DAY FOUR

To house hunters and sightseers, the red bricks which cobble some streets of St. Petersburg’s more eclectic neighborhoods—crash-pad garage apartment here, restored-in-pastels bungalow there, contemporary monstrosity on the corner closest the water—are quaint, character-lending. To the staggering inebriates that populate these areas after midnight, they comprise a minefield of potential humiliation and injury. Chris goes down three times, to Lacey’s once, as they skip, stumble and chase each other from the beach at Lassing Park to their building, where they make it to the top of the stairs before collapsing.

“I bet my dad died with better knees than these.” Chris cracks himself up, making the already problematic procedure of lighting a cigarette pretty much impossible.

“So, what happened to that first script?”

His shadow seems to get a bit smaller in the motion-activated light, and it gets a little easier to bend his head down to the steadying flame. Lacey wonders if she should be sorry she asked, before he shrugs.

“It got passed around the scene for a year, and finally somebody with more connections and less talent re-wrote it and registered it under his own name. The male mine surveyors became female recreational spelunkers, the bugs became bats, yadda yadda yadda. But whole conversations are mine, and even some of the names are the same.”

“That sucks, Chris.”

“Yeah, but it was partially my fault, thinking people were just going to help me out, you know?”

“Doesn’t make it your fault.” She pulls a cigarette from the pack they pooled their remaining cash to pay too much for at the last bar, hopes the guy coming up the street with even less grace than they managed doesn’t want one. “You shouldn’t get completely screwed just, wait, are you talking about The Crevice?”

Chris actually cackles, he’s so delighted. “I am indeed talking about The Crevice. The most aptly named straight-to-DVD horror movie ever. I can’t believe you know it.”

“Oh, you better believe I’ve seen The Crevice.”

After far too many minutes’ worth of wit on the subject of Lacey’s status as a secret Crevice-gazer, whether or not Chris’ own Crevice was better than the Crevice seen by the general public, comparisons of the number of times they’ve each been face to face with The Crevice, and so on, they wind down to sigh in harmony, setting them off again.

“Anyway,” he resumes, looking around for the beer that he didn’t have to set down in the first place to forget and then remember, “word gets around anyway about who worked on what. This guy Lars who’s done some stuff on that level, he e-mailed me for a copy of the original screenplay, and he liked it. Threw my name around and told me to come up with a pitch—actually, he gave me five hundred bucks to come up with a pitch—about a different twist on a haunted house story, and I pulled something out of my ass, and you don’t want to hear any of this.” Chris looks for the invisible beer again, settles for a cigarette. “I’m sorry. I love to talk about myself.”

“Clearly.” Lacey smiles and stretches; even bent like an accordion over two concrete steps and the lip of the second-floor landing, it’s luxurious. “But I asked. I’m interested. I like to write too.”

“Subliminal Jam-Music Drug References in Republican Tort Reform Literature, perhaps?”

She kicks him. It hurts.

“Hey, most of the people who go to law school probably know in the back of their minds they’d make better fiction writers than John Grisham.”

“Most of the people who go to the bathroom would make better fiction writers than John Grisham.” Chris can’t believe the sun isn’t coming up, maybe for the second or third time. Exhausted brain cells have crawled down and out his nostrils to scale his cheeks and try to pull his eyelids closed manually. “So, you want to come inside? I’ve got water and Advil and a toilet to throw up in. I’ll even hold back your hair.”

“No, thank you. My mother told me never to go with a boy into a room where the only furniture is a bed.”

“It’s not a bed, it’s a futon. People sit on futons.”

“Yeah, when they’re folded up on a frame, not when they’re spread out on the floor and covered with a dirty sheet.”

“Fine. Be that way, counselor.” He pulls one more cigarette from the pack, grabs the stairway’s handrail and takes about thirty years to pull himself upright. “My dirty sheet is in the shop, anyway.”

She takes her own sweet time finding her sea legs, but she takes even longer to finish kissing him on the cheek. She tells him goodnight, and only bumps her shoulder a little bit trying to get through her own front door. He waits for a while, pretty sure she’s coming back, goes so far as to light that last cigarette and drag on it twice before the urge to yark up eight hours of nothing but alcohol makes him butt it out in one of the cheap fake terracotta planters that dot the landing. He pockets the butt, though, as he’s fishing for that single, orphan key.

*****

Once inside, Chris declines to have an intensive discussion with himself about why a smart, beautiful young woman would decline to come home with a guy living in the only half of a vacant apartment to which he has access. He opts instead for falling down on his futon and reaching around blindly until he finds what he’s been reading, the Cliff’s Notes for The Haunting of Hill House.

He’s still trying to find the bookmark he may or may not have inserted among its pages when the sound of bedsprings eases under the door to the left bedroom.

It’s not loud, and it’s not sex. It’s once, then once, twice again at maybe half the volume, the sound of a bone-tired someone settling in for some serious rest.

“Hello?”

He sits and rolls almost gracefully to his knees, most of the drunk gone from his eyes and movement, his hand reaching for the ancient four-iron by the door. His brain’s transmission and reception, however, are still experiencing an even larger delay effect than usual.

Chris rises, crosses to the door and yanks on it with a confidence nothing about his size, experience or current level of coordination can justify. Still locked, the tongue moving in its socket with that tantalizing minimal amount of give.

“Hey. I’d much rather you were a live crackhead than half a dead chick, so say something meek and I won’t bust this door down and try to put you on the center of the green.”

There’s no sound. But there’s someone in there. Chris knows it the way he’s always been able to know that there’s a TV on in a house that he’s walking past, even if he can’t hear the sound; he just feels the way it takes up space in the air.

He turns and runs to the front door, throws it open, nearly walks through the screen. The booze reasserts its presence on his way down the stairs, but a couple of lucky hops keep him from eating the sidewalk. His momentum carries him onto the grass and around the side of the converted house, golf club in hand, eyes raised to find the darkened corresponding window.