Halfway House
Short Fiction by Stephen Geez
www.StephenGeez.com
Art by Dizzy
DizzyArt
This guy’s not all there, Freida thought, watching that felon his first day on the job. Named Connor, he seemed at times to drift away in his mind, his hands working without him.
The following week, he startled her in the big greenhouse, holding a long knife—caressing it, really—as if he wanted to cut someone, or maybe he already had.
He looked right at her a few days later. Caught, he glanced elsewhere, but surely he’d been imagining her, clothing torn away, body restrained, eyes confirming terror.
As Freida locked the florist shop one Friday, he hurried through the parking lot to catch his bus, but he slowed as he passed her clunky car, blatantly scanning the interior for steal-worthies, that fuzzy froggy dangling from her mirror not worth the explosive cacophony of breaking glass.
Soon after, he carried a huge clay pot to a customer’s car, then waited patiently while the woman lit a cigarette before opening the trunk. He eyed the flame, more than enough to torch a block of row houses, wailing families trapped, helpless babies dying in the cinders.
Then ditzy Jenny returned from maternity leave after squeezing out her second bawler for Grandma to help raise. She reclaimed her counter job, and Freida found herself down-laddered to the greenhouses where Connor labored silently, his every movement GPS-tracked. Small assurance; once his rampage is over, the damage done, they’ll have a printout showing he was there.
As he wrestled bags of Sphagnum onto a rack, he looked surprisingly small, his arms skinny. His sweep of sandy hair suggested innocent boyishness, though she would guess him to be about her age, low thirties, if that. Still, image deceives, and two halves dwell as opposite sides in the heart of every man.
The most dangerous souls live in the side where it’s darkest.
Freida’s ex-fiancé had taught her this, tricking and conning his way into and out of her life, duping and hurting her until she’d grown weary of searching out the good. He’d left her with nothing, her reliable car stolen and crashed, modest home foreclosed, tuition unpaid and student loans due. An unwelcome occupier of her mom’s dignity-squeezing apartment, gasping from the stench of an aging middle-ager’s bitter depression, Freida escaped to toil by day among vast arrays of exquisite flowers, determined to coax the bloom of happiness from a life ground to dirt.
The Bernies had whispered about a halfway house. Could Connor escape into flowers, too? Or must he flee further than a mind can fathom?
“Yes, ma’am, I can,” Connor was telling their bee-yotch boss, who stomped away in disappointment, missing that chance to remind a man of his limitations, his restrictions.
“No way,” Freida warned him, ignoring her cautions enough to move closer, but not too. “Eighty more flats—by five-thirty?”
“By seven,” he said, finding her eyes before looking away. “I moved. Only one bus now.”
“Get out of here!” she said, handing him another bag of granules, which he poured into the sprayer’s tank. Tendrils of hanging-pot vinery reached out to tickle their hair, stirred by the greenhouse vent-blower breeze.
“Freida!” shouted the bee-yotch from somewhere in the jungle. “You better help, too! Don’t let our criminal miss curfew!”
From an aisle of trayed cuttings, Bernie the Younger paused his spraying to shoot a sneering grin their way. Working across from him, Bernie the Older scowled and waved his half-wit son back to the task.
Freida retrieved stacks of trays while he wheelbarrowed more medium inside. They developed a sort of assembly line, the only sounds a whoosh from the blowers and coos from mourning doves nesting among the lilacs just outside. His face blanked again, his movements suggesting a trance, a disconnect from anything not flowing through his hands, except that he did surface occasionally to check his watch before sinking back into the current of his efforts.
He was definitely not all there.
The electronic box in his fanny pack beeped. He started, an instant of apprehension, awareness of her curious presence, embarrassment, frustration, chagrin. It beeped several more times before he could loose the pouch, unzip it, and reach in to manipulate his tormentor. As the prompt grew more urgent, the Bernies paused to watch. The bee-yotch yelled, “Add another sixty to that order!” Connor knelt and checked something strapped above his ankle, then hurried outside. He returned after a moment, the pack silent, that chaperon riding his tail once again poised to squall. He set back to the task, increasing his pace.
“We won’t be done by seven,” Freida said.
He eyed her suspiciously, then looked away, thinking, weighing. “She wants to fire me,” he said, setting down his trowel and bowing his head.
“But she hired you, so—”
He shook his head. “Old Man Brentwick did—for the tax credits.” He picked up the trowel and started filling a tray.
“Can’t you call the halfway house and get more time?”
His face hinted at a wince. He shook his head again, this time refusing to make eye contact. She’d managed to coax the skittish little jailbird to perch on her finger, but then she’d scared him away.
