I grabbed the Yellow Pages.
* * *
I had decided to call the Cobb County tax assessor's office. The identity of a property owner was a matter of public record. Within minutes, I should be able to learn who owned the residence at 2118 Common Avenue. Then, armed with a name, I could plunge into a more detailed investigation, if I so desired. I just needed to know, more than anything, that a real, living person owned the house.
I punched in the phone number. After the third ring, a recorded voice spoke: "Thank you for calling the Cobb County Tax Assessor's Office. Our offices are now closed. Normal business hours are—"
Cursing softly, I hung up. Of course, the office was closed. It was past eight o'clock in the evening.
I'll call them tomorrow morning, I thought. It's not a big deal, anyway. I only want to satisfy my curiosity.
Then I asked myself: why should I bother to inquire about the house at all? Did it really matter? I didn't live there. I lived in this apartment, and Grandma, of course, didn't live anywhere on this earth any more. Why stir up painful memories for the sake of satisfying my curiosity?
My stomach growled. Glad to be distracted from my thoughts about the strange house, I went into the kitchen and grabbed a frozen pizza from the refrigerator.
While the pizza baked in the oven, I unwrapped that day's newspaper and sat at the dinette table to read. But the paper might as well have been written in Sanskrit. I could not concentrate.
In my mind's eye, I kept seeing the front windows of that house, Venetian blinds parted, and someone watching me through the slats.
No, I imagined that. It was getting dark, and I couldn't see clearly. It's all in my head.
I desperately wanted to believe the voice of doubt. I wanted to chalk up the entire experience—the spectacle in the window, the house itself—to imagination. But another part of me, maybe my conscience, that part of me that compels me to be truthful, would not let me swallow those self-comforting lies. The truth was a big, throat-busting pill, and I was going to have to swallow it.
Someone was in the window watching me. But who? A ghost?
Could the entire house be a ghost, as Mom believed? Summoned by some mysterious power, for some equally mysterious purpose?
Was I going nuts?
Suddenly, the phone rang.
On the second ring, I picked it up.
* * *
"Hello?" I said.
No response. Soft static crackled from the handset, as if it were a long distance call with a bad connection.
"Hello?" I said. "Is anyone there?"
Amidst the static, I detected a voice; it was barely more than a whisper, too soft for me to identify the caller by name or gender.
"Hello?"
The static ceased. Silence as thick as syrup seeped from the phone.
"Is anyone there?" I said. By then, in a normal situation, I would have hung up. But so much weird stuff had been happening that it was easy to believe a simple phone call might be another piece of this unfolding mystery.
Another noise. Struggling to hear, I pressed the handset to my ear so tightly that the plastic felt fused to my eardrum.
I heard voices in the background, faintly. There was something familiar about them ...
I closed my eyes. Listened.
The voices grew louder. When I recognized the identities of the people speaking, my eyes snapped open.
I heard myself. And Grandma. Having a conversation we'd had only a week before I moved away from home.
It was impossible, but I was not imagining this, and I was not dreaming. It was as real as any discussion I'd ever overheard on a telephone.
The ghostly voices floated from the handset:
I don't understand why you gotta leave home, Rick. Your family is here, all your friends are here. You go down to Atlanta, and you're gonna be all alone.
I'm sick of living here, Grandma. I don't want to be like everyone else. Born here, live here, die here. I want to experience something new.
That's what vacations are for. Travel somewhere new for a little while, then come home. You don't have to move.
Yes, I do have to move. There's nothing here for me any more. Your family is here. Ain 't that enough?
That's what vacations are for. After I move to Atlanta, I'm going to come back to visit sometimes, Grandma. And I'll call.
You're gonna get down there and forget all about us. Come on. You know I won't do that.
Atlanta ain't a perfect place, Rick. Don't go there thinking everything is gonna be perfect.
I don't expect it to be perfect. No city is perfect. But I'll enjoy it.
You're deserting me. What am I gonna do without you?
You've got the rest of the family here. You won't be alone.
Do you know that I've never lived by myself?
Yeah, I know.
I can't live in this big house all alone. Maybe you'll find someone to move in with you. Oh sure, maybe I should get married again, right? A chuckle. Then: If you want to, Grandma.
I'm just kidding, boy. Any man I'd marry at my age is likely to die before I do.
Well, you know that women usually live longer than men.
I've never lived alone. What if something happens to me?
Nothing is going to happen to you, Grandma. Everyone in the family's going to be here for you. You'll be fine ...
The voices faded into silence. Static crackled over the line again. Then, the connection was broken.
I blinked. My vision was blurry with tears. I wiped my eyes furiously.
What in the hell was happening? Had I really unleashed something in the spirit world, just to haunt myself? To torture myself with guilt?
I slammed the phone onto the table.
"Nothing is going to happen to you, Grandma," I said aloud, mimicking myself. "You'll be fine."
Regardless of her theories about ghosts, Mom was right about one thing: I was in denial. The truth was, I did blame myself for the fire that had consumed Grandma's life. If I hadn't been so stubborn, so goddamn set on living my own life and moving a thousand miles away from home, if I had just stayed home with her, the fire never would have happened, she would still be alive. It was my fault.
