Halfway House (11 page)

They stood staring into the distance for a full minute before the telephone rang. He heard Lucy’s
abuela
answer.

“Hola. Si. Vaya más despacio.”
She yelled through the screen door.
“La multa, yo lo obtendré. Louis. Apuro. Hay una emergencia!”

Lucy exchanged a quick look with Bobby. “This can’t be good,” Lucy mumbled. The big man turned and opened the screen door. When it slammed behind him, Bobby’s gaze was drawn to the domino game. The noise hadn’t disturbed the two men. It seemed as if nothing could. Bobby watched their movements, each one slapping a tile down, grunting, grinning, or groaning, then raking in a replacement. What at first seemed methodical drudgery showed a hidden life of strategy and subdued excitement. Not excitement he’d ever seek out, but it was clear that for these two people the act of playing the game was greater than the environment around them.

The door opened again slowly. Lucy stood unmoving, his face slack with shock, his eyes ever-blinking as if there was something that he could not understand. He took a step forward, letting the door slam.

“What is it?” Bobby asked.

“Laurie.” Lucy grabbed Bobby’s arm. “She’s dead.”

Everything stopped for a ten count, then with the slap of a domino tile, everything started again. “What?” Bobby’s face buzzed with the rush of blood.

“She’s dead, Bobby.”

The tears came unbidden. His breath hitched, then doubled. His voice choked “She’s dead?”

“She was hit by a car.”

“But she was my—” Bobby looked around expecting to see her walking down the street, or through the screen door to announce this was all a bad joke. When she didn’t, he looked again to Lucy. “Do you mean I don’t have a girlfriend anymore?”

“No Bobby. She’s gone.”

He was a kid again. No mother. No father. Just Sister Agnes to come home to when well-meaning couples dumped him back on the porch of the home, his disease too much for them to deal with. Rejection. Pain. Self-revulsion. No future. No love. No...nothing.

“But I talked to her tonight.”

“I know Bobby, but she’s dead.”

His knees buckled, and he reached out to catch himself. He found the porch railing and grasped it with both hands. A hollow chasm broke open in his chest. He opened his mouth so far that his jaw felt broken. He tried to stop the pain from coming. He built an invisible dam to stop it, but the pressure was too great. What began as a sob soon overwhelmed him, and turned into a scream.

Obituary from the Daily Breeze

Laurie May Jenkins passed today from wounds sustained from a car accident. She is survived by her father, Carlos Vincent Jenkins. Laurie was a San Pedro resident all her life. Born on January 16, 1980, she graduated from San Pedro High School with Honors in 1997. She worked as a nurse at Our Little Company of Mary and spent time helping children in several local orphanages. She will be interred at Green Hills Memorial alongside her mother, Rebecca May Gentry.

Her leg snapped, sending her to a galaxy far far away. Stars ripped by her in Doppler light shows right out of a science fiction movie. Light speed. Hyper speed. Warp Drive. Whatever it was called, she was accelerating at an impossible rate. Colors beyond imagining glistened, then fell into her wake as she shot faster and faster. She tried to breathe. She tried to stop it. She even tried to scream. But nothing broke through the galaxy of pain.

A voice she recognized from a hundred bad travel commercials, T.J. Hooker reruns, and the hip captain of her favorite federation starship provided a background to her pain-fueled flight.

“Pain, the final frontier. This is the voyage of the Starship Laurie. Her never-ending mission to explore strange new pains; to seek out new pain and even more new pain. To boldly go where no nurse has gone before.”

Then the voice switched and became Peter Graves from the original
Mission Impossible
.
“This life will self-destruct in five seconds.”

“Count with me kids!”
Pee Wee Herman shouted. And a million children joined in as he counted down.

“Five.”

“Four.”

“Three.”

“Two.”

Wait.
She didn’t want to self-destruct. She was falling in love. She’d just met her father after all these years. Wait—

“One!”

Samuel L. Jackson serenaded her into nothingness.
“So long sucker.”
And everything faded to black.

