by Brian Hodge
"This is pretty nice, Dad, and you can go anywhere you want in the house. It's all yours. Along with the other residents, of course. It's what they call assisted living. You're on your own, except they take care of your food and medical and other necessities. And I can come see you every day."
His father shuffled, breathless, to the captain's chair by the windows and collapsed onto the pads tied to its spindles. He seemed to be listening from a long way off.
"I'll be bringing your other stuff, Dad. Your bed, your dresser, your nightstand. Photos and everything too. Anything you want moved, you just say so. I'm going to pick up the rental truck now. I've got a student to help me. Okay? I'll see you in a little while."
From the window ledge his father picked up a framed photo of a woman in batwing sleeves, as if he knew her.
"We'll take good care of him," Molly vowed with empathy, and Denny allowed himself to be drawn into the corridor.
The little woman with the glitter glasses and the perpetual smudge of lipstick on one of her eyeteeth began to shuffle past as they came out.
Denny made two trips in the rental truck, and on the final delivery he faced Ariel in the parlor. Paavo was there, as well as two women introduced as Helen Hoverstein and Marjorie Korpela. For the first time it struck Denny as odd that an old matron—older, it seemed, than the residents—should be in charge.
"Your father will be fine," Ariel assured him. "In fact, I'd advise you to leave him alone as much as possible. If you come, it will just make it harder for him to adjust."
"I'll think about it," Denny said.
"Well, if you do come again, I'll take your photograph—a nice photo of you and your father in his room."
For just a second, Denny Bryce thought the room inhaled. The woman named Marjorie stiffened and sat a little straighter, and the enormous eyes of the one named Helen froze on him with something like urgency. And did ramrod Paavo, his shirt still buttoned to the neck, lean back slightly as though buffeted by an invisible current? But as he stood up to leave, Denny noticed something he found reassuring. It was a painting of the Garden of Eden. Not the ubiquitous print that hung on Sunday school walls and in rectories; this one was an original. Whatever the quirks and foibles of this buttonedup grandame who ran the place, she was steeped in traditional morality, he thought. A little hard to live with but scarcely neglectful. No, he decided, there wasn't any trouble in this paradise.
Out on the porch he found himself confronted by the woman with the lipstick-smudged eyetooth. "Forget about having your photograph taken," she said. "It's a bad idea."
"Why?"
She tried to peer past him through the screen door. "It just is." Then she moved aside and, in a stage whisper meant to carry into the house, added, "… So, bring some cigarettes when you come again."
Chapter 3
Martin Bryce awoke nowhere. It was as if he had been trolleying along over the axons and dendrites of his brain and gotten derailed. He left the tracks almost every time he awoke. If he wasn't in a black gulf, he was at a way station that had no rail lines coming or going. The sense of utter loneliness that came with this never lessened, because it was always the first time. He didn't remember it happening the night before, or the night before that. Those tracks too no longer existed.
It was the green glow of a clock radio that usually reeled him back to real time. That thirteen-year-old radio she had given him on their fiftieth anniversary. He saw it and knew it was part of his marriage and that Beth was lying on the other side of him. But there was no green glow tonight, and she was not beside him.
"Where is this place?" he whispered.
The walls seemed too far away, and the air was sticky and heavy in his lungs. He closed his eyes, half dreaming, half remembering, and when he opened them again he had a context. The motes he saw swimming in the air were no longer a symptom of his dementia but a semitropical plague of insects. And the chirrs he heard came from a swamp. A dog barked a long way off on the perimeter of the encampment. He was inside the bullpen. All the prisoners were standing up because they couldn't fall down. Bodies pressed against bodies, penned up for the night, some with diarrhea, some with dysentery, some dead, all dying. The thirst, the heat, the reeking suffocation were all part of hell on earth. And in the morning when the sun had boiled them enough, the dusty march would continue. So Martin let himself die for a few minutes until the toxic tide ebbed away, and when consciousness washed in again he sat up, stood up.
