Billy's Bones (2 page)

Kevin shrugged. “Like I said. Panic attacks.”

“How old were you?”

“I don’t remember. Thirteen, maybe?”

“What was happening at that time?”

Kevin had begun to fidget again, crossing his left leg onto his knee so he could wring his ankle with his hands. “Do I have to sit?”

“No. Go ahead—stand up; walk around a bit.”

Kevin practically jumped out of the armchair. As he talked he circled the office, glancing at the books in the metal racks on the walls, at the water bubbler, at Tom’s desk before stopping at the window that looked out onto the streets of Berlin. “My mother says I was pretty out of control. Fighting with kids at school, breaking things in the house—like dinner plates and… this stupid wooden boy taking a piss in the garden… shit like that. I was yelling at her and my father all the time and locking myself in my room. And I think I ran away once….”

“Your mother told you this? You don’t remember it?”

“Not really. I mean, I remember kicking that pissing kid to pieces.”

“Why did you do that?”

“I was sick of looking at his
ass
.” Kevin grimaced and turned back to face Tom for a moment. “I mean, why do people think those damned things are cute? Why is it cute to have some little kid mooning you all the time?”

Tom had to laugh again. “I don’t know. I think they’re pretty tacky.”

“No shit.”

“Do you remember your time in Hampstead?”

“No,” Kevin said thoughtfully as he watched the cars on the street two stories down. “I had to go in the summer, ’cause they didn’t want me to miss school. I remember being pissed about that. They were afraid I’d run away, so I was never allowed out on the grounds without a nurse. I hated it.”

“Anything else?”

“Nothing very clear.”

This guy is just one big, giant defense mechanism
, Tom thought. He’d counseled other patients who were reluctant to talk about themselves before, but Kevin was combining that with humor and a disarming frankness. Perhaps even a shocking frankness, not that Tom was particularly shocked. But he suspected that, if he were female, Kevin might even become flirtatious. All to direct attention away from what he didn’t want to talk about—why he’d attempted suicide.

Forty-five minutes later, they’d covered topics ranging from Kevin’s fairly average childhood, growing up in rural New Hampshire, to meeting his wife in the local diner where she was waitressing, to his job as a handyman. Kevin had no qualms about telling Tom about his sex life, including how often he masturbated (“I mean, is that normal, considering I’m married?”), even though Tom hadn’t really asked. Nothing was sacred.

Except why he’d hung himself in that damned garage.

The session ended, and Tom had a sense they’d made a small amount of headway, perhaps, but nothing very significant. He liked Kevin, was charmed by him. If he were being honest, he was even somewhat attracted to him. But the man was an enigma. Was his memory really that fragmentary? Or did he simply say “I don’t remember” whenever he didn’t want to talk about something?

As they shook hands at the door, Kevin looked directly into Tom’s eyes with those soft hazel eyes of his, his heavy lids disconcertingly like those of a man sated from sex, and smiled that shy little boy’s smile. “You’re a lot easier to talk to than Dr. What’s-his-name at the hospital.”

“I’m glad you were comfortable.”

The handshake seemed to go on a little too long, Kevin’s eyes holding Tom’s until Tom began to wonder if he wasn’t above flirting with a male psychologist, after all.

When Kevin finally released him, Tom asked, “Will I see you next week?”

“Sure,” Kevin replied, but Tom knew he was lying. They went through the motions of finding a day in Tom’s appointment calendar that worked with both of their schedules, Tom writing it in with a ballpoint pen. Then Kevin walked out of the office.

Tom wished he could have done more. He hoped Kevin was past the crisis that had led him to hang himself, but he couldn’t be sure of that. All he knew for certain was that he would not see Kevin Derocher again.

Two

Three years later

T
HE
house was perfect: two upper floors and a finished basement with a wraparound porch and a deck in the back, all sitting on eight acres of lawn and forest. It had electricity—Tom wasn’t a complete Luddite—but there were no streetlights on the road. He’d be able to sit on the deck at night and look up to see nothing but the silhouettes of pine trees and the starry sky beyond. As Tom walked through with his real estate agent and took in the hardwood floors, the fireplace in the living room, the pellet stoves in the dining room and the basement, the washer and dryer, the hot tub on the deck—a friggin’
hot tub
!—and the current owners’ poodle dressed in a ridiculous sweater with snowflakes on it, Tom knew he had to have it. Not the poodle—the owners were taking her with them, and anyway Tom was picturing a German shepherd or some other big dog he could rassle with. But he wanted the house. More than he’d ever wanted anything in his life.

Four months later, after some haggling on the price, it was his.

He moved in the day after closing, sleeping on a mat in the upstairs bedroom. He hadn’t bothered to bring any furniture from his old apartment in Berlin. He wanted everything to fit in with the rustic, country look of the place. Maybe Shaker furniture. Or he could scavenge some furnishings from antique stores. Or maybe he’d just go around to local yard sales and see if any of the old farms in the area were selling off anything decent.

He’d paid a moving company to transport his packed belongings from Berlin to the house, and he took Friday off from work to oversee that. He found it amusing that the supposedly straight young men working for the company were so blatantly showing off their muscles for each other—and for him—as they stacked boxes onto each other’s backs, three high, and cheerfully carried them up and down the stairs. Was it as sexual as it looked? Or perhaps, at thirty-five, Tom was already a dirty old man. He did his best not to ogle them, but it wasn’t easy when they insisted on taking their shirts off.

That evening, he decided it would be nice to use the hot tub, but that proved to be more challenging than he’d expected. The previous owners had drained all the water out, which was probably for the best, so it would have to be refilled. But the inside of the tub had some kind of scum buildup that would have to be scrubbed off before Tom would feel comfortable letting his bare ass rest against it, and it had already been a long day. So instead, he sat on the deck as night settled in, drinking a couple beers and listening to the howling of coyotes in the forest.

