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THE ISLAND WAS QUIET, but a subtle unspoken fear pervaded the normal sea air. It smelled dangerous and people looked over their shoulders more often. The small community was shaken. Attendance to the beaches slowed down. People drove across the large bridge back to the mainland and stayed with family or friends. Little kids were no longer allowed to play by themselves and Chief Eugene, not entirely knowing what else to do, had his men segment off the shore and patrol it. It was too large to get done without taking all of his men off of the streets and so community members started helping out. An older man, a butcher named Eric Warners owned a small motorboat and he offered to take on a section or two. And following his example, others volunteered as well. Chief Eugene made clear that he didn’t know exactly what to look for but everyone was shaken enough to know better than to press for specifics.
Newspapers got their hands on the stories and soon headlines like “Vanishings at Marisol Island” appeared and “Invisible Sharks” on the more volatile tabloids. Journalists from Florida’s mainland came down and Chief Eugene wished he had information to give them. He felt embarrassed repeating the same “shark attack” reason over and over again. He hated getting the follow-up questions that he did not know the answers to. What type of shark? I don’t know. More than one shark? Seemed like it. Where are the bodies? Couldn’t say. What happened to Wesley Batter III? Where did he go? Why didn’t you follow up on your missing persons? And through all of it Chief eventually closed the case to the press. He felt inadequate and he started spending his days smoking cigarettes in his office.
Sometimes he dreams that he’s driving on the beach and he can see the boy’s mother standing on the shore, her hair wild in the wind like a sailor’s wife. The dream is real until it is not and the sky opens red and the vision of it all shakes and burns out like a film reel on the light’s heat.
A journalist from a small tabloid showed up at P.J.’s door. When P.J. heard the knock he was alone in the house. He tried to impress himself by getting up without wincing and swiftly getting to the door, but the pain proved too much and instead he hobbled slowly. Through the peephole he saw the man. He was thin and tall. He had dark black hair that he kept short and well combed and he wore pastel blue shorts, boat shoes, and a pink polo. P.J. opened the door.
“Hello?”
“Hey,” the man said. He offered a smile and spoke with a different, more casual air. He looked at P.J. as if he knew him or was trying to place his face among a description. “My name is Max Gear. I knew Haley and Wes.”
P.J.’s stomach dropped. For some reason he couldn’t define he felt responsible, like he was in trouble. Max looked at him with a hand extended.
“How did you find where I lived?”
“They told me,” Max offered. He pulled his hand back and shot a glance down to P.J.’s leg. The scar was ugly. “I went to UF with them. T.J. told me about you and your brother and where you stayed.”
“Oh.”
“Can I come in?”
P.J. backed away and limped to the kitchen counter. Max came in and eased the door closed.
“I wanna put all the cards on the table right now,” Max said. The phrase made P.J. turn around. “I’m a journalist by occupation, but I swear I’m not here to roll you or anything or wrap you up in some podcast.”
P.J. leaned back. He tried to act casual but he felt duped. For weeks he had been ducking small-time reporters. He had nothing to say to them. He would never tell the story as he actually saw it. Not to them. If his own brother wouldn’t buy it, how would the public? He’d be thrown in a padded cell.
P.J. looked at the reporter. He was a bit older. Touching thirty. He had in him a confidence that P.J. had not possessed in some time. For a split second, he grew angry at Max and thought him a scavenger of bad news, someone who had the inside scoop and was planning to exploit it, to take advantage of him. But the fact was, Max was doing it out of obligation. He had shared a campus with the spring breakers that P.J. befriended. Max had drunk with them. Max knew them.
“I write for this small blog called the Tampa Rep,” he explained. He was articulate and direct. Everything he said had a crispness to it. “We do some small prints, but, again, I’m here as a friend and not as a journalist. So assume everything is off the record. Unless you decide it’s not. Not that my blog would even give a shit about a conflict of interest, they don’t much care about any standards of practice.”
