Tom Piccirilli - The Cold Spot

He was back in the house he grew up in. The lawn had been mowed, the edging along the grass done with precision, the hedges perfectly trimmed, the tops as straight as if they’d been laid out with a ruler. Either it was high aesthetic or his father had a touch of OCD.

At the kitchen table, his mother sat calling to him, as if he was in another room. He stepped closer but she couldn’t seem to see him. He noted the way she wore her hair in looping ringlets, a slight reddish tint to it, the same as he got in his beard when he let it grow out. Her lips were full, almost as full as Lila’s. Her belly just a tiny bulge.

He waited to see himself, as a boy, come running by, but it didn’t happen. The dead little kid was in a chair at the other end of the table. Weird to see it and still not know if it was a boy or a girl. It stared at him with its mouth moving, indecipherable sounds emerging and growing louder until he thought he could almost make them out. He moved closer and closer, and the kid leaned forward and spit in his face.

“I dreamed of my mother again last night,” Chase told her.

“I thought you might be,” Lila said. “The way you twisted in your sleep. I held you and rubbed your chest lightly and you quieted down some after a time.”

She’d been raised on mountain folklore, backwoods myths, and gospel tent revivals. No matter how hard she tried, she’d never be able to lose the superstitious streak that had been spiked into her from childhood. When he spoke of his dreams her face grew very intense and she spooked him a little with how seriously she took them.

“What did your mama tell you?” she asked.

“Nothing. She just kept saying my name.”

Lila nodded, like spirits did this on occasion. He wondered if he should go fire a few rounds into the woods, maybe it would ease his mind a bit. Lila studied him for a moment, her features folding along all the contours of worry. It made his guts tighten, and she laid a hand against the side of his face.

“The dead will find a way to you. They’ll make you listen.”

It took about four years in Mississippi before he started to lose his cool. He’d done pretty well, all things considered.

They were at a picnic on a lake, all the kids running around down by the shore, skimming rocks and chasing turtles. Molly Mae and Judge Kelton had three little ones by now and were working on a fourth, the old man getting healthier by the year while Molly looked ready to throw herself under a truck.

Chase tried to keep his mind on the conversations circling him, but the accent still threw him off and he laughed inappropriately on occasion. He was never going to get a handle on it.

He knew he’d been getting a little distant and didn’t know how to bring himself back.

Lila came over and sat on his lap. “You want to head home to the East Coast, don’t you.”

“Yes.”

He knew she wanted to leave this place, maybe even more than he did, just to get away from the constant reminder of her family asking about when they were going to have children.

“You think I’ll like it there?” she asked.

“It’ll take some adjustment, but yeah, I think you will.”

“We going to live in Manhattan? I’m not sure I could get used to a big city like that.”

“You could, but I think we’ll be better off out on Long Island. Get a little house.”

“I suppose police work would be a little more action-packed.”

It made him tense up. He hadn’t thought for a minute she’d want to stay a cop in New York.

“I don’t think that’s an especially good idea,” he said.

Her voice grew heavy as she whispered into his ear. “You think those bad New York crews are going to take advantage of my poor countrified ways?”

“You wouldn’t be out there arresting your cousin Ernie.”

“Now you know Ernie was a real villain despite him being blood.”

It was supposed to make him feel like an idiot but instead it alarmed him a touch. She was strong and smart and could handle herself, but New York was a different world from anything she’d known. He thought about trying to talk her out of it, making a real scene if he had to, but there wasn’t any point. She’d hold her course the way she always had, right from the start.

L ila had never seen the ocean before. The first thing he did was take her down to the beaches. The water hypnotized her, the ever-shifting terrain and form of it, the endless blue and white fading beyond the vanishing point of the horizon. It took her hours before she went in up to her ankles. The sea terrified and elated her. A couple of times she kneeled and splashed, as if she were playing with a child. The waves rolled in and out, and from second to second, as her eyes widened and narrowed, it appeared to Chase that she had to force herself to remember she didn’t have a lost child rolling in the surf. That the kid had never been there no matter how alive in her mind it might be, calling out to her.

He became a teacher, like his father, in a town not far from where he grew up and where his mother had been murdered. Auto shop. He didn’t need a master’s degree to show kids how to fix a fan belt. Most of them couldn’t even change a spark plug and were only there because the other elective in the time slot was Home Ec. What you wound up with was all the girls learning how to make waffles and all the guys trying to act manly even though they each had Triple A and would call a towing service before changing a tire.

Only a handful of the boys were destined to be grease monkeys. They didn’t have the grades or the attitude for college and were bound to work in garages for the rest of their lives. A couple would take to it, and the others would probably be hissing in bitterness for decades to come. Chase taught them all the way Jonah and a few of the other string members had taught him, as if there was something mythic and lifesaving hidden within the depths of a car.

The kids liked him because he was young and cared more about life lessons than he did about grades. He’d watch them in the hallways and listen to their chatter. So many of them seemed bent out of shape already, worried about college, their résumés, mortgages they didn’t even have yet. He was astonished by the number of kids who had to go to rehab, had psychiatrists, took antidepressants because they’d already tried to off themselves. For the first time he started to realize maybe he’d been better off without school after all.

He taught the kids a couple of car-boosting tricks. Nothing too serious, just goofing around. But it solidified his reputation. They dug the way he spoke to them, as equals. Unlike other teachers, Chase would never judge or analyze them, and the kids knew it. The rest of the faculty members, trying to relate, would have to sift back through their lives and make an effort to recall what it was like to be a teen.

But they couldn’t quite remember and they didn’t really want to. It was too painful. Resentment would flare. So they wound up looking fake and deceptive despite their sincerity. He saw it happening all the time. Watching some old man make an ass out of himself hoping to sound hip, waving hall passes around, throwing a conniption fit if anyone was still around after the bell rang.

But Chase had never been a kid and had never been to school. He couldn’t pretend even if he wanted to. He talked to his students the way he talked to everyone. They respected him for it. They also knew that if they ever crossed him or gave him too much shit, he wouldn’t send them to the principal’s office. He’d take care of it himself. It kept them on their toes.