The road around the lake often defied expectation, which was somewhat of a joke with the locals. Normally you would expect the one road to encircle the lake with various side roads to the cabins. But here it was the side roads that told the story. No single road took you from one side of the lake to the other—you had to find your way down side road after side road, avoiding the ones marked “Absolutely No Trespassing”, until you eventually reached your destination. Their old neighbor Baxter said it all came about because of a series of right-of-way battles early in the century, and local officials who could not make a firm decision. So there was no way to get anywhere along the lake quickly.
An elderly couple approached him, their hair so much the same color as the morning fog it looked as if the tops of their heads were dissolving. A few steps more and he could see that they were smiling. The man said something to the woman and her face was suddenly brighter, full of energy. She was about to speak when Tom realized who they were: the Carters, a retired couple a mile up the road. He and Janet had had dinner at their place a few times.
“Why, Tom! It’s been a long time!” she said, moving forward, grasping his hand. Her hand felt so fragile on his he hesitated to move, afraid he might damage it.
“How are you?” he said, anxiously aware that that was all he could think of to say to her.
“Why, I’m good.” She looked at him with what might have been skepticism. “Have you been ill?”
He started to say yes, then thought the better of it.
“Forgive her, Tom. She’s just a curious old woman,” the man said, reaching out his own large, old hand, grasping Tom’s with unexpected strength. “We old people, we spend most of our time thinking about illness—ours and everybody else’s.” Tom couldn’t remember the man’s name. “Bob, here, in case you’ve forgotten.” The man grinned, as if to say, yes, I do read minds.
“Oh, sure, I understand,” Tom said, hearing the lack of conviction in his voice.
“And Janet? Did she come up with you this time?” The woman fixed him with a smile that strained her skin. “I’d love to catch up with her.”
There it was. They didn’t know. When Janet first died he’d had to deal with this kind of situation, but not the last couple of years.
“Well … no. No, she didn’t. She’s been pretty busy.” He shocked himself. He’d had no idea he was going to say that. The words had come so easily, and with so little guilt.
“Oh, really. So what kind of exciting projects is she up to these days? I know she was always so … active.” Something about her tone—could she tell he was lying? His daughters would know what her tone meant, Janet would have known. He had no idea.
“Well, let’s see. There’s sewing, and baking, and the flower garden, of course.” She looked at him strangely. Then Tom realized. “Well, of course, the flower garden this past summer, right? I mean, not many flowers this time of year.” He chuckled, and the old couple laughed as if he were the wittiest conversationalist they’d ever heard.
“Oh … and she’s just started dance lessons.” This last detail, he thought guiltily, was inspired.
“My my, she is busy.”
The dead are forever busy, my love, Janet’s voice said in his head.
“What’s that?” Bob asked.
Tom felt his face go hot. Had he repeated Janet’s words? “I … well, what did I say?” he said, and laughed, and they laughed back, and he couldn’t remember the last time he’d felt so in control of a conversation, and all because of a lie.
Of course, if Janet had been alive those were all things she might have done, and if he’d only thought of it he would have suggested to her the dance lessons, and she would have been so surprised, so pleased, because he never made such suggestions to her, never came up with things she might enjoy.
They wished him well, and said he should come over for dinner some time, and he said he would if he could, and then they went on their way. But instead of feeling triumphant, Tom felt a growing embarrassment and humiliation as he watched their thin arms and legs in the matching leisure suits trot with surprising vitality down the road.
Such a terrible betrayal, he thought. What was wrong with him? Janet would have been ashamed of him. But this would never have happened if Janet hadn’t died, now would it? Again, the shame. He found a boulder by the side of the road and sat down.
He wouldn’t have lied, he wouldn’t have betrayed Janet if not for the shyness he’d been cursed with his entire life. People didn’t know how overwhelming it could be. He didn’t know why he was like that. It may have been his father, but he was too old to blame anybody now. And the older you got, the stupider you felt about being shy. It seemed so ignorant and childish. Janet had shielded him from its consequences when she was alive. But now he couldn’t feel completely adult in the face of it.
