D Gillespie - The Toy Thief

“What the fuck is wrong with you?”

I stormed out of the room and left Andy sitting there, his eyes watching me, half-glazed.

I didn’t see him again for a few hours. Andrew was sleeping, and when I realized how long it had been since I laid eyes on Andy, I went looking for him. He was still sitting in the rocking chair, but the TV was off. So he just stared out the window, dead to the world as far as I could tell. A man might make it through prison like that, might even make it through a simple, dead-end job day after day. But a father can’t be dead inside, not without someone getting hurt.

“I know you’re there,” he said, proving me wrong.

I walked in and sat down across from him. “What is it?” I said bluntly. “What is… all this?”

“Whenever I hold him,” he said, “something’s… off.”

I shook my head in frustration. “Everyone says it’s hard at first. I mean, it takes time to learn how to be a dad.”

“No,” he said softly. “I love him. I know that. But something isn’t right.”

I shifted in my seat, wondering why he refused to look at me, to actually see my eyes.

“What is it?”

“My hands,” he said, holding them plaintively before him. “They can’t… they don’t work right. I touch him. I feel his skin. But I can’t…”

“Can’t what?”

He turned toward me now, grief and fear blooming in his eyes. “I can’t hurt him. I’m supposed to hurt him. My hands,” he said, pleading. “They can’t do what they’re supposed to do. I’m not supposed to be… this.” He motioned to his chest, staring at his skin. He quivered and rocked, scratching at his skin the same way you might scratch at a wool sweater, rubbing his knuckles like his bones were uncomfortable, like they wanted out. It was a painful, awful, and miserably pitiful thing to see.

“Fix me,” he said, reaching for me. “Please, you have to fix me. It’s gone. The dark. I know it is. I felt it die that day.”

My fingers itched, and I nodded. “I know it is too, Andy. I felt it too. So all of this,” I said, touching his chest, “it’s all you. You can beat this thing. I know you can.”

The tears on his cheek were the first real signs of emotion I had seen from him since he moved, and somehow, they made everything worse. I could have dealt with the anger, the blind fury that had made him smash the globe so long ago. Anger was something that made sense to me. But this. This pathetic thing in front of me was too much.

“He needs you,” I said. “Out of everything else on this planet, he needs you.”

“No,” he replied, his voice rising and hitching. “He needs Andy. Andy would be a good father. Andy would know what to say. And Andy wouldn’t expect to feel anything more than skin when he touched his son.”

“That’s you,” I said. “It’s all you.”

“I don’t know what I am. I don’t quite think I’m a man. But I don’t think I’m a monster either. I don’t know what I am.”

He let his eyes drift back down to his lap. Then he said the last words I ever heard him speak.

“All I know is, Andy’s dead.”

I tried to talk to him after that, but he wouldn’t say another word. I watched him the rest of that night, keeping as close an eye on him as I could while still taking care of Andrew. But I was only one person, just a girl. Girls get tired.

When Andy got into his car and drove several miles away before killing himself, I like to think he did it for us. He wouldn’t have wanted me to find him like that, his eyes glazed, a pair of empty bottles on the floorboard, whiskey and pills. They’d given him the prescription when he got out. Said it would help him sleep.

Once, in the early days after he got out of jail, he told me that he had never left that cave, and he was right of course. All those years later, he was still in there, still locked in that cage. Then again, another part of me thinks he was already dead on his feet long ago. The moment my mom left, she took a good part of him with her. The pictures showed that. The Thief took a bit more, and jail a bit more. The sleeping pills just finished the job.

That was about three years ago now. It scared the hell out of me at first, the idea of taking care of Andrew all by myself. Then I remembered the few months we had already spent together, the two of us like awkward roommates, me single-handedly taking care of the baby, and I knew it would all work out. He’s a sweet kid, running around now, rough and rambunctious, but with a quiet streak that surprises you. I’ve never told him to call me Mom, because I never wanted to be anyone’s mom, and it just felt wrong to try and make him do something like that. The questions are coming though. I can feel it.

He doesn’t ask about his dad, but you can see him working it all out now and then. I showed him some pictures, hoping to put him at ease, to make him feel just like everyone else at daycare – the mom, dad, grandparents, all of it. One of those quiet spells came over him then, and before I knew it, he had sneaked off and I couldn’t find him for a half-hour or so. I finally found him under the cabinet in one of the bathrooms, tucked back in there like an animal or something. Just like a cat.

That was how we first found Memphis. He’d been hiding in the shed out back, desperate and tiny, ribs showing through his short fur. I fished him out with a can of tuna, parsed out a piece at a time. He was rough from the start, always skittish. The kind of cat you couldn’t quite trust not to eat your food whenever you left the room. Still, he was the best damn cat I’d ever had. He lived to be fifteen, and he was just as mean as ever on the day he died. Some people might hate a cat like that, but I think we understood each other. Maybe that’s why I was able to coax Andrew out just the same way.

Just this year, a few months after he turned four, I took him to the Trails. We live on the other side of town now, and I don’t have much reason to go back to the old stomping grounds. The whole place was built up, sliced into small lots where the Trails used to be. We drove around the new subdivision, crisscrossing our way through each of the different side streets, my hands shaking a bit on the steering wheel.

“This place,” I told Andrew. “They called this the Trails.”

“What’s trails?”

“It’s… hard to explain. It was like, woods. Forest. With all these little paths cut in it.”

“Why?”

I laughed. That was his new favorite word.

“It just was, baby.”

I tried to mentally pinpoint the landmarks I had known, based on the houses that rested in the same spots. A two-story house of dark red brick was probably the place where we stumbled onto Barnett. A little roundabout marked the spot with the tree etched in pentagrams. If only these people knew. This side of town has changed so much, especially since we left. Did we take the bad parts with us? Or was it the Thief?

Bit of both, if I had to guess.

We drove to the far side of the neighborhood and found it fenced off, the chain link hidden behind a wall of greenery, much less offensive to the eye. There was a small turnaround in front of the gate, and I stopped there, almost certain that someone would ask me to leave. I didn’t care. Even if a cop showed up, I was going in.

“What’s this?” Andrew asked.

“Just a place I want to see, baby. Just to make sure I wasn’t dreaming.”

I pulled back the chain around the gate, enough for him to shimmy through, and I slipped in behind him. It was lovely back there, just as it had been before, that last time I’d seen it. I’d never come back before then. For most of my adult life I couldn’t have even imagined setting foot here. But there I was again, a woman grown, awestruck by the place, by how small it all looked, how the spans between tree lines seemed so very close. I thought once more of Andy, who had taken one last trip back this way. It had been in the dead of night then, and I wondered if the moon had been out for that last stroll.