Two Days Gone

by Randall Silvis

  “Okay,” the officer said and smiled crookedly.

  “It’s important,” DeMarco told him. “Don’t wait till you’re my age to learn that.”

  But he recognized that look in the young man’s eyes, the smile that was almost a smirk. Okay, pops, the look said. Whatever you say.

  The look lingered with him even after the officer was gone, as DeMarco sat in his own vehicle again, watching past the gas pumps as car after car moved through the intersection, the light changing ceaselessly from red to green to yellow to red. He knew he was accomplishing nothing by remaining there, that Huston could be miles away by now. He was out by the lake somewhere, somewhere along those miles of ragged coast. Maybe already with his Claire. With his family again, if that kind of thing were possible. DeMarco had no idea what was possible and what wasn’t. He was only sure that in this lifetime, at least, he never would know.

  The Ohio troopers knew the area, and they were out there patrolling it, cruising the back roads, looking for a campfire in the woods. Huston would need a fire tonight to keep him warm. If, indeed, he had any intention of lasting through the night, which DeMarco doubted. The troopers had DeMarco’s phone number and were supposed to call him if they spotted anything. A light in an abandoned building. A solitary pedestrian. A body in the water.

  DeMarco kept his window rolled down despite the chill. He liked the vague scent of water in the air, the damp scent of night. He thought it might be nice to live up there, so close to the water. It might be nice to have a boat that he could motor out a mile or so and shut off the engine and listen to nothing but the water, feel nothing but the movement and the low lap of waves.

  He laid his head back against the headrest and turned his face to the open window and closed his eyes. Christ, he was tired. Now that he admitted it, he could feel the heaviness in every limb. His neck and shoulders ached, his spine felt stiff. The air smelled of concrete and water.

  When the phone rang in the distance, he thought he was at home and tried to push himself up out of his chair. He rammed his chest into the steering wheel and that brought him awake. Now he thought the ringing was coming from the public phone mounted on the corner of the building, so he threw open the door and stood and only then felt the vibration in his pocket. But by the time he had his cell phone out, the call had gone to his voice mail. The number looked familiar, but he could not remember whose it was. He immediately tried to call it, but it went straight to voice mail without ringing, and when he heard the greeting of “Hi, guys, this is Danni,” he hung up and waited for the beep that would tell him that Danni had completed her message to him and hung up. He did not bother then to listen to her message but called her back. She answered on the first ring.

  “He just called me!” she said. “Just three minutes ago, he called me.”

  “Thomas Huston called you?”

  “Yes. Didn’t you listen to my message?”

  “No, I didn’t want to wait. What did he say?”

  “The first thing he did was to ask if I like poetry. Then he recited a poem for me.”

  “‘Annabel Lee’ again,” he said.

  “What?”

  “The name of the poem he recited. ‘Annabel Lee.’”

  “No, he said it was called ‘The Lake.’ And that’s what it was about. The loneliness of the lake.”

  “Danni, listen. Was it about anything else, anything having to do with death?”

  “I think so,” she said. “There was something about a grave in it.”

  “Do you have a computer?”

  “Yes.”

  “Can you go to it now? While I have you on the line?”

  “Sure, it’s right here.”

  “Okay, go online and see if you can find a copy of ‘The Lake’ somewhere.”

  “I don’t even know who wrote it,” she said.

  “Try Poe. Edgar Allan Poe.”

  “Okay, give me a minute.”

  DeMarco walked from one side of the parking lot to the other. He returned to his car, stood there a moment, then started walking again.

  “Okay, I have it,” she said.

  “Read it to me.”

  She did so.

  “That last part,” he said. “Starting with the word death. Read that part again for me.”

  This time she read more slowly. “‘Death was in that poison’d wave,/And in its gulf a fitting grave/For him who thence could solace bring/To his lone imagining/Whose solitary soul could make/An Eden of that dim lake.’”

  When she finished, he told her, “Thank you, Danni. Now tell me anything else he said.”

  “What does it mean?” she asked.

