Aaron Dries
HUGO
First hates are the last hates.
I’m thinking this as I peer out my bedroom window, scanning the street for the green van again. The Tree Frog, Finn named it, two weeks earlier at school drop-off when the vehicle stalked us for the first time. Its paint job glowed in the apple-crisp morning, not a warm colour at all, a cold colour that would freeze-burn your fingertips were you to touch it, and trailing a question mark of exhaust that lingered in the air longer than it should. Prior to moving apartments, and moving so fast, almost brutally fast, I let Finn catch the bus home when I wasn’t working in the office. He loved the adventure of the ride with the other students, how that half-hour of independence – which took him from the school gate to the end of our block – pushed against the image I have of him as ‘the child’. He’d waltz inside, swaggering, unnerving me; he will be a man one day. But for now, Finn is angry. Because I am the one who has taken him away from his old room in Narrabundah. I am the reason he’s mourning the fig tree across the road, the one that was so good for climbing and into which he’d carved his initials. And I haven’t let him catch the bus since we saw it, The Tree Frog. The paint isn’t matte as you might expect it to be, but shiny as tooth enamel. Only with an abscess within.
Guy has been released from the AMC.
The Alexander Maconochie Centre.
Prison.
“Hey, there’s that van again,” said my son, slender arm raised and pointing in the Bunnings parking lot where we’d been loading our car with paint cans and putty to mask all the wall gouges in our apartment – preparations for the about-to-be-broken lease. “Green tree frogs don’t like it when you pick them up because the oil in our skin hurts them. Did you know that, Dad? Did you? Dad? Dad, you aren’t listening. You never listen. Nobody fucking listens to me.”
Finn is seven.
You don’t have to be psychic to know where he learned the word. Right then, I didn’t have it in me to scold him beyond a reproachful hey! We watched the van slink off, a chill on the back of my neck like someone gripping puppy scruff, forcing Spot’s head to the carpet it shat on, rubbing its nose in the mess so it knew to never do it again.
I step back from the window in my bedroom in our new townhouse. It stinks of fresh paint. The street is empty. It’s cold but staying inside is doing neither of us good. Finn exudes pent-up energy, and there will be screaming if he doesn’t run it off soon. He’s dressed and is on his iPad watching Bluey downstairs. I’m the one dragging the chain because I keep looking for the van. Because I’m thinking, again, how in the end, the first hates are the last hates.
It began like this:
Guy and I left the Vietnamese restaurant tipsy. The date, which took place four days after his initial tap on my Grindr account, had gone better than either of us expected. “Want to come back to mine?” I said. He answered with a smile, a touch of my wrist. Laughing, we stumbled up the street. A homeless, elderly woman was begging for money on Northbourne Avenue where we waited for the pedestrian lights to change. She kneeled on a flattened box, shaking a birdnesty hat. Guy elbowed my arm, and as if it were the funniest thing, whispered to me, “I wonder if her LinkedIn profile’s up to date?”
We’d had a great time up to then.
I chose to ignore him, because earlier, our knees had brushed together under the table in a way that made me feel alive. And the taxi stand was right there on the other side of the road. And Guy was so charming, so handsome. And I wanted us to taste one another. Lips on lips. Lips on cock. Tongue to hole. Nipples pinched. Fingers sucked. Sweat mixed. Cum drying on our stomachs once we were done, as we slept. Because of this, all of it, because nobody had made me buzz this way in so long, I faked a chuckle. Yet I knew and ignored it. All these years later, I still remember the ride home that night, the two of us in the backseat, and how I thought: Yeah, this man is pretty and smart and confident and I’m obviously punching above my weight.
But there’s something else there.
Geez, this man can be cold.
Dead cold. Inert flesh cold. Bruise me without apology cold. Throw everything away cold. Apprehended Violence Order cold.
Stalker cold.
That first date was long ago. Age isn’t telegraphed in my body anymore. It’s in Finn. I still dream about his surrogate, the woman we paid, one of Guy’s old school friends. She ghosted us after the birth. Doing so must have been easier for her, as it was for us. Still, I often wonder where and who she is, and what of her is in our boy.
