Gwendy's Button Box

31

She’s going to spend the summer in Castle Rock, so when her parents have gone back to their hotel, she packs up the last of her things, stowing the button box at the very bottom of her trunk. During her time at Brown, she kept the awful thing in a safe deposit box in the Bank of Rhode Island, something she wishes she had thought of doing sooner, but she was just a kid when she got it, a kid, goddammit, and what do kids know? Kids stow valuables in cavities under trees, or behind loose stones in cellars prone to flooding, or in closets. In closets, for Christ’s sake! Once she gets to Columbia (or Iowa City, if the Writers’ Workshop accepts her), it will go into another safety deposit box, and as far as she’s concerned, it can stay there forever.

She decides to have a slice of coffee cake and a glass of milk before going to bed. She gets as far as the living room, and there she stops cold. Sitting on the desk where she has attended to her studies for the last two years, next to a framed picture of Harry Streeter, is a small, neat black hat. She has no doubt that it’s the one she last saw on the day she and Harry were flying that kite on the baseball field. Such a happy day that was. Maybe the last happy one.

“Come on out here, Gwendy,” Mr. Farris calls from the kitchen. “Set a spell, as they say down south.”

She walks into the kitchen, feeling like a visitor in her own body. Mr. Farris, in his neat black suit and not looking a day older, sits at the kitchen table. He has a piece of the coffee cake and a glass of milk. Her own cake and milk are waiting for her.

He looks her up and down, but—as on that day ten years ago when she first met him at the top of the Suicide Stairs—without salacious intent. “What a fine young woman you’ve grown into, Gwendy Peterson!”

She doesn’t thank him for the compliment, but she sits down. To her, this conversation seems long overdue. Probably not to him; she has an idea that Mr. Farris has his own schedule, and he always stays on it. What she says is, “I locked up when I went out. I always lock up. And the door was still locked when I came back. I always make sure. That’s a habit I got into on the day Harry died. Do you know about Harry? If you knew I wanted coffee cake and milk, I suppose you do.”

“Of course. I know a great deal about you, Gwendy. As for the locks…” He waves it aside, as if to say pish-tush.

“Have you come for the box?” She hears both eagerness and reluctance in her voice. A strange combination, but one she knows quite well.

He ignores this, at least for the time being. “As I said, I know a great deal about you, but I don’t know exactly what happened on the day the Stone kid came to your house. There’s always a crisis with the button box—a moment of truth, one could say—and when it comes, my ability to… see… is lost. Tell me what happened.”

“Do I have to?”

He raises a hand and turns it over, as if to say Up to you.

“I’ve never told anyone.”

“And never will, would be my guess. This is your one chance.”

“I said I hoped he’d rot in hell, and I pushed the red button at the same time. I didn’t mean it literally, but he’d just killed the boy I loved, he’d just stuck a knife right through my fucking foot, and it was what came out. I never thought he’d actually…”

Only he did.

She falls silent, remembering how Frankie’s face began to turn black, how his eyes first went cloudy and then lolled forward in their sockets. How his mouth drooped, the lower lip unrolling like a shade with a broken spring. His scream—surprise? agony? both? she doesn’t know—that blew the teeth right out of his putrefying gums in a shower of yellow and black. His jaw tearing loose; his chin falling all the way down to his chest; the ghastly ripping sound his neck made when it tore open. The rivers of pus from his cheeks as they pulled apart like rotting sailcloth—

“I don’t know if he rotted in hell, but he certainly rotted,” Gwendy says. She pushes away the coffee cake. She no longer wants it.

“What was your story?” he asks. “Tell me that. You must have thought remarkably fast.”

“I don’t know if I did or not. I’ve always wondered if the box did the thinking for me.”

She waits for him to respond. He doesn’t, so she goes on.

“I closed my eyes and pushed the red button again while I imagined Frankie gone. I concentrated on that as hard as I could, and when I opened my eyes, only Harry was in the closet.” She shakes her head wonderingly. “It worked.”

“Of course it worked,” Mr. Farris says. “The red button is very… versatile, shall we say? Yes, let’s say that. But in ten years you only pushed it a few times, showing you to be a person of strong will and stronger restraint. I salute you for that.” And he actually does, with his glass of milk.

“Even once was too much,” she says. “I caused Jonestown.”

“You give yourself far too much credit,” he says sharply. “Jim Jones caused Jonestown. The so-called Reverend was as crazy as a rat in a rainbarrel. Paranoid, mother-fixated, and full of deadly conceit. As for your friend Olive, I know you’ve always felt you were somehow responsible for her suicide, but I assure you that’s not the case. Olive had ISSUES. Your word for it.”

She stares at him, amazed. How much of her life has he been peering into, like a pervert (Frankie Stone, for instance) going through her underwear drawer?

