This is Thomas as he takes a deep drag from his pen cap, calling his mother’s name.
Lauren.
Tonight is the night of Luke Tulley’s Halloween party.
There was a brief period, after his father’s funeral two years ago, when Thomas didn’t like to leave the house, when his mother had to take help from anyone who could spare it, when dinners were pot stickers and fried rice and seasoned beef in white boxes from Good China Kitchen or greasy sandwiches wrapped in day-old newspapers from Big Bertha’s Subs. Whenever Lauren tried to take Thomas out of the house, he would scream and kick. One time, his fingernail cut her right cheek. A friend of a friend recommended an emotional therapy dog.
Thomas taps his pen cap with his index finger to let the imaginary ash fall to the floor and looks at Fritzy.
This is Fritzy, a pit-bull with bulked up muscle in his chest, the sort of upper body strength that comes handy for lifting one’s self over tall walls, out of pools, onto beds, for doing push-ups, for keeping strangers at bay with his red vest that says: Do Not Pet, Dog on Duty. He is always by Thomas’s side – at the bookstore, at the stop light where they listen to a homeless woman sing folk music while her partner bangs on overturned buckets, at the bench which overlooks Fitch Park. Docked ears, a tattooed number near his chest, Fritzy had been a bait dog some years prior, tied up in the corner and attacked by all the other dogs in an underground fighting ring. Now, rescued and trained, he is a gentle giant who listens only to Thomas; a safety blanket acquired after his first safety blanket, his father— the only person who could convince Thomas to go on roller coasters that went upside down or go jaywalking or try foods like sushi and calamari—was shot and killed, an innocent bystander, in a botched gas station robbery.
As he grows more tired of waiting, Thomas begins to choke. Someone has poisoned him, he thinks. Perhaps his mother had squeezed two or three drops into the egg drop soup they had with dinner. A way to finally get rid of the burden of having a son. Now she could go on dates and be normal and get rid of Fritzy. Start fresh in a small town where no one knows her history. Thomas claws at his throat, the white of his skin blushing red. He begins to walk towards his mother’s room. Knees buckling, he slows down and begins to fall. The fall isn’t perfect, however. He knows how it looks: there is hesitation and hesitation does not feel real. Laying on the wood floor he stutters his leg as if having a spasm and rolls his eyes up into his head. He cannot see Frizty but feels as if, at any moment, the dog will let out a long, bored sigh. This was just practice, Thomas thinks, he will get his death right next time.
This is Lauren, in her room, taking her time to get ready for a night she most certainly will not enjoy. When she hears her son choking in the hallway, she shakes her head. He has done this before—a fake hanging in his closet, a fake heart attack during 3rd hour Earth Science, acting out seizures in the mall—and she has not yet decided what to make of it. She knows the fake deaths started after his father was killed, but so many things started after that (her interest in running a marathon, her new job at a bank handling mortgages, Thomas’s hobby of pretending to smoke cigarettes, letting her hair grow out past her shoulders, the way Thomas started calling her Lauren) that it seems careless, if not insulting to her husband’s memory, to pin every change on his end.
“Remember,” she says to the empty room, “a fractured family is still a family.” There were times when she was driving alone in the car and would blurt out “I love you” to herself. She has yet to decide if the randomness of the outbursts, how it always came out of thin-air, indicated their truth or their falsehood.
She considered taking yoga or getting a prescription for anti-depressants, but so far has done neither. Her therapy consists of running three to five miles three nights a week. She loves the space, the quiet, the burn in her muscles, the sweat on her body, the world curving beneath her feet, the music in her ears. Some nights the desire is to go at a steady pace, to see how long she can run, to never reach the horizon even if it were attainable, to never let the future become the present. Other times she increases her speed until her muscles are pots of water at boiling point; she goes as fast as she can, then pushes herself further, until she comes so close to collapsing she has to stop. And when she does this – her body bent over, her hands on her knees – she laughs, discovering a new part of herself, as the buildings around close in.
That is where Thomas and his mother live, deep in the city. Theirs is a view of tall buildings and taller buildings behind the tall buildings, and old run-down historic districts between the tall buildings, and thrift shops and ethnic restaurants on every other corner, of sidewalks packed with fast walkers, bike peddlers and panhandlers, of street corners that become foreboding after sundown, of art exhibits in abandoned warehouses, of noises (think cars backfiring, think someone screaming but is it a laugh or a cry, think dogs barking, coins dropping, phones ringing little musical interludes between conversations) that sometimes can’t be placed, all sprawling outward and upward so that it was impossible to find a center, a point of origin to all that life.
