Threats (4 page)

 

12.

WHEN DAVID LEFT the dental practice, Franny experienced a natural adjustment period. Anyone would do the same, David reasoned. There was a financial arrangement to consider, as they began to rely on Franny's income from the salon. She started bringing home liter bottles of shampoo. Meanwhile, he settled comfortably back into his habits from dental school. He mixed chicory in his coffee and avoided using the heater.

One day while Franny was away, he took out all the forgotten food in the freezer. There were bricks of ground beef fuzzed over with frost, pints of old ice cream with one hard spoonful remaining. There were stale potpies, which David used to eat when nobody else was home, and four tubes of concentrated apple juice from years ago, when they had thought of throwing a party but decided against it.

He put a potpie in the oven and the beef in the sink. He let the ice cream thaw for an hour and drank the watery substance that remained. He mixed three pitchers of apple juice and lined them up in the fridge. He didn't have a fourth pitcher so he mixed the remaining juice in an old vase. He drank apple juice and ate the potpie, which had leached in the flavors of the freezer and tasted like plastic and wet paper. He thought about how the potpie was a product of its environment.

When Franny came home, she found the freezer-burned meatloaf next to a potpie that was old enough to attend middle school. Her mother's vase was full of juice in the center of the table. The sight of the vase reminded her of the woman her mother had been, the kind of woman who cleaned a vase with a moistened cotton swab in the event that someday, if someone felt the urge to drink juice out of it, they could pursue that urge. Franny sat down to eat with her husband.

 

13.

FRANNY NEVER CAME TO DAVID in dreams, and he respected her for that. He had heard of ghosts that moved through empty houses, opening cabinets or moaning in the hallway. There was the variety of ghost that sat at the foot of the bed and smiled, but when you reached toward it, you found only the sheets twisted around your legs and the darkness of the room beyond. Ghosts might leave footprints on a porch or follow you down a crowded street, staying just far enough behind and ducking into an alley every time you turned around. There was the kind of ghost who would fill a room with her scent. There were ghosts that traveled in a collective of ghosts, making a competition of it, ticking points off their list as they haunted the darker hallways of historical buildings.

There were ghosts that disguised themselves as glowing orbs in photographs, in such a way that some people would claim they were simple tricks of the light, overexposure of the camera or imperfections in the lens, while others would doubt the trick and believe. The ghosts, which could have appeared in any shape, orblike or otherwise, had the power to trick the living while still making their presence known. All ghosts found this to be very funny.

Some ghosts were mute, and other ghosts murmured to keep themselves company. Some had the power to throw chains against walls, but they were ghost chains and behaved differently from chains one might find wrapped in a coil at a hardware store. There was sound without weight, because the ghosts rarely had the power to lift more than the individual hairs on a pair of arms. It was a frustration to the ghosts, many of whom had spent long lives lifting things. Ghosts tended to express their frustration by causing trouble. A few dug around in trash cans. They pulled out cotton swabs and left them scattered around the room. When the victim entered, he worried that things were not as they seemed.

If Franny was out there somewhere, frustrated, she made no sign. She was the type to employ the silent treatment. He remembered her frowning past him, sitting alone on the couch with one of her magazines, then taking the magazine and heading out back.

She always seemed to end up in the woods behind the house when she was upset. He followed her out there once and found her standing by the stream on the far side of the farmer's fence. The stream was dry most of the year or covered in snow or leaves from the ash trees or ice, forming a thin line of flowing water when it warmed up enough for the snow to melt. When she saw he had followed her, Franny turned around and went back inside, and there was no dinner later. David toasted a piece of bread.

After that, he let her stay in the woods as long as she wished. She would go out unannounced and stay all day, returning hours later with webs in her hair.

 

14.

