The house of tongues, p.16
The House of Tongues, page 16
I needed her. I needed her in a way that defied any sense of reason—it had been a year or two since we last got together, and we’d kind of lost touch. Not out of any kind of malice or ill will—nothing of the sort. Over the years we’d remained as good of friends as possible when one moves on in life, finds a career, a family, a new home. It’s a rare thing for high school chums to stay as close as they once had, even high school chums from a small town. But I was extremely grateful that we’d done the best we could.
After an hour or so’s drive, I exited into downtown Columbia, barely catching the sign before I passed it, my mile-a-minute wipers straining to do their job on the huge windshield of the minivan. It was like the high forehead of an obnoxious, balding neighbor. With my phone precariously balanced on the dashboard directly in front of the steering wheel, I visually followed the GPS map to her apartment complex, the sultry British voice of Siri politely giving me step-by-step directions in case I was too stupid to follow the clearly marked turns.
Andrea lived in a high rise—which for Columbia meant it had about 20 stories. As I pulled into its underground parking structure, the sudden lack of raindrops thudding on the roof and windows of the van almost popped my ears with the silence. I was impressed with the place. Clean cement, plants and flowers and trees planted in all kinds of surprising places. The walls of the parking decks even had decorative carvings of exotic animals that were part creepy and part beautiful.
On the third deck, I pulled into an empty spot and turned off the minivan. And then I sat there, staring at a ridiculous carving of seals skimming atop the ocean. Now that I had arrived, I was scared out of my mind. Last year I’d forgotten the annual Christmas card to her—which wouldn’t be so bad if she hadn’t remembered in such a spectacular way, writing separate notes for each child in my litter, with a small, sentimental gift attached to it. A yo-yo, a gift card, a bag of bite-sized Snickers, something else.
And so I sat there, parked within 100 feet or so from my childhood best friend, soothing my nerves with cheap hot chocolate from the gas station, prepping myself on the greeting, the requisite ice-breakers, the hugs, the kisses on cheeks, the order of questions and scoping and sharing of funny stories from the good old days. I wanted to go in with a master plan, able to change tactics on a dime, go in the direction I needed as soon as the chance presented itself. This had to be a success. Bad things were happening to my family, and I was here to ask Andrea for help, as she had once helped almost 30 years ago and many times since.
Someone tapped on the window, so hard and so unexpectedly that I shrieked, jumped, and banged my head on the glass.
It was her, of course.
For some reason, I didn’t move. Just stared. Age had been neither kind nor cruel to this best friend of my youth—her hair dark and pulled back into a ponytail, her face without makeup, the tiniest of wrinkles at the corners of her eyes. She peered back at me with all the wisdom and kindness and smartassy-ness that I remembered from the good ole days. She cocked an eyebrow as if I’d gone soft in the head.
“Did you come to see me or my parking garage?” she asked, her voice muted by the window.
“Oh,” I said in response, like a complete imbecile.
She took the situation under control and opened the door, swinging it wide and then reaching down to pull me into a hug. This released all of my nervous and awkward inhibitions and I hugged her back, fiercely feeling the years melt away and almost smelling the springy scents of the woods in which we walked so many countless times in our youth.
“Hey,” I said. “It’s really good to see you and I know I’vd sucked at keeping in touch, lately, and I’m sorry. But man, I really need you right now.”
She made a joke of pulling away to escape, unclasping my hands from her neck, as if she’d had enough of my foolishness. But then concern creased her features and she didn’t release my hands from her grip. She squeezed them.
“What’s wrong?” she asked.
“A lot.”
“Hooboy.” She bent back over and kissed me on the cheek. “How about we go inside, make a cup of coffee. I just got back from the grocery store—wanna help me carry them up?”
“Nothing’s ever sounded so good. Absolutely nothing.”
