Bad toy, p.33
Bad Toy, page 33
part #2 of Sunflower Series
Tommy said, “You’ve always been a good friend, How. And I’m sorry if I didn’t always carry my weight or if I dragged you down with me. I’m not good at sharing feelings, I guess you already know that, but sometimes I wonder what life would have been like if you hadn’t come around.” He shrugged. “I … I guess I’m what I’m saying is … I’m glad you moved across the street.”
It was heartfelt, perhaps even touching, and Howie might have appreciated Tommy baring his soul if this had been another time and place, and under different circumstances. But doing it now only solidified his belief that Tommy had become detached from reality.
Susan let out another scream, but it was cut abruptly short as Quint’s weight fell on her chest, his paw raised, ready to slash downward and scoop her throat out.
Howie moved, ready to do something, not knowing what that something was, but knowing he was the only one left in the room cognitively functional enough to act.
Tommy’s grip tightened on his shoulder.
“I’m sorry,” Tommy said. “I’ll miss you, man. But this time I gotta be the hero.”
Howie was ready to shove him away and, hopefully, the crazy with it. “Tommy, now’s not the t–”
He never finished the thought. Tommy placed his other hand on Howie’s other shoulder and dragged Howie toward him while pitching his own body forward. Howie was unprepared for the sudden shift in weight and lost his balance. He smooshed into Tommy, and they looked like two people hugging, Tommy’s arms wrapping around the back of Howie’s neck, his eyes going wide, his mouth opening to issue a startled moan.
It was then that Howie thought about the knife, how it had been in his hand, and he could still feel the weight of it there, but now he was afraid to look, because he felt something warm flow over his skin even as Tommy’s fingers dug into his back. Tommy’s body slackened, and he dropped to the floor, Howie following along, finally finding the courage to glance down and see his hand wrapped around the handle of the knife, the blade buried in Tommy’s stomach.
“Oh God, Tommy. No …”
Tommy’s breath came in ragged gasps. His eyes were closed.
“Tommy … just hang on, man … I’ll get you help … I’ll …”
Tommy didn’t respond. Howie knew his friend was moving rapidly toward an exit, and that door opened just the one way; once you went through it, there was no coming back.
Susan managed another scream. Howie glanced over and saw that Quint had released her. The raggedy old bear was facing him now, staring at him with those coal-black eyes that seemed to shine with twin points of laser light.
“You should be dead!” Howie yelled.
Then realization dawned: Tommy wasn’t dead. Almost, but not quite. He still had a pulse, weak as it might be, and Quint wasn’t about to go quietly into the night without a fight.
Howie looked at Susan and yelled, “Run!” She hesitated as though she hadn’t understood, so he shouted at her again, “Run! Run for fuck’s sake!”
And this time she was on her feet and raced to the steps, glancing back at him, lingering, and he waved for her to go, to get out, leave while she had the chance, and when she was gone he focused on Quint.
Quint stood eight feet away from him, and, absurdly, it reminded Howie of an old-fashioned showdown. Each of them should have had six-shooters carried in leather holsters at their hips, ready to draw the moment the clock struck high-noon.
But this wasn’t a western starring John Wayne or Clint Eastwood. If anything, it was a monster movie, like the monster movie that had inspired Doug Wilkins to give a cheap, third-world teddy bear the name Quint.
But is Quint the real monster?
Howie didn’t have the answer to that. In essence, Quint was only a vehicle, a means to an end, a weapon. A passive object with inert potential. Quint was dangerous the way guns were dangerous. They could inflict lethal damage, but they required a method of delivery, such as a finger to pull the trigger or, in Quint’s case, someone spoonfeeding hatred. At first, Quint had been fed with something the size of a dropper, but along the way, that had been turned up to firehose levels.
Quint took a step toward him. Howie took a step back. He did a quick look over his shoulder, estimated that he had about ten feet or less before he ran out of space. Quint took another step.