The Tampa Rep was a small tabloid at best, a gossip rag at worst. It barely paid Max’s bills. He freelanced and scraped together posts and pieces just to get by. His career as a journalist was going to live and die at the Rep. He knew that. That had been decided for him the moment he walked across the stage to accept his diploma.
“That’s what you get with supportive parents,” was the big joke his boyfriend always said. “A good childhood but a shit adulthood.”
So when Max heard about what happened to Wes and Haley he thought of it as a call to arms. Rising to some occasion. His whole upbringing he was stockpiling guilt and shame for having supportive parents. I can’t let them down, I can’t let them down, I can’t let them down. And now here was a chance. Not just to prove himself to his parents, but also to his friends back at school. He had left things on a sour note.
“Do you want a drink?” P.J. asked.
Max checked his small digital watch.
“Well?”
“Sure, it’s early but why not?” Max responded and crossed closer into the kitchen. There the two stood about a yard apart. P.J. poured a glass of rum and cut it with orange juice. Then he added more rum and handed a glass to the journalist.
“How old are you, dude?” P.J. asked.
“Twenty-eight,” Max replied sipping at the rum and cringing.
“You knew Haley and Wes?”
“Yeah. I’m a few years ahead, but they’re great. Haley and I worked at a stupid café together. She was really sweet.”
P.J. thought of her. He shook her out.
“I didn’t see what happened to them.”
Max felt the defensiveness. He tried to assuage him.
“Look, again, I’m not here to put your face on an article. I promise. Let’s just talk about it and if you decide you want it out there, we can. I don’t want you to feel pressured.”
“You came to my house.”
Max took a breath. P.J. spoke again.
“I’ve been avoiding all of you guys.”
“How many have there been?”
“A few small-time tabloids that will just make me feel shitty and crazy.”
“Right. Well, that’s what I’m trying to avoid. But I’m sure you can appreciate how much this story hits home.”
“Don’t call it a story.”
“Okay, sorry,” Max said. There was a silence. Max took another sip of the rum drink. It wasn’t any better.
“Go ahead,” P.J. said. Max looked up and into his eyes. There was a chance. A vulnerable child rested deep in the dark of his pupil. Someone that did, indeed, want to be heard.
“On June 8th, when, uh, Gregory Rett disappeared. What did you see then?”
“Nothing.”
Max thought of Haley and Wes and a time where they played beer pong in a dirty apartment with a low ceiling. How hard he laughed. How funny Wes was when Haley forced him to be social. And now they were gone. Like the little boy.
“But I feel like you did see something. Considering your boat was destroyed and you were hospitalized.”
“It was just a piece of glass that did it. I wasn’t attacked by anything.”
“So then just your boat was? And by what?”
The yard between the men seemed to shrink and they were standing face to face. P.J. felt threatened and scared for some reason and he started to sweat on the back of his neck. He filled up his drink and then retreated to the balcony. A small seagull perched itself on the railing. It let out a caw and shimmied up and down and then turned to the diner. It cocked its head and watched cars pass by and then it spread its wings and took off. It flew through the sky and the clouds were gone fully and the bird soared. It scanned the beach for food and dove down to walk on the sand and look for little things to eat. It was about ten-thirty and the sun was weak.
“If you don’t want to answer these questions you don’t have to but I think you have something important to say,” Max explained as he followed P.J. He put the rum glass on a coaster on the coffee table and followed him to the balcony. The two looked out together. The fresh air felt good on his Max’s cheeks. Sometimes he felt like if he didn’t get out to the beach every couple of days he’d start to rot. A lot of Floridians think that.
“I don’t have anything important to say,” P.J. said.
The seagull soared out there and then turned and made its way back across P.J.’s line of sight and he followed it with his eyes.
“Mr. Neil, I –
“You can call me P.J. I know you know my name.”
“I’m trying to keep an air of professionalism.”
