Stress Test Ch. 42

Death had a lot in common with the surveys Sandy worked with at ATI. Both caught people off guard and gave a slender moment an importance it would have lacked without the intrusion. ATI extracted opinions from thousands of people and then peddled the results as if they held an eternal truth.

Sandy knew that the survey itself altered the sample because ATI quizzed people about so many things they'd never considered and didn't really care about. So as not to look stupid, the respondent said the first thing that flashed into his head, then changed his mind moments later. The interviewers came back to the office and traded horror stories of people who pestered them for days, trying to amend their original answers.

In the same way, death preserved a particular stage in a person's life regardless of how that person might have wanted to be remembered.

Jennifer died young, with all her sweetness intact, so now Sandy couldn't imagine what she would have been beyond childhood. In all probability, she would have looked and acted a lot like Sandy. But she would have been a new, improved version of Sandy, able to see certain warnings more clearly.

On the other hand, Stephen X's death left him with neither a future nor a past in Sandy's mind.

Roscoe had told Sandy all sorts of stories about Stephen X's childhood, but she could never pull the image of the boy into focus. It was too hard to imagine someone like Stephen X ever spooning up strained carrots or having his diaper changed. How could he have wound up where he did if he'd started at the same place as everybody else?

Saury was so young—and he would always be her baby—yet she had no trouble imagining how he would look, how his voice would sound, at every coming stage of his life. At least now he would be safe to grow up and lead a normal life.

Sandy wasn't exactly sure what normal life was supposed to be like for herself, but she settled into a comfortable routine in the weeks following Stephen X's death. She went back to work. She dropped Saury at Kid'n'Kaboodle. She bought groceries and ate and slept a fitful sleep.

She felt a little bit better each day, as if she were coming out of a long, bad dream. The fact that none of the things that happened bothered Saury helped her. He never mentioned Stephen X and he began to laugh more often. She only wished she could get him some kind of blood transfusion to wash away the last traces of the boy's father.

A month went by before the first phone call.

"How have you been?"

Sandy frowned and looked at the ceiling, trying to place the voice. "Fine," she said. "Who is this?"

"Don't you remember me, your good friend?"

"I'm sorry. I'm sure I will when you tell me your name." She felt her finger tapping the receiver. Suvi rose and walked to her side.

"We should get together sometime soon."

Sandy grew impatient. "Okay. Anytime you like." She hung up.

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The reporters usually called on Friday afternoons, never more than an hour after the short detective had told her how the police were running down some promising leads. By the time it became clear that the cops had run out of suspects, the incident had lost its news value.

Both the newspaper and television station reassigned women to the story and began mining it for human interest. The reporters asked Sandy how she was coping with the stagnant investigation. Did her husband's death give her a feeling of independence? What steps had she taken to protect her son and herself? How had she told Saury that his father would not be coming home again?

It all reminded her of ATI's surveys where page upon page of pointless questions were designed to catch people off guard so they'd answer truthfully when the real question sneaked in. The reporters' probing made so little sense that Sandy couldn't even tell whether she'd been misquoted when the stories finally came out.

She still felt the lack of news was somehow her fault. She wanted to help them get their stories so they would leave her alone, but she had nothing to tell them. One of the reporters, Dorothy Something, seemed nice enough. She was just doing her job. But the questions left Sandy with a queasy stomach and a sense of impending doom that never quite lifted.

Sandy dreamt of walking down a crowded, endless hallway in some sort of institutional building—a school or a hospital. Vulgar light flickered over the scene as the fluorescent tubes crackled and sparked. She touched each person on the shoulder and asked, "What's wrong? What's wrong?"

The people just looked at her like there was nothing wrong with them. She wanted a mirror, not out of vanity, but to confirm her fear that some terrible message had been scrawled across her face—something that everyone in the world but her could see.

Each time she reached out, she expected the person who turned toward her to be a skeleton shedding rotten, maggot-ridden chunks of flesh on the floor. But that never happened. They were all clean, wholesome people.