IT HAD BEEN A CLOUDLESS SPRING DAY near the end of Chico's first month as an officer, forty years before. He and his new partner got the call to head to an old motel. The place was boarded up and vacant but still had its signs up advertising color TV and a reduced rate, the rooms wrapped around a near-empty parking lot. The locks on the doors had been bashed away, and most rooms were home to off-book tenants favoring methamphetamines over their off-book kids, who cried bitterly and scrubbed their faces. The city had organized most of the resources required for a sting operation on the place but hadn't yet collected enough money for a battering ram.

The call came in concurrently with an ambulance call for a drowning. No residents came out to greet the siren. The noise set off wails from two or three children who were heard but not seen in the recesses of the motel. Their noise made it seem as if the building itself was crying, the sound released from multiple points.

“Assholes,” said the older officer, knocking on the last door and then kicking it with some affection using the side of his boot. The ambulance arrived as Chico and his partner made the rounds. The paramedics either had been given more information or knew by instinct, and they took their gear to the pool.

The pool, long since drained, had found a second life dedicated to collecting rain and mosquitoes. A foot of green water shone and stank at the bottom, dotted with leaves and rust, which served to highlight the white blemish of a naked child floating facedown. One of the paramedics waded in with a stabilizing board smaller than any Chico had seen before. He turned the child's body, secured it to the board, and lifted it up in his arms. Chico smelled burning plastic and asphalt. His kit belt was heavy around his waist. Each night that month, he took the belt off and rubbed a balm into the rashed skin.

The paramedic carried the board to the shallow end, where his partner was waiting. The child looked to be a toddler, a little girl, two or three years old. Her stomach was distended and her eyes were mottled with sludge. One of the girl's arms was shrunken, which gave it the appearance of being held protectively close. Her body was naked, save for a bulbous white cloth diaper. Chico watched the paramedics swab the child's face. He thought he saw some slight movement in the body and stopped walking to confirm that there was none. When he walked closer, he saw the twitch again. He was sure of it. The paramedics were packing up their supplies, kneeling next to the child.

“You checked the pulse,” Chico said.

The bigger paramedic put his hand on his chest and looked back at him. “You scared me,” he said.

“I want to make sure we follow protocol.”

“Jesus, you scared me. I thought you were back there by the wall and then you came up behind me and scared the word out of me. My goodness.” He touched the edge of the board. “This one's gone,” he said.

“You checked her pulse, though.” He came closer, standing nearly overhead. He lifted his hand to block the sun from the child's closed eyes. “You know what they say about protocol.”

The paramedic squinted at him. “What do they say?”

Chico understood that it seemed impossible for the child to be alive, but holding his hand over the sun seemed to shift the girl's features, as if a flutter of a pulse could be coaxed out with the right lighting conditions. He held up another hand and shaded the child's entire face. “It's there,” Chico said, both hands stretched high. “Protocol is there for a reason.”

The older cop was back at the car, writing the report. He watched to see the new recruit holding his arms in the air.

“Hey bud, are you inquiring as to how we do our job?” said the other paramedic, who also had been writing a report. “You idiots were knocking on doors. Clearly you missed something on the way in here, but that call came in when we were on the other side of town. This kid is about as dead as a dead kid can be.”

“Neither of you really checked, then. Did you know this is a reportable offense?” Chico had a vision of a news report he had once seen, an old woman rising up in the morgue.

The bigger paramedic was still squatting by the body. He crossed his arms over his legs. “You can check the pulse,” he said.

Chico knelt down. “I guess I am showing you how to do your job,” he said before his hand touched the child's neck.

The object that had once been a living child was taut like a balloon and soft, chilled even under the sun. It had not been apparent from where Chico was standing, but the spaces that the girl's eyes had once occupied were hollow and dark with rot. Chico's fingers pressed searchingly into the flesh of the neck, which offered no resistance. The skin was already weakening to the point where a slight push would send his hand through the front of the trachea and onto the girl's knobbed spine. The child was aspic.

The bigger paramedic said something and stood. His partner responded to him and looked at Chico, waiting. Across the parking lot, a figure emerged from a room, got into a car, and drove away. Chico removed his hand from the dead child's neck. “I'm sorry,” he said. The man waved him off.

