Echoes

by Ellen Datlow

  Only they didn’t. They sat me down between them on the sofa to explain that my father was moving into a condo closer to his job downtown. My mother and I would stay in the house. I wouldn’t see as much of my father as before but all I had to do was call and we were still a family bullshit bullshit bullshit.

  It was all so polite and calm, as if they were talking about something normal, like a dental appointment. Finally, they wound down and asked if I had any questions.

  “Yeah,” I said. “What the fuck?”

  They didn’t even have the decency to look shocked by the f-word. After a long moment, my mother said, “We know how upsetting this is, Gale—”

  “You don’t know shit!” I yelled, wanting them to feel like I’d slapped them. Then I ran up to my room and slammed the door so hard it should have shattered into a million pieces, or at least cracked down the middle. I felt even more betrayed when it didn’t.

  My first impulse was to call Jean and scream at her. She’d already know—yet another betrayal. Parents were on one side and kids were on the other, that was the natural law. She was supposed to be on my side, not collaborating with them.

  I put down the phone on my desk. My parents would come up to try talking to me; if they heard me on the phone with my traitor sister, they’d put their traitor ears to my traitor door. I waited to hear the telltale creak in the hallway. I said loudly, “Dear Diary, I wish my parents would drop dead.”

  They didn’t even knock. “That’s horrible!” my mother said. All the color had gone out of her face except for two pink spots on her cheeks. “How can you talk like that?”

  “Because she knew we were listening,” my father said, although he didn’t look too sure of himself. “It’s completely normal for her to be angry. Even Jean’s p.o.’ed at us.”

  “Oh, well, as long as everything’s completely normal, we can all relax,” I said. “It’s not like anyone’s getting stabbed in the middle of the street.”

  My parents looked at each other. “Maybe we should move,” my mother said.

  But we didn’t. My parents talked to a couple of realtors, but there was nothing available nearby. We’d have had to move farther away, which was out of the question. My parents wanted to keep me in the same school.

  I could have screwed that up by acting out. It would have been their worst nightmare and I spent hours fantasizing in my room. Drugs or booze would get me suspended, but for immediate expulsion, I’d need a weapon, ideally a gun. With my luck, though, I’d end up shooting my own ass off. A knife would do, we had plenty of those.

  Or I could just ditch school—that would actually create more legal problems for my parents than for me. My fleeting moment of guilt was drowned out by a rush of anger.

  So what? Screw them. They do whatever they want, never giving a crap about my feelings. They don’t have to, they’re grown-ups. They can get away with fucking murder.

  Except Gideon O’Dell—he hadn’t, and Lily hadn’t even gotten away with her own life. My mother’s words came back to me: Stains like that don’t wash out so easily. I thought it was odd she’d put it that way, as if she didn’t think whatever Mr. Grafton saw had been all in his head.

  Which made me wonder for the zillionth time how the hell I could have slept through something like that. I was still a sound sleeper. One night not long before the O’Dell murder, lightning struck a nearby transformer during an especially violent storm, and there were fire engines and police cars all over the place. The commotion kept everyone in a six-block radius up all night, but if the power hadn’t still been out the next morning, I’d never have known.

  • • •

  At first, I thought I was dreaming. Then I heard more pounding and a male voice demanding someone answer the door. When my parents went downstairs, I almost went, too, before I remembered I was still mad and I didn’t want them to think I cared.

  I raised the screen on my bedroom window so I could lean out and see what was going on. Two police officers were on our steps with my parents; they had on their silly matching robes, like they were just regular and my father wasn’t sleeping in Jean’s old room until he moved out next week.

  Another police car pulled up in front of the Graftons’ old house. I could see the people who lived there huddled close together on their front steps, but I couldn’t tell if any of their robes matched.

  “. . . bed between eleven and eleven-thirty?” one cop on the steps was saying.

  “I went to bed shortly after eleven.” My mother’s voice sounded draggy and plaintive. “Don was watching a news program.”

