Charles Bock - Beautiful Children

Loose change still sat on the counter. Mixed in with the quarters, nickels, and pennies, there was a half roll of breath mints whose wrapping paper trailed off, and a number of matchbooks. She zeroed in on these. They were black, every one of them. Three shone with gloss and might have been new. Another was creased and weathered. The lid on the final book would not shut, and Lorraine saw that all the matches had been torn from its left side. Examining another book, she again found its matches torn from the left side. Embossed letters on the lid. A gentlemen's club on Industrial. Lorraine's first reaction was a pointed anger. But this soon faded; it made perfect sense for Lincoln to frequent strip clubs.

Still it was painful.

Disappointment grew as she thought about it — not because the husband she had spurned for almost a year had found other forms of entertainment; rather, Lorraine's disappointment was rooted in the fact that during the course of her adult life, this man had been her best friend, the lover she'd desired most, her most intimate confidant, the man she could not have more proudly called the father of her child. Even now she was sure that Lincoln was not a bad guy, far from it; he was a decent person, a man whose only guiding principles had been to do what he felt was the best thing for his wife and his family. No. Lorraine's disappointment came with the realization that this had been the case all along, but she had been so firmly ensconced in her own pain that she had not been alert to his suffering. By all rights the discovery of those matchbooks in her son's room should have been shocking; but their existence felt as logical as anything did to Lorraine these days, and this was as disappointing as anything she had to deal with.

Still, she could accept what her marriage had come to, so long as she believed her child was alive. And she was sure this was so. A mother knows. She could shut her eyes and envision the morgue and the sheet being pulled back on her son's body. She could see herself looking down at his blue-white skin and his dead stare. Hundreds of scenarios visited her, gruesome thoughts tormented her, and yet none took hold inside her heart. None of them resonated as true. The phone had rung on her birthday, hadn't it? Newell was alive and out in the world, of this his mother was sure. She wondered how much he had grown, suddenly worried that he needed clothes, and had a strange thought about the obsolescence of his wardrobe in the closet. She hoped he was warm and healthy and had food to eat. Volunteer work had given her some understanding of what possible lives he might be leading, but it was nearly impossible for Lorraine to align the grime and pain of a life on the street with the child that she had brought into this world.

How could that life be preferable to what they had given him?

Into the universe she once again gave a primal, guttural prayer, praying that caring people in a shelter had gotten him, that her son had found safety, established a new life for himself, something with some modicum of order and comfort, this even as she tried to imagine why, if his life had this comfort, he would not contact his mother.

Not for a second did she believe he had been a troubled child.

Not for a second did she believe that he had been unhappy — not in a manner that was anything more than transitory.

There was no understanding. There were no hows, no whys, no logic, no answers. There was only numbness. Exhaustion. The absurdity of this life she was in.

It was well after midnight when Lincoln got home. Lorraine heard his car pull up. By the time he opened the front door, she was downstairs, waiting. She saw he was tired, and a little disoriented, surprised to see her.

She went to him and he said “Hey,” and he wrapped his arms around her and held her. “What is it? What?”

She did not answer but let him hold her and inhaled the smell of nicotine on his clothes. The stench of alcohol on his breath.

And something else.

“Lorraine?”

“The day. I, it just—”

Perfume. All over him.

The embrace ended, Lorraine removing herself, stepping back.

“There's been a mistake with the appetizers,” she said. “We were supposed to have grilled shrimp with spicy cocktail sauce. But it looks like there was a misprint or something. Midge, the banquet planner. She left all these messages.”

“Okay?”

“Shrimp's not part of the seventy-five-dollar menu. We can still have it but we'll have to pay.”

“That doesn't sound so serious.”

“It's forty dollars a dozen.”

He seemed to exhale now, eyeing her with a bit of suspicion.

“Right now we're fine,” she said. “We've got marinated chicken kebobs and grilled vegetable kebobs. Also these flame-roasted red peppers and smoked provolone. They're served on fresh baguettes with olive oil, they're supposed to be delicious. And there's going to be vegetable and cheese trays all around. So we can go with that. God knows there's enough other things to worry about—”

“Lorraine—?”

“But I'm telling you, Link, I was really tempted to pay for the upgrade out of our pocket, just to spite them, just to stick it to them, you know? Then we'd have the shrimp. We'd have a better cut of prime rib. I really was about to do it. And then, then I thought, It's a fund-raiser for teenagers living on the street.

“We're going to give these people all this food,” she said, “and, and, and meanwhile—”

Her husband took her to him and he held her head to his chest and stroked her hair as he used to do a long time ago. He told her it would all be fine.

“What are we doing?” Lorraine asked. “We have to let it go. We have to. But how, how do you do that?”

Lincoln held her, and kept holding her, and they sat at the base of the staircase. He waited for her crying to subside. “Hey there. Hey.” His words were slurred, a bit, but tender. She was smart to think like she did. They'd been to enough banquets. “You know how it is. You kind of assume the chicken's going to be rubber. The greens are always wilted. When we surprise them with all that fancy food, it'll knock their socks off.”

She blew her nose, and wondered if he was being nice because he was embarrassed about being caught drunk. If he felt guilty about cheating on her. If he still loved her and genuinely wanted to help. If all these things could be true.

“You'll see,” he said. “People get gourmet food and it makes them want to go to next year's banquet. They're happy to write a big check.”

“Next year?”

7.8

The glitz and glamour shrank behind them, having given way to cluttered hucksterism — a one-story storefront hawking plane rides to the Grand Canyon; a visitors’ information center where you could make show and hotel reservations. Now one of the most recognizable signs on the planet rose from a traffic median. Heading in this direction, you did not get welcomed to fabulous Las Vegas, Nevada. Instead, this side of the famed diamond read DRIVE CAREFULLY. COME BACK SOON.

Newell tightened his grip around the extinguisher's trigger mechanism. The undersides of his fingers dug into the clamp's serrated metal, and though he felt a stinging sensation, he kept squeezing.

On the other side of the street, an aboveground swimming pool sat in the courtyard of a motor lodge. The bottom of the pool was constructed out of see-through glass, and lights from inside made its water glow, and this was a momentary distraction for Newell.

The FBImobile approached an old motel and Newell held his breath. He remained breathless as the next motel went by — a split-level jobber, dilapidated, even in the night.

They weren't pulling into one of those seedy holes, but they sure weren't stopping, either. And the boy noticed the buildings becoming subsequently fewer, farther between. Cacti and tumbleweeds and dark emptiness filled the interim spaces. Behind that, the lights from nearby neighborhoods created this faint, spooky glow.