You're Next

THEN
Chapter 14

Three minutes past midnight, Mike sees the red lights against the window of the shared bedroom of 1788 Shady Lane and he knows. The neighboring cot is empty; Shep’s been working as a bouncer at a crappy bar and won’t be home for hours, if at all. Mike hears the Couch Mother’s steps thundering toward the front door, a quickening drumroll of his own mounting anxiety. He burrows, wanting to bury his head beneath the sheets. On the plastic stool that serves as his nightstand rests a dog-eared copy of The Grapes of Wrath that some genius – no doubt Dubronski or Tony M – has scratched up so the cover reads The rape of rat. Around him the others stir. Mike thinks, It’s all over.

A half hour later, he is in the all-too-familiar interrogation room, and this time, there will be no kindly Saab-owning grandfather to rescue his ass.

Yes, that is him in the security-still frame. Yes, he pawned the rare, stolen coin. Yes, he found it on the street.

As always, the detectives are faceless, nameless. They are adults in Peanuts cartoons. They are sounds and pointed information.

‘You’re a decent kid,’ they say. ‘We can tell. It’s not too late for you.’ They say, ‘We been looking at your record. Some run-ins, sure, but a safecracking job? It doesn’t add up. Now, we know you’re buddies with Shepherd White, and that sounds like something more up his alley. That kid is bad news. He’s going down sooner or later. You gonna let him drag you down with him?’

Mike thinks, Loyalty. He thinks, Stamina.

They say, ‘You’re on your way to college, trying to be a good citizen. Bright future. Shepherd White is a punk and a reprobate. You do the math.’

But Mike is working out a different equation. He is still seventeen years old. Shep is eighteen, and Shep has two felonies on his adult record. If Mike rolls on Shep, this will be Shep’s third strike, and he will go away for twenty-five to life.

Mike knows the options, and both scare him so badly that he has sweated through his communal T-shirt.

The detectives are unimpressed with Mike’s willingness to be exculpated. They say, ‘If you don’t want to play ball, here’s how it goes. You’ve got a shit-stained rap sheet, and we’ve got an angry victim, one Mr Sandoval from Valley Liquors, willing to say what needs to be said. Juries love safecracking cases; in this day and age, they’re quaint and easy to grasp. One way or another, we will nail your sorry foster-home ass. Even if we have to take a loss on the burglary, we can make receiving stolen stick as a felony. Which means you do time. So you better think long and hard about whether your pal is worth it.’

If Shep was present, he would speak up. He would serve a life sentence before letting Mike take the fall, because he is pure, unlike Mike, who is fighting with himself to do the right thing and wishing Shep were here to step in and take the choice away from him.

Mike’s throat is dry and tight. He says, ‘He is.’

The detectives are ready for this. They produce an application from Cal State L.A. and say, ‘Read.’

Mike reads question 11b, which is highlighted in yellow: ‘Have you ever been arrested for, convicted of, or forfeited collateral for any felony or Class A misdemeanor violation?’

They say, ‘That’s right. This won’t be done when you get out either. This is throwing away college. This is throwing away your future. Think it over.’

He is arraigned the next day and makes bail.

At home, as he heads up the walk, Mike sees Shep waiting in the bay window. They go out back, plunk down on the rotting swings.

Shep says, ‘No way. I’m going in and telling them.’

Mike says, ‘You go in, you’re not coming back out, Mr Two-Strikes-You’ve-Seen-Me-Play-Ball.’

Shep’s voice, for the first time in a long time, is loud. ‘I don’t care. This is your life. This is college. I’m going in.’

‘If you go in, I’ll never come visit you,’ Mike says. ‘I’ll never talk to you again for the rest of my life.’

Shep’s face changes, and for one awful instant Mike thinks he is going to cry.

As promised, receiving stolen property sticks. The judge is tired of kids like Mike, and he is assigned to six months in the Hall. The night before he is due to report, he asks for a moment alone in the bedroom. The others grant his last request. Shep’s face shows nothing, but Mike knows he is devastated to be left out with the others. Mike cleans up around his space, makes his little cot a last time, then pauses to take stock of the room. Resting on the long-broken air conditioner is one of Shep’s shoes, so big it looks like you could sleep in it. The drawers of the communal dresser tilt at all angles, the tracks long gone. There on the plastic stool is The rape of rat. He picks it up, runs his thumb across the tattered cover. Like the Saab, it seems to encompass everything he cannot have, everything he is not, everything he can never be. He reaches over and drops it into the trash can.

