Michigan
September 2000
It felt strange to be back in the state of Michigan. I never thought I’d be able to come back here, and with every passing mile I kept wondering if I had made a huge mistake. Still, I kept going. This sudden unexpected chance to see Amelia one more time, even for just a moment… it was more than I could resist.
I rode through Milford first. It didn’t look much different. Until I got to the bend in the road and I got my first big surprise. The Flame was gone. In its place was a generic-looking family restaurant now, the kind of place you’d go after church on Sunday. More importantly, the liquor store was gone, too. Replaced by a wine store, of all things. Not quite as upscale as Julian’s, but still. On another day, it would have made me laugh.
I didn’t know if Uncle Lito would still be in the same house. I mean, if the liquor store was gone… he could be anywhere now.
I made the turn into the little alley that ran along the wall of the building, back to the house. I didn’t see the old two-toned Grand Marquis there. I parked the bike and walked up to the front of the house. I peeked through the window. I saw the same table there, the same wooden chairs. The same threadbare couch.
I took out the tools and did a quick job on the front door. One of the first locks I had practiced on, way back when. Today it didn’t take me more than a minute.
When I was inside, I was greeted by that same familiar smell of cigar smoke and loneliness. I walked in through the house, through the front room and kitchen, back to my old bedroom. There were piles of laundry on the bed. Otherwise it was exactly the same. It felt so strange to be back here.
After all of the things I had been through… the calendar said only a year had passed, but to me it was a lifetime.
I came back out to the front room. I paged through all of the newspapers on the table. The racing forms. I had remembered my uncle saying on more than one occasion, when he was done with the liquor store he’d spend every day at the racetrack. That’s probably where he was today.
But I could see it wasn’t as simple as that. It wasn’t just a man retiring to do what he always wanted to do. There were plenty of bills on the table. Collection notices and threatening letters. There were three new bottles of prescription medicine, too. Medicine I knew he wasn’t taking when I was still living here.
Then something else caught my eye. I went over to the kitchen counter. There, next to the pile of dirty dishes, was a cell phone.
That was a surprise in itself, but then it also made me wonder why he didn’t have it with him. I mean, why get a cell phone if you’re just going to leave it at home?
I turned it on and saw that it was fully charged. I checked the call history. It was empty. Not one single call coming in or going out.
I checked the address book. There was one entry.
BANKS.
I turned the phone off and put it in my pocket. One of two things happened here, I thought. Banks gave this phone to my uncle so he could call him if I ever came home. So he could have me taken into custody for my own good. I could see him selling my uncle on that one.
Or else he gave it to my uncle so that my uncle could give it to me. So I could call Banks myself. Either way, it made me feel suddenly very vulnerable. I went to the front window and looked outside. Banks could be out there right now, I thought. Watching me.
I went out to my bike, scanning in every direction. Looking for someone walking by on the street. Or a man sitting behind the wheel of a car, maybe reading a newspaper. The way he had done it before, back when he was watching West Side Recovery.
I dug out the bundle of money Sleepy Eyes had given me that very morning. I went back inside and put it on the kitchen counter, where the cell phone had been. Remembering that old coffee can that had sat next to that register in the liquor store for all those years. HELP OUT THE MIRCLE BOY. With the yellowed newspaper clipping next to it.
Here you go, Uncle Lito. Just don’t lose it at the track.
____________________
As I got to the stoplight at the end of town, a police cruiser pulled up next to me. I could feel myself being examined. I didn’t look back at them. When the light turned green I took off, waiting for the siren to come on, already planning where I’d go if I needed to make a break for it. But it didn’t happen.
I rode east. Those same four miles I knew so well. The most important four miles of my life. There were more new houses being built, in a spot that had once been an empty field. Each one bigger than the next, stacked almost on top of each other, using up every inch of land. It was still the same road, though, and I knew exactly where I was going. I could have done it blindfolded.
When I got to her subdivision, I saw a dozen cars parked in the driveway and spilling out onto the street. A party of some sort was going on. Maybe for Amelia? Was I going to walk right into the middle of it? Talk about a surprise party.
I parked my bike on the street, took off my helmet, and went to the front door. I rang the doorbell twice, but nobody came to the door. So I went around back.
