DoubleDown V (5 page)

“What makes you think I like chocolate?”

She licked the ice cream, and it tasted great.

“You’re a girl.”

“Very perceptive of you.”

Bobby walked into the girls’ bathroom and she followed.

“I like seeing girls when they don’t think anybody is looking,” he said.  Unfortunately nobody was in the bathroom.

She didn’t reply.

“So, it’s time for you to tell me what you do when time stops.  You’ve seen what I do, but what do
you
do?”

Karen took another long swipe of her ice cream to buy her some time.

“I like to look in my neighbors’ homes, to see what secrets they keep from the rest of the world.”

“Ahh.  You’re a peeping Tom.”

“At least I don’t hurt anybody.”

They both stopped and stared at each other, a familiar feeling lurching through Karen’s body.  The calling.

Bobby recognized what was happening.  “Darn.”

“Yeah.”

“Come find me next time.  I’ll be here.”

She didn’t commit to that as the calling started to pull her back toward her house.  She wasn’t sure she wanted to see him ever again.

But part of her knew she absolutely wanted to.

Karen’s father was named Parker.  Parker Samson Richardson.  Her friends sometimes wondered if his parents liked comic books or something, since the name seemed so weird, something out of
Spider Man
or the
X-Men
, maybe.  She tried to pretend it was nothing special, perhaps a tribute to some long-forgotten relative or something.

He was forty-one years old when Karen was seventeen.  She knew he loved her, even though sometimes it was hard to tell by how he treated her.  He smiled and laughed with Tina, but with Karen, he was more reserved and serious.  He expected more from her.

One day when Karen was alone with her mother, she asked, “Why does Dad treat me so hard?  Why does he love Tina more?”

She immediately regretted the question when she saw the hesitation and heartbreak on her mother’s face.

For a moment, there was only silence.

“Truth be told, your dad loves you as much as Tina, if not more.  He just knows you’re the one who could follow in his footsteps and work in fields that he respects.”

Her mom looked around to be sure Tina wasn’t nearby.

“He doesn’t really expect much of your sister.  He still loves her, but he’ll be happy if she manages to just find a job—any job—and have a happy life with somebody who cares for her.  He wants more for you, and he wants to help you be all you can be.”

Karen absorbed this and never spoke of it again.  She tried to look at her dad with new eyes, but somehow he never seemed much different.  He seemed so hard to please.

On top of that, she knew his secrets.

*   *   *

On May 30, her world changed. She woke early to the sound of commotion in the living room below.  She glanced at her watch: 4:42 a.m.

A gray haze hung outside her bedroom window, waiting for the sun to rise.  A hint of bright red lights periodically flashed through the gray.

Police?

Tina was still sleeping.

“Please, help him … .”

Mom’s tiny voice was full of fear as it hovered and found its way from downstairs.  Karen ran to the stairs and saw two men dressed in white, moving her father, who was lying on a stretcher.  He was moving a little, but mostly what she would remember later was that he was crying.  He moaned from pain and tears fell down his cheeks.  Karen had never seen her father cry before.  He was dressed in his Frosty the Snowman pajamas, a Christmas gift from Tina two years earlier.

Mom was standing beside the stretcher, one hand on Dad’s shoulder.

“Tell me he’s going to be okay.  Please.”

Tears were rolling down her cheeks as well.

“We’re taking him to Highland Hills, Mrs. Richardson.  They’ll do their best.”

“I’ll go as soon as I get dressed.”

The paramedics took Dad outside.  Karen ran down the stairs and watched with Mom.

“What happened?” 

“I don’t know.  He woke up and said he needed help.  He could barely move, saying the pain was much worse and he couldn’t stand it anymore.”

“He’s had pain?”

The ambulance pulled away with its siren wailing.

“I have to get dressed and go.”

“Mom, tell me. What pain?”

They both started up the stairs.  “I don’t really know.  He’s had it for a while but wouldn’t go to the doctor.  Kept saying it would go away.”

