Chapter 30

1

“Is there magic?”

            “I like to think so, Adam.”

            “Is there magic in Reedy Creek?”

            Grimwood had only smiled. “What is magic to a child is power to an adult. Sometimes the two see the same thing differently. Magic and power are different to everybody. Sometimes that disparity, if you will, is what can tear apart so much of what is good. That is what’s happening here. This place is a battleground between ideas of power.”

            “Is that why Reedy Creek is so…sick?”

            “Yes. I think so. It takes a lot of energy to destroy, Adam. Chaos can be tiring. Sometimes bad ideas need to be broken. So good ideas can be born from the ashes.”

            “Is that why you are here?”

            “I’d like to think I am here so that good may still come of this place, Adam. Yes.”

2

Adam watched the surveillance tape over and over again. Maybe he was trying to convince himself that he was crazy. That what he’d seen was just the culmination of his own ideas, of evincing himself there was such a thing as magic. Because the image of that woman, that woman he could only see when he hit the pause button and the squiggled lines through the image froze in the right places leaving her face unmarred and visible, was anything but natural. Because she was not there. She did not walk up the path through the storm, festooned by wet leaves and clumps of mud from the flooded eavestrough; she did not come from the streetside, nor did he see her traipse around from the back of the house. She had appeared in just that splintered frame, a fraction of a second, and was gone the moment the door clapped shut. That’s when he saw her from the stairs. That’s when he heard her footsteps. And smelt her perfume.

            Maybe it’s a trick of the camera. Maybe the footage is spliced awkwardly, like the way ILM does some of those special effects. Manipulating film. Superimposing images. He wasn’t sure he believed that. Because the movies were fake. They were make-believe. The sort of magic that had very real explanations; the sort of magic that was better explained by its engineering, by its foothold in the adult world where men and women with very significant power could create worlds and tell stories. Stories that would provide the basis for the magic of childhood.

            In the morning he had a plan. If magic was the quintessence of childhood, and it was truly only articulation that began to change what was once belief into the thirst for power, then Adam understood whom he should be showing the tape to.

            He listened to the birds outside. Chirping and requiting their dispirited unease at the change of the seasons. He was very quiet, tip-toeing to Patty’s room. His door was slightly ajar, letting out a sliver of the coming sunlight in the backyard. Patty was in his crib, lying on his side, his thumb in his mouth. He looked at peace. The way a child should look, Adam figured. His eyes were open, staring through the slats of his crib, his mess of hair fussed in a curlicue over his visible ear. “Hey bud, how was your sleepy sleep?”

            Patty’s eyes rolled up to look at him, the slightest perch of a grin on his lips as they suctioned around his thumb. Adam found it odd his baby bro had just stayed in his crib. Often when he was first up in the morning, he’d wake the rest of the house with his parade of mumbled jargon as he marched up and down the hall, sometimes knocking the doors or walls. He was what his mom sometimes called a troubled toddler, and that he, Adam, was the same way when he was that age. The boisterousness of any boy.

            “Bampa, Dam dam.” He’d pulled the soggy thumb out of his mouth and rolled on his back, staring up now. Adam reached down to grab his brother, lifting him up by the armpits. His jumper bunched and Adam smelt something his mom would have to deal with. Later. Right now Adam wanted his brother to see something. To confirm something.

            “I know bud. I miss him too.”

            When Adam turned to leave he noticed the closet door was open. As part of the special stages meant to ensure little Patrick had a great night’s sleep, and wasn’t up to one of his screaming fits that pulled his mom from a deep slumber only to amble down a dark hallway to make sure the little guy was alright, the closet was supposed to remain closed. Adam understood that agreement because he’d made it himself when he was younger. When he believed there was something inside the closet coming to get him. You still have flashbacks. Echoes. The man with the peppermint breath. The man with the slick black hair and the dark suit. The man born from the shadows.

            The door was wide open. It was what Patty was staring at when Adam walked in. What he was still staring at. “Did you open this?”

            Patty only stared, slack-jawed. He didn’t answer. After the other night, the worst night of his life, he thought there was a good chance anything was possible, and Patty opening the closet door was just another strange possibility. Adam went to close the door but stopped. There, set on the top of the hamper their mom stuffed Patty’s clothes into, and he was wont to go through a few outfits a day as a result of his target practice with meals, was an unopened pack of Winstons.

            The smokes he caught grampa with in the backyard, what felt like so long ago now. The reminder of a bad habit, he’d once called them. Here, in Patty’s closet.

            Adam picked them up and stuffed them in his pocket. Things could always get misplaced, and a pack of smokes was just one of them. Grampa might have dropped them, or hell, even hid them in here when he realized the blind buy was just something to nurse a very temporary feeling. Adam understood the power of fixation. His fix was in the other room right now, waiting to be watched again.

            That’s it. Grampa hid them on the top shelf. Tucked the pack under those clothes and boxes. And it slid out and fell. He could live with that. Because Adam was moving beyond belief to reason. Adam was sliding from magic to power, ever so surely. At least he thought.

3

“Wanna watch a movie?”

            “Movie. Movie. Movie.” Patty was excited. It wasn’t often Adam permitted his little bro into his room. The kid sometimes crawled under his bed and pulled out an entire array of miscellaneous junk he would have preferred stayed in the darkness. He made sure to put down an old pair of jeans snatched from the bottom of his closet, which already smelt a little musty, just so Patty wouldn’t stink up his bed sheets before mom changed his diaper. Patty looked up at the TV set on the desk. Adam once watched the kid play Super Mario Bros., and could only laugh as he threw his arms around with the controller, mimicking the 8-bit polygons as they jumped across the screen and from block to block in some mindless mission to save a princess who was always in another castle. His other games were probably too complicated for Patty, plus, it was already established that if he didn’t need the kid in his room, then it was better he didn’t get the idea to just wander in. An open invitation could be dangerous. Adam hid grampa’s old pack of Winstons under his socks in the dresser. If anything, it would become something of a token. Something he could look back on and attach a very specific idea or memory to.