Dubronski is in the doorway; Mike thinks the asshole has WD-40ed the hinges for occasions such as this. Dubronski has been watching, but for once that fat bully face is not lit with schadenfreude. He pops a Jelly Belly for a sugar hit, plays with his pudgy hands. ‘Hey, Doe Boy, I just wanted to say, this sucks ass. I always thought if you could make it, hell, maybe we all were worth something.’

And that makes Mike’s insides crumble in a whole new way.

The Hall is tough, but not as violent as billed. Mike knows how to fight, so he doesn’t have to much. But it is hell – the hell of utter neglect. The others, his peers, represent every dirty part of himself that he never managed to scrub clean. He watches his back all the time and suffers from vigilance burnout, waking every five minutes, spinning circles down the corridors, keeping his back against the chain-link during yard time.

The third week he gets summoned to the head office, where the superintendent waits. She is not a warden. Just like he is not serving a ‘sentence’ but a ‘disposition’, and the hulking guards are called ‘counselors’. All those soft names don’t seem to make the time any less hard.

She asks, ‘How would you explain your state of mind, son?’

Mike says, ‘Scared straight.’

‘I understand you caught a bad rap. If you keep up the good behavior, I will make sure your time here is pleasant.’

‘Yes, ma’am.’

‘I will do my best to get you an early release. In the meantime don’t make me look stupid.’

‘Yes, ma’am.’

‘And when you’re out, don’t make me look stupid then either.’

‘Yes, ma’am.’

A few days later, a pie-faced guard wakes him at two in the morning and mumbles the news: The Couch Mother is dead.

Details are scarce. The rest of the night, Mike sits on his turned-back sheets with his bare feet on the icy tile, a wall of static blotting out thought and feeling.

In a hushed morning phone call with Shep, Mike learns that she had a stroke on a rare trip to the bathroom and cracked her head open on the lip of the tub. She had a good heart, a strong heart to push blood through all that acreage. But still, all hearts have their limits.

Hearing Shep’s voice jars something loose in Mike’s chest, and he hangs up and walks down the hall to the bathroom and locks himself in a stall. He sits on the closed toilet, doubles over, and sobs three times in perfect silence, his eyes clenched, both hands clamped over his mouth.

She may not have seemed like much, but she was what he had.

He is allowed to attend the funeral. Two sheepish uniformed cops, Mike’s escorts, stand in the back of the airless chapel. As the service begins, the hearse from the previous funeral is still idling in the alley, visible through a side door, and the folks for the next one are waiting in the reception area. Mike walks the aisle, regards the refrigerator of a casket, and thinks, I failed you.

None of the foster kids will give a speech. The notion of ceremony, of formality, evades them all. Finally Shep gets up. Somber in an ill-fitting dress shirt, he takes the podium. His mouth is a stubborn line. Silence reigns.

‘She was there,’ he says, and steps down.

Though the by-the-hour pastor frowns, Mike knows that Shep means this as the highest compliment.

Nine weeks later Mike walks from the Hall with a bag of clothes and forty dollars from the state. Shep is waiting for him outside on the shoulder of the road, leaning against a dinged-up Camaro, arms crossed. Mike has no idea how Shep knew about the early release date; he just found out himself the morning before.

As Mike approaches, Shep tosses him the keys. ‘You shouldn’t have done that,’ Shep says.

‘Loyalty,’ Mike says. ‘And stamina.’

Over the next few months, he applies for a few real jobs, but that felony charge gets in his way, sitting there like a boulder in the middle of a canyon road. So he gets a job as a day laborer, working with prison-release guys twice his age, hauling soot out of firehouses. With his first paycheck, he hires a lawyer out of the yellow pages and has his juvenile record sealed. But he soon discovers that while prospective employers can’t see his file, they will always know that it is sealed. And what they imagine his transgressions to be, he gleans, is worse than the reality.

At a dingy downtown government office, he stands in line with a bunch of domestic-abuse victims to get his last name and Social Security number changed. He is assigned a fresh number and a fresh surname, this time of his own choosing. He is Michael Wingate, and he has no past, no history. He has a clean start.

He gets a proper job as a carpenter, and nights he presses shirts in a purgatory of a dry cleaner. He and Shep drift, riding separate undercurrents. It is natural, gradual. It goes unspoken.

