Shadow Show: All-New Stories in Celebration of Ray Bradbury (18 page)

Doug removes the receiver from his ear and stares at it. He knows he shouldn’t do this, but he dials the number again, just to confirm that he did indeed dial his old phone number. If the same man answers, he’ll simply hang up. But it’s the woman this time.

“Hello?” She sounds tired now. Doug hears a young child in the background calling out, “Mommy, Mommy, Mommy.”

“Hush,” the woman says sharply to the child. And then again: “Hello?”

“Hi,” Doug says. “I was just calling to make sure everything is okay.”

“I’m sorry?” the woman says. “I think you have the wrong number?”

It’s the way she ends her sentences as questions that exhumes the past, confirming for Doug who it is he’s speaking to:
his mother
. He hasn’t heard her voice for so many years, a voice he thought he would never forget, but as one year folded into another, one decade after the other disappearing behind him, he found it harder and harder to conjure her up as she had once been. Her voice had been the first thing to fade, until he couldn’t remember her inflections on certain words or the precise way she carried her southern childhood in her speech. For the first time, he experiences what everyone else who’s ever stepped into his bedroom has experienced—that all the monsters on his walls are staring directly at him.

“This is Shirley, isn’t it?” he asks. His voice cracks. He’s trying not to cry.

“It
is
,” she says suspiciously. “And who are
you
?”

There is no way he can explain to her who he is. He can only try to keep her talking.

“We met a few years ago,” Doug says. “I worked with your husband, Tim.” Silence. “My name’s Frank Ivers. You wouldn’t remember me.” He forces out a laugh. He hears the child in the background again. The child is him. He’s listening to his younger self. “I didn’t know Tim well,” Doug says, “but I always liked him. I’m just calling . . .” He pauses. He’s shivering but trying not to. “I’m just calling to see how you’re holding up.”

He hears his mother lighting a cigarette. This means she’s settling in for a long conversation.

“It hasn’t been an easy three years,” she says. “The day Bob came home with the news . . .” She blows smoke into the mouthpiece. She’s sitting down now, Doug imagines. “It was the worst day of my life.”

“I’m so sorry,” he says. “I just want you to know that I’m a friend.”

His mother makes a noise of assent, but she’s lost in her own world. How many times had he seen this, his mother sitting on the couch and staring straight ahead as he tried to get her attention, showing her the cover of his new
Famous Monsters of Filmland
?

“Something’s not right,” she says finally. “I can’t put my finger on it, but . . .”

“Yes?”

Doug hears something rumbling in the background. A pickup truck?

“I’ve got to go,” his mother says.

“Who is it, Shirley? Is it Bob?”

The phone goes dead.

Doug is pacing the room, two fingers holding the heavy black phone, the phone’s base resting against his thigh. He sets down the phone, hangs up the receiver. After his father’s death, Bob began coming over more frequently, sometimes spending the night on the couch. Doug’s earliest memories are of his uncle snoring on their sofa as his mother tiptoed through the room and scolded Doug for playing too loudly with his Hot Wheels. “You don’t want to wake that man” was how she put it.

Doug was fifteen when his mother was murdered. A homeless man, who had been dumpster diving, discovered Shirley’s body in a large trash bin behind an apartment complex. She was wrapped in a blue tarp. People who lived in the apartment building had thrown leaking bags of garbage on top of her, unaware that a body was there. An autopsy revealed that she had died from severe blunt head trauma. Police had detained the homeless man as a possible suspect, but there was nothing to connect him to Doug’s mother, and no weapons of any kind had been found on him. No weapon of any kind had ever been found. Bob had been questioned, too, but he’d provided an alibi—a friend claimed they’d spent the evening together watching the Cubs game on TV, the same friend who had been with Bob during Doug’s father’s hunting accident. Doug had been away at a high school speech tournament, spending the weekend in a dorm room downstate. The story of his mother’s death stayed in the news for several weeks, lingering longer than most, but eventually, like everything else in life, it faded.

