Riss (10 page)

“
Perhaps Kala will have one.” He nodded, thinking of all the times he’d picked up his phone to call her only to put it back down again. “She is with those people now. I need to get to her to tell her I’m sorry I hurt her.”

He remembered hitting her but not why.
Actually, he was remembering a great deal about the day at her apartment, and he knew that when he hit her, it had no doubt been her fault. Then there was the situation with his momma. Dan had to get her to agree to let them come live with her for a time, at least until Kala had a job and a place for them to live. Maybe if she could get back on with the cable company, his momma would let them stay with her. It would work out well for him if she did.

Momma
was forever making him feel bad about himself, calling him names and telling him he was lazy. Kala never treated him like that. She loved him, and as soon as he got to her, they were going to get married. Dan’s momma made him mad a great deal, but he’d tried his best not to hit her too often. Once when he’d been extremely mad at her, she ended up in the hospital for several days. While he had missed her a great deal, he had also realized how bossy she was.

Dan thought he knew where
Kala was. There were a lot of police around the apartment building he’d been near the other day, and he’d seen enough police dramas to know that she’d be in some sort of safe house to keep her hidden away from him because of Randy and his missus. Someone had hurt them, and they might be afraid that whoever it was would hurt his Kala, too. Dan tried to think what had happened there, but all he’d been able to think was that they were both dead when he’d gotten there. And the reason blood was all over him was because he’d tried his best to save them. The person who had killed them was trying to frame him. Dan didn’t know who this guy was, but he was making a mess of his life, and Dan hated it.

His train of thought was off again.
When he’d been in that home, he’d been told that he had to keep track of what he was thinking. Straight thinking, they’d called it, or something like that. Dan knew that he sometimes would put too many sentences together that didn’t go with what he was thinking, and people would get confused. He even confused himself sometimes. Dan had started writing notes to himself, things he wanted to make clear so that he’d have a better picture of what he wanted. Rarely did it work the way he wanted it to, but he did still try to make others pay attention to him.

“
It’s because I’m so smart.” And he was, too. His IQ was very high. Not many people, the nurses and doctors told him, had an IQ of sixty-one and could be as smart as him. They had never been able to tell him what his roommate had as a score, but the guy had to be a five or something. He couldn’t even get a girlfriend. Dan had lots of girlfriends while he’d been in the home, too many for him to remember their names right now.

Dan knew that killing things was what had gotten him put away.
Never people, but animals. He had tried to tell the doctors and nurses it was because they were different from him and he’d just wanted to see what was inside of them, but they’d told him he was bad, really bad, and that he had to stop it.

“
I don’t want to be bad anymore. Kala won’t love me if I get bad again.” Dan sat down on the chair he’d found and looked around his little place. He’d come across it when he left Randy’s house. He’d been really scared and had run into the first place he came across. He was glad now that he had.

It was an abandoned house that needed a lot of work.
The furniture was dirty and dusty but still nice, and the walls were covered in something green, and the floors moved sometimes. He tried really hard not to think about what that could mean and spent a great deal of his time in the dining room and kitchen. The floors were hard in there and not carpeted.

There were no lights in the place
, but that didn’t bother him too much. The television was gone, as were all the other big appliances, like the microwave and refrigerator. He supposed his food supply was all the kind of stuff he could eat right out of the boxes, but it would have been nice to see his shows while he did.

Dan had tried to get back to his mom
’s house, but there was too much going on there for him to get in. He wanted his television to bring here and use. Then there were the recorders too. He knew that the cable company had turned off his free stuff, but he thought that maybe he could get something hooked up here until he figured things out. It was worth a shot. Surely they’d let him have it back in light of the fact that he didn’t live with his momma right now.

His
mom’s house. He kept thinking about what he’d seen there…yellow tape all around the house and yard. There had been a cop car in the driveway, too, and he’d been too afraid to go there and ask them what was going on. Maybe his momma had had a heart attack or something. Dan didn’t care much for her, but if she died, he’d have to go to her funeral and stuff.

Something occurred to him then.

“She’d leave me her house if she was really dead. I mean, who else is gonna want it? And it would be perfect for me and Kala. I know where everything is and all. So while she’s at work, I can keep the house just like Mom did, and we’d be so happy. Cable too. Maybe she could work for the cable company again and I’ve have all my shows again. Yeah, that’s it.” Dan frowned, thinking he’d thought of this before, but it went away before he could get a good hold on the thought.

Dan pulled on his coat. It was time to get out into the world.
There were things he needed to get ready, and one of them was to see what the hell had happened at his house now that he realized that his momma was dead. Kala would be so proud of him. She’d been telling him for some time that he should have a place of his own. Now he did. And the two of them would be very happy living there, too. He was smiling for the first time in a long while.

“
Kala, love, when we come together, it’s going to be fucking fantastic. Just like those movies I used to tell you about.” The woman who stood on the street next to him looked at him. Dan had forgotten to stay focused. “Sorry, talking out loud again.”

With a nod
, she moved on, and he smiled at her wobbly walk. That was never going to happen to him. When he was older and not getting around well, Kala would push him everywhere he wanted to go in a fancy wheelchair. They’d be the talk of the town.

It took him over an hour to get to his house. The yellow tape had been broken in several places now and hung lazily in the yard and around the trees.
Going up to the house, he didn’t see anyone hanging around, so he walked to the back where he’d hidden a key long ago when his mom had locked him out. Smiling, he pulled it out from under the planter that held a now dead pansy. Going inside, he was surprised to find the electricity off.

