Lost Echoes

40

Outside the air was easier to breathe and the sky was full of all those shiny yard lights. The backyard was stuffed with people, because Talia, mad as if she had been dipped in acid, had burst out of the shelter screaming, running toward the house, leaving Harry, coatless and confused.

She brought the crowd back with her. She was no longer drunk. She had snapped out of it.

So now he stood there, out of the woods, away from the shelter at the edge of the yard, watching as they swelled around him like a great flood of well-dressed water.

“What are you doing to my daughter?” Talia’s dad said. “She said you hurt her.”

“I didn’t mean to,” Harry said. “It was an accident. I swear. I had…I had a vision.”

“Do what?” her father said.

“A vision.”

“He’s crazy, Daddy,” Talia said. “I didn’t know he was crazy.”

“It’s okay, Talia.” It was the boy who had been in the crowd at school, at the burger joint, the one he had seen Talia look at while dancing. Kyle. All sorts of ideas and questions, and even some sad answers, came to Harry as he watched the boy slide up and put his arm around Talia’s waist.

“She wanted to show me the storm shelter,” Harry said.

“I did,” Talia said. “And then he was all over me. Look at my arms and wrists…. Well, you can’t see them in this light, but they’re bruised. Bad.”

“I ought to beat you down, boy,” her father said.

“It was an accident, I swear.”

Talia’s mother arrived. She wobbled out of the crowd and looked at Harry and smiled. “You’re cute, you know it?”

“Oh, shut up,” Mr. McGuire said. He reached into his pocket, pulled out his cell phone, punched buttons. Then to Harry: “I’m calling the police.”

“The police?” Harry said. “I didn’t do anything.”

“He said you killed someone, Daddy,” Talia said, clinging tightly to the boy.

“What?” Mr. McGuire said, then, into the phone: “Oh, police. Yes. Yes.”

He gave his name and address, clicked off the phone, dropped it into his front pants pocket.

“Killed someone?” Mr. McGuire said. “Me?”

“He said he thought you killed someone,” Talia said. “You, Daddy.”

“In the vision,” Harry said, “he looked like you.”

“Killed who?” Mr. McGuire said. “What in hell are you talking about?”

“I don’t know, a redheaded man, had freckles.”

“No shit. A redheaded man with freckles. Did he have on a funny hat? Maybe some goddamn galoshes?”

“No,” Harry said. “The man, the one big as you, he had on the hat. But it wasn’t funny.”

As they talked the crowd had begun to mumble, and now they came closer and closer to Harry, and he felt as if he were going to faint, as if he were tucked too tightly in cotton and all the air was being sucked out of the universe by God’s own vacuum.

“I killed someone, and I had on a hat?” Mr. McGuire said. “A redheaded man with freckles?”

“He might have been you. The size he was…I don’t know. Maybe it wasn’t you.”

“Now you’re not sure. Son, you need to make sure you stay on your medicine.”

“I think you might be right,” Harry said.

Mrs. McGuire said something, but Mr. McGuire yelled her down. She said, “You’re always such a shit. I’m going back to the house.”

And away she went, adrift and a-stumble toward the house.

They all stood there, Harry in the center, the crowd talking amongst themselves, breathing alcohol into the night air, and Harry, like some kind of sculpture, waited while they looked at him.

About ten minutes past forever the sky began to vibrate with red, blue, yellow, and white lights that wrapped around the golden light from the front yard and twisted it into a knotty rainbow.

The police cars had arrived.

With lights flashing, no sirens, three cop cars pulled into the back driveway and parked, doors opened, and cops poured out. The crowd split and the cops came up beside Mr. McGuire.

One of the cops was Kayla.