Then the G-force struck, crushing his arms and legs, pinning his chin to his chest, and it occurred to him that he couldn’t breathe, that no matter how hard he tried, he wasn’t going to be able to stop his eyes from rolling back into his head, and he wondered if he would lose consciousness before they hit the ground.
He felt no pain. He looked down at his arms resting on the seat, bits of glass caught up and glittering in the blond hairs. Wondered if he should try to raise them. If he wanted to know so soon. He decided that he did. He tried. They raised and he held his hands in front of his face and let his arms rotate at the elbows. Next, he let his neck wobble on his head. He wiggled his toes. Like an infant discovering its new body, he thought, running his tongue across his teeth, everything still intact.
He looked over at Melanie. Her eyes were closed and she had slumped against the door, her hair covered in shards of glass.
The nightgown barely swelled over her heart. She breathed.
He watched her for awhile, watched her sleep, and then begin to stir, her eyes opening, struggling to sit up, moving her fingers and toes, touching herself just as he had—a delicate evaluation of what worked and what did not.
At last she looked over at him, her face bleeding where the glass had cut, but otherwise in one piece.
She raised her eyebrows and he knew the question, shook his head.
They were sitting upright in a beat to shit RV, still buckled into their seats. Glass busted out of the passenger and driver side windows, sunlight passing in blinding shears through fractures in the windshield.
And they had not smiled like this before. Not in their lives. Like they’d borne witness to a private miracle. Been made to see. Called forth from their tombs.
There was nothing but grassland and morning sky as far as they could see, and the sound of wind moving through the tall grasses and the coolness of that wind was everywhere and upon everything.
An introduction to “Unconditional”
I’m a father. I love my son beyond words. Beyond understanding. This is one of the most difficult stories I’ve ever written. You’ll understand why afterward, but to say more would spoil the revelatory nature of how this story unfolds.
unconditional
“I’m not scared of what’s coming. Almost looking forward, you know? Like Christmas morning when you’re a kid and you been thinking about it so long, when it finally comes, it don’t feel real? Probably be like that.
“Way I figure, if it’s nothing? Great. If it’s better than this? Hell yeah. And there’s no conceivable way things can get any worse than what I lived. It’s like ever since I was fifteen, I been shot up with anesthetic. A heart pumped full of it.
“Not feeling nothing will drive you to do strange and evil things. This ain’t excuses. Just the way it is.
“You’re looking older, but I guess I am too, right? You missed it. I had a beard yesterday that I’d been growing for years. Looked like some demon prophet. But I figured I should have it cut. See my face one last time. Look, this is more than I talked to anybody in years, and still, it’s about all I got to say, so…
“What?
“Want me to read this now? While you watch?
“You’re just like all of ’em, you know that? Want to bleed me for something, and I can already guess what it is.
“Ain’t I right?
“No?
“Yeah. I am. And if you think you’re going to leave here knowing, I got some news for you.”
My son do you remember the backpacking trip we made into the Ozarks when you were eight years old? I still have a photograph of us squatting by a campfire, you looking cross in the cold with your arms wrapped ’round yourself in that green fleece jacket which last week I took down out of the attic for the first time in ages. Sat alone at the kitchen table late into the night fingering the cinder burns our campfire had made, the polyester melted into circles of plastic. The fleece still carries your scent, or at least some smell my brain has been long-programmed to associate with you.
In my bedroom hanging above the chest of drawers is a drawing you made for me twenty-seven years ago one morning when I was rushing out the door to work. Black Sharpie on orange construction paper—a tall house with too many windows. A tree. Flock of birds in the sky and in the wobbly scrawl of a five-year-old: “I love you, Papa.” I know what it does to me to look at the drawing and the photograph. I wonder what it would do to you? Are you capable of being moved by anything?
I remember teaching you how to tie a fly. How to cast. The joy in your face as you lifted your first rainbow from the current—exhilaration and pride. The other day I drove past the playing field beside the Episcopal church. A perfect October afternoon. The light golden. Leaves turning. Children playing soccer. Ruddy faces and grass-stained knees, and I thought of all the games I watched you play. I can still hear your high-voiced questions, so many of them, coming from the backseat of our car as the three of us drove home from somewhere on some night I failed to appreciate what I had.
When I was a boy, I passed a homeless man, drunk and begging on a street corner. My father, sensing my disgust, said something I never forgot, that I think of every time I see your face on the news or in the paper—“That man was once someone’s little boy.”
I cannot separate the man you are now from the boy you were then, and it is killing me.
I wanted everything for you, son.
I still do.
You never experienced the gift of children, and I hate that for you, because you won’t understand how I can still love you, how, even though you took everything from me, you’re still all that I have.
When you were a child, I didn’t tell you about the evil in the world, all that lay in wait. In the same way, let’s forget all that’s happened in the past, and let me just be your Papa for the four and a half hours you have left to live. When they strap you down, please say your piece to the families of the victims, but then find my eyes, seek out my face, and if you hold any shred of love for me, take comfort in my presence.
