by Ronald Kelly
Sometimes I wondered that myself.
The incident with the boy who looked like Joey Messner was what troubled me the most. Leaning against the railing of the boat, with music blaring and people enjoying themselves to the max, I began to wonder if I had simply imagined the entire episode. Perhaps I had been so distraught over Midnight’s condition that I had imagined the entire thing. But why? I hadn’t thought of Joey in years. Why would he suddenly resurface at such a strange time and place, in the way he had?
Am I going nuts? I couldn’t help but wonder. Has Karla finally pushed me over the edge?
A burst of loud, lustful laughter from my wife jolted me from my thoughts. My suspicions had been correct. She had already shed her clothes and was in the lake, along with several others. Among them was the bossman himself. He and Karla swam away from the others, suspiciously and inappropriately close, as I watched.
We got home around two-thirty the following morning. As I suspected, I’d had to fight to get her to leave. Karla had cussed and belittled me in front of her friends as I escorted her down the dock to where our car was parked. Phil Jenson had watched us, with an amused smile on his tanned face.
When we got home, Karla was totally out of it. I left her to sleep it off in the Lexus.
I found poor Midnight lying on the garage floor, dead. He was curled up in a fetal position and his pitch black coat had turned snow white in color.
A couple of months passed.
It was a Friday evening and I was returning home from work. I was particularly stressed that day. The marketing presentation I’d made earlier that morning hadn’t gone as well as I had expected, after weeks of preparation. And Karla was on my mind. She was out of town on business. Attending a sales conference in Memphis… with Phil.
I wasn’t in any particular hurry. I could have taken the normal route home. But I chose to take the shortcut instead.
It was late September and the leaves were just beginning to turn. The sun was setting and narrow streaks of the day’s last light beamed through the treetops along the rural lane of Tanglewood Road. I knew my reason for wanting to go there. I wanted to try to locate the spot where I had had the flat tire. The place where Midnight had suffered his downfall. The place where a long-dead pal from my childhood had come back to haunt me.
At first, I had difficulty finding the place I was looking for. Then I spotted the mossy deadfall sixty feet or so off the roadway. I parked the jeep and got out. The evening was cool and I pulled my jacket closer around me. Then I started through the heavy carpet of kudzu toward the deadfall.
I was halfway there, when I spotted movement in the shadows just beyond the fallen tree.
“Hello?” I called out. “Who’s there?”
They didn’t answer. Just moved further into the woods.
I hesitated for a moment. Just get back in the jeep and go home, I told myself. Fire yourself up a frozen dinner and brood over Karla all you want. Just get the hell out of here.
But I wouldn’t listen to myself. I ducked past the deadfall and continued on into the thicket. I caught a glimpse of the person ahead, moving into the dense tangle of the blackberry bramble. They turned and looked at me, then disappeared from sight.
My heart began to pound in my chest. No, it couldn’t be. It simply couldn’t be who I thought it was. It was impossible. More than impossible.
My pace quickened. I plunged into the blackberry patch, ignoring the pull and tug of the thorns as I fought my way through. Then I reached the edge of the bramble, stepped through, and everything changed.
I found myself standing on a sandy beach in the height of summer. The waves of the Atlantic crashed a few yards away, the surf rolling in, washing upon the sand with salty foam. Seagulls flew lazily overhead. I turned to the right and saw what I expected to see. The tall white column of a lighthouse stood atop rocky cliff.
I had been there before as a child. My family and I had taken a vacation to South Carolina one year, to Myrtle Beach and then down the coast toward Georgia. The lighthouse was located somewhere between Charleston and Savannah. My sister and I had been bored to tears, but my mother had loved it. Wouldn’t it be great to live in a place like this? she had said, her eyes closed, smiling as she breathed in the ocean air.
My mother.
I stared at the base of the lighthouse. She stood there on the rocky ledge, waving at me.
“Robbie!” she called out.
