Echoes

by Ellen Datlow

  It turned out the surprise was on me.

  The dome light of my truck was already on.

  I stood there, two steps off the porch.

  The truck was parked like always, with the driver’s door toward the porch, so I couldn’t tell at first what was going on.

  Was this Kay’s way of telling me she knew what I was doing? Had she come out after dinner, twisted the headlight knob so the dome light would be on when I came out?

  Except Kay is a practical woman. She would never use up the battery just for a joke.

  This was something different.

  I breathed in once, twice, and stepped wide around the bed of my truck.

  The passenger door was open.

  There was a pale lower leg extending from it, keeping contact with the driveway. A bare foot, the veins in it pulsing gray.

  Jeanie Silber.

  Locked doors don’t matter to the dead.

  I stared and stared at that leg. It was moving slightly. She was in the truck, looking for something. Not on the seat, where the pots and pans were, but the . . . floorboard?

  Then, as smooth as oil, that leg pulled itself up into the truck.

  I looked up to the back glass, fully expected her face to be pressed there, watching me.

  Nothing.

  How could there even be room in there for her, with the seat taken up by the pots and pans?

  I opened my mouth, was maybe going to say something, I guess—I can’t imagine what—but was interrupted by her pale right hand reaching delicately down out of the cab, past the rocker panel.

  Her fingers were spread, the pad of each finger delicately coming into contact with the packed dirt of the driveway. Like she was relishing it. Like she was putting on a show.

  But she didn’t know I was there, I don’t think.

  Then, quick as a cat, the rest of her poured out of the truck.

  It left her on all fours.

  At which point she did see me.

  Her lips peeled back from her teeth and she hissed.

  I stumbled back, sure she was coming for me, but then she stood instead. Into the girl I’d sort of known.

  What I keyed on, what I couldn’t help noticing, it wasn’t her oily hair, her drawn cheeks, her hipbones and ribs nearly pushing through her gown. It was her left hand.

  It was balled into a fist.

  She was holding something.

  I looked from her hand up to her face. There was a line of fluid starting to descend from a corner of her mouth—my first thought was it was all the spit we’d rubbed into the dashboard—and then the porch light clicked on all at once.

  I turned to tell Kay no, no, turn it off, and when I jerked my eyes back to the truck, Jeanie was gone.

  • • •

  Still I didn’t tell Kay.

  As far as she knew, she’d caught me trying to sneak a present in for her.

  But, when I reached into the truck to pull the box of pots and pans to me, I did it slow enough to case the cab of the truck. From my twenty-minute drive into the dealership, and from it just being my truck, I knew every speck of it, every molecule.

  For two weeks, at that point, I’d been keeping an eye on that broken blue rubber band from under the dog collar display in Haverly, that I’d left in the passenger side floorboard. I’m generally pretty neat about my truck, will pinch up fluff from the carpet, brush lint from the seat covers. This rubber band, it was an anomaly over there under the glove compartment.

  I’d been telling myself I could throw it away any time I wanted. Just, I didn’t want to, quite yet.

  Had I have thrown it out, then none of the rest would have happened, I don’t think. Had I left it in a trash can at the dealership, or just let it go out the window, or even returned it to the IGA, then Jeanie never would have had to come to my house for it.

  It was just a rubber band, though.

  How could I have known?

  It was what had been clenched in her left fist. It was what I saw missing, when I leaned down to hug Kay’s pots and pans to my chest, haul them inside.

  When I worked them down to my thigh, too, to lock the passenger door before closing it, I had to note that the passenger door was already locked. That it was still locked.

  The next morning, Kay inaugurated the pots and pans with breakfast, and, maybe I expected the eggs to carry some bitter tinge from having been close to the dead, but they didn’t. Everything was good. Everything was great, even. Normal.

  Until I went out to walk the fence. It was kind of my Sunday ritual in lieu of church, I guess.

