Free Remaking by Blake Crouch Page B

Sprite
still unopened between his legs, tears rolling down his cheeks.
     
    Mitchell unlocked the door and opened it.
    “Go on in, Joel.”
    The boy entered and Mitchell hit the light,
closing and locking the door after them, wondering if Joel could
reach the brass chain near the top.
    It wasn’t much of a room—single bed, table,
cabinet housing a refrigerator on one side, hangers on the other.
He’d lived out of it for the last month and it smelled like stale
pizza crust and cardboard and clothes soured with sweat.
    Mitchell closed the blinds.
    “You wanna watch TV?”
    The boy shrugged.
    Mitchell picked the remote control off the
bedside table and turned it on.
    “Come sit on the bed, Joel.”
    As the boy climbed onto the bed, Mitchell
started flipping.
    “You tell me to stop when you see something
you wanna watch.”
    Mitchell surfed through all thirty stations
twice and the boy said nothing.
    He settled on the Discovery Channel, set the
remote control down.
    “I want my Dad,” the boy said, trying not to
cry.
    “Calm down, Joel.”
    Mitchell sat on the bed and unlaced his
sneakers. His socks were damp and cold. He balled them up and
tossed them into the open bathroom, staring now at his pale feet,
toes shriveled with moisture.
    Joel had settled back into one of the
pillows, momentarily entranced by the television program where a
man caked in mud wrestled with a crocodile.
    Mitchell turned up the volume.
    “You like crocodiles?” he asked.
    “Yeah.”
    “You aren’t scared of them?”
    The boy shook his head. “I got a snake.”
    “Nuh uh.”
    The boy looked up. “Uh huh.”
    “What kind?”
    “It’s black and scaly and it lives in a glass
box.”
    “A terrarium?”
    “Yeah. Daddy catches mice for it.”
    “It eats them?”
    “Uh huh. Slinky’s belly gets real big.”
    Mitchell smiled. “I bet that’s something to
see.”
    They sat watching the Discovery Channel for
twenty minutes, Joel engrossed now, Mitchell with his head tilted
back against the headboard, eyes closed, a half grin where none had
been for twelve months.
     
    At 8:24 p.m., the cell vibrated against
Mitchell’s hip. He opened the case and pulled out the phone.
    “Hi, Lisa.”

    “Mitch.”
    “Listen, I want you to call me back in five
minutes and do exactly what I say.”
    “Okay.”
    Mitchell closed the phone and slid off the
bed.
    The boy looked up, still half-watching the
program on the world’s deadliest spiders.
    He said, “I’m hungry.”
    “I know, sport. I know. Give me just a minute
here and I’ll order a pizza.”
    Mitchell crossed the carpet, tracking through
dirty clothes he should’ve taken to the laundry a week ago.
    His suitcase lay open in the space between
the dresser and the baseboard heater. He knelt down, searching
through wrinkled oxfords and blue jeans, khakis that had long since
lost their creases.
    It was a tiny, wool sweater—ice-blue with a
magnified snowflake stitched across the front.
    “Hey, Joel,” he said, “it’s getting cold in
here. I want you to put this on.” He tossed the sweater onto the
bed.
    “I’m not cold.”
    “You do like I tell you now.”
    As the boy reached for the sweater, Mitchell
undid the buttons on his plaid shirt and worked his arms out of the
sleeves. He dropped the shirt on the carpet and rifled his suitcase
again until he found the badly faded T-shirt he’d bought fifteen
years ago at a U2 concert.
    On the way back to the bed, he stopped at the
television and lifted the videotape from the top of the VCR, pushed
it in.
    “No, I wanna watch the—”
    “We’ll turn it back on in a minute.”
    He climbed under the covers beside the boy
and stared at the bedside table, waiting for the phone to buzz.
     
    “Joel, I’m gonna answer the phone. I want you
to sit here beside me and watch the television and don’t say a word
until I tell you.”
    “I’m hungry.”
    The phone vibrated itself toward the edge of
the bedside table.
    “I’ll buy you anything