chapter FOUR
The front door was locked, so I went around to the back porch off the kitchen and tried the sliding glass door. It opened, and I poked my head in. A light over the sink glowed weakly, but it was enough to see by. The house was quiet. Everyone seemed to be asleep, but I didn’t want to stick around the kitchen long enough to find out. I had to find Chris’s room and just pray no one else shared it.
I stepped in and slid the door shut behind me as quietly as I could. The first thing that struck me was the smell. It was the smell of a human home—a heavy mix of foods, soaps and cleaners, cigarette smoke, and body odor. And there was something else.
A sudden jingling noise startled me. I froze with my back against the door, and a second later the source of that strange odor appeared as a dark shape glided into the kitchen. The next thing I knew, I was face-to-face with a black dog. A big black dog. Seeing me, it pranced forward, wagging its tail in welcome, then stopped three feet away, its entire body stiffening. Dogs—they’re just like doppelgangers. They can tell who’s human and who’s not. They can smell it.
The last time I was this close to a dog was when I’d had that little puppy my mother brought home. I still remember her taking its limp form from my hands and pitching it into the woods. I’d looked for the body the next morning, but it was gone.
I bent down on one knee and reached out to pet the dog, wondering if it was Chris’s or if it belonged to the whole family.
“Hey, boy. How ya doin’?” I said. I didn’t know if it was actually a boy or not, but that’s what people always say on TV.
The dog cocked its head at the sound of Chris’s voice. Then its hackles raised. The poor thing was so confused, it didn’t know whether to attack or jump up and start licking me. After a few seconds, it just gave up and slunk away, giving me one last skeptical glance before disappearing.
I went from the kitchen into a hallway. The living room opened out to my right, while the hall continued to my left with doorways on both sides. The little bit of light from the kitchen revealed a set of photos on the wall, and I paused to meet my new family. I found Chris in one of the pictures—looking a few years younger, dressed in a baseball uniform, smiling, with a bat over his shoulder. Beside it was a family portrait. Just what I was hoping for. There was Chris, flanked by a man and a woman on one side and a girl who appeared a good deal younger than him on the other. They all resembled each other—two parents, two kids, one big happy family. At least, that’s what it looked like.
I headed down the hall and passed the open door of a bathroom with a closed door directly across from it. Beyond them, at the end of the hall, were two more doorways. I went to the end of the hall and tried the door on my left, opening it a hair and putting my eye up to the crack. I could make out a double bed with two people sleeping in it. One of them stirred. I shut the door as quickly as I could.
I heard the bed creak on the other side of the door, followed by footsteps. Without thinking, I opened the door behind me, ducked inside, and pulled it closed. I spotted an empty bed and jumped in, throwing the sheets over me and praying nobody would come in.
It wasn’t so much that I was afraid of getting in trouble. I just didn’t want to talk to anybody right then. I was still pretty rattled from everything that had happened and wanted some time to settle down and ease into my new life. Get a lay of the land.
For a whole minute, I waited in bed, facing the wall as my heart pounded in my ears. Suddenly a toilet flushed, and I breathed a sigh of relief. A moment later the door opened and a slit of hallway light flashed upon the wall before me. I froze, resisting the urge to turn and see who was watching me, focusing instead on the shadow my head cast against the wall. Finally the door closed.
I waited until I couldn’t feel my pulse throb anymore before slipping out of bed and switching on the desk lamp. Chris’s room was pretty spare, almost as bad as mine had been at the cabin. At least I’d had an excuse—I was pretty much a shut-in. Chris might as well have been. I looked around at the mostly bare walls, trying to get a sense of things, and guessed there wasn’t too much to this kid. It didn’t appear that he had many hobbies or special skills I was going to have to deal with. That’s one of my recurring nightmares, by the way—I take on a form only to discover that the person is, like, a master bagpipe player or something ridiculous like that. As far as Chris was concerned, there was sports—football, basically—and that seemed to be it. All to the good, I thought—it was going to make my life simple.
