by John Everson
Evan surfaced from the dream with tears on his face. He wondered if he would ever stop reliving the nightmare in his sleep. It came almost every other night, and had since the night after Josh’s death. For a while, he’d worried it would drive him mad, and he’d started seeing Dr. Blanchard. In the distance, he heard someone call his name. He wiped his cheeks dry, and then heard his name again.
“Evan!”
It was Sarah. And she sounded upset.
God, from one nightmare to the next.
He rolled out of bed and staggered to the bedroom door, wearing only his boxers. He passed Josh’s room, dark and quiet as always, and reached the family room. Sarah was there, wearing her heavy pink robe and holding a cup of coffee. He could see the steam in the shadows of the dawn light.
“Evan, what the hell?” Sarah asked. With her free hand, she pointed out the front door. He stepped past her and looked. His heart leaped as he registered the sight.
The white cement of their porch was marred with an offering. Or a warning. Evan wasn’t sure which.
The cement was covered by a pile of hand-size silver fish. They were fresh; a couple still twitched and spasmed, sending dead ones to slide across the concrete. Dead fish eyes stared at Evan like an accusation. He grimaced and looked away.
“What the hell?” he echoed.
“That’s what I said,” Sarah answered. “Why the heck would someone pile fish onto our stoop?”
Evan shrugged. “High school prank? I dunno.”
“Well, that’s just creepy,” she said, wrinkling her face in disgust. “Could you get rid of them before the flies come? I don’t want to smell these things come dinnertime.”
“Could I get dressed first?” he asked, and she shrugged, before walking back to the kitchen.
Evan stood at the door a minute longer, staring at the dull, vacant eyes of the fish. The eyes looked angry, accusatory. In their reflection he could see the events of last night, on the beach, as he turned his back on Ligeia and left her to the water. Abandoned her.
In his heart, he had no question about where the fish had come from. They were here for him. A gift from Ligeia. But…what did they mean? Was it a spiteful good-bye? Or simply a way for her to let him know that she knew where he lived? What was she trying to tell him?
He closed the door and went to pull on a pair of sweatpants, so that he could scoop up the dead fish with a shovel and bury them in the compost at the back of the yard, though the neighborhood cats would likely tear them to shreds before they decomposed. Still, no point in wasting a chance at good fertilizer. But he had to wonder if this particular fertilizer were tainted in a way that would poison the soil instead of enrich it.
Evan shook away the thought and pulled on his clothes. Sarah remained in the kitchen, nursing her coffee like an addict. She was not a morning girl, and it took her a shower and a solid pot of the black stuff before she was ready to talk about anything. As he passed her on his way outside, he looked at her profile in the gray morning light and a chill cascaded down his spine. She looked so fragile and soft as she sat there at the kitchen table, just staring out the sliding door to their backyard. She looked so alone, and Evan longed suddenly to hold her, to crush her to him in an embrace to prove to her that he was hers and hers alone.
Sarah had no idea what he had done to her. No clue why anybody would send them fish. The thought drove a sick pit in the center of his stomach. Again, his fault. His weakness that threatened the equilibrium of their life. He didn’t want to hurt Sarah any more than he already had. He wanted to move beyond these last few weeks of his strange, but undeniable betrayal and bury it with the fish—bury it with the past, really, all of it. Once and for all. They could never erase the memory of Josh, nor would they want to. And he would never outlive his guilt at his son’s death. But they had to somehow get past the daily anchor of the pain; they had lived in a purgatory for too long. Evan figured he and Sarah had thirty or forty good years left to muddle about on this earth, and he didn’t want to spend them anchored in this horrible, recriminating cycle they’d slipped into since Josh’s funeral.
Evan dug a hole in the musty compost pile mix of coffee grounds, old grass clippings and rotting bits of food that somehow had escaped the scavengers. After he’d cleared a hole two or three feet down, he dumped in the pile of fish from the plastic bag he’d carried them in and covered the hole back up. The gray of the morning fog was just starting to lift, and he felt better as he tamped down the last bit of earth.
