by Ellen Datlow
The Tree of Self-Knowledge
Stephen Graham Jones
Jeanie Silber died the night of our prom, nineteen years ago. I almost just said it was an ugly wreck, but any wreck that snatches two kids in their senior year is ugly, I think. For years afterward, Clint Berkot’s Grand Prix was the one you’d see in the parades, being pulled on a flatbed trailer. They never even put signs or words on it, or on the doors of the truck pulling it. But it didn’t need any signs. Its crunched-in front end and shattered windshield and crumpled doors and wheels not in line with each other anymore was warning enough. Because of Jeanie and Clint, class after class of Titans graduated whole and intact. Not dead. Not ramming into a dull yellow grass-cutting tractor cocked in the ditch.
There was never any explanation for how Clint’s car got that far off the road.
It was a tragedy, plain and simple.
Clint and Jeanie were just like the rest of us. They were going to class, counting the days, biting their fingernails about jobs and life and kids and everything else that was coming for us. Clint wasn’t the quarterback, Jeanie wasn’t homecoming queen. Normal kids, part-time jobs, church probably two times a month, out of habit. He was towheaded, she had kind of red hair, like her mom. This was, I believe, their fourth official date. Maybe they were going to keep on with each other too. Maybe they were going to have the next crop of kids to catch candy at the parade, and then stare at the wrecked car being dragged past.
I didn’t go to prom myself. Not because of any intuition or premonition—this isn’t that kind of place, I’m not that kind of person—but for the usual reason. I didn’t have a date. My girlfriend Chrissy had dumped me two weeks before, and cried so hard while doing it I thought she was going to choke. All these years later, I can’t even remember exactly why she broke up, but I do remember the relief I felt when it was over. It wasn’t the pleasure of being unattached at the hip, released into the wild again. It was that, with graduation looming, one of us was going to have to break up. It was either that or get married. You grow up in a small town like Milford, this is just how it works.
I did end up married, of course, and that next year, even, to Kay, the love of my life. She’s from Haverly, the next town over, and graduated a year before I did. We met at the courthouse of all places, were both paying speeding tickets. I know that probably sounds like I’m setting something up: Jeanie died in a car going, by the highway patrol’s estimation, seventy-plus miles per hour, and a year later I got popped doing thirty-five in a school zone, but it’s not any setup. The cops around here have a quota; tickets are a main source of revenue for the county.
As for me and Jeanie, there’s nothing really to tell. We’d gone to a movie in the park together in either seventh or eighth grade, but had gone different ways by the time of the next school dance. That’s how it is when you’re a kid: you try on this person, that person, and you keep on moving. What you’re doing, I think, is trying out different versions of who you are, or who you can be. With Jeanie, I remember I wanted her to think I was tough. How I got that across to her was by dismissing all the horror movies my big brother let me watch, when our parents were asleep. Maybe she was impressed, maybe she wasn’t. It doesn’t matter. I do still think about those movies in my weaker moments, but less and less as the years stack up.
Until Thanksgiving, that is.
Now they’re all crowding in around me.
Because it’s what you do when you’re married, Kay and I alternate holidays with her parents and mine. This year it’s supposed to be Christmas here in Milford, with my mom and her turkey we’ll eat just enough of to be polite, meaning Thanksgiving was in Haverly, with Kay’s parents.
What happened was Kay’s mother needed some fast-rising yeast from the store, for her famous rolls, and, since I was the one of us in the living room doing nothing—watching the game—I got volunteered to make the necessary run down to the store.
Of course I tried to engineer the trip as close to halftime as I could, but the third time Kay stepped into the doorway to look from me to the television, I got the hint.
“I can’t wait for her rolls either,” I said to her, draining the last of my beer as if those last couple of drinks had been the only thing keeping me planted on the couch.
“Neither can she,” Kay said, with an edge.
I eased my way to the door, collected my red windbreaker—got to show team pride—and hotfooted it out to the truck.
From previous Thanksgivings, we knew the IGA was open until four. I still had twenty minutes. It should have been just a quick jaunt down the road and back, and some idle conversation with the unlucky high schooler caught behind the register.
Except.
This wasn’t my home store, quite. I mean, every grocery store’s more or less alike, but there’s peculiarities, too. In Milford, I probably could have zeroed in on the fast-rising yeast inside of thirty seconds. In Haverly, I was trolling up and down the aisles. Would it be in the bakery section? No. With the butter? No, and I was probably only checking there because I loved to go overboard on the butter, on Thanksgiving. The cooking aisle, then, with the spices and birthday candles and small packages of walnuts and pecans.
No.
Finally I had to ask, but the kid at the register—I’d nodded to her on the way in, pursed my lips about all the piercings in hers—had abandoned her post, evidently. Usually you can find a stocker or a manager, but this was a holiday.
I stood there in meats, the seconds ticking down until halftime, and finally nodded to myself.
The back, the stockroom, behind the milk. There’d be somebody back there. There would have to be, in case a surprise delivery showed up.
I stood at the double aluminum doors and called ahead: “Hello?”
No answer.
I looked both ways, nodded to myself that this was justified, and stepped into the employee-only area.
