by Andrew Pyper
So the next moon is to be the darkest hour for me, too. The moment when Tess will be out of reach once and for all.
The child will be mine.
I grab my phone, look up a site that shows a detailed worldwide lunar calendar. Find when the next new moon arrives. Read the result twice. Then again, slowly. The date—the exact hour, minute, and second—all inscribed to memory.
If I cannot find her first, my daughter dies at 6:51:48 on the evening of May 3rd.
Six days from now.
12
I HAD A PROFESSOR ONCE WHO, IN ONE OF HIS WILDLY OFF-TOPIC, possibly alcohol-fueled rants, argued that if you were to ask the average American why we bothered to fight the last war in Europe, and if that average American were to be perfectly honest, his answer could be distilled to something like “A Twenty-four-Hour Denny’s in every town.” It got a big laugh. In part because it was likely true.
So here’s to a Mac ’n’ Cheese Big Daddy Patty Melt (from the special “Let’s Get Cheesy!” menu) with a side of onion rings at 11:24 PM at the Denny’s in Rothschild, Wisconsin. Here’s to wide-beamed waitresses with coffee pots glued to their palms. Here’s to the comforts of a clean, well-lighted place, a deep-fried oasis along the open four-lane. Here’s to freedom.
I’m not myself.
Having driven all day, bidding hellos and farewells from behind the Mustang’s windshield to passing Ohio, Illinois, and Indiana vistas, spinning the AM radio dial between raving evangelicals and Lady Gaga, then switching it off to drift in long, haunted silences, I am ravenous and lonely. And Denny’s provides a salve for both conditions.
“More coffee?” the waitress asks, the coffee pot already half-tipped in the direction of my cup. I need more caffeine like I need a Louisville Slugger to the head, but I accept. It would seem rude, if not unpatriotic, to do otherwise.
My phone vibrates in my pocket. A mouse awakened from its lint-nested slumbers.
“I’ve been thinking,” O’Brien says when I answer.
“So have I. Not always a good thing to do. Believe me.”
“I want to suggest something.”
“The Maple Bacon Sundae?”
“What are you talking about?”
“Ignore me.”
“David, I think you’re creating your own mythology.”
I sip the coffee. The taste of liquefied rust. “Okay.”
“It’s a delusion, of course. I’m sure a very real-seeming experience for you, but a delusion nonetheless.”
“So you’ve decided I’m nuts.”
“I’ve decided you’re grieving. And your grief has taken your mind in a particular direction, led it to a place where its pain might be rendered in a comprehensible way.”
“Uh-huh.”
“You’re a professor of myth, right? You teach this stuff, live it, and breathe it: the history of man’s efforts to make sense of pain, of loss, of mystery. So that’s where you are, what you’re actively creating. A fiction that works in a tradition of previous fictions.”
“You know what, O’Brien? I’m tired. Can you give me the summer school version?”
O’Brien sighs. I wait for her, gazing out the window next to my booth. The parking lot is floodlit as though in anticipation of a sporting event, a game of football to be played among the reversing pickups and minivans. Yet there are still dark corners where the light doesn’t reach. In the farthest one, a parked, unmarked police car. The dark outline of its driver’s head just visible over the seat. A trooper catching forty winks.
“Remember Cicero?” O’Brien starts.
“Not personally. A couple millennia before my time.”
“He was a father, too.”
“Tullia.”
“That’s right. Tullia. His beloved daughter. And when she died, he was crushed. Couldn’t work, couldn’t think. Even Caesar and Brutus sent letters of condolence. Nothing helped. So he read everything he could get his hands on about overcoming grief, conquering the cold fact of death. Philosophy, theology, probably some black magic thrown in, too. In the end, though—”
“ ‘My sorrow defeats all consolation.’ ”
“A bonus point for the correct quotation, Professor. All of Cicero’s reading and research didn’t help. There was no spell he could cast to bring Tullia back. End of story.”
“Except it wasn’t the end of the story.”
“No. Because that’s where myths are born. At the point where the facts end and the imagination carries on, masquerading as fact.”
“The burning lamp.”
“Exactly. Somebody in Rome digs up Tullia’s tomb in the fifteenth century and finds . . . a lamp! Still lit after all these centuries!”
“Cicero’s undying love.”
“Impossible, right? A literal fire could never burn that long. But a figurative fire could. The symbol is powerful enough—useful enough for all those who have ever lost a loved one, which is everyone—for the myth to be sustained. Perhaps even believed.”
“You’re saying I’m Cicero. Except in my case, instead of lighting eternal flames, I’m inventing evil spirits sending me on a wild goose chase.”
“That’s not the point. The point is you’re a father. What you’re experiencing, these feelings, they’re normal. Even the secret signs and omens are to be understood as normal.”
“Even if they’re not real.”
“And they’re not. They’re almost certainly not.”
“Almost. You said almost certainly not.”
“I have to.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s you.”
Out in the parking lot, the dozing cop awakens. His head rising, a hand adjusting the rearview mirror, to wipe the sleep from his eyes. But he doesn’t yet turn the keys in the ignition. Doesn’t step out of the car.
“There’s a problem with your analogy,” I say.
