Stranger Will (26 page)

“I promise,” William says. He leans back, dodging questions about Julie, about the baby, about Mrs. Rose and everything else even William himself still has yet to understand. He says “I don’t know,” until it compresses to a single word, to a single sound, until Philip stops the questions, silences the radio and flicks on the interior light. “Okay,” he says and reads from a piece of paper in his hand, “Holiday Street.” He turns the car onto a road William has seen before. The neighborhood is familiar even in the dark. Philip reads numbers on houses, slows as they grow and stops at a house William wanted never to visit again. “This is it,” Philip says and pulls a knob releasing the trunk.

The Turners
, the mailbox reads. A tiny red metal flag stands tall at the side. William opens the flap as he passes the box. Two outgoing letters sit stamped and ready for tomorrow’s mail carrier. Without a step wasted, he pulls down the flag and continues dragging a cart full of chemicals behind his crutch.

“You shouldn’t interrupt the postal system,” Philip says. “It’s a federal crime, you know.”

The bucket behind him bangs against landscaping rocks, over pebbles on the sidewalk, against wooden steps, until both men are standing at the front door. “So is making a cripple carry his own tools.”

Philip opens the door. “Get ready,” he says, sniffing the air before flicking a light switch. They freeze in anticipation of the warning Philip had received on the phone. But “nothing,” he says, almost disappointed and sets his supplies down to search for a stain.

William lets his own gear down sniffing the air as well; familiar to him even without the explosion they were prepared for. He walks the walls lined with knick-knacks and photographs. He fills a glass of water from the kitchen and drinks in slow, even, gulps. He walks to the living room and falls into the couch. It hugs his body the same way it did nine days ago.

“Liar,” Philip yells from the bathroom. “Three o’clock in the fucking morning.”

William sets his cup down on the coffee table. Philip yells again, specific this time with “come here. I found our leftovers,” but being direct does not encourage William. He knows what he will find.

“Wouldn’t have taken but one of us a couple hours, but I will say it looks deceivingly brutal. These people had skeletons,” Philip says. “Look at this place: nice, well kempt. But we’ve got some splatters here. Someone was saying something with this.” William steps through the open doorway to a bathroom he remembers as being larger. But with two men, layered clothing, and dim lighting the walls feel built to suffocate. The acidic stench of his own vomit still hangs in the air.

“What do you think?” Philip says.

He knows the story. Spread against the floor William makes out clean linoleum in the shape of legs, spread legs, and splashed around them blood so fresh it still glows under the fluorescent light. Janice was a thin woman considering the child inside her and the clean area of floor matches that measure. The red climbs up the side of the bathtub, a loose triangle billowing where Janice’s breasts were.
Nobody could stay a conscious part of this
, he thinks, and makes note of the length of the invisible legs.
Too long to be bent and flexed
.

“What?” Philip asks. “What do you think happened?” William replies: “I don’t know, I said.”

“Tell you what, though,” and Philip steps back. “This thing smells domestic. The bathroom—the most intimate room of the house. Not the bedroom, no, too much going on in a bedroom. A bathroom is all about vulnerability. Medicine cabinets, hidden bottles of hair restorer, Viagra. You don’t injure someone in a bathroom unless you know the person.”

“Maybe it was murder, a stranger?”

Philip squeezes past William into the hallway. “Not messy enough. You know that.”

“Nice theory,” William yells to Philip. He sees Janice— remorseful Janice—crying as her child is pulled from her, taken away, and said to be off to a better home. For Anthony—quiet Anthony—Mrs. Rose doesn’t allow remorse.

“I can’t take all the credit,” Philip says stepping back into the bathroom with a mop and his brand new Tyvek suit. “Shelia reads up on that kind of stuff. I added the vulnerability part. She brought up the bathroom.”

“Domestic?” William says.

“That’s my guess. Shelia said a marriage pretty much revolves around a bathroom. If we aren’t in it, we are waiting outside the door. It’s where we keep everything that holds a couple together. We clean ourselves in a bathroom. We expel waste. Pretty much everything we do in there is designed to keep one person tolerable to another. Why wouldn’t we tear everything down in there, too?”

