Dead Boys: Stories

Dead Boys

HE NEEDS ME TO SAY YES. IT’S AN OLDIE BUT A GOODIE: keep the affirmatives coming. I read an article, an undercover, “Secrets of a Car Salesman” thing, that had a list of ten tricks to watch out for, and that was one of them. I held on to the magazine the article was in, putting it with a bunch of other magazines containing information that would someday be of use, but when the pile got to be about four feet high, Louise said, “This is ridiculous,” and threw them all out. So now I’m at this guy’s, this Rodrigo’s, mercy.

“Do you like the color?” he asks.

“Yes,” I reply.

“Red, right?”

“Red.”

Rodrigo’s hair is slicked straight back, and he has a goatee. There’s a pack of Marlboros in the pocket of his shirt. He should stash them somewhere else, that’s my advice. If he wants to look professional. A van from a Mexican radio station is parked on the lot. They’re blasting music and handing out bumper stickers and T-shirts. I’m not sure about that either. It might scare away the white folks.

Rodrigo urges me aboard the SUV. The seat wraps itself around my body. “Special motors; they remember you,” Rodrigo says. This model has enough chrome for three regular cars. Fog lights, leather interior, six-CD changer. The dashboard gauges glow purple when I turn the key. Way up here you’d see trouble before you got to it. No more sitting in traffic, wondering.

A few other salesmen stand together outside the showroom. They’re smoking and watching two girls shake it to the music from the van. La Super Estrella. The boss comes out and says something, and the salesmen scatter. My fingertips are cold against my face when I adjust my glasses. The clouds look like skywriting that has just drifted into illegibility. I can’t find the sun.

“Let me ask you something,” Rodrigo says, putting one foot up on the running board. “If I could get you the price you wanted, would you write me a check today?”

“Come on, man,” I scoff. “You’d have to be a pimp to drive this thing. A teenage pimp.”

Rodrigo steps back and looks me over. Oh, he’d like to thump me. He’s probably on straight commission. I read an article about that, too. I apologize for wasting his time. I can’t afford a new car. Louise and I are saving for a house. I was just driving by and saw the balloons and heard the music. The Glendale Auto Mall. It seemed like a place where something was happening.

A PACK OF dogs trots through the intersection, all shapes and sizes, escapees and throwaways. The leader turns, a shaggy black beast, and gives me a look, flashing his teeth. I send him a mental message: Car, dumbass. Me run you over. The signal changes, and we continue toward LAX. Razor wire protects windowless bunkers and empty lots. It’s six in the morning. Night tilts toward day.

Louise picked up this shortcut from a shuttle driver. It’s useful at rush hour, but now — what’s the point? The freeway’s practically empty. You could keep it at seventy-five, no problem. Louise won’t let me go that way, though. We have to take the same route every time. There are her rituals, and then there are her phobias. She’s scared of birds, stairs, and electricity. No, really. She has a childhood memory of being struck by lightning. Her mother says it never happened, but Louise still uses her elbow to turn off the lights when nobody’s looking.

She’s okay with flying, though; a good thing, because her job involves a lot of it. She works for a company that publishes corporate training manuals, and two or three times a month she heads out to meet with clients in Chicago, Dallas, wherever. It’s killing her, she says, so next year she plans to quit and have a baby. Ha ha ha.

We have to stop at the same McDonald’s every time I drop her off, too. The sky is pearling as we walk across the parking lot. I recall a sunrise I saw on a beach in Hawaii. Something like that can save your life if you use it later, when you need it. A garbage truck pulls in, passing between us and the restaurant. It screams its guts out as it reaches for a Dumpster. Louise hurries into the restaurant, her hands pressed to her ears.

Everybody in line is wearing a uniform. There’s a cop, two flight attendants, a nurse, some guys in orange vests and hard hats, and a postman. It’s like a children’s book. I go to the counter while Louise finds a table. That’s how we always work it. I know her order by heart. The girl at the register has acne and a silver tooth. Her friend says something to her, and the girl asks, while handing me my change, “For real?” A button is missing from her shirt. I can see her belly.

Louise lifts the magazine she’s reading so there’s room for the tray on the table. It takes a minute to get everything arranged to her liking, and then she says, “There’s a quiz in here that tells you how long you’re going to live.”

“I don’t believe in that stuff,” I reply, unwrapping my McMuffin.

“It’s not a horoscope; it’s a series of health-related questions. You can’t not believe in it.”

“Then what I mean is, I don’t care.”

“Do you smoke? No.”

