by Stephen King
I told my roomie I was going down to the 7-Eleven to get a pack of cigarettes (yes, I eventually picked up that particular bad habit), but basically I just had to get away from that smell. Given a choice between seeing dead folks—yes, I still see them—and the memories brought on by the smell of spilled wine, I’d pick the dead folks.
Any day of the fucking week.
15
My mother spent four months writing The Secret of Roanoke with her trusty tape recorder always by her side. I asked her once if writing Mr. Thomas’s book was like painting a picture. She thought about it and said it was more like one of those Paint by Numbers kits, where you just followed the directions and ended up with something that was supposedly “suitable for framing.”
She hired an assistant so she could work on it pretty much full time. She told me on one of our walks home from school —which was just about the only fresh air she ever got during the winter of 2009 and 2010—that she couldn’t afford to hire an assistant and couldn’t afford not to. Barbara Means was fresh out of the English program at Vassar, and was willing to toil in the agency at bargain-basement wages for the experience, and she was actually pretty good, which was a big help. I liked her big green eyes, which I thought were beautiful.
Mom wrote, Mom rewrote, Mom read the Roanoke books and little else during those months, wanting to immerse herself in Regis Thomas’s style. She listened to my voice. She rewound and fast forwarded. She filled in the picture. One night, deep into their second bottle of wine, I heard her tell Liz that if she had to write another sentence containing a phrase such as “firm thrusting breasts tipped with rosy nipples,” she might lose her mind. She also had to field calls from the trades—and once from Page Six of the New York Post—about the state of the final Thomas book, because all sorts of rumors were flying around. (All this came back to me, and vividly, when Sue Grafton died without writing the final book of her alphabet series of mysteries.) Mom said she hated the lying.
“Ah, but you’re so good at it,” I remember Liz saying, which earned her one of the cold looks I saw from my mother more and more in the final year of their relationship.
She lied to Regis’s editor as well, telling her Regis had instructed her not long before he died that the manuscript of Secret should be withheld from everyone (except Mom, of course) until 2010, “in order to build reader interest.” Liz said she thought that was a little bit shaky, but Mom said it would fly. “Fiona never edited him, anyway,” she said. Meaning Fiona Yarbrough, who worked for Doubleday, Mr. Thomas’s publisher. “Her only job was writing Regis a letter after she got each new manuscript, telling him that he’d outdone himself this time.”
Once the book was finally turned in, Mom spent a week pacing and snapping at everyone (I was not excluded from said snappery), waiting for Fiona to call and say Regis didn’t write this book, it doesn’t sound a bit like him, I think you wrote it, Tia. But in the end it was fine. Either Fiona never guessed or didn’t care. Certainly the reviewers never guessed when the book was crashed into production and appeared in the fall of 2010.
Publishers Weekly: “Thomas saved the best for last!”
Kirkus Reviews: “Fans of sweet-savage historical fiction will once more be in bodice-ripping clover.”
Dwight Garner, in The New York Times: “The trudging, flavorless prose is typical Thomas: the rough equivalent of a heaping plate of food from an all-you-can-eat buffet in a dubious roadside restaurant.”
Mom didn’t care about the reviews; she cared about the huge advance and the refreshed royalties from the previous Roanoke volumes. She bitched mightily about only getting fifteen percent when she had written the whole thing, but got a small measure of revenge by dedicating it to herself. “Because I deserve it,” she said.
“I’m not so sure,” Liz said. “When you think about it, Tee, you were just the secretary. Maybe you should have dedicated it to Jamie.”
This earned Liz another of my mom’s cold looks, but I thought Liz had something there. Although when you really thought about it, I was also just the secretary. It was still Mr. Thomas’s book, dead or not.
16
Now check this out: I told you at least some of the reasons why I liked Liz, and there were probably a few more. I told you all the reasons I didn’t like Liz, and there were probably a few more of those, too. What I never considered until later (yup, there’s that word again) was the possibility that she didn’t like me. Why would I? I was used to being loved, almost blasé about it. I was loved by my mother and my teachers, especially Mrs. Wilcox, my third-grade teacher, who hugged me and said she’d miss me on the day school let out. I was loved by my best friends Frankie Ryder and Scott Abramowitz (although of course we didn’t talk or even think about it that way). And don’t forget Lily Rhinehart, who once put a big smackeroo on my mouth. She also gave me a Hallmark card before I changed schools. It had a sad-looking puppy on the front and inside it said I’LL MISS YOU EVERY DAY YOU’RE AWAY. She signed it with a little heart over the i in her name. Also x’s and o’s.
Liz at least liked me, at least for awhile, I’m sure of it. But that began to change after Cobblestone Cottage. That was when she started to see me as a freak of nature. I think—no, I know—that was when Liz started to be scared of me, and it’s hard to like what you’re scared of. Maybe impossible.
