VenCo(6)

She returned to her chair and sat. Jinx jumped up and draped himself over her lap like a luxurious fur stole. She paused while she stroked him. Then she picked up the story again.

“He cut through any of the studs that got in his way with whatever he could find to use. Who knows what he did with the dirt, mighta ate it, maybe. He did such a good job, nobody noticed, but when he got all the way across the basement, the whole damn building collapsed—still standing, but with no foundation, all crooked and messy. It was pure luck none of the other patients got hurt.”

Lucky couldn’t help herself. “What happened to him?”

Stella held up a finger, instructing her to wait. “Afterwards, they shipped everyone to a new asylum out there in Collingwood. The old place here got boarded up and forgotten. Since they built the overpass, no one bothers to look under it anyway.”

She raised her voice, finally rounding the corner to her original point. “But I told Pinkerton, ‘Henry, you don’t know where that lunatic dug to. He could have made it all the way over into our basement. He could have escaped right through our back door while the cops were at the hospital shrugging their stupid shoulders.’”

Lucky also liked an underdog, and she liked a good story. She’d been parented by them both, after all. “So they didn’t recover his remains?”

“Nope. And by the time they realized his corpse wasn’t in the rubble, they figured he’d slipped away and was halfway to Mississippi. Me? I don’t think they even bothered to look.”

“Did you and Grandpa ever see him?”

“Nah.” Stella shook her head. “But I swore I heard him a couple of times when I was down in the laundry room, banging and scraping on the other side of the wall.

“I complained to Pinkerton. He told me I was imagining things. So one night I went to his apartment—he lived on the main floor where that awful woman lives now—and dragged his lazy ass off the couch. There was all kinds of rumbling and banging going on behind that cabinet down there in the basement—you know, the big green metal one that takes up damn near the whole wall. Well, Pinkerton listened good. Then he said it was just animals messing around.”

She clucked her tongue. “I wasn’t taking no chances, though. I made Ozzy put a padlock on that cabinet. I wasn’t having no maniac popping out at me while I was down there doing our laundry.”

“Did you guys ever find out what it was?”

Stella got up again, and the cat dropped from her lap onto the floor and stretched. She went back to the window. In the murky light from the streetlamp, a pair of raccoons huddled inside a window grate across the way. No human escape artists to be seen.

“Huh? Oh, nothing. The noises stopped.” She turned her head to look at her granddaughter. “You’re down there all the time—do you hear anything?”

Lucky shook her head. “Is the cabinet still locked?”

“Most likely. But that key’s around here somewhere. I’ll look, Ozzy. I’ll look . . .”

Lucky walked over to kiss her grandmother on the cheek. If Stella noticed, she didn’t let on.

She left Stella still staring out the window at her past. In the hallway just in front of the bathroom, Lucky reached up and tugged on a cord, and a set of stairs slid down. She climbed them to the attic, pulling the staircase up behind her.

Before the hatch clicked closed, she shouted down, “No more cooking tonight, Stella.”

There was no answer except from the TV: “A creature dwells within these walls.”

In the dark, cramped space under the slanted roof, Lucky felt around for a plug and then slipped it into the socket near the baseboard. The room jumped to life in the bright glow of a hundred white Christmas lights. Lucky stood in the one spot where she could stand up straight and pulled off her clothes. There wasn’t much up here besides the mattress—neat piles of folded clothes and a stack of journals filled with her writing. She grabbed the book on top, a pen stuck in the middle pages; then, down to her tank top and boxers, she slid under the covers to write. Before she opened the cover, she looked up at the faded folds of her red parachute, brought from her mother’s house and hung loosely over the rafters.

She opened the book and wrote one line before falling asleep.

What’s the point of a safe landing when you never leave the ground?





2

The Key to Life




For the next two days, Lucky woke to the pulse of a high-pitched alarm, already filled with dread. Each morning, she went downstairs to the bathroom to get ready. Brushing her teeth, she looked out the window facing east, where the sun was coming up for people who didn’t live under a bridge. Next door hunched the old asylum, the windows boarded up with rotting wood and the backyard dotted with urban archaeology—shopping carts, milk crates, bags of old clothes, and broken toys that the city wouldn’t pick up. Then she gazed up at the underbelly of the bridge, all steel girders and concrete fittings.

This week, Lucky was working on the seventeenth floor of a building with mirrored windows that refused a view into its bureaucratic guts. Her job, inevitably, involved moving papers around her desk, shuffling copies from red folders into blue ones, answering the phone, typing out schedules, and generally trying to ignore the futility of it all. All she ever wanted to do was write, but there was nothing marketable in what she produced. Plus, she’d never had a real cheerleader for it. In fact, she’d heard nothing but how impossible it would be to make a living.