by Andrew Pyper
Then, Diane’s voice. She hasn’t changed the recording since before Venice, so that there’s a lightness in it still, an almost flirtatious promise. It would be different now.
You have reached the voice mail of Diane Ingram. Please leave a message.
“Hey, Diane. It’s me. I don’t know if I’ll be able to call again after—”
After what? Something final, whatever it is. So I should say good-bye at least. Or maybe it’s already too late for that.
“I’m sorry. Shit! If you had a nickel for every time you heard me say that, right? There’s just no other way to put it, I guess. It covers all the bases. Tess. You and me. Will. I heard about the accident and, believe it or not, I’m sorry about that, too.”
The bathroom’s door opens and someone comes in to wash their hands. The faucet turned on full blast, raining spots onto the floor I can see from under the stall door.
“Diane. Listen, there’s—” I start, lowering my voice. But the idea of someone hearing what even I don’t know I’m about to say stops me. I wait for whoever stands at the sink to finish. But he doesn’t. The water pounding into the sink. The drops pooling together into puddles on the tiles.
“I just hope you find a way to be happy again,” I whisper. “I hope I haven’t taken that away, too.”
Too? What did I mean by that? I’ve taken her happiness as well as the wasted years of our marriage? As well as her daughter?
The hand-washer clears his throat. Draws a wheezing breath. Begins to laugh.
I yank the stall door open. The water still on full, plumes of steam graying the mirror. But nobody there.
Next I’m plowing out into the hallway to hug the wall, to feel its cool reality against my cheek. Visible to those sitting at plastic tables, digging chicken out of buckets, some of whom look back at me. Their thoughts of Drugs or Crazy or Stay the hell away written on their faces as they chew.
I check the phone and hang up. An almost three-minute message. The first half a stuttered apology, the second a torrent of running water, concluding with the laughter of something dead. What would Diane make of it? She’d probably come to a similar conclusion to the drumstick-holders staring at me now. There’s no helping someone like that.
The funny part is I’d meant to be comforting. I’d meant to sound sane.
WE PASS INTO TENNESSEE WITH O’BRIEN SINGING THE FEW BARS of “Chattanooga Choo Choo” she can recall. The actual Chattanooga slipping past as yet another cluster of highwayside motels, padlocked factories, and self-storage barracks. There is a real town beyond this ass-end of streets. Neighborhoods with families buoyed by the same affections or shattered by the same crimes as other neighborhoods, the ones we have lived in and therefore deem more real. People who, for all I know, are conducting similarly impossible searches. Talking to the dead and praying to whoever will listen.
There’s gonna be
A certain party at the station . . .
Soon the asphalt ribbon switchbacks up into the Appalachians, though nobody slows, a collective denial of charging eighteen-wheelers and yawning cliffsides. And nobody more indifferent than us. Tag-teaming the wheel through the night, gnawing on tacos and reconstituted chicken products, washing it all down with coffee near-solid with Sweet’N Low.
From time to time, O’Brien asks about my father. It prompts me to remember more than I tell her.
Because I was so young when he died, I can summon only snapshots, the taste left behind in the air by his darkening moods in the months leading up to my brother’s accident. Behavior that, considered in light of my own experiences of late, takes on a greater resonance. How he, never a religious man, began reading the Bible cover to cover, then starting again when he was done. The lengthy silences when he would stop whatever he was doing—mowing the lawn, spooning instant coffee into his mug—and appear to listen to instructions none of us could hear. And his looks. These more than anything else. How I would catch him looking at me, his son, not with pride or affection but a strange appetite.
I keep what I tell O’Brien to the surface things. His depression, his drinking. The lost jobs. His urging me to not be like him. And until recently, I thought I’d succeeded.
“But there’s more of him in you than you figured,” O’Brien says. “It’s why we’re going to him.”
“Even though he’s dead.”
“Doesn’t seem to be stopping him from coming back, does it?”
“He’s not the only one.”
I HAVEN’T TOLD O’BRIEN EVERYTHING.
Not because I worry she won’t believe me. I haven’t told her because it’s just between me and Tess. To reveal it runs the risk of breaking the thin thread that still connects us. To speak of it aloud might let Belial know that such a thread exists.
For instance, I didn’t tell O’Brien all the reasons I know we have to go to the old cottage by the river. I didn’t tell her about the entry in Tess’s journal where she spoke of the dream-that’s-not-a-dream.
Standing on the bank of a river of fire.
Tess taken to the far bank where my brother and I never ventured as kids. We didn’t speak of it, but we knew it was a bad place all the same. The trees there growing aslant, their leaves never quite returning in the summer, so that the forest appeared hungry.
