Among These Bones

by Amanda Luzzader

  Donna looked around the RV, at her shelves of books. All at once she seemed to be under the influence of some spell. Her eyes were suddenly brighter and her voice clearer. And although my mind had gone fuzzy with worry and exhaustion, I came to attention. Even the cats seemed to await Donna’s next utterance.

  “Words on paper are—” she paused and blinked a few times, searching for the word. “Words on paper are ephemeral. They get lost. They burn.”

  “Okay,” I said. “What are you trying to—”

  “There is a time for writing,” said Donna. She looked my way. Her eyes were wide behind her spectacles. “But sometimes to unlock the secrets, it’s better to find the right book.”

  CHAPTER 10

  Donna’s cryptic pronunciation immediately brought to my mind the flowered diary I’d found hidden in the girl’s bedroom that day the feral dogs had attacked us. It was like a cup of icy water had been dumped down my back. The secret journal that would have stayed hidden forever had Arie not admonished me to search carefully.

  Donna began to talk about books. She tapped the paperback spine of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and said, “Ken Kesey faked his own death, you know.”

  “No, I didn’t know that,” I said.

  Another journal.

  She looked at me and blinked a few times. “Hemingway was bi-polar,” she said, tapping her temple softly with the book. “Heard voices.”

  A hidden journal.

  The cats left the room as if they’d been issued some cue. I couldn’t tell where they’d gone.

  A secret journal.

  Donna continued. She cited facts about books and writers. She told me how texts of ancient scripture had been corrupted in translation, and even faked or encoded.

  Arie had a secret journal. That’s where he kept his real secrets.

  I don’t remember what excuse I gave Donna, but a few minutes later I fled her RV, and it took me half as long to get home. I ran up the stairs to Arie’s bedroom without pausing to remove my coat or gloves.

  I hadn’t gone into his room very many times since that night; it was too hard not to picture him still there on the floor. Someone, maybe Gary or the neighbors across the street, had come in at some point and neatly piled the papers and books, but it didn’t matter. I saw them there anyway, and Arie with them.

  My mind keened at the prospect that there might be something of Arie yet to find, something he’d kept from me. I took off my coat and gloves and boots.

  First I reread all the notebooks and journals, looking for clues. So much writing, so many numbers. As the day brightened to afternoon and then faded to dusk, I read each one. Nothing. That night I sat on Arie’s unmade bed, careful not to disturb the pillow, which I imagined still held an imprint from when he’d last laid his head there. My eyes wandered around the room. So many places Arie had always told me to check when we went through the abandoned houses—under the mattress, between the mattresses, behind furniture, beneath carpeting.

  But those hiding places seemed too obvious for Arie, and in any case the last thing I wanted to do was ransack his room. Arie liked his things neatly arranged. I would never be able to get it back the way he’d placed them, and even the undisturbed space between his meager possessions was something I didn’t want to lose.

  The sunlight drained from the room, turning from dusk to night. Searching by candlelight would be slow and clumsy, but the curiosity was like a pointy rock in my shoe. Then again, I wondered whether I might spend hours in search of something I was simply hoping was there, but wasn’t.

  And so I stayed there on the bed for a long while, trying to see the room the way he would. There wasn’t much in the room to search through, anyway. I saw his battered old basketball on the dresser. He’d hung a dartboard on the back of the door, but he never did find any darts. A collection of bike wheels and parts lay in one corner, along with his toolset. There was a shelf with a few books and the desk with his indexing and cross referencing, but I’d been all through those already. Arie would never hide something by simply placing it under or behind something. He was too paranoid. If Arie hid something, it’d be concealed. It’d be inside something that was inside something else, and maybe inside something else again. When it got too dark to see, I lay down on the bed and thought I might just sleep there. I realized then that the mattress was really quite shoddy, too soft in some spots and too hard in others, and I winced at the guilt of that. So like Arie not to complain. In the gloom I turned to lie facing the wall and somehow managed to fall into a dark, dreamless sleep.