  “It means he hasn’t killed himself yet, not as of four minutes ago anyway. So I need you to please just think hard and answer my questions now, okay? Did he say anything else or did he just recite the poem?”

  “Yes, he said, uh…he said something about seeing the whole way across the lake. About being able to see the lights in Canada.”

  “He said he could see them from where he was?”

  “No, he said he’d be looking at them in a few minutes. He said there were no stars out tonight because of the clouds but he was near a place where he could…how did he put it…‘ascend to the heavens’ I think. That was it. He said he could ascend to the heavens and from there look down on the lights in Canada as if they were stars. So that he would have to come down to them to get to heaven. It just made no sense to me, and the way he sounded, his voice was so low and tired or something. It’s hard to explain.”

  “You did fine,” he told her. “You did wonderfully. I have to hang up now, but if he calls back, you try to find out exactly where he is, okay? And then you call me immediately.”

  “I will,” she said.

  He hit the End button, then brought up his call log for the telephone company’s number. Then he realized that it would take several minutes to get the necessary information from them, so instead, he pocketed the phone and hurried into the convenience store. In addition to the middle-aged female clerk behind the counter, there was a thirtysomething male standing at the dairy cooler, half a gallon of chocolate milk dangling from his hand while he studied the display of Ben and Jerry’s pints, and a teenage couple loading up on chips and Slim Jims.

  “Could I have your attention please?” he said loudly and held his ID above his head. “My name is Sergeant Ryan DeMarco of the Pennsylvania State Police and I need your assistance. I am looking for a place, probably within a couple of miles of here, where it would be possible to see across Lake Erie to the lights of Canada. Can anybody think of anyplace like that?”

  The man at the dairy cooler said, “That’s like forty miles across.”

  The clerk said, “You can see lights from that far, I think.”

  The man with the milk came toward the front. “No, because of the curvature of the earth. It would be like trying to look over the horizon.”

  DeMarco said, “A high place. Somewhere a person would have to climb. A hill, a tower, something like that.”

  The clerk said, “There’s a cell phone tower just a mile or so up the road toward North Springfield.”

  “The lighthouse,” the teenage girl called out.

  “What lighthouse, miss?”

  The man said, “Would that be high enough?”

  “Miss?” DeMarco said again. “What lighthouse?”

  To her boyfriend she said, “You tell him.”

  “Just out at the point,” the boy said.

  “Tell me exactly where.”

  The man said, “I don’t think it’s high enough. Besides, it’s all fenced off. I don’t think you can even get to it anymore.”

  DeMarco crossed to the teenage couple. He looked directly at the boy. “This is extremely important,” he said.

  The boy said, “It’s high enough. And
you can get to it. You just can’t take your car up to it because the road is blocked off. And you have to climb over a chain-link fence.”

  DeMarco said, “Tell me how to get there.”

  “Just take 531 east until it swings south. There’s a dirt road there that veers off to the left, straight toward Perry Point. But you can only drive about twenty yards, then there’s these three metal poles you can’t get past. The old lighthouse is another couple hundred yards up that road. Behind an eight-foot fence.”

  “And you’re sure you can see the lights from there?”

  The boy said nothing for a moment. Then, “I, uh…that’s what I heard anyway. I mean there’s No Trespassing signs all over the place so…”

  DeMarco looked at the girl. She smiled and said, “We’re sure.”

  Forty-Nine

  His headlights blinked out behind him when DeMarco was thirty feet or so beyond the three metal security posts. He stood in the middle of the lane in sudden darkness. Low trees and sumac and a heavy tangled wall of fox grape vines on both sides of the lane blended with the now-black sky. He felt enclosed in a long, narrow closet, and because all directions were now uniformly black, he felt a dizziness swoop into him, and he lurched a step to his left before catching himself, standing still with his legs spread wide. He knew that it was only an illusion that he was falling—he had both feet on the ground; the earth was still flat beneath him. He could hear his engine ticking as it released its heat, as hot oil flowed back into the oil pan, as hot metal cooled and contracted.

