by J. D. Barker
Published by:
Hampton Creek Press
P.O. Box 177
New Castle, NH 03854
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental unless noted otherwise.
Copyright © 2019 by Jonathan Dylan Barker
All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.
Hampton Creek Press is a registered Trademark of Hampton Creek Publishing, LLC
Cover Design by Stuart Bache
Book design and formatting by Maureen Cutajar (gopublished.com)
Author photograph by Bill Peterson of Peterson Gallery
Hardcover ISBN-13: 978-1-7342104-1-5
eBook ISBN: 978-1-7342104-0-8
Paperback ISBN-13: 978-1-7342104-2-2
For my little girl.
The brightest spark.
Contents
PART 1
August 8, 1984
August 8, 1985
August 8, 1986
August 8, 1987
August 8, 1988
August 8, 1989
PART 2
August 8, 1992
April 23, 1993
PART 3
PART 4
March 12, 1994
August 6, 1998
PART 5
PART 6
August 8, 2010
August 8, 2020
Her name was Stella, and I loved her from the first moment I saw her. Even after watching her kill a man who looked a lot like me, I couldn’t help but love her.
I didn’t know she had killed him—not at that time, I couldn’t possibly know. I only watched them kiss, but that moment spelled his end as surely as water runs downhill.
We would hide the body together, amid her apologies for what she had done.
Then she would be gone, disappearing into the night.
And I could do nothing else but follow, my heart filled with ache, her scent pulling me so.
—Jack Thatch | 22 Years Old
PART 1
“Think for a moment of the long chain of iron or gold, of thorns or flowers, that would never have bound you, but for the formation of the first link on one memorable day.”
—Charles Dickens, Great Expectations
August 8, 1984
Eight Years Old
Log 08/08/1984—
Subject “D” within expected parameters.
—Charter Observation Team – 309
1
“Time.”
“Hush, you little runt. I’m talking to my sister.”
I watched as Auntie Jo plucked another cigarette, a Marlboro Red 100, from the pack sitting atop her checkered cloth bag and put it in her mouth, lighting it with a silver Zippo and sending a puff of gray smoke to the heavens.
“You said one hour. That was at five o’clock. It’s six o’clock now. Time is up,” I told her. She had no sense of time. Given the chance, she’d spend the entire day sitting here in the cemetery talking to the stones. Well, talking to Momma’s stone. She didn’t talk to Daddy. She didn’t much like Daddy.
“Knight Rider is on in two hours.”
“You won’t miss Knight Rider.”
“Last time I missed Knight Rider,” I reminded her. “We left here at six-thirty, got home at seven, ate dinner, you made me take a bath, and by the time I sat down to watch, it was half over. You can’t watch a show like Knight Rider from the middle. You gotta start from the beginning.”
Auntie Jo puffed at her cigarette. “You have an uncanny memory for an eight-year-old, you know that?”
“Can we go?”
“Not yet.”
I sighed and reached for the radio.
Auntie Jo had spread out a blanket over my parents’ graves so we wouldn’t have to sit on the wet grass. Rain fell most of the morning, and the sun in Pittsburgh, even in August, did little to dry things up. The ground was still all squishy.
“Four years, Katy,” Auntie Jo said to Momma’s stone. “Four years since that wretch of a man of yours took you from us—from me and your little baby boy, Jack.”
“Daddy didn’t kill Momma.”
“He was driving, wasn’t he?”
“It was an accident.”
“He was drunk.”
“Momma had two glasses of wine, and Daddy was drinking Coke. That’s what the waiter said. It’s in the police report.”
Auntie Jo straightened the flowers in Momma’s vase. Her fingernails were stained yellow. The flowers were daisies. I picked them out myself at Giant Eagle on the way here. There were no flowers in Daddy’s vase. It was filled with stagnant rainwater and weeds. Auntie Jo wouldn’t let me clean it out.
“He was drunk before he left.”
I shook my head. “He was drinking iced tea at home before they dropped me off at your apartment. Momma, too.”
“You can’t know that.”
“I have a canny memory, you said so.”
“You were four.”
“I was drinking chocolate milk. Momma put it in my sippy cup so I could take it with me. We watched Magnum, P.I. on your couch, then you put me to bed right after. I did not have to take a bath that night.”
“Huh.”
“The radio is broken.” I had twisted the dial from one end to the other and got nothing but static.
“It’s not broken, it’s just hard to get a signal here.”
“Then why did you bring it?”
“Because sometimes we do get a signal, and your mother liked music.”
Bob FM was at 96.9. I turned the dial a little left of the mark for ninety-seven. Huey Lewis said something about a new drug, then faded back to static.
I dropped the radio back on the blanket near Auntie Jo’s bag. “Maybe I’ll skip the bath.”
“You’re not skipping your bath.”
“If I skip my bath tonight, then we can stay until seven and I still won’t miss Knight Rider,” I explained.