“Yes?”
“I’m not claiming I’ve found a lamp burning for hundreds of years. Everything I’ve seen, I’ve seen with my own eyes. And none of it, strictly speaking, is scientifically impossible.”
“Maybe not. I wouldn’t know. You haven’t told me what you’ve seen. But look where it’s led you. Driving across the country following clues left behind by—who? Tess? The Church? Devils? Angels? And to what purpose? To reclaim your daughter from the hands of death.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“But it’s what you’re thinking, isn’t it?”
“Something like that.”
“And I’m not saying it’s wrong. I’m saying it’s okay. You’ve lectured about Orpheus and Eurydice, what, a dozen times? Two dozen? It makes sense that, in this time of distress, your brain would summon that old story and refashion it into your own.”
“I’m on a journey to the underworld. That it?”
“I’m not saying that. You are. To find the one closest to your heart. The age-old human yearning to step beyond the bounds of mortality.”
“Orpheus had a lyre that charmed Hades. What have I got? A head full of essays.”
“You’ve got knowledge. You know the territory. Even if that territory is completely made-up.”
“You’re smart, O’Brien.”
“Then you’ll come back to New York?”
“I said you were smart. Didn’t say you were right.”
As I watch, the light inside the state trooper’s car goes on. It reveals enough of the interior details to show that I’m wrong. Though it is one of those big Crown Victorias the police use, it’s not one of theirs. And it’s not a trooper behind the wheel. It’s Barone. The Pursuer. Grinning at me in the rearview mirror.
“I’m gonna call you back,” I say, getting to my feet and dropping a fifty on the table as I go.
“David? What’s going on?”
“Orpheus has got to run.”
I hang up and head out the door to my car. But before I do, the waitress calls after me. An intended pleasantry that, in the Midwestern manner, comes out as a stern comm
and.
“Have a good one, now!”
BUT THIS ISN’T A GOOD ONE.
Driving dog-tired through the night, taking exits at random, parking on farmhouse lanes with the lights off to confirm I’m no longer being followed.
It seems to work. By the time the first colorings of dawn push up against the horizon, there’s no longer any sign of the Pursuer. It allows me to consult the map and plot out my advance on North Dakota. I decide to stick to the secondary roads and avoid the interstates. Forgo sleep and just keep driving. Use the jittery energy of all-nighters and see how far it will take me.
Trouble is, this kind of thing has its side effects. Pasty sweats. Indigestion. Along with seeing things.
Like the person up ahead, for instance. A girl with her thumb out in the universal beckoning of the hitchhiker. Except the girl is Tess.
I come down heavier on the gas just to put the vision behind me. As I pass, I make a point of keeping my eyes off her, as I know it can’t be her, and if it isn’t her, then it’s more likely to be something nasty. A nightmare mask donned by the Unnamed for the hell of it. For the pain it causes.
Yet when I risk a glance in the rearview after I fly by, she’s still there. Not Tess at all, but a few years older than her. Looking more scared than I am.
I pull the Mustang over and she runs along the shoulder, a soiled Dora the Explorer knapsack bumping against her hip. There is the urge to drive on. Even if she is not involved in what O’Brien believes is my deluded mythmaking, there is little good that can come from picking up human strays on Iowa country roads. I am breaking the New Yorker’s rule of not getting involved.
Yet even as she comes into more particular view in the mirror, her run now slowed to a walk, I can see she has the blank-faced look of those who’ve been on their own for too long. Attempting escape. She looks less and less like Tess with each approaching step she takes. But she has more in common with me.
She opens the door and plops into the passenger seat before she looks at me. And when she does, it’s not at my face, but my hands. Gauging to see if they are capable of harm.
“Where you going?” I ask.
She peers ahead. “Straight.”
“That’s not a place.”
“Guess I’m not sure where I’m going.”
“Are you in trouble?”
She looks me in the face for the first time. “Don’t take me to the police.”
“I won’t. Not if you don’t want me to. I just need to know if you’ve been hurt.”
She smiles to show a surprising mouthful of yellow teeth. “Not the hospital kind of hurt, no.”
She turns to look out the rear window, as though she’s being followed, too. I roll back onto the road and put a mile behind us before looking at her again.
“You look like a dad,” she says.
“Is it the gray hair?”
“No. You just do.” And then: “You look like my dad.”
“Funny, because you look a little like my daughter. But she’s younger. How old are you?”
“Eighteen,” she says. And now, in the Mustang’s close quarters, she doesn’t look like Tess at all, which makes my saying she did a lie, too.
“You still live with your family?” I ask.
But she’s not listening. She’s picked up my iPhone from where I’d stuck it in the car’s cup holder, touching its screen, her fingers jumping back from the actions they cause as though she’s never seen such a thing.
“It’s a phone,” I say. “You want to talk to somebody?”
She ponders this a moment. “Yes.”
“Go ahead. You know the number?”
“They don’t have a number.”
“The phone lines don’t reach them where they live?”