He was in a room, barefoot but with his clothes still on, having gone to bed fully dressed, and the phantoms of war—that default realm he always returned to in his worst night sweats—were still with him. He was Lieutenant Commander M. B. Bryce, USN. He was in a barracks somewhere, and he didn't want to wake up Beth, because she shouldn't have to march with the rest of them. What had she ever done to the Japs? So he left her sleeping in the green glow of a clock radio that would keep track of time and space while he went back to the road in the province whose name he couldn't remember, but which history records as Pampagna on the peninsula of Bataan.
He remembered two things: a truck slowly flattening the bodies of those who had fallen at the side of the column, and the Japanese soldier who had taken Martin's canteen to give a horse water, then thrown it away. Water. He needed water. Not the dirty stuff in some carabao wallow, but a tall tumbler full of crystal cubes and pure, transparent water. Pawing through the air to avoid barbed wire, he shuffled toward the seam of light that lay on the tile floor of New Eden.
Heat lightning flickered on the horizon, and the north half of everything was suddenly vivid. Half the fields sprang to life, half the trees, half the farmhouse and four sides of the odd structure sitting on the roof. It was an octagonal cupola – the odd structure. Big enough to hold a person, Amber thought. Or maybe just half a person. But she was half a person. She waited for another wink from the horizon.
"God has a loose bulb in his lamp," her father used to say about heat lightning. Used to say. Now he hardly ever talked. He was suddenly old, like her mother, though that wasn't why he didn't talk the same. The reason he didn't talk was because he was mad, Amber thought. And sad. And—she wasn't sure about this—but maybe because he was afraid. She understood a little why her mother had painted him in the wheelchair. Before he lost his legs, he could be a grouch, even mean. And Amber had seen a lot of TV in the last year—Rosie and Jenny Jones and Ricki Lake—and she knew a lot of women were victims of men now. Actually they had always been, but now everyone knew it. So in a way this was new. She herself hadn't had any idea before that men could be so bad. Not all men, of course, but almost all women were victims. So maybe her dad deserved to be in a wheelchair a little, only she didn't think it should be forever. Maybe a week or a month, that was all. And it had been a year now.
More winks from the horizon, and this time she was sure she could get to the cupola. Not get there from the ground where she was standing now, looking up at the house where everyone was asleep, but from the window. She could climb out the window upstairs and push off the lightning rod with her foot while she pulled herself over the gutter, and then it was just a couple of steps along the edge before she could grab that funny-looking pipe sticking up through the roof, and then a couple more to reach the chimney, and then, with the chimney to block her slide if she fell, she could go straight up. The roof was steep, but she could keep trying until she made it. Shingles were like sandpaper. Your tennis shoes could grip. So she could make it to the ridge, and then it was a piece of cake to reach the cupola.
She liked the night. The world seemed bigger at night. Not just an old folks' home and a farm with no kids—and no animals anymore either—but a half-painted world where the shadows could become anything you wanted. She wasn't allowed to go to school, or to shows, or shopping when her mother made her weekly runs to a strip mall, so there were lots of things she wanted. At first she had liked the idea of staying home from school ("No more pencils, no more books, no more teachers' dirty look
s"), but she had zilch friends ("zilch"—kids didn't say that anymore). Her mother said her friends were all grown up, that they were in their forties. She supposed that was true, but it was hard to believe, and if they were truly grown up, then she really didn't care about them anymore anyway. She wanted to meet new people. So she liked the night, because she could explore and pretend there were lots of people around.
They really might be around too. Hadn't her father told her about the ghosts? That was before he was in the wheelchair, and he would show her the cellars or wave at the fields and say that the red corn they grew down by the woods was red from blood and corpses. Her mother called it Indian corn, or sometimes Winnebago, but her father said it was because gangsters had been murdered in the cellars and that they sometimes walked the fields at night gushing blood. They were still in the house too. In the tunnels or maybe the walls. Amber had looked for them many times, even though her old friends used to tell her she was freaked out. Now she wandered all over the house after everyone was asleep, and sometimes—like tonight—she climbed out a window and went through the fields to the woods or hung around the yard in the moonlight. There was a rope swing still on the basswood, except that the rope was yellow plastic now, because the Lutheran school that had built the new wing had changed it, and she sat on the tire and swung and pretended there were hands reaching for her as she gyrated to avoid them. She liked to scare herself. Liked to take risks. That hadn't changed. Because even if she was scared, she was lonely too, and she didn't think she'd mind meeting a ghost or two.
