Rough Draft (7 page)

But that's not how it worked out. Not how it worked out at all.

When the school bell finally rang, the mothers began saying good-bye to their friends. Some kept on talking on their cell phones as they craned around searching for their child in the throng of kids who poured out the doors. There was a lady cop directing traffic. All the lights were blinking yellow. It was a clear, pretty day, no clouds. Monday, early October, low eighties, low humidity. There was a white dog waiting outside the fence, a Labrador. It was fat and had a sway back and it stared in through the fence wagging its tail, looking for its master in that mass of kids.

It took a minute but finally Misty spotted Randall Keller. He was wearing a black T-shirt and baggy blue jean shorts that hung below his knees. He had on red running shoes and a green backpack loaded with books. He was carrying his bright pink bicycle helmet. No other kids were talking to him. He wasn't looking around for anyone. He didn't seem depressed or happy or anything. He just walked over to the bicycle rack and rolled his bicycle out and got on it and started pedaling across the playground toward the gate.

Misty started her car.

She waited for a break in the parade of four-wheel-drive monsters, then cut out into the street. Going slow for the school zone. Staying back of Randall. Watching the blond hair sticking out from under his helmet. Watching him pump the pedals, not too fast, the pack heavy on his back.

He rolled through a four-way stop and kept going straight. Misty waited her turn, then eased through the intersection and cruised up slowly behind him. He was on the sidewalk, taking it slow. Looking straight ahead, his face was red from the exertion, sweaty. She drove with her left hand and held the derringer in her right. Her passenger window was open. She wasn't going more than ten miles an hour. Her speedometer was broken, but she knew it couldn't be any faster than that.

There was a big blue sports utility vehicle right on her ass. Tailgating mom with a car full of kids. Misty was out of the school zone now. Speed limit back up to thirty, but she held it at ten or so, creeping along beside Randall. Holding the derringer in her right hand. Thumbing back one of the hammers.

Raise the pistol, aim, then fire. That's all it took. A few seconds and it would be over, and the boy would be wounded or maybe dead, lying in the front yard of some stranger's house. People screaming, running to where he'd tumbled off his bike. Blood spilling out of his fragile body. His perfect childhood over. Then the poor kid's mother would spend the rest of her life grieving. Just like Misty was spending hers.

That's all it would take. Some kook. Some lunatic killer coming along and doing it like that. What was his mother thinking? Hannah Keller, sitting in her house ten blocks away, waiting for her boy to come home. Why didn't she get in her car and go down with all the other mothers and wait for him? She was home. She didn't have a real job. A fucking writer was all she was, sat in a room, made things up. Leaving her son to bike home on his own, vulnerable to any sort of disaster, to any kind of fucking maniac killer who might want to hurt him.

The big blue four-wheel-drive beast behind her tooted its horn.

Misty lowered the derringer. Eased the hammer back. She set the pistol on the seat beside her. Rubber foam was poking through the seat cover. She accelerated, headed up 124th Street, took the first right she came to, circled the block and came out onto 124th again, and there he was, Randall Keller, waiting for the light at Ludlam Road.

Misty pulled alongside him. She could call out, say hi. But she knew what he would do. He would look over at her, then duck his eyes, and point them back down the street where he was headed. He'd do that because that's what he and all the other little perfect kids his age were trained to do. Not speak to strangers. Like that would save them. Like that would make any difference.

And the really ironic thing was that Misty wasn't a stranger. She and Randall were old pals, intimate friends. Except that Randall didn't know what Misty looked like. Wouldn't recognize her sitting in her powder blue Corolla. And now wasn't the time to pull the curtain aside and step out into view. She wasn't ready for that just yet.

So she didn't say anything, but waited till the light turned green, then went on straight and turned down the street where she knew Randall was going to turn, and she went on past Hannah Keller's cute little wood house in the middle of a mango and avocado grove with the high white fence and the red and purple bougainvillea, and Misty went to the end of the block, looking for some place to pull off, somewhere in the shade, out of the way.

