by Ellen Datlow
“No. No.” I can’t bear to let go of him, even though I’m seized with the need to move, to get up, to do, to fight. “You don’t have to stay. You don’t have to do this.”
“I think I do.” He looks nearly serene. But his eyes are still black. Black and afraid. More black and afraid than they’ve ever been. And they are what keep me here, anchored to this bed, to this boat, to him. He doesn’t want to stay here any more now than he did then. It’s just fear. The weight of it. The longevity of it. His want—his need—to open that outer hatch before the chamber has flooded full of water.
He digs his nails into my knuckles. Hard enough that I can’t keep holding on. “I want you to go outside now, Pinky.”
“No, no, no. It’s not your fault. It’s not your fault.”
“Hey. Hey!” He pinches my chin to turn me towards him. The pads of his fingers slip in my tears. “Listen to me.” He moves nearer until we’re close enough that I can see the gold and hazel of his eyes deep down past the black. He strokes my wet cheek. “You cannae save me. Remember? But I can save you, lassie.” He exhales. “I need to.”
When he lets me go, he gives me a little push. I stand up. I look down at him and he looks up at me.
“I love you, Gramps.”
He smiles, wipes his cheeks with those shaking fingers. “I love you too, Sarah.”
As soon as I step across the bedroom’s threshold, I smell the smoke of candles going out, and the door slams shut with a metallic clang. The house gives a long, thin scream of rage, and I run across the landing, cling to the bannister as I half fall down the stairs, as the house starts to list forward and port. In the kitchen, the lights go out and the angle steepens. The house screeches and rattles and drops like a stone. The walls of the scullery buckle and scream and crack. On my hands and knees, I crawl through the back door. Into sunlight and cold wind.
I sit on the stone bench. I cry with closed eyes. I listen to the crows. I listen to the house.
When I go back inside, everything is silent. And his bedroom is full of oakwood and autumn light and sweet new air.
• • •
There was money in that big jiffy bag. Enough money for law school ten times over.
I book the mission for the wake. Take all his unopened bottles of Sailor Jerry and his fancy horse doover s inside their DO NOT TOUCH bags down to the docks before the service in St. Michael’s. Maybe a dozen people come. I don’t know any of them, and I’m pretty sure none of them knew Gramps.
Mum and Brian come back less than a week later. The second morning, I walk in on them sitting at the kitchen table, talking about redecorating Gramps’ bedroom purple and green before moving themselves and their Ikea king-size in. And I’m not as mad about that as maybe I should be, because the house is already growing dark again. Its walls smell of mould, its windows mildew. The lights flicker on and off, even in the day. The ceilings are too low and the floors too untrustworthy, as if we spend our days walking through a boggy wet field under heavy wet skies. And I know they feel it, I know they know it. But Gramps left them this house, and that’s a different kind of bog for them—the kind they don’t even want to escape.
He is the only thing that still keeps me here. Because he is still here. I feel him—in those walls and windows and ceilings and floors—his snorts and jokes and wry smiles. His guilt, his sadness, his shame, his fear.
On a freezing December day, nearly six weeks after the funeral, I lie on Gramps’s single bed and look out over the back garden, up into a white-grey sky empty of clouds. The Heart Foundation people are coming tomorrow to take away everything that was his—everything, at least, that Mum and Brian don’t want—so I suppose this is another good-bye of sorts. When the sky gets greyer, darker, I get back up and wander between the dust sheets and cloths, stop in front of the pea-green cupboard.
The inside smells so potently of him, I almost close it again straightaway. But I don’t. I run my fingers through his trousers and jackets, two wire racks of brown ties, and that’s when I see the sleeping bag. Not rolled up, but spread out along the bottom of the cupboard, unzipped and open. I crouch down, push in past his clothes, and get in, pull its soft inside back over my knees. There’s the whistling whisper of a draft against my ear: maybe from the flanking chimney breast or a gap in the plasterboard. In the brightest corner lie a lighter, a pouch of tobacco shag, and half a dozen half-burned pig fat candles. Something catches my eye on the lowest inside panel of the door, and I lean back towards it, pull it closer, run the pads of my fingers across its wood. DFG. Scratched deep and careful with a penknife.