Oh dear God, I told myself. It’s happening again.
I found myself walking, then running toward the lighthouse. Soon, I was scrambling up the rocky embankment to the front stoop of the tall structure. My mother had gone inside. As I entered the column of the lighthouse, I could hear her footsteps on the risers of the iron staircase that spiraled upward. I hesitated at the bottom, then carefully made my way to the top.
When I finally got there, I discovered that the beacon apparatus of the lighthouse had been removed and the circular room had been glassed in and converted into a breezy Florida room, complete with potted palms and white wicker furniture. An easel sat to one side, boasting a canvas with a half-finished seascape. I recognized the style of the brushstrokes immediately.
“Mom?” I called out.
“I’m here, Robbie,” came her voice from a door that opened onto the outside railing.
I saw her standing there then, healthy and vibrant, not sunken and drained of life by the horrible battle she had waged with cancer. Her face was rosy and her auburn locks were long and luxuriant; a far cry from the loss of hair and dignity she had endured during her long sessions of chemotherapy. She wore the outfit she had during that distant vacation. Sandals, white Capri pants, a white and navy stripped top, and that garish sunhat with the colorful flowers and plastic lemons and pineapples around the brim. It was a hat that had been a running joke among my father, my sister, and I during that entire trip along the Carolina coast. I remember saying that, if the car broke down, we could live off Mom’s fruit salad hat. Mom had simply laughed along with us, unaware that she would be diagnosed with ovarian cancer a month after our return home.
Slowly, in a daze, I went to her now. She stood on the circular platform of the lighthouse, waiting for me.
“Isn’t it beautiful here, sweetheart?” she asked with that infectious smile of hers.
I looked over the railing at the vast blue expanse of the ocean. The waves crashed upon the gray rocks below and the gulls circled and soared overhead. I didn’t know what to make of it, being here at this place, when I should have been in a dark thicket in a stretch of Tennessee backwoods.
“Is this heaven?” I asked her, not knowing what else to say.
She beamed. “It can be if you want,” she told me. She opened her arms to me. “I’ve missed you so much, Robbie.”
Tears bloomed in my eyes and I felt a joy unlike any I’d ever known. “Oh, Mom… I’ve missed you, too.”
I went to her then and embraced the woman I’d lost when I was twelve. She wrapped her loving arms around me… and that was when I realized what a horrible mistake I had made.
At first, I felt warmth and acceptance, exactly what I should have felt in the grasp of the woman who had given birth to me. But then that warmth swiftly gave way to a chilling sensation of displacement, as though something cold and alive had infected my life’s blood and was coursing throughout my veins. A feeling of being drained of strength and consciousness rushed in on me, threatening to overtake me.
I don’t know how, but I tore myself from my mother’s grasp. Or the grasp of the thing that had presented itself as my long-dead mother.
“Where are you going, Robbie?” she said forlornly. As I backed away, toward the head of the spiral staircase, I watched as her face began to wither into a parchment-covered skull, her hair falling away in dry, dead strands. “I’ve waited so long, my dear. So very long.”
With a cry on my lips, I stumbled down the iron stairway. I felt as weak as water and nearly tumbled, head over heels, down th
e metal risers several times. Finally, after what seemed an eternity, I reached the entranceway of the lighthouse and plunged --
-- into the darkening woods once again. Sluggishly, I tore my way through the blackberry bramble and past the deadfall. I reached the jeep and, refusing to look back, started the engine and took off down the shadowy stretch of Tanglewood Road.
What’s happening to me? I wondered as I drove, scarcely able to keep my eyes open. It was as though every ounce of strength had been leeched from my body. I felt as though I were on the verge of dying.
A minute later, I had reached the highway. I was so intent on getting away from that wooded backroad, that I failed to see the dump truck barreling toward me as I pulled out. I must have slipped from consciousness before the collision, because I can’t, for the life of me, remember the crushing impact that followed.
