Gilchrist: A Novel

by Christian Galacar

  “What happened to him?”

  “The doctors said he had a heart attack.” The way Laura said it suggested she might not have agreed with the diagnosis. She crossed her arms and leaned forward on her elbows. “That was two years ago. Kevin took it hard. We both did.”

  “Wait. I’m a little confused. You just said you got married when you were both eighteen. Which means he was the same age as you.”

  “I know.” Laura nodded. She understood where Sylvia was headed with this because it was where most people headed with it. “How does a healthy person in their twenties have a heart attack, right? And he was healthy. Hardly ever even caught a cold.”

  “I’ve never heard of such a thing.”

  “I hadn’t, either. It never made sense to me. Sometimes I get the feeling we’re just dying for something else’s amusement.” She shook her head and laughed at the last part.

  “I know what you mean.”

  “Death never seems to make sense, does it?”

  “No, it doesn’t.” Sylvia thought of her son, then of what Peter had said about death being sneaky.

  “Anyway, what could I do other than accept it and move on? I realized that trying to find the reason in it wouldn’t change a thing. Even if it was somehow justified, he’s still dead no matter how you cut the deck.”

  “The doctors didn’t find any kind of heart condition?”

  “Nothing. Like I said, he was as healthy as could be. They said it was like his heart just stopped beating.”

  “What was he doing when it happened?”

  Laura chewed at the side of her cheek, eyes distant. “He went out for a hike one afternoon to scout for deer tracks and never came home. I thought he might’ve spent the night out there. He’d done it before, said the best time to track deer activity was at night. But two days later, a couple hunters found him sitting up against a tree. He was gone. Happy world one day, upside down the next. But that’s life, right?”

  “There certainly isn’t a shortage on surprises, especially the bad ones. I know that much,” Sylvia said.

  Tears had gathered in Laura’s eyes, but she looked at peace. “We were going to see the world together. A little bit at a time. We were planning on leaving this place finally. He wanted to move to Texas, and I just wanted to get out of here. Anyplace else was fine with me. This town…” She shook her head a little as if shedding a thought. “Never mind. I sound like a bore. If I keep going, I’ll probably scare you off. And you and your husband seem like fine people I wouldn’t want to leave an impression like that with.”

  “Nonsense, I get it,” Sylvia said. “Small towns are tough. I grew up in one myself. You reach a point where you just don’t care to have everyone knowing everything about you. And when you reach that point, it’s time to pack up and go.”

  “That’s part of it, sure. But that’s not what I was going to say.” Something troubled touched Laura’s face. “Mrs.… Sylvia, I hope you don’t take this the wrong way, but I’ve lived here all my life, and I know Gilchrist is a great place to pass through or to spend a couple weeks up at a lake house forgetting your cares. But living here, you get to notice that a lot of bad things happen in town. More than seems normal. At least it feels that way sometimes.”

  Sylva was starting to get a clearer picture of Laura Dooley, and in that picture, she saw a reflection of herself. The girl had been stuck beneath a cloud of death her entire life, and now she couldn’t help but see the world in dim, hopeless shades of gray. Tragedy, to her, was no longer a random part of life, but a symptom of something beyond her control. Sylvia knew firsthand that when it came to loss, finding something to blame was easy, if not necessary.

  Laura had simply set her sights on the biggest target she could find—Gilchrist. And why shouldn’t she associate death with the town she grew up in, when it was all she had ever known?

  “Take it from me,” Sylvia said, “it’s easy to see bad when you forget what good looks like.”

  “Maybe.” Laura brought her knees up to her chest, her heels resting on the edge of the chair. “Did you know five people have died in town over the last few days?”

  “No, I didn’t. Well, Peter told me the man he rented the house from passed away in an accident of some kind. I did know that. But five people? No. What happened?”

  “From what I heard, three were accidents. But the other two were a couple of cops who got into it over a woman. I went to high school with them, actually. Now doesn’t that seem like a lot to you, even a little strange? That’s too much death for a small town like Gilchrist.”