The house was dark in the corners that still terrified him.
He’d had to spend a great deal of his youth in them, standing still with his nose planted deep in the crevice. Dan remembered thinking that he’d never have a square house…all round so there would be no corners for him to have to stand in. Then when he’d gotten older, he realized that he didn’t have to stand there. He was bigger. Laughing, he found the flashlight that had been in the drawer for as long as he could remember and turned it on. The shadows disappeared, and he felt a great deal better.

The house was cold
, too. The heat must have been off for some time, and when he tried to turn on the television, he got a little unfocused when it wouldn’t come on. He’d never understood that. When the power was off, why did it affect his television? There should be special electricity for televisions, he thought. He’d have to talk to Kala about seeing if there was a box or something he could use when this sort of thing happened.

His belly rumbled
, and he turned to the kitchen. He opened the cabinets and found some of his favorite things still here. Maybe, he thought, he’d simply stay there until he found Kala. This way he could have it all fixed up for them when he talked her into coming home with him.

Going to the living room
, he was surprised by the smell. Something had died in there. It took him only a few minutes to find where the smell was coming from, and he sat down across from the chair.

The blood was everywhere.
And the pretty pillows that his mom crocheted were covered in spots of it, as well as the walls behind it. Dan was worried now. If his mom had had a heart attack, that was fine, but it looked to him like someone had hurt her. Running his fingers over the doilies that she’d always had on the back of her chair, he felt the stiffness of the dark stain and moved away from it.

“
Momma?” He went to her bedroom, thinking that whoever hurt her would have put her in the bed to help her. The bed was still made up, and her nightgown was laying over the pillow as it had been for his entire life when she wasn’t wearing it. The towels in the bath were clean too, no sign of blood anywhere. Dan went back to the living room to stare at the chair.

“
I have to get rid of the chair. It’ll scare Kala to have all that blood and stuff in the house. Maybe I can take it out to the burn pile.” Nodding, he stood up to move it when he saw his mom’s purse. He knew something really bad had happened if she left that behind. All her pills were in it.

Picking it up
, he took it to the kitchen where the light was much better. There he dumped the leather thing out onto the table and looked at what she stored in it. It had always been a mystery to him how she always seemed to have whatever she wanted in that thing. Dan had secretly thought it was magical and that she would say words over it to get what she wanted. There was no way that thing held it all. Now he could see that it was just a regular bag and nothing more was in it than he’d ever seen her take out.

Her wallet had ninety dollars in it and a quarter.
She’d always told him to have a quarter on him to make a call if need be. He’d tried it once, to call Kala when he’d just wanted to hear her voice, and had found out that it took three quarters to make a call. He’d meant to tell his momma that, but had never gotten around to it. Dan decided to make a note to tell her when she came home.

In addition to the money in the wallet
, he found another fifty stashed deep under the lining. Smiling, he realized that his mom was something of a liar. Whenever he asked her for money, she’d told him she didn’t have any. She’d lied to him a lot, he thought.

There were also three credit cards with the passwords written on them in magic marker
, as well as a note attached to each of them with the balance. He wasn’t sure if it was how much she owed on them or how much he could charge, but it was a lot of money. Putting them with the cash, he started opening some of the little cases inside it. Inside each of them, he found a wonderment of things, but nothing useful to him. He didn’t even think Kala would want any of the things his momma had thought important enough to carry around. He thought of Kala’s purse.

He
’d taken it once when she’d been to lunch. Kala had some items in there that confused him a little, and still did. When he thought to ask her about them, he decided that it was probably a girl thing and forgot about them. But she did have some pictures in there of other men that he’d never liked. She was his. Dan continued looking through his momma’s purse and tried not to think of Kala with other men.

In the end he
’d found some change and a few pictures—none of him—and all her pills. There were also a few more cards to stores he had no idea where they were. He put everything back except what he was going to need, like the credit cards and the money. After setting it back behind her chair, he sat down again.

“
Kala will have to help me with the chair. I’m not well enough for that.” He wasn’t really. He’d not taken his “happy pills,” as his mom called them, in days, and now he was starting to feel less than happy. “Once Kala comes to be my wife, I’ll be happy all the time. She will make sure that I’m happy all the time. It will be her job.”

Going to his room
, he stood staring at it for some time before he finally went in. Someone had robbed him, and had made a horrible mess of things. His momma was going to blame him for this and he’d be in a lot of trouble again.

All his pictures of him and Kala were gone.
The things she’d given him, too, were no longer hanging in the closet next to his things. Even her panties and bras, the ones he’d found in her laundry basket when he’d gone there for a visit, were gone. But it was his wall to her that disturbed him the most. All the lists of things she’d said to him, the sticky notes she’d left him, and the ones where she told him she loved him were also gone. Dan went to the wall to see if maybe they had fallen off, but there was nothing there. None of his things that they had shared were there. All his wonderful memories of Kala and him were gone, and he felt his anger bubbling out.

“
Why would someone take my things?” He opened his drawers and found even his clothes had been mussed up, moved around, and not in the neat way he’d liked them. “Momma will be so mad when she sees this, and I’m not going to take the blame for this. No siree. I’m not at fault this time. Someone is going to have to come here and bring me back my things and straighten this stuff up. Or there will be hell to pay.” Dan felt his anger take him over, a rage that seemed to consume him, and he let it take him. He needed this.