And if Kaylene …
Probably, it was Kaylene, Rebecca realized as she swept a toothbrush, hard, through her bruised and swollen mouth. Kaylene wouldn’t have slept much, either. As far as Rebecca knew, Kaylene still hadn’t slept two consecutive hours in five years, ever since the moment she’d clawed out of unconsciousness to find herself soldered by her own blood to the ice rink in Mrs. Starkey’s barn. Unless the blood had been her best friend’s. Or her other best friend’s.
All of which made what she’d done onstage the night before last that much more inexplicable. Except not really. At least, it didn’t seem so inexplicable to Rebecca anymore. Emerging from her room, she tiptoed downstairs and glanced toward the coat closet where she and Kaylene had stuffed the Whistler’s hat upon their return, in its mashed paper bag behind the galoshes rack and the scarf pile. It was Rebecca, in the end, who’d decided that they had to bring it home and dispose of it themselves, as soon as Kaylene decided she was done with it. In the meantime, here it would stay, quarantined with the rest of them.
Rebecca very much hoped it was Kaylene wandering around. She wanted to give her friend another hug. There was no need to talk about the fight or the hat anymore because there was nothing else to say. Kaylene had been right after all. The hat was a hat. Now it was Kaylene’s hat, to wear with stripes.
The living room was empty. Rebecca glanced toward the kitchen and through the sliding doors into the yard, but there was no one in either place. For a few seconds, she stood by the couch with her hands on her hips, tonguing the bruises Kaylene’s guitar pegs had left when they slammed into her mouth. In truth, Rebecca had slammed into them while hurtling onto Kaylene’s back. All she could really remember of that moment was shrieking—her own—and then the monstrous feedback roaring out of Kaylene’s amp, the geysers of surprised shouting from the audience, and the feel of the Whistler’s hat squirming in her hands. Oily, juicy, like a giant centipede she was popping.
Trying to pop.
Joel, she realized. That’s who must have been moving around. The fact that she hadn’t even thought of him before now provoked another ache, from a much older, deeper bruise.
Joel. Or rather, Ghost-Joel who lived under the Stockade stairs. The only resident of the place who’d shown no sign whatsoever, as far as Rebecca had seen, of resurrecting or recovering or even remembering himself.
Whirling, she grabbed her laptop off the counter where she’d left it two days ago and jabbed it awake. Why had she never tried this? What if Joel had just been waiting—exactly the way he used to, back in their East Dunham lives—for Rebecca to surface on his screen and tell him she needed him? Call him out to play?
SMACKDOWN? she typed. She wasn’t even sure that game existed online anymore, knew neither of them would remember their old passwords even if it did. She also knew that wouldn’t matter. What mattered was her message in his morning, scrawled across his computer window like a word traced in dew. Their private code for Hello, old friend. Almost-dad. I’m sorry I’ve been so …
He didn’t answer. He wasn’t on his computer or even awake, most likely. Pushing back from the table, Rebecca started to stand, then froze. That old sensation—her Spider sense, or “trick,” as Jack and Marlene had called it, back when there’d been a Jack and a Marlene—sizzled through her skin and paralyzed her. For a second, she literally could not breathe.
It had been so long that at first, she couldn’t remember what to do next. She felt herself casting about inside her own head as though riffling her desk back in the UNH-D Crisis Center for the ALWAYS DO/NEVER DO instructions on how to handle suicidal callers. Instructions she’d memorized and never once consulted or needed. She’d always just intuited. Known. She knew now.
What did she know?
Whatever it was, it hurt. Horribly. As agency returned to her limbs and she got herself moving down the little hall toward Joel’s door, the hurt softened, rounding into something richer, something strangely right. Almost like the faint, flickering ache that came with memories of her parents. Because in truth, ever since the cataclysm in the woods, and even before, maybe since the day Rebecca had moved out of Halfmoon House, right on time and in just the way she was supposed to because she’d grown up, she and Joel had been floating inexorably away from one another. They’d kept calling back and forth across the void, but they’d gone on drifting, like the doomed astronauts in that Ray Bradbury story he’d insisted on reading her once, at bedtime, no less, because he was Joel, haunted in the dark but singing by dawn.