Do you think of him? Me?
Milk spurts across bub’s cheek when he fought the bottle. Screaming. Hunger pains. Abandonment pains. Sleeping regressions. Songs on repeat. Routines. Nappy rash. Day care sickness. Vomit. Battery acid shit. The cupboard you forgot to lock. The scissors you thought were hidden. All the lessons Guy and I learned. Like how fatherhood turns you into your father. All the ways you want to say this is hard but aren’t allowed to because you should be grateful you have a child when others don’t – especially as two gay men.
I never thought I could love someone the way I love Finn. That’s why it hurt so deeply when we parked the car after our trip to Bunnings, and I found him checking the wheels to see if the rim bolts had been tampered with again. Finn had been in the car when Guy did this the first time, and we crashed on the Barton Highway. People said we should be dead, that it was a miracle we survived.
(I wonder if her LinkedIn profile’s up to date?)
Yes. Cold.
My knees pop as I crouch to scrounge through suitcases I haven’t unpacked yet, looking for my thermals. I find a pair of trousers I haven’t seen in eight years and wore only once on my wedding day. It’s important I don’t forget how much I’ve been hurt and humiliated, so I slip my hand into the pocket, into our past, and draw out whatever is rustling about inside. It’s a fifty dollar note. I can’t help laughing. It is the saddest laugh I’ve ever heard.
* * *
We’re at Pialligo Redwood Forest, an artificial slice of another world near the airport. Finn calls it Endor.
He runs across browned grass, breathing out frosty ghosts. The air is brittle. Canberra winter is dry and gets between your joints.
He plays finger guns. Pew-pew. Watch me, Dad. Can I bring this stick home with me, Dad? Dad, look, it’s a plane.
Here, he’s not the kid I sometimes find loading his Star Wars sheets into the washing machine after wetting the bed. The kid who freezes, who doesn’t speak, lips turning blue. The one who sucks his thumb and checks the wheels of cars.
I’m glad I spent those fifty bucks on him. “Whatever you want, buddy. It’s all yours.”
“Pho,” he’d said, because his friend, Liam, told him about it. Not McDonald’s. Not Hungry Jack’s. Pho.
“So, how do you like it?” I asked, chopsticks in hand. “Nice, isn’t it?”
“Yeah. But I don’t like the white bits.”
“They’re called bean sprouts.”
“I don’t think I like bean sprouts, Dad. They’re too crunchy.”
“That’s fine, mate. Are you going to tell Liam about us having pho together?”
“Maybe.”
Finished, we drove in silence, listening to the radio. Quiet until:
“I don’t like Mister Christie,” Finn said without explanation. Mister Christie is one of his teachers at school. “He smells like smokes.”
‘Smokes’: it’s an adult’s word in a child’s mouth.
Five years ago, Guy stubbed his smokes out on Finn’s eyelids when he was sleeping. Guy talked me out of taking our toddler to hospital, somehow convincing me that Finn did it to himself.
Shadow shame, together. Always.
Finn screams. I’m relieved when I find him in a clearing at the far end of the forest, fingers of gold light scrunching his duckish hair. I wonder if Guy is here, watching us with a spider’s stillness from behind a tree. Finn stands above a dead rabbit on a bed of pine needles. It’s too cold for flies and maggots.
“Maybe he’s sleeping!” I tell my son.
“No. He’s not.” Finn turns away, an old man in a kid in a pea jacket. I’m the child here. Me. I do the breathing techniques Doctor Smalls taught me. If I close my eyes, I can see her nodding, legs crossed at the heels in the chair in the office in the house on a street where bad things never happen.
“Finn, not too far, I’m—”
White noise. A tinny taste drips onto the back of my tongue from my nasal cavity, similar to the decent cocaine you sniffed off your husband’s chest on one of those nights, and more than once, back before you had a kid and realised how the first hates are the last hates. My brain says cough this taste up; my body swallows it down. Rollercoaster tummy, even though I’m standing still in this dank, fake forest. My eyes are drawn to twin chalky gum trees at the perimeter of the clearing. I take a step to the left, not because I have to. I do it because doing so just seems right, and their branches overlap in my line of sight, forming a perfect triangle with a smaller triangle at its core.