            Adam had already rewound the tape. He planned on watching only about five minutes of footage. He figured Patty would get bored of watching the rain.

            “You ready?”

            “Star Wars!” Patty yelled, laughing and kicking his legs.

            He was in for a disappointment. There were no light sabers, no Jedi, no starships. This was a test. A test to gauge the magic in Reedy Creek? He thought that might be true. That this was a litmus test for his theory, that beyond the sickness in this town, there was something strange going on as well, something lingering between the worlds of magic and power. Something that shouldn’t be here.

            He pressed play.

            “Our house,” Patty said. The kid was smart. His mom often said Patty had the kind of memory that meant he would be intelligent. He could memorize spatial patterns, and was so apt to point out the car window to specify exactly where they were heading based just on the landmarks. He understood repetition, perhaps.

            “That’s right, buddy.” Adam waited. Knowing what would happen didn’t take away the anxiety, the same way waiting for the monster to jump out in a horror movie didn’t stop you from reacting. Understanding something was there, was coming, was a part of what made it so terrifying. He watched the rain fall, the wind blow the swarthy clusters of leaves; he watched their house stand as a testament to their shelter from hell. But not from her. Adam shuddered.

            “No…no…no…” Patty closed his eyes. Adam leaned forward and quickly stopped the tape. The last image he saw on the screen was of the door opening; there was just a sliver of foyer light on the porch before everything went black. That’s when grampa opened the door. That’s when you heard the knocking inside, when Patty pissed himself, when—

            “Patty, what is it? What did you see?”

            Patty’s hand was still over his eyes in a clumsy effort to close them, but there were still enough spaces between his fingers to ensure he could see Adam clearly.

            “I turned it off. It’s okay now.”

            Patty looked at the TV, slowly dropping his hand away from his face. “The lady,” he said. It was a whisper.

            “Lady? What lady, Patty? You gotta tell me.”

            “Lady in the rain. She what has bampa.” He was still staring at the dark screen, as if the image was still there. Maybe it was for him.

            “Who is she, Patty? Do you know?” He knew it was a longshot, but at the same time, his brother could see what he could not. He saw the lady in the rain. The lady who was not wet, who lingered between magic and power. Who wasn’t supposed to be there.

            There was a knock on his door.

            “You decent?”

            She didn’t wait before opening the door, as if the question itself was the only warning she’d give.

            “Patty?” His mom smiled. Something about seeing her boys together was special. Broke the conditions of being sad, because sadness demanded so much of you. “You boys okay?”

            “Yeah. Yeah, I think so. He needs a change though. And my jeans another wash.” Adam feigned a smile. He only patted Patty’s back. Hopefully consoling him. His mom came into the room and picked up Patty; he only nestled his head into her hair. Adam regretted showing the boy the tape. He regretted it because he knew what happened when he pulled into this world people he should not have. Like grampa. Will the Lady take Patty next? Will she? He shuddered. He would never let that happen. Never. At least he will see her coming. He thought of the frozen frame of her face looking back at the camera, as if she knew it was there, as if she anticipated being seen.

            “And you? You ready for today? For the service?”

            “I’d be lying if I said yes.”

            “It will be hard. Saying goodbye always is, Adam. But it’s necessary. We both need it.”

            Adam hadn’t thought of the service at all. He knew his mom wanted him to write something, to say something, but he wasn’t sure he could. Maybe if you hold onto grampa’s Winstons, stick them in your pocket, just to feel them while you’re talking, it will be enough to connect you to him. Just to get through. He looked back at the TV and saw his reflection in the screen. He looked so muted. Faded almost. Lingering between worlds.

            “Mom, do you believe in magic?”

            She scowled as she looked at him over Patty’s bushy mane. “I used to. When stuff like this happens, when you begin to lose the things you love, it’s hard to imagine something like magic. The world becomes far too plain.”

            He expected that answer. And he could tell she knew that.

4

Croak had gone upstairs after speaking to Darrel Janz in his TV. At least the version of him from the Reverse World, where the mural was of an indigo field beneath the haze of an opulent moon, a lidless eye behind the man’s head constantly watching. Like one of the cameras. And why shouldn’t it? Croak believed that version of Darrel, that replica of him, was a version of Grimwood. Or an employee. It was a strange and sobering thought, but he understood somewhere, perhaps in the deepest parts of what remained of his childhood-psychology, that he was witnessing something beyond the practicality of a world he had learned to study and interact with to a world where unbelievable things were possible. Something Adam might call magic.

            When he got to the top of the stairs he saw that it was late. He wasn’t sure how long he was downstairs for, but if he got home before the news, then he must have been down there for at least six hours. It felt like one. If that. Didn’t it? He thought so. His stomach was gurgling. He saw the crumpled bag of El Sombrero on the table and wondered if his mom brought home Mexican. He couldn’t smell it. He was almost certain he would smell those re-fried beans, alerting him to the stink that was to come if he stuck even a forkful into his salivating mouth. His mom wouldn’t appreciate the fart jokes, no, but maybe Randy would. If he was finally out of his funk enough to come downstairs and eat. Why are you thinking about food, dumbass? You have a job to do. Look. Mom’s probably on the phone with him. The guy from the video. The guy Darrel showed you.

            He stood in the doorway a moment. Silent. Listening to his mom. Understanding he was already invited, in a way, into her private world via the camera feeds. And he knew something now she must not have wanted him to know. Maybe it was a surprise.

            “This time it was bad,” she said. Her face was buried in her hand, her hair thrown up in a tuft over her fingers. “He left. No, he packed his bag and left.” A pause. “He wouldn’t listen. Even if it is drugs, I swear I will work with him. I will help him.” Another pause. “I know he needs time. I know he’s a kid. But he’s my kid.” His mom was crying. Croak listened for another minute. Listening to his mom breathe, listening to how coarse each breath was, how stuttered. “Why do they have to be such assholes? I didn’t do this to him on purpose.”

