Pandemonium

if I waited I might get lucky. The noises, usually most persistent after dark, were quiet for the first night in weeks. Maybe coming home had given me some control.

Around midnight, Lew finally clicked off the living room TV and clumped to bed. Mom and Amra had gone to bed hours ago. I waited a half hour more, breathing. The thing in my head kept still. I sat up slowly, afraid to wake it.

I opened the door and stood for a long moment peering into the dark, listening. Then I walked down the hallway with short steps, trailing fingers along the wall until I’d passed the bathroom and found the corner at the end of the hall. I turned in to the living room. Moved past the couch and around the end tables and footstools, navigating by the moonlight silvering the edges of the furniture. In the kitchen, the vent light above the stove had been left on like a nightlight. I unhooked the basement door, stepped down, and shut the door behind me. The stairs creaked as I went down.

I walked through the vault, the cold cement stinging my bare feet. I went past the comics and the board games, past the box where Amra had found the slingshot, and turned farther into the maze, down a narrow path between the wood veneer cabinet stereo and the orange crates full of phonograph albums.

Two green dry-cleaning bags hung from a black pipe: my father’s uniforms. The workbench was just behind them, against the far wall, near the water heater and sump pump. Tools hung from a peg board that had been screwed into the cinderblock. Only a few silhouettes were empty. The bench held the heavy red toolbox and stacks of Cool Whip containers full of screws and nails and orphaned hardware. A red Craftsman hammer lay on the bench like he’d left it minutes ago. The safe was on the floor, under the workbench. It was a small steel box, about twelve inches to a side, painted black. I squatted down, and pulled on the door’s little silver handle. It was locked, as I expected.

I leaned down on one forearm, and looked up at the underside of the workbench. It was too dark to see. I ran my fingers along the lip of the bench until they found the cuts in the wood. I smiled. I couldn’t read the numbers etched there, but I didn’t need to—Lew and I had memorized the combination long ago. Not that my father had made it difficult: 2-15-45 was my mother’s birthday.

I leaned sideways to let the light hit the dial. The safe didn’t open, and for a moment I wondered if Mom had changed the combination. I tried again, and this time it opened.

The inside of the safe seemed much smaller than the outside. A shelf divided the space into two small compartments. On top was a dark leather holster, flap closed, and a small box of ammunition. On the floor of the safe was the pistol swaddled in an oiled rag. I moved my hand under it, lifted it out like a baby, and unfolded the cloth with my free hand. A gleaming black .45 automatic, my dad’s service sidearm in Korea. I fit my hand around the stubbly grip and aimed at the white cylinder of the water heater, feeling the weight of the Colt tug at the end of my arm. Before Lew and I had cracked the safe we’d held only plastic toy guns. The heaviness of the metal had come as a shock.

On the other side of the basement, the door to upstairs creaked open. I quickly folded the rag back over the gun and set it in the safe.

“Del?” It was my mother.

“Down here,” I called. I was afraid to close the safe, sure that the metallic click would be immediately recognizable. I pushed the door to within an inch of closing. “Don’t worry, I’ll turn off the lights when I’m done.”

The stairs complained as she stepped down. I did the only thing I could think of: I coughed and pressed the door shut. When she turned the corner I was walking toward her, a short stack of vinyl LPs in my hands. “I hope I didn’t wake you up,” I said. “You know, you could sell these on the Internet.”

She was dressed in a housecoat and thick blue woolly socks. She glanced at the albums, then at my face. “You haven’t slept at all yet.”

I shrugged. “My circadian rhythms are all messed up. I don’t sleep much anyway.”

“I used to hear you walking around the house at all hours,” she