Lost Signals (26 page)

“Never tried that. It work
 
?” Tyler’s curls were barely visible over the top of the radio. Before Matt could answer, he continued. “Me, I was into Vigeneres big time. My buddy and I used to keep encrypted notes on the girls in school. Mine were unbreakable. He’d use some lame Rot-13 and always get busted. Although eventually he started using a numerology matrix, ‘cause he was into witchcraft and crap like that.”

“Witchcraft. Really,” Matt said, trying to avoid an overt display of impatience. “I didn’t know witches used codes.”

“Ciphers. Yeah, to find lucky numbers or something. Look it up and show it to the kid. He might pick the winning lottery numbers.”

“I’ll do that. Andrew’d get a kick out of thinking witches were using his radio.”

“Yeah, kids love weird stuff. It travels the boundaries of culture, man. Some things are just universal, I guess.”

“I guess.” Matt ran a hand through his hair. “So, I don’t mean to hurry you, but can you fix it
 
?”

“Yeah, no prob, man.” He gently twisted the tuning dial. “You got too much slack in the line here, it probably snapped. I can thread you up a new one. Just give me a day or so.”

Matt looked around the empty shop. “Can’t you just do it now
 
? It’s not like there’s a line in here.”

Tyler narrowed his eyes.

“You think I got nothing else to do today
 
?”

“No, it’s just . . . well, I can’t leave it here. My son will flip out if it’s missing. Playing with this is about the only thing he looks forward to.” Matt immediately hated himself for admitting that to a stranger. “He doesn’t actually know I broke it yet, so maybe—”

“You broke it
 
?” Tyler raised an eyebrow. Inwardly, Matt groaned. How had that slipped out
 
?

“It was an accident. I was trying to turn the volume down.” But that wasn’t exactly right, was it
 
? He’d been trying to tune away from that sound, the shrieking noise. But it had been an accident, of course.

“So you’re just going to play it off like it’s fine until he realizes it’s broken and then make him think he broke it
 
?” Tyler snorted and snapped the open clasps closed. “Well-played, Dad. I’ll pretend I don’t know you if you bring it back later in the week or something.”

Matt started to explain, but instead he shook his head and lifted the radio off the counter. He had opened the shop door and was just stepping across the threshold when Tyler called to him.

“Hey Dad, I’m serious about taking that radio off your hands. Bring it back in and if you want, I’ll say it can’t be fixed. Give you $75 for the case and you can get the kid some baseball cards.”

“I’ll think about it,” Matt said.

“You know, I’ve seen grown men go nuts over trying to figure out the patterns in those numbers stations. You ask me, the kid needs a better hobby.”

Matt nodded and let the door close behind him. “I didn’t ask.”

***

He thought he heard the phone ringing as they climbed the steps to the front door, but it was difficult to hear much of anything over Andrew’s enthusiastic jabbering.
At least his day went well
, Matt thought as his son described the school’s communal greenhouse.

“ . . . and the eighth-graders grow peas to study genetics, but I don’t think they get to eat them.”

“Probably not,” Matt agreed. “But you can eat peas for dinner tonight, how’s that
 
?”

“Negatory, Dad. That means no. How about corn instead
 
?”

“Corn’s not a vegetable. Wait,” he said to the motion blur that had been his son. “You dropped this.” He reached down to pick up a paper that had fallen from the boy’s folder, but Andrew was already bounding down the hallway.

“You gotta proofread it, Dad. It’s my essay about what I want to accomplish this semester at school. I have to turn it in next Monday and you’re supposed to sign it or make a copy or something.”

Matt sighed and settled down at the kitchen table with a contented smile. The cell phone vibrated in his jacket pocket, but he reached in and silenced it. Reading through his son’s essay, his smile widened.

“This sounds great, kiddo,” he said as he walked back to Andrew’s room. “Good sentence structure, good word choice. You spelled ‘believe’ wrong again, though. Remember I before E except after—”

“Did you move this
 
?” Andrew demanded, pointing to the radio. He looked so tall under the overhead lights. Almost a teenager, with a teen’s fierce independence already.

“I was just . . . looking at what you were working on. I didn’t move anything.” The boy’s glare made him defensive.

