The car door slammed, and it got so quiet inside that he could hear the phone.
"...Voss? Are you there? Can you hear me?"
Cooper's voice was coming out of his fist. He'd never hung up — he'd carried her through the dining room, through the lobby, across the parking lot, without hearing her. Now he raised the phone to his ear and found the button with his other hand; the engine answered from somewhere below, under the seat.
"I hear you. Did you call the police?"
"No. I... no."
"Don't."
"Voss, he's..."
"I'll get there faster."
He hung up and tossed the phone onto the passenger seat. The headlights caught a wall, a dumpster, someone's bumper — he pulled out of the lot without looking in the mirror, and the street took him in.
The city on a Saturday night was empty and bright. The light on the corner was red; he went under it without slowing. Brakes squealed on the right, a horn blared behind him — long, offended — and the sound fell away, the way everything falls away that isn't riding with you.
His throat was bare. He was breathing deep, for the first time since five o'clock, and couldn't get enough: there was plenty of air; something else was missing. His shirt collar stood open, and the cold off the glass settled where the hook had sat all evening. He wasn't wearing his jacket — he didn't remember taking it off; it was somewhere in the back, crumpled on the seat.
Craig. At his place. Now.
Three words. They went around in a circle, and nothing fit between them. He tried to wedge something else in — "I'll make it," "I'll get there in time" — and the words fell through, the way a foot drops through the gap between steps.
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Second light. Yellow — he went through it on red. A van ahead was changing lanes lazily, Saturday-style, and Jacob swung left, into a lane that didn't exist, between the van and the oncoming traffic, and cut back in under someone's headlights. The wheel was hot under his palms. He didn't remember gripping it that hard.
He hadn't picked up the first call.
The phone had trembled against his chest while he sat there counting off dessert and thinking about his father's rule. Six minutes — that's what Cooper had said. While he was keeping the rule, in that front hall... He didn't know what had happened in that front hall. He knew Craig. He knew how Craig stood over someone on the floor, because he had stood right next to him and laughed.
Doesn't matter. I'll deal with it.
That was what he'd said to Simon in the car, when Simon asked who. I'll deal with it — and off he went to get fitted for a tux. As if Simon were the one who'd let something slip.
The phone on the seat lit up. Priscilla. He didn't look.
It went dark. Lit up again. Father.
He flipped it face down without taking his other hand off the wheel, and for a second the car drove itself.
The houses got lower. He knew this transition: brick — then siding, then fences, then trash cans by the stoops. Forty minutes, if you drove like a human being. He wasn't driving like a human being. On a turn the heavy rear end slid out; he caught it and realized people had been honking at him for a while now, from several places, and that he couldn't hear it, just as he hadn't heard the dining room.
Craig. At his place. Now.
He pushed harder.
The light in the front hall kept changing.
Simon didn't understand what it was at first. The yellow from the kitchen lamp lay still; then white passed across it — left to right, over the dent in the wall, over the coat rack, over the jacket on the coat rack — and was gone. A car. Someone had driven down the street and not stopped. Then another one.
He counted them, because counting was easier than thinking.
Craig stood by his father's armchair and waited. He didn't sit: he stood with his hip against the back of it, arms folded, and looked at Simon the way you look at a clock — checking whether it was time yet. Between him and the front hall there were two steps. Between Simon and the front hall there was Craig.
"Well," he said.
Simon ran his tongue over his teeth. All there. That mattered, he didn't know why. His eyebrow kept bleeding — slowly, warmly; he wiped his eye with his palm, and the palm came away red, and the eye still saw everything blurred.
He was thinking about what Craig had said. Not about leaving — he'd already thought about that and hit a wall. About something else. I'm just the mailman here. Somebody gave it to me — I brought it.
"You said you're the mailman," he said.
The voice didn't come right away. He had to draw breath twice, because the first time his ribs wouldn't let him.
"What?"
"Somebody gave it to you. So somebody has it." He spoke slowly, a word at a time, the way you lay out loose change. "I leave. And they still have it."
Craig looked at him.
"That's not your problem."
"It is." Simon swallowed; his mouth tasted of iron. "You're promising nobody will see it. You can't promise that. It's not yours."
He said it and heard for himself that he'd hit something. Not because Craig's face changed — the face stayed the same. Because he didn't answer right away. The pause was short, one breath, but it was there, and Simon held on to it the way he'd held on to the edge of the table in the kitchen: the one thing that didn't slip out of his hands.
"You think you're smart," Craig said. Quietly.
"No."
"You think you get to bargain."
"I'm not bargaining. I'm asking who's making the promise."
White light crossed the front hall once more and was gone.
