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But before I could even sit back down with my coffee, my cell phone rang and I answered with dread when I saw it was the sitter, our neighbor Mrs. Anderson. She must have gotten my text. I didn’t know exactly why she was calling, but it probably wasn’t for anything good. The first words out of her mouth confirmed that suspicion.
“Jace, I sorry, but I no can stay late tonight. My daughter, Maria, she in labor. She call me and say I need go pick her up and take her to hospital.”
Mrs. Anderson’s English wasn’t great, even after all these years, but she was a godsend to my family. Tyler, my little brother, wasn’t always easy to handle, but from the first, she’d had no problems with him.
“Oh no, of course, Mrs. Anderson. I’ll be right home.”
“First baby for her, so maybe no big rush, but…”
“It’s okay. I’ll work something out. Let me make some calls.”
Cursing under my breath at the unfortunate timing, I shut down my computer and started frantically searching through my contacts for the number of another sitter I used sometimes in emergencies. He was good, but an hour away, so I had to pay him not only for his time but also his gas. Still, my brother was difficult and not everyone would stay with him.
Thankfully, I was able to reach the man, and he agreed to meet me at my house in an hour or so. I knew Mrs. Anderson would have given Tyler and my mom their dinner already, so at least I didn’t have to worry about going through a drive-through on the way home.
I figured I could check in on my mother, make sure Tyler was settled and then change out of this hot costume before I headed back to the office. My mom was no match for Tyler if he got in one of his moods. When I’d first come home and gone to bring him back from the state mental hospital in Milledgeville, Tyler and I had spent the night in a motel. He’d gotten upset over not being able to find a TV program he wanted to watch on the motel cable, and there had been an unfortunate incident resulting in a bill to replace the TV. After one of Tyler’s meltdowns, it had a hole in the screen the exact size of the TV remote. I also had to pay for a visit to Urgent Care for a sprained wrist. Tyler hadn’t meant to hurt me—but he took after my dad and was a big boy. He just didn’t know his own strength.
Stepping out into the wide corridor of our building, I hurried down to the elevator to get to the parking deck in the basement. My office shared the floor of the building with a doctor’s group, Midtown Internal Medicine, and they always seemed to have a lot of geriatric patients in and out every day. They had clinic hours until seven, so since it was only a little after five, there was still a lot of traffic in the halls as I left. I had picked up my briefcase as I left the office by force of habit, and as I dodged around an old lady who was taking her time strolling down the hallway, some guy with an armload of boxes shoved into me and spun me right into the path of the little, whitehaired, old lady.
She squawked in alarm and swung her cane up at my head, which made me instinctively fling up my arm to dodge the blow. When I did, I hit her a glancing blow on the chest, and she windmilled her arms and toppled backward. Horrified, I leaped to catch her, but we both fell to the floor in a spectacular sprawl. I managed to turn to take the brunt of the fall, but the old lady was frightened out of her wits. She also got mad as hell, thinking, I guess, that she was being attacked. She began screaming at the top of her lungs and punched me right in the eye.
I scrambled to my feet, deciding it was past time to make a strategic exit and threw abject apologies over my shoulder at her as I limped down to the elevator. I jumped inside just as the doors were closing and a few minutes later I was sliding into the front seat of my mom’s old Buick, headed toward the east side and my mother’s house in Cabbagetown, an older neighborhood on the east side of Atlanta which, a hundred years or more ago, had been the home of a mill that made cotton bags for packaging.
The mill was long gone, the building once housing it having been turned into expensive lofts. Our house was originally part of the little village that had been built around the old mill, so it was a typical cottage style, but not renovated, like some of the others in the old historic district. The land it sat on was valuable, I guess, but my mother would never sell the house, no matter what. She’d lost a lot in her life already after my dad died, and I wanted to save her home for her if I could.
By the time I pulled up in our driveway, I was sweating like a pig. The air conditioning inside the office was good, so the camo jacket hadn’t felt too awful inside the building, but now that I was outside, I was roasting, and I had one of my headaches coming on, along with a real shiner. My eye was swelling up nicely where the sweet, little old lady had really nailed me with one hell of a right hook. Once in the house, I could pop a couple of extra strength aspirin.
Mrs. Anderson took off as soon as I arrived, having no time to waste on idle chitchat with the likes of me. After checking in on my mom, who was napping, I went into the living room where I could hear Steve Harvey’s voice drifting down the hallway. I figured Tyler would barely even acknowledge me when one of his idols was on, but I felt better just checking in on him for a minute. I saw him standing in front of the TV, rocking back and forth, like he usually did for the entire thirty-minute show.
“Hey, buddy!” I called to him. “I have to go back to work, but I’ll be home as soon as I can. Mr. Bannister is staying with you, okay?” I was surprised when he spared me a quick glance and a sweet smile—a special mark of favor while his favorite show was on—before totally focusing back in on Steve.