“It’s not for you, okay
 
?” Andrew said, gathering the papers and shifting them to the side of the desk, away from Matt’s view. “Don’t touch it, please
 
?” The last was less a question than a plea for mutual understanding, respect.

Matt sighed. “I won’t touch it.”

Father and son looked at each other, the tension between them on pause. In the kitchen, the phone began ringing again.

“I should get that,” Matt said.

Andrew nodded. As Matt closed the door behind him, he heard the female voice again—unplaceable, but as familiar to him as an evening newscaster’s. The voice read a series of single-digit numbers in a less hesitant and more confident monotone than earlier.

“5-5, 5-5-9-5, 5-9-6-5-7, 7-3-5-1-1-5 . . . ”

Matt stopped outside the door, listening carefully. It couldn’t be hers, but damn if the voice didn’t sound like Sheila’s. The numbers stopped. There was a pause and then that voice that sounded eerily like his ex-wife’s began to read the numbers again. Matt shook his head. The way the voice intoned “five” was the exact inflection of Sheila’s faint Savannah accent. The accent she usually tried to hide while sober, but escaped when she’d been drinking.

Was his ex-wife actually a spy
 
?

He smiled, inwardly laughing at himself. Much as Andrew might want to believe it, Sheila was no spy. But now it seemed she had a new hobby, sending coded messages via the shortwave radio. Leave it to Mommy Dearest to jack up the drama of communicating with her son. Now the only way Matt could compete would be by tapping Morse code messages on the radiator, or sending smoke signals from the barbecue pit.

As Matt reached for the kitchen phone, the ringing abruptly stopped, transferring almost immediately to the phone in his pocket. It was a Florida call from a number he didn’t recognize but according to the phone’s log, had called at least four times before. When he slid his finger across the screen a deep baritone asked “Am I speaking with Matthew Tremper
 
?”

“This is Matt,” he said, wondering alternately if the voice was a bail bondsman, how much money he needed to raise, and what Sheila had done this time.

“Mr. Tremper, this is Officer Hanlon of the Florida State Police. I’m afraid there’s been an accident.”

Matt listened, unmoving and unspeaking, the screen of the phone cool against his cheek. The call completed, he whispered his thanks and dropped the phone on the table. He walked down the hall in silence, knocked at his son’s door, and opened it slowly.

In the room, Sheila’s voice—or what had to be a recording of her voice—came through the radio’s speaker in a clear and steady monotone.

“7-3-5-1-1-5”

Matt shivered. Even in its neutrality the voice sounded so alive, so certain and focused—and so loud. Listening to her on the radio was surreal. Sweat slicked the palms of his hands and he wanted to laugh at the absurdity of it.

“Kiddo,” he said, drawing the boy into an embrace. “I’m really sorry I have to tell you this. It’s about your mom.” He felt, rather than saw, Andrew’s eyes flick over to the radio, where the sequence of numbers had just begun to repeat. The numbers droned on, muffling the child’s sobbing, the nonsense message replaying in its infinite loop.

“5-5, 5-5-9-5, 5-9-6-5-7, 7-3-5-1-1-5”

“7-3-5-1-1-5”

“7-3-5-1-1-5”

***

“What actually happens to us after we die
 
?”

It was the most innocent of questions, one Matt had fielded a few times in the past when a handful of mice, goldfish, and Knuckles, their old tom cat, had exited stage left. But he’d only really addressed the expiration process itself
 
: the circle of life, the eventual and inevitable decay. He’d not yet had to delve into metaphysics, and he certainly wasn’t prepared for it today.

“That’s a difficult question, kiddo. The answer depends a lot on what people believe.”

The funeral had been hard for both of them. The closed-casket and religion-free service was administrated by the funeral director and there were few friends and almost no family members present, at least none Matt recognized. The entire event had been sterile and distant, the air-conditioning set entirely too cold. Andrew mourned in his ten-year-old fashion, by withdrawing even more into himself and his radio. Matt hoped the approaching start of school would help.

“Why does what happens depend on what you believe
 
?” Andrew asked.

“Well, because nobody knows. Some people like to believe that you come back in a different body, or that you go to a different kind of existence, where your consciousness lives on with the people you love. Different people believe different things
 
; that’s why it depends.”

There was silence at the table while Andrew stared at his milk.

“What do we believe
 
?” he asked.