  He felt an urgency, yet knew that it would do neither him nor Huston any good if he went rushing headlong into the bushes. The lane was still there. It had not disappeared from existence just because his headlights went out. His eyes would adjust. A step at a time, he told himself.

  He was carrying his flashlight but decided not to use it here. It would have cast a powerful beam, enough to illuminate the path for two hundred feet ahead. But if Huston was indeed up ahead somewhere, and DeMarco felt certain he was, he would see the light coming toward him, jerking back and forth, and some vague premonition told DeMarco that the only productive approach would be a cautious one, that he needed to move in on Huston as carefully, as reverently, as one might approach a wounded animal that had crawled into the brush to die.

  He thought for a moment about taking out his cell phone and using its dull blue glow to illuminate his path, but he did not want to chance even that. His eyes would adjust. He was moving north toward the lake, and in all likelihood, Huston was facing north, if indeed he was not already facedown on the boulder-strewn shore. But an anomalous blue light bobbing up the lane might still catch Huston’s attention, might force a tragic decision that had not yet been implemented. Most suicides, DeMarco knew, were anything but sudden. Most victims sat a long time with the gun in their lap, the razor pressed between finger and thumb. It took a long time to summon the courage or despair sufficient for the next step.

  DeMarco drew hope from the fact that Huston had reached out twice. Unfortunately, the first call had been answered by a machine. Nathan would have had the prescience and empathy necessary to intuit Huston’s motives and might have swayed the man’s resolve somehow, might have pulled him in. Danni, however, was very young—too young to know the depth of Huston’s sorrow. Too far away, in a sense, to extend a hand into the chasm of Huston’s grief.

  DeMarco wondered why Huston had chosen Danni and Nathan to contact. A stripper and a student. Did the man have no friends, no trusted confidante? At first, DeMarco thought this very strange. Then he asked himself, Do you?

  DeMarco knew that his only choice was to proceed cautiously under the assumption that the implication of Poe’s poetry had not yet been fulfilled. His own arm was long enough to reach into any chasm. No chasm was deeper than the one gouged out by the loss of a child.

  Ten minutes later, having stepped off the lane several times before pulling himself back toward its center, and having felt his trajectory making a slow turn toward the north, he now saw the blackness shift ahead of him, saw it open up into a lighter shade of blackness. His eyes were adjusting now, cones and rods taking in more light. Ahead, at a distance impossible to calculate, maybe forty feet and maybe forty miles, was a charcoal wall. Vague silhouettes darkened it here and there, but the only one that interested DeMarco was the one that rose like an obelisk, like a lighthouse without a light, an obsolete beacon of hope.

  He could smell and hear the lake now. The scent of wet earth, so too like the scent of sex. A soft rumble. Water lapping against rounded stones. Soft darkness washing against a harder darkness, sighs against groans, tears against grief.

  He did not see the security fence as much as he sensed it, so black had the night become. No moon or stars, an absolute occlusion of sky. Something told him to put out his hand as he walked, and soon he felt the coldness of wire emanating toward him, so unlike the chill of a living night. He slowed his approach but kept moving and, a few seconds later, touched the fence, the mesh of thick wire against a palm.

  The boy had said that the fence had to be climbed. He had not said whether the top was laced with spikes or barbed wire or some other deterrent. DeMarco gazed upward but saw only more darkness.

  The fence rattled softly when DeMarco pushed himself against it and pulled himself off the ground. He held himself there, letting the noise dissolve away, until his fingers ached. The boy had said “an eight-foot fence.” DeMarco was two inches short of six feet tall and had pulled himself a foot and half off the ground. So the top of the fence should be only a few inches above his head. Spikes or a coil of razor wire would be a foot higher.

  He slid his left hand up the wire. A rounded bar looped with chain-link wire. Emptiness above. And DeMarco thought, Thank God for small favors.

  Every inch of his ascent produced another creak or rattle from the fence, another wince from DeMarco. He wondered if Huston could hear the sounds.

