Dominion

by Greg F. Gifune

“Yes, I’m sorry, I—”

  “It’s time for dinner, let’s go sit down and have a nice Thanksgiving, OK? Doesn’t that sound like fun? Michelle, would you take Mom into the dining room please?” She helped Frances to her feet and carefully guided her to Michelle. “Aimee, go ahead in and sit down for dinner too. Uncle Daniel and I will be right in.”

  Michelle walked Frances to the dining room with Aimee following close behind.

  The moment they were gone Jeannie spun and faced him, hands on hips. “What was that all about?”

  Already overcome with guilt, Daniel shook his head. “I don’t know what happened, I just lost it.”

  “Yeah, evidently. Are you aware of how fragile Mom is right now? Not just physically, but psychologically? Do you understand how detrimental getting her upset and worked up like this can be? You know, you breeze in here and upset her then off you go and leave me to deal with the aftermath. Nice. Come on, haven’t you listened to a single thing I’ve told you over the last year?”

  He glanced at the dark monitor in the corner then back at his sister. “She said she saw Lindsay.”

  “What?”

  “Lindsay,” he said, even then knowing how crazy it sounded. “She said she sees her.”

  Something shifted in Jeannie’s face. It was subtle and controlled from years of being a professional, but he’d caught it just the same. “Daniel, Mother has Alzheimer’s. Her entire sense of reality is distorted. Do I really need to explain this to you again? Have things gotten that bad?”

  “You don’t understand, she said she saw Lindsay in—”

  “She’s ill. She sees Dad on a regular basis too, the Easter Bunny now and then and I’m pretty sure last week she had tea with Amelia Earhart. What the hell is wrong with you?”

  Daniel grabbed his wine from the table and drank it down. “I’m sorry.”

  “You need to get some help.”

  “You don’t understand, I—”

  “I understand you just accosted our mother because she claimed to see your dead wife.” Jeannie snatched the wineglass away from him. “I know a lot of good grief counselors and can recommend several—”

  “There are some things happening, and I need to figure out what it is I’m dealing with before I can explain any of this,” he told her quietly. The desire to get out of there was suddenly overwhelming. “I know it sounds crazy, I know it does, but—”

  “Do you feel like you’re losing your grip on reality, Daniel?”

  He squeezed his eyes shut a moment. “I have to go.”

  “Running isn’t the answer. It won’t solve anything.”

  “I’m not running, I’m just—I have to go.”

  “Let me help you.”

  “You can’t.”

  “But I know people who can.”

  “I need time to figure some things out.” Any inclination to tell her about the phone calls evaporated. “I wasn’t ready for this kind of thing yet, I shouldn’t have come in the first place. I don’t want to ruin your holiday, I’m sorry.”

  Jeannie let out a laugh, but it was more contemptuous than humorous. “Our mother is wasting away and slowly reverting back to infancy on her way to a horrible death. I’ve given up a career I love to care for her and am forced to watch her die right in front of me a little bit more every day. There’s tremendous pressure on my relationship with Michelle because of the lifestyle changes this has demanded of us both, and God love her, she hangs in there without so much as a single complaint. Our daughter cries herself to sleep at night because one morning she woke up and her Aunt Lindsay had gone to Heaven and now she’s terrified that maybe the next time she goes to sleep one of her Mommy’s or her Nana or maybe her Uncle Danny or even one of her little friends at school might be gone next. I’ve lost my sister-in-law—who I loved very much, by the way—and you, who I also love dearly, I have to see in agony that doesn’t seem to be getting any better. Now you’re confronting a mentally ill woman about having seen your dead wife and you refuse to get help and all you can say to me is you’re sorry? Yeah, me too, I’m so sorry I can barely stand another second of this. But I do. I do stand it. Know why? Because I don’t have any choice, do I? Other people count on me, love me and need me. I’m not alone in the world. I don’t live in a void. And neither do you.”