The drip turns sweet and rolls down my throat, like a kind of reward. I feel as though something I will never be intuitive enough to understand has clicked into place.
“Dad!” Finn’s yell isn’t a question. “Hurry up, I want to go-oooo.”
My son may want to leave, but I don’t want to move – ever. This is the centre of the universe. This is exactly where I’m meant to be. However, it’s his day, and my fear of The Tree Frog snaps back. It takes effort to force my leaden legs to move, to shake off the invisible hands that have taken hold, not threatening, not as though disciplining me or offering caution, but fatherly. Go to your son, I tell myself. Take one step after another. Dead leaves crunch as I leave the clearing, my senses returning to normal, the white noise dissipating. Once the triangle within a triangle is out of sight, I feel gross and shamed, like the moment you finish jerking off but the porn still plays. Gah!
What the fuck just happened?
Is this vertigo? That is what happens to Mum, isn’t it? Maybe it’s hereditary. Shit. Wait. Did I just have a stroke, or something?
“Dad?” Finn says, leaning against the car, so casual. Again, I see a flash of the man he’ll grow into – lanky and suspicious.
“Y-yeah?” I say, finding the words, shaking, touching the door handle to ground myself. This here is the feel of cold metal. This here in my nostrils is the smell of earth after a week of on-and-off-again rain. This is the taste of musky saliva and nothing more. This is the reality I share with my beautiful son.
This is me telling you everything here is normal.
I glance back at the woods, Endor. From where I’m standing by the car, everything looks so dark where we had been, like the inside of a great mouth. The inside of a closing mouth.
“Dad.”
“What, mate? Sorry. You okay? What’s wrong?”
“Do… you have a gun?”
Hearing this is a jab in the ribs. I wince. Shame twists harder, deeper. “What kind of question is that? The stuff you come up with, mate, I swear. Get in the car now, would you.”
No. No, I don’t have a gun, I don’t tell my son. I also don’t tell him that there was a time, and not that long ago, really, when I knew how to find one.
* * *
Later that night, Finn asks if he can have Sook, his teddy bear. Stitches and spit – that’s all the old thing is now, and with one eye dangling on a thread.
“I seem to remember you telling me you were too old for Sook,” I say, wanting to respect his choice but cautious of regressions. He corrects me with a glance. “Fine, fine.”
I lift Sook from the toybox in the living room, trying not to trip over action figures and Tonka trucks I asked Finn to put away. I’m in no mood to school him now. Plus, I’d left unpacked boxes everywhere, so who was I to talk? I give my boy his toy, tell him I love him, and close the door.
Ice in the tumbler. The burn of good whiskey. I sprawl on my bed and am grateful our new rental has decent heating.
Monday feels far away. Mum is due at 8:00 a.m. tomorrow. She wants to get down from Jindabyne more often than she does, but her health makes travelling difficult. I miss who she used to be to me: my mother and not the person I see for thirty seconds on my way out the door when she comes to sit on school holidays, who I watch nod off on the couch once I’m home from Parliamentary Circuit after senate estimates. I don’t resent her for the things she’s said – like when she told me she’d always thought, when it came to Guy, that I was mixing with the wrong element.
Well, if that’s the case, I’m the wrong element too, Mum.
Because I mixed back.
And gladly.
My wedding ring sits on the bedside table. I don’t want to wear it, yet I don’t want it far from my mind. It reminds me that Guy happened, and that he deserved his sentence. Even if the sentence was nowhere near long enough.
I found out about his release from my social worker who insisted I hustle to get an updated Apprehended Violence Order. But doing so required the disclosure of our new address to Guy so he would know what property to stay away from.
Being angry at the system doesn’t change the system. I’ve learned that the hard way.