            Croak sidled around the wall and scuffed his socks on the floor toward the hallway leading into the foyer. His mom only looked up at him. Her eyes were red and puffy; he sometimes saw her like this if she ever thought she was alone. He always figured adults had more shit to deal with, and sometimes crying was the best method of defense. Or maybe that’s what he wanted to think. She carries a shit ton of baggage about dad. And Randy hasn’t let her forget it. She gestured to the bag of food on the table and only feigned a smile. “I know…I know he needs time. I get that. But he should not have left. He shouldn’t have run away…”

            So Randy took off? Jesus H. Christ, this is what the Creek sows.

            Croak took off down the hall and went up the stairs. He could still hear his mom’s murmuring voice. Randy’s door was open. He wasn’t in the room; it was just the grim shade of must, mess, and musings. The culmination of teen angst. Croak went into his own room and grabbed a notebook from his dresser. He picked up a thick black felt. He quickly scribbled a note on the top page, tore it out of the book, and went toward his mom’s room. She was still in the kitchen. This would only take a second. He knew that. And then he could get rid of the evidence and wait.

            He slowly opened her door, making sure it didn’t creak. Making sure she didn’t hear any familiar sounds that would alert her to what Croak was attempting. Don’t be a shit. She doesn’t know, and her mind’s on other things. He walked into the room, staring at the wall by the headboard. He looked up at that camera, the one he’d pushed with his finger when he was so upset the first time he watched the news, the first time he saw Darrel Janz after the power went out. He wondered if he’d smeared the lens, if anything could be seen through it, and then he considered Grimwood would have sent somebody to take care of it. Because the world through the cameras had to remain unobstructed. The observers needed a two-way mirror. Maybe Darrel came upstairs in the night. And replaced the camera as he stared down at your mom. As he looked at her and whispered into her ear to ask if she wanted to join him under the lidless moon, if she wanted to part her hair the other way and see this world from inside a television. To see this world without power. If not Darrel, it was one of those guys at the Commodores. Bernard or Steve. He was certain of it.

            He stood there staring up at the camera. Please work. Please.

            He held up the sheet of paper. He’d written:

I WANT TO KNOW WHO MY MOMS

BOYFRIEND IS. PLEASE CALL ME.

555-8775

5

After he’d ripped up the piece of paper and hid it in his trash beneath a bruised banana peel and carton of chocolate milk, Croak made his way back to the kitchen. Ignoring an empty stomach was a cardinal sin. Especially for a growing boy.

            His mom was still sitting at the table, staring down at her hands. The phone was back on its cradle. He could hear the ticking of the clock on the wall. But beyond that the room was silent. Croak only looked up at the phone. Wondering if he would get an answer. Wondering if Grimwood would call. If he was mature enough to overlook Croak’s denial to help him fix Reedy Creek when he’d first asked. Whatever that means, he thought. He pulled out the chair across from his mom and she looked up.

            “I take it you heard?” She offered a wry grin. She was a very pretty lady. Croak understood why his friends had the hots for her. And even if they’d tried to keep that truth hidden from him, he could read between the lines.

            “Did he really run away?”

            “He’s a teenager. That’s what teenagers do.” She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand and fixed her hair. “You hungry? Tacos are probably cold by now. What on earth were you doing in the basement? Sounded like you were talking to somebody.”

            “Nope. Just watching the tube.”

            “We’re okay, right?” She reached across the table so that he’d take her hand. “I mean, you don’t…blame me, do you?”

            “For what, mom?”

            She looked at him skeptically for a second. Trying to see the lie, the irony in his tone. “For bringing you here. For, well, for trying to give you a life away from your father. Away from what he left us in.”

            “I don’t think of him much.”

            “Randy does.”

            “I know. But he’s older.”

            “He blames me. I think. Or, at least that’s what everything boils down to. It hurt him when our family split. It really did. I just want to make sure you aren’t holding onto those same feelings. That same pain.”

            I want to meet your new boyfriend. The man from the camera. I want to say hello to him and ask him to play catch. I want to show him my curveball and have him tell me how to really snap my wrist. Like Danny can. I want you to be honest. He looked up at the phone again. “No, mom. Of course not.”

            “Life is so fast. I think of, I think of Adam’s grampa. I do. Such a nice man. A bit of a flirt. But gone regardless. Such a shame. I think of how fate decides who goes and who stays. I think of what happens, what passes in the blink of an eye. I remember you and Randy when you were little, and now—” She squeezed Croak’s hand. “We’re going to be happy again. I swear to you, Cory. We will. We’re going to be a family.”

            The phone rang.

6

He pedalled home faster than he ever had. Scared about what he’d seen. Shocked. Because he’d expected to come face to face with George Lincoln Rockwell’s successor, a real-life Nazi in Reedy Creek, his house the resurgent armament of a movement looking to rekindle Arianism. To light the fire of Volkish values under the cauldron of a town brimming with immigration. But he saw his father with a gun. Hidden in the bushes, his vantage point strategic, planned, calculated.

            He pedalled home because he wanted to beat his father there; he wanted to ask his mom what David Greenfield was, what he really was, and why he’d have a gun. A Beretta. Why would he be stalking that bastard janitor from Reedy Secondary? But he didn’t think his mom would know. Because this town was built on secrets, and Danny was beginning to understand the extension of that reality. There was a clear division between adulthood and childhood, there was, and for every year of development he figured youth became more invisible. His father had secrets. Another life maybe. Is that why there is a camera in your parents’ room? Is that why there is a camera in your father’s study? He’d always figured that as far as his life went, as far as his parents’, he and they were far too boring to mean anything in the grand scheme of things. You’re from New York, boy, a fucking survivor. Your dad is too.