In the front yard of a big brown house at the end of Hannah Keller's street there were a dozen cars parked helter-skelter. A tea party going on inside. Or maybe a bridge club. Trays of tiny sandwiches without the crust. Some of the women in white gloves. Fresh from the beauty shop, smelling of gaudy perfume. Women saying catty things about women who weren't there. Whispering behind their hands.

Misty pulled in among the cars, Mercedeses, Cadillacs. She found a place on the shoulder of the road, in the shade of an oak tree. She shifted the Corolla around so it was facing back down Pinecrest Lane, Hannah and Randall's street. A good view of her driveway entrance. It would only be a half-hour wait before Hannah Keller and her eleven-year-old son headed out for Randall's weekly meeting with his shrink.

Misty's heart was fluttering. The air had a special tremble. Something was just about to happen. She could feel it—something big and ugly rumbling down the tracks. A freight train, with Misty, wild and crazy, at the helm.

Hannah heard the back door slam.

She saved the chapter she was working on and leaned back in her chair, waiting for Randall to put his books down and come back to her study to say hi.

But he didn't come.

She waited, listened for his footsteps through the house, but she heard nothing.

So she pushed back her chair, got up and walked through her bedroom, out to the living room, then along a narrow corridor to Randall's room. She pushed open his door and stepped inside. Posters of
Star Trek
villains and all-girl pop groups covered his walls. His bed was neatly made and his closet door opened on a carefully organized array of clothes. A couple of framed math and computer studies awards hung on the wall and in the old metal birdcage that sat on the far edge of his desk, Spunky was curled up in his bed of shredded paper. A former lab rat, Spunky was black and fat, getting bulkier all the time. An insatiable appetite for pepperoni.

Randall was eleven years old and had his father's thick blond hair and liquid blue eyes and knobby cheekbones. Sometimes on a groggy morning, when Hannah shuffled into the kitchen to find her son at the breakfast nook reading the newspaper and drinking orange juice, her pulse stuttered hard and she had to take a deep, calming breath, for this son of hers was more than a rough approximation of his father. Randall was turning into his physical duplicate, as if Pieter Thomasson's Nordic genes had prevailed in all the thousand
microscopic battles for supremacy. At the oddest times her ex-husband looked out at her from Randall's eyes, grinned at her from her son's lips, and sometimes he even haunted her sleep as the two of them, Pieter and Randall, appeared in her dreams as terrifyingly interchangeable.

Randall was wearing baggy jeans and a black T-shirt and his Marlins baseball cap was on backwards. He was tapping his right foot fast against the oak floor, probably keeping time to the infernal beat of his cursor.

Hannah smiled and shook her head and ducked down to give him a kiss on the cheek.

“Hey, pardner,” she said.

“Hey.” A listless voice.

“You didn't come say hi. What's wrong?”

“I didn't want to interrupt your writing.”

“You can interrupt me anytime you want, Randall. You know that. I like it when you interrupt me.”

A blade of sunlight from the west window cut across his desk and lit up the side of his face and she could see the faint dusting of peach fuzz on his cheek. He was going to have a beard as downy and inconsequential as his dad's.

“How was school? You do okay on that English composition?”

“I got a B.”

“B's are fine.”

“Not as fine as A's.”

“And did Miss Mays like the drawing of the osprey?”

“She put it up on the board. I guess she liked it. Unless she was trying to make fun of me.”

“Oh, she must've liked it. It was very good, Randall. Very realistic.”

The assignment had been to draw one of the animals of the Everglades. Drawing was torture for him. So personal, so much exposure.

“Everybody else did alligators. There were a couple of deer. I was the only one who did an osprey.”

“So you were original. That's good.”

“I wish I'd drawn an alligator like everyone else.”

She came up behind him, tried to keep her voice upbeat.

“You remember what day it is, right?”

“I remember.”

“We have to get rolling in ten, fifteen minutes.”

“Oh, Mom,” he said. “Can't we skip it for once?”

“But you like Dr. English.”

“She's okay.”

