The Between Years

he stepped out of the tub, he towelled off and dressed in the finest clothes he had: a wine-colored dress shirt with black dress pants. Randy thought that the shirt looked nicer with the V-neck sweater that went with it, but figured the day was too warm for that. Still, when he sent his little boy to heaven, he wanted to look his best.

    As he searched the house, he couldn't help but feel like he'd forgotten something. The place was so enormous that he could easily overlook something and was amazed at the job he'd done in a single day. Then he spotted Bupa's war medals hanging in a frame. As a child, he would stand in the hall, stare at those medals, and marvel at the mystique behind them. In the frame, a black and white photo of Bupa in uniform at eighteen years of age was pasted in the middle. His medals and draft card surrounded the picture. Randy took the frame down, clutched it to his chest, and set it in a box.

    As the hour grew late, he unlocked the door for Carol, just like he'd promised. Make a promise keep a promise, he remembered. Then he climbed the stairs once more, but this time he wouldn't wait for Kenny to appear. He meant to be the master of his own destiny.

CHAPTER 30
    Randy paced the front hall and listened to the floorboards creak and groan beneath his feet. He grinded his teeth and felt beads of sweat form on his forehead and his temples. He checked his watch; it was 10:40. Carol was late already, but he couldn't say that he was surprised. He knew that she was ready to pull the plug on him when she'd stood him up last night.

    The ordeal reminded him of a banner that his Nana had sewn that read: Blessed are those who don't expect much for they will not be disappointed. Regarding Carol's absence, he couldn't say that he was disappointed because deep down, he knew something like this would happen.

    Staring out the front window, he waited for Carol to pull into the driveway, but every set of headlights he saw approach always sped past the house. Then he jerked the curtain closed, stormed away from the window and back into the hall. He didn't know why he would give her the benefit of the doubt anyway.

    Back in the hall, he glared at the hole, and decided he didn't want to waste any more time. He rolled up his sleeves first, unfastened the top button of his shirt, picked up the pickaxe and wondered if he could really go through with it. His breathing picked up and his muscles and insides tensed up.

    You're in too deep to turn back now, he told himself.

    If he didn't do it, he doubted if he ever would, so he glared at the hole as he readied himself.

    He raised the pickaxe, took a few small swings at the air like a batter warming up, raised it over his head, and tore into the wall. Randy himself crashed to the floor because of the unanswered force. Bricks didn't explode and mortar didn't crash onto the floor the way he'd expected. Nor did the head fall off his pickaxe, or become lodged in the wall. The pickaxe ripped down the wall as if it had only been wrapping paper and emitted a sound like a zipper being fastened.

    Bands of darkness seeped out of the narrow opening, covering the affected portion of the hall with pitch darkness. Randy climbed to his feet, nursed his aching knees, pulled the pickaxe out of the vertical gash he'd created and tried to look in but he couldn't. To him, the wall looked like a movie screen that had been sliced down the middle. The wall was not made of bricks and mortar and never had been. What had stood there for two hundred years had been a facade.

    Randy rubbed his jaw and noticed that he was already bleeding. He felt hypnotized by the expanded darkness, as if darkness could beget more darkness. For a moment, he worried it would be able to reach out and grab him, but it passed by him the way sunlight would. Blinding darkness, he thought. The words would have made no sense to him any other time but now.

    Thus far, nothing had escaped the walls except for the darkness that covered the floor and opposite walls like paint. He also noticed that the hole he'd torn was big enough for him to step into. And, at first, he considered doing it, but then thought better of it. As fearless as he felt, he wouldn't forego common sense, and would make sure nothing happened to him before he could retrieve Kenny.

    “ Kenny?” he shouted. “Kenny, it's Dad, can you hear me?”

    No answer. Deep down, he hadn't expected one, at the very least because Kenny likely hadn't summered