Son of Destruction (8 page)

His first try fell flat – ten minutes, an hour ago – how long has he been sitting here under a tree outside the Publix? Stupid, thinking he could walk up to the house in Lucy’s snapshot and find Family. Grandparents. Aunts. That they’d hug him, all,
My how you’ve grown
, ply him with milk and cookies and tell him everything. Or that Lucy’s secret lover would show up for the Greek recognition scene:
Father!
The smack of flesh on flesh colliding.
Son!

Instead there was only Chaplin. Was the curtain moving in the Magic Kingdom turret behind him, a woman peeking out? He can’t be sure. He should have stuck it to the charming bastard while he had him, flashed the Jeep snapshot, but Chaplin is too – what. Faded to be one of them. Even thinking about it makes his belly shrink. The man was laid open, standing out there in the road with his hands floating up like origami cranes.

Shit, Dan should have stuck it to him. —You knew her, you probably took this fucking picture.

The trouble is, he can’t prove it. He should have homed in: —What else would she be doing out in front of your house, back when you could still afford to paint it?
Back when she was happy
.

He should have leaned on Chaplin, hard. —What changed her, or is it who? Was it you?

He was too seized up to ask, —Are you him?

He isn’t ready yet. Afraid Chaplin will say yes and when Dan gets old, he’ll be weak and apologetic, just like him. Coward, he took directions to the Archambault house, thanked the guy, got back his car and left. It’s not like he was running away, he just couldn’t be there, OK? Not that he’s dodging that particular question. It’s just too soon.

In fact, he is running ahead of the answer.

He used to think anything was possible; kids do. When he found his real dad everything would change. When Lucy said it wasn’t Burt his heart jumped.
Now!
But she bound him with,
He wouldn’t want you to know
. The rest is gnawing its way out of his belly now. What was she afraid to tell him? That his genetic package contains a wild card, he decides. That he’s been holding it since birth. He knows in his gut that there’s something waiting inside him that he has no name for, some buried shame or latent power or unimaginable secret, and here in the town where his mother grew up and – he thinks – met his father and fell in love, the knowledge leaves him laid wide open.

Waiting for it to show itself.

It can’t be Chaplin.
He has to know. He runs his fingers along his jaw, divining the bony structure. He and Lucy have the same eyes, but the shape of his skull comes from someone else, not that polished failure he left paddling in the road. He holds his hands up to the light, half-expecting to see the truth outlined in the tapering fingers or written in the network of veins on his naked arms. A man with superpowers would see everything, down to the last capillary, illuminated, but this is just Dan Carteret, hunched in the dirt under a tree in the Publix parking lot in Fort Jude Florida, wondering.

He needs to look into his father’s face and see.

How he will age. Whether he can be happy.

What he will become.

Too much bad coffee, no food and no sleep breed questions. They swarm round his head like gnats.
Batting them away, he lurches to his feet like Swamp Thing and goes into the Publix to refuel. He grabs potato chips, hot dog buns to sop up stomach acids – when did he eat? Nuts and Slim Jims for protein, Red Bull for that caffeine jolt and the essential sugar rush. He carts his stuff outside and sits down in the shade to eat.

He starts a list.

Scope the Archambault house, now that you’re here. Take digis and make notes so you can write a feature to justify your presence here. Find neighbors who lived here back in the day, before the neighborhood went to crap. Line up interviews for tomorrow, when you’re not so fried. Go back to the hotel for a WiFi connection and file a pitch. Then you can crash. Tomorrow, look for Lucy’s life before him, find it in the morgue at the Fort Jude
Star
.

Good, he thinks. A sensible plan.

But Lucy’s snapshots seethe in his pocket like unanswered letters or overdue bills: his smiling mother, clasping her notebook in front of Chaplin’s house. She was there that day for a reason. The more he thinks about it, more he knows he isn’t finished there. When the camera caught her with that lovely smile, was she coming out or going in? Chaplin damn well knows. What else does Chaplin know?

What she was really like, Dan thinks bitterly. Before.

Standing, he heads for Archambault’s, but his mind is stuck somewhere between here and there.