“I’m not cooperating.”

“It’s not like I can’t answer them all for you. Do you exercise? If so, how often?”

“Louise, who says I’m ever going to die?”

She puts down the magazine and opens her juice. “Forget it,” she says.

My coffee steams up my glasses. I wait for them to clear so I can read the newspaper. There’s an article about an earthquake in India. They interview the guy in charge of burning the bodies. “There will be many more ghosts after this,” he says. “But I won’t be afraid. I have met ghosts so many times by now that I think I’m one of them.”

Louise’s cell phone rings. It’s her boss, the one I think she’s fucking. A UPS guy comes in, and a real, live sailor. The girl with the silver tooth takes a break. She walks outside and sits on the curb, poking at something with the toe of her shoe. I had a dream last night that they brought back an old TV show, and it made everybody happy.

YOU CAN SMELL the ocean at the airport, and seagulls plunder the trash. When you take off, you can look down and watch the waves crawl toward the shore. They seem like they’re barely moving from up that high. Louise is jittery. Maybe it’s the coffee. Her hand shakes when she twists the rearview mirror down to check her hair. She complains that my driving makes her nauseous. We fight the way people do in movies, always coming close but never landing a blow.

The streetlights go out as I pull up to the terminal. For an instant everything is hot pink. I pop the trunk and help Louise with her bag. She fits everything she needs into a single carry-on. That’s one of the things I love about her: She’s so practical despite her neuroses.

“Good-bye, husband,” she says.

“Good-bye, wife.”

A quick kiss, and she’s off. I watch her until she’s out of sight — my own ritual. I’m losing her. She slipped through my fingers somehow.

I TOOK MY cock out in the elevator once, coming back from lunch, just to do it. I unzipped my pants as soon as the doors closed and let it dangle until the bell rang for my floor. If the receptionist had looked up, she might have caught me getting myself together.

The corporate structure here is labyrinthian. They always reorganize when someone new gets to the top. My team is currently part of the production department. For the past two months we’ve been coordinating the development of a print campaign for a new brand of yogurt. There’s the team leader, then me, then three facilitators. They used to be called assistants.

The facilitators sit in cubicles outside my office. There’s talk that they’re going to move everyone into cubicles, to improve communication. I’ll quit if that happens. You can hear your neighbors sighing in those things, you can smell their perfume. If they catch a cold, you’re going to get it. People sneak up on you.

The company leases the entire tenth floor. My window faces north, floor to ceiling. In the winter I close the door, turn my chair around, and watch the storms blow in. When Malibu burns, I can see that, too. I once hired a guy who quit after two weeks. “I don’t know how you hack being in this box all day,” he said. He left to spend more time painting. You can’t rely on rich kids.

This morning I received a memo from the personnel department, regarding one of the VPs, Kress. His wife died, and he’s been out of the office for a month. The memo relayed his request that nobody mention his loss when he returns. We are not to hug him, console him, or otherwise say or do anything out of the ordinary. He would appreciate this very much.

One of the facilitators pokes her head in, Heidi, a skinny girl with moles.

“Donna will be late.”

“You’re kidding,” I reply, flatly.

Donna is our team leader. She’s often late. Her children are her excuse. No one questions it. This one’s sick, that one’s got the shits.

“She asked me to tell you.”

“Bless her heart.”

“Can you initial these layouts?”

If Donna goes, I have a feeling they’ll skip me and promote Heidi. She comes in early and stays past six; I air out my dick in the elevator. Her hair is a strange color, and I saw her crying in her car after the Christmas party. Someone said she’s religious.

The phone rings. It’s Adam, from accounting.

“What’s up with that Kress memo? What a narcissist.”

Adam keeps porno in his desk drawer. He smokes dope in the stairwell. We aren’t exactly friends — I wouldn’t loan him money, and he wouldn’t ask — but we cut each other some slack.

“Let’s go in on a wreath,” I say. “Have it waiting for him.”

“Know what I mean?”

“This place.”

“Your old lady’s gone, right? We’ll have dinner.”

Two years ago Adam ran over a jogger and killed her. The woman darted in front of his Explorer, and there was nothing he could do. Even the cops said so. This was before we met. Someone who knew him then told me he wasn’t the same person afterward. One night while we were drinking, I asked Adam about that. “Of course it changed me,” he said. “I’d been waiting all my life for an excuse to fuck up.”