There were a couple things on the wall—an AC/DC poster, another of some sports star—but not much else. No real toys that I could see, aside from a football on top of the bureau next to a piggy bank. There was a stereo with maybe a dozen or so CDs in beat-up jewel cases. And then there was the TV—a nice one, bigger than the one I used to have. I went over and flipped it on, turning down the volume until I could barely hear it. It was incredible—the image so sharp, the colors like real life. And the channels. My old set had had an antenna that picked up four, sometimes five, channels with varying degrees of success, depending on the weather, my patience for fiddling around with it, or the mood it was in. This TV had channel after clear channel. And there were channels just for news, sports, food, all kinds of different things.
I plopped myself down on the floor and settled in for a good hour or two of TV time. I had a bit of catching up to do, and it helped take my mind off all the night’s ugliness. After a while, though, I started getting sleepy, so I grabbed the remote, got up, and went back over to the bed. I was about to get in when I noticed the sheets.
Race cars. Chris had race car sheets. It struck me as a little funny at first, and then sad as the memory of what had happened around the fire came back to me. I tried to imagine that same drinking, swearing, screaming boy coming home and curling up in his race car sheets to go to sleep.
But not tonight. Not any night, not anymore. Instead it was me who was curling up with the race cars. Chris was out there in a musty old culvert, by now as cold as the plastic he was wrapped in, not even able to see the sky. And I was the one who had put him there.
I picked up the remote and flipped around until I came to a rerun of Gilligan’s Island. It seems like there’s always Gilligan’s Island playing on some station. Even growing up with only four decent channels, I was able to see it pretty regularly. As a little kid, I didn’t like the show. I felt scared for the castaways—lost, confined to an island with not much to live on. But to them everything was a big joke. It irritated me that I had to worry for them. Oh sure, they wanted to go home, but when every episode ended with them yukking it up, how serious could they be? As I got older, I lightened up. I figured maybe they were on to something. Maybe sometimes, to survive, you just have to make the best of what you’ve got.
“Chris, it’s time to get up.”
I opened my eyes to see Chris’s mother standing over me in a pink bathrobe. She didn’t look as good in real life—her eyes drooped with dark circles, her brown hair was going in all different directions, and her skin seemed pale and gray. Almost like a doppelganger’s.
She walked over and turned off the television set.
“What were you doing watching TV?” she asked. She seemed pretty annoyed.
“I got up in the night,” I said. “I was having trouble sleeping.”
“Well, you got over it pretty well. It took me three tries to wake you.”
“Sorry.”
“Anyway, you better get up. Your father’s already in the shower, so you’ll have to wait. You’re going to be late. Again. And this time I’m not going to write a note for you.”
“I can’t go to school,” I said. I almost added “Mom.” I wasn’t sure what to call her—Mom, Mother, Ma?
“What’s the matter this time?” she said, frowning.
“I don’t feel good,” I said. “I’m sick. My stomach really hurts.” It wasn’t true, but I knew as soon as I opened my eyes this morning that there was no way I could leave the house today. I needed more time.
She came over and felt my forehead.
“You don’t have a fever.” She grabbed my chin. “You got in late last night. Were you drinking?”
“No!” I exclaimed. It wasn’t a lie—not really, anyway. “I just have a stomachache. Please let me stay home today?”
“Fine.” She sighed and turned away. “I don’t care, anyway. I’ve got to be at work in an hour.” She paused in the doorway. “But you’re telling your father. Not me.”
“Okay,” I said.
She frowned again. “You must be sick after all,” she said, and disappeared.
I lay back in bed and looked up at the ceiling, trying to decide how that had gone. She didn’t seem to suspect anything, other than some questionable activity on the real Chris’s part. Fair enough.
“What the hell are you still doing in bed?” barked a voice so loud I nearly jumped out of my skin—literally. I looked over. This time it was the man from the picture standing over me, wearing nothing but a towel around his waist. Like Chris’s mother, he didn’t look so hot compared with the picture. He’d just gotten out of the shower, so his black hair was all messed up, and there was a trickle of blood running down his neck from where he’d cut himself shaving. Whereas Mrs. Parker had just seemed annoyed, Mr. Parker seemed mad as hell.