One day he walks past the window at Blockbuster and sees her standing there between Drama and Comedy. He stops to gawk. The sight of this woman makes him hurt in the worst way; it makes him yearn. But he is too intimidated to go in and talk to her, so instead he goes home and lies awake all night, cursing his unexpected timidity.

For the next few weeks, he goes back to Blockbuster before work, on break, between jobs. She has to return the movie sometime – two days, right, then late fees? He grows convinced that she has sworn off rentals, that she leaves the house only at inopportune times, that she saw him in the window leering like a stalker and was frightened into moving.

But one Sunday she reappears. Without figuring out what he is going to say, he rushes up to her in the parking lot, and only then does he stop and ask himself, What are you doing? She appraises him, panting and speechless, and before he can utter so much as a syllable, she bursts into laughter and says, ‘Okay, lunch. But somewhere public in case you’re an ax murderer.’

Lunch lasts through dinner. Engrossed in conversation, they forget to eat, the food no longer steaming on untouched plates. She works at a day-care center. Her smile makes him dizzy. She touches his arm, once, when laughing at something. He tells her his story, unedited, in a single breathless burst, how he was six kinds of stupid when he went into the Hall but has since gotten it down to three or four. He tells her about the Couch Mother and the Saab Grandfather and the Superintendent Warden, how they all gave him consideration before he really deserved it, how that probably saved his life, and how he hopes eventually to do the same thing for other people. He tells her he wants to build houses someday. She says, ‘Dreams are a dime a dozen. But sounds like you actually have the backbone to get there,’ and he burns with pride and says, ‘Stamina.’

She lets him see her to her car, and they pause, nervous in the biting October night. Her door is open, the interior light shining, but she stands there, waiting. He hesitates, desperate not to blemish the perfect evening.

‘If you had any guts,’ she says, ‘you’d kiss me.’

There is a second dinner, and a fifth. When she invites him over for a meal, he changes outfits three times, and still, to his eye, his clothes look worn out and blue-collar. As she sautés mushrooms, he patrols her apartment, picking up a sugar bowl, eyeing the rows of matching candles, fingering vanity curtains that are there only to provide a dab of lavender. He pictures his bare mattress, his cabinet lined with cans of SpaghettiOs, the poster of Michael Jordan thumbtacked above his garage-sale desk and realizes that no one ever taught him how to live properly.

That night they make love. She weeps after, and he is convinced he did something wrong until she explains.

She is very different from the girls he met during his tenure at 1788 Shady Lane.

At the movies one night, she giggles at his whispered joke, and the muscle-bound guy in the row in front of them turns and says, ‘Shut up, bitch.’ With a quick jab, Mike shatters his nose. They rush out, leaving the guy mewling in the aisle, his friends looking on helplessly, clones in matching college football jackets. Outside, Annabel says, ‘I’d be lying to say I didn’t find that charming and exciting in a fucked-up sort of way, but promise me you won’t ever do something like that again unless you really have to.’

That’s her – reverent and irreverent at the same time.

Confused, he acquiesces.

Later that week, exhausted, he dozes off at the shirt press and burns a tux vest. The customer, a coked-out dickhead in a blue Audi, shows up on his way to his black-tie event. ‘Do you have any fucking idea how much that tux cost?’ Mike apologizes and offers to file a damage claim. ‘And what the hell am I supposed to wear tonight?’ The customer grows irate, leaning over the counter, jabbing a finger into Mike’s chest. ‘You stupid fucking clown, you couldn’t pay for that with what you make in a year.’ The guy shoves Mike, and Mike sees the angle open up, the downward cross to break the jaw, but instead he takes a step back. The guy’s rage blows itself out, and he departs, peeling out and flipping Mike the bird. Mike still has a job, his knuckles aren’t bruised, and there are no cops to contend with. For days he basks in this small triumph.

He is becoming socialized.

But still he fears Dinner with the Family. Her father is a bankruptcy lawyer. Her older sister is a domestic machine who produces baked goods and offspring at an alarming rate. Her brother has a Subaru and a weave belt. He gives to charity and complains about taxes, the kind of guy who probably played multigenerational baseball at the park around the time Mike and Shep were boosting Bomb Pops and urinating on Schwinns.

