Chasing Down Ben

All possibilities exist somewhere in the universe. Somewhere beyond the next hill, perhaps. Somewhere beyond the sun, or even beyond God.

            Somewhere like Prestonville, Illinois, at 2:46 p.m. on June 17, 2022, on the cracked concrete stoop of a weathered ranch house off downtown, the façade’s coffee paint peeling because of the fire sun, a forlorn roof shingle dangling over the attached garage.

            All of that was within walking distance of Southern Illini Junior College, where Jimmy Trost once went by the nickname Trost the Most.

            He was a stud basketball player back then, big man on campus and in the townie bars. In his second year at the school, the night of January 23 to January 24, 2010, he got a girl named Trina into trouble, and then decided he wanted no part of whatever was to come next because, hey, he was headed to the NBA, or so his Pops had ingrained in him. 

            That was one possibility. Unequivocally there were others.

            But there is no condemnation in the universe.

            What is, is. Wherever it is.

            There is no isn’t.

            Other realities exist. Every other reality equates to countless possibilities.

            Jimmy paused before ringing the doorbell. This was Trina’s mother’s house, that ranch with a late 1990s gunmetal gray Camry with a missing rear bumper in the driveway. He had checked around town. This is where Trina lived, along with her—their—son, now scattered to the four winds.

            He was dead, the twelve-year-old named Ben, by his own hand. Rumor had it he had ingested a household cleaner of some sort. Cyberbullies had pushed him too far, to the point of no return.

            But was there another reality in the universe where he lived, and even thrived?

            Was there another reality where Jimmy and Trina and Ben lived happily ever after? Where he and Ben played basketball in another driveway, either here in Prestonville or even back in Chicago, from where Jimmy hailed?

            Or maybe Coronado, California. Or the South Bronx.

            The universe plays no favorites.

            I wonder if she’s home, Jimmy mused as he fidgeted at on the patio, counting the bricks next to the storm door. One, two, three, ten, twenty, one hundred.

            He pressed the doorbell.

            The inner door, a blond hardwood with three vertical decorative windows, cracked. A pasty-faced woman in her late seventies in a turquoise housecoat appeared.

            Presumably Trina’s mom.

            Jimmy winced, scrunching his eyes just a tad. Hell may hath no fury like a woman scorned, but hell never met her mother.

            “Well, if it isn’t my son-in-law,” she said with a yellowing gap-toothed smile, opening the inner door fully, revealing red slippers and equally red, though stubby, fingernails. “Come in, come in. Trina is in back, kicking the soccer ball around with Ben.”

            Jimmy frowned.

            Rather unexpected.

            He could imagine the hatred this woman might have for him, considering…well, everything, including Ben’s cosmic choice to escape the cyberbullies.

            As for Ben, having grown up in a fundamentalist church, Jimmy believed his boy existed somewhere, just not here and now, in this plane of existence.

            And yet…

            Jimmy crossed the threshold into a living room, which stank of ancient smoked cigarettes. An old-school television, the kind built into a wooden cabinet, lined the wall, just below a portrait that caught Jimmy’s eye due to its familiarity.

            He had to look closer.

            It was him. Smiling, his jet-black hair shiny and combed back.

            And an older Trina, now with thick-rimmed glasses and a green ribbon in her hair.

            And an unsmiling Ben, sandy brown hair and wearing a blue Cookie Monster sweatshirt, maybe four years old.

            “Well, sonny boy, how’s your team up at the high school?” the old woman said.

            “My team,” Jimmy replied. The only team he had, the only team he had ever coached, was the varsity boys at the tony Barton School.

            That was in Chicago. Wilmette, to be exact, on the ritzy north shore.

            Not Prestonville High School in the southernmost part of Illinois, the part they call Little Egypt.

            What was happening?

            “I want to see Ben,” he said, evading the question. “Now.”

            The older woman was Edna, he somehow surmised, as if someone had whispered the name in his ear. She frowned a bit but then returned to her happy gaze.

            “Well, sure. They’re out back. Can I get you a Coke, or maybe a beer?”