Auntie Jo snuffed out her cigarette on the side of Daddy’s stone, then placed it in a small tin she kept in the apron pocket of her faded pink waitress uniform. Normally she would toss the butt off into the grass somewhere, but not here, not at the cemetery, certainly not near Momma’s grave. She found another, lit it up, and sucked in another puff. “Okay, no bath tonight, but you’re getting one for sure tomorrow. Deal?”
“Deal.”
“One more hour, then,” she said. “What does this here say, Jack? Can you read it?”
“You know I can.”
“Then what does it say?”
“You make me read it every year.”
““What does it say, Jack?” She knocked at the side of Momma’s gravestone with the hand holding the lighter. “Read.”
I rolled my eyes. “Kaitlyn Gargery Thatch. February 16, 1958 to August 8, 1980. Loving wife, mother, and sister.”
“My sweet baby sister. It should also say, ‘killed by an evil man who drank himself into the grave next door and dragged her along kicking and screaming so he wouldn’t have to be alone.”
“Daddy didn’t drink.”
“He drank plenty.”
Auntie Jo liked to drink, wine mostly. Auntie Jo assumed everyone drank. If Daddy drank, I never saw him. Momma did, not much, though, not like Auntie Jo.
Daddy’s stone only had his name, birthdate, and the date of his death. Same day as Momma. If my Auntie Jo had her way, he might not have a stone at all. Luckily, it had not been up to Auntie Jo—the guys at the hard
ware store where Daddy worked all pitched in and paid for both, on account of Momma and Daddy not having put money aside for burials. Both stones were carved from the same slab of black granite. Momma’s shone, having been polished meticulously by Auntie Jo when we arrived. Daddy’s carried a layer of dust and dirt, the surface dull beneath. I’d come back later to clean it, make it shine like Momma’s.
I was four when they died, and the rounded tops of both gravestones had towered over me. Now, though, I was more than a foot taller. I stood up now and smoothed my jeans over knobby knees.
“Where are you going?”
“I wanna go for a walk.”
Auntie Jo frowned. “You should stay and talk to your mother. I’m sure she would like to hear everything that happened in the past year.”
I rolled my eyes again and placed a hand on Momma’s gravestone. “Momma, I’m eight. I have no friends because most kids are dumb. Auntie Jo still won’t let me eat chocolate chip cookies for breakfast, and school is boring. I’ll report back in another year, maybe sooner if something changes with the cookies.”
Auntie Jo waved the hand with the cigarette over her head. “Go. Just don’t wander off too far.”
I gave Daddy’s stone a quick look. I’d come back and talk to him. I just couldn’t do it with Auntie Jo listening in.
Snatching the radio off the blanket, I extended the antenna to full mast, increased the volume, and held the little box out before me as I started up the small hill toward the rest of the cemetery.
Momma and Daddy were buried on the south end of the cemetery under a red maple tree. This time of year, the leaves were fire engine red.
The static broke for a second and I thought I heard Elton John, but then he was gone again. I reached the top of the hill and made a sharp left, careful to stay on the stone pathway and not walk over the graves on either side.
I paused when I reached the mausoleums, all positioned in two neat rows with a stone pathway down the center.
Pittsburgh had a lot of cemeteries. This particular one, All Saints Hollow, was one of the largest.
The mausoleums.
I didn’t much like the mausoleums.
When we drove by a cemetery, Auntie Jo said you’re always supposed to hold your breath the to keep the spirits of the dead from finding you. I’m not sure why this rule didn’t apply when you were actually in the cemetery, but if it applied anywhere, it would be at the mausoleums. The air was still here. I pictured the dead peeking out from the cracks in the stone, bony hands ready to reach out and snatch unsuspecting little boys, pulling us inside those squat structures, never to be seen again.
I drew in a deep breath, pulled the radio to my chest, and ran down the center of the mausoleums, nearly tripping when Steve Perry started to blare from the speaker.
I reached the far end of mausoleum row and blew out the air, the speaker again going back to static. I had no idea why the radio worked in the middle of those buildings, and I didn’t really care. I could find another spot. I wasn’t going back in there.
Looking out over two hundred and seventy acres of rolling hills, I could no longer see Auntie Jo or the red maple.
The cemetery came to an end at a thick tree line. A black metal bench sat beneath the trees, a willow sweeping over the top, a canopy of thin leaves and moss weighted in shadows. Upon that bench sat a girl. About a hundred feet from the girl, a woman in a long white coat stood beside a white SUV on one of the cemetery’s access roads, her hands in her pockets.
It wasn’t hot out, but it wasn’t cold, either, too warm for such a coat. This didn’t seem to bother her. She had it buttoned to her neck. As I came over the hill, the woman turned toward me, her eyes black, hawklike. Her hair, as white as her coat, fluttered in the light wind. She became rigid at the sight of me, her shoulders squaring off. Her hands balled into fists and disappeared beneath the folds of her coat. She held there a moment, eyes upon me, cautious and strange, then returned her gaze to the girl on the bench.
The girl wore a white ruffled blouse, also buttoned up, tucked neatly into a black skirt falling just past her knees. Her long brown hair, alive with waves and curls, dropped over her shoulders and down her back. One side partially covered her face, the other pinned back behind her ear. Her dark eyes were lost between the pages of a paperback book held in her lap with gloved hands.