Craig pushed off from the armchair. The two steps that had been between him and the front hall became two steps to Simon. He took him by the collar — the collar wasn't holding anymore, the fabric gave — and lifted him. Not all the way: just enough for Simon's back to come off the wall and go back into it with a blow that turned his eye white.
"I'm asking one last time." Close. Beer, sweat, and something else, his own — the smell people give off when they're enjoying themselves. "You. Are leaving."
Simon hung from his hand and looked at him.
Leaving was simple. He'd known that when Craig said "think," and he knew it now. A bus, a town without faces, a wall. Craig was right; it was easier for everyone. And at the same time he'd seen Craig fail to answer "who's making the promise" — one second, one breath — and he understood that he couldn't hand the one decision that was still his to a man who didn't even know what he was promising.
"I..." he said.
Something crunched in the front hall.
Glass: the sound a screen makes when someone steps on it a second time. Craig heard it too: his head began turning toward the door, slowly, the way you turn at a footstep you weren't expecting.
The door was wide open.
He saw it from the street, still in the car: a yellow wedge on the porch, an empty doorway, no one. He didn't remember cutting the engine, or whether he had — only that he'd grabbed the phone off the seat and shoved it in his pocket. The porch — two steps. From deep inside the house came a voice — low, pleased. He knew that voice. Something crunched under his foot, and he looked down: a phone. The screen a spiderweb, light still smoldering under the web. The voice broke off. The doormat kicked askew. On the coat rack — someone else's jacket; he knew it: it had hung in the locker room next to his own for more than one season.
Through the kitchen doorway — an overturned chair, shards, a puddle on the floorboards.
He went in.
Craig was standing over Simon. Holding him up against the wall by the collar, his feet barely touching, and Craig's head was already turning toward the door — slowly, toward the crunch — and Simon's face wasn't a face: red on one side, white on the other, one eye shut, the other looking. He wasn't struggling. He was looking.
Craig finished turning his head.
"Jake..."
The old reflex — Jacob had seen it hundreds of times: Craig straightens up when he walks in, looks for his eyes, waits to be told where. He started straightening up now, too. He let go of the collar. Simon slid down the wall.
After that, Jacob didn't decide anything.
He grabbed Craig by the back of the neck and the tank top and tore him off his feet — across the whole room, into the wall by the television. A shelf rocked, bottles rained off it. Craig hit the wall with his back and didn't go down: he never went down from a single hit, Jacob knew that better than anyone, because he'd taught him not to. Craig pushed off the wall, straightened — and Jacob saw everything in him ready: shoulders, weight on the front foot, chin down. That was how he went into a scrum.
He didn't go in.
His hands came up — not fists, palms out, at chest height. The way you raise them on the field when the captain is yelling at you from across the pitch: okay, okay, got it.
"Jake. Jake, stop. It's me."
Jacob hit him.
In the face, a right, with everything he'd brought with him from the car. Craig's head snapped toward the wall, and again he didn't go down — but he didn't hit back either. His palms stayed up in front of him. The second blow — into them, through them, into his cheekbone. The third. Craig covered up with his forearms, the way you shield yourself from hail, and moved back along the wall, sideways, keeping his back pressed to it, and Jacob followed.
The room was cramped: armchair, table, television, two walls. Two bodies, each one used to having way made for it. Only one was making way.
He understood that on the fourth blow, and on the fifth, when Craig — healthier than him, heavier than him, a man who had broken bigger men than himself in the scrum — lowered his hands to the level of his stomach and simply took it. He could have hit back. He had hands, he had legs, he had a wall at his back. He didn't hit. Between blows he looked at Jacob with one eye — the other was already closing — and in that eye there was no fight. There was what was there in the locker room every morning: where to?
Somewhere underneath what he was doing lay something else, and he knew it was there: a face against the wall, one eye shut. Six minutes. His father's rule. I'll deal with it. He'd made it here — and he'd been too late, and here it was, his lateness, standing in front of him in a white tank top, not raising its hands, saying "Jake," and he was doing the only thing he knew how to do with it.
The wall ran out. Craig's back hit the armchair.
"Jake..."
Jacob caught up with him at the armchair.
He didn't remember how he'd ended up in the corner — between the wall and the TV stand; his back had found two walls at once and wouldn't let go of them. Before the corner he remembered one thing: the doorway to the front hall with Jacob in it — and how, for one breath, it had gone warm inside him. He came. The breath ended when Craig went flying into the wall.
Craig wasn't fighting.
Simon saw it and didn't understand. The man who had steered him around this kitchen by the hair was standing with his back to the armchair, palms raised, saying "Jake." Only that. "Jake." As if a name could stop it. Jacob hit, and Craig took it — on his forearms, his cheekbone, whatever got in the way — and didn't hit back once. He'd backed up as long as there was room. Then there was none.