Although she thought nine was old enough for me to walk home from school by myself, Liz sometimes came for me instead of Mom if Liz was working what she called “the swing shift,” which started at four in the morning and ended at noon. It was a shift detectives tried to avoid, but Liz got it quite a bit. That was another thing that I never wondered about then, but later (there it is again, yeah yeah yeah, right right right) I realized that she wasn’t exactly liked by her bosses. Or trusted. It didn’t have anything to do with the relationship she had with my mother; when it came to sex, the NYPD was slowly moving into the 21st century. It wasn’t the drinking, either, because she wasn’t the only cop who liked to put it away. But certain people she worked with had begun to suspect that Liz was a dirty cop. And—spoiler alert!—they were right.
17
I need to tell you about two particular times Liz got me after school. On both occasions she was in her car—not the one we took out to Cobblestone Cottage, but the one she called her personal. The first time was in 2011, while she and Mom were still a thing. The second was in 2013, a year or so after they stopped being a thing. I’ll get to that, but first things first.
I came out of school that day in March with my backpack slung over just one shoulder (which was how the cool sixth-grade boys did it) and Liz was waiting for me at the curb in her Honda Civic. On the yellow part of the curb, as a matter of fact, which was for handicapped people, but she had her little POLICE OFFICER ON CALL sign for that…which, you could argue, should have told me something about her character even at the tender age of eleven.
I got in, trying not to wrinkle my nose at the smell of stale cigarette smoke that not even the little pine tree air-freshener hanging from the rearview mirror could hide. By then, thanks to The Secret of Roanoke, we had our own apartment and didn’t have to live in the agency anymore, so I was expecting a ride home, but Liz turned toward downtown instead.
“Where are we going?” I asked.
“Little field trip, Champ,” she said. “You’ll see.”
The field trip was to Woodlawn Cemetery, in the Bronx, final resting place of Duke Ellington, Herman Melville, and Bartholomew “Bat” Masterson, among others. I know about them because I looked it up, and later wrote a report about Woodlawn for school. Liz drove in from Webster Avenue and then just started cruising up and down the lanes. It was nice, but it was also a little scary.
“Do you know how many people are planted here?” she asked, and when I shook my head: “Three hundred thousand. Less than the population of Tampa, but not by much. I checked it out on Wikipedia.”
“Why are we here? Because it’s interesting, but I’ve got homewor
k.” This wasn’t a lie, but I only had, like, a half-hour’s worth. It was a bright sunshiny day and she seemed normal enough—just Liz, my mom’s friend—but still, this was sort of a freaky field trip.
She totally ignored the homework gambit. “People are being buried here all the time. Look to your left.” She pointed and slowed from twenty-five or so to a bare creep. Where she was pointing, people were standing around a coffin placed over an open grave. Some kind of minister was standing at the head of the grave with an open book in his hand. I knew he wasn’t a rabbi, because he wasn’t wearing a beanie.
Liz stopped the car. Nobody at the service paid any attention. They were absorbed in whatever the minister was saying.
“You see dead people,” she said. “I accept that now. Hard not to, after what happened at Thomas’s place. Do you see any here?”
“No,” I said, more uneasy than ever. Not because of Liz, but because I’d just gotten the news that we were currently surrounded by 300,000 dead bodies. Even though I knew the dead went away after a few days—a week at most—I almost expected to see them standing beside their graves or right on top of them. Then maybe converging on us, like in a fucking zombie movie.
“Are you sure?”
I looked at the funeral (or graveside service, or whatever you call it). The minister must have started a prayer, because all the mourners had bowed their heads. All except one, that was. He was just standing there and looking unconcernedly up at the sky.
“That guy in the blue suit,” I said finally. “The one who’s not wearing a tie. He might be dead, but I can’t be sure. If there’s nothing wrong with them when they die, nothing that shows, they look pretty much like anyone else.”
“I don’t see a man without a tie,” she said.
“Well okay then, he’s dead.”
“Do they always come to their burials?” Liz asked.
“How should I know? This is my first graveyard, Liz. I saw Mrs. Burkett at her funeral, but I don’t know about the graveyard, because me and Mom didn’t go to that part. We just went home.”
“But you see him.” She was staring at the funeral party like she was in a trance. “You could go over there and talk to him, the way you talked to Regis Thomas that day.”
“I’m not going over there!” I don’t like to say I squawked this, but I pretty much did. “In front of all his friends? In front of his wife and kids? You can’t make me!”
“Mellow out, Champ,” she said, and ruffled my hair. “I’m just trying to get it straight in my mind. How did he get here, do you think? Because he sure didn’t take an Uber.”
“I don’t know. I want to go home.”
“Pretty soon,” she said, and we continued our cruise of the cemetery, passing tombs and monuments and about a billion regular gravestones. We passed three more graveside ceremonies in progress, two small like the first one, where the star of the show was attending sight unseen, and one humungous one, where about two hundred people were gathered on a hillside and the guy in charge (beanie, check—plus a cool-looking shawl) was using a microphone. Each time Liz asked me if I could see the dead person and each time I told her I didn’t have a clue.
“You probably wouldn’t tell me if you did,” she said. “I can tell you’re in a pissy mood.”
“I’m not in a pissy mood.”
“You are, though, and if you tell Tee I brought you out here, we’ll probably have a fight. I don’t suppose you could tell her we went for ice cream, could you?”
