“E. … it’s me—obviously,” Dougy began in his cautious and lurching manner she’d found endearing, until now. Beside John—behind, really—a specimen of maleness with whom she shared no history or common interests, Dougy appeared a stunted and mostly defective member of his sex. E. adored her friend’s quirks and valued his companionship, though her mere association with him now stung as a reflection of herself, of her rank or quality of femaleness, values she didn’t know she had, shallow, repulsive, and undeniable. The intensity of E.’s embarrassment made her so disappointed in her psychological development that she tipped the spine of her book in his direction and said, “Dougy!” overcompensating with cheer.
“Um … OK,” Doug said, startled by E.’s warmth. He reached for his neck for the second time today to cope with his anxiety. He willed a stop to the defensive gesture and smiled to say he appreciated the change. Too slow—the college textbook again shielded her eyes. “Well, this is John. The—he’s the kid … who—”
John stepped forward. “Emily, you know things that could help a lot of people.”
An appeal to her perceptiveness? The girl’s pulse sped. She leaned in, feigning an even deeper interest in the page she’d flipped to, as if she hardly cared that the revised John Walker had a genuine interest in anything she’d discovered during her fourteen long years of studying human behavior. The open chapter was titled “Disorders of Sex and Gender,” and E. blushed, whizzing through paragraphs about sexual dysfunction before the boy. She took comfort in knowing that, even if he could see over the book, he likely wouldn’t notice her face redden, her cheeks so awash in acne that her otherwise pale skin sometimes matched her ginger hair. No—if she thought any more about her appearance and how the boy perceived her, her emotions would childishly dive into shame. Over what? John Walker wasn’t special in the deep sense of the word.
His explanation for the visit iced her excitement. The Dead Man had come to discuss her actually dead little sister: “Who was Erika hanging out with the week of the incident?” “Who were her closest friends and enemies?”—questions like those the police had drilled E. over countless times. The answers were common knowledge at Palos Hills Junior High, Erika would’ve been proud to know. As if popularity were synonymous with respect, the girl had worked hard to become the most notorious socialite before the end of her first year. She’d snuck out of the house, showing skin like a high schooler despite her underdeveloped body, and had hung out with an older, eighth-grade crowd. She’d had an alcohol tolerance and several overlapping boyfriends, all action-packed into those first four months. E. was left to deal with the fallout. Instead of kids reaching out over Erika’s passing, E. was harassed. Kids left notes in her locker, reading, “She was asking for it,” “God does exist,” and “Ding dong the whore is dead.” The band kids had even ostracized her, all of whom she couldn’t care less about. She didn’t need condolences. What bothered her was the blame in their eyes, as if they believed she could’ve prevented the murder, or worse, that she had something to do with it. The notes had escalated to “Kill yourself next, Sataness!” by February, after two months of police work hadn’t turned up conclusive evidence against a single suspect. She told herself that the accusatory looks and notes were partly inspired by the rumors of devil worship in the woods where Erika had been found, of which E. had long been an easy target because, quite simply, she wore a lot of black.
But most of their suspicion likely had to do with her inability to express much emotion over losing her sister. E. hadn’t cried at the service or the burial. The spectacle attracted over a hundred people whose behavior upset E. more than anything, snapping photos around the funeral home and demanding more coffee and cookies from the staff when none of those kids could’ve said they’d loved Erika. E. even struggled to say it. The girls had grown into antagonists, forever irreconcilable. When she thought of her sister allowing herself to be dumbly taken advantage of by older boys, or when she pictured the woman Erika might’ve become, then E. felt something. She wanted to hurt someone, waste them as her sister had been wasted. But she didn’t feel the amazing emptiness she believed she should. Maybe there was something wrong with her. As with all mysteries, she’d turned to books for an answer. Until then, E. had nothing more to give to the living or the dead—or this boy in between, who couldn’t possibly care for Erika any more than his fans.
