After the Locks are Changed

by Gary Fincke

After the Locks are Changed

Home

After the locks are changed, after he stops cursing and pounding on both doors, he hurls his key against the kitchen window while McCartney, her German Shepherd, yips and whines. Still, he calls several times each week, always after midnight with slurs of pleading punctuated by threats. When she puts her phone on mute at ten p.m., his texts bloom like algae. Each morning, his messages begin with “Let’s meet” before they skid from sentimentality to rage.

One night, McCartney stiffens and growls. Her daughters, thirteen and ten, sit up from their books, alert and listening. She hears scraping from the bathroom and knows he’s remembered the window with the warped frame that makes it impossible to lock. She taps 911, gestures the girls to her side, and leads them outside to her car. From the kitchen window, as she pulls away, he displays two middle fingers. She doesn’t hear barking. She doesn’t see a strange car parked along the street, so she drives only a few blocks before turning left and then u-turning before parking, headlights extinguished. When the police pass by within minutes, she tells the girls, “He won’t even have time to steal anything. This one will cost him more than an overnight and a warning.”

She calls 911 again. “We’re safe,” she says. “Thank you.”

In a voice barely above a whisper, Renee, the older girl, says, “No, we’re not.” Darcy, the younger, stares straight ahead as if she expects her father to appear.

The First Time

The five women are teachers, the husbands five different things, the party DJ’d by the iPod of the hosts. Twice, he turns up the volume. Twice, a woman, not the homeowner, turns it down. The third time, he dials the volume to jackhammer, and that woman’s husband turns it off, the party on pause. He finishes his drink while she apologizes to everyone. He hears her repeat it as she asks for their coats. “It’s not your house,” she says when they are outside.

“Really? Like I don’t know that? You act like I’m six.”

“Not six. Drunk.”

“You know what? You’re a sponge. You suck all the joy out of the room, you and all the rest of those lightweights. That wasn’t a party. That was a PTA meeting.”

“Some of those lightweights have children waiting for them at home. They have babysitters they have to drive home. Adult things.”

“We don’t have kids.”

“Yes, we do. And a babysitter, too.”

“We have a fucking sponge is what we have. This adult can drive it home.”

“Not hardly,” she says, showing him the keys.

For six miles, he is quiet. For a full day, she does not speak. “I’m supposed to say I’m sorry, right?” he finally says. “Ok, I’m sorry. Happy?”

She stares. “No, I’m not happy. Are you?”

“It’s not like I touched you. It was just words.”

“That’s not an excuse, that’s a deflection. If you ever touched me, it would be over.”

“Ok,” he says. “I get it.”

“I’m not sure you do.”

“I’m really sorry,” he says. “See?”

New Year’s Eve, Los Angeles

At 7:30, after taking Darcy to her friend’s sleepover nine blocks away, she and Renee walk home together. Nearly there, they see an empty car double-parked, the driver’s side door open, its lights extinguished. Here, after dark, fifty yards from home, their street always feels dangerous, alley-like, badly lit. Budget apartments sit below on one side instead of single-dwelling houses and duplexes like the ones set into the hillside on the other. She notices Renee veer right, and she drifts her way as subtly as she can muster. The next bend takes them into the street’s deepest shadows just before the flight of stairs to their door.

“Those apartments are sketchy,” Renee says after they are inside and McCartney welcomes them. In the bedroom Renee and Darcy share, Renee chooses a record her grandfather has sent her for Christmas, one of the eight used albums of his he’s guessed she’d love–Queen, Judy Collins, Linda Ronstadt, Harry Nilsson. She plays an entire side of Nilsson Schmilsson, singing softly along. The dog, instead of settling, is restless, pacing to windows. He doesn’t bark.

An hour of music, and then she and Renee begin a second trip—another sleepover, the girls three years older for New Year’s Eve five blocks away. As soon as they walk around the bend, they see two police cars by the double-parked car, its door still open, but now a girl is inside. Except for the policeman who waves to invite them past, whoever arrived in those two marked cars must be inside the apartments. “What you looking at, little bitch?” the girl says. The policeman’s wave shifts into demand. “That’s it, keep walking, little bitch,” the girl calls as they pass him. “Fuck you, little bitch,” she yells as they clear the scene.

“I wish I hadn’t looked,” Renee says when the street turns wider on the next block. “Did you look, Mom?”

