was there when they let him out, and I drove him to the house. He asked, in a roundabout way, if he could live with me.
“I mean, I have to spend six months here,” he said. “I’m dreading it, but I’ve done worse. Lord knows that. When my six is up, I’m not sure where I’ll go…”
Just fishing really. Too afraid or proud to ask, and me not sure if I trusted him, even after everything. I dodged the question, and on the way over, I stopped at the cemetery.
“Where you going?”
“To see Dad.”
“No,” he said with a blank face.
“I thought you’d just—”
“No. Just no.”
We drove on, and he got out of the car at the halfway house without another word. He called me a few times, letting me know how things were going. It didn’t sound too bad, considering all he’d been through. They set him up with a job working a fryer at some chicken joint within walking distance. He said it was nasty work, that the fryers had burned all the hair off his forearms.
“Beggars can’t be choosers,” he added.
“I suppose not.”
Most of our calls were a mixture of general chitchat – the whos, whats, wheres, and so forth – combined with awkward silence. Neither of us knew what to say. We were strangers, and that’s just how it was. About five months in, he told me he had a place lined up to stay.
“Her name’s Kirstie. She works with me. She’s sweet. I guess you could say we’re dating.”
I could hear the excitement in his voice, and I realized that he’d never had a girlfriend. He’d been thirteen when they locked him up, and he’d probably never even kissed anybody. The idea made me equally bitter and sad.
“Good,” I told him. “I’m glad to hear that. I’d like to meet her.”
I tried to imagine the kind of girl who would want to move in with a convict whose only career prospects included working his way up to the cash register. That thought made my fingers itch, and I realized my own love life wasn’t much to be jealous of.
“Yeah,” he said, the smile clear through the phone line. “I told her ’bout you. She’d love to meet you.”
We never did get together. I still don’t know all the details, but I do know that Kirstie had problems of her own – drugs, to be specific. Meth, I believe. She was a mess from top to bottom, and the two of them never really had a chance to make anything work. The next time I heard from Andy, he was out on his own, living in a little apartment. He didn’t mention her, and I didn’t ask, and that’s how it went, for a while at least.
Then Andy found out he was a father.
I dreamed again. A real dream this time, not a vision or a message from beyond. It was a simple one. Just me, sitting in the bathtub with all my clothes on. I smelled like a campfire. I glanced down at my hands, expecting them to be charred and burned, but they were the same hands I looked at every day when I sketched in a notepad or scribbled down my homework minutes before class started. I don’t know why I was so afraid, but I kept waiting for something to happen, waiting for a moment that never came. The moment seemed to linger, stretching out like taffy, far beyond when it should have ended. No blood, no monsters, no writhing pool of blackness, just me in a bathtub, the smell of smoke in the air, staring at my hands without blinking.
Andy didn’t wake me up until nearly five, barely long enough to get a fresh bag of peas on my cheek before Dad got home. The swelling was noticeable, but not so bad as to be overly concerned about. If I played it right, he might not even see it.
“What if he does?” Andy asked. We were both standing just inside the bathroom as I turned my head this way and that, trying to assess the damage.
“I slipped getting out of the shower,” I said. “Bumped it here,” I added with a slap on the bathroom counter.
“Will he buy it?” He sounded more concerned than he had all that day, and I realized how guilty he felt about the whole thing.
“He will.”
And he did. He came in, same as he always did, and though he seemed a bit more attentive than normal, checking on both of us multiple times to make sure all was well, he didn’t quite notice the obvious things that mattered. Not my swollen jaw. Not Andy’s red, blurred eyes. Certainly not the strangely clean bathroom. Looking back, I don’t blame Dad. He was, just as much as the two of us, trying to keep it together. There was no doubt that he noticed some things, but I’m sure he thought there was more time. Why wouldn’t he? He didn’t want to push too hard on me or Andy, because he didn’t want to make things any worse. I don’t think it would have made any difference even if he had known. We were too far gone by then, by the night when everything finally went down.
I think I knew it was coming, at least in one way or another. The dreams. That feeling of something large and unstoppable rolling toward me. That hopeless feeling in the pit of my belly. All of it only grew, changed, becoming deeper and more powerful as I waited for the sun to finally drop. I wouldn’t sleep. I honestly didn’t know if I would ever sleep again, at least not while the sun was down. We ate a quick bite in the living room, pizza coming around in the rotation once more.