“He’s not here,” Olivia said to Daniel, to herself. “You’re dreaming.”
“No,” said Daniel. “He’s here. I can smell him.”
Olivia sniffed the air. She knew her son’s smell. Was confident of that. Knew she could’ve been blind and still picked him out of a crowd. She’d held his clothes to her face and breathed in deeply. She’d held him close in her arms and buried her face in his thick black hair. When he was young, he smelled of cut grass and pine trees, band-aids and hydrogen peroxide, strawberry Kool-Aid and Ivory soap. As he grew older, he smelled of Old Spice and dirty tennis shoes, secondhand smoke and ocean, pepperoni pizza and musty libraries.
“He’s here,” Daniel said, nearly pleading now. “I know it.”
Olivia heard the obvious fear and confusion in her husband’s voice. She had not often heard him sound so defenseless. She went to his side, touched his face.
“It’s okay, it’s okay,” she whispered. “Go back to sleep.”
Daniel pointed at the place where John had been standing.
“Right there,” Daniel said. “He was right there.”
Olivia looked at the spot. She wanted to see John standing there. She wanted it so much that he almost appeared. As if John was struggling to step from another world into this one, a sliver of light floated there at the foot of the bed. Olivia could see it, and knew that it was an illusion, an odd moment of moonlight, the afterimage of the closet’s bright lamp. But she wanted to believe in it.
“Right there,” Daniel whispered as Olivia gently pushed him onto his back.
“I know, I know,” she said as Daniel closed his eyes and fell back to sleep.
Wide awake now, she walked downstairs into the kitchen for a glass of milk. She opened the fridge and saw that the leftover roast had been cut into. She then saw the carving knife dropped carelessly into the sink. Daniel’s midnight snack. No wonder he was dreaming, Olivia thought as she washed the knife and replaced it in the cutting block.
14. Blank Pages
WILSON WOKE SLOWLY, KEEPING his eyes closed even as he drifted into consciousness. The clock radio beside the bed was playing a song about fire and rain. Sunlight filtered softly through his closed eyelids, creating a fireworks display. The next-door neighbor’s dog barked through the thin walls of the apartment complex. No pets allowed, but Wilson did not mind the dog. He had often considered getting a dog himself. The garbage truck two blocks away rumbled through gears. The smell of eggs and hamburger from the apartment below him. A mother and father, two boys, down there in such a small space, a one-bedroom only a little larger than Wilson’s studio. They were never loud, never bothersome. Wilson heard only the faint metallic music of the boys’ video game, Nintendo or some such thing. The mother, Janice, picked up Wilson’s mail when he was away, though he rarely was. She would deliver it to him neatly wrapped in one of those huge rubber bands that seem to have no other use than wrapping up large bundles of mail. He wondered how Janice fit her husband, two sons, all the eggs and hamburger, and those huge rubber bands into that little apartment.
He remembered other mornings, waking up, wondering which foster parents were keeping him, surrounding him with their space. He often forgot. One day the O’Gradys’ large house, and then he was in the Smiths’ tiny place the next morning, waking up in the same bed with Stuart Smith, who wet the bed. No. Wilson wet the bed but always blamed it on Stuart. After he moved from the Smith house, Wilson slept alone and could not blame it on anybody else. The Johnsons were kind and considerate about Wilson’s bed-wetting. Mrs. Johnson slipped a shower curtain between the sheets and mattress when she made the bed, and washed the soiled sheets without saying a word. The Sheldons were cruel. Mr. Sheldon shamed him. Mrs. Sheldon made him wash the sheets himself by hand. Some nights, he was forced to sleep in the bathtub, without blankets, sheets, or pillow, because he had ruined so many. The Hawkinses simply made him sleep in the same wet sheets night after night. The Crowleys locked him in a dark closet for hours at a time.
As a teenager, Wilson had learned to control his bladder on most nights. But when he did wet his bed, he woke up early and washed the sheets. During sleep-overs with friends, he stayed awake all night, terrified to fall asleep. While living with the Lambeers, he’d once fallen asleep on the floor during an overnight birthday party and stained a shag carpet. His new friends had promptly and completely ostracized him after that. Alone and frightened, he made friends with family pets, and if those family pets sometimes ignored him, Wilson kicked them. Their yelps of pain made him feel better. Or he led the dogs and cats miles away from the houses, tied them to traffic signs, and walked away. They came back, or they didn’t. Wilson had once set a bowl of antifreeze in front of a family dog and watched happily as the dog lapped it up.
Now, as an adult, Wilson tried to forget all that, but once in a while he still woke up with a start, worried that he’d wet the bed yet again. He’d woken up that morning, touched his crotch and the sheets beneath him, and breathed a sigh of relief. He’d been up late working on his novel, Indian Killer. With his other novels, he usually wrote about five pages a day, but he had managed to fill only a single page of Indian Killer before he forced himself to bed at 3 A.M. He’d only written ten very rough pages since he had talked to the desk sergeant about the killings. Up late every night, trying to finish. So much pressure, so many monsters. Wilson wondered about a woman, a wife, calling him to bed. Would she have let him stay up until three in the morning? He was frightened by the thought, by a woman. He thought of Beautiful Mary pushing him into that doorway, how she held his penis with her callused hand. He saw her scarred face and her dead eyes. He trembled at the memory and wondered if he would sleep. As it was, Wilson crawled into cold sheets and lay there wide awake for hours before sleep surprised him and dragged him off into the dark. He had never remembered his dreams very well, but last night, he knew he had fought off a variety of faceless monsters. Then he had dreamed about the murders. To his surprise, Wilson had dreamed of David Rogers’s face as a bullet passed through his brain, had seen the blood fountain from Justin Summers’s belly, had heard the muffled cries of Mark Jones. Now Wilson’s arms and legs felt sore.
Wilson kept his eyes closed. He ran his hands over his body, searching for strange bumps and growths. He was getting to be that age and had to be more careful. Any change, however slight, was cause for concern. No pain, nothing new there, no growths, no tumors, no chemotherapy, no hair falling out, no funeral with his fellow officers in their dress blues telling funny stories and outright lies about his worth as a human being.
Wilson opened his eyes. He was hungry. He slid out of bed, stepped into clean blue slippers, went to the bathroom, and washed his face. The newspaper was waiting for him just outside his front door. The delivery guy always folded it strangely. It must have something to do with the union, Wilson thought. He thought that every morning. He read the front-page headlines about the Indian Killer as he walked over to the little kitchen area, poured Grape-Nuts and one-percent into one of his two bowls, pulled one of his spoons from the drawer, and sat down to eat.