“Yes.”

“But she only talked to me.”

“You’re nearly as tall as I am already. You’ll never see her again.”

They have only three more blocks, both on the other side of an avenue where traffic is constant. They stand at the intersection, three streets intersecting the main highway, a series of left turn lights extending the wait. Down the sidewalk on their side, they see a small crowd has gathered where the apartments have a lower entrance.

“McCartney knew, didn’t he?” Renee says, after they cross.

“Yes, he must have sensed when the police arrived.”

The new year is less than three hours away when they reach the sleepover house. Both of her daughters will stay up for the bells and sirens and fireworks from thousands of yards spreading toward the city. “What do you think she could have done?” Renee says. “She didn’t look much older than I am,” whispering as if it were a secret.

Pentecostal

McCartney becomes a nuisance for unwelcome sounds. Car door slams. Voices passing on the street below. The wind driving a deck chair against the sliding, glass door. But he is security for the threats she does not hear. She reinforces McCartney with a motion sensor. Though coyotes, some nights, rouse the dog to barking before frightening her floodlight to brilliance. Renee and Darcy mostly seem to sleep through her double alarm. After a while, the coyotes, as if they have memorized where light begins, pace at the edge of darkness while McCartney does his extended solo.

One night, long after the coyotes have retreated, McCartney is so dissatisfied, she leashes him and steps outside. Across the highway and from beyond the hillside houses that end in wilderness, the glow of the latest wildfire has lengthened the radio’s menu of languages. Fuego salvaje. Chay rung. Incendios. Smoke has drifted into the neighborhood. Evacuation is unlikely, but possible.  

The vacant lot next door has been cleared of brush and damaged trees to lessen the chance of attracting embers. As if emptied, every nearby house is darkened, the ordinary and the reasonable already elsewhere or at rest. Although she sees that it’s him at the edge of the light, McCartney is a lunge of howls.

The spotlight scorches them. He has something in his hands that looks like an axe handle or baseball bat. “I’ll kill that dog if you let him go,” he says. The girls, holding hands, appear behind her but do not speak. He crouches like a gargoyle, four steps, then three, close enough that she sees what he is carrying is the bottom half of his cue stick, what he hefts slowly from left to right and back again. “McCartney will hurt you first,” she says. Renee begins to scream. He backs away and disappears.

Darcy says, “Why did McCartney bark at Dad this time?”

“McCartney’s not stupid,” Renee says. “He knows Dad is dangerous now.”

From somewhere close, a car alarm begins to moan inside a garage like a steady pulse. From house to house, barking has erupted. Each flaring light translates their speeches, not into salvation, but, for now, reprieve.

Across Country

He sends a text to her about a shooting in the Pennsylvania town where they once lived. A jealous ex-husband has killed his former wife and her new boyfriend. “Asshole,” she sends back. “You, too.”

When he doesn’t answer, she puts her phone away. At breakfast, Renee says, “Dad texted me a story from where we used to live. A shooting.”

“Did you know those people?” Darcy says.

“No,” she says at once. When she Googles the full story, she learns that the shooter used a homemade gun. That the victims sat at an outdoor table so the shooter had no doors to open before and after he fired. A customer who conceal-carried burst through the restaurant’s door and shot the killer twice. “A hero,” one witness said, though both victims were dead and the killer managed to get back in his truck and drive away.

The girls have read every word of the story. “She wasn’t doing anything wrong,” Darcy says. “They hadn’t been married for over a year.”

“That restaurant wasn’t there when I was growing up,” she tells the girls. “It wasn’t there after you two were born. I don’t even know where it is.” She does not tell them she went to high school with the woman who was killed. She says she didn’t know either victim, which is true, at least, because she barely ever talked to that girl back then.

“Everything is so random,” Renee says.

The Worst Time

“We’re out of beer.”

“You can’t drive.”

“I’m not drunk. It’s three miles.”

“You don’t have a license.” Remember why?”

“She’s sleeping.”

“Not for long.”

“You think a few beers means I can’t watch a sleeping baby?”

“And now she’s awake.”

He picked up the baby. “I’m carrying her. See? It’s not hard.”

“Put her down.”

“I’ll hold her until you come back. Fifteen minutes. Holding a baby isn’t hard.”

He walks with the crying baby to the balcony of their second-floor apartment. “Bring her back inside.”