“I don’t feel good,” I croaked, trying to sound as sick as possible.
“Big deal,” he said. “I feel like crap every morning, but I still get up and go to work.”
“I can’t go to school today. I really can’t.”
“But you felt good enough to go out last night and get drunk. And don’t bullshit me, either. I know when you got in.”
Now I knew where Chris had gotten his scintillating personality.
I figured there was no point arguing, so I just shut up and waited for him to decide what to do. As he stood there glaring, a girl dressed in school clothes appeared behind him in the doorway, looking in at me with quiet eyes. It was the sister.
“What’s the matter with him?” she asked. Her voice was subdued, almost a monotone. There was something about her that creeped me out. I don’t know what it was. I just wanted her to go away.
“Little baby says he’s sick,” Chris’s father said.
“I’m sick, too,” the sister replied.
“No you’re not, Echo,” he said, whirling around. “Now get your ass back in that kitchen and finish your breakfast before the bus comes.”
Echo jumped and disappeared down the hall. Chris’s father turned back and eyed me one last time.
“You’d better not leave the house today. I’ll know it if you do, believe me. In fact, don’t even get out of your goddam bed until I get home.”
I shrank back and looked away.
I could feel him staring at me for a moment, like he was waiting for me to challenge him. When I didn’t say anything, he turned and left, slamming the door behind him.
I sat up in bed shaking, trying to understand what had happened. I mean, this guy was even worse than Chris. My mother may have been cold, but even on her worst day, she had never gotten in my face. Then again, I’d never had a father before. Maybe they’re all like that, I thought.
I waited in my room, listening to the Parkers as they dressed, ate breakfast, bickered, and hollered. Then one by one they left. Dad was the last to go. He stuck his head in one last time before heading out the door.
“And no TV,” he snapped.
“Yeah, right,” I said after the door shut.
From my bedroom window, I watched as Chris’s father backed the car out into the street. Then he was gone. I had the place to myself.
I spent the rest of the day poking around, trying to learn as much as I could about my new home. Trying to forget how I’d gotten there to begin with. It wasn’t easy, on either end.
I opened all of Chris’s drawers, hoping to stumble across a journal or diary, something to help me get a better sense of who this kid was. I came up empty. Searching his closet yielded nothing but a collection of porno mags hidden under a stack of sweaters. I admit I spent a bit of time poring over those.
There was nothing else of interest until I looked underneath Chris’s mattress. There she was again. This time, instead of being scratched and jammed between the folds of a wallet, she was tucked inside a birthday card, smiling out of a glossy photo with trees and hills in the background. Amber was even more beautiful in the daylight.
I glanced at the card. There was that same handwriting from the back of the wallet photo—a loopy stream of letters. I read the note, dated last April. It was six months old.
Hey Chris,
Happy Sixteenth Birthday. You took this picture, remember? Our first picnic together. It was so perfect. Why don’t we do it again? Pretty soon school will be out. No more stupid practice. We can go to the lake and to the fair, okay? Things haven’t always been perfect, but I forgive you, even though you’re a jerk sometimes.
Love, Amber
It was nice. I put the picture up on the windowsill and slipped the card back under the mattress. Then I took it back out and read the card again, trying to imagine what her voice sounded like.
I went through the rest of the house. It may not have been as big as most of the other places on the street, but it was bigger than the cabin I grew up in, and it took a while to go through all the rooms, especially since I had to be careful to put everything back exactly as I found it.
Echo’s bedroom was across from the bathroom. Unlike Chris’s bare room, it was full of all kinds of strange stuff. Dolls, toy ponies, snow globes, costumes—I went over everything, touching each object, picking things up, then putting them back. A few of the toys were familiar—I’d seen commercials for them on Saturday mornings in between the cartoons, but it was different seeing them in real life. Scattered across the floor or lying still upon the shelves, they seemed smaller, almost dead somehow.
