Black Chuck Read online

  “When was the last time you saw her?” Evie asked.

  “It was a long time ago,” Nan repeated. “When the men came to look at Shaun’s room—” Nan stopped short and looked up from the papers, blinking at the cupboards in front of her.

  “What men?” Evie asked.

  “Oh, policemen, I think,” she said.

  “And they looked in Shaun’s room?” Evie felt a sudden urge to run up the stairs, to somehow protect his privacy from the strangers who’d already been here weeks earlier.

  “They looked in Shaun’s room,” Nan agreed, but she sounded as if she were assuring herself, not Evie.

  “And Sherrie never came back after that?”

  “Oh no! Sherrie moved away a long time ago.” Nan smiled again.

  They were going in circles. She’d never talked to Nan this much in the entire time she’d known Shaun. Was this what every conversation with her was like?

  Shaun was a totally different person with Nan at his side. Not the invincible, not the king, but just a boy, fussing affectionately over the unsteady old woman who’d raised him. Guilt stabbed at her again. For not being here for Nan after he’d died, for not loving Shaun when she’d had the chance.

  “Nan,” she said, “do you mind if I look in Shaun’s room too?”

  “Oh, I’m sure he won’t mind,” she said, eyes twinkling with water.

  Evie left Nan in the kitchen and climbed the stairs to his room.

  It still smelled like him. Familiar and warm and boyish. It was as messy as ever, clothes all over the floor, broken skateboards, posters curling. She stepped gingerly over it all, looking around.

  His dresser was littered with loose change, deodorant, a pair of pliers with a broken tip, a sealed package of white sport socks, elastics for his long yellow hair. His last movements preserved in patterns of clutter, things resting just where he’d dropped them, peaceful as a museum.

  His cell phone sat in a sealed plastic bag amid it all. She lifted the edge of the bag and saw a receipt from the police marking it Released To Family.

  Had it been sitting right here the night she’d called his voice mail?

  For some reason, that made her think of a book she’d read once, about a submarine crew searching for the source of a distant radio signal after a nuclear war. Even after everyone on earth was dead, technology would whisper mysteriously on.

  Evie took the bag and dropped it into her backpack, then slumped at the edge of Shaun’s bed, looking around at the mess.

  On the floor between the night table and bed frame, a box of condoms spilled an accordion line of shiny blue packages. She and Shaun had mostly used these. Obviously, not every time. She didn’t know why she’d never expected the worst to happen, except that it was Shaun, and the worst never happened with him.

  Evie sighed. She couldn’t pretend much longer that this thing wasn’t inside her. This looming future. It was growing every day and eating everything she had—literally. All her strength and energy and will, all the food she put in her mouth. Every second of rest she stole was never enough for it. It was Shaun’s kid, sure enough.

  She’d been sleepwalking with it for nearly four months, drifting on its tide, pretending it wasn’t really happening. And soon it would be too late to do anything but exactly what Shaun’s mom had done—ditch and run.

  She lay down on the bed, curled up and cried.

  A gentle voice broke through her dreams, a hand on Evie’s shoulder.

  Evie opened her eyes, confused. She blinked at the room, trying to piece it into something familiar. Oh God, she thought, and bolted up.

  “I’m so sorry, Nan!” she gasped. “I didn’t mean to fall asleep.” She rubbed her eyes, swollen and sticky with dried tears.

  Nan sat down next to her. “You’re a friend of Shaun’s, aren’t you?” she asked, folding her hands in her lap.

  “Yes, Nan,” she said. “I’m Shaun’s girlfriend. We met before.” But Nan said nothing. Evie took a shaky breath. “Nan, I have to tell you something. About Shaun.” Nan just kept on smiling. Evie looked down at Nan’s old hands, so fragile and bony and blue. “I—I mean, Shaun, that is, we—” Oh, just say it, she thought, kicking herself. “I’m pregnant,” she said. “And, um, it’s Shaun’s.”