There was a pool there now. An honest-to-God in-ground swimming pool in the very spot where I had started digging. There was a white fence around the whole thing. Tables and chairs everywhere. Green tablecloths and flowers. Forty or fifty people all stood around with plastic glasses of white wine. I didn’t recognize anyone.
They started to notice me, one by one. I just stood there. Finally, the back door opened and Mr. Marsh came out, a bottle of wine in each hand. He looked good, I’ll say that much. He was obviously back to his suntanned, king-of-the-world self. He stopped when he realized that everyone was staring at something. He followed the invisible arrow until he finally spotted me. He processed this information for the next two seconds, doing a heroic job of not dropping his wine bottles.
“Michael,” he said. “What are you doing here?”
He handed off the wine bottles and came over to me, turning me by the shoulder and half pushing me back around to the front of the house.
“It’s good to see you,” he said, “but I thought… I mean… how are you?”
Such sincerity, I thought. It brings a tear to my eye.
“We’re having a little party here, as you can see. I finally opened up that second health club. Now I’m working on the third.”
We finally stopped walking when we were in the driveway. Away from the party. Away from anyone who could hear us.
“Listen,” he said, “I know I owe you a lot. I mean, I don’t know if saying thank you is enough. But thank you. Okay? You gave me the chance to get out from under those guys. I got totally paid up and everything’s good now. They’re not going to bother me anymore. Or anybody in my family.”
That might be true, I thought, but for reasons you’d never guess.
“You remember Jerry Slade, right? My old partner? He kinda disappeared off the face of the earth. I never did see him again. Just goes to show you. You gotta stick around and face the music, you know what I mean? Just stay positive until things start to go your way.”
You are so full of shit, I thought. If you weren’t Amelia’s father…
“But I don’t know if you’re supposed to be here, you know? I mean, I don’t know if that’s a good thing, is all I’m saying. But it is great to see you. Don’t get me wrong. I’ll tell Amelia, I promise.”
I pointed up to her window.
“Yes, she’s doing just fine. I’ll be sure to tell her you were here.”
I waited him out. I wasn’t about to leave.
“She’s studying art, just like she always wanted to. Isn’t that great?”
I kept waiting.
“She’s in London, if you can believe it. She absolutely loves it there.”
London…
“I’ll tell her you were here. She calls me every week.”
She’s in London.
“Look, I really should get back to the party. If you ever need anything… I mean anything. You let me know, okay? You take care of yourself.”
He put a hand on my shoulder. Then he went back to his party.
I wasn’t sure what to do then. I stood there in the driveway for a while, looking up at her window. Wondering if her bedroom still looked the same. The garage doors were open, with several large tubs filled with ice. This is where he kept the wine, along with the bottles of water and soda pop and whatever else. I grabbed a bottle of Vernors. I figured he owed me that much. One bottle of cold ginger ale in exchange for saving his life, his home, his business, his family. His old Mercedes was parked there on the other side of the garage. He’d be trading it in for something new, no doubt, as soon as the new health club took off. I was about to turn and leave. Then I noticed the stickers on his back window.
Michigan State University.
And above that… the University of Michigan.
I knew his son Adam the football star was at MSU. And if I remembered right, from all that bragging he had done when I first met him, that was Mr. Marsh’s alma mater, too. So why the hell would he have a University of Michigan sticker on his car?
Only one reason, genius. Although you had to hand it to him. Art school in London. He came up with that one pretty quick.
I couldn’t even blame him.
After all those hard miles to get here, it was only forty more to get to Ann Arbor. A beautiful September afternoon as I headed down to where I thought the center of campus had to be. There were students walking all over the place. Backpacks over their shoulders. Maize and blue T-shirts. Young smiling faces.
I rode down State Street, looking at the buildings. The biggest of all had eight huge columns in front, and right next to that was the art museum. I figured I had to be getting closer, but I didn’t see the art school anywhere. I finally parked and walked around until I found a campus map. It looked like the art school was up on North Campus, a whole separate area of town. I got back on the bike and headed up that way, passing the huge hospital. It looked vaguely familiar now. I must have come down this very road when I was nine years old, to see some supposed expert about getting me to speak again.
There were blue buses running back and forth on the main road. This was how the students must have traveled between the two campuses. I kept going until finally I saw the art building. It was all metal and glass, and in the late afternoon light it was already starting to glow from the inside.
