“No,” Gwen said. “He’s with the nanny. I know he is.”
It was quiet on the other end of the line. Gwen tugged at her neck as if trying to free her voicebox. The useless thing. Of course she should have called the police before calling her husband. How had she not thought of that? It didn’t matter. Louise would evade the police as she’d evaded Gwen, revealing nothing about who she really was or where she might be headed.
Dan said, “Gwen? Honey? We don’t have a nanny. Do you mean the sitter?”
“I fired the sitter. Weeks ago.”
“Honey?”
“She’s driving a bus. A rust-colored VW bus. He’s with her.”
“I’ll be right home,” Dan said. “Stay there.”
He didn’t say It’s your job to keep him safe, though Gwen heard it in her head. She hung up the phone, remembered the scrap of paper Louise had handed her the day they met. She found her purse, dumped the contents onto the floor, and rooted through the mess until she found Louise’s number. She dialed. An upbeat female voice told her she’d reached a day spa.
Gwen asked for Louise. “Don’t know any Louise,” the woman said.
Gwen read the number on the paper aloud and the woman said, “Right number, no Louise.”
“No,” Gwen said firmly.
“What do you mean, no? Honey, you sound like you could use a massage. Would you like to set something up?”
The phone slipped from Gwen’s hand. The kitchen tilted sideways. The world was un-righting itself. This isn’t happening, Gwen thought. This isn’t right.
(Afterthought)
There are countless possible endings. Happy endings and sad endings. Abrupt endings that leave readers wanting more. Anti-climactic endings in which a character’s been given an opportunity for change or redemption, but she turns and walks away. Near-misses. Joycean epiphanies, Oprah aha!s A character experiences a moment of insight that changes her view of the world forever. Sometimes the insight comes too late. Sometimes the thing a character wanted from the start turns out to be the wrong thing; she didn’t want that after all. Be-careful-what-you-wish-for endings. You could be punished for wanting too much, for never ever being satisfied. For averting your eyes a moment too long. For making a silly mistake. For trusting a stranger. The story will end — it has to; it’s inevitable — but the punishment might not.
6.
Gwen sat in her car in the parking lot of the grocery store watching the automatic doors open and close. She was here because it was the only place she’d ever seen Louise outside of her own home, and she was hoping the old woman would reappear. She would need food for Max, and milk. If Gwen spotted her, she would follow her in, snatch Max from her arms, turn back time to the way things had been before that ill-fated meeting. She was here because she didn’t know where else to go or what else to do. She couldn’t go home, couldn’t face this particular ending that she herself had made inevitable. She’d left the house before her husband had gotten there. Surely he’d called the police by now and they were looking for Max and also her. She would sit here until the sun went down, until someone came and dragged her away.
Outside the car it was an incongruously sunny day — incongruous considering the storm that raged inside her. It was warm in the car, but Gwen knew that outside, the air was chilly. She felt as if she were in a vacuum, as if in the stale space of her car time had paused, was holding its breath. She thought of something Dan had told her the evening after her first encounter with Louise. He’d come in stomping the snow off his shoes and when she’d asked if the drive had been bad, he’d said it was the weirdest thing — the weather had been clear in the city, just a light drizzle until he’d hit the edge of their neighborhood, and then his view had gone white.
Please, Gwen thought, I’ll do anything, give you anything, just bring him back.
A knock on the window broke the vacuum’s seal. A policeman stood looking down at her. A young man; someone’s grown son. “Ma’am?” he said in a gentle voice. “Ms. Smith? Are you all right? One of the grocery clerks said you’ve been out here for some time. She called the station. Your husband called too. He’s worried. He said to tell you Max is fine.”
7.
She found them in the basement, curled on a beanbag. Max was sleeping and Dan had a protective arm around him. When Gwen came in he untangled himself from the baby and stood and put his arms around her. “Are you all right?” he whispered.
She nodded. “What about Max? Where did you find him?”
“Here. We have a little escape artist, it seems. He must have gotten out of his crib and made his way down the stairs on his own. It’s a miracle he didn’t hurt himself. I guess it’s time to get some gates up, huh?”
Gwen shook her head; she started to say that it wasn’t true, the baby hadn’t gotten from the top floor to the basement on his own — but then she stopped. She sunk to her knees and pressed her cheek to Max’s forehead. She kissed his nose. He sighed, eyes still shut, and reached up to pat her face with a pudgy hand. Such a tiny, delicate, perfect being.
“Honey,” Dan said, his voice soft. “I’m worried about you.”
“I’m all right. I got a little lost. A little confused. I let my priorities get out of whack. But I’m okay.”
“I read the letter,” Dan said. “About your story. I saw it when I was taking the recycling out this morning. I’m sorry they didn’t want it. I know how those letters can get to you.”
“It’s no big deal. Not after this scare with Max.”
“It’s been some day, huh? Your phone call terrified me. You weren’t making any sense. The nanny? The bus? What were you talking about?”
“Not now,” Gwen said. “I’ll explain some other time.”
Dan accepted this with a sigh. He said, “When I was driving home all I could think was, what if he’s really not there? What if, just like that, my world’s gone? I offered up one of those bartering prayers: Take anything else, but not my son. Then I got home and he was here and you weren’t. I didn’t know what to think. I hadn’t meant to barter you.”
“I did the same thing. Hopefully it doesn’t work that way, though.”
“Hopefully not.”
“But maybe sometimes it does.”
Dan lowered himself onto one of the beanbags again and the three of them sat together, a stunned family. “Maybe there’s a story in this,” Dan said after a while.
“No, I don’t think so,” Gwen said, even though she knew that a story was exactly what Louise had intended to give her — a parting gift of sorts. “No,” she said again. “I don’t want it.”
Chemo Boy and the War Kittens
by Brian Muir
The story “Chemo Boy and the War Kittens” has a special significance for award-winning film writer Brian Muir, for he has battled cancer himself, more than once. We’re happy to be able to report that his health is currently good, and that 2010 is also treating him well in other respects: Broke Sky, an indie film he co-wrote, which won nearly a dozen film-festival awards, recently premiered on cable, on IFC. The series to which this new story belongs is surely one of the strongest P.I. series running at short-story length.
On the sole of my boot it spread; a Rorschach smear, crumpled legs reaching out in a quest to crawl, to spin a web, to hide in a dark crevasse waiting for juicy prey. I scraped it off into the kitchen garbage. Spiders have never been my favorite.