2
We didn’t say a whole lot at first. I was a little surprised by both the weight and volume of her considerable grocery take—at least five plastic bags dug divots into my fingers that almost burst from the pressure by the time I swung the items onto the kitchen counter in her apartment. She unloaded and mechanically told me where to put things like instant grits and cans of chili beans and Oreo cookies and something called quinoa that I silently swore to never try. I quite proudly put the milk away without needing any direction, however.
We spoke of this and that—what the kids were up to, how her job was going, how my job was going, why she ate quinoa, etc.—but nothing that stayed in my memory for more than 30 seconds. With each product put away into its carefully ordered spot, we seemed to take a leap backward in time, comfort and ease replacing discomfort and awkwardness. Without hearing her say it, I felt forgiven for my recent lack of Christmas card skills.
She put on a pot of coffee—for me, I guess—and then proceeded to make herself a cup of chamomile teaWith stunning morbidity this made me think of Betty Joyner at the Rexall Drug, and how—unless she’d figured out a way to travel through the universe approaching the speed of light to slow her relative age to ours—she was surely dead by now, buried in the ground. For a quick instant I pictured her body in the casket, decay already having taken her lips, exposing the teeth that might last forever, always grinning.
“Shall we sit?” Andrea asked, handing me a cup of steaming coffee. Relieved to escape dark thoughts of Mrs. Joyner’s smiling corpse, I offered thanks and nodded. We sat down at the corner of her kitchen table, the 90-degree angle of the wooden edge the only thing between us.
“So,” I began, taking a careful sip of my lava-temperature beverage. “I’m impressed you’ve yet to ask me what in the hell I’m doing here. Thanks for that.”
She held her cup in both hands as if she relished the warmth of it. “You mean you didn’t just come to say hi? To your best friend from high school?” She smiled to take the bite out of it. “I’m just kidding. You’ve got four little monsters. I’m surprised you have time to take a dump, so I certainly don’t expect you to pop in for movie night with me every weekend.”
This made me laugh, partly as a coping device. I had no idea where to start with all this mess.
“I’m assuming you heard what happened… what’s happening… back in our sweet little hometown?” Even as I asked it, I suddenly knew that she hadn’t heard. That would’ve been the first thing she’d talk about when I’d arrived—actually, she probably would’ve shown up on my parents’ doorstep the same day if she’d known.
“Never mind,” I quickly followed up. “It’s a tiny place in the middle of nowhere, a world away from here. Of course you haven’t heard.”
“What’re you talking about? Is everything okay? Did one of your parents…”
“No, no, they’re fine. My kids are fine.” That’s all I could get out. A stark hesitation took over me, so strong that I felt muffled by some unseen force. Was it really fair for me to bring Andrea back into all of this—she’d probably been going to therapy for decades to get over the horrific things we’d seen as teenagers. Maybe she was good now. Healed now. How could I do this?
“David?” she asked softly. “If you don’t tell me what’s going on, I’ll be forced to punch you in the brain. What happened?”
A heavy sigh was the best I could do for a response.
“David.” This time it held the warning of a viper about to strike.
I decided to move forward. To suddenly lie to her and hide things seemed like the biggest betrayal of all.
“A whole bunch of crap has happened since we came to visit my parents. You could go online and read The Item and you’d know everything.”
“You’re killin’ me, Smalls,” she replied. “Just spit it out. Please.”
“Well, the first weird thing was that Dicky Gaskins showed up. Knocked on my dad’s door like that was a perfectly expected thing of him.”
“Dicky Gaskins?” She said his name with all the loathing it deserved. “What the hell did he come to your house for?”
“I still don’t know. But it gets weirder. He started choking on his own tongue and then my son saved him, pulled it right out of his throat.” Something about that whole affair still tickled my childhood memories, like a person standing just outside my peripheral vision, stalking me.
“O… Kay.” Her brow pinched as she pondered reasons behind such absurdity. She’d also had several high-salaried therapists tell her that she’d blocked some of our high school memories. Neither one of us had sought to bring them back.