“But you’re not here as a journalist.”
Max balked. The tight rope was getting harder to walk.
“And what the fuck difference does it make?” P.J. started. He didn’t look at Max. “Is an air of professionalism going to bring back that little kid? Or your friends? Or stop that crazy shark guy?” And then P.J. froze. It slipped out. He held his drink tighter.
“What crazy shark guy?” Max asked.
“It’s nothing, man,” P.J. said. But inside he was screaming to let himself confess it all.
“Are you alright?”
Max watched P.J. He didn’t take his eyes off the horizon. He could see the muscles in his jaw clench and tighten. He could see P.J. blink and rearrange his grip on the railing.
“Who’s the shark guy?”
P.J. said nothing.
“P.J. -
“I don’t know who he is,” he finally said. He turned to Max. “I just know he lives in this shack about a mile north of the Seashell. He was the maintenance guy for a while. His name was Rory, I think. That’s what his jumpsuit always said.”
“And what about him?” Max pushed.
And the truth was P.J. had nothing. There wasn’t a damn piece of actual evidence that P.J. had that could have linked Rory to anything. And upon realizing this P.J. grew despondent and defeated. He shrugged. Screamed at himself again.
“That’s my point, man,” he started. “I got nothing. Really. Nothing. He just gives me a bad vibe.”
“A bad vibe?” Max repeated.
“Fuck off, man. I told you I had nothing. This is what I have.”
“Alright, I’m sorry. I’m listening.”
P.J. grew silent again. He looked into his drink. It was clear to Max that P.J. was going to be drinking all day. It was a wonder if he even liked it. He drank it with the same speed and reaction as medicine. Then P.J. took a large pull.
“Sometimes I think,” P.J. started. His voice cracked. He took a series of shallow breaths like he was staving off crying. “Sometimes I think that there’s a lot of bad things on the other side of all of this.”
He finally turned to Max. It was then Max realized there was real reason P.J. was pushing off reporters. He didn’t want to hear himself confess these things. Each word verbalized a stepping stone to some crooked monolith in the distance. A dark, obsidian beacon throbbing out rings of chaos and evil. Max let him speak.
“You know when you’re a kid and you think something is under your bed?”
“Yeah.”
“If you stay under the covers and don’t think about it, you’ll be fine. But if you lean off the edge of the bed and investigate the darkness that’s when it’ll get you. So you just have to be okay with the darkness underneath you. You just have to keep your back to it because to look at it is... I don’t know. I’ve been thinking a lot about this.”
Another pause. Max could feel the darkness closing in. There was a chill. He could taste the salt of the air resting on his lips, trying to climb in and seep into his skin.
“This island isn’t a safe place anymore, I don’t think,” P.J. said and he finished the rum. “I’m moving. And you should get going.”
“Get going?”
“I’m saying you gotta leave now, man. Just get out of my apartment,” he said and pointed to the door.
Max nodded in concession. He headed out the door and turned. He crossed the threshold but stopped to look back at the man P.J. Neil had become, a young man in ratty gym shorts with a rum glass in his hand and a stitched up thigh already starting to scar. He could tell P.J.’s eyes were once brown and alluring, but now they seemed right at the surface of his iris as if all the deep complexities inside him had vanished and been replaced by an inexplicable hollowness. Or a dread. Or a mix of both. He had the stare of a wooden statue and his face was growing hairy and the hair on his head was getting long and curling every which way. And Max looked at the crumbling statue.
P.J. let him out of the apartment but before closing the door, he asked, “How well did you know Haley?”
Max stood in the open air corridor. The sounds of the beach and the passing cards seemed amplified. “Pretty well,” he said. “She was really sweet. Deserved a lot better from a lot of people. Myself included.”
P.J. nodded. Then he closed the door.