“And we skipped two weeks ago, Randall.”

“Once a month is enough. Cutting back would save money.”

“Don't worry about the money. The money's irrelevant. What matters is for you to start feeling better.”

He was using the computer mouse to flick through screen after screen, bright images coming and going almost instantly.

“What're you working on, Randall?”

“A project for computer science.”

“Tell me again. What's it about?”

He looked up at her. His mouth twisted into a smirk.

“Go on,” she said. “I know I won't understand it. But I like to hear the words.”

“Cognitively self-modifying automata.”

She nodded.

“And what's that in English?”

“Little bugs that live on their own inside a program. The longer they survive, the more they learn and adapt. They get smarter and smarter and harder to detect.”

“That sounds like computer viruses.”

“Viruses destroy things. These are just bugs. They're neutral. They're just there, learning, not hurting anybody.”

“And they're teaching that in computer science?”

“They're trying to.”

He smiled politely and his eyes strayed back to his screen.

“I really hate my clothes,” he said.

“What?”

“Oh, never mind.”

“Your clothes? Why? What's wrong with your clothes?”

“They're wrong. They're geeky.”

“When did you decide that?”

“They're geeky and I hate them.”

“Well, then we'll go shopping, find you some new clothes.”

“I don't like when you go shopping with me. You watch me all the time. You smile and stuff.”

“I make you self-conscious?”

“And I don't want to go to soccer anymore either.”

“You love soccer, Randall.”

“I only go because you want me to. But I don't like it. It's too hot out there, no shade, I get all sweaty and I can't breathe. The coaches scream at me. And I don't like the kids. I don't like getting kicked in the shins. I'm not doing it anymore.”

“There's nothing about soccer you like, really? Now be honest.”

“I don't like all the other people in the stands. All the parents and the little kids. Everyone hanging around watching, whistling and cheering. I'd rather be alone.”

“You need friends, Randall.”

“No, I don't.”

“Of course you do. Everybody needs friends.”

“
You
don't have any friends.”

“Sure I do.”

“Name one.”

“There's Gisela.”

“One friend, big deal.”

“There's Max.”

“He doesn't count. He's your book agent.”

“But he's my friend too.”

“He
has
to be your friend. You pay him. Anyway, he lives in New York. You see him like twice a year. That's not a friend.”

“Randall, this is a ridiculous conversation.”

“I have Stevie,” he said. “I don't need any more friends. Stevie's plenty.”

“Look, Randall, I like that you have an E-mail friend. But a real friend is someone you know face-to-face. Someone
you spend time with. If you gave it half a chance, I'm sure some of your soccer teammates, or kids in your class would be thrilled to be friends with you. Isn't there someone you want to invite over? You could swim in the pool. Have a cookout.”

“Yeah sure, Mom, sit around a campfire, roast weenies. Oh, boy.”

“Come on now, Randall.”

“I don't need anybody. I'm happy by myself.”

“Remember how much you used to like to fish, go swimming, snorkeling? You need to get out of this room, away from the computer.”

“Why? What's so good about being outside?”

“It's healthy. It's enriching.”

“You get skin cancer outside.”

“Oh, now you're being silly, Randall.”

“
You
don't get outside.
You
don't do things.”

“Of course, I do,” Hannah said.

“All you do is write. You stay inside and you write. That's all you ever do. Turn on your computer first thing in the morning, sit down in front of it and type. Turn it off before you go to bed.”

She drew a slow breath, let it out.

“I hate my clothes,” said Randall. “They're stupid.”

Hannah put her hand on his shoulder. She could feel the vibrations radiating from his body like the hum of a tuning fork buried deep in the bone, a low throb that had begun to pulse years ago, that morning when he found his grandparents dead.

The watershed moment. Everything forever different afterward. His startle reflex on hair-trigger. Now he was jumpy. Any little noise, a bird exploding into flight, an avocado falling from the tree would send him reeling. His appetite was erratic. He was depressed, quiet, stayed in his room. He had manic bursts, long hours lost in his programming language, deaf to the world.