Mom rushed to her room and called back, “I’ll phone you when I know.”

Karen watched as her mom got dressed and then left after giving her a quick hug.  She sat in her father’s favorite La-Z-Boy armchair and waited for her mother to call.

*   *   *

It didn’t take long for the diagnosis.  Parker Samson Richardson had cancer.   A lot of it.

The doctors guessed it started in the liver, but they weren’t sure.  It had metastasized and spread through his body.  His lungs were dripping with the stuff, and when the doctors realized it had spread through his lymph nodes, they told Karen’s mom there wasn’t much that they could do.  It had been too long.

Parker Richardson didn’t have a good reason why he hadn’t gone to the doctor earlier, but the surgeons seemed to think it wouldn’t have made much difference anyway.  It was spreading fast and had been for a long time, possibly longer than he was aware.

What caused it?

Nobody had a clue.  He didn’t drink much, didn’t smoke, ate healthier than most people, and had no particular risk factors in his family history.

“He’s just an unfortunate random choice,” said one doctor.  Karen heard him say that, and from his voice, he seemed to be trying to be sympathetic, but the words had the opposite effect on her.  They made her angry.

She had been a churchgoer all her life, not every Sunday, but two or three times each month.  None of her friends went to church, and when she was younger they used to tease her; but there was something vaguely reassuring about believing in some crazy old man who lived in the sky and made things happen just on a whim.

Karen once believed those whims were mostly good, but no longer.  After her dad went into the hospital, she never entered a church again.

She doubted God cared.

*   *   *

Within a month, her dad had deteriorated into a flimsy excuse of a man.  He’d lost weight, so much that his cheeks looked hollow.  Karen couldn’t believe that she hadn’t noticed that he was sick before that night.

Surely Mom noticed
. 

But she never asked her mother.  That would only lead to guilt of one kind or another.

Time stopped for Karen once in that month, and when it did, she stepped away from watching
The Bachelor
with her mom.  Chris Harrison was frozen on the screen, a huge smile on his face as he talked to the man who was picking the most eligible girl in America to be his wife.

“Stupid show,” Mom said.

“I know,” Karen said.

They never missed an episode.  Now, though, in Karen’s private time, she wanted to see Dad.

In his semiprivate room, he was on his back, his eyes staring into empty space, his mouth wide as he gasped for breath.  His lungs didn’t work very well, and he couldn’t seem to get a good deep breath.

She sat on the edge of his bed and put one hand on his cheek.

“Hi, Daddy … .”

She reached down to hold his left hand with her right.

“It’s been a long time since I called you Daddy, hasn’t it?  Sometimes I miss that.  I miss how close we were when I was a little girl and you were my hero.  You were always there to chase the monsters away from under my bed and to sneak me a cookie when Mom said I’d had enough treats for one day.  You helped me with my homework when I couldn’t figure out how to multiply or couldn’t remember the names of Christopher Columbus’s ships.”

She thought back to those days, memories flooding through her.  Daddy helping her to build sand castles, teaching her how to fish, and even how to hopscotch.  None of her friends had a father who would jump rope with them.  Only she had that.

“I miss you, Daddy.”

Karen leaned over and hugged her dad, wishing that he could give her a hug in return.  She knew she’d never be able to do this when time wasn’t standing still; they hadn’t hugged for many years.  Now there was an additional gulf separating them—the box in the closet.

“I’ve got a secret, too, Daddy.  I wish I’d told you about it, but I knew you’d never believe me.  Who in their right mind would believe it?  But with your love for science, I just wish I could have told you and convinced you it was true.

“Maybe if I told you about finding
your
secrets—the gun and the magazines, and … you know, the other thing.  Maybe if I told you about what Mrs. Montgomery writes about her husband and all the other hidden gems on our street.  Maybe I could convince you, but I doubt it.  It’s too freakish.”

She shrugged and wiped her nose with a tissue from his bedside table.

“I love you, Daddy.”

