Eye of the Storm

by Sara Reinke

  The corner of Paul’s mouth hooked wryly. “Yes, they do.”

  “If haunted houses aren’t real, then ghosts aren’t real,” Emma said. “And if ghosts aren’t real, how come Grandma comes and talks to me sometimes?”

  Paul’s smile faded. Emma had been little more than a baby when his mother, Delores had died, and yet Emma claimed to have dreams about her. She had told Paul that Delores Frances told her things, showed her things. It had been Emma’s predictions―given to her, she claimed, by the ghost of her dead grandmother―that had helped Paul crack the Watcher case.

  And if ghosts aren’t real, why in the hell was I dreaming about that dead blond girl, imagining I was the one who cut her fingers off? ’Cause that’s all it was―my imagination. Just a dream.

  Wasn’t it?

  He turned away from Emma, looking out the windshield again. “There’s no such thing as the Bermuda Triangle,” he said again. “Your daddy and Jo are going to be just fine.” He glanced at her again briefly. “I promise.”

  She looked back out her window. He couldn’t tell if she believed him or not. This time last year, she would have accepted his explanations of things without hesitation or question. But every passing year brought Emma closer to that point in life when children came to the dismaying realization that grown-ups weren’t always right; that they could lie, cheat, steal and hurt. Or worse, just be wrong, he thought glumly.

  “Daddy says he wants to buy a house there,” she said after a moment, pointing out the window as they drove past a large hillside. At the top of the hill stood a crumbling, hollowed-out building shell, the sprawling, dilapidated remains of an old hospital. A big billboard had been erected at the bottom of the hill. Letters that had been painted in red, white and blue spelled out: Coming Soon! Liberty Heights ― Townhomes, Patio Homes and Luxury Single-Family Houses!

  “That’s the old Liberty Sanitarium,” Paul said. “They’re supposed to be tearing it down soon, starting new construction by the summer.”

  He hadn’t realized Jay was considering buying property there. He might have to wait awhile, Paul thought. It was no great secret that Milton Enterprises, the contracting company that had purchased the land and planned to raze the existing building to begin work on the new subdivision, had run amok of local historical preservationists who hoped to save the ruins on site. The impending lawsuits and red tape could keep construction at bay for at least another year.

  “What’s a…sani…tarium?” Emma asked, carefully sounding out each syllable in the unfamiliar word.

  “It’s like a hospital,” Paul replied. “They built them in the old days, like in the 1920s, for people who had tuberculosis.” She looked both puzzled and unwilling to try wrapping her six-year-old tongue around that one, and he laughed. “It’s a sickness, like the flu, only it’s much, much worse.”

  “Do people die from it?” she asked.

  “They did, yeah, way back then.” Tens of thousands of people had supposedly died in Liberty Sanitarium, in fact. In its hey-day, it had been considered the most state-of-the-art tuberculosis treatment facility in the United States. The truth of the matter was, most people who entered its halls as a patient never emerged. At the height of the tuberculosis epidemic, it was rumored that one person an hour died there. A special network of tunnels and chambers had been constructed beneath the building so that workers could store and transport bodies off the premises without the other patients seeing just how many of their fellows were dying.

  “What does it do?” Emma asked. “Toober…tooper…coolis…”

  “Tuberculosis,” Paul interjected gently. “I’m not really sure. I think it makes it hard for you to breathe, like a bad cold.”

  “Or smoking,” she added pointedly.

  Paul did not miss the thinly veiled hint. “Or smoking,” he agreed.

  * * *

  Emma looked out the window as Uncle Paul continued driving. They had passed the Liberty Heights billboard, but traffic was thick, and they weren’t moving very fast. If she squinted, she could still spy a glimpse of the red, white and blue lettering through the trees behind them, just above the letters on Paul’s truck mirror that read Objects in mirror may be closer than they appear.

  She remembered the first time her daddy had driven her past that sign, and had pointed to the hilltop. “We’re going to look at houses there,” he had told her. “They haven’t built any yet, but they will soon, and then we can buy one. What do you think?”