I parked the bike again and walked through the building. The people there, the art students… they didn’t seem to be moving as quickly as the students on the main campus. They were dressed a little better. Hell, they were just flat out a little more attractive and more put together. They wouldn’t make any money when they graduated, but at least they’d have more fun.
This is where I should be, I thought. If everything hadn’t gotten turned inside out. One more year of a regular life, and this would have been me.
I hadn’t planned on everything being quite so big, so I wasn’t sure what to do next. Write her name on a piece of paper? Start showing it around?
No, not yet. I decided to go back outside first, to get on my bike and to keep looking. I went up the hill and found a big dormitory. It seemed to be the only dorm on North Campus, the only dorm anywhere near the art school, so I figured there was a good chance she lived there.
Inside, there were two women at the front desk. They both looked like students themselves. Like maybe this whole town was run by people in their twenties. I went up to them and made a writing motion. They looked at each other, until finally one of them produced a pen and a piece of paper. I wrote down Amelia Marsh with a question mark after it.
The first woman took the paper from me and read it. “Okay, umm…” She looked over at the other woman. “I’m not supposed to do this, but why don’t you go on up and leave a note on her door yourself? Who knows, you might see her.”
She gave me directions to the sixth floor. I walked down the long hallway, passing students on their way to dinner, I assumed. I went up the elevator to the sixth floor. Down the hallway to the room number they had given me. I heard music coming from every open doorway I passed. Finally I got to her door and knocked. Nobody answered.
I sat down right there in the hallway, my back against the hard wall. There was music coming at me from two directions, and I was tired and hungry, and not sure now if this had been a good idea in the first place. Maybe this was the sort of thing you just don’t do to a person. You don’t just show up after a year and expect her not to slap you right across the face. I put my arms across my knees, put my head down on my arms.
The time passed.
“Michael?”
It was Amelia. She looked beautiful. Incredible. Amazing. Of course. She had long black shorts on. A black sleeveless shirt. Black work boots. Her hair was tied up to one side of her head, but otherwise as unruly as ever.
I got to my feet. I stood there in front of her. In the hallway of her dormitory, having not seen her in a full year. Having run away from her without a word.
“I’ve got one question for you,” she finally said.
I prepared myself.
“What the hell did you do to your hair?”
____________________
I sat on her bed. She sat at her desk. I watched her reading my pages. I watched her catching up on the last year of my life. Starting with the day I left her. Riding east. My first job. Ending up in New York City. The horror in that house in Connecticut. Then the long trip west to California, and everything that had happened there.
I hadn’t had the chance to cover the last few days, of course. What had happened with Lucy. Then this trip out to Cleveland to witness three murders, before deciding on the spur of the moment to come up here and find her.
Even so, it was enough.
The tears were running down Amelia’s face as she followed my story. Page by page. This is why I’m here, I thought. This is the whole reason right here. If one person in the world can understand what I’ve been going through. One person who really knows me. That’s all I could ask for.
When she was done, she put the pages together carefully and put them back into the envelope.
“You’re telling me,” she said, wiping her face, “that my father got you into all of this?”
I gave her half a nod. It wasn’t quite so simple, but basically yes.
“You became… a safecracker. That’s why you had to leave.”
Yes.
“Are you going to stop now?”
I didn’t have an answer.
“Why did you agree to do it in the first place?”
I did it for you, I thought. But I don’t want to tell you that.
“You know,” she said, leaning closer to me, “the way you drew some of these pictures… it’s like you really get into this stuff.”
I looked away from her. Out the window at the fading light. What a long day this had already been.
“Michael. Look at me.”
I turned back to her. She gave me a pad of paper and a pen.
“Why did you keep doing this?”
I wrote on the pad. I didn’t have any choice.
She looked from the pad back to my face.
“But… you did. You always did.”
No. I underlined the word.
“There’s more to this…”
I swallowed hard. I closed my eyes.
“This is about what happened to you, isn’t it… when you were a kid.”
I wasn’t surprised at this leap. She was the one person in the world who could have made it.
“I told you everything,” she said. “About my mother killing herself. About what I was going through last summer. Everything.”
I shook my head. This part… This is not why I came here.