Now she looked up at the cupola and thought, Maybe that's where they are.
She had never looked there before, so it might be. Another series of flashes winked on the horizon, almost as if someone who couldn't speak was signaling to her. Yes, yes, yes! … The cupola. That's where they are. Climb up and see. So she jumped off the tire swing, and snuck back into the house, and tiptoed up the stairs, being careful not to step in the center of the squeaky treads—which didn't matter, because you could beat pots and pans and not wake the living dead in the house, who were mostly about a hundred years old—and Amber went to the sewing room where the window was that she had chosen from the ground.
She checked to make sure her new Skechers were on tight, and then she tugged open the window and stared down three stories to the ground. Scary, for sure. But she had things to hang on to, and except for that couple of steps near the edge above her, there wasn't any risk. The trick was to pretend you were on the ground. That's what her father used to tell her. You could jump and dance on a two-by-four lying on the ground and never fall, so why couldn't you do it if the two-by-four was in the air? You could. You just had to think about what you were doing instead of thinking about falling. Amber never fell.
She sat on the window ledge and thumped her feet on the side of the house, just like sitting at the dining room table. You couldn't fall off a chair, and this was a chair. Then she crouched. No problem. Easy as pie. Standing up, though, that was a little harder on account of the window being in the way. But she had one hand outside the window and the other on the wall inside the house, and she rose up about a foot before the sash checked her shoulder. Letting the hand on the wall slide back a little, her fingers dug into the old window frame and she wiggled her shoulder free of the sash so that only the crook of her elbow touched it, and then she stood up another foot.
Hello, stars …
Five fingers were all that separated her from soaring, and it was tempting to just let go. She liked to think about that, because she wouldn't actually do it, of course, but she was that close to being free. No one could follow her here. She was the boss now. And there was the lightning rod, against which she wedged her left foot. Solid. She wouldn't push off it very hard, though. Just enough to hold her while she pulled herself over the gutter with her left hand as she let go of the window frame with her right. It would only take maybe half a second to make the transfer. Then she would have both hands on the gutter, and her foot would push off the metal rod. Already she was feeling the shingles above the frame with her left hand, and they were like thick book covers that she could tug on, she thought. If she slipped, she would just grab the lightning rod. Hadn't she heard stories about how the kids used to shinny up and down the thing in the old days? It went into the ground, so it wasn't just attached to the house. She bet no one ever went up to the roof this way before, though.
Bracing herself with all the lightness of being in the mind of a steeplejack, she pushed and pulled, calculating the energy required on the fly, her weight more or less ricocheting from the ledge to the rod to the gutter. It was the gutter that threatened to undo her. A big, galvanized gutter that had probably supported more than one two-hundred-pound man in its day but that now had begun to loosen in the rotting fascia board. Still, a seventy-pound will-o'-the-wisp, shifting quickly as she redistributed her weight, weighed less than some of the ice dams it still held up for months all winter. Faster than you can say "Fools rush in where angels fear to tread," Amber Leppa found herself scrabbling onto the shingles above the world.
She stretched out almost at the same steep angle as the roof, daring only one glance at the murky yard an infinity away. Her heart fluttered, because already she sensed the need to keep moving, to use her momentum before gravity could test the stingy friction and fling her down. There was the black pipe sticking up out of the roof. But she saw now that it had a kind of base to it, like the brim on a stovepipe hat. Did that mean it didn't go down into the house? Maybe it was just shoved under the shingles and wouldn't hold her.
