The Fall of Never (25 page)

“I’ll be okay.”

The obstetrician sighed. “What is it?”

“The baby,” Carlos said. “I need to know the sex of the baby.”

“You and Marie agreed not to—”

“Marie still doesn’t want to know,” he said.
“I
do.”

There was a long pause on the other end of the line. For a brief moment, Mendes thought Bruce Chalmers had hung up on him. Then, with deep resignation, Chalmers’s voice again: “It’s a boy, Carlos. You’re going to have a son.”

Before Mendes’s eyes, the world abruptly went gray and grainy, as if he were no longer on the same dimensional plane as the rest of his surroundings. Objects right in front of him looked impossibly far away. The soft light over the kitchen sink suddenly seemed overly bright, nearly blinding. Even the sound of the sleet patting against the windows behind him sounded like someone dropping uncooked rice into a tin can.

Chalmers’s voice, equally distant: “Carlos? Carlos? What the hell is going
on
with you, man?”

“I’m here,” he said, forcing himself back into reality. He closed his eyes, no longer willing to look at the cruel world around him. “Just letting it all sink in. I’m going to be a father. I’m going to have a son.”

“Yeah,” Chalmers said, still a bit concerned. “Get that throwing arm in good shape, huh?”

“Right,” Mendes said, no longer hearing the other man’s words.

“Carlos—”

“Goodnight, Bruce.”

He hung up the phone and managed to catch himself in one of the kitchen chairs. He opened his eyes: looked at his hands, looked at the tabletop, looked at the two black windows frozen with sleet.

It’s a boy.

You’re going to have a son.

For the first time in his adult life, Doctor Carlos Mendes was terrified.

Chapter Fifteen

Felix Raintree’s sedan was discovered on North Town Road one day after the detective went missing, several hours after a heavy snowstorm swept through the valley. The car was uncovered by Sheriff Alan Bannercon of Caliban County—a young, southern officer who’d worked most his life in the backwater of Astroville, Kentucky before relocating to New York. Though none of his deputies appeared to have a problem with him, he knew there were some personnel, particularly from the District Attorney’s office, who did. Felix Raintree was one of them.

Bannercon found the car with its driver’s side door half open, the interior light off, the battery already dead. The entire vehicle was covered in snow; yet, there were no footprints in the fresh snow outside the car. Which was a bad sign. The absence of footprints meant Raintree’s vehicle had been abandoned some time ago.

This ain’t good.

Alan Bannercon thought of the missing hunters. It was not a passing consideration; rather, it hit him as if he’d seen a blaring neon sign, loud and clear, and it bothered him to make the connection so quickly. Associating Raintree with those hunters was like dooming the detective from the start. Three hunters mysteriously vanished last month…and now Alan Bannercon sat in his cruiser, staring at Raintree’s abandoned vehicle, with no impressions left behind in the snow. The car must have been there for hours, Bannercon understood, could have been there since last night.

He got out of his cruiser and carefully stepped around Raintree’s car, his eyes sweeping the ground for any sign of the missing detective, any footprint, a popped button from his shirt, a single loose thread. Peering inside the vehicle, he saw that the keys were still in the ignition, though the car had been turned off. Not a positive sign, those keys being there. He reached in and tried the headlights, found them to be dead (they were, in fact, already turned on), and backed away from the car. Looking over his shoulder, he cast a glance into the deepening woods behind him. Clumps of wet snow had already gathered in the branches of the fir trees, and the ground was sufficiently covered as well. Again, no footprints.

No shit,
Bannercon thought.
There are no footprints because he stepped away from his car before the snow ever started falling.

“Raintree!” His voice seemed to shake the trees. “Felix Raintree! Hello!”

Stepped away,
he thought.

And what if Raintree didn’t step away at all? What if he’d been
taken
away?

But no, that was ridiculous. In Spires, everyone practically knew everyone else. Who would attack Felix Raintree? What in God’s name would be the reason? And would an attacker bother to shut off the car’s engine? No, it just didn’t make any sense. There had to be some other explanation for this, for Raintree leaving his car like this…

Of course, there was no explanation for the disappearance of those three hunters last month, either.

Cold, Bannercon hustled back to his cruiser and radioed the dispatcher.

For the next couple days, Kelly spent her time either with Gabriel Farmer or at her sister’s bedside. With Gabriel—
Gabe,
he liked to be called now—she felt a certain homey quality, a certain welcoming that she did not feel around her parents or inside the walls of her parents’ house. He was quiet and passive in his own sociable way, yet he seemed an attentive listener.

Though Becky still had not woken from unconsciousness, the young girl’s complexion gradually began to return to its normal color, and the bruises and scrapes that sheathed her body had started to fade. In the two weeks Kelly had been at the compound, she saw Becky’s doctor twice. He was an anticlimactic fellow with an enormous brow and quicksilver eyes which lingered just a second too long on the mouth of any person he watched talk. Both times, Kelly watched this Doctor Cavanaugh shuffle into the house, shake nonexistent rain off his overcoat, and nod deferentially at her parents (both of whom seemed not only accustomed to the small doctor’s aversion to conversation but more than willing to follow suit). In Becky’s bedroom, Doctor Cavanaugh huddled over Becky’s slumbering form like a troll looking to steal her breath. He carried with him a small leather satchel, and from it he produced a series of instruments with which he examined the sleeping girl. Cavanaugh checked her blood-pressure, her pupils, her respiration—all with the perfunctory efficiency of an electrical engineer. Kelly’s parents stood behind the little doctor the entire time, their eyes glazed, their faces slack and void of expression. It was like they were here because they knew they should be, not because they actually wanted to be, Kelly realized as she stood leaning in the bedroom doorway. And to her amazement, her parents didn’t ask the doctor a single question, didn’t express an ounce of concern. Their detachment from the situation infuriated Kelly. It evoked images of institutional Christmases where there would be a single wrapped gift at the foot of her bed—a gift from Glenda, she knew, despite what was written on the card; the meals in the enormous, sterile dining room where her parents sat like stone gargoyles at either end of the massive, hand-carved table. Even as a child she had wanted to stand up and scream at them, wanted to burst into a fit and start flinging silverware around the room—anything to break the monotony, and to generate some hint of emotional reaction from her parents.