“You said we had all this stuff in common, remember? If that’s true, how would I even know that? You still haven’t told me anything.”
I pointed to the papers in her hands. It’s all right there.
She wasn’t buying it.
“What happened to you?” she said. “Are you ever going to tell anybody?”
I didn’t move.
She took a few deep breaths. She took my hand for a moment, then she let go.
“I don’t know why I feel this way about you. Okay? I try not to, because it’s just… it’s just crazy. But I swear to God, I will kick you out of my room and you will never see me again, ever, unless you tell me what the fuck happened to you to make you this way. Right now.”
There were cars passing by under her window. People walking in the evening. Normal people. A thousand of them all around her, playing music, talking, laughing. While I sat there on her bed, with a pad of paper in my lap. I started writing again.
I want to tell you.
“Then go ahead.”
I don’t know how.
“Start with where it happened. Draw me the house.”
I looked at her.
“I’m serious. You were eight years old, right? Isn’t that when it happened? Where did you live?”
I thought about it for a while. Then I put the pad down. I stood up. I went to the door and opened it.
She bit her lip as she watched me.
“Okay, fine,” she said. “Good-bye.”
I stayed there at the door.
“What? What is it?”
I picked up the pad.
Let’s go, I wrote.
“Where are we going?”
I’m going to show you where it happened.
It was getting dark now. It was crazy to be doing this. I had no business taking her where I was about to take her, but I had been on the run so long… I was so tired, and I had already lived through enough in the past few days to last me for the rest of my life. So maybe the fact that I had no idea what I was doing was a good thing just then. Maybe that was exactly what we both needed.
She got on the back of my bike. Just like old times. It felt just as good as ever to have her hands around my waist. We rode out of Ann Arbor, heading due east. I knew where I was going. I had always known. Even though I hadn’t gone anywhere near it in ten years.
I got off the highway, right before it took us into the heart of the city. I wandered in a slow zigzag toward the water. I knew we couldn’t get lost now. All we had to do was keep going until we hit the Detroit River.
It was coming up on midnight when we hit Jefferson Avenue. We turned north. We passed the enormous steel plant on the river. The taste of the smoke and the grit in the air already, punishing us as we got closer and closer. Amelia wrapped her arms tighter around my body.
I kept going. I knew we were close. Then I saw the bridge.
The bridge over the River Rouge.
I looked at the street signs. Just before we got to the bridge, I took that last left turn. The last turn before the river. We were on Victoria Street now. I rolled to a stop.
“Is this it?” she said. The wind was still buzzing in my ears. “Is this really where you lived?”
Now understand, this has nothing to do with the city of River Rouge. Or the people who live there or the businesses or the streets or the river itself. It is a place like any other place, where you grow up and you go to school and you make your stand against the world. If you go to this particular street, though, you’ll be just as amazed as Amelia was when we got off the bike and looked around and breathed that air.
There are six houses on the southern side of Victoria Street. On the northern side is the plant where they make wallboard, a city unto itself of brick and steel, of pipes and smokestacks and water towers and huge mounds of gypsum.
“Is the air always like this?”
Amelia covered her mouth with her hand. Besides the gypsum, there was the salt from the salt plant just up the river, the coke and the slag from the two iron plants. Not to mention whatever came out of the wastewater plant. Or from the storm drains, whenever it rained.
“Which house did you live in?”
I walked down to the street and stopped in front of the house. She followed me. It was a simple one-story house. Inside, a small living room, a small kitchen. Three bedrooms. One bathroom. An unfinished basement. At least that’s what I remembered. I lived here from the time I was born until that day in June of 1990. Kindergarten, first grade, second grade. Playing outside in the tiny backyard on those days when the air wasn’t too bad. Inside on all the other days.
As I looked at the house, I knew it was empty. I knew it had been empty for ten years. Nobody would buy this house. Nobody would live inside these walls. Never mind the air or the industrial blight across the street. You wouldn’t go into this house for one second if you knew what had happened here.
And everybody knew. Everybody.
The whole street looked abandoned. I opened up one of my luggage bags and grabbed a flashlight. Then I took Amelia by the hand and led her up the two front steps to the door. I tried the knob. It didn’t turn. I got out my tools and started in on the lock.
“What are you doing?”
It didn’t take long. Less than a minute. I turned the knob and pushed the door in. I took her hand again and led her inside.