It was cooler back there. And dimmer.
“Hello?” I called out again.
This was getting ridiculous. Had the store already closed, the front door just been left unlocked? Was I going to singlehandedly ruin Thanksgiving dinner?
No, I wasn’t.
Moving in a way meant to signal that I wasn’t at home here, that I didn’t assume my being back in the stockroom was all right, I edged into the suite of thin-walled offices I would have assumed were there, had I ever thought about it. You have to interview people somewhere, I guess. The motion-sensor lights were off, even in what looked like the break room.
“Hello?” I said again, quieter. With no heart behind it anymore.
If I’d thought to bring my phone, I could have called Kay, asked her to ask her mother where the yeast was. This way I could at least document that I’d tried. I could have used the store phone, I suppose, but I didn’t think of that then.
I just wanted some famous rolls. And to watch the rest of the game. And to maybe talk to an actual human in a blue apron and off-white name tag.
Walking with more purpose now, I pushed through the transparent strips of plastic into the space behind the deli counter. Then I knocked on the door of the freezer, I couldn’t really say why. Nobody knocked back.
I laughed to myself. I ran my fingers through what’s left of my hair.
I decided that the girl with the rings through her lips would be my answer. That she was probably standing out by the ice cooler on the sidewalk, smoking an unauthorized cigarette or three.
That had to be it.
When I couldn’t figure how to get across the deli counter without clambering over it, falling down into a mess of ice that probably smelled of shrimp, I retraced my steps through the plastic strips and stockroom, pushed through the aluminum doors from the other side, stepped back onto what we’d call the sales floor at the dealership.
The store was just as deserted as before.
“Hello!” I called again.
Nothing, no one.
I walked down the wide aisle that divided th
e front of the store from the back, then hooked it left to beeline the registers.
I was walking past the toys on one side, the hardware on the other. Pop guns and mousetraps.
And then I stopped.
The IGA in Haverly is one of those stores—maybe because there’s a pharmacy in back?—where there’s angled-down mirrors all around the edge of the ceiling.
I looked up into the one slanted up over me, and it gave me the aisle I’d just stalked down.
Way at the back of it, there was a narrow wisp of a girl with auburn hair.
She was squatted down at the edge of a cardboard display like kids do, where you bend both knees out.
But she wasn’t a kid, quite. She was a woman. Seventeen, eighteen. Not the girl from the register, either. The girl from the register had had all black on under her blue apron.
This girl was wearing a thin, kind-of-white dress. Almost a nightgown.
The reason she was squatted down was she was reaching under the cardboard display, reaching deep enough she had to drop her shoulder down, turn her head to the side, away from me.
My first, unbidden thought, it was that she was hiding her face because of what Clint Berkot’s dashboard had done to it.
That was when I realized it was Jeanie Silber, dead for nineteen years.
• • •
Thanksgiving wasn’t ruined because of me showing back up to the house late. It turned out Kay’s mom had an emergency pack of yeast. Nobody noticed the desperation I drank the rest of my six-pack with, and if Kay’s dad noted the delay between him asking questions about the score and me answering, he didn’t comment on it.
And of course I didn’t say anything about Jeanie.
By the time I’d turned around, from the mirror to the aisle, she was gone.
I’d stood there with my heart pounding in my chest.
Finally, I breathed.
I’m not too proud to say I yelped when the girl from the register spoke from behind me, either, asking was I ready to check out.
She jumped too, and we laughed about it, alone in a grocery store on Thanksgiving Day.
“Do you know where the yeast stuff is?” I asked.
“For an—an . . . ,” she stammered, trying to find a way to say “infection,” I was pretty sure.
“Cooking,” I told her.
She relaxed, smiled, the silver rings in her lips glinting in the fluorescents, and together we found the last of the yeast, gathered together in a holiday endcap with the gravy packets.
“Anything else?” the girl asked, and I chanced a look up into the mirrors, shook my head no, and I paid with cash.
Three days later, though, I strolled back in.
Rolling between my fingers in my jacket pocket was a dime from the ashtray of my truck.
Looking at the items on their hooks at the other end of the toys and hardware aisle, I fumbled the dime down, then knelt to find it.
Tentatively, I pushed my hand under the cardboard display. It was for dog collars.
That was the part I couldn’t get over: What could Jeanie Silber have come back for?
It let me jump right over the fact that she was back at all.
I pushed my right hand into the unswept place, cast my fingers around blindly, and then, for a moment I’m as sure of as I’ve ever been sure of anything, a set of fingers lightly brushed the top of my forearm.
I stood all at once, toppling the cardboard display.
There was nothing under it.
The blue aprons collapsed on me. I guess I’m old enough at thirty-seven to look like I might need medical help.
I assured them it was nothing, I’d tripped, this was no cause for concern, and I tried to help them collect the dog collars I’d spilled. But then one of them looked up, her lower lip accented silver.
“Yeast,” she said to me, like making an identification.
“I’m sorry,” I said to all of them, and found the door myself, waited until the cab of my truck to close my eyes tight, let the panic breathing come. I rubbed and rubbed my forearm, where that contact had been made.
