The Intruders (2 page)
The doorbell rang.
As she hurried downstairs, she heard the volume drop a little further and smiled. She still had this expression on her face when she opened the front door.
It was dark outside, the streetlamps at the corner spreading orange light over the fallen leaves on the lawn and sidewalk. A strong breeze rustled those still left on the trees, sending a few to spiral down and around the crossroads where the two residential streets met.
A figure was standing a couple of yards back from the door. It was tall, wearing a long, dark coat.
“Yes?” Gina said.
She flipped the porch light on. It showed a man in his mid-fifties, with short, dark hair, sallow skin in flat planes around his face. His eyes seemed dark, too, almost black. They gave no impression of depth, as if they had been painted on his head from the outside.
“I’m looking for William Anderson,” he said.
“He’s not here right now. Who are you?”
“Agent Shepherd, FBI,” the man said, and then paused, for a deep cough. “Mind if I come inside?”
Gina did mind, but he just stepped up onto the porch and walked right past her and into the house.
“Hold on a second there, buster,” she said, leaving the door open and following him. “Can I see some ID?”
The man pulled out a wallet and flipped it open at her without bothering to look in her direction. Instead he panned his gaze methodically around the room, then up at the ceiling.
“What’s this about?” Gina asked. She’d seen the three big letters clearly enough, but the idea of having a real live fed in the house didn’t even slightly compute.
“I need to talk to your husband,” the man said. His matter-of-factness made the situation seem even more absurd.
Gina put her hands on her hips. This was her house, after all. “Well, he’s out, like I said.”
The man turned toward her. His eyes, which had appeared flat and dead before, slowly seemed to be coming alive.
“You did, and I heard you. I want to know where he is. And I need to take a look around your house.”
“The hell you do,” Gina said. “I don’t know what you think you’re doing here, but—”
His hand came up so fast she didn’t even see it. The first she knew was when it was clamped around the bottom of her face, holding her jaw like a claw.
She was too shocked to make a sound as he began to pull her slowly toward him. But then she started to shout, substituting volume for the articulation denied her by being unable to move the lower half of her mouth.
“Where is it?” he asked. Matter-of-fact had become almost bored.
Gina had no clue what he was talking about. She tried to yank away, hitting at him with her fists, kicking out, jerking her head back and forth. He put up with this for about one second and then whipped his other hand around to smack her across the side of her head. Her ears rang like a dropped hubcap and she nearly fell, but he held her up, wrenching her jaw to the side in the process, making it feel like it was going to pop out.
“I’m going to find it anyway,” he said, and now she knew she could feel something tearing at the side of her head. “But you can save us both some time and trouble. Where is it? Where does he work?”
“I…don’t…”
“Mom?”
Gina and the man turned together, to see Josh at the bottom of the stairs. Her son blinked, a deep frown spreading across his face.
“Let go of my mom.”
Gina tried to tell Josh to get back upstairs, to just run, but it came out as desperate, breathless grunts. The man stuck his other hand in the pocket of his coat, started taking something out.
Josh hit the ground running and launched himself across the living room. “Let go of my—”
Gina just had time to realize she’d gotten it wrong before, that her son wasn’t a man after all, that he was just a little boy, stretched taller and thinner but still so young, when the man shot him in the face.
She screamed then, or tried to, and the tall man swore quietly and dragged her with him as he walked over to the front door and pushed it shut.
Then he pulled her back into the room where her son lay on the floor, one arm and one leg moving in twitches. Her head felt like it was full of bright light, stuttering with shock. Then he punched her precisely on the jaw, and she didn’t know where she was.
A second or several minutes passed.
At length she was aware again, sprawled on the floor, half propped against the couch she’d been curled up in ten minutes before. The plate of food lay upside down within arm’s reach. Her jaw was hanging loose, and she couldn’t seem to move it. It felt as if someone had pushed long, thick nails into both of her ears.