Doug dials the number again. He isn’t drunk anymore. In fact, he feels more lucid than he’s ever felt. For the first time, he believes he can undo the terrible things that happened, that he can turn time back, that he can control the outcome. On the eighth ring, a boy answers.

“Hello?” the boy whispers.

“Hello?” Doug says. “Hello? Who is this? Is this Dougie?” Doug knows without a doubt that he is speaking to his younger self. He doesn’t even realize he’s crying until his knuckles, wrapped around the receiver and pressed against his face, pool up the wetness.

“Who are you?” the boy asks. “Is this Mr. Belvedere?”

Doug takes a deep breath. The name is familiar. But why? “Who’s Mr. Belvedere? Tell me about him.”

“He’s in a better place now,” Dougie says.

“He’s dead?” Doug asks. “Did someone kill him?”

“He’s in a better place now,” Dougie repeats.

“Listen,” Doug says. “I don’t have much time, and you won’t hear from me again for another couple of years, so I want you to do something for me, okay? I want you to remember who I am. I want you to pay attention. Because something terrible is going to happen, and only you can stop it.”

Dougie starts crying into the phone, and Doug remembers now how easily he used to fall apart, Uncle Bob always mocking him, matching little Dougie’s snivels with his own fake snivels, mashing his ugly, scrunched-up face against Dougie’s, his uncle’s sour breath like poison. He could taste that man’s breath for hours afterward.

“Don’t cry, Dougie,” Doug says. “Don’t cry. I’m your friend. You have to believe me. I’m your friend. Okay? I’m your . . .” He senses something has happened. “Hello? Dougie? Hello?” The call has been disconnected.

The phone calls are jumping in time, but by how much?

Doug quickly calls back, but the old phone is slow, and each number he dials on the rotary requires patience. It’s one of the reasons he has continued using this old phone, to distinguish himself from his coworkers who are always distracted by their cell phones, texting even as he’s trying to talk to them: “Go on,” they’ll say. “I’m listening.” Doug thought the rotary phone would keep him grounded, but now he desires speed; he desires whatever technology will allow him to stay in contact with his old life.

“Hello?” It’s the boy again. Dougie. Himself. His voice—the boy’s—is deeper now.

“Dougie,” Doug says. “How old are you?”

“Who is this?”

“Quick. How old are you?”

“Nine,” Dougie says.

“Nine,” Doug repeats. “Do you remember me? We talked probably three years ago? You had mentioned someone named Mr. Belvedere?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Dougie says.

In the background, a man calls out, “Who the hell are you talking to? If they’re selling something, just hang up!”

“Is that Uncle Bob?” Doug asks.

“Yes?” Dougie says. He’s suspicious, but he’s curious, too. Doug knows this because he knows how he would feel.

“Something terrible is going to happen to Mom,” Doug says. He swallows.
Slow down
, he tells himself. “To your
mother
,” Doug says. “I don’t know who’s responsible, but I think it’s your Uncle Bob. It’ll happen when you’re fifteen.”

His voice shaking, Dougie whispers, “I’m calling the police.”

“It’s too soon,” Doug says. “He hasn’t done anything yet.”

“I’m calling them on
you
,” Dougie says.

“No, no. I’m your friend.”

“No, you’re not,” Dougie says, and hangs up.

Doug dials the number again as fast as he can, as fast as the phone will allow him. It rings ten times. Eleven. Twelve. Thirteen. Has he wasted a phone call? What if time jumps six years the next time he calls?
Pick up . . . pick up,
he thinks. And then, miraculously, someone picks up. He can tell by the way the phone rattles, the way the receiver is almost dropped, that whoever picked up must have run to the phone.

“Yes? Hello?”

It’s his mother. It’s Shirley.

“Shirley?” Doug says.

“Yes?” She’s out of breath.

Doug realizes that this may be the last time he’ll ever talk to his mother. He also realizes that the phone he’s using is the same phone his mother is using: the heavy black rotary. They are holding the same receiver, but they are separated by time and space.

