And when those dishes are done, and Bobby’s eyes have slipped shut by the light of the television, and I’ve repacked the boxes with all the clothes I won’t need, I enter that bedroom down the hall.
It’s worse than the shrine.
Now I know Bobby’s son must be dead and gone. The little bed is neatly made up with a faded Star Wars comforter. Books and toys line the shelves. I drop the box down on the bed and pick up a sealed package containing an action figure of Han Solo. There is a thick layer of dust coating the top. I wonder if Bobby’s son was a serious collector. Or if he’d ever been here at all.
The clothes are practically new, the toys are new, the books have no creases on the spine.
For the first time I wonder where Bobby’s wife is. Did she take their son and leave him here all alone?
I place the box back on the floor, on the square spot where the carpet looks brand new instead of dulled over by dust, and head back into the living room. Lila is whining at the door so I let her in, and then I sit down on the couch, pull an afghan over me, and warm my toes under Lila’s body curled at my feet.
The television’s dancing lights and muted sound send me to sleep.
-17-
I snap awake in the dark. Lila is sitting in the middle of the living room, watching me, her eyes green.
(Did I kill him – no don’t look)
It is a colossal effort to turn my head, to look at the place on the couch beside me.
(Blood you’ll see blood everywhere)
But I don’t see any blood. Bobby is sound asleep, just as I’d left him. He is obviously breathing, but I don’t hear any snoring. I don’t hear anything at all. The television is silent, its black eye watching me.
“You need to go back.”
My head whips around looking for the source of that voice. A girl’s voice.
(Kayla’s voice)
No - that’s impossible.
The window near me is open, letting in a chilly breath of air that reeks of autumn and decay. I look out. No sign of a teenage girl.
Not even the crickets make a sound.
“We need you back home.”
My head whips back to look for the source of that voice. It sounded close, closer than anyone could sound from outside, but even though I have better hearing than most people I don’t know where it came from. It’s just me and Bobby and Lila. The hair on my arms is standing on end, every pore in my body painfully alert.
The voice almost sounded like it was coming from inside my head.
Vibrations rumble through my head darkness swimming in sweat
I swallow and try to hold off. I don’t want to kill Bobby. I don’t want to kill Lila.
Nausea
No, no, no.
Lila’s eyes catch mine. Immediately I feel a flood of calm. No nausea. No dizziness. Her eyes anchor me to this place, this safe place where I am warm and well-fed.
“You must go home.”
That voice again, soft and feminine. It is Lila, I know it is.
“Yes,” I say.
Then I wake up. Everything is sideways. I’ve slipped over so my head uses the couch’s hard armrest as a pillow. Lila is asleep on my feet. Bobby is snoring. The television plays its late-night reruns, filling the room with a babble of voices and laugh tracks.
I start to sit up, then stop. Relax.
Go home? Does it make any sense? No one out here knows anything of what happened that day, my thirteenth birthday. I’ve been running all these years, but where has it gotten me? A few states over, homeless and hungry, with no plans for a future aside from “go someplace warm.” It could be the police aren’t looking for me anymore. It could be no one found those bodies.
And even if I am wanted for murder, maybe it’s time I stopped running and faced it like a man.
Yes, I will go back.
My eyes close and I pull the afghan tight around my shoulders.
After breakfast.
-18-
It continues like this for weeks. I tell myself I will leave after lunch, after dinner, tomorrow, next week. But I like Bobby. I help him cook meals that aren’t straight out of a box. We drive into town and I help him sell hot dogs. Sometimes I walk to the grocery store and buy ingredients for dinner while he’s working. Sometimes I sell hot dogs while he sleeps in the truck. He sleeps a lot.
Some days, if I’m restless with nightmares and sleep too late, I only wake up when Bobby’s truck rumbles to life. Usually he leaves a note, Didn’t want to wake you. Make yourself at home. Or, See you for dinner, cook something good! On these days I clean the trailer, vacuuming and dusting and sweeping and scrubbing. One day I find a pair of hedge clippers and trim the weeds around the trailer.