“Please—” John said. No more than the girl’s ginger dome and eyebrows were visible from behind the book. By her silence, he sensed her interest phasing into complete absorption of her reading, blocking him out, a stranger, unwelcome. Eager to be the first on the crime scene since the police had reopened the woods to the public this morning, and desperate for the lead he needed, John admitted, “I owe it to your sister to learn who did it.”
The girl had visited him during his most difficult time in the hospital, he said. Just once, during his first and worst round of treatments. Every drop of the chemo blew fire into his veins until his fine muscle had evaporated down to the sinews. During that period, no visitors were allowed up to his room except family. But, one night, his nurse chased off a group of baseball buddies that’d come to celebrate their first win without him, and Erika, who was with them, had slipped by, determined to woo the guy she’d heard so much about, if not to leave dating the most popular boy in school, then maybe to brag about having made out on his deathbed. When John’s clouded eyes opened, a girl was smiling, cross-legged at his feet. With some effort, he lifted his head and smiled back. No—she was crying, cheeks glossy from the light overhead. John’s skeletal smile confirmed that his looks, strength, and vitality were completely spent, what’d made him adored was gone. The fight to restrain her emotions tensed Erika’s face into a grimace. John hadn’t feared death until that moment, witnessing the girl’s revulsion to himself. She apologized: “I’m so sorry.” John heard her grieving over the frailty of her own mortality after glimpsing what she too would become one day. Anger and hot breath swelled inside him, enough to spew a curse on her and the entire town. Sitting up loosened a pain in his chest, however, and he was forced to lie back, ego deflated. Erika’s gaze hadn’t dropped from his face, and her hand hesitated to touch his leg, which looked slim as a stick under the bed sheet. She reached out and squeezed his hand. “If it could be me,” she said, “I would do that for you.” The girl was no longer crying. Her eyes were blotched with mascara in a clownish way that accentuated how very serious she was. Not John’s mother and father, nor any of his family or friends had expressed anything so selfless. So, when he’d heard Erika had been killed, honoring her by solving her murder was all he could think of. It’d gotten him to stop feeling sorry for himself and out of bed to do something about it.
The boy had his head bowed before her. He’d spoken in short, simple sentences charged with emotion, which E. parsed for meaning. “Love” was the word that invaded her mind regarding the interchange between the Dead Man and her sister. It sounded as if they’d barely spent ten minutes together. If their special moment had dragged on for an hour or dipped into conversation before the nurse had returned and thrown Erika out, surely the boy would’ve realized that her sister wasn’t a saint, and he wouldn’t be here now. He must’ve heard about her first-semester exploits. Yet here he was, which proved John was as nonsensical as everybody else. Though not exceptional in judgment, the story did prove to E. that at least one of the boy’s legendary attributes was true—he cared about more than himself.
What a story. Doug bounced his shoulders in a defeated manner behind John, as if to say, “Well, how in the hell am I supposed to compete with that?” If not for E.’s cheery hello, Doug might’ve pulled a shelf of books on himself to end his misery. For the first time in his life, he experienced a true pang of jealousy, not the common kind of another’s charms and talents and accomplishments that he experienced daily and had grown numb to, but an unmistakable, personal kind of jealousy that deranged his thinking about his relationship with E. In the years he
’d known her, Doug had never pushed for more than friendship. Neither of them had dated anyone, yet, and he’d been grateful for what intimacy they had. Dating wasn’t E.’s thing. She put the development of her mind first—another of her traits he respected. How many people can say that? She made him want to be a better person and to play video games less to make time for books that she recommended, despite that he never finished them. He knew he would enjoy taking things further, though he didn’t want to jeopardize their friendship. He didn’t want to lose the only girl who’d ever paid him attention. Sometimes she would laugh at the bungling things he did or said, but that was OK because Doug liked to see her happy, which was a rare thing, he’d learned. Most importantly, she always came back. She called him to her place, up to her room, to be around him no matter what he did. That time together was rare, precious, too. Sure, E. could be cold, lost in her brainwork over big ideas, things that Doug sometimes couldn’t begin to understand, and sometimes she used her disinterest to keep people at bay that she didn’t respect, which was what he hoped she was doing with Dead Man Walker. “You had your chance, buddy, move along,” he wanted to say. But Doug wasn’t one hundred percent positive that was what she wanted, and jealousy made him afraid of messing up with John around. Instead, he reseated his glasses on his nose and waited for someone else to break the silence.