He decides to risk it. He’ll never forgive himself if he lets this moment go. “Mom,” he says.

Shirley says, “I’m sorry, but—”

“No,” Doug says. “It’s me. It’s Doug.”

There is silence. Then Doug hears her digging through her purse to find her cigarettes. She keeps them in a rectangular pouch with a snap; there’s a pocket on the side for the disposable butane lighter. He hears the flick of the lighter, his mother puffing to get the cigarette lit.

She exhales and says, “I knew it was you the first time you called all those years ago.”

“How?” Doug asks. “How did you know?”

“A mother knows her son,” she says.

Doug flips off his bedroom light and lies down, setting the phone on his chest.

He says, “I need to tell you something.”

“Hold that thought?” his mother says, her voice getting higher as she ends her request as a question. “I want to know about you. I want to know how you’ve been. Did everything turn out okay?”

No,
he thinks.
No, it hasn’t
. But he doesn’t want to disappoint her. “Everything’s beautiful,” Doug says.

“Are you married?”

“Yes,” Doug lies.

“Kids?”

“A boy and a girl.”

“Are they healthy?”

“Yes, they are,” Doug says. “They’re perfect.”

“What’s your wife’s name?”

He imagines his coworker from earlier tonight, the way she would touch his ankle with her toes. “Louise,” Doug says. “Louise Malgrave.”

“I’m so happy,” his mother says.

“But Mom. Listen,” Doug says.

His mother interrupts: “Shhhhhhhhhh. Hush now. I want to hear about you.”

Doug shuts his eyes. He’s so tired. “I don’t know what else there is to tell you.”

“Tell me what your day is like. Tell me what you look like now,” she says. “Tell me anything. I just want you to talk to me.”

Doug obeys. He tells her of an imaginary day in the life of a Doug who doesn’t exist. He tells her about his three-bedroom house. It’s in a neighborhood she always wanted to live in. He tells her about the new riding lawn mower, the family portraits on the wall, the alligator shoes Louise bought him for his birthday. He tells her about the life she always dreamed of, the life he’ll never live, and he can tell by the way she laughs or sighs that she’s happy about how her son’s future will turn out.

D
oug wakes up with the phone on his chest, the receiver beeping near his ear. He fell asleep while talking to his mother. His heart starts pounding. How could he have fallen asleep?

He reaches over and flips on the light. He hangs up the phone long enough to get a dial tone and then dials his old number again. It barely rings before someone answers.

“Who is this?” It’s Uncle Bob. His voice is deep, a rumble. He sounds as though he hasn’t slept in days, weeks.

Doug says, “Can we talk?”

“I knew it,” Uncle Bob says. “I just didn’t think you’d have the gall to call here.”

“You don’t understand,” Doug says.

In the background, Shirley says, “Who is it?” and Uncle Bob says, “You know damned well who it is.”

“Hold on,” Doug says. His own breathing is shallow. He feels sick. “I’m not who you think I am,” he says. “Please listen to me.”

Uncle Bob’s voice comes to Doug from a distance now; he must have set down the receiver. “You want to talk to him one last time?” he asks Shirley. “Come here and talk to him,” he yells.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Bob,” Shirley says.

Something falls over and breaks. Shirley screams.

Doug, holding the phone, paces his bedroom. He’s yelling into the receiver: “Bob! Bob! Bob, let’s talk!”

Their voices, his mother’s and Uncle Bob’s, grow louder as they approach the phone, but it sounds as though his mother is being dragged against her will.

“Leave her alone!” Doug yells.

Clearly, Bob isn’t listening. He’s gripped by his own rage, the way a man drowning in quicksand can’t think of anything except surviving. He says, “You want to talk to him? Hunh? You want to talk to him?”

The phone, Doug can tell, is being picked up. But then there is a loud crash coupled with a scream. The crash is like an explosion in Doug’s ear. This sound repeats, over and over, until his mother stops screaming. He hears his uncle breathing heavily, and then he hears nothing, as though the phone’s cord has been pulled from the wall. Doug waits.