“You think I’ll drop her?” He extends his arms over the railing. Darcy kicks at the air.

Now she is crying too. “My God. Please.”

When he pulls her in and turns, she rushes at him and takes Darcy from his hands. He doesn’t resist. “You’re so OCD. I never knew that until this second one. You act like you never had a baby before, like Renee never happened and you’re starting over.” He opens the refrigerator and pulls out the last beer as she leads Renee and carries Darcy to the car.

“Hi, there,” he says, when she reappears the next afternoon. “Look, I cleaned up. I vacuumed and did the dishes,” but she walks into the bedroom to gather things into an overnight bag. “Look, no beer in the fridge,” he says, but she passes him without speaking.

He calls down from the balcony just before she slams the car door shut behind her.

“Never again,” he says, which he repeats when she returns in three days, which holds true for eleven days.

When Darcy is Five

The cookie in her daughter’s self-illustrated book has long hair cut into bangs so much like hers she says, “The gingerbread man is a girl,” but Darcy explains he is wearing a wig. Her cookie runs out the kitchen door and escapes to run and play, but on the last page, that gingerbread man is trapped inside the three-dimensional, pop-up mouth of a scarlet fox, the wig gone in the final picture, lost, perhaps, in the struggle, and when she asks why he is smiling as he’s being swallowed, Darcy says, “Because he only has one face.”

When Renee is Eight

She draws twelve pages about a princess who needs to be saved. The door to her re-brick tower is chained shut for a dozen sunny days, her hair tightly curled and long, but nowhere near what would welcome a prince to climb. One line per page, this princess sings an abridged “Over the Rainbow.”  Bluebirds dot every clear sky. Lemon drops sparkle, then fade, but as she finishes, the prince, arriving on horseback, applauds and stays mounted. The rest of the story, Renee whispers, is a secret-secret.

The Mermaid Cemetery

For her eleventh birthday, Darcy asks for a trip to the mermaid cemetery near the ocean. The cemetery is surrounded by a fence with an ornate gate that says, “Welcome to look, but not to touch.” Someone tends these graves.  Someone has carried kelp and seaweed to vases brimmed with water Darcy tests with her fingertips. Renee says, “Stop,” but Darcy licks her fingers, tasting the salt. Renee opens the brochure and begins to read the captions under the photographs that describe the histories of the mermaids who are buried beneath them. The girls follow the mulch trail among headstones shaped like fish, becoming mourners. Aloud, they both wish themselves transformed, wanting to change in order to have bodies that can live in water, scales swallowing their skin until their legs fuse, light and land abandoned, so deep below the surface, they will be impossible enough to be worshipped.

On Location

Renee tells her that Emma Stone played tennis for a Battle of the Sexes scene on a nearby Los Angeles court. “Down by the fountain,” she says, meaning the Riverside courts. Meaning not too far.

Renee has played three times and plans to use her fourteenth birthday money to buy a vintage outfit like the one Emma Stone wears in the movie. Renee wants to swing her racket like Emma Stone, who had never played before she’d taken the part, but she thinks it would be hard to play with a wooden racket, so strange and heavy, its sweet spot small.

She drives Renee to the Riverside courts. They stand where Emma Stone pretended to be Billie Jean King winning a tournament held in San Diego. Less than 100 yards away a row of power lines towers up from where they follow US 5 and the roar of traffic.

Renee asks her to watch Battle of the Sexes again. They sit side by side on the couch. concentrating as if they haven’t already seen it. At last, Renee says, “Look, there it is, right where we were standing,” and they watch Emma Stone run across the court, swing her wooden racket, and deliver a winning forehand as Renee leans against her.

Art School

One late afternoon she waits for a student’s father who is late picking up his daughter from her art school. Renee and Darcy, who do their homework every day in her school office, are impatient, already packed to leave. From the upstairs classroom, they watch both the front and back street for the father’s car. The downstairs doors are locked.

When the pounding on the back door begins, Renee says, “It’s Dad. He saw me at the window.”

“Your Dad is here,” Darcy calls to the student. “He’s out front.”

“Lucky,” Renee says, but she steps back into the middle of the room while the student leaves through the front door.

As soon as she is alone with Renee and Darcy, she cracks a window and says, “Don’t make your daughters see you get arrested.”

“I’m not doing anything,” he says. “There’s no law against talking to my wife and kids.”

