Slices (13 page)

“Kyle.
Stop.” She grabbed hold of his arm, tried to haul him away from
the bed.

“You’re
hurting me,” he said, in that same dead calm voice. “There’s
a man coming. You can hear footsteps. He’s getting closer and
closer and you can’t move, and you can hear him get closer and
closer and he’s gonna tap on the window and you can’t
move — ”

“Josh!”
She dropped Kyle’s arm and shook Josh’s shoulders. “Josh,
wake up!”

Josh
jerked awake and screamed, and Kyle fell backward, sat down hard on
the floor. She held Josh as he cried and rocked him back and forth.

Kyle
just stared up at her. “He’s still coming,” was all
he said.

Three
days later, and she’d tried to put it out of her head, tried to
pretend their birthday wasn’t nearly here.

But
the knock came at her door one night. Sarah nearly dropped her coffee
—
it’s
him, it can’t be him, he’s two weeks early
— and her boys looked up at her from their dinners, curious and
wordless.

It’s
not him, she told herself, it’s not, and in a voice barely
louder than a harsh whisper she said, “Wait here.”

It
wasn’t him. She’d never seen the red-faced angry woman on
her doorstep before.

“Can
I help you?” Sarah asked.

“Can
you
help
me? What the hell did your boy do to my son?”

“Excuse
me?”

“My
son. Shane Flannery. Don’t act like you don’t know what
I’m talking about.”

“I’m
afraid I don’t.”

The
woman looked like she was going to explode. “My son came home
bleeding the other day and now I can’t make him go to school! I
brought him over here to talk to you and now he won’t even get
out of the car!”

She
pointed, and Sarah saw him — fingers pressed white against the
car window, eyes wide. The playground bully. He’d looked so
large on the playground, and now he looked small and lost, like a
ghost in an attic window.

“It
took me all this time just to get him to tell me the name of the kid
who did this to him! Now where is he? Where’s Kyle? Is that
him?”

Sarah
followed her pointing finger again, and there at the living room
window was Kyle, staring intently out.

“Are
you? Are you Kyle? Why are you staring at my boy? What did you ever
do to him, what did he ever do to you?”

“I’m
not staring at Shane,” Kyle said flatly.

“What
are you staring at?”

“Your
car.”

“What
about my car?”

The
corners of Kyle’s mouth twitched upward slightly. “It’s
on fire,” he said.

She
stared at him — so did Sarah — then both of them turned
back to look at the car.

Black
smoke curled up from under the hood — thin wisps of it at
first, then thick black clouds.

Both
women ran for the car. Shane was frantically struggling with the door
handle, and Sarah could hear the dull
thunk
of the doors locking.

The
Flannery woman yanked her keys out of her purse, dropping it and all
its contents to the ground. She was screaming something. Sarah
couldn’t even tell what. The woman was trying desperately to
open the car and her son was pounding on the window to get out and —

Sarah
looked helplessly back at the house.

Kyle
was expressionless, but she thought she’d heard him laughing.

She
ran back into the house, grabbed Kyle’s shoulders, pulled him
away from the window and made him face her.

“Make
it stop,” she said.

“What?”
Kyle said, with wounded innocence.

“Kyle.
Are you doing this?”

“What?
Am I doing what? How could I — ”

“Make
it stop. Now. That little boy could die. Is that what you want?”

“Yes!”

She
raised a hand to slap him.

“Don’t,”
he said.

“Or
else what? What are you going to do to me, Kyle?”

He
stared at her for a moment, then stared outside. His shoulders
sagged. “All right,” he said. “It’s out.”

She
ran to the door, just as the woman opened her car and pulled her
screaming child out of it, pulled him into her embrace like a baby.

“Are
you all right?” Sarah shouted, as the flames died away. “Is
everything — ”

The
woman stood and glared at her, the look on her face beyond words.

She
looked at her car, and back at the house. She put her son, kicking
and screaming, back into the car, got in, and tore off down the
street.

Sarah
just watched her go.