A second.

A minute.

A lifetime later.

Why had Pee Wee Herman ended my life? she
wondered.

Instead of an answer she spied a white pinprick of light ahead, the only relief in a cloying universe of darkness. Her body felt weightless, neither her arms nor feet touching any surface. So, as she’d done countless million times along the San Pedro shore, she pulled with her arms extended and her hands cupped, stroking, stroking. She moved more slowly than she’d wanted, but the light began to move closer, or rather she began to move closer to the light. She couldn’t be sure which because there was a complete absence of depth to this dark and empty realm.

The light took shape as she continued to swim. Now a rectangle, its edges rounded. A buzzing noise replaced the silence. The sound began as a faint hint of something, then rose in decibels until it was all around her, wrapping her in a static buzz.

The light took feature with spots of constantly moving gray. Black lines ran horizontal and flipped upwards one after the other.

An image appeared, as if the rectangle were a window. The halfway house. She’d walked by it enough times to know it on sight. It was as much a fixture of San Pedro as the huge guns on the hill.

Closer and closer, she swam until the rectangle was a hundred feet wide. It framed the halfway house in a life-size square of static light.

The buzz.

The static.

The flipping horizontal bars.

The rectangular window.

Then it hit her.

This was a gigantic television screen.

“Look Mom, I’m on TV!”
cried the cowboy kid from Willie Wonka.

But she couldn’t be on TV.

She was...she was...she remembered crossing the street to her car, then pain, then the crazy travel through a Technicolor cosmos, and now the halfway house as seen life-size from inside a television. The halfway house was where the souls of the dead traveled when...

DEAD!

Her life had self-destructed in five seconds.

“So long sucker!”
said Samuel L. Jackson.

“Go ahead and scream your head off,”
Pee Wee Herman giggled, before he became Paul Reubens whacking off in a porn movie theater.
“We’re miles away from anyone to hear you!”

She sobbed as breath and pain returned in an instant avalanche of reality. Her leg was shattered. Her head both throbbed and ached. Her jaw had snapped in a dozen places when her face had bounced off the asphalt. Her back crackled like a tin of Tic Tacs. Her arms, which had been propelling her forward, cracked long ways, then spiraled, then snapped, both hands dangling from wrists that were crushed and twisted.

“The mind plays tricks on you,”
Pee Wee Herman continued in a line she remembered from
Pee Wee’s Big Adventure
, the last movie her mother had taken her to before she’d died.
“It’s like you’re unraveling a big cable-knit sweater that someone keeps knitting and knitting and knitting and knitting and knitting and knitting...”

She hated Pee Wee Herman.

She hated TV.

The foster family had set her in front of one with the other three foster children, using the device as babysitter, teacher and mentor. She was lucky she’d been able to sneak books, or her brain would have been as dead inside as the others who’d eventually wound up addicts and criminals, now being fostered by the California Penal Institute.

So why was this her fate?

Pee Wee Herman and Rocky Balboa began to sing
Ring Around the Rosie,
the cadence faster and faster and faster.

She needed to get away.

She needed to escape.

On the other side of a curtain of static haze was the halfway house. Flowers moved in the breeze. Sunlight lit the roof. The patch of grass in front was an impossibly perfect green.

She timed the flips of the horizontal bars and after a minute of planning, urged her broken body through. Her heel caught on a rising horizontal bar and sent her tumbling onto the hard cement walk. Pain remade her for a fine instant, then it disappeared.

She heard the roar of traffic. She heard the sound of a ship’s horn somewhere in the harbor. From somewhere nearby she heard a siren, as welcome a sound as she’d ever heard. Looking around, the television screen was nowhere to be found. She sat in the middle of the sidewalk in front of the halfway house in San Pedro.

Hope suffused her.

Had she escaped death?

She felt her arms and legs and face. All the pain had disappeared, as if nothing had ever happened. Was she alive and healed? A thought struck her. Had it even happened? Maybe she’d made it up, just a series of misfiring synapses come together to create the creepy television realm.