  From his perspective at the top of the fence, with the rounded bar painfully hard against his crotch, the lighthouse seemed to stand out in sharper relief now, a silent shell. DeMarco balanced himself, felt the quickness of his heart, the ache in his shoulders. Then he slid his leg over the top rail as quietly as he could, achingly eased his body perpendicular to the ground, and hung there by his fingertips. The ground, he knew, could be no more than five inches below his feet. Unless the fence was erected along a cliff face. But that would mean that the lighthouse sat perched in midair.

  He held on a few seconds longer, told himself to stop being so foolish, then uncurled his fingers and let himself drop. Logic promised that the ground was there but it still came as a surprise to him. He felt the jolt in his knees and hips. Stood with his face to the fence for a few moments to catch his breath. Then turned and walked as surely and quickly as he could toward the lighthouse.

  The door at the bottom of the tower stood open. Maybe Huston had opened it, maybe it had been knocked open long ago. DeMarco took one step inside. The air smelled of closure, dampness, and mold. Now he pulled his cell phone from his pocket and flipped it open. Shone the blue light around the small, circular room. Graffiti scrawled on the naked stuccoed walls. A littering of trash, beer cans and bottles, wine bottles, cigarette butts, and food wrappers. An old woolen blanket, green and filthy and twisted into a stiff tangle. And in the far corner, a metal staircase corkscrewing toward the top.

  DeMarco turned the ringer and vibrator off on his cell phone. Then pocketed the phone. Laid his left hand on the rusty rail of the staircase and began a slow ascent. Without the cell phone, he was in total blackness again. He tested each stair with his foot before settling his weight atop it. Kept waiting for the missing stair that would send him tumbling to the ground.

  Discernment

  Fifty

  DeMarco felt the stairwell walls tightening around him but gradually detected a freshening of the air. All the lenses and mirrors would hav
e been removed long ago when the lighthouse was decommissioned, and by now, vandals would have stripped the upper platform bare and smashed out all the windows. He could feel the coolness on his face now, the damp tickle of moist breeze.

  His hand slid onto a downward curve in the stair rail and there was nothing beyond it. He leaned forward and felt in the darkness with his right hand, touched the rough planking of the upper platform. He was three steps from the top. He asked himself which way was north. Turning his head slowly, he felt for the touch of breeze on his face. Found it, rose another step higher.

  The lake splashed against the rocks below. Far out in the lower darkness, a long broken string of dim lights glowed, a scattering of dull pearls. And between the center and the left end of that broken necklace, a shadow. A man standing with his back to DeMarco. A man leaning hard against the rail. DeMarco could hear the man’s breath, ragged and quick inhalations. The man’s shadow was as black as grief.

  DeMarco searched his mind for the right words. A phrase that might pin the shadow to the rail instead of sending it leaping forward. For a few moments, he could think of nothing. His mind was a swirl of blackness. Then it came to him, and he said it without hesitation and tried to blend the whisper of his voice to the lake’s.

  “‘It was many and many a year ago, in a kingdom by the sea…’”

  An abrupt turn from the shadow. A damming back of breath. Both men stood motionless. Huston’s voice when he finally spoke was a barely audible rasp, a serrated breath drifting out toward the water. “‘That a maiden there lived whom you may know…by the name of Annabel Lee.’”

  DeMarco said, “I’m sorry, Thomas. I can’t remember any more of it. I wish I could.”

  • • •

  Huston spoke without moving. “Ryan DeMarco,” he said.

  “I’ve been trying all week to find you, my friend.”

  Huston said nothing. DeMarco could not see his face, but he felt the man’s brokenness, the pain that comes from knowing that what is broken can never be made whole. DeMarco smelled dread in the air blowing in across the lake. He smelled grief and sorrow and despair. He felt the chill of the darkness and he felt the loneliness of the rocks on the battered shore below. And suddenly he was very tired again. He did not want to have to do anything else tonight. He eased himself down on the edge of the landing and leaned back against the wall. “I am so fucking tired,” he said.