Kyle
came and stood next to her.

“You
could have killed that boy,” Sarah said. The words sounded
thick and strange in her ears. “You could have killed both of
them.”

Kyle
shrugged. “Good.”

“No,
Kyle, that’s not good — ”

“Yeah,
mom, it is. Okay? It doesn’t matter. He — do you know how
many times he’s beat me up? Do you know how many other kids he
beats up? He’s — he's
worthless,
it doesn’t matter — ”

“Kyle,
of course it matters — ”

“Why?”
he exploded. “Why does it matter? Why are there people like
that? You don’t know, you’re not there, you send us off
to school alone and the teachers don’t know, they don’t
care, they don’t
do
anything and kids like that shove me and hit me and make fun of me
and it happens
every
day
and I
just want it to
stop!
I get so mad and I can feel it! I can feel it inside my head and it
wants to come out and I just want to make them stop!”

“Okay,
listen. Listen to me.” She grabbed his shoulder and crouched
down, looked him in the eye. “What about me? Did you want to
hurt me, a minute ago?”

“I
don’t know — ”

“You
did, didn’t you? What if I died? Then what?”

“I
wasn’t going to — ”

“What
if you did? What next? Who next? What if the police came and took you
away, what then? Do you kill them?”

“I
don’t know!”

“Where
do you stop? What happens to you?”

“I
don’t know! Stop it!” Joel screamed.

“Mom?”
Josh was staring at both of them from the doorway. “What’s
going on?” When she didn’t answer, he said, “Your
dinner’s getting cold.”

She
nodded, wiping tears out of her eyes. “Go finish your dinners.”
She gave Kyle a little swat. “And as soon as you’re done,
go up to your rooms and pack.”

“Pack?”
Kyle said.

“We’re
— going on a little vacation. For your birthday,” she
said firmly. “It’s a surprise.”

“What
about
school?”
Josh asked.

“We’re
leaving
tonight?”
Kyle asked.

“You
— can make up the homework later. Classes too.”

“But
— ”

“Move.”

Sarah,
driving again. Sarah, nearly asleep. The broken centerline of the
road in her headlights just an endless pulsing ribbon. Her car would
start to drift, and the
thrum-thrum
of her wheels hitting the bumps of the divider line would jerk her
awake again.

“Mom,
I’m tired,” Josh said. “We should stop soon.”

“I
know, baby.” She reached over and patted his leg. He wasn’t
complaining, just pointing out, without saying it, how tired she was,
too.

Dangerous
to drive like this. You could flip the car if you’re not
careful. Then what? What will you trade away this time?

Stop
it.
“Stop
it,” she said out loud.

“Mom?”

“It’s
nothing, baby.” She glanced at him, and her eyes flicked to her
rear-view mirror, looking at Kyle passed out asleep in the back.
“We’ll stop soon, I promise. We just need to find a
motel.”

Josh
tried to smile.

She
went back to watching the road.

At
night, all roads are the same road, black and nameless and endless.
This was the same road, this trip the same road trip, the one her
friends were never coming back from —

No.
Enough. Let it go.

She
shook herself fiercely.

Somewhere,
she could hear laughter. Somewhere on this same road.

Her
eyes drifted half-closed, snapped open, closed again.

Almost
time it’s almost time they’re almost twelve you’re
almost there almost twelve it’s almost midnight and the road is
humming a lullaby under your tires under you’re tired you’re
just eighteen and it’s almost midnight —

You
tell your friend Jerry, he’s the one who’s driving, you
told your parents you’d be home hours ago and are we lost or
what?

And
he just laughs and you laugh and he throws another beer can out the
window.

Three
days, three whole days on the Oregon Coast with Jerry and Susan and
Brendan and Matt and high school is finally done and you’ll be
friends forever and your whole future stretches out ahead black and
nameless and —

Sarah’s
eyes almost open. She’s going too fast —

You’re
going too fast, she tells Jerry, and they both laugh and then he
doesn’t make the turn and the guardrail doesn’t hold and
the world ends.

