Joe Schreiber - Chasing The Dead (mobi)

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  “Yes.”

  How does the voice on the other end know about this? It is one thing to know about her life now, where she works, where she lives, and what kind of car she drives. Even to have gone into her house and looked through her things—an intruder with enough intelligence and motive could have done that.

  But nobody knows about what they did that summer, the thing that bonded them together permanently. In a peculiar way, she herself doesn’t know about it. It has not been on her mind, at least the daytime part of her mind, since she graduated high school. In fact, it is as if some arcane form of psychological self-defense had wiped him completely from her consciousness even before she left Gray Haven.

  Phillip, she knows, has not been so lucky.

  For whatever reason—perhaps just because he is a man and not so consciously accustomed to the sprockets and flywheels of psychological micromanagement—he has not been able to expel the nightmares so handily. Only after they were married did she realize that he still had nightmares about it. They attacked in cycles, serially, industriously corroding whole layers of insulation off his ordered and businesslike thoughts right up until the point that he left her eighteen months ago. Sometimes he’d thrash so violently in bed that she was afraid he might hurt himself, or her. Sometimes he shot straight up in bed with a scream like nothing she’d ever heard from him when he was awake. His eyes were open but he was still dreaming. There was sweat in his hair, pasting it down in thick brown fingers to his forehead. Even when the dreams were at their worst, he refused to tell her about them, but Sue always knew—on the same level that she herself remembers. She knows all this because he is Phillip Chamberlain, the only boy she ever loved, and because they went through it all together, approximately one lifetime ago.

  “Tonight you’re going back to Gray Haven,” the voice says.

  “What?”

  “You’re going back to pay your respects. Do you know the place?”

  “Who are you?”

  “Answer the question, Susan. Do you know the place?”

  “I know the place, but—”

  “Good.”

  Again Sue is silent. In the background she can hear Veda again, not crying but whimpering, tired, hungry, wanting it to be over.Oh honey, oh sweetie, I sympathize. And Sue has to hang up on the voice to keep from asking to talk to her baby girl again.

  Because she already knows this is how this game will be played.

  Whatever privileges she might have had to make special requests are gone.

  For the sake of her daughter she is going to do exactly what the voice asked.

  She is going back to Gray Haven.

  8:42P.M.

  The roads are going to hell. Sue can feel it, that queasy little shimmy in the back tires whenever she adjusts the wheel more than a few degrees in either direction. It’s snowing harder now. Still, the Expedition is holding steady at sixty-five, sometimes seventy-five when the road straightens out. She’s got another half-hour until she gets to Gray Haven, maybe longer if the weather continues to fall apart like it is.

  Still, she’s had plenty of experience driving under adverse conditions. You can’t drive an ambulance for eleven years without experiencing everything that bad weather, bad karma, and plain rotten luck have to offer. Before she left it all behind to become Mrs. Phillip Chamberlain, Sue delivered babies in the middle of electrical storms and drove stroke victims through nor’easters. Once, when her ambulance broke down in the middle of Buttfuck Idaho she and her partner kept an eight-year-old with his throat half torn out by a German shepherd alive and calm for an hour and a half until a helicopter arrived, and the kid eventually recovered enough to send her a crayon-drawn thank-you note. Sue used to keep it stashed above the visor of her ambulance. Back in the day, she was the golden girl—the one everybody said could eat stress and shit sonnets.

  The road rises and falls and the opening lines of one of Veda’s favorite board books, a story that Sue’s read her at least a hundred times, keeps repeating stupidly through her head:“Up slippery hills cars creep, don’t beep. Inside the hills the giants sleep.” It is what you get with kids. The children’s authors of America erect a little writer’s colony in your forebrain, and no matter how grim or horrific the circumstances you find yourself in, they’re always ready with a bit of utterly inappropriate doggerel.

  Driving on. She’s got the road mainly to herself. She passes several cars, a Dunkin’ Donuts truck, even a couple of snowplows, but there’s no sign of the farm pickup she saw earlier. The more she thinks about it, the more certain she is that it’s the one from two months earlier, the afternoon of the pumpkin patch.

  One day back in late October, a week before Halloween, Sue and Marilyn took Veda pumpkin-picking outside Lexington. Veda ran up and down the rows of gnarled green vines and pumpkins, stopping every few feet to attempt to pick one up until she finally found one small enough to lift. The three of them went out to dinner afterward and Veda fell asleep in the car, the crisp air and exercise having done its job. Sue dropped Marilyn back at her condo, then headed back to the house with her sleeping daughter still clutching the miniature pumpkin in her car seat.

  They were just a few miles from home, cruising along a backwoods two-lane road, when somebody started flashing their headlights at her from behind. Sue slowed down, thinking the driver wanted to pass, but then he slowed down too, coming up close behind her, and Sue felt all her alarm systems go on at once. The vehicle was an old pickup with a big grille, round fenders, and wide-set headlights, just like the one tonight, and the driver was waving her over to the shoulder.