Whiskey works. I kill the lamp and roll onto my side, reaching under the bed to touch the shoebox. Just to know it’s there.
* * *
A snake of cold air slithers over me in the dark. I know it is Guy by its wrongness. I inch out of bed and creep up the hall, telling myself that bursting into Finn’s room will frighten him, and that will start the bed-wetting and thumb-sucking again. I push on anyway, tight as rope, clenching my jaw.
The door is open. My son’s blankets are on the floor.
Sook is face-down on the empty bed.
Pulse-punch. Pulse-punch.
I rush to the window and look down at the courtyard between the front door and the open gate. Two silhouettes scuttle inside the green van at the curb. I rip the phone from the wall where it was charging in my room, the wedding ring bouncing out of sight. Almost tripping over toys as I sprint downstairs. Leaves blow into the living room.
The door had been locked.
Wondering what Guy’s done and how he did it will have to wait. I dial the police as I go, mashing the phone keypad and falling onto the footpath as The Tree Frog screeches away.
My car keys are on the granite counter inside. Force my feet into boots by a Welcome mat that must have belonged to the prior owner. I should have gotten rid of it when we moved in. These were the kind of details, the slights, which detectives note in their reports when something bad happens, the ironic comeuppance.
See, these people welcomed danger here.
They let it stroll in and take what it thought it had earned.
Danger thinks it owns everything. I know that now.
The van turns right at the end of the street. I follow, shoving the phone into the clip-holder as I steer, swerving to miss a dog that zooms across the road. Accelerator to the floor. Guy runs a red light, so I run a red light. The engine howls.
“Siri. Call the police.”
“Calling the police now,” says a female voice through the radio. The Bluetooth sync volleys my trauma through wires and off satellites in the sky as I wait for a dial tone.
Guy takes a left, away from the city, over – not through – a roundabout, going south. The airport exit.
“Police, ambulance, or fire?” says the operator. “What is your emergency?”
It’s not real until I say it.
* * *
The police operator tells me not to pursue. I step out of the car at the entrance to Endor.
“Hugo, I repeat, do not—”
I lose Guy in the dark for thirty seconds when my phone slips from my hands. Fumble over gravel to find it.
“Hugo, are you there?” comes the small voice. “Mister Helleyer?”
Find it. Skid to the trunk and draw out a tyre iron, sensing its weight, flicking on the phone’s torch feature, a silvery eye that reveals tree trunks, bushes, branches, all curdled with plumes of breath as I do everything the responder tells me not to.
“Finn! Yell if you can hear me. It’s Daddy. I’m here, Finn. Jesus. SCREAM.”
Footsteps. Rustling clothes. Crunching twigs like something chewing bones. I imagine Sook out there, grown large, its button eye hanging loose as it unstitches its mouth to reveal sharp teeth.
It scoops up my son and eats him alive.
Shadows swirl as I scuttle between trees. Why would Finn leave with Guy considering how frightened he was by him? And then it clicks. My boy has been forced. A hand on his mouth, maybe. A whispered threat. Jesus, did Guy pull a knife on him? Please, not that.
I funnel hatred into the tyre iron. Squeeze it. Punish it.
“Are you there, Hugo?” comes the voice from the phone. I’m on the same path from yesterday, the one to the clearing with its frozen rabbit. It’s all familiar, yet different by night. But there is light up ahead.
The wind is stronger in the clearing. It churns the trees. They shush us.
Guy and Finn have their backs to me. My ex is dressed in a windbreaker with the hood up and holds our son with one arm. They stand between the two pale gum trees, which are stark against shadow, like something being dug up from the earth, dustings of white on all that black.
I take two steps, tyre iron raised, my phone in the other hand. Quivering.
“Guy. You leave him right there, you piece of shit. If you think I won’t hurt you, you’re dead fucking wrong.”
Finn turns. Guy’s torch dances across his face, time enough for me to see how confused my boy is – and it breaks my heart. Guy forces Finn to stare at the space between the trees, under the branches.
Triangles within triangles.