  Because we’re just down from the lake, all the high schoolers out popping coyotes, they tend to leave their beer cans in my ditch. I don’t fault them for it. I was just the same at their age. I used to think a beer can fading in the grass through the years made the world feel lived in. Really, I was just leaving those cans to show signs of my passage, I suppose. To prove I’d been there. To pretend, at least to myself, that I mattered, that I was leaving a mark.

  My Sunday ritual was to walk out to the road in as straight a line as I could, because a straight line is the most efficient line. It’s not that I’m compulsive about wasted steps, but, since Kay had us both wearing those watch things that counted our activity through the day, I’d become aware of my walking in a new way.

  There were only fourteen cans, from at most two cases—two different brands. A light Saturday night. Good for the coyotes.

  The way I could tell if I’d walked straight or not, it was that, coming from the road, the winter wheat I’d always run there just out of habit—I didn’t hire anybody to come in with their combine, just let it seed out—it would show where my feet had parted it, coming through. From the house it was invisible, because of the way the stalks bent, with the wind. But, from the road, my path would be a line of shadow that would last for a day or two, like when you rub suede the wrong way.

  My path was arrow straight.

  Jeanie’s wasn’t.

  I stood there at the fence for probably five minutes.

  At the house, Kay was hanging her new copper pots and pans this way, then that way. By my leg in a plastic bag were fourteen beer cans, to pour into the recycling bin in the garage. There cutting through the wheat was one trail, going home, and another, leading off somewhere else.

  I followed Jeanie Silber.

  • • •

  You can tell where the dead have passed.

  I didn’t want to have to know this, but I do.

  I don’t think they’re solid, not in the way we are, but there’s something there that—it interacts at some level with the world.

  Jeanie’s ghost legs had parted the wheat the same as mine had, but the wheat stopped where the trees started, and the trees are thick enough that there’s only leaf litter under them. The loam was mucky enough in low spots that there could have been a footprint, but I don’t think Jeanie really weighed anything. Not in a way that can press a shape into mud, anyway.

  But there were kind of shadows on the trees. That’s the only thing I know to call where her hands had touched, as she passed through. In the movies, when an elf girl is running through the woods, she’s always stopping to lean on this tree, look back, to lean on that tree, look ahead.

  That’s what Jeanie was doing.

  Not every tree had a smudge of shadow. But when I found one, I could stand there, take a bearing, study all around me enough until I fixed on another point of darkness.

  A couple hundred yards into the trees, even though I’d been back here setting blinds and chasing dogs for fifteen years, I started dropping my shiny beer cans behind me, to mark my path. Then I’d walk ahead a bit and look back, make sure the can was still there.

  In some of those stories about elf women, they’re leading men out deeper and deeper. For their own reasons. I know this, but I kept following her all the same.

  I’d just dropped my twelfth can, meaning I was maybe a half-mile gone, was going to hit the lake soon, w
hen I saw a tree with one whole side smudged with shadow.

  I circled it. Looked all around.

  And then I looked up.

  Jeanie Silber wasn’t up there like a cat, waiting to spring on me. But she had been up there. I could tell she’d crawled up on the north side. The bark was darker there.

  I sat one silvery can on the east side of the tree, one on the west, like performing my own ritual, and then I hauled myself up on the thickest limb.

  Like most of the trees this close to the lake, this one had a kind of crotch right up where the trunk split into all its big limbs. As a kid, we’d sometimes find coachwhips coiled up there. Always just one snake, never a bunch of them. One time I’d found a rat nest in that kind-of hollow, sunless space, and came back to it with a pump-jug of kerosene, flushed the rats out. They’d flowed down the tree screaming.

  Usually it was just rotting leaves and such, though. Maybe a dead bird.

  That’s what this tree was holding: nothing much.

  Not until I pulled myself all the way up, set my foot there to climb higher.

  My boot crunched in, through the sodden twigs, the rotting leaves.