  It did seem like a lot. But not all that strange. People had accidents all the time, and men fought over women every day; it was practically the oldest conflict in the history of the world. But Sylvia could see how filtering it all through a lens tainted by a lifetime of tragedy could make a person think as much. In the pitch dark, every unexpected sound is a ghost or a ghoul.

  “He’s good with Kevin,” Laura said.

  “Huh?” Sylvia looked up. She had drifted away in thought. She looked at Laura, then followed the girl’s gaze into the living room, where Kevin and Peter were laughing and playing cards.

  “Your husband—he’s good with Kevin,” she repeated.

  “They do seem to be hitting it off, don’t they?”

  “Do you two plan on having kids?” Laura asked. “You seem like you’d be good parents.”

  Sylvia crossed her arms and cupped her elbows. “We were parents for a little while. We had a son. Noah. But he died.”

  Laura’s lips parted as she drew in a breath.

  “It’s okay,” Sylvia said.

  She heard her voice shift into monotone as she began to tell Laura about the child they had lost. But for the first time since it had happened, she didn’t feel sad as she told it.

  3

  “I think they’re talking about us in there,” Peter said, looking into the kitchen. He raised his eyebrows at Sylvia, who smiled at him and then returned to her conversation. Back to Kevin, he asked, “You have any threes?”

  Kevin scrunched his face and fanned through his cards. He was wearing the Red Sox cap Peter had given him, and it was falling over his eyes again. “Hmmnn-no. Go fish.”

  “Wow. Nothing again?”

  “Huh-uh.” Kevin shook his head, pushed up the brim of the hat, and scratched his nose.

  “You’ve been stonewalling me all night, pal. Are you cheating? I think you’re cheating. No one in the history of Go Fish has ever been this good.”

  “I practiced all night.”

  “So that’s your secret. Okay.” Peter glanced back at the kitchen, saw that he wasn’t being watched, and leaned closer to Kevin. “Hey, pal, can I ask you something?”

  Kevin nodded, never lifting his eyes from his cards. “I know what you want to ask me.”

  “You do?”

  “Yes, I don’t mind.”

  “What do I want to ask you?”

  Kevin squinted at his cards, as if he were looking through them, not at them. “When you hugged my wife yesterday,” he said in a voice that sounded like he might’ve been trying to imitate Peter, “she told me you whispered her a secret. What did you say to her?” Kevin scratched his nose again and continued to arrange and rearrange his cards.

  Gooseflesh broke out all over Peter’s skin as an even blend of bewildered excitement and uncomfortable awe washed over him. “Holy sh… cow. How did you just do that?” Not only had the boy gotten it right, but he’d recited the question nearly word for word, using the same phrasing Peter likely would have used.

  “I can see it,” Kevin said casually.

  “See it? How can you see it? I don’t understand.”

  “With my other eyes.” Kevin finally looked up from his cards. “It’s like x-ray vision, only different. You have them, too.”

  “I have what?”

  “Other eyes.”

  “I do?” Peter laughed uneasily. “Where are they? I only see the usual two when I
look in the mirror.”

  Kevin stood and leaned across the coffee table. He spread his first two fingers into a V and touched them against Peter’s forehead. “They’re right here. I don’t think they’re open, though. Not all the way. My dad said most people have them, but they just never learn how to use them.”

  “Can you do it again? I mean, can you show me how you use yours again?”

  “Uh-huh.” Kevin cocked his head to the side as if thinking. “Want to see a trick?”

  “Okay.”

  Kevin closed one eye, and his face steeled over in concentration. “Pick a number between one and a hundred.”

  “Really?”

  “Uh-huh. I’ll guess it.”

  “All right,” Peter said, but he had a hunch it wouldn’t be a guess at all. He closed his eyes and focused. When he had the thought held clearly in his mind, he opened his eyes. “I’ve got one. It’s a big one.”

  Kevin’s forehead bunched in a show of confusion. “Hey, did you cheat? What’s an unkis?”