            There was a sliding door that led to the backyard. Ignoring Edna’s question, he stepped through the circa-1970s kitchen, with a puke-green refrigerator and a cube dishwasher with a wooden top that you rolled across the floor and connected to the faucet with a convenient, built-in hose.

            Jimmy slid open the door and stepped out into the patio. Raindrops were now falling, a storm that must have just whipped up, he thought. Strange. There hadn’t been a cloud in the sky as he drove past campus, his old stomping ground.

            The backyard was empty.

            There was no soccer ball.

            But there was contrast.

            The grounds were immaculate. Lush, Kentucky bluegrass spread behind a carefully constructed brick retaining wall snaking along a multi-colored paver patio. A cylindrical brick fire pit was offset left. Beyond that was a basketball court, the backboards raised into the air by arcing concrete stanchions. In the middle of the court was the logo of the NBA’s Chicago Bulls.

            And was that a hot tub on the far right of the property, next to an Olympic-caliber swimming pool?

            “You’re back early. I didn’t expect you until later tonight.”

            Jimmy turned his head and Trina, sans glasses but dressed in dirt-covered jeans, work boots and a white blouse. On her hands were worn, green gardening gloves. The right one held a tiny shovel.

            “Where’s Ben?”

            “Ben who?”

            “Our son. Ben.”

            He was tempted to add, “The one that ended his life,” but be stopped himself because that felt like an asshole comment.

            Trina frowned, and wiped a raindrop from the left side of her face. The rain was beginning to come down harder.

            “Hon, we don’t have children. You said you didn’t want children. The NBA grind, and all that. This ringing a bell?”

            Jimmy cocked his head slightly right, and in his peripheral vision was a mammoth structure.

            He turned and the ranch had disappeared. In its place was a Jenga-like dwelling with a substantial picture window, flat lines and a cantilevered second story.

            In the context of the backyard, it made sense.

            And yet, it didn’t.

            “The hell…?” Jimmy said.

            “Did you guys win?”

            “Did we win,” he replied, more a statement than a question.

            “The big West Coast road trip,” Trina said. “The Lakers, Clippers, Golden State…”

            Jimmy took a step toward Trina, who facially appeared slimmer than the version of her in the picture inside the living room of the house, the one that had disappeared and been replaced by a McMansion. Which reminded him.

            “Where’s your mom?” he said, noting her floral perfume with a hint of amber that he recalled she had worn that night in 2010.

            “My mom? My mom’s been dead for years. You know that.”

            “But I just saw her,” he replied, his voice trailing off into nothingness.

            A voice emerged overhead, drifting in from what he perceived as the front of the house, perhaps as far away as the street.

            He turned toward the voice, peering up toward the roof line. The rain had stopped and the sky was filled with cirrus clouds that blocked the sun.

            It was soft, like a child’s, but with an alert pitch, like a teenager.

            A ’tween boy.

            Maybe twelve years old.

            “Mom? Where are you? I don’t feel good.”

            “Did you hear that?” Jimmy said, but when he turned back, Trina was gone, though the high-class backyard amenities and the McMansion remained.

            “Mom?”

            Jimmy spied a set of French doors at the edge of the paver patio, roughly where the sliding door had been, and bolted toward them. He turned the nickel handles.

            Of course they were locked.

            But there was a dark figure moving around inside, appearing to stagger and then fall to the floor in the hallway.

            “Ben? Shit!”

            He turned the handles again, still with no luck. So he reared back and punched the third window from the top on the right side, shattering it. His knuckles bled and he had a three-inch gash along his wrist, but thankfully the blood was flowing and not spurting. Spurting was bad, he recalled from high school biology. That was the undoubted sign of a dead man walking.

            He reached in, turned the inside handle and opened the door, leaving behind a bloody handprint. 

            “Ben? I’m here, buddy. Hang on.”

            The hallway was then so dark that he couldn’t see his own hand in front of his face. Behind him, it was now apparently midnight outside, not even a shadow from an outdoor light, and he shook his head.

            This made zero sense. But his son, he believed, was just ahead.

            So he foraged on, placing his hands along the left wall, the bumps of the drywall feeling like cool pebbles, and sliding his shoes so as not to step on Ben.

