The Next (11 page)

We only knew Sally’s name because when I was first learning to ride my black and silver Huffy dirt bike, I had reached a speed that caused me to freeze, unable to brake or steer. That’s how I ended up with my face in a pile of bricks in front of Sally’s house. Because my parents were in no condition to drive me to the hospital due to a bottle of rum they’d received from Dad’s buddy Hank, Sally took me to get my forehead stitched. I was in such a bloody mess I didn’t remember too much more about Sally, except that weeks later she gave me a heavy three-foot long red metal fire engine when she came by to see how I was healing. I had been pulling out confusing new blue and yellow stitches I’d discovered in my forehead. In her perky, upbeat high-pitched voice, Sally explained that all of us were made of blue and yellow thread like that throughout our bodies. If I pulled my threads out, nothing would hold my body together and I’d fall onto the floor in puddle of Jell-O. She smiled to let me know she was joshing me, and I giggled. I also stopped pulling out the stitches from my forehead.

Sally lived alone. As we approached her lit window in the dark, we saw that it was open, with gauzy white curtains parted slightly and undulating slowly in the light breeze. With the glee that we always got when we felt we were getting away with being naughty, we approached the window. We heard Johnny Carson and the laughter of a studio audience and saw the flickering of the television’s cold blue light. This was disheartening. Spying on television watchers was as boring as watching a rock harden. But this did not deter us.

Juniper bushes were a mixed blessing. On one hand, they provided incredible covered passageways for us to get from one side of a yard to the other; on the other hand, they scratched and stung our skin a lot. Fifteen feet from the window under the branches of the bushes, we stopped as we heard the television get turned off. The light from a table lamp near the window filtered through the bushes like rays through lace. We cocked our ears, listening. We could hear the scraping of wood on wood, like a piece of furniture sliding on the floor, but that was all.

The black moist soil darkened our knees as we neared. Ten feet. Eight feet. Our hearts always beat delightfully fast as we neared a victim. We silenced our breathing as best we could. Even when a sharp protruding juniper root gouged into our thighs or forearms, drawing blood, we made no noise. Five feet. Two feet.

Crouched below the window, we slowly inched our way up the brown-shingled wall until we could peep through the window. The curtain swayed before our noses. Then we saw her.

Sally was standing on a pink crochet cushion atop a wooden chair beneath the beam that traversed the vaulted roof. Hanging from the beam was a colorful thick knitted rope fastened into a noose. We recognized the rope. We’d seen Sally knitting it for the last four weeks at the bus stop at the corner of Wild Cat Canyon Road and Woodhaven Road. We thought it was a thick scarf. Obviously we were wrong, for Sally was now inserting her head into a loop of the intricately detailed noose.

Paul then did something he never did. He betrayed us with a single utterance:

“Don’t.”

Not a scream. Not an exclamation. Just a soft mumble as if his inner-monologue had cautiously peeked its head out from the earth just to see if the coast was clear and then withdrew in a flash to safety.

“Don’t.”

Sally heard.

She turned her head toward the window, but not with any alarm or any hint of distress. Because the light was positioned between her and us, she couldn’t see into the darkness where Paul and I crouched. Yet to this day I believe she knew—or sensed—exactly who was on other side of her windowsill. She’d probably known for years that Paul and I habitually spied on her, and she allowed us to believe we were always too clever to be noticed.

As she withdrew her head from the maroon, lime, and cobalt blue knitted noose, the expression on her face remained as calm as if all she’d chosen was raspberry jam over orange preserves. Sally stepped down from the chair and scraped it back under the dining room table, which housed her collection of empty, jewel-red, glass decanters. She took five dainty steps to the quilt-covered couch and exhaled slowly and fully, sinking deeply into the cushions. She turned the television on with the remote control. Johnny Carson. Studio audience laughter. Except for that one time on the chair, Sally never looked toward the window at all.

Wordlessly, Paul and I felt each other’s desire to pull away from Sally’s privacy. We walked along the side of the house rather than face the barbs of the juniper again, stealthily avoiding making any noise in the pebbled petunia garden. Sally’s gauzy window light grew fainter and fainter. When we reached our side of the valley, the fog had grown thicker. We looked back across the distance and saw the faint dot of window light from Sally’s house. The light flicked off.

Goodnight Sally.

It had gotten colder and damper. We snuck through the window to our basement bedroom. No sound came from Mom and Dad’s room. I guess we were mistaken about the direction that night’s discussion would take. Both cars were parked in front, no skid marks, no shattered bottles, no fuming mutterings. Two daddy longlegs traversed our orange hotrod track. I guess one had found a friend and invited it to come out and play. We crawled into the lower bunk together and watched the spiders dance until we finally fell asleep.

Would I have tried to save Sally as Paul did? I wasn’t the one who uttered “Don’t.” I wasn’t the one who saved her. But given another chance, would I? Or would I have preferred to witness the horrifying once-in-a-lifetime spectacle of the tutu hippo stretching the colorful knitted noose taut in a heavy, slow swing?

The Beached Whale’s head collapsed on the pillow in sleep, and her bowl of popcorn slid off the couch and dropped to the floor, spilling yellow.

No, Johanna did not know this lady as I did.

But so what.

Johanna’s point was she did not want to become the kind of New Yorker who fattened up on popcorn on a futon watching life through pixels, no matter what past experiences substantiated that kind of life. No matter where we’d
been,
we had choices to make
now
, and Johanna refused to allow herself to select the Beached Whale existence. She refused to allow me to select it either. How does one argue with that?