  “What do you think it is?” Peter asked timidly.

  Kevin concentrated again. Then, with an air of uncertainty, he said, “A cat? A big, fat cat?” He giggled.

  Peter nodded silently. After a second, he found his words. “Unkis was my cat when I was your age. That’s amazing. But how…?”

  Instead of thinking of a number, Peter had conjured up a memory of his childhood pet—Unkis, a fat white tabby that used to sit oddly humanlike on the couch with its legs spread and one paw resting on its wide belly.

  Sadness sprouted on Kevin’s face. “He got hurt.”

  “That’s right. My father…”

  Kevin looked back down at his cards. “I don’t want to see it anymore. Do you have any Jacks?”

  The demonstration was over, and Peter understood why: if Kevin really could see what he thought he might be able to, then he could see that Unkis had died when he fell asleep behind the back tire of the family station wagon and Peter’s father hadn’t thought to check before leaving for work.

  Peter was in shock. He shook his head in utter disbelief. “How is this possible?” A small, astonished laugh escaped him. “You did know about Noah,” he said in a low voice to himself, and looked toward his wife.

  He heard the words coming out of his mouth, but they didn’t feel his own. Was this really happening? In any other place, at any other time, he would have found a way to explain it away, maybe even flat-out refused to believe it no matter how much evidence there was. Giving in to irrationality was an uncharacteristic sidestep for him, but he stepped anyway. Something about the town, about the boy, evoked a sense of verisimilitude that compelled him to let go of his conventions. Well, that, and people could only rationalize so much before having to accept the thing staring them in the face.

  It was as if his life up until that very moment had been lived inside the circle of a spotlight, and someone had just brightened the bulb and widened the light to reveal a slightly stranger world that had once been hidden in the shadow beyond. And that someone was a six-year-old boy sitting across from him with a goofy, too-big Red Sox hat and an itchy nose. A boy who could seemingly look into his mind and tell him what he saw there, yet who also had trouble pronouncing certain big words. He was an astounding balance of ordinary and extraordinary.

  Kevin nodded. “Yeah, I saw it. I didn’t mean to. Sometimes I can’t help it.”

  “And you told my wife that you were sorry about what happened to him when she hugged you goodbye,” Peter said in a low voice. He wasn’t asking questions; he was stitching together pieces of a bizarre quilt and beginning to see the full shape. But it was a shape he didn’t quite understand. He thought of what his wife had said yesterday: Just because something doesn’t make sense to you doesn’t mean it isn’t real.

  “She was sad, and I didn’t want her to be,” Kevin said. “Was she mad at me for looking?”

  “No, pal, she wasn’t. Maybe just a little confused. But that’s okay.” Then, more to himself than to Kevin, he added, “I get the feeling you’ve confused people before.”

  Footsteps started their way. Creaking floorboards. The sound of a sink turning on.

  Peter looked sideways across the room. Sylvia stood in the doorway, leaning against the jamb, arms folded. She yawned. Behind her, Laura was cleaning the dishes off the table, rinsing them and then stacking them beside the sink.

  “Getting late?” he asked.

  “It’s only nine, but I’m exhausted. I can barely keep my eyes open.” She sat down on the couch next to Kevin, who was focused intently on his hand of cards, even though the game had fallen away to more interesting things.

  Peter checked his watch. “I guess we should call it a night. You don’t mind if we finish this another time, do you, pal?”

  Kevin shook his head.

  Sylvia looked at him. Her mind was turning something over. Peter had a good idea what it was, and damn it if she didn’t have a good reason to wonder it. She hadn’t brought it up since their conversation the day before. She might have stolen the occasional glance in Kevin’s direction, but nothing more. And Peter saw in her face that she already knew what he had just discovered about the boy. For her, there had never been any doubt. They had shared something special when she had hugged him goodbye at Shady Cove.

  “Did you whoop him?” Sylvia asked Kevin. “Sometimes he gets a big head. It’s your job to make sure it doesn’t pop like a balloon.”