            “No, my dad was bullied. He was weak.”

            Danny got home, smelt the chicken in the oven, heard his mom in the kitchen clattering dishes. He went into the bathroom by his room and locked the door. He turned on the bath fan and listened to the rattling hum as he cried, rocking back and forth as he sat on the toilet lid. Have you ever once wondered what happens when your parents are outside your orbit? You have your concerns, and they have theirs. That’s life. You knew that going into this. You knew that the moment you saw Grimwood’s cameras. People are interested in secrets. People are interested in the private world. But you never once stopped to consider that your father’s was interesting.

            He heard his mom call up to him that dinner was ready. His dad wasn’t home yet. He’d have the same idea as Croak; they would both share in the opportunity Adam created, and he’d grab a piece of paper from his room and jot something down, in all capitals. Because it was urgent. He’d take that paper to his parents’ room, remembering when he first spotted that camera when he was given the task to explore his house for parts of the Creek’s network, that pervasive and invasive network that held the illicit parts of one’s life on tape, remembering how angry he was, how fucking disgusted he was that somebody could be watching what he thought was sacred. What happened behind closed doors was for nobody to see but the owner of those experiences; he didn’t think intention mattered. He didn’t think what that invasion of property could proffer mattered, even if it meant saving a hundred lives. A thousand. Because it was wrong. He stood in his parents’ room, so clean and organized, utterly boring on the surface but the veneer of something far more intriguing. He held up the piece of paper the same way Croak would, facing the lens, staring at it, still angry but restrained now because he was at the mercy of the man on the other end of that feed for answers. And understanding that was something of a compromise because a part of him, that part so prone to relenting to anger, quashed his temperament and told him the truth could only be learned through cooperation. And Adam opened that door up now, didn’t he? He did. His paper read:

WHO IS MY FATHER?

            His mom called up again and he answered her. He’d be a moment. His heart was racing. He stood staring at that camera and would until he got a sign. Maybe it’s the sickness of this place. Maybe that’s what’s infected your dad. Did you ever think of that?

            The phone rang. He answered it in his parents’ room before his mom could. He figured she appreciated that. She was always complaining that she did everything in the house. His dad would roll his eyes and the two guys, the majority, would have a silent laugh at her expense. But she was right. He’d folded up his note and sat on the chair where his mom sat to do her make-up. He stared at himself in her vanity. His face was stark white. His eyes distant.

            “Hello.”

            “It comes as something of a surprise that you’d assume just because you have a question that I might assist you after the way you treated my own request. I suppose your self-interests are greater than mine, Daniel.”

            Danny remembered that voice. He remembered the toothsome grin, the glint in those beady eyes under the shadow of a fedora; he remembered how distinctly wrong the man felt, how out of touch he seemed in terms of his belonging. That was just it. He didn’t feel like Grimwood belonged. That he was something of an outsider: outside the system, under the surface. “I did what I felt was right. We’re just kids.”

            “Kids can make a difference too, Daniel. Especially if the situation calls for it.”

            Danny closed his fist. He was still staring at himself, watching the rose blossoms on his cheeks beneath the fray of tangled black hair that contoured in an unruly smudge against the wall and headboard behind him. “I want to know who my father is. If that means I have to grovel—”

            “I expect nothing of the sort, Daniel. Who do you think I am?”

            Danny was silent. An outsider. He heard his mom downstairs. He wondered if she knew. If she had any answers. But he figured her life was just as secret as his father’s.

            “Okay, Daniel. Okay. You have a very valid question. The answer shouldn’t be told. What fun is there in that? I would suggest you return to the edge of Reedy Creek. To the house in the woods.”

            “You watched me?”

            “I watch everything.”

            Danny looked up at the camera. He felt so exposed. So powerless. And maybe he was. As a kid, maybe that was his lot in life.

            “You are not a detective, Daniel, if that’s what you expect of yourself.”

            “What?”

            “Pardon. Manners, Daniel. Remember. Etiquette is the very virtue of principle. You made the mistake of not checking your target’s mailbox. If you are wondering about your father, the details are in this man’s name. Then we can speak. Your father has secrets. This you know now. To learn them you must take the first step. And then you can do something simple for me.”

            “For you?”

            “Oh yes, Daniel. When you learn the details, you will want to know everything. And for that there is a price.”

            That was last night. Now Danny sat to breakfast with his mom and dad. Frozen in that space between knowing something and wanting to appear ignorant. Indifferent. He figured his take on apathy would just call more attention to himself, so he shoved oatmeal into his mouth and chewed slowly.

            “I would hope you’re planning to go this morning, Daniel,” his mom said.

            Danny only looked up.

            “Adam’s mother called me. Poor thing. I know how dearly you felt about Adam’s grandpa.”

            He swallowed and looked at his father, who only watched him, unaware of the mystery between them. “You’re okay with me missing school?”

            “If it means paying your respects, then yes. The man deserves them. Would you like it if I joined you?”

            He didn’t really care either way. Until he thought about where he was going before the service. Until he thought about the phone call and realized he couldn’t involve his mother. “You can come. But I’m going to ride my bike. Clear my head.”

            “Everything okay, Daniel?”

            He looked at his dad. He was angry at the man. Secrets could be so infuriating, because they existed outside what you thought you had. What you thought you’d built. He didn’t even recognize his father. Not anymore. He only saw the man loading and unloading the gun outside the janitor’s house, the mechanical precision of his hands supposing it was an act of experience.

            “I saw some scratches on the Buick, dad. Did you hit something? Maybe bushes or something?”

            His dad was silent and only looked at Danny’s mother. “Not that I’m aware of. Are you something of a quality inspector all of a sudden?”

            Danny couldn’t even listen to his dad. Not now. He pushed himself away from the table and stood up.

            “Daniel. You’re acting rude.”

