Note: I wrote this quite a while ago and was never really happy with it. In the interest of moving ahead, I am posting it now. Previous episodes are on the blog if you want to remind yourself of what is going on or catchup. Thanks for reading, Dan.
The freezer was loaded with frozen dinners: meat loaf
with mashed potatoes and carrots, chicken nuggets with French fries and green
beans, turkey a la king, and cardboard pizzas. The fridge had two gallons of
milk, a pack of deli meat, individual cheese slices, a jar of pickles, butter,
and something in a Tupperware – the last remains of food brought over after the
funeral two weeks earlier. Richie refused to open it because he was sure
something was growing inside and even breathing it would send him into
convulsions. Richie knew the cupboard had cans of spaghetti and ravioli,
macaroni and cheese boxes, and peanut butter. A loaf of bread was on the
counter next to a note from his father.
“Out of town for work for week. Be sure to
eat.” Below was scribbled a number for a hotel. A Monday
night in April, the house was otherwise empty, and Richie couldn’t fathom what
to do next. So, he left. Retreating the sidewalk in front of the house and
watching his home, as if he stared long enough, he’d uncover some secret. Perhaps,
another family inhabited the space when they were gone. A happy family. With a
living mother. A sober father, and a son who wasn’t neurotic.
His tics had increased since his mother died. The
cleaning. Not just his skin, but the house, was compulsory. He wore gloves
everywhere, including at this moment, outside in April. The night air was cool,
but not cold, yet his hands were shoved in a pair of skiing gloves. Now there
were the cracks in the sidewalk. He couldn’t’ step on those. School was a
mental breakdown between each class, as he tip-toed from one tile to another. He
supposed the teachers noticed. He knew by the looks from his classmates that
they suspected he was cruising for a breakdown. At least out of respect for his
grief, they were still leaving him alone.
The worst was the paranoia – he was certain he was
being watched. Even alone on the sidewalk in their quiet neighborhood, he felt
eyes on him. Studying his every move. Noting his comings and goings, and his
impulses. He took nightly walks, but he couldn’t take more than a few steps
without glancing over his shoulder, expecting to see a white van with tinted windows
following behind. Something straight out of the X-Files. Dr. Bitch would
be worried. His father had stopped paying for his counseling, but his
grandmother had taken over the payments and his mother’s insistence that he
continue with the therapy.
Richie walked the block, watching other families
through their dining room windows. The full tables with warm meals, the happy
parents, the content children. He was the watcher rather than the watched. Some
of them waved, growing used to this lone boy roaming the neighborhood at dusk.
He never waved back, instead increasing the pace of his steps and turning his
attention completely to avoiding the cracks in the sidewalk.
He returned home after dark, and the phone rang as
soon as his key slipped into the slot. Perhaps, his father was checking in to
apologize for abandoning him for a week. The notion was so absurd, Richie was
glad that even though he was alone that he hadn’t spoken it aloud. It was more
likely that it was his grandmother. He rushed to the phone on the kitchen wall,
not bothering to turn on any lights. The sound of a needle scratching across a
record came from the other end of the receiver and then music with the lyrics: “It's far beyond a
star. It's
near beyond the moon. I know beyond a doubt.
“I’ve been watching you,” Sarah Arndt’s voice greeted
him. It was a calm, precise voice with no humor.
“Yeah, and?”
“Your lonely,” she said. Richie wasn’t sure how to
respond, so he listened to her shallow breathing on the other end. “You know
pain.”
“I sound like a hoot.”
“No joking,” she said. “Joking is for the weak, and if
you were weak, you’d be broken by now.”
“Thank you, I guess.”
“Tell me something about your mother and nothing corny
like that fruity pastor was saying at the funeral.”
“She loved Led Zeppelin, and her and my dad met at bar
when she picked a bunch of Zeppelin songs in the jukebox.”
Sarah didn’t react to that, and it felt like he had
uploaded data into a computer, and it was deciding if the information was
valid. It was a dreadful silence, like he was standing with a blindfold and
being forced to walk forward with no idea if there would be ground to touch
once he took my first step. She was so quiet that he wondered if she had put
the receiver down when she lost interest in him.
“I’m going to pick you up tomorrow night at seven,”
she finally said.
“Where are we going?”
“Beyond the sea,” she said, but the reference was lost
on him. When he didn’t respond, she continued.
“It’s never bothered you to get into a strange vehicle before and take
off without knowing where you were going, right?” She said, and he realized that she was
referring to his infamous trip with Grandpa Ricky. Most of his classmates had
forgotten about that enough that it was rarely mentioned, although it was never
too far away in his mind. While Richie was thinking this over, the line clicked
dead.
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