Lost Echoes

television airwaves with his trusty channel changer, Harry came upon something unexpected.

A realization.

There really was nothing on.

Nothing he wanted to see.

Nada.

The goose egg.

The family didn’t have wide cable access. That was part of it. But they did get a lot of stations with the basic cable. But there wasn’t shit on.

He flipped and got the news, but it was all bad and about war and people dying or killing or yelling or fighting. He caught a couple of movies, but the violence was so intense, he sort of lost sight of the stories.

He just sat there flipping through the channels, thinking about Kayla. He had tried to go see her the next day, the day after the kiss, but no one was home, and when he went back the next afternoon, they were gone. The house was as empty as a politician’s promise.

But he could still remember the kiss as if it were yesterday, the way she had held his hand, the way her flesh felt when she touched him. That biting smell of perfume in his nostrils.

Puzzle pieces separated. The pattern broken. The puzzle screwed.

“Well, I’ll be goddamn,” his father said. “Will you look at this?”

Harry turned to look as his mother came in from the kitchen, a towel in her hands. She said, “Don’t cuss.”

“Look here,” Dad said, and slapped a finger against a newspaper on the dining table. “What’s this say?”

Harry knew his dad had been able to pick out a few words, but couldn’t read well enough to get the whole of the story, all that missed school, something about reversing letters when he tried to read, which was why he had called in Mom.

She read a bit of it from the paper. Harry got up from the floor, strolled over, slid in between them.

It was the front page of the local paper. It had a large headline.

KILLER OF BAR OWNER CONFESSES

There was an article, and Harry’s eyes just hit the high spots. Ex-husband admits to killing his wife, the owner of Rosy’s Roadhouse. Had a key. Waited until the place was empty and she was closing. He was upset about their split-up. He wasn’t happy she was seeing another man.

“That’s the place down the hill,” Harry said.

“That’s right,” Mom said.

Mom turned the page, went to where the story was continued. There were two photos.

One of the victim.

One of the murderer.

Harry knew them both. Or rather, he had seen them both. Down there in Rosy’s. The night he slipped out with Joey and Kayla. The night he fainted.

He leaned over and looked closer at the picture of the man in the newspaper. It was him, all right. The man with the black hair, the scars, and the sharp, curved knife, the guy that cut the woman’s throat, knocking her against the jukebox. He could remember the light and the warmth, the record playing. That feeling of tightness. It all came back to him. Just for a moment.

He looked at the woman’s photograph. She looked better than when he had seen her, frightened, cut, then dead. But it was her.

His eyes bounced along the paragraphs in the article as his mother read them aloud to his father.

Slit throat.

Up against the jukebox.

Blood on the wall.

Murdered with a knife.

Harry stepped back, and he was no longer remembering the warmth and the light. It was as if his very being were falling backward, down a long cold tunnel. It was a terrible feeling, and it made his stomach churn.

“I saw him do it,” Harry said.

“What?” his mom said. “What did you say?”

“I saw him,” Harry said.

“You saw this guy?” his dad asked, thumping his finger on the photograph.

“Yeah. I saw him.”

“How the hell did you see him?” Dad said.

“In my dreams.”

There was a long moment of silence, large enough and empty enough for an elephant to walk through.

“Dreams?” Dad said. “Son, you need some rest. You don’t dream people you ain’t never met. You seen that on some TV show or something, read about it in one of those crazy stories you’re always reading.”

“You just think you’ve dreamed it,” Mom said. “You’re seeing his face in the paper now, just now, and you’re thinking you’ve seen him before. Maybe he reminds you of someone.”

Harry shook his head. “No.”

He turned slowly and walked out of the room toward his bedroom. He turned on the little rotating fan and lay down on his bed and looked at the water spot on the ceiling, the one that looked like a bear’s head with its mouth open. There was another water spot not far away. It looked like a mouse. The mouse appeared to be running toward the bear’s mouth, and the bear, silent and waiting, was going to surprise him. Big-time.

His mother stood in the doorway.

“You okay, baby?”

“Yeah, Mom. Okay.”

“We shouldn’t have let you see that.”

“No. That’s all right. I always read the paper.”

And he did. He had started last year, because of a school class that was teaching them about current events. And it always depressed him. Someone was always killing or hurting or stealing or lying to someone else.

“It’s just someone reminds you of someone else,” she said.

“Yeah. Sure. It just sort of got to me.”

“You want some water?”

“No.”

“Got some Coca-Cola, you want it.”

“No. I’m fine.”

She reached out and touched his hand. She smiled at him. He tried to smile back.

“Well…okay. You call you need something. All right?”

“Sure.”

She went out and closed the door.

Night had fallen when his father came into the room. A big slice of darkness lay across the sheets. A bit of wind came through a couple of cracks in the wall, which in the summer was all right. During the winter, though, it was a bitch. Still, it was an all right room. At least he had his own space. Joey, he slept on the couch in a house worse than this, and over there no one even tried to make it a home.

“You sure are upset,” Dad said, and stretched out on the bed beside Harry, under the wedge of darkness, causing the old bed to dip. He could feel his father’s hand close to his. He didn’t look at it and he didn’t touch it, but he could feel the heat off of it, and he knew it was short fingered and thick like a catcher’s mitt, scarred all over from wrenches that slipped and slammed them into bolts and sharp-edged metal.

“I’m just not feeling well.”

Harry said this while looking at the ceiling, studying the bear-head water spot, which was hardly visible now. The mouse he couldn’t see at all.

There was some light coming from the hall, but the darkness was stronger. It shoved the light out.

“You sure you seen those people before? Ones in the newspaper?”

“Yes, sir. I guess. I don’t know, really.”

“Maybe you did. Maybe long ago you did. Then later, see, you dreamed about them, or thought you dreamed about them, when really you were just remembering seeing them. I don’t know about that kind of thing, but it could