Dominion

by Greg F. Gifune

  “I know it may seem somewhat morose,” Thomas had said, directing his comments to his daughter rather than to her and Daniel as a couple, something he did quite a bit, “but it’s a practical gift and a good investment. God knows what plots will cost by the time you two are our age.”

  Who could’ve known then that his daughter would be the first of them to be buried and laid to rest there? In fact, the day Thomas and Charlotte had given them the plots, Lindsay had less than a decade left to live.

  Though Daniel had attempted to return to the cemetery in the months since Lindsay’s funeral, he’d never gotten as far as her grave. He’d made the drive several times but had never been able to force himself through the gates. This time he pulled right in, surprised by his resolve, his car creeping through the narrow paved paths that cut through an ocean of headstones for far as the eye could see. He located Lindsay’s plot at the far corner of the cemetery, beyond which lay a small stone wall, a smattering of trees and a stretch of state highway.

  During the ride from Boston he’d continually checked for the Explorer, but the man following him was nowhere in sight. Even as he rolled to a stop in front of Lindsay’s stone, he checked the rearview, half expecting to see the dark green monstrosity bearing down on him. But the cemetery was quiet.

  He was alone with the dead.

  Daniel stepped out of the car and slowly approached his wife’s grave. The utter silence and stillness throughout the cemetery grounds was intimidating, like the foreboding hush of an intensive care unit.

  It was even colder here than it had been in Boston. He pulled his coat in tight around him as columns of breath spilled from his mouth in continuous white bursts. Moving closer, Daniel crouched down a few feet from the grave and studied the dark stone. He vaguely remembered picking it out, and how he thought it attractive and tasteful, if those terms could be ascribed to such an awful thing. A small cross lying on its side was etched into the face of the headstone, Lindsay’s name just beneath it. Lower still, her dates of birth and death were displayed. Next to them were blank portions of smooth stone waiting for the day Daniel was buried there too.

  He sank down onto the cold hard ground and knelt before the stone. He knew the act of visiting the gravesides of loved ones brought peace and comfort to countless people, but he always found something intrinsically disturbing about cemeteries. Hallowed as they may be, they were still dumping grounds, places to discard and store dead bodies like the irrelevant objects they had become. Though he desperately wanted to—needed to—he had no sense of Lindsay here—or anything human for that matter—only grass and earth, trees and flowers, shrubbery, marble, stone and sky. Of course these things were of far greater beauty than anything Man could put forth, but the harsh reality of the situation was that just feet below him, Lindsay’s body lay in a box. A body he’d once held and caressed and tasted, a living body of flesh, blood and bone pulsing with life and warmth. And now she was reduced to a slab of marble, meaningless words and perennial flowers. Dirt, grass, memories and stone, that’s what she’d become now. And what of those memories, were they indicative of something deeper and more significant or were they as basic as they seemed? The heat of her body when he’d curled up next to her, the way she smelled faintly of deodorant soap and shampoo, the way the bottom of her foot slowly caressed his shin even as she slept, the taste on the nape of her neck, the soft mewling sounds she’d make as she wiggled closer to him, pressing the halves of her ass against his groin, her smile, the way she moved, her laugh and wicked sense of humor, her intelligence and conversational skills, all these things conspired to remind him how deeply he loved Lindsay—how deeply he always had. Many people were not in love with their spouses, or fell out of love as years of marriage passed, but not Daniel. He was madly in love with his wife even now. He felt attraction to other women from time to time, of course, and in a few isolated incidents while out of town he’d had too much to drink and flirted more than he should have, perhaps allowing things to get closer to the point of no return than he should have. But he’d never betrayed her. There seemed little point in it, because no one could come close to measuring up to Lindsay. Other men he’d known—even Bryce when he was married—were open to the possibility of sex with other women, or conjured other erotic partners in their fantasies and conquests, but when Daniel thought of sex and lovemaking both, he always thought of Lindsay first. It was her eyes that came to him, her lips, her tongue, her hands, her soul—all of it Lindsay.