  “I know this is the last thing you needed right now,” he said. “There’s a lot I haven’t been able to get a handle on yet, but I’m not crazy and I don’t need a therapist, all right?”

  Jeannie brought a hand to her head and rubbed her temples. “It’s been five months since Lindsay was killed. You’re not getting any better. If anything, you’re getting worse.”

  “I have to work these things out on my own.”

  She nodded slowly then reached out and touched his shoulder. The look on her face revealed a long history of emotions and memories and experiences the two shared. For Daniel, he saw the Jeannie he’d always known, the young girl that had taken him for rides on her bike during that brief period of time when despite the difference in their ages, both were still just kids. He remembered them riding all over town together when he was just six and she fourteen, and how one day every month they’d make the long trek across town to the pharmacy so he could buy the latest Captain America comic book and she could score the newest issue of Tiger Beat. He saw in her eyes now the same young teenager that would put the radio on in her bedroom and teach him how to dance to the newest pop songs, and how they’d laugh and laugh because Daniel could just never seem to get the steps down. When he was nine he remembered the seventeen-year-old version of Jeannie picking him up from school one day not long after she’d gotten her license, only to find a couple older kids bullying him. Though Daniel stood his ground and tried to fight them off, it was two against one and he was getting the worst of it. Jeannie dashed from the car, grabbed one boy by the scruff of his neck and flung him away with strength no one would’ve guessed she had. Leveling vicious kicks at the other boy, who was on top of Daniel pummeling him at the time, she had kicked that kid nearly to the curb before he managed to scramble to his feet and run for it like his buddy had earlier. “Touch my brother again, you little pukes,” she screamed after them, “and I’ll kill you!”

  Mortified that his older sister had to save him from a beating, he remembered Jeannie all out of breath, her chest heaving and her eyes wide. He wanted to be mad at her, but when she asked if he was all right, they both burst out laughing at what she’d just done. They were still laughing ten minutes later while sitting in the car at the local ice cream stand, devouring hot fudge sundaes Jeannie had bought for them.

  “You’re pretty tough,” Daniel had said.

  “I’m not tough.” She reached over and gave his chin a faux punch. “I just love my little brother.”

  He remembered how he felt at that moment, and how much he loved his sister too. And now, all these years later, Daniel felt much the same, like his older sister was again willing to do whatever she had to do to save him. Maybe it was his turn to save her.

  “I’ll be all right, Jeannie. I just need more time.”

  “OK, look,” she said softly, “after dinner we can sit down and talk, just the two of us, all right? We’ll work this out, I promise, but for now let’s go have dinner and forget all this for a while. Let’s try to be a happy family for twenty minutes or so, that’s all I ask.”

  “I’m sorry, Jeannie, I have to go. If I don’t I—I won’t be able to hold it together.”

  “It’s too late for Mom to be well,” she said. “She’ll never get any better, only worse until the day she dies. That’s the reality, her reality. It doesn’t have to be yours. You have to be willing to try, and you have to let people help you. This isn’t something you can do without us.”

  But he knew in his heart that in order to protect her and the rest of his family, this was something he did have to do without them.

  He hugged his sister tighter and harder than he ever had before. At first she stood
perfectly still, arms at her sides, but then finally hugged him as well. And even though both realized he would leave once the embrace had ended, when he told her he loved her, she told him the same.

  THIRTEEN

  He needed to think, so Daniel took back roads for a while and planned to grab the highway around Dartmouth or New Bedford when he was ready to head back to Boston. He’d been driving for about ten minutes when he saw a small, old-fashioned diner set back from the road, its neon sign blinking and a roadside sign advertising Thanksgiving specials. Coffee and a sandwich hardly seemed a suitable holiday meal, but after the way he’d behaved at Jeannie’s, he didn’t think he deserved much better.