            He looked at his mom. He thought only of his father standing behind the scraggled branches, black leather gloves over the deft fingers currently pinching a piece of buttered toast, hands so precise as they maneuvered that gun, staring out at the dilapidated pre-war with countless posters of tits taped to the walls in the sort of haven one expected a pervert to live as if he had very specific business with the man inside.

            “I’m…sorry. I need to go.” He pushed his chair in and left without looking back.

7

Brenda had taken the call as her kids were at the table eating breakfast. She knew Horace was off to Adam’s and she’d already cleared it with the school for him to miss the morning. Death was very painful. Very real. And he hadn’t much experience dealing with its finer details. She didn’t know Lewis. She knew of him, but Horace had always told her he delighted in taking advantage of his retirement by enjoying the little things in life. Like television. She’d smiled then, understanding it was something of a joke. But in the end there was some truth to it, wasn’t there? Sometimes the very act of getting old involves understanding there is a fine line between life and death, and that once you’re forced to consider your own mortality an element of depression can strangle from you the urge to enjoy the time you have left.

            “Good morning.”

            “Brenda?”

            “Yes,” she said, twirling the cord in her forefinger, watching Horace eat his cereal, watching Chels at his heel, her nose resting atop her paws.

            “This is Dr Langford. I’m sorry to bother you so early in the morning.”

            A pit fell in her gut. She wasn’t sure why, but she finally settled on the man’s tone. He told you to leave expecting the worst. He did. And you prepared Horace for that. He cried his tears and you yours. It was all you could do. But now there was a diagnosis, wasn’t there? It wasn’t just conjecture. “It’s no bother, how are you?”

            “I’m okay. I’m…” he stopped himself. “These calls are always so difficult, Brenda.”

            “You found something.” She whispered. She didn’t want her kids to hear her. She knew how vulnerable they were. Right now she needed this for herself. She sat on the edge of the counter.

            “I apologize for the delay. I really do. I usually do the bloodwork at my clinic, but I, well, I came across something strange so I sent a sample to Davenport for an analysis.”

            “Something strange?”

            “We do complete blood counts here. What that means is that I analyze the profile of the serum and breakdown its parts to evaluate the patient’s overall health. Oxygenated red blood cells, immunized white counts, platelets for clotting, which could rule out leukemia. You understand. I’d wagered when I first sent you home that the worst-case scenario would be an affliction to the lymph nodes called lymphosarcoma. Cancer.”

            “Is it?”

            Dr Langford only exhaled. “I don’t know.”

            “You don’t know?”

            “I…what I saw in the sample, and what prompted me to get another opinion from Davenport, it’s environmental. Nothing contagious, but it behaves with the same behavioral characteristics as a virus. Is Chelsey…is she still throwing up?”

            Brenda looked at the dog, sitting there with Horace. “No. She’s just tired.” Very tired. She thought she was going to be sick. It was harder to pretend she was okay, to swallow the anxiety like a fist-sized pill. She thought she might choke.

            “What I witnessed, it didn’t replicate like a virus. No. But its behavior. It looked like…like insects in her bloodstream. And they fed specifically on the white blood cells. I don’t…it was like watching a caterpillar on a leaf. Chewing and chewing until the cellular material was gone. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

            “What are you saying?”

            Dr Langford was silent on the other end. She could hear him breathing. She knew he was still there.

            “Are you saying she is dying?” This time she cupped the phone and looked away.

            “Has she been anywhere, eaten anything she should not have?”

            “You don’t have to avoid the question.”

            “I haven’t seen this before, Brenda.”

            “What can we do?”

            “I don’t know.”

            “You don’t?”

            “Make her comfortable. If I was in your position, that’s what I’d aim for. I would make sure she’s comfortable.”

            She could tell it was very hard for the man to express what amounted to a death sentence. She tapped the counter with her fingernails. Brenda didn’t know it yet, but this would be the first of a string of very bad news. She hung up the phone. She didn’t remember if she said thanks or goodbye. At the moment she didn’t think it mattered. She walked in a daze over to the kitchen table and touched Horace’s shoulder; she put on her strongest face and figured that because she was a mother she could convince her children everything was okay. That it was her obligation to do so.

            “You okay, mom?” Angela asked. She was looking up from the Post, reading about the new body found in the greenbelt. Minutes from their house. Reedy Creek had become a place of death. It reeked of it.

            “Just fine. You should be off. Horace, you remember, this isn’t a funeral, but you’re honoring a good man regardless. So be on your best behavior.”

            He smiled up at her. She wouldn’t know he’d seen the bugs eating Chels’s eyes. She wouldn’t know that he could see them even now as she stood by his side, that he could even hear them skittering, marching through her coarse fur; she wouldn’t know any of his secrets. That he would be going to a woman’s house after the service because he was starting to enjoy the game into which he’d been pulled by the stranger in the underworld. Enjoying the favors.

            She watched her kids leave and waited just a moment. She held it together for as long as she could. She didn’t want them to see her break.

8

He came here to ponder. He thought maybe the unopened pack of Winstons he’d found in Patty’s closet would be enough. That if he put them in his pocket, just knowing they were there would amount to the sort of connection to grampa he required to speak openly about the man. To remember him.

            But he needed his smell. Needed the feel of his clothes. His mom had closed grampa’s bedroom door and hadn’t opened it since the man was taken away on the gurney. Adam crept down the stairs, avoiding some of the people his mom had hired to bring some finger foods, and some of the neighbors who’d seen the ambulance and flashing lights and most likely offered their help to set up chairs and clear away the furniture for a greater meeting room. Adam saw that his mom had taken some of the photos out of their frames and replaced them with pictures of grampa: in one the man was quite a bit younger. His Korea days, most likely. He was in uniform, a lit smoke stuck in his grinning lips, his hair short and combed to the side, his face freshly shaven; he didn’t have any wrinkles. The only part of him Adam recognized was his eyes. There, in that photo, they were the same as they’d been when the man was sitting in the bleachers watching him try out for the varsity baseball squad. The same sort of life. What was missing when you saw him on the couch staring past you. Staring beyond you. Because he was fucking dead. Adam clenched his fist. There were recent photos of him. Most of them were with Adam. The father you should have had. He felt his heart well.

