Bad Things (6 page)

months back. Security and good sense dictated replacing the door

with something more robust, but Ted was adamant it needed to look

the way it had, for tradition’s sake. I’d specifi ed that he at least buy

supertoughened glass, also some metal strips that I intended using to

strengthen the off-the-rack door.

While I was working through that portion of the job, Becki re-

turned. I was ready for a break from hammering and sawing, so I

went to give her a hand with the cash drawer, which was not light. In

the end she let me carry it by myself, though she hovered encourag-

ingly in the background and went off to fetch me a soda as a reward,

while I levered it into position and bolted it in place.

She got sidetracked with some issue in the kitchen, and I was

back at work on the door by the time she returned with a Dr Pepper

stacked with ice.

She stood around for a while and watched me working, without

saying anything.

“That was a nice thing you did,” she said, after maybe fi ve min-

utes.

“What’s what?”

“You know. Signaling to the cooks that you thought they didn’t

have anything to do with it.”

“They didn’t.”

I concentrated on maneuvering a pane of glass, making sure it

was bedded properly before screwing a piece of the metal brace work

securely into place. When I turned around Becki was still looking at

me, one eyebrow slightly raised.

I smiled. “What?”

“You haven’t always been a waiter, have you.”

“No,” I said. “But it’s what I am now.”

She nodded slowly, and walked back inside.

B A D T H I N G S 25

Midway through the day, the guy from the kitchen brought out a plate

of food. I hadn’t asked for this, or expected it. It was very good, too, a

selection of handmade empanada-style things fi lled with spicy shrimp

and fi sh.

“That was great,” I said, when he came back for the plate. “You

should get Ted to put those on the menu.”

The cook smiled, shrugged, and I guess I knew what he meant. I

stuck out my hand. “John,” I said.

He shook it. “Eduardo.”

“Got the dough ready for the young maestro yet?”

He laughed, and went back inside.

It took over six hours, but eventually everything was done. By

four o’clock I’d replaced the frames on inner and outer doors, and

fi xed the other damage. Becki had the register back up and running,

something I was surprised she was capable of doing. Her entire de-

meanor during the day had been something of an eye opener. I hadn’t

fi gured her for capable and businesslike. The guys in back had mean-

while returned the kitchen to its spotless and socked-away state.

Ted came on an inspection tour, pronounced it good, grabbed

a couple handfuls of beers, and took them out on deck. We all sat

together, Ted, Becki, and me with the guys out of the kitchen—and

Mazy, too, when she wandered in as if fresh out of some fl ower-

scented fairy realm—and drank slowly in the sun, which wasn’t very

warm, but still pleasant. Fairly soon Ted got his head around the fact

that though more than one of the cooks was called Eduardo, none

was actually called Raul.

After a while Becki got up and went and fetched some more beers.

She dispersed them around the crew and then offered one to me. I

looked at my watch, realized it was coming up on fi ve. I’d been working

in direct sunlight half the day and my shirt was sticking to my back.

“I need to get back to my place to change,” I said. “Pretty soon,

in fact.”

“I’ll give you a ride,” she said as I stood up.

26 Michael Marshall

“This is good of you,” I said as we walked together to her car. She

didn’t say anything.

She waited out on deck while I took a shower. As I came out into

the living room I saw she’d taken a beer from my fridge and was sit-

ting drinking it, looking out to sea. I sat in the other chair.

“Going to have to head back soon,” I said.

She nodded, looking down at her hands. I offered her a cigarette,

which she took, and we lit up and sat smoking in silence for a mo-

ment.

“How much trouble is he in?” I asked eventually.

She glanced up. The skin around her eyes looked tight. “How did

you know?”

“Why steal a battered juicer and leave a computer? The mess in

the kitchen was overdone, and the cash drawer looked like it was at-

tacked by a chimp. No one came there last night looking for money.

So where was it? In the locker room?”

She nodded.

“Dope, or powder?”

“Not dope.”

“How much?”

“About ten thousand dollars’ worth.” Her voice was very quiet.

“
Jesus
, Becki. How stupid do you have to be, to stash that much

cocaine in your father’s restaurant?”

“I didn’t know it was
there,
” she said angrily. “This is Kyle’s fucking thing.”

“
Kyle?
How did he even get that much capital? Please don’t tell me

you gave it to him.”

“He got a loan. From . . . some guys he knows.”

It was all I could do not to laugh. “Oh, smart move. So now he’s

royally
fucked, owing not just the back end of drugs he no longer has to sell, but the money he used to buy them in the fi rst place. Perfect.”

“That about covers it.” She breathed out heavily, drained the rest

B A D T H I N G S 27

of her beer in one swallow. “And if you’re thinking of getting heavy

about drugs, I don’t need to hear it.”

“No, drugs are way cool,” I said. “Moral imbeciles making for-

tunes from fucking up other people’s lives, staying out of sight while

wannabes like your idiot boyfriend take all the risks.”

“Better get you back. Going to be a busy night.”

“Take it I’m going to be on pizzas?”

She smiled briefl y, crooked and sad, and I realized how much I

liked her, and also how close she was to seeing her life veer down a

bad track into the woods. “I’m not sure where he even is right now.”

We stood together.

“And you can’t just walk away from this?”

“I love him,” she said, in the way only twenty-year-olds can.

She drove me back to the restaurant, letting me out at the top of the

access road.

“Go fi nd him,” I said. “Get the names of anyone he might have

told where he stashed his gear.”

She looked up at me. “And then?”