After he put the shovel away, he stepped back into the house. He walked into the kitchen behind Sarah and put his hands on her shoulders, giving her a squeeze.
“It’s time,” he announced. She looked up at him with a crinkle of confusion.
“Tomorrow morning, we are going to start converting Josh’s old room.”
Sarah only nodded and took another sip of coffee.
“I know I’ve said it before, but we need to do this, for both of us.”
“I don’t know if I can help,” she answered. “I’m not sure I can put his things in a box.”
This time it was Evan’s turn to nod. “Go shopping in the morning,” he suggested. “Let me take care of the worst of it. Then you can work with me to redecorate it, to make it new again.”
He brushed a tear from her cheek, and she leaned into his hand. Wordless, he held her, and caressed her shoulder with his free hand. “I love you,” he said.
The day passed slowly. Evan was on a paper-trail mission and that meant lots of time at the desk, sorting through forms. Plenty of time to think. And his mind always seemed to come back to the ocean. And a woman.
“How’s it going?” Bill asked him in the afternoon. “You’ve been pretty quiet today.”
Evan shrugged. “Woke up with a pile of fish on the stoop this morning.”
“Hmmm,” his friend said. He leaned in to talk softer. “Well, that seems normal. Especially when you’re dating a sea creature. Maybe it’s the Siren equivalent of roses.”
“I don’t think so,” Evan said. “I broke up with her last night.”
“Uh oh. In that case, I suppose you could consider it the marine equivalent of dog shit on your stoop. Be glad she didn’t set the fish on fire. That woulda stunk. ’Course in your neighborhood, nobody woulda known the difference.”
“Very funny,” Evan said. “Do you think I should try to go talk to her tonight?”
“Do you want to make up with her?”
Evan shook his head. “I’ve gotta end this. I told Sarah that tomorrow we’re cleaning out Josh’s room. It’s really time to move on. You know? On every level.”
“Then let it be,” Bill said. “You’re not going to make her any happier by going out there, raising her hopes when she sees you, and then telling her a second time that no, you’re breaking up. Trust me, dragging it out never makes it easier. You’ve told her once, so now move on. You dropped your bomb, she gave you her little love token, and hopefully that’s the end of it.”
Evan nodded. “I hope so.”
Bill went back to his desk, but in his heart, Evan knew that a pile of fish wasn’t going to be the end of it. Ligeia was more tenacious than that. But what she would do next…he had no idea. A shiver raised the hair on the back of his neck. He had no idea.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
“I brought home some boxes from work,” Sarah said, as Evan stood in the center of Josh’s old room, coffee cup in hand. “I stacked them up in the garage.”
Evan nodded absently at his wife as he looked around the room, eyes roaming from posters to light fixtures to the jumbled desktop. He wasn’t sure where to begin.
“That’s fine,” he said. “Thanks.”
Sarah rested a hand on his shoulder, and planted a peck on his cheek. “You’re not mad at me for leaving you here to do this for a while, are you?”
“No, I understand,” Evan insisted, though in his heart, he was a little miffed that Sarah was bailing on this part of the journey. They both needed to
put away the pieces of their son’s life—him doing it for her wasn’t really going to help her with that. And he could have used her hands in putting it all away. Symbolically if not in practice. He wasn’t looking forward to this. Hell, he’d spent a year avoiding it.
“I’ll be back by lunch,” Sarah promised. “By then I probably can be more help to you.”
“Okay,” he agreed, as she gave him a quick kiss and disappeared out the doorway. He didn’t miss how her eyes lingered on the walls of the room that one last time, or how she blinked quicker as she did so.
Once he heard the garage door close, Evan took his own deep breath and circled the room a last time. And then he began.
First step was simply to start removing things from the walls and piling it on the bed. And so the Snow Patrol poster turned into the first victim, as Evan slipped his hand beneath the paper and forced the tape away from the wall. He didn’t know why, but he carefully removed the tape from the poster and rolled it up to set on the bed, as if he were going to rehang it at some point. But Evan had no intention of doing that. Still…he handled Josh’s things as if they were his own. Carefully. With love.