            He opened his grampa’s bedroom door and turned on the light, latching the door behind him before anybody noticed him. Sometimes that was the benefit of being a kid. You could be invisible.

            The man’s room was simple. He always said he preferred the practicality of utility, that a bedroom only needed a bed otherwise it would have been called a shitroom. “And you’ve already got one of those in the house, and I doubt you wanna hear a turd flushing when you’re asleep.” Adam snickered. The room was grampa Lew. It really was. It smelt of him, his aftershave, his cologne; he thought of pressing his face against the man’s chest when he first saw him, when they first came into this house and he knew things might be okay, that if grampa was here now his dad couldn’t hurt the family anymore.

            Adam opened the closet door. He was reluctant, thinking about Patty’s room, thinking about what the boy could see that he couldn’t. There was nothing out of the ordinary in here. Just the man’s clothes. His mom hadn’t packed them. He figured that was still too hard for her to consider. The wound was still so fresh, and Adam thought he might not have even fully processed it; setting down the flowers at Fenway, confessing to his friends, that was certainly an avenue of mourning, but it was also a tactic. Something to stem the tide of his own incredible beliefs about what he saw and about what might have happened. And now he had the tape of something inexplicable. Something without reason.

            The Lady.

            He stepped into the closet and let grampa’s clothes swallow him; he felt shirts and slacks brush by his face. He disappeared in the scent. Memories flooded him. Going to the real Fenway. Playing catch. Talking baseball. Talking life. Aspirations. Grampa believed in him, he did. He believed those games they played at the fake Fenway, the magic Fenway where the imagination made it real, were truly only a precursor for what Adam was meant to become. Grampa believed that more than Adam ever would. He remembered when grampa came to that clearing, that field he and his friends turned into something else; he sat in the grass with Chels running laps around him, without a care in the world, the light breeze of summer flipping his hair, his hands stretched out behind him to prop him up as his legs splayed. And the boys played ball the way it was expected of them at this place: Croak called the game as Vin Scully, Pug crouched behind the plate as Johnny Bench, because his own dad said the Red Machine smacked the Sox around in the 70’s, and he partly wanted to piss off Adam and grampa, he did, because sports were all about smack talk; Danny was on the mound as Guidry, because he loved kicking up his foreleg like a praying mantis and flicking his wrist as he released the ball. And Adam was Ted Williams. Just this once. For his grampa.

            He cried as he stood there. They were real tears now. Not of anger. Of confusion or disbelief. They were the tears of understanding. Of concession. Of finality. He took one of grampa’s white shirts off the hanger and sat on the bed with it, draping it around his neck. He lay back on the pillows of a bed that would never be unmade again and stared up at the ceiling. At the light and the cobwebs hanging like tattered threads from the bulbs.

            He saw the book on the nightstand where the man once kept his teeth in a glass and an ancient alarm clock he claimed worked better than anything sent Stateside by the Japs. There was a VHS tape stacked on top of it. Its sticker read 1985. That’s the stupid scrapbook he was working on. The guy was getting all, what does Pug call it, nostalgic the last few days, as if—

            “As if what, Adam?” he whispered to himself, setting aside the tape and picking up the book. He didn’t know. Or if some part of him did, it wasn’t saying anything. Not now.

            This is what old people do, Adam. They collect their lives. Because at the end, you want to know you meant something. You want to know it all had some sort of meaning. You can move on knowing you’ll last as a memory, but what if you don’t? What if people don’t remember you? Then the world will go on as if you never existed. Books like this, they’re a story, to prove what happened and the people involved were real, breathing beings. That they were here. And that they mattered.

            “You fucking mattered, grampa. You were my father. You were my best friend.” He touched a photo of Lew. He’d written beneath the mount that he was nineteen and free. He was at a lake, wearing swim trunks, staring out at the water, the gleaming sun writing a streak across its rippled surface; his body was lithe, his youth so innocent, so obvious, but painful:

Lewis Forsmythe. 19. July 1937. I was free, and this image expresses it best. The world was not yet at war again. My future was on the bank in the distance and I had only begun to figure out how to get there.

            He turned the page. More pictures. And again. Again. Until he thought he might disappear into that time, that history might steal him. He would gladly go. He would gladly be a part of this man’s life just as it was beginning. He found a picture of grampa’s wedding day. It was a photo of his grampa’s back and his grandma’s dress, her hair long and cascading down the white frill, the pastor between reading from the Bible. Below it grampa had written:

There are moments when your life is defined for you. When your meaning is revealed. Until then you sort of just meander, like a lost kid. I don’t want to sound sappy, but I never knew or understood until this moment what love could do. You cannot see it in this picture, but I am crying and I am smiling. Because love is everything. She was my everything. Is my everything.

            Adam wiped his eyes. His grampa was human. You didn’t know this. It’s not that you didn’t care, it’s that you were too caught up in your own things. Grampa was just on the sidelines of your experience. But maybe you were on the sidelines of his.

            He turned the page and his heart stopped.

            “Oh my God,” he whispered, just as there was a knock on the door. He quickly peeled off the picture and stuck it in his pocket against the pack of smokes. The caption beneath was brief. And telling.

            You have to be sure. You have to know for sure before you tell anyone.

            “There you are,” his mom said. She looked at the book sitting open on his lap. “Adam, it’s too soon to be in here.”

            “I needed to be near him,” Adam replied, closing the book and setting it on the bed, waiting for his heart to drum its beat, waiting for the color to return to his face. He set aside the white shirt and missed its smell immediately. “I couldn’t come up with anything to say in my room.”