“And then,” I said. I tapped the car twice with the fl at of my hand,

and she drove away.

The front door to the restaurant was open, other front-of-house

staff busily arranging chairs out on deck, but I walked around the

other way and went in through the portal I’d spent most of the day

replacing. I reached out as I walked through, and gave it a shove. It

felt very fi rm.

There’s something good about having rebuilt a door. It makes

you feel like you’ve done something. It makes you believe things are

fi xable, even when you know that generally they are not.

C H A P T E R 4

What can you do, when things start to fall apart? Let us count the

ways. . .

Not panic, of course, that’s the main thing. Once you start, it’s

impossible to stop. Panic is immune to debate, to analysis, to ear-

nest and cognitively therapeutic bullet points. Panic isn’t listening.

Panic has no ears, only a voice. Panic is wildfi re in the soul, vault-

ing the narrow paths of reason in search of fresh wood and brush

on the other side, borne into every corner of the mind by the winds

of anxiety.

Carol wasn’t even sure when it had started, or why. The last

couple of months had been
good
. For the fi rst time she’d started to feel settled. The apartment began to feel like a home. She got

a part-time job helping at the library under the dreaded Miss

Williams, tidying chairs and putting up posters and helping or-

ganize reading groups. Work more suited to some game oldster or

slack-jawed teen, admittedly, but gainful employment all the same.

She walked to the library and back and yet still managed to put on

a few pounds, having regained something of an appetite. She made

acquaintances, even put tentative emotional down payments on a

B A D T H I N G S 29

couple of potential friends, and generally quit acting like someone in

a witness protection program.

Sometimes, she even just . . . forgot. That had been best of all, the

times when she suddenly remembered—because it proved there had

been a period, however short, when she had not.

At some point in the last few days this had started to change. She

woke feeling as if she had sunk a couple of inches into the bed over-

night. Instead of vigorously soaping herself in the shower, she stood

bowed under the water, noticing fl ecks of mildew between a pair of

tiles and wondering how she could have missed them before, and if

she’d get around to doing something about it—or if it would just get

worse and worse until she was the kind of woman who had grubby

tiles and nothing could be done about that or the state of the yard

or her clothes or hair. Chaos stalks us all, gaining entrance through

cracks in trivial maintenance, the thing left undone. As soon as you

realize how much there is to
do
to keep presenting a front, it becomes horribly easy to stop believing, and start counting again instead.

It was better when she got out into the world, but still it felt as if

her momentum was faltering. Books slipped from her hands, and she

could not fi nd things in stores. A bruise appeared on her hip from

some minor collision she couldn’t recall. Annoyingly, this reminded

her of something her ex-husband used to say: that you can always tell

when your mood is failing, because the world of objects turns muti-

nous, as if the growing storm in your head unsettles the lower ranks

outside.

And then, three evenings before, she had found herself returning

to the front door after locking it for the night.

She knew it was shut. She could see it was shut, that the bolt was

drawn. She remembered doing it, for God’s sake, could recall the

chill of the chain’s metal against her fi ngertips. That night, these

memories were enough. The next, they were not, and she returned

twice to make sure.

30 Michael Marshall

And last night she’d done it eight times, furiously, eyes wide as she

watched herself draw and redraw the chain, turning the key in the lock

until it wouldn’t turn any further, over and over, before fi nally with-

drawing it. It wouldn’t be nine times tonight. That wasn’t how count-

ing worked. If it didn’t stop now, it would escalate to
sets
of eight.

Sixteen times, twenty-four. . .

To understand how much a person can mistrust reality and them-

selves, you need to stand in a cold hallway, fi ghting back tears of self-

hatred and frustration, as you watch your own hands check a simple

bolt over twenty times.

She knew the walls of your skull were not a bastion. That thoughts

could get in through the cracks, and did. That, in fact, if you felt in

certain ways, it was a pretty sure sign they already had. The more she

opened her mind to panic, the more likely she’d start slipping down

that road again. So she wasn’t going to panic.

Not yet.

These thoughts occupied her most of the way home from the library,

under skies that were a smooth and unbroken gray. Once indoors

she made a pot of strong coffee. She had an hour before he got back.

Once he was home it would be easier. She’d have plenty to keep her

mind off things. It also meant she wouldn’t actually be able to
do
anything, however.

For a moment, thinking of Tyler, she felt a little better. Dinner

could wait. Neither of them was a fussy eater. She could whip some-

thing up later. So. . .

She fetched her laptop from the living room and brought it to the

kitchen table. When her browser was up she hesitated, hands over the

keyboard.

She felt driven to do something, but . . .
what?
She had thousands

of words saved onto her hard disk, innumerable pdfs, two hundred

bookmarked sites. The problem was none of the creators of these

B A D T H I N G S 31

sites
knew
they were relevant. They were like people wandering the

streets, blithely observing that portions of the sidewalk seemed to be-

come white once in a while, without having the faintest understand-

ing of snow. You needed to comprehend the system to place these

reports in context. She
did
understand, had glimpsed it, at least. She was smart, too, though it seemed to her now that she’d never really

capitalized on this.

There had been times when she’d experienced a glimpse of free-

dom, especially during the last couple of months. When it had oc-

curred to her that the whole thing could be nonsense, a cloud on

her vision that had never been more than a speck of dust in her eye.

It didn’t matter how many metaphors she conjured, however—and

English had been one of her best subjects in high school—in the end,

she knew she
believed
. Her faith was dark and unshakable. The knowl-