Michael Collings - The Slab

Elayne met Daniel for the first time two weeks later. They had their first official date in the middle of March-they took Miles to a dollar-a-car drive-in to see Home Alone. Even though it was raining so hard that neither of them could see through the front window, and Miles fell asleep fifteen minutes into the film, they counted the date a huge success.

And a week after Daniel Warren’s thirty-second birthday, accompanied to the Chapel of the Roses in Las Vegas only by Miles and by a still stunned Amanda Warren, Daniel and Elayne were married.

The new family lived for another couple of weeks in Daniel’s apartment, but it had been clear from the beginning that that arrangement was only temporary. The apartment was spacious enough, but there was only one bedroom, and even though Miles insisted repeatedly that he thought sleeping in the living room on Daniel’s overstuffed sofa was “real cool,” both Daniel and Elayne realized that the boy needed a home, a real home.

They began looking at possibilities.

From the beginning, Daniel had insisted that they not even consider anything right in the San Fernando Valley.

“It’s already too expensive to buy here, too crowded for a family,” he explained to Elayne late one evening. “In another few years, it will be like living in the middle of a fishbowl. There’re some new places going up farther north, between here and Ventura, that look pretty nice.” Besides, he continued, he had begun negotiations to take over an ailing Ford dealership in a rapidly developing area called Coastal Crest. So far there wasn’t much there, but what there was had been building up fast. Daniel could imagine it as it would be in ten years or so-an exclusive, high-priced neighborhood where the people would have plenty of money to spend on things like second or third cars.

So they began looking near Coastal Crest, in the hollow tucked comfortably into the Coastal Range that was generally known as Tamarind Valley.

It didn’t take long to find the perfect place.

On a beautiful, summery day early in May, Daniel took a day off from work. Miles was still in school, but Elayne had already quit her jobs, so the two of them drove the thirty minutes by freeway out to Tamarind Valley. The further they went, the more Elayne liked what she saw-gently sloping hills crowned with bright green grass and patches of vivid yellow, thigh-high mustard. They met the realtor at his office on Tamarind Boulevard, just off the 101 Freeway between one knot of developments that was Coastal Crest and a second, maybe five miles further north, that was Tamarind Valley.

Half an hour later, they were comfortably seated in the back seat of a brand new, air-conditioned 1992 Ford Taurus wagon and heading out to look at listings.

Elayne fell immediately in love with the third house they viewed. It was certainly big enough for the three of them. “And for more children, if you want more,” she added in a whisper to Daniel. Diplomatically, the realtor chose that moment to turn on the kitchen tap and blither on about the high water-flow.

The house had five bedrooms, a huge open-beamed living room that looked even larger than it really was, and a comfy kitchen/dining room combination overlooking a deep back yard and beyond that the Coastal Range further to the south. The two-car garage was roomy as well, and even though there was a small crack in the cement slab that threaded its way aimlessly on a rough diagonal from one corner to the opposite-recently sanded down so that it was less obvious and, more importantly, presented less potential for tripping-the place seemed just right. The yard was beautifully, professionally landscaped, with trees and shrubs and blossoming geraniums that nodded brightly in the sunlight.

“I just love it,” Elayne whispered to Daniel as Fred Land ushered them back to his waiting Taurus and drove them past the long lines of houses on Oleander. “It’s a great house, and there are lots of kids for Miles to play with.”

That at least was true. There seemed to be three or four kids per house all along the block.

“How about it?” she asked again an hour later when Fred Land stepped out of his office at Lyons Realty for a moment to get them coffee. “Please.”

“We should check things out a little more, first, shouldn’t we?” Daniel said. “We should talk to some of the neighbors, find out about the area. We should…”

“Please,” Elayne repeated.

And because there was a certain texture to her voice that for an instant sounded startlingly like Amanda Warren’s, and because the exact details of the house were less important than the simple fact of who would be living in it with him…and because he recognized that land values in Tamarind Valley could only go up, he agreed.

Elayne never quite noticed that Daniel had not said anything at all about the house itself. When Fred Land returned with tray supporting three cups of steaming coffee and a half a dozen doughnuts on a paper plate, Daniel Warren said simply and directly, “We want it. Get started.”

The deal closed thirty days later, on June 17, 1992. The next day, June 18, Daniel Warren, Elayne Warren, and Miles Stanton moved in (they hadn’t gotten around to legally changing Miles’ last name, although Daniel assured Elayne and Miles that he intended to-Miles giggled happily at the idea). They rented a U-Haul truck and began moving from his apartment just off Sepulveda to the house at 1066 Oleander.

To their house.

That night, Daniel Warren waited until his wife of just under two months was soundly asleep, worn out by the rigors of moving and nudged further into deep sleep by medication that he knew she took nightly…only this time she didn’t know that she had already taken another pill carefully pulverized and mixed with a glass of fine white wine after dinner.

Then he got out of bed, careful not to disturb her just in case, and left the room. He closed the door silently and securely behind him.

For the first time-but not for the last time-Daniel Warren tiptoed naked down the hall, trying to calm his racing pulse and steady his shaking hands. He had waited for so long, planned so carefully, put up with so much, just to reach this moment.

He stopped at the closed door at the end of the hall, breathed deeply two or three times, then swung the door open and stepped into the early summer-night warmth of the back bedroom where his ten-year-old stepson Miles lay sleeping. He stood next to the boy’s bed, his legs almost touching the bed clothing that had fallen halfway to the floor, his toes digging nervously into the carpeting.

In spite of everything he had felt for all of his adult life, for a long time he dared not move. Then he silently drew back the single sheet that covered the boy’s bare chest and bare legs. Holding one hand ready to clamp tightly across the boy’s mouth if Miles should wake up screaming, he extended his other hand, trembling with anticipation, and began tugging at the inch-wide elastic waistband of the boy’s stark white underpants.

By the time Miles Stanton turned fifteen, he still had not changed his surname from Stanton to Warren. He adamantly refused to allow the change, even though his mother pressured him again and again to do it. She could get no reason from him, simply his stony rejection of the idea. Daniel never pushed the issue.

In addition, the boy had learned a number of important things.

He had learned how to keep frightening secrets from everyone, even- especially — from his mother. He had learned to pretend that he loved someone that he did not love. He had learned to keep to himself just in case he should let something slip during an idle moment of play or relaxation. He had learned to accept pain without making a sound. He had learned to give pleasure that was, for him, torture. He had learned fear.