Gear was born and raised in St. Petersburg, Florida and he spent all of his days reading the newspaper beside his parents. He was adopted as a baby and had never felt the desire to meet his biological folks. It seemed clichéd to him. And maybe the pathos that felt rejected was already set in stone. He felt tossed away. And even though his new parents were caring and loving and intelligent Max always felt the guilt.
He has a boyfriend in St. Pete who he will never see again. His boyfriend’s name is Quinn Lamar and he is black and he works at the deli of an upper-class market. He moves through the city proud of Max and when he gets home he calls him and they talk on the phone and he sleeps in a bed where Max’s presence is missed.
Max was staying at a small motel, but before he went back there he went to see what shack P.J. was talking about. He drove in his small Toyota to his destination. He didn’t listen to any music because P.J.’s voice, shaking, on the verge of collapse, occupied his thoughts.
It was early in the morning when T.J. told him about Wes and Haley disappearing. He was eating breakfast with Quinn and when he heard the news he did not cry. He didn’t do anything. It was too abstract. Someone was gone. They were not dead. They may be alive. But they were gone.
He spoke on the phone with T.J. for an hour. He just paced around the small apartment, and Quinn picked up the information from Max’s side of the conversation. Although the day had started, it was pretty much over from there.
Now, the car cruised towards a scenario that Max had no warning of. He drove forward keeping the speed limit, a careful driver as always, until he saw the Seashell. He passed it by and drove on and the small hut on the sand neared in the distance but it never increased in size. It was forever small and seemingly out of reach, like it no longer abided by the rules of the universe. The sun was higher in the sky now and Max put on his sunglasses.
Max had done nothing to the world and asked very little from it, yet he harbored in him a great deal of self-loathing. Now he cruised towards damnation. His soul was that of a hero’s, though, always fighting, always marching onwards despite the incredible odds. He was a man with a heavy burden, a rucksack of self-inflicted shame and guilt slung over his shoulders. He put shame on himself for being adopted. He put guilt on himself for being spoiled by artistic parents. Earlier in his life, he even put shame on himself for being gay. His first boyfriend in college had to shake him out of it. To wake him up and force him to realize that the pain he put on himself, he also put on to others. And that was Gear’s greatest weakness. He wanted to die on the cross. He didn’t want anybody else to. So when he realized how hurt people were to never see him happy, he decided to change.
When he pulled into the driveway of the shack he parked right behind where an old pick truck used to sit crooked in the grass.
He got out of the car and the sweat from his back stuck to his shirt. The dirty driveway was bright but it was dark gray behind his sunglasses so he took them off and he pulled out his notepad and approached the house. With a knocking on the door, the part that always put butterflies in his stomach, the maelstrom far down below sped up violently. Blankets of the universe bent down and twirled. The sun dimmed a little, briefly, almost unnoticeable, and then picked back up to a scalding torch.
The knock was loud, but there was no sound inside the hovel. Max turned back to the car, and then back to the door and knocked again and again, there was nothing. He searched the perimeter. He looked at the boarded-up windows. He thought P.J. gave him a false lead and he grew annoyed. The shack looked abandoned. He got up close to the window and cupped his eyes against the glass but saw nothing. It was plastered over with newspapers and cardboard. He went around to the back of the house where the lawn chair sat facing the ocean. There were bits of fish guts and some tails and heads scattered around and Max assumed it was for baiting fish. He circled the house again and came back to the driveway. He knocked once more, quick and determined raps, but nothing answered. He called if anybody was home and again there was nothing.
Back in St. Pete when he told Quinn he was going to look into the story Quinn didn’t say anything. Instead he kept quiet and looked around the room in a furtive silence.
Later in the evening, Quinn finally spoke up. “Why?” was all he asked and for some reason Max wasn’t expecting that question. “The Tampa Rep would never run that kind of story,” Quinn said. But Max only stared at him. They were in the car on their way to dinner.
“It could be an important story either way,” Max explained. He turned the car. He turned it again. They were going to a bar that had food trucks in the back.