  Maybe, she remembered thinking at the time, the guy was just flagging her down to tell her she had a taillight out or something. But a lonely stretch of road five miles outside of town was the last place she wanted to find out. When the farm pickup slowed down, Sue floored it and lost him, got her little girl home and locked the doors. In the garage she checked the Expedition. The taillights, and everything else, were just fine. And she hasn’t seen the farm pickup again until tonight.

  But is that really the case?

  The headache between her eyes is starting to come back. Because now she’s thinking of an evening just a week or so ago when she was downtown doing some Christmas shopping at Prudential Center, pulling out of the parking garage, and a pair of headlights swept out after her. She only got a glimpse of the vehicle before it vanished in traffic, but hadn’t it looked like the same farm truck? Hadn’t she recognized, just for a split second, that grinning grille and rounded front end?

  Even then, the connection between the two events pulsed in and out of her mind and vanished as quickly as it had arrived. Because who would really be followingher ? What were the odds that it was the same truck?

  But now she realizes that it was.

  How long, exactly, has he been following her?

  Again her thoughts go to Marilyn and Sue prays (yes, prays, and any ambulance driver who tells you they’ve never muttered a prayer is lying, heartless, or both) that somehow the nanny is able to protect Veda or at least reassure her, hold her hand or sing to her. An eighteen-month-old girl can’t possibly understand what’s happening to her. Sue doesn’t know enough about childhood trauma to know if this is a blessing or a curse. She just prays that Marilyn is insulating Veda from the worst of it, that the man who has her has done nothing to either of them physically, prays that despite hearing Veda scream that one time over the phone. But even if he hasn’t touched Veda, except for the time he made her cry on the phone, even then, how much therapy will she need as an adult just to get her through the distant memory of this night?

  But maybe, just maybe, it’s still all right. Maybe Veda’s already cried herself out and fallen asleep. It is possible, isn’t it? Eight o’clock is her bedtime. Maybe in the morning she’ll wake up and Marilyn will be there and Sue will arrive and it will all be like a bad dream.

  Or maybe they’re already dead.

  “Stop that,” Sue says aloud
to herself. “You stop that shit right now.”

  But behind that tough snarl—and it is tough, Sue can hear that much just listening to the sound of her own voice—another scared, selfish question hangs, rotating slowly, the one question that she simply cannot help asking on some level. Just two hours earlier she was an affluent thirtysomething-year-old ex-wife and mother, and Veda was just another one-and-a-half-year-old coming home with her nanny to get ready for her nightly bath before bedtime. Why is this happening to them?

  Because the past is never done with us. Not in any substantial way.

  Screw you, Phillip, Sue thinks. Screw you, you unreliable rat, you child-abandoning shitbag, you worthless waste of skin. You’re in Malibu right now, no doubt jogging naked down some beach when you’re not mixing up a pitcher of sour apple martinis for your newest surgically enhanced fuck doll while three thousand miles away some faceless maniac does Christ-knows-what to your only daughter. So forgive me if your charming philosophical views on the past don’t quite engage me like they used to back in the jolly old days of yore.

  Instead Sue thinks of Veda, holding the image of her daughter in her mind’s eye. In this vision Veda is sleeping, chin tucked, mouth slightly open, snoring gently but deeply enough that Sue can see the straps of her car seat tightening and loosening slightly across her daughter’s chest. Marilyn sits beside her, awake, alert, ever vigilant. Sue embraces the image, coddles it. As if imagining Veda in her car seat might somehow preserve her, protect her.

  Which she knows is patently ridiculous.

  But Suealso knows with that same lead-pipe certainty that a certain amount of ridiculous faith in oneself must be waterproof, fireproof, and shockproof until it is impervious to doubt. For better or worse, she has learned two or three hard lessons about the depths of human depravity, probably knows more on the subject than anyone she’s ever met. And the one thing she took from that experience in the summer of 1983 was that when there’s blood on the line, whether it’s your own or somebody else’s, there is no room for self-doubt.

  It’s surely the reason why she got so bored in college and dropped out to become an EMT. Once you’ve been fire-baptized, you lose your taste for the milk and cookies of academic life.

  And Sue thinks, here we go loop-de-loo, dovetailing into the central undercurrent of her life, something that a bald, pretentious little psychiatrist named Dr. Henry from Harvard Square had pointed out to her the one time she actually tried therapy. Dr. Henry’s observation—put forward manfully enough considering that he was a short little clinician with a high-pitched voice and coffee breath—was that Sue Young has always related to the best things in her life neither through their presence nor their absence but their loss.

  And not even bald, fat little Dr. Henry was fey or fussy enough to suggest that Sue Young’s “innocence” might have been the first and most influential loss of her life, the one by which all other losses would be measured. But the idea had still sat there unspoken between them, session after session, staring at them like a lab rat chewing on a legal pad. Until the day that Sue walked in and handed his receptionist an envelope containing a letter that said, in essence, she was going to find another way to spend the hour from two to three on Thursday afternoons.

  The sign up ahead reads:GRAY HAVEN —6.

