That made her laugh and she hugged him again—the best medicine.
* * *
• • •
They sat around the picnic table and dug into their lunches.
His ex put his girlfriend right beside her and Willow appreciated the gesture. Dixie talked to all comers, sharing funny RN anecdotes. (Addie had a few of her own.) She was good at listening too.
“I wish we could delete the last few weeks,” sighed Adelaide during a lull. “We just lost someone dear to us at the hospital—a volunteer. As if the month hadn’t been shitty enough.”
“Oh?” said Willow.
“Annie Ballendine. I introduced you at the fund-raiser.”
“Was she the one,” said Willow, playing dumb, “you called the World’s Greatest Volunteer?”
“That’s right. And she was.”
“Helluva lady,” said Owen. It occurred to him to share the moment he had with Ms. Ballendine at the SRO—and the odd coincidence of her intersection with Honeychile—but thought it best not to revisit. “Annie the Unforgettable. A kind and selfless woman.”
“Oh, but I didn’t tell you!” said Adelaide, in a burst of enthusiasm. “I think we actually may have a challenger.”
“To the World’s Greatest?” said Willow.
“Uh huh,” she said, smiling cryptically.
“I strongly doubt that,” said Owen. “Unless ol’ Dubya’s planning to join up. Now that he’s got some time on his hands.”
“Very funny,” said Willow.
“Don’t go all sensitive, Dub,” winked the sheriff.
“You will not believe who I’m talking about,” said Adelaide.
“A celebrity?” said Pace. “They’re always volunteering at hospitals, right? For, like, ten seconds?”
“Nope—not a celeb. Though actually kind of, I take that back!” She paused for dramatic flair. “Elaine Rummer.”
“No!” said Pace.
“Elaine?” said Willow.
“That’s right. She came to see me and it was a complete surprise. Said she didn’t want to stay at home anymore stewing in her juices. Said she wanted to work with troubled teens in lockdown—kids who had tried to kill themselves. ‘As you may know, that’s my specialty.’ That’s word for word what she said. I forgot how sweet and funny Elaine is. And it was so touching because she said that her biggest concern was how she looked—the scars on her face. Which really aren’t so bad. I mean, they’re not great but it’s not as bad as they were in my head. She said she’d understand if I had to turn her down because she didn’t want to frighten the kids. I signed her up on the spot.”
“Wow. Wow. That’s great, Addie,” said Willow.
“Mom, that is so amazing,” said Pace.
“That certainly is an interesting turn of events,” said Owen.
“You know,” said Adelaide. “They always talk about closure, how there never can be ‘closure’—you guys always talk about it. You’re always saying you don’t believe in it, that closure doesn’t exist. And maybe it doesn’t . . . But I want to tell you, there was something about Elaine that I still can’t put my finger on.”
“I heard they got religion,” said Owen.
“It’s more than that. You’ve seen her, Willow. Do you know what I’m saying? Did you notice anything different?”
“Not really.”
“It was like she was glowing, from the inside. That make any sense? Oh, I know she’s had her ‘problems,’ her mental issues—who wouldn’t have. But this wasn’t that, you know, it wasn’t mania, or whatever. It was something else. I felt different just being in her presence. Maybe finally finding out what happened to her kids gave her that. Maybe closure is real.”
When they were leaving, Adelaide held him back while Dixie said her goodbyes. She squeezed his arm.
“I absolutely didn’t think I’d be saying this,” she said, “but your girlfriend’s kinda awesome.”
“Glad you approve,” he said.
“Try not to fuck it up, Dubya. That one’s a keeper.”
3.
It was dusk when they got back. Dixie briefly came over, then wanted to go home and change. She left her purse.
He couldn’t describe the unwelcome shift in her mood but felt the darkness descend in more ways than one. He remembered having the same feeling at the end of certain love affairs, when both parties had the terrible realization that they only came alive for show, around other people. It spooked him, but he powered through—too late to change course.
When she returned, he sat her down on the sofa and told her he had something important to say. Instead of waiting for him to speak, she looked at the wall and said, “You painted it over . . . how come?”
He shrugged and said, “Guess it’s time for something new.”
“But I liked it,” she said petulantly.
“You might like what’s coming better.”
The innuendo didn’t register. “I really had fun today. Your wife and daughter are so smart! And so gorgeous—they don’t look anything like you,” she said drolly.
“She’s not my wife, Dix.”
“Oops! I guess what I meant was, once you have a kid together you’re kind of in it for life.”
“Dixie—” He knew it was going to come out a mess but none of that mattered. “Look, what I want to say—what I wanted to tell you is that I love you and care about you—”
“I know that. Love you too, Willow.”
“—and I know I’m an old guy, but what I wanted to say is . . . that I want to be with you until the lights go out.”
“The lights?”
“For the rest of my life.”
“‘Until the lights go out’!” she said exuberantly. “That is so corny.”
He knew she wasn’t being mean, and soldiered on.
“I want to marry you. Will you be my wife?”
