Alfred chose this moment to step into the bathroom. “Well, look at this,” he said.
“You got some pretty dull masonry bits here,” Gary said, breathing heavily. “I should have bought some new ones while I was at the store.”
“Let me see,” Alfred said.
It hadn’t been Gary’s intention to attract the old man and the agitated twin fingered animals that were his advance guard. He shied from the incapacity and greedy openness of these hands, but Alfred’s eyes were fixed on the drill now, his face bright with the possibility of solving a problem. Gary relinquished the drill. He wondered how his father could even see what he was holding, the drill shook so violently. The old man’s fingers crawled around its tarnished surface, groping like eyeless worms.
“You got it on Reverse,” he said.
With the ridged yellow nail of his thumb, Alfred pushed the polarity switch to Forward and handed the drill back to Gary, and for the first time since his arrival, their eyes met. The chill that ran through Gary was only partly from his cooling sweat. The old man, he thought, still had a few lights on upstairs. Alfred, indeed, looked downright happy: happy to have fixed a thing and even happier, Gary suspected, to have proved that he was smarter, in this tiny instance, than his son.
“We can see why I’m not an engineer,” Gary said.
“What’s the project?”
“I’m putting in this bar to hold on to. Are you going to use the shower if we put a stool and a bar in here?”
“I don’t know what they have planned for me,” Alfred said as he was leaving.
That was your Christmas present, Gary told him silently. Flipping that switch was your present from me.
An hour later he had the bathroom back together and was in a fully nasty mood again. Enid had second-guessed his siting of the bar, and Alfred, when Gary invited him to try the new stool, had announced that he preferred a bath.
“I’ve done my part and now I’m done,” Gary said in the kitchen, pouring liquor. “Tomorrow I have a few things that I want to do.”
“It’s a wonderful improvement in the bathroom,” Enid said.
Gary poured heavily. Poured and poured.
“Oh, Gary,” she said, “I thought we might open that champagne Bea brought us.”
“Oh, let’s not,” said Denise, who had baked a stollen, a coffee cake, and two loaves of cheese bread and was preparing, if Gary was not mistaken, a dinner of polenta and braised rabbit. Safe to say it was the first time this kitchen had ever seen a rabbit.
Enid returned to hovering by the dining-room windows. “I’m worried that he isn’t calling,” she said.
Gary joined her by the window, his glial cells purring with the first sweet lubrication of his drink. He asked if she was familiar with Occam’s razor.
“Occam’s razor,” he said with cocktail sententiousness, “invites us to choose the simpler of two explanations for a phenomenon.”
“Well, what’s your point,” Enid said.
“My point,” he said, “is that it’s possible that Chip hasn’t called you because of something complicated that we know nothing about. Or it could be because of something very simple and well known to us, namely, his incredible irresponsibility.”
“He said he was coming and he said he would call,” Enid answered flatly. “He said, I’m coming home.”
“All right. Fine. Stand at the window. It’s your choice.”
Because he was expected to drive to The Nutcracker, Gary couldn’t do as much drinking as he might have wished before dinner. He therefore did quite a bit more as soon as the family came home from the ballet and Alfred headed upstairs, practically at a run, and Enid bedded down in the den with the intention of letting her children handle any problems in the night. Gary drank scotch and checked in with Caroline. He drank scotch and searched the house for Denise and found no sign of her. From his own room he fetched his Christmas packages and arranged them under the tree. He was giving everybody the same gift: a leather-bound copy of the All-Time Lambert Two Hundred album. He’d pushed hard to get all the printing done in time for the holiday, and now that the album was complete, he planned to dismantle the darkroom, spend some of his Axon profits, and build a model-railroad setup on the second floor of the garage. It was a hobby that he’d chosen for himself, rather than having it chosen for him, and as he laid his scotchy head on the cold pillow and turned out the light in his old St. Judean bedroom, he was gripped by an ancient excitement at the prospect of running trains through mountains of papier-mâché, across high Popsicle-stick trestles …
He dreamed ten Christmases in the house. He dreamed of rooms and people, rooms and people. He dreamed that Denise was not his sister and was going to murder him. His only hope was the shotgun in the basement. He was examining this shotgun, making sure that it was loaded, when he felt an evil presence behind him in the workshop. He turned around and didn’t recognize Denise. The woman he saw was some other woman whom he had to kill or be killed by. And there was no resistance in the shotgun’s trigger; it dangled, limp and futile. The gun was on Reverse, and by the time he got it on Forward, she was coming to kill him—
He woke up needing to pee.
The darkness in his room was relieved only by the glow of the digital clock radio, whose face he didn’t check because he didn’t want to know how early it still was. He could dimly see the loaf of Chip’s old bed by the opposite wall. The silence of the house felt momentary and unpeace-ful. Recently fallen.
Honoring this silence, Gary eased himself out of bed and crept toward the door; and here the terror struck him.
He was afraid to open the door.
He strained to hear what was happening outside it. He thought he could hear vague shiftings and creepings, faraway voices.
He was afraid to go to the bathroom because he didn’t know what he would find there. He was afraid that if he left his room he would find the wrong person, his mother maybe, or his sister or his father, in his bed when he came back.
He was convinced that people were moving in the hallway. In his clouded, imperfect wakefulness, he connected the Denise who’d disappeared before he went to bed to the Denise-like phantom who was trying to kill him in his dream.
The possibility that this phantom killer was even now lurking in the hall seemed only ninety percent fantastical.
It was safer all around, he thought, to stay in his room and pee into one of the decorative Austrian beer steins on his dresser.
But what if his tinkling attracted the attention of whoever was creeping around outside his door?
Moving on tiptoe, he took a beer stein into the closet that he’d shared with Chip ever since Denise was given the smaller bedroom and the boys were put together. He pulled the closet door shut after him, crowded up against the dry-cleaned garments and the bursting Nordstrom bags of miscellany that Enid had taken to storing here, and relieved himself into the beer stein. He lipped a fingertip over the rim so that he could feel if he was going to overflow it. Just when the warmth of rising urine had reached this fingertip, his bladder finally emptied. He lowered the stein to the closet floor, took an envelope from a Nordstrom bag, and covered the mouth of the receptacle.
Quietly, quietly, then, he left the closet and returned to his bed. As he was swinging his legs off the floor, he heard Denise’s voice. It was so distinct and conversational that she might have been in the room with him. She said, “Gary?”