Rebecca Jones-Howe

Copyright © 2020 by Rebecca Jones-Howe

All rights reserved. This story or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

BEHIND THE TEMPORARY VALENTINE’S DAY seasonal display stands a wall that separates Target from the abandoned interior of Sahali Summit Mall. Brad removes a row of cards and presses his hand to the display fixture, imagining the decaying concourse on the other side. He used to throw pennies in the fountain when he was a kid, used to wish that he’d be a better hockey player so his dad would stop harassing him to make goals like Gretsky.

Mall management had the fountain filled in the early aughts. That was the beginning of the end, when the franchise stores started to vacate and the local tenants saw a decrease in foot traffic.

Brad recollects when he got his job at the struggling Sport Chek and he met Dawn at the independent music store simply called Summit Music, with its walls painted black and a long strip of red neon lining the store’s perimeter. The first time they met was when Brad bought a copy of Franz Ferdinand’s You Could Have It So Much Better back in 2005. “Well, do ya? Do ya, do ya want to?” Dawn asked, singing the tune of the album’s single. Brad started spending his breaks on the bench outside of the mall’s side entrance, hoping that Dawn would come out to smoke her honey-flavoured clove cigarettes.

He picks out a card with a red heart over a pink polka-dot background.

IT’S VALENTINES DAY AND YOU TOUCH MY HEART!

Something about the word touch sets him off. Not just physically, like he hasn’t been touched in months, but deep down in like a fist pulling his throat into his body. A pressure. He digs into the slot for the card’s matching envelope, hasty to leave because he still hasn’t picked up the groceries.

He passes the display of Valentine’s Day chocolates on the way out. They sit in heart-shaped box, an impulse, a temptation, but Brad knows that his wife’s favourite chocolates are at the the Rocky Mountain Chocolate Factory.

He decides to make one last stop before heading home.

He tucks the gifts beneath the seat of his truck and carries the groceries into the house. Dawn gathers the dinner plates and piles them into the kitchen sink. The baby cries in the high chair. The toddler cries in her booster seat. There’s still a plate of Hamburger Helper beside his eldest child, Ethan, only it’s not actually Hamburger Helper but a homemade version that Dawn makes because it’s healthier.

Dawn scrapes half of the cold macaroni and ground beef into a Tupperware container for Brad’s lunch tomorrow.

“How was work?” she asks.

Brad shrugs, has nothing to say about the bland monotony of the mail sorting plant.

Dawn sighs, tending to the baby instead of nagging him for coming home later than he promised. Brad eats his dinner out of the pot, appreciating Dawn’s efforts while still missing the overly salty taste of the real Hamburger Helper that his dad always made after his parents divorced.

After eating, he scoops the toddler, Casey, out of her booster seat, and takes her upstairs to brush her teeth. He tries to wedge the brush past her screaming mouth, hoping to scrub away all the grime. Then it’s to bed with a story and a lullaby, followed by a long session of coaxing to get her to sleep with the lights off. Then he returns to the table to help his 3rd grade son with his spelling homework.

SCREAM

QUIT

DEFENCE

Brad drills until his son’s frustration starts to show, brows furrowed, fists clenched tight. Ethan’s too old for stories or lullabies, so when he puts his son to bed, Brad has nothing to offer but a calming pat on the shoulder.

“If you fail the test, it’s going to be okay. There will always be another.”

“Okay, Dad.”

Brad shuts Ethan’s bedroom door, realizing that he probably said the wrong thing.

Brad takes off his hard hat in the locker room. He shrugs out of his orange vest and digs his phone out of his locker to find the new picture of the grocery list that Dawn has sent. The list is always written on a chalkboard that hangs in their kitchen.

Most of his exchanges with Dawn consists of photos of the same chalkboard. It’s what their marriage has become.

Safeway isn’t Brad’s usual grocery store, but it’s the only other remaining anchor at the Sahali Summit Mall. He finds himself parking in front of it only to glance over at the old scar of the cursive neon sign that once hung in front of the mall entrance.

Brad swallows. The pressure returns in his throat. A tightness. An unsteadiness. An infestation, like it’s something his body needs to fight.

Fresh snow falls over the empty mall parking lot, starts to stick to the windshield. He gets out and hurries inside the grocery store. Safeway still has a florist counter, and Brad peers through the aged display case at the vase of roses and buys six for Dawn.

