The Nobody People by Bob Proehl (manga ereader TXT) 📕

keeps a broom in the hall for when she needs to roust him from work. It hasn’t been used in a year.

“Avi!” she yells. “Where the fuck are you?”

Avi jumps out of the chair, nearly toppling. He goes over to the hatch and gives it a push, too hard. It drops fast, swinging toward Kay. She catches the edge and lowers it.

“Where the hell have you been?”

Everything clicks into place. Avi returns to the world. The sunlight on the computer screen. Hunger growling in his gut.

“What time is it?” he asks. He eases himself down the ladder. Going down is harder.

“Six-thirty,” she says. “The school’s been calling you. I’ve been calling you. I had to get a cab from work and go pick her up.”

“My phone—”

“It’s in the living room,” she says. “Doing no one any good.”

“Shit, Kay,” he says. “I’m sorry. This stuff Louis sent me—”

“You said you were going to pass on it,” she says. She stands with her arms crossed, watching to be sure he doesn’t fall but not helping him down. He doesn’t have anything to say. Once he’s off the ladder, she turns away from him. “We stopped at McDonald’s. You’re on your own for dinner. You should go apologize to her.”

Kay goes into their bedroom and closes the door. The argument feels like a relic, something left over from the time before. Avi doesn’t want to be the person who forgets anymore. The one who climbs out of a bomb crater to discover he’s broken a promise. Tomorrow he’ll call Louis and tell him he’s got nothing. He’ll call Carol at the Trib and ask for assignments. School boards and common council meetings. Double homicides. Something local, safe.

He stands outside Emmeline’s door. She’ll be over it by tomorrow. An apology is meaningful only right now. Inside, she’s talking to herself. He can hear the tone but not the content. The high musical cadence and bounce of his daughter’s voice, broken up by long pauses. Emmeline has always had imaginary friends. She retreats to her room to talk with them. There’s another pause, then she says, “I know you’re out there, Daddy. Come in.”

Avi opens the door. Emmeline is sitting cross-legged on the floor, drawing a blackbird in crayon. She looks up at him. “You haven’t eaten anything all day, have you?”

Avi sits down on the bed. He’s most aware of his handicap around Emmeline. She is of a size to be occasionally lifted and carried and tossed. She isn’t too old for them to play together on the floor. But he hates needing her help to get up.

“I wanted to get you a hamburger,” she says. “But Mom was mad at you.”

“She was right to be mad,” says Avi. “Are you mad at me?”

Emmeline shakes her head. “Where were you?” she asks.

“I was upstairs,” he says. “There’s a person who hurt a lot of other people. I was trying to figure out how he thinks.”

Emmeline nods as if taking in information she already knew. “I bet his brain is a mess,” she says. “I bet a bad idea got pushed in and grew. Like roots.” She presses the heels of her hands together, fingers curled, then extends her fingers out until they are tree branches, antlers. Roots.

Avi should have called Louis right away, standing outside their bedroom door so that Kay could hear his performance. Look what I’m giving up for us. Look at how I’m being better.

But he waits until morning. Kay is on to a Chester Himes novel with a smoking pistol on the cover. Emmeline attempts a series of gambits to trick Avi and Kay into talking to each other.

“I think our yard is big enough for a dog,” she says. “A small one. A yippee dog.”

“If Daddy got arrested, Mom, would you defend him? Or would it be a conflict of interest?”

None of them catch.

Kay gives Avi a dry kiss on the cheek and hugs Emmeline long and deep before she leaves. In the car on the way to school, Emmeline says, “I’m not mad, Daddy.” Avi thanks her for saying so. “Are you going to catch the man who hurt people?” she asks.

“I’m not trying to catch him, Leener,” says Avi. “The police will catch him.”

“You think they will?”

He pauses. He wants her to live in a world where the bad guys get caught and little girls don’t get turned into nothing while they’re at church. But he decided a long time ago to trust his daughter with the truth, no matter how unpleasant.

“No,” he says. “I don’t think they will.”

“Do you think he’s going to hurt someone else?”

“Yes.”

Emmeline nods and looks out the window. “If they were trying to catch me, they would look at all the places that serve French fries,” she says. “Even if I was hiding, I would eat a lot of French fries. You could check the hotels near French fries and you’d find me.”

He watches Emmeline go up the school steps, then fishes his phone out of his coat pocket and plays the church video again. His head spirals back into the mess. He goes home and examines the photos Louis sent him of Owen Curry’s room in Seat Pleasant, Maryland. The room looks more like a proper bomb site than the bomb sites. There’s chaos in how boys that age exist in the world, as if they’re flinging themselves at it, hoping to break through to something better. Avi was that way when he and Kay met even though he was ten years older than Owen Curry is. He took a new assignment every month. He crashed back into Chicago in a mess of booze and drugs, trying to scrub his mind of the horrors he was writing about. He hired someone to clean his apartment while he was away, then let it degrade into squalor again, sink full of dishes, air rank with weeks of old takeout.

Avi wonders about the smell