“I don’t even get my point,” Natalie sighs, draining her drink. “Two nights ago, I swore on my sister’s grave—literally on her grave—that I wouldn’t let Ralston get away with a new trial, with not being held responsible for what he did to her. But here I am, doing exactly that. Hell, I’m the one letting him off. But all I can keep thinking of is that little girl. of trying to save her. Maybe if I did—”
Her voice trails off.
Maureen clasps her hand again. “You don’t have anything to atone for, Natalie. What happened with Stephanie wasn’t your fault. You didn’t do anything wrong.”
“No?” The idea of it strikes Natalie as absurd. “Then you tell me, why am I still here, Mo? Why am I still alive?”
* * *
They quit the bar a drink or two later. The brisk night air is fresh and sobering, not at all the effect Natalie is seeking. Clarity is not her friend, not right now; all it does is mock her. She quickly lights another cigarette and lets the nicotine spin back the comforting cobwebs in her brain.
A couple of times Maureen asks if she’s okay to drive and accepts the conventional reassurances. Natalie is decidedly not okay, they both know it, but the politics of sorting that out are too intricate for either of them to deal with at the moment.
‘‘I’m fine, “ Natalie lies, and they leave it at that.
A moment later, sitting in her car, filling it with smoke, she watches Maureen’s sedan back out of its space and zip toward the exit out toward where an old barn apparently once sat. A barn. How would it look now? Natalie wonders. She imagines a tumble-down wooden structure graying in the moonlight, aging gracefully, conceding nothing until the day the wreckers come. So a barn becomes a mall, a mall becomes a bigger mall, a farmhouse becomes a barn, and who ultimately cares? It’s all the same, really, unless you’re part of what’s forgotten.
Like Bret Hartlow.
Natalie isn’t sure why his name comes to her just then. nor why it seems so important to her. While she’s blankly pondering these issues, though, her car follows a route across town and when she becomes aware again it’s to find herself parking outside Hartlow’s building, in the crazy, backlit shadow of one of the sheet metal dancers.
A word comes to her, to explain why she’s here: confirmation.
* * *
The coffeehouse is wall to wall with the late-night crowd. Toward the back a band named Craven Raven—four guys dressed in predictable black, a lead singer with “EAPOE” stenciled on his bicep—is gently stirring the assembled throng into a soulful panic. Natalie has to push her way through, and somewhere along the way she acquires a beer and downs it quickly before climbing the stairs to Hartlow’s apartment.
Thirst, she tells herself. And silk for the cobwebs.
Bret responds to her knock wearing boxers and a plain white t-shirt, his pajamas, no doubt. The boxers have little smiley faces printed all over them, which seems to Natalie like a bad idea for a guy prone to acid trips. The contrast between Hartlow and his shorts couldn’t be greater. His face is a frown, dark and forlorn, the wan, hollow look of unwelcome sobriety.
“Oh,” he says, “hi.” He turns and shuffles listlessly back to his couch, where he collapses with a sigh. “What brings you by?”
Natalie follows him inside and pushes the heavy door shut behind her. It’s not much of a buffer. The Ravens’ frenzied beat vibrates through the walls, and with it the dissonant babble of a hundred muted voices.
“You remember me?” she asks, mildly surprised.
“I have pretty good recall from when I trip.” He isn’t boasting, just sharing a fact. “I looked you up on the web today,” he adds. “I guess you kind of know what I’m going through.”
“I guess. I take it your sister didn’t give you my message?”
“My sister is shielding me from all human contact. You’re lucky—she’s in bed now, thank God. One more minute of her hovering and quoting me scripture and I was going to have to kill myself out of pure spite.” He laughs, unhappily.
On the small table next to Hartlow is a framed photograph of a popular televangelist, one of those smiling fan club photos with a signature scrawled across the bottom. Natalie doesn’t remember it from yesterday. Hartlow lays it face down on the wood when he notices Natalie eyeing it curiously.