"What's wrong?" Sandy demanded as she tapped an old woman's shoulder.

Mama Gore turned to face her. "Nothing, dear," she said, shaking her head slowly. "Nothing is wrong." Sandy woke with a start to find she'd knocked the pillows onto the floor. Suvi had sprawled over them, snoring in utter peace.

Every time Sandy's name splashed into the news, another volley of phone calls came from the shooting instructors and insurance salesmen, the fringe lunatics and heavy breathers. The mail brought letters from groups like POLICE—People Offended by Lax Investigations of Criminal Elements. Talk radio courted her.

When Sandy took Saury to Kid'n'Kaboodle's field day, she tried to cope with the burden of being a local celebrity.

"I saw you on TV the other day," confided a plump woman in a sweatshirt that matched the children's blue and orange Kid'n'Kaboodle t-shirts. Saury and the other kids ditched their parents for a noisy game of poison tag. "You looked terrific. The camera really agrees with you."

Sandy figured that was code for "you look like crap now." She smoothed her hair and wondered whether that meant that discussing Stephen X's demise brought out the best in her.

"Does your son know what happened?"

Sandy followed the woman's gaze to the soccer field where the kids darted back and forth. "I don't even know what happened," she said. "All I want is to forget about it."

"Oh, pardon me." The woman looked mortified. "I didn't mean anything."

"I'm sorry—" Sandy started, before she realized she'd done nothing to be sorry for. After an uncomfortable moment of silence, she pointed to the children and said, "Wouldn't it be nice to have so much energy?"

"If only we could harness it!" The woman shook her head. "Jason can run full tilt all day, but get him home and he's too worn out to pick up after himself."

"Really? Sometimes I think Saury is too neat for his age," Sandy had never thought such a thing before, but she knew at once it was true. "He should loosen up a little."

"Well, maybe we can work out a trade." The plump woman tugged her sleeves down over her hands and stamped her feet. "At least for evenings and weekends."

"His father was never a child."

The woman cocked her head in Sandy's direction. "You mean the guy who got shot?"

Sandy didn't seem to hear. "I guess he didn't hate children so much as he hated the child within people, the part that can still grow. He had real a real problem with that.

"But I don't think it's too late for Saury. He's just a little boy, isn't he?"

The puzzled look on the woman's face embarrassed Sandy. "It's been nice talking with you," Sandy said, "but we've got to go . . . to our next thing now." She tried without much success to smile at the woman as she edged away. After a few steps, she turned and called out, "Saury! Saury!"

The children sprinted and dodged each other in their identical Kid'n'Kaboodle t-shirts. Sandy had lost track of Saury and now she couldn't pick him out of the blue and orange swirl on the soccer field. Calling his name, she trotted into the jumble of children.

She thought she saw Saury, but when she touched him on the shoulder, it turned out to be another boy. "You can't tag me," he protested through a veil of freckles. "You're not it."

"Saury!" she shouted. Then she felt a tap on her butt. When she turned around, it wasn't Saury, but a girl she knew from his class. "Poison, Mrs. Skinner," the girl laughed. "You're poison. You've got to lie down."

She saw Saury spread-eagled on the ground. She knelt beside him and cradled his head in her hand. "Saury! Saury, what happened?"

His eyelids flipped open. "Shhh, mom. I'm playing poisoned."

Sandy's relief outweighed her embarrassment as they drove home. Why did she worry so much? Why did she always expect something terrible to happen?

"Couldn't you hear me calling you?" She frowned at her son.

"We were just playing, mom. Don't you ever just play?"

Having chided herself for her pessimism, Sandy couldn't quite believe what she saw when she opened the back door. Suvi whimpered and cast her a pitiful look from the middle of a heap of books, knick-knacks and planks. He'd apparently been bored, so when he ground his last goat's hoof into dust, he started gnawing on the bottom of the book shelves. With canine ingenuity, he'd managed to rock the shelves until they tumbled over on top of him.