  “Were you asleep when your husband came to bed, ma’am?” the second cop asked.

  “She usually is,” my father said coolly.

  “I usually am,” my mother said, echoing his tone.

  I couldn’t blame them for not wanting to tell the cops they were sleeping separately; it wasn’t like they were the O’Dells.

  “Now, your daughter Gale—is she all right?” asked the other cop.

  “Of course she’s all right.” My mother was suddenly wide awake and pissed off.

  “We’d like to confirm that.”

  “It’s four a.m.!” my father snapped. “She’s asleep.”

  “Well, actually . . .” The second cop turned to look directly at me. So did everyone else.

  I glared at everyone for a long moment before I pulled my head in. Lowering the screen, I saw the third cop talking to the people across the way. One was pointing emphatically at the street. Or rather, at a particular spot on the street.

  I went downstairs. One cop was in the living room with my father and the other was in the kitchen with my mother. Sexist much? I thought. Good old Saddle Hills. The cops asked me if I’d seen or heard anything unusual, like screaming. I told them the way I slept, I wouldn’t have heard a rock concert.

  I thought they’d leave when it became obvious we’d all been asleep till they’d woken us up, but they didn’t. Apparently cop-obvious was different from obvious-obvious. They went through the entire house and my parents admitted that despite their matching robes, they weren’t happily married after all. It got boring; I stretched out on the sofa with a paperback.

  The next thing I knew, the police were telling my parents they were sorry for the inconvenience in that way they have that’s somehow both sincere yet totally detached. It was getting light when I stumbled back to my room and dropped dead.

  A few hours later, my father’s angry voice woke me. Were the cops back? I rolled out of bed and raised the screen.

  It took a few moments before I realized the guy on the front steps was from across the street. He was trying to explain something but my father wasn’t having any, telling the guy to get the hell off our property if he didn’t want to find himself on the wrong end of a lawsuit.

  The guy gave up. But as he started down the steps, he looked up and saw me. I drew back, hoping he wasn’t stupid enough to try talking to me. He wasn’t.

  • • •

  Or rather, not then. He waited until my father moved out and rang the doorbell right after my mother left for the supermarket. I considered not answering, then decided if he got weird, I could call the cops. Or my father.

  “Yes?” I asked stiffly through the locked screen door. He was a bit younger than my father and not much taller than I was, with a round face, thinning blond hair, and the kind of pale skin that burns even when it’s overcast. The shadows under his puffy brown eyes made him look like he’d been up all night.

  “I knew exactly what I was going to say before I came over here,” he said unhappily. “Now I can’t remember.”

  “Oh.” I had no idea what to do with a helpless adult. “Retrace your steps, maybe it’ll come back to you.” I started to close the door.

  “It’s not that,” he said quickly. “It’s—I don’t know how to begin.”

  So what did he expect me to do? “Maybe you should talk to my parents, Well, my mother.” I started to close the door again.
<
br />   “Have you ever seen a ghost?” he asked desperately.

  I still didn’t let him in.

  • • •

  His name was Ralph Costa and he was why the cops had visited us in the middle of the night. He’d seen a man stabbing a woman in the street and thought it was my parents.

  “Why would you think that?” I asked, thinking maybe I should have shut the door on him after all.

  “She ran up your front steps and tried to open the door,” Ralph Costa said. “I thought she lived here. But he dragged her into the street and . . .”

  “Stabbed her a lot?” I suggested.

  He looked sick. “At first, I couldn’t even move. Then I was on the phone, yelling for the cops to get here now. I woke May and the kids and made them stay in the back of the house so they wouldn’t see. But when the cops came, there was no body, no blood, just . . . nothing. But I know I wasn’t dreaming or hallucinating. I saw a man kill a woman.”

  I’d heard every variation of the story—whoever told it would say Gideon almost caught Lily in their backyard—but this was new. “Was she screaming?”

  “Of course—she must have been, I heard her—” He cut off, looking puzzled, and I could practically see him replaying it in his mind. “I heard her.” He shook his head. “I tried to apologize to your father but he was pretty irate.”