The strangest thing in the room, though, was the frog. There was a terrarium in the corner of her room with a big green frog in it. It seemed like a funny thing for a girl to have. I went over and knocked on its glass, but the thing never moved from its rock in the corner of the glass cage. It just blinked its eyes a few times and that was it.
The parents’ room was dark with the shades drawn, so that I had to turn on the overhead light to see. The first thing I noticed was a picture of Elvis on the wall above the bed—I recognized him right away in his rhinestone suit and flower necklaces. There were a few bottles of perfume on the bureau beside a cardboard box of jewelry and some photographs, including one that lay facedown. I picked it up to see what was in the frame—a wedding picture—and noticed the dark rectangle underneath where there wasn’t any dust. I put the photo back down on its face and moved on.
It was while poking through the father’s underwear drawer that I found the gun. If he was trying to hide it, he hadn’t done a very good job. The pistol was wedged against one side, held in place with a pile of boxers, and I spotted it as soon as I opened the drawer. I pulled it out and studied it. I was pretty excited. I’d seen all kinds of guns on TV before, and now here was one in real life. I remember being surprised at how heavy it was. And at the smell—that strange mix of metal, oil, and powder. After fiddling with it awhile, I managed to get the clip out. No bullets.
The living room was plain: TV against the far wall. No books to speak of. A desk in the corner stacked with bills and other papers. I noticed some burn marks on the plaid couch, and there was a pile of newspapers and a dirty ashtray on top a frail-looking coffee table. The dog lay curled up on a gray comforter like it was just another piece of furniture, watching me out of the corner of its eye.
“Just you and me today,” I said to it.
The dog sort of sniffed and looked away.
“Come on,” I said, “don’t be that way.”
I went over to pet it, but as I drew closer, its ears flattened, its eyes flicked up toward me, and the lowest murmur rumbled in its throat. Not quite a growl, but I decided not to take any chances.
“Another time then,” I said, backing away.
I found out later that the dog’s name was Poppy. Old Poppy never did warm up to me. Maybe he knew what I’d done.
I turned to the desk and looked through some of the papers, mostly money stuff—bills, a few paycheck stubs, things like that. I learned that Chris’s father’s name was Barry and that he worked at a plumbing supply store. The mother’s name was Sheila. She worked at Wal-Mart.
The only part of the house I hadn’t explored yet was the basement. I found the door to it in the kitchen and headed down the wobbly steps. The heavy odor of concrete filled the space, and the two naked bulbs at either end cast a feeble light. The air seemed thick. There was the furnace and water heater in one corner. A freezer chest, washing machine, and dryer in the other. The third corner was full of messily stacked boxes and bins. I didn’t feel like going through them. Later, I thought.
The fourth corner was blocked off by a pair of sheets hanging from a clothesline nailed to the joists. I poked my head in and saw a tiny table with chairs around it. Some of the chairs had stuffed rabbits and bears in them, a few were empty. There was a little lamp in the corner next to a toy carriage and beside the carriage was a box full of toy tractors, dump trucks, bulldozers, and cars. I turned on the lamp and looked through the box. The toys inside were all pretty beat up, but neatly arranged. In fact, the whole corner was tidy, with everything, even the chairs, symmetrically ordered. There were some pictures on the wall that I guessed Echo had drawn. They were cute—pictures of her stuffed bears and her frog, all playing in a field with the sun shining down, a big yellow circle spiked with orange. Other scenes were at night, with the bears dancing beneath the moon. The whole thing was kind of weird, but so far it was my favorite place in the entire house.
I turned the lamp off and headed upstairs. All in all, I wasn’t sure what to make of the Parkers’ house. I’d seen plenty of family homes on TV, especially in the sitcoms, but this was different. It wasn’t so much the clutter, or even the smells all stirring together. There was a dingy feeling about the place, as if a layer of some kind of poisonous dust had fallen over everything in the house: invisible, but palpable. I don’t know what I’d been expecting, but somehow the whole place seemed less real than the homes I’d gotten to know on all my favorite shows.
