The inside of the antiques shop is exactly as I left it. Boxes piled in a corner, shelves laden with musty, forgotten castoffs. But the little engraved instruments are not sitting on the shelf behind the counter. In their place stand a row of old Beatles records and a poster of Marilyn Monroe.
A man steps out of the employee office, and he is not the same, either. He steps into the light, and I see that if he is a man, he is just barely—probably eighteen or nineteen at the oldest. His hair is oil black and pulled up in a Mohawk.
“Can I help you?” he asks.
“I’m just passing through. Something in the window caught my eye.”
“What was it?”
“A little wooden piano,” I lie.
His face knits with doubt, but he rounds the counter all the same and hustles to the window display. “I can’t remember seeing one of those recently, but to be honest, some of this stuff has been here since before I started working here.”
“How long have you worked here?” I let my gaze roam, remembering how tall the shelves once felt, how strong the walls. This place was like a fortress for me. Now the ceiling, its exposed pipes and beams peeking from squares where tiles have been removed, feels like it might cave in with a hard rain.
“About a year. A little over. Yeah, sorry. I don’t see anything like that up here. Are you sure you saw it?”
“I heard this store used to carry miniature instrument carvings. Must have been the power of suggestion,” I say.
“Rick carved them back when he managed the store. He was my neighbor. That’s how I got the job. I’m not exactly marketable, as my mom says.” He grins. “They might still sell them at the Music Box, though. It’s right across the street.”
“Is Rick still in town? I do a little carving myself. I’d love to pick his brain.”
“He doesn’t live in Tarson anymore. A friend of his killed himself in Cold River a long time ago. My mom said he never could get over it.”
My finger pauses on the spine of the book. Could Timmy, that pudgy, redheaded shit, have been a friend of Rick’s? I recall the hours Rick spent with me, teaching me how to guide the blade of a knife for precision, depth, line versus slope. And patience, always patience.
You can only make one stroke at a time, Michael.
I am filled with the desire to hold the walking stick, to trace each key under my thumb. I move for the door, calling out a polite farewell.
“Hey, wait,” the boy says, and I turn on my heel. “He left a number so I can call him if I have any trouble. I don’t know if it’s still his number, but it might be worth a try. Maybe you can buy something over the phone.” He hands me a scrap of paper. “Don’t tell him I mentioned the suicide. He gets pretty locked up about it. He was the only friend in town the kid had. I think he feels like he failed him.”
I take the paper and stow it in a pocket. Timmy had plenty of friends. Even now I can see their faces circled around me, mouths open with shouts, spit flying.
“It wasn’t a popular thing, the friendship,” the boy said.
“Age difference?” I speculate.
“No. I mean, maybe, if the kid was normal. But this kid. Monster.” He smiles and shudders at the same time, and the hair on my arm raises, sensing a coming lightning strike, an approaching storm. “His name was Michael Walton. You should look him up. Closest thing this town has to an urban legend.”
AMA Chapter 40 | 11:00 PM, December 2, 2006 | Dalton, Georgia
AMA WOKE GASPING FOR BREATH, every inch of her beaded in chilly perspiration. The bullet wound ached with fresh pain as if she’d just been shot, and she realized she was pressing the undersides of both wrists together, bound once again in her dream. She slapped at the button for the bedside light. If getting out of bed wasn’t such a production, she’d turn on the overhead light, too, but the switch was by the door. Between her sprained ankle and the sedative they’d given her to help her sleep, she wasn’t sure she could make it without falling.
She was panting and furious, scared enough to sweat and shake in a hospital room where more security and more doors would separate her from Michael than at any point in the future, unless by some miracle he was caught. She wondered if Michael would own space in her brain, a sliver of every shadow, every bump in the night, for the rest of her life. By letting him go, she gave him that. And she gave him Hazel. If only that man hadn’t had a gun, hadn’t tried to shoot Michael. Maybe he would’ve run off and left Ama standing there in the rain.
But Michael would’ve come back.
She recalled the crime scenes in the case she defended for him. The cat that had been dissected piece by piece, layer by layer. A small dog with its ribs broken open with a hammer, its lungs cut open with a pair of gardening sheers. Michael Jeffery Walton finished what he started.
She pulled her legs into her body and rested her forehead on her knees. Would he see this as a negotiation on her part—a plea deal? She would leave him alone if he would leave her out of it. But could she do that? Really? He’d already had Hazel for an entire year. She’d been with him for a matter of hours and hadn’t thought she’d survive.
She opened the laptop Lindsey had brought up for her earlier in the day, along with a change of clothes and a bottle of Zinfandel. The only thing stopping her from opening the wine was that Lindsey had forgotten to bring a corkscrew. Reading comments about herself on the V.A.A.C. site was like some kind of purgatory, or whatever it was called when Catholics punished themselves. One of the comments mentioned Eddie by name and said they would be paying him conjugal visits in prison as a way to say thank-you.
“Christ Almighty,” Ama muttered.
Someone tapped on the door before pushing it open. A nurse walked in, petite and lithe, a cable-knit sweater draped from her shoulders like it was sliding off a hanger, and Ama wondered if she had to buy her clothes in the kids’ sections at department stores.
“Hi, Ama,” she said. “Trouble sleeping?”
“I’m just ready to be in my own bed,” Ama replied, closing her laptop and casting it aside.
“Nothing is better than your own bed,” the woman agreed. “Your own pillows.”
“No offense, but it’s criminal to call these flimsy things pillows,” Ama said. “And don’t get me started on the sheets.”
The woman laughed, an easy sound, like they might be trading stories at a bar about crap dates or ridiculous pickup lines, and Ama wondered at the sense of relief bleeding from her heart.
“If you drink enough of that wine, the bed will be more comfortable,” the woman offered, eyeing the bottle, and Ama smiled in spite of herself.
“If I could get it open, I would.”
“I can help you with that. Just don’t tell the supervisor.” The woman arched a brow and reached in the oversize pocket of her sweater, producing a set of keys held together with the loop end of a Leatherman keychain.
“You are my hero,” Ama said, feeling as light as she had since waking.
“My name is Kim,” the woman said as she removed the cork and passed Ama the open bottle. Ama realized this relief, this coolness flowing through her, was a response to the sheer normalcy of this moment—of these ninety seconds not discussing vitals or reliving flashbacks.