Echoes

by Ellen Datlow

  “Sam! What the fuck!”

  She smiled, teeth a white flash in the dark.

  “Thought it was you, from behind,” she said, smiling. “You live near here?”

  “Uh, yeah . . . near the old chocolate factory . . . but you? What’re you up to?”

  It was hard to talk, the slope getting steeper, no breath to spare and the memories coming back, and a sudden tension because Sam looked fantastic and he felt the attraction and remembered that one night and here she was again and maybe . . . maybe . . . but he was married now, and he and Jeanne had a baby . . . and that night with Sam, it hadn’t been all—

  “Oh, I’ve been all over,” she said, not even gasping a little for air though Jules had his head down now, nose flaring, mouth half open, trying not to show how badly he needed the oxygen he was sucking back. “London, Vietnam, then Thailand. Boston most recently. But I had to come back. To the old house.”

  “W-what? The . . . the . . . share house?”

  He was puffed, it was hard to talk.

  “Yep. Good old Fifty-Two Lawrence Street.”

  The share house. Ten of them had lived in it when Jules was there, in seven bedrooms, though the house had eight. One bedroom was always empty. The little one at the back, that might have been some sort of laundry or servant room, in the days when the house had been a grand mansion and not a run-down dump rented out to ever-changing groups of students and hangers-on. It was too damp to stay in, that small bedroom. Beads of water slid down the walls like sweat, and the floorboards were rotten. It smelled, too, of rot and neglect and despair.

  Not that any of this had stopped Jules and Sam that one time. They’d taken their roach ends and the almost-empty bottle of Captain Cayman rum and all the pillows from the big sofa in the lounge and slunk out there, hiding from the rest of the household who’d almost certainly blab to Jules’s and Sam’s respective current girlfriend and boyfriend, intentionally or not. Besides, the room out the back seemed neutral ground, like if they had sex there it wouldn’t matter so much as if they did it in one of their own rooms.

  “W-w-why?”

  Jules almost couldn’t get the word out. Sam had been increasing the pace, almost without him realising it. They were practically sprinting up the steepest part of the hill.

  “Explain later,” said Sam. She winked at him, slow, like she’d done that time when they were gradually sliding together in the lounge room, smoking dope and drinking rum, the possibility between them growing into definite, mutual decision. Only this time he wasn’t entirely sure he’d seen it, they were moving fast, there was sweat pouring down his forehead, getting in his eyes, and it was still velvety dark, none of the streetlights on this stretch were working.

  “Come to the house! Tonight after work!”

  Suddenly, excruciatingly, she sped up even more, leaving Jules behind. He tried to catch her, for six, seven steps, then abruptly folded, staggering into the curb where he went down on both knees to throw up his coffee and last night’s dinner—he always had breakfast after his run. By the time Jules looked up, shocked and embarrassed, Sam was disappearing around the corner, shapely legs moving in perfect rhythm, arms not so much pumping as slicing through the air on either side.

  Jules sat on the roadside, wiping his mouth. The first faint arc of the sun rose up out of the sea behind him, its light sliding up the road, the birds getting noisier. A few cars started to go by, and then a runner, a man Jules knew by sight.

  “You okay, man?”

  Jules waved him off.

  “Yeah, something I ate. Should’ve given it a miss today.”

  “Nah, not you,” said the runner, taking the opportunity of talking to slow down almost to a walk, though he kept going. “King of the Hill.”

  “What?”

  “That’s what I call you,” said the man over his shoulder. “King of the Hill. Fastest I’ve ever seen anyone taking this. Respect!”

  “Except for Sam,” muttered Jules, but the other runner didn’t hear him; he was fixing the one earbud he’d taken out back in, already getting back into the zone.

  Except for Sam.

  Jules thought about her as he slowly jogged home, his mouth burning with the acrid after-taste of vomit.