Jacob said nothing. He hadn't said a word since the second he walked in.
Simon knew that face. He'd seen it above him — at the lockers, in the bathroom, in the rain, in the kitchen when a hand held the back of his head. He'd thought that face existed only for him. Now it was above Craig, exactly the same, down to the last line. The one who'd said "no it is" yesterday in the car and heard him, and the one who'd said "say it" — they were the same person. Simon had always known that.
A blow. Craig's head snapped — and only afterward, a breath later, came the sound: dull, wet. It arrived separately and landed somewhere other than where the blow had been. Simon blinked. The next one — the same: movement, pause, sound. As if someone had spliced it badly.
My ear, he thought. Craig hit me on the ear. It's the ear.
Craig's knees buckled. He didn't fall — Jacob was holding him by the tank top, one-handed, and the tank top held — but his legs gave out, his head dropped onto his shoulder, and the palms that had been up in front of his chest this whole time came open and hung. The eye he'd been looking with closed.
Jacob hit him again.
In a face that wasn't looking anywhere anymore. The head flopped on the neck like a doll's. Again. Red came off Craig's lips — didn't spray, but flew, in drops, slowly, and the drops hung in the air a second longer than drops hang, and landed on the wallpaper, on the back of the armchair, on the white shirt, on Jacob's cheek.
And the light came apart in layers.
Simon saw it at once and didn't believe it. The yellow lamplight — the light that had always been here — split at the edges, the way a badly printed picture slips out of register: everything grew a red fringe on one side and a blue one on the other. The back of the armchair. Jacob's shoulder. The arm that rose and fell. There was one arm, but two shadows followed it — the red one slightly ahead, the blue one slightly behind — and they couldn't keep up with it, and when it stopped they caught up and folded into one, and then pulled apart again.
He squeezed his hurt eye shut. With the good one — the same.
The blow repeated. Not the next one — the same one: the arm went back, came forward, reached the face — and went back again, from the same point, with the same motion, like a frame that had gotten stuck. One sound came for two blows. Simon watched and counted — two, three — and on three the room jerked.
A band. Horizontal, a palm's width, at the level of his eyes: everything caught in it — a piece of the armchair, Jacob's side, the wall — shifted to the right, the way you shift a line of text, and for an instant hung where it shouldn't be, with a ragged edge, and then snapped back. He had time to see that inside that band Jacob's shirt was in one place and his arms were in another.
Jacob was flickering.
He was there — and he wasn't. For a fraction of a second, like a bulb with a loose connection: there he was, full height, over Craig; then — empty, the armchair, someone else's body slumped against it, and no one above it; then there he was again, at the same point, arm raised, red on his cheek. The arm struck. The sound came. Jacob went out and came back on.
The wall behind Simon gave. Not the wall — whatever he'd thought was the wall: it didn't hold, it gave like fabric. The distance to the armchair stretched out like a corridor, then shrank — so close he could see the threads at the split seam — then stretched out again.
Craig wasn't moving. Craig hadn't been moving for a while. Jacob kept hitting him.
Simon didn't understand what was happening. To him, to the room, to the lamp, to the man flickering three steps away and beating someone who couldn't feel anything anymore. He thought it was his eye. His ear. His head, which had been slammed against the wall. Nothing was left inside him but one thing, and that one thing came out on its own.
"ENOUGH!"
Not like a voice. Like a wave: he felt it with his face, his chest, the way the air swayed; it hit the walls, came back, passed through him, and went on further, out to where there was no room anymore. The echo was long, out of all proportion — a living room in a house with a peeling facade doesn't sound like that. That's the sound of a hall.
The arm stopped.
In midair, halfway through the swing. It didn't slow, didn't waver — . Back, shoulders, head — everything froze at the point where it was and held there, steady, effortless, the way a frame holds on pause.
And went on flickering.
Jacob stood with his arm raised — and went out, and came back on, and the red fringe and the blue drew apart from him and came together, and the band at eye level jerked once more and didn't snap back. He stood perfectly still — and wasn't in place. Craig hung from his hand, his head on his shoulder.
Simon came apart.
He didn't know what it was — what happened inside him. Air stopped going in. He opened his mouth and couldn't breathe in, and he was crying — he knew it from the sting in his eyebrow: the tears were running into the cut — and shaking so hard his teeth knocked together, and he looked at the man who was flickering and thought that it would reach him now. That he would go out too. That the room would fold the way the band had folded, and he wouldn't be in it. He pressed himself into a corner that didn't hold, and called out — not aloud, there was nothing aloud left — for it to stop.