  As he pulled in and parked, he was surprised to see a fair number of cars in the lot. He wondered what town he was in. Perhaps Freetown, which neighbored Lakeville, but his mind had wandered while he was driving so he couldn’t be certain exactly how far he’d gone. He sat there a moment, rattled and wishing he still smoked. At least when he’d been a nicotine addict he had an outlet, something to do that relaxed him when he was this tense. Now he just sat there as if he had brain damage, staring straight ahead and trying to make sense of what the hell was happening to him. Tension and stress—anxiety, his physician had called it—had become a constant in his life. Since Lindsay’s death it was simply a matter of degrees, but even during the better moments it ran through him like an electrical current and left him feeling like he was on the verge of something bad, like his body might come apart at the seams at any moment and fall away from his skeleton the way one’s coat might fall to the floor. A nearly constant sensation of walking on eggshells, it held firm and exhausted him even when he was in a state of inertia. His doctor had given him a prescription for some anti-depressant that was supposed to also calm anxiety, but Daniel had never taken them, fearful that they might dull his mind to a point where he’d no longer be himself. Instead, he found simple distractions worked from time to time, though only for short intervals.

  Had anyone told him a year before that this was how he’d be spending his next Thanksgiving, he wouldn’t have been able to imagine it, much less believe it. Yet not half an hour ago he’d been fully prepared to believe his mother had seen and spoken to Lindsay through a computer. He caught his reflection in the rearview mirror and sighed. Though he was ashamed at having screamed at his mother, he still wasn’t sure what bothered him more, the way he’d acted or the fact that when she told him about Lindsay she’d seemed more lucid than she had at any other point during their conversation. The look of abject terror on her face was not something he’d soon forget either. And what had she meant about the man looking for Lindsay? Of course the man on the phone had immediately come to mind, and even though he knew at best it seemed ridiculous and implausible, a part of him refused to abandon the possibility completely. Maybe he needed to believe it in some strange way, and until he had something better to hold on to, he’d settle. Could there be any validity to the things his mother had told him? Could it be possible that her disease had opened doors in her mind that allowed her to see or experience things “sane” people could not? He remembered when his mother had been diagnosed, the doctors had admitted there were still many things they didn’t understand about Alzheimer’s, and even in general terms it was common knowledge that much of the human mind—healthy or otherwise—remained a scientific and medical mystery in many ways. Of all the things to say, all the endless possibilities, why say she’d seen Lindsay on the computer? Why mention a man looking for her, a man that frightened her?

  I think he might be the Devil.

  Surely everything she’d said couldn’t be dismissed as simple coincidence after all that had happened between his dreams and the phone calls, could it? For the first time in his adult life he forced himself to examine his beliefs in something other than a superficial manner. Daniel had been raised Catholic but stopped attending church regularly in his late teens. He returned only sporadically, usually on special occasions like Christmas or Easter Sunday. Organized religion had lost much of its appeal to him, but he considered himself a spiritual person and still believed the basic principles of Christianity. And if he believed in God and an afterlife then was any of this really so far outside the sphere of reality? Couldn’t it be possible that Lindsay was somehow trying to contact him or perhaps warn him through any means she could?

  Or were Jeannie and nearly everyone else he’d come in contact with lately right when they suggested he needed professional help?

  “No,” he said aloud. The phone calls were real. The man on the other end of them was real. The fear in his poor mother’s tearful eyes was real. The feeling deep in his gut that there was something more at play here, an otherworldly facet lingering just beneath the surface, was real.

  The anxiety weakened a bit, but he could still feel it pulsing through him, down his neck, through his arms and into his fingertips.

  He grabbed his cell phone and dialed Audrey’s number. As Bryce had suggested, if anyone knew anything else that might be useful, it was Audrey. She answered on the second ring. “Hey. Happy Thanksgiving.”

  “You too,” she said, though he could tell she wasn’t sure who it was.

  “It’s Danny.”

  “Danny, hi, how’re you doing?” Audrey’s voice held its usual mixture of enthusiasm and restlessness, a tone that much like Audrey herself struck him as genial if not wholly authentic. “That’s so sweet that you’d call. I was going to try to get a hold of you later. Are you going to Jeannie’s?”

