Minders

CHAPTER 17

Tiny prickles of impatience teased Ford all day at work.

He’d texted Plum that morning—“I CAN’T GET YOU OFF MY MIND. I’M SORRY I WAS A DISAPPOINTMENT. WILL YOU GIVE ME ANOTHER CHANCE?”—and had been checking his phone all day for a reply that didn’t materialize, but Sadie knew his anticipation was really due to his excitement about his date with Cali that night.

He stopped at the tree house on his way home from work, and as he put out candles and set the table he hummed to himself, his mind almost as playful as it was when he was with Lulu. He hung a mirror he’d found at a job site on one wall, and grinned when he unwrapped a bottle of Bailey’s Irish Cream he’d skipped lunch for three days to afford because it was Cali’s favorite.

Watching him go through the preparations, Sadie was envious of Cali. Not because of Ford, of course. Because of the hours he’d spent planning to make the night a success. He’d built a whole tree house just for her.

He rushed home to get dressed, and he’d been tucking in a surprisingly unwrinkled dress shirt when his mother came out of her room and said, “We need to talk, Ford.”

“No we don’t,” he told her, his mind filling with matte dots, as though ready to repel anything that might try to penetrate it.

“We do.”

“Well, I can’t right now.”

“Soon,” she insisted.

He shrugged, already pushing the conversation to the farthest corner of his mind, determined not to let anything spoil the night. “Fine, tomorrow after work.”

“Okay,” she said, nodding to herself. “Okay.” Disappearing back into the gloom of her bedroom.

He rode his bike the two miles to Cali’s house, a yellow one-story with its own yard and a front porch. Leaving the picnic basket on the porch, he rang the bell then walked through the unlocked screen door.

A man in a tank top and work pants sat on the couch, his face lit by the television.

“Hello, Mr. Moss,” Ford said.

“Hello, Ford,” Cali’s father answered without taking his eyes from the television. “Have a seat.”

Ford sat and watched a show about making fondue for ten minutes while his mind buzzed impatiently with different imagined versions of Cali saying, “Ford, no way!” for each surprise she discovered in the tree house. Cali came out wearing a tight dress and high heels with her hair pinned up.

Ford’s mind played a drum flourish. Sadie thought she looked pretty, and there was no denying that she had boobs.

“You look—” Ford began, searching for words. “Better than dinner.”

“Must not be much of a place you’ve picked out then.” Cali smiled at him.

“Oh, it is. It is.” Their fingers twined together, and Sadie felt his heartbeat pick up.

Cali said goodbye to her dad, and they stepped out onto the porch into the warm night. Ford bent to grab the picnic basket, and Cali tugged her hand from his. “No,” she said emphatically. “No, no, no.”

What was going on? Sadie wondered as Ford’s mind filled with even lines of dark circles hovering in protective formation. “Cali?” he asked.

She shook her head, her cheeks flushed, arms crossed over her chest. “Not again,” she told him. “You said we were going somewhere new. Somewhere special.”

“We are,” Ford assured her.

You totally are, Sadie agreed.

“Then what is that?” She pointed a long, harlequin-painted nail at the picnic basket.

“Dinner?” Ford said.

“I am not spending another one of those nights climbing over people’s discarded crap to one of your ‘special’ places in some old building with no working bathroom.”

Sadie hadn’t thought about the bathroom part.

“Look at me,” Cali said, running her hand down herself like a TV presenter. “I’m the kind of woman who should be taken out and shown off. Not the kind who should be sitting on the floor eating off paper plates in some moldy house no one else wants to be in either.”

Sadie was shocked. She’d expected Cali to be so excited, thrilled. Because Ford had expected her to be excited, she realized.

And because I would be.

Now Ford’s mind hummed with anxiety. He set the basket down. “I thought you liked that. You said you liked it when I found secret spots to take you. They’re way more special than that place we went for dinner on Friday.”

“Really?” Cali said, raising an eyebrow. “Because I think toilets are special.”