  The words felt heavy as weights. The only other person she’d ever spoken them to wasn’t even alive anymore, and she felt like she’d just confessed to his murder. She collapsed into tears all over again. “I’m sorry, Nan. So, so sorry…”

  Nan reached for her hand, squeezing it in her own more firmly than Evie expected. “Oh dear,” she said, “it can’t possibly be as bad as all that.”

  “But it is, Nan. It’s really, really bad,” Evie practically wailed.

  Everything she’d been pretending not to feel, everything she’d buried and ignored and covered up—it all rose up and crashed over her, sucking her out to sea. “I don’t know what to do,” she confessed. “I’m so scared. And I can’t tell my mom.”

  “Well,” Nan said, “I think you probably can. She’ll still love you, you’ll see.”

  Evie blinked at her tears. The wise words hardly seemed to match the person who’d been randomly stacking things in the kitchen, who’d seemed confused about who Evie even was. “Do you still love Sherrie?” she asked. Even though she dumped Shaun on you? Even though she ran away to be crazy and drunk?

  “Of course I do!” Nan said. “Sherrie is a good girl. She does her best.”

  God, Evie thought, some best.

  “And I got my grandson from her,” Nan added. “My bright star. I can’t be angry about that now, can I?” She beamed proudly now.

  She patted Evie’s hands and then stood up, shuffling toward the door. When she got there she turned and smiled sweetly. “If you see Shaun,” she said, “will you please tell him to come home?”

  Evie ached as she watched the lucidity drain out of the tiny, fragile woman, watched her slide right back into lonely confusion. Should I tell her? she wondered. Should I break the awful news again until it sticks? Shaun is dead, Shaun is dead, Shaun is dead…

  Evie blinked back fresh tears. “Okay, Nan,” she said. “I’ll let him know.”

  19

  E

  Baxter Grains had once been a pretty big employer in Cold Water, but it had mostly closed when the economy had collapsed, leaving this whole end of town limping and destroyed. The Grains still operated, but not like it used to. Most of its buildings were empty now, most of its workers long gone.

  But that’s what made it interesting.

  With its lattice of crumbling fire escapes, and storehouses full of rust and echoes, the Grains was a fantastic secret fortress. One big, broken playground.

  Freight trains still ran through it, but they didn’t stop anymore. Just blew on past like they couldn’t get away fast enough. Evie had learned how to listen before running across six lanes of tracks, how to feel for the rumble in the steel. Everything with Shaun had been a slide of adrenaline, from her brain to her fingertips, from her heart right down to her toes. Even just walking across a field.

  She came up alongside that dirty industrial yard, bright sun picking out bits of broken glass, making it sparkle and wink in the breeze. If she squinted, she could just see him kicking around in the scrub, hair the color of dry wheat against a light-blue sky.

  She asked, Do you remember, Shaun Henry-Deacon? Do you know what happened to you?

  And then she was climbing. Sliding the toes of her sneakers into the too-small holes of the fence, her weight cutting into her fingers where they curled around the wire.

  Before Shaun, Evie had never climbed a fence in her life. She wasn’t sure she’d ever climbed anything, to be honest. But if you wanted to hang with the boys, you had to learn to keep up. She’d climbed her first fence after watching Sunny go gracefully over this one, and since then she’d seen most of the town from fence-tops just like it.

  On the other side, she jumped the last few feet to the ground, tu
mbling onto her rear end—gravity had changed a little since she’d got knocked up. “Crap,” she muttered. The cut on her knee had reopened. She wiped a dot of blood away, then stood and brushed herself off, picking bits of stone from her hands.

  Shaun’s body had been found on the other side of the empty storage building, close to the corrugated fence that blocked the parking lot from the tracks. There was a little hill there, where a thin trail skirted the bottom of the fence.

  Evie had never used the trail. The tracks there went from six to eight lanes, two of them peeling off onto Grains property, and if she were honest, she was too chicken to go near them, even though they looked rusty and probably hadn’t been used in years.

  Besides, if you walked just a little farther west, the ground went flat, the tracks thinned out, and you could see in both directions for a good long way.