  “I’ve already been, actually.”

  “Can you stop by at some point and have a drink with us? We’re just laying low today, no big plans. Nice quiet day, you know? Come on by, Elliot and I would love to see you.”

  “I have some things I have to do then I’ll swing by, OK? Thanks, Audrey.”

  “See you soon.”

  Daniel flipped his phone shut, got out of the car and climbed three wide steps to the diner door. Before going inside he looked to the sky. The sun was still high and bright, but the temperature had been dropping since that morning. If it kept up, by the time dusk hit it would be freezing.

  A burst of forced hot air slammed him full in the face as he stepped into the diner. The air was dry, stiflingly warm and smelled of grease. The counter area was full but Daniel noticed a couple empty booths near the rear of the restaurant. Even though the clientele consisted mostly of truckers and elderly folks, he was surprised to see a place like this doing so much business on Thanksgiving. A rickety freestanding sign next to the entrance read: PLEASE WAIT TO BE SEATED, and behind an old-fashioned cash register, a harried waitress had just finished ringing out an older couple. “Happy Thanks-giving,” she said less than convincingly as she turned her attention to Daniel, grabbed a couple laminated menus from a stack on the counter then led him to one of the vacant booths.

  He slid into the booth, flipped open the menu and listlessly scanned his choices. “Can I just start with a coffee for now?”

  “Sure,” she said, motioning to a small placard on the table. “Those are today’s specials. Turkey, turkey and more turkey—bet you didn’t see that coming, right? You want that coffee regular or black?”

  “Black, please, no sugar.”

  The waitress hesitated. “Did you want anything for…” She looked back at the diner entrance then turned to Daniel with a puzzled expression. “Are you alone?”

  “Yes.” He glanced over at the entrance as well. “Why?”

  “There was a woman standing behind you when you first came in. I thought you were together, sorry.”

  A shiver snaked along the back of his shoulders. “What did she look like?”

  The waitress hesitated in the aisle. “Huh?”

  “The woman, what did she look like?”

  “Reddish-brown hair to her shoulders, real pretty eyes. Cute little thing.”

  Daniel sprung out of the booth so quickly he nearly fell. Startled, the waitress took a few steps back and away from hi
m. He pulled his wallet from his back pocket and quickly rifled through it until he came across a photograph of Lindsay. “Is that her?” he asked, shoving the photo closer. “Is that the woman you saw?”

  The waitress glanced at the photograph uneasily. “I’m not sure.”

  “Look at it.”

  “Mister, I am looking at it. What’s going on?”

  “Look at it again.” He held it closer to her face. “Is that her or not?”

  “Could be, I guess. Sort of looks like the same person.”

  Before she’d finished the sentence Daniel was bolting down the aisle toward the exit. He sensed the patrons around him stopping to look at him as the noise level in the diner had noticeably decreased, but he kept on until he’d burst back out through the door and into the chilly air.

  He scanned the lot but could find no trace of a lone woman. As he jumped down off the stairs he saw a young truck driver crossing toward him. Had a woman come out of the diner in the last minute this man would’ve been in perfect position to see her. “Excuse me. Did you see a woman come by here just now?”

  The man cocked his head, indicating he hadn’t heard him. “Say again?”

  “A woman, did you see a woman come out here just a minute ago?”

  He pointed to his John Deere cap. “Brown hair, real pretty?”

  “Yes.”

  “She just went around the corner there.” His stare indicated the far end of the diner.

  Daniel ran for the side of the building but found only more parking spaces, most of them empty, and a large dumpster.

  Beyond the diner lay only woods, the sun breaking through and reflecting along windshields of vehicles parked nearby.

  A burning ache gripped his neck and his head began to throb. He braced himself against an SUV parked a few feet away. “Where is she?” he asked the forest. “Goddamn it, where is she?”

  “Who the hell you talking to?”

  A painfully thin man dressed in whites and a short order cook’s paper hat stood at the back door of the diner, a bag of trash in each hand.