The Book of Living and Dying

by Natale Ghent

  “I didn’t have to,” Michael said, rather distantly. “He never mentioned it again so I left it alone. And that’s where it stands. It wasn’t his time, you know what I mean?”

  What an awful thing to face, Sarah thought. What a terrible thing to carry in your heart. In a gesture of sympathy, she put her arms around him. She took his hands, guided him up and toward the bed. He hung back, dragging his feet, allowing her to coax him forward. She lay down on the bed and pulled him in beside her. One arm behind his neck, she cradled his head, sidling into him. She stroked his face, kiss ing him several times on the forehead. They lay together like that, until she thought that he was asleep, his breathing regular, light. Nuzzling her face against his, she let her fingers trail through his hair.

  “I love you,” he whispered.

  A wave of gratitude washed over her. He loved her. Her. And she loved him, too. Desperately. All at once great joy and profound pain collided in her heart. How had they managed to find each other? How had their souls recognized their similarity, their common need? She traced the lines of his tattoo with her finger. He had given her so much. He knew things. Like the night he took her to the circle in the cedar forest and the stones that marked its place. Like a cemetery. Like the one in Terrace.

  Where tombstones radiate outward, as the growth rings of a misshapen tree, so that the centre stones, being made of limestone, constitute the oldest, with rings of headstones expanding by years, the most recent located on the outermost ring, carved in granite. Pink and brown. Or black. The entire cemetery occupying ten acres, circumvallated by a stately wrought-iron fence possessing one main entryway by the groundskeeper’s house, and two auxiliary gates on the north and south walls. Their plot was in the newest and final location, cremations only, past the Asians with their double-bed headstones, and to the right of the Jews. Some of the oldest trees in the state were located there, a climax forest of maple, beech and oak. It was a popular place for dog walkers and, oddly, lovers.

  Because love conquers all, Sarah thought, kissing Michael’s arm.

  CHAPTER NINE

  W“Where are we going?” Sarah asked. She felt slightly nauseated and the sun hurt her eyes. She ? V squinted out the passenger-side window of the Ford Escort, Donna’s mother’s car. It seemed incongruous, Donna in her combat boots and black rag-doll hair, nose ring glimmering, driving something as conservative as a Ford Escort.

  “It’s a secret,” Donna said, shifting to a higher gear. Highway speed. “A Hallowe’en present. I’ve been meaning to take you here for a while.” She fumbled with her cigarettes, pulled one out, tossed the pack on the dash and engaged the lighter. The car swerved slightly.

  Sarah looked at her nervously. “Smoking is one of the major causes of automobile accidents.”

  Donna scoffed, popping the lighter out and holding it to the end of the cigarette, eyes lowered.

  “Could you at least look at the road?” Sarah asked.

  The car swerved again, tires crossing the white line. “Right,” Donna said. She pushed the lighter back in its housing, took an affected pull on the cigarette.

  “No, I’m serious.”

  “I’m watching the road, Wagner!”

  “I mean about smoking causing accidents.”

  “Give me a statistic.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Come on.” Donna snapped her fingers impatiently.

  “It’s high.”

  “How high?”

  “I don’t know, 50 percent, or something.”

  “What crap. It’s that damn surgeon general. He’s the bogeyman of the twenty-first century, disseminating false information to make people quit. Cancer, lung disease, death by second-hand smoke, asthma—car accidents, now.”

  Sarah frowned, taking a cigarette from Donna’s pack. Pulling the car’s lighter out, she looked at the grey metallic spiral of the element, then pushed it back into its housing. She waited for the pop, lit her cigarette and replaced the lighter. She exhaled, grateful for the distraction. “Well, if I’m going to die in a traffic fatality, I’d rather go down with my bloodstream full of nicotine.”

  “Amen.” Donna made a motion with her hand toward Sarah, as though clinking a glass of beer in agreement.

  The car rattled along the highway. They were well out of town now. The sun hung low in the sky. The trees along the highway stood like ranks of petrified soldiers, row on row, immobilized by some evil charm. They sped by in hypnotic rhythm as Donna chattered away about something, Sarah maintaining the conversation with low hums of agreement. She felt so tired. She rested her head against the cool glass of the window, the sun on her face. Just like that trip to Montreal. The last trip they ever went on as a family.