“My sister thinks I need better role models,” he explains.
“She cares about you.” Natalie says.
“She’s embarrassed by me. In my family, religion’s one of the ways you keep score, how you separate the good guys from the bad guys, figure out who’s up, who’s down. Having a Portal Guardian in the family cost them major status points, some of which they’d recover by winning me back to the church.”
“Just some?”
“You never get them all back.”
A long, aching moan wells up from the floorboards beneath their feet.
“Pipes,” Hartlow notes. ‘‘I’m right over the facilities. On nights like this, they get overloaded. Too much shit in the system.”
Natalie smiles politely. “Must get annoying.”
‘‘I’m used to lt. So tell me about your message.”
“I wanted to ask you about someone, a woman I met. Her name’s Abby Wible.”
“Never heard of her,” he answers immediately.
“I think she was a Portal Guardian.”
“Not that I know of. What makes you think she’s one of us?”
“She lived next door to Selena Latham’s dad. Roger. And she drowned herself in her bathtub the same night your friends died.”
Hartlow breaks into a knowing grin. “Oh yeah, her. She did that? Wow, good for her.”
There’s a note of envy in his voice—someone else has done something he wishes he had the courage to do—and Natalie instantly regrets telling him. Two minutes she’s been here, and already she’s given Hartlow a kamikaze role model. Great work. But she can’t afford to think about that right now, there’s too much else at stake.
“Then you knew her?” she presses.
“Vaguely. She and Roger had something going. She came by the house a couple times, the two of them talked. If you want my opinion, I think she liked him. Not that he reciprocated. I always thought he was kind of a jerk.”
“What did they talk about?”
“No clue. All I know is she came by.”
“He never said anything to you?”
“About his personal life? You obviously don’t know Roger.”
“But Abby wasn’t part of your group?”
“Nope. Like I said, she just visited a couple of times.”
Natalie wonders about that. Why would someone like Abby come to visit Roger if she wasn’t a member of the group herself? Because they were neighbors? Friends?
Is it possible they could have been more than that?
“Liked him how?” she asks.
“Yeah, like that,” Hartlow answers. “Not that I ever had proof. Just an impression.”
“Based on what?”
“Gestures, the way she looked at him, I don’t know, impressions.”
Impressions can be wrong, Natalie thinks to herself. But in this case, she doubts they are. It seems like on unlikely union, this liaison between the frosty Abby Wible and her cold-fish neighbor, but women are always making bad matches, especially when they’re feeling vulnerable and alone.
The way a woman might feel, say, if she knew her husband was cheating on her.
At moments like that, a woman could be manipulated, used, encouraged to do stupid things. Abby didn’t have to be an official member of the Portal Guardians to do the group’s bidding. All she had to be was stupid in love.
“Did Roger ever write her a letter like the one your girlfriend wrote you?” Natalie asks.
Hartlow shakes his head. “Like I said, he was kind of private.”
The pipes groan again. A horrible noise, Natalie thinks, like being inside a slowly dying beast. She thanks Hartlow for his help and heads back downstairs, where the Craven Ravens
are pounding out a song about broken promises.
On her way out another beer finds its way into her hand. and she downs it in one long eager chug. Broken promises. Who, she wonders, broke them first?
* * *
She calls Philandering Phil on her way home.
Sixty miles an hour up the Parkway North in the black of night, one hand on the wheel, one on her cell phone, and a dark mass seething deep inside of her. She’s not sure what she wants—more information, an even higher degree of confirmation, or maybe it’s just a chance to gloat.
God, she wonders, am I that petty?
Phil answers on the third ring, sounding weary, almost as if she woke him. She doubts it. It’s still before midnight, and even in mourning Phil doesn’t strike her as the sort of man to retire early.
“Hello?”
“Abby visited the Portal Guardians’ house,” Natalie tells him. “A couple of times. I thought you’d like to know.”
“Who is this?”
