“Let me tell you a story, friend,” said Foster. He waved for Robb to start down a row of graves. Foster jerked the gun for him to turn where needed. Without speaking, they arrived at a white headstone that almost glowed in the dimness. In this, a section dedicated to infants and children, some plots were heaped with toys. So many greeting cards and flowers were banked against one headstone that they obscured the name. There the two men stopped and stood.
The dark hummed with crickets and tree frogs and the rustle of mice. The sound of things too fragile for the daylight. And the silence of the owls and snakes that preyed upon those most fragile.
“You were so worried about the quarterly audits,” Foster said. He stood gazing down on the pale stone. “You decided to work through lunch. And then you decided to work late, so you called your wife, Mai, to pick up your kid at day care.”
Foster knew the story by heart. He’d heard Robb tell it so often in the group. “That day the temperature hit a hundred,” he continued. “Then Mai called from the day care to say Trevor wasn’t there.” The staff said Robb had never dropped the boy off. Robb had insisted he had. He charged that the day care workers were covering up something. Over the phone he shouted for Mai to call the police. He could hear her relaying his accusation and the staff members insisting Robb had never stopped by that morning.
Over the phone Mai asked if Robb had taken their son out of the backseat. They’d had the windows tinted. Even if someone had walked past, no one could see inside. Very quietly Mai told him to check the car.
Robb bent low over the tiny headstone and righted a glittery plastic wreath that had toppled.
“You stood above the spreadsheets that covered your desk,” said Foster, “and you knew what you’d done.” And if it had reached a hundred degrees that day, it had been so much worse inside a locked car parked among a few acres of cars on an open concrete parking lot.
Baby Trevor must’ve woken up alone still strapped in his car seat. And Robb would never know how much his child had suffered.
Mai had left him that day. First hysterical, then sedated to catatonia. The police, of course the police had come to arrest him on charges of reckless endangerment and negligent manslaughter. In short order the quarterly audits became the least of his worries. In part because he’d been fired for absenteeism. That, and the fact that everyone in the company had watched as he’d run to his car. They’d all watched first him, and later the paramedics, attempt the impossible with the small limp body. Foster asked, “You remember?”
The toys on the grave, Mai’s relatives had left them. Foster didn’t need to move the stuffed bear and the basketball to reveal who was buried here. Foster offered up the story not to torment Robb, but to remind him that Robb, himself, was also human. They were both human. And they would both fuck up on occasion.
“As brutal as that nightmare was,” Foster said, “at least you know what occurred.” Robb knew the full story to tell and tell to the group until it no longer hurt. Or hurt less. And that was more than Foster could claim.
The story. The grave. It was something Robb could grasp.
Foster added, “My friend.” He pocketed the gun and produced the check. All the money he had in the world. The check he’d already written and stashed in his pocket, he handed it over.
And Robb took it.
Mitzi paced along the rows of filing cabinets. Her fingers trailed across the file drawers, each crammed with tapes recorded at least a generation before. The metal cabinets thick with dust. Dust muffled the sound of her footsteps on the concrete floor.
Under one arm she lugged an open shoebox. Juggling a wineglass in that same hand. Her head a little foggy from the wine, but intent on her hunt. Her other hand she dipped into rusted file drawers and rotting cardboard boxes. She examined Girl Rider, Crushed, Stampeding Bison. She wondered how someone had staged that scenario. Surfer, Flayed Alive, Vampire Bats. It boggled the mind. Both of these had been before her time.
When the shoebox was full or her wineglass was empty, she’d head back to the sound pit and play her selection.
The studio storerooms presented a hoarder’s warren of stacked boxes patched with strapping. Heavy boxes had crushed those beneath them, spilling out reels of unspooling magnetic tape. A firetrap is what it posed. Flammable shellac. Hardened wax. Here and there trailed leftover movie scenes on silver nitrate stock, dubbed long ago by the predecessor of her predecessor of her predecessor and promptly forgotten. The fish-smelling, low-tide stink of decaying celluloid.
A match, even just a spark, and the entire trove would burn like the Hindenburg.
Mitzi considered the recorded phone calls left by people seated aboard hijacked jetliners doomed to crash. Those, and the voicemails left by people trapped above the fires in the World Trade Center. These messages were all over the web. People sounded so rational saying their good-byes and their I-love-you’s to an answering machine. Especially considering how so many of those same people would be among the two hundred–plus who’d shortly jump to their deaths.
What moved Mitzi’s heart was how the people who received those messages went on to treasure those tapes and duplicate them and to duplicate the duplicates to be certain those final words would never be lost.
That was always the impulse: To preserve, to curate. To cheat death.
Ambien did a great job of punching holes in her short-term memory. It was her long-term memory that was