She looked up into the pure blue sky to laugh. Then she saw it. A tornado of souls swirling over the halfway house. Faces watched her then disappeared as they were carried around the immense vortex.

She stood and glanced around. The streets were as empty as if she were the last person on earth. The only other beings were in the swirling mass above her.

She looked up and saw the vortex whirling closer.
No!
She had to get away. She moved to run, but found that once again her feet had nothing beneath them. She was floating toward the tornado and there was nothing she could do. All the stroking in the world couldn’t stop her.

Her hope vanished as she was sucked into the vortex, shouldered aside and pummeled by a thousand dying souls. She began to spin helplessly above the halfway house. Regret took her as she longed for Pee Wee Herman, William Shatner and Samuel L. Jackson. She was dead. Her life was over. And now her soul was being absorbed by the building beneath her. If she’d only stayed in the darkness. Samuel L. was right. She really was a sucker.

“I know you are so what am I?”
whispered a memory of Pee Wee Herman.

Six beers and a lot of meaningless but heartfelt words from Lucy was enough to get Bobby moving back to the cove. After all, he had the most thankless job. He had to tell Kanga.

Bobby hurried along the cliff. He’d experienced all five phases of grief in that hour with Lucy—denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. Part of him intently reminded God that he should have been taken instead. Another part of him was pissed off beyond all recognition. Still another part, a semi-sane, rationally morbid part, wanted to see the body to make sure there wasn’t some error. But like Lucy said, that’s what funerals were for. “Viewings are like a salve. At first they burn, but they end up helping. Seeing the body makes people heal faster. Trust me. You’ll see.”

Bobby clenched his jaw as a cold current of anger flowed through him. The word motherfucker repeated itself over and over until it became one mush-mouthed nonsensical sound that conveyed the purity of his rage. Then a vision made him stop.

There on the path about halfway down to the beach was a tall, thin woman who stood looking down. Her long hair covered her face. Slowly, as if she were a deer ready to be spooked, Bobby began toward her. A scuttle of stone, a stumble, anything might be enough to spook her, and Bobby didn’t want that; he wanted to speak with her.

The three-quarter moon was high in the sky, bathing her in monochrome—the same light Hamlet’s father had been dipped in that frigid Denmark night. Was she a ghost? Could she be some demon back to reap revenge, or perhaps a wisp to tempt him over the cliff?

Bobby shook himself free of the improbability and concentrated on the probable. What if another woman had Laurie’s purse and been misidentified by the police? What if this
was
Laurie, hurt, disoriented, come to the only place she felt safe, the cove of her father? The more his mind reasoned, the more reasonable it seemed. He tried to remain objective, but the manifold possibilities sent his heart into his throat. Tears burgeoned, ready to flow.

This had to be Laurie.

She was alive.

He felt certain of it.

When he got within a dozen feet of her, he whispered her name. “Laurie?”

The woman looked up, her face in shadow.

“Is that you?” He couldn’t keep the quaver from his voice.

“Who’s Laurie? I’m Tiffany.” The woman pointed at the ground. “What are these things?”

Bobby smiled in embarrassment. He’d fooled himself into hoping. How desperate of him. He recognized her now as the woman who’d been with the three men at the beach shack night before this one. He hadn’t caught her name. Tiffany—like Buffy, but breakable. Probably an Orange County girl.

“Are these real?” She pointed to the footprints.

Bobby shrugged.

“I mean, are they actual footprints?”

“Some say so.”

“How did they get here?”

“Some say by magic.”

“I believe in magic.”

Bobby fought a sigh. “Well, there you go.”

Close enough to smell her mall makeup and expensive perfume, he wondered how he’d ever believed this could be Laurie. Where Laurie’s nose had been broad and pleasant, Tiffany’s was pinched and pouty. Her angular features were a several degrees away from beautiful. He found himself getting angry at her because she wasn’t Laurie. He wanted to push her. He wanted to do something mean. But he held himself in check.