This is Luke Tulley’s home, a 30-minute drive south into the desert, an old historic home with three bedrooms and only one bath. Orange lights are strung over the front door and windows, a smoke machine billows in the hallway, a group of people are tinkering with a malfunctioning strobe light in the backyard. Thomas looks at a skeleton hanging from the ceiling. There is a surreal mixture of people dressed up (doctors, witches, a man in a full body condom suit, superheroes, a strutting, wise-cracking, pipe-smoking Sherlock Holmes) and people not dressed up (tired moms in athletic wear, middle-aged men dressed as if, at any moment, they might be called into work at their middle management jobs, young girls wearing leggings and oversized sweaters, young boys wearing flannel and cardigans and heavy bourbon colored boots.)
Fritzy sniffs a yucca plant as Thomas and Lauren walk up to the crowded patio. Luke greets them, dressed as a doctor with blood over his scrubs, with a smile and a hug.
“Don’t worry,” he says, “the blood is dry.”
After getting Lauren a cocktail and Thomas a soda, Luke shows them the rest of the decorations, weaving in and out of groups of people. Fritzy becomes the life of the party. People turn on their heels to meet him. A woman with long blonde hair pushed back with a grey hairband squeals when she sees Fritzy. Her eyes grow wide and she bends down, asking Thomas if she can pet his dog.
“He is actually working right now,” Lauren says to the woman.
“He’s so cute,” the woman says, “he has a job and everything.” It looks like she might cry. Her date comes from out of nowhere, apologetic, smiling, and pulls her away.
Thomas takes a pen cap out of his front pocket and puts it in his mouth, inhaling.
“I should get a dog,” Luke says and shows them his room.
Thomas has agreed to leave Fritzy in Luke’s room until the party gets a little smaller.
“He will be right in the room if you need him,” Lauren says to Thomas.
“I know, Mom,” Thomas says.
“Also, if you feel yourself getting stressed just let me know. We can see Fritzy whenever you need to.”
“I know, Mom.”
“We won’t stay very late, okay? Just an hour or two. We can leave earlier if you need to.”
Luke looks at Lauren.
“Okay, Mom.”
“Stay,” Thomas says, holding his hand up as if to stop traffic. Fritzy lays down at the foot of the bed, curling his legs beneath his body and resting his face on the plush carpet.
See Luke moving through the party swiftly. There is a cigarette sticking behind his ear, and when he walks from one place to another, he does so as if any step might be the step that turns into a dance. He pulls Lauren along with him. Can you slice that lemon for me, Lauren? Laur, can you pour two shots of vodka into the tumbler? Let’s do a shot together, okay?
But Lauren has not let go of the fact that she plans on driving home tonight, despite Luke’s offer to let her, her son and his dog stay the night.
She tells Luke, “No, thank you” and then “thank you, though.”
See Thomas with Luke. “Help me make a drink, buddy,” Luke says, laying the kitchen towel over Thomas’s shoulder.
“What should we make?” Thomas asks, looking at all of the bottles on the countertop.
“You point, I’ll pour.”
For every bottle Thomas points at, the red one, the brown one, the clear one, Luke pours that drink—half a shot’s worth—into a tumbler full of ice.
Thomas points three more times: clear, clear, purple.
Watch Luke shake the tumbler until his hands get cold, pouring the drink into a tall glass. Watch him take a sniff of the drink, watch his face cringe dramatically.
“Luke, you really don’t have-” but before Lauren can finish her sentence, Luke begins to sip the drink, until he has to stop and cough.
“Didn’t even offer us a taste,” someone says.
“Jesus, he is going to puke,” someone else says.
“What happened to the adorable dog?” the drunk woman asks.
After some struggle, Luke finishes the drink and holds up the empty glass like a trophy.
“Another!” someone says and Luke fakes a heart attack.
“God, wasn’t that drink terrible?” Lauren asks, smiling.
“It wasn’t great,” Luke says, laughing. “I don’t feel it yet.”
“You will,” Lauren says.
“I will,” Luke agrees. “I want to have a cigarette. Come with me.”
Luke takes the cigarette out from behind his ear and walks with Lauren to the front patio, holding onto her hand as he leads her out the front door.
