Stay Awake (15 page)

Not completely, obviously. He continued to do a decent job as a father, he thought. He kept an eye on Hazel as she toddled around, he kept her diapers clean and made little plates of food with cut-up fruit and cheese and crackers, he took her to the park in the stroller, and they never watched any television that had sex or swearing in it.

He was not yet ready to start looking for a job, but he was helping a little bit with various chores. He rinsed off the dishes and put them in the dishwasher. He took some letters to the post office, and put gas in Joni’s car, and went grocery shopping with
a list that Joni had made up—though there was a moment where he became kind of frozen in the aisle of condiments and crackers; it was another note, a shopping list stuck to the cage of the shopping cart:

Which, really, what was so surprising or disturbing about that? Nevertheless he didn’t know how long he had been standing there looking at the scritchy, pathetic handwriting when a middle-aged lady had spoken to him firmly.

“Sir, I need to get access to that ketchup, if you could please move forward.”

And Critter awakened from his trance with a little shudder.

It was foolish, he knew, to feel so unnerved by such stuff. He had never been a superstitious person, and in any case it wasn’t as if there was anything particularly uncanny at work. He was living in a city—of course there were all kinds of flotsam drifting around.

But he hadn’t noticed it before, that was the thing. Beth used to tease him, in fact, about how inattentive he was, she was always pointing out the weirdness of the world that he was missing—hot-air balloons in the sky over the park; the woman in the bear suit sitting on the el train a few seats in front of them, her bear’s head in her lap; the pool of blood in the foyer of their
apartment, right there underneath the discarded catalogs and junk mail. “Oh my God!” Beth said. “I can’t believe you didn’t see that!”

But now, suddenly, he did. Now, suddenly, it seemed that there were notes everywhere, emerging out of the blur of the world. Something had happened to him now that Beth was gone, he thought—there was an opening, a space, a part of his brain that had been deaf before was now exposed, it was as if he were a long-dormant radio that had begun to receive signals—tuned in, abruptly, to all the crazy note-writers of the world.

“Please,” someone had written on a napkin and left it on the table in McDonald’s, where he had taken Hazel for a little peaceful snack, a casual Toledo afternoon, but now here was this other voice poking its head through the surface of his consciousness like a worm peeking up out of the ground. “Please,” in ballpoint pen on the napkin. And then “Please” on the napkin underneath it, and “Please” again on a third. Someone either very polite or very desperate.

Probably it wasn’t such a big deal. When he had first come to live with Joni, he had shown her some of the notes that he had found, expecting, he supposed, that she would find it as eerie as he had—the accumulation of these strange little documents, popping up wherever he went, all of them sad or desperate or slightly creepy. She was the type of sister who had liked to tell him ghost stories when they were younger, back when she was a teenager and he was eight or nine. He’d figured that she, too, would see some kind of omen in the array of notes. But she didn’t.

“These are awesome,” Joni said. “I love the ‘psychic underworld’ one.”

She had a scrapbook full of stuff that she had come across at the library, and she showed it to him as if she had discovered that they shared the same hobby. As if they were stamps or coins or some such thing.

“Oh, you have to see this one,” Joni said, and opened the scrapbook to show him a note written on powder-blue memo paper with pictures of kitties on it:

“I found this next to one of the computer terminals on the second floor,” Joni said. “Can you believe it? The handwriting looks like she’s about—what?—twelve?”

To Joni, he guessed, it was something a bit like gossip. Mildly titillating. Something like a glimpse into a window across the street, or an overheard conversation at a restaurant. How weird people were! Her eyes got a kind of conspiratorial glint.

“I love that it’s written in pink ink!” Joni said. “It’s probably one of those strawberry-scented markers!”

“Yeah,” Critter said. “Ha ha.”

They were sitting at the kitchen table together, and Joni had opened a forty-ounce bottle of beer, which she poured into two
highball glasses. He had a bed in the guest room, and they had set up a crib for Hazel against one wall.

He lifted the glass to his lips. How to explain that he was afraid? How to explain that it felt as if these notes were like the stories she used to tell him about ghostly hands that reached up to grasp your wrist when you weren’t expecting it, hands that tightened and wouldn’t let free?

“What?” Joni said. “What are you thinking?”

When Beth was killed, she was reading. It was around four on a Thursday afternoon, school was done and she was on her way to pick up Hazel at day care, hurrying down the sidewalk toward the bus stop. Walking and reading, which he always warned her about, her feet moving automatically beneath her as she flipped through a stack of quizzes that her students had taken in preparation for their sixth grade proficiency test.

And then she’d taken a step out into the street without looking. That is what the police said. Stepped out into the street without looking both ways. The practice tests fanned out, flew up, fluttering, and were carried away, wafting into the gutters or caught in fences or flattened against the side of a building.

He started to imagine this, and then he made a choice not to imagine it any longer.

• • •

He had always prided himself on being a steady sort of person. Not prone to anxiety. Stable. Even a little intimidating because of his size.

People always assumed that he was called “Critter” because of how he looked. The mane of red-brown hair and heavy beard and eyebrows, which he’d had since his late teens, the bear-paw hands, broad chest, imposing gut. Very few people knew that his real name was Christopher, and that he had become “Critter” because as a child he’d had such a speech impediment that he had a hard time pronouncing his own name. “Chri’er,” he called himself. “Cridderfer,” he said, and even now he had a hard time pronouncing “Christopher.” Even now, at age twenty-nine, he stumbled over the syllables, there was still a slight lisp and sputter as he spoke his own name, “Chrithdopher Tremley,” even when he pronounced it slowly. He dreaded the various official encounters—banks and government offices, doctors, policemen, the man at the funeral home—which was always the worst time to try to force the hated name out of his mouth. It was a terrible, exposed sort of feeling.

