“But he also goes to SeaWorld,” Dorothy said, and pointed at his sweatshirt. “They keep orcas prisoner in little, little tanks. Like if someone stuck you in a closet and made you stay there all day. No one should go to SeaWorld.”
“Yeah,” Jay Rickles said gently, almost quivering with pleasure. “Daddy’s okay. Daddy’s okay, folks. Daddy’s just fine.”
A final spasm of furious camera flashes filled the room. In their stammering, almost blinding light, Kellaway’s very pale skin had a blue sheen, like gunmetal.
9:18 P.M.
They were still out there, the news vans, the camera crews, choking the street in front of his house. He sat on the ottoman in the middle of his living room, with the landline in his lap. The police had taken his cell phone. He could see the broadcast vans through a gap in the drapes pulled across the big picture window. CNN. Fox. His TV was on, the only light in the room, the volume turned off. They were playing that same clip of Jay Rickles saying his thing about the bad guy with a gun meeting the good guy with a gun.
Kellaway felt like a bullet in a gun himself, felt charged and ready to go off, to fly toward some final, forceful impact. Loaded with the potential to blow a hole in what everyone thought they knew about him. When a gun went off, everyone turned their heads to look, and they would look at him now, too. At him instead of past him or through him.
He expected the phone to ring, and it did. He lifted the receiver to his ear.
Holly’s voice was breathless and small. “You’re home. I wasn’t sure you’d be home. I was just watching you on TV.”
“They recorded that hours ago. You’re just seeing it now?”
“Y-yes. Just seeing it now. You’re all right? You aren’t hurt?”
“No, love,” he said to his wife. Still his wife, even now. On paper anyway.
A little indrawn breath. “You shouldn’t call me that.”
“Love?”
“Yes. You shouldn’t even think it.”
“I would’ve been thinking it if she killed me. If she shot me today, it would’ve been my last thought.”
Another shuddering breath. She was trying not to cry. She cried so easily: at the ends of TV movies about Christmas, at ASPCA commercials, when movie stars died. She was always clothed in the sheer velvet gown of her emotions, the fabric of it rippling with every step into the world she took, clinging to her wherever she went.
“You shouldn’t of gone in there. You should’ve waited for the police. What if she shot you? Your son needs a father,” she told him.
“Your lawyer didn’t seem to think he does. Your lawyer thought it would be just fine if I only saw George once a month, with a chaperone there to spy on me.”
She took a sniffling breath, and he knew for sure she was crying now. It was several seconds before she could speak again, and then her voice was frail with emotion. “My lawyer didn’t just push you around. She pushed me around, too. She threatened to quit if I tried to negotiate with you. She made me feel so stupid when I told her I knew you’d never hurt us, that you’d never—”
Holly’s sister squawked in the background, a harsh, unintelligible sound that reminded him of the adults talking in a Charlie Brown cartoon. Holly didn’t know how to stand up for herself. The expectations of other people were like a blasting gale and Holly just a sheet of newspaper, flapping this way and that under their influence. It was Rand Kellaway’s opinion that Holly’s sister Frances was a closet lesbian and that the man she was married to was, in all likelihood, a queer. The dude wore bright shirts in suspicious colors (tangerine, teal) and enthusiastically watched figure skating on television.
“What’s Frances saying to you?” Kellaway asked. He felt something flare inside of him, like a stroked match hissing into flame.
But Holly wasn’t listening to him anymore, she was listening to her sister. Holly said, “Yes.” More squawking. “No!” And then again, “No!” in a pleading, whining tone.
“Tell her to mind her own business,” Kellaway said. He could feel Holly slipping away, out of reach, and it maddened him. “Don’t listen to her. Whatever she’s saying doesn’t matter.”
Holly turned her attention back to him, but her voice was flustered, hitching with emotion. “G-George wants to speak with you, Rand. I’m going to put him on. Fran says I can’t talk to you anymore.”
When they had lived together, it had been one of Kellaway’s rules that Holly could talk to Frances only when he was in the room, for exactly this reason. He had not wanted Holly to have a cell phone because of the danger of Frances texting her. He had refused to let Holly buy one, but then the fucking company she worked for gave her one, insisted she carry one.
“You tell that hairy cunt—” he began, but then the phone clattered, and it was George.
“Daddy,” George said. He had his mother’s rushing, breathless, excitable voice, the same soft, sweet slur. “Daddy, you were on TV!”
“I know,” he said. It took a great effort of will to steady his voice and inject some warmth into it. “I was in TV Land all afternoon, where all the TV people live. The hardest part is getting there. They have to shrink you down, very, very small, so you can fit inside the television set.”
George giggled. The sound of it was so lovely it made Kellaway ache. He wanted to hold his son in his lap and squeeze him until he shouted and tried to wriggle free. He wanted to take George to the beach and shoot bottles for him. George would clutch his fists and dance every time a bottle smashed. Kellaway would smash the world to see George dance.
“That isn’t true,” George said.
“It is. First they make you very, very small, and then you get a ticket and ride to TV Land on Thomas the Tank Engine. I sat right next to one of the Teletubbies on the trip.”
“No you didn’t.”
“I did. Really.”
“Which one?”
“The yellow one. He smells like mustard.”
George giggled again. “Mom says you saved people from dyin’! She says there was a bad person and you shot her down just like—pow! Is that what happened?”
“That’s what happened. Just like that.”
“Okay. That’s good. I’m glad you shot that bad person.” The squawking sounds began in the background, Fran getting going again. George listened to her, then said, “I’ve got to eat my Eggo and go to bed.”
“You do. Go on, now. I love you, George.”
“I love you, too.”
“Put your mom back on.”
“Aunt Fran wantsa talk to you.”
Before he could reply, the phone clattered again. Then someone new was on the other end of the line. Even her breathing was unpleasant: thin and slow and deliberate.
“Hey, Randy,” said Frances. “You got a court order not to talk to my sister.”
“She called me,” he said patiently. “There’s no court order says I can’t answer my own phone.”