“ She tased me! And then she did this.”
Henry pushed Shawn through the front door into his house. Gus followed, stunned at the damage. The table and floor were covered with the charred, soaked remains of hundreds of photographs. A thick coating of ashy soup covered the hardwood; ashes clung to every surface. The smell of burning chemicals hung in the air.
Shawn studied the scene carefully. “She burned all your pictures?”
“They’re not my pictures,” Henry said. “They belonged to a client.”
“Really, a client?” Shawn said. “Is that what you call the old folks you do your little hobby for?”
Henry leveled an accusing finger at this son. “Aha!”
“‘Aha’?” Shawn said. “I don’t see an ‘aha’ here. Gus, do you see an ‘aha’?”
“I see a big mess,” Gus said. “I’m not getting much in the way of ‘aha’.”
Henry’s accusatory finger didn’t move. “She said you were embarrassed by my scrapbooking. That you thought it made me look like an old lady.”
“Look, I said she’s crazy. I didn’t say she was stupid.”
Henry grabbed Shawn and dragged him over to the wreckage on the table. “This is really funny to you, isn’t it?”
Gus couldn’t look at Shawn. If he did, he knew they’d both burst into giggles. Not because they didn’t take this seriously. When Henry had picked them up outside the impound lot, his muscles still twitching slightly from the electric shock, his skin pale, and his eyes red, they were both terrified that something awful had happened. And when he demanded they come with him without saying anything except “your friend stopped by,” they jumped into the truck without a question. Gus knew how guilty Shawn must feel about Tara’s assault on his father; he felt guilty himself, even though he couldn’t figure out any way in which he was more than fractionally responsible.
But Gus and Shawn had been getting called on the carpet together for decades now, and the pattern was always the same. It didn’t matter how seriously they took their scolding or how much they feared their punishment. If they looked at each other, they’d start laughing. And while they could sometimes manage to hold off the giggling fit until the lecture was done, as soon as anyone told them that the situation wasn’t funny, they were lost.
“Of course not, Dad,” Shawn said. “Not the part about her shooting you with a stun gun, anyway. I hate to think how much that must have hurt.”
That was a small lie, Gus knew. They both welcomed the thought of Henry’s pain, since it was the only thing that was keeping them from bursting into inappropriate and unintended laughter.
“If we’d ever thought she’d come to see you, we would have called with a warning,” Gus said.
“She did this because you wanted her to.”
“No!”
“So you didn’t want me to stop scrapbooking?”
“Well, I wouldn’t go that far,” Shawn said. “I’d like to see you maintain some dignity.”
“Like when I was lying helpless on the floor, my muscles twitching uncontrollably?”
“Maybe a little more dignity than that,” Shawn conceded.
“I don’t know what’s more disturbing,” Henry said. “The fact that there’s a lunatic out there acting out your deepest desires, or that you have so little respect for me that you don’t trust me to live my own life.”
“It’s a tough call, but I’m going to go with the lunatic,” Shawn said. “Gus?”
“Lunatic, definitely,” Gus said.
“A lunatic you just happened to tell what an embarrassment your old man is.”
“I never did that,” Shawn said.
“Then how did she know?” Henry demanded. “She read your mind?”
“You know, there’s a really funny thing about that,” Shawn said. “She thinks she did.”
“Tara believes that Shawn is beaming her orders psychically,” Gus said.
Henry stared at Shawn, his anger momentarily eclipsed by disbelief. “She what?”
“It’s true,” Shawn said. “I thought it made her happy to help out. You know, the way some people claim to like picking up litter or helping the homeless or standing outside supermarkets trying to get me to sign petitions. Anyway, it turns out that Tara thinks she’s my psychic mind slave.”
“Oh, Shawn.” Henry thought wistfully back on the days when he could lift his son over his knee and paddle some sense into him. “I told you this psychic nonsense would bring nothing but trouble.”
“It’s brought me a lot besides trouble,” Shawn said. “This time it just happened to drop a little trouble along the way.”
“And the second she told you this, what did you do?” Henry said. “Did you take her to a doctor? Bring her to the police so they could hold her for psychiatric evaluation? Try to ease her out of her delusion?”