“But then you probably already knew that, didn’t you?”
There’s a long, hostile pause. “Oh shit. You again. Do you have any idea what time it is?”
“She had a thing for your neighbor, didn’t she?”
“What the hell’s the matter with you? Why are you doing this?”
“Did she sleep with him, Phil?”
No answer.
“Did she?”
“Listen, you dumb bitch, this is harassment. I’m going to have the police all over your ass.”
“Or is that what she really meant by the note?” Natalie persists. ‘“‘Wouldn’t you like to know?’ You didn’t really know, did you, Phil? You didn’t know whether she cheated on you. And you, I bet you’re the type who just has to know. Fuck everything in sight but you can’t stand the thought your wife might have diddled the neighbor. Abby really had your number, didn’t she, Phil?”
“You’re insane.”
“Maybe. But I’m right aren’t I, Phil?”
“Go to hell,” he hangs up.
It’s all the answer Natalie needs. She slams the phone onto the seat next to her and drives the rest of the way home in a dark, brooding silence.
* * *
The yard is littered with reporters and their instant news paraphernalia when she pulls up in front of the house. Aunt Katie has made Natalie’s story fresh again, by linking it to a mass suicide and an imminent murder. As Natalie pulls through the driveway into the garage, the news crews shove cameras and microphones at her, blind her with bright lights, top on her windshield, shout her name as the automatic door lowers behind her. Does she know about Anne Coyne, how does it make her feel, why does she think Coyne did it? On and on, a jumble of questions she won’t answer, at least not right now.
Tomorrow, she thinks. Tomorrow she’ll have to face them. And just the thought of it takes her breath away.
Inside, the house is dark. Emily is in her chair, snoring, her empty glass and saucer filled with butts keeping vigil, trophies to mark the passing of another evening. Court TV is running tape from the day’s action in the Tillotson case, some psychologist testifying about the subtleties of memory. Natalie switches it off, wakes her aunt and ships her off to bed. Except to ask disinterestedly where Natalie has been, Emily goes without protest. She doesn’t seem in the mood tonight for the usual hostile banter.
Natalie grabs a beer while she’s rinsing out the saucer in the kitchen. Then heads back to her aunt’s chair. That chair is like ground zero in this house. It stinks like something dead but there it is, center of malodorous gravity. She wants to sleep but can’t stomach the thought of resting while Selena is still out there somewhere. A stupid conceit. she knows; her waking hours haven’t exactly been productive. Extending them, especially now, won’t help anyone, but then neither will tossing around in bed all night.
Simon Ballard’s videotape, the one with Max Temple’s interview with Ralston, is still in her purse. It seems as good an activity as any. She pops it in the VCR and lights a cigarette.
The show continues pretty much as it did before, a string of emotionally needy people asking Ralston to settle their doubts about the afterlife, a loved one, a lost soul. What they all want, Natalie realizes, is permission to go on living, which he beneficently grants. A nice guy, and in touch with such kind, forgiving spirits.
One lady even calls in about her dog. Turns out Ralston can commune with pets, too. Perfect, Natalie thinks. Dr. Doolittle meets Dr. Kevorkian.
“Hello?”
She spins around at the sound of her aunt’s voice. “Emily?”
“I have a question about my sister.”
Natalie freezes, her skin tingling. The voice is coming from behind her, from the television.
“What was her name?” Ralston asks.
Slowly, Natalie turns to face the screen. “Megan,” comes the disembodied reply. Emily’s voice, on the TV, talking with Ralston.
Natalie’s mind rejects it. She must be wrong, it must be someone else who sounds like her aunt. Except Megan ... no, it can’t be.
“I’m having trouble seeing her,” Ralston says slowly, deliberately, almost like he knows. “Did she die some time ago?”
“Yes.”
“It was a sudden death.”
“Yes.” A sob. Her aunt’s sob.