The first thing that hit me was how cold it was. Even after a warm September day, the unnatural chill in this place… the lights from the plant came streaming in through every window, so it wasn’t that dark, but still I felt myself wanting to reach for a light switch. To fill the place with a warmer light than this pale glow that made everything look like it was underwater.
Amelia didn’t say anything. She followed me as I walked through the living room, our footsteps creaking on the wooden floors. There was no carpet. I remembered that. Other things coming back to me, like where the television was. Where the couch was that my mother would sit on while I was on the floor, watching cartoons.
We went into the kitchen. The tile had curled up in places. The old appliances were still in place.
“Why is this house still here?” she said. “Why haven’t they torn it down?”
Yes, I thought. Tear it down. Burn the lumber and everything else that will burn. Take the ashes and bury them in the ground.
I led her back out, through the living room to the hallway, where it got much darker. She gripped my hand tighter, and I took her past the bathroom, past the master bedroom, past my own bedroom from way back when. To the extra room at the very back of the house.
This door was closed. I pushed it open.
It was empty. There was still a roller blind on the window. I went to open it and the whole thing fell off the window with a crash.
“Okay, I’m getting a little nervous in here.” Her voice was small in the middle of this emptiness.
I looked along the floor for the faint indentations in the wood. Four of them. They were centered against the back wall.
I took out my pad of paper and my pen. I started to write, holding the pad up to the dim moonlight that came in through the window. Then I put the pad back in my pocket. There was no way I could do this and make her understand what it felt like. This whole trip was a horrible mistake.
“So show me,” she said. “I want to see what happened.”
I shook my head.
“There’s a reason we’re here. Show me.”
I took out the pad again. I started to draw a picture. But I didn’t have room on the pad. How could I do this on a stupid little pad of paper? I ended up throwing it against the wall.
That’s when I got the idea.
It was plaster, with a simple coat of off-white paint. It had always been that way. No bright colors for this house. No wallpaper.
I turned on the flashlight. I went to the wall, and I started drawing with my pen. Amelia came over to me and watched over my shoulder. I drew a picture of a little boy reading a comic book in a living room. I drew a woman smoking a cigarette and watching television. My mother. On the couch next to her… this was the tricky part. A man with a drink in his hand. But not the father. How do you make that clear? This man is not the father.
“Michael, do you have stuff out on your bike? Pens? Pencils?”
I nodded.
“I’ll be right back.”
What? You’re going to leave me here?
“It’ll only take a second. You keep doing what you’re doing.”
She left the room. I heard her footsteps, and I felt the air shift as she opened the front door. It was just me and the ghosts for a long minute or two. I fought off the feeling that I was trapped here forever now. That the door was locked and she’d never come back.
Then the door opened again, and she reappeared in the room. She was carrying my wooden art box. Everything I’d need to do this for real.
Especially if she helped me.
When I finished the first panel, she came behind me and started filling in some of the details. The second panel went a lot faster. I just sketched in the general idea, and then she finished it while I went on to the third.
That’s how we did it. That’s how I finally told her this story. On this one September night, in this half-dark empty room, me and Amelia together again, filling up the walls.
June 17, 1990. Father’s Day. This is the day that happened then and is still happening. This is the day that lives outside of time.
I am sitting on the floor of the living room, reading a comic book. My mother is on the couch, smoking a cigarette. The man I call Mr. X is sitting on the couch next to her. He is not my father, but even though it is Father’s Day, there he is on the couch with my mother.
His last name really does start with the letter X, but it’s a name I can never quite remember. Xeno? Xenus? Something like that. Anyway, that’s why he is Mr. X.
He’s been coming around a lot lately. I don’t mind too much because for the most part he treats me okay. He brings me lots of comic books, for one thing. The very comic book I am reading on this day had come from him. From the little suitcase that he brings with him sometimes. He buys the comic books and he gives them to me and then sometimes he goes into the bedroom with my mother while I am reading them.
I am eight years old, but I am not a dummy. I know the comic books are a way to keep me occupied. I play along because, hey, what can I do to stop them? They’re going to do what they’re going to do, and at least this way I’m getting comic books!