Howie glanced over at Tommy. Tommy was still, face white, eyes closed, mouth hanging open an inch or two. There was no discernable up and down movement of the chest to indicate he was breathing. Howie was certain that he was gone, that no life remained in his best friend’s body, but that was impossible. If Tommy was dead, Quint wouldn’t be standing in front of him now, very much alive.
Shelby said, “Did you mean what you said?”
Howie had forgotten she was there.
“Huh?”
“That stuff you said. About Susan. Did you mean it?”
Quint moved close to Tommy’s body. He grabbed the handle of the knife and pulled it free from Tommy’s flesh.
Dead, Howie thought, has to be. No way he wouldn’t have reacted to that.
Blood leaked down Quint’s paw. He brandished the knife, coming toward Howie.
Shelby said, “Did you?”
“You want to talk about this right now?”
“Just answer me!” she shouted, and her head came around, her eyes meeting his. “Did you have those thoughts about her?”
Howie couldn’t fathom how she could be worried about something like that at a time like this. They shared the basement with two dead people, her own father and brother, and a teddy bear with a big knife.
How can he still be alive?
“Did you?” Shelby asked. “Just tell me.”
“No, of course not. I made it all up to get a rise out of Tommy. I needed him pissed off so Quint would come alive, so you guys would believe me.”
Howie continued to back away as Quint approached him. It was like watching death coming in slow motion.
“Promise?”
He felt his back touch the wall. He was out of space and out of time.
“Yes, I promise! You know I love you!”
“Leave him alone,” Shelby said softly.
At first, Howie was confused. What did she mean, ‘leave him alone?’ Leave who alone?
He realized she wasn’t talking to him. She was speaking to Quint, because she repeated herself, “Leave him alone,” saying it more forcefully this time, and Quint hesitated, and then he dropped the knife and walked over to her. She held out her arms to him, grabbing him when he was within reach, and let him curl up in her lap.
Howie didn’t believe what his own eyes were showing him. It couldn’t be. It just couldn’t.
“It wasn’t Tommy,” he said. “It was you. It was you all along.”
She stroked the top of Quint’s head. The bear’s paws and chest were saturated with blood.
“I can’t believe he’s really dead,” she said. At first, Howie thought she meant Tommy, but then he followed her gaze and realized she was talking about her father.
“It doesn’t seem possible.” Her eyes went to Howie. “Did you know that whenever he hurt Tommy, he would always come back and apologize later. Like he knew what he did was wrong, and he felt guilty about it, so he would go tell Tommy he was sorry, so sorry, and then he’d promise to never do it again. He made that promise so many times.” Her hand went on petting Quint’s head, sometimes massaging his right ear before moving to the left one. “But at least Tommy got an apology afterward. I never did. All the times he snuck into my room late at night and touched me and did those things to me, he told me he loved me so many times, told me I would always be his little girl. But he never apologized to me. He never said he was sorry. Not once. Never.”
Memories flooded Howie’s mind, the most vivid of which was the night he had snuck over to the Wilkins house and climbed up to peer into Shelby’s window only to be greeted by the leering face of Doug Wilkins. He remembered thinking it was strange; why would he be in her room at that hour of the night? In hindsight, the answer was obvious, and maybe he had vaguely suspected, but his brain had never allowed him to visit such a dark place.
Shelby stared at him. “You probably think I’m gross now,” she said. “Because of what he did to me. Spoiled goods. Isn’t that what they call it? Maybe you hate me for what Quint did, too.” Howie didn’t respond, but she looked at him defiantly. “It was the right thing. Maybe not the right way. But it was the right thing. Tommy didn’t deserve all the crap he went through.”
“Neither did you,” Howie said. And he meant it, but wasn’t sure he felt it. He moved closer to her, his eyes darting from her to Quint and back.
“Tommy was right,” she said. “If you hadn’t moved here … life might not have been tolerable.”