He handed her the little box. She opened it and went wild, squealing and shouting, “It sparkles, it sparkles! It’s so beautiful.” He was delighted with her response but she wouldn’t take it out. When he told her to try on the ring, she kept saying, “Put it on? Put it on?”—as if it were the silliest, craziest idea in the world.
“I can’t put that on!”
His heart sunk. “Why not?”
She burst into tears.
“Baby, Dixie, what’s wrong? What is it?”
He prayed it was nothing more than an endearing hysteria—her engines flooded by the prospect of being Mrs. Dixie Rose Wylde.
“I have to go home now. I have a headache.”
She kissed him on the cheek and was gone.
He sat there with the ring staring at him from the coffee table like a Jack-in-the-box, trying not to feel like a fool. He quickly did the ameliorative math: She didn’t actually say no, she just said she couldn’t put the ring on. (It’ll be a funny story we tell our kids.) And: If she does say no, that’s fine—she’ll probably say yes later. And: If she says no and it never ever happens, that’ll be fine too. Plenty of fish in the sea. And: It just wasn’t meant to be. And: Maybe she’s seeing someone else. Maybe she even has a husband. Maybe she has two husbands. And: I’ll move away. Go wherever. Fly out to Hollywood and get a glamour job consulting on CSI. Fuck a few starlets. Hell, fuck Amy Adams, Jessica Chastain and Angelina, now that she’s available. And: Get a place somewhere in Holland or Panama City or Bali or friggin’ New Zealand where I can live on the cheap. Some place with six-dollar massages. Someplace whores and hash are legal.
His eyes landed on her purse and the old habit seized him. He picked it up and set it on his knees. No reason to be furtive anymore—not when your bride runs from the altar.
That’s when he saw the Guide and blacked out.
Lacey Beth was written on its cover.
GHOST TRAIN
1.
He left her alone that night.
Thankfully, she didn’t call.
It explained everything: her childlike reaction upon seeing the engagement ring—her recent childishness, in general—and the abrupt, adult-informed distress that forced her to flee. Dixie’s identity was in the state of panicked free fall commonplace to all landlords. He’d witnessed it firsthand at the Meeting. And of course something else had become clear:
Dixie Rose Cavanaugh was his Eskimo.
Lacey Beth . . .
He pushed the savage, irrational thought from his head that being a Porter had somehow paved the way for the fate that had befallen her; that Willow’s role was to blame for “calling” her death. As he went to sleep he willed the train to come, praying he might find answers there. It had been awhile since he’d summoned it and he wasn’t sure it would appear. Yet in what seemed like a blink, the Subalterns, resplendent and monkish in their foggy cloaks, were helping him board.
The locomotive departed . . .
It was cold on the train, a cold he’d never before apprehended. As if in ordination, a creature made of shadows placed a beautiful brocaded cape upon his shoulders. Annie told him that one day, “if you are very, very lucky,” he would feel its heavy weight. But the detective didn’t feel very lucky; no, he didn’t feel lucky at all. He felt as bereft and lost as the blue children who sought his feeble ministry.
He made his way down the corridor as the Subalterns lit candles in the sconces mounted on dark wood. He could see them through the glass as he passed—so many children were waiting in their cabins! He wondered if it was a backlog from the weeks he had made himself unavailable.
He went into five of the candle-flickered rooms, one after the other. Each child nervously called out his or her name: “I’m Scooby”—“I’m Abigail”—“I’m Marie-Claude”—“I’m Jimbo”—“I’m Britney”—but there was no Lacey Beth. And what difference would it have made if Willow had found her? What was he thinking? That he could convince the little girl not to become Dixie’s tenant? And where would that leave the woman he had hoped to marry? Because he knew too well what the qualifications of a landlord were: they must be dead. Without a tenant to prolong her stay, Dixie would be forever lost to him . . . In a nearly hallucinatory desperation, he thought he might find her, see her there, not Lacey Beth but Dixie the woman—his woman—but he knew that was impossible—and knew as well that “Lacey Beth” would not be present because the children on the train, this train, were only meant for him. He was their Porter . . . Still, he kept up his senseless search, yearning to connect with the chimera whom the Great Mystery had assigned to inhabit his fiancée—the child that like a carnivorous flower would slowly then quickly enfold and devour the love of his life, the lady who he now believed loved him back in equal measure. Knowing it was impossible, because Lacey Beth had already disembarked and was living inside his love! He searched and searched, down the hallways and into the cabins that were empty, madly driven to stare into the well of the nascent child-tenant’s eyes—the eyes that already shared sight with his bride-to-be!—even with the knowledge that she would inexorably co-opt Dixie Rose into a seizure of divine violence—Lacey Beth’s moment of balance—the harbinger of his beloved’s permanent leave-taking.
He personally handed the address of the Cross of Glory Lutheran Church to all those he comforted but ordered the Subalterns to deliver their drinks and treats instead.
On awakening, he gathered his paintbrushes and began a new mural.
* * *
• • •
When she came for her purse in the morning, Dixie apologized for having run away. She started to explain herself and he saw that she was struggling—with so many things.
“I know what happened to you, Dixie.”
“You do?” she said.
It was obvious she hadn’t a clue what he was talking about.