Just a token. A little perk. An apology for not being able to be a better man.

He packs the flowers in with the groceries and heads out. The snow’s heavier now, it’s thick pack dampening his footsteps across the parking lot.

That feeling in his throat returns.

The mall entrance waits, shadowed and still. He turns and approaches the doors. They’re boarded from the inside with plywood but that hasn’t stopped vandals from smashing the glass. Shattered pieces slip under his feet. Brad puts the groceries down. He tests one of the doors. The metal handle wobbles. Broken pieces of tempered glass rattle as he shakes the door on its bolts. Still locked. Still secure. He moves to the next door and the next, thinking of Ethan’s spelling test.

SCREAM.

QUIT.

DEFENCE.

He kicks the plywood that covers the last door on the right. The panel budges just a little. He kicks harder and knocks the wood loose.

Then he hears it.

White noise. Water rustling.

Kneeling down, Brad stares into the black vestibule. He sees himself in the glass of the interior doors and the throbbing builds in his skull.

He thinks of calling inside, thinks of climbing through the small opening, but then the thinks about how much it would mean to Dawn if he could make it home in time to have one dinner with his family.

Brad stands and hurries back to the truck. Upon putting the groceries inside, however, he realizes that the roses are missing. Footsteps trace back to the path from whence he came. The red flowers sit in the dark, trampled in the snow. Dawn sends him a message and when he looks at the phone there’s a new item to the grocery list.

I need an onion for the soup. Is it too late?

It isn’t, not really. He could go back, give her what she wants, which is to make a healthy homemade version of Campbell’s Chunky Vegetable and Beef.

He doesn’t go back.

Dawn’s sobbing when Brad gets home. The kids sit in the living room. A movie plays on the television but none of the kids pay attention. They all look up when Brad places the groceries on the counter, and he hurries up the stairs and finds his wife laying on the bathroom floor, tearing at her hair.

She’s past the point of consoling.

Brad goes back to the living room. “What happened to Mom?”

Ethan shrugs. “She burnt Casey’s grilled cheese, I think.”

“Oh,” Brad says. He squeezes his hand over Ethan’s shoulder and preheats the oven for a frozen pizza. Then he goes back upstairs and pulls his wife into his arms. He doesn’t have the heart to tell her that he didn’t get the onion.

He runs the water and pours the honey-scented bath salts in.

At night he can’t sleep. He digs through the photo albums on the bookshelf.

Brad finds a picture he took inside the mall with his old digital camera. He remembers taking it the day his father met Dawn. It had already been several months into their relationship, but Brad wanted to keep the meeting casual, just lunch from the fish and chips stand. The shot was a candid, capturing his father in mid-conversation with Dawn, standing near the planters placed where the mall fountain used to be.

Brad squints at the background, at the shuttered stores, their entrances either gated off or boarded over completely.

FOR LEASE.

“Make sure you treat her nice,” his dad said after the meeting. “I didn’t do the same for your mom, you know?”

He suffered from a heart attack two months after the photo was taken.

Brad got his dad’s urn from Debbie’s Fine Jewelry and Keepsakes, which was one of the last tenants inside the mall before it closed permanently.

He bought Dawn’s engagement ring on the same day.

On Friday night Brad takes Ethan to his junior hockey game.

Ethan plays defence and spends most of his time defending himself instead of his side of the rink. It was like this when Brad played hockey too, only his dad always screamed from the stands, expecting more, expecting better.

Brad stares at his phone the entire game, only raising his head when the parents around him break into fits and cheers. Brad stands to watch his son get slammed into the sideboard.

The other parents gasp and clutch their hands over their mouths. Brad’s heart pounds between his hears. His breaths sound like they’re underwater. Ethan takes a moment before getting up but his skate slipping beneath him and he plummets to the ice a second time. The referee offers a hand. Ethan takes it. He adjusts his helmet and skates again, pretending like it didn’t hurt.

Maybe today, Brad thinks, will be the day that Ethan will beg not to do another year of hockey.

It was Dawn who wanted this, Dawn who wants to put Casey into dance. Brad can’t exactly blame her. The moment she found out she was pregnant with Ethan, she threw her cigarettes away, replacing her only vice with the pressure to cook healthy foods and enroll all the children in all the extra-curricular activities.

A modern life. A happier one.