Back at home, a little drunk, Quinn tried to get close to Max but something in Max turned off. He loved Quinn and loved being his partner but for some reason the question was stuck in the soil of his mind like a spade. Why did he want to do it? Because he was their friend. That’s why. Right?
In bed he remembered them. He remembered working with Haley and listening to her stories. He remembered telling her what English courses she should take. What professors weren’t worth the hassle. He remembered Wes and how, when he got drunk, he would lift up Haley and pretend to do wrestling moves with her. Ostentatious displays of spinning her around, tossing her up, and making others laugh. He remembered how hot and humid Gainesville got in the summer. Why did he remember the heat? The sticky, mosquito-infested, humid, muggy heat. Why did he remember that the most?
There was a friend they all shared named Kayla who liked to be scared and liked to scare others. Max had graduated but he stuck around a year or so and in his final summer Kayla hosted a séance at her house a little way off campus. It was a brown bricked house her parents paid for and it was surrounded by dark green trees and sat at a distance from the road like it was shy and afraid to be seen. Max and Haley were there, but Wes didn’t come. He didn’t like to be scared on purpose and he thought a séance was intentional and ignorant.
They sat there in a circle. Some smoked pot and some drank beers. And Max started to ask questions and started to pick on Haley. With his fingers on the planchette he pushed it around the Ouija board.
“Do you like Haley?” he asked the spirit before he moved the planchette to YES. He was drunk and his mouth was watering.
“Do you want to hurt Haley?” he asked and moved the planchette to YES.
There was a moment before Haley got nervous, but when Max noticed it he went deeper.
“What do you wanna do to Haley?” And then he moved the planchette to V-I-O-L-A-T-E. And then Haley stopped playing because she got too scared. Later, when the séance had ended and Haley wasn’t having fun anymore Max dug even deeper to scare her. He made her cry. He laughed. Then he tried to make her feel better but she grabbed her bag and left.
The truth was that he liked Haley. Liked her in a carnal way. Seeing her scared and crying was the closest thing to fucking her as he was going to get. And he knew that, but didn’t mind. Outside there were big trees buzzing with cicadas. On porches people drank and smoked, the orange lights of the house making silhouettes of them. Looming shadows smoking weed and holding cans. On the Gainesville strip college students partied and danced. Everyone was in love and everyone was afraid of the future. But in this house right now Max watched Haley be scared. He felt a possession over her. In helping her pick classes and guiding her through college he wormed into his head a desire for her body. So when he teased her without recompense it was to slake some spiteful and absurd thirst.
“That was fucked up, man. She was scared all night,” Wes told him the next day. Then, all at once, Max felt bad. He didn’t admit it to anyone, but he just liked the idea of her small frame crying, her slender shoulders shuddering with each shallow breath. It was a moment of sadistic self-indulgence. He felt guilty for it ever since. And now that she has been missing, sometimes he wished he could go back and never touch the planchette. It’s not that he believed he set a course, but Quinn told him once about the importance of what’s put into the universe. Entropy and all of that. Positive energy versus evil energy. Lately, it had not been feeling positive.
He never told Quinn about that either. They were together at the time and Quinn knew who Haley was. Sitting at that bar that day Max did consider broaching the story. The business about being attracted to Haley took no explanation, not to Quinn. He had been with men and with women and Max had his own interests. But the specificity of it being Haley might have perturbed him. The act of making her cry for no good reason might have landed cockeyed. They were all friends. Had been for a long time. Even more so, it was the specificity of Max’s growing violence towards her. It was like he didn’t want to have a romantic night with her. He wanted to just be naked with her and do something to her but he knew he couldn’t so instead he scared her. How could he possibly explain that to Quinn who sat across from him nursing a beer? Quinn thought too highly of Max to take that news in stride. Max could barely explain it to himself without completely succumbing to self-loathing.