The older officer was there then, talking into his two-way. “Let's go,” he said. “I'll drive.” He leaned over and thumped Chico on the back with an open palm. The older officer clearly saw Chico as a novice, which he was, fresh from the academy and from high school before that.

They headed for the next call, a noise complaint that seemed to have been resolved prior to their arrival. On the way, Chico saw that both of his hands were slick with algae. He nearly wiped them on his pressed uniform pants, then stopped, instead resting his hands palms up on his knees. His hands dried, and he washed them hours later, nearly six hours later, when he was alone.

A few days passed before they paid a visit to David's family home.

 

15.

NO DOMESTIC DISPUTE between Franny and David had inspired the removal of their wedding rings. She would take hers off at work when she was giving scalp massages. Once, she thought she had lost the ring, but she found it in the treatment room on a candleholder David had made for her during a personal failure of a pottery class he had taken the year he lost his job. After she found her ring, she started leaving it at home.

David didn't take any specific satisfaction from seeing a ring on his wife's finger. He thought about the day they first met, outside the grocery store during a similarly long winter. Her boot had slipped and she skidded down the sidewalk, kicking forward and losing her balance, pulling the long side of the rolling cart down onto her legs. David had been walking behind her and was startled at the movement. He stepped back in surprise, which gave her a clear path to the ground.

She went down hard, bouncing on the landing. He ran forward to pull the cart off her legs while she rubbed her thigh. “Jesus,” she said. She watched David lower his own bags and pilot one of the cart's wheels into a groove in the pavement. He wore khaki pants that stretched across his rear end. Their grocery bags were mixed together in the confusion, and he loaded his items with hers into the cart. She saw a saint's medal glinting from a chain around his neck and felt poorly about taking the Lord's name in front of a religious man. “Thank you,” she said.

“Your milk split,” he said, lifting the dripping gallon.

She braced herself against the ground and stood. “Thank you for helping me,” she said.

“You'll need another gallon.” He watched her lift a foot and rotate her ankle in a slow circle, testing it. “I can get you one if you want to stay here.”

“I've never had a man buy me milk.”

“I'd like to be the first,” he said. He realized that they were flirting, which was something he had seen and possibly experienced but had never understood in the moment as he did right then. Once, in college, he had told a woman that he enjoyed her scent, but he had seen it as an honest compliment, the kind one adult delivers to another, and not a statement given to promote a favorable reaction, a flirtatious statement, potentially garnering affection. “I would be honored to be the first,” he said.

Whenever anyone heard the story of Franny and David's first meeting, they would ask why he hadn't caught her there in the grocery store parking lot. He would claim he hadn't been close enough. Years later he would stand next to a kiln and hope the objects inside would drastically change shape. They emerged as they had entered, amateur and uneven, too small, colored like wet sand.

David's wedding ring came off before Franny's, in their fifth year of marriage, a time of great stress in his life. He had lost his dental license the year before, and they had just moved in with his father. He found he had been fussing with the ring, turning it round and round on his finger until his skin flamed, the distressed red band suggesting allergy.

Then they both left their rings together at home and forgot where they ended up. Franny hoped they weren't in the basement. David forgot about them.

 

16.

DAVID SAT on the front stoop. The dead bolt was not electrified, he was sure. He was fairly sure. There was no evidence to suggest that the dead bolt was electrified, and it was more reasonable to assume that in fact it was not.

It was a bright day for winter, unusual too because of a drizzling rain that fell without cloud cover. David's eyes were spangled by sunlight. It seemed that the ground was moving, but then he looked closer and saw that the motion was created by black ants crawling from a crack in the walk, up the stairs, across the porch, and into a gap in the foundation, into the house. The ants were small enough and the drizzle light enough that a connection between the two would be rare indeed, though the ants moved sluggishly out of their hibernation. He wondered how an ant would celebrate the event of a raindrop, if it would survive the impact. David's body felt wrapped in a thin layer of cellophane.