But he came back. “I live on my own now, eight o’clock curfew.”
Sure, and on his own he lived every minute feeding himself to that parasitic tick of a GPS unit whose jaws burrowed into his butt.
At nearly seven o’clock it grew clear they would need another half hour. She could offer to stay and finish without him, but his failure might delight the bee-yotch, their common enemy.
“How far by car to your place?” she asked.
He lost himself in calculations for a moment, then decided, “Ten minutes.”
“I’ll drop you off,” she pronounced, no discussion required, just like that inviting the murderous raping counterfeiting thieving arsonist to direct her down some dark, secluded dead-end road.
Apprehensive, she drove too fast, arriving in eight minutes, half an hour to spare. He resided at the end of a gravel road surrounded by fallow fields, in a side-by-side duplex, its lived-in left-side unit neat and quaint and homey, the vacant right-side unit damaged, decrepit, and decayed. As he stepped from her car, she worried he might actually be so rude as to invite her in, daring her to find some polite way to decline, but he simply thanked her and allowed as how he would look forward to seeing her again tomorrow. He didn’t even invite her in. How rude.
He turned to walk up the steps, but hesitated and looked back.
“I’m waiting until you get in,” she admonished. Silly man, no social graces, probably not all there.
And he went to the door on the right! He let himself in, waved bye, and disappeared inside.
Five weeks, she dropped him off every evening. It annoyed her at first, then downright pissed her off that his side of the duplex never seemed to improve. She could see not investing in structure for the landlord, but he could have cleaned it, fixed it up, taken some pride in the appearance of his home. After he’d festered so long in prison, didn’t finally having a real place to live mean something?
On the job he avoided talking, something about appearing to have anything to do with anybody inexplicably making him nervous, but he usually relaxed a bit in the car afterwards, talking some, though never much. He worried constantly, this grew clear—about his pages-long list of ridiculous restrictions, about losing his job, about everything and nothing in a life that eventually inevitably goes wrong.
Finally on a day when they had time to spare, she stopped at a small grocery and announced, “You’re inviting me in tonight, and I’m bringing the food and drinks.”
He followed her inside, up and down the aisles, nodding and shaking his head, maybe even amused by her barrage of queries as she bustled about. Yes, he does have a stove, cookware, fridge . . . cleaning supplies. “I’m serious,” she said. “I need to feel . . . comfortable.” That embarrassed him, as did having to emphatically say no when she gestured toward beer and wine. Oh yeah, that pages-long list of ridiculous restrictions . . . “Is the bathroom clean?” she asked, skeptical of his nod, but trying not to show it. She felt bad about riding him so, but if a guy can’t learn in prison how to take some upside-yo-head, then where’s he ever gonna learn it?
And what’s with this being afraid all the time? Weren’t there bigger things to be scared of in the joint than out here on the streets?
The living area looked awful, piles of junk everywhere, towels and sheets posing as curtains, flea-market rejects standing in for lamps, but the couch and low tables and older-model TV all looked immaculately clean, an odd contradiction, as if a man volunteering to live in squalor nevertheless demands a relaxing place to sit.
She carried the food to the kitchen, again finding that disconnect where broken drawers and splintered cabinets prove spotless, the plumbing and sink scrubbed to a sparkle. She invited herself to wander back through the dining area, poked her head into a meticulous bathroom, and found three bedrooms, the open one neat and clean, the other two closed. She reached for the first knob, and he didn’t object, so she peered inside to find dusty piles of junk, then checked the other and found a similar rat’s nest. Well, one could certainly tell which of three cells belonged to this con.
She poured them some cold sodas, then set about frying sirloin tips and simmering a saucy vegetable medley. He hovered around, offering to help, following orders, setting a surprisingly beautiful table complete with wildflower bouquet, and he seemed to be thoroughly enjoying himself, though in an awkward, still-skittish way.
He is all there, just needing a reason to reveal the rest.
They ate in front of the TV, shouting out Jeopardy answers, teasing each other about unexpected expertise in the oddest categories. She regaled him with crazy-customer anecdotes from her time at the florist’s counter, and he uncaged some wacky prison tales—apparently sometimes funny things actually happen in the joint. He placed his electronic box in its cradle right at eight, then recalled several embarrassing encounters he’d suffered as a result of its penchant to beepingly demand attention for no reason at all. Several times she pondered the big question, but always decided maybe she’d rather not know. Finally, she settled for going halfway there: “Look, I just want to know two things.”
He picked at a loose thread hanging from his shirt button.
“Were you guilty?”
He nodded. “Yes.”
“Any chance you would ever do it again?”
He shook his head. “None.”