  But surely she was more to him than snippets in his mind’s eye, a series of sexual trysts or anecdotal stories told between family and friends, remembered fondly in quiet moments or the dead of night? Surely she was more real than that even now. Yet she was slowly transforming into those things with alarming consistency, her memory and his grief woven together into a tapestry of convenient mental video clips and sound bites.

  An ambulance passing along the road caught his attention, distracted him from the visions of what had once been Lindsay trapped beneath him deep in the earth. The ambulance lights were flashing but weren’t accompanied by a siren, and the silence of those spinning lights was disconcerting. Shouldn’t there have been a warning blare along with them? The ambulance moved at a steady but slow clip, and Daniel wondered who might be inside. Were they male or female, young or old, alive or dead, dying or just injured, awake and aware of what was happening or unconscious and oblivious?

  He remembered Lindsay had once told him that whenever she saw an ambulance with its lights or siren on, she would stop and think for a moment about whoever was inside and then say a prayer for them. It was a practice Daniel had adopted, and as he knelt there now, watching the ambulance slowly fade into the distance, he silently offered a quick prayer for its occupant.

  When others had driven past the crime scene that night and seen flashing lights from police cars and ambulances, eerie and otherworldly in the darkness, the gathering of paramedics or the milling about of law enforcement officials, he wondered if any of them had prayed for Lindsay. When they’d seen the body, just a small lump beneath a sheet, as if a child dressed as a Halloween ghost had curled up in the middle of the street for a nap, had they thought about her then, sent her positive energy or good vibes or whatever the hell else people did for those less fortunate than themselves? Did they think about whom she might be, who might love her, how many lives would be ruined before that night was through? Had any of that occurred to anyone as his wife’s body lay dead on blood-spattered pavement? And if it had, and they’d all prayed and sent her good wishes, had it made any difference whatsoever? He wanted to believe it had, but all he knew for sure was that no amount of prayer had saved her.

  Unless one believed that death was the rescue, a kind of sanctuary not possible in this world of sorrow, anger and violence.

  Through the thin veil that set the here and now apart from the past, something crept into the corner of his eye and nested there, something white and moving with slow and steady allure. The edge of a bed sheet flapped in the breeze. Initially he wondered if it might be the sheet the police had covered Lindsay with in the street, but soon realized it was something else entirely.

  Daniel rose slowly from his knees, arms limp and dangling at his sides.

  An ugly, industrial-style steel bed—the kind found in hospitals—sat between two rows of headstones. Someone lay asleep or unconscious beneath the sheets, tucked in tightly, nose connected to a thin oxygen tube from a unit next to the bed. An IV had been fitted into the person’s arm, and another machine that monitored the heart beeped rhythmically.

  Though impossible, it all made sense to him somehow. He moved toward the bed, weaving carefully between the headstones until his eyes confirmed what his mind had already known. “Dad,” he whispered.

  His father, just moments from death and too weak to raise his head from the pillow, shifted his empty eyes to his son. His skin had become an upsetting gray color, and though his father was still a relatively young man, he looke
d ancient. The cancer had literally destroyed him, rotting him from the inside out. The ghastly smell of feces and bile hung in the air, and as his father opened his mouth to speak, thin lips parting slowly, he instead swallowed with great effort then seemed to think better of it.

  Daniel had seen this all before, of course, but he’d been thirteen then, just a frightened and confused kid, brought to the hospital to say goodbye to his father, a man he’d barely known. Only six when his parents divorced and his father moved away, Daniel barely remembered his father in any context other than the day he died.

  “Dad,” he said again.

  His father managed to speak, but only in a barely audible whisper.

  Daniel forced himself to lean closer, so close that he could feel the shallow breath leaking from his father’s slowly dying body against his cheek. “Tell me again, Dad.”

  “They can’t see you.”

