The Next (18 page)

Mr. Palmer was watering the begonias in his garden. He observed Mama Duck and her armed ducklings beeline past his porch. After Grandfather had passed, he nodded hello to me. Once again I’d been singled out, and I had no idea why.

Because every curtain was closed, the trailer was dark when we stepped up the stairs and through the screen door. Grandfather turned one lamp on and opened one curtain. Six curtains could have been opened, including two that would have faced Mr. Palmer’s trailer, but only one on the opposite side was opened. Through the window we could see the trailer parked parallel to ours. Specifically, its kitchen window, but it was dark. Nobody was home.

Grandfather heated up a can of beans and hotdog chunks in one pot on the stove. He stirred, plopped our meals on plates, and handed them to us. Like the trailer, like my Grandfather, like everything Paul and I had experienced that day, there was no joy in the meal. No embellishment like a sprinkle of chili pepper. No hospitality in spooning the food onto the plates. It was merely a perfunctory provision of carbohydrates and protein to his two wards. Nothing more.

We devoured the beans and meat in silence as Grandfather waited patiently, eating nothing himself. We licked the plates clean, and Grandfather washed the dishes. The lights flicked on in the window of the mysterious trailer. Paul and I saw Grandfather pause and glance over at it. There in the window, a figure passed through the kitchen. It was Graves.

Grandfather saw that we recognized him. He returned his full attention to the sink, drying the plates with a white towel and placing them in the cupboard. He picked up our rifles and put them in the hall closet. We heard a dangling of keys followed by the distinct sound of the closet door being locked.

The bed was pulled out, the lights were turned off, the front door was locked, and Grandfather exited down the hall without a word. Without a goodnight. Without a wink of acknowledgement, much less affection. We had no racetracks to play with. No familiar state park to sneak out to. Just an expectation we’d fall asleep with very little choice to do otherwise.

We lay in the darkness watching the light from Graves’ living room form a square against our wall, occasionally interrupted by the shadow of the old man passing through. Frogs croaked in the pond in a vast hoarse chorus. Crickets advertised their presence with high-pitched ascending scales.

The square of light flicked off, and in the blackness I began to process the day of silence. Why hunt? Why on our first day? What was the old man’s relationship to my Grandfather? Why had Grandfather kept every curtain closed that evening except the one facing Graves’ trailer? Was that deliberate?

I heard a click on the hardwood floor where I sat with my back against the door. I opened my eyes. Glasses. Broken. I’d been holding them since Marzoli left, but they’d slipped out of my hands as sat there. I picked them up again, staring closely at the cracks in the lenses as my brain waffled between the past and present.

Like an apparition, Graves’ gaunt face appeared through the glass. Its sudden appearance was so startling my body went rigid and my blood froze. I felt my fingers tingle like tacks were being shot through the veins to their tips. From his shadowed sockets, his blue eyes pierced the hazy dark on the other side of the window, strafing our bed like two searchlights.

Paul and I were exposed: our shins, our thighs, our underwear, our abdomens, our chests. Our white teenage skin reflected what little light crept through the window and slipped onto our mattress.

After a minute of breathless stillness, I redirected my eyes to Graves. He was staring right back at me.

Jesus!

I braced myself on the mattress with my hands but ended up gripping Paul’s elbow. Paul stirred and rolled over, his firm bottom exposed to the night air, clad only in the loose, stretched white underwear he’d had for years.

Graves squinted, bringing several new wrinkles to the ridges of his sockets. He swiftly moved to the left and disappeared. I felt queasy.

I squeezed Paul’s elbow more tightly than I’d intended. I felt wetness. I lifted my hand to my eyes. I’d crushed the lenses of the glasses with my fingers. Shards were sticking out from my palm. Blood was running down my wrist…

Suddenly I realized something that vice-gripped my heart and wacked me back to the hardwood floor of the present like Mohammed Ali’s last blow at his first World Heavyweight fight.

The cracked designer glasses impaling my hand were Ruben’s!

Chapter Sixteen

Marzoli would not return my phone call even after I’d rung him three times.

He must be pissed at me. But why? I needed to know why Marzoli needed to be in
my
apartment? What did he need from me in particular that I hadn’t already revealed to him? Why did he need to be covert about asking me? Did I really present myself as some temperamental son-of-a-bitch he had to seduce into revealing whatever the hell he needed to know?

Errr…yes.

The bear trap gouged its rusty teeth into my gut even deeper.

The sun had set, and the courtyard was hushed with the Sunday evening activities serene people of the earth do:
Downton Abbey
, steaming tea kettles, foaming candle-lit baths, Eat Fifty Shades of the Bridges of Madison Pray Love.

The Broadway Dancer stood in front of a mirror, plucking his eyebrows. He turned to the side and observed the ever-so-undetectable bulge of his belly. He sucked in his stomach and held the pose for a few seconds before releasing it. He must have an audition in the morning. Dancers are more prone to harsh self-critiquing before auditions than before curtain calls. The dancer threw the tweezers onto the coffee table and shoved the coffee table out of view. He propped himself on his elbows and toes and suspended his body in plank position, maintaining the pose for two minutes as he breathed steadily in and out. Beads of sweat formed on his forehead.

How much fat did he think he’d lose between now and tomorrow morning by planking? But I understood. Obtaining a zero-fat ratio wasn’t really the point. He wanted to feel the satisfaction of actively bettering his life. He was fighting the feeling of futility by engaging in the one thing in his life he had power over—his body. He was just like all the fighters in New York, trembling and sweating in a planked position, struggling to maintain any kind of elevated leveling in life before the collapse, the release, the expiration.

