Shya Scanlon - The Guild of Saint Cooper

“So Happy comes home and there’s his wife, drunk on the couch with a, well, not a stranger exactly, but there was broken glass all over the floor…”

We walked for a little bit in silence. Blake was obviously irritated, and the more I thought about it, the more I worried that it had actually been some kind of trespass.

“I can’t believe you didn’t tell me about this,” Blake said at last.

“Tell you what, though? I mean, nothing happened!”

“What do you mean nothing happened? You broke a window, nearly hurting a young girl, then got drunk with her mother.”

We stopped at a corner to let a moving truck pass. A young boy waved at us through the window, then flipped us off.

“Well,” I said, “nothing untoward.”

“But it could have. It was a charged moment. It was the kind of moment that can easily lead to something happening.”

“So you admit nothing happened!”

“I would have told you about it. Actually, I wouldn’t have thrown the balloon, nor would I have gotten drunk in some strange man’s house, alone. But if I did, I would have told you about it.”

“Well, I did tell you about it, technically.”

“Just now?”

“Yeah, you know, isn’t that proof that I wasn’t hiding anything?”

“I’m not saying you’re hiding something.”

“What are you saying, then?”

“I don’t know, Blake. That you’re careless?”

“I’m careless now.”

“You put yourself in a potentially dangerous situation, and you didn’t even notice how potentially dangerous it was! I’d say that’s careless.”

“So now we’re assuming that it was potentially dangerous. Was I, like, moments away from fucking her? Please, tell me.”

“Who knows? Who knows what would have happened if Happy hadn’t come home.”

There was no way to win this argument. I picked up a rock from the front yard of an abandoned house and threw it through a window. Blake stopped and looked at me, stunned. What was I trying to say? I didn’t know, exactly, but it felt good.

“Hey!”

We turned to see a man step out onto his front porch across the street. He was wearing a bright pink jumpsuit and holding a baseball bat. There was a figure behind him, too, but I couldn’t make it out. Spouse? Another man with a bat? He stared at us questioningly, trying to look tough and almost succeeding, probably the way I would have had someone thrown a rock through Brock’s window.

“Let’s keep walking,” said Blake calmly. “Please.”

“Sorry,” I called to the man.

The day had ended without me noticing, but with Blake walking three steps ahead I became acutely aware of the darkness. The city had shut down power to two-thirds of the streetlights — an effort at conservation that, in light of the spike in crime, had been met with fierce opposition from both neighborhood watch groups and national public health associations like WIC. I knew we were in greater danger statistically, but it was only walking under the odd streetlight that I felt exposed. I noticed we were taking a route that didn’t take us by the Edelsteins. Was Blake doing this intentionally? I hoped so. I liked to think she wanted to avoid the site of our disagreement. It was a small act of grace that gave me hope. Blake had once pointed out a story to me on some blog about a married couple who, every year on their anniversary, swallowed their wedding rings. Fishing the bands out of their shit the next day, they claimed, was a symbolic act. Blake had found it utterly disgusting, but I’d secretly been touched. Of course, I hadn’t told her my true feelings and had made a big show of my agreement. But clearly I hadn’t learned.

When we arrived at the house I tried to get a look at the Edelsteins’ front porch but couldn’t see it. In my mind, they were both still sitting there, on the bench swing, waiting for Alice. I felt terrible for having made Josie cry, and I felt terrible for having spent that afternoon with her, drunk. And for the first time, I realized Alice wouldn’t be coming home.

DETERMINED TO KNOW WHAT the fuck they were doing, I’d been waiting for Crystal and Olivia in my mother’s old Escort for almost an hour — enough time to reverse my decision, reverse it again. Hearing about the success of my book triggered something in me, somehow, and made me feel unimpeachable. But I felt a bit creepy sitting there, frankly, and because I didn’t even understand my own motives the creep factor stuck. By the time they came out and got into their car, I’d decided to go through with it half because I didn’t want to run into anyone on my way back inside and have to explain myself. They pulled onto the street and fifteen minutes later I was following them up the north side of Queen Anne Hill.

My brother had lived on Queen Anne, had fallen in with the philanthropist, wine-tasting crowd. Nibblers, he’d call them. He used to complain about working downtown only to come home to a view of his office.

“It’s like being a plumber,” he said to me once, “and having windows that face a sewage treatment plant.”

“You’re comparing Seattle to a sewer, you realize.”

“ Au contraire ,” he said. “I’m comparing it to a plant.”

During the ride out of Ballard I tried to think of something to say to Crystal should I be caught and confronted. My first thought was to say she’d left Olivia’s windbreaker, a thought which got me several blocks before I realized that for this to have even the faintest hint of truth I would have had to make some attempt to get her attention on the drive instead of keeping a safe distance behind. That, and I’d have to have the windbreaker. I then briefly flirted with honesty, but “to see where you go” was obviously dodging the question.

Queen Anne was an aristocratic enclave initially served by trollies that were hauled up by a descending weight on tracks beneath a street on the south, downtown side of the hill. I used to break into the tunnel through a manhole to do drugs, and I’d always thought the whole thing was ripe for metaphor: A rich neighborhood with inhabitants who required an underground system to reach it. Judging by the absence of even the slightest sign of life, reaching it was clearly no longer a priority for anyone except Crystal.

When she turned down the street they used to live on, I pulled over.

“Wow,” I said. “Okay.”

Sure enough, they pulled into the driveway of their old house.

After they disappeared inside, I crossed to the opposite side of the street and made my way down the block, scampering through overgrown yards from house to house. I figured my best bet would be to set up camp in a house across from theirs, and fortunately one of these had been under construction. Long white strips of plastic sheeting hung from a half-demolished wall, and I snuck through it into what had once been a kitchen. Looking for stairs to the second floor, I took a hall toward the back of the house and into what looked like a library. Books were strewn about and the fireplace even seemed to have been recently used. I took a poker and poked through the ashes: more books. A partially burned spine revealed the volume to be an Encyclopedia Britannica, Eleventh Edition, EVA to FRA. I tried to think of what would have been in it. Evangelism, of course. Evolution. France. There was a standing chalkboard against one wall, and on it was written the word “Day” and then, in a spot that bore the chalky smudges of multiple erasures, the number 15.

“Fifteen days,” said someone behind me.

I turned quickly, slipped on a magazine, and fell into a pile of paperbacks.

“Fuck,” I said from the ground. “Sorry, I was just…”