The Fall of Never(36)
He heard one of the dogs whimpering behind him. Without turning around, he called back, “You boys keep it down now. I don’t like the cold any more than you do.”
Finished, he shook himself off, zipped up his pants, and side-stepped the serviceberries. Heading back up to the house, he turned his head slightly toward the fenced-in community of Dobermans and said, “You good boys sleep well. We’ll all go running in the woods for a while tomorrow. You all just…”
His voice died in his throat. He froze in midstep, and it felt as though his heart had suddenly seized in his chest. Struggling to speak again, he managed a choked, “What are…” before he was silenced.
Moments later, and DeVonn Rotley was gone.
Chapter Eleven
Joshua Cavey got out of bed early, fixed himself some scrambled eggs, and ate them out on his fire escape while thinking, To hell with the cold weather. It’s too beautiful out here.
Traffic was moving sluggish this morning. Even this early, with the mist of a fleeting dawn still hanging in the air, impatient commuters were laying on their car horns. He could hear a group of children laughing somewhere behind his apartment building, and could also hear the steam engine-sound of a bus’s air-brakes the next street over.
He’d dreamt of Kelly last night. And though he only remembered fuzzy selections of the dream, he remembered enough to leave an uncomfortable feeling in the pit of his stomach. Kelly…and an immense house that reached high into the night sky…the sound of barking dogs…a mysterious figure, maybe…
But he couldn’t really remember it. He rarely remembered his dreams. Except for a select few—dreaming of Sampers raising the gun, his eyes like chunks of granite, pulling the trigger, doing it over and over and over again. Those dreams had just been unsettling; the dream about Kelly seemed almost like some sort of premonition, something he should be watching for and worried about. Shoveling the last bit of egg into his mouth, he silently wished Kelly would call him as she’d promised. Surely she was all right—he was just being a big goon, really—but she had promised. Besides, was it a crime to want to put your mind at ease? He didn’t think so. Not yet, anyway.
After a short while the cold began to make his left shoulder throb, and he climbed back into his apartment.
There was no mistaking the absence of a feminine hand in the decoration of Joshua Cavey’s apartment. For the most part, the walls were completely barren with the exception of a large Andy Warhol print that hung on the wall opposite the windows. His furniture was functional and sufficient. An acoustic guitar stood on a stand in one blank, white corner while a fishbowl on a pedestal (the bowl, though filled with water, contained no fish—the pathetic things had died almost a year ago) stood in another.
His kitchen was of similar practicality. He owned only one pot, one pan, two plates, three glasses (all mismatched), and a handful of spotty silverware. The table in the center of the cramped kitchen boasted only a single chair. And to look inside his refrigerator was to look upon the shelves of a grocery store the day after a mean winter storm.
There were a few five-pound barbells on the floor of his bedroom, and he went to them now, sitting down on the edge of his bed. He grabbed one in his left hand, began working the weight up and down, up and down. This was no longer necessary—as part of his physical therapy following the shooting, he hadn’t needed to continue after what the doctors called a “complete recovery”—but he did it on occasion because it relaxed him. The arm and shoulder were still sore, but the weights did not cause a strain as they had when he’d first tried to lift them following a number of operations and an obscene selection of medication. Now, lifting the weights only gave him peace. On many occasions, he found they forced his mind to run blank and his body to completely relax. It was something akin to transcendental meditation.
But the barbells weren’t working this morning. He couldn’t stop thinking about Kelly.
And just what is it about her? his mind spoke up. Why should you even care so much about her, anyway? Are you falling in love with her? That would be bad.
Bad, he knew, because she did not feel the same way. He knew nothing of her past—like him, she chose to keep certain things to herself—but he knew there was something there, something she either didn’t fully remember or didn’t feel comfortable talking about. He never spoke to her about Sampers and about his injuries, mainly because he was afraid and embarrassed by them. So didn’t it make sense for her to withhold information about her own past for similar reasons? Perhaps an abusive boyfriend in her past, an old uncle who liked to touch her in places little girls should never be touched…
Now you’re just forcing yourself to think, his head yammered. Now you’re just insistent upon thinking about Kelly Rich, about keeping her picture inside your head. Are you doing this to yourself on purpose? Are you trying to drive yourself mad? She is practically a stranger to you; you had better friends at NYU who you don’t bother to keep in contact with. And now you’re sitting here worrying about her, hoping she calls, when she has every right in the world to do as she pleases, even if that means completely forgetting about you.
But the dream—something about her running through the woods in the dark, out of breath and frantic…and a dog chasing her…or something like that, something about a dog…
In that instant, he recalled what Dr. Mendes had told him about Nellie Worthridge, about one of the things she’d said to him: We almost killed that f*cking dog. What that meant he didn’t know, but he surmised that he had dreamt about a dog because he had dogs on the brain (or, rather, had both Kelly and Nellie Worthridge on the brain, and his dream had simply incorporated recent details of both people—Kelly’s departure from the city, and Nellie’s comment about killing—or almost killing—a dog).