Barker House Read online

  “I didn’t drink none of it,” he said. “They did. Ask them.”

  “I’ll have everyone put to a hearing.”

  No one answered. I was breathing quickly and holding the entire Mr. Coffee machine, wrapping the cord around the base.

  “Fine,” I said, sweating, my collar and my lower back damp. “Everyone against the wall.”

  The inmates lined up against a free part of the wall, their hands against the white concrete, legs spread, chins down. I held the coffeepot. I’d been letting things go. Everything kept getting farther and farther away from me.

  Before a seizure, I’d get really cold. It felt like a chill, one that crept up on you lying in bed, or washing dishes, just a shiver. But the chill didn’t shake a limb. It’d lay me down and take minutes from me. It’d put me on the moon.

  I wasn’t cold but I was worked up, another warning sign. I stared at the washer, focused on an orange shirt with black lettering, and followed it from the front to the top, and then it disappeared, and after a moment came back again. I didn’t know how long I followed the shirt. If I collapsed, I’d be alone. I could die right there and they’d watch me. They’d laugh. They’d finish folding the clothes before telling anyone. They didn’t know they had this power over me. I put the coffee maker on the floor and patted each inmate down, handed them their ID tags from the hooks on the wall, and relieved them of their shift. None of them thanked me.

  In the kitchen, I waited for cleanup to finish. I lined up my crew outside the elevators, patted them down, too. A normally quiet inmate slapped me on the back. He had a wide smile as he entered the elevator.

  Afterward, inside the pantry, I spooned three trays’ worth of meatloaf into a metal bowl. I covered it in ketchup and ate it while reading the ingredients on the back of a box of breadcrumbs.

  At forty-five, the backseat of a taxi was a good place to evaluate things. Driving the same way I’d driven home for sixteen years, only now as a passenger, and having to pay for it, made me want to run away like Sandy had. Or sleep. But I could never sleep. Route 3 at eleven thirty at night was quiet and dark but not dark enough. The driver was usually Juan or Benji or sometimes Frank and I’d talked with them enough the first few months to where we didn’t need to talk anymore. They knew the state had revoked my license for six months and then extended the revocation. My doctor wasn’t confident. I might still have a seizure while driving. I didn’t feel them coming on with enough warning, so I wasn’t so sure either. I didn’t want to kill anyone, or myself.

  We had a small house in Concord. A two-bedroom Cape with one bathroom. I got home from work and hoped the inmates went to bed without issue. I showered and ate a ham sandwich on the bed and watched Joey climb a mountain in a blizzard. Joey played this one medieval video game that I hooked up to the bedroom TV. He’d stay up until I got home from work, late, and I’d let him finish whatever quest he was on. His grades disappointed, which was different from when Sandy was here. But it wasn’t like Sandy sat down with him and did homework. It’d been years since that. Joey was just going through an ordeal. I’d tell the teachers, “His mother left. He’s taking it badly.” And they were mostly women and they’d nod and make sad faces and sometimes they’d touch my shoulder. I wondered if they’d seen me climb out of a cab outside the school.

  Anyway, his character, Dzole, was in search of a Hagraven, he explained. A witch that was half bird, half woman. “Her talons are poisonous, Dad. It took me an hour to make enough serum to fight her.” Joey wore a black hoodie and plaid pajama pants and sat at the edge of the bed with his legs crossed. Dzole, a hardy Nord, was a witch hunter. It was a role-playing game. You got a base character in a lore-heavy world, then imagined who your character was within that world. Excitedly, Joey read me the bio he wrote for Dzole from a message board. It was something like, “Some years ago, while on a job escorting a caravan to Whiterun, his wife and newborn son were kidnapped and used in a sacrificial ceremony by Forsworn witches. Dzole returned to an empty cabin, and with revenge in his blood he set off to destroy unholy creatures, demons, and witches. He would never be satisfied. No amount of money or bounty would fill his heart again. The days were long, for Dzole yearned for the night, when the ones he sought were lurking.”

  Other kids, adults too, shared their character’s stories and the community rated them. Joey’s had more thumbs up than down. I understood the need for escape. The need to pretend. I’d been following Joey and Dzole’s quests for a few months. I was surprised at how invested I’d become. I watched the Nord’s progression from unskilled swordsman to master killer.

