Chapter 10: Bullseye

Rain worked its way down the glass. Water came off Eli’s jacket and went dark on the boards between their shoes.

Then Quin laughed — three breaths of it, nothing behind any of them — and let go of Eli’s wrist. He wiped his face with the flat of his hand. When he spoke, his voice came out hoarse.

“So the band was the cover story.”

“It was never a cover.”

“One thing.” He said it to the window. “You put one thing together about a person and you think you’ve got the whole file. And you came here this time of night to use it on me.”

“I meant all of it.”

There was a version of how he had ended, and everybody had it. He’d fought with the rest of Rough Corner. He’d been voted out, the label had dropped him, and then the feeds stopped saying his name. All of that was true. None of it was the reason. He had never corrected anybody about it, because a wrong reason was cleaner than a right one, and it cost less.

Then Eli said it — low, in the dark, with nothing on top of it.

“I picked up a bass because of you. That doesn’t change if your hand never comes back.” A pause. “I want a new band with you in it. You don’t have to play guitar. I’ll be your bass player. You sing lead.”

Quin listened to the whole thing.

Later — not then, later — he would think about the fact that he had listened to the whole thing.

“Okay.” He put a step between them. “So you’re the good one.”

The grin came up, stayed too long, and went.

“You looked for me. You dug me up out of the ground, and you brought a light with you, and you’ve got the face on. The one that goes: come on, get up. You can do it. You can do it.” He lifted a hand like a coach calling him in from the sideline. “Yeah. Come on.”

Eli didn’t answer that.

“You want to know what happens if I let you.” He took a breath and it shook on the way in. “You sort me. That’s what you do with trash. Cans in one bin, glass in another one, me in the third. And you put in the hours, and you do it right, and when you’re finished you’ll know exactly what kind of garbage you spent all of them on.”

He was shaking. He didn’t know when that had started.

“So do us both a favor and stop.” He wiped his mouth. “I don’t want anything. I don’t want to do anything. I want to be nobody, on purpose, with nobody watching. Free. Is that allowed?”

Eli answered him.

“Are you free right now?”

He opened his mouth and there was nothing in it. Nothing to hand back. He stood there with his mouth open for a second, and then he had both fists in the collar of Eli’s jacket and he drove him back into the door.

Steel. The sound went through the floor and into the walls. The cap came off Eli’s head and slid down past Quin’s fist and landed upside down on the boards.

“Don’t.” His voice was gone. “Don’t stand there like you’ve got me figured out.”

The hall light was off. The streetlight came up through the wet glass and that was all there was. Their faces were close enough that he could feel Eli’s breath on his mouth, and for a second neither of them did anything at all.

“I don’t,” Eli said. Then, quieter: “That’s why I came looking.”

“I looked for you for a long time.”

Then the window went white.

Not a flicker. One flat, unbroken second of it, the whole apartment printed like a photograph — the case, the jacket dripping, the cap on the floor, Eli’s face turned up at his. And the eyes. The flash went straight through them and they came back pale, fixed on him, steady, the way a hunter looks at prey.

His hands let go. He hadn’t told them to — he was still holding the collar when his fingers quit.

The anger went out of him like water out of a sink.

Eli was staring at him. That was the part he couldn’t do anything with. Straight on, unblinking — and Eli almost never looked anybody in the eye.

And Quin’s own eyes were moving, quick and small, the way they do when somebody is reading.

The laugh came up in him, and it wasn’t funny. It was the other thing, the one under it. I’m the one who’s been looking. I’m the one who—

Thunder went over the building. He laughed out loud, once, at himself, and his eyes were burning.

The second flash came.

And this time it took him somewhere else. A summer night. A stage, and a field in front of it packed to the fence, the noise coming up off all those people like heat off pavement, the amps humming through the deck under his shoes. He was at the top of his life. Every one of them out there loved him, and it was his, all of it, for as long as it lasted.