Brad wishes he could spend money on a therapist instead. It’d be a better gift than chocolates and a card with a shitty sentiment.

He spends the rest of the game watching urban explorers walk through abandoned malls on YouTube.

Ethan’s team loses the game by four goals.

Brad tries to make it better, allowing Ethan to pick out whatever flavour of ice cream he wants from the Safeway freezer. They walk out with mint chocolate chip and Brad nods at the dead mall entrance.

“Your mom and I met there,” he says.

Ethan doesn’t say anything. The mall’s been closed for most of his life. The boarded doors must look like some kind of relic. Old school, which is what the kids in the urbex videos all say.

“Dad, what are you doing?”

“Come on,” Brad says, walking toward the entrance. “See, there’s a hole in the door? We could go inside if you want.”

“We can’t go in there, Dad.”

“Sure we can. The hole’s big enough.”

Brad kneels down to look through the broken panel, surprised to find that all the interior doors of the vestibule have been opened. He pokes his head inside. The echo of the fountain calls.

“You can crawl in and unlock the door,” Brad says.

Ethan shakes his head.

Brad stands, puts his hand on his son’s shoulder and coaxes him toward the opening.

“Don’t you want to see all the things you missed?”

Ethan’s face crumples, looks just like it did when he lost the hockey game. But, just as Brad once did, Ethan does what is asked of him. He crouches down and peers inside.

“It smells so bad, Dad.”

“Just unlock the door.”

A white vehicle pulls up in front of the mall. The security guard leans out and shines a flashlight. Brad yanks his son’s jacket and Ethan falls out of the opening and onto the pavement, his gasped sob cutting into the night.

Brad squints against the light’s glare. He raises his hand.

DEFENCE.

The guard lets them off with a warning and they both heave sighs of relief inside the comfort of the truck. Brad turns the key in the ignition. The engine’s rumble fills his gut with dread.

“Don’t tell your mom, okay? It was stupid. I know that. I just wanted you to see.”

Dawn rolls over at night, awakened by the glow of the Brad’s phone.

“Can you turn that off, babe?”

He pulls his headphones out and apologizes.

He continues watching in the dark of the living room. It’s a video of Rolling Acres Mall in Akron, Ohio, the most famous of all the abandoned malls. The camera pans across an empty store wall desecrated with a series of graffiti.

YOU CAN’T HIDE.
I WILL FIND YOU.
I WILL HURT YOU.
I WILL KILL YOU.

Former mall patrons posts comments below the video. They share memories. They mourn.

Brad goes to the truck and he digs out the Valentine’s Day gifts he bought for Dawn. He fidgets with a pen for an hour, clicking it again and again, listening to the echo in his own house, and he wonders what it would sound like at the mall.

At his mall.

Ballpoint to card, he writes what feels like a last testament.

Ethan told me what you did last night. What is wrong with you?

Brad’s only got five minutes to left on his lunch break. Today’s leftovers are tacos. Dawn made the seasoning herself, but a part of him still misses the over-salted Old El Paso that his dad used to swear by.

If Brad leaves the message unanswered, Dawn will eventually have to replace the conversation with another picture of the chalkboard on the fridge. This isn’t the right thing to do in a happy marriage. This isn’t doing what his father asked, and yet Brad dims the screen of his phone before heading back to the warehouse floor.

I WILL FIND YOU.

When the five minutes is up, he puts his hard hat back on and returns to his forklift. The rest of his shift he moves packages full of Amazon orders. Valentine’s Day gifts, he imagines, set to arrive within two days of purchase.

Dawn reads the Valentine’s Day card, her face twisting over his message. Brad smiles, his lips feeling plastic and mannequin-like. He opens his arms for a hug but her touch feels like nothing.

She opens the box of chocolates and eats one. Ethan asks asks for a chocolate. Then Casey asks, and the box Brad spent forty dollars on melts in the greedy grasps of the children.

He wishes he’d gone back for the roses.

Rolling Acres is to become an Amazon Fulfillment Centre, so says the article on Brad’s phone.

Something about the word fulfillment sets him off. Not just physically, like he hasn’t felt useful in months, but in the pit of his throat, like the hand of his dead father reaching up to choke him.

SCREAM.

I WILL HURT YOU.

Dawn sends him a new picture of the chalkboard grocery list.
Brad glances up from the phone and stares at mall entrance.

Sahali Summit Mall.

His mall.

