Caraliza

by Joel Blaine Kirkpatrick

  The Reisman Portraits watched the street empty in the front as evening came, sending a soft, honey glow into the studio in the back. It waited until the streetlight in the front, on the walk, came alive, filling the shop with the sepia color Evan desired to capture with his Bryant Waterbury. When the sepia tones matched the oldest images on the walls, faces dead now more than seventy years, the building made sounds it waited until the darkness to make. The screams in the attic echoed into the street, and a couple walking by were shaken and made to run across to the other side. The woman clutched at her husband, hearing a second scream that made her hide behind him.

  “911 services, what is the nature of your emergency?”

  “We need police on Eldridge near Broome, Lower east side. Yes, Reisman Portraits building. We’ve heard screams. They should hurry.”

  Another wail pierced the walls of the building, and lasted in full breath until the couple on the street ran in fear and the approaching police sirens could be heard as the scream died away.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Shelly sat near the bed Evan had been sleeping in for six hours. She had not moved, and his family was furious with the hospital staff she was even allowed in there with him.

  “How do the police know she wasn’t the one who bashed him you idiot!” his mother yelled at the doctor in the corridor. “I don’t care if they want her to stay here for questioning! I want that bitch out of that room now!”

  But the officer at the end of the corridor decided he had enough worry with the assault to have to deal with upset relatives. He grabbed Evan’s mother’s arm, and told her to shut up the yelling or he was going to take her down stairs himself. She was as welcome as anyone was, until she started acting like that, he did not care who she was.

  Shelly cried until she could not anymore, and Evan had not made a sound to her since puking on the curb that afternoon. His clan was not the only loud family gathering to find out what the hell happened to their kids in that building.

  Shelly had cringed in the dusty corner of that attic, in the stench of old urine, and heard whispers, sobs, and shuffling around her until she was nearly mad from it. As the room darkened, the noises grew, until they surrounded her in the corner, and she was backed into it as far as she could get. Evan only moved once the entire time; it did not look like he could have made the movement, his foot moved as if shoved and then his leg moved, not the other way around. She could barely tell he was breathing.

  When the door opened in front of her, and no one was there, she began screaming and it was a good thing she did; Evan would have died before morning. His brain was swelling and the front of his brow had been cracked. Nearly fifteen pounds of heavy glass jar, filled with silver nitrate, battered him unconscious. It was the only thing nearby, in the clutter of the shelves, which could have done such damage.

  The paramedics took him down by hand; the stair was too narrow to allow the gurney. The police allowed Shelly to accompany him, she was in shock, and, even if she had tried to kill him, she was too addled to run off. Plus, she clearly loved him; you do not act that way over people you’ve just tried to kill with big heavy jars. She was only asked to show her driver’s license, and it satisfied them she had every right to be in the old building, and to bash anyone else who should not be there in the dark. The police were hoping it was an awful accident, and it was not a lover’s spat, and the kid would not die.

  Evan needed medical help hours before he got it. She was still so terrified, she started screaming again, even with the police and all the flashlights. She was spooked like they had never seen. So, Shelly was allowed to sit in the room with Evan Bryant, and so could his mother if she would just shut up the yelling.

  Surgeons were preparing to relieve the pressure in his skull if he did not show better response to the medicines they had given him. He was so heavily sedated, he would not be moving if Shelly wanted him to anyway. So she sat there and wished the day had not happened at all; he warned her, the ghosts in the Reisman Portraits might not want to be friendly.

  She had agreed with him, while she stood on the back porch that afternoon. She only needed to peek around the corner of the alley and she could see, afraid as he was, he had not left. It meant a lot to her, she opened a door so he could run away, and he stayed put. It would take some powerful stuff to damage their feelings for each other, if this shit had not done it. Shelly was thankful her meddling aunt introduced them. He was worth any trouble he might cause by accident, and she was going to stay by his bed, until the doctor told her to leave. They did not seem to care she was there.

  Evan’s family was not of the same mind. They wanted nothing to do with Shelly; sweet, popular, brilliant socialite that she was. It took only about five minutes in the waiting rooms until nearly a dozen various relatives realized they were opposing clans there for the same reason; a horrid event in the Reisman Portraits.

  It would make the papers surely; two and a half murders in seventy-five years, and the papers would tell all about it, no doubt. Other buildings reported a murder a month, but those were not news. A near-to-boil clan war between the Reismans and the Bryants…people would buy some print to read that.

  One of the officers who came in to question Shelly was asked to step down the hall to calm the parents, or throw them out, whichever might be more effective. When Shelly got a chance to explain to the officer what happened, she started entirely in the wrong way. She already had the police department’s sympathy, but mentioning ghosts in her old family building did not rank as practical explanations of how a young man was nearly killed.

  “Look, I don’t care if you believe in ghosts or not,” she corrected their reactions to her first few words. “I have lived with that haunted old building my entire life. Evan was less prepared than I was. I got the living shit scared out of me for hours in there. He got hurt. He was trying to help me. He thought it was me up there.”