  Jeanne and little Cary, their baby, were asleep again after a three a.m. feed and an hour or so of wakefulness after. Jules showered and got dressed for work even more quietly than usual, and slipped out. The drive in to the office, with the noise and the traffic and the bad drivers and the stress helped him put Sam out of his mind. Or almost out of his mind. But never entirely.

  By eleven o’clock, he couldn’t stand it anymore. He got out his phone, about to message Shirley, who’d been one of their housemates and had known Sam the longest. But he decided to call her instead, and she picked up on the second ring.

  “Jules! How’s being a dad?”

  “Good, good,” mumbled Jules. “How’s mother- father- whatever-you-call-it-hood?”

  “Well, you know,” said Shirley. “It’ll all be worth it when Cary and Harry grow up and get married.”

  “No way our son’s going to marry any spawn of yours,” said Jules, half-heartedly. He just didn’t have the strength for their usual banter. “Look, do you ever hear from Sam? Sam Finegold?”

  “Uh, no . . .” Shirley’s voice had changed, no longer the cheery, older sister tone she usually employed with Jules. “To tell you the truth, I’m not entirely sure she’s still with us.”

  “What? Look, the reason I’m asking is I saw . . . I thought I saw her this morning.”

  “And you want to get it on with her again?”

  “No! I just saw . . . I wondered . . . what do you mean again?”

  “We all know you guys did it in that horrible old laundry room.”

  “What . . . no . . . that’s—”

  “Sam confessed to Elijah who told Nadya who told me. That’s why Sam bailed from the house.”

  Jules was silent for a moment. Sam had left the next day, and of course he’d wondered if it was because of what they’d done. Or maybe something else, he was hazy on, having been so stoned and drunk, but there had been something—

  “Shit! But that’s not, I mean,” he stammered. “I’m married, I love Jeanne. I’m good. I just wondered, that’s all. What do you mean not with us? I saw her.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Yeah, I’m sure.”

  “She see you?”

  Jules lied. He wasn’t sure why. Or he was, but didn’t really want to admit it to himself. Shirley was more of Jeanne’s friend these days than she was his. And he did want to get it on again with Sam. He always had.

  “I . . . I don’t know.”

  “Nadya saw her, five years ago,” said Shirley. “In a Buddhist monastery, in Vietnam. Sam didn’t want to know her. Hey, was her head shaved?”

  “I . . . er . . . she was wearing a hoodie.”

  “It was when Nadya saw her. Hard core. Head shaved, saffron robes, the works.”

  “I guess her family, her dad was Vietnamese, so I don’t know, she went back to her roots or whatever. You freaked me out with that ‘not with us anymore,’ I mean if she’s just become a Buddhist monk, okay. I thought you meant dead.”

  “I did mean dead. And her dad was a Catholic, he grew up in Marseilles.”

  “What?”

  “Surely you’re aware of the French Colonial history of Vietnam and the migration of—”

  “No! No! Sam being dead! What do you mean?”

  “Okay, after Nadya saw her in Vietnam, maybe two years ago, she popped up on Facebook again. Account had been inactive for years, but we were still friends there, and I see she’s posted something about being in Boston, for the marathon. So I send her a message and she replies, says sorry she’s been out of touch, she’s got some problems, she’s had to change her name and go dark, and she still can’t talk, and then—

  “You think she got killed in the marathon bombing?”

  “No,
dumbass! This was two years ago, way after the bombing. About a month later, someone else posts on her wall, no one I knew, says they’re a friend and they’ve got bad news, Sam was killed in an accident, out running. That stays up for about a month, no replies to questions, no nothing, and then the account is deleted.”

  “Killed out running.”

  “That’s what the friend said. She was a big runner you know.”

  “Yeah. She . . . uh . . . kind of got me started. Seeing her doing it.”

  “So Sam’s dead. Maybe.”

  “Maybe?”

  “Oh, come on. She messages me that she’s got trouble, has to change her name and hide out or whatever, and then a ‘friend’ posts she’s dead from her own account?”