  Sue floors it.

  9:06P.M.

  GRAY HAVEN,the white sign says.ESTABLISHED 1802.

  It is, as she remembers it, a muttered curse of a town. It has little to recommend it except that whatever else life has in store for you will be an improvement.

  Sue hasn’t been back here in almost fifteen years, since her mother died. The truth is she misses it like acne and braces.

  Townsend Street, meanwhile, has not changed noticeably. The corner bar, the Blue Parrot Lounge, is still here with its single neon Budweiser sign sputtering in the window. There is a video store and a nail salon and the Exxon station. The textile mill where her dad put in thirty-two years is still down to her left, a series of boxlike buildings sloped awkwardly against one another’s shoulders like a group of men who can’t remember what they had in common except the mutual inability to stand without assistance. The streets and sidewalks are empty. The snow tumbles down, looped crosswise through the intersection in front of her. Narrow row houses with broken porch lights. Somebody’s idea of the future, once upon a time.

  Sue drives straight through. If she wanted to go back to the old place she would take a right on Crill Avenue and follow it three blocks east. There would be the yellow one-story house where her unemployed dad sat with theBoston Herald and his oxygen tank for the last six years of his life, hunting through the classified section with a ballpoint pen. When a “business opportunity” caught his eye he would draw boxes around the listing, over and over, until the ad would lift right out, to be deposited in a neatly stacked pile of similar gray rectangles to his right. Every night her mother threw the pile away. Every morning her father started a new stack.

  Coming up on the right is Sheckard Park. The wind whips harder here, ramming its way down the hillside, blasting snow hard against the side of the Expedition. The swings and slide where she played as a child are still there, their steel framework submerged in drifts like the masts of some doomed polar expedition. In the middle of it stands a statue of a bald man in muttonchops and a long doctor’s coat, holding a Bible and a bone-saw, gazing stoically off to the west. Sue knows the plaque underneath the statue identifies the man as Isaac Hamilton, but it doesn’t say what he did to deserve to be immortalized for decades, maybe centuries, of having pigeons shit on his head. There’s a fair amount of writing on the plaque, some kind of poem, she recalls vaguely, but she’s not sure. Although she grew up less than a mile from here, Sue’s never bothered to look it up.

  Past the park the lights of town diminish to a dull, pale haze in her rearview mirror and in front of her are occasional farmhouses, bankrupt auto body shops with state inspection signs dangling by one corner, and miles of nearly uninterrupted darkness.

  Two miles down the road she turns right onto Old Gorham Road. It is a long, dithering country lane whose sole defining characteristic seems to be its determination to continue sloping steadily downward. It forks twice, and both times Sue bears left, the second time onto a one-lane gravel road with no posted name. Here the pines are close enough that their needles hiss against her windows. The gravel is covered with half a foot of snow but the Expedition makes short work of it. America’s upper class is nothing if not prepared for a little impromptu off-roading.

  The road straightens out. Up ahead in the high beams she can begin to make out the old playground, two metal swing sets now devoid of swings and a rusty, slumping slide, all of it overgrown by weeds. Sue’s not sure whether this land was owned by the township or simply abandoned here by some private landowner, but at one point it was the choice make-out spot for a generation of townies, and not long afterward, a favorite place for local kids to hang out, just far enough away to require bicycles and determination.

  Beyond it is the bridge.

  It’s less than an eighth of a mile in the distance but to Sue it seems a whole world away. Like the tired little cluster of playground equipment and the road leading up to it, the bridge has never had any name that she knows of nor has it needed one. It is a lonely, one-lane structure buried deep enough in the woods that the only people who could find it would have to know these dark back roads inside and out and thus have been searching for it specifically, or have stumbled upon it completely by accident.

  Underneath the bridge is an overgrown swamp, two square acres at least, where a creek once flowed, long since dead. In the shadow of those rotten timbers, sunken beneath the stench of decaying leaves and plant life from decades before she was born, was the spot where something happened back in the summer of ’83.

  Sue feels her neck and back coiling forward as if somehow to muffle her accelerated heartbeat. Suddenly her mouth is full of sour adrenaline, its mercury drip in the
back of her throat.

  There is a memory here, half-buried in the wintry hush of falling snow, a thing out of some child’s nightmare that years ago somehow made the leap into the real world.

  All at once her phone chirps.

  A great flutter of muscle causes her arms to fly up sideways, her left hand whacking the door.

  “Hello,” she manages.

  “You made it,” the voice says, sounding low and insolent, urgent, making her think of phone sex. “I’ve been waiting.”

  Waiting.Sue stares out into the dark woods, her entire body momentarily reduced to what feels like an enormous pair of eyes, darting and searching the thick blackness piled in layers around her. “Are you out there?”

  “What do you think?”

  Sue is breathing through her mouth. Her heart goesthump, thump. She can hear herself, her body doing its job, keeping her brain alive. Something vaguely reassuring about the lumbering way that it goes about its work. Come hell or high water it’s just another day at the cracker factory for the old human body.