            “Did you find the right words down here?”

            Adam only nodded. He touched the heft of his pocket and stood up.

            She smiled, as if relieved. “People are already here. I’d like to get started before my nerves say otherwise.”

            Adam followed her out of the room, looking back only once at the book on the bed. The book that might have answered his question.

9

Danny went back to the house at the edge of the woods where the yard banked toward a locked shed and brambles were stacked beyond the fence that had scuffed the gold paint job on a Buick Regal. The blue truck was gone. The gravel driveway sat empty besides the empty beer cans littering the grass among the weeds.

            The neighbor was sitting out on his lawn chair again, smoking a cigarette. He doffed his Hornets ball cap to Danny as he pedalled up on his bike.

            “Back so soon? Your friend’s not around this morning. He’s where you should be, ain’t that right? If I were a stickler I’d be calling up them truancy officers or whatever they call ‘em.” The man smiled, his legs lazily propped out before him to show his worn cowboy boots.

            Danny slowed down and smiled back. The house was so quiet, so sullen on a morning that should have otherwise heralded the fortune of a warm day; it looked like a wart on a pretty lady’s thigh. A blemish.

            “You ain’t got a crush on him, do ya?”

            Danny couldn’t help but grin. “I dropped something yesterday. My wallet. Had my library card.”

            The man in the Hornets cap, its black bill and yellow rims smudged some by ages old dirt and sweat and use, sat forward and his eyes darkened. Danny wondered if this man was what his father, or the man he thought was his father, called a welfare case. “Shit, boy, if it had your name onnit I hope ol’ Ed didn’t find it first. You don’t want him handing it back to you. Not if you don’ want him knowing you’ve been snooping. I told you already, and excuse my French, but he’s one crazy motherfucker. I reckon when Reedy Creek goes up in flames, he’ll be one of the first turned to brimstone.” He licked his yellow teeth and took another deep drag of his smoke.

            “What do you mean?”

            “What do I mean?”

            “About this place going up in flames.”

            The man smiled. But it was a crazy smile. Almost drawn on, like a clown’s. “You don’ feel it? Shit, boy, I sit out here most days and feel the town tightening like the string on a guitar. And when it’s too tight, if somebody should pluck it, the entire thing might snap. The Creek don’ take kindly to these strangers. I do apologize if you an’ your folks are from out of town, but this corn shit is like the first strike of a match over a jerry can o’ gasoline. Sooner or later, that match catches. Then boom.”

            Danny swallowed.

            “Look at the murders, kid. Some fuck out there has a sick sense o’ humor. And I know the paper ain’t saying anything about what’s on the scene but I’ve heard enough. I got friends on the deputy line that ain’t no Napolitano loyalists, and none of ‘em give a hairy shit about this council pushing public opinion. Those ivory tower types are ass licks who’ve never had dirt under their fingernails. Somebody is culling the weeds, and it won’t end until everybody has accounted for their sins. I hope your intentions are clean with that man.” He nudged his head toward the dilapidated house whose interior walls were festooned with titty pictures.

            Other people could sense the sickness. It was truly palpable. Especially if it permeated the adult world.

            The man stood up and flicked his cigarette into the street. “We’ve got front row seats to the end of the world, kiddo. Why I ain’ calling the school to report you. Cause maybe it won’t be there tomorrow.” He went into his house and Danny heard the screen door click.

            He may be dumb as bricks but he’s cunning. Because he sees and feels it too. Danny looked up at the camera in the tree above the man’s lawn chair. Somebody’s watching you. Watching how you choose to live. And he is likely judging you from his theater underground. He waited to see if the man would come to the window, would pull aside what looked like ripped sheets and peer out at the strange kid hanging around Poverty Row, the boonies. Or whatever euphemism you could dredge up to beatify what was clearly decrepit.

            Danny rode up to the janitor’s house. The man’s mailbox was nailed to a 4x4 post and sledged into the sod next to the street. It looked like a rusted tin lunchbox. Danny looked both ways down the street, to check for a world beyond the wind’s stirring. He was alone.

            He opened the slot and peered inside. There was a stack of envelopes. And what looked like a rolled-up magazine in a plastic sheet. Tampering with mail’s a federal offense. He heard that in his father’s voice. So is carrying a fucking gun and loading it, wearing black gloves like some…like some trained killer.

            He was tempted to pull out the envelopes, to look through the stack, but figured their official status as bills or personal letters would make Danny something he was not. A voyeur. He understood the apparent hypocrisy of trying to appear decent after following a man home and spying on him, after watching strangers on candid surveillance tapes, after witnessing a world beneath this one where secrets and privacy were on display on a never-ending loop of streams, but in this instance the end justified the means. It was a dangerous proposition if misused, but he truly understood what it meant at this moment.

            He pulled out the magazine. There was a picture of a naked woman on the front, her vulgar parts covered by both the zine’s title (BEAVER FEVER) and the subscription label slapped across the bottom center.

            The details are in this man’s name.

            “Jesus,” Danny mumbled, nearly dropping the magazine. Like his friends before him, he would be pulled into the incomprehensible fever dream of clashing beliefs, trying to reconcile what he understood to be real and true to what he and his friends discovered in this little town. To what they should have left alone.

            The name on the subscription read:

            EDDIE HILTON.

10

It wasn’t a funeral. And for that he was thankful. Grampa’s body wasn’t here. Just his memory.