I went back to Chris’s room for some daytime TV. Gilligan’s Island was on (of course), but I didn’t watch it. There was a football game on one of the sports channels, so I watched that instead. I decided I should bone up. Who knew what position Chris might play? It felt good to study the game, to take note of what all the players were doing. I was getting a grip, taking control. I could do this.
At halftime I flicked to a local channel in time to catch the news flash. The caption in big letters along the top—“Body Found”—made my heart start to pound. The anchor was talking, and beneath the caption was a box showing footage of police carrying a blanketed stretcher. I turned up the volume and listened.
“…today recovered the remains of twenty-six-year-old Jill Vitelli, last seen on Friday. Her body was discovered this morning outside of Springfield by a fisherman along the banks of the Killmartin River. There is no word yet on whether foul play was involved, but local police have begun an investigation. Channel Six News has learned that Vitelli’s car, a 1998 white Subaru Legacy, is currently missing, though police at this time have not officially confirmed this. We will, of course, follow up on this breaking story at the six o’clock hour. Now, back to One Life to Live.”
I lay back and breathed a sigh of relief. Springfield was a ways away from here—the train had brought me through there a few days ago. I flicked back to where the game had restarted, but I just couldn’t pay attention. The news still had me rattled. I suddenly thought of my mother. An image of her driving down the road in a Subaru flashed through my head, and I wondered where she was now, what she looked like.
I heard a noise outside and looked out the window to see a big yellow school bus pull up to the curb across the street. A minute later it drove away, leaving behind a whole crowd of kids. I spotted Echo in the group. She was talking to a few other girls as the others dispersed. Pretty soon it was just Echo and another girl, and then that girl left and Echo was all alone. She poked around on the sidewalk for a few minutes, looking smaller now, with her black jacket tucked under her arm. Finally she crossed the street and let herself into the house, coming in through the back door like I’d done last night.
I turned the TV’s volume down and listened to Echo bustle around in the kitchen. Part of me wanted to go out there and talk to her, maybe feel her out a little bit. What kind of brother was I? How was I supposed to treat her? What did she call our parents? What did she think of them? But I held back and closed the door instead.
A half hour later, there was a knock. I could hear Echo call my name, but I just got into bed and pulled the sheets over my head until she went away.
I know. I’m a real coward sometimes, but there was still something about Echo that bothered me. The image from this morning of her standing in the doorway came back into my head, and I suddenly realized what it was. It was that girl, the one I’d seen on TV back when I was Echo’s age, the one whose form my mother had taken on, whose schoolbooks became my schoolbooks for the next year. Echo looked just like her—not so much the face, but the hair and the clothes, the backpack. It was all so familiar. Those parents probably never found their daughter, just like at some point Echo’s brother would disappear and she and her parents would never find him. It was only a matter of time. And I was the only one who knew it.
Of course, my mother would have a different take. “You’re overthinking things,” she’d probably say. “Just become the form. Forget about your own miserable self for once.”
And she would probably be right.
Later that evening Echo knocked, then poked her head in. I hit the mute button.
“Supper’s ready,” she said. “Mom told me to get you. She made yellow meal.”
“Okay,” I said, wondering what “yellow meal” was. I got out of bed and followed Echo down the hall.
“Yellow meal” turned out to be frozen fish patties heated in the oven, Kraft macaroni and cheese, and canned corn. Apparently it was my favorite. To be honest, it was pretty good, if a bit monochromatic, and I was hungry, too, having eaten only half a can of beans in the last two days. Still, I was supposed to be sick, so I poked the food around the plate a bit at first. I figured sick people weren’t supposed to seem too eager.
“Still not feeling great, huh?” Sheila asked, watching me. “By now you’ve usually inhaled your first plate and reloaded for seconds.”
Before I could answer, she turned and hollered into the living room.
“Barry, get in here! Your supper’s getting cold!”
A minute later Barry came in, the smoke from the last drag of his cigarette still trailing from his nostrils. He swigged the remnants of his beer and set it down next to the two other empty cans on the counter.
