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“Come with me, Toby.”
Chris just says it, just like that, like it's the simplest thing. He holds out his hand, flashes his megawatt, heart-stopping smile, and says, “Come on, Toby. Come with me.”
“I can't,” Toby says.
And Chris just shrugs, all casual, like he was only asking to be polite.
“Guess I'll see you around, then.”
*
There are four figures in the painting that hangs on the refrigerator: a man, a woman, a girl, and a boy. Behind them is a sun with a smiling face, and a white house, and flowers so tall that they surpass the roof. The people are all wearing the same smiles as the sun; even the girl, who hardly ever smiles anymore, and certainly doesn't paint pictures. Harry B. age 7 is written in the bottom-right corner.
Toby cried the first time he looked at it because Genevieve and Gary weren't in it. He cried the second time he looked at it because he was. Other paintings have come and gone, monsters and race cars and cowboys riding horses the size of dinosaurs, but Toby can't bring himself to take this one down. If it was smaller he would fold it up and keep it in his wallet, to be taken it out whenever he finds himself wondering if freedom and sobriety aren't all they're cracked up to be. He could look at it and tell himself: you have a good life; you have a son who is going to be a great artist some day and a daughter whose therapist says she's well on her way to recovery and a gorgeous, kind, funny girlfriend who you think might one day be your gorgeous, kind, funny wife; you have a house with a garden and you have a good job and the sweet sun smiles upon you.
Toby has a good life—an amazing, perfect, fucking beautiful life; but when has that ever been enough?
*
“You have a collect call from,” says a robotic female voice, followed by a breathless stretch of silence. “If you would like to accept the charges, please press one or say 'yes'.”
A minute passes, and the voice speaks again: “If you wish to accept the charges, please press one or say 'yes'.”
Toby looks at the fridge: Holly and Harry; flowers and sunshine. He hangs up the phone.
“Who was that?” Marion murmurs into his shoulder when he crawls back into bed.
“Wrong number,” he tells her, but she's already drifted off.
Toby lies in the dark a long time before he's able to follow her.
*
Toby is dreaming.
Toby knows he's dreaming. He's had this dream a million times before. He knows what's going to happen. It still doesn't stop him from climbing into the driver's seat. Nothing ever will.
Who's it going to be tonight? Gary? Genevieve? The Cathy Rockwell classic?
Let's find out: squealing tires, thump, and whose smiling face is pressed up against his windshield but Christopher Keller, the latest in Toby's long, long, long line of victims. Toby closes his eyes and then Chris is gone, replaced by the wild-eyed madman Toby was when they met.
Well. That's a new one.
And now comes the screaming, the sirens, and the waking up in a cold sweat. Toby gets up and goes to the kitchen for a drink. He wants gin. He has water.
The phone rings.
He answers it.
He says 'yes'.
*
Chris seems thinner than when Toby last saw him, smaller and weaker; Toby tries to tell himself that it's a trick of his memory, where Chris has always loomed larger than life, but there are ghosts in Chris's eyes that Toby doesn't recognize and unfamiliar scars on his body.
“I'm sorry,” Toby says and he kisses a thin white line trailing across Chris's stomach. “I'm sorry.” He moves on to the familiar little circle on Chris's chest. “I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry.” Toby kissed Holly and Harry goodnight earlier that evening and he'll do it again tomorrow; he's not sorry. But he wants to be and doesn't that count for something?
“I'm sorry,” he says again, because maybe that will make it true.
“Hey,” Chris grabs Toby's face between his hands and wrenches it from his chest, tilting Toby's face until he can look into his eyes. “Hey. Toby. It's OK,” Chris says. “Hell, I'd probably still be in that shit hole if you hadn't taken the deal, huh? We both would.”
It's easy to forgive when you're free—easy when you're not in a body cast, or bleeding internally. Toby doubts Chris would have been so magnanimous from death row.
“So you coming with me this time?” Chris asks him, trailing kisses down his body.
Jesus. This again.
“I can't,” Toby says.
“You want to, though.”
Yeah, he wants to. He also wants a martini or two (or three or four). He wants to get so high that he can't even walk. He wants to see his kids grow up. He wants a lot of things.
Toby wants Chris to understand, but he knows that he won't; so he grabs Chris's shoulders and shoves him back down on the bed, pushing his legs apart and crawling between them. Because he wants to.
*
Toby left a note for Marion explaining his absence last night: he was having nightmares; he was having cravings; he needed to get out for some air, talk to his sponsor, talk to his shrink. Small truths, big lies—it's tempting to say that he learned from the best, but the truth is that he'd been pulling that shit on Genevieve before Chris was even a glimmer in his bleary eye.