  Dzole was muscular and wielded a hand ax, wore a leather skirt and a metal helmet with horns. The soundtrack was always impressive, but during a quest, with enemies nearby, the music was epic. The snow fell at a greater speed the farther up the mountain he climbed. The score picked up. I stopped eating my sandwich. A cry, like a crazed eagle, avalanched down the mountain. Joey jumped and paused the game. He put his head down and took a deep breath. I put the plate on the bed and scooted toward him; my body lopsided the mattress. Joey leaned into my weight. He caught himself on my thigh. He was skinny, his fingers piercing. I wished I could give him my fat.

  “I’m not ready,” he said. His hair covered his ears and, if he let it, his eyes.

  “You got this. You said you stocked up. I’ve seen you fight dragons.”

  He un-paused the game and the cry finished its descent. He continued his climb. The cries got louder but Dzole wasn’t afraid.

  “The bird woman must die,” I said.

  She stood on a rock in the distance, her figure hunched, but I couldn’t see her face. The dim lamp on the bedside table was drowned out by the glare of the box TV. A gray aura created a funnel in the small room. We were entranced. I couldn’t see Sandy’s empty white dresser, the one we’d put together on a snowy Saturday morning years ago as Joey lay on a blanket on the floor. I couldn’t see my mother’s oak rocking chair, the one Sandy had rocked Joey in, nursed him in. The wooden cross above the TV wasn’t ours. The blue-veined floral comforter wasn’t for two men to sleep under. Dzole didn’t move.

  “Go get her.”

  “No,” Joey said. “I’m not ready.”

  “What’s the point of playing, then?”

  “I’m going to level up some more.”

  I scooted back to my pillow to finish my sandwich. The bird woman threw a fireball toward Dzole as he jumped off the mountain.

  I had seizures in my sleep. After Sandy left, Joey started sleeping in my bed. He said he hadn’t seen me have a seizure. But I wasn’t sure how he hadn’t. I’d wake up and my body would be right up against his. At fourteen, he was almost as tall as me. But if I blanketed his body I’d smother him. I’d crush him. It wasn’t safe, what we were doing. We slept like there was a wall between us, or another body. We’d never talked about it, but I knew he didn’t want to find himself snuggled up against his father. But he couldn’t be alone. Not yet.

  In the dark of the bedroom, I’d awoken once damp and stiff, my muscles aching. A small pool of blood on the pillow, and when I touched my wet face, the blood was up into my ear. I wondered if my brain had finally found a way out, spilled onto the pillow. I turned and saw Sandy. She was asleep. I wanted to whisper in her ear to stay, explain to her that the universe had turned on me. We joked, long ago, “Life has no meaning. This is all so silly.” And we laughed. It was too easy. The way it all fit in. Then later, in that other life, she said, “Happiness isn’t real.” I hated her then for being so concise.

  I’d never had a seizure in public, but I wanted to. The more I thought about the seizures, or willing one on, the less likely I was to have one. It’d been seven months. I’d had seven seizures. I knew my seizures didn’t understand time, but I couldn’t help but think they were falling into a pattern. Still, they seemed to hit when I’d forgotten about them completely. In line at Subway, surrounded by other customers, waiting for my roast beef sandwich, I wanted to have
one. At the bank. In the back of a cab. In the cereal aisle while reaching for Tastee-Os. I wanted to wake up and see worried faces, people on their phones, a kind woman holding the back of my head and asking me if I was okay.

  I did try to find Sandy a few weeks after she left. I searched Facebook but she’d deleted her account. I called the Remax office she worked out of, but Meg, the receptionist and her running partner, told me Sandy quit. “Where is she?” I asked. Meg told me she didn’t know. I told her I wasn’t well. She said sorry. I thought it was a genuine sorry.

  I called Sandy’s mom in Saratoga.

  “She wants to be on her own, Leon,” her mother told me. “Respect her wishes.”

  “Sandy has responsibilities. Your grandson needs his mother.”

  “She’s not good for him right now. He has you.”

  “I’m not well.”

