Sour Candy (5 page)

“
Oh for fuck sake, look,
here.” Phil dug his cell phone out of his pocket and shoved it into
Cortez face. “Call her. Call my ex-wife. We divorced because I
didn’t
want
children.”

“
Yes, we already spoke to
her.”

“
So then…what you’re saying
can’t be true. She backed it up.”

“
Not quite.”

Phil stared at him. “What does that
mean?”

“
It means you’re correct in
that she divorced you because you didn’t want children. The part
you’re leaving out is what made the situation worse: you already
had one. She accused you of neglecting him, of not wanting anything
to do with him.”

“
If that was true, then how
could the kid end up here with me?”

“
After your ex-wife’s
accident, she agreed to let you have sole custody of the
boy.”

“
Accident? What
accident?”

“
She was struck by a car
while crossing an intersection downtown. She survived but lost the
use of her legs. You’re seriously telling me you don’t remember any
of this?”

Phil turned away, his vision swimming.
“I need to sit down.”

“
Please do.”

Wincing, Phil lowered
himself to the damp grass. His head hurt. Everything hurt. His mind
felt like weak tin being crumpled by a merciless hand. He knew this
was all wrong, that something had happened to the fabric of his
reality, had been
made
to happen by someone or something, but how it might have been
done was beyond him. Worst of all, the overwhelming evidence
presented to him brought with it the first seed of doubt. He had,
after all, been in an accident. Could what Cortez was saying be
true, the knowledge of his real life jarred from his brain during
the crash? Could the kid really be his charge? There was so much to
take in, so much to process, and none of it made any
sense.

“
What about the store?” he
mumbled.

“
Say again?”

“
The store. Walmart. Where I
saw the boy and the woman. The manager was there. Did you call him?
He can tell you I wasn’t with them, that the woman was there with
the boy.”

“
Yes, Marsh called him
before we drove you home.”

“
And?” Phil already knew
what the answer was going to be and he turned his grim defeated
smile to the rain.

“
He says you were there
alone with the boy.”

Phil took out his phone. “You know,
Detective, there are a couple of holes in your story too. It still
doesn’t add up, and I think you know that. I think that’s why
you’re here. I think you’re incredibly good at your job and you
operate on instinct. I think that same instinct is telling you that
something doesn’t jibe here and it’s driving you a little crazy not
being able to put your finger on it.”

Behind him, Cortez was
silent.

Phil continued. “It may very
well be the case that at some point today I went insane, or just
had all knowledge of the boy and my life with him knocked right the
fuck out of my head.
I
don’t believe that but then if I were truly mad I wouldn’t,
would I? No, what I actually think is that there’s something wrong
with that boy. I thought it the first time I saw his eyes and the
way he was dressed. I thought it when I saw the condition of the
woman I took to be his mother. She looked like she might have been
afraid of him and had simply checked out to protect herself. For
all I know maybe that’s why she killed herself. To get away from
him.” He laughed, because now he really did sound insane. But the
words wouldn’t stop coming. “I also think that before Mrs. Bennings
crashed her car into me, that child was not a part of my life, that
nobody I know had ever heard of him. I think he released Mrs.
Bennings from her obligations on the condition that she find a
replacement. Which she did. Maybe the candy was her way of
transferring the responsibility for him, some messed up ritual that
only made sense to them. And now that that’s done, my world has
been altered to accommodate him.”

“
Phil,” Cortez said, using
his first name for the first time since they’d met. “You realize
how this sounds, right?”

Phil tapped a finger on the screen of
his iPhone and saw that he had one missed call and a voice mail
from Lori.

“
Yes, I do. I also know that
you managed to do a spectacular amount of research into my life and
the boy’s place in it in the short space of time since the
accident. Don’t these things usually take days, weeks, and wouldn’t
there have needed to be some compelling reason for you to do it in
the first place? But no, here you are and you know everything. It’s
like the whole police department suddenly dropped everything and
threw all their resources into proving that boy was mine. And I
know that nothing I say or do will change that reality.”

He thumbed the icon to listen to the
voicemail and put the phone to his ear.

“
Who are you calling?”
Cortez asked.

Phil didn’t answer. He just listened,
and once he was done, he knew the boy had won.

“
You know what else,
Detective Cortez? The worst thing of all?”

“
What?”

“
I think I know all of this
because the boy is allowing me to.”

* * *

Over the next hour, and with the child
still sequestered in the kitchen, they showed him framed pictures
they had taken from his office desk and the walls in the upstairs
landing. They covered a period of years and showed Phil grinning
with his son in various locations, most of which he had never seen
before. In one, he was fishing on a pontoon boat, the boy at his
side, both of them smiling, their faces dappled with light from the
sun on the water. Around them, other tourists grinned knowingly. In
another, they were on a rollercoaster, arms raised, both of them
screaming in delight. There were more, all of them showing a father
and son’s most precious moments, all of them showing Phil happier
than he could ever remember being. There were a dozen pictures of a
perfectly ordinary young boy enjoying time with his father. Only a
closer look showed the slightest hint of darkness in the boy’s
eyes. It was vague, but there, easily attributable to shadow, or
the quality of the picture, but Phil knew better. How could anyone
look at those pictures and not notice the queerest things apparent
in them? The digital dates in the bottom right hand corner showed
that they had been taken over the course of three years, but not
only had the child not aged in that time, he was wearing the exact
same clothes in each one, the same clothes he was wearing today.
And how often did one see digital timestamps on pictures these
days?

