Playtime (12 page)

It smells musty inside, though she hasn't been gone
that long. He steps into the room and swings the door shut behind him, twists
the lock.   

 It is just a small combination living area. Just
a room. There are a couple of pictures of Renee, one on the bar that separates
the dining room from the kitchen, another on a small table next to the brightly
colored fabric couch. He had laughed when he had first seen that couch, it was
so colorful. That is what I like about it, she had said. Men always want to
dampen everything down, scared to let go, she had said. Come here and play in
the colors, she had said. 

 Even when she had lived with him, she had kept
the apartment. He had thought it quirky and an unnecessary expense, but she had
wanted to always have a place of her own. He had told her that his place was
her place. But she had tossed that chestnut mane of hair at him and replied
that legally that wasn't true. Legally she had no right to anything. Let's make
it legal, then, he had said. No problem for him. He had been around a fair
amount of women in his time, and nobody had ever affected him like Renee did.
If she wasn't the right woman for him, nobody was. That had been the start of
the discussion that had culminated in the big fight months later. 

 Because to him, in the end, it was all about
loyalty: about making a decision to accept somebody else with their warts and
eccentricities. Saying: you are mine, whatever comes. I will love you, whatever
comes. But even though she had said she loved him, she never could take that
final step, make that ultimate commitment. The apartment was the symbol of that
fact. 

 She has chimes hanging in the corner that tinkle
when the AC or heat cuts on. They are silent now. Motes dance in the sunlight
coming through the kitchen window. The kitchen is just a walk-in area, barely
large enough to turn around in. The refrigerator hums; the clock on the stove
shows the correct time.   

 A glass and two spoons are in the sink, unwashed. 

 He thought it was the childhood she had gone
through that made her so untrusting and cynical. She had seen guys flit in and
out of her mother's life, but nobody stayed. What loyalty there? He had thought
he could change her, win her over, but he guesses he never quite had. He sighs
and heads into the bedroom. 

 He can smell her in the bedroom, and when he does
he realizes that the entire apartment smells like her, though only very faintly
in the living room. But very strongly here. 

 The room holds just a big bed and night stand and
a long dresser with a mirror. All mahogany, a matching set with headboard.
Exercise bike in the corner. A picture of her mother is on the nightstand. One
of him and her on the dresser. He likes that. It is the only sign of him he has
seen so far in the place. A guy had brought one of those portable climbing
walls to the seawall, and they had dared each other to go to the top. This had
been not long after they had first met, and Renee hadn't known yet that he was
an experienced, if infrequent, climber. She had started it, egging him on, and
he had taken it from there till she had been roped up and scrambling up the
wall.   

 She had no experience, but if there was one thing
she wasn't it was a quitter, and after several tense moments in tough spots,
she had climbed the thing and been lowered on down, beaming at him with a
smirky, triumphant smile. She was nothing if not game. That was another thing
he loved about her. When he went up like a squirrel chasing a nut and came
sliding back down, she had known something wasn't right and had laughed like an
idiot when he told her he had forgotten to mention he was a climber. That was
when they had the guy that ran the wall snap the photo. Both of them flushed
and laughing and triumphant. He picks it up and looks at it. Can see no sign of
death there. Both of them as alive as they can be.   

 A tear trickles down his face and he flicks it
off. He doesn't want to cry looking at her in this photo. She is celebrating
the moment, and so will he.   

 After a minute he starts opening the dresser
drawers, one by one, and looking through them. He shifts the clothing around
enough to make sure nothing is hidden underneath it then moves it back where it
belongs. The scent of her is strongest in her panty drawer. He holds a pair up,
puts them back. He has memories of her walking through the house with just this
pair of panties on. She liked that, liked to roam around with just the bottoms
on after they had sex, raiding the fridge or using the remote to check out what
was on the tube. Her breasts were small and pert and seemed gravity-defying to
Blaine. Most guys he had known liked bigger breasts, but he never had. Hers
were perfect as far as he was concerned, in perfect balance. It seemed somehow
to him that a woman with big breasts needed to have a big ass just to balance
them. Her ass hadn't been that big. It had been Goldilocks right. 

 He finishes looking through the drawers, finding
nothing of interest, just more clothes. If she had dated other men, at least
their pictures were nowhere to be found. He must have had some special place in
her heart. 