  “Oh yeah. But . . .”

  “But what? Maybe she’s dead, maybe she isn’t. She was just a housemate from long ago, one of many. Sure, you fucked her. Also one of many. Focus on the people who are alive and who you do actually care about. Or are supposed to. Speaking of which, we’re having Gil’s lasagne when you guys come around Saturday.”

  “But why didn’t I . . .”

  “I have to go, Jules. The past is another whatever and so on. Give Jeanne and young Mr. Grant a kiss from me.”

  “Why didn’t I hear Sam’s footsteps on the road?” asked Jules, but there was no one listening.

  Work got busy for a while. Jules worked through lunch, not noticing he was hungry. About three he went out, got a coffee and a stale cinnamon roll which he ate half of, sitting in the Starbucks window and staring out into space. Looking back through time to that one night, trying to find his way clear through the blurring wash of rum and the swirling dope smoke and—

  “Mee-ow,” he said suddenly, startling the two young women sitting closest. And then they jumped again as he said “Mee-ow!” even louder, and then “Fuck!” followed a few seconds later as he came back into the present and saw everyone staring at him with “Oh, sorry! Sorry! Thinking aloud.”

  Thinking aloud and imitating a cat. Badly. Only he wasn’t trying to imitate a real cat’s miaow. He was imitating . . . someone . . . who was imitating a cat.

  Jules left the café, leaving most of the cinnamon roll behind.

  • • •

  He’d thought it was Sam making the noise. They’d been there quite a while, were going slow this time around—not like when they first went out to the room—in no hurry now. He was down low, head cradled between her legs, Sam’s fingers through his hair and he was . . . and then the fake miaow and he looked up and Sam said, “What’s with the cat noises,” just as he said “Does the miaowing mean you like it or—”

  And then they were scrambling apart and the three inches of rum left in the bottle got spilled on the floor and soaked one of the pillows and they stood close, looking around in the dim light, because there was no actual source of illumination in the room, just what came in from the single high window from the street lamp outside. Which had suited them before, but now most definitely did not.

  “It wasn’t me,” whispered Sam.

  “Me either,” said Jules, going along with it, even though after that sudden excitement he thought it was her, because who else could it be. “But it was . . . it sounded . . .”

  “Right here,” said Sam. “A girl. A young girl. Imitating a cat. Oh my—”

  • • •

  Jules stopped suddenly. People swirled around him. Someone swore as they bumped past, hitting his elbow.

  He couldn’t remember. Sam had said something about a young girl, and the sound. He’d heard the sound again and started to turn around. He’d seen something, but he’d slipped on the spilt rum and fallen down and . . . he couldn’t remember. He’d woken up the next day in his own bed, horribly hungover, throat rasped to pieces by smoke, with a bruise on his head and several splinters in his feet from the rotten floorboards.

  A young girl imitating a cat, Sam had said.

  Mee-ow.

  Sam had gone by the time he managed to stagger out into the shared spaces of the house. Jules was a mess, dazed and confused. He joined in with the others, pretended to wonder why Sam had left so abruptly. But not too much. Housemates came and went all the time, for all sorts of reasons. It was that kind of house.

  A month later Jules left the house too, never having gone out the back to that horrible little laundry room again.

  And he never thought about it. He thought about Sam sometimes, and having sex with her, but it was not in that room. Even though it had been, the only time. He remembered differently, or imagined differently, and the imagined version had taken over from the real, even though on examination it broke apart. He and Sam were real, but everything else around them was stuck-on glitter, made up by his mind to cover up what had really happened.

  Whatever that was.

  • • •

  Jules couldn’t work back in the office. He tried. He phoned home and talked to Jeanne and Cary. At least he exchanged commonplace banalities with Jeanne and made goo-goo noises at Cary, who made random sounds which in all likelihood were not in response to his father.

  At the end of the call, he said he had to work late and wouldn’t be home at the usual time and to not bother setting aside anything for his dinner.