There are pictures of him inside of this mall but there is no history online, just a couple photos of the old sign, its red neon long gone.

He hasn’t shared his memories. He hasn’t mourned.

Brad thinks about what would happen if he didn’t buy any groceries. Just went home. Just found his wife crying. Just lay down on the floor beside her, the cold ceramic tile to his cheek.

The illuminated screen of his phone blacks out. Red shines down over his thumbs. He looks up again, where the neon’s glowing. He hasn’t seen that glow in years, the red of it warming, pulling him out of the truck, luring him across the parking lot, welcoming him home.

He kicks at the plywood but it’s been reinforced.

Hugging the shadows, he rounds the graffiti-tagged side of the building to the employee entrance. The old bench remains, its seat covered over with snow and flimsy cardboard. The stench of piss radiates around the doorway. Plywood covers all the doors on the outside, but he tests one of the handles and finds the pin lock broken on the leftmost door.

Brad wrestles it until the loose lower hinge breaks. The metal wobbles on the frame and he ducks down and squeezes his way through. He goes in feet first, wedging the door open as he goes. Broken glass slices at his wrist.

“Shit.” He stumbles as he stands, clutching over the torn flesh.

Blood drips down his fingers but the cut doesn’t look that deep. The warmth is welcome, like a glove.

The stench of mold pricks his nasal passage. It stings in his eye sockets and makes him squint in the dark. The mall’s silence floods his ears. Blinking, adjusting, he pulls out his phone and turns on the flashlight. The white beam hits the tiled walls.

Cream and salmon and teal.

The mall was never renovated. It’s a relic, a piece of a past.

Old-school.

Moonlight bleeds through the skylight over the mall’s main concourse. The barricaded Safeway sits to the right. He turns to the left, where the blinking neon lights cast shadows along the span of the corridor.

The light illuminates, up the ramp over the shattered glass from all the broken shop fronts. The first place he enters is Summit Music. Only one line of neon radiates with pink. It reflects off the broken pieces of glass at the shop entrance, little stars sprinkled over the moldy floor.

He traces his fingers over the old display cases, void of the CD’s he used to buy just to see Dawn, to talk to her. He’d never been all that great at talking to women. He once thought he was good at pretending, but even she caught on to that.

“You don’t actually like Arcade Fire, do you?” she asked. “You don’t seem like the type.”

Brad doesn’t remember the last time he spoke to her. Really spoke to her.

A few posters still remain pasted to the walls above the checkout desk. He doesn’t recognize any of the artists, just pop star remnants of the years that cast the mall into dated obscurity.

He traces the patches of black mold and the fallen ceiling tiles back trough the mall. He passes the dollar store, the Sport Chek. He stumbles against the plastic spiral wishing well. Mall management had it put in after the fountain was removed. It was a replacement place for all the spare change, all of Brad’s loose coins looping around the yellow whirlpool of momentum, unable to prevent themselves from slipping into the black hole of a dying cause.

Packed snow from the roof slips through the broken panes of skylight glass. The flakes crash over the spot where the mall’s fountain once stood. A vandalized exit sign sits on the floor. The metal cables splay out like dead limbs. Brad kicks at the metal box. The sign appears to flicker, but he shines the flashlight over the letters and everything goes dull.

Brad walks again, his footsteps sounding like gravel over the debris. The tightness in his lungs only worsens. Mold. Infestation. He shouldn’t be here and yet he is, face to face with the cinder block wall that severs the Target from the dying remains of the mall. Reaching out, he touches the spot where he picked the Valentine’s Day card a week before.

REMEMBER THE MALL? REMEMBER HOW WE FELT AT THE MALL? I STILL THINK OF YOU THE WAY YOU TOUCHED MY HEART AT THE MALL.

He wrote that.

In his delusion, he’d written that.

In this delusion, Brad draws a breath and chokes on the mold. Spores fill his throat like a fist clutching round. He wipes his nose and the blood drips from his wrist, down his shirt and to the floor. His phone slips out of his grasp. Its light skips and dies. White noise fills his ears and he blinks hard, turning to see the fountain.

Moonlight that beams down through the roof, casting reflections over the polished white tile.

Brad approaches the white tiled edge. Water shoots from the spout at the top level and spills down the sides. The ripples glow with movement, with promise, with life.

He leans over the fountain’s edge and reaches into his pocket for a coin.