 He opens the walk-in closet. Lots of shoes and a
rack of dresses. Stuff neatly stacked on the shelf. Stowed away. Nothing that
looks like it will be of help to him. He doesn't want to stay in here too long.
  

 He moves back to the kitchen, rifles through the
drawers till he finds the inevitable one filled with assorted junk. He thinks
everybody must have one of these. He does. There is a tape measure, two
extension cords: batteries, pens, tacks, twisty-ties. Paperwork for her flat
screen and the sound system. A couple of matchbooks from a joint down near here:
Limbada's. He looks at those: opens them, shuts them again and studies the
cover. It is a club on the beach in her end of town that draws a big crowd on
weekends, mostly younger singles and such. Scroungy grunge music down on the
sand. That kind of thing. They had never been in there together. He didn't much
like that sort of action. Too much noise and too wild. He was getting past all
that. Ten years back he would have been going, but not now. He sticks the
matches in his pocket. Quickly looks through the other drawers in the kitchen,
the pantry cabinet. Nothing. No spare phone, no address book, no pictures of
other guys. He doesn't know any more than he had when he walked in. Except for
the matchbook, which probably didn't mean a damn thing. Only in the movies that
some tiny clue led to the solving of the big mystery, only in Sherlock Holmes
and that sort of fictional drama.   

 He makes a perfunctory check of the bathroom, but
of course, nothing is in there. He seems to remember she had a photo album or
two but hadn't seen those. Maybe he had missed them, or more likely her mother
had picked them up. Probably the only things in this place she would want. He
looks around again, goes to the bedroom door. It doesn't seem like very much to
represent a life. He takes a deep breath, inhales her smell again. Looks at the
picture on the dresser, debates taking it with him, but he has a copy too. If
she had been having some type of wild affair with another man, he had found no
evidence of that. He moves to the curtains and peeks out from the side at the
lot and the apartments opposite. A couple of small kids are playing on bikes
with training wheels, on the pavement across. Nobody else. He opens the door
and slides out, locking it as he goes, and sticks the key back in the bottom of
the pot, heads for the truck. 

When Blaine wakes up the next morning his head is
throbbing. The first thing he does after brushing his teeth is to head over to
the computer. He wants to look at some more stuff on near-death. When the
screen comes up, he checks the day and date automatically, without much
thought, then comes back to it. That's not right, he thinks. The day and date
shown weren't today. They were the date of Renee's death. That's sick, he
thinks. Must be some kind of glitch. So he picks another web page, and it shows
the same. What the hell? For just a second he thinks Todd, then dismisses that
immediately. Todd would never do a joke about something like this. He had his limits.
He loved good fun but no …   

 He hollers for him, but Todd is up and has headed
out somewhere. Blaine pulls up the bank site and checks that. They give out the
date and time automatically. They match what the screen in front of him now
shows.   

 He is sitting there confused, trying to puzzle it
out when Todd comes through the front door. 

 "Hey," he says, "You ready to get
in the water?" 

 Blaine just looks at him, shrugs his shoulders,
and when he does, realizes the soreness from the big day out a few days back on
the day of Renee's death, when they had surfed all day long, is gone. Maybe it
just faded away. 

 "Sure," he says looking up at Todd,
"Why not?" He is beginning to have the small seed of a hope blooming
up inside his chest. Could it be that the last few days were some awful nightmare?
He certainly has wished that wish numerous times, though he knows inside that
thoughts really have no effect on material things. Do they? 

 "You all right, man?" Todd says,
walking past him, taking his button-down shirt off, doubtless to change it for
a Tee. 

 "Right," Blaine says absently after a
brief pause. He knows what is happening here isn't possible, but he is damned
if he will mess it up. If it is some variety of dream let it continue. It feels
awfully real though. His mind is reeling. How could it be real after the last
few days? They were not a dream, or more accurately, a nightmare. Dreams always
had the hazy edges: that feel of unreality, though he had dreamed some that seemed
very real. The last few days hadn't felt like that at all. They had been as
real as real could be. But so did this seem right now. Could his sorrow at
Renee's death be causing him to hallucinate? Could his wish for her to be alive
have caused him to retreat from reality? He stares down at his hands, flexes
his fingers, pops his knuckles. Feels real. What about news from the last few
days? His mind races, trying to remember what he has read or seen on the tube
that would verify them, but after a minute he shakes his head. He hasn't looked
at the news in a number of days. He has been sunk into the greatest depression
of his life. He hasn't given a damn about the news. 

