Among the Dead and Dreaming

by Samuel Ligon

  Alina

  People mistake us on the phone sometimes and tell us we look alike, that we could be sisters, which my mother loves, but nobody ever thinks I am her, so when he calls her name I figure it must be because of the sun behind me. Even though I finally buried the wooden man on the beach, it still feels like I’m holding Kyle in the ball of my hands, and I don’t feel like talking to anyone, especially some guy I don’t know who’s probably in love with her like all the rest. But then he says it again—“Hey, Nikki”—and when I turn, he looks kind of familiar and I see in his face that he’s recognized his mistake, and I say, “Nope. Wrong number,” and he says, “You must be. . . .”

  And stands there looking at me.

  Nikki

  I was awake all night and slept the morning away and now when I call her name, she doesn’t answer. I run downstairs, telling myself she’s on the porch or in the backyard, but she’s nowhere. I call Ashley’s mother, who hasn’t seen her since last night. I call Long Beach High School, but Alina isn’t there, wouldn’t be allowed there, they tell me, until she’s enrolled. I run to the beach, thinking she’s lying in the sun or getting coffee or sitting on the boardwalk eating an ice, playing volleyball like she used to with Kyle.

  But she’s nowhere.

  I call Mark and his phone rings and rings. If she’s moving, she could be in all the spots I’ve already checked, walking ahead or behind me, but I can’t just go home and wait. I walk, half running, up and down the boardwalk, then to Magnolia pier, where it’s only fishermen, and I wonder if I should ask if anyone’s seen her, but I don’t know how long I’ve been gone or if I can even talk, and she’s certainly home by now.

  But the house is empty. And there’s still no note.

  I could have at least warned her that someone was out there, some sick fuck gunning for her. But I didn’t because I was too sure of my power to protect her, certain I could keep her invisible, when she’s so beautiful, when her walk and her hair and her smile and her eyes and everything about her screams look at me look at me look at me, and me so stupid, so goddamn stupid. Because he didn’t know she existed I fooled myself into believing I could hide her and make her not exist—her, the only thing he could take from me, the only thing to protect. And he got her, all that sickness, all that disease in his blood. I call Mark again and he answers and I ask him to come right now, everything boiling in my stomach and throat, nearly choking me, so I can hardly talk, and I say, “Please,” and he says, “What’s going on?” and I say, “Please.”

  Mark

  Nikki was on the sidewalk when I pulled in front of her house, something frantic in her eyes and the rigid hold she had on her body, her forehead smeared with ink or ash.

  “Come on,” she said, approaching me as I got out of the car. “I have to tell you—”

  She looked at me for a second, a deep fatigue in her eyes and all over her face. “Here,” she said. “We’ll sit on the porch.” She put her hand to the smeared spot on her forehead. “He might drive by,” she said. “We should go inside.”

  She opened the door and I followed her into the kitchen.

  “We don’t have time,” she said, looking into a cabinet over the sink, her back to me. Frozen. But with a tremor running through her.

  “What is it?” I said.

  She turned around, a blank intensity in her eyes.

  I waited for her to say what she had to say.

  She ran her hand over her forehead.

  “Talk to me,” I said. “Tell me.”

  “Just,” she said. “I don’t—”

  And once she started, she couldn’t stop, laying herself open, everything she hadn’t said the night before, a rape, this prick Burke coming after her from prison, her daughter already missing. I held onto her, standing in her kitchen, then went with her to the floor as she talked as fast as she could, a river of words pouring out of her, her fear working itself into my guts as if I’d swallowed a broken piece of it.

  25

  Alina

  “Alina Fiore,” I say. “Who are you?”

  “Steve,” he says, walking toward me and offering his hand. “LeRoy.”

  I take his hand and let it go. “Nice to meet you, Steve LeRoy.”

  I turn to walk away, and he says, “I knew your mama, Alina—way back when—in Texas,” and I stop cold, because of whatever it was I recognized in his face or ears or eyes, whatever it was that made me know without knowing, what I’ve been waiting for all these years, all my life. But it can’t be true, even if I do feel a shiver of knowing, because there’s no way for it to be true.

  “You must’ve been born after she left,” he says. “Come on. I’ll show you some pictures from way back when. Of your mama.”

  He beckons me toward the bench he’s been sitting on, looking out toward the ocean, and I feel myself pulled to the pictures he waves in his hand. “Come on and sit,” he says, patting the bench. “Your mama and me was close down in Austin,” and I think it can’t be true, even though I know it is.

  Maybe I don’t want to know. Maybe I’m not ready.

  “Look at this,” he says, handing me a picture of him and her standing on a rock in a nearly dried up river. “She wasn’t much older than you are now.”

  I look from the old picture of my mom and him up to the real version of him now—my father finally right in front of me—then back to the picture of him and my mother so happy before I was born, or maybe she was even pregnant with me then—I know she got pregnant in Austin—her and my father on a rock in a river in Texas, and now he’s right here with me, part of me hating him for waiting all these years and part of me wanting to know everything about him. I remember how often she told me he never even knew I existed, and I say, “Did you know about me?”