  Her father boasting how he’d managed to get the best room in the city, her mother’s wooden figure in the passenger seat, noncommittal, terse. The first hotel was a total bust except that the kids had a room of their own. The stale smell of dirty laundry, the stiff sheets and flat pillows. She was thrilled when John—fourteen at the time—joined her in jumping on the bed, which they both did, wildly, until the plastic Shepherd casters supporting the frame snapped on one side, sending them careening and shrieking to their deaths on the orange molten lava carpet. Legs burned to charcoal twigs, eyes popping from their sockets. And then the horrifying discovery of the soiled diaper beneath the bed as her father kneeled down to inspect the casters. Her mother’s disdain, her father’s dark pride.

  The next hotel vindicated him, with its picture window stretching across the room, high above the city, offering up the whole of Montreal for their pleasure. Wasn’t it beautiful? Wasn’t it just magnificent? Sharing the room, the four of them. And she, to her father’s pleasure, begging to have the cot by the window so she could sleep like a sparrow, the city twinkling beneath her, until the fear of falling gripped her, more powerful than her father’s unspoken disapproval as he dragged her cot to the middle of the room.

  “We’re almost there,” Donna said.

  They sailed past a road sign that announced the city of Salem, a silhouette of a witch flying on a broom as its logo. Beside the sign, on the gravel shoulder of the road, a faded plastic wreath perched on green wire legs. A crash site memento, Donna explained.

  To the right of the road, the sun danced off the ocean, an endless silver expanse flashing in syncopated beats between buildings before the highway veered suddenly inland, carrying them to the centre of town.

  Hallowe’en, and the place was a carnival. Tourists dressed as witches and vampires. Children in matching outfits. Even several dogs wearing black capes. Donna pulled the car into a parking spot on the street, cutting off a minivan that had obviously been waiting for the space to become available. The vampire driving the van cursed and sped off as Donna grinned and waved.

  “They’re so good-natured about the whole thing, aren’t they?” she joked as they got out of the car. “Shall we do the tourist thing and grab a bowl of chowder at O’Neill’s before our meeting?”

  “Our meeting,” Sarah numbly repeated. “I wish you’d tell me what this is all about.”

  “We’d better get off the street,” Donna said. “We look like the weirdos dressed in our civvies.”

  O’Neill’s was packed, the patrons costumed, animated. A group of vampires at a table near the window burst into raucous laughter.

  “Looks like a scene from Hell,” Sarah said as they stood in the entrance, hoping to catch a waiter’s eye. Several bustled past, trays laden with frothy pints of beer and steaming bowls of chowder. They didn’t even acknowledge Sarah and Donna.

  “Hey,” Donna shouted as a young waiter raced by, his cropped blond hair dyed pink, the sweat gleaming behind his ears. “Hey,” she said again to no avail. “What do we look like? Chopped liver?”

  Several witches glanced over with the smugness of patrons who are comfortably ensconced.

  “Screw you,” Donna sneered at them.

  Sarah put her hand on Donna’s arm. She didn’t
feel like a fight today. “It’s okay. Let’s go somewhere else.”

  Donna stood, glaring.

  “We can go somewhere else,” Sarah said again. “There are lots of places.” She tugged on Donna’s arm, pulling her from the bar into the street.

  But it was the same deal in every other pub and restaurant in the city: harried wait-staff, fidgeting lineups, gleeful chatter from those who had managed to secure a table. So they wandered through the shops, also crowded. They sniffed essential oils and tried on hooded cloaks. They perused gemstones and crystals, bought saltwater taffy, had a boxing match with devil and nun puppets (Donna being the devil, of course), inspected rows of shot glasses and coffee mugs, all sporting the witch-on-a-broomstick logo.

  “It’s all just a pile of junk,” Donna proclaimed. “They should burn this crap instead of witches. This is the real threat to America,” she announced loudly, making a motion with her arm as if to clear the glass shelves of their merchandise. The shopkeeper eyed her warily. Donna gave her a satiric curtsy. “Let’s pay our respects at the graveyard, shall we?”

  The cemetery was crowded with “gawkers,” as Donna called them. People with cameras and video recorders, little kids running around, playing tag among the tombstones, the limestone tablets leaning drunkenly. The gallows tree marked the centre of the small graveyard, its gnarled arms beseeching the sky. There was an unsettling energy, as if the ghosts of those convicted and tortured for witchcraft were reaching out, entreating the living to remember the hysteria that had led to the deaths of nearly two dozen people and the accusation and incarceration of hundreds more.