There were tears in her eyes and a sort of smile on her face as she tapped gently, for form’s sake, before pushing open Joel’s door. For a breath or two, she stood, absorbing the room’s new emptiness, feeling it fill another pocket she’d never known she had inside her. That’s what we really accumulate, she thought, to the extent that she was thinking anything. Not experience, not memories, but holes. We are places to put empty places where people we loved have been.
“Off you go,” she said. Even to herself, she sounded like a mom saying good-bye to a child. Already, she could picture herself brewing coffee, starting pans for Benny’s eggs, and telling the rest of her Stockade-mates the news, one by one, as they awoke and came down to start their days: Joel’s gone.
It wasn’t even a new role for her, she realized, wiping her cheek. The whole time they’d lived here, she’d thought of this place as Jess’s Stockade. They all had. Yet it was Rebecca who dealt with Trudi. Rebecca who’d bought the battered drum set, on impulse, at the monthly San Juans flea market, started bashing it on a nightly basis, and eventually badgered Kaylene into forming Sock Puppet. Rebecca who did most of the playing with Eddie, because Joel wasn’t up to it, anymore. She could feel her housemates above and around her, attached to her, as though she were the trunk of a surprisingly sturdy tree. So much more deeply rooted in this world than she’d imagined.
Suddenly, she remembered. Shuddered, straightened, and spun around, glancing everywhere. There had been someone down here this morning. In this room, or skulking around outside, peering through the glass.
Back in the living room, she stared into the yard but saw only mist and milky morning sunlight. There were no lights in Trudi’s or Jess and Benny’s windows in the tower out back. Rebecca was already half across the dining room, preparing to throw open the door and yell for Jess without being sure why, when the knock came.
Came again.
Rebecca froze. Eventually, she turned toward the front door, simultaneously taking a step away from it. She was trying to remember if anyone had ever knocked on that door. Surely, someone had: a mailman, although they hardly got any mail; Benny after forgetting keys; someone. The sound seemed completely out of place, superimposed from some other house in another dimension, where a different Rebecca lived with an actual family to which she’d been born. If the cormorant from the woods had popped its head out of the kitchen-sink drain and hooted at her, that would have seemed more natural. As though dreaming, she felt herself stumble forward. She opened the front door.
The force of the gaze that met her slammed into Rebecca like hail, hit her so hard and fast that for a second, she thought she’d been blown off her feet, sent flying backward. The woman’s face was shaded by a heavy umbrella—there was no rain, just misty early-November morning sunshine—and a gauzy veil that obscured everything but the blaze in her eyes. She lifted the veil and let Rebecca see her face. Her skin was perfect, shimmering black. The night sky walking.
Rebecca knew what she was looking at before the woman so much as smiled or said one word. She remembered this feeling, would never, ever forget it. But what she’d felt before barely even qualified as the same experience. Was the kiddie-ride version. There would be no leaping back from this gaze, the way she’d managed to when Sophie had shivered up out of the sheets in the attic bed where Jess had hidden—and imprisoned—her. There would be no leaping toward it, either, the way she had with her shovel when she’d murdered the thing in the hat.
It was more, apparently, than the woman expected, because as she stepped into the house, she said, “Huh.” Lowering the umbrella, she released Rebecca long enough to glance around the living room, up the shadowy stairs toward where Kaylene slept, down the hallway toward where Joel mercifully didn’t.
That was something, Rebecca thought, and not so small a thing, either: Joel had gotten away. With luck, he might never even know what happened after he’d gone.
Thinking that triggered a new revelation. A little one, and hardly surprising, all things considered: she was preparing to die. She had been, really, since the moment the monsters had come to East Dunham.