Part of her hoped that some of the sentiment might sink in and that his soul would feel a little better after she was called home.  Who knew?

She stayed with him for what felt like two hours, but of course there was no way to measure time when clocks didn’t tick.

Later, when she settled back to watch the silly TV show with her mother, she felt a tiny bit more at peace.

*   *   *

One week later, she was at the hospital again, in normal time.

She was alone with her dad, sitting beside him, telling him about her day. She tried to visit every day, knowing any particular day could be his last, wanting to give her mom a break.  Mom sat with Dad twelve hours every day, with never a hint of complaint, but Karen knew she appreciated it when she spelled her off.  Tina also took her fair share of time sitting with him.

The gasping for air was much worse, and everybody knew the end was very close.

“I still hate broccoli, you know.”  Karen was trying to make light conversation when she realized Dad had stopped breathing.  She jumped to his side and saw his mouth move, trying to get just one last breath, but nothing was working anymore.  His eyes pleaded with her.

“I love you, Daddy.  I always have.”

She held tightly to both his hands and stared directly into his eyes.  He blinked one last time and then stopped even trying to get any air.  He was as frozen as when time stopped for her.

After a few moments of just being with him, Karen called for a nurse and then phoned her mom to tell her.

It was more than a year before Karen saw Bobby again. She didn’t miss him.  In fact, he almost never crossed her mind.  Her mind and her heart were with her dad.  His death had left a hole in her soul that she struggled to fill.  When time stopped for her, she walked through some neighbors’ homes, but she didn’t feel the same excitement.  She didn’t even bother to write down what she found in her Secrets Journal.

Her reaction in her free time wasn’t much different from normal time.  For almost six months, she didn’t crawl out of the hole that consumed her. 

Early in the new year things changed.

She woke in the middle of the night. Time was stopped.  It rarely happened in the middle of the night, and the combination of enough time having passed and the relative rareness of a night-time stoppage shook her mind free; she felt positive for the first time since the funeral.

Excitement.  Curiosity.  Freedom.

Her special feelings flooded back to her, and she jumped out of bed.  She never knew if she’d have ten minutes, an hour, or half a day to herself, but she didn’t want to waste a single second.

She knew it made no sense to say she had “an hour” to herself, because with time stopped, the concept had no meaning, but it
felt
like time was passing to her, and that’s what mattered.

Curiosity.  Her favorite emotion.  She loved the itch inside her that wanted to know what was going on in the houses down the street.

She decided to head to a small shopping area nearby.  She called it “downtown,” but really it was just a group of stores that happened to have opened in the same general area: a Starbucks, a used bookstore, a bakery, and a half-dozen others.

Homes surrounded the stores, and those homes commanded her attention tonight.

The first two were locked tight.

The third was different. It was a small, wooden, two-story house with faded brown paint and a sagging appearance that made her expect to find an old husband and wife sleeping soundly.

The clock had stopped just after midnight.

The main floor was quiet and dark.  Karen could see a light upstairs and she carefully climbed up.  Even though she knew that nobody could
catch
her, she felt a rush of excitement at the prospect of somebody turning and saying, “Hey, what the hell are you doing here?”

The light was coming from a bathroom. She opened the door and saw a guy a little older than her, maybe twenty or twenty-one.  He had long, greasy hair, and he stood naked in front of the sink.  He had one hand on his fully erect cock.  He seemed to be watching himself in the mirror.

She wanted to leave but couldn’t.  She stared at the guy.  He was standing with his feet spread apart, gritting his teeth.  He needed a shave, but she only barely noticed that.  She reached out, moved his hand away, and put her own hand on him.  She felt warmth and wetness.  There was a tube of lotion on the counter.  She had never touched a man before, and she wanted to know what it felt like.

Karen had turned eighteen the month before with little fanfare and had never been close to having a serious boyfriend.  She sometimes fantasized about being with somebody who would make love to her and give her the kind of pleasure she only ever felt from herself.