Except that he wasn’t looking at the field. He was looking at one spot in it, near the front. A pair of eyes, pale, fixed on him. He had stood up there in front of all those people and played to somebody he couldn’t see.

And through them — through those eyes — he could see himself. The version that had been proud. The one that had been worth it. He had never once said that out loud to anybody.

He couldn’t get out from in front of them.

Rain came down the window in sheets. Inside, nothing moved at all.

He didn’t know why Quin was still looking at him. He only knew that he was, and that the look had weight in it, and that it kept coming, past the point where looking usually stops, like it wanted to get under the bone of his face. It went on long enough that it started to hurt.

He hated being looked at in the eyes.

The color was the part other people could see. The rest of it he’d had since he was five — a street sign going soft at the edges first, then everything, then years of appointments where no doctor ever said the word cure to him and meant it. There was management. There was glasses. There was the slow.

His family was happy, and that made it easier. Nobody in his house ever acted like he’d been handed something defective. He learned to take the looks, the questions, the long stares from strangers in the checkout line. He kept his bangs long. He wore glasses in class. He didn’t look at people while he talked to them, and after a while it wasn’t a decision anymore.

Then he was seven.

Second grade, a Tuesday like every other Tuesday, the kind of day nobody thinks about afterward. His grandmother picked him up from school and drove him to the hospital for a follow-up, and the results took a long time, and it was dark by the time they were done. They didn’t go straight home.

She knew he wanted something sweet after an appointment. That was what she was like. She held his hand the whole way down the block and bought him all of it — cake with frosting an inch thick, bread with cream in the middle, a pudding with jam on top that caught the light off the window.

He never tasted any of it. When it was over it was all in the blood on the ground.

They were on the crosswalk. They had the light. He’d counted the numbers down the way he’d been taught to — five, four, three — and when the walk light came up he pulled at her hand and said, “Grandma. We can go.”

Then everything changed shape.

The sound came from the left. It wasn’t a long sound. It was short and it was enormous, and after it there was a car going away down the street, fast, and his hand was empty.

He stood there. He stood there for a while. There was blood on his face, and it had gone into his eyes, hot and sour, and everything had gone soft and far, behind a sheet of plastic, and he stood in that, not breathing, not understanding, until somebody on the corner screamed. Then the plastic tore.

He was on his knees beside her with both hands over her mouth.

He was trying to keep it in. That was the whole of what he was doing — that was what he remembered about it, how small his hands were, and how much there was, and how it came up around his fingers no matter how hard he pressed down.

She couldn’t say anything to him. She looked at him. She took what was left in her arm and brought her hand up the last two inches and touched his eyes.

He was crying. She hadn’t reached for her own mouth. She’d reached for his eyes.

The blood stayed there. That was how he kept it for years afterward — the mark her fingers left on him never came off.

He would still ask himself, a long time later, whether it would have happened if he hadn’t had those eyes. It was a stupid question, and he knew it was a stupid question, and he asked it anyway, because he was a child and there was nobody else around to ask.

He stopped speaking that afternoon. He didn’t decide to. The words went somewhere and didn’t come back.

Two years of it. He couldn’t go to school. His parents took him to every doctor in the state and two outside it, and drove him home afterward without saying anything in the car.

There was a trial in the middle of that. He sat in a room that was much too big for him and looked at the man at the defense table and knew, the way children know, with his whole body, that it was the wrong man.

The attorney was gentle about it, which was the worst part. He explained to the room that a boy who had been through what this boy had been through could not be a reliable witness; that a child who had stopped speaking could not be questioned, or measured, or held to anything; that children that small, under that much, ended up pointing at whoever was sitting in front of them. He said it in a soft voice.

When they brought Eli in, he pointed at the man and cried until his throat was sore, and nothing came out of him. He was seven.

His parents learned the alphabet in sign language with him. He could do the letters. When it came to anything he actually wanted to say, his hands came up covered in blood — that was how they were in the dreams, and sometimes how they were wide awake — and he couldn’t hold them up in front of his mother and father like that. So he didn’t.