I survived the crash with only a broken arm and a concussion. But what mostly ailed me were the aftereffects of my experience beyond the deadfall alongside the deserted stretch of Tanglewood Road.
My doctors couldn’t figure out what was wrong with me. I was terribly anemic and my white blood count was way off the scale. Tests for leukemia and a dozen other possible causes came up negative. In time, my immune system strengthened and rebuilt itself.
I remember waking up in my bed at the hospital and seeing Karla sitting next to my bed. She smiled at me, but there was something in her eyes that shouldn’t have been there. An underlying expression of disappointment, instead of relief. But why?
Then I looked toward the doorway of the hospital room and saw Phil Jenson standing at a comfortable distance… and I knew.
“You had us scared to death,” she said. She played the faithful wife and took my hand in hers. “As soon as I got the call, Phil drove me back. What happened?”
I shrugged, feeling as though a freight train had given me a full-body massage. “I can’t remember much about it. I was coming home from work and I had a wreck. I don’t even remember how it happened,” I lied.
“Well, you ought to see the jeep,” she said, with a hint of disapproval. “The thing is totaled.” She absently brushed a strand of brown hair from her eyes. “But, hey, you’re the one that matters, aren’t you?”
Am I? I wondered. I looked over at Phil. He avoided looking me in the eyes.
It wasn’t long before he departed, leaving Karla there with me. We sat there in silence for a long time, not talking, watching some stupid show on the TV suspended on the opposite wall.
Later on, she dozed off in the chair, leaving me alone with my thoughts.
I laid there and stared at her, feeling sad and lost. What happened to us, Karla? I thought. What turned it all around? I remembered the day of our wedding. She had been so beautiful standing before me. Our love for one another had been so complete then, so very evident. And it had lasted… for a while.
Then she had applied for the administrative assistant job and began working for Phil.
My despair gave way to anger. What am I going to do with you, Karla? I wondered.
Soon, the nurse came in and gave me something for pain and, before long, I too was asleep.
Things got steadily worse for me and Karla following my release from the hospital.
The emotional chasm between us seemed to widen and grow deeper and darker with each passing day. She spent more of her time at work or on business trips… with Phil. Also, her attitude grew more vindictive and loveless. I couldn’t count the amount of arguments we got into over one stupid thing or another. I tried my best to keep our marriage on course, but it seemed destined to go careening off a cliff, to crash and burn on the jagged rocks below.
Then, one night in late October, the culmination of resentment and harsh feelings finally came to a head.
We had decided to go out to eat and take in a movie. Secretly, I had hoped our date would help rekindle some of the feeling we had shared before. But Karla wouldn’t allow that to happen. She seemed snappy and preoccupied during our meal, as if she derived no enjoyment from us being together at all. Once, her cell phone had rang and she had hissed “I’ll call you back later,” before returning it to her purse and finishing her dessert.
The movie had proven to be even more disheartening. We sat, side by side, but there was no closeness, no hand-holding. It was a romantic comedy, the type we once loved so very much, but that night neither of us laughed. We might as well have been sitting across the theatre from one another the entire time.
The silence inside the car as we drove home was oppressive. Something was about to happen that night… to both of us. Something bad. I could feel it. Karla was about to spring something devastating on me… yet something I had expected for a very long time.
Halfway home, I saw a dirt turnoff at the lefthand of the road. Without warning, I steered off the highway and onto the dark stretch of Tanglewood Road.
“Where are you going?” snapped Karla irritably.
“It’s a short cut,” I replied.
We drove for a couple of minutes in pitch darkness. There were no streetlights andvery little moonlight filtered from the treetops above.
I slowed the Lexus down and made a sharp turn in the road. The headlights illuminated the mossy mass of the deadfall.
“What the hell are you up to?” she demanded to know.
I cut the engine and sat behind the steering wheel, leaving the headlights burning. “Let’s talk.”