The mess didn't bother Sandy as much as the way Suvi hobbled on three legs, dangling a paw in the air. He turned mournful eyes to her and licked her hand as if trying to show that he wanted her to lick his injury. The vet couldn't find any broken bones, but she wanted him to stay overnight so she could keep an eye on the swelling.

Suvi had come into their lives so easily that his absence made the house feel empty. Funny, Sandy hadn't felt anything like that when they let her come back after carting off Stephen X's body.

Sandy flinched when the phone rang at the usual time that night. The reedy voice said, "We should get together sometime."

"Do I know you?" Sandy snapped.

"You should know me after I helped you with that bad, bad man."

Sandy pressed the phone against her neck for a moment then slammed it in the cradle. She breathed deeply.

The murder had been in the papers and on television forever, making her fair game for every crackpot in the world. A chill played along her spine.

Faceless monsters crowded her life like the zombie hordes in Stephen X's precious tape of Death of the Damned. One replaced another after each was destroyed.

Sandy couldn't believe that other people's lives were like this. She felt singled out, like the watches that Wally Conner had put through his stress test. Maybe Sandy's tormentors were just pawns in a much bigger plan, like the destructive forces Wally had used. After all, when Stephen X lost his power over her, he was taken out of the game. So maybe one trial would come after the other until she finally went crazy or died or did whatever it was that all this led to.

She hadn't taken her hand from the phone when it rang again. She jumped back from the wall as the sound pierced the air. "Saury," she called. "Let's take the Mustang for a ride."

Saury came out of his room rubbing his eyes. "Why's the phone ringing, mom?"

"Because it's broken. We're going to go out for a little while so it won't bother us."

She drove around town with the top down for more than an hour, back-tracking and turning at random intersections until she felt safe and alone with Saury and the cool, starry night.

They were about to turn off Westmore onto Rollingwood Drive when the battered pickup came out of nowhere and hugged their bumper. It flashed its brights.

Sandy thought something was wrong with her car so she pulled over and twisted around in the seat. When she squinted to see past the pickup's headlights, she made out the delicate, bird-like features of Uly Bondarbon at the wheel. That's when she connected him with the voice on the phone.

As the door of the pickup began to swing open, Sandy jammed the Mustang into drive and tromped on the gas. The gaudy lights of Westmore flashed by as they never had in all those years she nursed the Impala down this street.

She lost sight of the pickup in her rear view mirror and turned down the dark road that ran along the railroad tracks. She killed the lights and leaned back against the headrest, listening to the distant rumble of a train.

"What are we doing, mom?" Saury asked with the moonlight filling his wide eyes.

"We're just resting for a few minutes, honey. We'll go home pretty soon."

Sandy tried to blink the road dust out of her eyes. When she opened them, she watched the train's headlight roll across the trees and power lines that ran along the tracks. How could the engineer see where he was going, she wondered, when the light looped around like that?

The freight roared past, rocking the car with its wind. Then she felt the thud of the pickup truck against her rear bumper.

The reedy voice called out over the noise of the train. "You haven't forgotten your good friend, have you, Sandy?"

The Mustang fishtailed through the dirt as it picked up speed. When she straightened out, Sandy flipped on the lights again and drove as hard as the pounding in her chest.

She thought of Artie Sandoval who had even looked a little bit like Uly Bondarbon. He'd killed himself because he loved her, but he knew nothing about her. Nothing. Where did she fit into this creep's fantasies? Why couldn't they all just leave her alone?

When she pulled even with the engine of the train, she dared to glance in the rear view mirror. But with so many bumps jostling the car, she couldn't focus on anything behind her. If she turned her head, her hair whipped across her eyes. The pickup had doused its lights. For all she knew, it sat right on her bumper.

As she moved ahead of the train, she realized she didn't know this road. But there was nowhere else to go now. Sandy reached over and felt the coarse fabric of Saury's seat belt. She ran her hand along it down to the buckle and tugged to make sure it was secure.

The engineer pulled the horn for a crossing.