The
new world is upside down and the blood rushes to her head and the
world is red and the blood is everywhere, everything is blood and
metal and safety glass like diamonds and screaming and when she can’t
scream anymore, when her lungs feel like they’ll burst, there
is only silence, silence and her ragged breathing and then footsteps,
quiet footsteps and a tap at the window and a voice that says, soft
and gentle and understanding:

“Well,
now. Looks like you’ve found yourself in a world of hurt.”

She
said something. Screamed something. Wasn’t sure which.

“Calm
down. Calm down, now. You gotta think a minute, you’ve got to
think real clearly. You need to make a decision, here, an important
decision. Could be the most important one you’ll ever make. All
right? I’m gonna ask you something. All right?”

She
nodded.

He
pulled what was left of her window out of its frame in showers of
glass. Just so he could lean in close and whisper:

“How
bad do you wanna live?”

She
told him. He kept asking her and she kept telling him, she wanted to
live, and he pulled the metal of the car aside like pulling off a
blanket, lifted her out of the wreck like picking her up out of bed,
and everything inside her was broken and wrong and by the time he
laid her out on the beach, far from the car and inches away from cold
pounding surf, it wasn’t anymore. She didn’t hurt, she
didn’t bleed, just stared up at the horns of the moon in the
sky as he pulled the clothes from her body, touched her, made
everything right inside her. Kissed her warm and helpless as the
bodies of her friends were cooling down to the temperature of the
ocean’s night air. She could just see the car’s
headlights from where she was, as they stabbed blindly into the dark.

“I’m
not the devil,” he told her, fusing her bones under his touch,
“but I’m nearly as old as him and there’s those
would say I do the devil’s work, and maybe that’s so, and
there’s those that come to me for fame and those that come to
me for talent and you I found just wanting your breath to stay in
your sweet body and that’s surely something altogether
different. No matter what they say I’ve never taken anyone’s
soul, never taken anything that wasn’t mine and you’re
going to give me what’s mine, all right? You get to live, you
get to walk away, and when that moon comes around all sharp again
nine times from now you will have yourself two boys, two fine young
boys, and one of them will be your perfect angel, everything you ever
dreamed, and the other — the other one belongs to me, and on
his twelfth birthday, well. On his twelfth birthday, you hand him
over to me, is all. You hand one of your boys to me or there will
surely be hell to pay.”

There
was more. There was more that happened that night, his breath hot in
her face and his pen in her hand, signing everything away and he was
taking her name, even her name belonged to him and
she
didn’t want to see this part —

She
jerked and gasped and was awake again.

The
car was driving along the winding coast, the wheel gently moving
under her unmoving hands, steering itself.

She
stared at it, then at Josh.

He
looked almost apologetic. “I didn’t want to wake you,”
he said.

It
was a family emergency. That was all Sarah would say on the phone,
and she had co-workers who would cover her shifts at the bakery
without question or complaint, but her manager wasn’t happy,
her manager had said “We’ll talk about this when you get
back,” which she felt fairly sure meant she wouldn’t have
a job when she got back, but she couldn’t make herself care.

There
was money, some, at least, money she’d started to put aside for
their college funds, and obviously — if she was going to face
reality here — she was only going to need half of it.

The
other half could go to gas and hotel rooms and ice cream cones and
kites, and she could almost start to believe that this was the
vacation she’d told them it was.

She
could almost believe it, except the world told her it wasn’t
true.

Leaves
turning too soon, falling to red and golden ruin. Crows and cats that
stared at them in the street, watching and secret. The sound of
footsteps and tapping windows when no one was in the street. Radios
in stores and restaurants that died away to static droning as she
approached, distant sounds coming through like laughter and car
crashes.
He’s
coming,
the world whispered, and she was finally listening.

She
wasn’t going to run anymore. That had been her first impulse,
but she was done. There was nowhere she could run to that he couldn’t
find. She would have to make her stand here, in this coastal town
whose name she didn’t know.

The
knock at her door was coming at midnight.