  There was a cavity there, of sorts. It belched up a stench that made me cover my nose with the back of my wrist.

  I stood there for a long minute, my foot pushed down into that space.

  What I was waiting for was Jeanie, roused like I’d once roused those rats. Maybe this was where she slept. Maybe this was where she’d been living ever since the wreck.

  It made as much sense as anything.

  She wasn’t there. But she had left something: the blue rubber band. It was down there in the muck, along with a silver tack, a sharp little white tooth, a piece of fabric, and maybe a rock. I couldn’t tell if the rock was just there already, or if it was part of her collection.

  I knew better than to touch them.

  This was for the dead, not for the living.

  I lowered myself slowly from the tree, stood there by the trunk breathing hard.

  As much and as hard as I cased the woods around me, there were no more shadowy handprints leading anywhere.

  My guess was that, in order to carry the corporeal thing the rubber band was, Jeanie had to be corporeal herself, for as long as that walk took. Afterward, though, after she’d delivered her cargo, she could just step into that same space she had when she left the grocery store, the same place she’d gone in an instant, when Kay turned the porch light on.

  I don’t know the rules of the dead. Don’t let me tell you otherwise.

  But I did, now, know that they like to collect cast-off nothings, and secret them away in hidey-holes.

  I also knew I wasn’t supposed to know this. I wasn’t supposed to have found this hidey-hole. Because I was alive.

  I walked away without looking back, and didn’t even need the beer cans to find my way home.

  • • •

  Until the week before Christmas, I was able to pretend that Thanksgiving and Jeanie Silber had never happened. Sales were in a slump, but that’s the way it always is in December. Come January, I’d be standing in the showroom and getting to decide which couple out in the lot I wanted to carry hot chocolate to, as hello.

  The only real difference in me, I think, was that I had become the neat freak around the offices. Which, I say “offices,” but we’re really all in cubicles, so we can stand up and ask this or that to whoever happens to be available. It’s supposed to make the buyer feel like we’re all a family. They don’t know that the questions we ask each other are all part of a script, some standard call and response, but that’s neither here nor there. What matters about the cubicle situation is that I was always the one pinching my slacks up a bit, to squat down, pick up this stray paper clip, that staple. Whatever trash there was.

  I didn’t want to round a cubicle wall, see Jeanie pinching the staple up from the threads of the carpet.

  I wondered if the junk she was compelled to collect was stuff that had happened to be on the dash she’d lost her life on. A rubber band. A tack. A random pebble. I wondered if it was like that for all of us, if we’re all compelled to spend eternity chasing down whatever arbitrary detritus that’s with us at the moment we go. I wondered what would happen if she ever collected it all. I wondered and wondered and wondered, and I left the doors on my truck unlocked, most nights, and once, ferrying a garden hose to Kay’s parents, I’d even walked the aisles of the IGA in Haverly again. The girl with pierced lips wasn’t there, and the cardboard dog collar display had been retired, and the floors were fresh-waxed, not a speck to pick up, throw away.

  I left feeling better.

  One night, even, in a partial unburdening, I asked Kay if her high school had heard about our big car wreck over here, prom night. It serioused Kay down, kind of made her wince. She looked up and to the left, which is where the past is located, I guess.

  “We did a candle thing,” she said, moving green beans around on her plate. “A vigil, I mean.”

  “We never knew,” I told her.

  She laughed, stabbed a green bean, said, “Were we supposed to call over, say y’all should send someone over, to see how much we care?”

  I smiled too.

  She was right, as usual. You do a thing because it’s right, not because you want it to be acknowledged as right.

  Not that the dead care much about candles, I don’t think.

  I wondered if what Jeanie was doing was trying to arrange her little bits of junk so as to make a doorway or a path Clint could come back through, or on.

  Why was she in that aisle, and not him?

  Or, was he just in some other aisle, in some other little town around here? Did he have his own hidey-hole—a coffee can left to rust out in the tall grass, a hubcap leaned up against a fence?