  “I’m sorry to hear.”

  Neither of them took my calls after a few months of check-ins. Her mother sent Joey a birthday card in March. She signed it Grandmammy XOXO. There was a check for twenty dollars.

  People said sorry a lot. I didn’t necessarily dislike the sorrys but I didn’t need them. I needed Sandy back. I needed her to fix Joey. I needed my brain back. A sorry was reassurance things weren’t getting better. They were getting worse.

  I told the kitchen crew that if they were going to drink during their shifts, they needed to be smarter about it. “Hickey drinks coffee from that thing,” I said. Hickey was the part-time cook on my two days off. I searched online and found an easier way to extract alcohol from hand sanitizer.

  “Kids do it,” I told the two bakers. “Mix the salt in. Let it sit.”

  Inside the pantry, the bakers—an old, dirty vagrant and a long-haired gay kid—started doling out shots an hour into their dinner shifts. The pantry was near the walk-in freezer at the farthest end of the basement.

  I allowed two shots each, which they slurped off a plastic spoon. I read about kids dying from the stuff, so I monitored the shots and made sure no one was fall-down drunk. It was enough to take the edge off and for them to be sober before the shift ended. Even Copley came into the pantry for shots. I received many thank-yous and handshakes and “You don’t know what this means to us” but no “I’m sorrys.” Dinner and cleanup ran the same as it did before. But I felt safer. I’d begun to want to have a seizure in the kitchen.

  Joey wouldn’t fight the Hagraven.

  “I need to get Dzole to level thirty first,” he said one day during breakfast.

  I should’ve been asking about homework and studying. But I was more concerned with his avoidance of the Hagraven. “Do bosses have levels?”

  He finished chewing his cereal before he answered. We ate a lot of cereal. “She’s level eleven.”

  “Destroy her, then.” I made coffee and filled a bowl of cereal for myself. Joey didn’t respond. “Show me how to play. I’ll fight her for you.”

  “You’ll die.”

  “Can’t you just restart if you die?”

  “Dzole has never died.”

  That night, Joey sat crisscrossed on the edge of the bed; a big can of energy drink was on the carpet. The living room looked big without a TV. But we really only used half of the house. I wanted to lay on the sectional in the living room, in the dark, and pretend Sandy had come home and taken Joey to wherever it was she went. I wanted that more than I wanted Sandy to come home and stay.

  “Did you do it?” I asked as I took off my socks.

  “No.”

  I got in the shower. My stomach was flabby. It wasn’t the kind of stomach some men can get away with, tight and round. It was just fat and fleshy. If Sandy walked in and saw me washing under my breasts, she’d gasp. That was the last thing I thought about, Sandy walking in, her hands on her beautiful face, long red nails up near her eyes, shocked and maybe afraid at how fast I’d deteriorated, and then I opened my eyes and Joey was standing over me holding a towel. He was crying. He was spectral, a fuzz emanated off his body.

  “You’re bleeding.”

  I was embarrassed, like I’d been caught in a lie. I couldn’t move. Blood-tainted water ran under my body toward the drain. The shower curtain was across my legs, plastic rings broken in pieces on my stomach.

  I could feel my body loosening. My jaw unhinged. “Can you turn off the water?”

  I was bleeding from the back of my head. Joey wasn’t crying anymore. He handed me the towel and pulled the shower curtain off me. “I’m okay,” I said. “It’s just a cut.”

  “I heard you fall. I heard it happen.”

  “Did you see it?”

  “No. It was over when I came in.”

  “Good.” I stood up with my back to Joey and wrapped the towel around my waist. I felt like I normally did after a seizure. I felt out of body. There was no pain. The blood meant nothing.

  “Are you scared?” He started to cry again but quietly. He was wearing his youth baseball jersey from before he quit last season. The Cincinnati Reds. It was bigger on him now than when he played. How’d I let him get so thin? He had his mother’s nose, slim with a slight hook at the tip.

  “I’m scared all the time.”

  “I want to help you,” he said, and picked up my clothes. He looked exhausted. He handed me my boxers and turned away, looking at the door. I couldn’t get my feet off the floor.

  “Dad,” he said.

  “You need to sleep in your own bed.”