I remember I used to see my father on weekends sometimes. Back when I was five or six years old. We’d go to Tiger games and movies, and I believe one time we went on a big steamboat on the Detroit River even though it rained all day. Then he disappeared for what seemed like forever to me. Even when he was away, my mother would still get phone calls from him. She’d send me out of the room while she talked to him. Then she’d go outside and sit on the steps and smoke a cigarette.
She works at one of the plants down the river. Mr. X is actually her boss, I believe. The first time he came over, they went out and I got stuck with a babysitter all night, but then after that he started coming to the house and staying longer and longer. That’s when he started bringing the comic books.
So Father’s Day. Here we are, all sitting there in the room, when we all hear a noise at the front door. My mother gets up and looks out the little window, but she doesn’t see anybody. Before she comes back to the couch, she hooks that little chain on the door. That little chain with the knob that fits into that little slidey hole thing. No matter how old I am, I realize that a little chain like that is not going to stop somebody if that somebody really wants to get into the house. Not that anyone would want to. But if.
There is a back door in the kitchen, leading out into the tiny yard with the wooden fence around it. So there are two doors plus seven windows, which I know because I have counted them, plus the one tiny door on the side of the house from a long time ago when the milkman used to come. That was before I was born, but we did use that door the one time we got locked out of the house. I was just small enough back then to fit through it.
But that back door. That’s the door my father came in. Who I haven’t seen in two years. All of a sudden, it isn’t just my mother and Mr. X on the couch watching television while I sit on the floor reading my comic book. It’s my mother and Mr. X on the couch watching television while I sit on the floor reading my comic book and my father standing there in the doorway like it’s the most perfectly natural thing in the world, leaning against one wall with his feet crossed and saying, “So what are we all watching, huh?”
Mr. X gets up first and my father hits him across the face with something. It’s a rolling pin, which he’s picked up from the kitchen. Mr. X bends over with his hands on his head, and my father kicks him right in the face with his boot. My mother is screaming now and trying to get off the couch and getting tangled up with the legs of the coffee table while I keep sitting there the whole time watching everything happen. My father hits Mr. X in the head again, and then he goes after my mother, who is trying to get the front door open now except she can’t because of that stupid little chain.
Then he spins her around a few times like they’re dancing, and my father asks her if she missed him. She’s trying to hit him and she’s screaming and finally she claws him right in the face. He pushes her down right next to me. Mr. X is trying to get up now, so my father picks up the rolling pin and hits him in the head again. And again and again and again and again. The sound of that wooden rolling pin hitting his head makes me think of one thing, which is the sound of a bat hitting a baseball.
My mother is screaming at him to stop, so he throws the rolling pin at the television. It hits the screen and knocks out one half of it while the other half goes black. Then while my mother is trying to crawl away, my father gets down on his knees and he comes over to me finally.
My mother is begging him to leave me alone, but all my father does is he takes my comic book from me and he looks at it.
“I’m not going to hurt our son,” he says. “How could you even think that?”
Then he hits her across the face with the back of his hand.
“Go in the bedroom,” he says to me, his voice dropping into a gentle tone. “Go ahead. It’ll be all right. I promise.”
I don’t want to move for one simple reason, and that is because I have pissed all over myself and I don’t want him to see the puddle on the floor.
“Go ahead,” he says. “Go. Right now.”
So I finally get up, puddle or no puddle. I go to the bedroom, and when I look back my father is taking his shirt off and my mother is crying and trying to get away. I go into my room and I try to open up my window, one of the seven windows in the house, but it has this lock on the top that is jammed tight and I can’t move it one little bit. My pants are all wet and I want to change but I can’t remember which drawer my pants are in and it doesn’t even occur to me that I could just start opening them until I find the right one. I can’t think straight at all. Not with those sounds coming from the living room.
There is a pile of comic books in my room and a desk with a pad on it where I had been trying to draw pictures of superheroes and a single bookshelf with my books on it, plus a trophy on top of that from T-ball, which I pick up now, thinking this might be something I could use because it would really hurt if it hit you on the head.
I open up the door to my bedroom, cracking it open the way I do at night when I’m supposed to be in bed but I want to see what’s on television. But of course now the television is half gone and all I can see is what my father is doing to my mother in the living room. I could draw an exact picture but it still wouldn’t make any sense, the way she’s bent over the coffee table with her hair hanging to the floor and the way my father is behind her with his pants off, moving his hips against the back of her again and again.
