Eighty-Sixed: Chapter 58 - Driveway

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“We’ll try our best to find a pay phone and call every couple of hours,” Jeremy told Mickey, jingling the pocket full of quarters in his shorts. “When Olivia calls, get an exact address and phone number and tell her to stay put.  We’ll get to her right away, wherever she is before things get any worse.”

“Will do,” Mickey said.  He was upset to see them leaving so soon.

“I’m serious,” Jeremy said and looked over to David, slumped once again in the passenger seat of their Cutlass Sierra.  “He needs a win.  We all need a win.  But from what he’s gone through, especially, I’m surprised he hasn’t already lost his mind.”

“Same for Grace,” Mickey said, pointing a thumb back toward the house.  

“I’m sitting right here,” David said. “I can hear you both.”

Mickey leaned down and peered through the open driver’s window, extending a hand to his son-in-law.

“You’re a good man, David,” he said.  “I was always glad Olivia ended up with you.  I’m sorry about how Gracie’s acting.”

“Just tell Olivia to stay put,” David said.  “I don’t know how much longer I can stand not seeing her.”

The Cutlass backed up slowly, kicking up a wafting cloud of brown dust, gravel crunching loudly beneath the tires.  Jeremy turned the steering wheel, twisting the car around to face the street, and slammed hard on the brakes at the sight of Grace standing at the pathway’s end with a double-barrel shotgun pointed directly at the windshield.

“Well, what the hell, Gracie?” Mickey yelled and slapped at his thigh.  “You put that damn gun down right now.”

“Crazy old lady,” Jeremy said, scrunching down in his seat. “David, get down.”

Grace held her ground, adjusted her grip, and propped the butt of the gun more firmly against her right shoulder.  Mickey stomped his way across the dirt toward her as David simply sat in his seat and watched his in-laws act out this parody, this ridiculous scene of irrationality and threatened violence.  

“Grace, you hear me?” Mickey said. “I know you hear me. I’m standing right here. Put the damn gun down.”

“I told you David’s part of fixing all this,” Grace said.  “He has to stay here.  Jeremy can go find our daughter.”

“Fixing all this?” David yelled as he got out of the car.  “I don’t even know what is happening anymore!”

“David, wait!” Jeremy called but then followed his brother as he walked over to where Mickey now stood.

“He has to go inside one of the black holes.”

“Gracie, now I already told you…” Mickey said.

“You tell me a lot of things,” Grace continued. “They say on TV that those black hole things caused all this and that what goes into a black hole doesn’t come back out. But that’s not exactly true.”

“How so?” Jeremy asked.

“Those black holes opened up and swallowed our whole world, I guess,” Grace said solemnly, her face washed pale, worn, and tired. “They spit us right back into ourselves, only here and now, but it’s like they knew that wasn’t right.  What happened needed to be fixed and put back the way it was.  And now the televisions and the radios are cracking like lightning, and we saw that black hole swallow up Mickey’s radio.”

“It was right in my shed,” Mickey conceded. 

“They’re all coming back,” Grace said.  “That radio got swallowed up and is now gone, just like it had been gone for years by the time any of this happened.”

“How do you mean?” asked David.

“That radio quit working probably twenty years ago,” Mickey said. “It fizzled out right in the middle of Sammy Sosa hitting another home run.  I fiddled with it for a bit, but it was beyond dead. I ended up tossing it in the trash.”   

“So now that space,” Grace said, pointing at the work shed, “right there where the radio had been, is back to how it was supposed to be. The radio’s gone again because, in our original time, that radio was destroyed long before your kids were even born.” 

“So what’s your theory, exactly?” Jeremy asked.  “David needs to jump in one of those black holes?  Is that what you’re suggesting?  That’s ridiculous.  For what purpose?”

“I’m not jumping into anything,” David said weakly.  “I just want to find my wife.”

“Well, I want to find my grandchildren,” Grace said.  “And like that radio disappearing, I think if you go in one of those things, maybe Mark and Rosie will come out.”

“Gracie,” Mickey said.  “That makes no sense at all.  Besides, we saw on TV that the black holes appear randomly.”

“There’s one inside right now,” she called out, her left eye squeezed shut as her right eye set fixed and lined up with the length of the gun.  

“Gracie, you’re just not making sense, hon,” Mickey said as he stepped towards his wife.  “Put that gun down right now!”

“I need you to go inside, David,” Grace said calmly.  Jeremy turned to his brother, who faced the gun barrel directly.

“Stay right there, David,” Mickey rebuked.  “Gracie, you’re talking crazy.”

“Inside,” she said again.  “It just ate up the television, and it’s waiting for you.”

“What are you going on about?” Mickey said.  He stomped his foot again, stopping in place about ten feet from where Grace stood stone-faced with the gun cocked and ready.

“It wasn’t even on,” she said. “I sat down on the couch, and then out of nowhere, one of those black circles just crackled like lightning and was there.”

“In the house?” Mickey asked.

“Right there,” she said, “right in front of me. It just appeared out of nothing and swallowed up the television and the reading chair beside it.”

“Dear Lord,” Mickey said, stepping backward and away from the house. “Are you serious?”

“And it’s still there,” Grace said through gritted teeth.  “But it may not be for long.  Get out of the car, David.  Get out right this second.”

“What do you intend to do here, Gracie?” Mickey asked.

“Like I said, he’s going in before it’s too late,” she said.  “This is our chance to save the kids.”

“He most certainly is not,” Mickey said.  “No one’s going near that blasted thing.”

From the house’s west side, a rain of fiery sparks burst with a loud bang from the junction box bolted next to the exterior brick chimney of their fireplace.

“There goes the power,” Grace said, never taking her squinted eye off David.

“It caught fire!” Mickey yelled, stumbled backward a step, turned, and ran for the work shed. “It’ll burn the house down!”

He moved quickly, quicker than one would expect for a man with such a sun-weathered face, beaten down from years of watching over fields, fighting with the very earth and the unpredictable turning of a breeze.  He was old even now, though his body seemed much younger than David remembered.  

Mickey disappeared into the darkness of the shed for just a moment before re-emerging with a fire extinguisher in his hands. Determined, he was upon the house, pulling the metal pin from the head of the extinguisher, pointing the house, and dousing the flames in the foam.  

Grace never looked away from David.  She never lowered her gun.

“I need you inside the house right now, David,” she said again.  

David took a step toward his mother-in-law.

“Don’t,” Jeremy whispered, his eyes wide-eyed and horrified.  The memory of David on the kayak floated across his mind.  That day, which now seemed like ages past, if it had happened at all: David in the yellow kayak with provisions hemorrhaging out of his vessel and into the water as he called out for help across the foamy current.

“I’m going to lose everything!” he’d cried, and then moments later, the branch had landed across his face, propelling him backward, lifting him out of the kayak, and dropping him into the raging and angry river.  

Standing beside the car, David looked at his brother with the same eyes as on that day on the river.  The same eyes, only younger, in this younger body, this body which was given a second chance, an opportunity to be reunited with the beautiful young woman who’d worked so hard to escape this town, this farming town, this place of dust and endless rotation of crops and cascading fields of corn and wheat and parties in abandoned field houses.  The same eyes that had rescued Olivia from this town, that had given her children, that had lived such a good life with her, such a loved life.

David stepped forward again, standing upright, as he stared down the barrel of the gun held by his mother-in-law, the woman who never quite ever understood her very own daughter, at least in the way that David did.  

“Show me where it is,” David said to Grace.

Grace finally moved the gun off of him, pointing it briefly at the house, before repositioning it back onto David.

“In the house,” she said.  “It’s in the house.”

David nodded and made his way to the back door.

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