“Did Erika go to the woods on certain days of the week or month? Was it always at night? Any little thing—”
“I can’t help you,” E. said. The boy was making her uncomfortable in so many ways. She wanted him out of her mental space where no visitors were allowed—not her mother, though the woman often tried; not even Dougy, though he was good company. Yes, it was a defense mechanism to prevent others a glimpse of the general disorder of society that was reflected in her personality—the frivolity, the shortcomings, the contradictions, the flaws and resulting failures—issues that E. could handle alone. No one had posed even a mild threat of drawing out her mess into the world. What would happen if her defenses lowered and the charismatic Dead Man lay siege to her mind with his pained eyes and his goodness? He might even love her as easily as he’d loved her sister.
John couldn’t understand the girl’s indifference to his story and total self-absorption. She didn’t care about finding her sister’s murderer. In her position, he would do anything to aid an investigation, public or private. The loss wasn’t real for her yet, he thought, at once conscious of his numbered days and bodily limits. John came forward and stood over her, then—to reach her, make the face of death real enough. The girl’s forehead and the tops of her otherwise pale cheeks were reddened, as if with too much sun. Beneath, he saw a halting resemblance to Erika. E. wasn’t as kidlike. Her distinguished nose and calculating eyes spoke of an adult intelligence years beyond him. His heroics seemed childish then, and John’s advance yielded the opposite response he’d hoped for. E. reared the hardback as if she might hit him if he got any closer. Doug shuffled behind him, and John felt like what he was—an outsider between two friends, maybe more, whose lives he’d charged into. The self-consciousness of his illness began to spiral out of control and make him feel ghoulish, a persistent nightmare. He abruptly apologized and turned to leave.
E. saw the passion in his face drain. Complete emotional vacuity—all traces of life erased, exposing the corpse, the remains, as what was left of her sister had been called. She remembered the inert and waxen likeness of the girl’s face framed by the half-closed casket and the way it—no longer she, but it—contrasted against the living hair, so golden, fanned out on white satin. Maybe we are objects, and life is the trick? she thought, seeing John go.
Corpse—grave—dirt.…
That was how E. recalled the detail: her sister’s manicured nails caked with dirt. The week before she’d died, Erika had taken a scrubber to her hands. E. had thought she was brushing her teeth and commented about taking off the enamel. On a few of those mornings, E. had washed silt from the basin of their shared bathroom sink. The observation couldn’t mean much.
“Her fingernails were dirty,” E. said. “On more than just one night.”
E. didn’t want to start caring about the boy and what he did or did not feel. The information was a small gift to make his transformation into it-ness easier. Her big mouth stopped the boy at the end of the aisle, who half turned to ask more from her.
“Brilliant.” He was smirking. Benevolent again, he dumped gratitude on her. “Thank you, Emily—E. This is important.”
“I—well, the dirt … maybe. But it’s woods—really dirty,” Doug stammered.
“Sure, buddy. On the bottom of your shoes. Unless—”
“She was digging,” E. said. Suddenly her book felt very heavy. She set it down reluctantly.
“Right.” John nodded with determination now.
So full of purpose so close to the grave, the boy was trying to make his last days mean something, E. saw. Maybe something of value could be learned from observing him, though not too closely.
“It could be something,” he said. “It could be nothing. But we won’t know until it’s looked into, and I don’t have the strength to do this alone.”