He doesn’t see me coming out of the room with my T-ball trophy in my right hand, getting closer and closer until I can see what he has done to Mr. X’s body. How he’s taken Mr. X’s pants off just like he’s taken his own pants off except there’s blood all over Mr. X’s legs because he has cut off or pulled off or whatever else he has done to Mr. X’s private areas, as my mother calls it when I’m in the bathtub.
I run back down the hallway except this time I go into the spare bedroom where we keep my old bed I’ve grown out of, plus the old gun safe that used to be my father’s but was too heavy to get out of the house.
I am not allowed to open that safe or even touch it under any circumstances, my mother has said more than once. There’s something about the bolts in the door that are extra dangerous. Because they have springs in them that automatically lock when you close the door. But today seems like good circumstances to me all of a sudden after what I’ve just seen, and I don’t want my father to do to me what he’s done to Mr. X, so I pull the safe door open and I get inside. It’s empty now, of course, because my father doesn’t live here and he doesn’t have any guns or anything else to put in it, so I have just enough room if I sit cross-legged. Then I pull the door closed.
That’s when I realize that there is no handle on the inside. I can’t get back out even if I want to. Not without somebody on the outside spinning the right combination. I start to wonder if I really will suffocate or how I’ll even know if I am. I remember all those times when I’d be under my blanket and the air would get heavy until I stuck my nose out and the air would be so cool and delicious. It starts to feel like that, the heavy part I mean, but then I notice that there’s a thin line of light on the side of the door where the hinges are and if I put my nose up to it I can almost smell the fresh air.
So I stay in there with my legs crossed and my nose up against the side of the door. I can’t hear what’s going on outside the safe very well, but I know one thing for sure. As much as I’ve ever known anything in my whole life. I have to be quiet.
Waiting.
Waiting.
Waiting.
Until I finally hear the footsteps. Into the room. Then out. Then into the room again. My father’s voice.
“Michael?”
Then farther away. Then closer.
Then right next to the safe.
“Michael? Are you in there?”
I must be quiet.
“Michael? Seriously, did you go inside there? You know you shouldn’t be in there.”
Quiet, quiet. Not a sound.
I feel the safe being tipped over a few inches.
“Michael! Come on! You didn’t really go in there, did you? You’re gonna die in there! There’s no air!”
I feel the warmth spreading in my pants again.
“Michael, open the door, okay? You’ve got to open it.”
I can hear the dial being spun now.
“I don’t remember the combination! You have to open it!”
More spinning. Such a simple idea. If those three numbers come into his head, he will spin those numbers and the door will open.
“What was it? Fuck! It was two years ago! How am I supposed to remember?”
A hand slamming down on the top of the safe. I stop myself from crying out. Nothing. Not a sound.
“Listen to me. You have to open this thing right now. Just reach up and turn that handle. You have to do this, right now!”
Be quiet. Be quiet.
“Come on, Michael. Turn that handle.”
There is no handle.
“I promise you, it won’t hurt. Okay, buddy? I swear to God. It won’t hurt. Just come out and we’ll do this together, okay? You and me.”
Be quiet.
“Come on, Mike. I can’t do this by myself. You have to come with me, okay?”
There is no handle. Be quiet. There is no handle.
“It’ll be so quick. You won’t even feel it. I swear to you. I cross my heart and hope to die. I want us both to be together when we do this. Okay?”
I keep my nose against the edge of the door, but I’m getting dizzy.
I hear my father crying. Then I hear him go away. At last. At last he’s gone.
The relief and the panic all at once. He’s gone but now I’m going to be in here forever.
Then the footsteps again. A crinkling noise, all around me. The light getting dim.
“We’ll go out together,” he says. “I’m right here with you. I wish I could see you one more time. It’s okay. Don’t be afraid. We’ll go out together.”
The air getting thinner and thinner. My mind starting to shut down. A pinhole of light, at the bottom of the safe. Whatever he has wrapped around it, he isn’t covering the whole thing. He’s trying to cut off my air but…
Everything’s black for a while. I think. I’m out and then I come back. I can hear his breathing.
“Are you still there, Michael? Are you still with me?”