On Saturday, he buckled down and scrubbed. His clothes were completely drenched by the time he’d made sure all the soap was out of the tub, but he just took them off and got a little thrill from puttering around his yard in the nude, knowing there were no neighbors to see.

He filled the tub with water again and spent some time figuring out the right balance of chlorine and other chemicals. Then he flicked the power switch on the wall to turn the water pumps on.

Nothing.

He flicked it off and on again.

Still nothing. Well, not entirely nothing. Tom heard a faint humming sound coming from underneath the hot tub. But that was it.

The hot tub was dead.

“T
HE
water pump is burnt out.”

It had taken a week to find somebody local who serviced hot tubs and another four days to get him out to the house. Now, the guy had the side of the hot tub opened up and half the pieces on the deck, and he was shaking his head as if the whole thing was hopeless.

“It was running when I looked at the house, four months ago,” Tom said, as if that would somehow make it not broken now.

“I’d guess somebody flicked the switch on when it didn’t have water in it,” the man observed. “Then they left it on.”

That could have happened at any time since the thing was drained. It was possible Tom had done it himself when he was going through the house, opening doors, checking locks, switching things on and off. “Okay,” he said, “how much will it cost to replace it?”

“The pump? Maybe a couple hundred. Maybe less. But look at this.” The repairman indicated the mess of wiring and duct-taped tubes underneath the tub. There was even a standard power strip—one that couldn’t possibly be rated for the voltage and current the hot tub demanded—with something plugged into it. And the cement underneath was damp. “None of that’s up to code. If anyone found out I repaired something that badly cobbled together, I could lose my insurance.”

“Can’t we get replacement parts?” Tom asked, tugging at his beard and struggling to keep the dismay out of his voice. “And then put it together right?”

The repairman shook his head. “They don’t make this model anymore. You’d have to look around for used parts, and that’s not really something I do. I’d recommend just buying a new one.”

But Tom wasn’t interested in spending several thousand dollars to replace something he’d never really had to begin with. A hot tub would have been wonderful, but it wasn’t really necessary. It just pissed him off that he’d
thought
he was getting one with the house.

The repairman seemed to sense that Tom wasn’t interested in replacing the old hot tub, so he dug his wallet out of his back pocket and fumbled through it until he came up with a business card. He extended it to Tom. “Look, if you really want to get this up and running—safely—I have a friend who does general handyman work for a living. He isn’t certified for servicing hot tubs, specifically, but he’s good with plumbing and electrical. And he won’t screw you over.”

Tom took the card and puzzled for a moment over why the name on it seemed so familiar. Then it hit him: he’d seen the man as a client once, years ago, after a suicide attempt.

Kevin Derocher.

T
OM
debated whether he should call Kevin, feeling he might be violating the professional relationship between a therapist and his client. But Kevin had seen him only once, three years ago. And it was just to get the goddamned hot tub fixed. So he gave in and dialed the number.

If Kevin recognized Tom’s name, he gave no sign. He was busy for the next week, but agreed to come out the weekend after. So it was just under two weeks later, on a Saturday morning in early June, that a beat-up black pickup truck with a covered truck bed and the words Derocher Repairs stenciled on the sides pulled into Tom’s long, winding driveway, and Kevin Derocher stepped out of the cab.

He hadn’t changed much. Still lean, his chocolate-brown hair still unruly, as if he’d just gotten out of bed, and his face still looking like he could use a shave. He was wearing faded jeans and a plain white T-shirt. As he started to climb the front steps to the porch, Kevin caught sight of Tom coming out of the house and stopped dead.

“I remember you,” he announced, flashing the cute, shy smile Tom remembered. “I was wondering why your voice sounded familiar.”

Tom came forward and shook his hand, grinning. “You didn’t recognize my name?”

“I never remember names. But I kind of remembered your voice—all soothing and shit.”

Tom laughed at the ribbing. “How have you been, Kevin?”

“Okay.” Kevin glanced away and ran his hands through his tousled hair, suddenly looking uncomfortable. “I mean, things are different. Tracy divorced me, after she miscarried the baby.”

“I’m very sorry.”

“Probably for the best,” Kevin said with a shrug. “I wasn’t much of a husband. Probably wouldn’t have been much of a dad either.”

The temptation to psychoanalyze that statement was strong, but Tom resisted it. “Why don’t I show you the hot tub?”

He took Kevin around the porch to the back deck and showed him the disaster. Kevin crouched down and practically crawled inside the damned thing, which caused Tom to fret about the spit-and-glue electrical connections under there. If Tom had known he was going to do that, he would have run inside and pulled the breaker. But Kevin somehow managed not to fry himself. He stood up again, wiping his dirty hands on his jeans.

“That’s all kinds of fucked up,” he said.

“I’ve noticed.”

“I’ll make up a list of parts we need. You’ll have to order the pump online—I’m not paying for it out of pocket. But I can get all the plumbing and electrical pieces.”

“You think it can be fixed?” Tom asked hopefully.

“Anything can be fixed, man. As long as we can get the parts.”

“And it won’t be a watery, electrocution Tub of Doom?”

Kevin laughed. “Not unless you want it to be.”

They went inside, and Kevin helped Tom find a replacement pump online. It ended up being just $125 plus shipping, and it could be there by the end of the next week. Tom felt his excitement at having a hot tub beginning to revive. The more rational part of his mind told him it was a silly extravagance, but the rest of him kept picturing himself steaming in the hot water, late at night, looking up at the stars.