LOUISE SHOPS OFF a list, but I like to freestyle. When she’s out of town, I buy Whatever I want: sardines, Ruffles and onion dip, pot pies, quarts of Olde English “800.” They’re getting ready for St. Patrick’s Day at the store. Lots of cardboard shamrocks and leprechauns. If you believe the supermarket, we’re always celebrating something.

Only two checkstands are open, and both have long lines. I pick up the Enquirer. The woman behind me bumps me with her cart. I ignore her. She bumps me again. “Listen,” I say. She grimaces apologetically, all of her teeth showing. People often think I’m angry when I’m not. Something about me is too hard.

The days are getting longer. There’s still an orange glow in the west when I leave the store. A hippie asks me to sign a petition. I refuse, but I try to be nice about it. Moths circle the lights in the parking lot, heroic in their single-mindedness.

A YEAR OR so ago I had a problem with earthquakes. The big one seemed to be imminent. I couldn’t sleep, I couldn’t swallow. My health insurance would have covered a shrink, but there was no way I wanted those kinds of claims floating around. I paid for it out of my own pocket.

She was nice enough, and I liked her office. The lighting or the furniture or something was very relaxing. Pretty good for a random pick out of the yellow pages. I told her that I felt something cataclysmic was about to happen, and this was keeping me awake nights.

“Do you see yourself as being in danger, or others?” she asked.

“I just want to get rid of the insomnia,” I said. “I have to work.”

She set me up with weekly appointments and a prescription for Xanax. I never returned, though; I didn’t want to answer any questions. Her receptionist called once or twice, but I pretended to be someone else and said I was out of the country. Louise was traveling a lot then. I went through the pills in a couple of weeks. Three of those and a beer — what a tremendous buzz. In the end there was no earthquake and nobody got hurt. That was good, I guess.

SOMEWHERE BETWEEN THE restaurant and the titty bar, Adam tells me he’s going to kill himself. He’s driving because he’s less drunk than I am. First he gets quiet, then he says, “I’m never happy. I want to die.” We’re on Sunset Boulevard. Dreams have come true on this very street.

I take a deep breath and push it back out between my teeth. I didn’t realize we were that kind of people. I thought we were tougher. Adam laughs when I don’t say anything. He puts on his sunglasses. A song he likes comes on the radio, and he turns it up and yells, “This is my jam!” I have failed him.

Monday night is amateur night. Not really, but that’s what the sign says. We’re supposed to believe that there are all these horny housewives dying to take off their clothes for strangers. It’s cute in a way. Old-fashioned. Another sign says DO NOT TALK ABOUT DRUGS OR YOU WILL BE ASKED TO LEAVE. There are nicer places, but we like this one.

We sit at the rail. The only other customer is a Mexican cowboy who spends more time staring at himself in the mirrors that cover the walls than at the strippers. He’s got a beautiful pair of boots. The two girls dancing tonight take turns, three songs each. Whichever one’s not onstage when we order fetches our beers from the bartender.

Adam’s doing a thing now. Embarrassed about what happened in the car, he’s laying it on thick. He slaps me on the back, whistles and claps and throws too much money around. The dancers play along, illegally flashing their beavers and letting their nipples brush his face as he tucks bills into their G-strings and tells them he loves them. They lie, and we lie, and that’s how it goes. The cowboy leaves. He spits on the floor on his way out.

One of the girls is named Danisha. Sometimes she speaks with an English accent, and sometimes she’s Jamaican. She complains about the jukebox. “Too much ’eavy metal,” she says. When she dances, she looks me right in the eye while grinding her pussy against the pole, and she sits beside me between sets. “Buy me a drink,” she says. “The owner’s watching.” I’m having fun. This bar, this woman. It feels good to be in the middle of something.

I ask Danisha where she’s from, and she draws little circles on the inside of my thigh with her long, red fingernail as she answers. “Baby, I been all over the world. London, New York.” She keeps clicking the stud in her tongue against her teeth. Girls like her often wind up dead. Nobody claims their bodies. After an hour or so Adam gets tired of pretending. He twists his napkin into knots and frowns at his beer. “Let’s go,” he says. “Let’s get the fuck out of here.”

WINDOW WASHERS ARE working on the building next door. They stand on little platforms that lower from the roof like lifeboats. You couldn’t pay me enough. I wonder if they ever see anything interesting — people fucking, people fighting. Heidi taps on my door with a pen to get my attention.

“I brought doughnuts. They’re in the lunchroom if you want one.”

It’s not worth it. You never know who’ll be in there.