Sadie started to feel annoyed with Cali. If she’s going to be that way, she doesn’t deserve to see the tree house, she told Ford.

But he didn’t agree. Fix this, fix this, fix this, his mind chanted. “Please, Cali? Please will you come? I think you’ll really like it.”

Cali teetered back on her heels. “No. I can’t. If I go you’ll be funny and we’ll have sex and nothing will ever change.” She let out a long ragged breath. “I think it’s time for this to be over.”

Her words caught Ford completely off guard. For a moment his mind froze, every sound gone, every dot stuck, suspended in place. “Over?” he repeated, and Sadie felt how tight his vocal cords were. “You and me? Because of a picnic?” He kicked the basket. “Forget the picnic. Fine, let’s go to a restaurant.”

“It’s not the picnic. It’s everything.”

Points of color flared agonizingly and Ford’s head filled with noise, as if Cali saying “it’s time for this to be over” were a magnet for other voices—“piece of crap,” “puppy,” “I miss him,” “drop it,” “let go,” “get out of here”—lashing him, causing real, physical pain.

Sadie felt the stickiness of humiliation, the heat of his anger, scented the bleach of betrayal, the raw hurt of having worked so hard and been rejected. He did the only thing he knew how to do, the thing he always did. In a harsh, cold voice he said, “Are you sleeping with your boss already?”

“You asshole.” Cali turned to go back into the house.

“Cali, wait, I’m sorry.” He reached for her arm. Sadie was impressed with him, impressed with his accepting responsibility and being willing to admit he was wrong. “That was a terrible thing to say. I didn’t mean it. It’s just—you said everything was wrong. But I thought we were fine. We went out with your friends the other night, and it was great. I loved George and Cotton.” Ford’s vision dimmed, and Sadie felt him recoil from the lie but sensed his hopelessness, his desperation. “I always just assumed it was you and me together forever. That’s what we said. And now we have some little disagreement and you say everything is over.”

Cali looked at his hand on her arm. “It’s Georgia and Clinton. And you didn’t like them. You hated them. You pretended to, but you were bluffing.”

Ford blinked, and Sadie felt a rising sense of vertigo, as though he had no idea where he was or which way was up. “That’s not—”

Cali stopped his protest. “You were so busy this weekend, I had a lot of time to think. And the more I did, the more it became clear.”

Something in her tone made Ford let go of her arm. The feeling of vertigo stayed with him. “What?”

“You—you’re all about the past. Old houses, old friends. City Center. Things staying how they are. But I’m not. I want to move forward. I’m tired of picnics, and crawling through rafters to see some great view of the city, which is just the same dirty city no matter how you look at it. I like eating off plates with silverware at a table with chairs. I adore restaurants and new homes in new developments with new furniture and new carpets. I want to live somewhere with a bathtub no one has ever used and a refrigerator that makes ice. Like Georgia and Clinton’s town house.”

Sadie watched Ford rooting around his mind, hunting for patches, anything he could use to fix this like he fixed the tree house, only the materials were much more sparse. He considered a memory of an old porch swing they’d sat in on an abandoned porch and watched the sunset, but settled instead on “We agreed that place was hideous. All that fake plastic molding and wallpaper that looked like tile.”

Wrong choice, Sadie thought.

Cali shook her head. “You said it was hideous. I—I liked it.” She looked down, knitting her fingers together. “Actually, I loved it.”

“But the windows were aluminum. They’ll be freezing all winter. And the front door wasn’t even real wood. Everything was fake. A lie.” Stop! Sadie called out to him. You’re completely missing the point.

Cali sighed. “That’s not what I saw. I saw something clean and pretty. For happy people with a bank account and plans for the future.”

Sadie watched miserably as Ford flailed around, finding all the wrong handholds. “It’s not going to look pretty for long. That stucco was already starting to—”

“Stop it!” Cali said. “This isn’t about the damn house. It’s about us. About us being over.”