  He had been smiling. She knew the idea of buying a new house, making a new home with Jo made him happy. He hadn’t been happy in a long, long time―not really happy, not even when he’d said he was, not even when he’d smile. He had missed Emma’s mommy. It was like when Lucy had died, it had scraped something out inside of Daddy, leaving him raw and hollow and sad in places, and nothing had filled those holes until he’d met Jo Montgomery.

  “It’ll be closer to school for you,” Daddy had told her. “And closer to the new hospital where Jo’s working now.”

  They lived at Jo’s house, but it was small, and Daddy wanted something bigger. He and Jo were thinking about having a baby. They hadn’t said anything about it to her, but Emma knew still the same. Sometimes she could tell what people were thinking. Her grandmother would tell her. And Grandma had told her they wanted a baby.

  Emma worried that maybe they wanted one because she’d been bad, and they weren’t happy with her anymore. She was afraid sometimes that Daddy would love a new baby more than her, and that he’d forget about her. Grandma had told her that wouldn’t happen.

  He loves you, lamb, more than anything or anyone in the whole, wide world, Grandma had whispered inside Emma’s mind, and Emma had closed her eyes, imagining Grandma’s smiling face. He always will.

  Grandma had promised, but Emma still wasn’t sure―just like she still wasn’t sure she wanted to move into a new house at Liberty Heights. Daddy had showed her a picture he’d printed off the internet―a floorplan, he’d called it, and he had pointed to a big open square on the page that he said was going to be her bedroom.

  “It’s the biggest one on the whole second floor, besides mine and Jo’s,” he said. “See how big that is?”

  Emma had smiled and nodded because Daddy was happy, and she had wanted him to think she was happy, too. He’d promised her she could get a puppy when they moved, and that had made her feel a little more enthusiastic about the prospect of a new house, but she still had her reservations.

  She had felt uneasy a lot lately. She had been worried about her daddy. Something bad is going to happen, Grandma had told her, just before Daddy and Jo had gotten married. Her grandmother usually spoke to her in quiet, kindly tones, even when she had something grim to tell Emma, but when she’d said this, she’d sounded frightened. Sometimes she only knew bits and pieces, things she could offer to Emma in hints and warnings. This had been one such occasion.

  A storm is coming, Grandma had said, and in her mind, Emma had been able to see Grandma standing in the sideyard of the Kansas farm where her daddy and Uncle Paul had grown up. Grandma stood with one hand on her hip, the other drawn to her face so she could shield her eyes as she looked out across the flat plains toward the horizon. Emma had followed her gaze, and had seen a line of ominous black clouds, far off in the distance, a creeping shadow spilled across the proscenium of the sky. A storm is coming, Grandma had said again. Something bad is going to happen, and your daddy is going to be hurt.

  This admonition had not been followed with anything like unless we stop it, which is what Grandma usually said. This led Emma to think―and fear―that maybe Grandma knew something she wasn’t telling Emma; that she hadn’t said anything else because there was nothing that they could do to stop it. Or we’re not supposed to.

  “So what do you feel like for supper tonight, kiddo?” Paul asked, drawing her attention away from the truck’s sideview mirror.

  “I don’t know,” she replied. Uncle Paul would never let anything bad happ
en to Daddy, she thought. Uncle Paul was a policeman. He was a hero on TV, just like McGruff the Crime Dog in the cartoon commercials. Bad things had happened to Daddy just last year, but Uncle Paul had saved him. A bad man had tried to hurt them, a bad man called the Watcher. Uncle Paul had stopped him. He was gone now, but what the boy at school had told her that day about the Bermuda Triangle had only made her worry worse. What if there were bad men like the Watcher in the Bahamas? How could Uncle Paul stop something bad from happening to Daddy if he was all of the way in the Bermuda Triangle?

  “We bought those chicken nuggests the other day,” Paul suggested. “Some macaroni and cheese, too. What do you say?”

  “We probably ought to have a vegetable, too, Uncle Paul,” she told him pointedly, looking at him. He wouldn’t let anything bad happen to Daddy, she thought again. I know he wouldn’t.

  He smiled at her and nodded once. Until they’d gone to the grocery store together on the night of her arrival, his definition of vegetables had apparently consisted of canned baked beans. “You’re probably right,” he said.

  * * *

  “Hey, lamb. How are you?” Daddy asked her later on that evening.

