The Handyman Read online

  “Were they—?” Dad asked.

  The sheriff shook his head. “Never found hide nor hair of ’em. Which is why they’re still persons of interest. No sign in the ashes of any bones or…anything. I don’t know if the explosion was deliberate or they left before it happened or left because it happened, but they’re gone.”

  “We put an APB out for them, too,” the deputy said.

  It took the rest of the morning for the kid’s skeleton to be brought up. Pictures had been taken, they’d gone over the basement for fingerprints or other clues that might point to the identity of the boy or whoever had walled him up, and I’d long since gotten bored and gone back to our house, when Mark came running over and told us they were bringing up the body. Luckily for Billy and me, Mom was in the bathroom at that moment, so we took off without telling her, running across the street and standing next to Dad for protection, in case she caught us.

  After all that, we couldn’t really see anything. The skeleton was brought out on a stretcher, already sealed up inside the white bag, although I could kind of make out the outline of a body.

  Soon after, the officials left, and Billy and I went home with Dad. I didn’t know what the Goodwins were doing or how they’d be able to sleep tonight in a house where a dead body had been found. The entire family came over later in the afternoon, when we were packing for our trip back to California, and thanked us for all our help. I assumed they were saying goodbye, and I felt sad. I’d just gotten to know Mark, but already I considered him one of my best friends, and I’d been looking forward to hanging out during the summer. Now the idea of spending those three months alone with my brother depressed me—although at least I still had Wyatt down the street.

  A lot of stuff had happened since we’d bought the house in Randall, but I wished for the first time that we hadn’t bought the house. While the dead kid would make a great story to tell my friends once I got back to school, deep down, I would rather not have known about it. I was pretending to be cool, but the thought of spending vacations across from that house kind of freaked me out, and when Dad woke me early the next morning to get ready for the trip home, he pulled me out of a dream in which Irene was pushing Billy’s dead body into a crevice in the basement, her ancient wrinkled face all smiles, while Frank stood on the stairs watching her and nodding approvingly.

  FIVE

  The economics of vacation home ownership turned out to be not as simple as my parents had originally thought, especially when things started to fall apart. At first, it was a leaking toilet. The plumber who came to fix it shook his head and said he was surprised it hadn’t leaked immediately because the bonehead who’d installed it hadn’t put in a required gasket. After that, we had a blackout, because, the electrician said, Frank hadn’t wired the house properly and one of the circuits was being overloaded. Then the roof leaked during a summer monsoon, and the roofer told us after he’d patched the spot that there should have been a layer of tarpaper under the shingles. He warned us to expect additional leaks in the future unless we had the entire roof redone.

  “This damn Frank house,” Dad said after each new disaster.

  That year, my father had to get a summer job to make ends meet. There weren’t that many part-time job openings in Randall for a middle-aged man who was only in town between the last week of June and the last week of August, but he managed to get hired at the lumber yard. Wyatt from down the street had moved, though we never found out why or where, but the Goodwins still lived in Frank’s house—surprisingly, after all that had happened—and for that I was grateful.

  “I wouldn’t live there,” Billy confided to me. “It’s probably really haunted now.”

  I felt the same way, but I didn’t want Billy to know that, so I pretended to be braver than I was. Mark even invited me to stay overnight there a couple of times, and I did. Although…

  I didn’t like the house.

  Part of it was the skeleton in the basement, of course. But part of it was the fact that Mark was right—it did feel haunted. As I lay on the floor in my sleeping bag while my friend snored in his bed, I heard creaking on the stairs, as though someone was walking slowly up. No one was—and I knew that even at the time—but the sound was definitely real, not a figment of my imagination, and there was no explanation for what caused it. The house had cold spots as well: one outside the upstairs bathroom, and one near the kitchen downstairs that I knew everyone must have felt but that no one commented upon. The cold spots might have been a result of air seeping in from outside due to Frank’s shoddy workmanship—except this was summer, and the air outside the house was even warmer than the air inside. What could definitely not be put down to poor workmanship were the glimpses of movement I occasionally spotted in my peripheral vision. It happened while we were eating dinner with the entire family—a dark shadow that seemed to slip quickly from the entryway into the short hall that led to the master bedroom—and it happened while I was alone: movement behind me in the bathroom mirror while I brushed my teeth; a figure far taller than Janine passing from the landing into her bedroom; a shifting of the darkness behind the partially open door of Mark’s closet.

  More than ghostly encounters, however, it was the house itself that made me feel unsettled. The doors did not seem to be in the right places; they were always too far to the left within a wall or too far to the right. And the views outside the windows were not what I thought they should be. In Mark’s room, for example, the window opposite his bed should have looked across the street at our house—but it was the other window that faced that direction, while the one opposite the bed faced the forest. Strangest of all, each time I closed my eyes and opened them, the walls seemed to have just stopped moving, as though they’d been in motion until that second and had only clicked into place when I opened my eyes.