  Donna clucked in feigned disapproval. “Best marketing gimmick ever. A few months of terror in 1692 translate into millions in tourist income. Not a bad trade-off.”

  Sarah shoved her hands in her pockets, kicking absently at one of the tombstones. She didn’t want to think about the stupidity of the human race. People were awful at the best of times, she knew that.

  “They’re not all in here,” Donna continued with a gleeful tone in her voice.

  “What do you mean?”

  “The bodies of the accused. They’re not all in here.” She bent down to read the inscription on a headstone. “The families weren’t allowed to bury their dead. The bodies were just tossed in shallow graves and covered in dirt. And when it rained, you could see fingers and toes sticking out through the mud. So the families came at night, stole the bodies away and buried them in secret, in unmarked graves.” She looked up at Sarah, smiling.

  “You love that idea.” Sarah shuddered, folding her arms across her chest. Thankfully John was cremated. Nothing but a pile of ash. Nothing to fight over. Nothing to push up through the mud. But it hadn’t stopped his ghost from wandering around. And here she was on Hallowe’en, in the spookiest place in the world, at a time when spirits roam freely. Sarah watched as the children played among the tombstones, their hide-and-seek laughter filtering through the autumn air, her thoughts tumbling like a dropped penny. How different was she from Donna, really? Hadn’t she stretched out in a pine coffin once on a school trip to Pioneer Village just to make her friends laugh? Eyes closed, hands folded neatly over her chest. She was suddenly irritated, suddenly impatient with the crowds, with herself, and most especially with Donna. “Why are we here?” she demanded.

  But Donna ignored her. “We should go,” she said.

  “What’s this stupid appointment for, anyway?” Sarah grumbled as they left the cemetery. Taking a shortcut through a side street, they walked past the shops on Essex to a narrow alleyway like a missing tooth in the row of red-brick buildings. The walls of the buildings were tall, threatening to pinch the space shut at any moment. Donna moved along the corridor, scanning the population of strange doors that lined the wall, some painted, some wooden, some with windows, some blind.

  “It should be here somewhere …”

  What kind of door? Sarah wondered, her mind latching on to a story by H. G. Wells, about a door in a wall. “I am haunted. I am haunted by something—that rather takes the light out of things …”

  “This is dumb, Donna. Let’s go.”

  “Here it is,” Donna said, stopping in front of a weathered pine door. She checked the number: 17½. Testing the door handle, she wiggled it and pushed hard. A bell jingled flatly. The smell of incense and cigarettes hung in the air. A couple of dingy yellow upholstered chairs crouched in the dim light of the room, the dirty mustard walls decorated with faded moons and stars, the room truncated by a worn white curtain that hung from ceiling to floor at the back. Behind the curtain, a woman’s voice could be heard, raspy, muffled. Donna slumped into one of the chairs. Sarah sat across from her, hands still shoved in her pockets.

  “A fortune teller.”

  Donna nodded. “She’s supposed to be good,” she whispered.

  When did Donna ever whisper? “Have you been here before?”

  “She comes highly recommended,” Donna said evasively. She produced her cigarettes, reconsidered and slipped them back into her purse to fiddle with her Zippo instead.

  Just then, the curtain was pulled back and a man appeared, looking embarrassed. He smiled nervously at Sarah, glanced at Donna and hurried out the door. A moment later a woman stood at the curtain. She looked at Sarah, her almond-shaped eyes black as coal. Like Michael’s. She wore an old sweater and jeans. Her face was round and dispassionate, worn with abuse. Hardly the image of the all-seeing mystic, Sarah thought.

  The woman motioned for her to come in and disappeared behind the curtain. Donna sat expectantly in her chair. What was that look she had on her face? Conniving? Delight? Sarah wasn’t sure. She rose, hesitating at the sound of the woman’s grating cough. Pulling the curtain back, she could hear Donna snapping her Zippo open and shut behind her. Open and shut.