  Emma sat on Paul’s couch, holding his cell phone against her ear with both hands and smiling with relief to hear Jay’s voice―happy and unhurting―from the other end.

  “I’m fine, Daddy. How are you?”

  He chuckled, sounding surprised by her question. “I’m good. Are you and Uncle Paul having fun?”

  “Yes.” Emma glanced across the room toward the doorway leading into the kitchen. She could see Uncle Paul walking back and forth, his shadow pooled beneath him on the white linoleum floor. He was talking on the cordless phone to M.K. or Bethany. Or maybe Aunt Vicki, now that she thought about it. His brows were narrowed, the corners of his mouth turned downward as he spoke, like he was aggravated or mad.

  “Guess what we did today?” Daddy asked. “We went snorkeling. You know what that is? It’s like scuba diving, only you don’t bring an air tank with you. You don’t go very deep.”

  She thought about asking him if he realized the Bahamas were in the Bermuda Triangle, but pressed her lips together and decided against it. Uncle Paul had told her the Bermuda Triangle wasn’t real, and Daddy probably thought so, too. She didn’t want him to think she was being silly.

  “We had a spelling test at school,” she said. “Mrs. Adams said it was a surprise.” Emma hadn’t thought it was a very fun surprise, though, and neither had most of her other classmates.

  “How’d you do?”

  “I spelled orange wrong.”

  “Well, that’s okay. It’s a hard one,” Jay said.

  After she finished talking to Daddy, she sat on the couch, kicking her heels against the side and listened to her uncle. He’d moved from the kitchen into his bedroom, but his voice was still sharp enough to overhear.

  “…that crap, okay, Vic? I’m not a fair-weather parent―I work for a goddamn living. And since I’m still paying most of the mortgage on that goddamn house, I think I should have a say in whether or not my sixteen-year-old daughter gets to date.”

  Uncle Paul was angry. He was angry a lot now. The lonely, empty place inside her daddy was gone, but now there was one inside of Uncle Paul―only his was a lonely, angry place. Sometimes it seemed to Emma like it threatened to swallow him whole. He and Aunt Vicki had gotten a divorce, and even though Daddy had explained to her that this didn’t mean they’d stopped loving one another, or that she couldn’t see Aunt Vicki or her cousins, M.K. and Bethany anymore, Emma still knew that Uncle Paul was angry and frightened because of it. He missed them.

  “Thanks, Vicki,” she heard him say, his voice dry and mean. “Thanks a hell of a lot. Yeah, you, too.”

  There was a loud clatter as he slammed the phone down against something. “Bitch!” Paul snapped and Emma jumped, wide-eyed. She had never heard her uncle say that word before, and especially not about Aunt Vicki. She sat absolutely still against the sofa, holding her breath, listening. She suddenly wished she hadn’t hung up the phone on her daddy. She didn’t know how to work Paul’s phone to redial him, either.

  She heard Uncle Paul sigh heavily, and then the scrape of his bedroom window opening. She heard a soft snict! and knew that he’d lit a cigarette. He tried his best not to smoke around her. He usually went outside, or at least on the little balcony off the living room.

  After a long moment with no other sounds, Emma slipped off the couch. She tiptoed down the short corridor, past the open doorway to the little bedroom she was using, and toward the larger master bedroom. The light was off in the hallway, and in his room. Night had fallen outside, and there was no illumination whatsoever except for the glow of a streetlamp outside seeping in through Paul’s open window.

  Emma peeked around the doorway and saw him sitting there, silhouetted in shadows, draped in pale smears of light. He looked out the window, his shoulders hunched almost wearily. She watched him lift the cigarette to his mouth and take a long drag on it. As the cinders glew brightly, momentarily, she could see his face. His brows were furrowed, his mouth turned in a frown.

  He looked like a stranger to her, someone she’d never seen before. Again, she thought about that raw, angry, empty space inside of him, the place left by the divorce. It’s like it’s eating him up inside.

  “Uncle Paul?” she said softly, hesitantly.

  He glanced up at her, his posture suddenly stiffening. “Hey, kiddo,” he said, his voice somewhat hoarse. He reached behind him, flicking on a lamp, and Emma blinked, momentarily dazzled by the sudden yellow glow. “You through talking to your daddy?”

