by Ellen Datlow
“Little pasta tonight, eh?” said Broillard, checking the price of the spaghetti. “How’s it going out there?”
“Real great,” Shellane said. “I’m fucking your wife.”
The words sent a cold chemical flooding through him. His hands were like ice. Broillard gaped at him, an expression that—with his long hair and sideburns—tent him a hayseed look.
“I know how you treat her,” Shellane went on. “But you lay a hand on her, you say an unkind word, I’ll take you to the deep woods and leave you for the beasts.”
“You nuts, man?” Broillard made a. grab for something beneath the counter. Shellane caught his wrist and squeezed until the bones ground together. With his free hand, he fumbled about on the shelf. His fingers curled around a wooden shaft—a sawed-off baseball bat. He rapped Broillard with it on the side of his head, hard enough to provoke an outcry.
“Supposing I smash your fingers with this little guy,” Shellane said. “There goes the ol’ career, eh?”
He rapped Broillard again, harder this time, sending him to his knees, hands upheld to stave off another blow.
“I don’t know who you’re doing,” Broillard said with whiny outrage, “but it ain’t my wife!”
“Nice-looking redhead name of Grace. Beautiful green eyes, perky tits. Ass round as a teapot. Sound familiar?”
Broillard pushed himself into a corner, as far from Shellane as possible, and his voice unsteady, shrilled, “Get the fuck outa here!”
“Oh, I’ll be going … soon as I’m certain you understand that I’m your daddy. From this point on, you don’t even whimper unless I give you a kick.”
Broillard summoned breath and shouted, “Help!”
Shellane leaned across the counter and clubbed him on the kneecap. While Broillard was busy absorbing the pain, he went to the door, locked it, and turned the “Closed” sign outward. He shut the blinds, throwing the interior of the store into a gray twilight.
“Now we can be intimate,” he said, coming back over to the counter. “Now we can communicate.”
“I swear to God,” Broillard said. “If you—”
Shellane shouted, an inarticulate roar that caused Broillard to flatten against the wall.
“Grace told me a great deal about you,” Shellane said, “but she didn’t let on what a big pussy you are,”
“I don’t know what the fuck you want, man, but this is crazy!”
“Crazy is hitting her in the stomach so it won’t show. Telling her she’s a fat cow and she fucks like a sick fish. Like a cat with the heaves. That was very inventive, Avery … that last. It has the feel of hateful observance.”
Looking stricken, Broillard came to one knee. “Who told you?”
“Grace. She gave me chapter and verse on your sorry ass.”
“She’s dead.” Broillard said it with bewilderment, then more vehemently: “She’s dead! Somebody’s feeding you a bunch of shit!”
“What do you mean, she’s dead?”
“She’s dead … she died! Two years ago!” Broillard’s expression gave no indication that he was lying. “She’s dead,” he repeated with an air of maudlin distraction. “I … you can’t—”
“Don’t be playing with me.”
“I’m not playing. It’s the truth!” Broillard put his hands to his head as if fearful it might explode. “This is too weird, man. What’re you trying to do?”
Shellane wondered if he had been tricked. “You have a picture of her?”
Broillard blinked at him. “Yeah … I think. Yeah.”
“Let me see it!”
“I gotta—” Broillard pointed to the cash register.
“Get it!”
Broillard reached with two fingers between the cash register and a display case, extracted a dusty photograph with curled edges, and handed it to Shellane. In the picture, Broillard was standing in front of the blue Caddy, his arm around Grace, who was shielding her eyes against the sun. He was thinner. The shape of a sideburn barely sketched on his cheek. Grace looked the same as she had that morning. Both wore Endless Blue Stars T-shirts.
“That’s not her,” Broillard said with weak assurance. “She’s not the woman you’re banging, right?”
Shellane had a moment’s dizziness, as if he’d stood up too quickly. He stared at the photograph, unable to gather all his emotions, aware only of dread and hopelessness.
“She’s dead!” Broillard said with desperate insistence. “Go out to the cemetery and look, you don’t believe me.”
Shellane let the picture fall onto the counter. “We’ll both go,” he said.
THE LOCAL BONEYARD was quiet and neatly landscaped, and as they passed among the ranked stones, a few drops of rain still falling, Shellane was put off by the impacted piety of grandfather trees and green lawns. Death was quiet enough in its own right. He thought he would prefer to wind up in a Third World cemetery, someplace with a feeling of community, kids drooling taco juice on your plot, balloon salesmen, noisy families picnicking in front of their loved one’s crypt. Grace’s stone was a modest chunk of gray marble in a corner of the graveyard, close by an elderly maple, its crown of yellow leaves half denuded. What looked to be her college yearbook photo, a waist-up shot of a smiling girl in a dark blue sweater, a gold locket on a chain, was recessed in the marble beneath a transparent plastic square. Her legend read:
GRACE BROILLARD
1971—2000
Beloved Wife
No flowers were in evidence. The smell of leaf mold and a damp, darker odor.
Numb, uncomprehending, Shellane asked, “How did she die?”
“Natural causes,” Broillard said.
“The hell does that mean? What’s natural about the death of a twenty-nine-year-old woman?”