In the lexicon of next things, there’s one more thing he has to do today. If he can prove that Chaplin knows her, he’ll nail the bastard to the wall. Fuck yes he knew her. In a town this small, how could he not? All he needs is a clipping, yearbook, prom photo to link the two of them, or letters . . . just something he kept.

He has to go back to Pine Vista. Tonight. When you think your source is hiding something you lean on him, hard, but Dan is too messed up to tell whether Chaplin is hiding something or just plain hiding out in that Spanish stucco heap. This time he’ll go armed.
Bring takeout. This may take a while. Jumbo coffee. Maybe a six-pack. Eat while you wait. Black jeans, he decides, black T-shirt so nobody sees you out there in the night; sneakers, so they won’t hear you creeping up
.

He’ll hole up in the car for as long as it takes, waiting for him to go to bed. No, better. To go out.

Then he’ll break in.

The next person to meet Dan Carteret is Steffy McCall. The last thing Steffy wants to do is meet anyone. Not today, not with her mom and dad running around crazy, all ragged and disrupted. Something happened last week, and they have gone to a place that there’s no getting back from.

Steffy saw her very own mother from upstairs in this deserted house. Her mom came wandering out of the Publix lot and across the street. She was way too close to where Steffy and them hide out and smoke weed, like, right down there in the yard. She was
this close
! She plopped down under the banyan tree underneath the attic window, which scared the shit out of Steffy. Your mother, outside your private place!

Mom! She’d wreck everything if she found out.

Steffy and Carter Bellinger that she is secretly in love with, plus Billy and lascivious Jen, have been hanging out here ever since the day Carter broke in. For the first time, Steffy had her own safe place and it was wonderful. Then, last week – last week! – her clueless, fat-assed mom wandered across the street from the Publix and sat down under the big old banyan; you could see the top of her head from here.

They were all loaded by that time, out of their heads on Jolt Cola and weed and it was killing Steffy, but she had to play mean bitch and shush them before Mom heard. ‘Shut your hole,’ she told Carter who she really is in love with, and she almost fucking cried. ‘That’s my mother, so shut your fucking hole.’

If she saw them it would be the end of parties in this house, and Mom would be up her ass with a fine-toothed comb. As it turned out Mom’s mind was on something else. She just flapped like a confused penguin and went tottering off, so, whew.

It was good she was too distracted to hear them, but as it turns out, Mom was distracted by something really bad. By the time Steffy got home that day she had written a whole cover story that her folks were too upset to hear. Dad was dragging the rollaway bed to the far end of the house and everything was different.

Thank God for this place. She and Carter and them were rolling out of the Publix with the trunk full of beer and munchies that day. Instead of driving out to Pierce Point to get loaded like always, he broke into this creaky old house and they ran everywhere. In the attic, Carter said, ‘This is the place.’ It was like fate.
Yang
.

Steffy was all
ying
, ‘And we are the ones.’

They scavenged outside the big places on Coral Shores and Carter stole some great stuff from his pool house. Jen had an air mattress and pillows and a step-on pump to keep it fat and Billy brought the beer. Their attic looks like home now – except for this ancient dressmaker’s dummy, saying a snotty fuck you to their X-Box posters and Cinemart lobby cards which are kind of mocking her now that she is here alone and everybody else is on the bus.

If Carter really loved me, he’d have stayed back.
But no, he was like, ‘Come on, it’s fun!’

Fun just doesn’t seem right to her, given the way things are at home.

Nobody knows where she is.

Mom thinks she’s on the class trip to Busch Gardens. Her friends think she’s at the dentist. If Carter really cared, he’d have known that Steffy was too messed up to go. He’d have stayed back with her and they’d be kissing now. They might even be, oh, Steffy’s too young, but she thinks about Doing It; she thinks about it all the time. Alone in the dry attic, she has to wonder: do other kids sneak in here when we’re not around?

If Carter had stayed back today . . . Yeah, right. Shit. If he wants to get with Jen Cashwell in the back of the bus, OK, let him, Steffy is on to bigger things.

Like personal space. She only just found out she had one – it was in a magazine Mom had. Unless this is her own personal down time, which people need more than they need beer or weed or even Carter, that she loves so much, heavy-breathing in their ear. It’s hot in here, but she’s cool. Some people would say Steffy was hiding, but she’s not. She just doesn’t want to be around anybody right now, not even Carter Bellinger.