  He looks at me for a long minute, sort of studying me, and finally says, “No, I didn’t, Alina,” and I say, “But how did you find out?”

  He hands me a picture of him and my mother on the porch of some farmhouse they maybe lived in together. “Didn’t she tell you about me?”

  “Here’s another,” he says, then snatches it back and says, “Ooops. That one’s kind of—what’s the word? Inappropriate.”

  I reach for it, sort of desperate to look at the stupid thing.

  “Not to me it ain’t,” he says. “But you know how people are.”

  “Let me see it,” I say, not knowing if I want to see it. Not knowing if I want to know this man at all, knowing, of course, that I want to know everything about him, but afraid too, and pissed that he could just appear like this. But also knowing it’s not his fault, because she never told him about me, hating her for how she treats me like some object she possesses or something else to control in her life, always trying to decide what’s good for me or bad without really knowing at all, and how she treated Kyle, and how she thinks she’s better than everyone, and how my father didn’t die like she said he did in some accident, which I knew all along—just because of how his name would change.

  “Come on,” I say, reaching for the picture. “I can handle it.”

  “You can, huh?” he says, holding the picture close to himself. “How old are you, Alina?”

  “Thirteen,” I tell him, kind of angry he doesn’t know, that he can’t do the math, but maybe my mother was just—nothing to him. Except that he’s here now and has these pictures of the two of them down in Texas.

  “You know what?” he says. “I think you’ve got as much right as anyone to look at a picture of your own mama,” and he hands me the photo, my mother on a bed topless, leaning against a headboard and smiling, practically my age, and there’s nothing dirty about it, she’s not trying to be sexy, she just doesn’t have a shirt on, and she’s never been modest in any way—I’ve seen her nude thousands of times. She’s just so young and beautiful and her smile so huge, lighting her up, and just like in the river p
icture I look for evidence of myself in her body, tiny inside her. I see him in my mind behind the camera taking the picture, the man she’s smiling at, both of them there, my mother and father, all this evidence that they existed together and were happy, and me between them, invisible, already alive and just waiting to be born.

  Nikki

  Mark doesn’t understand why I can’t go to the cops, even after I tell him about Cash bleeding out on the couch at Duval. “But that was self-defense,” he says. “From back at your apartment,” and I tell him again how I have no way to prove that, how I didn’t do anything to stop the bleeding, how my cousin disappeared off the face of the earth, is probably dead herself by now—I would have heard from her otherwise, long ago—how Alina and I have no family but each other, how I killed Cash—I killed him—and he says, “But nobody knows that, and nobody came after you.”

  “Burke knows it!”

  “He doesn’t know it. He’s guessing. And what you did was self-defense.”

  “He does know it, and he already told me.” I see Burke and Alina again, Burke maybe touching her this very second—which I can’t—or driving her dead in the trunk of his car, her body broken, and I let go again, feeling like I’m going to throw up, and he’s holding me, saying, “It’s going to be okay. What do you want me to do first?”

  “The money,” I say. “In case he calls.”

  “But that’s why we should go to the cops,” he says.

  “No!” I say. “He’ll kill her,” and I tell him again what he told me on the phone weeks ago, what he’d do to me if I went to the cops, which never scared me, except I’d never abandon her, but now it’s much worse, because now he’ll do it to her. But maybe he doesn’t even have her, because maybe he doesn’t—it’s possible—maybe she just walked and walked, all the way to Point Lookout and back, to Montauk and back, walking, Burke not even in New York at all, having no idea in the world of her, her just walking all these hours since I woke and she was gone. And even though I hate myself for my hope, I say, “I’m going back out. You stay here—in case they come back. But don’t let them see you. And don’t scare her if she comes alone.”

  “I won’t scare her,” he says.

  Somehow I’ve landed back in his embrace. I’m holding on to him.

  “And the money,” I say, “the money,” and he says, “I’ll get it. Go.”

  Burke

  I know everything by the way Alina looks at me once I show her the pictures, all this raw hunger in her face. She thinks I’m her daddy—thinks I’m Cash—and I let her think it, sort of bringing him to life through my impersonation. And once I figure it out, which must be the same second she figures it out, which is pretty much immediately—the guiding hand of fate bringing us together—Cash starts coming out in her more, making himself visible in her attached earlobes or the ways she tilts her head, sort of sly like Cash was and playful, except she’s got all this confusion and hurt running over her face.

  “Did you know when you saw me?” I ask her. “When you heard my name?”

  “She lied,” Alina says, pinching her eyebrows like Cash.

  “Don’t blame her now,” I say.

  “Said your name was Jim. Or Dan.”

  “Try not to be hurtful,” I tell her.

  “She said you died!”

  “Well, now—”

  “But I knew it wasn’t true, because of how your name would change. And how she wouldn’t talk about you no matter how much I begged.”

  “That’s the trauma of true love, Alina. It can work in mysterious ways. Especially when you’re so young.”

