Chapter 7: The Voice Behind Him

The jug came off the stand heavier than he expected. Five gallons in a plastic shell, cold all the way through. He got both hands around the neck and lifted it and drank.

Water ran off his chin and down his throat and over the front of the coat. Cold enough coming down to hurt, and then it stopped hurting. The hollow place under his ribs, the one that had been there since the street, began to fill.

He had to breathe, so he came up, and then he put his mouth back on it and drank again.

Too slow. The neck was about the width of his fist, and the water came out in a rope.

He closed his mouth over the plastic and bit down.

The neck split. Something in it cracked and gave, hard enough that he felt it in his back teeth. He bit down again and tore the hole wider, and the water came out in a rush and he got his mouth under the rush and swallowed, and some of it went up his nose, and he kept swallowing.

It tasted like cold metal. It was the best thing that had happened to him all night.

Behind him, at the table, his mother said something.

The words didn’t get in. There was water in his ears and there was the talking underneath the water, the low steady talking that had followed him off the street and had not stopped yet, quieter now than it had been, not gone.

He kept drinking.

“Elliot?” Her voice went up at the end of it. “How did you—“

“Walked.”

It came from behind him.

It came in a normal speaking voice, close, a yard away. It came out of the empty part of the kitchen at his back, and it was his voice. His mouth was over the jug. Both his hands were on the jug. Water was going into him and running off his jaw onto the floor, and he could not have said a word to save his life.

He didn’t turn around. His mouth stayed on the jug.

The voice went on. “Took a while. Raining pretty hard. I got turned around.”

Water dripped off his jaw. A small dark spot came up on the linoleum and spread.

“Fell a couple times. Lost my shoes.”

The light in the doorway moved. It lay in a yellow bar across the kitchen floor. The bar went dim, held, and came back, as if someone had passed a hand over the chimney.

“Mom, I got mud on the floor. I’ll clean it up tomorrow. I’m too tired.”

He came up off the jug when he had to breathe. He wiped his mouth on the back of his hand, and the back of his hand came away red and wet. The cut on his forehead was still open. He’d get to the cut later.

He looked at the jug. The plastic at the neck had a hole torn through it, ragged at the edge, with the shape of teeth in it.

He set it down. It went over onto its side and rolled a quarter turn and stopped, and water began to run out of the torn neck.

He went back out through the dining room and his feet left a black print every time they came down, and there was a trail of water down the middle of the floor behind him. His mother and his father were at the table and neither of them had moved. Their plates were untouched. Their faces came up to him and then went past him, to the space between the doorway and the wall.

At the time it seemed to him that they were angry about the floor.

“Mom. I’ll get the floor in the morning.” His voice came out thick. “I’m going to bed.”

Neither of them answered.

“Goodnight,” he said. “You should both go to bed, too. It’s late.”

He got the red coat off in the hall and let it fall. It came down heavy and stayed where it landed. He went down the hall with one hand out to the wall and found his door without looking and shut it behind him, and the room smelled like him, and the bed was where it was supposed to be. He put his face in the pillow and got his legs up onto the mattress and the frame took his weight with a sound like a cough.

He remembered her asking how he got home. He remembered answering her. His throat was scraped raw. He must have done his share of the talking. He couldn’t find the words now, and after a while he stopped looking.

Out in the dining room the lamp burned steady.

The chimney glass had a film of soot across the lower half. The flame stood up straight and stayed up. Two plates, neither one touched. The silverware still beside them. Wet prints ran from the front door to the kitchen and back out to the hall. In the kitchen, the jug lay on its side in a spreading puddle, and the neck had been torn open, and the tear had a bite in it. In the hall, the red coat lay where it had fallen, and the wet was spreading around it.

The man at the table put both hands flat on the wood. His hands were shaking, and he pressed them down to stop it.

“He came back,” he said. His voice was low and rough. “That’s not possible.”

The woman didn’t look at him. She was looking at the hallway, at the shut door at the end of it, and her mouth worked twice before anything came out of it.

“If that was really our Elliot—“

She stopped.

The man said nothing. The lamp did not move.

“—then who did we kill last night?”