There were times in high school and in college where Max considered cutting himself. He had done it once on the base of his thigh but it hurt too much. He liked the way he looked naked and thought he looked good. Thought scarring himself would be a damn shame. Then he felt vain for that too. So he’d look at images online and pretend it was him and he’d play out scenarios in his head of Quinn seeing his scars, hundreds of them, all at once and out of nowhere, and when Quinn would start crying he would too in real life. Again he wondered how could he explain to Quinn why he felt obligated to help Haley. He stood outside of the hut and the entropy of it all felt suffocating.
On the beach, in front of the Seashell, Dennis moved from beach chair to towel serving daiquiris on a black tray. He wasted no time in finding new employment and was grateful that the management had even proved sympathetic to his situation, offering their concerns to P.J. and encouraging him to “take some time to himself until he’s ready.” Dennis walked in big sandy sneakers and sweated under his blue uniform and khaki shorts. He noticed, far off, a small figure snooping around the hovel. He grew cold and served the last drinks and then hustled over.
Max went back to his car to sit down. He looked at the small shack. It sat there. Stout Ominous. Prepared to give up, he put his hand on the ignition. But then he looked at the house again. The sun reflected off of the dull gray roof and the rain gutters were bent and crooked. There were patches of grass and driftwood scattered across the dirty sand. He thought of all those journalists in the movies and how they’d easily enter the house and snoop around. Then he thought of Quinn’s silence. The car ride. The heat of Gainesville. Haley wiping away at her eyes because she didn’t want people to see her cry.
He saw Dennis walking across the beach and waving him down. Max put his shades back on and got out of the car and the two met in the sand.
“Can I help you?” Dennis asked. He crossed his arms.
“Max Gear,” he said. He extended a hand. Dennis shook it. Then he looked past Max to the house.
“You shouldn’t be around here, man. That guy’s not right in the head.”
Max looked back at the house. It reminded him of a tree trunk struck by lightning.
“Yeah, that’s what I’ve heard. What’s your name?”
“Dennis.”
“Are you P.J.’s brother?”
“You talked to my brother?”
“He answered some questions and he mentioned this guy back here,” Max did a thumb towards the hut.
“Oh Jesus,” Dennis said, “My brother doesn’t really know what he’s talking about. I love him to death but he’s just scared.” There was a pause. Dennis surveyed the beach. He looked back to his work area. He looked even further back to the apartment far in the distance where he hoped P.J. was sleeping but probably wasn’t. “We’re moving pretty soon. It’s not my idea but, it’s easier to go with it than to fight him.”
Another pause.
“I just feel bad, to be honest. About that poor guy over there. Dude gets such a bad rep because he’s a little weird, you know?”
“Your brother called him a shark freak,” Max said.
Dennis rolled his eyes.
“Yeah, that might be true. But P.J. says a lot of things.” They held eye contact. Dennis wondered how Max looked scared. Would it be like his mother? Would it be like his brother? He held strong to this sense of normality. He had his own suspicions about the house or else he wouldn’t have pulled Max away from it. But investigating it or diving deep into his fears was not something he had the patience for. Not here in the sun. Not ever.
“I was just telling your brother actually,” Max started. “I’m here in kind of a tricky situation. I’m a journalist for the Tampa Rep. But I went to school with Haley and Wes.”
“Oh, shit,” Dennis said. He shifted postures. “I’m sorry about what happened to them.”
“Yeah. That’s okay. It’s a lot harder on their families I imagine. I’m just the only one close enough to poke around.”
“I don’t know what my brother told you,” Dennis offered, “But I think they just drove off. I don’t mean to insult you.”
Max squinted from the glare of the sand. Then he looked at Dennis. He had a fine sheen of sweat on his face and his arms were tan and dark.
“No, I’m not offended,” Max said. “But I’d like to check out this guy’s house if it’s all the same.”
“How do you mean?”
“Well have you been inside? Have you spoken to him?”
“I’ve spoken to him once but I’ve never been inside.”