Because I was hot and still sweating like fat Elvis, I decided to take a quick shower and change clothes before going back out in the heat again. Even though it was almost the first of November, we’d been having unseasonably warm weather, and the temperature had been hovering in the high seventies. I sprayed myself liberally with deodorant after my shower, doused myself with cologne and got dressed in something cooler before going over to stand in front of the fan. It was mostly blowing warm air at the moment, but it was better than nothing. At least marginally.
Before I left again, I went into the bathroom to straighten my hair, which was silky fine, and refused to cooperate much with anything I did for it. I’d been told plenty of times in my life that I looked good, but I wasn’t conceited about it. I knew it was only an accident of genetics, a lucky break. Unlike theunluckyone—the fucking disaster—that had caused my little brother Tyler to be born with Fragile X syndrome. A roll of the dice and I got lucky, while Tyler got snake eyes. There were a lot of theories about the syndrome, and one of them was that the genetics were passed on to daughters who may or may not be affected. But their children were, at a rate of about fifty percent. I was in the fortunate percentage.
It wasn’t right and it wasn’t fair, but after a while the rage I felt over it just became a part of me, like it was the only way I knew how to handle the grief. I wondered sometimes if that kind of anger was the real reason behind Tyler’s outbursts. If, maybe he was just so goddamned furious about the raw deal fate had handed him that it just exploded out of him sometimes without warning. Like he was working up to some supernova event, some dramatic and catastrophic destruction that would be marked by one final, titanic explosion that would finally destroy us all.
I went over to my closet to find something to wear. I loved men’s fashion and dressing well. And though I couldn’t afford it now, the fact that I could only worship it from afar didn’t take away from my adoration. Total obsession wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, after all.
Then I thought of Dylan and changed my mind with a little frisson of unease. A cold chill hit me out of nowhere like it always did when he came to mind, and I got a full body shiver.
The doorbell rang, and I went gratefully to the door to let in the emergency sitter. I got him settled and finally left to go back to my office. Because of the insane traffic, it took me longer than usual to get back downtown, and I arrived back at my building in midtown much later than I’d planned to. It was almost eight, and I still had a solid three hours of work to do on the pet food designs.
The car park was silent as a tomb when I stepped out of my car and onto the concrete deck. Not a great analogy to make on All Hallows Eve when the veil between this world and the next was particularly thin, according to the all the ghost shows on TV. Also, one hell of a time to think about it when I had to walk across that deck all alone in the dark.
Most of the people who parked there in the deck were office workers in the area, like me, so they were already gone for the day, and the place was both dark and deserted. It wasn’t even Daylight Saving Time yet, but all day it had been cloudy and muggy, and it seemed darker than usual for this time of evening. Everything was a little spooky, and the one light at the far end of the parking deck just wasn’t hacking it. I thought I heard soft footsteps behind me at one point, but when I turned around to look, there was no one there. Just nerves, I told myself, but I walked a little faster just the same.
Shaking off the jittery feeling I was having, I entered the building, using the keypad on the side door to let myself in. In an effort to cut down on rising energy costs, our building had timers and dimmers to greatly soften overhead lights once people had mostly gone home for the evening, and I had the place pretty much to myself tonight.
I made my way through the shadowy lobby and upstairs to my floor. Once I stepped off the elevator, I heard the sound of a door closing somewhere down the hall, and I stopped and gazed around nervously, but I didn’t see anyone.
Figuring it was probably just the cleaning crew, I went down the corridor to my office and let myself in, using a keypad again. The building’s owner had installed these a year or so before and they were convenient if you could remember the code. Thank God I did, but it was never a sure thing. With my memory being what it was, I’d had to write it down and keep it on a slip of paper in my wallet. I usually remembered, but I liked the comfort of knowing I had it written down, just like all my computer passwords that I kept in a little notebook on my desk.
Sighing, I settled down and went to work. The designs I’d finally gotten from the art department late that afternoon were good, and pretty soon I was immersed in tweaking them for the store displays, making sure they were just the way Golden wanted them. After that, I moved onto finalizing plans for getting the coupons and special offer displays to the stores, and by the time I finally had everything finished and the portfolio neatly packaged and sent off, it was almost eleven. I turned off my computer and sat there in the dim light. It was then that I had the eerie feeling that someone was watching me. And it felt as if they had been for a long time.
I tried to remind myself not to let my imagination run away with me, but I thought—I was almost sure—I could hear someone breathing not too far away.
A feeling of great lethargy began to come over me, and I put my head down on my desk. I was so tired. I thought I’d stay there for just a moment until I could gather my strength again to get up and go outside. But I began to sink into a dream. Lemon yellow moonlight was shining through my cubicle window, though it was soft and faint. In that dim light I could see the street below, but it was wrapped in velvety blackness. Still, I knew someone was waiting for me there. I realized the window was somehow open, and I climbed out of it and drifted down toward the street like a wisp of smoke. I was anxious to reach it, and yet terrified of doing so at the same time. Whatever was there meant me harm, but I couldn’t resist. I drifted closer and closer to the one who waited for me and then he rushed toward me and enveloped me in his arms. I felt a sharp pain in my neck as he held me close, and then I knew no more.