And piece by piece, the posters and plaques and other knickknacks all came down until the room began to look a little bare, though there was a good pile forming in its middle.
Evan went to the garage and found the pile of boxes Sarah had contributed; a handful of midsize copy-paper boxes and slightly smaller boxes that held the coffee pouches Sarah’s company used in their lunchroom. He left most of them in the hallway outside Josh’s room, as he filled one of the coffee boxes with the trinkets he’d pulled down from Josh’s tackboard. Pictures of Josh with Tiendra, the girl he’d taken to junior prom. And of him with the guys, probably freshman year, all lined up waiting for the starting gun at a track meet. Then there were the key chains that he collected, with logos ranging from popular movies to rock bands. And the snakebite kit, still wrapped in its plastic sleeve that he’d found at a garage sale for its kitsch value. The old 1960s vintage kit had a red label at the top that read RIP, SLASH, SUCK! SURVIVE!
Evan and Josh had both laughed over the block letters and assorted exclamation points when they’d found it sitting in a box in someone’s dank garage. For fifty cents, Josh had had to have it.
Just below that, Evan plucked a handful of buttons, most of them things that Evan himself had picked up over the years. He smiled as he pulled off the Japanese-animation vixen who posed as a sultry coquette advertising Matthew Sweet’s classic Girlfriend album. Geez. Evan had picked this one up himself back in college. Of course, that’s where the rest of these came from, he realized, as he pulled off a tiny Psychedelic Furs “Pretty in Pink” button and a spooky gray-tone “Lonely Is An Eyesore” button, advertising an ethereal collection by the ’80s English label 4AD.
Evan misted up for the first time then, thinking about the music he and Josh had shared. They’d always been close, but music was where they really connected. And Josh had been as fascinated with the “antique” mystery of Evan’s old LP collection as Evan had been with the new stuff that Josh brought home on his iPod. Music wasn’t a generation-gap indicator for them, it was glue. Evan pocketed the buttons, instead of putting them in the box to pack away.
They had been his originally, and now they were his touchstones to countless nights spent in front of the stereo, playing music with his son, both of them closing their eyes and nodding, living in the beats.
In the corner, the acoustic Washburn guitar still sat, covered in dust. Evan remembered all the times he’d kicked back on the floor, trying to pick up the basic rhythm and chords on that guitar while a song played on the stereo. Later, Josh had taken lessons, and had gotten better than his old man, though neither one of them were ever performance-ready musicians.
Evan picked up the guitar now from its stand, and with a sharp burst, blew the dust in a cloud from the instrument’s neck. Then he sat on the bed and strummed it, wincing slightly at the out-of-tune disharmony that jangled through the room. Holding down the seventh fret of the second largest string, he began to carefully tune the guitar by ear. Once he was satisfied that the instrument was at least mostly in tune with itself, he began to strum an easy song he’d played a lot when Josh had been a baby.
“Don’t you know / I love you so / never never never gonna let you go,” Evan sang quietly.
“And when you’re big / it won’t be long / I will still be singin’ this song…”
He stopped abruptly, to wipe a tear from his left eye. Evan could still remember the time that he’d written the simple ditty, when Josh had still been an infant, lying in a baby seat. The boy had waved his chubby arms in the air as Evan played, almost as if he were keeping the beat.
“Don’t you know / I love you so / never never never gonna let you go,” Evan whispered, setting down the guitar and picking up one of Josh’s swimming trophies. He set it in the box, and then set another trophy next to it, and a third, before he couldn’t keep up the bravery anymore. He sat down on the floor of his son’s room and let the tears flow freely, finally, and held his face in his hands.
“I’m sorry,” he choked to the empty room. “I’m so, so sorry.”