  But Shaun had been found by the trail, so she headed in that direction.

  The grass was already brittle and dry, though it was barely summer yet. It looked like a mangy hide, long in some places, scratched bald in others, flea-bitten skin poking through. For years, people had used this field as a trash heap, throwing litter over the fence and letting the rats and coyotes sort it out. The ground was strewn with faded takeout containers, bent soda cans, rusty nails, glass. She stepped through it toward the fence.

  As she rounded the side of the storage building, she saw remnants of yellow police tape lifting in the breeze. Three whole weeks had passed since they found him here—was there still no verdict yet on what had happened to him?

  Maybe nobody really cared, she thought. Shaun was just a punk-ass burnout flunking out of high school. Kids at school had laughed at his memorial. His own mother didn’t want him, and his nan didn’t even know he was gone.

  She stepped over the twirling end of tape and started up toward the trail. The ground was uneven, covered in loose gravel with bits of grass shooting through to keep it all from sliding back down onto the tracks. There was less garbage over here. Fewer people came through this way. Or maybe the police had gathered it all up as evidence and hadn’t bothered to bring it back.

  At the top of the hill, she continued east, eyes scanning back and forth across the trail, searching for anything that might have been his, might have been missed.

  She reached the arc light and stopped. There was nothing here. Either the police had already taken it all, or there had been nothing here to begin with.

  That same surreal feeling—that it was all a fake, that Shaun was going to jump out, laughing, any minute—rose up inside her. How can a guy like that just blink out of existence? One second he wants forever from you, and the next he’s just…gone.

  Of course, she knew his body had been found. He wasn’t missing—he was dead. But it just felt so impossible to believe. Was it really so crazy that Nan still waited for him to come home?

  Evie saw a glint of metal at the edge of the little hill. She crouched down. It was a shiny silver bead about a centimeter wide, and as she rolled it between her fingers, the ground began to rumble. “Shit!” she hissed, stuffing the bead into her shirt pocket.

  The gravel shook, and she stumbled to her knees and rolled, trying to skitter back up over the lip of the hill before the train reached her, but it was too late.

  It wasn’t on the closest track, or even the next one over, but still. The thunder of it pinned her to the ground, and as it passed, the first engine let out a succession of short, staccato wails, as if it was coming right at her.

  She threw her hands over her ears and huddled into a ball. It was one thing to love this sound from her bedroom window, to hear it drifting from far away and think of it as lonesome. It was another thing entirely to be almost underneath it. Tons of steel and iron, howl and fire, hurtling by like hell on wheels.

  She squeezed her eyes shut as the train’s two massive engines screamed past. But as the rest of the cars flew by, the sound leveled out to a steady, clacking roar, and she was able to shuffle back from the edge of the incline, kicking in the dirt till her shoulders hit the corrugated fence. She plugged her ears and watched the cars rattle by.

  Why was he found way over here? This trail was nothing—it didn’t go anywhere. It ran out after a few hundred feet, and then you had to cut through the only part of the Grains that was still used anymore to get out to the road beyond.

  A hundred yards back the way she’d come stood the old storage building. Inside were smooth, flat, wide-open concrete floors perfect for skateboarding, and getting in was stupid easy. After the train had passed, Evie stood and walked back toward the storehouse.

  Partway down the west side of the building was a boarded-up window she knew wasn’t really boarded. She pulled the rotten wood aside and lifted herself through the gap.

  The main floor was dark, and full of rats and other things Evie tried not to think about. The windows were covered to keep people from smashing them, so it was damp and moldy inside. But as she climbed the steel staircase to the second floor, sunlight poured in from above.

  There were floor-to-ceiling windows on the second floor, and the sun had baked the smooth concrete, warming the whole place like an oven. Old, dusty ceiling fans stood motionless along the rafters. Paint peeled in grotesque bulges all over the ceiling. She could hear the coo of pigeons roosting, the sudden flutter of wings.