I might as well have twisted on the gas burner myself.
I cradled my head in my arms. My skull pounded like a giant bass drum.
My eyes were closed, but I kept seeing the images from my nightmare, in brilliant color: Grandma waving at me, then turning to walk into the blazing house.
Nothing is going to happen to you, Grandma. You'll be fine.
Before I realized what I was doing, I bolted upright, grabbed my car keys, and slammed out of the apartment. Raced to my car. Gunned the engine. Roared out of the parking lot. Halfway there, I admitted to myself where I was going. I was going back to that house on Common Avenue. Going home.
* * *
I pulled into the driveway of the residence at 2118 Common Avenue. I parked in front of the garage.
I'm home. No matter how far away I move, this will always be home.
A fuzzy sense of unreality held sway over me. I remembered the time that I had been playing football with some kids in the neighborhood: I had been running through the grass with the ball, and practically the whole team tackled me and piled on top of me. Mashed the breath out of me, cut off the oxygen flow to my brain for a bit. Mr. Jackson, who lived next door to Grandma, came and untangled us, and I had walked around in a daze for at least an hour, my body on autopilot.
I felt like that right now. My body was on cruise control. I was simply along for the ride.
I climbed out of the car.
Night had fallen over the city. Porch lights shone outside most of the surrounding houses, and warm, golden light suffused their windows.
This time, the storm door that led to the breezeway was unlocked. I pulled it open.
The breezeway was dimly lit. A short flight of wooden stairs led to the house. Another door led to the back
yard; that door yawned open, barred only with a screen door. I looked through it and saw our dog, Cleo, a Doberman, watching me. Her nubby tail wagged, her sable eyes glimmering in the darkness.
"Hey, girl, how're you doing?" I said.
She leaped and placed her forepaws on the screen. She pressed her nose to the glass.
I waved at her. I climbed the steps to the inner door.
This door would be locked. Grandma always kept this lock engaged.
I found the familiar, shiny gold key in my pocket.
I turned the key in the lock. I pushed open the door.
When I stepped through the doorway and into the kitchen, smoke engulfed me.
* * *
Acrid, black smoke seared my nostrils and eyes, snapping me out of my nostalgic daze and into alertness. Coughing, I dropped to the floor and covered my mouth.
The stove stood in front of me, barely visible in the twisting haze. I glimpsed a cast-iron skillet sitting on a sputtering burner, a skillet that Grandma had used for thirty years. Flames and smoke poured from the pan as if it were the opening to Hell.
The fire. This is the fire that killed Grandma. And I'm in it. Oh, shit.
I didn't think about running out of the house. Grandma was in here. This was my chance to save her. To redeem myself.
Finally, everything made sense.
The blaze had started in the skillet, but I didn't know how to fight it. You couldn't throw water on a grease fire; it would only feed the flames, and even if it could work, the fire had grown too powerful for that approach to be effective.
My only choice was to get Grandma out of the house. I had time. The fire had not yet advanced past the kitchen.
On all fours, keeping close to the floor, I scrambled out of the kitchen and into the carpeted hallway. Thick waves of smoke rolled into the hall and into the living room ahead of me, but nothing in there had caught fire.
Heart hammering, I dashed down the hall to Grandma's bedroom. The door was closed. I rammed it open with my elbow and exploded into the room.
In the warm darkness, I saw Grandma, nestled under bed sheets. Pungent fumes laced the air.
"Grandma, wake up!" I ran to the bed. "Wake up! There's a fire!"
"Huh?" Her voice was groggy; the bedsprings creaked as she rolled over. "What you say, boy?"
"The house is on fire!" I clutched her arm. "We've gotta get out of here!"
She coughed—a sharp, body-wracking cough that I could feel in my own bones. For perhaps the past five years, Grandma had been plagued by coughs that seemed to flare up as soon as the sun went down. I had grown so accustomed to hearing them as I dozed off to sleep that they had become as commonplace as a cricket's nocturnal whine.
But these coughs were spurred by the quickly spreading smoke. My own lungs had begun to burn. I dropped to my knees. Grandma and I were face-to-face.
"Oh, Lord," she said. "Fire. The smoke. Oh, Lord, help us."
"We're going to make it out of here." The smoke had brought tears to my eyes; I wiped my eyes with my shirt. "Come on. We're running out of time."
She coughed. "Can't breathe ... can't walk." Hacking coughs punished her body.
I grabbed her arm and slung it over my shoulder. She slid out of the bed, much of her weight upon me. Under ordinary circumstances, my knees would have buckled, but adrenaline had endowed me with inhuman strength.
With my free hand, I snatched the bed sheet off the mattress and covered our heads with it, hoping it would give us some protection from the deadly fumes.
Like a sober friend carrying a drunken buddy home from a party, we shambled toward the bedroom door. In spite of the sheet, smoke scoured my eyes, nose, and throat. I began to feel light-headed. As if from a distance, I heard Grandma coughing.
The smoke's gonna kill us, I thought. I dropped to the floor, pulling her down with me. We crawled out the bedroom and into the hallway. I lifted the sheet higher to see what was ahead of us.