“Well-”
Henry’s hands were twitching again. Gus wasn’t sure if it was the aftereffects of the stun gun or sheer rage.
“No, let me guess. You took advantage of her mental illness and used her as a servant. Just like you take advantage of everybody.”
“I don’t take advantage of people,” Shawn said. “Do I, Gus?”
“Yes, Gus, go ahead and tell him.”
Gus stared down at the ground. It was a trick he’d been trying since he was three-ignore the problem and wait for it to go away. It hadn’t worked yet, but Gus was hoping this time might be the charm.
“He can’t do it, Shawn. Because he knows the truth-you’ve been taking advantage of him for years.”
Shawn looked shocked at the accusation. “I don’t take advantage of Gus.”
“It just always works out that you get whatever you want no matter what it costs him.”
“Yeah, it works out that way,” Shawn said. “No, wait. It doesn’t always work that way. I do lots of things for Gus.”
“Name one.”
“I kept him from going to Guatemala with the chess club, because I knew his delicate system couldn’t handle all those Latin American germs.”
“And because you didn’t want to be alone for two weeks.”
“So it was a win-win,” Shawn said. He turned to Gus. “Come on, Gus, tell him he’s crazy.”
It’s amazing how much detail you can see in the plainest of wood floors if you really look, Gus thought. The pattern of the grain was so interesting he couldn’t bear to lift his eyes from it.
“Gus?” Shawn was pleading now.
Henry fixed Shawn with a piercing stare. “You use people, Shawn. You manipulate them, and you take advantage of them. Most people don’t mind too much, because you’re a fun guy to be around. But this time you’ve used a terribly sick person, and it’s got consequences.”
For a moment, it looked like Shawn was going to argue. But before the first words were out of his mouth, he saw the look on his father’s face and reconsidered.
“I don’t think I treat people all that badly,” Shawn said. “But I’ll concede I might have made a mistake with Tara. What I took to be an adorable eccentricity turned out to be a psychotic compulsion, and if I had realized that earlier, I probably could have saved us all a lot of trouble.”
“Us all?”
“Well, you more than me,” Shawn admitted.
“That’s a beginning.” Henry patted Shawn on the shoulder, then picked up one of the less charred file boxes from the floor and handed it to him. “This is a better one.”
Shawn stared at the soggy mass of charred cardboard. “That’s a box.”
“More precisely, it’s an empty box. At least it is until you get busy cleaning this mess into it. Then it will be a full box.”
“I’ve got to find Tara,” Shawn said.
“Yes, you do,” Henry said. “But first you need to restore my house to the way it was before she showed up here.”
“Couldn’t we just burn the rest of it down? It’ll be faster.”
Henry picked up another box and handed it to Gus. “He’s going to get you to do most of the work anyway. You might as well start now.”
Gus didn’t bother to argue. He took the box and started dumping sodden photos into it.
“And while we’re cleaning up your house, what are you going to do?” Shawn said.
“I’m going to sit in my chair and watch you work,” Henry said. “And when I’m done enjoying that, I’m going to try to figure out what I can tell the Perths.”
Shawn picked up a stack of prints, each one of the happy couple sitting on their living room couch and staring straight into the camera.
“Maybe you can tell them that something interesting finally happened to them.”
Henry scowled at his son, then headed for the armchair in a far corner. But just as he settled in, there was a knock at the door. All three men froze.
“She’s back,” Gus said.
“What do we do?” Shawn said.
Henry pulled himself out of the chair. “I don’t know what you two brave souls are going to do, but I’m going to answer the door.”
“What if it’s Tara?” Shawn whispered.
“Then you can send her a psychic order to commit herself to the nearest nut hatch.” Henry walked to the door and threw it open.
His first thought was that someone had left a mannequin on his porch as a joke. The man was frozen absolutely still, one hand outstretched in retreat from the door it had just knocked on. After a brief moment, the man seemed to come to life, the hand retreating mechanically to his side.
Henry glanced back over his shoulder. “Shawn,” he said, “this has got to be for you.”