He descended a long slope in the road. Here the mist had settled more thickly. He imagined this pocket was the place the fog went to escape the sun. That here was its last refuge before sunlight sought it out and burned it away.
The surrounding woods appeared only in patches peeping through torn holes in the fog. And here and there a discolored roof, or a bit of wall. Cabins here, but he couldn’t tell how many, or if they were occupied still, or even whole.
A gentle pattern of soft voices issued from the gaps in the fog. He stopped and looked around. The fog was close, the cabins just on the other side, looming closer. He could feel their dry, tinderbox weight. It suddenly occurred to him how they had taunted the flames, seduced the fire into coming and consuming them. Some things, some people, by their very nature invite calamity.
He could almost, but not quite, make out what the voices were saying. A familiar rhythm to them, each voice knowing its place within the pattern of the whole. Members of a family.
Then they were beside him, whispering in his ear, their tiny hands taking his hands. Let’s go swim, papa. The day is hot and the lake is so cool. He tried to pull his hand away, twisting it, but not wishing to hurt the small hand that had grasped his so firmly. You promised! A piping wail. Tom was sorry, not wanting to hurt a child for the world.
Cold mist on his face. He touched the skin with his fingertips—narrow streaks of damp down his cheeks as if he had been crying.
The kids had enjoyed the cabin for only a few years. By the time they were teenagers, going up to a mountain cabin seemed the lamest thing in the world to them. Each trip up engendered increasing complaint. Where only a year or two before there had been an unending supply of things to do, now there was nothing. And the people who lived up here had gone from being adventurous playmates and storytellers to “too weird for words”.
Janet had taken all of this in stride. “It’s the age—we really shouldn’t make them come up here, I suppose. We shouldn’t make them miserable.”
For Tom, however, it was a major loss. Something about his children’s teenage years seemed profoundly threatening to him. As if one night his children had gone off to bed and the next morning he’d discovered strangers had taken their place. Now and then there was a shadow of the children who used to be, in a gesture or in a particular cast of eye, and sometimes during a period of stress or strong disappointment his old children might return to him. But these moments made the loss seem even more profound. There was a working chaos in these new children, which threatened to transform his family into a phantom of what it once had been.
These thoughts were somehow connected to the apparitions which had faded into the mist and woods, although he did not know how. He passed several burned-out cabins, wondering why no one had torn them down. What a dangerous place for children to play, he thought, but realized that these particular children were doubtless well-removed from danger.
The lane forked. He stood there trying to remember the route to the lake shore and the main dock. He hadn’t realized that was what he had been seeking when he first headed out this morning, but the desire had manifested itself, and now he could not shake it loos
e.
A sudden inspiration compelled him to stop in the middle of the road and sniff the air, as he imagined a primitive hunter or ancient trapper might. Candy on a child’s breath, the smell of shampoo in her hair. He closed his eyes. Someone was crying, and was there any sound worse than a child’s lonely cries?
But underneath these scents, seeping up like a persistent memory, ready to sink you if you didn’t pay better attention, was the subtle perfume of water, and burnt wood soaked in water, and things drowned for decades.
He opened his eyes and looked down between the trees. A sharp glint grabbed his eye. A shimmering where the sun caught the chop and churn as the lake chewed at the dock pilings. Tom left the road and started down the slope through the trees.
About five minutes down he had the apprehension that perhaps this was not the best of ideas. His shoes slipped on the damp leaf fall that blanketed the pathless wood. He’d never been very talented at hiking or climbing, and what meagre skills he’d had were long forgotten. Feeling himself slipping, he reached out and grabbed a rough-barked tree. He could feel the flesh of his palm tearing. He yelled, jerking his hand away from the razor-bark, then lost his balance, tumbled forward, kicked out to keep his balance, and ended up running down the slope like a madman, dodging trees, getting his face slapped repeatedly by thin, stiff branches, unable to stop. Blood roared in his ears, shouting at him to do something.