We were almost back to Webster Avenue by then and I was feeling a little better. Telling myself Liz had a right to be curious, that anyone would be. “Maybe if you actually bought me one.”
“Bribery! That’s a Class B felony!” She laughed, gave my hair a ruffle, and we were pretty much all right again.
We left the cemetery and I saw a young woman in a black dress sitting on a bench and waiting for her bus. A little girl in a white dress and shiny black shoes was sitting beside her. The girl had golden hair and rosy cheeks and a hole in her throat. I waved to her. Liz didn’t see me do it; she was waiting for a break in traffic so she could make her turn. I didn’t tell her what I saw. That night Liz left after dinner to either go to work or go back to her own place, and I almost told my mother. In the end I didn’t. In the end I kept the little girl with the golden hair to myself. Later I would think that the hole in her throat was from the little girl choking on food and they cut into her throat so she could breathe but it was too late. She was sitting there beside her mother and her mother didn’t know. But I knew. I saw. When I waved to her, she waved back.
18
While we were eating our ice cream at Lickety Split (Liz phoned my mother to tell her where we were and what we were up to), Liz said, “It must be so strange, what you can do. So weird. Doesn’t it freak you out?”
I thought of asking her if it freaked her out to look up at night and see the stars and know they go on forever and ever, but didn’t bother. I just said no. You get used to marvelous things. You take them for granted. You can try not to, but you do. There’s too much wonder, that’s all. It’s everywhere.
19
I’ll tell you about the other time Liz picked me up from school very soon, but first I have to tell you about the day they broke up. That was a scary morning, believe me.
I woke up that day even before my alarm clock went off, because Mom was yelling. I’d heard her mad before, but never that mad.
“You brought it into the apartment? Where I live with my son?”
Liz answered something, but it was little more than a mumble and I couldn’t hear.
“Do you think that matters to me?” Mom shouted. “On the cop shows that’s what they call serious weight! I could go to jail as an accessory!”
“Don’t be dramatic,” Liz said. Louder now. “There was never any chance of—”
“That doesn’t matter!” Mom yelled. “It was here! It still is here! On the fucking table beside the fucking sugar bowl! You brought drugs into my house! Serious weight!”
“Would you stop saying that? This isn’t an episode of Law and Order.” Now Liz was also getting loud. Getting mad. I stood with one ear pressed against my bedroom door, barefoot and dressed in my pajamas, my heart starting to pound. This wasn’t a discussion or even an argument. This was more. Worse. “If you hadn’t been going through my pockets—”
“Searching your stuff, is that what you think? I was trying to do you a favor! I was going to take your extra uniform coat to the cleaners along with my wool skirt. How long has it been there?”
“Only a little while. The guy it belongs to is out of town. He’s going to be back tomor—”
“How long?”
Liz’s reply was again too low for me to hear.
“Then why bring it here? I don’t understand that. Why not put it in the gun safe at your place?”
“I don’t…” She stopped.
“Don’t what?”
“Don’t actually have a gun safe. And there have been break-ins in my building. Besides, I was going to be here. We were going to spend the week together. I thought it would save me a trip.”
“Save you a trip?”
To this Liz made no reply.
“No gun safe in your apartment. How many other things have you been lying to me about?” Mom didn’t sound mad anymore. At least not right then. She sounded hurt. Like she wanted to cry. I felt like going out and telling Liz to leave my mother alone, even if my mother had started it by finding whatever she’d found—the serious weight. But I just stood there, listening. Trembling, too.
Liz mumbled some more.
“Is this why you’re in trouble at the Department? Are you using as well as…I don’t know couriering the stuff? Distributing the stuff?”
“I’m not using and I’m not distributing!”
“Well, you’re passing it on!” Mom’s voice was rising again. “That sounds like distributing to me.” Then she went back to what was really troubling her. We
ll, not the only thing, but the one that was troubling her the most. “You brought it into my apartment. Where my son is. You lock your gun in your car, I always insisted on that, but now I find two pounds of cocaine in your spare jacket.” She actually laughed, but not the way people do when something is funny. “Your spare police jacket!”
“It’s not two pounds.” Sounding sulky.
“I grew up weighing meat in my father’s market,” Mom said. “I know two pounds when I’ve got it in my hand.”
“I’ll get it out,” she said. “Right now.”
“You do that, Liz. Posthaste. And you can come back to get your things. By appointment. When I’m here and Jamie’s not. Otherwise never.”
“You don’t mean that,” Liz said, but even through the door I could tell she didn’t believe what she was saying.
“I absolutely do. I’m going to do you a favor and not report what I found to your watch captain, but if you ever show your face here again—except for that one time to pick up your shit—I will. That’s a promise.”
“You’re throwing me out? Really?”
“Really. Take your dope and fuck off.”
Liz started to cry. That was horrible. Then, after she was gone, Mom started to cry and that was even worse. I went out into the kitchen and hugged her.
“How much of that did you hear?” Mom asked, and before I could answer: “All of it, I imagine. I’m not going to lie to you, Jamie. Or gloss it over. She had dope, a lot of dope, and I never want you to say a word about it, okay?”