The arm came down.
Evenly, without a jerk, the way you lower it on a count. The fingers on Craig's tank top opened — all at once, not one by one — and Craig slid down the back of the armchair until he lay on the floor, on his side, face to the wall.
Jacob turned his head. Slowly — not the way he'd stopped; differently, like a human being. Looked at Simon. And again he wasn't there — and he was.
Then he came toward him.
Across the room, three steps — or thirty, the distance wouldn't hold. He went down on his knees — both of them, right on the floorboards — and reached out. The same hands. Skinned knuckles, blood on the cuffs, the ones that had been holding Craig by the tank top ten seconds ago. Simon saw them at his face and flinched — back into the corner, head into the wall, not deciding anything, just flinched.
The hands stopped.
They hung in the air, a centimeter away. Then one settled on his shoulder — carefully, the way you lay your hand on something that might break — and the other went behind his back, not touching his side, and he was drawn forward — slowly, without a jerk, with room to stop. He didn't stop. He fell face first into the shirt, into the split seam, into the smell of sweat and someone else's blood, and he was held — one arm across his shoulders, the other under his shoulder blades, far from his ribs — held the way he'd never been held: .
"Baby." The voice was raw, unfamiliar. A hand moved over his hair — from the nape upward, slowly, again. "Baby, stay with me. Stay. You hear me? I'm here. Stay with me."
He said it into Simon's hair, and stroked it, and said it again — the same words, round and round, the way you talk to someone who's slipping away.
And the light began to come back together.
Simon saw it with one eye, through tears, through fabric: the red fringe and the blue moved toward each other — slowly, like the two halves of a door closing — and lay one over the other, and turned yellow. The band at eye level went back into place — he didn't see how; at some point it simply wasn't there. Sound came back: the breathing by his ear was coming from where the breath was. The distance to the armchair became the distance to the armchair — three steps, and nothing in them changed. The wall behind him became a wall: hard, cold, with wallpaper he knew by heart.
Jacob wasn't flickering. Jacob was holding him and saying "stay," and he was in place — all of him, whole, heavy, hot through his shirt.
The room came back. It came back slowly, in pieces, the way sight comes back after a flash. Everything had stopped in a single second — and it went on reassembling itself until he stopped counting.
Simon clutched the shirt. With both hands, the fabric at his back, a wet cuff. He was holding on to a person he was afraid of, and he was afraid of him, and he held on, and it was one motion, not two. The shaking didn't stop. It went into the other's arms and came back, and the arms held on anyway.
"Pack your things," Jacob said into his hair.
Not a question.
"You're coming to my place. Tonight. We'll take what you need, the rest later." A pause; the arms tightened a little and then eased, remembering the ribs. "I'm not leaving you here anymore. Not for a single night."
Simon heard it through the shirt.
In the car he had said no. The apartment, the doorman, someone else's money — no, and he'd been heard. This was different. This wasn't a home that someone pays for. This was "my place," said into his hair, with skinned hands, by a man who had just stood with his arm raised and stopped at the sound of Simon's voice. Inside him the same thing should have risen as in the car — cold, his own: who decides where I live. It didn't rise. Or it rose — and didn't get there. He was shaking, and he was being held, and .
He didn't say yes. He didn't say anything. He held on to the shirt.
"He..." The voice wouldn't come. He tried again. "He told me to leave. Leave town."
The arms went still.
"What?"
"Leave. Or they'll show it." Simon spoke into the fabric, a word at a time, pausing for breath. "He has a recording. You. What you told the cops... about the party. He showed me. A piece."
Jacob didn't answer. Simon couldn't see his face — only felt the hand on his shoulder change: not stronger, but harder.
Something stirred on the floor by the armchair.
Craig was coming to the way people come to after a knockout — not all at once and not all of him: first a hand crept across the floorboards, then he coughed, red, then he tried to get up on one elbow and couldn't, and lay there breathing through his mouth, looking their way with the eye that still opened.
Jacob turned his head. Simon felt the movement with his whole body, because he was holding on to him.
"It was her," Jacob said.
Not a question.
Craig swallowed. He took a long time gathering the words.
"Her." His voice was wet, coming through split lips. "Gave me forty seconds. To show him. She has the rest. I did what I was told, Jake. I'm the mailman."
"Out."
One word. Not loud.
Craig took a long time getting up — first onto one knee, then by the back of the armchair, then to his full height. Simon turned his head — cheek against the shirt, not letting go of it — and watched. Craig stood swaying, looking at Jacob, and in that look there was something Simon had never seen in him: he was waiting to be told something more. Nobody told him anything. He walked past them — brushing the wall, not them — into the front hall. Simon heard the jacket come off its hook. Heard glass crunch underfoot once more. Footsteps across the porch, uneven. Then nothing.