Donna is out today. Something about chicken pox or flu shots or chaperoning a field trip. I take her calls and sit in for her at a meeting. On my break I go down to the little store in the basement of the building and buy a lottery ticket. The girl who sells it to me wishes me luck. “Thanks,” I say, because that’s what you say.

New e-mail. A couple of ads: “See your favorite movie and TV stars in hot XXX action.” “Are you tired of working for someone else?” Adam has sent me a photo. I look over my shoulder before I open it, make sure nobody’s around. It’s a man who’s been run over by a train. Half of him lies leaking on one side of the rail, half on the other. I hate the Internet.

There’s also a letter from a girl I went to high school with. I didn’t know her well back then, but she got my address from my sister and now writes me about once a month. She lives in Alaska with her husband and a bunch of kids. The usual thing is she complains about her life, and I tell her to keep her chin up. Lately, though, she’s been fantasizing about having sex with me. Her letters make me blush. I asked her to send a picture, but she wouldn’t. Adam says this means she’s a pig.

Louise calls. She might be getting sick.

“Come home,” I say. “I’ll take care of you.”

“Probably not till Friday. It’s up in the air.”

There’s something cold in her voice. I play with the stapler on my desk, the paper clips. I don’t want to love her more than she loves me. We’ve been married six years, and I hope we make it to seven. She tells me about a dinner she had with her clients. Tapas and sangria.

“Where are you again? Seattle?” I ask.

“Denver.”

“Right, right.”

Heidi is at my door. They need me in the art department. I rush the good-byes and hang up. There is nothing for me to do but stand and walk down the hall. I’m full to bursting and empty at the same time, like the universe on paper.

I OPEN THE window and lie on the couch. Our apartment overlooks a school. A sneaky breeze clinks and clanks the chains on the swing set in the playground. It’s warm for March. About now I would usually read one of the magazines that are always piling up, but not tonight. tonight I’m not going to worry about what I’m missing. I turn off the TV. The moon climbs the palm tree across the street and sits there shining.

I’m thinking about my childhood. It used to be right there for me, but now there are so many blanks. A police helicopter flies low over the building, then circles, playing its spotlight over a house up the street. It makes a sound that I feel in my chest more than hear. I put on my flip-flops and go downstairs. One of my neighbors is standing on the porch, her hair in curlers. I didn’t know women wore curlers anymore.

“See anything?” I ask.

“I think it’s those Armenians.”

I shuffle toward the commotion. Four or five squad cars are parked in the street, doors open, light bars flashing, abandoned in a hurry. The helicopter is right overhead. Its sun gun paints the house pale blue and makes the shadows wobble, like a whole day captured in a time-lapse movie. I’m surprised that I haven’t been stopped yet. I start to cross the street to get even closer, but a cop steps out of the bushes and says, “Over here. Now!”

We are crouched behind a hedge: me, the cop, a bald-headed kid, and the kid’s two Chihuahuas. The cop closes his eyes, listening to a sputtering radio. His shotgun is pointed at the ground. I’ve seen the kid walking the dogs before. He tells me it’s a hostage situation. A man is holding a gun on his elderly parents. “They forgot his birthday,” the kid says. “It’s sad.”

I reach down to pat the dogs, and they lick my fingers. There’s some kind of flower smell in the air. The kid’s leg is touching mine. He’s shaking. Maybe he’s scared and maybe it’s crank. I’m not scared because I don’t care anymore. It’s a good feeling, like getting something over with.

Another cop joins us. He tells the first one to take us out of the area. I want something bad to happen; I dare it to. Electricity buzzes out of my balls and spirals up my throat. The Chihuahuas bounce at the ends of their leashes, pissing and sniffing, as we hurry away, bent double, and I glimpse the silhouette of someone standing in the doorway of the house with a gun to his head.

THE ALARM GOES off at seven-thirty. I spent half the night running up and down a beach, searching for a place to throw away a broken bottle. “Toss it in the water,” said dream Adam, who looked nothing like the real one. The sand sucked at my feet, and there were bruised fish rolling in the surf. I find myself on Louise’s side of the bed, my head resting on her special pillow, the only one she’ll use. I once put the case on another pillow to test her, and she knew as soon as she lay down.

Some mornings I beat the guy in the next apartment to the shower, but not today, so the water pressure’s for shit. Looking at myself in the mirror afterward, I decide to grow a mustache. I shave everything but my upper lip. There’s not a word in the paper about the standoff. I go through it page by page at the kitchen table. If that didn’t make it, what else was left out? I hate to start a day wondering.