  I awoke with the dawn and the first thing I saw in the gathering light was Arie’s dresser. Without thinking, I sat up, crossed the room, and searched the contents of every drawer. Then I checked each drawer for false bottoms. I found nothing. Next I turned to the bookcase. I thumbed through each book, set them aside, and rapped on the shelves and sides, searching for secret compartments like some spy in a movie. Still nothing. It occurred to me that if I had searched the empty houses this way, maybe we’d have found a library of real secrets. When I’d finished dismantling and inspecting the desk, I got on my belly and peered underneath everything. I felt my way along the carpet for something slipped underneath. On a frenzied whim, I pulled up the carpet altogether, ripping it from the tack strips, jerking it out from beneath the furniture. I flung it into the hallway.

  “I’m sorry, son,” I whispered. “I guess I’m ransacking after all.”

  On hands and knees, I examined the bare floor for loose boards, ran my hands along each section of molding. There was nothing. Maybe there was no journal, no secret. By this time it was growing dark again, and so I lit a candle.

  Only the bed remained. I checked between the mattresses, flipped the box spring upside down. Dust bunnies swirled on the floor around my feet. I held the candle so that I could see through the gauzy fabric and into the wooden ribs of the mattress box. As I did so, something small and hard shook loose from the bedding and fell to the floor. I picked it up.

  It was a plastic action figure. A small, poseable man with a brown leather coat and fedora—an adventure hero from the movies. Arie was much too old for such toys, and I had never seen this one. It seemed likely that it was in the house before we lived there, but I knew instantly that it was Arie’s, that he’d found it somewhere and kept it, and all at once I was reminded that despite his maturity and brilliance, he was a boy, too. He’d been my little boy. And he was gone.

  “Alison, what are you doing?” A voice from behind me.

  I screamed and flinched and spun around. Gary Gosford stood in the doorway staring at the disheveled room.

  “Oh. Hi. I’m just—” My mind raced. The folds of pulled-up carpet, Aries things strewn around. The furniture askew.

  “I knocked but nobody answered,” said Gary. “I was worried. What happened here?”

  My eyes rose to meet his. “I needed to—”

  He stepped into the room and took the action man from me. “This was Arie’s room?”

  I nodded. He looked around the room slowly. He pressed his lips together.

  “This is where you found him, then,” he said in a soft voice. “Must be really hard to be in here.”

  “Hm? Oh. Yes. Yes. It is. Hard to come back. In here.”

  “I’m sure it’ll get better, Alison. Try not to make yourself crazy,” he said. He gestured at the room. “I’m not sure all of this is, you know, healthy.” He stepped back, pocketing Arie’s toy as he did. “Maybe try to keep busy with something else. Can you do that?”

  All I wanted was for him to leave. “I’ll try,” I said.

  “I can stay with you tonight, if you want.”

  “No, no,” I said. “I’m fine. And actually I’m feeling kind of tired now. I should go to bed.”

  “You’re sure you’re okay?”

  “Yes, I’m feeling better. Thank you.”

  Gary looked around the room once more and shook his head. “I’ll come by more often. Don’t worry,
” he said.

  When I was sure he had gone, I blew out the candles and lay down on the mattress to cry awhile—for Arie and his boyhood and for the hidden diary I couldn’t find and probably didn’t exist. For all my lost memories. I thought maybe I’d sleep there again, and so I kicked off my shoes and pants and groped in the dark to pull Arie’s blankets around me. Again that crummy mattress, that unevenness.

  An unevenness that tattled on itself.

  My heart thumped a few times. I rose up and patted the mattress. Something flat, rectangular, firm.

  A notebook. It had to be.

  Not under the bed, not between the mattresses, not even up in the space beneath the box spring, but inside the mattress.

  “You sneaky little shit,” I muttered.

  I threw off the sheet and blanket and in the darkness I felt along the sides and seams of the mattress—yes, there at the top was a neat incision, no wider than necessary to admit a notebook. I reached in, chuckling that I’d been sitting on it when I first came in. I lit the candle once more.