Two winters later, on the shortest day of the year, he was sitting on a bench in that same hospital by himself. His father had gone to get the results. It was taking a long time. It kept taking a long time.

So he got up and went to find him.

He passed a family on their knees in the corridor in front of a doctor. He passed a man alone with an IV pole and a takeout container balanced on his knees.

And then he came to the little room at the end of the hall, where the water cooler was, and his father was behind it with both hands over his face.

His hair had gone gray in two years. It made him easy to pick out of a crowd, and it made him look like somebody else’s father. Two years of his wife’s grief, and of filings that went nowhere, and of a son who couldn’t answer him, and all of it was in his shoulders.

Eli walked down the hall. He crouched. He put his head against his father’s shoulder, and he reached up, the way she had, and touched his father’s eyes.

“Dad,” he said. “Don’t cry.”

He never found out how the sound came back. He remembered the rest of it. He remembered that his father cried harder, and that his father didn’t have the strength left to pick him up, and that the two of them stayed down there on the floor for a long time.

It wasn’t worth celebrating. Getting the voice back didn’t stop anything from coming. After that it was one thing and then the next thing with no space in between, and it put holes in a family that had been happy, and nobody ever patched them.

Sometimes he wondered why it had to be their house. Whether the only way to prove what fate was allowed to do was to take something good and break it somewhere you’d have to see it.

There was more damage than the voice. Almost every crosswalk after that, when he came up to the corner and stood there, he heard it — the hit, and then the siren, both of them before the light changed.

He didn’t tell his parents. They had enough already.

Time dragged him along. He thought junior high would be different. Junior high was a deeper hole.

He was in the seventh grade, and he was small for it, and he didn’t talk much, and his grades were the best in the building, and he wouldn’t bend. Any one of those might have been survivable. All of them at once was not.

Dane Ashby was two years older and a head and a half taller. He started on the eyes — their color, the way they went strange when Eli was tired — and on how little Eli was. Then came the rest. Kids who had been sitting with him stopped sitting with him. His books went in the trash. His homework came back from the hallway in pieces.

And when Eli started hitting back, Dane’s friends found him in the bathroom between bells and took it seriously: all of them at once, at the sinks, by the stall doors, long enough that Eli learned to count the seconds instead of the faces.

He heard why from a girl in his math class. Not much of a why. The girl Ashby wanted liked Eli. That was it. That was the whole thing, and everything else about Eli — the quiet, the grades, the size, the fact that he wouldn’t fold — was only fuel.

Then one afternoon he saw the man who came to pick Dane up.

A loud shirt, flowers all over it, open at the collar. The same jaw. He was parked in the pickup line with the engine running, and Eli knew him from forty feet away, the way you know a sound.

Dane Ashby’s father.

Eli got on his bike and went after the car. He stayed with it for a block and a half, the chain skipping the whole way, and then he lost it at a light and went down on the shoulder of the road, and lay there with his cheek on the gravel until he could breathe.

The next morning he went up to the ninth-grade hall and got Dane Ashby by the collar and got sound out of his throat.

“Somebody kills somebody, somebody answers for it. Somebody has to — somebody has to answer for it, that’s — that’s how it’s supposed to—“

That was all of it. Then his throat closed, like a hand.

Dane Ashby looked at him like he’d been handed something he couldn’t read. Blank. He said, “What?” and then, “You’re a psycho,” and pulled his collar out of Eli’s fist, and his friends came off the wall and put Eli on the floor and beat him in the middle of the hall, and it went on until they were finished.

He knew by then. Lying on the tile of the ninth-grade hall, he knew.

Dane didn’t know his father had killed a woman on a crosswalk and kept driving. He didn’t know what had been taken out of Eli’s family, or what was left of it, or that Eli had been standing there on that crosswalk holding her hand.

He didn’t know anything.