The night of your birth while your mother slept I walked you up and down the hospital corridor, your tiny heart racing against my chest. I sang into your ear, told you that no matter what happened, I would be your Papa.
Always.
And I stand by that still.
The young man behind the Plexiglas turns over the last page of the letter and stares into the scuffs in the table. Through the walls, you can hear metal doors closing, bolts sliding home, the distant voices of the guards. He doesn’t look anything like a monster. Rather, an IT guy. Wire-rim glasses. Scrawny and slight. Five-seven in shoes with generous heels. Five-six in the prison-issue flip-flops. He’s had a recent shave.
The old man startles when he reaches up to unshelve the phone again.
For a long time, they both just breathe into the receivers, and when he speaks, his voice is soft and southern and contains a raspy, blown-out quality, as if he spent the last four years screaming.
“That’s all you got to say to me?”
As his father nods, he can see the long, blanched line of scarring across the old man’s throat, and he feels a flicker—not remorse, not regret, just some unidentified emotional response, alien because it’s rare.
“I heard they had to cut out your voicebox.”
A nod.
“And you won’t use one of them speech enhancement devices?”
Shake.
“Hell, I wouldn’t either. I don’t want to speak for you, but I would think not having to talk to assholes has a bright side.”
His old man breaks the slightest smile.
“So you aren’t going to ask me? That’s not why you came?”
A look of recognition passes across his father’s hazel eyes like the shadow of a cloud, and the old man shakes his head.
“You just came for me. To be here for me.”
The young man is quiet for a long while. He gathers up the pages of the letter and reads them again. When he
finishes, he stares at his father, feels the tremor he’s been fighting for the last two days sneaking back, and he has to sit on his right hand to stop it.
“I want to do something for you now. It ain’t much but it’s all I got to give. You remember the big Magnolia tree I used to climb in the cemetery? That’s where Mom is. Underneath it.”
A sheet of tears begins to shimmer across the surface of his father’s eyes.
“I can’t tell you why I did what I did to her. To you. So if you came to hear where I put her, now you heard, and now you can leave and quit pretending and I won’t hold it against you.”
His father lowers the phone and leans in toward the scratched-up Plexi.
Mouths, I’m not going anywhere.
An introduction to “The Pain of Others”
This one closes out the collection, because it’s probably my favorite story I’ve written to date. I’d tried half a dozen times to execute what I thought was a cool idea...what if in the course of your daily life, you accidentally intercepted a hit, a contract killing—maybe you discovered that a hitman was going to knock someone off, or you were mistakenly tasked with carrying out the hit.
I kept trying to attack this idea and kept striking out. I couldn’t get any traction, and I was starting to become really frustrated.
This was the problem (I realized in hindsight): in all my failed attempts to write this story, my everyman, the person who accidentally gets themselves involved, was a good person. Which meant that logic dictated they would simply go straight to the police, identify the bad guy, save the good guy, story over. And that’s no fun.
The breakthrough for me on this story was when I realized that my hero couldn’t go to the police. That I would have to make that impossible. So I decided to make them a thief, on probation, and to have them in the midst of committing a crime when they discover the hitman and his intentions.
Sometimes you get lucky and characters come fully-formed and ready to talk to you.
Letty Dobesh, the anti-hero of “The Pain of Others” did not disappoint. She truly wrote herself, and I had so much fun with her, I’m sure she’ll show up in something else in the not too distant.
In the meantime, this is Letty’s story. She’s a thief, yes, but she has a conscience. I love her because she made this story happen for me. I hope you’ll love her too.
the pain of others
The bite of conscience, like the bite of a dog into a stone, is a stupidity…Can you give yourself your own evil and your own good and hang your own will over yourself as a law?
– Friedrich Nietzsche
Letty Dobesh, five weeks out of Fluvanna Correctional Institute on a nine-month bit for felony theft, straightened the red wig over her short brown hair, adjusted the oversize Jimmy Choo sunglasses she’d lifted out of a locker two days ago at the Asheville Racquet and Fitness Club, and handed a twenty-spot to the cabbie.
“Want change, Miss?” he asked.
“On a $9.75 fare? What does your heart tell you?”
Past the bellhop and into the Grove Park Inn carrying a small leather duffle bag, the cloudy autumn day just cool enough to warrant the fires at either end of the lobby, the fourteen-foot stone hearths sending forth drafts of intersecting warmth.
She sat down at a table on the outskirts of the lounge, noting the prickle in the tips of her ears that always started up right before. Adrenaline and fear and a shot of hope because you never knew what you might find. Better than sex on tweak.
The barkeep walked over and she ordered a San Pellegrino with lime. Checked her watch as he went back to the bar: 2:58 p.m. An older couple cuddled on a sofa by the closest fireplace with glasses of wine. A man in a navy blazer read a newspaper several tables away. Looked to her like money—top-shelf hair and skin. Must have owned a tanning bed or just returned from the Islands. Two Mexicans washed windows that overlooked the terrace. All in all, quiet for a Saturday afternoon, and she felt reasonably anonymous, though it didn’t really matter. What would be recalled when the police showed up? An attractive thirty-something with curly red hair and ridiculous sunglasses.