That first night, she kissed him on the cheek as she left. The second, he kissed her back. In the coming weeks, their exchanges expressed slowly increasing passion. As she felt more at home, and he grew more accustomed to her barging intrusion, she pressed her preference to see the place, you know, fixed up.
“And how come I never see the people next door?” she wondered one evening.
“Nobody lives there.”
“Really?” She headed out to the porch, Connor right behind. “It looks so—” She peered through the window, then worked her way around the side, standing tiptoe for curtain-peeps. Fully furnished, it boasted beautifully crafted furniture. Posing on the walls, landscape paintings and photographs modeled their fine formal frames. An exquisitely carved fireplace mantle flaunted its constant charms, unthreatened by the notion of ephemeral flames flaring up to wave for attention. The dining-room set displayed its mahogany pedigree, polished to a sheen, while the staid kitchen cabinetry lent gravitas to a domain any Food Net chef would covet. Some sort of flat-roofed outbuilding squatted forlornly in the tall grass out back, the path to its door long-since ceded to weeds. She peered into the duplex’s rear windows. Three bedrooms waited patiently, one a playland for the little girl who arranged her unicorns and dolls on shelves built into a princess castle; one a swirl of baby-boy blue staging an antiqued crib for the royal prince; the biggest a king-and-queen’s boudoir, oakenly solid for the family man, frilly and soft for his beloved bride and mom to their kids.
“It’s furnished!” she announced, even as he glanced about nervously and urged her back inside. “And clean, too,” she added just as a black cop-car-styled sedan pulled up in front.
“My parole officer,” he whispered, rushing her toward the porch to meet a tan-skinned Shrek in leather jacket and ill-fitting polyester slacks. His black slick-back hair and bushy ’stache stereotyped something, but she couldn’t quite place what.
“Who’s this?” he demanded, not waiting for an answer, which Connor couldn’t explain anyway. “And where were you?”
Freida tried to tell him, but he barged into Connor’s place and stomped around, opening drawers, tossing cushions, popping a whole cookie into his mouth.
She offered, “I’m thinking of renting the place next door.”
“Right,” said the PO, adding a snort as he inspected the tether box in its cradle on his way out. He drove off in a cloud of road dust.
“So,” she said as Connor dropped onto the couch, unsettled, “what happened to the family next door?”
He hesitated. “Killed—by a drunk driver, is what I heard. Don’t know the details.”
“You should talk to the landlord about moving over there.”
He shook his head, then headed for the kitchen. “No one can move in there—yet.”
So they ate, watched television, and held hands for a while. Getting up to leave, she suggested they make plans for their upcoming day off.
“I can’t,” he said. “Parole office, then errands, too much . . .” He sighed, weary, frustrated—she could only guess.
“I could go with you,” she offered, “drive, at least—wait in the car.”
He searched her eyes, and seemed about to say yes, but he looked away, his shoulders sagging. “Stuff I need to do myself.”
“Okay,” she said, putting her arms around him. “I could be waiting for you when you get back.”
And he smiled. He hadn’t forgotten how, after all. Or maybe he had, but just now finally remembered. He fished around in his pocket and produced a shiny key, so new its edges virtually growled as it bared its teeth.
She never left that night, and though they slept little, all fumbley and nervous, they eventually found each other, and for the first time in her life she saw that what just happens to happen can prove way more interesting than what anybody intends to happen.
“I’ll be here when you get home,” she promised the next morning, planning a day of cleaning and organizing. She dropped him at the bus stop, then headed out to fill her trunk with supplies, intending to turn half a house into a whole home.
She quickly found the task daunting. Too much and too many crammed the corners, stacked the shelves, piled the floors. She hauled the apparent disposables and unreclaimables out to the road, but a lot could prove useful: building supplies, tools, fittings, fixtures, and pristine rugs. She headed to the outbuilding to look for storage space, but found the door locked. Dusty windows revealed shed-style storage at one end—yard equipment, riding mower, a little girl’s bike—with the bulk of the floorspace arranged as a wood shop: all manner of saws, a monster lathe, racks of tools, and lots of gear she didn’t recognize. They had been remodeling the place themselves . . .
The dead family.
Fixing up the other side, they had barely begun phase two of an unlived life, maybe as income property, or space for friends, extended family.
Freida spent hours dragging and piling and cleaning, filling the two extra bedrooms to the ceiling, then filled a notepad with intentions: measurements for curtains, lists of repairs, needed supplies and linens and fodder for the cupboard . . .
Over the next few weeks, the place brightened more with every accomplishment. They worked together, learning each other’s rhythm and style, his skills and artistry blooming. Still, sometimes it seemed she would lose a piece of him, especially when he sat in silence, or gazed out the window. She woke one morning and found him in the yard staring across the field beyond the outbuilding.