Eventually he did, crashing head first into a tree and dropping like a loaded sack.
After a few moments of stunned rest, he tried to focus his attention, looking for broken places. Things appeared sore but not broken. He was just glad he hadn’t done this where anyone could have seen him.
He pulled his hand out of the undergrowth. It came up black with ash and streaked with blood. Mist rose out of the shadowed vegetation, stinking of smoke. Children whimpered between the trees and his head swam with terror. “Jesus, Janet …” And as suddenly the stench was gone.
But there were still voices in the air, moving tree-to-tree throughout the wooded slope like children playing a hiding game. Beyond these, the deep water and, clearly, the sound of many voices raised in manic song, drifting across from the opposite shore.
Somewhere a party was going on. Somewhere, someone was having a good time. This always seemed to be the case, and he had never been a part of that kind of life: a life of parties, and good old buddy get-togethers, and singings past midnight. His own fault—he just didn’t have it in him. People picked up on it, of course, tried to jolly him into a good time. Or they had. After a certain age they decide you’re set in your ways. Which was, of course, true enough.
He picked himself up and made his way slowly down the slope. Now he was looking at the weathered grey dock, the way it pushed tentatively out towards the far shore like an old finger. At the shadows deeper there, like night lapping at the pilings. Something hidden and immense beneath the waves.
Something stung at his knee. He looked down and saw that he had torn his pants, blood on the lips of the flapping tear. He looked a mess, like someone who’s just walked away from a car crash and has not quite survived.
A man sat fishing off the dock. “Baxter?” The elderly neighbor, who did not turn around at the call. It pleased Tom, perhaps too much, that he remembered the man’s name. He walked closer, and discovered a limp in his step. He started to say the old man’s name again, when Baxter turned around.
“Looks like you’d be better off fishing,” the old man said.
“I guess … I guess I’m just not suited to wandering around by myself.”
“Few of us are, if truth be told,” Baxter said, a gleam in his eye. “Sit down. Rest. You had no further appointments, I trust?”
“Well … no.” What’s he talking about? Tom lowered himself unsteadily to the boards, Baxter grabbing his arm when it looked as if he might actually tumble into the lake. Tom laughed awkwardly.
“Good day for fishing,” the old man said.
“Really? Well, I … I wouldn’t know. I guess it’s been a while since I fished, not since I was a teenager.” Tom was so tired he didn’t have the energy to be embarrassed by his lack of conversational skills.
“I don’t know, Tom. You’ve always struck me as a fisherman.”
Confused, he peered at Baxter. All the years they’d had the cabin up here he’d barely spoken to the man, so how could he have made such a statement? They barely knew each other. Tom looked for a smile, something in the eyes. When Janet was alive she’d often had to tell him when someone was kidding him. He couldn’t even guess. He looked hard at Baxter, seeking signs of humor. “I guess I don’t know what you mean,” he finally said.
“A fisherman waits for something to happen. That’s you, Tom, always waiting for something to happen.”
“Now, just a minute …”
“Oh, I don’t mean that as a criticism. You’re a decent man. You’re just stuck in one place; you always have been. And you know it. You dream about it, think about it. You just don’t know what to do about it.”
“Now wait a minute.” And Baxter did just that. He waited for Tom to say something, but Tom could think of nothing to say. He felt almost desperate for this old guy not to say anything more, but he didn’t know how to accomplish that short of killing him. Killing him? What’s happening to me?
Then he looked at the old neighbor a little more closely, afraid not to look at him now, turned just as the rays of lowering sun caught Baxter’s head just so, and Tom found himself looking through translucent skin to the hard skin, the metal-shiny skin below, all covered with sores and spiny, thorn-like protuberances, the eye so large and cold and fish-like, staring at him, taking him in. Tom felt the blood run out of him, so swiftly the world fluttered and beat at his head.