That sweet drip at the back of my throat starts again. There’s an electric crackle in the cold air, that come closer sensation. It’s stronger this time. White noise.
An invitation.
Endor floods with light. At first I think it’s a plane, only the light is purple. It’s not coming from overhead, either. The light blooms in front of Guy and Finn. They become thin silhouettes, scars on the brightness, between the trees. Immense wind. No, this is no passing flight. There is no word for what’s happening here. This power, I can’t help feeling, has its own authority, is its own element. My throat turns dry.
I rush forward.
Guy twists around. A gust pushes the hood off his head. Purple light flexes and in that flare I realise the man who took my son isn’t Guy. This man has my face, and there are tears on his cheeks. My cheeks. Something inside me rips in two, and I want to reject both halves.
Purple rolls to white.
“I put it in the mailbox,” shouts the man who looks and sounds like me.
Everything pops, then darkness. The white noise is gone.
I fall on my haunches, phone spinning across the ground, landing beside the dead rabbit. Gasping, my eyes adjusting to the dimness, I search the empty space where my son stood moments before – not held against his will, but where he’d held the man’s hand. My hand. They have vanished. I’m screaming when red and blue light starts to paint the trees.
The squawk of radios. Their torches on my face.
Voices that instruct me to lie flat on earth that has never felt so empty.
FINN
Why is it daytime? Why is there a funny taste in my mouth?
Are you my dad?
I was so sleepy when he woke me, saying I had to keep quiet and leave, and no we can’t go back for Sook. I couldn’t tell the colour of the van he rushed me into, but I knew it was The Tree Frog. As he drove, I sniffed the man who looked like my dad and was relieved. No trace of smokes on him, like Mister Christie at school, like Pa. The whole van rattled as if it was about to shake apart, as if one of the wheels was about to fall off, sending us into a ditch. I got cut up in the last crash. Liam has asked me where I got my scars more than once, but I never tell. And then we were pulling up at Endor and running through a dirt cloud. Dad heaved me off the ground when I tripped, branches whipping my cheeks. Someone shouted my name behind us, pretending to be my father. Then came the purple light.
Now, I’m squinting because it’s daytime.
Daytime.
It can’t be. But it is.
Dad guides me back to the parking lot. There is no green van now. There is a black car and its wheels look okay. He tells me to hop in. Even though we’re not in a hurry, I sense urgency beaming off him. I keep pointing at the forest, asking questions. Dad tells me to be quiet. “There isn’t time.”
We drive off. There aren’t many cars on the road. Dad’s hands rest on the wheel. I suck my thumb.
“Don’t do that,” he says.
I tap my bare feet on the floor. My skin is sticky with tree sap.
“Dad?”
“Yeah?”
And then I ask him. Because it can’t be. And because it is. “Do you remember what we had for lunch yesterday?”
He pauses. Changes gears. Turns the strange car onto our street. It smells like an unwashed sink in here. A sick feeling wriggles in my tummy.
This isn’t my dad.
We pull up out front of our old house in Narrabundah – it looks like a wooden toad. We haven’t been in the new place for long, but I already miss having a common yard where I can bury my toys. I miss the fig tree across the road. My tree. I carved my initials into it, over and over again, with the metal point of my maths protractor. On this morning, which should still be night, the sky is blue like your tongue after you suck a gobstopper.
“Finn. I want you to stay here. We’re going on a trip.”
“Why are we here? I don’t have any shoes.”
“I’ve packed your stuff already. Our stuff,” he says.
I peer into the back seat where gym bags sit on top of one another next to the suitcase with the wonky wheel we packed when we moved.
“I need to duck inside and grab a couple of things,” says Dad, or whoever he is. “I’ll be ten minutes. It’s important you don’t leave or talk to anyone. Are you listening? No climbing. No following me inside.”
He smiles when I nod, a familiar-enough smile.
“Why are you crying?” I ask.
“…I’m happy, is all, mate.”
He kisses my cheek and leaves, taking off his jacket and carrying it under an arm as he runs towards the front door, crunching over leaves. There’s no gate at the old house. Dad is wearing a black shirt and is sweating even though it’s cold.