I’ve got a flair for cooking. Maybe it’s just Bobby being nice and the crap I’ve grown used to eating over the past three years, the bruised fruit and pizza crusts from the garbage, but what I make tastes good to me too. It’s surprising, considering what I’m working with, but somehow I can tell by scent what needs to be added. In the kitchen the warm smell of good food cooking wraps around me like a blanket. I can almost hear my mother’s voice, asking if I want to stir or crack the eggs or lick the spoon, singing along with the radio. I can almost feel her hand on my head, just resting there, like she could protect me this way, keep me safe.
We both knew that when my father got home it wouldn’t be safe.
A few times, like today, the memories of my father and what he would do to ruin dinner made me think it was him coming through the door and not Bobby. I found myself gripping the knife I had used to cut up beef for a stir fry, backed into a corner.
“Easy there, Dan,” Bobby said as he entered the trailer. He held out his hands. “It’s just me.”
I couldn’t get my jaws apart to say anything, my teeth were clenched so tight. But I did put the knife down and look away, pretending to be busy washing the vegetables. My heart is hammering in my chest.
Bobby has learned not to call me Dannyboy. He has learned to go to bed at night and not share the couch with me. He leaves me alone after these incidents and lets me get myself together. Except for that one time he found me curled up in a ball on the floor
(I don’t even remember how I got there)
with Lila licking my face and hands. On that day, he stroked my hair until I stopped shaking so much, talking to me about his son, Little Bobby. I don’t remember the first part of what he said, but once I was able to focus on his voice I listened real hard, about how he taught Little Bobby how to throw a baseball and how he went to all of Little Bobby’s baseball games, how Little Bobby was going to play for the major leagues someday. When Bobby lost his job during the recession, and found out his wife was cheating on him, he funneled all of his energy into Little Bobby.
When he got to the part where his wife left him and took Little Bobby with her, that was when Bobby asked me how I was doing.
“I’m okay,” I told him.
“I bet you are,” he said, not sarcastic but matter-of-fact. He never mentioned it again. Never yelled at me for letting Lila hang out in the trailer with me, but considering that the place seems so much bigger now that it’s clean, and I vacuum her fur up on a daily basis, there’s not much reason to keep her out.
I cut the strips of beef in a slow, methodical rhythm, keeping my movements as steady as possible and my mind as blank as a new layer of snow. But it won’t go away. Memories of my father keep punching through the blankness.
“Stop with the women’s work, Dannyboy.”
Flinching, feeling the tightness as he grabbed my collar and pulled me away from the counter.
“Come on, let’s wrestle.”
These were the good days, when we would wrestle.
“Gotta learn how to be the leader of the pack, Dannyboy. Come on, show me what you’ve got.”
I was too afraid to give it all I had. What if I really hurt my father? How angry would he get then? So I held back, grappled with him u
ntil he laughed and pinned me to the ground, digging his elbow into my back and pressing my face to the floor, squeezing every molecule of oxygen out of my system, his grin hanging over me, waiting, just waiting, for me to think I was about to die.
black spots dancing in front of my eyes, behind the tears being squeezed out, losing sight of my mother in the kitchen, she’s disappearing and she hasn’t even turned around, I’m dying and she won’t even turn around to see
It’s a few moments before I realize Bobby is waiting just outside the kitchen area. I blink and look up at him.
“How’s dinner coming along, kiddo?”
I clear my throat. “A few more minutes.”
It’s safe here with Bobby, I keep telling myself, smelling the sizzle of the steak and the weaker aromas of the pea pods and broccoli.
-19-
“Why is this happening now?” I ask Lila after Bobby has begun snoring in the bedroom. My fingers scratch her velvety ears. “I’m safe here. I shouldn’t be freaking out like this.”
Lila looks at me. She’s just a dog. She doesn’t have any answers for me. I roll onto my side to stare at the television.