She reached up with her hand to touch his face. He almost flinched. Almost. There was blood on her hand. She didn’t seem to notice. Her hand touched his cheek, cupped the side of his face. All the feelings came flooding back, and he was eight years old again, seeing Shelby for the first time, as she looked all those years ago, and the feeling, man oh man, it had been like grabbing hold of a lightning bolt with bare hands. All he could do was hold on for dear life and go along for the ride.
“I’ve always loved the way you look at me.”
“I’ve never looked at anyone else,” Howie said.
She smiled. When she took her hand away, there was a smear of blood on his cheek.
In the prolonged stillness, Howie heard the front door opening and closing. Marsha Wilkins’s voice floated down to them from above. “Doug? Doug, is something wrong? Tommy? Shelby?”
“You better go,” Shelby said.
“I’m not leaving you.”
“You have to. You were never here.”
“I won’t …”
“If anybody asks, that’s your story. You were never here.”
Marsha’s voice again. “Doug? Honey? Are the kids all right?”
“Go now. You can slip out the back without being seen if you hurry. If you can’t get out that way, go through my window. You have experience with that.” A wistful smile touched her lips.
“I …”
“Go. You have to.”
From her lap, Quint issued a guttural growl.
“Go now, Howie.”
And he did. When he reached the foot of the stairs, he glanced back at her. Shelby sat there smiling at him, Quint in her lap.
He left her that way. It was the final image he would have. He never saw her again.
14. GONE
1
He slipped out unnoticed through Shelby’s bedroom window. On his way out, he took in her room, the bed, the small make-up table, and then the bed again, and now it would forever soil his memory that Doug Wilkins, on countless occasions, had snuck into this room and done awful things to his own daughter.
There was something else. The odor of something burning.
Finally, he climbed out the window and jumped to the ground below.
2
By the time he made it back to his house and quietly let himself in through the back door, sirens were howling loudly; blue and red lights pulsed in the darkness. Howie was shivering from the cold, when he heard a creak at the top of the stairs. When he glanced up, his father was standing there.
His father came down the steps, staring at him. The sirens died, but the lights from the police cars parked across the street splashed undulating colors into the foyer.
“Dad …”
Charles Schmidt stood in front of his son and stared. He didn’t speak, didn’t ask any questions. He opened the front door and watched the circus taking place across the street. Howie stepped out on the steps next to him and they watched together. Smoke was pouring from the house now, and he knew it wasn’t by accident. He was on the verge of crying, of breaking down totally, and as hard as he fought, he knew the battle was already lost. He let the sobs come and take over for a little while. He felt a soothing hand touch his upper back and stay there. Howie could count the moments of tenderness he had shared with his father on one hand. This was one of them.
They watched as police officers and deputies and firefighters and paramedics converged on the Wilkins house. Not long after, two stretchers came out, one after the other. A scream filled the night. Two police officers wrestled a wildly thrashing Marsha Wilkins as she screamed, “My babies! Not my babies!” as they forced her away from the burning house.
Two stretchers, he thought. Two bodies. Only two.
After a while, Howie’s mother came downstairs to see what the commotion was about. Unlike her husband, she had questions and wasn’t afraid to ask them. She was met with silence. “I’m so sorry,” his mother said, giving him a hug. By that point, Howie’s tears had come and gone. Now all he could do was watch, feeling hollowed out inside.
The rest of the firefighters vacated the house. The firehose gushed water at it, but it didn’t seem to do much good. Later, it would become public knowledge that the fire had started in the basement.
Howie waited for a third stretcher to be wheeled out.
There had to be a third.
But nothing came. They watched it burn. All of it. The roof seemed to implode. Flames poked out like groping hands with long fingers, reaching toward the stars.
Howie stood there watching until there was nothing left. Only charred rubble remained, cordoned off by yellow crime scene tape. By the early morning hours, even law enforcement and emergency services had gone.
No one else came out of the house that night.
PART IV: THE INVITATION
15. ALL THE TIME GONE BY
Do you know what it’s like to be haunted? I do. But the ghost is inside me, rattling its chains in the back of my brain. You can never shut it out. You can silence it for a while, play noise over it, but it’s never gone. There isn’t an exorcism for the mind. As far as I know, anyway. And, believe me, I’ve read a lot of books.