  You can think your whole life on what the dead do, and why they do it, and not get any closer to figuring it out.

  Until I saw Jeanie, I don’t guess I ever even considered them. My older sister used to have a story about a ghost she’d seen, but she had stories about everything, if telling them meant you’d sit there and listen to her.

  In the movies and on television, the dead are usually hanging around for justice, or to tell some secret.

  Not Jeanie.

  She just wanted the rubber bands we were always losing track of. She wanted to hold them close and scurry away, put them in their perfect place. Like a child, I guess. A child with a rock they find by the lake, how they’ll designate that rock special, perfect, a forever rock, and then you have to put it up in the windowsill until they grow up, forget about it.

  Maybe that’s the dead. Maybe they’re like children. Maybe they’re starting over.

  I wish that for Jeanie.

  It’s a cliché, but she really did have her whole life in front of her, that prom night. It wasn’t fair she was in that car after the last dance, meeting that tractor at seventy miles per hour. But at least it had been a good prom for her. At graduation, when the photograph of her and Clint Berkot went up onscreen, her in her shiny purple dress, him in his big brother’s suit jacket, there hadn’t been a dry eye in the auditorium. Including me.

  In a way, it was like Jeanie and Clint could have been any one of us. Like they’d died instead of all of us.

  Maybe when Clint’s Grand Prix had drifted over into the ditch, when the grass had started hissing against the undercarriage, maybe Jeanie had reached across to hold his hand on the gearshift, and maybe she’d smiled at the thrill of it all, and maybe she’d gone out like that—happy, full, ready for life.

  I hoped so.

  You’ll notice that’s in the past tense, there.

  That’s because this isn’t over.

  • • •

  Two days before Christmas, Kay’s mother fell and broke her hip. It was terrible, but it could have been worse. That’s what we tell ourselves, right, so as not to call down any more bad luck? We play like we’re grateful for the bad luck we’ve already had.
Like not complaining can be the end of it.

  Kay’s father had been right there in the living room when it happened, anyway, and the ambulance had been there minutes later, and it was all going as well as it could. Kay and I had never had kids, just flocks of nieces and nephews, so, while we tried to make Christmas up into something special, it was really just going to be a day off from work, when we’d let ourselves pour a couple fingers of this or that into our morning coffee.

  I wasn’t even thinking of Jeanie Silber after Kay left for the hospital again, I mean.

  Not until I noticed, way down at the end of the stretch of road I could see, a dull yellow tractor parked on that steep slope like it was a lost cow, trying to clamber back up onto the blacktop. It wasn’t pulling a shredder—cutting the dead grass in the heart of winter didn’t make much sense—had probably been dropped off there to dig for a power line or a utility pole, but still, it was the same color as the one Jeanie and Clint had rammed into at seventy, nineteen years ago.

  I stood on the porch and drank my coffee and made a mental note to call in when the county offices were open again, see if any of our services were going to be interrupted before the new year.

  And then I heard it: a car’s radials, whining in the distance. Coming this way, and fast.

  I shook my head no, that this was nothing, that I was being stupid, but, stupid or not, I dropped my coffee, was running in my slippers down the drive, waving my arms.

  I didn’t make it even close to in time.

  It didn’t matter.

  The car was a Buick, light blue. It slipped past, unaware of the fate I’d been so sure of.

  I stood there, and fell to my knees when the Buick was gone. In thanks.

  I wasn’t crying, I’m not sure my eyes really know how to anymore, but there was a choking sob or something welling up in my throat.

  I hadn’t known Jeanie Silber, no.

  But she had died, instead of any of the rest of us.

  And then—and then I realized: If that was true, if one or two of the graduating class had been meant to die that prom night, just to keep the statistics accurate or the books balanced or whatever, then . . . then if she was coming back, that meant it was one of our turn to step behind the veil in her place, right?