“It gets worse. So much worse.” My chest shuddered with a halting breath, my emotions threatening to spill over. Wesley. My son. That bastard had taken my son.
“Man, David. What is it?” She reached out and held my hand tightly in hers.
“Dicky Gaskins kidnapped my oldest kid later that day. Wesley. In the middle of the night, actually. Had him for three whole days and we still don’t know what in God’s name he might’ve done to him.”
Andrea said nothing, but tears of shock brimmed the bottom edges of her eyes.
“But we got him,” I said, breathing a long, cool rush of air into my lungs. “Safe and sound, at least by the looks of it. At least on the outside. And they arrested Dicky. But then just yesterday we found a dead body back behind my mom and dad’s place, mostly buried in the swamp. I haven’t found out who it was yet. And—” Actually saying all of this out loud made me realize just how much had happened, how much shit had hit the fan. “—Dicky escaped, evidently.”
“Oh my—”
I held up a hand. “One last thing and then we can fill in the details. The body out back… it’s head had been cut off. Just like…” I didn’t need to finish, didn’t need to say the words. She’d lived it with me all those years ago. Not everything had been blacked out by our frightened and traumatized minds.
Andrea sat back, her hands on her cheeks, her eyes frozen in a death stare. “This can’t be happening. You can’t be sitting here, telling me all of this. It can’t be…” She trailed off, looking as shaken as I’d ever seen her.
“I’m sorry, Andrea. It was stupid for me to come over here and drag you into all this.”
“No, no…” She seemed so dazed, so… unbalanced. “It’s okay. It’s okay. I just need… I just need to process this.” Without any further explanation, she turned and slowly walked out of the kitchen and down the short hall of her apartment. I watched as she entered the bedroom at the very end and closed the door behind her, softly, its thump like the last period of the last sentence in a depressing novel. My heart ached with regret, not helped by the uncertainty of her reaction. Had I triggered something? Was she going to have a breakdown? Indecision wracked me, needling the surface of my heart.
I stood up, took a step toward her room, then stopped. She’d made it clear she needed some time, and I had to give it to her. Grabbing my cup of coffee so I’d at least have something to sip while I waited, I sat on her couch and looked dully at the wall opposite. My eyes immediately went to a frame perched atop her television. It held an old photo, a young man and young woman standing arm in arm, dressed in jeans and T-shirts, smiling with all the bird-flipping confidence of youth.
It was a picture of me and her, 16 years old.
3
She came out of her room 30 minutes later. It had seemed like seven hours, maybe eight, maybe a thousand, but I knew it almost to the minute because a digital clock sat right next to the old photo of us. Those were basically the only two things my eyes had looked upon while I’d waited.
When I heard the bedroom door open, I stood up, almost spilling the cup of coffee. I’d barely touched the now-cold beverage. She wasn’t in my view at first—you couldn’t see down the hall as I had been able to from the kitchen—so I anxiously waited for her to make an appearance.
When she did, the first thing I noticed was that she held a suitcase in her hand. She let it thump to the floor.
“Can I stay at your parents’ place?”
4
I wouldn’t have believed it if the best psychic in the world had shown me a crystal ball revealing things exactly as they would play out, or even if God himself had come down and given me the same vision on my TV in full-color. But less than two hours after I’d arrived in her parking garage, Andrea and I were in my car, driving east, back toward home. Her suitcase was packed safely in the trunk, the Ozzy’s Boneyard channel played on the radio, and fresh coffee and tea from the gas station nestled in the cup holders, steam escaping out of the little sip holes.
All of this put a permagrin on my face, despite the heavy circumstances, and Andrea noticed.
“It’s good to see you smile,” she said. We’d just left the city limits of Columbia, had about an hour to go. Rain continued to pour from the darkly gray sky and my windshield wipers worked at full speed, their sound as soothing as the patter of the rain itself and the incessant swish of the tires on wet road. “You looked three steps from death the whole time we were in my apartment.”