She makes a sucking sound through her teeth that may be a smothered show of mirth. Continues to play with the screen, moving through apps with greater speed as though she is learning the device’s capacities as she goes. It gives me a chance to steal glances at her without being noticed. Reddish hair in a ponytail, fat freckles, a filthy summer dress patterned with pink polka-dots. A doll. An oversized Raggedy Anne come to life. She is, it occurs to me with a flush of shame, a talking, breathing fetish. The Freckled Farmgirl. The Dirty Ragdoll. Something missing in her that has been filled by vaguely sexualized, stock details.
She closes a window on the phone and swings her head around to catch me looking at her. For the first time, her eyes assume a brightness when they meet mine. It makes me feel like she’s caught me in the middle of some lewd act, the indulgence of a private perversion. And her eyes say it’s okay. My secret is safe with her.
“Do you believe in God?” she asks.
A Born Againer. Maybe that’s all this girl is. Just a harmless Bible thumper, thumbing a ride to some revival barbecue up the road. It would explain the flatness of her voice, the eyes at once observing and dim. Her odd, doll-like aspect has been taught. A by-product of faith.
“I don’t know if there’s a God or not,” I answer. “I’ve never seen him if there is.”
She stares. Not off-put by my answer. Just waiting to hear the rest of it.
“But I’ve seen the Devil. And I promise you, he is most definitely real.”
This takes a moment to reach her. Like she’s at the end of a bad long-distance connection, waiting for the meaning to arrive. When it does, she makes the teeth-sucking sound again.
I return my eyes to the road. Correct the leftward drift that has taken the Mustang into the oncoming lane.
“What’s he look like?” she asks.
Like nobody. Like you, I almost say.
At first, when I feel the warmth in my lap, I think I’ve pissed my pants. Over-tired, too much coffee. An unstoppable flow of heat down my legs.
Yet when I look down expecting to find my jeans darkened, I find the girl’s hand there instead. My fly down. Her hand inside.
“You believe here,” she says, pushing the index finger of her free hand against my temple. Except the voice is no longer the girl’s. It is the voice that came out of Tess’s mouth on the rooftop of the Bauer. At once alive and lifeless.
“Now you must believe here,” the Unnamed says.
With that, she squeezes.
I pull her hand out in one yank of her wrist, but it costs a fishtailing turn of the steering wheel, so that the car dodges onto the shoulder before veering hard the other way, waggling across both lanes. To hit the brakes would start a spin, and at this speed—the needle poking against 60 mph—it would likely send us flying off into a passing field. The best thing is to get the car back in line and then slow it down. And I’m managing it, too, letting the girl go so I can return both hands to the wheel, compensating for what the back end of the car wants to do by cutting the other way with the front tires.
We’re just straightening out and I’m putting my foot on the brakes when the girl clenches her fingernails into the sides of my face. That’s what starts the skid.
Sky.
Asphalt.
Daytime moon.
A spinning, flashing show.
We stop in the middle of the road. If anything comes over the rise ahead it will take us out before it has the chance to slow down.
But the girl is scratching now, screeching and chattering like a rabid animal, like the man in the chair in Venice. I push her against the passenger door and her head cracks against the frame. Not that she feels it. She just lunges at me again. Goes for my eyes.
I swing my fist again and again—half-connecting with her jaw, her ribs, a square shot to her ear. Then, when she appears to be waning, I lean over her legs and open the door.
I’m pulling myself straight when she bites.
A snarling sinking of teeth into the back of my neck. I can’t tell if the scream that follows comes from her or me. The bright shock of pain lends me a seizure of new strength. It’s enough to push the girl out the door, where her ass meets the road with a fleshy slap.
I g
et back behind the wheel. Slam it into drive.
But the girl comes with me.
In the two seconds it took me to start rolling she must have scrambled up and gripped her hands around the door’s open window. The girl is now being dragged along next to the car. The door swinging out so that she scrapes along the shoulder’s gravel. Then, as it swings closed again, she slams against the side.
The Mustang flies over the rise.
The girl howls.
I let my foot sink the pedal to the floor.
“Please!”
A new voice. Not the false one that belonged to Raggedy Anne, not the Unnamed’s. The girl’s real voice. The one that was hers when she was alive. I’m certain of this. This one word has found its way over the wall of death to ask me for help I cannot give.
It’s an impression confirmed when I turn to look. The girl now being slashed along the side of the car, still holding onto the swinging door. But I don’t slow down. Because she’s already gone. Already his.
“Help me?”
She knows I can’t. A girl who has swum all the way up to the surface only to find a stranger drowning just like she is.
But I reach for her all the same.
And she reaches, too. Releases her left hand from the door handle and throws it over the passenger seat so that it briefly grazes mine. The skin cold as meat taken from the back of the fridge.
Even still, we reach for each other again.
It forces her weight back and the door swings wide. Her legs stream blood as they drag over the asphalt, wildly bouncing like a string of soup cans tied to a JUST MARRIED! bumper. She looks at me and, even before she lets go of the door, I see the dimness returning to her eyes. Whoever she was in life slips back underwater. Now there is only this animated puppet, this freckle-cheeked shell.
Then it’s gone.
The nails of one hand scratch against the side of the car, scrabbling to find a hold. A sickening thud as the Mustang’s back wheel rides over her.