  He nodded. “Yes.” Then he faced her and smiled. “I let him win one round.”

  Peter looked at Sylvia. “Hey, I’ll take it. A win is a win.”

  “Well, I’m sure he appreciates your mercy very much,” she said, her eyes pinned to Peter’s.

  Laura came into the room, shirtsleeves pushed up, hands reddened from hot dishwater. “All right, kiddo, it’s someone’s bedtime. I’ve let you stay up long enough, and the Martells need to get going. Say goodnight and goodbye.” She scooped up her son and held him off her hip.

  “Goodnight and goodbye,” he said, and smiled. It was the smile of a normal six-year-old boy who had stayed up a little later than he was used to and was starting to crash.

  “Go brush your teeth and get into bed. I’ll be up in a few minutes to tuck you in. Okay, sweetie?”

  “Okay, Mommy.”

  She kissed the side of his head and put him down. Peter and Sylvia wished him a good night. Then he scurried up the stairs. The night had been a pleasant one and, for Peter, an interesting one.

  “Thanks for dinner,” Peter said, standing on the front steps of Laura’s house as she stood in the doorway to see them off. “I think you might’ve undersold that meatloaf. Best I ever had. I’d swear to it in court.”

  Laura smiled, folding her arms. “I don’t know about best ever, but I do think it was one of my better ones. You got lucky.”

  “We should do it again,” Sylvia added. “Maybe we could have you and Kevin to the lake house before we leave. We don’t exactly have a lot going on these next few weeks.”

  “I’d like that,” Laura said. Suddenly she didn’t seem so young anymore—she looked like a mother. A seriousness glazed over her face. She glanced over her shoulder into the house, then back to them. “He must trust you both an awful lot. He doesn’t usually let people see what he showed you.”

  Her directness threw Peter. “I uh… I’m not sure what you—”

  Laura smiled. “He’s my son. Do you really think I don’t know?”

  Peter passed a hand over his face. “To tell you the truth, I don’t know what I saw. All I know is that it was truly remarkable.” He looked at his wife to confirm what he suspected she already knew. “It was. You were right, Syl.”

  Sylvia nodded. “When he hugged me goodbye yesterday”—she swung her gaze to Laura—“it was like…”

  “Like you were sharing one mind?” Laura said.

  “Yes. That’s exactly it,” Sylvia said, her eyes growing wide. “I didn’t want to bring it up before.
I hope you don’t think I was trying to keep anything from you, but it was just so bizarre. I didn’t think I should say anything because I thought you might think I was completely crazy. I’ve never… I mean, how?”

  “I don’t know,” Laura said earnestly. “But his father was the same way. I think some people just have it, the same way some people are born tall or short or blond.”

  Peter thought about how Kevin had touched his forehead and told him he had other eyes, too. “I promise you we won’t say a word to anyone,” Peter said, offering his sincerest tone. He meant it, too.

  A small laugh escaped Laura’s mouth, and her grin spread. She had considered this before, probably more than a few times. “That’s nice of you to say, but do you really think anyone would believe you if you told them?”

  “No,” Peter said, “I suppose not. They’d lock me in the looney bin. That’s what would happen.”

  “Besides, even if someone would believe you, you wouldn’t say anything,” Laura said. “Kevin knows who he can and can’t trust. And if he trusts you, that means you’re safe to him.”

  They all stood there in the cool silence for a moment. There seemed nothing left to say, so the Martells went to their car and got in. Laura stayed on the front steps and waved as they backed down the driveway. As they drove home to Shady Cove, Peter told Sylvia about what had happened during his game of Go Fish with Kevin. The whole time, she had a content look on her face. The look said: See, I’m not crazy.

  4

  The telephone was ringing when they returned to Shady Cove. The bell sounded like an alarm calling out from darkness.

  “Who would be calling this late?” Sylvia asked, stepping slowly through the dark house. “Does anyone even have this number?”