            Come on, come on, Jimmy boy, he said to himself just as he touched something smooth with what felt like a latch of some sort.

            Light switch.

            He flipped it.

            The hallway was empty save for a white bottle with a multi-colored label and serif lettering.

            It said Drano Liquid.

            The bottle’s black cap had apparently rolled against the wall’s baseboard and sat upright.

            Jimmy grabbed the bottle, and it was empty.

            “The hell are you doing here?” came a voice from just ahead, in the foyer. “Get out of my house.”

            Edna, but a different Edna. A cigarette with a long gray ash dangled from her lips, and she was hunched over with a demonstrable hump on her back below her neck. She wore the same turquoise housecoat, but her nails were no longer painted. Instead her hands were curled with pronounced knuckles that made it seem as if they had bunions. A dirty white scarf with blue piping covered the top of her head, but it was clear she had much less hair than before, enough where Jimmy wondered if she had cancer.

            In her right hand she struggled to hold a fifth of some sort of liquor, Southern Comfort, maybe.

            “This is all your fault, you bastard.”

            “Edna, I…”

            “Nobody calls me that. Especially you.”

            “Isn’t that your name?”

            “Never mind my name,” the woman said, slurring the last few syllables. “Get out of here before I call the cops.”

            “But where’s Trina?”

            “Out!”

            She gestured toward the Drano bottle.

            “You brought my grandson into this world,” she hissed. “He was a wonderful little boy.”

            She took a full-out pull from the liquor bottle.

            “Now he’s gone,” she went on. “And so is she. They’re all gone.”

            She slumped into a wooden rocker with a pistachio throw pillow next to the front door. 

            “They’re all gone,” she murmured. “All gone.”

            So was she. Blotto, Jimmy thought.

            He took two long strides toward the front door. Better get out of here, he thought. Who knows who’s watching in a one-horse town and who’ll call the cops.

            On the end table next to the rocker was an official-looking document, folded in thirds, one with a star on the masthead.

            A police star. Or more accurately, a sheriff’s star.

            Preston County Sheriff’s Department, it said.

            Edna, or whoever she was—Trina’s mother—was snoring. The liquor bottle (it was indeed Southern Comfort) had fallen to the floor and the liquid was pooling on the beige carpet that was worn to the quick in several spots.

            The sentence of the first paragraph said something about “warrant for arrest,” and Jimmy attempted to seize the letter with his right thumb and forefinger. As he did, something grabbed his wrist hard, causing him to yelp, blood oozing through the gnarled fingers.

            He looked up.

            It was Trina.

            She had lost about forty pounds and was dressed in the same turquoise housecoat that Edna, or whomever, had been wearing. She looked haggard and hopeless, dark circles under her eyes, the same scarf with the blue piping on her head, but it was clear she was bald and maybe one hundred pounds at best.

            Startled, Jimmy tried to pull his hand back, but that simply increased the severity of Trina’s grip. She must be using all of her strength, Jimmy thought absently.

            “I love you,” she said. “Take care of our son. Promise me.”

            “Wh-where is he?”

            She loosened her grip and her hand fell on the end table. The letter had disappeared, and she didn’t appear to be breathing.

            Then there was a sound, a rhythmic tempo.

            It was a basketball bouncing.

            “Hey dad,” came a boy’s voice. “Come on out. Let’s play.”

            The front door was shut but sun now poked through the three vertical decorative windows as when he arrived. Jimmy grabbed the handle and it was locked. He cursed as he tried to unlock the door, trying several times to loosen the latch, finally succeeding. He swung open the door, and there was the vintage Camry, the one with the missing rear bumper. Behind it was a basketball hoop affixed to a plain steel pole, which he hadn’t noticed before. But maybe it hadn’t even existed.

            He dashed out the storm door, down the cracked stoop and past the Camry.

            All that was there was a basketball, sitting forlornly on the driveway.

            Jimmy walked over and picked it up.

            Written in indelible ink marker, under the Wilson logo, was the word Ben.

            He’s gone, Jimmy thought. But yet he’s not.

            He’s a part of infinity now.

            And like the universe, there is no condemnation in infinity.