J. Wachowski - In Plain View

“You saw most of the raw stock before I cut it together. Give me some credit.” I rolled my neck and got a sound like something breaking. Deliberately, I jotted a short message on the scrap paper. “You’re pissed at me because your nephew got his fingers burned.”

“Bullshit!” he countered. There was a growing sheen to his head which was pumping red and white flashes of furious blood to his skin. “You should have shown me the finished version before you released it. Simple courtesy, even if nothing had changed. Those guys at network are going to want your ass on a platter now. Your problem is you want it both ways. You want a team position but you act like a freelancer. Here today-gone tomorrow. No respect for the team!”

Same theme, new variation. “I’ve been up two days, Gatt. Speaking of bullshit, I’m too tired to take this right now.” I stood up.

“You walk out that door, don’t think you’re coming back.”

“No, I don’t think I am.” I pushed the note across the desk. Signed and dated, it read simply, I resign.

I turned around and Ainsley was standing in the doorway, wearing his goofiest grin, carrying a VHS cassette pinched between his bandaged fingers. His face was pale, his eyes glassy, and he had a hint of manic vibration about him. Six or seven hours in the booth, running on nothing but deadline adrenaline and diet pop, and my college boy was still standing. Don’t ask me why, but I felt a little flash of pride.

Ainsley tilted his head to see around me. “Seen the story yet, Uncle Rich? It’s great.”

Gatt couldn’t speak. He pointed. His eyebrows twitched. His nostrils flared.

“Go ahead and show him,” I told Ainsley. “I’m gone.”

4:23:51 p.m.

I begged a ride off the mailroom courier to pick up the Subaru. Then drove back to the hospital, waited around for the doctor’s discharge and suffered through forty minutes of paperwork, wherein I promised to turn my entire self over to accounts receivable for parts if I forfeited on my bill.

Tonya kissed us both goodbye and went back to the city. Jenny cried.

“I’ll be back on the weekend, honey. You can count on it.” Tonya always knew the right thing to say. For both of us.

At last, Jenny and I were on the way home. It was a quiet drive. We hadn’t really been alone together since I’d shipped her off to school on Monday. The silence swirled between us, warping into an emotional black hole that sucked my energy. I wanted to pull over and slump into a long, dark nap.

I’m in this for the long haul, I reminded myself. Consider Jenny first.

As we pulled into the garage, I looked for her face in the rearview mirror. “Home at last.”

“Yeah,” she said. She didn’t sound convinced. She climbed out of the car and into the house without a glance back. It took me longer to gather up the sack of stuff from the hospital and my camera bag.

“Remember that guy we met at the picnic on Sunday-Sheriff Curzon?” I followed her inside the house. “He’s supposed to stop by later. Maybe share a pizza…what?”

She stood stock still, four feet inside the doorway. I almost stepped on her.

When she tipped her head to look up at me, I could see her eyes had dilated, the black iris swallowing up the lighter brown of her eyes. Her lips moved barely making words.

“What?”

“Someone’s here,” she whispered.

My first instinct was straight out of a bad TV movie. “Don’t be silly.” We were only four feet inside the door. They’d told me Jenny might be jittery coming home, but this was more than I expected.

“Someone’s in the house?”

Her head bobbed up and down, fast. “The TV was on when I first came in,” she said. “And the light, too. But they turned off when I opened the door.”

It sounded a little too specific to be a hallucination. I pushed her behind me.

“I put the lights on timers, remember? Wait here. I’ll check it out. Stay by the door.”

“No!” She grabbed my wrist.

“Jenny, calm down, babe. You don’t want to wait?”

She shook her head.

“You want to come?”

Nod.

No one could be in the house. The fact that my heart was beating twenty percent faster was my irrational need for excitement.

I dropped all the junk I was carrying and took Jenny’s cold hand in my warm, moist one. I led her over to the closet, quietly opened the door and removed the midwest girl’s weapon of choice-a solid oak, regulation, Louisville slugger.

In sixteen-inch softball, the balls aren’t the only things that run bigger.

Jenny appeared suitably impressed.

“Stay behind me,” I said. “But watch my bat.”

The main rooms of the house made a loop-entrance area to living room, family room, kitchen, dining room and back to the front. A hall off the living room led to the bedrooms. The garage led straight into the kitchen eating space. We walked all the way around the house once, turning on all the lights, before I said, “All clear.”

“Let’s check the bedrooms,” she whispered. “Just in case.”

Right. We walked up the hall and checked the bedrooms, too. Nothing.

Jenny tried a smile and took a big, deep breath. “Could we check the basement, too?”

I hoisted the wood onto my shoulder. “You bet. Let’s go.”

Basements can be creepy on the best of days, but ours was definitely intruder free. Jenny looked slightly embarrassed, but she was speaking to me in full sentences now, so I didn’t mind.

We stopped in front of the spare fridge and I pulled out a frozen pizza.

“Would you take this up and turn the oven on, kiddo? I’m going to throw in a load of wash, before I throw myself in the shower.”

I was still wearing the clothes I’d started with on Monday. Even black jeans can only take so much. I dropped my pants and stuffed them into the washer.

“Double-check I didn’t leave anything in the oven,” I called.

Jenny remained where I’d left her, right at the bottom of the steps. “Go upstairs…by myself?”

“I’ll be less than two minutes. You want to take this with you?” I held out the bat.

Her mouth twisted in a rising grimace. That smile of hers needed work.

“It’s heavy.” She put the pizza box under one arm and carried the bat in front of her with both hands.

“Darn right it’s heavy. What should we do tonight?” I kept talking as she went up the stairway, giving her a voice to hang on to as well. After I tossed my shirt in the washer, I dug through the hamper for other stuff that could stand a double wash. “Want to watch a movie? After Sheriff Curzon leaves, maybe we could watch some cartoons…Jen?” There were no sound effects upstairs-oven door squeaking, gas clicking as the oven fired-so I called louder, “Jenny?”

No answer.

A giant thud rocked the ceiling above my head.

My first thought was that she’d seized again and pitched a header on the kitchen floor.

I sprinted for the stairs, throwing on some old bathrobe hanging near the dryer, pounding up two at a time. As I rounded the top step, I hollered, “Jenny! What the hell was that?”

“Hello, Maddy.”

Pat the fireman was standing in our kitchen. I caught him in the act of picking up the fallen bat. He let it swing from his fingers by the cap end. “Did you send her up here to club me with a baseball bat?”

“Softball,” I corrected. Under duress, my primal nature reverts to know-it-all. “What are you doing here, Pat?”

Recognition took the edge off my shock and sharpened my anxiety until I tasted sour metal at the back of my tongue. He was wearing jeans, a leather jacket and a baseball cap-White Sox. Figures. My grandfather always said don’t trust a White Sox fan.