I shouldn’t be afraid of those memories. My father is dead. I killed him. There was no way he could have lived through what I did, any more than that old man and his wife, or Paul the pervert, or any of the countless others I’ve woken up to find dead. I shouldn’t still be afraid of my father.
I should be afraid of myself.
I still don’t know what triggers it. I always had a feeling it was hunger, or anger. But it wasn’t always. And it was only less likely to happen when I was feeling full and safe and warm. And it hasn’t happened once since I’ve been with Lila, or this whole time I’ve been living here with Bobby.
It would be helpful to know what “it” is. Am I a psychopath? A multiple personality? Is a secret CIA program controlling my brain?
None of the late night reruns of Dr. Phil have cleared this up at all.
All I know is that it doesn’t feel like a part of me that does that,
(the killing ripping apart eating thing)
more like a psychotic hitchhiker in my brain.
If I go home, and they are looking for me as a murderer, maybe I don’t go to jail. Maybe my lawyer can plead insanity and I’ll be in a mental hospital for the criminally insane.
I think I’d prefer jail.
It’s not that I’m denying I have a mental disorder. It’s more that I don’t trust people. Especially doctors who’d want to drug me up and who’d probably only make it worse. I’d rather be in a cage than a straightjacket.
My two options – jail or hospital. Probably why I chose the open road instead.
This time when I begin dreaming I know it is a dream. My cousin Kayla stands before me in the white dress she wore to church on Sundays. We always went to church, my mother, Aunt Julie, Kayla, and me. My father and Uncle Red never came. Sundays were their hunting days, but even if they didn’t go hunting they stayed at home rather than come to church with us. I hated those days. My father would see me in the suit and tie my mom made me wear to church and say things like, “One day you’ll see dressing like a sissy ain’t gonna make God love you.”
Kayla’s white dress has puffy sleeves and a white ribbon around the waist. Now that I see it on her, standing in the moonlight, looking fifteen instead of twelve, I realize that she hadn’t worn that white dress for a least a few years before I left. It’s a dress for a third grader, not the teenager wearing it now.
She’s even wearing lacy ankle socks and black Mary Janes.
I stare at her from where I lay on the couch. I know she is a dream, so why bother getting up?
“There are things you don’t remember, Danny,” Kayla says. “Things you don’t remember because you don’t understand.”
“Like what?”
She smiles at me. “Like what you are.”
“And what am I?”
“You are a part of me,” she replies. “As I am a part of you.”
“What does that mean?”
“You need to come back,” she says, not smiling anymore. She is starting to glow.
“Why? Why do I need to come back?” I cover my eyes with my arm. Her glow is becoming painfully bright. “The police will get me. They’ll lock me up. I’m safe here. Why can’t I stay here? I don’t want the police to catch me.”
“Then you will need to avoid the police. We need you back home.”
“Why? Why?”
Because I can’t see, I barely realize she is so close to my face until her lips are on mine. “You can save us all.”
How? How can I save anyone, when I can barely take care of myself?
-20-
All day it weighs on my mind. “You have to come home. We need you… you can save us all.” I am distracted helping Bobby out at the hotdog stand and burn several dogs.
“Something on your mind?” he asks, feeding the charred meat to Lila.
I shrug.
The days are colder now and I’m thankful for Little Bobby’s jacket and gloves, although standing in front of the grill keeps me warm. But now Bobby’s handing me a hot dog with the works and telling me to go have a seat. The guys at the discount electronics boutique next to the Dollar Store are on their lunch break, which usually starts off the “lunch rush.”
Sitting on the bed of Bobby’s truck, I stare in the distance thinking rather than eating. On the one hand, I would like to see my mother again, but I can’t imagine she’d be willing to forgive me for killing her husband. I can’t even forgive me. Even after all he did…
Would she welcome me home with open arms? Her son, the murderer?
Hell, she probably wouldn’t even recognize me.