“You left the TV on, Dad,” Echo said. Barry turned to her but didn’t say anything, and after a second Echo looked down at her food.
“How was work?” Sheila asked.
“A bitch. Big delivery in the morning, then a bunch of pipes broke at the hospital and I had guys coming in all afternoon looking for this and that. I told Mitch, another day like that and he could find himself a new manager.”
“Careful,” she said, “he might take you up on it.”
“Funny, Sheila,” he said. “He knows he could never make it without me there to run things for him.”
“I suppose,” she replied.
“No supposing,” he said.
Then nobody said a word. We all just ate, staring at our plates, glancing up from time to time to see if anyone else was glancing up, and then ducking our eyes back down. Finally Barry broke the silence.
“And what about you?” he said, turning to me. “Is the little pansy going to be feeling good enough to go to school tomorrow?”
“Barry, stop it,” Sheila said.
“Well, the game against Waterbury’s coming up this weekend. I don’t care how good a linebacker he is, if he misses another practice, coach might not start him.”
“I’m feeling better,” I said.
“Well, start acting like it. You know, you look kind of funny. All pale and everything. Jesus, no wonder Amber doesn’t call anymore.” He started laughing.
“Barry, leave him alone,” Sheila said. “Things are going fine with Amber. Isn’t that right, Chris?” She turned and looked at me expectantly.
“Swimmingly,” I said. I’d heard people say it in the movies before, and I always liked the sound of it. Unfortunately it didn’t go over well with Barry.
“Swimmingly?” he said, scrunching up his face. “What are you, a faggot or something?”
“No,” I said. “I just meant things were all right, that’s all.”
“Swimmingly,” Echo said, then giggled to herself. She liked the word too.
“Shut up, Echo,” her father barked.
“Swimmingly,” Echo said again, laughing harder.
“Jesus Christ,” he said, getting up. He grabbed his plate and went back into the living room. Sheila sighed and shook her head.
“Swimmingly,” Echo murmured, smiling down at her plate.
“God, Echo, would you just shut up,” Sheila said, slamming her fork down. Echo jumped at the noise, and I admit I did a little too. We watched as Sheila got up from the table with her plate, went over to the sink, and started doing the dishes, her face set hard.
Echo and I finished eating dinner alone. Neither of us spoke until the end.
“By the way,” Echo said, “Amber did call. This afternoon.”
“She did?” I said, snapping to attention.
“I tried to get you, but you wouldn’t open your door.”
“So what’d you do?”
“I told her you were sick.”
“What did she say?”
“She said ‘good.’”
As I lay in bed that night, I thought back over my first day as Chris Parker. To be honest, I was a little disappointed. Not so much with myself. Things hadn’t gone perfectly—or even swimmingly, for that matter—but I thought I’d held my own. It had more to do with Chris’s family. I know. Who was I to be disappointed in anybody? But as much as I hated killing Chris, a part of me had hoped to find a home, join a real family like the ones I’d seen on TV, even for a little while. Kind of sick, I guess. But the truth sometimes is.
Problem was, I didn’t really like my new family, and they didn’t seem to like me. In fact, I didn’t think any of them liked each other. Lying there in bed, I looked out the window at the half-moon hanging in the sky. Maybe I should just leave, I thought. Why stick around? Part of me wanted to bolt. You don’t owe them anything. Get back on the road. But part of me knew it didn’t matter whether I owed them anything—I owed it to myself to stick it through, to challenge myself, like my mother would have wanted. So the Parkers aren’t your dream family, I could hear her say. Big deal. Life is full of disappointments. Suck it up.
In the end I couldn’t bring myself to leave. Not for any high-minded reason or anything like that. I just didn’t have the energy. It was funny—I didn’t go anywhere or do much of anything that first day, but for some reason I was exhausted. Maybe it was from more than just today. Maybe it was from everything that had happened the day before, or the week before, or ever since my mother kicked me out. Maybe it was my whole life.