I didn’t think my heart could hurt any more, but it can, it does. This is where Gramps went. On bad nights—the worse and worst nights—this is where he hid. This is where he waited.
This is where he is now.
I don’t know how long I stay there. Too long. Not long enough. It’s dark by the time I stretch out my stiff legs to leave and my foot hits against something with sharp edges. When I push the door wide open to let what little light there is back in, I see the blue wooden box.
I can’t not open it, and feel a lot better about that when sitting on top of all the old letters addressed to him, there’s one addressed to me.
His writing is big. Untidy. It makes me want to smile even before I’ve read it.
Make the good shit happen, Pinky.
Don’t wait. Don’t give it a fucking choice.
I cry. And then I laugh.
Because we’re haunted by a house that is haunted by a man, who spent his life haunted by a submarine that was haunted by the ghosts of a hundred and ten men. Because when you think about it, it’s nearly funny. One for the record books. How do you think the unthinkable?
With an itheberg.
• • •
I’ve packed a bag. I’ve written a letter of my own. And when I lie on my bed tonight and look up at the ceiling, I won’t feel dread or shame or misery. Or fear. Because tomorrow will be different. Tomorrow, I will leave this house and never ever come back.
And I’ll take Sailor Jerry with me. Inside a wooden box full of sky and freedom, the same shade of blue as his girl’s eyes.
Because everything deserves an ending.
Because everyone deserves to escape, and most times they cannae do it on their own.
Because All Is Well.
And I’m making the good shit happen.
Natalya, Queen of the Hungry Dogs
John Langan
In Memoriam Lucius Shepard
I
When it came, Hunter’s e-mail was brief, blunt. “Well,” it read, “that’s wife number three packed her bags and gone. Said she cared too much to watch this thing have its way with me. Pity. If she’d stuck it out a little longer, she’d have done quite well for herself. She may still. I haven’t told the lawyers. Anyway. The doc says it’s a matter of weeks, at most. Why don’t you come up for a couple of days? Bring a bottle of something good. Maybe two. You know the way.”
“What should I do?” Carl asked his wife after she had read the message over his shoulder.
“You mean you aren’t going?” Melanie said.
“No, I am going.”
“Then what . . . Ah. You don’t know how long you’ll be there.”
“He shouldn’t be on his own. Not now.”
“Doesn’t he have a daughter?”
“They haven’t spoken for fifteen years. She stopped talking to Hunter when he married the second time. I suppose it’s never too late, except it almost is.”
“What about his brothers and sisters? Isn’t he one of four?”
“They don’t talk much. There’s one brother he’s on good terms with, but he lives in Austria.”
“Well, it isn’t as if he’s alone.”
“Nurses aren’t the same as family.”
“You aren’t family.”
“I’m close enough.”
Melanie sighed. “You have coverage at the dojo?”
He nodded. “Indrani can do the four-thirty classes, and I’m pretty sure Tara and Jeff can teach the five-thirties. The only day I’m not certain about is Saturday. I’ll have to call Carmen, see if she’s available.”
“You should take the Subaru. I’m pretty sure I read something about there being snow on the ground in Vermont already.”
“Will do. And babe?”
“Yeah?”
“I love you.”
“Of course you do.”
II
Of the many stories Hunter Kang had shared with him over three decades of friendship, the one Carl Kimani returned to as he packed for the trip to South Burlington, was that of Hunter’s first death. “Not near death,” Hunter had said. “Death. I was gone for at least five minutes before I was revived.” They had been sitting at a booth in Pete’s Corner Pub in Huguenot, drinking Heinekens, after a particularly grueling workout at their karate school. They had known each other six months.
“What happened?” Carl said.
“Riptide,” Hunter said. “My dad decided to take the family to the Jersey Shore. This was after my little sister died—I told you about Natalie, right?”
Carl nodded.