Ford’s mind heaved and rolled from anger to desperation and back again. “Why now?” he said. “What changed?”

“Nothing’s changed, Ford. That’s the problem.” Cali’s expression was almost pitying. “I’ve been waiting for you to change for months. You say you want to grow up, have a construction company of your own. You talk about all those old buildings, restoring them to the status they deserve, like they are members of your family. But it’s all talk. In the end, you’re still a scrapper.”

Ford’s mind continued to rise and fall in stormy confusion. “That’s not true. I salvage.”

“That’s just a fancy name. Like when alcoholics call themselves wine connoisseurs. You go into old buildings and take stuff no one else wants. All you do is get distracted by one thing or another. I waited for you. I was patient. I believed you—believed in you. But you never meant it, did you?”

Sadie felt Ford looking for a horizon line, for anything stable. “Of course I did.”

“Have you looked into getting a contractor’s license? Or asked the foreman if you can be the head of your crew? Have you done anything?”

He saw a lifeline and reached for it. “Well, with James dying—”

“No,” she said, stomping her foot. “You’ve been hiding behind that for too long. James is dead. He’s not coming back. You should be as loyal to those of us who are still alive as you are to him.” She shook her head. “God knows he wasn’t as loyal to you.”

Hundreds of images of Cali spun through Ford’s mind, too fast to be clear, as if he was running through their entire history trying to make sense of what was happening. Finally they slowed without giving him any answer, and he said, “All those times you said you loved me, did you ever mean it?” There was raw pain in his voice, and also fear.

“Of course I did.” Cali’s eyes looked sad. “I’m just tired of waiting for you to become the person you said you wanted to be.”

He nodded, letting that sink in. After a long minute of silence he said, “I guess I should go.”

Cali nodded. “Yeah.”

He picked up the picnic basket. “Just so you know. The place tonight has chairs and a table. I built them for you. Because I thought it would make you happy.” Sadie’s chest felt tight, and she was having trouble breathing.

At the bottom of the stairs he turned around to look at Cali standing above him. His mind was still stormy but he strove not to show it. “You look really beautiful,” he said. “Good luck with the new job. And thank you for everything, California. I—I really enjoyed our three years together. Or three years minus a week.”

Red, white, and blue dots in Ford’s head became fireworks during a party, a younger Cali setting a roasted marshmallow between two graham crackers, saying, “I’ve never met anyone else who likes s’mores without chocolate before,” and then kissing, more fireworks, a number in a phone.

The Fourth of July was their anniversary.

Cali’s shoulders sagged. “Me too. Next week is going to be weird.”

“Yeah,” he agreed.

Tears hovered at the corners of Cali’s eyes, and her lower lip began to tremble. “Ford,” she said, reaching toward him.

Remarkable, Sadie thought. That one simple gesture, that show of ambivalence, had calmed the turbulence inside of Ford. “Don’t,” he told her, on solid ground at last. “It’s better this way.”

As he went, Sadie thought she smelled pine needles.

Like a man on autopilot Ford continued on his preprogrammed route, riding his bike from Cali’s to the tree house. His mind was beyond quiet, it was absent. Frozen. Numb, Sadie thought. Nature’s antidote to the pain of being alive.

He hauled the picnic basket up into the tree house but didn’t unpack it, just left it on the table, his phone next to it, and collapsed into one of the chairs he’d built specially for Cali.

Goddamn chair, Sadie heard him think, and she laughed, feeling the prickle of tears in her eyes at the same time.

That’s not objective, she chided herself.

Goddamn objectivity, she answered back.

His numbness started to chafe at Sadie, making her feel isolated and out of sorts. Ford closed his eyes and drifted into a penumbra state between sleeping and being awake. His mind was filled with milky white light, and now, set against it, she saw dots dancing into an image of James’s face. It wasn’t the James of the graduation photo, it was five or six years younger, and Sadie noticed the image seemed sort of stylized, as though James had been polished like a trophy.