Too late. The edges of her Skechers pressed harder into the roof. Either she went for it now or she would slide back toward the lightning rod. Pushing sideways on the shingles with her hands, she flung herself with enough momentum to achieve two steps, and that put her within reach of the pipe.
Her right hand caught it first, and she felt the give, felt the shingles lifting. It was not going to hold. As soon as her weight was centered over it, it would tear out of the roof and she would sled with it right over the edge. But in that parsed second of time before her left foot came down, she saw the nimble possibilities. There was the gutter, of course. She could grab that as she went over, but from her brief testing of its strength at the window, she knew it wouldn't hold either. So that left the chimney. Instead of stopping at the pipe, she could just push off it as she had the lightning rod, and hope she got enough shove to reach the chimney. But that too failed her preview, because the pipe was going to slide right out from under the shingles.
And then her left foot planted just short of the pipe, and she felt the shingle reseat itself flat to the roof, and she knew instantaneously that the base of the pipe extended out under the shingles and that her left foot was pinning it down. So now she dropped her right foot on the other side, pinning that half too, and grabbed the pipe and squatted back on her fanny with her weight still pressing down on the hidden extension of the base. Nothing moved.
Equilibrium.
It wasn't the kind of thing you'd want to try after a heavy meal—she could feel the delicate friction beneath the soles of her shoes as she rocked slightly—but she could land like a butterfly, and all she had to do now was push off evenly. Which she did. Changing from butterfly to grasshopper, she leaped with both feet at once, and in another moment she had the chimney to brace on as she gazed up at the eight-sided thing on the roof.
Even if it took her a couple of tries, she would definitely be able to scramble all the way up because she could push off as hard as she wanted from the chimney, whereas the lightning rod would not have given her enough momentum. Some of the slats were broken out of the cupola, and she thought she could wriggle in once she reached the ridge. There was one thing, though. What was in the cupola? Meeting ghosts didn't seem all that good of an idea, suddenly. Because the way the slats were broken—all jagged and pointing in one direction—it looked like something had smashed its way in with one swipe. And even though she couldn't be sur
e it came from the cupola, she smelled a new kind of dampness and rot. Like the black mud down by the marsh. Decayed like that. You inhaled it and you felt like you were underwater, gulping down mouthfuls of green slime and gritty stuff that swam and multiplied inside you. She didn't mind heights, but she didn't like to be touched when she couldn't control the contact. And when slimy things touched you inside, you had no control at all.
So the more she thought about it, the less she liked it. Something up there might be watching her, and she was about to rush into its claws. Well, well, my dear, you've come just in time for dinner—and you're it! But what if there wasn't anything up there? It really was a neat hideout, a cool place to crash whenever she wanted, high above the world, like the eagles aerie back in the woods her father had talked about, a place where she could be sure no one would reach her. At least she could climb to the ridge a few feet away from the broken slats and check it out, she decided.
Bracing one foot against the chimney, the other under her body, she rocked back and charged the steep pitch. Up, up she went, half standing, half lunging, until just when she had lost all momentum her fingers caught the crest of the roof. For a critical second while she straddled the ridge, she lost track of the octagon. Time enough for something taloned or fanged to fly shrieking into her face, tearing at her eyes or the softness of her throat. But then she faced around and heard only the rattle of grit or maybe a rat in the leaves banked where the valleys met the eaves. Silence followed. Nothing moved in the cupola. Nothing scurried or fluttered or rushed out at her.
She inched forward, using her knees and her hands, hoping she remained in line with the chimney in case she had to bail out but afraid to look away from the inky darkness beyond the slats. The stench—that bottom-of-the-world odor—was overpowering now. Things had probably died in the cupola, she thought. Pigeons and things. So the smell of decay wasn't really surprising. She crept closer, right next to the broken facing now, and that was when she thought she heard a rustling. It wasn't a big rustling. More like a mouse. Would a mouse stay there if something bad was inside? Drawing her legs up one at a time until she was balanced on the ridge, she poked in.