The man in the coat was squatted down next to Josh, whose right arm was still moving, lazily smearing its way through the pool of blood seeping from his head.
The smell of gasoline reached Gina’s face. The man finished squirting something from a small metal can all over her son, then dropped it on him and stood up.
He looked down at Gina.
“Last chance,” he said. His forehead was beaded with sweat, though the house was not warm. In one hand he held a cigarette lighter. In the other he held his gun. “Where is it?”
As he flicked on the lighter, holding it over Josh and looking her in the eyes, Gina knew that—whatever this was—it wasn’t a last chance to live.
The greatest hazard of all, losing one’s self, can occur very quietly in the world, as if it were nothing at all. No other loss can occur so quietly; any other loss—an arm, a leg, five dollars, a wife, etc.—is sure to be noticed.
—Søren Kierkegaard
The Sickness Unto Death
There was this girl I knew back in high school. Her name was Donna, and even that was wrong about her, as if she’d been mislabeled at birth. She wasn’t a Donna. Not in real terms. She made you realize there must be an underlying rhythm to the universe, and you knew this purely because she wasn’t hitting it. She walked a little too quickly. She turned her head a little too slowly. It was like she was dubbed onto reality a beat out of true. She was one of those kids you saw at a distance, toting a pile of books, standing diffidently with people you didn’t realize were even at the school. She had friends, she did okay in class, she wasn’t a total loser, and she wasn’t dumb. She was just kind of hard to see.
Like all schools we had a pecking order of looks, but Donna somehow wasn’t on the same scale. Her skin was pale and her features fine-boned and evenly spaced, faultless except for a crescent scar to the side of her right eye, legacy of some toddling collision with a table. The eyes themselves were inky gray and very clear, and on the rare occasions when you got to look into them, you received a vivid sense she was real after all—which only made you wonder what you thought she was the rest of the time. She was a little skinny, maybe, but otherwise slightly cute in every way except that she somehow just…wasn’t. It was as if she released no pheromones, or they operated on an inaudible wavelength, broadcasting their signal to sexual radios either out of date or not yet invented.
I found her attractive nonetheless, though I was never really sure why. So I noticed when it looked like she was hanging out with—or in the vicinity of—a guy named Gary Fisher. Fisher was one of the kids who strode the halls as if accompanied by fanfare, the group that makes anyone who’s been through the American school system instantly wary of egalitarian philosophies later in life. He played football with conspicuous success. He was on the starting basketball lineup, played significant tennis, too. He was good-looking, naturally: When God confers control of sports spheres, he tends to wrap it in a prettier package, too. Fisher wasn’t like the actors you see in teen movies now, impossibly handsome and free of facial blemish, but he looked right, back in the days when the rest of us stared dismally in the mirror every morning and wondered what had gone wrong and whether it would get better—or even worse.
He was also, oddly, not too much of an asshole. I knew him a little from track, where I had a minor talent for hurling things a long way. I’d gathered from the jock grapevine that a realignment had taken place among the ruling classes, principally that Gary’s girl, Nicole, was now going with one of his friends instead, in what appeared to be an amicable transfer of chattels. You didn’t have to be too keen an observer of the social scene to perceive a degree of interest in taking her place—but the truly weird thing was that Donna seemed to believe herself in the running. It was as if she had received intelligence from somewhere that the caste system was illusory and you actually could fit a square peg in a round hole. She couldn’t sit at the same table at lunch, of course, but would wind up at one nearby, close to Gary’s line of sight. She would engineer “accidental” bumps in the corridor but manage nothing more than nervous laughs. I even saw her a couple of Fridays out at Radical Bob’s, a burger/pizza place where people tended to start the weekend. She would stop by whatever table Fisher was sitting at and deliver some remark about a class or assignment, which would fall to the floor like a brick. Then she would wander off, a little too slowly now, as if hoping to be called back. This never happened. Other than being mildly perplexed, I doubt Fisher had the slightest clue what was going on. After a couple weeks, a deal was done in some gilded back room—or the backseat of a gilded car, more likely—and one morning Gary was to be found in the company of Courtney Willis, textbook hot blonde. Life went on.