I’m not sure how long I stood there.
I’m not sure why I stood there.
But I did, I stood there watching her, watching her turn the pages with a gentle determination, her lips slightly parted, mouthing the words silently to an enthralled audience of one.
“Jessie’s Girl” blurted out from my radio and the girl’s head jerked up, her eyes on me, one hand carefully marking her place in the book.
I fumbled with the radio’s knobs and turned it down.
I didn’t remember walking up to the bench, but somehow I had. I stood right beside it.
The girl’s brow furrowed, and she tilted her head curiously. “My, you are an ugly little boy.”
I wasn’t sure what to say to that, so I said nothing at all. I knew I wasn’t ugly. Auntie Jo said I was lucky that I took after Momma in the looks department rather than being cursed to look like Daddy. Although, I had a picture of Daddy, the only one I managed to hide from Auntie Jo. He looked like a movie star standing next to his rusty Ford, the same one he had been driving when—
“Your clothes are ratty, too.” She had an odd accent, sounding something like James Bond but not quite.
A squeal came from the radio’s speaker, drowning out Rick Springfield and all else. I switched it off, retracted the antenna, and found myself climbing onto the bench, sitting on the opposite end from her. Again, I didn’t know why. My mind screamed for me to run away. This was a girl, after all. I had no business with girls, especially one like this, all prissy and proper and smelling of flowers. But I didn’t run. I climbed right up on that bench and sat beside her, ignoring the strange flutter in my stomach.
I nodded up at the woman standing at the SUV. “Is that your momma?”
“No, not my mother.”
“They why is she watching you?”
“That’s what she does.”
“It’s kinda creepy.”
The girl smiled at this, then forced it back as if she didn’t want me to see her smile, as if it were something she didn’t give away so freely. “What kind of boy wanders around a cemetery all alone? Where are your parents?”
“Dead.”
“Really? Who killed them?”
Not what killed them or how did they die, but who killed them. As if death by another’s hand was the most logical of things.
“What are you reading?” I asked, wanting to change the subject. I didn’t want to talk about Momma and Daddy, not now. There had been enough of that today.
She held up the book so I could see the cover—Great Expectations by Charles Dickens. The paperback’s spine was nearly white with creases, opened and closed so many times the color was gone, faded and cracked away. The cover wasn’t much better. The book looked a thousand years old, some lost thing rescued from the bottom of a box in someone’s basement.
“Is that the one with the boy and the raft?”
“Hmm. Ugly and uneducated, I see.”
“What is that supposed to mean?”
“You’re thinking about The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. That book isn’t even written by Dickens. Twain wrote it. Twain is a hack. Twain isn’t even his real name. He was just a boat captain who managed to scribble out a few thoughts when he wasn’t gambling and drinking.”
I hadn’t read anything by Twain or Dickens. My reading shelf consisted of half the titles from the Hardy Boys collection and a few dozen comics. I didn’t know anyone who read Twain or Dickens, not even my parents or Auntie Jo. “What is Great Expectations about?”
The woman at the SUV had managed to draw closer. I hadn’t seen her move, but she was only about ten feet from us now, watch
ing from the corner of her eye, no doubt listening to every word.
The girl looked down at the book in her gloved hands. “It’s about everything that really matters.”
“I don’t understand.”
“You wouldn’t.”
“Can I see it?” I reached for the book and she shied away, moving toward her side of the bench. The woman edged closer, then stopped as the girl looked up at her.
The girl placed the book on the bench and slid it over to me with the tips of her fingers. This seemed to calm the older woman.
I picked up the book and read the description on the back.
“My name is Stella,” the girl said. “I was named for the girl in that book, only her name is Estella.”
I handed the book back to her. I half expected her to make me slide it back on the bench, but she didn’t. She snatched it from the air and placed it back in her lap. “When a girl tells you her name, it’s only polite to reciprocate.”
“Reciprocate?”
She sighed. “Respond in kind, do the same.”
“Oh, my name is Jack, Jack Thatch.”
“A common name for a common boy. What is your real name? Nobody is really named ‘Jack,’ it’s usually the informal of ‘John’ which never made sense to me—not like Mike and Michael, it’s more like Bill and William, which is even stranger.”
“My full name is John Edward Thatch,” I told her. “Everyone always calls me ‘Jack,’ though.”
“Of course they do. And who is Edward to you? Surely a family name.”
“My dad’s name was Edward. Everyone called him Eddie. How old are you? You talk funny.”
Her eyes drifted to the older woman, then to the cover of her book. She fidgeted with the pages. “I’m eight.”
“You don’t sound like you’re eight. I’m eight, too.”
“Well, you don’t sound like you’re eight, either.”
“Stella?” The woman said this in a low tone, almost a scolding tone, drawing out the name, then: “We need to go.”
Stella sighed again and closed her eyes. She said something softly, too soft for me to hear, yet the older woman seemed to understand her words even though she was further away.