The door stayed open. Cold drifted into the living room.
Jacob didn't get up. He sat on the floorboards, in blood — his own and someone else's — and held on, and Simon held on, and the shaking wouldn't go away.
"What do I bring," Jacob said. "Tell me. I'll go up."
Simon thought. The room upstairs — the only place in the house where things stayed where he'd put them. The notebook under the textbook. The backpack on the chair. On the backpack — a folded gray T-shirt, not his.
"My notebook," he said. "My backpack." And more quietly, into the fabric: "The T-shirt. It's on the backpack."
"Which one?"
"Yours."
Jacob didn't answer. His hand just moved over Simon's hair once more — slowly — and stayed there.
Craig's phone picked up on the seventh try.
Before that Priscilla had listened to it ring, watching the road: downtown, the bridge, brick, siding. She was driving where he had gone — in that direction, not to an address: she didn't have an address, she had Craig, who wasn't picking up. The dress got in the way of her feet on the pedals; her heel kept slipping; along the stocking that had torn in the dining room, a cold run was creeping up her thigh. Her coat had stayed on the back of her chair. She hadn't gone back for it — she hadn't gone back at all.
"Yeah."
The voice wasn't his. Muffled, with something in his mouth.
"Where are you."
"I left." He named a street she didn't know, and a corner, a corner store. A pause in which he swallowed. "He showed up, Ashford."
She didn't ask who. She hung up and drove faster.
The corner store was the only lit thing on the whole street — yellow, a grate over the window, empty crates against the wall. Craig stood under that light in his jacket, zipped up to his throat, and when she pulled over and got out — in heels, onto wet asphalt, in a sleeveless dress, into the autumn cold — he didn't move.
His face wasn't a face.
Lips split, left eye shut, the eyebrow swollen and sagging; a scrape on his cheekbone that would be black by morning. He stood up straight, the way he always did, but only his body was standing straight. Everything else in him hung low.
"What happened," she said.
"He showed up. I didn't make it in time."
"Make what in time?"
"Nothing." He looked at her with one eye. "He knows. About the recording. About the forty seconds. That it was you."
She stood and listened, and the words reached her slowly, the way the cold reaches bare shoulders.
"You told him."
"He didn't ask. He said: it was her. I said: her."
"YOU IDIOT!" It came out of her in a voice she didn't recognize: not her own, not the one for corridors, not the one for crying in offices. The voice hit the grate over the window and came back. "HOW COULD YOU LET JACOB FIND OUT EVERYTHING?"
Craig didn't step back. He stood and looked at her, and the eye that could see didn't look away.
"I did everything you told me."
"I didn't tell you to..."
"You said: show him and explain. I showed him and explained."
"I didn't ask you to beat him up!" She took a step, another; her heel turned, she stayed upright. "I said scare him! Show him forty seconds! I didn't ask..." She couldn't find the word. What those hands had done to the boy's face she hadn't seen — but she could see what had been done to Craig himself, and that was enough. "That's not what I told you!"
She shoved him.
With both hands, in the chest, with all the strength there was in her — the way you shove someone to send him flying, to hurt him, to make anything at all move. He didn't move. Her palms hit his jacket and stopped, the way palms stop against a wall, and the wall stood where it stood and looked down at her guiltily — the guilty look of a dog that doesn't understand what it did wrong.
She shoved him again. The same.
There was no third time.
Whatever had been holding her up all evening — the dining room, the threshold, the road, the ringing — ran out somewhere between the second shove and the third, and she didn't manage to catch it. Her face went first; then her throat; then she heard the sound she was making and didn't recognize that either. She was crying. Not the way she had in the car under the blue window, where she could wipe away the mascara and drive off. Not the way she had in the office, where the tears stopped on cue. — loudly, unbeautifully, with her mouth open — and her legs wouldn't hold her, and she did the only thing that was closest.
She fell face first into his jacket.
Into the rough fabric that smelled of beer and someone else's blood, into the chest that hadn't gone flying when she shoved it — and cried into it, and held on to it with her fingers, because there was nothing else left to hold on to.
Craig stood there.
He didn't raise his hands. They hung at his sides, big, battered, and didn't move — not toward her, not away from her. He didn't say anything. He didn't step back and he didn't hold her. He just stood under the yellow light of the corner store, on the empty street, and let her cry into him the way a lamppost lets you lean on it.
The lamp hummed above them. No one came down the street.
The screen goes dark.
To be continued in the next episode.