That’s when I feel the whole world tilting. I hear the steady squeak of the wheels underneath me. The rumbling across that wooden floor. Down the steps. Whump whump whump. A fresh blast of air through that crack along the safe’s door. Waking me up. We are outside now. We are on the sidewalk. Hitting every crack. Bump bump bump. Onto the smooth road. A car passing by us, honking its horn. Then the motion of the safe almost stopping. I can hear my father laboring outside now, fighting for every inch. We must be on rough ground. The dirt and weeds and gravel beside the road. Where are we going? We can’t be going toward the river. We can’t be.
A few more feet. Then we stop.
“You and me, Michael. You hear me in there? You and me. Forever.”
Then the fall. The impact, slamming me against one side of the safe. The sudden darkness.
Then the water, seeping in through the crack. It’s cold. It fills up the safe, one inch at a time. It’s squeezing out the rest of my air.
The seconds ticking away. I feel the water covering my face.
I can’t breathe. I am cold and I am dying.
I can’t breathe.
I close my eyes and wait.
I finished the last panel. Amelia was right behind me, darkening the lines and making everything stand out as if we had burned it into the wall. For the second time that night, the tears were running down her face.
We stood back and looked over what we had done. The panels started in the room where the safe had been. They wrapped around three walls and out into the hallway. They continued into the living room and finished on the wall opposite the front door, right where the couch had been. The last panel was the biggest of all. A complete underwater panorama, with the trash collected there on the bottom of the river. An old tire. A cinder block. A bottle. A piece of lumber with the nails still in it. The stringy weeds pushing up through the debris and swaying with the current.
In the middle of everything, tilted slightly with one corner submerged in the sand, the great iron box. Sunken. Abandoned. Never to be brought back to the surface again.
That was it. That was the very last panel.
“Why does it stop here?” she said. “They got you out. They saved you.”
I understood what she meant. In the reality she was thinking about… yes, they got me out. It was a cheap safe, after all. That’s why the door didn’t quite seal shut, and why I was able to keep breathing, at least until I was in the water. That’s why the men who pulled the safe from the river were able to open it. With a big crowbar? With the Jaws of Life? I didn’t know. I wasn’t awake to see that part. It didn’t really matter. In my own mind, the safe was and always would be at the bottom of the river. With me locked inside forever. That was the only real part for me. As real as anything had ever been real.
“You’re not in that box anymore,” she said, wiping her cheeks. “You’re free now. You can leave the box here.”
I looked at her.
“Now that you’ve done this. Can’t you leave it all right here in this house?”
If only it were that easy.
She kissed me, in that room where the worst parts of that day had begun. She kissed me and she held me tight. We both sat down on the floor and stayed there for a long time. Just the two of us in that house.
When I opened my eyes again… it was so late. Past the middle of the night. We had been here in this house so long. We collected our things. We went outside and got on my bike. Then I took her back to Ann Arbor.
As we left, I knew that if anyone else ever dared to come inside this house, they would see this story. They would know exactly what had happened here.
____________________
When we were stopped in front of her dormitory, she got off the bike and stood there next to me for a long time, not saying anything. She reached into her shirt and pulled out a necklace. It was strung through the ring I had given her, a year ago.
“I still have this,” she said. “I wear this every day.”
I wanted to say something so badly. I wanted to open my mouth and talk to her.
“When you left… I tried not to care about you anymore. I really did.”
She kissed me.
“I know we can’t be together right now. So just…”
She stopped. She looked up at the stars.
“I can’t do it. I can’t just let you ride away again.”
I reached back into my bag for a pad of paper. I took out a pen and wrote two sentences for her. The two most important sentences I’d ever written for anyone.
I will find a way to come back. I promise.
She took the paper from me. She read it. Then she folded it up and put it in her pocket. Whether she believed it or not… well, I wouldn’t have blamed her if she didn’t. But I did. I knew I’d find a way back. Or die trying.
“You know where to find me now.”
She turned to go inside. As I rode away, I hoped to God that it would always be true.
It was another long trip, all the way back to Los Angeles.
I started out slow, but halfway there, the decision came to me. As crazy as it sounded… as desperate and hopeless… I knew it might be my last chance to be free.
I’m going to do this, I told myself. No matter what, I’m going to try.
For the last thousand miles, I was flying.