Someone has slipped Jesus flyers under the windshield wipers of all the cars in the garage. Big black clouds are piling up on the mountains to the north, but the rest of the sky is clear. The radio says rain by noon, so the wind has a lot of work to do. I stop for gas, and a homeless man asks if he can pump it. He’s not one of those funny ones. He stinks, and his pants are falling down. I give him a buck, but he can’t figure out how to work the nozzle. I tell him not to worry about it, keep the money anyway.

Donna calls me into her office. She’s wearing a denim shirt embroidered with Warner Brothers cartoon characters. Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck. “Did you sign off on this?” she asks, holding out the proof for an ad I okayed for her when she was out one afternoon.

There’s an apostrophe missing in the copy: Yogurts finest hour. That’s the kind of thing I’m supposed to be concerned about. It’s difficult lately. I want to say, “Maybe you should do your own fucking job,” but I don’t. There are pictures of her children on her desk. I curse them instead.

The plaza is empty at lunch. The clouds have moved in, and the wind leans on the trees. I drop a potato chip bag, and it is carried off before I can get to it. The mirrored windows of the skyscrapers towering over me reflect the gray sky. Because of this, you almost forget the buildings are there. Birds sometimes smack right into them and fall to the ground, senseless.

I EAT SALTINES and Vienna sausages for dinner, sitting in front of the TV. I have a few drinks. The questions are difficult on the game shows tonight. The contestants sweat and lick their lips. We have surround sound. We have DVD. One day soon I’m going to bump us up to a plasma screen.

The phone rings. Someone says, “Sorry,” and hangs up. The bathroom smells like cigarette smoke. It comes in through the air shaft from the apartment downstairs. The lady with the curlers lives there with her husband. I can never remember their names. He’s on disability, and she’s a part-time dog trainer. They keep odd hours. “The kike came by today,” the husband says, his words drifting up the air shaft with the smoke. He’s talking about our landlord. “How do you feel about wood floors?”

I pause to look at a picture hanging on the wall of Louise and me standing in the snow. What makes it funny is that we’re in shorts and T-shirts. We’re wearing sandals. You take the tram in Palm Springs, and they haul you up a cable from the desert to the top of a mountain in about five minutes flat. The right time of the year, it’s eighty at the bottom and freezing on the summit.

I had to beg Louise to accompany me. We were on a weekend getaway. She shut her eyes and clutched my arm as we swung out of the station. Now and then the gondola shuddered, drawing gasps from the other passengers and causing Louise to dig her nails into me. Going from rocks and sand to icicles and hissing pines with such startling suddenness was like a dream. I was a little unsure of myself. What other amazing shit would happen?

The snack bar on top was full of kids in some kind of uniforms. Their screeches rose up and were trapped in the rafters. Louise and I hurried out to a deck in back that overlooked a hilly area where people sledded and built snowmen. Everybody was dressed for the cold but us. The snow was dirty, and rocks showed through. Big black birds sat in leafless black trees. Louise had a headache. She thought she might pass out. I asked someone to take a picture of us. I put some snow in my mouth. Louise shivered and started to cry.

I wouldn’t let her hang on to me on the way down. That was wrong. I told her it was time she got over herself. She closed her eyes and clung to the safety rail in the gondola, and I acted like I didn’t know her.

Dear Robin,

How is Alaska? How is your husband? How are the kids?

You asked last time for a sexy story. Does this count?

“You again?” Danisha said when I showed up at the bar. She was a stripper. I had to wait for her to get off work. The lock on the door to her building was broken, and the lobby smelled like a toilet. I was worried about my car, parked out front, because I didn’t want anything to happen that I’d have to explain. Danisha took my hand and pulled me up creaking stairs to her apartment. Her dress rode high on her ass, and she wasn’t wearing panties.

“Help me with this,” she said.

We worked together to turn the couch into a bed. The walls of the living room were papered with photos of rappers torn from magazines. I didn’t know what to do with myself. I pulled the bottle of tequila that I’d bought on the way over out of my pocket and took a drink. The lamp had a scarf draped over it, a piss-elegant touch. My eyelid twitched. My stomach fluttered.

“Want to get high?” Danisha asked, examining her forehead in a mirror.

I held up the bottle of tequila.

“Well, I’ma get high,” she said.

She stepped through a door and closed it behind herself. I heard a TV and voices.

This is where I get robbed

, I thought.

This is where I get killed.

I was too scared to sit down, so I walked to the window. The glass was broken. It was all over the floor.

What does she do when it rains?

I wondered. I tried to see my car but couldn’t.

