“Da-ee?”
He blinked away the sweat in his eyes and saw her standing by her bookshelf, wearing her white dress with the red and blue plaid shirt, the Raggedy Ann outfit, his favorite. The one she was wearing the day they went to Locomotion Pizza. It was going to be their day, a special day. She clutched her favorite stuffed animal against her chest, a blue rabbit, and looked up at him with worry. The room around her was clean and tidy. He kept it that way. The rest of the house was a disaster, but not this room. Not this room.
Behind him, he heard Autumn sobbing in the living room, and he turned and closed the door. He leaned his head against the wood, his pulse like a raging river in his ears. Autumn was right. He had to deal with this. They couldn’t go on this way. He had to be a man now — accept what he’d lost, what he could never get back.
“Mommy sad, Da-ee?” Rosie said behind him. “Mommy ha’ tears?”
He turned and looked at her, and just for a moment, in the time it took to blink, he saw the Rosie they found in that man’s van — a dark gash along her forehead, blood covering half her face, her dress covered with red spatters. Then it was gone, and she looked as she had before, only with tears in her eyes. She wrung the rabbit in her little hands.
“That’s right, honey,” he said. “Mommy’s sad.”
“Why Mommy sad, Da-ee?” she said. “Why?”
He opened his mouth to speak but no words came. He felt a cold chill, the coldest he’d ever felt in his life, and he shuddered violently. She rushed to him, hugging his legs. He patted her hair. She was so warm and solid he couldn’t see how she could possibly be fake. He dropped down to her and pulled her away from him, looking into her moist eyes. There were worlds in those eyes. He had seen them.
“Sometimes,” he began, and he was planning on saying the rest. Sometimes, he was going to say, there is no why. But before he could, her room changed. He saw the rumpled sheets on her bed, the same as they had been the day she left. He saw the books stacked haphazardly on the carpet, the pile of toys by the closet, the dirty clothes in front of the changing table. He saw the dust on the blinds and a spider camped out in the corner. And the smell — the staleness of the air, how it had lost the scent of her over time and now only smelled like death. Even this, he thought. Even this is taken from me.
He hugged her violently against him. He had to deal with this. But it wasn’t about dealing. It was about deciding. And then he knew what he had to do. He picked up Rosie and ran with her through the house. When he passed the living room, Autumn called out to him, but he kept going. He rushed into the garage, hit the button, and quickly buckled Rosie into her car seat. Never forget to buckle. Never.
“We going, Da-ee?” she said.
“Yes, dear,” he said. “We’re going.”
And then he was in his Ford Explorer, starting the engine. As he was backing out of the garage, Autumn appeared at the door, her face red, filled with confusion. She said something, but he couldn’t hear her over the engine. He was in the street, and he shifted into gear. Autumn followed him, shouting, and now he could hear her. We’ve got to deal with this! Don’t run away! But he pressed down on the gas pedal and sped away from her. He glanced in the rearview mirror and saw her in the middle of the street, running after him. Only it wasn’t her anymore. It was the horrible vibrating ball that Rosie hated, the one someone had given to her on her birthday. It bounded after them, but they were too fast. They were getting away.
“Where we going, Da-ee?” Rosie asked.
Instead of answering, he stepped on the gas, speeding up the car. Only it wasn’t a car. It was a giant eagle, but plush, with feathers as soft as Rosie’s hair. The wings flapped and they leaned low, racing over the road. Only it wasn’t a road. It was a runway, with a bright yellow control tower at the end, a smiling blue cat inside giving them the thumbs up. The eagle lifted them up into the sky, high up over the neighborhood. Only it wasn’t the neighborhood. It was Rosie’s world — a world with soft edges and primary colors, a world with no gray in it at all.
Camera Guy
by Mark Barsotti
© 2007 by Mark Barsotti
Mark Barsotti lives in San Diego, where, he says, he “keeps [himself] in ink and paper selling life insurance.” He first attempted to write fiction when he was about ten years old. Most of his work contains elements of the fantastic, but with “Camera Guy” he stuck closer to mystery and suspense and got his first professional sale. We hope he’ll write more in our field.
I hate doors without peepholes. Not only have I always been an unabashed voyeur, but the lack of a peephole led me here: scribbling in a notebook while hunkered in the last row of a midnight Greyhound, wheezing out of the San Diego bus station for points east and unknown.
Has it only been a week since Camera Guy came knocking at my door? Just drifting off for an afternoon nap, I pulled a pillow over my face and ignored that knock. It persisted, probably my grumpy, ex-Marine landlord badgering me about the rent. No. The check, for once, had been mailed on time.
“Go away,” I grunted. Then it struck me that it could be a FedEx from Sal, my agent, or maybe — my groggy mind leapt wildly toward wish fulfillment — it was an exotic woman in peril. Playing white knight might not only get me laid for the first time in ages, but the lady-in-peril’s story could be the Big Idea I needed, a tale soon transformed into a comeback screenplay that would have Hollywood clamoring for my services again.
A fantasy, sure, but they’re my stock-in-trade, so I got up and shuffled through my apartment. It’s a great space: four rooms a mile from the beach and dirt cheap for San Diego (a grand a month), since the six-unit building is tucked along a cul-de-sac in a light industrial area. The perfect refuge for an artist on the skids.
Perfect except for a door without a goddamned peephole, leaving me no way to scope the owner of that insistent fist without opening up.
So I opened up.
And I got my story, all right, a whopper delivered by one Jay Maxwell Marshall, black-sheep scion of a blueblood Boston clan, steeped in old money and exotic vice. Ignorant, at that point, of Jay Max’s pedigree, I took my unkempt caller for a panhandler, more ambitious than most, working door to door.
“Yeah?” I asked with a yawn, but my sleepy writer’s mind noted details. My caller had an old hippie’s wild mane of graying brown hair. Shirtless, khaki shorts, orange Chuck Taylor sneakers. He was rail-thin, save for a little potbelly, and had leathery skin the color and consistency of an old catcher’s mitt. The big, sad eyes were a hazy green, like the surf at OB. A beach boy gone to rot.
“I need help,” he said.
My slam-the-door impulse was stayed by an odd, altruistic twinge, solidarity with the downtrodden, perhaps, since my career freefall threatened to land me in their ranks. Sal fed me occasional hackwork like the “Alan Smithee” script for My Mother the Car, but I hadn’t had a fresh idea in months. And only a killer concept could resurrect me from Tinseltown oblivion.