“Have you been to a Meeting yet?” he said gently. He spoke to her as he would a child. “A very special Meeting, where there are others just like you?” She stiffened and grew circumspect. “It’s okay—it’s okay, Lacey Beth.” Her eyes widened at the name. “I know you’ve been told not to tell anyone about the Meetings, not anyone ‘outside.’ But it’s all right to tell me, I promise. Because I know. I know all about it and I’m not from the outside. Have you been to a Meeting? Have you, Dixie?”
She looked at the floor as if caught being naughty.
“Yes.”
“Can you tell me how many times?” he said, trying to gauge how far along she was.
“Just once.”
“Once. That’s good.” She’s not that far along then.
“Willow . . . what’s happening?” Her mood shifted and he was glad that she was confiding. “What happened to me?”
“Something you had nothing to do with.”
“I can feel myself . . . but I can feel her too—Lacey Beth. She’s only eight years old. Someone did something so terrible to her, Willow, it’s so terrible what they did! This world is so awful . . .”
“It can be,” he said.
“The thing that happened to me . . . to Dixie—did it happen to you too?”
“No. Other things happened to me but not the same. Not the same as you, Dixie.”
“Can we still get married?” she asked timidly.
“I don’t think so. I don’t think that we can.”
She began to cry. “But I really want to! I wanted to! I was so happy when you asked—I just wasn’t expecting it . . . but then part of me said, ‘That wouldn’t be fair, that just wouldn’t be fair to Willow.’ Because I have a feeling,” she said, trembling. “That I’m not going to be here very long. I have a feeling that maybe I’m not even here now—”
She wept and he held her. He didn’t know whom he was holding but it didn’t matter. In a sense, he was holding himself.
Her tears stopped as if on cue, and she said, “Can we still fuck?”
He gasped at the insanity of the place they had found themselves trapped. “I think it’s better we don’t, Dixie—in a week or so you won’t want to. Trust me. You just won’t want to anymore.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Because I’ve met a lot of you—”
“A lot of me?” she said, sounding hurt, and very, very young.
“Children from the train. Someone met you on a train, didn’t they?” She nodded. He smiled at her like a father now. “Did they give you lemonade and cookies?”
“She gave me milk and chocolate cake.”
“What was her name?”
“Lisbeth. She’s from England. She has an accent.”
“Did she tell you what her job was?”
“That she’s the Porter.”
“Well, that’s what I am too.”
“You?” she said with happy, twinkling eyes—as if he’d proclaimed himself to be the Bunny Rabbit King. “You’re a Porter?”
“That’s right.”
“That is so cool.”
“But there’s something important that I wanted to tell you . . .”
“Are you gonna ask me to marry you again?” she said impishly. “’Cause you better watch out, this time I’ll say yes!”
“No,” he said, smiling. “I just wanted to say what a wonderful time I had with you, Dixie.”
“Are you crying?”
“Just a little.”
“Why are you crying?”
“I don’t know. It happens sometimes.”
“I loved you,” she said, but this time she spoke like a woman. “And you were the one, Weeping Willow—don’t you ever think otherwise. You were the only one.”
Suddenly the commingling of Dixie and Lacey Beth shone brilliant and blue, lighting up the darkness of the curtained room. It was definitive: his home, like Annie’s, was now an SRO—Single Room
Occupancy—but his heart had expanded, becoming the most magnificent of palaces.
2.
He drove her to the Episcopal Church in Royal Oak, about twenty minutes from where they lived and a half hour from where he led his own Meeting. They walked upstairs. In the hallway at the door, a young woman with glasses put up her hand and shouted, “Halt!” Dixie said it was all right, that her escort was a friend who had given her a ride to the Meeting. “He cannot come!” barked the sentry. Willow thought she may have been autistic; she certainly didn’t have Bumble’s finesse.
“Trudy, my friend is a Porter!”
“I don’t care,” she snapped.
Dixie turned to Willow and giggled. He smiled and said, “That’s fine. I’ll wait for you in the car.” They embraced. When he was halfway down the stairs, Dixie excitedly called after.
“There’s going to be a birthday tonight!”
* * *
• • •
He sat in the park next to the church, on a bench beneath the trees.
After he told Dixie that he was a Porter, she had all sorts of questions. He held back, thinking it wasn’t his place to provide answers. He wasn’t her Porter, after all. But she was curious about her own death—the death of Dixie Rose Cavanaugh—and he let her explore that. She told him that a few weeks ago she’d had the worst migraine of her life. The part of her that was an RN speculated that her demise might have been due to an embolism, a brain bleed that allowed Lacey Beth to come.
In the car on the way to her Meeting, she said, “If we can’t fuck, Dubya, can’t we at least sleep together? For comfort? Please? Can’t we at least have sleepovers until the moment of balance, when I go away?”
“I don’t know.”
“We won’t do anything bad. But it would be so nice to cuddle! I’d like that, Weeping Willow. And you’d like it too.”
“We’ll see.”
Why not? He’d lost his physical attraction toward her, or thought he had. Probably it wasn’t a great idea.
A Guide for Murdered Children Page 37