Alone, I sit, wishing I had my iPad. I climb into the backseat and scrounge through the bags to see if Dad packed it. I sigh, empty-handed. Bite my lower lip. Suck my thumb, wondering how this man found our new townhouse if he isn’t my dad.
Did you ask our social worker? Did you pretend to be Dad on the phone?
Why are you doing this?
Who are you?
* * *
The car door clicks shut. I look left, right, left again before crossing the street, just like Dad and Pa taught me when I was little. I hurry to the door, knowing I’m going to get in trouble. Sometimes doing the wrong thing feels right. There was a time at the Manuka pool when Dad yelled at me to stop swimming and come into the covered area because there was lightning about. I pretended not to hear him, and once I paddled to the ladder and climbed out I got in trouble, as expected. It was worth it, though. Pushing back is something I need to do. This is different. I’m doing the wrong thing because I need to know what he’s hiding, and I’m doing it out of anger because he thinks I’m stupid – too young – to know that nothing about this is right.
Trying not to make noise. The front door is open. My feet swish over floorboards. It’s even cooler inside our old house. All our things are here, as if we hadn’t packed everything into boxes and moved. The couch is in the living room, as are the paintings, one of which I did with Nan when I went to visit her in Jindabyne one time.
My toy box isn’t in the corner near the TV where we used to keep it. None of my shoes are on the rack by the door – just Dad’s work boots with the heavy laces that click when he walks.
The smell of dead flowers and vase water rolls over me. There’s a table I’ve never seen before set against the wall by the corridor to our bedrooms where I can hear Dad shuffling about. Old flowers rustle like cockatoo feathers you find on the ground – they are bound with faded purple ribbons. Above these bunches, almost tipping in the wind coming through the door I left open, is a booklet. I reach through the flowers to take it and flip it over.
Air seeps out of me slow. I’m a deflating birthday balloon. I’m a rabbit in the woods of Endor. I’m so cold.
Celebrate the life of Finn Patrick Downes-Helleyer, taken too soon, it reads.
Beneath these words is my school photo. Dad had made me do my hair that morning, but I’d tousled it as I waited for my turn to sit on the stool. This copy is black and white. The booklet slips from my fingers and slides across the floorboards, coming to rest between Dad’s feet. I hadn’t heard him come down the hall. There is a shoebox in his hand. I know what it is because I’ve snooped through it before. He keeps it under his bed here and at the new townhouse, too. It’s full of trinkets and money. I expect him to yell like that day at the pool, only he just looks sad instead. He’s breathing deep. We’re empty now, the two of us. There’s nothing left. Dad pulls me into a hug.
“You weren’t supposed to see that,” he says, running his fingers through my hair. I slip my thumb into my mouth. Salty. Dad is crying. Gripping me. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. Jesus, hold me, Finn. Hold me back. Please. This is real. You’re real, right? I did this, didn’t I? We’re not dreaming. It worked. Christ.”
A tap drips in the kitchen. The wisping of his jacket.
“Where’s Pa?” I ask, pulling out of his grip. I’m not ready to give him what he needs. I’m not sure it’s safe yet.
Dad wipes his tears away. He is pale. “You don’t need to worry about him.”
“Tell me or I’ll scream.” I spit the words at him, making him flinch.
He studies me, as if searching for who I used to be. I can still feel him shaking. “He will never hurt you again,” Dad tells me, and I believe him. I believe him deeply. “I’ve made sure of it.”
I hold my ground for as long as I can. His shakes don’t trickle into me like they usually do. They bounce off. I won’t let them in. I can’t have his fear inside me anymore. It’s poison.
HUGO
It’s not quite dawn when the detectives leave the townhouse. Mum will arrive in a few hours. Everything hurts. Is dying better? The police said they’ll want to speak to me again and advised me against going back to the forest, where I told them things turned bright and someone took my boy. If the details sound blurry, it’s because the story I told them lacked focus. For all I know, there are conversations being had right now where I’m being described as ‘a person of interest’, just like in the movies.