  The first time she’d ever come here it had been sweet with the thrill of breaking in and the chance of getting caught. It was nighttime, black and cavernous. But Shaun had held her close, held her hand, hadn’t let her get scared. The moon and arc lights shining through the windows had lit his grin, calming her a little in the darkness.

  When she’d finally seen this place in daylight, she realized how silly her fear had been. It was actually beautiful. Sunbeams marked the dusty air, and there wasn’t half as much garbage inside as there was out in the field. Shaun had cleaned it up himself. He’d wanted to build a ramp in here, maybe one day a half pipe. In the dust on the floor she could still see the faint tracks of his wheels, carving huge ellipses around the pillars. In tighter corners, his fingers had touched down too. Shaun had come here a lot.

  She kept climbing all the way to the third floor, where it was dirtier, not as pretty as downstairs, and the ceiling was lower. On the side facing the tracks, a busted-out doorway punched a huge hole in the wall. A section of broken fire escape clung to the outside of the building, but its landing had long ago been kicked in, leaving a dizzying drop to the landing below.

  Despite this, she’d seen Shaun use this doorway a hundred times, monkeying hand-over-hand down the rusty bars to the second floor, making the old metal sing like a tuneless guitar.

  She walked to the hole in the wall and looked out over the field, the tracks. It was late afternoon now, the sun leaning long shadows through the grass. Empty beer cans littered the floor up here, gathering dust. There were fist-sized holes in the moldy walls. It was possible other kids came here too, but Evie’d never seen any. This whole building was like Shaun’s private playground.

  She reached into her backpack and pulled out his cell phone. She didn’t know his passcode, and the battery was probably dead anyway, so she didn’t bother taking it out of the plastic bag.

  Instead she got her own phone out and keyed in his number. She leaned against the frame of the busted-out doorway and put the phone to her ear, waiting for that phony surfer-drawl that widened out the words and bounced them against his perfect, white teeth.

  “Hey, you’ve reached Shaun…”

  She took a deep breath. The voice mail beeped.

  “I saw your nan today,” she said. “I told her, y’know, about the baby and all. She wasn’t even mad. She told me about your mom, how she was young too. That made me feel a bit better, I guess.” Evie sighed, all her words weighing heavy on her chest. “She really misses you. We all do…”

  Evie gazed over the dirty field, past Réal’s place and the cemetery, past Sunny’s, past town, out past everything beyo
nd. She squeezed Shaun’s phone in her fist, feeling like the very worst person on earth. “I just…I want you to know how sorry I am for everything, and I—”

  But she choked.

  And the voice mail beeped before she could tell him why she’d really called: I think I might have this baby after all.

  20

  R

  Five kids meant a lot of food. A lot of clothes and toys and things to spend money on. It meant bills and a mortgage on a big house. It meant that both his parents had to work, which had left Ré in charge since he was barely old enough to handle it.

  His main job was feeding the kids, and he was home at the same time every day to do it, whether he himself ate or not. And lately he had not.

  At least, not the meat parts. Not since Shaun.

  Not since seeing his best friend’s insides scratched in the dirt of that field, sand and grass and trash all stuck to it like it was old pink bubble gum.

  Every time he was faced with a plate of meat, he just wanted to puke his living guts out. He had become a bona fide vegetarian.

  So when Mark slid the brown paper bag across the table, its contents struck Ré with a horror that seemed designed just for him.

  “What the fuck is this?” he yelped, shoving it away.

  Mark hissed, glancing around the dining room. The Olympia crowd had thinned since three o’clock, but there were still more people hanging around than either of them would have liked. “It’s the cure,” he said, leaning in. “Do you know how hard it was to get this?” He touched the bag protectively.

  “Ostie d’câlisse de sacrament!”

  Even if you didn’t know French, it sounded pretty vicious.

  Réal pressed himself back against the booth, leveraging his hands on the table edge and staring at the bag like it might lunge at him. That familiar green sickness washed through his gut. He swallowed it back with effort. “What kind of fucking cure is that?”