light ready to pronounce judgment. Reggie shrugged as if it all was no big deal, saying it all at once, their routine – I’m not a kid, I’m almost fifteen, don’t treat me like a baby, I can stay out late – without a word.
‘Wash up,’ she said, too tired to fight, saving him the excuse he’d been planning to get to the bathroom to wash his hands before she saw them. She closed the front door behind him as he turned down the hall.
Locking the door, he turned on the faucet and grabbed the bar of soap on the sink. Scrubbing, he watched the pink swirl away down the drain. The whirlpool effect made him think of the ocean, a sinking freighter, and sailors being sucked down into the depths.
Reggie washed the soap clean as well. Grabbed some toilet paper from the roll and scrubbed down the doorknob where he’d left a scarlet smear. He peed and flushed the bloodied tissue away with his piss.
He looked briefly in the mirror. Saw how normal he looked. Not as if he’d just helped dig a bullet out of a man.
***
His food rolled around his plate aimlessly, like wanderers in a vast wasteland. Then he noticed his mom watching him and he ate to avoid suspicion. Silverware tinkled for a time against china before his mom tried conversation.
‘You were gone awhile today,’ she said, speaking around a mouthful of roast.
Reggie shrugged.
‘I was just walking in the woods.’
Her sharp, short intake of breath was just audible in the space between them.
‘You have to be careful out there, Reggie,’ she said. ‘There’s coyotes, bobcats, mountain lions. Not to mention squatters.’
When he didn’t respond, she continued.
‘You’re gone longer and longer,’ she said, staring at him across the table. Fellow travellers separated by a looming gulf.
He didn’t know what to say and so said nothing.
‘I know it’s summer,’ she said, ‘but it’d be nice to see you around more.’
She smiled to show her diplomacy and earnestness.
‘Maybe we could go see a movie,’ she said. ‘Wasn’t there a comic book movie you wanted to see? Maybe we could have lunch, make a day of it, like we used to.’
‘Like we used to’ meant when his dad was still around. It meant lots of things, but mostly it meant when things were still good. When things still made sense. When they still knew how to be a family.
She waited for him, but he had nothing to say. There was nothing worth saying.
He stared at his plate as if the answers were there. But there was only meat and potatoes, so he crammed these in his mouth to avoid answering. Still, she wanted something; he knew this would continue unless he gave her some acknowledgement, so he nodded vaguely, noncommittally.
In his peripheral, he saw her turn her attention back to her dinner. This submission saddened him in some indefinable way.
They ate in silence and went their separate ways.
***
Reggie lay in his dark room waiting for his mom to fall asleep.
With the door ajar an inch or so, he could see the occasional flash of the television from below like the stroboscopic lights of a landing aircraft. He would also be able to hear the buzz saw sounds of her snores, and know when it was safe for him to get up.
In the meantime, he was in the dark with his thoughts.
Sometimes the darkness frightened him. Other times the blackness was calming – or numbing – like a void. A neutral place where he felt nothing.
Occasionally, as now, the dark was a place in-between, where his mind drifted to things unseemly in the light of day.
Arms behind his head, stretched out on the mattress, at first his lazy thoughts threatened to invite sleep. But then, as so often happened, they converged on the wake in the funeral home not so long ago. He didn’t want them to, tried futilely to steer his mind in another direction, yet it betrayed him.
The place had a lot of curtains, he remembered thinking. The coffin was open at the front of the room. He had to walk down an aisle of mostly empty chairs to get to it. His mom sat off to one side in a black dress like a phantom, crying.
With each deliberate step the coffin drew teasingly nearer.
Until he could see over the rim of it and what was there wasn’t his dad but a facsimile of the man. Waxen and stiff and immobile. A mannequin or life-sized doll and not his father at all.
He stared at it for a time until his mom stopped crying and one of the employees there came up to him and led him gently away. But he glanced back, keeping the thing in the casket in his line of sight for as long as possible.
Then the coffin was shut and that was it.
***
When the deep, droning hum of his mom’s snores started, Reggie rolled out of bed and slipped his shoes back on. He hadn’t changed out of his clothes and his mom hadn’t checked in on him, so there was a minimum of rustle and noise before he was ready and moving downstairs.
He took the steps to the side nearest the wall to avoid creaks.
All the lights were off.
He felt like an intruder in his own home.
At the bottom he could turn to either the living room or the kitchen or hang a hard right down the hall. In the living room the blue flashes of the television screen lit his mom’s sleeping form in an eerie and solemn glow. Intermittent with her snores were higher sounds like whimpers, and he wondered what she was dreaming of. If her dreams were anything like his, it couldn’t be anything good.
He watched her for a moment longer, bundled under an afghan blanket in the glow of the television. She seemed small and fragile there in the dark, in the glow. She was alone in the dark of the room and for a moment he wanted to reach for her. Have her hold him, tell him it was all right.
Then he was heading into the kitchen, pausing briefly at one drawer. Out the back door, moving with a stealth borne of youthful practise, and heading across the lawn to the garage for the second time that day, the building small and squat and solid like a battlefield fortification in the night.
6.
The man was gone when Reggie got back to the tree house. The sled was empty where he’d left it; no trace of the man as if he’d been raptured for judgment.
Then he heard a noise from above, looked up, and saw a pale oval high over him looking down. It moved back and out of sight, and Reggie whispered, ‘I’m coming up’ and moved to the rungs of the ladder nailed to the tree.
At the top he crawled-pushed himself onto the floor and rose to a squat.
The old lantern his dad had given him for the tree house bloomed alive when the man lit it and put both them and the space between them in a dim yellowish light. They could have been Neanderthals huddled in a cave in some distant aeon passed.
‘I brought this,’ Reggie said, still whispering, holding out the spool of fishing line he’d taken from the garage and the sewing needle from the kitchen drawer.
He held it out to the man like an offering and the man took it, setting it down with the rest of their surgical equipment – the sterile pads, gauze, aspirin, and peroxide. The man wore only his heavy denim jacket against the night chill, having removed the shirt at some point. It lay in a bloody bundle in one corner. The flesh of his torso above and below the bandaged area was pale and ghostly.
‘This won’t be … pretty either …’ the man said, sounding stronger and more lucid than before. ‘You