“That’s right, I did. We had been in mourning for, it must have been a year by then. Dad packed us into the van, including Mom, who insisted she didn’t want to go, and drove to Point Pleasant. Sprang for three rooms at the Neptune Motel, one for him and Mom, one for my older sisters, and one for me and my little brother. It was . . .” Hunter shook his head, smiling. “Man, it was fantastic. One of the best things my old man ever did. Maybe the best. We spent our days at the beach, with a break at lunchtime for subs at a deli a couple of blocks away. At dinner, we had pizza or hamburgers, and were allowed to watch TV in our rooms until eleven o’clock, which was unheard of. You remember Simon & Simon?”
“Sure.”
“That was the first time I ever saw that show. I loved it. Anyway, our second to last day at the beach, I swam into a riptide. The next thing I knew, I was being carried away from everybody, out to sea. I didn’t know what to do. I tried swimming toward shore, but I wasn’t strong enough to keep myself in place, let alone fight my way to the beach. I started to panic. It wasn’t long before I was screaming for help, waving at the rest of my family. At first, they thought I was showing off. By the time they realized what was happening, I was going under.
“If you were forced to pick a way to die, drowning isn’t the worst. Don’t get me wrong, it’s pretty bad at the start. You thrash and cry, struggling to keep the water out of your mouth and nose. In what seems like a matter of seconds, though, you’re overcome by a feeling of tremendous peace, and you let the process that’s started, continue. After I went under for the final time, I looked at the water around me, which was this luminous blue, and thought this was the color of death, and it was beautiful. Even at this age—we’re talking eleven years old—I was aware that what I was experiencing was a kind of gift, not like what Natalie had been through, the year before.
“My sister Vicky was the one who reached me first, and not my other sister Heather, which was strange, because Heather was on the swim team at her high school, and Vicky was captain of the chess club. Vicky also knew that the way out of a riptide is not to swim against it, but sideways to it, parallel to the shore, until you’re free. This was what she did. As she was turning toward the beach, Heather joined her, and together, my sisters brought me in. When they delivered me to my dad, though, I was dead. No heartbeat, no breathing. If you could have hooked me up to an EEG, I’m sure it would have showed no brain activity.
“For what might have been the first time in his life, Dad froze. Here was a man who had immigrated to the US from Busan with a degree in graphic design and a bank account with just enough in it to let him live outside LA for three months. At the end of six weeks, he had a job with a small advertising company; within six years, he was chosen to head up their office in West New York. During that time, he met my mom, which meant dealing with her parents. Let me tell you, however progressive their voting record, when it came to whoever was dating their Lily, Grandpa and Grandma McMaster were not terribly thrilled with their daughter dating and then becoming engaged to an Asian. Apparently, Grandma said to her, ‘Marriage is hard enough as it is. Why do you want to complicate it?’ Nice, huh? But the two of them stuck to their guns, and when Dad moved east, he took his wife and young daughters with them. Together, they built a life for themselves in Jersey. The family expanded, two boys and another girl. At five, his youngest daughter was diagnosed with a rare form of bone cancer, which took two agonizing years to kill her. Throughout all of it, he had remained steadfast. Mom called him her rock, and I think the rest of us viewed him that way, too. Now here I was lying lifeless in his arms, a second child lost within the span of twelve months. It was too much.
“Fortunately for everyone, my mom hauled me away from him and dropped me onto the sand. She pumped my chest, turned me on my side to help the water pour out, rolled me on my back, pinched my nose, blew two breaths into my lungs, and started a set of chest compressions. My sisters, my brother, my father gathered around us, along with some other people who had witnessed Vicky and Heather dragging me out of the surf. One of the bystanders ran for a lifeguard (all of whom, needless to say, were fucking useless). Dad started to speak to Mom, words to the effect of, ‘Honey, he’s gone,’ but she stopped him with a look that killed the sentence in his mouth. She labored over me. She pressed down on my sternum one, two, three, four, five times, switched to my head to fill my lungs, went back to working on my heart. The seconds advanced, each one carrying me that much further from her, but my mother’s pace did not slacken. She was a dentist—did I ever tell you that? Met my dad when he came in with an abscess. Romantic, eh? She was six years older than he was. Packed up her practice in San Marino and opened a new one in Jersey City, while managing a steadily expanding family. When Natalie was given her diagnosis, Mom brought in a second and third dentist so she could spend the maximum time possible with her. She took my sister’s death hard—not that the rest of us didn’t, but with Mom, it seemed almost personal, as if death had targeted her child, in particular.