  “And also because—I just knew you were alive. Because of this feeling I had. But sometimes I didn’t know. Sometimes I believed her.”

  “Well, I’m here, now, that’s for sure. And we got all kinds of time to catch up.”

  I hand her a picture of Nikki and me out on 6th street in Austin.

  It’s so typical of that bitch not to tell Alina one goddamn thing about her daddy, what every child has a right to know. She’ll have to pay for the rest of her life now. No reason whatsoever to slaughter that milk cow. I’ll take her out later, torture her and take her out later, everything she’s done, everything she’s taken, which I only knew part of before. But now I know she’s been running up debt with interest all these years gone by, and it’ll be like how the courts do, garnishing a man’s wages to pay for the babies his bitch wife’s stolen, even if she is a cheating whore or crank addict, humping everything in pants. No matter any of that, he’s still got to pay. But not this time. Because this time it’s her that’s got to pay.

  We flip through the pictures, one by one, and I tell her that’s the Colorado River in that picture, and that’s a house we lived in on Duval Street, and how we met at a concert back of Stubb’s and fell in love from the moment we laid eyes on each other, her wearing that leather skirt like in the picture of the two of us at Stubb’s counter, and me wearing that stupid cowboy hat from the picture of us down by the river, and how we were inseparable from the moment we laid eyes on each other.

  She’s got emotion all over her face when she looks at me—love and whatnot—and I say, “Come here, baby,” and take her in my arms like she is my daughter, which she practically is, the same blood running through us, and she cries against me, wrapping her arms around my neck and squeezing as she sniffles, while I map out the story that will keep her close and believing until I can call Nikki and tell her what I got, all these people walking behind us on the boardwalk or down on the beach, and she says, “But how did you find me,” and she sits up looking at me, “if you didn’t know?”

  I reach out to run a piece of hair behind her ear. She is my blood. That’s the thing of it. Even if I am working her for money, she is my blood. Practically my own daughter, with Cash dead and gone.

  “We fought over you,” I tell her.

  “But I thought you didn’t know.”

  “I knew and I didn’t know,” I tell her. “Just like you. You knew and you didn’t know. That’s the guiding hand of fate, then doubt working against it. I knew your mama was pregnant. That’s what we fought over—what your mama wanted to do.”

  Her face maps the wheels turning in her head as she tries to put it together, but I’m miles ahead of her.

  “Your mama was young,” I tell her. “I don’t want you to blame her now. She was very young. Both of us was. Maybe the reason our love was so pure.”

  “So she wanted—”

  “She didn’t know what she wanted. You know how bullheaded she can be. She wouldn’t admit to being confused. Thought she wasn’t ready for a baby, what she said anyways. But I wouldn’t let her do it. That’s what we fought over.”

  It breaks my heart to think of all the years I missed watching her grow up, everything Cash missed and keeps missing, this sweet little girl almost a woman who Nikki ain’t even poisoned against him. It’s much worse than that. She’s erased him, killed him and then erased him from his baby’s life. More of a monster than I ever dreamed possible.

  “She never told me that,” she says staring out at the ocean.

  “Sounds like she didn’t tell you much.”

  “She didn’t tell me anything.”

  I run my hand in circles over her back as she stares at the water and then looks at me with Cash’s eyes.

  “I want to tell you how in love we were,” I say, “and just exactly what happened between us. You got to be somewhere?”

  I run that hair behind her ear again as she looks at the water sniffling.

  “I don’t have to be anywhere,” she says.

  “Let’s get some pie then,” I tell her. “And talk. Just you and me. You like pie?”

  “I like pie,” she says, and I say, “Me, too,” and we walk the boardwalk, a father and daughter reunited after all these years apart and so much to learn about one anoth
er. I’m thinking she’ll have to pay the fifty thousand for starters, then pay once a year, maybe twenty grand or thirty, depending on what she earns. But I’ll have to keep her close to make sure she don’t slip away again.

  There’s other families around us, mothers and babies or mothers and toddlers, the little ones that ain’t in school. I’ll want to see Alina at least once a week to watch her last years growing up, and to make sure Nikki don’t try to snatch her again and run. Although I found her once, the second I started trying, so if I do end up in Puerto Rico, traveling from one beach to the next, I can always find her again. Because of the blood—because of blood finding blood like a magnet to iron.

  26

  Nikki

  I walk through the heat of another hundred degree day, half running and scanning the beach and boardwalk, trying to find places he could have left her body, trying to make myself as strong as I’ve always been, focused on finding her and the forward movement of my legs. I scramble into the low dunes crisscrossed with rickety erosion fences, thinking she might be leaning against one of those, or maybe lying in one of the depressions, but she’s not, and I haven’t checked the coffee shops or restaurants where she could be reading or eating lunch, because she could be anywhere, and in my head begging—please, please, please—not even noticing it most of the time, just, please, please, please—trying to believe in god and not believing, because I’ve never believed, never once even considered believing in something that’s so much about trying to believe in itself, something that’s always felt like a magic trick, a hidden door finally opening to nothing when you completely surrender to the delusion.