“It’s only six o’clock and you’re drunk.”

“You don’t know that.”

“The girls won’t be talking. None of us are coming out until the police arrive.” She holds her phone to her ear so he can see.

“You bitch,” he shouts. “Fuck you,” he yells, slamming his shoulder into the door. When it holds, he says, “You cunt” and walks away, but instead of leaving, he climbs the set of stairs to the parking lot and opens a car door.

Despite her warning, the girls are at the window now. “Whose car is that?” Renee says. “Why does he have a car?” He raises one arm and points something dark at the window where they stand. She is mesmerized, but Darcy drops and rolls into the office, Renee drops to her knees and follows her sister by crawling. Once they are inside, she runs into the office, locks the door, and taps 911.

“We do that drill in school,” Darcy says.

“That’s for elementary,” Renee says. “Nobody in middle school will roll on the floor except weird kids. You’ll see next year.”

In less than a minute, a police helicopter hovers overhead, but by the time the police arrive by car, he is gone. There are security cameras outside the building and above the parking lot. “We need to confirm it was a gun,” a policeman says.

“We’re not crazy,” she says. “The girls have been drilled. They both dropped as soon as he raised his arm,” but the police say they need to study the object in his hand.

“Maybe it’s a phone. It would be hard to tell,” one says. “We have the make and model of the car. We have the license plate. We’ll get the video enhanced and call you in for confirming things.”

Minutes later, in the car, Darcy says, “Daddy could have shot all of us.”

Renee says, “He just wants to shoot Mom.”

The following day, she returns to the church where her art school for children, four to fourteen, is housed. This week the mediums are watercolor and acrylic painting, projects arranged by age and experience. Two of her students live on the same block. News has spread. There are queries about security. A mother mentions the homeless served lunch by the parish; a father asks who controls the weekly AA meeting held inside a downstairs room. Someone lingers to suggest she consider a location dedicated exclusively to art, testing, as he speaks, the strength of the studio door, the challenge of its lock.  Nobody says a word about the source of the disturbance.

The day after that, a policewoman pauses the video where he’s inside the car, his arm extended. “It’s a phone, not a gun,” she says. “See there?”

The girls crowd closer, but she stays distant as if the image could materialize in the room. As if the policewoman is wrong. “We understand your fear,” the woman says. “It would have been impossible to tell in the moment. You could still press charges for the threatening gesture.”

“Good news, then,” she says.

“Pressing charges? Yes, you could call it that.”

The Last Time

Because school has just started, her art classes as well, she and the girls don’t fly to Pennsylvania for his father’s funeral. Because he wants to hang out with old friends, he flies to Las Vegas instead of home. “I need a ride,” he says on the phone.

“No,” she says to herself. “Why?” she says aloud, and he short-lists, “You don’t have school. Neither do the girls.  It’s not that far. My friends took off. My card is maxed out.” As if Las Vegas is a field trip. As if it’s about her guilt.

Darcy says, “How far is Las Vegas?” Renee says, “Why can’t he ride the bus?” She says, “You’ll see.”

The trip takes nearly four hours. As he wheels his suitcase toward the car, she nods at the paper bag he carries. “It’s barely noon,” she says. “We have another four hours in front of us.”

“It’s not open,” he says, something worse, because she can smell it on him before he displays the full bottle and unscrews the cap. He nurses the vodka for a few minutes before he asks her to stop at a KFC as they are leaving the city behind.

“Nobody else here eats that,” she says.

“Is that right, girls? You don’t want any extra crispy?”

Renee grips Darcy’s arm to remind her not to answer. He comes back to the car with a bucket. “Did you at least bring napkins?” she says. He settles in on a drumstick.

An hour later, she and the girls have to pee. When he lifts the bottle in salute, she sees it is nearly empty. They are gathering a few snacks in the convenience store when Darcy looks out the glass door and shouts, “Daddy’s sick.” He’s sprawled on the sidewalk; Renee begins to cry. Outside, they both hold back while she shakes him, but he doesn’t respond.

“Your husband?” the store manager says from the doorway. “I’ve already called. I can’t have that here.”

“The police?”

“He doesn’t need a cop. He needs a doctor.”