  “Why would he think you were there when you said you were down stairs?”

  “Because he thought he heard someone up there! Don’t you get it, he believed someone was up there, he thought it was me. I found him on the floor when I came up and -” she paused because the next part was not any better than all the stuff she already said. “- I heard things up there too. Things I’d never heard before. I couldn’t move I was so scared.”

  After hours of crying for Evan, she was finding tears for herself.

  “How can we be sure he was as scared as you say? He can’t verify any part of your story in his condition. His condition looks like you hit him, not a ghost. What else can we believe?”

  “Because we were scared earlier in the afternoon. We had an argument, and he stayed out on the street, because I went back inside. He was too scared to go back in.”

  “You were scared earlier in the building, but went back anyway…in the afternoon. Is that some kind of funhouse going on in there? We still can’t believe he was afraid to be there.”

  “Then go look out in the gutter outside the shop, he puked his lunch he was so afraid. I gave him an ultimatum. I didn’t give him any choice.”

  “What did he eat?”

  “What!” Shelly was incredulous. “What the fuck does a ham sandwich matter?”

  “We don’t just stand around, Ms. Reisman. Notes were taken at the scene. Mr. Bryant’s car is still there. We found what you said we would find.”

  Shelly sat back and looked at the officer, disgusted. They had taken notes about puke in the gutter. She hoped Evan did not die; they would want DNA samples from her underwear for the prosecution.

  “We didn’t fuck each other in there, if that’s your next question.”

  “Shelly, your mouth is going to cause you trouble until Evan wakes up and asks for you instead of his Mommy.” And the officer wrote down exactly what she said about the absence of sex that afternoon. She looked at the pad and rolled her eyes.

  Several hours later, he was still nowhere near to waking up, but the surgery seemed less urgent. Her
parents pulled her from the room, and took her to get some coffee, just so his parents could spend some time with him. His mother was being more of a bitch than she accused Shelly of being, and the hospital staff was unhappy the faces in the room were changing. Evan was much better off with Shelly’s hand holding him than his folks.

  Mr. Bryant was actually being cordial, considering the circumstance of their meeting, at Evan’s bedside. But the men of the two families could be cordial. It was the duty of the wives to wield the weapons of war between them. The men could go to a ball game together and have a beer over their differences. The wives would go against each other in the boutiques and the salons. It would be bloody, certainly so, if it began to make the papers.

  Shelly would have loved it, if she had not decided she loved him. Because of her, he came back and faced her ghosts; the ones she screamed her lungs at, while he sat outside on the curb. She had pissed them off, she knew it, and Evan was actually nearly killed. For all her love now, and the waiting she did for the last half day at his bedside, she might still lose him.

  He was right, and the I.V. proved it. He might not have wanted to go back into the Reisman Portraits, but he did. He might not want to see Shelly again, and had very good reason just to stay away. Her ghosts may have taken him away from her, by leaving him alive to choose.

  That hurt a lot, and it made her cry in the cafeteria. It was getting late in the afternoon now, and Grandma Sareta actually walked in to where she and her parents were sitting; the clan was indeed mobilizing for the conflict. She and Shelly took a walk, Sareta hated sitting down for very long in a hospital. “They will put you in a room if you sit still long enough” she said.

  They walked the corridors on another floor, to avoid the carrying on where Evan was drugged into a near coma.

  “Grandma, this day has been a fucking nightmare.”

  “You’ve been here all day? I guess you and your young man are fine, in spite of the bashed head?”

  “We’ll find out when he wakes up. He is such a sweetheart, but it’s my fault we ended up here. He’s lucky I screamed loud enough for people on the street to hear.”

  “Why were you screaming? Did you see who would do such a thing to this boy?”

  “We were in the attic.”

  Grandma Sareta stopped and took Shelly by the arm, squeezing as if to punish her.

  “What in were you doing in that schreklih plaz?”

  “Evan heard sounds. He must have thought it was me.”

  “Did you hear these sounds, or did he imagine them?” she did not release her grip on Shelly’s arm and it was beginning to hurt.

  “Yes, I heard them when I came up.” Shelly pulled her arm away, not to escape but to embrace Sareta and weep against her grandmother’s shoulder.

  “What sounds did you hear, child?”

  “We heard Yousep and the girl, hiding in terror. I could hear her sobs. I could hear him soothing her. I could hear them weep in the dark!” Shelly did not like telling it. It still frightened her; they had been so young, and so scared, in the corner, in the darkness.

  “You must know, others have heard such things. I have not, I will confess, moide sein sich; others have heard them, and they will not go in. You are the bravest Reisman I know, mein kind, libe. You are the only Reisman alive who loves the place and it is schreklec, awful the place does not show you love in return, but evil.”

  “I don’t know what to do now. I don’t know if I can go back after what we’ve seen together.”

  “But you only said you heard things, what did you see Shelly?”