  “Yeah, the cops tromped around for hours looking for bloody knives and dead bodies. It was pretty bad.” I couldn’t help rubbing it in; it had been pretty bad. Worse, the cops had asked the neighbors if my father ever beat us and now they were all looking at us funny.

  “I really am sorry,” Ralph Costa was saying. “If it makes you feel any better, the cops stayed at our house a lot longer, asking about my mental health. They didn’t mention the O’Dells until just before they left. My wife looked it up later on microfiche at the library. No one ever told us.”

  “You’re still pretty new,” I said. “And it was a long time ago.”

  “Not even ten years,” Ralph said, which reminded me time was different for grown-ups. “Did anyone else ever see—well, what I saw?”

  I considered telling him about Mr. Grafton and decided against it. The house had changed hands twice before the Costas had moved in, which was pretty unusual. But my parents said the first people had moved to be closer to a sick relative, and the second ones got a sudden job transfer. No ghosts.

  “I’m a kid,” I said finally. “Nobody ever tells me anything.” It wasn’t a total lie. Mr. Grafton hadn’t told me about seeing the O’Dells. “Hey, I got stuff to do before my mother gets back. Have you talked to the neighbors?”

  He looked unhappy. “Asking people if they’ve ever seen ghosts replaying a gruesome murder is no way to make friends.”

  I almost said I was sorry, then thought, why should I apologize? He was the one seeing things. He thanked me for listening and left, and I went to sort laundry in the basement, where I couldn’t hear the doorbell.

  I didn’t tell my mother about Ralph Costa right away, but the longer I put it off, the harder it would be to explain why. And if she heard about it from Ralph first, she’d have a cow: A stranger has to tell me what you’re doing—do you know how that makes me look? Divorce had made her touchy.

  But what could I say? Hey, Mom, that guy who thought Dad murdered you dropped by while you were at the supermarket. Turns out he saw Lily O’Dell’s ghost. But wait, it gets better—did you know Lily ran up our front steps and Gideon dragged her into the street by her hair? I couldn’t even imagine that shitstorm, but I was pretty sure it would end up being all my fault.

  God, grown-ups had no idea of the trouble they made for kids just by running their big fat mouths. Damn them, I thought, feeling angry, miserable, and cornered. Damn them all, even the ones who didn’t stab their wives to death in the street. How the hell was a kid supposed to deal?

  Finally, a couple of nights later, fortified by takeout beer-battered fish and chips, I decided I’d just go for it. Only what I heard myself say was, “Mom, did I really sleep through Lily O’Dell getting killed?”

  For a moment, I didn’t think she was going to answer. Then: “Actually, I’m pretty sure you saw the whole thing.”

  I felt my jaw drop. She watched me gape at her for a few moments, then sighed. “If I tell you about that night—and I can only tell you what I saw—promise me you won’t obsess about it.”

  “Okay, I won’t.”

  “I mean it. And don’t go blabbing to all your friends.”

  Before I could answer, her hand was clamped around my wrist, not tightly enough to be painful but it wasn’t comfortable, either. “Seriously. If I find out you’re trying to impress your friends with this, the consequences will be”—she paused for half a second—“severe.”

  What are you gonna do, kill me? I suppressed the thought, hoping her mom ESP hadn’t picked it up. “I give you my word.”

  Like that, she let go and was back to casual. “You were sleepwalking that night.”

  “You never told me I sleepwalked!” I was flabbergasted.

  “Only a few times, and it never happened again after that night.” She shrugged.

  “Did you take me to the doctor?”

  “Of course we did,” she said, almost snapping. I opened my mouth to say something else and she glared at me. “Gale, do you want to talk about sleepwalking or Lily O’Dell? I’m too tired for both.”

  I was on the verge of telling her I was sorry motherhood was such a burden but caught myself. Her lawyer had phoned earlier. Those calls seldom put her in a good mood.

