Sam Weller - Shadow Show

Shirley says, “I’m sorry, but—”

“No,” Doug says. “It’s me. It’s Doug.”

There is silence. Then Doug hears her digging through her purse to find her cigarettes. She keeps them in a rectangular pouch with a snap; there’s a pocket on the side for the disposable butane lighter. He hears the flick of the lighter, his mother puffing to get the cigarette lit.

She exhales and says, “I knew it was you the first time you called all those years ago.”

“How?” Doug asks. “How did you know?”

“A mother knows her son,” she says.

Doug flips off his bedroom light and lies down, setting the phone on his chest.

He says, “I need to tell you something.”

“Hold that thought?” his mother says, her voice getting higher as she ends her request as a question. “I want to know about you. I want to know how you’ve been. Did everything turn out okay?”

No, he thinks. No, it hasn’t . But he doesn’t want to disappoint her. “Everything’s beautiful,” Doug says.

“Are you married?”

“Yes,” Doug lies.

“Kids?”

“A boy and a girl.”

“Are they healthy?”

“Yes, they are,” Doug says. “They’re perfect.”

“What’s your wife’s name?”

He imagines his coworker from earlier tonight, the way she would touch his ankle with her toes. “Louise,” Doug says. “Louise Malgrave.”

“I’m so happy,” his mother says.

“But Mom. Listen,” Doug says.

His mother interrupts: “Shhhhhhhhhh. Hush now. I want to hear about you.”

Doug shuts his eyes. He’s so tired. “I don’t know what else there is to tell you.”

“Tell me what your day is like. Tell me what you look like now,” she says. “Tell me anything. I just want you to talk to me.”

Doug obeys. He tells her of an imaginary day in the life of a Doug who doesn’t exist. He tells her about his three-bedroom house. It’s in a neighborhood she always wanted to live in. He tells her about the new riding lawn mower, the family portraits on the wall, the alligator shoes Louise bought him for his birthday. He tells her about the life she always dreamed of, the life he’ll never live, and he can tell by the way she laughs or sighs that she’s happy about how her son’s future will turn out.

Doug wakes up with the phone on his chest, the receiver beeping near his ear. He fell asleep while talking to his mother. His heart starts pounding. How could he have fallen asleep?

He reaches over and flips on the light. He hangs up the phone long enough to get a dial tone and then dials his old number again. It barely rings before someone answers.

“Who is this?” It’s Uncle Bob. His voice is deep, a rumble. He sounds as though he hasn’t slept in days, weeks.

Doug says, “Can we talk?”

“I knew it,” Uncle Bob says. “I just didn’t think you’d have the gall to call here.”

“You don’t understand,” Doug says.

In the background, Shirley says, “Who is it?” and Uncle Bob says, “You know damned well who it is.”

“Hold on,” Doug says. His own breathing is shallow. He feels sick. “I’m not who you think I am,” he says. “Please listen to me.”

Uncle Bob’s voice comes to Doug from a distance now; he must have set down the receiver. “You want to talk to him one last time?” he asks Shirley. “Come here and talk to him,” he yells.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Bob,” Shirley says.

Something falls over and breaks. Shirley screams.

Doug, holding the phone, paces his bedroom. He’s yelling into the receiver: “Bob! Bob! Bob, let’s talk!”

Their voices, his mother’s and Uncle Bob’s, grow louder as they approach the phone, but it sounds as though his mother is being dragged against her will.

“Leave her alone!” Doug yells.

Clearly, Bob isn’t listening. He’s gripped by his own rage, the way a man drowning in quicksand can’t think of anything except surviving. He says, “You want to talk to him? Hunh? You want to talk to him?”

The phone, Doug can tell, is being picked up. But then there is a loud crash coupled with a scream. The crash is like an explosion in Doug’s ear. This sound repeats, over and over, until his mother stops screaming. He hears his uncle breathing heavily, and then he hears nothing, as though the phone’s cord has been pulled from the wall. Doug waits.

But there’s only silence. Just silence.

Doug hangs up and dials again. There’s a noise after the second ring, a click, as though someone is answering, but it’s only the familiar automated voice from years past: “We’re sorry, but the number you have dialed is no longer in service…”

Doug slams the receiver back into place.

He sits on the edge of his bed, phone on his knee, shaking. He’s cold, too. Freezing. He plays the last phone call over in his head and then plays it again, his uncle yelling, “You want to talk to him? Hunh? You want to talk to him?”

On a hunch, Doug lifts the phone into the air, holding the receiver to keep it secure in its place, and then flips the entire phone upside down. The bottom is black metal with perforations, four thick rubber washers for legs, stickers with numbers printed across them, a dial for turning the ringer up, and several screws. Doug feels it before he sees it. The tip of his finger hits a series of rough patches on the metal surface. Holding it close to the light, Doug can see it now: dried blood. He confirms it by chipping some away with his fingernail. It’s been here all along, traveling with him from apartment to apartment, always next to him as he sleeps. Doug chips away more dried blood until his hands are covered with brown flecks and his fingertip is bleeding from scratching at the phone.

It’s his mother’s blood. It’s his mother’s blood, and Doug is holding the murder weapon.

Doug drops the phone onto his bed and walks to his kitchen, flipping on the light. He picks up the phone bill and studies it up and down, searching for an address. On the back of the last page is print so small, he isn’t even sure in what language it’s written. He pulls from his desk drawer a magnifying glass his mother had given to him when he was a child. It has a hand-carved ivory handle and sterling silver frame, and it had once belonged to her grandfather. Before handing it over, his mother had made Doug promise to be careful with it. Doug is depressed now to think he’s kept it not on a mantel or wrapped in velvet but in a drawer littered with matchbooks, old IDs, orphaned keys, a furtive golf ball, and worthless wristwatches that died long ago.

He holds the magnifying glass up to his eye, moving it close to the text on the bill and then back up to his face, until the words come into focus. In the tiniest print, he sees a street address for customer complaints. The company is local, and their offices are located in a building downtown that he knows well: the Belvedere.

Doug leaves his apartment, the phone bill clutched in his fist. He’s never been downtown this time of night, after the bars have closed. The stoplights are all blinking yellow for caution. There are, however, a surprising number of cars parked along the side streets. Doug takes the first space he sees, even though it’s several blocks from the Belvedere.

Doug had lived with his Uncle Bob until he graduated high school and went away to college. During those two years after his mother’s murder, Uncle Bob had taken surprisingly good care of Doug. In fact, he was kinder to Doug after his mother’s death than he’d ever been when she was alive. It wasn’t that any violence ever had been visited upon Doug, nor did he ever see his uncle do anything to his mother. It was more of a mood that Doug was keenly aware of when his uncle was around, the way a rainy day might become eerily sunny and airless before a tornado. It was intangible. But all of that stopped once his mother was gone.