Her aunt, who sits in this chair all day long hiding inside the alien televised world of someone else’s miseries. Her aunt, who won’t even talk about the past.
Yet here she is, doing exactly that. And not just discussing it but discussing it with the very man who made the past such a noxious place for her.
“She wants you to be happy,” Ralston says.
“I just want to know if she forgives me,” Emily wails.
Ralston is silent for a moment. ‘“That’s what she’s saying,” he assures her.
“All is forgiven.”
“All is forgiven?”
“That’s right.”
“Turn that off!” Emily shrieks.
Startled, Natalie leaps out of the chair. It takes her brain a second to understand that the voice came this time from behind her. She spins around again. There, midway down the stairs, her slight body trembling in a faded nightgown, stands Emily in the weary flesh.
“You called him?” Natalie asks angrily, incredulously, still trying to understand.
“Turn it off, I said,” Emily shrieks again. “Now!”
“Why would you, how could you—” The words won’t come. “I don’t understand.”
With surprising speed, her aunt dashes across the room. Just as Max Temple is starting to say something about taking another caller, she slams her fist into the television and pounds away at the buttons until the screen abruptly goes black.
“How dare you bring that man into our home?’’ she screeches.
“But you were talking to him,” Natalie says, still lost.
Emily turns away, her body still quivering, her voice like metal cutting glass. “You had no right to be watching that.”
“What are you talking about, Em? A million people must have watched that program.”
“Not here, they didn’t. Oh, no. Not in my house.”
“But you did. You watched it here, and you called him. You actually fucking called him. Why, Em? Why would you do that?”
“I told you I didn’t want any profanity!”
“Are you kidding me? You won’t even talk to me about my mother, but here I find out you phone her killer, and you’re worrying about my language? What were you thinking, Em? Did you really think he was going to put you in touch with her spirit?”
Natalie doesn’t see it coming. One second Emily is staring hard at the floor, the next she’s scooping up Natalie’s beer and hurling it wildly across the room, hard enough that the can clunks into the far wall and splatters beer across the faded paint.
“Don’t you judge me!” she screams.
“Em –.”
But her aunt isn’t listening. She grabs the sliv
er saucer, where Natalie’s cigarette is still smoldering, and hurls it at her. Natalie ducks just in time, but not quickly enough to avoid having her face showered with ash.
“You think I don’t know what’s going on?” Emily cries. “I don’t want to know, any of it, but it keeps creeping in. All the reporters who keep calling, all those people out there on our lawn. Today ... today was horrible. I had to unplug the phone, but by then it was too late. Just from the questions they were asking, I knew. Usually it’s more subtle, simple things—you going off to the cemetery, a smell that reminds me of her, a memory that slips back ln. I try to shut it all out, I try, but something always creeps in. And this time it won’t go away, it just won’t go away.”
She glances around frantically, as if she’s looking for something else to throw, then collapses into her chair. Her tone softens, like she has forgotten about Natalie and is talking to herself in the mirror.
“I was just flipping through the channels, that’s all,” she continues. “You weren’t here and I still had a drink to finish, so I just was looking for something to watch. And suddenly there he was. I know about his books. I see them advertised. Old women like me are who they think will buy them, you know? I’ve never bought one, but it makes me wonder, what if he’s telling the truth? What if he really can talk to her? So there he is on my television and people are calling him and I figure, I mean, why not...”
Her voice trails off. Natalie doesn’t know how to respond at first. She’s never seen her aunt like this, so full of contradictions and lies, so gullible and stupid. It evokes no pity in her. Her aunt, of all people, should know better. “Because he’s a fraud,” Natalie says.
“You don’t know that.”
“He murdered my sister! And yours. What more do you want? Oh, that’s right, forgiveness. What had you done to her, Em? Why did you want her to forgive you?”
Emily shakes her head. “It’s all so black and white to you, isn’t it? Just like your mother.”
Black and white, Natalie thinks, sure. Like the smoke pouring from the farmhouse that day.
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