Mike minds his silverware, his elbows, his napkin in his lap. He thinks of those few domestic memories he has held on to – sage incense in a yellow-tiled kitchen, his mother’s tan skin, the dust-and-oil smell of the station wagon’s cloth seats. He feels uncomfortable, unworthy of sitting here at a nicely set table in a nice home. The parents, none too enamored, seem to agree. When her father passes the butter, he asks, ‘Where did you go to college?’ and Mike smiles nervously and says, ‘I didn’t.’ The rest of dinner is consumed by stories of successful friends and neighbors who never went to college and were successful anyway, the two other siblings swapping anecdotes while the parents chew and sip and shoot each other shrewd glances. Annabel has to contain her laughter at the absurdity of it all, and when they leave, she says, ‘I will never make you do that again.’

The next week, at dinner, she fiddles with her watercress. Her face is tight and flushed and quite unhappy. He braces himself for the speech he has been fearing. And sure enough she comes at him hard. ‘What are we doing here?’ She tosses down her fork with a clatter. ‘I mean, I don’t want to do this whole casual-dating thing-’

‘I don’t either.’

She bulldozes ahead, undeterred. ‘-where we agree we’re allowed to see other people-’

‘I don’t want to see anyone else.’

‘-and I pretend I’m okay with it.’

‘I’m not okay with it.’

‘I’m too old for that shit. I need security, Mike.’

‘Then marry me.’

This time, finally, she hears.

They don’t drink a drop of liquor at the ceremony but feel drunk with joy. The service is brief, some pictures after on the courthouse steps, Mom and Dad doing their best to muster smiles.

As he helps her mother gingerly into the car at the night’s end, she pauses in a rare unfiltered moment, dress hem in hand, and says, ‘The thing that doesn’t add up with you – you’re so gentle.’ He replies, ‘I spent enough years being not.’

He works hard, is promoted to foreman. In what is the single best day of his life, their daughter is born. She was to be Natalie, but when they meet her, she is Katherine, so forms must be reprocessed to ensure she has her proper name.

They settle into an apartment in Studio City. Prints of water lilies, matching linens, little seashell soaps for the bathroom. Through their back window, they can see the Wash, where the L.A. River drifts through concrete walls.

Out of the blue, Shep calls from a pay phone. It has been months – no, over a year. Both times he and Annabel met were excruciating, Shep’s hearing putting a damper on what little conversation could be summoned. Annabel is protective of Mike, all too aware of the costs of the sentence he served, and Shep doesn’t understand her; she is simply beyond his frame of reference. Mike remembers only long silences and sullen sips of beer, him in the middle, sweating worse than he did at that first dinner with her family.

Given Shep’s hearing, this phone conversation, like all others, is awkward, filled with starts and stops. Shep has heard that Mike has a daughter, and he wants to come by. Kat is five months old, and Mike is nervous, still adjusting, but cannot bring himself to say no.

Shep arrives two hours late, well after Kat is down. ‘Can I spend the night?’ he asks at the door, before saying hello. ‘I have a thing going on with my place.’

Mike and Annabel manage nods.

From his pocket Shep withdraws a gift – a wadded, unwrapped onesie sized for a three-year-old. Mike hates himself for wondering if it is stolen. He rubs his fingers over the butterfly pattern. It is the softest thing he has ever seen Shep hold.

Shep puts his feet on the coffee table and lights up, and Annabel says, apologetically, ‘Would you mind not smoking in here? The baby.’

‘Right,’ Shep says. ‘Sorry.’ He walks to the window and leans out, blowing into the wind.

Annabel says to Mike, ‘I think I’m gonna grab some sleep while I can.’

Mike goes over to Shep, wanting him to say good night, to be polite, to be gracious. He rests a hand on Shep’s back, still ridged with muscle. When Shep flicks his cigarette and turns, Annabel is starting to pull out the couch bed, and he says quietly, ‘Don’t bother. I’ll just sleep on it like it is.’

‘It’s really no trouble.’

He pauses a moment, processing. ‘Couches are more comfortable,’ he says. ‘I sleep on a couch at home.’

‘Oh,’ she says. ‘Okay.’

They stare at each other, Shep pinching his St. Jerome pendant between his lips.

‘Well,’ she says. ‘Good night.’

Shep nods.

The bedroom door closes. Shep says, ‘Go get a drink?’ and Mike says, ‘I’m pretty beat. The baby has us up a couple times a night, and I got work at five.’

Shep asks, ‘Can I have a key?’

At three in the morning, the front door opens and closes loudly; Shep never hears doors well. Annabel wakes with a start, and Kat fusses through the monitor.

Mike stumbles out into the living room. Shep says, ‘Alcohol? Bandages?’

