She climbed inside the hungry hole.
One by one—Charlie, Dave, Mark, Michael, Lainee, Sam, and Ella—followed.
Down.
Down.
Down.
Into the murk.
118 Maple Street
Monday, August 2
The police searched Rhea’s house, leaving no bottle unturned. They found nothing.
Instead of leaving for his office or hiding out in his basement once it was all over, Fritz stuck around. He watched out the dining room window, and he made phone calls, his voice hushed. He knocked on Ella’s door. Then, in muffles she couldn’t hear, was afraid to listen for, he spoke to FJ. At some point, FJ broke down. Rhea heard him crying. Heard Fritz whisper, “I’ll take care of it.”
She understood then, that Fritz was plotting. That’s why he’d followed her to the police department. He was setting the grounds for their divorce.
She retreated to her office with her wine. Locked the door. With nothing else to do, she went over all the stored things. The dissertation she’d wanted to turn into a book about the panopticon. In her memory it had been brilliant, but upon inspection this was not the case. She’d written it before her father’s death, though it was evident a part of her had known, even before the final, grand mal seizure, that he was a drunk.
She looked up what had happened to Aileen Bloom. She’d become a professor, just like Rhea. She’d taught first at the University of Washington, but they didn’t give her tenure, so she’d moved to smaller school upon smaller school, and now she was an adjunct at an online university. She mocked her students’ stupidity in online posts, which a large portion of her following thought was funny. Her teaching reviews were mostly negative. She graded too hard, and kept trying to teach Bertrand Russell to remedial teenagers.
This was the loser who’d ruined her life.
She looked up Jessica, but then stopped, afraid to learn that the child had died. So instead, she looked up Larry Wilde. Saw pictures of him from various feeds. A newborn. A toddler. A Little Leaguer who never got off the bench. An uncomfortable feeling rushed over her, similar to the feeling of prey when it’s watched by a predator. She thought about how strange it was, that Gertie had done such a horrible thing to him in the night.
Who would hurt a child like that? Why?
She remembered her dad driving her home from school in a swerving car, feeling so safe. She remembered watching the sci-fi channel with him, each drinking from separate Coke cans. She remembered the first time he’d shaken, his arm going tight to his chest in a palsy, eyes open but unseeing. They’d been watching The Black Hole. She’d been four or five years old. They’d been talking about time travel, pushing through one side, becoming infinitely dense, and then coming out the other side, clean and new. If you think about it like cellular teleportation, it’s purifying. Time and distance are the same, he’d told her. The farther away you get from an event, the easier it is to fold it back on itself, to change it.
And then her dad’s body had seized. She’d tried to wake him. He’d been rigid, his arm fastened to his chest, fingers locked in bent positions like claws. His skin frozen in a grimace. It had gone on long enough that she’d had time to look back at the TV. A spaceship was riding through the hole. Bright flashing lights smeared all together into infinite, rainbow density, and then darkness. Meaningless and murk. The sins of the world. And then it transgressed, through heaven and hell and then back again, to before it had all begun. The ship survived. Pristine now. New.
When her dad woke, he didn’t remember. He acted as if it had never happened. He smiled at her, and she’d seen a godlike glow all around him. So bright. And she’d known that she’d harnessed time. She’d pulled away from the earth and traveled through a black hole. When she’d come through the other side, she’d entered them both into a new reality. She’d saved his life. His seizure had taught her that she was special.
Years passed. She remembered the school nurse noticing her wrinkled clothes that she didn’t know how to wash, her knotty hair, and asking, Is something wrong at home? and thinking, Of course. Why else would I be here every day? But instead asking, What could be wrong? She’d meant this question seriously. Because she hadn’t lived anyplace but with her father, so how could she know? Seriously, she’d wanted to ask. Explain to me. What could be wrong?
She grew up and forgot, the way all adults forget about magic. And then her dad died. She should have been there with him on that couch when it happened. She should never have moved away. She knew it was magical thinking, the illusions of a child; and yet magical thinking imprints. It leaves a mark, a binary of real and unreal that never goes away. On one hand, her dad was a drunk who raised her in a vacuum of neglect. On the other, he was the hero she’d abandoned and could have saved.