Peering outside around one edge of the curtains, she said, “You need to rest. Just for an hour.”
What a stroke of good fortune. Maybe his luck was turning around. To connect with Amber when he needed her most. And to find her at the first place he called, and to be invited over and given a place to sleep. The dirt from Trevor’s grave clung to his pants in dark scabs. It lined his fingernails. But baby Trevor had never existed. Robb was a character, and most of the world had turned into a movie where events were prompted to move him toward some goal. He felt his bones settling into the mattress. Amber leaned down to kiss him again, and her hair fell forward to brush his face.
“Sleep,” she said. She padded quietly to the doorway and quit the room, pulling the door closed behind her.
Whatever had trapped him, Foster had escaped. Here he was safe. Tuesday at four o’clock something, some long con would descend on Mitzi Ives, but he didn’t have to be there.
He could sleep through Tuesday, he felt that tired. The dog wedged against him felt almost like Lucy had as a baby. To have the smell of Amber, of her hair, clinging to him, he could imagine when they were first married. He placed himself back in a time when they were happy, and the future glowed. The baby snuggled close into his hip, and if he didn’t open his eyes he was a new father, a young man.
If he didn’t open his eyes, the world seemed perfect.
Soft and low, the little dog began to howl. Then long and loud, the howl heralded a siren. A siren joined the dog’s howl, and from beyond the bedroom window a chorus of neighborhood dogs joined the siren. A police car approached, drawing so close it drowned out the animals.
Foster opened his eyes and retrieved his glasses.
The pug watched, head cocked, as Foster pulled open the curtains and the window and slipped quietly into the backyard. Slipped over the sill and jumped to the grass. Jumped and vaulted the back fence. Vaulted and raced away down an alley.
Mitzi put Foster aboard a ship. The scenario had always been one of her favorites. She shut off the studio lights and began to build the world by creating the ocean. The mid-Atlantic in March, a storm-tossed, wind-churned ocean. She broke waves against the wooden hull and whistled the wind through the rigging. She made the canvas sails billow and snap. Rain strafed the decks, and water sloshed in the bilges.
He’d staggered in, this Gates Foster, exhausted and mumbling. His clothes caked with dirt. A purple goose egg swelling one side of his face. Mumbling about a conspiracy. Mumbling about being betrayed by his former wife.
She’d dragged out the cot and blankets and urged him to lie down. She deleted this world and began to build a new one around him. Lightning cracked. Thunder roared. And gradually the distance between the thunder and lightning lengthened. The winds weakened. Of the heavy rain only a light mist fell on the ship. Then even the mist stopped. The sails fell slack as the seas calmed, and by that point this Gates Foster had fallen fast asleep.
The day dragged on. Each scream might be the pain and terror of someone, but it wasn’t the scream Foster was looking for. It wasn’t the scream of anyone he loved. And as his reserve of empathy ran dry, he found himself irked by the noise of people’s suffering. This bedlam crop of people’s misery, he began to hate the strangers whose torture hurt his ears.
Foster reviewed each scream. Dismissed and deleted it. Moved on to the next.
Mitzi had cast looks at him, almost frightened looks. Almost as if she knew who he was and what he intended to do.
He texted the escort agency and got no reply.
He erased the agony of another reel filled with an army of dying strangers.
Yelling to be heard, he pushed back from the console and asked, “When are you due?”
When Mitzi didn’t respond, isolated by her own set of headphones, he tried again.
She turned, pulling the headphones down to her neck.
“When’s the baby due?” he asked.
Mitzi shrugged. “Tuesday afternoon,” she said. “Just after four o’clock.” She placed the headphones back over her ears and returned to the task at hand.
In Foster’s headset the tape hiss changed. The tone shifted to suggest a new recording. A different room tone brought a man’s voice. This stranger said, “Mitzi, honey, you were wrong to tie up Daddy while he was asleep…”
Foster snuck a glance at the woman working next to him.
A child’s whisper answered him. It was lost in the tape hiss until Foster could make out the words, “…what did you do to my friend?”
The man stammered, “Mitzi, you can’t.”
The child’s voice shrieked. Raging, “Into the microphone, please!”
His voice reedy and shrill, the man insisted, “You can’t. Mitzi, you love me!”
As silence fell, Foster listened harder. He recognized the voices as something, as being related to something he’d heard before. A pickup from a different microphone? Another fragment of the past.
Whatever the case it wasn’t his past.
He checked the label on the reel, the list of names for each recording. In the loopy handwriting of a teenager, this one was titled Serial Killer Flayed to Death by Child. He rewound the segment. He erased it. He waited for the next.
Mitzi knew the primitives were right. The tribes who believed a photograph would steal a person’s soul. It would, and it did. So did an audio recording, as did video. Our greatest creation is our selves. The
