He’d stopped trying to bring her back.
She only came back when she felt like it anyway, in dreams and lies and broken-down déjà vu.
Like, Park would be driving to work and he’d see a girl with red hair standing on the street, and he’d swear for half an airless moment that it was her.
Or he’d wake up when it was still dark, sure that she was waiting for him outside. Sure that she needed him.
But he couldn’t summon her. Sometimes he couldn’t even remember what she looked like, even when he was looking at her picture. (Maybe he’d looked at it too much.)
He’d stopped trying to bring her back.
So why did he keep coming here? To this crappy little house …
Eleanor wasn’t here, she was never really here – and she’d been gone too long. Almost a year now.
Park turned to walk away from the house, but the little brown truck whipped too fast into the driveway, jumping the curb and nearly clipping him. Park stopped on the sidewalk and waited. The driver’s side door swung open.
Maybe, he thought. Maybe this is why I’m here.
Eleanor’s stepdad – Richie – leaned slowly out of the cab. Park recognized him from the one time he’d seen him before, when Park had brought Eleanor the second issue of Watchmen, and her stepdad had answered the door …
The final issue of Watchmen came out a few months after Eleanor left. He wondered if she’d read it, and whether she thought Ozymandias was a villain, and what she thought Dr Manhattan meant when he said, ‘Nothing ever ends’ at the end. Park still wondered what Eleanor thought about everything.
Her stepdad didn’t see Park at first. Richie was moving slowly, uncertainly. When he did notice Park, he looked at him like he wasn’t sure he was really there. ‘Who are you?’ Richie shouted.
Park didn’t answer. Richie turned jaggedly, jerking toward him. ‘What do you want?’ Even from a few feet away, he smelled sour. Like beer, like basements.
Park stood his ground.
I want to kill you, he thought. And I can, he realized. I should.
Richie wasn’t much bigger than Park, and he was drunk and disoriented. Plus, he could never want to hurt Park as much as Park wanted to hurt him.
Unless Richie was armed, unless he got lucky – Park could do this.
Richie shuffled closer. ‘What do you want?’ he shouted again. The force of his own voice knocked him off balance and he tipped forward, falling thickly to the ground. Park had to step back not to catch him.
‘Fuck,’ Richie said, raising himself up on his knees and holding himself not quite steady.
I want to kill you, Park thought.
And I can. Someone should.
Park looked down at his steel-toe Docs. He’d just bought them at work. (On sale, with his employee discount.) He looked at Richie’s head, hanging from his neck like a leather bag.
Park hated him more than he thought it was possible to hate someone.
More than he’d ever thought it was possible to feel anything … Almost.
He lifted his boot and kicked the ground in front of Richie’s face. Ice and mud and driveway slopped into the older man’s open mouth. Richie coughed violently and banked into the ground.
Park waited for him to get up, but Richie just lay there spitting curses, and rubbing salt and gravel into his eyes.
He wasn’t dead. But he wasn’t getting up. Park waited.
And then he walked home.
Eleanor
Letters, postcards, yellow padded packages that rattled in her hands. None of them opened, none of them read.
It was bad when the letters came every day. It was worse when they stopped.
Sometimes she laid them out on the carpet like tarot cards, like Wonka bars, and wondered whether it was too late.
