Among the Dead and Dreaming

by Samuel Ligon

  I hadn’t realized in the first call that he might be insane. I couldn’t tell if that made my situation better or worse. Or if he even was crazy. I said, “But I was gone by then. Up in Chicago,” and he said, “Why’d you go there?” and I said, “Just—the breakup and everything,” and he said, “You had it pretty bad for him, didn’t you?”

  Since he’d discovered where I worked so easily, I knew he’d find where we lived, too, though I’d changed us to unlisted after his first call. But Texas wasn’t so far. Not far enough. He’d show up at work, if nowhere else, and I couldn’t imagine how I’d hide my feelings if I had to see his face.

  “You seeing anybody now?” he said.

  I thought of how Cash would have responded to Kyle, his insane jealousy. On the other hand, maybe the prospect of a man in my life would push Burke away. Though it wouldn’t have Cash. It would have made him meaner.

  “Cash always said you two was wild,” Burke said. “Going down to the river after work at Stubb’s, the two of you drinkin’ and skinnydippin’ and gettin’ high.”

  “That was a long time ago,” I said.

  “Not for me, though,” he said. “Prison stops time. For me, it’s like yesterday. And now I find myself thinking so much about you, Nikki, almost like we know everything about one another through him.”

  I felt myself sinking, and if I didn’t come up soon I was going to have to inhale everything around me, suck it all into my lungs and spit it out once I reached the surface. I made myself breathe. I said, “It’s been good talking to you, Burke. Good to remember those times.”

  “It’s a kind of haunting,” he said, “not knowing what happened.”

  “It’s probably what the cops thought,” I said. “How he was running with bad people.”

  “Is that what you told them?” he said, and I said, “I didn’t tell them anything, I didn’t talk to them,” and he said, “They didn’t track you down?”

  “I told you, I was gone,” I said. “And if I’d been there when they killed him, they would’ve killed me too.”

  “That’s what I’m so grateful for,” he said. “Like the guiding hand moved you away for a reason. For later, maybe. For us.”

  I swallowed hard and kept breathing.

  “I just want to learn about the woman he loved,” Burke said. “But not like this, a thousand miles apart.”

  I would never be able to look at his face.

  “You don’t need to be afraid, Nikki,” he said. “I hope you know that much. I want to learn about your love is all, and everything about you. Ain’t no reason to be afraid.”

  That’s when I felt the old coldness—down deep. Just how he said I shouldn’t be afraid. Like he could smell it on me. Like he’d been smelling it for years.

  “You wouldn’t begrudge me,” he said. “Would you? Sharing memories together?”

  “I just want to get on with my life,” I said.

  “Cash did, too,” he said, “but they took him from us. And now it’s up to us to honor his memory, the least we can do. Who knows what other chance we’ll get to make things right.”

  “I just need some space,” I said, and he said, “We gotta heal each other, Nikki,” and I said, “I need time to think,” and he said, “There’s not one reason in this world we can’t help each other, Nikki. We’re practically family. Practically blood.”

  I should have gone to Kyle right then, the only one who could have helped me. I wanted to. I was going to. But I’d been taking care of myself all my life, me and my mother, me and Alina. And I didn’t know how to tell it right. Besides, maybe Burke wouldn’t call back. Alina was oblivious, packing for school, and I didn’t want to burden Kyle with it. I didn’t know how to tell it so he’d understand. I didn’t know how to do anything but run, and I wasn’t going to run. Not this time. Being off the phone made me think, each minute that went by, that Burke would just disappear and I’d never have to think about him or his brother again. I knew it was a lie, like I knew he knew everything that had happened between Cash and me and was just stringing me along, waiting for me to show my throat. But I kept telling myself the lie, like a song stuck in my head I hated and couldn’t get rid of.

  9

  Burke

  I didn’t want to believe she done it and didn’t believe it, but the suspicion would creep up on me, the guiding hand turning my head to something I didn’t want to look at, things she said or how she said them, like the fact that there wasn’t no Oak Bluff, Illinois, at least not according to Rand McNally, though maybe I heard it wrong, because I knew she loved him and would love me, too, especially with him gone and me the person most like him in the world. But then it seemed like she just wanted to push me away—maybe because she was still so hurt, I couldn’t tell. And I didn’t know how to test it without pushing her further, which I didn’t want to do. She was all I had and wanted in the world.

  I told her that a few days later, that she was all I had and wanted in the world, and she said, “You don’t know me,” and I said, “I know you,” and she said, “But you don’t. And I can’t keep talking like this. I’ve got work to do.”

  Knowing how much they loved one another, it didn’t make sense that she wouldn’t want to rekindle it. That she’d deny me. “I just want to share memories,” I said. “Of Cash and the two of y’all together.”

  She held her tongue.

  “It’ll help the both of us,” I said, and she said, “I want to get past all that.”

  I couldn’t half believe she’d deny him now, everything they’d been through, everything I’d been through for them. Didn’t she realize she never could have had him in the first place if it wasn’t for me doing his time? I knew there’d been trouble between them, sure, but there was two sides to all that lovesick talk in his address book. And pictures don’t lie, the way they’d moon over one another.