Over twenty years. That’s how long it’s been since I saw Shelby for the last time. I remember watching the house burn as it slowly crumpled in on itself, as the fire devoured it from the inside out. Why did I go? Why did I leave her there? Fuck, if that isn’t the million-dollar question that I’ve asked myself everyday for nearly a quarter of a lifetime.
The only answer I’ve got is this: because she told me to.
“If you really loved her, you wouldn’t have left her.”
To that, I say FUCK YOU!
I was terrified, scared out of my mind, had watched two people die, my own hand on the handle of the knife that caused the death of my best friend. Maybe I’m making excuses, but I wasn’t right, wasn’t thinking, and when Shelby told me to go … I followed her orders, the way I’d always done. I wish I hadn’t. After all, isn’t that what ghosts really are? Regrets you can’t forget.
A week from today, I turn 41. Twenty years is a long time. I tried to move on. I tried it all. I even fell in love again, got married when I was 32. It was good for a while. Her name was Holly. We’d met in college, become friends, fell out of touch after graduation, and then reconnected on Facebook years later. I was convinced that I had moved on from that tragic night, that maybe Shelby wasn’t forgotten completely, but her memory only came to visit every once in a great while. Sometimes she came to me in dreams. Often she came alone, but sometimes she had Quint with her. When Quint was with her … I considered those nightmares.
I got divorced two years ago. Not because of Shelby. I shared a lot with Holly, as married people tend to do, but she only knew about Shelby in a vague sort of way. I had never gone into detail. What would have been the point? Telling the truth would have only ended things earlier; she would have thought I was a total nutjob. No, it wasn’t because of Shelby, not on the surface at least. I’ve always had this personality defect where I go blazing into any problem. There was no time for being timid or treading lightly. And I can’t abide by mystery. At the core of me lay the biggest mystery of all, one that has never been solved. A mystery to me was the same as a lie, the same as being left in the dark, and I don’t enjoy the dark. When you know someone well enough, you spot little clues, little cues that betray when they’re sad or when there’s something bothering them, and when Holly would get in one of her moods (she despised that word) I would notice, and I would ask. She would act aloof, or say it was nothing, and I could never let it go at that. I had to keep poking and prodding until I got something, and not just something, that wasn’t good enough. I needed the whole story, all the details, and if I got a whiff of bullshit, I would keep prying on that lid until it sprang open, without regard to the cost.
Laying it down in writing makes it seem stupid. Childish. I’m doing what I promised in the very beginning that I wouldn’t do, which is to make this story about me. But isn’t that part of being human? Self-interest?
Why did I leave Shelby? All the answers sound like excuses. And is that as deep as it goes? Guilt, plain and simple? I don’t think so. I loved her. It was that strange and awkward and naïve and unconditional love that seems to be the domain of children. I knew I was in love with her when I was eight, before I had any real understanding of what the words meant. She was my first love, and first love is forever. You spend your entire life chasing after that feeling, trying your damnedest to recreate those memories, but sooner or later you come clean with yourself and admit that it just isn’t the same. Anything that comes after pales in comparison. That’s the kind of dark secret that a person kicks under the rug. When you fall in love with someone else, that’s not the kind of thing you leave out in the open for your new person to trip over and possibly hurt themselves on.
Who knows, maybe it isn’t the guilt at all. Maybe it’s the mystery. She never came out of the house. That gets me. I left her there in the basement, the acrid smell of smoke hitting my nostrils before I had cleared her bedroom window. Her mother must know, I thought. She had to know. But I never saw Marsha Wilkins after that night either. She moved across the country to live with family, or she checked herself into a mental hospital, or the pain was so overwhelming that she drowned herself in the Missouri. Those were rumors, and there were at least a dozen more of them in the weeks following the fire. I would have asked her if she knew anything, but I’ve never had any luck in tracking her down.