He was a very private person. Beth used to tease him; she thought it was funny, all the things that he felt uncomfortable about, all the stuff he thought of as
personal
. He disliked being barefoot, he hated to talk on cellphones when people could overhear him, he didn’t like to sit in the window of the el train, where people from the street could see him as he glided past.
My poor shy man
, Beth murmured, and he blushed when she kissed him in public.

He would never, ever, have written a note for people to find lying around the library or the sidewalk. It would have seemed
grotesque to him. Maybe that was what bothered him so much about these things that he kept coming across. He had the image of his own personal thoughts softly detaching and being carried off by the wind like dandelion seeds, floating through the city. That was one of the things that grief felt like, he thought.
Astral traveling
, he thought.

And now, as if the notes themselves were not enough—

Lately, he had begun to imagine that he saw notes that weren’t even there. They weren’t hallucinations. Not exactly. Just little misfires, he guessed.

Like, for example, one day he and Hazel were walking to the grocery store to get a few things that Joni had listed for him, he was pushing Hazel’s stroller down the shady block and she was quiet, fingering her teething ring, and then he hesitated. Stiffened. He could see a piece of paper that had been stapled to the side of a tree.

YOU SUCK! it said in big capital letters.

And then when he got closer he realized that he was just imagining things. It actually said: YARD SALE!

And then there was another time when he thought he saw something written in the mud outside of the library where Joni worked. He glanced down to the bare corner of the lawn where the grass had been worn off and it looked for a moment as if someone had printed something there.
IM
 … 
WATCHIN
 … 
YVV
. That’s what it looked like at first. And then when he looked closer he saw that it wasn’t words, after all. Not English words, at least. Some kind of Chinese characters? he thought. But no, it wasn’t
that, either. It was just the tracks of birds, pigeons, probably. Their three-toed feet marking a line across the wet ground.

He was surprised by the disappointment that settled over him. Nothing, he thought, and his throat tightened. Nothing, nothing.

If the world was trying to send him a message, what was it?

It was a little after midnight, and he sat there in his room in the dark, in the guest room in Joni’s apartment, staring out of the window, while against the opposite wall Hazel was asleep in her crib, her face leaned gently against the wooden bars.

There was nothing to look at outside the window, but he kept looking. The sky was starless and purple-gray, and the silhouettes of tree boughs reached up into it. Through a gap in the trees and buildings, he could see a sliver of a busier street, the red taillights of cars sliding past and then disappearing.

If you have a message for me, he thought, what is it?

There were the strings of high wires that ran from the buildings and connected to poles and then to other buildings and then to poles again—you could hear how they hummed to themselves if you were near them and quiet; there were the gestures of tree branches and the smattering of fallen leaves running together down the middle of the street in a formation; there were the little whispery, wordless sounds Hazel made as she dreamed and stirred.

You might be able to read such things, maybe. Someone might: not him.

He wondered. He was not the man he had been anymore. He thought:
You are still you, but changing fast
.

It seemed so obvious, once he thought it, but still the idea sent a little shudder through him. He would never be the same person. He would never be able to go back.

He could imagine himself the way that he had once been just five or six months ago. What would he have thought, driving by down there on the street, glancing up to see a big bearded man sitting at the third-floor window of an apartment building. A grown man, almost thirty years old, peering out at the street, mumbling to himself.

He would not have recognized himself, bent over a dollar bill that he’d spread out on the sill of the window, carefully writing with a pen.

What a weirdo, he would have thought, as the man held his note out in the air, letting the wind take it from his fingers.

Back then, he probably wouldn’t have even noticed. He wouldn’t have been looking up toward the windows, and he certainly wouldn’t have seen the dollar bill lift up in a gust of autumn wind, carried off with a few leaves and scraps.

Off to join the others in their conversations—all the little messages that the world was bearing away.

That summer, not long after he turned twenty-three, Pierce kidnapped his ex-girlfriend’s son, Jesse. Actually, Pierce thought, it wasn’t so much a kidnapping as it was a rescue—Jesse had come with him willingly enough—though there was also, Pierce had to admit, an element of sheer vindictiveness, a desire to wake her up and make her suffer. In any case, after a couple of weeks on the road with Jesse, Pierce had begun to realize that he had probably made a mistake.

They had been traveling west without any real plan in mind, and they had arrived at last at Pierce’s father’s house in St. Dismas,
Nebraska. St. Dismas was one of those old dried-up prairie towns, not even worthy of being called a “town,” not even a settlement anymore. There were a few empty old houses and sheds, and a gas station, long closed, and an abandoned grain elevator alongside the railroad tracks, and a few straggling cottonwood trees sending their snowy seeds through the empty streets. Beyond the little cluster of buildings were long stretches of fields—wheat, sunflowers, alfalfa—and a two-lane highway that led off toward the rest of the world.

Pierce was dreaming of St. Dismas when he woke up that morning. He could picture the town as seen from above and the tangle of dirt roads that led away from it, and the highway. He was sleeping in his father’s old room, and Jesse was across the hall in the room that Pierce and his brother had once occupied when they were kids. Everything in the house was more or less as it had been since his father died, over a year before—couch and lamp and ashtray, dishes and canned goods in the cupboard and a refrigerator that he didn’t dare to open, dressers and pillows and blankets. A lot of dust and mildew.

Pierce opened his eyes and he could hear Jesse talking to himself.

—All right, he was saying. Thank you, thank you, you’re a great audience, he said, and Pierce knew that he was probably hopping around in front of the mirror, “capering,” as Pierce’s father would have said. Telling himself his little secret jokes, making faces and then laughing at the expressions he created. Pierce and Jesse had shared any number of motel rooms, and Pierce had often opened his eyes from a deep sleep to find Jesse deeply involved in one of these private performances.