by Andrew Pyper
Eddie is nowhere to be seen.
There’s no way he could have walked away from the fall, so the only place he could be is under the tiger. Crushed. But maybe not. Maybe shielded by the struts of the Penobscot and Guardian Buildings.
I find the stairs beyond the minivan and fly down them, leaping four steps at a time and shouldering into the wall at every landing. At the basement level I fall, tripping on a pipe exposed through a hole in the foundation. It feels like something cracks in my leg, not that I hear it. Not that I hear anything but my speaking, beating heart.
Eddie . . . Eddie . . . Eddie . . .
More of the tiger’s insides now spilled over the model city so that the streets are awash in its blood. The beast so heavy it has uprooted many of the structures it fell upon, but not entirely flattened them, so that there is a space of three of four feet between it and the ground. This is where Eddie would be if he survived. Or if he didn’t.
Either way, he’s not here.
DING!
Across the atrium’s floor, one of the glass elevators—missing all of its glass now—opens its doors. Nobody inside. Waiting for me.
Two thoughts, both arriving at the same time, both seemingly inarguable.
One, Ash sent the elevator for me. And if I step inside it will take me to her.
Two, I can’t leave without finding Eddie first.
And then a follow-up consideration, less certain than the first two, but persuasive all the same.
I’ll never find Eddie, not on this side. Because if he’s dead, this isn’t his place.
If he died in the hospital in Boston, he would have gone to a different place, the best day of his life, whatever that would be. Pushed on the swings by his mother in the playground in Marcellus. Playing soccer with his dad after he came home from a shift still wearing his uniform, the smooth leather holster, the shining badge. Something from the time before he met me and Ash was introduced to his life.
Which means he willed his way here.
Which means he did it for me.
I walk to the elevator and step inside.
46
* * *
I press the button for the forty-second floor but I don’t have to, the doors closing on their own, the elevator rising before being told where to go. As I drift up, I watch the monster’s body shrink on the floor below, its red eyes now lifeless and dark as buttons. Gone to a deeper hell where it will hunt again. Where it will exist for eternity as something worse.
The elevator passes through the atrium’s roof and I’m knocked back by a blast of arctic air. Below, the river is gun-gray, its surface mottled by what looks like spattered paint—browns and blacks and whites—that I know to be the faces of the dead. The damned of the damned, staring up through the ice.
That’s forever, Tiger.
It’s like he knew. Like my father tried to tell me what every father tries to tell his children without frightening them, coming at the subject sideways. An effort to say that while there is an end, it only means we should live as hard as we can while we’re here. Not like me, he was trying to say. I want you to live better and more awake than me.
I thought I didn’t know what he meant when he said those things, yet I remembered them, cling to them still.
There’s a border in the middle. An invisible line.
My mother left me a watch. My father a puzzle of words.
DING!
The doors open.
From the hallway, the stale smell of printer ink and recycled air. The perspiration that comes not from physical exertion but stress, the sourness of human worry left in the carpet, cleaved to the ceiling tiles.
As soon as I step out of the elevator the doors close behind me. I don’t even try to throw my hand in to stop them. There is only here, the room I’m already starting toward. There’s only the unmeasurable now.
It still looks like a corporate workplace—the interior modular desks, the exterior offices where the management worked their phones and screens—but one left in a hurry, an evacuation from which none returned. There’s papers on the surfaces, computer keyboards, name tags fixed to the walls next to doors, calendars pinned to the sides of cubicles. All blank. Arranged as if by the hands of those who once came here every day, but all trace of their presence erased. Like they were ghosts even for the time they were alive.
My dad’s office is second from the end. I remember that because his boss had the larger unit, a man whose first name I never knew as he was referred to exclusively as “Henley, the sonofabitch,” though the two men golfed and drank and worked together for over twenty years.
Both my dad’s and Henley’s doors are closed. The only ones I’ve seen that are.
I open Henley’s first.
His things are still here—the kidney-shaped desk, the view of the Ambassador Bridge, now collapsed—but no photos or personal items. The Detroit Tigers bat, signed by the entire 1987 American League East championship team, no longer stuck in the wood brackets screwed into the wall.
“Come on, Danny! You’re keeping poor Dad waiting.”
I can hear her.
Not just in my head anymore. I can hear her calling through the wall, six feet from where I stand.
“He’s been so patient. Haven’t you, Daddy?”
The voice takes me out into the hallway again. It’s not my decision but hers, taking over things as easily as she’d ever done. Telling me to put my hand on the door handle, a ball of ice she urges me to turn. The door a slab of steel she suggests I might shoulder open.
Cold.
A single step onto the office’s carpet and the air crystallizes, making it almost impossible to move through. It cramps every muscle, stutters the simplest thoughts. An equal slowing of body and mind.
It takes a moment to see my father.
He sits behind his desk. The chair turned around so that he looks out the window, the leather back obscuring all of him except the thinning hair of his head, the liver-spotted knuckles on the armrests.
One foot on the far side of the river and the other on your throat.
“Dad?”