  Her granddaughter was hesitant to reply, there was guilt on her face, the worst was not admitted, and it was very unpleasant; the time had come for her to tell the rest of it.

  “We took a photo, with Papa’s camera,” was all Shelly needed to say.

  Evan recovered. Two days later, he did ask for Shelly when they woke him, to see if there would be any damage after the injury. “Shelly, you’re so stupid…” were not exactly loving words, but they made her feel better.

  While she was at the hospital, she and Evan were being discussed elsewhere. One family wanted some prosecution, because of the assault, the other wanted the Reisman Portraits emptied and sold. Shelly was on the wrong side of both arguments. She was very close to losing her most cherished ambition, and she did not know it yet. After kissing Evan enough to be sure he did not hate her, she headed home to her parent’s, and into a meeting which made her think the clan did hate her.

  “You cannot take it from me!” she screamed at them. “It was an accident! We scared ourselves and he fell into the shelves. It could have happened to me up there, but I love being scared in there. You all know that! You can’t’ do this to me!” and she stormed out.

  Shelly Reisman had only one place she could go, when her whole world was crashing around her. She went back to the studio. They would have to come and get her. She also wanted to get the two new plates, and Papa’s chest, before anyone else got the nerve to go back in there. The spooks were raging and more than half the clan could not have been forced inside again, but she could not let anyone get in before she retrieved those plates.

  The building was not aware she was gone; it acted as if it did not know anything happened at all, and she knew differently. The familiar smell of the dust, the furnishings, the absolute quiet, and the light trying to get back into the rear windows of the studio; the building greeted her as it always had, but this time, the silence was from guilt.

  The building had broken her heart, and she told it.

  She stood in the middle of the studio and yelled as loud as she could without alerting more neighbors. The building had crossed a line with her. It would have to earn her love back or it would be taken down. It was utterly stupid and she knew it, but the relief it gave her was remarkable. Shelly Reisman owned the building, she made it plain to whatever spirits were there, and as proof she would not take any shit from them, she headed up stairs to get the shelves back in order.

  She was so tired later that afternoon she actually hurt, all over. Nothing in the entire building, which could be shoved, or moved, or rearranged by the young woman, had been left alone. Everything was handled again. It was hers, and she made the building feel it, until she was too tired to do more. Then she picked up the two new photographic plates in the darkroom closet, grabbed Papa’s case, and headed out the front door with a mighty slam. The door glass was certainly strained, but it did not break. She kicked the Reisman Portraits in the shins and walked off. The Waterbury sat alone on the coffee table in the studio; it was being punished as well. She was more than satisfied, and decided to go straight to the hospital to see Evan. The case was no longer sacred to her. She would set it on his bed, and they would turn it upside down, to rifle through it like bandits.

  Evan was not alone in his room when she arrived, but thankfully, it was not his mother by his side, just some friends, and they gave Shelly a few glances, and then said their goodbyes. If she found the nerve to keep coming back, she might be really harmless, and the friends let Evan keep her. At least he was sitting up, and it was very good news, it also made dumping the family treasure chest much easier to do. He gave her a quizzical look when she walked in the door with it.

  She looked across the room at her young man in the bed, fearful questions instantly on his horribly bruised brow, one eye blackened from the wicked blow he received. She tearfully sat on the edge of his bed and begged him to forgive her. She was wrong to bait him with only the possibility of losing her. She had never known anyone important enough to come between her and her building, but Evan had become just that, more important than the shop. She was beautifully sincere, but Evan knew it was impossible for her. She could no more walk away from the place than an angel could remove its wings.

  The two new plates were out in her car, so she told him, in case it was bothering him. She explained, as she hefted the box onto the bed near his feet, she did not want to give the building any sati
sfaction of having other secrets from her. The chest Papa made for the camera seemed to be the biggest secret of them all, so she was going to take control of it, and be done with it. Evan was not convinced, but he was glad she came to see him, even if she brought a few ghosts.

  The entire morning his mother harangued him about “that Reisman girl!” and it made him remember how much he really wanted to see Shelly, and not his mom. But he would not tell Shelly a word of that. She did not need to be bothered with his family troubles as well as her own. Her defiant mood as she walked in, was surely caused by her own clan as much as by the spooks in the building.

  He wanted to hold her, but could not move enough to do it right, so he just told her she could put the case back on the floor, and lie down in the bed with him, that was all he needed right then, not answers to old secrets. She did stop what she was doing to the lock on the chest, to give him a wonderful kiss, with the sweetest, shy glance he had only seen once before. They both felt much better now that little ceremony was shared, and she thought to ask him if he wanted to see the stuff the chest might contain.

  Evan gave in, but only because Shelly was going to drive him nuts about it, which was okay too, but just took so much longer and only got in the way of other kisses. Empty the chest, he said. She used her car keys to pry the face off the beautiful little latch. She held her breath and lifted the lid just a very little, and not for dramatic effect.