He looked at his gift. The colors were still vibrant and glowing beneath the glass. The lines were fine but dark where Audi had traced. He pictured her small fingers, spending hours meticulously following the paths already set into the paper. Her lines followed those paths, the ones that split out in a thousand directions, one way leading to three more, each of those three leading to three new ones, on and on, the paths circling each other and spreading out and falling together again, a patchwork of possibilities spread across the once-blank field of the paper.
He had thought of the other possibilities, of course, all the other paths. The other lives that he might have lived had always hidden somewhere in his subconscious, specters of other Geralds in other worlds where things were not the same. Worlds where he did other jobs, lived in other cities, married other women. Worlds where Dolores wasn't dead, worlds where he'd never even met her. All the different paths, and now these new ones: he catches Audi out there in the snowy night, before she disappears into shadow, and she sobs into his chest, and they get back into the car. They go on living together, but for how long and for what purpose and under what pretense, he doesn't know. Or maybe he adopts her, but that one could never be. Her parents would keep looking for her. They'd never allow it.
And the last one, the one he felt in his stomach and pushed aside with his brain. Her leg wrapped so tightly around his. Her lashes on his chest. No, he thought, shaking his head. No.
All those different paths, traced so carefully with delicate fingers.
The wind had died down, and the snow was falling again. He wrapped himself up in a blanket and sat down on the couch and closed his eyes. The heater clicked on. Gerald listened to its ticks and pings and rumbles as the heat moved through the empty rooms.
Something Pretty, Something Beautiful by Eric Barnes
FROM Prairie Schooner
WE DIDN'T START breaking into houses to steal things. The four of us started breaking into houses simply to see what would happen.
By the time we were eighteen, we were still doing it because none of us had found any reason to stop.
"Now," Will Wilson whispers, waving me forward, then silently pushing me over the high windowsill of another house we've broken into in Tacoma.
When we were little kids, like eight or nine years old, my friend Teddy and I would walk home from Sherman Elementary together collecting bottle caps and Popsicle sticks and cigarette butts. We searched the grass and the sidewalks, under bus stop benches and around paper boxes, keeping what we found in secret pockets we made in the lining of our jackets. Teddy and I would walk home in the rain, racing the cigarette butts and Popsicle sticks along the narrow streams of water in the gutters; then days or weeks later, when it was dry, we searched for the butts and sticks in the stiff, matted mess around the sewer drains.
Teddy and I were best friends.
On rainy days back at Sherman, Teddy and I built dams during recess in the dirt near the long-jump pit. The rainwater ran through the pit in a shallow, foot-wide stream as it flowed along the far side of the schoolyard toward a big iron drain. Other kids came out to make dams too, but Teddy and me were always the first there, building the main dam, a tapering arc six inches high and five feet across, leaving the other kids to make small dams and beg us to release some water.
I remember being out there in my corduroys and nylon coat, wet like everyone else. None of us wearing raincoats. It's as if it rained so much no one bothered to fight it. Except Teddy. Teddy always wore one of those bright yellow slickers, curls of black hair bursting from beneath the yellow hood. Scraping more dirt toward the dam with his yellow rubber boots.
And as recess went on and our dam got to be seven and eight inches high at the front, now ten feet around, the kids below would always start their really loud yelling, wanting us to break our dam, to let the water rush down and wreck theirs. But Teddy and me always held out, even when one of the kids tried to kick a hole in our dam-one of the hyperactive kids, usually, the ones that every day had to go to the nurse's office to take their medication. The ones like Michael Coe, who we weren't friends with then and didn't ever want to have to talk to.
I had to push Coe away once, after he tried to kick at our dam. He was a low, heavy kid with a buzz cut and tight T-shirt. I knocked him into a small mud puddle, and he went into this frenzy, whipping himself in circles and screaming and his face turning red. Coe told on me, and the teacher made us put our desks together for a week, and that, we always said, is how we became friends. Although, really, that is how Coe started following Teddy and me to my house after school, showing up uninvited when me and my babysitter and Teddy were playing Wiffle bat baseball or eating bologna sandwiches. How, after a while, Coe started bringing his new friend Will Wilson over to my house.
But on those rainy days in the dirt, when the bell to end recess would finally ring, on those days Teddy would only then begin to smile, carefully moving to the very front of our big dam, the other kids now yelling happily and jumping up and down and Coe and the hyperactive ones turning in fast circles, flailing their bodies onto the hard, wet ground, the teachers a hundred yards away, screaming at us from the dry doorways, and Teddy with the tip of his round, brightly booted yellow foot, he'd make just a nick in the dirt of our dam and the water would begin to trickle out.
And Coe and the other hyper ones would be breaking their thin little dams even before the water had reached them, the water flowing faster through the now bigger break in ours, Teddy pacing back and forth, staring and watching and smiling.
And sometimes I thought I wanted to smash the wall of our dam, jump on it with my wet sneakers and let the water rush down. But I never did that to Teddy.
And I remember now a day when I looked past the kids around us, seeing some new kid leaning against the high chainlink fence, watching us all and smiling too. Smiling like Teddy was. Smiling like he understood something more. Although now, when I think of him, I think of Will Wilson in that first moment, and he had a lean face, older, eighteen, not eight.
Will Wilson did look young then, I know. He'd been just a child. But I can't remember that so well.
But I remember standing next to Teddy, so satisfied with him. Teddy, my best friend, dry beneath his coat, me wet and warm in the rain, both of us watching our dam in the schoolyard, smiling as it went through its slow self-destruction.
Old Town was the wealthiest area of Tacoma, an area that we sometimes drove through just to look at, to see it. And as I cross that sill into the darkness of this house in Old Town, I see the black shapes of unseen furniture, gray light from a window. Touch my feet to a wood floor, then carpet, feel around me the full and spreading silence, and even then I can't explain it, can only sense it and want it, but from that moment, like the first moment we ever entered a house, the break-in is about the violation itself, the entering of a space that isn't ours, that is protected not by guns or bars or even locks but by an assumption of safety. An assumption that we-with one easy motion-have taken hold of and destroyed.
And like most every time before, I now turn to Will Wilson, standing with him in the shadows of a wall, the two of us smiling as we think of the owners and their children upstairs asleep. Oblivious to it all.
When we were seventeen and eighteen, we'd wake up at Will Wilson's house. It was a house on an empty road between two neighborhoods, some unplanned midpoint between subdivisions. It was like a lot of places I remember in Tacoma, one of those forgotten roads lined by high fences and tall, overgrown bushes and lit just barely by intermittent streetlights. Sometimes there'd be a store, a corner store with faded advertisements for cigarette deals and inexpensive beer, and in a few places there'd be duplexes or old storefronts, doors that faced these forgotten roads, dark doorways that looked abandoned until you looked close and you saw something, mail in the mailbox or the flickering blue light of a TV behind a curtain or a tricycle pressed against the side of the building, and you realized that someone was home.