“Tom … Tom …” Baxter’s hands on him, breath like decaying fish. “I’m sorry, son.” The old man’s face swam suddenly into clarity. “I wouldn’t have had you see me that way, but there is no way to completely control …”
“What?”
“I died a year before your Janet. Don’t you remember?”
The world stopped as Tom stared at the man. He could hear nothing, even though Baxter’s lips moved. Some sort of water bug tumbled out of the loosely flapping mouth and flew away. “Jesus, oh, Jesus …”
“Tom, it’s okay. I’ve always liked you, Tom. I just want to help. You know that Janet would want …”
“Don’t say her name! God, don’t say her name!” Tom leapt up and away from the thing sitting on the dock. And sound went away again. The thing continued flapping its mouth and water poured from its darkening hide but Tom heard nothing.
The light was failing, but he could not move. Clouds rolled in and darkness spread through the water, but he could not move. An overpowering stench of smoke filled his lungs so he could hardly breathe, but he could not move. He could not hear and he could not move.
Then the volume of the world returned, coming up slowly from a fade, “It’s been ringing off and on since you arrived here yesterday,” the Baxter-thing was saying. “Did you know? Your phone, ringing and ringing. You really should pick it up, you know. They get worried, Tom, and you don’t take enough care with that. All that ringing—I hate to make so much of it, Tom, but the dead so hate an unanswered phone.”
“You’re crazy,” Tom said softly. “Or I’m crazy. Maybe the two of us, we’re two crazy old men.”
“Not so old, Tom. I understand how you feel, but you’re far from old.”
“I feel old, or at least too far from young, crazy old man. And farther every day.”
“Go back to the cabin. Answer your goddamned phone.”
“You stuck around to tell me that?” Tom tried to look through the old man again, to see the metallic fish head, but could not. Baxter looked ordinary enough, perhaps paler than most, but nothing more sinister, surely, than a retired man going fishing. But Tom had seen. “Don’t you belong somewhere, in Hell or something?”
The Baxte
r-thing chuckled softly. “Tom, Tom. My my, you’ve got more vinegar in you than I thought. I just liked to fish, still like to fish—that’s why I’m here. You sit quietly with your hook baited, waiting for some kind of nibble. Of course, you know about that.”
“You never know what’s going to bite,” Tom said.
“Exactly. Some men fish too much, wait too long with that old pole in their hands. I think you might be one of those.”
“Bullshit.” He looked at Baxter for a reaction, saw none. Then, “The people who died in that fire you told me about, they’re here? Their children, too?”
“I’m afraid so. You aren’t going crazy. The voices you heard were real.”
“So why aren’t you helping them?”
“You can’t help the dead anymore; you need to learn that. It’s essential that you learn that.”
“But the children …”
“Your children are still alive. Go back to the cabin. Pick up the goddamned phone. It’s important, Tom.”
At that moment Tom became aware of the music, and the voices singing. The party had been going on at the far side of the lake for some time. He stared across the dark water at all the lights burning over there, more and more added to the throng as the daylight dimmed. Then he saw the small white rowboat tied to the dock.
“Whose boat?” he asked. “Yours?”
“It belongs to the lake. It belongs to everybody. But just leave it, Tom. Go back and answer your phone. Talk to your kids.”
“I will, I will. There’s just something I need to check out first.”
“No, Tom. Go back. It’s not for you.”
“You said the boat belonged to everybody.”
“I’m not talking about the boat. The party—you don’t belong over there.”
“Then it is a party.” Tom moved towards the boat.
“Stay away from the boat.”
“Just a quick trip over. I’ll be right back—I promise.”
“Stay away from the boat, Tom.”
“It can’t be more than fifteen minutes across.”
Absent Company Page 15