Evan let out the grief; he’d grown accustomed to letting the tears have their way. For a while after Josh’s death he’d tried to be brave and hold them in, but once he’d begun letting the tears out as they came, he’d found that the periods of awful lasted less and less. He had discovered the cathartic impact of tears.
And so now he sat there in the middle of his son’s floor, and cradled his face in his hands and bawled like a baby. The sooner it came, the sooner it would be gone.
Thump.
Something crashed against the window. Evan sniffed and rubbed a hand across his eyes and nose, trying to clear his face. What the hell had that been? It was loud; sounded like it nearly busted the glass.
He got to his feet and started toward the bedroom window, still covered partially in the charcoal gray drapes that Josh had picked out for himself.
Evan had his hand on the drape to pull it back when another smack hit the window.
Thud.
He jumped back. “What the hell?”
Now his heart was pounding. Who was throwing things at his window?
Evan gingerly pulled back the draperies and looked outside. The morning was shaping up to be a lovely shade of slit-your-wrists gray, and he had no doubt that a storm would roll in before dinner.
The edges of his view were obscured by small evergreen shrubs, but Evan could see the open grass of the yard directly in front of him, and the empty asphalt of the street beyond. The Aramonds’ brick ranch across the street looked as quiet and deserted as everything else he could see from this vantage point.
“Hmphff,” Evan said, and released the curtains. He decided to go outside to have a look.
The neighborhood seemed still as midnight when he stepped outside; strange for a Saturday, but it was pretty cool and blustery. Not exactly a day that called out for an outing to the beach!
Evan stepped off the stoop and walked over to the side of the house where Josh’s window perched just above the ground. Their house had been built into a hill, and while half of it was solidly aboveground, the other half was below. It made for good heating and cooling bills, since the ground provided a natural insulation.
It was clear that something had hit the window. When Evan stood in front of his son’s bedroom window, he could see an oval spot near the center of the glass. Josh’s window had a spray of some white-colored dust around that impact spot, and something that looked like it might be blood dripped down the white painted frame below.
He looked around on the ground near the evergreens and saw the culprit instantly. A seagull. The creature was still alive, but it wouldn’t be for long. The wings fluttered, briefly, crazily, with a flap-flap-flap sound that succeeded only in turning the bird’s body in a circle. Evan could see the pain in the creature’s bright, open ey
eball. The thing stared at him from its crooked head and flapped again, moving its bulk in a circle around the broken neck.
“Sorry, buddy,” Evan whispered, and went to get a shovel. He needed to put the thing out of its misery and bury it before Sarah came back home. It drove her nuts when birds hit one of the house’s windows. “Bad luck,” she insisted.
When he came back, the gull was already dead, one open eye stuck staring at the gray sky. Evan shook his head, and thanked the air that he didn’t have to smash the thing in the head with the shovel before burying it. Instead, he scooped it onto the blade. That’s when he noticed the second one, lying just underneath a long branch of evergreen, near a gnarled twist of root. There had been two thumps, hadn’t there?
He looked at the bird splayed out on the spade and then at the other bird, and shook his head. “I’ll come back for you,” he promised, and walked the first bird around the house to bury it in the compost pile. Once back there, he dug a small hole (and was secretly pleased that so far, the fish appeared to have been untouched by the local cats) and dropped in the dead gull.
Then he returned to the front of the house to retrieve the second body.
He was scooping the shovel under the bird when he heard the first sound.
“Eee-ahh-ee! Eee-ahh-ee!”
Evan looked up from the bushes to the sky, and quickly located the source of the sound. Another gull circled overhead, lazily pinpointing the house in its flight.
He raised an eyebrow at the unusual interest gulls were showing in his house today and lifted the dead bird on his shovel.
“Ee-ahh-ee!” came the sound again, only this time it was closer. And then another screech answered it. “Eeeee-aahhh!”
Evan looked up and there were five gulls now flying in the air above his roof. The things did not appear to be en route to another beachside location. The target was right here.
Maybe one of these were a mate, he wondered, stepping out of the bushes with the dead bird.
“Eee-ahhh! Ahhh-eee!”