You're Next

Mike cleans up around his space, makes his little cot a last time, then pauses to take stock of the room. Resting on the long-broken air conditioner is one of Shep’s shoes, so big it looks like you could sleep in it. The drawers of the communal dresser tilt at all angles, the tracks long gone. There on the plastic stool is The rape of rat. He picks it up, runs his thumb across the tattered cover. Like the Saab, it seems to encompass everything he cannot have, everything he is not, everything he can never be. He reaches over and drops it into the trash can.

Dubronski is in the doorway; Mike thinks the asshole has WD-40ed the hinges for occasions such as this. Dubronski has been watching, but for once that fat bully face is not lit with schadenfreude. He pops a Jelly Belly for a sugar hit, plays with his pudgy hands. ‘Hey, Doe Boy, I just wanted to say, this sucks ass. I always thought if you could make it, hell, maybe we all were worth something.’

And that makes Mike’s insides crumble in a whole new way.

The Hall is tough, but not as violent as billed. Mike knows how to fight, so he doesn’t have to much. But it is hell – the hell of utter neglect. The others, his peers, represent every dirty part of himself that he never managed to scrub clean. He watches his back all the time and suffers from vigilance burnout, waking every five minutes, spinning circles down the corridors, keeping his back against the chain-link during yard time.

The third week he gets summoned to the head office, where the superintendent waits. She is not a warden. Just like he is not serving a ‘sentence’ but a ‘disposition’, and the hulking guards are called ‘counselors’. All those soft names don’t seem to make the time any less hard.

She asks, ‘How would you explain your state of mind, son?’

Mike says, ‘Scared straight.’

‘I understand you caught a bad rap. If you keep up the good behavior, I will make sure your time here is pleasant.’

‘Yes, ma’am.’

‘I will do my best to get you an early release. In the meantime don’t make me look stupid.’

‘Yes, ma’am.’

‘And when you’re out, don’t make me look stupid then either.’

‘Yes, ma’am.’

A few days later, a pie-faced guard wakes him at two in the morning and mumbles the news: The Couch Mother is dead.

Details are scarce. The rest of the night, Mike sits on his turned-back sheets with his bare feet on the icy tile, a wall of static blotting out thought and feeling.

In a hushed morning phone call with Shep, Mike learns that she had a stroke on a rare trip to the bathroom and cracked her head open on the lip of the tub. She had a good heart, a strong heart to push blood through all that acreage. But still, all hearts have their limits.

Hearing Shep’s voice jars something loose in Mike’s chest, and he hangs up and walks down the hall to the bathroom and locks himself in a stall. He sits on the closed toilet, doubles over, and sobs three times in perfect silence, his eyes clenched, both hands clamped over his mouth.

She may not have seemed like much, but she was what he had.

He is allowed to attend the funeral. Two sheepish uniformed cops, Mike’s escorts, stand in the back of the airless chapel. As the service begins, the hearse from the previous funeral is still idling in the alley, visible through a side door, and the folks for the next one are waiting in the reception area. Mike walks the aisle, regards the refrigerator of a casket, and thinks, I failed you.

None of the foster kids will give a speech. The notion of ceremony, of formality, evades them all. Finally Shep gets up. Somber in an ill-fitting dress shirt, he takes the podium. His mouth is a stubborn line. Silence reigns.

‘She was there,’ he says, and steps down.

Though the by-the-hour pastor frowns, Mike knows that Shep means this as the highest compliment.

Nine weeks later Mike walks from the Hall with a bag of clothes and forty dollars from the state. Shep is waiting for him outside on the shoulder of the road, leaning against a dinged-up Camaro, arms crossed. Mike has no idea how Shep knew about the early release date; he just found out himself the morning before.

As Mike approaches, Shep tosses him the keys. ‘You shouldn’t have done that,’ Shep says.

‘Loyalty,’ Mike says. ‘And stamina.’

Over the next few months, he applies for a few real jobs, but that felony charge gets in his way, sitting there like a boulder in the middle of a canyon road. So he gets a job as a day laborer, working with prison-release guys twice his age, hauling soot out of firehouses. With his first paycheck, he hires a lawyer out of the yellow pages and has his juvenile record sealed. But he soon discovers that while prospective employers can’t see his file, they will always know that it is sealed. And what they imagine his transgressions to be, he gleans, is worse than the reality.

At a dingy downtown government office, he stands in line with a bunch of domestic-abuse victims to get his last name and Social Security number changed. He is assigned a fresh number and a fresh surname, this time of his own choosing. He is Michael Wingate, and he has no past, no history. He has a clean start.

He gets a proper job as a carpenter, and nights he presses shirts in a purgatory of a dry cleaner. He and Shep drift, riding separate undercurrents. It is natural, gradual. It goes unspoken.

One day he walks past the window at Blockbuster and sees her standing there between Drama and Comedy. He stops to gawk. The sight of this woman makes him hurt in the worst way; it makes him yearn. But he is too intimidated to go in and talk to her, so instead he goes home and lies awake all night, cursing his unexpected timidity.

For the next few weeks, he goes back to Blockbuster before work, on break, between jobs. She has to return the movie sometime – two days, right, then late fees? He grows convinced that she has sworn off rentals, that she leaves the house only at inopportune times, that she saw him in the window leering like a stalker and was frightened into moving.

But one Sunday she reappears. Without figuring out what he is going to say, he rushes up to her in the parking lot, and only then does he stop and ask himself, What are you doing? She appraises him, panting and speechless, and before he can utter so much as a syllable, she bursts into laughter and says, ‘Okay, lunch. But somewhere public in case you’re an ax murderer.’

Lunch lasts through dinner. Engrossed in conversation, they forget to eat, the food no longer steaming on untouched plates. She works at a day-care center. Her smile makes him dizzy. She touches his arm, once, when laughing at something. He tells her his story, unedited, in a single breathless burst, how he was six kinds of stupid when he went into the Hall but has since gotten it down to three or four. He tells her about the Couch Mother and the Saab Grandfather and the Superintendent Warden, how they all gave him consideration before he really deserved it, how that probably saved his life, and how he hopes eventually to do the same thing for other people. He tells her he wants to build houses someday. She says, ‘Dreams are a dime a dozen. But sounds like you actually have the backbone to get there,’ and he burns with pride and says, ‘Stamina.’

She lets him see her to her car, and they pause, nervous in the biting October night. Her door is open, the interior light shining, but she stands there, waiting. He hesitates, desperate not to blemish the perfect evening.

‘If you had any guts,’ she says, ‘you’d kiss me.’

There is a second dinner, and a fifth. When she invites him over for a meal, he changes outfits three times, and still, to his eye, his clothes look worn out and blue-collar. As she sautes mushrooms, he patrols her apartment, picking up a sugar bowl, eyeing the rows of matching candles, fingering vanity curtains that are there only to provide a dab of lavender. He pictures his bare mattress, his cabinet lined with cans of SpaghettiOs, the poster of Michael Jordan thumbtacked above his garage-sale desk and realizes that no one ever taught him how to live properly.

That night they make love. She weeps after, and he is convinced he did something wrong until she explains.

She is very different from the girls he met during his tenure at 1788 Shady Lane.

At the movies one night, she giggles at his whispered joke, and the muscle-bound guy in the row in front of them turns and says, ‘Shut up, bitch.’ With a quick jab, Mike shatters his nose. They rush out, leaving the guy mewling in the aisle, his friends looking on helplessly, clones in matching college football jackets. Outside, Annabel says, ‘I’d be lying to say I didn’t find that charming and exciting in a fucked-up sort of