  Once her eyes adjusted, she could see that he was smiling at her, his face softened and kind again―the way it always was. The hard-edged and frightening stranger she’d seen sitting in front of his window was gone.

  “Yes,” she said, nodding.

  Paul stood, cupping his cigarette against his palm, as if he didn’t want her to see it, even though the stink of smoke was apparent in the air. He walked past her toward the bathroom, and she watched him drop it into the toilet.

  “How’s he doing?” Paul asked, flushing the commode and stepped back into the hallway. “Are they tired of sun and sandy beaches yet?”

  “No,” she said. “He…he said they went snorkeling today. It’s like scuba diving, he said, only you don’t bring an air tank with you.”

  He smiled as he walked past her. He went into the kitchen and opened the refrigerator door. She heard glass beer bottles jangle musically together as he reached for one. “Why don’t you go ahead and brush your teeth, get your pajamas on?” he said.

  She nodded, grateful for the excuse to duck into her room and close the door. Uncle Paul seemed alright now, but she could still picture him in her mind, the angry look that had twisted his face as he’d sat alone in the darkness. It’s like it’s eating him up inside. “Okay,” she said.

  * * *

  Paul dreamed he was in a crowded nightclub. His conversation with his wife

  my ex-wife, she’s my ex

  had left him frustrated and angry, and in the dream, this manifested itself in the furious, pounding rhythm of deafening techno music as it shuddered in the air around him and thrummed in the floor beneath his feet. The club was dimly lit, except for the dance floor, which he could glimpse around people crammed about him in sticcato, brilliant pulses of neon-colored lights. The air in the club was thick and hot and moist, stinking of cigarette smoke and perfume, spilled beer and sweat.

  He imagined that as he shoved and shouldered his way through crowd, he caught a glimpse of his daughter, M.K., dressed in low-riding jeans and a halter top that was more of a bandana than a blouse. He spied her, but then the crowd surged around him, obscuring her from his view and he knew he was dreaming. There was no way in hell M.K. was in a nightclub. He was dreaming of her because he’d been arguing about her with Vicki, his ex-wife earlier that evening.

  Paul, if you’
d like to tell her she can’t go on dates during her weekends with you, that’s fine. Those are your rules. But during the week, she’s here with me, and we go by my rules―and I say she can go out with this boy on dates. I’ve met him and his parents and he’s a perfectly respectable young…

  He shook his head, forcing Vicki’s words from his mind. That’s not why I’m here. Though in the dream, he had no idea what he was doing in the bar, he knew there was a reason for his presence, something he was only momentarily forgetting. It’ll come to me.

  He edged his way to the bar and leaned over the edge to flad a bartender. The wooden proscenium of the bar was sticky against his skin. He could see himself, his reflection in the bar’s mirrored backwall. He ordered a double-shot of Jack, no splash, no rocks

  When the hell is the last time I drank whiskey? Fifteen years ago? Twenty? Surely to Christ before Vicki and I got married

  and fished his cigarettes out of his pocket while he waited for the drink.

  “Can I bum a light?”

  He turned to find a young woman standing next to him, shoved into nearly intimate proximity by the sheer, staggering force of the crowd. She was slender and small-breasted, her nipples outlined through the thin fabric of her white, spaghetti-strap camisole top. She wore a red skirt with a hemline that barely covered her buttocks, and a waistline that fell below the defined curves of her hip bones. She had short-cropped, icy blond hair worn in a deliberate tousle around her face, and for a moment, her resemblance to his wife nearly struck him breathless―Vicki, twenty years ago, when he’d first met in her college, first wanted her, first fallen in love with her.

  The young woman held an unlit cigarette between the two forefingers of her right hand, and she smiled at him hesitantly. “Can I bum a light?” she said again, pitching her voice to a near-shout to be heard over the din of the music. “Someone walked off with mine.”

  She was beautiful, and Paul felt a sudden, powerful jolt of lust. She was twenty years younger than him, at least, but all at once, that didn’t matter to him at all. “Sure,” he said, and her smile grew more relaxed, less tentative. She leaned forward as he held out his lighter. He cupped his hand to shield the flame, and watched as she lit her cigarette.