  It was only when he said this Jules realised he was going to go to the old house, he was going to meet Sam and that when he thought of her he had two kind of opposite feelings going on. One was pure lust, which was the same feeling he’d pretty much always had for her, but the other was a kind of slight, rationally damped down fear.

  Maybe she was dead, and that morning he’d seen and talked to a ghost.

  Jules smiled as this thought bubbled up, but at the same time, he didn’t or couldn’t completely dismiss it. He didn’t believe in ghosts, at least not in his brightly lit office. Out running in the pre-dawn, maybe . . .

  Running. Sure, Sam had always been a runner, but she’d never been as fast or as strong as he was, so how had she gone up the hill like that? And why hadn’t he heard her?

  His rational mind provided good answers for both questions. Obviously she had been training, and training hard and properly, more than just the daily to the beach and back run he did himself. As for not hearing her, Jules considered, his mind did wander when he ran. He thought about other stuff, even though he often couldn’t afterwards say what that other stuff was.

  But still he had a kind of frisson up his spine that said Sam might be a ghost, accompanied by the other stronger, frisson that was about her being still very much flesh and blood, in a very attractive package. Only he didn’t like to think he was the kind of guy who would cheat on his wife. Though he had in the past. But he’d decided not to anymore, he’d broken off with Maggie here in the office. Only he might with Sam. Because in a way she predated Jeanne anyway, and they’d never finished properly.

  Whatever, he had to see Sam again. Plus there was the niggling question about what had happened, the whole cat noise thing and the . . . whatever he’d seen. He wanted to know about that. Or actually he wanted to forget it again entirely, and just remember the good bits, but that didn’t seem possible.

  • • •

  Jules parked almost directly opposite the old house as the sun set and the street lights flickered on. All of them, unlike near the beach. Lawrence Street had come up in the world. Same big old falling-down houses for the most part up at this end, but farther along many of the smaller houses had been renovated and extended. There were new cars parked out on the street, something no one would have dared ten years before. The whole area looked more prosperous. Safer and quieter, unlike the old days when there were often people just hanging around.

  He was just thinking this when a movement out of the corner of his eye made him flinch and turn.

  Sam was by the window, bending down to look in. She smiled, a hesitant smile. Uncertain of him. She was wearing different clothes, jeans and a silky top with lots of small buttons, which he found both tempting and reassuring
. If she’d been in running clothes still, like she might have been killed in . . . even though it was absurd to think she might be a ghost.

  But she didn’t tap on the window. People always tapped on windows when they went up to someone in a car. Didn’t they?

  Jules pressed a button, the window slid down.

  “Hi,” she said, with the hesitant smile again, and a catch in her voice. She really was nervous. He didn’t know why. What could this really be about? A sneaky way to see him again? All of a sudden he felt a wave of revulsion at himself, this clandestine meeting, what he half hoped for, hated himself for. At the same time, Sam looked so hot, not aged like he felt he’d aged, no matter that he could run up the hill as fast as ever.

  “Look,” he said quickly, remembering his resolution. He wasn’t going to fuck around anymore. “I shouldn’t have come. It’s wrong. I love Jeanne, my wife, and I have to go—”

  Sam leaned in and grabbed him by the shoulder, her slim fingers trembling, digging into the muscle and bone as if she was trying to close her grip on a lifeline.

  “No, please, Jules! Please!”

  Jules felt an almost electric shock at her touch. She was definitely not a ghost. He put his hand over hers, instantly weakening in his resolve to go home. Her hand was warm, the skin soft. He ran his forefinger over her knuckles, resting in the space between, and he smiled at her, his eyes bright.

  Sam slid her hand out of his and stepped back, to allow him to get out of the car, and stepped back again as he zapped the car locked and moved in for a hug and a kiss, both their movements awkward as he stopped when she went back, and then she came in again and pecked him very lightly on the cheek, standing off to one side so a hug would be awkward.