“I felt three steps from death.” I took a sip of my refreshingly hot coffee. “But the instant I saw you with that suitcase… my spirits lifted. It’s kinda like the old days, you know? I never would’ve survived high school without you.”
“High school? Or Pee Wee Gaskins?”
Her tone was light despite the dark turn of the question. “Both. Definitely both.”
“Well, we’ll just have to figure it out all over again, now won’t we? If this Dickwad or whatever his name is likes running around cutting peoples’ heads off like his daddy, then we’ll deal with him, too. Boom.” She took a victorious gulp of tea, which must’ve scalded her throat something fierce. “Ow. That’s hot.”
This made me think of something. “I guess the movies aren’t so wrong after all.”
“Huh?”
I glanced over and laughed when I saw her look of puzzlement.
“It’s something my kid and I are always noticing. In movies. Like, cop movies, crime, whatever. Or anything that shows an office.”
“David, what in the hell are you talking about?”
I laughed again. “In the movies, whenever some aide or whatever brings coffee for everyone, in those ugly generic cups they always use, the main characters always grab them and gulp them like water, tipping way higher than a normal person would. They’re so obviously empty, just props. I swear it’s in every movie ever made. They never sip it like it’s actually, scaldingly hot. And you just did that.”
“That’s because I felt empowered and invincible. And I forgot that it’s hot.”
I shrugged, then made a show of sipping my coffee very carefully and loudly, my lips jutting out like a chimpanzee. “Like I said, maybe I was wrong about that.”
“So far we’ve had a very enlightening conversation.”
“Haven’t we?” I held out my cup and she graciously tapped it with hers. “Cheers.”
“Cheers,” she returned. “It’s good to be back together.” I wondered if she was mocking me, but I could tell from the corner of my eye that she was gazing out into the bleak rain, deep in thought. “Time is weird. Something that happened last week can seem a million years ago, but things that happened when you were a kid seem like yesterday. I don’t think it’s as linear as we think it is.”
I nodded, wondering if we were about to launch into an existential, philosophical discussion. I didn’t know if I wanted to or not—I was just happy to be with her again.
“I’m really sorry how things worked out, Andrea. Really.”
She swatted at the air between us. “Oh, please, none of that guilt trip bullshit. It’s not on you, not on me, not on anyone. You went to college, got married, had 70,000 children… I don’t have any regrets and I hope you don’t, either. I’m just saying that this is nice, that you’re the best friend I’ve ever had and now I remember that. And I don’t wanna forget it. So just promise me we’ll keep in touch a little better than we did. Deal?”
“Deal. Absolutely. I want that as much as you do.”
“And let’s forget this cheesy conversation ever happened.”
“Also a deal.”
“But without forgetting that we’re going to keep in touch.”
“Also a deal as well.”
“Okay, Mr. Redundant. I’m glad that’s settled, then.”
We drove on, into the storm.
5
We were about 20 minutes from Lynchburg when our conversation finally turned to what had been going on in Andrea’s life the last year or so. It started with her mom, and Andrea’s voice was as melancholy as the rain falling from the sky.
“She’s in a home, over in Augusta. I tried to find a good place in Columbia but nothing quite fit, not even close to the one she ended up in. Lots of azaleas and oak trees and little ponds to sit by. She loved nature, that woman, so I found somewhere she could enjoy it.”
“Man,” I said. “Sorry to hear that. Does she have… dementia?”
“Oh yeah. It’s pretty bad. Thankfully the one thing she always does seem to remember is me, though not a lot of our memories together. At least she’s never called me by a different name. Once that happens, I’m gonna lose it, I swear.”
I felt terrible that I hadn’t even known about this. “How about we go and see her once we’ve figured everything out back home? We could go there on the way back to Atlanta in a couple weeks.”
“Thanks, that’d be nice. I guarantee she remembers you. I told her about our little game, by the way.”
I jerked my head so fast to look at her that the car swerved a foot or so. “What? No way. You told her?”