For most of us.
Two days later Donna was found in the bathtub at her parents’ home. Her wrists had been cut with determination and only one testing slash on the forearm. The adult consensus, which I overheard more than once, was that it could not have been a fast way to go—despite a last-ditch attempt to hasten progress by pushing a pair of nail scissors deep into her right eye socket, as if that crescent scar had been some kind of omen. There was a handwritten letter to Gary Fisher on the floor, the words blurred by water that had spilled over the edges of the tub. Lots of people later claimed to have seen the letter, or a photocopy, or overheard someone saying what was in it. But, as far as I know, none of this was true.
News spread fast. People went through the motions, and there were outbreaks of crying and prayer, but I don’t think any of us were shaken to our core. Personally, I was not surprised or even particularly sorry. That sounds callous, but the truth was, it felt like it made sense. Donna was a weird chick.
A strange girl, a dumb death. End of story.
Or so it seemed to most of us. Gary Fisher’s reaction was different, and at the time it was the most surprising thing I had ever seen. Everything was new and strange back then, events backlit by the foreshortened perspective of a fledgling life. The guy who did something halfway cool one time became our very own Clint Eastwood. A party that happened a year before could take on the status of legend, generating nicknames that would last a lifetime. And when someone went tearing out into the farther reaches of left field, it tended to stick in your mind.
On the following Monday, we heard that Fisher had quit the team. All the teams. He stood there and let the coaches bawl him out, then just walked away. Maybe these days you’d get some kind of slacker kudos for that kind of shit. Not in the 1980s, and not in the town where I grew up. It was so out there it was disturbing—the Alpha Teenager Who Resigned. Fisher became the guy you’d see wandering across the campus in transit between the library and class, as if he’d slipped into Donna’s slot. And he worked. Hard. Over the next months, he hauled his grade-point average up, first a little, then a lot. He went from being a C student—and some of those had been massaged through sports prowess—to B’s and some regular A’s. Maybe he was getting parent-funded extra tutoring after school, but actually I doubt it. I think he just jumped tracks, decided to be some other guy. By the end you hardly ever saw him except in class. The masses dealt with him warily. No one wanted to get too close, in case the madness was catching.
I did see him this one afternoon, though. I’d been out training for our last-ever track meet and stayed on after the rest of the team left. Theoretically I was practicing the javelin, but really I just liked being there when no one else was around. I’d spent a lot of hours running that track, and it had started to dawn on me that the end was coming and some things were happening for the last time. As I pounded up the approach, back and forth, refining my run-up, I saw a guy walking from the far end. Finally I realized it was Gary Fisher.
He wandered the periphery, not headed anywhere in particular. He’d been one of our star sprinters before he quit, and maybe he was there for the same kind of reason that I was. He wound up a few yards away and watched for a little while. Eventually he spoke.
“How’s it going?”
“Okay,” I said. “Not going to win, though.”
“How’s that?”
I explained that a guy from another school had recently revealed himself not only to be good at throwing but to care about it also. After easy wins had stopped being a given, my interest had waned. I didn’t put it in those terms, but that was the bottom line.
He shrugged. “Never know. Could be Friday’s going to be your day. Be cool to go out on a win.”
For a moment then, I found I did care. Maybe I could do it, this last time. Fisher stood a bit longer, looking across the track, as if hearing the beat of feet in races gone by.
“She was provisional,” I said suddenly.
It was like he hadn’t heard me. Then he slowly turned his head. “What’s that?”
“Donna,” I said. “She never really…locked in, you know? Like she was just renting space.”
He frowned. I kept going.
“It was like…like she knew it might just not work out, you know? Like she came into the world aware that happy-ever-after was a long shot. So she put all her chips on one bet to win. Came in red instead of black, so she just walked away from the table.”