And me? I pined like a lover for Marzoli to merely be in the same room with me. What did it say about me that when he showed enthusiasm to be here, I showed him to the door? What result had I achieved? I was extracting from my palm shards of the concrete proof of Ruben’s murder, and I could not inform the one person who could do anything about it. I’d planked, but just gave up. Just collapsed.

I extracted the last and largest shard from the side of my thumb in an unenthusiastic act of self-preservation.

What the fuck was wrong with me?

My phone rang.

It was not Marzoli.

“Who’s this?” I asked after answering it, smearing a drop of blood on the screen.

“It’s Rebecca. Didn’t my name come up?”

“Why would it? I deleted your contact info after you failed to sell any of my songs for a year.”

I said it in a chiding tone, but in fact I had.

“I got your song.”

“Oh, you got ‘Obsession’?”

“Yeah, it’s fantastic.”

“It’s called ‘Paralyzed.’”

“Well, I like it. Have you got any other material?”

That single question could indicate one of two things: one, she cannot push “Paralyzed” because it sucks, or two, someone liked it so much they wanted to hear other songs by the same writer. I guessed the former due to the fact that she hadn’t remembered the name. If she’d forwarded it to more than one person, even two, the name would have been reinforced by typing it multiple times. Obviously, she hadn’t.

There was a burst of activity in the kitchen of the Layworths. The kids just came home, tossing their snow gear and jackets onto chairs and scrambling around in frenetic disorder. Mrs. Layworth entered as well, calm and a trifle distant, placing her leather computer bag on the table. She exchanged a brief, steely look with her husband and proceeded to pull spaghetti noodles out of the cupboard.

“Yes, I have other songs. You’ve got copies of my other songs.”

“But do you have any new stuff?”

Stuff.
I bled creating
stuff.

“Rebecca, who rejected
‘Paralyzed’?”

“One of the
American Idol
runner ups.”

“What place?”

“Seventh. I think. Maybe eighth.”

Little Miss Felicity Perfect ran to the parents’ bedroom. Mrs. Layworth dropped spaghetti noodles onto the floor and ran after her. The dry noodles spread all over the tile. Little Mr. Hunter Perfect laughed hysterically and danced all over the pasta in delight, sliding from one side of the counter to the other. Mrs. Perfect retrieved her daughter, closing the bedroom door tightly behind her. Mr. Perfect rolled his eyes at his wife and put his hands up as if to say, “What’s your problem?”

And what exactly was her problem? Why were the children forbidden to enter the bedroom when they’d always had free reign of it before? What ought they not to encounter? Was Ruben’s body in the bedroom? And if so…where? Could I not see everything in the bedroom there was to see?

I heard Rebecca Stray cough over the phone, reminding me she was still on the other side of the satellite.

“Are you upset?” she asked.

“Why would it upset me to be rejected by the eighth place reject of
American Idol
?”

“You’re upset.”

“Which season?”

“Does it matter?” she said.

“You got a song on Saturday and a rejection on Sunday. If you were me, would you think you’d given it a fair chance?”

“You’re telling me you know how to do my job better than I do?”

If there’s anything I’d learned over the years, it’s that pissing off your agent does no good for you ultimately. A healthy antagonism keeps it peppy. Being offensive, even if you’re inarguably justified, magically vaults your songs in a lost ark nailed inside a crate stamped “top secret” and shoved somewhere in a mile-wide warehouse full of identical crates.

The bitch doesn’t even play the piano! How the fuck does she know ‘Paralyzed’ wouldn’t move?

“No, Rebecca, I don’t have any other songs.”

“What the heck are you doing with yourself?”

“Spying on the neighbors.”

Mr. Perfect bent down and spoke to his daughter directly. He pointed toward the bedroom door. The girl walked to it, opened it, and entered the bedroom. Mrs. Perfect followed her with her eyes, consternated, and then darted a look of irritation at her husband. Or was it a look of horror? The girl proceeded to the bathroom, retrieved a Little Mermaid doll from the side of the bathtub, and returned to the kitchen. Mrs. Perfect made an exasperated sound, closed the bedroom door, charged back to the kitchen and pointed her finger to the spaghetti mess on the floor, commanding her husband to clean it up.

Where the hell was Ruben?

“Well, I hope your neighbors inspire you. I can’t sell this song, and they’ve all seen your old stuff. Maybe it
would’ve moved if Whitney was still with us.”

“Whitney wasn’t with us when she was with us.”

“But her people bought your songs.”

“She never recorded them.”

“She
bought
them.”

“And you got your commission.”

“I’m hanging up now. You and Johanna should come over sometime.”

“I despise you, and I’m fucking men now.”

“Good. I hope they’re paying you for it. You need the money. Why don’t you write some country songs for a change?”

What sucks about cell phones is you can’t slam the receiver down. I tapped the “end” button.

There was blood smeared all over my phone now.

I had no Band-Aids so I ran my hand under hot water. When I stopped the water, the bright red continued to ooze from the slivered skin. I could blot it with a paper towel. I could try to get the blood to clot. Or…

I saw movement under a plate. A baby roach emerged and crawled to the end of a serrated knife blade.

Could I not just continue to bleed? Bleed until there was nothing more to come out? Could I not speed up the bloodletting? To end the gnawing self-pity? To end the self-hatred because I was one hundred percent aware I was indulging in gnawing self-pity? To stop the sabotage of random, menacing, purposeless attacks of a clawing, angry memory? To stop the anxiety that derives from never knowing why, when, and how I would be attacked? To stop the miserable pining for a life I wasn’t even sure I wanted? To stop pining for the people that would give me the life I wasn’t even sure I wanted?

Just to stop.

My phone beeped.

I’d received a text.

Please…Marzoli…please…

Even a “fuck you” from him would give my emotions something to chew on. Something to look forward to resolving. Something to look forward to not resolving.