"Are we having a race?" Saury rocked in his seat.

"Yeah," she said. "Yes, honey." She was afraid to take her eyes off the road, but she didn't have to look to know that Saury sensed the truth in her voice.

The light from the train rolled over the road sign before her headlights picked it up. Just past the crossing, the dirt came to a dead end. She could go straight and be trapped, or she could try to make the crossing. When Sandy glanced over her shoulder to see how far ahead of the train they'd gotten, the corner of her eye caught the shadow of the truck.

The train blared again and its brakes began to wail as Sandy put both feet on the gas. She stole one more glance behind her and caught an impression of the engineer cursing and waving in the dim light of his instruments.

Sandy waited as long as she dared and promised herself not to look down the tracks. She slammed on the brakes and slid into the turn. The Mustang spewed out a great wall of dirt as it swerved up to the crossing. Sandy wrestled the wheel and the car swung past ninety degrees. Her heart shot up in her throat as she found herself facing the train head-on.

The car's back wheel slid off the planks that smoothed out the crossing for traffic. In a crazy, compressed sequence of events, the tire blew when it slammed into the rail. The impact flipped the Mustang into the air. Sandy and Saury rolled through the night sky in a lazy arc that ended with a jolt on the far side of the tracks.

The crash landing snapped Sandy's head back just in time to see the train crushing the pickup into an awkward slab of metal. Sparks exploded from clouds of steam. Then the pitiless force of the machine tossed what was left of the truck into the field.

Sandy lost track of time again as the awful wail of the train's brakes faded into cry of the ambulance.

_________________________

Saury loved an adventure. The implications of the accident—the idea that the truck and train might have been driven by human beings—didn't sink in. He bragged to his friends about what a great driver his mom was.

Sandy envied the way each day could offer something fresh and new at that age.

When she held Saury close, she knew that things would be different for him. He would never have to know the Jack Gores and Stephen X Skinners of the world. Maybe that was Sandy's reward for surviving the stress test.

And it couldn't be too much to hope that the nightmare world she knew would disappear, like a scab that shrinks little by little until you can't tell exactly where the wound was. Already, time seemed to be straightening out for her, heading in one direction.

The police toyed with the idea that Uly Bondarbon had murdered Stephen X. With hindsight, they could have come up with an adequate, twisted motive for him. But there was a problem with the crime scene. Someone Uly's size could not have fired the bullets the forensics people dug out of the wall and the floor. The angles were all wrong.

"Bondarbon wasn't the shooter," the tall detective announced. "The real killer is still out there and we're not going to quit looking for him."

"How do you know it was a man?" Sandy asked.

"What?"

"You said you're still looking for him," she said, chalking up a point for herself. "Oh, never mind."

She didn't care if they ever solved the crime, except that maybe somebody ought to thank the guy. With Suvi back home, she didn't worry much anymore about the killer returning. Each day, the dog became a little bit bigger, a little bit more protective, a little more eager to prove his loyalty.

Like the woman with the part-Rottweiler she'd met in the park, Sandy lost her fear. The surprising part was how deeply that fear could weave itself into the fabric of a woman's life. She saw it now in the teenager who spent fifteen minutes fixing her make-up in the ladies room at Burger Castle. She saw it in the way women took their keys out of their purses before they walked into the parking lot at night. She saw it in the way women tried to ignore the rubbernecking men they passed.

Sandy got another promotion and went to work on the day shift. She found that Stephen X had squirreled away some decent assets. Apart from its usefulness, the money made her happy because he couldn't take it with him.

Sandy and Linda began making plans to do something fun on the long weekend. That was why she was expecting to hear Linda when she answered the phone on Tuesday evening.

"Hi!" Sandy said.

"Yeah," said the man's voice. "I'm looking for Marti."

Sandy opened her mouth, but didn't say anything. She lowered the phone from her ear and placed it gently in its cradle as Suvi watched, waiting for her caress.

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END

Go back to Chapter 1 of Stress Test.

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