Maybe even before that. In truth, she’d been preparing for this moment since the instant she’d opened her childhood bedroom door to another knock, in the middle of the night, and found not her parents nor her babysitter but a police officer. Such a tired face that woman had had. Almost featureless, worn smooth like a beach stone. There had been no pull or power whatsoever in her gaze. She’d had a surprising, gentle voice, though, all whisper, more mama-librarian than northern New Hampshire cop. Rebecca could still hear that voice, though the only words she could remember it saying were, Get dressed, honey.
At her sides, her fists curled uselessly, except maybe as silent signal. Reminders to herself: she was going to die. She did not want to. Not even with all these pockets sewn into her skin, overflowing with people she’d already lost.
The woman took a single step forward, and her face blotted out everything else. Eclipsed Rebecca’s whole world.
Rebecca forced her mouth open to scream. But she didn’t.
Not couldn’t, didn’t.
She stared, though. The eyes on this woman. They were somehow churning and still all at once, like the surface of a great river and also the river underneath. The smile on her mouth never got near those eyes, but it glittered, fleeting as sunlight sparkling on water.
“Don’t worry, little fighter,” the woman said, smile sparking brighter and then fading as she rummaged in the pockets of her heavy coat. Her voice seemed to probe at Rebecca, latching onto memories and instantly poisoning them. This voice was almost a perfect opposite, or negative, of that New Hampshire woman cop’s voice. So purry-soft, for a creature with that mouth.
No longer smiling at all, the woman held up an old, creased Polaroid.
Before her visitor could ask her question, Rebecca gasped. She felt as though she might literally fall into the photograph. Or as though she were emerging from it. The sight of the hat was not what upset her, this time. It was the face underneath: the papery skin, the jack-o’-lantern grin that sang, had kept singing even as Rebecca slammed her shovel into and through it. Over and over and over.
Finally, she understood. It wasn’t the monster’s face that had haunted her all this time. It was not what the bearer of that face had done to her life and loved ones.
It was what she’d done to it. To him.
What she’d had to do.
Creased as it was, the Polaroid seemed to overflow with color, though the scene was shadowed in darkness. River reeds flowed in all directions and a swollen moon flooded river and earth alike with whiteness.
The hat was there, all right, but not where it belonged. It wasn’t on her monster’s head, but slumped—almost curled, like a cat—on the head of the grinning woman draped over his shoulders. At first, Rebecca assumed that woman was her current visitor, then saw that it wasn’t. The woman in the photograph was heftier, with dustier skin and lighter eyes. Same mouth, though, or at least the same sort of smile, hovering by the monster’s ear as though she’d just finished whispering or was about to whisper. Like a lover, or a mother.
How could something with that mouth love? How could any mother or lover love that thing?
That boyish, grinning, monstrous thing.
“You have seen him,” the woman hissed, snatching back the photo, advancing so fast that Rebecca half expected to feel her reaching inside her skin, rifling her as though she were a trunk.
“I…” Rebecca managed, trying to squirm back but managing only to drag her head a few inches farther away. The woman’s breath smelled surprising. Mint and apples. Yet it stank.
“Out with it, missy. Is he…” The woman stopped, mouth open, hand raised and cupped as though she were about to grab Rebecca’s chin. Or scoop out her eyes.
But she looked startled. Stunned, even. As though something had just occurred to her. In that single second, watching this new monster’s terrible, beautiful face, Rebecca thought she recognized something in her visitor’s expression. Something she’d learned never to trust and always to dread.
Hope? Was this creature hoping? What was she hoping?
“Are … they … here?” the woman whispered.
“They. They’re…” Rebecca’s tongue felt wrapped in cotton, too slow and clumsy for words. “He’s … her … I’ve never seen her.”
Her visitor’s face seemed to snap like a bowstring, hope shooting away and that other expression—the killing one—locking back into place. “No,” said the woman. “I thought not. Stupid of me.” She grabbed Rebecca’s face and began to squeeze. “How about him?”