I
could
ignore all of Johanna’s shortcomings and adjust to her evolution as a New York chick in the pursuit of what she called “having it all.” I
could
authentically become a
we
for the first time since Paul and I wordlessly slipped out of each other’s lives. I
could
have a beautiful woman to share the day’s shit with as I donned the silk pajamas she would inevitably give me one Christmas day. I
could
clink a Pottery Barn porcelain plate of quiche Lorraine onto our marble kitchen island for her on Sunday morning as our own Perfect Little Hunter and Perfect Little Felicity ran around us in happy mindless frolic.

I
could
reach for that designer duplexed martini-clinking Manhattan star…

And yet…Marzoli had awakened something…something powerful. A fresh calling that was slowly tipping the scales toward something entirely different, unexpected, and weighty. The most surprising realization of all was that I was not as opposed to the labels associated with this leaning as I would have thought I’d be, even though I knew so little about it. What would the road that begins with a stubbled jaw brushing against another stubbled jaw lead to? What were the micro and macro details of that road? Of a morning begun that way? Of a night that ended that way? Would it be better? Worse? Worth it?

Would it fit me?

Two weeks. Just two weeks and Johanna would be asking for my thumbs up or thumbs down on all I’d never had and so much I’d always wanted. But then, like Sally’s rope, was what I’d always wanted been the equivalent of the incremental crafting of something colorful and intricately detailed, but ultimately rather deadening?

It never occurred to me that the Next would include such a paramount fork in the road.

My heart beat faster at the thought.

I closed the curtain as the Beached Whale dozed.

Marzoli was right. It was not a nice name at all.

Goodnight,
lady.

Oh, fuck it. My feet never could be laced into goody two-shoes.

Goodnight, Beached Whale.

Perhaps I should go back to sleep too.

Chapter Eleven

The right side of Dad’s face melted as the flames increased…

I woke up with a soundless scream in the black of my curtained cave. I couldn’t breathe. I needed air.

Since when did I start needing air?

What the fuck was going on with me? For decades, I couldn’t remember a goddamn rat dropping about my past, and now I couldn’t shut my eyes without the worst of those fuckers creeping back.

I opened the curtain and then opened the window. The metal hinges squealed from disuse. The air was icy and wet.

Not a single twitch of activity happened across the courtyard. Just shades of shadows and a frozen distilled peace at three in the morning as the sensible people of New York snoozed. Why, then, was I feeling so uneasy?

The curtains remained closed in the Perfects’ bedroom.

As if nothing had ever happened.

A thought began to creep under my skin as horrifying as the fecal paths of a scabies infection. It undermined my understanding of
everything.
It carved out the very volume of my eyeballs. It disintegrated the reliability of taking for granted my past as my own factual experience. It eroded the potential for any positivity in the future.

Did I imagine everything?

Did I have one factual piece of evidence that anything had actually taken place hours earlier? I stuck my head out the window and looked up. My ears immediately stung from the cold of the air. Light was coming out of Ruben’s window. I pulled my head back in and glanced at the computer screen. It was 3 a.m. Ruben had to be hard at work obsessing on something to be up this late.

Nathan’s pale skin was shaking violently as I pulled his window shut.

Stop. I had nothing to substantiate this creepiness. No four-eyed tentacled monster lurked under any bed or closet. Ruben was upstairs, busily taking his million-dollar trust fund for granted, and all was quiet on the Perfect front.

And yet…

And yet Nathan had been killed. Marzoli affirmed this.

But…what if….

The late night graininess was dousing my brain with doubts.

Had Marzoli been imagined too?

I searched for his card on my desk…where was it? It had to be here! It had to be! Was I going crazy? Was he real? Did I say what I said? Did he say what he said? Did I feel what I felt? Did I see what I saw?

I heard the boy growl to me, “You did not see that.”

I could barely grip the branch any more as the blond boy stood underneath, grasping his Swiss army knife. My palms were sweating and slipping. My forearms burned.

Run, Paul!

“You did not see that! Repeat that!”

I was in too much desperation to utter anything, let alone what he was commanding. My forearm felt as if it was tearing in two. I could no longer hold onto the branch. I scraped past spiked broken branch bases as I plummeted toward the gleaming knife.

“Leave him alone!” I heard Jessie shout, but was he near or in the distance?

I couldn’t tell which sensation came first or hurt more, the blade slicing into my rib, or my back slamming onto the ground. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t see anything except red cut with black streaks for a full ten seconds. When I opened my eyes, the blond boy was on top of me, screaming.

“You didn’t see anything! Repeat that! Repeat it!”

I felt the cool blade pressed against the hardness of my Adam’s apple. I thought about Paul.

Please, Paul, keep running.

“Repeat it!”

“I…I…did…not…see…”

“See what!”

“Anything…”

I could feel the blond boy’s hardness through his jeans on my thigh. He started pressing it against me.

“Repeat it!”

I could not open my eyes, tears stinging, “I…did…not…”

He began pumping against my thigh, pressing the blade deeper against my throat.

“…see…any…thing…”

Suddenly his mass lifted off of me. Jessie had pounced on top of him, shouting furiously, rolling him away from the tree. I saw fists pounding. Hair yanked. Words of anger whacked each other like two-by-fours. The knife raised into the sunlight. And suddenly the action ceased.

Through my salty wet tears, I saw the blond boy stand slowly.

Jessie lay still on the ground in the tall dry grass.

Beyond Jessie’s body, I saw Paul’s blurry wide-eyed face, crouched in the green brush near the stream.

Don’t look, Paul. Don’t see what’s about to happen. Close your eyes...

The curtains of the Perfects’ bedroom opened.

I shook my head to refocus.