John faced E. fully. Caught between them, Doug backed into a bookshelf, compelled to clear the aisle as if by the force of understanding that seemed to unite this stranger to his friend to the exclusion of himself. The thought of losing that bond to someone else—not just anyone, but John Walker, Palos’s favorite damned-to-be dead kid—made his mouth spasm a series of panicky phrases, the sum of which made it known that, if E. decided to help for her sister’s sake, she wouldn’t have to do it without him.
“Help? Of course. Why wouldn’t I? I might know a guy at school who we could—”
“Great,” John cut him short, “but let’s keep it between us for now.”
“E.?” the Dead Man asked, proving to Doug how little he understood the girl, that he never would. Her choice was obvious: E. had closed her book.
5
The kids went to the woods while the sun was still up. At night, it was said, devil worshippers crept from behind trees, stalked in shadow to nab child sacrifices for their blood rites. If too old or un-virginal, they’d only chop off your big toe with a rusted knife. Nobody could walk with his big toe missing, know-it-all Ronny Mickle once had told Doug when they should’ve been studying for the Constitution test. Whenever he thought about the woods now, Doug couldn’t get the image out of his mind: gleeful maniacs watching him crawl through the trees homeward, bleeding out to inevitably die in a fit of hopeless frustration. Maybe Ronny had made up the demented story after hearing how the police had found some kid’s lost dog in a pit along one of the trails; dead, of course, three of its feet lopped off. Maybe that story, too, had been invented by another tall-tale teller or a parent to scare their kid from wandering into the woods at night. Either way, there was no getting around the case of Erika Summerson.
Tales of nighttime evils were told about the woods long before Erika’s body had been found at Bachelor’s Grove divided in two. Not that John or E. believed in these fantasies. John needed daylight to aid his search for clues, and E. was only glad not to have to stand close beside the boy in the dark. Doug, however, didn’t not believe in devil worshippers and blood rites, and he was grateful to see the afternoon sun high above the woods at the end of the block of homes they walked. Even if the rumored hooded marauders weren’t magical beings, but older kids playing dress-up and performing make-believe rituals past curfew, if his fourteen years’ experience as an underdog had taught him anything, it was that ordinary people were capable of extraordinary wickedness.
The trail entrance at Oketo Street was still blocked with a long PHPD barricade. Alone, not one would have gone inside, their fear was so great. Doug feared crossing paths with a devil or lesser demon that would prove true his worst nightmares to date, the existence of uncompromising evil, which knowingly made him childish and further inferior to John. E. feared crossing a
trace of her sister’s murder. John feared finding nothing at all.
Wordlessly, together, they scaled the barricade. The kids scurried into the trail mouth to avoid notice by a passing car or kid from the neighborhood who might misunderstand their intention and phone 9-1-1. The police had announced an end to their regular surveillance of the woods this morning, proclaiming the trails safe for “adult-supervised activity”—John’s green light for approaching her, E. assumed. The public backlash to their yet fruitless investigation would doubtless redouble. Since January, outraged members of the community, E.’s parents included, had petitioned to have the area bulldozed to protect the children of Palos Hills. They were going to build condos or something much less interesting.
The day was cool yet lovely while the sun was up. The sky was cloudless but for two scrawls, one in the shape of a hook and the other like three snowy peaks of an otherwise invisible mountain range. The breeze gave the kids goose bumps and gently stirred the leafing treetops. Shadows danced in slow motion along the path, as if in welcome. They hiked over a mile out to the ridge of the wooded moraine, carved out fifteen thousand years ago by glaciers during the last ice age. Sometimes a clearing in the trees would reveal sections of town from strange angles that made their home only vaguely familiar, a midwestern town, sure, but not their own.
The kids walked in a line. Doug kept close to E. in case an animal or devil worshipper sprung from the tree line. Not that E. needed protecting or that he would have the ability or courage to do anything but screech. But if something did happen and he wasn’t there, John would be, and Doug’s anxiety over losing her that way was presently greater than the loss of his own life, enough to get him to walk into this cursed place, likely the first people to enter since it’d reopened.
Into that Good Night Page 4