  He was quiet. And then, “Can we talk about this later?” He tossed the rest of my clothes into a pile on the bathroom floor and went to leave.

  “Joey,” I said, “what if the Hagraven was the one who stole Dzole’s family?”

  “She wasn’t the one,” he said, and left.

  I opened the medicine cabinet and took out my toothbrush and wet it, then applied toothpaste and then I washed the toothpaste off. I put the toothbrush back. I dried the shower walls with the towel. I took the top off the toilet and adjusted the ball float. I stood in the shower and looked out into the night through the blinds. I tried to find the moon, something I knew was real. I couldn’t. But the maroon fence was still there, and so was the birdfeeder we’d hung from an oak branch. Everything was still here. I couldn’t see the cut in the mirror because it was right in the center of the back of my head. I rinsed the blood off my hair in the sink and got dressed. From the medicine cabinet, I took Sandy’s razor, nail file, contact solution, mouthwash, makeup remover, and floss, and I threw it all in the trash can. I went down the hall and checked on Joey. He was back at his post, the joysticks tapping, buttons clicking.

  “You want to talk?” I asked him.

  “There’s a note from my teacher you need to sign,” he said without looking away from the TV. He had it folded on the bed.

  It was the usual note he’d been receiving. This one was from Miss Descoteaux. Your son didn’t complete the semester project. He’s been sleeping in class. Would you like to chat on the phone or could you come to the school? We can set up a conference. You should come in, Mr. Gomes.

  “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  I put the note on the nightstand and lay on the bed. It felt good to stretch out. I’d be sore in the morning.

  “I’ve been messing up at work, too,” I said. Joey clicked the buttons on the controller. I realized Dzole was making the summit to the Hagraven. “Sometimes we get in ruts, Joey. It happens. We need to snap out of it.”

  “Is she ever coming back?”

  “You should prepare like she isn’t.”

  The bird woman screamed. Dzole reached the top of the mountain. He pulled a battle-ax off his back and stood in a fighter’s stance, two hands on the handle. Fireballs rained down on him. Joey paused the game. He left the bed and stood in front of the TV. I couldn’t see beyond him. By the back of his shirt, I yanked him onto the bed and the controller fell to the floor. Joey looked at me like he had in the bathroom. I wanted to tell him there was no reason to be scared. Before I could, he
picked the controller back up and ran Dzole toward the fire slinger.

  Gen Pop U4 Cell #2341

  Dialogue I

  DON:

  I have this dog that likes to eat tuna. I feed the cat then that big fucking lab ass-bumps her into the other room and eats her food.

  RAY:

  I had a dog when I was a kid. Ran away. Hit the light, Don, I’m done reading.

  DON:

  I started feeding him cat food, then I found that light tuna shit to be cheaper. He looks healthy. Better than he ever has.

  RAY:

  You got to really smack it. The side there. Button’s jammed.

  DON:

  Bernie. The dog’s name is Bernie.

  RAY:

  …

  DON:

  Seven years of the dry food crap and he starts eating tuna and looks great. His nose doesn’t have crusties and his nails, Jesus, those nails could cut through the visiting glass. I called my daughter, she’s staying there till I get out and she tells me he won’t eat the tuna. Her tone. Like I made it up.

  RAY:

  Don, I’m tired.

  DON:

  She says there’s a mound of stinking fucking fish in his bowl and now what’s she supposed to do. I told her keep feeding him the tuna. If he’s hungry he’ll go for it.

  RAY:

  Sure.

  DON:

  She tells me I’m crazy. I belong in jail. But that’s where she’s wrong. Jail ain’t supposed to be for crazy. She might be right about the tuna though.

  RAY:

  You got yourself a smart one.

  DON:

  She didn’t get it from her mother. That whore couldn’t spell tuna. Anyways, I wrote her last night and told her to get rid of the both of them. The cat and Bernie. Looks like my lawyer isn’t too excited about my trial. I was thinking plea deal but I’m too old for plea deals. I’ll put your glasses on for the trial. Can I borrow your glasses? I’ll act like I’m drooling and falling asleep and I’ll stick those big fucking beer mugs on my face like I’m retarded or something.