  “You’d be surprised how alike we are,” I said. “But, remember, I’m the older, so you’ll come to realize, looking back, that it was always me you was seeing in him. You’ll come to realize I was always the one—”

  “I can’t do this,” she said. “I just can’t do it,” and she hung up the phone!

  I called her back and she said it again, that she couldn’t do it, and I said, “What about my hurt?” and she said she knew, she knew, but she couldn’t help me now.

  “How about I call back in a few days,” I said, and she said, no, no, she didn’t want to talk. She needed space. She was hurting too much.

  “When then?” I said.

  Nothing but her scratchy breathing.

  “I got to see you,” I said.

  “No,” she said.

  I felt her slipping the same way Cash felt her slipping—how easy it was for her to disappear—and I said, “How come you never talked to the cops about what happened? How come they didn’t track you down?”

  “How would I know?” she said.

  “How come you didn’t go to them then?”

  “I don’t have to answer to you,” she said. “Or anyone. I’m sure Cash told you that, too—that I don’t answer to anyone—so if you think for one goddamn minute. . . .”

  I pulled the phone from my face, her awful sounds coming through the receiver into the air of my mother’s kitchen. I think that’s what sealed it more than anything, just the mouth on her—that queen bitch tone—like I was less than nothing, and she’d just been putting up with me in my time of pain and suffering. That goddamn filthy mouth on her.

  I lowered my mother’s phone to the cradle, holding everything tight, and stood from the table, pouring myself a cup of coffee with Jack on top. I walked my mother’s house and tried to hold myself together.

  The way she pretended not to know me, not to know Cash, fed this burning in me, hot and fast. But I didn’t want to believe, even though I could feel how off she was in her voice. I didn’t want
to know, even though the guiding hand was trying to show me. So I fought it, the last time I fought it, because of what it proved to me over the next few hours and days, and then I never fought it again.

  I knew the only way was to test her. And if she was true and it hurt her, we’d get over the hurt together and I’d make everything right. But if she wasn’t true . . . I knew I’d feel so stupid for not knowing all along—what I learned at Huntsville—that it’s almost always somebody close that’ll kill you, my wasted worry nearly blinding me, the way she could turn on me after all my sorrow.

  I poured another drink and dialed again. She answered and I sprung the test, because there was no other way to know for sure. “I know you killed Cash,” I told her with gravel in my voice, praying it wasn’t true as I placed the phone on the cradle, still trying to hold everything in.

  I took a drink and then another, trying to calm myself. I still didn’t know anything, even as I was starting to know in my heart, everything she took from him and me, everything clear and burning, shown by the hand. It was all too sloppy to be a Mexican drug gang. They would have made goddamn good and sure he was dead. The fact that she never went to the cops, never went to the funeral. All the lovesick talk in his address book. How she was probably using my sorrow against me. That was the worst of it.

  I called again, praying I was wrong, but finishing what I started, already two steps ahead of myself, because if she was involved, I’d have to learn her level of fear—if she’d go to the cops, if she had a man who’d try to track me.

  “I’ve been in prison fifteen years,” I told her, “thinking about you. Cash told me who to look for.”

  She tried to interrupt and I told her to shut up. “I don’t care for the cops,” I told her, “but I’ll go to them if I have to. I’ll call them right now. I know you killed him.”

  I listened to her breathe, a sort of hiss, like air from a tire, and I waited, letting out rope in the silence.

  “What is it you want exactly?” she finally said in this muted, broken voice.

  I felt the beginning of my release, every muscle in my body settling, even as I felt the burning.

  “Is it money?” she said, the guiding hand of fate fingering her once and for all and forever as the killer.

  I was blind for a second before everything became red ringed and perfectly clear in the center.

  “What is it you want?” she kept whispering. “What is it you want?”

  “What do you got?” I asked her.

  “Nothing,” she said, crying and sniffling, but trying to stay quiet, trying to hide it.

  “I guess you’d rather talk to the Austin police,” I said. “Or the Rangers.”

  “No,” she said, and then: “Ten thousand.”

  As if there’d never been a thing between us.

  I hung up on her. Called back.

  “Twenty thousand,” she said. “Please.”

  I hung up and let her stew. Days passed as the hand worked out what would become of her.

  “Let’s start with an even fifty,” I finally told her.

  But money would never be enough. There’d have to be other payment too, worked out by the hand. I looked at her pictures in the Goat at night—waking up, it felt like, coming back to life after all my wasted years. I gave Billy one week notice and bought a plane ticket to John F. Kennedy airport, figuring I’d wing it until I spent some time with her. Now that I knew what she’d done to Cash, her betrayal and denial, I felt good doing right by him and our mother. It was like I could finally breathe on the outside free—a pure, true instrument of the hand.

  10

  Alina

  It’s so unfair that it has to be Kyle when there are all these awful people whose deaths would make the world a better place, like serial killers and rapists, all the horrible people who hurt people, and I can hardly even believe any of it until I see her at the airport and fall apart completely, because it’s so unfair that I’m never going to see him again, unless I believe in heaven, which I don’t think I do believe, but maybe I do, though I don’t think you can just decide to believe in something like that.