“What if there’s proof linking him to the vanishings right inside his house? How would you know if you don’t go inside?”
Dennis looked at the house over Max’s shoulder. He pondered it for a moment. Then said the obvious answer.
“Because that’s illegal.”
Max said nothing at first. Then, “Yeah, that’s true.”
“What kind of journalist are you?” Dennis asked. There was a sense of humor in the question, and Max thought about it. He didn’t have the answer. It definitely wasn’t the kind of journalist he spent four years studying to be. Sometimes he didn’t feel like a journalist at all. Most times he just felt bored and angry.
“Take my number,” he said and Max wrote it onto a napkin on Dennis’s circle tray. “I’m coming here tonight. Whatever the risk is, I think it’s worth it.”
Max turned to go. He pulled out his phone to text Quinn but he thought better of it. Then he got inside his car and slowly pulled out and went to his motel. Dennis watched him leave and then looked at the napkin with the phone number. He put it into his pocket and then looked at the house again. Not a sound had come from it. Dennis knew that Rory lived there but he couldn’t place how he knew. He couldn’t remember ever seeing Rory come in or out of it. He’d seen him come and go from that general direction, but couldn’t place the specifics. Was it during orientation years ago when the manager made a comment that the maintenance man lived nearby. Either way, the hut sat there squalid. It almost seemed like it swallowed color and sound. For a moment he imagined opening the door and disappearing forever like there’s a trap in the floor that’d drop him into oblivion. Then he turned and jogged back to work.
Quinn and Max spoke on the phone. They knew each other’s voices and found comfort in the natural pauses of conversation. Max sat on the edge of the bed in the motel, but he sat in the dark. Some sunlight made its way through the cheap blinds of the motel and landed on the pink pastel walls.
“Is it silly that I already miss you?” Quinn asked.
“No, no, I miss you too.”
“It’s only been like a day,” Quinn laughed, “Not even. And you’re gonna stay another night?”
Max told him yes and the two discussed each other’s day. Max had already made up his mind to break into the hovel. But he decided to keep it a secret. He knew Quinn would be against it. And what if Quinn asked “Why?” again? What would Max say? Would he talk about how he made Haley cry so many years ago? Would he talk about the rucksack of guilt he has been carrying his whole life? And soon enough the two said their I Love You’s and their Goodbyes and Max said he’d call much later at night if Quinn wanted and Quinn said “I’ll be asleep, but wake me up anyway.” And then Max said Okay and they hung up. And then Max sat there in the gray of the room and he looked at his hands.
If P.J. was afraid and Dennis was in denial, then Max was the one who toed the line. He felt both sides of it. The cosmic horror hadn’t revealed itself fully to him, not yet, but he knew it was there. Right at his fingertips. Something was wrong. He could feel it in the air like a current. He knew deep in his heart that Wes and Haley were gone and that the little boy was too. They once took up space in his life and in his car and in his kitchen but now they were gone. He felt like he was leaning out of a window and could just barely feel the truth, like a breeze or a gentle touch.
When he was younger he drove up to Vermont from New York to meet with family and he forgot to get gas along the way. The last hour of the trip was all through back roads. A snowy, dark black journey without a street light. When the car beeped to tell him he was almost out of gas he felt the anxiety set in. The gas stations were closed. The snow fell harder. The trees and forests seemed so black and so impenetrable. He ran options through his head of what he would do if the car gave out and stopped short somewhere in the white black of the night. Would he walk? Bundled up in a coat and scarf and go knocking on the curious doors of suspicious buildings? Or would he stay in the car and let the cold tighten on the window and fight to get in.
He sat on the edge of the bed and looked at his hands. His knuckles. The veins along the back. They were clean and precise and attractive hands. And although it was hot outside, it was almost as if he could feel the coldness tightening around the room. The white-black of the woods. Quinn’s silence.
Then his phone buzzed and he got a text. It was from Dennis.
“I’m in.”