“She passed out. Some kinda trouble with her heart. We thought she drowned, ’cause she fell over at the edge of the lake. But the doctor told us her heart just stopped. She didn’t have any water in her lungs.”
Looking off at the sky, Shellane felt that his emotions had been eclipsed by a gray sun. “Lie down,” he said.
Broillard tried to dart away, but Shellane caught his arm. “I want you to lie down on the grave.”
When Broillard refused, Shellane swept his legs from beneath him, and he went sprawling atop the grave. He propped himself up on his elbows.
“Lie flat,” Shellane told him. “Get familiar with the pose.”
Reluctantly, Broillard obeyed. “What you gonna do?”
“You vile twist of shit! You drained the life out of her. You beat her down inch by fucking inch. You had her trapped. You took over her home, her business, and for her kindness, you hammered on her until she didn’t care enough to live.”
“You didn’t know her! She was a liar! Anything she wanted, she’d lie to get it! She—”
Shellane kicked him in the side; Broillard gasped, clutching the injured area.
“You didn’t know her,” he said again, with a quaver
“If she lied, it was because you tormented her. You gave her no reason to be truthful.” He nudged Broillard’s leg. “Confess your sins, Avery. Cleanse your soul before you come face-to-face with the Creator.”
Broillard’s eyes were squeezed shut. “Please … please don’t.”
Shellane wanted to hurt him, but each time he contemplated doing so, he lost focus. The sky above had the look of a flat gray lid; a maple leaf skated sideways on the breeze, back and forth, settling to the ground. “Grace,” he said, testing the truth of the name, finding that it provoked not dread, but desolation.
“I’m sorry … I.” Broillard began to weep, his words fractured by sobs.
“Shut up,” Shellane told him.
“I didn’t want her to die!” Broillard said. “I was all fucked up, I just—”
Shellane put his foot on Broillard’s stomach, a light pressure, and Broillard tensed, sucked in his breath.
“I want you to lie there for an hour,” Shellane said. “One full hour
. Maybe she’ll come to you. Give you a kiss.”
“No, man. I—”
Shellane pressed down harder.
“Tell her you were fucked up. Stoned. Drunk. Stressed out. Tell her you were crazy. Your creative spirit was suffocating. Buried under a rock of circumstance. And as you struggled to liberate your essence, you accidentally kicked her in the heart ten thousand times. I’m sure she’ll be merciful.” He kneeled beside Broillard. “A full hour. You leave before the hour’s up, I’ll find out. Do you know how?”
Eyes still shut, Broillard shook his head.
Shellane put his mouth close to man’s ear and whispered very softly, “She’ll tell me.”
OF COURSE HE HAD doubts. Doubt assailed him as he drove back to the cabin. There must be an explanation other than the obvious. A twin sister, an actress hired to play a part. But that was ludicrous, soap opera-ish. The idea of a ghost was much more logical, and what did that say about the world? That the occult could seem more rational than the mundane. Yet he suspected that he must not believe it. If he did, he would be more frightened of returning to the lake; he would want to run into the cabin, scoop up his belongings and be gone. Or was he half a ghost himself? So diminished and deadened by his sins, he was accessible to death’s creatures, immune to their terrors. This struck him with the force of truth and he tried to dredge up some awful fear hidden from sight, a mortal terror that would humanize him. He conjured new images of Grace. Imagined himself in bed with a corpse, a skull filled with maggots, saddled in a bone pelvis and sucking a mummified tongue. But she was none of those things. Whatever the physics of her substance, it was akin to his own. When he saw her, maybe then he’d be afraid. Now it was all speculative, but when he saw her … that would be the test of his humanity. Then he’d know if she was too real for him or if he was sufficiently unreal to be real for her.
The lake had gone a deep ocean blue under the prison sky, sluggish waves piling in to scour the shingle, and the boughs of the evergreens lifted with the hallucinatory slowness of undersea life. The cabin looked forlorn, a shabby relic. Grace was standing among the trees beside it, watching the road as he pulled up. Like a tiny figure placed in the corner of a landscape to lend perspective and a drop of color. He sat in the car, waiting for her to call out, but she remained silent. He stood with one foot on the ground, one on the floorboards, and stared at her across the roof of the car. In her jeans and plaid jacket, she looked entirely ordinary, and he wanted her to be real. Ghost or flesh-and-blood, it made no difference so long as she was real. As he walked toward her, she folded her arms and ducked her head. He stopped a few feet away, thinking that he would see death in her; but she was only herself. Mouth held tightly. Eyelids lowered. He started to frame a question, but could not come up with one that didn’t sound absurd. Finally he said, “I know what happened to you.”
“Do you?” She gave an unhappy laugh. “I’m not sure I do.”
Coppery strands of hair drifted across her face—she did not bother to brush them aside.
“You died,” he said. “Two years ago.” Unable to speak for a second, he put a hand to his brow—his fingers trembled. “How’s it possible … for you and me … ?”
“I’m not an expert on the subject,” she said with irritation. “I’ve only done it the once.”
“But we can touch each other. That doesn’t make sense.”