It’s just one more reason not to go home.
Of course, other scenarios play out in my head. One where my mother thought I’d been dead all these years, killed by the same maniac who killed her husband: she sees me, her face blank with disbelief as I walk up the driveway, until she finally recognizes that it’s me, her son, I’m alive, and I’m back, and then she’s weeping and running crazily down the driveway to hug me and finally I’m home and that emptiness which has accompanied me for so long disappears with a painful pop and I’m crying too…
I’m crying in real life, not just my imagination. I slap the tears away before anyone can see. (Lila saw, but she’s just a dog)
I never let myself think about that. Never never never. I couldn’t go back home, so I saved myself that pain by not thinking about it. Now, because of those stupid dreams, I’m thinking about it. I shouldn’t think about it. I should keep on going south, like I had planned.
(And what if you’re in the south and you’re still killing people? They’re big on the death penalty in Texas. They might not even let you see your mom again before they executed you.)
But…
What if?
What if my mother is in trouble? What if she knows something that could help me stop killing people?
“One dog with ketchup on it.”
I am broken from my thoughts by a loud, clipped voice. Bobby’s customer is a police officer. His eyes are obscured by sunglasses and his blue uniform is free of wrinkles. Instinctively I hunch down and start eating, hoping he didn’t notice me.
Too late.
“That your boy?” the officer asks, nodding at me.
Bobby looks over at me. “Yup.”
“How old?”
Bobby doesn’t skip a beat. “Sixteen.” Bobby doesn’t know that my sixteenth birthday is only a few weeks away. It’s the same lie I would have told.
“You will need to avoid the police.” That’s what Kayla said in my dream last night. What if this cop wants to arrest me right now? See some proof of my age?
“How come he’s not at school?” the cop asks.
Bobby slathers ketchup over the top of the hot dog and slides it over to the officer, accepts the cop’s crisp five dollar bill and
gives him change.
“He a drop out?” the police officer presses.
“Homeschooled,” Bobby says, finally.
“Good.” The officer’s final words before climbing into his patrol car and driving away. Only when he is out of sight am I able to breathe normally.
I am quiet the rest of the day. Bobby accepts my silence on the long truck drive home. Home. I call it home now. It’s not my home, I think as I throw something together for dinner while Bobby takes his afternoon nap. I remember my mother’s cooking, and forget about what happened when my father came home. I remember those sunny afternoons in the kitchen with her. That is home. Not this.
At dinner Bobby says to me, “You know, the couch isn’t very comfortable. If you want you could sleep in Little Bobby’s bedroom. Have a little space of your own.”
I nod and chew thoughtfully, but I don’t answer him.
It’s time to go.
-21-
It’s midnight and I’m padding across the carpet in the dark, carefully not to make a sound. There was a backpack in Little Bobby’s things and I’m going to take it, even though I spent almost three years living hand to mouth. This time I’ll do it right. I’ll pack warm clothes, and some food, and my money. The collar and leash for Lila, too, just in case. Maybe I’ve learned to control that dangerous side of me.
I take longer packing than I should. I consider carefully each item I place inside. Do I really need another t-shirt? Should I take a second pair of shoes?
(how will Bobby feel when he wakes up and I’m gone with half the things that remind him of his son?)
In the kitchen I take the basics: bread, a water bottle, a can of peanuts, a package of deli meat, three apples, some granola bars. I want to write a note, but I don’t know what I would say. Thanks for the stuff?
Lila watches me with her brown eyes.
“Okay, then, let’s go.”
As quietly as I can, I open the trailer door and Lila and I leave. We walk into the night, not looking back.
-22-
Lila leads the way. She trots ahead, sniffs the air, and decides which road to turn down. I let her, because it’s dark. After weeks of turning on the light in the evenings when I couldn’t see, I feel blind, stumbling through the night. I’m tired, too. Nightmares have robbed my sleep all week, and anxiety drained my days. Not even the cool night air, biting through my