33.
Unfortunately, some things are so bad.
The inside of Jacques P. Landry’s private room was fifteen by twelve feet and stank of cigar smoke. The carpet was thick and brown and felt dirty beneath my palms as I trespassed across it that night, scared thoughtless on my hands and knees. To my left was a table stacked with files and envelopes. On the wall above it, a dry-erase board scrawled with symbols I could not discern. Next to this stood three filing cabinets, the middle of which was topped with a television and other electronic devices, and the digital clocks of these machines provided one of my only two sources of light. The other came in a sliver from beneath the locked door and made the doorway look like the entrance to another dimension. It reminded me immediately of something in my past that I could not place. Then the hair on my arms stood up like an animal’s.
I got the feeling I was not alone.
I stopped and listened for someone else in the room but heard only the soft whir of electronics. The place was so dark that I could barely make out even the largest objects and so I held my breath and scanned the wall to my right, making guesses as to what was there, and then my body went cold all over. In the far corner of the room I saw the outline of a head, what could be hair. It was hard not to scream. The shadow was so still, though, that I couldn’t be sure. This made me doubt everything else in my vision, as well. Is that a lamp or a shotgun? A table or a cage?
I did not know the answers to these simple questions, and the shape I saw against the wall could have been a potted plant. It could have been the smiling face of Jacques Landry. Yet it remained freakishly still. So I sunk closer to the floor and invented simple rules for myself. If it moves, I fly out of the open window. If I hear breathing, I crawl backward and try not to wake it. Is that a chin or a handle? I wondered. A shoulder or a drawer? I pressed my belly to the ground to get a different vantage point and soon felt something cold beneath my forearm, a light square on the dark carpet. Once I noticed this one I saw others as well, spread across the room as if spilled or dealt out like cards. They were made of photographic paper, I could tell, the same size and shape as my picture of Lindy, and I carefully slid the nearest one toward me and turned it over. It was a close-up of male genitalia.
The image was so unexpected that I almost didn’t recognize it. The picture looked posed and clinical, and yet this was not from a medical book. It was black and white and poorly lit, like pornography from a bygone era, and I immediately knew whose body it was. The thick mat of pubic hair, the sturdy thighs from which the organ stood erect all repulsed me. A trio of dark moles dotted the pelvis. The testicles hung like weights. It looked, to me, just like him.
When I glanced back up, I saw a person sitting in the corner. Her cheeks were thin and her neck long and I wondered wildly if some foster child had been tied to a chair and left for dead in this room. I worried too, even though it was irrational, that it could have been Lindy tied up in that chair because this is the nature of worry. Yet my fear of this was enough to motivate me to stand up and, once I moved toward her, I saw that this was not a person at all, but rather a life-sized female doll. She was stiff and naked and plastic, and the blank of her openmouthed gaze horrified me. I then saw another one, a male counterpart, crumpled to the floor beside her. He was facedown and undressed and the way his arms folded over his head made him look like a guilty penitent. I became clumsy with fear. I backed away and knocked an ashtray off an end table. I bumped against a video camera perched on a tripod. I tripped over cords that ran across the carpet to the far wall, and when I followed them to the filing cabinets I saw that they were plugged into the electronic devices stacked on top of the television. Once I got close enough, I could see that these devices were Betamax machines, outdated versions of the VCR. There were three of them, all plugged into one another, and I carefully ran my hands across their fronts. I flipped open their small viewing windows and, inside the middle machine, I saw a tape. I couldn’t help myself.
I made sure the volume was off. I pressed play.
I expected the worst. Some part of me hoped for it. I knew that if I could find evidence of obvious atrocity then I could just grab this tape and go. This was my idea, I suppose, of being a hero. Instead, what materialized on the television was not immediately obvious. It was a series of pictures laid out like a grid and, in the eight or so squares that made a border around the screen, I saw the faces of foster children. The kids were thin and shirtless and stared blankly at something off camera like a Third World version of The Brady Bunch. I recognized the face of Tyler Bannister, the tattoo of a bird with one wing visible on his neck every time he looked away from the camera. The tattoos on his wrists visible when he covered his eyes. I also recognized Tin Tin and, in the other frames, saw kids from around eight to twelve years old that did not last long at the Landrys’. I did not see Jason at all. Every so often, one of these children would gaze into the camera and speak, but I could not hear what they were saying. For this, all these years later, I remain thankful.