  It was an ordinary notebook, like the others we used. This one had a red cover, on which Arie had scrawled the outline of a human skull. Within the round space of the cranium, he’d drawn a clock face that indicated three o’clock. He’d traced it repeatedly with a ballpoint pen, for the lines were deeply incised into the heavy paper cover. And then he’d burnished the lines with a pencil eraser, so that it stood out in white.

  I’d read all of Arie’s journals—the first one began in January and the last one contained an entry from the day he collapsed. But I’d never seen this one. He must have felt he had to keep it secret, even from me. What if he wouldn’t want me to read it? Even now that he was gone?

  I ran a palm across the notebook’s cover and the clock-skull figure. I sat there with the journal in my lap for several minutes, afraid to read what might be Arie’s most intimate feelings. Afraid that releasing them, hearing them in my mind would mean that Arie would really be gone then.

  With trembling hands, I took a deep breath and opened the notebook.

  I scanned the first page and a gasp might have escaped me. Then I stood and turned the page. Row upon row of Arie’s neat, smooth handwriting. I sat back down and flipped through all the pages. Every page was practically alike, and I wasn’t sure whether to laugh or cry.

  CHAPTER 11

  The parking lot stretched for what seemed like a mile in all directions. In the distance, the Ferris wheel towered over the amusement park, which sat decaying and inert.

  “Sky Dreamer,” I whispered.

  There was no evidence that anyone else was there or had been there recently. Most of the snow had vanished under two days of sunlight, but in the drifts and grainy patches that remained I saw no footprints, no bicycle tracks.

  I drew a deep breath, took another look around, and started across the weedy expanse of pavement. Ravens and magpies atop the lamp poles tipped their heads to watch me cross below them. In the islands of melting snow, dry bleached stalks of weeds stood dead and trembling in the wind. The parking lot had begun to assume the appearance of a wild winter plain, and it was difficult to imagine that it had ever been filled with cars or the shimmering asphalt heat of summertime.

  At last I reached the park entrance and stood beneath the arch which in faded and peeling letters welcomed visitors to Thrill Harbor. I turned to face the weedy pavement I’d crossed. Families would hurry in from their cars and minivans, converging here and passing excitedly through the turnstiles and on into the park. Now the place lay dead, a rotting checkerboard of melting snow and cracked tarmac. There were aluminum shutters drawn over the ticket windows and a cage-like barricade chained up and padlocked outside the turnstiles.

  Some of the barricades had been partially pulled down, and so I clambered over them and then hopped over a bank of locked-down turnstiles. I thought of my dream and the man who took my ticket as the rides spun and strobed in the dusk, and that made me look up at the Sky Dreamer. There it was, arching into the empty sky above the buildings and lesser amusements.

  Among the rides and shops it was shaded and cooler, and so I zipped the collar of my coat higher.

  When Arie and I searched the neighborhoods, there had been a constant impression of not belonging in the vacant houses, the guilt of trespassers in a burial ground. But something was different here. Something or someone was hiding here. Lurking. I folded my arms.

  The earth was even more enthusiastic about reclaiming the interior of park than the parking lot. Thick vines of bindweed and wild grape, now brown but nevertheless thick and sinewy, snaked up the walls and railings. Dead vines hung from the rides and power lines. On the roofs of the restrooms and concessions stands, black moss grew along the eaves, and wild maples and willows had taken root in the rain gutters. Shrubs had burst out of their landscaping beds and invaded the pavement thoroughfares. The grassy lawns were tall and dead, shoulder-high in some places along the margins of the midway.

  A pillow of snow lay in each seat of the flying swing, and dirt-speckled snowdrifts were banked up on the sidewalks. The elements had exacted their price, flaking the paint and fading the plastic until all the colors merged to a kind of indeterminate gray.