The dots shifted, showing James with a young Ford, probably around twelve, the golden rope Sadie recognized from his other memories now stretched between them. James lifting one end and saying to Ford, “Got it?”

Ford answering, “Got it,” and holding up the other end.

James checking, “You’re sure you’re ready?”

“Ready.” Ford nodding, but nervous.

James putting out a white winter glove and Ford putting out a black one and the two of them shaking. James, serious, saying, “I’m counting on you. Don’t let me down.”

Twelve-year-old Ford solemnly promising, “Never.”

James, his handsome face lighting up, saying, “Okay. Let’s go get rich!”

Sadie’s heart began to pound with excitement as she watched. This was what had happened in the icehouse.

The next moment, Ford opened his eyes and reached for his phone, and the memory vanished. Sadie had no idea who he was calling when he dialed, until an automated voice answered, saying, “You have one saved message. Message saved for one hundred twenty-four days. Press one to play, two to delete.”

One hundred twenty-four days was a little more than four months, Sadie calculated, which meant this message must be from around the time of James’s murder. Was this the message Ford’s subconscious had wanted him to hear?

Ford took a deep breath and pushed one.

“Thursday, six thirty-nine P.M., from: private number,” the computer voice said. There was a pause, the sound of a throat being cleared, and then a guy saying, “What’s up, Ford? It’s me, James. Listen, my meeting is running a little long, so I was wondering if you could do dinner. Lulu wants lasagna. You know how to make that. If it’s too hard just do mac and cheese.”

The message was slow, each sentence punctuated by a long silent pause as though James were distracted. Or on something, Sadie thought. But she felt her heartbeat slowing to keep time with its rhythm. “Sometimes I add those tiny meatballs if you can find them at the store. Mostly the key is the sauce, that’s the part she likes. Really pretty much any noodles will do.”

Finally the speed picked up, and the words began to come out in a rush.

“Probably this is way too much detail, I promise if you help me out you’ll be glad—more than glad because I’m doing this for you as much as anyone. Everything is going to change after this, it’s going to be you and me, brother, the way it used to be. What the… oh god, I’ve… shot… hel—”

The message ended.

Sadie’s heart dropped, and she gasped in disbelief. She had just heard James’s murder. He’d been leaving Ford a message when he was killed. Oh, Ford, she thought, oh, you poor boy. No wonder he felt guilty.

There wasn’t anything he could have done, but to have to listen to that cry for help over and over had to be excruciating.

The numbness deepened then, his mind becoming a solid monolith. She wanted to wrap her arms around him, hold him, make him know that he wasn’t alone. She wished she could sit with him and tell him that it wasn’t his fault until he believed it. Do anything to shatter the stone-like silence that had settled over his mind.

But there was nothing she could do, no way to touch him. This was the powerlessness Curtis had talked about, and it was terrible.

The tree house was filled with dark shadows when his mind began to whir with sounds again. They began low, indecipherable, but one of them came into focus, James’s voice from the memory in the icehouse saying, “I’m counting on you. Don’t let me down.” Initially it repeated every few seconds, but it sped up, cycling faster and faster until it was overlapping, as though there were two Jameses, then four, then ten, all saying it at just slightly different times, like an echo chamber. As it reverberated, the phrase eroded, becoming “you don’t let me down,” “don’t let me down,” “let me down,” “down,” “drow—”

Ford’s phone buzzed with a message, loud and startling in the silence, yanking him from his thoughts. Sadie heard him think Cali, and for a split second she glimpsed a crack in the numbness.

But it wasn’t from Cali, it was from Plum. It said: “COME TO MY PLACE. BOSUN BUILDING, PENTHOUSE A. TELL THE DOORMAN YOUR NAME IS ROMEO. DON’T KEEP ME WAITING.”

Just what the doctor ordered, Sadie heard Ford think.

Only if it was Dr. Frankenstein, she said. Or Dr. Bad Idea. After everything that’s happened tonight, do you really think—

“ON MY WAY,” he texted.