The People Next Door by Christopher Ransom Read Free Book Online

eyes.’
    ‘I know, honey. I told you he was going to be fine.’
    What happened? His memory skipped to thismorning – which seemed to be some other morning, a long time ago – when he had been unrolling the cover from the boat, throwing
     it onto his driveway. Between then and now there was no yawning chasm, not even a crack in the sidewalk. The splice in time
     was seamless.
    ‘Welcome back,’ Amy said, taking his cold hand. Her face was drawn, angry. ‘Don’t you dare do that again. You scared the shit
     out of me, Mick.’
    ‘I don’t remember,’ he said.
    ‘Nothing?’
    ‘I’m sorry.’
    His wife smiled thinly, glancing at the kids. ‘You had an accident on the boat. Coach Wisneski rescued you.’
    It took a moment for Mick to remember that his former wrestling coach from Boulder High had become, in his retirement, the
     head administrator of Boulder Reservoir’s on-site maintenance staff, a lifeguard and a certified member of the lake patrol.
     Memories of the growling old bastard came back, the way he always lumbered around the beaches and boat house in his orange
     shorts, the metal whistle carried over from his wrestling days dangling on a cord in front of his bald, baby-smooth chest,
     his legs and torso the color of fudge. Wisneski was six-four, lean, with vain Tom Petty hair, and he had been forced into
     early retirement ostensibly for breaking a clipboard over the forehead of one of his athletes, a hardass who couldn’t evolve
     with the times.
    ‘Rescued me,’ he said, the words coming out in a papery whistle. ‘From what?’
    Amy shook her head, unable to say it.
    ‘Dad, you drowned,’ Briela said, chipper even in her awe of him. ‘You held your breath for the longest time. How did you do
     that?’
    ‘I don’t know, sweetie. But I’m happy to see you.’ Mick forced himself to sit up. ‘Where’s Coach?’
    ‘There was some confusion,’ Amy said, meeting his eyes as if trying to impart something she could not explain in front of
     the children. ‘One of his eardrums burst when he was diving for you. When I got here you were conscious and he was in shock.
     I told the first ambulance to take him. He’s older and you were coherent before you blacked out again. Do you want to wait
     for the second ambulance?’
    ‘No. No, I’m good.’ The thought of an ambulance ride, the hospital with its sick and dying, its probing doctors, revolted
     him. It wasn’t just the lapse in health insurance. He did not trust
them
. ‘Help me up.’
    ‘But honey—’ she started.
    ‘But nothing. We’re going home.’
    ‘But what if—’
    ‘I said I’m fine, goddamn it.’
    Amy looked away, shaking her head.
    As they headed to the truck, his children hugged him and talked over each other in their relief. Mick smiled and put on a
     brave face, ruffling their hair and telling them he was really okay, but inside he was still recoiling from something, repressing
     tremors.
    He did not understand why, but something about his family did not seem real. He felt duped, tricked by somedark hand of fate. For a moment, as they touched him and kissed his cheeks, he was certain that these people, while bearing
     every hallmark of his pairing and making, were not his real family at all, but others hiding beneath clever masks of artificial
     skin.

12
    After stopping at the pharmacy to buy a better first-aid kit and patching up Kyle’s scalp in the truck (the bleeding had stopped
     and the cut was much shallower than it had seemed during their panic on the boat), they stopped for take-out subs at Deli
     Zone. Most of the staff had coffee-break bong smoke wafting from their beards and the order took so long and they were all
     so hungry, they decided to eat dinner in one of the small booths, chewing in happy silence.
    After, Briela was dying to watch a movie she couldn’t wait for their Netflix queue to deliver, so they wasted another forty
     minutes in Blockbuster, loading up on candy and popcorn. Kyle