All Steffy wants to be in the world . . . All she wants to be is alone, which is what she is. Or she thinks she is. Even in a town as safe and sleepy as Fort Jude, you never know.

Another girl would think the attic was creepy, but Steffy and Carter and them have had so many beers and smoked so much weed and told so many secrets in this old place that it’s like home.

At this point, it’s better. No parents all undertones, hissing and spitting over things they don’t want her to know about, and no Dad desperately pretending it’s not a fight. No Mom, all smirched from crying and, like, trying to be brave.

Steffy can hardly bear the sight of her mother these days, trotting around in her perky pastel outfits and heavy makeup, with a lipstick line that she can’t keep straight because her mouth won’t hold still. No Mom for Steffy for a while, thank God, and please, no Dad. She doesn’t know how she feels about Dad, the way he is. He is not bearing up well under the pussy whip, and, what Steffy can’t stand?

All this, everything that’s coming down on him? Davis brought it on himself. She found out about him and Aunt Gayle before Mom did, you know, from that time they flew out to California? Mom dyed her hair and bought outfits for the trip – gaudy colors that she hated, so she must have known something was up. You’d have to be blind, deaf and stupid not to see it. Like, from the minute they walked into the house in Toluca Lake. A blind wombat would pick up on the loaded looks, that cunty smile on Gayle, and if Steffy didn’t know it for sure, by the time they got back from a day in Ventura she did. Gayle took Stef and her folks and her second husband Clueless Ed and their assorted kids for a day at the beach. After lunch she sent Ed off for charcoal and some obscure item that she knew would take him forever to find, sunscreen SPF 2000, maybe, or eye of newt. That left Steffy and her sort-of cousins beached while Gayle took Dad body surfing and Mom sat on a rock looking confused.

That night Mom went to bed early and everybody else sat on the back deck of the house Ed built, listening to Gayle and Dad talk about the great times they had when they were kids back at the family camp in Myrtle Beach, the cousins just played and
played
. Grampa McCall was Superintendent of Schools in Columbia, South Carolina, and Dad never lets you forget it. He built the camp so the generations could gather, Dad said, and Aunt Gayle said,
We had the best time
. It was like an opera or some half-assed sentimental duet that went on and on.

Dad hardly noticed when Mom stuck her head out the upstairs window, he and Aunt Gayle laughed and talked while Clueless Ed cleaned up and toasted marshmallows for the kids, and they talked on while the kids lit sparklers and ran around screaming in the dark and they went on talking instead of putting the kids to bed, which they were supposed to do, so Steffy was up almost all night. After all, Mom said later, it’s the only thing I asked you to do. This was a first in both households, surprise. The forgetting. They got laughing so hard that around midnight Mom came out in her bathrobe and rasped, ‘Keep it down.’

After that trip Mom bought a whole ’nother wardrobe; she even lost a couple of pounds, but by then it was too late.

No time for that now, Abernathy
, Steffy thinks, Dad’s joke.

She is in a really strange mood. If she goes home any time between now and 5:30, when her folks are out the door for Patty Kalen’s engagement party, they’ll drag Steffy, even though the whole town knows Patty and her dad are hardly speaking because he was so drunk that he tried to pick her up outside Mook’s Bar. ‘You’re going,’ Mom said. ‘Everybody who’s anybody is. After all, that poor girl lost her mother. Cecilia Kalen was one of our nearest and dearest.’

Steffy couldn’t say,
Mr Kalen creeps me out
, although it’s true. ‘Do I have to?’

‘Yes. We’re giving it.’

By ‘we,’ she does not mean her and Dad, Nenna means her and her girlfriends that she hangs out with because he and Mom live in separate worlds.

It’s like Dad is here, but he isn’t, and Steffy has no idea whose fault this is. If she goes home now he will be lying in wait. He doesn’t pounce, it’s more like lurking. Or melting into a puddle that you could fall in, which he’s been doing a lot this week. Get too close and you’ll sink. He schlumps around with every line in his body screaming
Hit Me
, unless it’s
Forgive Me
, and Mom . . . Mom will tell her, ‘Go put on something decent, you’re not going out looking that.’