He doesn’t respond other than the slightest shifting in his seat, an involuntary twitch. Something about it suggests it is the outward expression of an internal struggle to be heard, to signal that a part of him still feels and hears, too.
“Go on, Danny. I’m sure Dad wants to sink his eyes into you.”
Ash leans against a bookshelf of binders. Our father’s lifework, the memos that weighed the chances of a certain engine or headrest or seat belt causing paralysis or dismemberment or death for those riding the open roads. She’s no longer burned, but Ash the ugly-beautiful, radiant and blue-eyed and flushed, a masterful simulation of gratitude in her dimpled show of straight white teeth.
“Really. Go on.”
So I do. Side-step around the desk with my back to her—feel the septic breath she leans forward to blow against the back of my neck—and stand at my father’s side.
“Say hello, Danny.”
“Hi, Dad.”
He twitches again.
His face a rictus of desperation, eyes swollen half spheres. The black nostril hairs flickering. He knows I’m here and it has brought on a new layer of whatever horror he’s already been inflicted with. Whatever my sister has already done to him.
“See? Look how happy you’ve made him!” Ash squeals, coming around to press against me. “I haven’t seen him this excited in, well, forever. He’s positively beaming!”
A single finger touches my chin and turns my head to face her. The skin on the inside of her lips blue as something hanging in a meat locker.
“Have you missed me?” she says.
She opens her arms. Steps closer. Wraps them around me.
An embrace suffocating and dark as soil spilled onto a body thought to be dead but isn’t. A hold my father will never escape. And now neither will I.
“You drowned her.”
It’s something less than a w
hisper, but the sound I make is so close to her ear she hears it. Her whole body hardening to stone.
“Why?” I say. “She was our mother.”
“You know why,” she says, tightening her hold. “She wanted to save our lives but she showed us the river instead. And I went through, Danny. I saved you but they took me down. They took my soul.”
Just when I’m about to black out she lets me go.
“So I took hers,” she says.
I try to back up toward the door but I can’t. A wall of density, a charged force stops me whenever I move away from her. It forces me to stand where I am so I can take all of her in, admire the full realization of her perfection here, her home from the moment she was stillborn.
“Eddie,” I manage.
“I’m sorry. Who?”
“The boy. Did you bring him here?”
“You saw him? That would be his doing if you did. I just pulled him away from his worried momma. Bait for you to come find me. It didn’t matter to me what happened to him after that.”
“He was here.”
“Bad boy.”
“Does it mean he’s dead? If I saw him?”
Ash pouts in fake sympathy. Cocks her head to the side and her golden hair, shining without any light for it to reflect, makes a half moon of her face.
“I see that you care, Danny, but you’ll stop soon enough,” she says. “You’ll forget. That tree stump of a woman you married, the runty boy you thought you could be a pretend dad to, that ridiculous bit of time where you let yourself think you were free—it’ll all be gone. I promise you that.”
She slides over to stand next to our father. Strokes his head with a manicured hand.
“You’ll be just like Dad,” she says. “The last of the Orchard men, reunited. And only with eyes for me.”
Just being here with her draws the last vapors of life from me. Whatever I’d carried with me that allowed me to walk from place to place, the thing that infuriated the dead who saw or sensed or smelled it on me, is going. Soon Ash will steal the last of it and leave me like the man in the chair, encased within himself, tortured in ways of her design but unable even to scream.
She was always special.
“Why did you kill Meg Clemens?” I ask her, as much to test my ability to speak as for an answer. “She helped me, you know. When the friends who killed you tried to kill me. She got me out of that house.”
She lifts her hand away from our father’s head, the fingers stiffening a second before relaxing again. A tell of irritation she fails to wholly conceal.
“Meg the Good,” she says. “May her spirit rot in heaven.”
“She didn’t deserve to die.”
“We all die.”
“Not like that.”
“But we could,” she says, and smiles, her “sweet face,” a masterpiece of rehearsed authenticity. Then it drops. Circles appear below her eyes the color of an old banana peel. “Because you never know, do you?”
Dots of shadow explode before my eyes. The reverse fireworks that precede a blackout. I reach out and, as I stumble, find the wall. Clip my head against it and half the dots shoo away, though the rest still swim before me, binding and doubling like cells.
“Easy now,” Ash says.
Not damned.
“Why is Dad here?” I fight to ask her, holding on to my voice like a rope tossed to a drowning man. “Why is this his place?”
A demon.
“You didn’t figure it out yet? You didn’t guess?”
A bright flash behind my eyes, the chalky taste of bleach at the back of my throat. Migraine symptoms. Never had one in my life, but talking with Ash—doing it here—is a new sickness, mutating and becoming more creative by the second.
“No,” I manage.
“He was an accomplice to murder,” she says. “He knew the most terrible things and this is where he’d let himself think about them. Look out this window and whisper all his secrets to himself.”
That’s forever.
“I don’t—”
“He followed me. Two days before my birthday. Our birthday. Ever since Meg went missing he wondered if I might have been involved somehow, might have known something. So he went all private eye and saw me getting into Mr. Malvo’s car after school and tracked us all the way to the house on Alfred Street. When the two of us went in Daddy sat behind the wheel and watched. Two minutes later poor Dean came running out, got in his car, and took off.”