“She might be right.” William leaves for a mop of his own and a few seconds of air free of the name
Shelia
.

He digs into the car trunk, past the suit for a latex glove when Philip yells from the bathroom. “She’s right about a lot of things. I’m really happy with everything, you know.”

William inhales. He takes the air deep. “We’ll do alright,” Philip says. “I know it.”

William reaches for a second glove, snaps it over the gauze of his healing hand. The second glove he helps over his fingers with his teeth. Outfitted, he lugs a dry mop head and a hose to the kitchen and begins filling his bucket with water. As he waits for the level to rise, he checks out the refrigerator, filled with condiments and lunchmeat. He opens cabinets, shuffles through cereal, canned vegetables, and a stock of powdered baby formula. “That was a waste,” he says holding a can of Enfamil.

“Shelia is definitely the one,” Philip says from the bathroom. “She’s great to be around and she has direction to match. The stuff she does at the school—I couldn’t do that.”

Not knowing exactly where the confrontation will take him, he begins with “about Shelia…” but stops. Catching sun, strategically placed in the beam’s path, is a cage, rusted but smooth enough to shine—a bird cage William doesn’t remember the couple having—one he remembers seeing at Mrs. Rose’s house.

“What about her?” Philip yells.

William approaches the cage. He breathes in the stink, more painful than any chemical. Bloated at the bottom of the cage, atop fresh newspapers and pellets of food scattered, perhaps by struggle, perhaps by hunger, is a dead pigeon. Attached to its leg is a small, metal canister.

“I really want to know what you think,” Philip says. The sound of a sturdy bristled brush working against tile echoes to the kitchen.

“She…” but William has changed direction. He opens the cage and lifts the bird by its leg. The head dangles. William pulls the canister away, opens it with his teeth, the taste of blood rich in his mouth.

“It’s really important,” Philip says. “This is what I want to talk with you about.” His scrubbing has stopped.

William unrolls the paper inside. In familiar handwriting, neat with age and intent, the words float for a moment before William can settle his eyes by the glow of the shallow sunlight:

More powerful than teaching is showing you that lessons are never unlearned. Only when we are all dead will this stop. Until then, we die one imperfection at a time. We learn one life at a time. I have failed with you, and for that I will fall away, but failure in itself reverberates forever. When something moves…

“Come in here,” Philip says. “I’ve got to tell you the news. I need to say it now.”

…everything moves
.

He limps toward Philip’s voice, never pulling his eyes from the paper.

Like a van swerving into a tree, dodging a head-on collision
.

William supports himself by a brick wall. He trips over a mess of supplies, chemicals, rags, bags, all of it binding each step.

A tree may teach the driver to drive more carefully...

His arm burns against the wall, the abrasion wearing him thin.

…or a tree may teach him that he was never meant to drive on that road
.

At the bathroom doorway, William looks down to Philip who smears dots of red to an opaque pink mask on the linoleum floor. He draws a quick face in the blood like finger-paint then yells again as he stands and smashes his print with a saturated mop. “Please,” he says and jumps when he turns to see William standing so close. He doesn’t even look to the paper in William’s hand. Instead he confronts eye to eye and states that he’s waited too long to say it already.

“Shelia and I,” he starts, trailing off for the right word. Behind him the bloody print of Janice is giving birth to Philip’s finger- painted face. “We’re close. You’ve seen the ring, right?”

William nods. His palm sweats through the paper in his hand. “I meant to tell you earlier, but I couldn’t find the right time. Not that this is the right time either but…things are going to be different. A lot different. Shelia, she’s—she might be…”

But William already knows the end. He stands, as eager as he can pretend, and moves his own lips to the word as Philip lets it spill.

“…pregnant,” they say in unison.

“That’s great,” William says. He buries the note in his pocket. “Really.”

“I think so,” he says turning back to Janice’s red ghost, “but Shelia…”

And William feels the blood swell within his veins. “But Shelia, what?”

“I want to keep it. I want to be a father, you know, but Shelia…she isn’t so confident.”

Spoken like William all those months ago—hopeful, and two cups of coffee away from conviction—but William is here to interrupt. “What does she tell you?” he asks already preparing to tear it down.