“When you put your hand on me, the first time, down by the water, I felt it. That’s all I know.” She shrugged. “I’m amazed you can even see me. No one else does, I don’t think.”
“You were worried about Broillard seeing you. The other day, on the beach.”
“That’s how I am with him. I don’t go, ‘Oh, he can’t see me.’ I just react the way I always have with him.”
The wind poured through the trees, drowning out every other sound. Shellane turned up the collar of his jacket. He studied the edges of Grace’s body, hoping to determine if they wavered or flickered or displayed any other sign of the uncanny. Which they did not. And yet there was something about her. That luminous quality he had first observed down by the water. With the gray sky above and trouble in the air, she should have looked pale and drawn; but she still had that glow, that eerie vitality, and he thought now this must be a symptom of her unnatural state. The desolation he’d felt beside the grave returned. He had an impulse to run for the car, but his feet were rooted.
“Avery told me,” he said. “I had a talk with him about the way he treated you, and he told me.”
“You must have frightened him. For all his bullying, Avery’s a very frightened man.”
“I was tempted to kill the son of a bitch.”
She let out a despondent sigh. “I wanted you to. That’s why I told you that stuff about him. For a long time, getting back at him was all I thought about.”
Some ducks that had been floating by the margin of the shore flapped up from their rest and beat against the wind toward the far end of the lake. Grace watched them go. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I just hated him so much.”
“And now you don’t?”
“No, I still hate him. But it doesn’t seem as important.”
She held out her hand and he drew back, both a fearful rejection and one of embittered practicality. If she was a ghost—and what else could she be?—he was not relating to her as such, but rather as he might to a woman with a problem he did not want to get involved in. Like a girlfriend with a drug habit. Fear nibbled at the edges of his awareness, an old Catholic reflex serving to remind him that she was an abomination, a foulness, a scrap of metaphysics. But he could not turn away.
“Why’d you think I’d kill Avery?” he asked.
“I knew things about you from the first moment. It was so weird. I knew who you were. Not your name or anything, but I had a sense of your character. I could tell you’d done violent things.”
“My name’s Roy Shellane.”
She repeated it. “I didn’t think you looked like a Michael.”
The wind came again and she hugged herself.
“I feel alive,” she said wonderingly. “Ever since you got here, it’s like I’m back in the world. I’ve never felt so alive.”
He studied her face, trying again to discern some taint of death, and she asked what was wrong.
“I keep expecting things to be different now I know,” he said. “That you’ll turn sideways and vanish … something like that.”
“Maybe I will.”
“I keep thinking I’m going to be afraid.”
“Are you?”
“Just that you’ll vanish,” he said. “And I guess it frightens me that I’m not more afraid.”
The way she was looking at him, he knew she wanted him to reassure her. With only the slightest hesitancy, he stepped forward, half-expecting his arms to pass through her, but she nestled against him, warm and vivid in her reality. He felt a stirring in his groin, the beginnings of arousal, and this caused him to question himself again, to speculate about what he had become.
“Roy,” she said, as if the name were a comfort.
He rested his chin on the top of her head and gazed out over the lake, at the heavy chop, the foot-high waves trundling toward shore, and felt a sudden brilliant carelessness regarding all his old compulsions.
“I know you can’t stay for long,” she said. “But a little while … maybe that would be all right.”
DURING THE DAYS that followed, it occurred to Shellane that theirs was a pure romance, free of biological imperatives, divorced from all natural considerations, and yet it seemed natural in all its particulars. They made love, they slept, they talked, they were at peace. Even knowing their time together would be brief, that was not so different from the sadness of more conventional lovers whose term of intimacy had been proscribed. Yet Grace’s abrupt departures continued to trouble him. For one thing, he was never certain she would return; for another, he could not think where she went or into what condition she might have been reduced.
If he asked, he knew she would tell him—if she herself knew—but he was afraid to hear the answer, imagining some horrid dissolution. Sometimes when he left her sleeping and was busy at his laptop or puttering in the kitchen, he would have the feeling that in his absence she ceased to exist and sprang back into being whenever he looked in on her. But these were minor discords in the music of those days. The most difficult thing for Shellane was an increasingly acute feeling that his ability to interact with her hinted either at madness or the imminence of some black onrushing fate. The similarity of his youthful behavior to that of Broillard seemed to tilt the scales of possibility toward the latter, to hint at a karmic synchronicity. Yet he was not prepared to give her up. Whenever he considered leaving, this thought would be pushed aside by more immediate concerns, and though he realized he would soon have to leave, he was unable to confront the fact.
Two days after he had learned the truth about her, while she lay sleeping, Broillard knocked at the door. He was in bad shape. Bloodshot eyes; disheveled; coked up, his sinuses mapped by hectic blotches. Like a vampire beginning to decompose in the strong sun. He wiped his nose and twitched, yet attempted to present a manly appearance by speaking in a stern voice and holding his shoulders square.
“You’n me need to work shit out,” he said.
“Not a good time,” Shellane told him. “I’m occupied.”
“Yeah? Me, too. I’m occupied in figuring out why I shouldn’t call the cops on your ass.