“One of those issues was her stepfather. He… how shall I put it? He fiddled with her.”

“Are you serious?”

“As a heart attack. And you know the truth about young Mr. Stone.”

She does. The police tied him to at least four other rapes and two attempted rapes in the Castle Rock area. Perhaps also to the rape-murder of a girl in Cleaves Mills. The cops are less sure about that one, but Gwendy’s positive it was him.

“Stone was fixated on you for years, Gwendy, and he got exactly what he deserved. He was responsible for the death of your Mr. Streeter, not the button box.”

She barely hears this. She’s remembering what she usually banishes from her mind. Except in dreams, when she can’t. “I told the police that Harry kept Frankie from raping me, that they fought, that Harry was killed and Frankie ran away. I suppose they’re still looking for him. I hid the box in my dresser, along with the coins. I thought about dipping one of my high heel shoes in Harry’s blood to explain the… the bludgeoning… but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. In the end it didn’t matter. They just assumed Frankie took the murder weapon with him.”

Mr. Farris nods. “It’s far from a case of all’s well that ends well, but as well as can be, at least.”

Gwendy’s face breaks into a bitter smile that makes her look years older than twenty-two. “You make it all sound so good. As if I were Saint Gwendy. I know better. If you hadn’t given me that goddamn box, things would have been different.”

“If Lee Harvey Oswald hadn’t gotten a job at the Texas Book Depository, Kennedy would have finished out his term,” Mr. Farris says. “You can if things until you go crazy, my girl.”

“Spin it any way you want, Mr. Farris, but if you’d never given me that box, Harry would still be alive. And Olive.”

He considers. “Harry? Yes, maybe. Maybe. Olive, however, was doomed. You bear no responsibility for her, believe me.” He smiles. “And good news! You’re going to be accepted at Iowa! Your first novel…” He grins. “Well, let that be a surprise. I’ll only say that you’ll want to wear your prettiest dress when you pick up your award.”

“What award?” She is both surprised and a little disgusted at how greedy she is for this news.

He once more waves his hand in that pish-tush gesture. “I’ve said enough. Any more, and I’ll bend the course of your future, so please don’t tempt me. I might give in if you did, because I like you, Gwendy. Your proprietorship of the box has been… exceptional. I know the burden it’s been, sometimes like carrying an invisible packsack full of rocks on your back, but you will never know the good you’ve done. The disasters you’ve averted. When used with bad intent—which you never did, by the way, even your experiment with Guyana was done out of simple curiosity—the box has an unimaginable capacity for evil. When left alone, it can be a strong force for good.”

“My parents were on the way to alcoholism,” Gwendy says. “Looking back on it, I’m almost sure of that. But they stopped drinking.”

“Yes, and who knows how many worse things the box might have prevented during your proprietorship? Not even I know. Mass slaughters? A dirty suitcase bomb planted in Grand Central Station? The assassination of a leader that might have sparked World War III? It hasn’t stopped everything—we both read the newspapers—but I’ll tell you one thing, Gwendy.” He leans forward, pinning her with his eyes. “It has stopped a lot. A lot.”

“And now?”

“Now I’ll thank you to give me the button box. Your work is done—at least that part of your work is done. You still have many things to tell the world… and the world will listen. You will entertain people, which is the greatest gift a man or woman can have. You’ll make them laugh, cry, gasp, think. By the time you’re thirty-five, you’ll have a computer to write on instead of a typewriter, but both are button boxes of a kind, wouldn’t you say? You will live a long life—”

“How long?” Again she feels that mixture of greed and reluctance.

“That I will not tell you, only that you will die surrounded by friends, in a pretty nightgown with blue flowers on the hem. There will be sun shining in your window, and before you pass you will look out and see a squadron of birds flying south. A final image of the world’s beauty. There will be a little pain. Not much.”

He takes a bite of his coffee cake, then stands.

“Very tasty, but I’m already late for my next appointment. The box, please.”

“Who gets it next? Or can you not tell me that, either?”

“Not sure. I have my eye on a boy in a little town called Pescadero, about an hour south of San Francisco. You will never meet him. I hope, Gwendy, he’s as good a custodian as you have been.”

He bends toward her and kisses her on the cheek. The touch of his lips makes her happy, the way the little chocolate animals always did.

“It’s at the bottom of my trunk,” Gwendy says. “In the bedroom. The trunk’s not locked… although I guess that wouldn’t cause you any problems even if it was.” She laughs, then sobers. “I just… I don’t want to touch it again, or even look at it. Because if I did…”

He’s smiling, but his eyes are grave. “If you did, you might want to keep it.”

“Yes.”

“Sit here, then. Finish your coffee cake. It really is good.”

He leaves her.