“Some smart things,” he says scrubbing Janice’s stain. The print fades, slowly with each stroke. “One thing that makes a lot of sense, she says that we are always controlled and only when we accept that can we ever be—”

“Free,” William says. “Free. I know. I’ve been told that, too.”

Philip keeps scrubbing. “When did she tell you that?”

“She didn’t,” William says and for the first time he understands the world as a vast system of signs; a conversation spoken over him, around him, through him, perhaps about him, but never with him. He is the product of experimentation—the man upstairs but without a gun propped under his chin.

“Who did?” Philip asks, but William has found a different thread.

“Remember the man upstairs?” he asks. “The guy we found with Shelia.”

“Peter,” Philip says. “Yeah. Shelia told me his name.” “She ever tell you more?”

“He wasn’t anybody much. Shelia didn’t like him. But for good reason, I suppose.”

“Was he the father,” William asks leaning against the bathroom doorframe, “of her dead child?”

“She said the man upstairs was just a bum, a weak bum.” Said with the learned spite of Shelia via Mrs. Rose via what William now recognizes as a lifetime of soured attempts.

“Weak?”

“He did it himself,” Philip says. “Pulled the trigger and that was the end of it. Shelia is a little shaken up by it—who wouldn’t be—but she is taking it pretty well. It’s for the better, though.”

“For the better,” William says too low to echo off the hard tiled walls. He watches his friend recommit to the stain, scrubbing what he’s discovering is a simple step in a lesson plan. Philip will meet Mrs. Rose. They will share coffee. He will rid the world of his child, a step proving his weakness—her theory’s validity—and then what? Shelia will go again and again until her body stops producing, until Mrs. Rose finds another source. Another well. Another body to empty.

“I’ve got to go,” William says. He throws his gloves to the floor.

“Where are you going?” Philip asks. He yells that they have a job to do and that if they don’t clean this mess, who will? But William is gone already.
I was not the first failure
he says to himself as he turns the engine of Philip’s car, chemicals bleeding from the back,
but I will be the last
.

Mrs. Rose kneels wrist-deep in her garden, pulling weeds, panting heavy enough for William to see from the road, her clothes expand. His first shotgun was lost in the van wreckage. This new one he picked up from a pawnshop just a few miles up the road, a dusty, no-questions-asked kind of place that buys cheap and sells expensive. He’s never believed in conclusion via a gun—the shots have always brought him more pieces to play with—but if there is one thing he has learned from Mrs. Rose, it’s that he has the power to steer outcome. The trick is to keep anyone else from believing it.

Philip’s car vibrates the dust from the dirt road, its engine echoes against the ground loud enough to rouse the dying, but Mrs. Rose, she keeps her back turned and her knees to the dirt. The plants in her garden have turned crisp and brown, drained by the cold weather. Mrs. Rose, too.

He positions the gun, its weight resisted by his strengthened arm. He pulls the trigger. Mrs. Rose falls. Her birds panic in their cages. William breathes in the exhaust from his shot, the first truly satisfying breath he remembers taking.

He then rides to the police station, embracing the idea of a prison cell.
Containment
, he thinks and smiles about the all that word implies: Control, refusing freedom. Acknowledging freedom. A janitor, mopping the granite floor of the entryway, opens the door.

“Thanks,” William says, but the man in the uniform says nothing. He just mops.

He tells an officer about Mrs. Rose, and about his child, about Julie’s hunt, about the wreck and says to “check the accident reports if you want.” From the back seat of car filled with shovels and gloves, William directs the car to the clearing. Officers dig in the spot William points to through plastic restraints. They find nothing. William points to three more areas, saying “try there,” and “I know it’s out here,” knowing really that they will find nothing if they didn’t find his baby the first time. They reprimand him for the hours spent searching through mud, saying, “We don’t have time for this. We’ve got criminals to catch.” They drive him back to the station for paperwork and a proper arrest.

Back at the station, the janitor still mops. He pours, into a bucket, bleach so pure the fumes shape the air. William breathes the vapors deep until his lungs ache, until his entire body accepts the pain not as a burden but as a truth.