            A group of people had showed up for something his mother had quickly put together. But she was good at that sort of organization. She often did it for his father when he was something of an important man on the east coast. They’d cleared out the front room next to the foyer, pushing the couches into the TV area where grampa used to sit. There were about twenty-five people clustered in two identical sections, with a slim aisle between to accommodate a pathway. There were more photographs in here, set on the side tables where his mom had lit candles; their flames fluttered and drifted with the passing of each person as he or she sat. His mother spoke first and was open that this was meant as an opportunity to say goodbye. That she thought funerals bore the connotation of death and she wanted to concentrate on her father’s life. She shared a few stories. About her wedding day under the Redwoods, her daddy walking her down the aisle over fallen leaves and mulch, a beautiful wreath upon her head that she believed would welcome the birds from the trees to settle upon her hair like they had in the Disney movies, and she told everybody how giving her away that moment was one of the toughest things he’d ever done in his life because it had meant his baby girl was a woman. She cried as she spoke. Adam heard tears around him, sniffing, women dabbing their eyes with kerchiefs or reaching for tissues in their purses. He didn’t know most of these people. Grampa hadn’t made many friends in Reedy Creek. He hadn’t left the house much until recently. And that was because of the world the boys uncovered. It always came back to that.

            “Talking helps. I know most of you didn’t really know my father. Lewis. You’re here because you’re decent. I know exactly what he’s thinking right now, looking down on this: not a stripper among you.” She chuckled and the audience followed. “He wasn’t one to perceive his passing as something meant to bring down his friends, his neighbors. He would have wanted pizza and the game on in the background. He would have wanted the good will to persist and the moods of his friends to stay lifted. He said the same thing at my mother’s funeral. That it isn’t worth it to be sad forever, because missing somebody might cancel out really remembering them. Sadness is a burden, and closure needs a doorway. That’s what this is. For my family. Assistance to find that doorway. My son Adam has agreed to say something, and I knew this would help him as well. He and his grampa were best buds.” She smiled and the room warmed at the thought.

            Adam stood up and went toward the front of the room. His mother hugged him and sat down in his chair, staring up at him. There were framed photos of grampa on the table beside him: the man as he looked old, and the man as he looked young. So brief a capture of so many years ventured. It was truly remarkable. He touched the pack of cigarettes in his pocket, the folded picture, and he looked out at everybody watching him. He saw his dad standing near the back. Saw Pug’s mom with her legs crossed and a nice floral dress pressed demurely between her knees, her eyes misty and her hand clutching a wad of Kleenex. Pug was next to her. And Croak next to him. Danny’s mom was sitting in the row behind. But he didn’t see Danny. And he knew she was looking for him, peering every so often behind her or toward the window at the front, broadcasting the front lawn and shedding trees. There was a cop sitting beside Danny’s mom, in unform. His cruiser was parked out front. Adam wasn’t sure who he was, but he appeared crestfallen. He’s the guy who came by yesterday. The one who talked to mom.

            “Hi…everyone,” he stammered. He wasn’t nervous. Wasn’t scared. He was curious. But he was certain it showed differently as he spoke. That his curiosity about what he found, about what it meant, translated into a fear of public speaking or a sadness about what he wanted to express. “I tried to write something for this. My mom, she wanted me to be open because it would help me. Maybe because I wasn’t reacting the right way. I’m not sure. But I couldn’t find the right things to write. I’m not even sure my grampa would have wanted me to stand here and read something. He wasn’t like that. He was…he was like one of the guys. One of us. A friend. We came to Reedy Creek because our lives were messed up in Suffolk. Like, really messed up. My dad got tangled in with some…some bad men, and they almost killed us all.” He watched his father’s eyes darken, saw his face flush. With embarrassment. And partly with agreement. Yes. Adam believed that. His father would forever carry that burden, and trying to ignore it, to forget it, would only invite its dark presence back in their lives.

              “Adam,” his mom said, shaking her head, pantomiming that this wasn’t what they agreed.

               He ignored her.

               “I dream about them. All the time. I dream about what they did to us, what they did to my dad. I dream about the shadow men in the black suits. My grampa saved our lives. And we came here. He came with us. That nightmare, our life there, it was my doorway to a life with my grampa. And my mom said this whole service is about finding a doorway. Reedy Creek is mine. I got to live with my grampa. My best friend. I got to see what being normal means. My dad was always so busy. Always so important. I grew up understanding that. I…I thought I did, I mean, until grampa showed me what it really meant to have a dad. My grampa knew what kind of a chump Billy Buckner is, he took my Mookie Wilson ball cards out to the backyard and lit them on fire, because he always knew me best, he always understood what mattered to me. He watched the Sox with me, he lived and breathed ball with me. He was everything I want to be when I grow up. Reedy Creek was my last chance to be with him. To love him. And Reedy Creek took him away. My doorway was opened and now it’s closed. Forever. I…I hate this place.”

            He touched the bulk in his pocket. Looking for that connection. Everybody was staring at him with a sort of horrified fascination; his grim honesty wasn’t exactly what they expected. Not from a kid. They expected one sob story, endless sniffing and snorting, and that would be it. Rush to the finger foods and back to the rigors of life when their bellies were compensated. The cop had folded his arms, his eyes questioning, and his friends, the friends that actually showed up, shared their worry with upturned glares that would one day appear rather patronizing when the adult world was underway.

            “I…I…I’m sorry…” Adam pushed his way down the aisle without looking at anybody, without looking at his friends, his parents. He could feel his father’s eyes on him. Could feel his hurt and anger. But he didn’t care. He went up the stairs to his room. And he took the photograph out of his pocket.

11

“Have you told your father about what you’ve found? About me?”

            “You already know the answer to that.”

            “I do?”

            “Don’t you see everything down here?”

            Grimwood smiled. “I see what I choose to see. Nobody can see everything.”

            “I think you can.”

            “Will you ever tell him? He is guilty for his association with the council. But goodness can be earned. Your grandfather learned to trust him. Learned to like him, even. I believe he did that on your account.”

            “Why?”

            Grimwood stroked his chin. “Perhaps he was trying to prepare you.”

            “For what?”

            Grimwood tapped the VHS tape with his slender fingers. “I believe that is for you to figure out, Adam. I hope you find your answer in this. But I’m afraid even the smallest boat can go adrift. And an ocean of magic is a very strange place to be lost.”