The flames had spread to the living room and the end of the hall. Furniture that I had grown up with—sofas, chairs, end tables, lamps-blackened like roasted marshmallows in the all- consuming fire. A rancid stench filled the air, and the heat squeezed every ounce of sweat out of me.
We could not go any farther down the hallway without risking our lives. We had to find another way.
Beside me, Grandma whispered. I glanced at her. Her face was tortured, and her lips moved ceaselessly. I realized that she was praying.
"We're going to make it out alive," I said to her, perhaps attempting to convince myself. "We're not gonna die in here, we'll find another way out."
She continued her prayers, whispering with such intensity that I doubted she had heard me.
A dancing wall of flames slowly advanced toward us. Behind the fiery blockade, objects crashed, sputtered, exploded.
"Let's go back to the bedroom!" I said. "We can climb out through the window!"
Grandma shook her head.
I tried to pull her backward, toward the bedroom. She would not move.
"Let's go!" I said. "To the bedroom! Come on!"
"You go, Rick," she said. She gasped, coughed. "Leave me here."
"What? No!"
"You can't save me, baby," she said, her voice paper-thin. "You've been good to me, a fine man, like a son. But you've got to go on now. My time has come. Please, leave me here."
I shook my head fervently. "But I'm supposed to save you."
"No, no, sugar," she said. "You're supposed to leave me here and go on with your life."
Like a swift bird, the meaning of the words that she had spoken flitted through my thoughts, but, distracted by my growing fear of a fiery doom, I could not focus upon her message.
"No way," I said. "You're coming with me if I have to carry you." I reached to get a better hold on her.
As if by spontaneous combustion, Grandma burst into flames. Her face split open like some kind of bizarre, fiery flower, skin charring, lips peeling back to reveal disintegrating teeth, eyes sinking into her blackening skull. Her arm that I had clutched ignited like a piece of dry wood, fingers curling up, shriveling, bones popping.
I screamed. Let her go. Then reached for her. But there was nothing left of her to grab. Hungry flames devoured her body as if she had been made of straw.
I howled. I had been given a second chance to save her. And I had failed.
The bed sheet on top of us had caught fire, too. Frantic, I cast it off into the flames that had consumed Grandma.
Those flames that attacked Grandma had erupted from nowhere, I thought vaguely. As if she were destined to die here. As if I were meant to learn that nothing I could have done would have saved her.
The meaning of everything that I had witnessed hit me like a jackhammer. Anguished by the hard truth, I felt a sudden urge to throw myself into the inferno, to give up and perish with Grandma and this house that held so many memories. But I couldn't. An invisible force seemed to hold me back and drive me to save myself.
I scrambled into the nearest room. My old bedroom. A double-bed, a dresser, a nightstand, not much else. I didn't stop to examine anything. I flung open the only window in the room and stuck my head out through the gap.
It was about a twenty-foot plunge to the grass below. The height of the drop mattered little. I would have taken my chances with a fifty-foot fall rather than accept dying in the blaze.
I climbed onto the window sill, focused my gaze on a soft-looking spot on the lawn, and drew a deep breath.
Then, I jumped.
I wasn't sure how long I was unconscious. When I awoke, I was lying on grass. Night still reigned.
I looked around. I saw that I was on the front lawn of the residence at 2118 Common Avenue; my car was parked in the driveway. But something was different.
It was not Grandma's house.
The address above the mailbox read 2118, but it was a completely different house. It was a beige, two-story, contemporary-style home that fit in well with the re
st of the neighborhood. A wooden "For Sale" sign stood in the yard, creaking softly in the night breeze.
Staring, I got to my feet.
The house was dark, silent... and, obviously, vacant.
I took note of my clothes. They should have reeked of smoke. But they smelled as if they had been laundered yesterday, which, in fact, they had. I did not find any stains, or rips in the fabric.
Countless questions spun through my thoughts. But it was futile to ponder them, because few of the questions had answers. I knew only one thing for sure: I could not change the past. I could only accept it and move on. A tough and unsparing but, ultimately—liberating truth.
Sighing, I walked to my car. I slid my hand into my pocket.
I pulled out the car keys—and found a shiny gold key that was unattached to the key ring. I recognized the key. For years, I had used it to unlock the door to Grandma's house. Before I had moved away, I had given it back to her.
Now, it had been given back to me.
"Thank you," I said. I pressed the key against my lips, softly. I dropped it into my pocket.
I would keep the key with me for the rest of my life, just as I would keep all my memories of Grandma—with no more guilt to plague my dreams. I got in the car and drove away.
GHOSTWRITER
"How's the new book coming along, honey?"
Andrew was reaching for the bowl of tortilla chips when she asked him the question. He'd been anticipating dipping a fresh chip in the dish of spicy salsa; his mouth had literally been watering in expectation. But Danita's question made his mouth go dry.
"The book?" He drummed the table. "It's coming along okay, I guess."
Danita's brow creased disapprovingly--the same look he imagined that she gave her clients at the law firm when they tossed a lie her way. Frowning, she folded her arms on the table, leaned forward.
Suspenseful Tales (2011) Page 10