  I said nothing to anyone, however, and, in truth, the subject of the house hardly ever came up. I suppose the Goodwins wanted to forget what they’d found in the basement, so no one mentioned it, and life continued on as though it had never occurred—although I noticed that Dean’s new bedroom was what had formerly been his dad’s den, next to the master bedroom, and the basement was once again used only for storage.

  The weird thing was that no one had discovered who the skeleton boy was. There were no missing kids in town, and though the sheriff’s department had sent out photographs and dental x-rays to every law enforcement agency in the state, perhaps the country, no one had ever responded. No grieving parents came to claim what was left of the body, and I think everyone kind of assumed that it had been Frank’s boy.

  I know I did.

  June and July passed by quickly. It was nice having friends living right across the street, and Mark and I, and Billy and Janine, spent most days together, hiking, riding bikes, listening to music, hanging out. We didn’t even have to invite friends from California over that summer, and one night, upstairs in the loft when we were about to go to sleep, Billy said, “I think summer’s more fun in Randall than it was in Anaheim.”

  “I think so, too,” I told him.

  ****

  You never know which conversation with someone is going to be your last. If you did, you’d probably make it more meaningful, probably talk about important subjects, personal things: hopes, dreams, regrets. Feelings.

  My last conversation with Billy was a disagreement about cartoons. Specifically, whether the new batch of Ren and Stimpy episodes, the first in a long while, were up to the show’s usual standards. Billy said the new cartoons were just as good as they’d always been. I said they weren’t funny and the voices sounded off.

  I’ve thought about that morning many times since then, played it out in my head with a hundred different outcomes. Sometimes, in my imagination, we talk about our plans for the future: what we want to be when we grow up. Sometimes, we talk about our parents, the good, the bad and the ugly, because we’re the only two people in the w
orld to have the shared experience of living with them.

  But the truth is the truth, there’s no escaping it, and the truth is that my last words to my brother were banal criticisms of a long-forgotten kid’s program. And his to me were childishly mundane rebuttals. There was nothing special or significant about what either of us said, and the only reason I remember that conversation to this day is because of what came after.

  And what came after was death.

  It happened during a commercial. Billy had to go to the bathroom, and he hopped up from his seat on the floor and ran past the kitchen, down the short hall, and—

  The floor gave way beneath him.

  I saw him fall, heard the crash, heard the scream. The sound of collapsing wood lasted longer than my brother’s cry, and I knew instantly what that meant. Filled with horror, I ran over to where he’d fallen through the floor. Mom, washing dishes in the sink, had immediately turned around and was already there, and Dad rushed out from the bedroom, where he’d been changing his clothes.

  Billy lay beneath the house, impaled by what looked almost like a spear: a sharpened triangular board embedded in the ground and now protruding from my brother’s midsection, blood gushing all around it and spilling onto the earth. His eyes were wide open, and he seemed to be staring right at me.

  Dad pulled me back from the opening just as Mom fainted and started to fall. He let me go, causing me to drop back onto my buttocks, while grabbing her around the waist and keeping her from collapsing. His own face was sick with shock, a terrible expression I knew I would never forget. Back in the living room, I could hear the voices of Ren and Stimpy arguing, and I laid on my back and stared up at the ceiling and started to scream.

  ****

  I was a kid and left out of the deliberations and details, so I don’t know how everything happened or what transpired, but the funeral was held in California. We drove back in a completely silent car, and Billy was transported somehow to a mortuary in Orange County. He was buried at an old cemetery in Anaheim across the street from a restaurant called The Original Pancake House. The day was hot and sunny, and the new suit my mom bought me itched. There were no kids there—family friends and relatives had not wanted their children to be exposed to death so intimately—and I was alone with a bunch of adults and a small coffin that didn’t even look real. We weren’t churchgoers, but there was a minister who stood at the head of the open grave and talked about loss and grief and pretended to know my brother.

  I stood there numbly, feeling more alone than I ever had in my life. Billy and I hadn’t always gotten along, but we were brothers. We slept in the same room, we ate our meals together, we brushed our teeth together, we played together when our friends weren’t around. I was closer to him than to anyone else in the world, and now he was gone, his body about to be buried amidst all these strangers.

  I had never seen my dad cry before, but he cried that day. Everyone cried. Then they lowered the small coffin into the hole, we each threw a handful of dirt on top of it, and then the funeral was over.

  “He’s not even buried!” I shouted when my parents started to move away. My voice was too loud and broken up by sobs.

  But Mom told me that’s how it was done: the people at the cemetery would finish filling in the grave once we were gone.

  I folded my arms and refused to move. “I’m not leaving!” I announced.

  “Daniel,” Dad said gently.

  I appealed to him as someone who should know better. “That’s Billy!” I yelled, pointing into the open hole. “We can’t just leave him like this!”

  He looked at me, put a sympathetic hand on my shoulder. “You’re right,” he said, and the people who had started to leave came back, and we all stood there as employees were found who filled in the hole. Dad said a few more words when it was done, thanked everyone, and people drifted off until only the three of us remained, looking down at the rectangular mound of dirt. We stood there quietly, thinking our own thoughts, and it was Dad again who put a soft hand on my shoulder and said it was time to go.

