Previous installment: The Wheel: Part 3, Return to a New Earth
Start at the beginning: The Wheel: Part 1, Jack Colby
Where we left off: Jack and Justin were finally let off the Ferris Wheel and were approached by the police. Jack has an outburst of anger at the carny who split the Colby family up for the ride, and Justin follows suit when Jack won’t let him go to the other side of the wheel to see if his mom is there.
Voiceover narration: Andrew Thomas
Art: Jenelle Thomas https://alovelygiraffe.com
An Empty Home
When they pulled into the driveway later that evening, the sun had only recently gone down, and the sky was still awash in sepia tones. The windows of their house stared back at them, blank and lifeless. As the garage door rolled up, Sheila’s Ford Explorer came into view. They had taken Jack’s Camry into town, hoping its smaller size would bring some relief to what was sure to be a nightmarish parking situation, and besides, they didn’t need the third-row seat if it was just the four of them. Jack realized he wouldn’t need the third row for much of anything anymore and briefly started to wonder which vehicle he should keep before shoving the offensive thought away.
He pulled the car into his designated spot on the left and turned it off. Through the driver’s side window, he saw Megan’s bike, pink with white tassels hanging from one of the handlebars. The ones on the other side had fallen off somewhere in the subdivision last summer and must have been picked up and thrown away because Jack never found them on either lap he made around the sub after Megan realized they had gone missing. He’d been telling her since last August that he would replace them, and now, amidst all the worries that had been so quickly added to his mind, he found one that he could reluctantly let go. Jack dropped his head and massaged his brow.
“Dad, are we going to get out?” Justin asked.
Jack looked at him in the rearview mirror and noticed he had already unbuckled. He nodded and said, “Yeah.”
The two remaining Colbys headed into the house and were met by silence and the coolness of air conditioning. It was like walking into a mausoleum, and Jack knew that it didn’t matter how warm it would be overnight; he needed to turn off the AC and open some windows to let some life in. He began to do so, and the last trilling calls of evening birdsong made their way in. As if compelled, he stepped out onto the back porch to listen.
“Hey Dad, can I have a snack?” Justin asked from the other side of the screen door.
“Yeah, go ahead, just no sugar.”
Jack continued to listen to the birds as the sounds of Justin rummaging through the pantry mixed in. Boxes shuffled and bags crinkled, and soon Justin began to sigh and mutter to himself. Jack tried to ignore this and let him figure it out.
“Hey Dad, I can’t find anything,” Justin complained a few minutes later.
Jack shut his eyes and took a breath. Without turning, he said, “Nothing? Do we not have Cheez-Its or something?”
“Yeah.”
“Can’t you eat those?”
“I don’t know.”
Jack turned to him. “Justin, anything we have will be in there or the fridge. Figure it out.”
Looking disappointed, Justin grabbed the box of Cheez-Its and sat down at the dining table on the other side of the sliding door from Jack, who had returned to his vigil over the yard—this time from a patio chair. Under the porch, a cricket joined the birds in song. Soon, the repetitive crinkling of a plastic bag did too as Justin pulled one cracker after another from the box. The sound grated on Jack until he couldn’t take it anymore.
“Bud, can you pour some in a bowl and put the box back, please?”
Justin didn’t answer, but Jack heard the sound of his feet hitting the ground, followed by an opened cabinet, the clink of bowls, a stream of crackers falling into the selected bowl, and one final obnoxious crinkle as Justin stuffed the bag down in the box and set it back on the shelf. Small footfalls crossed the floor back to the table, and what followed were the muted sounds of chewing. Jack decided he could handle that.
Minutes passed, and finally, the chewing sounds stopped. “Hey Dad, do—”
Jack cut him off. “Bud, I’m the only one here.” He turned in his chair, looking at Justin through the screen. “When you talk, I know you are talking to me; you don’t have to say ‘Hey Dad’ every time.”
Justin hesitated. “Ok…do you want to do something?”
Jack turned to give the yard one last look and got up from his chair. He slid the door open and sat in the chair kiddie-corner from his son.
“Like what?”
“I don’t know.”
Of course, he didn’t. Jack sighed. “You want to watch TV for a little bit?”
“I guess?”
“Ok, let’s do that and then get to bed, ok?”