Such things would only go unnoticed if
you’d been instructed not to notice them, but Phil could see it
clearly because the child was making no effort to blind him. The
child wanted him aware of the game he was playing so that the
effect would not be diluted by self-doubt or fear of
madness.

There was something terribly wrong
with the child, and simply by crossing paths with him, Phil had
caught his attention. He felt trapped in a bizarre otherworld in
which everything was crooked, but the harder he fought to extricate
himself, the more tangled he became. So, in the absence of better
options, he stopped struggling.

And every ounce of that theory still
sounded to him like sheer lunacy. This was the real world and
things like this simply didn’t happen.

And yet it was.

“
Is it coming back? Any of
it?”

Now that there was something of a
rapport between them (in the detective’s mind, at least), Cortez
stayed with Phil while Marsh kept the boy company in the kitchen.
They were sitting in Phil’s home office, and though the detective
had expressed concern that given his mental state, drinking might
not be a good idea, they were nursing tumblers of Johnny Walker
Black. Phil had insisted that after the day he’d just endured, the
liquor would calm his nerves.

“
I think so,” he lied. “It’s
just bits and pieces. I think after that woman killed herself, the
paramedic might have been a bit rattled. It’s possible he missed a
concussion. Seeing those pictures…I don’t know. They’re the one
thing that doesn’t seem out of place.”

“
You mean what’s in the
pictures or the pictures themselves?”

“
The pictures themselves.
They look like they belong right where they are.”

“
That’s something I
guess.”

“
I’m sorry, by the
way.”

“
For what?”

“
My behavior. I hope you’ll
understand that I’ve never experienced anything like this before.
Almost two decades of driving and I’ve never been in an accident.
I’ve also never really been injured. I think it shook me up more
than I realized.”

“
We should probably take you
back to the hospital if you think you might be concussed. Leaving
that untended can be dangerous.”

Phil shook his head and looked at the
liquid in his glass. “I think I just need to rest.”

“
I know I asked this before,
but is there anyone who could come look after Adam while you’re on
the mend?”

Phil nodded. “Yes, Lori. She left a
message saying she’ll be over later.”

“
That’s good.”

And you’re going to accept
that on faith despite my abrupt change in
attitude
, Phil thought,
and you’re going to do something the police would never do
and leave me here, drinking and alone with the boy because that’s
what he wants. No child services, no child psychologist, no
guardians of the state, no nothing. And I’m guessing if you
conceded to that nagging whisper in the back of your mind that
persists in telling you that you’re being manipulated, the boy
would probably make you take out that gun of yours, stick it in
your mouth and pull the trigger. Because like me, there’s a part of
you that knows this is anything but normal.

Lori. It took everything in him not to
stalk into the kitchen and throttle the life out of the child for
what he had caused to happen between Phil and the woman he loved.
His heart ached at the memory of her standing there this morning, a
morning that seemed years in the past now, her eyes gleaming with
mischief and love. It was going to be such a wonderful day. He
tried not to replay her voice message in his head for fear it would
affect his performance in front of the detective, but snippets of
it kept coming back like malicious whispers:

I asked you to stop
calling me. We’re done, Phil. Get that through your head. We’ve
been done for a long time now.

A long time. By his count, it had been
less than four hours.

I tried, I really did, but
I told you I wasn’t ready to be a mother and as hard as that is,
taking care of a kid that’s not your own is even harder.

I just need to live my
life until I’m ready to settle down, and that day isn’t anywhere in
the near future.

Words he himself had once used with
his ex-wife.

I’m sorry.

Please don’t call me
anymore. It’s too hard.

In the only outward concession to the
anger that burned within him, Phil’s grip on the glass
tightened.

Marsh appeared in the doorway and
looked none too impressed to find both men drinking. “Nice,” she
said, and hiked up her belt. “Thought you were off the sauce,
Cortez?”

He inspected the glass. “It isn’t
sauce. It’s scotch.”

“
Wiseass.” To Phil, she
said: “I assume you’ve been talked down, Mr. Pendleton?”

Expression forced into one of fake
apology, he nodded. “Yes, I think so. As I’ve been telling your
partner here, I lost my mind for a little bit, probably due to the
accident. I’m sorry I made you both jump through hoops.”

“
That’s the job,” Marsh told
him. To Cortez she said: “You about ready to head out?”

The detective drained his glass,
tipped it at Phil in thanks and set it down on the desk. He rose
and followed his partner out of the room.

“
Goodbye, Mr. Pendleton,”
Marsh said.

In the doorway, Cortez paused and
looked back over his shoulder. In his eyes, that glimmer again, the
awareness that without being fully aware how, he was merely a cog
in a machine too big and too strange for him to understand. “I left
my card on the table,” he said. “You start to feel….whatever…call
me.”

Your card won’t be
there
, Phil thought,
the kid will make sure of that
, but
he forced a smile and said, “I will, thank you.”

They left, the sound of the door
shutting behind them like the closing of a tomb.

6. Confrontation

It took Phil another thirty minutes and
two more jolts of scotch before he could summon the courage to
enter the kitchen, the short walk down the hall extending before
him as if in a dream.

Inside, he found the kid sitting at
the table eating candy and drawing a picture with crayons he had
produced from somewhere.