As her watch beeped three o’clock, she picked out the sound of approaching footsteps—the barkeep returning with her Pellegrino. He set the sweating glass on the table and pulled a napkin out of his vest pocket.
She glanced up. Smiled. Good-looking kid. Compulsive weightlifter.
“What do I owe you?”
“On the house,” he said.
She crushed the lime into the mineral water. Through the windows she could see the view from the terrace—bright trees under grey sky, downtown Asheville in the near distance, the crest of the Blue Ridge in the far, summits headless under the cloud deck. She sipped her drink and stared at the napkin the barkeep had left on the table. Four four-digit, handwritten numbers. Took her thirty seconds to memorize them, and a quick look around confirmed what she had hoped—the windowwashers and the hotel guests remained locked and absorbed in their own worlds. She lifted the napkin and slid the keycard underneath it across the glass tabletop and into her grasp. Then shredded the napkin, sprinkling the pieces into the hissing water.
One hour later, she fished her BlackBerry out of her purse as she stepped off the elevator and onto the fifth floor. The corridor plush and vacant. No housekeeping carts. An ice machine humming around the corner.
Down the north wing, Letty flushing with the satisfaction that came when things went pitch-perfect. She could have quit now and called it a great haul, her duffle bag sagging with the weight of three high-end laptops, $645 in cash, one cell phone, two iPods, and three fully-raided minibars.
Standing in front of the closed door of 5212, she dialed the front desk on her stolen BlackBerry.
“Grove Park Inn Resort and Spa. How may I direct your call?”
“Room 5212.”
“Certainly.”
Through the door, she heard the phone ringing, and she let it ring five times before ending the call and glancing once more up and down the corridor.
The master keycard unlocked the door.
5212 was the modest one of the four—a single king-size bed (unmade), tiled bathroom with a shower and garden tub, the mirror still beaded with condensation. In the sitting area, an armoire, loveseat, leather chair, and floor-to-ceiling windows with a three hundred and fifty dollar-a-night view of the Asheville skyline, the mountains, and a golf course—greens and fairways lined with pines and maple trees. A trace of expensive cologne lingered in the air, and the clothes on the bed smelled of cigar smoke.
She perused the bedside table drawer, the armoire, the dresser, the drawers under the bathroom sink, the closet, the suitcase, even under the sofa cushions, which occasionally yielded big scores from the rich too cheap or lazy to use the hotel safe.
Room 5212 was a bust—nothing but three Romeo y Julieta cigars, which she of course pocketed—bonuses for the bellhop and barkeep.
On her way out, Letty unzipped her duffle bag and opened the minibar, her BlackBerry buzzing as she reached for a 1.5 ounce bottle of Glenlivet 12 Year.
Pressed talk. “Yeah?”
“What room you in?”
“5212.”
“Get out of there. He’s coming back.”
She closed the minibar. “How long do I have?”
“I got tied up giving directions. You might not have any time.”
She hoisted the duffle bag onto her shoulder, started toward the door, but the unmistakable sound of a keycard sliding into the slot stopped her cold.
A muffled voice: “I think you’ve got it upside down.”
Letty opened the bifold closet doors and slipped in. With no doorknob on the inside, she had to pull them shut by the slats.
People entered the hotel suite. Letty let the duffle bag slide off her shoulder and onto the floor. Dug the BlackBerry out of her purse, powered it off as the door closed.
Through a ribbon of light, she watched two men walk past the closet, one in a navy blazer and khaki s
lacks, the other wearing a black suit, their faces obscured by the angle of the slats.
“Drink, Chase?”
“Jameson, if you’ve got it.”
She heard the minibar open.
The man who wasn’t named Chase poured the Irish whiskey into a rocks glass and cracked the cap on a bottle of beer and the men settled themselves in the sitting area. Letty drew in deep breaths, her heart slamming in her chest, her knees soft, as if her legs might buckle at any moment.
“Chase, I need to hear you say you’ve really thought this through, that you’re absolutely sure.”
“I am. I only went to Victor when I realized there was no other way. I’m really in a bind.”
“You brought the money?”
“Right here.”
“Mind if I have a look?”
Letty heard locks unclasp, what might have been a briefcase opening.
“Now, you didn’t just run down to your bank, ask for twenty-five large in hundred dollar bills?”
“I went to Victor.”
“Good. We’re still thinking tomorrow, yes?”
“Tomorrow.”
“I understand you have a son?”
“Skyler. He’s seven. From a previous marriage.”
“I want you to go out with your son tomorrow morning at ten. Buy some gas with a credit card. Go to Starbucks. Buy a coffee for yourself. A hot chocolate for Skyler. Wear a bright shirt. Flirt with the barista. Be memorable. Establish a record of you not being in your house from ten to noon.”
“And then I just go home?”
“That’s right.”
“Can you tell me what you’re going to do? So I can be prepared?”
“It’d be more natural, your conversations with the police I mean, if you were truly surprised.”
“I hear you on that, but I’ll play it better if I know going in. It’s the way I’d prefer it, Arnold.”
“Where does your wife typically shower?”