They retreated to the living room, and Jack put on The Simpsons. It was the classic “Marge vs. the Monorail” episode, a parody of The Music Man, where a Harold Hill-esque character comes to town promising more than he can deliver. The humor (including seemingly random deadpan lines from Leonard Nimoy) fell flat, however. On any other day, Nimoy’s quips would have had him in stitches, and Justin would be laughing right along with him without a clue as to what was so funny. Jack shut the TV off before the credits rolled.
In the silence that followed, he looked over at Justin on the couch next to him to find him blinking the long slow blinks of a small boy who was perilously close to the ledge overlooking the abyss of sleep and trying ever so hard not to fall into it, no matter how hard the wind blew.
“Why don’t we get to bed, bud?” Jack said.
“Can I sleep with you?”
Jack smiled, maybe his first real smile of the evening. “I thought you might want to. I think that’s a good idea.”
They got up and headed down the hall to the bedrooms. The kid’s bathroom—Justin’s bathroom, Jack realized—was the first door on the left. He told Justin to brush his teeth extra long and good tonight because of all the garbage he had eaten at the festival. This was a half-truth; he was also trying to buy himself a few minutes. As Justin turned into the bathroom, Jack looked out of the corner of his right eye, spotted Megan’s door handle, and pulled the door to her bedroom shut without looking inside. That was a battle for another day. Instead, he steeled himself for the bedroom ahead of him, the one he and Sheila had shared at the end of the hall.
When he walked through the door, he looked up at the dark room in front of him. He didn’t dare turn the light on; he wasn’t ready to see it that clearly. He stood there in the door, though, and let his eyes adjust to the darkness. What he found was that he did still share the room with Sheila. Her side of the bed was just as unmade as the last time she crawled groggily out of it. Her pillow seemed to cradle the ghost of her skull. If he looked at the jumbled covers in the right way, he could almost convince himself that she was there, curled up against the cool, conditioned air.
Suddenly, a need to get out rushed over him. He walked forward quickly and turned into their bathroom. Still in the dark, he opened the drawer that held their toothbrushes, looking only long enough to make sure he had his before grabbing the toothpaste (he couldn’t stand the sweetness of Justin’s) and backing out into the room. With his free hand, he picked up his pillow and walked back into the hallway illuminated by Justin’s bathroom light. He tossed his pillow into Justin’s room and headed for the bathroom. Justin was just finishing up when he walked in.
“I was thinking we could sleep in your room. Sound good?”
Justin nodded.
“Ok, go climb in bed, I’ll be there in a minute.”
When Jack walked into the bedroom minutes later, Justin was seemingly already asleep. He lowered himself carefully into bed, knowing that Justin would still be easily woken at this point, and he was right. Justin sat up in bed and gasped.
“It’s ok, bud, it’s just me. Lay down.” Jack pushed on his chest to encourage him back down. “I love you. Sleep tight.”
“Love you too, Da…”
Jack was no stranger to sleeping next to his son. They had upgraded Justin’s bed to a double a couple of years prior for that very purpose. The kid had an active imagination that followed him even in sleep, and none of them slept well when he inevitably climbed in between Jack and Sheila in the middle of the night after some nightmare or another. Jack had a feeling a bigger bed wasn’t the right way to address the issue, but with parenting, sometimes you have to do what’s easiest, just for a little while.
Despite his exhaustion, sleep remained elusive. He lay awake for hours replaying the horrific scene in his head over and over, helpless to stop it. Somewhere around midnight, he realized that he didn’t remember exactly what Megan looked like. He could call her face forth in his mind, but the details weren’t all there. The more he tried, the more it bothered him, and soon he was considering running into the kitchen to look at her school picture that he knew was on the fridge. He resisted the temptation, though, worried that it would only wake him up further.
Whether he ever actually slept, he was not sure. Justin woke frantically multiple times during the night, much more than usual, which left Jack alert each time. In waking and sleeping and everything in between, he tried to see his wife and daughter. This became harder and harder through the night, and he did not know if it was because he was truly forgetting or because he was in a dream state. Eventually, he gave up trying, and the wheel rushed in to replace them, rolling through his consciousness on its terrible, endless mission.
“When you talk, I know you are talking to me; you don’t have to say ‘Hey Dad’ every time.”
What a line. This whole thing is raw and real, and my heart aches for these people. Great stuff, man
loving this!!