In the middle of this grid—what the children were watching while being taped, I suppose—were two separate frames of black-and-white images from our neighborhood. One frame was comprised entirely of video footage and, in it, familiar cars pulled out of driveways, neighbors watered their lawns, we played football in the street. It was the ordinary stuff of our suburban lives in those days. The other frame shuffled through a collection of still photos, much like the close-ups scattered all over the floor. My mother at the mailbox. Bo Kern’s harelip. A woman’s vagina. Duke Kern’s sculpted stomach. And then Lindy, one summer day before it all happened, I knew, with her hair fallen across her tanned shoulders. With her smile so innocent that I’d almost forgotten it.
Then everything changed.
I noticed a light on the walls, and its flicker was unmistakable. I ran over and peeked through the side of the curtains and it took me a long time to process what I saw. There was a police car on Piney Creek Road, parked two doors down at my house. The vehicle sat in our driveway, its lights spinning without sound, and in front of that, I saw my father’s Mercedes. I watched two officers get out of their car as my father walked up our driveway to meet them and I’d no idea what to make of it. I remembered my mother calling him after Jacques Landry came to our door, telling us that he would stop by, but to show up in the middle of the night? How desperate must her voice have sounded? How long had he been at my house? Did I leave my window open? Were Mom and Rachel awake? Or was the reason he had shown up not because of that cur at all, not because of Jacques Landry, but rather because my mother had woken up to find me missing? Had she called him again? Had she also, this time, called the police? At what point did my decisions begin to hurt the people I loved?
I didn’t have time to think.
Behind me, the Landrys’ telephone rang. I nearly jumped through the window. The clang of the bell filled the house so aggressively that it was hard to recall the silence that preceded it. By the second ring, I heard Mr. Landry moving around in the den. It sounded like someone was rousing a bear. I heard a glass break, a piece of furniture fall over. I then heard him calling out for Louise to answer the phone and I knew I had to get out of there. I took another quick glance around the room for the safe, for the entire reason I came, and I spotted it, the size of a dormitory refrigerator, sitting beneath the desk.
Before I could get to it, three more patrol cars came screaming down Piney Creek Road. They had their sirens on, their lights flashing, and I turned to watch through the side of the curtains as they stopped in front of the Landrys’, maybe thirty yards from where I hid. I shut the curtains and heard the heavy sound of Jacques Landry running down the hallway toward me. I couldn’t move. This was it. I was sure of it. He was going to open the door and find me and he was going to kill me. If a person could shoot an innocent dog, why not shoot a meddlesome boy? I found no logical reason. So I put my back to the wall and stared at the door and in this almost ecstatic fear realized what the sliver of light beneath it reminded me of.
It reminded me of Christmas Eve, every year but that last one.
It reminded me of the way my sisters would return home from college for this holiday or, back when we all lived together, simply play along with the idea of Santa Claus because I was their brother and I was younger than them and I had rushed through supper to take my bath and put on my pajamas so that I could sleep where I always slept on Christmas Eve, which was on the pullout trundle of my sister Hannah’s bed. She and Rachel would turn in early that night, as well, to share the bed above me as they did only that one time per year where they would tease me by wondering aloud if we had forgotten to put out food for the reindeer, cookies for the big guy. And even after they eventually told me the truth, which they claimed it their big-sisterly duty to do, we continued to sleep in Hannah’s room on Christmas Eve for what we said was our mother’s sake, and I would have sold my soul, at that moment, to do it again.
But the reason I was reminded of this was that in those youngest years, when I still believed in nearly everything a child is supposed to believe in, I would stare at the sliver of light beneath Hannah’s door long after she and Rachel had fallen asleep and want desperately to be the one boy on Earth who saw Santa’s feet and could testify to it, as he stopped outside of our room to give my sisters and I a quiet blessing. Yet when I finally did see a pair of feet stop at a door exactly like Hannah’s, in a room the exact shape of Hannah’s, it did little but confirm to me that Hannah was dead and my childhood was over and that blessings are as easily taken away as they are given.