 He heads into the bathroom to look at himself in
the mirror, but he looks the same way he always does, more or less. He is
tanned, but he had already been tan. His eyes are clear; he doesn't look crazy.
He retreats back to the computer, checks the screen again. It still shows the
same date, the date of Renee's death. 

 Or maybe not sneaks into his mind unbidden, but
he pushes it away. Not because he doesn't want it to be true, but because he
wants it too much. He doesn't dare hope. He wouldn't be able to take it if it
weren't true. He couldn't take it the first time. Life isn't like that, he
thinks disjointedly. You don't get do-overs. 

 He has risen from the captain's chair that sits
in front of the computer and is pacing, still looking at the screen, head
whirling. What's the strongest thing we hold onto, he thinks. Our sense of reality.
Because if you don't have reality, what have you got? Though people will try
and twist it to fit their desires. Could he have been drugged? No way, he
thinks right away. What drug could induce those feelings of reality? What about
his time with Renee's mother? What about the conversations with Nielson? He
hadn't imagined those things, not in any way he knew. He knew that memories
faded, turned into generalizations as years passed, but those memories were as
fresh and real as any he had. 

 He is breathing hard, working hard, because he is
questioning his own sanity here, his grasp on the world around him. Maybe any
second he will wake and wonder at his efforts to hide from Renee's death,
wonder at the lengths a mind will take. 

 What are the possibilities? He thinks. If this is
real now, then Renee's death might not be. If that was real then, I am having
some manner of delusion now. Delusion now or delusion then, something is
terribly wrong with my grasp of reality. 

 Could it be the accident? What if he had suffered
some type of brain damage that they hadn't caught with the tests? He thinks
back to the tests that Penfield had done with some patients undergoing brain
surgery with their skulls open. He had touched electrodes to certain spots in
their brains and they had relived experiences just like they were occurring
again, heard sounds and songs, felt certain feelings just like they had felt
them in reality. Possible, he supposes. It certainly had happened to them.   

 He recalls some story about a man who dreamed he
was a butterfly and asked if that was the reality, or if maybe he was a
butterfly that was dreaming he was a man. How would he know? 

 And that is really the 64,000 dollar question, he
thinks. If what I am experiencing now is true, then Renee's death on that day
could be a delusion. Either deluded then or I am deluded now. Psychosis is the
medical term, he believes. Either way there is a period of delusion that feels
real. A disconnection from reality.   

 He can think of no real reason he would have a
delusion about her death. It was true he had some ambivalence about the
relationship, but not that style of ambivalence. Not the kind that would make
you desert reality. Much more likely that he is deluding himself now, unable to
accept her death. Or that could all be psychobabble bullshit. Why should you
get to pick your delusion? 

 He shouts at himself inwardly: focus. He zeroes
in on his breath, tries to follow the stream in and out, in and out. Calm down,
he thinks. Leave it all for a minute. In and out. In and out. Breathe. 

 So what has he really got for evidence right now?
Besides wishful thinking. The computer screen? The fact that Todd wants to go
surfing? 

 What he needs is more confirmation. He could call
Renee's phone. If one version is true, it will ring in a police station
evidence bag. If the other is true, she might answer. He takes a deep breath.
He can't make himself do that. Yet. 

 His brother is in the other room. Get him in here
and feel him out. If what looks like it is true on the computer
is
true,
then he will be ready to go surfing and to the bar to see Renee tonight. If it
is not, then at least Blaine will be partially ready for that. He doesn't have
to reveal that he could be crazy. Hell, Blaine thinks, one way or the other, he
is definitely having some reality issues, no question about that. But he doesn't
have to let Todd or anybody else know that. Shouldn't be too hard to bring up
Renee and see where he stands on that. He takes another deep breath and hollers,
"Todd!" 

 His brother appears in the doorway in baggies and
a Tee, dressed for the beach. "We going or not, bro? We're burning
daylight."