And there it was. Ten years coming, and still Matt hadn’t thought of a good response.

“You mother and I—” He stopped himself. How strange that only now, after her death, did he think of the two of them as a single unit again, in agreement on the one issue they’d actually never fought over.

“Kiddo, there really isn’t any reason to believe anything happens after we die. We live, we make an impact on other people, and we try to do some good while we’re here. But when the time comes, the best explanation is that we just pass away.”

“Where do we pass away to
 
?”

Matt sighed and opened his hands. “We pass back into the universe. Our bodies turn into energy and we sort of, well the part that made us ‘us’ just rejoins all the other parts of everyone else, and we all go back to the universe, back to the stars.” He patted himself on the back for that one. Poetic, but not religious. Let the boy stew on the interconnectedness of matter and energy for a while. “Do you want another piece of toast
 
?”

“So we don’t go anywhere at all
 
? We just die.”

“I don’t believe we go anywhere, no. But we live on in memories. So as long as you have a memory of someone, they—”

“You don’t believe Mom’s in heaven
 
?” The narrowed eyes and raised brows signaled a challenge rather than a question.

“No Andrew, I don’t believe Mom’s anywhere, except in our memories.”

“What if you’re wrong
 
?” Another challenge.

“I don’t think I am, but I won’t know that until I’m gone myself, and I’m really kind of tired of talking about this today. Do you want another piece of toast or not
 
? I have to get you to the Y.”

“I don’t need daycare, Dad.”

“I don’t need to go to jail, Andrew. I can’t let you stay home alone.” He glanced at his watch and cursed. “I’m gonna be late. Forget the toast. Grab a banana and let’s go.”

“Just go on. I’ll ride my bike. And I promise I won’t burn the house down making toast.”

“No staying home playing with that radio, you hear
 
? I’m going to call the Y at 8:30. You’re going to be there when I call, right
 
?”

Andrew rolled his eyes and shooed his father out of the kitchen. As Matt grabbed his briefcase and swiped his keys off the counter, he looked back at the boy staring at him from the table—his son, flesh of his flesh, taller even than yesterday—how was that possible
 
? His child’s eyes were dark and brooding, world-weary eyes that befit an old man more than a child. Eyes that questioned, challenged, and glared at Matt before dropping back down to the breakfast plate. He should have home-schooled the boy, should have spent the time with him, one-on-one. It wasn’t like his career was booming.

“I’m going to call at 8:30, and you need to be at the Y, understand
 
?”

Matt closed the door before Andrew could respond.

But when 8:30 came, he was pouring over a blueprint, so it wasn’t until a 9:00 meeting that he realized he’d forgotten, and by the looks of the agenda, it would be a while before he could break away. He’d almost forgotten about it entirely when his boss’s executive assistant quietly walked in to the meeting and touched him on the shoulder. Her face was pale and her hands trembled as she passed him the phone message slip.

He read two words, “Andrew” and “accident,” and tore out of the meeting, running back to his desk, where his cell phone scooted across the surface, vibrating with an angry and repeating buzzing. He saw nothing but scattered blueprints, yellow lines on black asphalt, white uniforms, and green scrubs. He heard nothing, only the hollow emptiness that muted the voices of his co-workers, the hospital staff, the doctor—

“We did all we could. I’m so sorry.”

—even his own shouting as he collapsed into a vinyl chair. Someone pressed a paper cup of cold water in his hand, but it fell away, the liquid puddling between his feet.

He felt nothing. Disbelief flickered then extinguished itself. His hands didn’t work. His eyes wouldn’t close. He felt nothing
 
; thought nothing. Words made no sense to him.

My ex-wife is dead.

He felt nothing. The words meant nothing.

My son is dead.

He felt nothing. The words held no meaning.

I’m not a dad anymore.

And then he felt everything.

***

He could have left the room untouched, or have possibly let the movers box up everything for storage. That would have been the simpler option, a task completed without the mist of unshed tears and the excruciating pain of touching the things his only son had just weeks before passed through his own small fingers. Every item in the room told the same heart-breaking story, even if Matt wasn’t aware of the particulars
 
: a Yankees baseball jersey
 
; a book of ghost stories
 
; the potato clock, sundial, and forgotten cactus—all the detritus of a bright star of life, full of promise and potential.