December Park(165)

Then the dark figure rushed toward Peter, kicking up torrents of water and smashing through the stack of crates that, in all the commotion, had tipped away from the mattresses and crashed to the floor.

And then the revolver was suddenly in my hands. I extended my arms until my elbows locked. Pulled the trigger. Twice.

The muzzle flashes provided horrific snapshots that would no doubt remain burned into the gray matter of my consciousness for the rest of my life: the bleak emptiness of the figure’s face, a sweep of filthy wet hair, the pale crescent of the back of a hand as it blurred into motion . . .

The figure spun and faced me in the white flash of the second gunshot, loud as damnation. His face was a blazing skull whose features seemed to shift and reposition themselves. Then, in the glow of Peter’s lighter, the man fell backward into the frothing miasma of water, mud, and garbage.

The gunshots still echoing in our ears, we all stood there in silence. In fact, the whole world had gone silent: I could no longer hear anything at all. Then . . . slowly . . . sounds filtered back to me. The first to return was a mechanical whooshing; it took me a moment to realize it was the sound of my own blood racing through my veins. Then my heartbeat and respiration joined in the chorus. My entire body was made of wax.

I lowered the gun, then dropped it to the floor where it splashed between my feet and was swallowed up by the dark water.

“The Piper,” Adrian said. I recognized the words, but the sound of his voice could have been the bleating of a sheep or the firing of rocket engines.

White foam collected about the Piper’s fallen body. In the timorous glow of Peter’s lighter, I thought I glimpsed the Piper’s chest shuddering up and down. I took two, three steps toward him until I could see the tiny holes in his tattered shirt. With each dying breath, blood spurted from the holes. I had made those holes in him. I had done it.

The Piper’s eyes were open. He looked at me, and I could see the life slipping from him very quickly, the— My breath caught in my throat.

For a second, I was no longer here: I was running a field day relay race in December Park. The front of my pants was soaked because I’d been so petrified that I’d urinated in them. The crowd loomed over me as I fell behind, running to keep up, my face burning, my sides burning. I wasn’t fast enough, wasn’t good enough, and they said— “Angelo.” It was Peter. He was closer to me now. “Angelo.” He kept repeating my name. He never used my full name. To him, I was always Angie.

I exhaled with a tremendous shudder. Beside me, a younger version of my grandfather (who wasn’t my grandfather at all, I now realized) shoved me toward the triangular opening in a grass hut. When I went inside, a slightly different version of my father (who wasn’t my father at all) was there. This man held my shoulders and whispered horrible things in my ear. When I asked him to explain, he just said, I become you and you become me and us become us and we become we.

“I don’t know what that means.” I must have spoken aloud because Peter reached a hand out to touch me.

I shoved him aside.

—You will find, said the Piper in my head. You will find, you will find, you will find.

Shaking, I went to the Piper and dropped to my knees beside him. He turned his head slightly, his longish hair fanned out in the water, the color drained from his face. The features had stopped shifting and had come to rest, and I now understood why they had originally appeared to be shifting.

Then my hand was out, hovering in the air. I smelled nothing. I heard nothing except the rushing water filling the room. If there was still a storm outside, I knew nothing of it: we could have been submerged beneath the sea.

I placed my hand on one of his shoulders. Around me, the water grew frigid. The Piper’s breath rasped, and blood spurted from the two bullet holes in his shirt. He held what I had thought was a curved blade but was in actuality a piece of the metal configuration that had been bolted to the far wall, too crude to be called a weapon even if that was its purpose.

“Go,” I said to Peter and Adrian. I didn’t know how many words I had left in me, so I had to make them count. “Get Dad. Tell him.”

Tears spilled down my face. My entire body burned. I was aware of Peter and Adrian talking, but their language had become nonsense to me. I was only aware that they had finally left once the light from Peter’s lighter was no more.

Trembling, I rested my head on the Piper’s chest. After a while, I felt his hand come up to the back of my head and settle there. By the time his heart stopped beating, I was sobbing like a baby.





Chapter Thirty-Four


Out





And then I was on the boat again. I was seven years old, and it was a big deal being out on the boat alone with Charles. We had our shirts off, and the sun baked our shoulders and backs. There were two crab lines tied to the oarlocks, old chicken necks at the ends. A crab would follow the chicken neck all the way to the surface, gorging itself. Mere inches from the surface, you’d bring a net underneath it and scoop it up.

As Charles maneuvered in and out of the coves, my job was to keep an eye on both lines for signs of a nibble. We caught no crabs that afternoon, and Charles had grown increasingly bored, so he took the boat out to the choppier waters beneath the Bay Bridge.

“See those?” Charles said, pointing at the face of the cliffs that loomed high above us. It was the place he called the ass end of Harting Farms. “Those holes? All of ’em?”