“What’s going on?” she asked on Doctor Cavanaugh’s second visit. He looked up at her, neither startled nor expectedly, his eyes immense and swimming behind the lenses of his glasses. He stared at her with the curiosity of a caged bird. Her parents turned toward her as well, her mother’s lips pressed whitely together, her father practically staring straight through her.

“I’m sorry?” Cavanaugh said.

“What’s going on here?” she repeated. “What’s wrong with her?”

“Ma’am,” Cavanaugh began.

“This is Kelly, our other daughter,” her mother said, as if in apology.

“She’s still not awake,” Kelly said. “Why isn’t my sister awake yet?”

“Your sister’s in a coma,” Cavanaugh said.

“So what do we do?”

“We do nothing,” Cavanaugh said. “There’s nothing. We wait. She’ll awake when she’s ready.”

But that wasn’t good enough. Just looking at the girl lying there, her body so unreceptive, Kelly wanted to burst into tears. “What else do you know?”

“What else?” Cavanaugh repeated. “Ma’am, your sister is unconscious. She needs rest. That’s all we can give her—rest.”

“And why does everyone seem so damned satisfied with that?” she said. Without waiting for an answer, she turned and stormed out into the hallway.

I’m sorry, Becky. I can’t help but feel that I deserted you. And it’s true—I hadn’t really even thought of you in so long, and that’s not fair. Maybe I dreamed about you, but what good did that do? Look at you now.

Not for the first time, she tried to understand why her parents had ever bothered to have children. The gap between their ages could suggest that they’d both been unplanned (or at least Becky could have been, she supposed), but still…did it make any sense? She tried to summon the image of her parents making love and found it impossible to do. Their reservations were too great, their personal walls too high. It would be like two robots simulating copulation.

She rushed through the downstairs foyer and through the front door, stepping into several inches of snow. The icy wind attacked her out of nowhere. In an instant, her eyes watered and blurred. It took her several seconds before she realized she was sobbing.

It was something about this place—this house, this
compound—
that weakened her, drained her. She’d suspected this as a child or, rather, sensed it (it was something too great and too aesthetic to mold into linear thought at such a young age), and knew it all the more as an adult. There was that lingering suffocation about her—the sensation of tight arms wrapping themselves around her body and slowly squeezing out her life. And despite her fear of the institution, there had been some relief there as well when she’d gone away as a child, as if a small part of her had actually realized that she’d finally been pulled from the nightmare.

The loneliness and despair that had consumed her childhood suddenly rushed back to her in one thick, frozen wave, nearly knocking her to the ground. Sobbing, she skirted around the side of the house and traversed along the frozen ridge. From this standpoint, she could see clear across the snow-covered valley and straight out above the town of Spires in the distance.
It’s snowing in autumn,
she thought absently.
It’s the middle of fall.

Again, the childhood image of her father sobbing in the darkened stairwell returned to her, clear as ever. She could see him perfectly in her mind’s eye—the way his massive shoulders hitched, the way he covered his face with one large, square hand. His other hand hung off his left knee where it trembled in midair. His back was toward her, enormous like God’s, like an expanse of blank canvas. She could even make out the swirls and corkscrews of his hair at the back of his head, peppered with gray and thinning at the crown. His cries were silent, which made them somehow more wretched, as if he were desperate to maintain some semblance of dignity even in the midst of such great despair. And what had happened, anyway? What had made him cry like that? She’d stood in the darkened stairwell watching him for so long, waves of emotion passing through her like colors in a spectrum. Confused. Frightened. Angry. Sad. She’d felt the need to console her father—the most basic human reaction—but she didn’t know how and didn’t even understand if such a thing were appropriate. Her parents hadn’t taught her love, hadn’t taught her kindness and compassion. Likewise, she’d never received it. Not from them, anyway.

She turned away from the view of the snow-covered valley, shivering. Arms wrapped tightly around her body, she turned back around the side of the house. She could feel her tears freezing to her cheeks. Her face burned. Falling snow gathered in her lashes.

Suddenly, she thought of blood. Specifically, of blood flowing down a tiny wooded brook.

Her body seemed to shut down and she couldn’t take another step. She turned her head sideways and stared at the woods.

“We almost killed that fucking dog,” she whispered, the words meaningless and hardly registering in her brain.

Droplets of blood pooling into the icy brook waters, swirling, changing colors, flowing downstream…

A conversation between strangers in her head:

—What did you do?

—I did it for you. Do you like it?

—You can’t do this.

—Do you like it?

—It’s bad! You have to stop!

—I did this all for you, Kelly. I made them this way. This is our own special little world here. This is like that story where the kids never grow up. This is your Never-Never Land, Kelly.

Her entire body began to tremble. She felt her knees give out, sending her body crashing to the snowy earth. The cold was tremendous. Her bladder suddenly moaned then exploded in a gush of burning urine; she faintly sensed its heat spilling from the crescent of her crotch and tracing down the legs of her jeans. It was like death, she thought, like dying, like suffering and dying in the cold.

Something moved behind the trees to her right and she just barely brought her head around in time to see it. Blurred through fresh tears, she could only make out a fleeting white form. She sensed a memory nearing the surface of her consciousness, almost there, almost there, yet still lost. In her throat, she could feel her breath coming in great whooping gasps and she suddenly feared she was near hyperventilation.