He'd done this to Marion before, too: the first time Chris contacted him, more than a year after Chris's daring escape on the way back from the courthouse, too desperate and afraid of himself to hold any grudges, and Toby too desperate for Chris to say no; Toby had taken off into the night, found himself in a sleazy motel room that he'd paid for in cash, and promised himself in the morning he'd never do it again.
And Marion had believed Toby's lies, then—or, more likely, pretended to. He'd been too relieved to think about it. He was stupid to think it would work again.
Marion is standing by the telephone when he walks in the door. The note is crumpled in her left hand and the receiver is gripped tightly in her right. Her expression is so sad—it makes Toby wish so badly that he could love her the way she wants him to; if only he could feel passion for something that didn't cause him pain.
“I should call the police,” Marion says. “I'm going to call the police.”
“OK,” he says. He waits. Silence builds between them like a wall.
Finally, Marion holds out the receiver.
“You do it,” she says. “Don't say your name. Just give them an anonymous tip. Tell them he's in the area.”
She's forcing him to choose, Toby realizes—to declare his loyalty. He takes the phone, considering.
Toby thinks about Ronnie Barlog and Nate Shemin and Mondo Browne. He thinks about convenience store owners and college boys and lonely women with low self esteem—lives that Chris has destroyed.
Holly and Harry and Marion—lives that Chris could destroy.
Alcohol and heroin and Chris.
Holly and Harry and Marion.
Love and want and need.
“Don't make me do this,” he says.
Marion nods and heads for the door, making the decision for him.
*
“You gonna go with me this time, right, Toby?” Chris asks from between Toby's legs, looking up at him earnestly while his cheek rubs against Toby's inner thigh. “Come on.” He leans forward until his mouth is right above Toby's cock. “Say yes.”
“No fair, no fair, no fair” Toby says.
Chris's tongue darts out three times, swiping the head of Toby's cock. “Yes, yes, yes,” he says.
Toby clamps his hand over his own mouth. “You're no fun,” Chris says before engulfing Toby's cock. Toby shouts into his hand, something unintelligible, something that sounds very close to 'Yes.'
“God, Toby,” Chris says, crawling up Toby's body. “You're so fucking hot.” Marion never said that to him; not once. No one has. Only Chris.
“I can't, I can't, I can't,” Toby whispers into his neck. “My kids.”
“I know,” Chris says.
*
Sometimes Toby's work for his late father's law office takes him back to Oz, to interview clients. He always drops in to see Sister Pete. No one understands him like she does; not even his real shrink. She's seen Chris Keller's power to cleave a person in two, just by existing. She knows how much damage he can do.
Shortly after his break with Marion, he'd questioned her about her decision to remain with the Church: Did she ever regret it? How did she know that it was where she was supposed to be?
Pete told him about the doubts that Chris had engendered in her and the soul-searching that she'd embarked on. She told him how he'd taught her, inadvertently, to examine and question every facet of her identity. She told him about the conclusion she'd reached: she is a woman; she is a psychologist; she is a nun.
“I belong here,” she'd told him. “This is my home.”
Toby wasn't sure if she was talking about the Church or Oz. Maybe she was talking about both.
He took the painting down after that. It seemed wrong to leave it up with Marion gone. And Harry had been complaining about it for a while, anyway, not wanting of his school friends to see his “baby drawing.”
Toby put it in the bottom drawer of his desk, above another painting of a family standing on a front lawn, this one with a dog as big as a house.
*
Days go by uneventfully. Toby works at his father's law firm during the day. He always gets home in time to make dinner. In the evening he helps Harry with his homework or watches TV. On the weekends they visit Grandmother. Eventually, Holly starts begging off to hang out with her friends and go on dates; then Harry does, too.
Soon enough, Toby is helping them pick colleges. Holly chooses Yale, despite Toby's protests. She decides to major in psychology. Sister Pete is so proud.
When Harry's time arrives he chooses a Fine Arts program at a small local college. His grandmother disapproves. Toby tells him to do what makes him happy.
Toby knows he'll miss his children, but he doesn't try to hold on too tight. He lets them go.
He is their father. He'll always be their father, no matter where he is.
He'll always be a murderer, too.
A lawyer.
A drunk and an addict.
A man.
He sits alone in his empty house, waiting for the question that will lead him home:
“Are you coming with me, Toby?”
“Yes.”