“Well. Mom put all of her effort—her concentration, her strength, her will—into her fight with the Grim Reaper. It was as if she was prying his grip from me one bony finger at a time. Right as the ambulance pulled up in the parking lot, I opened my eyes and sucked in a gigantic breath. Heather shrieked. Dad burst into tears. The EMT’s insisted on taking me to the hospital, which my parents agreed to. Mom rode in the ambulance with me. Dad followed with everyone else in the van. On the way there, as the EMT was fussing over me, Mom leaned in close and whispered, ‘You know what happened to you.’
“I nodded. The fact of my death felt too enormous to fit into words; it crowded the back of the ambulance with us.
“She glanced at the EMT, and when he looked away to check something, she said, ‘Did you see anything?’
“I knew what she was asking. I nodded again. ‘Natalie,’ I said.
“Mom inhaled sharply. ‘Really?’
“ ‘Really,’ I said. ‘She was glowing—she was surrounded by yellow light. She was wearing the Hello Kitty T-shirt she liked, the purple one, and her favorite jeans. She held out her hand to me, said where she was was beautiful and peaceful. That’s all I remember. The next thing I knew, I was sitting up on the beach.’
“ ‘Oh, baby,’ Mom said. She sat back, one hand over her mouth, her eyes full of tears. ‘Oh.’ If the EMT noticed, which I’m sure he did, then I’m also sure he thought she was overcome by what had almost happened to me. He was half right. She didn’t ask me anything else, not there, not during the day I spent in the hospital, not during the trip home. In fact, she never mentioned what I’d described to her again. But after that, I had the sense she wore her grief for my sister more lightly, as if it were no longer a heavy coat, but a light scarf.”
Hunter raised his hand. “Bef
ore you ask, because how could you not, no, I did not see my little sister in a full-body halo. She did not speak to me. You want to know what I experienced while I was dead? Nothing. One moment, I was floating underwater, my vision closing off, and the next I was on the beach, coughing up the water still in my lungs. In between was a blank. It wasn’t like being asleep. I had no sense of the passage of time, no sense of anything. I simply . . . wasn’t.
“Of course, I couldn’t tell my mom any of that. I knew what she wanted to hear—what she needed to hear. So, I told her. I lied, but . . . when she was dying, she was at peace with it. On her deathbed, she told my sisters Natalie was coming for her.”
After a sip of his beer, Carl said, “Not to play Devil’s Advocate . . .”
“What?”
“The kid who went to twelve years of Catholic school would argue you didn’t see the next life because you weren’t heading there. It wasn’t your time.”
“I was dead. That sounds like it was my time.”
“Not if God didn’t want it to be.”
“Yeah, well, tell your inner Catholic child to come talk to me after he’s been dead for five minutes. Then we can compare notes, talk about what God wants.”
III
On a clear, cold Wednesday morning in early November, Carl took I-87 from the Beacon-Newburgh exit north to Route 7, on the other side of Albany, which he followed east out of New York into Vermont. Once over the border, he turned north again with 7, driving along the western edge of the state, toward South Burlington, a place Hunter had declared among the most civilized small cities he had spent time in, with the perfect proportion of bookstores and good restaurants, and within easy distance of Canada, his second favorite country. “Although,” he had added recently, “the way things are going here, it’s edging closer to the top spot.” Set on a hill a couple of miles southwest of the city, his large house was surrounded by evergreens, which did not diminish the view of Lake Champlain with the Adirondacks beyond from its windows. The fruit of Hunter’s years as a photojournalist, as well as of a handful of prudent investments, the house was a source of mild envy for Carl, whose modest Cape was, now that the girls were at college, plenty big enough for him and Melanie, especially with the garage converted into a study. But a spacious residence had been Carl’s fantasy since a childhood spent sharing fifteen hundred square feet of raised ranch with his parents, older brother, and younger sisters.