They told me they believed me, these men and women, some in blue, others in black. But I didn’t believe them when they said it.
The living room smells of instant coffee. Clots of warm air where police officers had huddled taking notes after escorting me home. Cologne clouds. Footprints on carpet, slowly starting to lift. A gum wrapper here. A long strand of brown hair on the kitchen counter there.
My bed screams for attention. I’m not ready. I need to go outside again, into the dark, and look in the mailbox. Because the other me – the one who took Finn into the white noise light in that place where there are triangles inside of triangles – told me. Right before they disappeared. All this, in the parts of the story I couldn’t tell the cops.
I unlock the front door. Finn’s shoes sit on the rack to my left. His toys are scattered across the living room floor where he left them the day before.
The dark stretch of pathway to the mailbox by the gate. My hand comes to rest on the latch and I lift the lid. Rattling metal. Reaching inside, I think about spiders, even though it’s not the season. Parenting has trained my senses to be on alert for danger. For so long, Guy tried to convince me that my diligence was silly. I sought out the ugliness of the world to predict any threat to our son from that world.
“Everything will be fine,” Guy would say, cupping my cheek, kissing me. “Please, don’t be a drama queen. This town’s got enough of them.”
And all the while, the danger, the spider, was inside the house already.
“Weren’t there signs?” Mum asked more than once. I told her no, even though I was lying.
The first cold.
My fingers settle on steel inside the dark mailbox. I withdraw a handgun.
The last cold.
A note is wrapped around the handgun’s handle, bound in place with a rubber band. In twisting it free, the paper rips in two. The note is in my handwriting and reads:
I’m sorry but you should’ve been ready for him. Use the gun when he comes. He has knives and wants you dead. Finn will be safe with me here.
* * *
Inside, weary, waiting for dawn. It comes so late on these cold mornings. Itchy, red eyes. The loaded gun against my thigh.
I will never see my son again, a fact I approach with wonder, through a labyrinth of dead maybes, as immense as a miracle, or a devil’s miracle. I have no religion yet pray at my bedside after searching for the wedding ring. God doesn’t find me on this morning, but I do find the ring. It landed by the shoebox full of Guy’s letters, our wedding invite, two rolls of cash in case we ever had to run. I place the ring on the living room coffee table. Every lightbulb in the townhouse – which never had the chance to become a home for us – is off.
Moments ache with tension.
A shadow moves across the blinds. Swallowing, I stand, gun in hand, as I hurry to the window and listen. Footsteps. Guy’s raggedy breaths. His shadow is at my eyeline. He will try the door any second now, and I know he will have his knives, the ones he planned to use on me and Finn.
I have left the door unlocked for him.
Finn lives behind every blink now. I want to scream. Hold it in. It’s so important I keep my pain intact for a little longer, like a wound with delicate stitching that might rip open at the slightest movement, like Finn’s stitches after the car crash. Guy is shuffling across the Welcome mat. He’s snatching at the door handle.
Again, I imagine that Guy is Sook grown large, hunched over and monstrous with its one dangling eye swinging back and forth on a sinew of string, spit-soaked fur all matted and kissed away in patches so the leather peeks through. Sook has blades for teeth.
And the blades are glimmering.
Hold the wound, I think. Keep the stitches in.
My boy. Finn, I will kill Pa with my love for you.
The door swings open and Guy’s (Sook’s) shadow spills into the room, thrown by dawn as it breaks at his back. I lift the gun and shoot him with rage in the shape of a bullet. The ringing in my ears from the bang is so intense I can’t hear myself screaming. I’ve let it all go. The stitches are undone and the wound is free to bleed. A constellation of blood and brains on the wall, not cottony teddy bear stuffing. Purple smoke hazes the air, and I double over, the nose of the gun touching the tiles. Sunlight plays on my mother’s face, and on the wet hole in the side of her head. Her eyes might be open, but they do not see. I grab her wrist and say her name and then say it again. And again. She’s so cold.