  Mom doesn’t look that horrible is what rubs me so wrong in the car on the Cross Island, like she’s only comforting me and hasn’t been crying for days. She tells me again what happened—a motorcycle accident on the Ocean Parkway, which I already know, and this rich woman, Cynthia, who my mother obviously hates, which is weird because she doesn’t get jealous, and I’m like, “He was cheating on you?” not sure if I hope he was or hope he wasn’t, and she’s like, “I don’t think so,” but it’s so obvious she’s lying.

  “Was it over between you, then?”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Why was he with that woman?”

  “I told you, they were friends.”

  “And you didn’t like her.”

  “I didn’t know her.”

  Everything she says is a lie. For the first time, I can recognize it, and that feels kind of cool, just that I can tell, but also horrible, and then I remember I’ll never see Kyle again, and I wish it was me instead of him, or me with him, the two of us dead together, since my mom hardly even cares that he’s dead. She was at school with me for two nights and then I was alone two nights, with Cassandra, my roommate, who seems really nice, but I was also missing home and my mom and Kyle, even knowing he was coming to Interlochen next week, our secret, unless he told her, which I know he didn’t because I’d be able to tell, but now he’s dead and I’ll never see him again. She tells me about this lunch we have to go to with the families—right this second, so I’m not even going to drop my stuff off—and I’m like, Are you kidding me? But I see how hard she’s trying to keep from crying, her face gone bloodless, and I feel it all coming up from wherever I’m holding it, and I can’t hold it any longer, and she lets go, too, both of us crying all the way to Rockville Centre, where this stupid lunch is going to be, and that makes me feel worse, or just so guilty because of everything I felt for him but didn’t mean to feel, just how he was coming to visit and how she never seemed to give him what he needed, but her crying now and feeling it with me, both of us crying now all the way to Rockville Centre and this stupid lunch.

  Mark

  I didn’t expect to see Nikki at The Pavilion, seated next to Kyle’s father, big fat Gino Pantopes. People weren’t telling me the plans, or I was forgetting them. Nikki looked nearly as worn out as Cynthia had, her face drained and washed out from crying.

  She didn’t know anything yet.

  The Pavilion was a wedding mill, with fountains and cherubs and a dining room upstairs offering a view of the rolling lawn and duck pond out back. Cynthia’s sister, Beth, sat between me and her broker husband, Craig, who Cynthia had always called Dreg, and Nikki sat across the room with Gino and a girl who had to be her daughter. Plates of food appeared and disappeared. I thought of how Cynthia would have hated this event, how we’d have mocked it together, the duck pond and Gino’s fat purple face and Dreg asking stupid questions. If I could have told her anything, I’d have told her how much I hated her and Kyle being remembered together like this. I didn’t want to be that petty, but I was. I looked at Nikki across the room, entirely self-contained, and then I heard my name and noticed Denys standing and looking at me.

  They were all looking at me.

  “So, that’s fine,” Denys said. “Diana and I want to provide these opportunities to share our memories of Cynthia and Kyle. We thought you’d start, Mark.”

  I looked at my untouched plate, felt heat rush to my face. What could I possibly share about Cynthia and Kyle?

  “I thought we’d go around the room,” Denys said, “each of us—”

  “Oh, God, no!” Celia Pantopes wailed.

  She was half out of her seat, Gino trying to pull her down. When he lost his hold, she stumbled out the door, wailing.


  I got away from my table before anyone could stop me.

  Denys said, “Well, we don’t,” and Diana said, “Please, everyone, finish your lunch.”

  I followed Gino out the door, Celia struggling down the winding staircase.

  I stood against the railing above them, watching them, unsure where to go.

  Nikki came out of the banquet room, leading the girl she’d been sitting with, her daughter. She stopped to introduce us, and I stuck out my hand like a car salesman. “Mark Barlow,” I said to the girl, startled by how much she looked like her mother.

  “We’re going out back for a minute,” Nikki said. “To get some air.”

  It seemed like an invitation. I followed them down the staircase, past Gino and Celia hunched by a fountain in the lobby. I stopped to take off my jacket, then caught up with Nikki and Alina on the manicured lawn.

  “Because I want to is why,” Alina said, snapping her hand away from Nikki and storming toward the duck pond.

  Nikki seemed surprised to see me. “She’s upset,” she said, and I said, “Who wouldn’t be?”

  Nikki looked away. “I know,” she said.

  “I’ll leave you alone,” I said, and she said, “Stay.”

  We sat on a bench in the shade of an oak tree, watching Alina make her way around the pond. “She seems like a nice kid,” I said.

  “She is nice,” Nikki said.

  A fountain of water sprayed up from the center of the pond.

  Nikki massaged her forehead with her fingertips. “This whole thing’s so weird,” she said. “I don’t know what to say up there. About Kyle. About the two of us.”

  “It’s not like you’re going to reveal some secret,” I said.

  She looked across the water at Alina half way around. “Secret?”

  “You know,” I said. “Everything you suspect or whatever.”