When it was over, I reached over with my left hand for the keys hooked to the belt loop on my right side, and registered at the last moment that this was wrong, that this wasn’t my left hand’s job.
Or, it was only my left hand’s job when my right hand was busy.
I opened my right hand slowly, not even completely aware I’d had it clenched into a fist.
A dusty blue, broken rubber band.
I shook it off my palm, into the passenger side floorboard, and I drove back to Milford.
• • •
I could have told Kay about this, I know. Maybe I even should have told her about all this. What I tell myself is if there been something to show, something to prove I wasn’t losing it, I would have told her.
And, the thing about Kay? She would have listened. She wouldn’t have been trying to suppress a grin. She wouldn’t tell me I was getting carried away. I’m not saying she’s any kind of true believer, into crystals and horoscopes. Kay’s down to earth, always has been.
I think maybe the reason I didn’t tell her, it was that I didn’t want to have to imagine what she would be thinking while I was telling her. That her husband of eighteen years was starting to slip. That he was starting to see things. That he was starting to see people from his past, people who had died.
Which? Okay, so I’m going to be haunted. Fine. But why Jeanie Silber? Of all people? I hardly knew Jeanie. That movie we saw in the park, I don’t even remember for sure what movie it was. I know more about Clint Berkot’s Grand Prix they died in than I know about Jeanie. I can tell you what water pump it needs, I know what tires came factory on it, I remember a ding on the left side of its rear bumper.
If any of the dead people from my past were going to start slouching around in my peripheral vision, it should have been my dad. There’s some unfinished business there, I’d say. He could come back, tell me where the 9/16 box-end wrench that completes his prize set was. He could give me some parting message to pass on to Mom, I don’t know.
He would make sense, anyway.
With Jeanie . . . I don’t know. What it feels like with Jeanie, it’s that I was in a grocery store that was supposed to be ninety-nine percent empty. Like she’d targeted it right at that moment, so she could be there, do what she needed to be doing.
As for what that was, whatever errand she needed to run now that she was dead, I thought on that for probably two weeks after Thanksgiving. She’d wanted something, that was obvious. Something that was supposed to have been under that cardboard display of dog collars.
My impulse was to go back, stake the toy and hardware aisle out, catch her in the act, make her open her fist, reveal the earring or whatever she had to have. Do the dead like shiny things? Once you’re dead, do you start thinking like a raccoon, or a largemouth bass?
It made as much sense as anything.
And then there was the fact that she hadn’t aged even one day, as near as I could tell. It made sense, I supposed, but what I couldn’t figure out was where all the blood went. From what happened to her in the wreck. From what made her funeral be closed-casket. In death, do you dial back a few minutes, to how you used to be? Do you take on the form you kind of remember for yourself?
The blood, though . . . I’m kind of ashamed to say this. But I should get it out.
Clint Berkot’s Grand Prix. That summer after graduation, when it was still just sitting down at Salmon’s U-Pull-It yard, we’d go sit around and drink beers, toasting Jeanie and Clint into the afterlife. Salmon didn’t mind. One or two nights, he even dragged a bench seat up himself, drank right along with us. One of those nights, he showed us a trick, too. Evidently you can trail a line of spit down onto a dashboard somebody’s cracked their face open on, and, if there’s enough blood left in the vinyl, the water in your spit’ll reactivate it, make it bloom red again.
It felt holy and wrong at the same time, rubbing
our spit into that dash. Rubbing our fingers in Jeanie’s blood.
That’s not why I saw her in the IGA, though. If it was, then Dave Timmons and Gracie Elder and Nash Waldrop and the rest of them would be seeing her too.
No, I’m fairly certain it was just that I wasn’t supposed to be there then, in that grocery store. And, even had Jeanie allowed that some last-moment shopper was going to be there, then what were the chances it would be someone who would recognize an un-aged girl who died nineteen years ago?
What happened was simple: I saw her when I wasn’t supposed to, when she was doing whatever small things the dead do.
And then I saw her again.
• • •
Because I was feeling guilty for not telling Kay about Jeanie—it wasn’t like I was cheating or keeping secrets, I know—I’d bought her a new set of pots and pans. I knew she wanted them because she’d been strategically leaving the catalog they were in open on the coffee table, on the kitchen counter.
Kay’s never been the kind to ask for anything, especially anything as extravagant as this set of copper pots and pans, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t covet them. Maybe she didn’t even know she was leaving the catalog open on their page. Maybe she’d be looking at them and then just drift off, into a version of the world where those pans were hanging from a rack over the island in the kitchen.
And, I don’t mean to reduce Kay to the kitchen, understand. She’s the most successful realtor in her office, has been on the town council, and she’s getting her master’s degree by correspondence. But she loves to cook, too. So I’d ordered that set of pots and pans, had them delivered to the dealership, and then smuggled them home in the passenger seat of my truck, left them there because that was the one place Kay wouldn’t stumble on them.
We live a good half mile from our closest neighbor, but still, I’d locked the door, and checked the passenger side too. Just on the chance.
Now, in my robe and slippers, Kay fast asleep, her book still open on her chest, I was sneaking out to my truck for her surprise. Because I was sneaking, I turned the porch light off, didn’t want anything giving me away.