panic. That's all.
* * *
Some time later she was roused by a knocking sound.
She blinked, realized the sound was someone knocking on the front door. Of course. She hauled herself up from the chair and trudged out of the kitchen. She was disquieted to realize that she'd spent at least some of the time in thoughts she believed had left her: the idea of killing herself.
She opened the front door to see Rona smiling at her, looking teenage and wholesome as all get-out.
‘Mommmeeeee!’ a voice shrieked from below, and she squatted down to let Tyler give her a hug. He gave good hugs. She straightened up with her son in her arms, and smiled broadly at his occasional sitter.
‘Thanks, honey,’ she said, as the four year old in her grasp wriggled for the door catch. Locks and light switches were catnip to this kid. Pockets of the world on which he could exert an influence, Carol supposed, first steps in controlling the chaos. She hoped he never learned how they could turn on you.
‘Oh, he's a peach,’ Rona said.
Her cheer was unassailable. Tyler's mother knew that, on occasion, her son was perfectly capable of not being a peach, but you'd never know it from Rona's reports. ‘So, Friday morning next, right?’
‘Yep,’ Carol said, her attention caught by the lock her son was manhandling. Thinking: I'll be seeing you later.
‘You … okay, Mrs Ransom?’
Carol looked round to see her neighbour's daughter looking at her curiously. ‘I'm great,’ she said with a big fake smile, and shut the door.
While she fixed him a small holding snack in the kitchen she submitted her son to a forensic interrogation as to how he had spent his day. You needed to extract this information quickly. What had happened at kindergarten seemed to become unreal or uninteresting within a couple of hours, as if events were ephemeral, and the past lost its charge like a battery. Carol envied this a great deal.
It appeared that he had ‘done things’ and that it had been ‘fine’.
They sat on the sofa together with a children's book – one perk of working at the library was an inexhaustible supply of these – and within fifteen minutes Carol felt herself relaxing. They could do that to you, sometimes, children. They were so much themselves that if you let yourself be pulled fully into their orbit, you could forget your own world for a time.
Then the phone rang. They looked up at it together. Their phone rang very seldom.
‘Someone's calling,’ Tyler said.
‘I know, sweetie.’ She got up and went over to the table, picked up the handset. ‘Yes?’
‘Hello, my dear.’
It was a woman's voice.
Carol knew immediately who it was. It was a moment before she could say anything in reply, and it came out as a brittle whisper.
‘How did you get this number?’
‘A little bird told me. Time to come home,’ the woman said. ‘We can help.’
Carol put down the phone.
‘Who was that?’ her son asked.
‘Nobody, honey.’
‘Can nobody talk, then?’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Sometimes.’
She asked him to count up the number of cows on the page of the book in front of him, and managed to walk to the bathroom and close the door before she threw up.
That night she checked the bolt thirty-two times when she went to bed, though she knew it was too late. Nobody was already inside the gates, and that's what panic actually was, she realized. It was the noise of the world whispering in your ear, when your life was ruled by something that wasn't there.
It was the sound of nobody talking, all the time.
It was a busy night in the restaurant. I didn't give Ted a heads-up that we wouldn't be seeing his pizza guy, as he'd have wondered where I'd got my information, but waited until he came asking for me to fill in – and acted like it was business as usual. I alternated between the oven, the floor and the bar as we went through two half-full sets of covers. Unusually good for that time of year, and you could see Ted relax a little as he realized it was all going to help cover part of the day's costs and appease the dark gods of cash flow.
I was the last member of staff to leave the restaurant, and on hand when Ted gave the outside door a final looking-over before locking it for the night. He grunted approvingly.
‘Nice job,’ he said. ‘I should really give you something for all that work.’
‘You already do,’ I said.
He looked at me for a moment. ‘Want a lift?’
‘I'm good,’ I said. ‘Looking forward to the walk.’
‘You're a weird guy,’ he said. When he got to his truck he looked back. ‘Thanks, John.’
‘All part of the service.’
He shook his head and got in the pickup, a man looking forward to a beer on his home turf and putting his feet up in front of late-night television with no idea that – for reasons of which he was entirely ignorant – his world stood a little more fragile tonight. But I guess none of us ever do know that, until after the fact.
I waited until he'd driven away, then got a chair down from the stacks. I'd told myself I'd wait half an hour, forty minutes tops, but it was only twenty before I heard a vehicle turn into the access road.
I felt my heart sink as Becki's car came into the lot, but got up and walked over. If I didn't want to be here now, I shouldn't have said the things I had earlier. This happens because of that, and words are actions too. A lesson that mankind in general – and me in particular – seems to find hard to get through their heads.
Kyle was in the passenger seat. He looked up, then away, and didn't say anything. His hands lay on his thighs, the fingers of both drumming constantly.
‘Hey, Captain Stupid,’ I said. ‘Having a good day?’
‘I've been there already,’ Becki said.
‘So what does he have for me?’
She turned and stared at her boyfriend. He spoke quietly. ‘Rick. And maybe Doug.’
‘Who would be?’
‘Assholes,’ Becki said, bitterly. ‘They're on the beach sometimes. They were at the party last night.’
I turned back to Kyle. ‘So how'd they come to know where you were keeping