Even as her cheekbones started to bend, Rebecca experienced a surprising surge of relief. She could feel her self—her whole self, everything she’d been and done and everyone she’d ever known and helped, counted on and loved—erupting out of wherever it had all been hiding. Flooding through her. What a relief it was, she thought, to die as she had lived. To be who she’d been at the moment she stopped being.
“He’s dead,” she said. “I killed him.”
“SALLY!” called a new voice, out of nowhere.
Instantly, the pressure on Rebecca’s face released, as though she’d been sprung from a trap. She staggered back, banging against the dining room table, her hands flying out to steady herself, then up to her face to feel the cold the woman’s hands had left. Had imprinted.
By the time she’d steadied herself her visitor was already out the front door, heading straight down the little drive. At the edge of the Stockade’s outer fence stood two more people Rebecca had never seen. A tall man dressed in what looked like a fifty-year-old seersucker suit and bandages that completely wrapped his head and hands, and a wan Hispanic woman with a pince-nez and beautiful, long black hair. The woman seemed to float beside her companion, trembling like a sapling in the morning breeze, shading him with a green-flowered parasol.
“Boo?” Rebecca thought she heard her invader say, in almost—but not quite—the same tone she’d used to ask if the monster and his mother-lover were here. “Is that really you, Boo? Well, I never…”
With a lurch and a cry she almost managed to bite back, Rebecca leapt to the front door and slammed it shut.
16
For hours, it seemed, Sophie just sat against the slick, cool wall of the cave and watched Eddie crawl, climb, and perch among the rocks at the back. He moved like a crab and at a crab’s pace, scuttling over open spaces, freezing, peering down into some crevice or pool at a sea star or pebble or swirl of water. Occasionally, he’d call out to announce a discovery, but his words blurred in their own echoes, and Sophie simply called back, “Uh-huh,” and went on watching. Even more occasionally, he’d remember the game they were playing, take out the dead cell phone she’d given him, and stick it to his ear. Then she’d lift the shell in her lap to her own ear as though it had just rung, and he’d say whatever he said into the phone, and she’d tell him, “Eat.” Those were the only times he remembered the apple in his sweatshirt pocket and took a bite.
Mostly, though, the kid forgot she was there. Indeed, he seemed to forget everything except the rocks, the water, and whatever he thought he glimpsed in them. Sophie, for her part, ha
d temporarily forgotten everything but him. Once, apropos of nothing she could discern, the boy swung his head around, looked right at her, said absolutely nothing, and grinned.
That was the best moment.
“Like my cave?” she’d said then, but he hadn’t heard or hadn’t understood and had gone right back to exploring. And that was only right, and the reason she’d brought him here, though this place had never felt like hers and barely qualified as a cave, really. It was more a deep, womblike indentation in the rocks, into and out of which the green salt water of the Strait flowed and sloshed like amniotic fluid. Sophie had never lugged belongings here, never set up a tent or anything. Even today, all she’d brought were the groceries she’d stolen for the kid.
Watching Natalie’s son prowl, though, she realized how much time she must have spent on these rocks during the past five years. She liked the slap-and-settle of water in its pools, and the occasional sea lion bark or snuffle of something larger surfacing out in the cove. Even more, she liked the spatters of green light playing over the rocks and the piles of kelp strewn about like dirty clothes in a little girl’s room.
Not that she’d had that sort of little girl’s room, not in the trailer where she’d been a little girl. Sophie would have been terrified to leave clothes on the floor for fear of accidentally stepping on one of her mother’s discarded needles.
Soon, she knew, she’d have to take Eddie back. If she was still planning to take him back, which she assumed she was. What else was she going to do with him?
Except look at him. Watch him slip through curtains of green light and slide his hands into rocks and talk to sea anemones.
Without consciously intending to, Sophie lifted the shell to her ear. She even made dialing motions in the air with her finger, to no one watching.
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