Even with the windows down, the car is torrid in mid-afternoon. She sends the girls back into the store. Customers turn their heads as they pass. Some loiter by the large front window. On their way out, they look in another direction. Before long, the EMTs start an IV and load him into the ambulance. She tells Renee to dump the rest of the chicken and the empty bottle into the trash can that stands just outside the entrance. “Where are you taking him?” she asks the driver.

“Las Vegas,” he says.

“We’re on our way back to Los Angeles. That’s like starting over.”

“There’s no help between here and there,” he says. “You must know that from being on this road before.” There is nothing to do but follow. In the hospital cafeteria, while he is “under observation,” their early dinners are so bland, they are hard to swallow.

Near twilight, he is wheeled to their car. “It was so fucking hot sitting in the car while you were pissing. I got myself out, but the fucking parking lot gave me a knockout punch.” She stares straight ahead and drives. In the back seat, the girls pretend they can still see to read. After it is full dark, he says, “Route 66 is out here, girls. Where everything was cool once.” Nobody speaks. “You’re right, girls. There’s nothing to even see here. No wonder nobody lives here. Fucking desert. It just puts you to sleep.” A few houses blink by at a crossroad. “Somebody’s awake there, but not for long, I bet. Nobody sleeps In Las Vegas because it’s cool inside and the lights stay on. If we were there, we’d all be awake and talking where they know how to live in the desert without boring people into a coma.”

As they pass into the city, he says, “So, nobody’s talking?”

Rollover

In the third year of drought, her house foreshadows ashes. For several days, the texts and phone calls cease, but then a policewoman calls. “From the art school dust-up,” she says. “I recognized your ex’s name at the scene. I thought I could give you a head’s up.”

“Your father was in an accident,” she tells the girls. “In that car we saw at the art school, with the woman who owns it.”

“A bad accident?” Renee says.

“A rollover. The car’s a loss.”

“Is he dead?” Darcy says.

“No. He was driving. The passenger side door took the full force of a large tree.”

“She’s dead?” Renee says and begins to cry.

“Not yet.”

“Was he drunk?” Darcy says. “Did he fall asleep like that time in the desert?”

“Yes, and maybe.”

“So, he goes to jail?” Renee says.

“Probably.”

“I hate that word,” Renee says. “That and maybe and hopefully.”

“And ‘we’ll see’,” Darcy says. “Like we can’t see anything right now. Like we’re blind.”

“Like we won’t know what’s happening until it’s over,” Renee says. “Right, Mom?”

The Past Tense of the Census

In the national census year, before they moved to Los Angeles, she had sought part-time work, self-designed hours convincing her to canvas the county of farms and quiet, well-zoned streets. There were heads to count, assessment questions, and not every house, she soon learned, was welcoming. House trailers were rare and always alone, set so often on barely landscaped lots that she was surprised by one site’s borders of high wooden fence, a lawn weed-infested, yet closely mown by somebody, she thought, who was taking whatever care he could, not a man who, before she reached the door, opened it and stood naked, except for sandals, two steps above her.

Once exposed, she thought, a man might be capable of anything. She backed away, saying nothing, fishing for her keys. She kept her eyes on him, but he didn’t move.  She drove back to the house they rented where he was babysitting, four weeks out of rehab and two months sober. Darcy and Renee, three and nearly six, skittered around the fenced-in back yard. Twilight settled in. They stood beside the deck rail so the girls could see they were watching. Their neighbor’s Black Lab barked longingly at its fence gate as she began, hushed and intimate, to speak.

Was that guy drunk? he asked.  I don’t think so. What did he say? He was soundless. What did he do? He picked his teeth, spit, and showed himself. How close was he? Arms’ length. Pounce distance. And right there her story ended as if she was willing to tear only one page from her notebook of memory. By then, all she could make out of their daughters was movement. “They’re getting hard to see,” she said.

“Just wait,” he said. In a little while, they’ll disappear.”

Author Gary Fincke is a poet and author of short fiction and creative nonfiction. His earlier collections won the Flannery O’Connor Prize and the Elixir Press Fiction Prize. Others are from Coffee House , Missouri, and West Virginia. “After the Locks are Changed” is the title story of his twelfth collection of full-length stories, out in May from Stephen F. Austin.

Artist Francesco Capasso was born in Naples in 2001, he is a visual artist and student at the Academy of Fine Arts in Naples, his works range from photography to conceptual art through performance, having interaction and reflection as the principle of work of the participant within the work, uses the landscape as an idealizing pretext.