  Daniel looked up, expecting to see others, but no one shared this place of death and reminiscences with them, only row upon row of headstones. “No one’s here but us.”

  “I made so many mistakes, son, committed so many sins,” the man said, his voice louder but still quite weak. “I failed you and your sister terribly. And I’m sorry. It’s not enough, I—I know it’s not enough but I mean what I say. I’m so sorry. If I could take it all back and do it again differently I would. It’s the guilt that kills us. It’s the guilt that tears us apart. I promise you I would, I—”

  “It’s all right, don’t—”

  “I should’ve never left you kids, I—I should’ve come home.”

  “It’s OK.” Daniel let his hand rest atop his father’s. “You’re home now.”

  “Home to die, I—I’ve come home to die.”

  “It’ll be all right.”

  “You can’t be here. Don’t you…don’t you know where I’m going?”

  “I’m with you. I’m here, Dad.”

  His eyes widened with more fervor than they appeared capable of, staring in horror at something only he could see just over Daniel’s shoulder. “Do you love me? Son, do you love me?”

  Before Daniel could answer, the fire in his father’s eyes was extinguished. They rolled back and the lids sank closed as what remained of his ravaged body fell still. Dark blood seeped free of the corpse, soaking into the white sheets around its waist and legs in a steadily growing sunburst.

  As Daniel backed away, vomit gurgled at the base of his throat. He choked it back, brought a hand to his nose to block the awful stench and staggered away.

  Then it was all gone and he realized he was still kneeling before Lindsay’s grave.

  “Get up off your knees, boy,” he heard his father say from some distant time and place. “You’re chasing the wind. Go back, boy. Go back.”

  He clenched shut his eyes but his father was there waiting for him again, emaciated and dead in a pool of his own blood and fecal matter.

  Head spinning, Daniel stood up and quickly returned to the car, his father’s voice ringing in his ears. He slipped behind the wheel, closed the door after him and started the engine. The heater came to life, shielded him from the icy stares of the dead and brought him back to the night of the hot winds.

  Lindsay had sat at the foot of the bed watching him. Eventually he’d crawled over to meet her, taken her in his arms and held her nude body against his own. She’d stared into his eyes as that humid wind, baleful and constant, drew the perspiration from their pores and left them dizzy and sluggish. Her hands moved up his back and onto his shoulders, pulling him closer until there existed no space between them. A statue fused by a sculptor’s torch, a single organism of entangled limbs, welded torsos and synchronized breath, they remained locked together until sleep came, first for Lindsay, and then for him.

  But when Daniel went searching for that memory, for the intensity and intimacy of it, for the truth of it, the version he found had been altered. This time as he held her, she looked down at the floor, as if the bed were a lifeboat adrift in shark-infested waters, as if things were crawling about down there on the floor, circling them, stalking them, waiting and watching in the darkness with predatory glee. And then the hot winds crossed their bedroom, ripped Lindsay away from him and tore her to pieces. Without so much as a scream, her eyes filled with blood and her skin was torn from the bone, falling away in bloody sheets before her carcass splintered and fell to pieces. Like smashed pottery, she crumbled away to dust, a façade planted there to taunt him, to remind him of what was forever lost, of what could never again be. A cruel dream shaken loose from his head, only to dissolve into nothingness once freed, she was gone and he was left behind in the dark with those small vile things that slithered and crept about on the floor.

  The car heater had cured his chill but had already become stifling. He turned away from the grave, looked out over the vast rows of headstones in the opposite direction and lowered the window a bit.

  A woman moved along a path a few dozen yards away. Not much older than he, she was bundled up in a heavy overcoat, hat and mittens, and held a small wreath dressed in red ribbons. Her high heels ticked against the pavement until she stepped onto grass, then silence returned. There was something affecting about the way the woman stopped abruptly, like she’d stumbled upon the headstone she’d come to visit by accident. Her face was stoic, expression controlled, but as she bowed her head, vaporous clouds appeared in rapid succession, giving her away.