  The house when we got back seemed quiet and empty and unbearably sad.

  In the days that followed, someone from either law enforcement or the insurance company, I don’t know who, examined the accident site at our Randall house to determine what had happened. According to my dad, it was concluded that the structural design was flawed, with too much stress being placed on an area of flooring with no underlying support. How that part of the hallway had lasted as long as it had was a mystery, since it should have failed long before this. And why it had collapsed under Billy, the lightest of us all, rather than under someone heavier, was something that no one had an answer for. My parents planned to sue the makers of the pre-fab kit—“For everything they have,” Mom said bitterly—over the faulty house design, but found out that the company had been made aware of that problem almost immediately and had instituted a fix. For our year and the year before ours, before the problem was permanently rectified with a remodeled kit, an extra beam was added to support the wood over the hallway, along with steel brackets to install the beam between two existing supports. Moreover, to protect themselves from lawsuits, the company had required recipients of the fix to sign for it.

  And Frank had.

  He had simply not installed it.

  The only question in my mind was whether Billy’s death had been an accident, the result of poor workmanship, or whether the collapsing floor had been intentional, some sort of trap. It was the sharpened board directly beneath the spot that made me wonder. I thought of Frank’s alien stare, and the way he waited to drive his truck until Billy and I were walking so that he could offer us a ride, and as crazy as it sounded, I could see him setting us up that way on purpose.

  He’d ripped off our furniture.

  And our paneling.

  And piled dead dogs in our crawlspace.

  And now he’d killed Billy.

  Our family did not survive the loss of my brother. My parents accused each other of setting the stage for Billy’s death. My dad blamed my mom for wanting a vacation home in Randall in the first place, and my mom blamed my dad for hiring Frank to build it and for not seeing the sharpened board when he helped the sheriff and his men take the dead dogs out from under our house.

  We never went back to Randall. The house and all of its furnishings were sold without any of us returning to Arizona, and after a year of terrible screaming fights alternating with deep cold silences, the two of them separated, me and my mom staying in the house, my dad moving to a nearby apartment. They both worked for the same school district but they did not see each other on a daily basis. In fact, I’m pretty sure the only contact they had was when I was passed off from one to the other.

  My dad died in a car crash when I was sixteen, and my mom cried through the entire funeral. Until that moment, I thought they’d hated each other, but obviously something was left of her feelings for him—more than something—and seeing how much his loss affected her made it more acute for me as well. I thought I’d been getting along fine with the weekend visits and occasional summer sleepovers, but suddenly I was aware of all I’d missed, the little intimate everyday things that amounted to a real relationship. I remembered Dad tucking me in at night when I was little, sitting next to me on the couch watching TV, taking me to the hardware store with him to buy some small item he needed and, afterward, stopping off to get an ice cream cone. Despite everything everyone said about spending “quality time” with kids, I realized that it was “quantity time” that was more important. I never cared what I did with my dad, I just wanted to be with him for as much time as possible. It sunk in that we would never have time together again, and I understood, as I hadn’t up to that point, how far apart we’d drifted after he’d moved out of the house. Staring at his closed coffin, I felt unmoored in the world, adrift. I still had my mom, but my dad was gone, and I would never be able
to ask his advice on buying a car or making repairs or applying for college or any of the thousands of other things that would come up in my life. I sobbed through the rest of the funeral myself, crying for my dad, for my mom, for me, for Billy, for the lives we should have had but didn’t.

  ****

  I was in college when my mom passed away. In those pre-cell phone days, I was called out of my Principles of Economic Theory class by a delivered pink call slip and told to go to the Administration building, where I was informed by an elderly secretary that Mom had collapsed at work and was in St. Jude’s Hospital. The school had no more information than that—I don’t think the hospital’s privacy policy allowed them to reveal anything else to a non-family member—so I hurried out of the building and across the massive parking lot to my car. St. Jude’s was less than ten minutes away. I got there in record time, speeding but not getting caught, and swung into a green 15-minute visitor’s spot, dashing through the building’s entrance to the Admissions counter, where I was told that she was on the fifth floor, in Intensive Care.

  “Can I see her?” I asked.

  “You can go right up. Just wear this.” She’d written my name on an adhesive sticker, and I affixed it to my shirt pocket, hurrying over to the elevator.

  The ICU was structured like a wheel, with a nurse’s station at the hub and a series of rooms arranged around it. My mom was in Room D, lying on a raised bed that took up much of the small space. She was surrounded by monitoring equipment. There were wires everywhere and a tube shoved down her throat, so she could not speak, but she was alert enough to squeeze my hand when I grasped hers. I realized that I had not held her hand since I was a child. In fact, the last time I could remember doing so was in Randall, when she came with us to buy a root beer float at the Dairy Queen one time and held onto both me and Billy as we crossed the highway.