We drive past the house, head down to the end of the street, turn around, and drive back. We slow down, taking another look. Painter is in there, counting his money, wanting to spend it but having to wait. We drive past and pull over, the house on the same side of the road as us. I shut off the engine and turn off the lights and we sit in silence for a bit, thinking, thinking.

Everything is packed into Sam’s schoolbag. It was the only thing I could find. They fit in there easily enough, this bright red bag with a weird cartoon character of a dinosaur on it that is loved by children everywhere, but if it caught a flight into the country it wouldn’t get past customs. I wasn’t sure what I was going to need, but we figured it out in the end. Rope. A knife. Actually a couple of knives. Duct tape. Gloves. I don’t have any balaclavas, and the best I could come up with was a baseball cap. The beer I was carrying has fallen over during the drive and neither of us thought to bring a fresh one, which means there’s still much to learn.

I turn off the interior dome light, then open the door. There are Christmas lights up on some of the houses, and in most of the windows you can see bright lights coming from make-believe trees. I lean against the car, then pull away from it when it sways behind me. I move around to the passenger door and open it and grab out Sam’s bag. I carry it by the strap, walk across the grass out the front of the neighboring house, then the strap on the bag unthreads because I’m holding the wrong one, the bag opens, and everything spills out onto the lawn, jangling and clanging against each other.

“Shit.”

Shit.

I crouch down and pack everything into the bag, careful not to get cut. I keep looking around for anybody watching, but nobody is, at least not that I can see. Everything goes back in okay, even the hat, which for some reason I’ve forgotten to put on. I grab it out and prick my finger on the knife.

“Aw, Jesus,” I say, shaking my hand, then sucking the cut on my thumb. It’s not much, but it hurts. I stand up and take a few more steps forward. I stare at the house, wondering why it’s different from when we drove past two minutes earlier, then realize I’m standing in front of the wrong one. I’ve led us the opposite way.

We turn around and head past my car toward the correct house. I don’t know what the next step is, I wait for my companion to fill in the blanks, and he does, because my monster is a real team player. He takes over and leads us up the path to the front door. I lean against the house while he puts his finger out and rings the bell.

chapter eighteen

Nice house. Nice street. A family street. Not a white-trash, let’s-rob-a-bank kind of street, but I guess those bastards can afford to live where they want.

The house is a single-storey dwelling painted one of those Latin-sounding coffee-color names. The yard smells of freshly mown lawn, small different-colored flax bushes have been evenly spaced out around the house, so even I bet they were measured out, some with red leaves, others with green. They’re surrounded by yellowy white limestone instead of dirt or bark, a tidy low-maintenance garden planted on layers of weedmat I imagine, the kind of garden Jodie wanted and the kind of garden we were going to have until Gerald Painter took all that away from us. There’s a silver birch tree out front with the roots climbing out of the ground and cracking the sidewalk.

It’s a brick home, a nice solid home, with a nice solid front door with thin pieces of glass striped down one third in from the left-hand side and one third in from the right-hand side, with a big matte-silver door handle on the right. The bell is a small black box with a white button that buzzes for as long as you hold it. I can hear it buzzing as the monster holds it down. He doesn’t let it go until we can see a shadowed image moving down the hallway toward the door, slowly and not quite in a straight line, all detail of the figure distorted in the strips of glass.

The door opens. It opens my future and this man’s fate, this man with the bruises on his face and neck that resemble the bruises on mine. His nose has a small bandaged brace over it. He squints and presses his face forward to get a better look, and we want to shove the steak knife right into his head.

His eyes widen as he recognizes me—not us—just me—and for some reason he can’t see the monster, because a smile, not the your-wife-is-dead-and-it’s-my-fault-fuck-you smile, but a sad, sympathetic smile, stretches out beneath the bandaged brace.

“Come in,” he says, before either of us say a word.

“Thank you,” we say, and he closes the door behind us.

“I kind of thought you might show up,” he says. He walks ahead of us, he’s limping slightly, and he veers toward the left and has to keep correcting himself. As far as hallways go, it seems okay. Photos that seem fuzzy to me, a bookcase, a houseplant, all boring shit unless you lived here. He leads me into the dining room which is tidy and doesn’t have any beer bottles anywhere even though he seems drunker than me. “Take a seat,” he says, and there are seats at a breakfast bar of the kitchen, and we take one. It’s a few degrees warmer inside than out and a set of French doors are wide open, the dining room flowing out onto a deck where there’s outdoor lighting and a gas barbecue and a picnic table that’s turned silver in the sun. There’s a Christmas tree in the living room tall enough to touch the ceiling and thick enough to hold what must be about five hundred decorations.

“You . . . ah, you thought I might, might show up?” I ask, trying really hard not to slur my words.

“Can I get you something to drink? I don’t have anything alcoholic,” he says. “I did, until my wife poured it all down the sink. Doctor’s orders of course. Not that it stopped me from trying. I’ve got Coke or Sprite but it’s not the same. Want something?”

“Why’d, why’d you think, that, ah, that I was going to”—I suck in a deep breath and exhale loudly—“to, ah, show up?”

He shrugs. “I don’t know.”

Painter is taking on a slightly blurry complexion. It’s as though he’s standing with his identical ghost, his ghost living almost exactly in the same place but off by a few millimeters, so it looks like it’s trying to peel itself away. When I rub at my eyes the ghost disappears.

“Yes you do. You wouldn’t”—I take another deep breath and can taste beer, and suddenly I really have to take a leak—“wouldn’t have said anything otherwise.”

Painter is a man in his mid to late forties with a shaved head and dark eyes that don’t seem to focus well. He takes a seat at the kitchen bar, sitting slowly, exhaling heavily, and holding on to the bench at the same time. There’s a microwave in view behind him with a clock that doesn’t match my inner perception of time because it’s telling me I’ve already been here five minutes and I’m sure only one has passed.

“Since the . . . robbery, I’ve had problems,” he says. “Something in here,” he says, and he taps his head, and I realize the shaved head is fresh, “got broken. I mean, the doctors had bigger words for it, but if you ground those words up and put them in their simplest form, that’s what they’d say. I can’t walk straight. I reach for something and I miss. I take a piss and it goes all over the floor. I’ve got this ringing in my ears that won’t stop, and sometimes for no good reason I’ll just start to cry. It’s permanent too. They had big words for that also, but it didn’t matter how they tried to tie a goddamn bow on it, the gift was the same either way. Got this for life,” he says. “Can’t ever work again. Can’t drive. Can hardly ever go into public. Don’t know what I’ll do. I’ll lose my house, that’s for sure. I got insurance for what happened to me, but it doesn’t cover shit. But hey, look at me, bitching about what happened to me, what happened to me ain’t worth a damn considering what happened to you. To your wife and the bank manager.”