“Why? What happened?”
“I showed him Meg. I showed Mr. Malvo that I was the only girl for him. And he looked down into that cellar and saw her body and figured out a couple things in a hurry. One: I was in charge now, not him. And two: he couldn’t tell anyone because he’d be the one who’d go to jail, the pervy teacher, not me, not a girl, not Meg’s friend.”
“So he left you there.”
“Until Dad came in. Sneaky Daddy. Tiptoed up behind me and looked down just the way Dean did. It was like he was seeing something he half thought he’d end up seeing. He just sort of nodded—you know the way he would? That okay-so-that’s-that nod of his? Turned around and made a funny kind of speedwalk for the door like he was trying not to throw up on the floor.”
It’s like she’s reading my mind, which is nothing new. My father’s fight not to be sick the same as mine.
“Dad knew?”
“Don’t you remember the way he was acting around that time? How weird he was? I tried to talk to him about it but for two days all he would say is ‘Let me think.’ He was twisted up tight as could be. ‘Let me think about this, Ashleigh.’ And then it was the night before my birthday—our birthday, there I go again!—and he opens my bedroom door and whispers, ‘Meet me at the house tomorrow.’ I heard that and I knew he’d never tell. I was his daughter and he had a duty to me. That’s the kind of man he was, right? The funny part, the sweet part, was my killing Meg brought me and Dad closer than anything.”
A dry spit. Nothing in my stomach to throw up. Nothing inside of me at all but a churning nausea, edged with clawing pain.
“So you weren’t meeting Malvo the day of the fire,” I get out. “You were meeting Dad.”
“It was my Sweet Sixteen! I deserved a special party! You thought Daddy went to work, remember? So I asked the girls—Michelle, Lisa, Winona, remember those bitches?—to come along with me. Promised to show them something. A surprise. And they would have been surprised, wouldn’t they? Seeing Meg. Watching my dad make Ash’s mess go away. And they would never tell, either.”
“Why?”
“Because I told them they couldn’t.”
The floor undulating under my feet now. Not swaying in the way of a ship at sea, but bending unpredictably, knees buckling, like trying to walk across a trampoline. Except I’m not walking.
“It was going to be fun,” Ash says. “But then the girls chickened out and I kept going on my own. When I got to the house, Dad was there. The place dripping and stinking with the gas he poured all over. He told me what I already knew: he wasn’t going to the police, he was going to cover things up with me. He was my father. It was really quite beautiful, Danny. It was so worth it, you know? But then he said something I wasn’t expecting. ‘But this is the end of that,’ he said. ‘Once this is done, you’ll be nothing to me. This is the last act I will perform as your father. From this point on, you’re not mine.’ ”
Ash laughs. It’s like the screech of tires. The helpless moment before impact.
“But you would never let him go,” I say.
“Clever Danny.”
“So what did you do to him?”
“I kissed him.”
Ash turns her head to look out the window. Scans the grey, undefined horizon as if words were written there.
“A real kiss. A grown-up kiss, a fuck-me kiss, a this-is-going-to-be-so-good kiss,” she says. “I started loosening his belt with one hand, the other on his back. I just wanted to keep him there. So I could let him know that he could do whateve
r he wanted. I was still his. I wanted to be his. I wouldn’t tell because that’s the kind of girl I was. The kind of girl every boy wants because you can do things with them that nobody else would let you get away with.”
She turns to me again and the shadow-dots race and cloud. I have to blink hard to stop them from claiming all of the light that’s left.
“What did he do?”
“He pushed me away,” she says, taking a step closer. “He understood exactly what I was offering and it disgusted him. I disgusted him. He kind of threw his hands into my shoulders. Pushed me. Hard. I stepped back, lost my balance a little. And then I’m falling. Went through the hole in the floor and landed weird, broke my ankle, and I’m screaming for him to get me out of there. But he just looks down at me. Not angry. It was hatred, Danny. Hate isn’t a feeling, it’s the absence of feeling. And that’s what he felt toward me: absolutely fuckall.”
Her arms rise at her sides, readying. Coming at me slow but filling the space of the room until there is nothing but her.
“He just walked away,” she says. “I’m guessing he was going to find a ladder somewhere or something, because I don’t think, even after all that, he’d leave me to starve down there with a dead body, that he’d let me die. But I’ll never know for sure. Because the next thing is those three cunts are standing there and they’re lighting the place on fire.”
Dad jolts in his chair. His lips tremble, but nothing comes out. His hands gripped to the armrests as though fighting to stay upright.
“And you’re screaming for me,” I say. “Not for Dad, not for them to call the cops. Me.”
“There was only you, Brother,” she whispers. “Useless, unwanted you.”
I look back at her and Ash is inches from me. Her fingertips on my eyelids, drawing them closed.
The darkness is a weight. Like falling into water wearing a parka and jeans and boots. The struggle to the surface a hopeless shifting that only takes you deeper.
But there is something down here with me.
The vague notion of a past. Something found and cherished and lost, though I can’t see it or think of its name.