  The woman hunched at a tired orange melamine table, a deck of cards to one side, a cigarette burning in a nicotine-stained ashtray. A thin lamp leaned in one corner, the shade faded, ripped, strands of beads hanging from its craned neck. The smell of alcohol was overpowering. Gin? Rubbing alcohol? A metal chair with a wooden seat and back, the kind used in grade-school gynasiums, stood in front of the table. The woman motioned soundlessly to the chair. Sarah stepped into the room, letting the curtain fall closed. She could see the scuffmarks of a million encounters on the linoleum floor as she pulled the chair out and sat down.

  The woman didn’t speak. No small talk, no questions about why Sarah was there. Her wide, puffy hands were remarkably nimble as she began shuffling the cards. Tarot cards, Sarah could tell, now that she was closer. The woman began to cough again; the smell of alcohol and smoke made Sarah feel faint. There was barely enough room for the table and two chairs in the room, let alone the fumes radiating from the woman. Sarah covered her nose and mouth with one hand to keep the nausea down. The woman sucked her cough back with a long pull on her cigarette and continued to shuffle the cards, her face taking on a glazed, hypnotized appearance. Snapping cards on the table in the pattern of a cross, she studied them briefly. The name of each card was printed clearly across the bottom: ten of Swords, two of Cups, the Emperor, the Magician. She looked up at Sarah, looked through her, actually, her dark eyes focused on a spot far beyond the young girl in front of her. When she spoke, her speech was slow and thick with accent, her tongue clicking heavily in her mouth like a beetle.

  “You are looking for the girl,” she said.

  Sarah shook her head, no.

  “You are looking for the girl,” the woman said again, then touched the card marked “The Emperor.” “There is a man. He is of the world. He no longer serves you. You must leave him behind.”

  “Peter …” Sarah murmured.

  The woman’s eyes did not register acknowledgment. Her face remained vacant. “You are searching for an answer. A clue. The pieces are in front of you. They always have been.” She held one hand lightly over the cards. “There is another man.” She pressed a thick finger on “The Magician,” the familiar
lemniscate floating just above his head.

  “Michael …”

  “He has a message for you,” the woman said, tapping repeatedly on the card. “Je suis un mensonge qui dit toujours la vérité.”

  Sarah waited for her to explain. “I’m sorry … I don’t speak French.”

  The woman responded by flipping a card off the top of the deck and placing it into the middle of the cross: the Lovers. An edge of urgency tinged her voice. “Trust him,” she said. She plucked another card off the deck, laid it across the Lovers: the Fool. It showed a man walking with a sack tied to a stick carried over one shoulder and a little dog running at his feet. He walked toward the edge of a cliff, his gaze turned heavenward, unaware of the danger before him. Raising her head slowly, the woman looked directly at Sarah, her eyes glittering in the dusky light of the lamp. Sarah stared back, unable to resist the impenetrable void in the woman’s eyes as the final card was revealed: a black-armoured skeleton riding a white horse. Death. The woman leaned across the table, the smell of alcohol and cigarettes surrounding her like an aura. “Bury your dead,” she hissed.

  The words scalded Sarah like steam from a burst pipe. In an instant, John was there, sitting across the table in the woman’s place. Stomach lurching, Sarah hunched forward, the acid rushing into her throat. She covered her mouth with her hand as her head began to spin and she thought for sure she would be sick.

  But when she looked up again, it was only the woman sitting across from her, gathering the cards and straightening the deck into a neat pile. Whatever spirit had possessed her was gone, her face dispassionate and empty once again. Sarah staggered back from the table, the legs of the chair scraping loudly against the floor. She stumbled, groping for the curtain, and was relieved to see Donna still waiting as she appeared from the back room, dazed.

  Donna rose up and pressed something (a business card?) into Sarah’s hand before disappearing behind the curtain herself. Stuffing the card into her coat pocket, Sarah lunged for the door and pulled it open, the bell jangling as she stepped into the fresh air, the shadowed alley bright in comparison to the fortune teller’s den. She breathed frantically in and out, felt the fumes of alcohol and smoke leaving her lungs, then heaved forward and retched, the vomit splashing loudly, astonishingly, against the bricks in the alley. Hands shaking, she searched her purse for a tissue and wiped her mouth, dropping the soiled tissue to the ground with disgust. She made her way down the alley, shivering uncontrollably. Stupid old woman. She exhaled forcibly, throwing her head back until she could see the robin’s-egg-blue strip of sky. In a moment she heard the door close and Donna’s footsteps tapping quickly behind her.