Drawing closer, Mike sees that his cheek has been badly raked by fingernails. He tilts Shep’s head, sees the white flesh glittering through the blood. He gets one of the matching hand towels from the bathroom and soaks it in warm water. When Shep pats on rubbing alcohol, he doesn’t so much as flinch. They have done this many a night – staying up, whispering, cleaning wounds. For a moment Mike is lost in the sweet familiarity of the ritual. But the footsteps and movement wake Kat fully. Annabel emerges from the bedroom, pauses on her way to the nursery. ‘What happened?’

Shep says, ‘Crowded bar. I was having trouble, you know…’ He gestures to an ear. Mike has never known him to speak directly about his hearing problem, and he isn’t about to start now. ‘Guy was playing with me. Sneaking up. He had a lot of friends. He sucker-punched me. The rest didn’t go down how they wanted. His girlfriend jumped on my back somewhere in there. Cops showed up, so I split. It wasn’t my fault.’

Someone bellows outside, ‘You fuckin’ asshole, get out here! We’re gonna kill you!’

Kat is crying now in the nursery.

Mike says, ‘Did you hear that?’

Shep says, ‘What?’ Mike points to the window. Shep crosses and sticks his head out. An instant later a bottle shatters against the wall near the window. The yelling, now a chorus, intensifies.

The phone rings, and Annabel snatches it up. ‘Yeah, sorry, Mrs. McDaniels.’ She points at the ceiling, in case Mike has forgotten where the McDanielses live. ‘Everything’s okay,’ she says into the phone. ‘Just some drunk out there. We’ll handle it.’ She hangs up, says to Mike, ‘I don’t want this going on here,’ and disappears into the nursery.

Shep withdraws his head from the window, wiping beer spray from his face. ‘Couple of his buddies must’ve followed me home,’ he says. ‘I’ll handle it.’

Calmly, he goes outside. Sitting on the couch, Mike lowers his face into his hands. There is a crash. And then another. Then silence.

A moment later Shep reappears. ‘My bad,’ he says.

‘Look,’ Mike says, ‘maybe you should split before more guys show up.’

‘What?’

‘I think maybe this isn’t the best time…’ He is grasping for words, stuck between a blood-sworn loyalty and what he owes that grandfather from the park who bought his soul for fifteen grand. He considers the Couch Mother, the superintendent, Annabel, Kat, himself. Obligation makes for tough sledding.

Shep says, ‘The guy came at me. I was defending myself.’

Shep is a lot of things, but he is not a liar.

Mike thinks about his mother’s faint cinnamon smell, his meandering graveyard walks, and Kat asleep in the next room. He will not – cannot – let anything put that child or her future at risk. And yet Shep is Shep, their friendship battle-tested like no other relationship Mike has ever known. Life is unfair; Mike knows this firsthand. But in this moment he hates that he is now on the high end of the seesaw, enjoying the better view.

He is sweating, unsure of himself, filled with self-loathing. He says, ‘I know that, but it’s not… safe. I mean, I got a baby now. The neighbors. I’m still trying to figure this whole thing out, you know?’

Shep snaps off a nod and stands, his face betraying nothing. Feeling like a heel, Mike walks him down. His broad frame cut from the slanting yellow of the streetlights, Shep heads toward the Wash, Mike a half step behind. A narrow footbridge extends across the river. Black water rustles against concrete banks below. Mike is hustling to keep up, calling after him – ‘Shep. Shep. Shep.’ – sure that Shep is, for the first time ever, mad at him.

But halfway across, when Shep finally hears and turns, his face shows no anger.

Bugs ping off the lights overhead. The eastern horizon has moved from black to charcoal. They are centered above a river moving invisibly beneath them.

Mike clears his throat. ‘You told me once… you said, “You can be whatever you want to be.”’ He wants to cry – he almost is – and he doesn’t understand himself. It is as though his face is having its own reaction to this while his heart stays resolute and hunkered down. ‘Well’ – he casts his arms wide – ‘this is who I want to be.’

Shep’s mouth moves a bit, forming something like a sad smile. Blood shines darkly in those claw marks beneath his eye. He says, ‘Then it’s who I want you to be, too.’

They both seem to sense the finality in those words, in this moment. The wind comes up, cutting through Mike’s jacket. Shep offers his hand, and they clasp, gripping around the thumbs.

‘You’re my only family,’ Shep says.

He walks off before Mike can reply.

Mike watches Shep’s shoulders fading into the early-morning dark. He bites his lip, turns back into the wet wind, and starts for home.