The Unexpected and Fictional Career Change of Jim Kearns
After the Incident: Chapter Eighteen
NOTE: This is the last chapter in the Jim Kearns novel (with an epilogue to come). To start at the beginning, please click here.
The morning arrived blustery, cool, and grey: a preview to November. Maddy’d already left for work and the kids still lay in their beds, oblivious to the world. I’d heard one of them, Rachel, I think, rummaging through the hall closet at about three o’clock the night before, looking for a comforter.
The comforters would be out in earnest soon enough, and another post–Labor Day season would begin dealing thrills and spills anew, but I already felt a low-key exhilaration at the prospect of change. Overall, I felt good all around — except for having missed my little visit with Rose the evening before. I’d sort of . . . napped after supper (it wasn’t the amount of beer so much as speed of consumption) and slept through the night. She’d seemed eager to see me, too. Hopefully I hadn’t slighted her, but if I had she’d soon let me know.
Still, I hadn’t seen her all morning, not from the front door when I saw Maddy off, nor from the third floor as I jotted down a few words; and later, when I stood on her porch and rang her doorbell, I felt a growing suspicion over her absence. Despite what I’d thought about the weather being so nippy for that time of year, normally she would have completed a few lengths of the block already.
A minute after my second ring, I wandered to her front window; I didn’t want to peek through her partially drawn curtains, but my anxiousness compelled me. I pressed my nose to the glass, cupped my hands around the sides of my face at eye level, and peered into her house.
The scenario left me uneasy: my snoopiness as viewed from behind and the dark, motionless stretch of living room/dining room leading to her kitchen. In the kitchen itself, her open fridge door cast a triangle of light across the small stretch of linoleum visible from my viewpoint. Something appeared to be lying in the light, a wedge from a cheese wheel perhaps, but I couldn’t identify it. So I waited, and I waited a bit more, and a minute later, when no one stepped up to attend to matters, I started for her back door.
By now I was officially scared, and when I turned the corner into her yard and saw her kitchen door flung wide open and swinging in the breeze, I took her deck stairs in two bounds and burst into her house.
The kitchen lay in a shambles, with the fridge wide open and its contents scattered everywhere. All of her cupboard doors were jacked open, too, with broken plates, assorted pill bottles, cookie bags, and other jetsam scattered across the floor.
And in the far corner, trussed like a Thanksgiving turkey and slumped in a chair, sat Rose. At least I thought it was her. A tartan pillowcase covered her drooping head, obscuring her features with the efficiency of a Klansman’s hood. Her ever-present Bible lay open at her feet.
I bolted across the room and pulled off the pillowcase. It was Rose, of course, and she was cold to the touch. I looked around, found a wall-mounted phone right next to where I stood, and punched in 911.
The police knew exactly how the incident had unfolded.
It seems a gang of youths had been roaming the borough lately, not actually casing places, but keeping an eye open as they wandered the streets. If they spotted promising targets — seniors, the wheelchair-bound (access ramps were always a good hint), or anyone who seemed defenseless and possibly dependent on prescription painkillers — they’d return later that night in hopes of a low-risk break and enter. Oxycontin and Dilaudid had resale value (even Tylenol 3s were solid highs with a few beers), and finding cash in all the typical places — cookie jars and sewing kits — was more hit than miss in these kinds of homes.
When the perpetrators of this crime had passed by Rose’s porch the night before, they hadn’t seen what looked to be a burly son talking to his aged mother. They’d seen a lonely old woman, maybe on the mend from a broken hip or bypass surgery and in need of potent meds, sitting by herself with her Bible on her lap and her darkened house looming in the background.
At least that’s how I’d interpreted the turn of events.
Now, you might question how teenagers, kids less than a decade removed from Barney the Fucking Dinosaur, could have done such a thing to a helpless old lady, but the answer’s obvious. Maddy’d been right to correct me last summer: seventy-five percent of the world’s inhabitants weren’t assholes. No, indeed, I had lowballed the estimate. The planet spilled over with sphincters.
And me, I was the biggest one of all, for having wallowed in drunken slumber the night before, snoring off my afternoon cups while Rose waited faithfully for me on her porch, exposing herself to that roaming band of animals.
I’d killed poor, sweet Rose.
Next week, the Epilogue to Jim’s journey.