There is a shout of excitement from inside the house.
“I think he is making the drink for someone else,” Luke says, taking a seat on the patio steps.
“I want to thank you for inviting us. I really appreciate it.”
“I wish you wouldn’t say that,” Luke says. He sits down on the porch swing and grabs a pile of free candy left for trick or treaters in a bucket.
“What’s wrong with saying that?”
“It makes it sound like I am doing you a favor. Like this is a transaction.”
Lauren scrunches her face, then looks at her hands. “I just know housing a dog can be a hassle.”
There was a time when Lauren and Thomas came over to Luke’s house once or twice a month, to watch movies Luke referred to as “must-sees”. Then the visits became less and less frequent and then stopped altogether.
“Fritzy is an angel,” Luke says. He may not be feeling the drink he just had, but some of the earlier drinks are beginning to make themselves known. His body loosens, unraveling.
“He is. I sometimes wonder if it was a good idea getting him, though. I can’t imagine taking Fritzy away, but at the same time Thomas shouldn’t have to keep a service dog for the rest of his life, should he?”
“I guess it just takes time,” Luke says. He offers his cigarette to Lauren; she declines it.
“Do service dogs retire?” He asks, moving closer to Lauren. “He can take off the vest and just be a normal dog for Thomas.”
Lauren laughs, and is looking out at the desert and is wondering if she will have enough to run tonight when she gets home or if she will be too tired.
This is Luke Tulley, seeing Lauren look out into the distance, imagining that she is imagining the moment when they finally kiss and he moves in, to try to kiss her.
This is Lauren laughing. This is Lauren apologizing. This is her trying to figure out what to say and coming out with nothing except, “I wonder how Fritzy is doing.”
Luke gets up to leave, and does so, not just out of anger, but out of necessity, as if it has started to rain and he is allergic to the water.
At the viewing, friends of the family, distant uncles and aunts, co-workers from the Motorola plant, shook Thomas’s hand and tousled his hair and patted him on the back. Lauren, too, had her arms squeezed and was guided in and out of rooms with a hand on the small of her back, and was hugged over and over and over again. It was as if there was a theory, somehow uniformly adopted by everyone that Thomas and Lauren met, that if they were touched enough, that the pain and grief and mourning would go away.
•
After Luke left, Lauren went to his room to see Fritzy.
“Good boy,” she said, finding the dog curled up in the same position as when they had left him.
Fritzy is a dog trained to calm down soldiers who awake in the middle of the night to the sounds and sights of their fellow men and women (sometimes enemies, sometimes friendlies) being divided into quarters. Fritzy is trained to assist the sort of men and women who walk around all day with clenched fists and forced smiles on their faces. One of Lauren’s co-workers has a husband that suffers from PTSD. She knows the stories; he sleepwalks to the kitchen and pees in the oven. The peeing in the oven isn’t from the PTSD. That’s just a sleepwalking habit that he developed in his high school years. The PTSD is when his wife tries to wake him up and he, convinced she is his enemy, grabs her by the throat and pushes her up against the wall, a stream of urine running down his bare leg, his wife gasping, yelling, pleading, doing whatever she can to let her husband know that he is home, he is safe.
Lauren leans into Fritzy’s face and whispers, “You ready to go? Where’s our boy? Where’s Thomas?”
The dog’s ears go alert, the neck extends, the tail wags, as Fritzy gets up and walks over to the bedroom door where, as if waiting for the day to begin, he sits patiently.
Thomas is still in the living room with other party guests. A man dressed as a Nazi is dancing with a woman in a simple black dress with a long, skinny cigarette in her hand. Someone drops or knocks over a bottle of beer. The room grows quiet, then loud again.
Lifting his hand up to his chest, as if covering a wound, Thomas looks around for the shooter, his eyes squinting.
The living room is cut up by the strobe light and covered in thin grey smoke.
Stumbling, he moves away from the counter, he puts his left hand over his stomach and groans.
“Thomas?” Luke asks.
“Help,” he says, his voice weak, “I’ve been shot.”
“Thomas?” Luke asks again, making his way towards him.
“Lauren,” Thomas says, his right hand reaching out to the crowd in front of him. He moves the weight of his body onto the balls of his feet, he bends in, as if about fold into himself,
and then—
David Klose writes out of Mesa, Arizona. This is his first published piece of short fiction. He will be attending Lesley University this year to pursue his MFA in Creative Writing.