  Where to start? A sere breeze gusted down the midway, snatching my hair from beneath the hood of my coat. I tucked it behind my ear. So many buildings—gift shop, candy store, fun house—some burned, some collapsed. There were piles of debris and the occasional dead truck resting on deflated tires. So many places someone could hole up; so many places where someone might hide. I felt eyes watching me from every busted-out window and gaping doorway. Goosebumps rose on my neck and arms, and I wondered suddenly why I hadn't given a second thought to coming alone to find Ruby. I chewed my lip and went on.

  I followed the midway and came to a grand carousel with fiberglass horses and hippogriffs skewered on masts striped with what must have once been gold and royal blue. Vines and woody weeds were growing up around bottom edge, and more vegetation had sprouted from the pipes of the calliope.

  Beyond the carousel rose the Sky Dreamer, dark and tall against its backdrop of day. The midway continued into a broad tunnel that ran completely under the Ferris wheel and into the far half of the park. The wild grapevine grew thick and gnarly around the tunnel’s gaping entranceway, giving it the appearance of a portal into some subterranean world. Water pooled down in the floor of the tunnel and formed a frozen pond of black mud that splintered and crunched underfoot. In the half-light I saw names and symbols and rude words scrawled on the walls.

  In one place, someone had scrawled Please Remember Me.

  Along one side of the tunnel, there was a line of red letters two or three feet high. There wasn’t much light, but the writing stood out from the grime and older deposits of graffiti. In the darkness I could clearly make out the words: BOATS AGAINST THE CURRENT BORNE BACK.

  The muddy water was deepest in the dark center of tunnel, where its drainage had no doubt been choked by garbage and sediment.

  As I sloshed along, worrying that the filthy water might over-top my boots, I became all at once aware that I was not alone.

  I glanced up, and there where the shadows were deepest, I thought I saw the silhouette of a man leaning against the wall of the tunnel near the far end.

  I stopped short and held my breath. Then I couldn’t see him. I cocked my head to one side and squinted.

  I swallowed hard and said, “Someone there?”

  The figure pushed off from the wall. “Who wants to know?” he asked.

  A lanky, greasy-looking man unveiled himself from the dark and came my way through the muck.

  I stepped back. My hands curled into fists.

  As if the man’s mere presence in the dank tunnel were not enough to make me recoil, as he came closer I saw that his face was scarred by a livid gash that ran from his forehead, down through one eyebrow, and into the unkempt scraggle of his beard.

  In his bony fist he held a bowi
e knife.

  All my energy was building inside me to run. I felt like a compressed spring ready to release. But then I pictured myself running through the unfamiliar and tangled maze of the park, with its snow banks and walkways blocked by weeds and debris. I imagined the man giving chase. He probably knew the place better. He could probably run faster than me. And what if he had accomplices?

  In the firmest, steadiest voice I could manage, I said, “Stay back.”

  “You shouldn’t be here,” he said.

  “You stay back.”

  “What’re you doing here?”

  “None of your business,” I said.

  “Well, it is now.”

  He came forward, covering the distance between us in three or four quick strides. I swung my fist at him but he deflected it without much effort. Then he grabbed my coat and brought me to heel as though I were a misbehaving child. I tried to pull myself free of him, but the grip of his hand was like some great iron clamp. He pressed me against the wall and showed me the knife.

  “Quit fightin’,” he said. “You’re comin’ with me.”

  He kept the scruff of my coat in his balled fist and dragged me from the tunnel. I stutter-stepped and staggered along behind. I tried fighting him, but he kept me off-balance and tripping.

  We came out of the tunnel on the other side of Ferris wheel. The man towed me along a pathway that ran behind the rides and down a flight of concrete steps.

  “Let go!” I hollered at him. “Where are you taking me?”

  He gave me another jerk, harsh enough to hurt my shoulder. He was tall and strong. “Shut your mouth.”

  We approached what appeared to be the rear entrance of a low-slung brick building. Between two dumpsters there was a single metal door. The man looked around as if to ensure that no one was watching, and then pounded deliberately three times on the door.

  It opened and another man stepped partway out. He was short and mostly bald with a big black beard.

  “Who’s this?” he said.