Karla stared at me for a long moment, then unleashed a harsh laugh. “Talk? You want to talk? Okay… let’s talk then.”
I sat there, gripping the wheel firmly. Staring past the windshield into the woods beyond.
“I don’t love you anymore,” she said with a cruel edge to her voice.
“Really?” I continued to stare straight ahead. Watching.
“I’m in love with Phil,” she told me. “I want a divorce.”
“Uh-huh.”Watching. Searching.
“Our marriage has been dead for a long time, Rob,” she continued. “I deserve to be happy, don’t I?”
A little smile crossed my face. “Karla?”
“What?” she snapped.
“Look.”
She turned her attention from me and stared through the windshield, toward the dense forest awash in halogen light. “What the -- ?” she muttered.
There was a little girl standing near the deadfall. A girl wearing a white dress with tiny pink flowers embroidered across the neckline. Her hair was long and chestnut brown… the same hue as that of my wife.
It was Karla’s twin sister, Kerrie.
The one who had drowned in the family swimming pool at the age of five.
Karla turned her eyes toward me. They were full of confusion… and fear.
“Go ahead, Karla,” I told her. “It’s all right.”
She placed her hand on the door handle. Hesitated.
“She’s waiting for you,” I urged softly. “Go.”
As if in a daze, Karla left the car. I watched as she made her way through the ankle-deep kudzu, toward the child who stood next to the deadfall.
I rolled my window down a crack and listened.
“Hi, sissy,” said the little girl. She extended a pale hand.
“Hi,” returned Karla. She stared at her sibling for a long moment, then their fingers entwined.
In the pale glow of the headlights, I watched as the two turned and started toward the forest. I could tell that the girl was already doing a number on her. Karla’s movements were jerky and unnatural. She turned once and smiled back at me. In the light, her face leered like that of a skull.
I shifted into reverse and then started on down the road for home. I glanced back only once, but the darkness of the forest had already swallowed them completely.
I don’t know why I ever went back. Out of curiosity maybe… or guilt.
I received some flack over Karla’s disappearance. Her parents were sure that I had something to do with it, and the police had suspected me of f
oul play. I submitted to a polygraph to satisfy them. They asked me if I had killed my wife and, truthfully, I had said no. I passed the test and, eventually, their suspicions lagged and the case grew cold.
A few days ago, I happened across Phil Jenson in a restaurant. He openly confronted me, accusing me of doing Karla in. I defused the situation before it could escalate into something violent. “She left us, Phil,” I’d told him. “Both of us.” And I hadn’t lied.
Then, one afternoon in mid-February, I was out running some errands in town. On the way back, I spotted the turnoff up ahead. I didn’t hesitate. I took the shortcut home.
It was cold that day; in the mid-30’s. The greenery of the surrounding forest had withered and faded with winter, leaving mostly dead vegetation, but the pines and cedars still held their evergreen luster. The road was speckled with clumps of old snow, where sunlight had been unable to reach them.
I slowed the Lexus as I approached the deadfall. I put the car in park and rolled down the window.
Karla stood there, halfway between the deadfall and the road. She was tanned and trim, wearing that slinky sharkskin bikini she had worn during our honeymoon in the Fiji Islands. She even sported that diamond stud in her belly button, the one I’d bought for her birthday the month before we were engaged.
She smiled at me brilliantly, teeth so perfectly white, eyes so clear and full of hope. My thoughts returned to that private bungalow where we had spent that glorious week in Fiji. The evening walk we had made, hand in hand, along the white sand beach and the wondrous love we had made beside the gentle surf. I remember peeling the bikini away, revealing her underlying beauty, reveling in the way she felt against me. I remember the hardness of the diamond stud on my tongue as I made that teasing journey downward.
Then, as the brilliant pink and gold hues of the sunset had spilled across us, our passion built and spiraled to a pinnacle unlike any either of us had ever reached before. A pinnacle of mutual ecstasy that almost seemed to transcend both life and death.