  The woman carefully laid the wreath across one corner of the stone then stood there with a helplessness Daniel knew all too well.

  He wondered who she was, who she had lost, and what her life was like now. What kind of person was she? He imagined what it might be like to live with her, to love and be loved by her. Had they ended up together, in some other life, would they have shared the same things he and Lindsay had? Would their life together have been similar or wildly different? Conjecture aside, Daniel and this woman were together in many ways, and he knew that, realized it as he watched her paw tears from her eyes and stare at a monument to someone no longer here…or there. Perhaps the young woman who had been kind enough to give him a tissue earlier was right. Maybe no one was ever really alone. And if Lindsay was more than the memories she was already becoming, then maybe she was still with him in some way he could not yet understand, watching over him and trying to guide him.

  But she was not here, in this cold and lifeless place.

  Daniel raised the window and looked at his watch. Quite a bit of time had passed. He’d apparently been sitting there longer than he realized.

  He dropped the car into drive, pulled away and headed back to the city.

  TWENTY

  Storm clouds crawled across the sky, rolling in over Boston Harbor as an icy drizzle began to fall slowly but steadily, weakening what little daylight remained and casting the city in a strange and ominous hue. Night was on its way, bringing with it more sleet, colder temperatures and a growing sense of dread Daniel could not escape.

  He’d parked and was halfway up his front steps when he heard the sound of a car door slamming shut behind him. Through the rain, a woman watched him from the curb, hands stuffed into a bright yellow raincoat, the hood pulled up to conceal her face.

  “I’ve been waiting nearly an hour,” she said. “I tried calling your cell but just kept getting your voice mail.”

  “Jeannie?” He came back down the steps to meet her. “What are you doing here?”

  His sister pulled the hood back far enough to reveal her red eyeglasses. “I needed to see you.”

  “Is Mom—”

  “She’s fine. Everyone’s OK, it’s not that.” She touched his arm, let her hand linger there a moment. “We have to talk.”

  Daniel nodded, rainwater dripping across his face. “Come on inside.”

  Once in the living room Daniel took her coat, hung it up then did the same with his own. “Can I get you some coffee, tea? I’ve got hot chocolate in—”

  “No thanks. I can’t stay
too long. I don’t want to leave Michelle alone with Mom any longer than I have to. Normally she’d be all right, but Mom’s all over the map lately, harder to handle than normal.” She rubbed her hands together to warm them then motioned to the couch. “Sit down with me a minute, OK?”

  “Jeannie, this really isn’t a good time right now.”

  “I need to talk with you.” She sat on the couch and patted the cushion next to her. “Come on, sit.”

  Daniel complied. “I know after the way I behaved yesterday with Mom you must think I’m—”

  “You don’t look good. You look like you haven’t slept in days.” She quickly appraised their surroundings. “This place isn’t being kept up either. When’s the last time you did some laundry, dishes, or ran a vacuum in here? And yesterday, yes, I mean, my God you weren’t even making any sense. I’m not trying to kick you when you’re down, Danny, you know that, but I’m concerned about you. I love you and I’m concerned, do you understand?” Jeannie brushed a dangling strand of hair from her face. “I’m worried you might be losing control.”

  “Things are—they’re all wrong lately, mixed up and—and other things have been happening to me I don’t understand yet.”

  “What kind of things?”

  “Things that have to do with Lindsay.”

  “Can you explain them to me?”

  “I can’t even explain them to myself at this point.” Daniel stood up, no longer able to remain still. “I don’t—I can’t—”

  “Look at me.” When he hesitated she said it again. “Daniel, look at me. It’s me you’re talking to. It’s just you and me, no one else. You’re completely safe.”

  Daniel wondered if he’d ever truly feel safe again. Still, when he did as his sister ordered and looked deep into her eyes, the anxiety weakened. “I’ve been sensing Lindsay around me,” he said. “OK? All right? I’ve been sensing her presence around me, like—like she’s standing right next to me sometimes.”