“Where the fuck else am I suppose to take him?” Danisha yelled.

I couldn’t hear the answer. She appeared again in the living room with a big smile on her face. I sat beside her on the dark green sheet, and she pushed play on a boom box. It was some woman with a gravelly voice. “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” she said. Danisha put a glass pipe to her lips. Her lighter had Tweety Bird on it. The smoke she exhaled wrapped around us and drew our bodies together. It tickled our noses. Danisha fell back on the mattress, and for a second I thought she’d fainted. Then she reached for me.

While I was banging away, she coughed, and her pussy tightened around my cock. After half an hour, she pushed me off her and said, “That’s it unless you got more money, honey.” I was all shriveled up anyway. I’d been faking it for a while. I walked to the window and cut my foot on the glass. I laughed, and she laughed. Then she told me I better leave. There was blood all over the place.

Remember how you said it’s dark there six months out of the year? Well, it’s dark here all the time.

P.S. Don’t write back.

KRESS RETURNS TO work. I see him walking down the hall. I see him at the Coke machine. People seem to be respecting his wishes; they stay out of his way. He’s an old guy, with one of those comb-overs that you laugh at behind his back. Someone said that he and his wife were married for thirty years. I feel bad for joking with Adam about his loss. I don’t know where we get off.

Adam’s voice mail picks up when I try his desk. The receptionist says he didn’t show up this morning and didn’t call in. I dial his apartment, but there’s no answer there either. I wave away the worry that flutters around my head. He’s a flake. Everybody says so.

Donna and I proof some copy. She smells like sour milk. A cereal accident, I bet, while she was rushing to get her kids ready for school. What do I think of Heidi? she wants to know. I say she’s doing a great job. “She is, isn’t she?” Donna murmurs, bent over the table, squinting at a photo through a loupe. I get the feeling I’ve just cut my own throat.

It’s drizzling outside. Little drops are swallowed by larger ones that race hungrily down the glass. I order a cheeseburger from the cafeteria in the basement. Louise calls. She won’t be home until Sunday night. Things are crazy there. I can’t prove she’s lying, but I’ll hire someone who can, I swear to God.

“You know that test you wanted to give me, the one that would tell me when I’m going to die?” I ask.

“What are you talking about?”

“In the magazine on the way to the airport.”

“What about it?

“I’m ready to take it now.”

She pauses, then laughs. “I threw it away. It was stupid.”

Later, I follow Kress into the bathroom. He locks himself into a stall, and I stand at a urinal. I wash my hands when I’m done. My new mustache looks funny in the mirror. It looks like a mistake. I open the bathroom door and close it, pretending to leave. Instead I wait, my breath stilled. Kress groans. He punches the wall. “Goddammit!” he screams.

This is grief. This, I understand.

THE TRASH SMELLS awful. There must be some chicken in there, some rotting meat. I grab the bag and carry it down to the Dumpster. It’s dark outside. The streetlights have come on, a nightly miracle. I like it when things work like that. I like knowing that the garbage man will come on Tuesday. It’s comforting.

The kid with the Chihuahuas passes by, hurrying them along before the rain starts again. He yanks their leashes when they try to drink from oily puddles.

“What happened to that guy down the street?” I ask.

He doesn’t know. I walk with him to the house, and we pause in front. It’s shut up tight. There’s no car in the driveway, no flickering TV. I cross the lawn and climb the three stairs to the porch.

“Don’t!” the kid hisses.

The welcome mat is red, white, and blue, like the flag, and a menu for a Thai place hangs from the doorknob. I peek in the window. I put my ear to the door. Nothing. I want to knock, but I don’t. The kid and the dogs are gone when I turn around.

THE ARTICLE IS called “Hideouts: 10 Places You’ll Never Want to Leave.” I can’t get through it. My eyes drift off the page every few minutes and wander around the living room. The apartment’s pops and cracks make me flinch. I add the magazine to a new pile I’ve started so I’ll know where it is when I need it.

It’s late in Denver, but I call Louise’s hotel anyway. The phone rings and rings. She never picks up. What happened to buying a house and having a baby? I want Whatever she wants from now on.

The rain is really coming down. I stand at the window and watch it bounce off the street. My foot throbs. It’s bleeding again. I must have ripped open the cut somehow. There are no Band-Aids big enough in the medicine chest.

I try Adam again. I’ve been calling every hour all day long. Finally, he answers.

“Hello?” he says.

Tears well up in my eyes and get away from me before I can blink them back. “You’re alive,” I sob. “You’re alive.”