Page 92 of Sleeping Giants
He watched as Larry stirred the fire, killing it. Amanda used the bathroom—the light in there was turned on, then off. He could hear running water. Finally, all the lights inside the cabin were turned off. The plume of smoke from the chimney died. All was quiet.
He waited. It was a strangely windless night. He could hear Larry snoring in his bed. In the woods, he knew, the boys were asleep in their graves. Dennis was in the ocean, his bones worn down to glass.
Time passed. The moon grew fat and full. He crept slowly to the outer walls of the cabin. He felt the soft dander under his feet.
He thought of Martha. From his earliest memories, it was her face he saw. When he had crawled out from that rug back in Colorado, as one of her very first patients, he had felt reborn. All his past memories—the abuse, the abandonment—had been stripped away, leaving in their wake only her face and the pure sweet taste of milk, dripped from a bottle. She was like a mother to him.
He would do anything for her.
But he had discovered, as the years passed, there was a cost to losing his memories this way. He no longer knew why he did what he did. He was as untethered to the past as the moon was to the earth. He was unable to form any other attachments. In a place inside him he could barely recognize, he feared the next person he loved would smother him too.
He dragged a can of gasoline from the woods. Working quietly, he poured it around the edges of the cabin. He wondered if he should torch their cars, too, and decided to let nature take its course. He was hoping the whole dune would go up, so that by the time fire trucks arrived all the way from Seaside, the cabin would be burnt along with the surrounding woods, and no one would be able to figure out how it all had started. Larry and Amanda would just be two more corpses in an unsolved wildfire. He knew all about wildfires, because after he was finally discharged from the Colorado clinic, he had been transferred to a youth facility where the boys worked on fire crews. He had written Martha regularly during those years.
Later, when he moved to the Oregon Coast, they had stayed in touch. She had even helped him out. He had been happy when she took the job at Brightwood. She had told him their relationship needed to stay secret. It was smart thinking, he knew, with all that had happened. She had needed him. No one had ever needed him before. He could not explain to himself why this troubled him so much, why there was a part of him that hurt so bad.
The cabin walls were now soaked with accelerant.
Stepping back, he wiped his hands carefully and set down the empty can. He reached for a book of matches, and set the world on fire.
28
It was very early when Ralph showed up to work. The nightmares of his youth had returned. He woke up with his heart beating so hard he thought it might explode. Unable to sleep, he had taken to coming to work earlier and earlier.
He reached the custodian closet, shrugging off his jacket.
He stopped.
The shovel had been moved. He was pretty sure he had left it in the corner. He put all his gardening tools there. The shears and rose clippers were on a shelf, and the lawn edger leaned against the wall. The shovel was usually there next to it, its handle worn smooth by his hand.
Now it was a couple of inches away. Not far, but far enough that he thought, That cannot have been me.
Puzzled, Ralph ran his hand through his unruly hair. His hair was always dry because he used bar soap on it. At the center, they had used the cheapest soaps, never any shampoo. He didn’t know any better.
He looked around the closet, at the cleansers lined up on the shelves and the mop bucket on the floor. He kept the closet locked, of course. The stuff inside would be dangerous for the boys. The lock could be opened with the master key all the staff carried. It worked in every doorexcept that of the treatment room. Only Martha had the key to that door, and she guarded it carefully.
Shaking his head, Ralph changed into his work jacket and checked the clipboard by the door, where the staff wrote down everything that needed to be fixed. There was a clogged sink in the boys’ shower. He picked up his plumbing snake.
But first, he needed coffee.
He stopped in the kitchen, where the cook was already at work, making biscuits she would serve with country gravy. Ralph’s mouth watered at the smell. It was the one good thing about working at the center. You got to eat the same meals as the boys, and they were good, in his estimation.
The cook looked up. She had a smear of flour on her face.
“Coffee’s hot,” she said.
Ralph poured himself a cup. It was still early, and the boys had yet to awaken. The night watchman was pulling candy wrappers from his desk, getting ready to leave.
The cook saw the snake in Ralph’s basket of tools.
“Another clogged line?” she asked, making a face, tucking a sheet pan of biscuits into the massive oven. Two more sheets were cooling on the counter.
“Not the toilet, at least, this time. Got a note from last night.”
“You musta heard what happened.”
“No. What?”
“Another boy run off. Joey. You know him? Sweet little tyke, but he has a mouth on him. Sure hope he’s okay. I never heard what happened with the last one, did you? Martha said once they catch them, they send them on to another place. She was here earlier but went home, upset.”