On their days off, she would coax him to go out, see a movie, picnic in the park, browse the big-box store. He always stayed close to her, nervously protective, self-conscious about his electronics, embarrassed by unprovoked beeps, and looking quite relieved to arrive home.
Then one morning she presented him his own set of keys to her car and asked him to run to the store.
“I—I can’t,” he said, shock in his face as he quickly handed them back. “No license, suspended for life.”
And she saw the awful truth.
She took his hands, felt him trembling, searched his eyes. “It was you.”
His eyes filled with tears.
“You were the drunk driver who killed that family.”
His lip trembled, and a tear spilled down one cheek. He slowly nodded.
“Oh God. A little girl . . . That baby boy . . .”
“No baby yet,” he said. “They were rushing to the hospital, too fast, too dark.”
And a drunk driver lurked out there in the night. “And you don’t even remember it?”
He shook his head. “What they told me. Pleaded guilty. Deserved worse.”
Tears spilled from her eyes, and she held him close, both trembling now. She knew he would never mean to hurt someone. But how could he learn to live with the awful truth, an entire family gone, their home empty, their lives unlived?
They moved to the couch, rubbed each other’s shoulders, wiped their faces. She wondered, “How can you live here—I mean, so close?”
“No place else to go,” he said, and though surely other places waited nearby, she thought maybe he needed to see the result, to feel the absence, to know the truth of an instant he might never remember.
It took some time to find each other that night, and they woke exhausted before heading to the greenhouses. Freida pulled counter duty to cover for Jenny again.
“I’m leaving early,” Jenny said, her grin announcing good news. “I’m getting married!” she squealed. Both women jumped around and hugged each other. “It’s that guy—Carlo? I told you about him? Makes good money working for his dad. We’re going to Vegas, then looking for a place for us and the kids.”
As Jenny bustled about, waiting for her ride, Freida pondered the stark comparison between how one family can blossom while another just disappears in an instant of horrible mistake, and she wished Jenny the best, a chance at finally finding what she’d searched for in so many wrong directions. “Hey, I might know a place for you,” she told them when Carlo came to whisk her away. “I’ll look into it while you’re gone.”
And she did, using some downtime to search the county database for contact information on the duplex’s new owner.
That evening she hugged Connor for a long time, then asked him for the key to the outbuilding in back.
His shoulders dropped, and he bowed his head. She knew he would have one. He took a deep breath, then reached for her hand and led. He stomped some of the tall grass to make it easier for her to get to the door, then slid his hand underneath the window ledge and produced the key. He looked at her, and where she expected suspicion, reticence, or at least confusion, she found relief. He rubbed his face and sighed.
“When?” he asked.
“Only this morning. I discovered you bought this building even before you went to prison. You were fixing this place up,” she said, nodding toward the door. He opened it, and they stepped inside. “You finished the left side, then rented it to that family, but never got to finish the other.”
They stood in the musty, dusty workshop where a whole man could build dreams.
“No,” he said. “That’s not what happened.”
She took his hands and looked into his eyes, and this time he refused to look away.
“That little girl,” he said, tears drawing lines to his chin, “the little brother she never knew, their mama . . . they died because a stupid man convinced himself the baby wouldn’t come early, because a fool thought he could drink that night and still keep his family safe.”
“But how would you—?”
He shook his head. “Their daddy, their husband . . . he didn’t die, didn’t even get hurt. No, the price he paid is having to live with it.”
And live with it he did, for when a man’s not all there, he must be somewhere. Maybe he has no place else to go, so he dwells on the other side.
But deserved or not, there always exists that glimmer of possibility that another beautiful soul will reach out, open the door, take down the towels and sheets, let in some light.
“For me?” she said after weeks had passed, watching him cut new cabinet doors.
“For us,” he corrected, handing her the sander. “If you want.”
“I want,” she said, smoothing hard edges, learning how to join him in the safe place where he loses himself to work with his hands.
And the left side sang again with the laughter of Jenny’s children and Carlo’s love for his burgeoning family, while the right side gradually discovered how to realize its promise.
And when the parole officer barged inside, the man who lived there proudly said, “I’d like you to meet my wife.”
And she would spend many hours learning about the people he’d loved and lost, and she would honor their memory, too.
And then one sunny day an expectant father carried an ornately carved and hand-built crib inside, and both halves of a house completed an exquisitely loving whole.
And in the years since, in those moments when it seemed the man wasn’t all there, the woman who loved him knew exactly where to find him.
* * *
© The Fresh Ink Group, LLC, 2009
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