  “That night?” I said in a small voice.

  • • •

  “It was a Saturday,” my mother said. “After you and Jean went to bed, your father and I stayed up to watch a movie on cable. You got up three times, first wanting a glass of water, then to ask for a PB&J. The third time, you were sleepwalking.”

  My mother sighed. “We didn’t think you could open the front door. Even if you managed to work the bottom lock, you weren’t tall enough to reach the deadbolt or the chain. But we didn’t know how resourceful you could be even asleep. You got your step stool from the front closet.”

  Now she chuckled a little. “The chain lock was still a few inches out of reach, though, so you used the yardstick. It was in the corner right beside the front door. Moving the chain with it wasn’t easy—I tried it myself later—but you were on a mission to get that door open.

  “You’d have been out on the steps with Lily O’Dell if not for the fact that the screen door lock kept sticking. I oiled it, your dad tried axle grease, and Jean even put mayonnaise on it once but that only made it stink and stick.

  “So when Lily O’Dell came up the front steps and begged you to let her in, there was nothing you could do. Except maybe wake up.”

  My mother’s face turned sad. “When I got to you, Gideon O’Dell was dragging Lily into the street. He might have already stabbed her a few times or maybe he’d just beaten her bloody—” My mother stopped and shuddered. “Just beaten her bloody. Jesus wept.

  “Anyway, there was so much blood on your face and your pajama top, I was afraid Gideon O’Dell had hurt you, too. But it was all Lily’s—she’d pushed in the screen and grabbed at you. I cleaned you up, changed your pajamas, then put you to bed in our room and told you to stay there. Naturally, you didn’t. I found you asleep by the window in your room.”

  I waited, but she didn’t go on. “Then what?”

  “We let you sleep in. You woke up around noon and as far as we could tell, you didn’t remember a thing.”

  “I don’t see how that’s possible.” I was picturing Lily O’Dell on the other side of the screen door, beaten and bloody and begging for help.

  “You were very young,” my mother said for what must have been the millionth time. “The doctor said your mind was protecting you from trauma.”

  “But wasn’t Jean traumatized?”

  My mother smiled a little. “I wouldn’t l
et her put on her glasses. Your sister was so nearsighted she couldn’t see past the end of the driveway.” She finished the last bit of wine in her glass. “If you’ve got questions, ask now—after this, the subject is closed. Forever.”

  “But I need to think,” I said, wincing inwardly at how whiny I sounded.

  “Think faster, kid.” There was a hard, all-but-pitiless edge in my mother’s voice I’d rarely heard before. Sometimes she sounded like that with her lawyer, and most of the time with my father. But she was supposed to show she loved me no matter what. Those were the rules, she was my mother.

  Correction: she was my getting-divorced mother; she made her own rules.

  She put her hand on the base of her empty wine glass and I blurted, “Did you take me to another doctor? Like a psychologist or a shrink?”

  “We didn’t need to,” she said. “Dr. Tran said you were perfectly healthy and suggested we consider the kind of deadbolt that needs an indoor key. Or put a bell on your bedroom door.” My mother laughed a little. “We tried that. But not for long—your singing ‘Jingle Bells’ out of season drove us all crazy. You never sleepwalked again anyway.”

  That explained a vague memory of singing Christmas carols in an inflatable kiddie pool in the backyard. “Did you talk to Dr. Tran about my repressed memory?”

  My mother glanced up at the ceiling. “It’s not a repressed memory.”

  “But—”

  “You’ve forgotten plenty else in your life and those aren’t repressed memories,” my mother said. A hard little line appeared between her eyebrows and I knew I was pushing it. “Nobody remembers every detail of their lives.”

  “But something like that ?” I said.

  “I told you, your brain was protecting you,” my mother replied. “Probably saved you years of therapy, if not decades. But if you drive yourself crazy because you weren’t traumatized, I’ll go upside your head.”

  “Is that why you and Dad are getting divorced?” I asked. “Because you’re traumatized?”