The same place Belial had shown me on the swing in Jupiter. The playground surrounded by dark forest. An emerging beast.
The line between this place and the Other Place.
And my daughter on the wrong side. Hearing me searching for her, calling her name. Watching my brother’s body float past.
Arms pulling me back. Skin that tastes like dirt.
Tess begging me to find her.
Not words from my mouth through the air, but from my heart through the earth, so only the two of us could hear it.
I hadn’t known that’s what it was. That the sound I can sometimes recognize beneath the ringing tinnitus and talk-radio blather and exhaust-tainted air blasting past the open window, is her.
WE MAKE OHIO AND SWITCH TO I-90 AT TOLEDO, SO THAT WE NOW speed along the underbelly of Lake Erie, flat as aluminum foil in the night. The irony of a sign for Eden draws us off the interstate to park at the rear corner of a Red Lobster lot for a half hour of sleep, though only O’Brien cranks her seat back and closes her eyes.
As O’Brien gasps and whistles her way through the slumber of the unwell, I flick through Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy. I’m drawing my thumb across the pages and letting them flip and blur when the book opens to a bookmark I didn’t know was there. A photograph. Curled at the edges, white borders turned yellow with time. A photo of me.
This is who I take it to be at first, anyway. Though in the next second I see it is my father. The only picture I have of him. I know this because I had long believed I’d destroyed all the others. The shock of the similarity leaves me slightly breathless, fighting for air just as O’Brien does next to me.
He would have been almost exactly the same age I am now when he went out into the woods with the Mossberg 12-gauge his father had given him, slipped the barrel past his lips far enough to reach the trigger with his free hand, and fired. In the photo, taken only weeks before my brother’s accident, his expression might appear as one of fatherly satisfaction. The underslept smile of the dad who’s been pulled away from his work by his wife, who has sat him down here, in an easy chair before a fire, to snap a portrait of the breadwinner in the prime of his life.
But the more studied appraisal reveals the efforts of both the subject and photographer: the glassy, mirthless eyes, the shoulders and clasped hands angled in a “relaxed” pose. An overlookable sort of man whose near-desperate sadness was evident in his details, from dimpled half-moons under his eyes to the psoriasis-reddened knuckles.
I’m thinking about opening the car door and letting it slip out onto the concrete when I notice the only underlined section on either page the photo had been stuck between.
The Devil he is a spirit, and hath mea
ns and opportunities to mingle himself with our spirits, and sometimes more slyly, sometimes more abruptly and openly, to suggest such devilish thoughts into our hearts. He insults and domineers in melancholy, distempered phantasies especially.
Why that passage? I don’t remember it having any particular significance in my research, and I’ve never cited it in any of my lectures. But it must have leapt out at me nevertheless. And I’d placed the only photograph of my father between the pages to mark it though I’d never returned to it over the years.
A foreknowledge. That’s what it must have been. I’d read those words—melancholy, distempered phantasies, Devil—and sent a message to my future self I couldn’t have understood at the time. I’d recognized my father diagnosed by Burton’s observation. A man of reasonable promise, blessed by better luck than most, but nevertheless a ruin, a witness to a child’s death, a violent suicide.
How did Robert Burton know so much about such things? A cloistered academic in the earliest days of the seventeenth century? Here’s an answer: the same way I know so much about it now, a cloistered academic four centuries on. Personal experience.
O’Brien coughs herself awake. I slip the photograph between the pages and slap the book shut.
“You want me to drive?” she asks, reading the clouds gathered in my eyes.
“No. Just rest,” I answer, roaring the Mustang to life. “I’ll take us the rest of the way.”
I CAN’T SAY IF O’BRIEN’S THOUGHTS HAVE TURNED TO THE PURSUER or not, but mine certainly have. Neither of us have mentioned him, in any case. I suppose it’s because there’s little point. O’Brien saved my life by doing what, only days ago, would be an unthinkable thing. She’d gotten out of bed at the sound of his fiddling with the lock and found the only weapon a motel room could offer, then hidden with it against the wall by the door, hoping not to be noticed when he opened it. Then, when he’d pulled out the knife, she’d done what she’d done.
It’s hard to guess at how this act weighs upon her. Perhaps she worries about who they will send after us now. Or perhaps, like me, she only calculates how little time there is left.
WE CROSS THE BORDER AT NIAGARA FALLS IN DARKNESS. AT O’BRIEN’S insistence we park the car and take a couple minutes to walk to the water’s edge and look over the rail. A smooth collapse of broad river falling away into an exploding cloud of mist, though its gray reach upward lends it the restlessness of smoke more than water.
“That’s us, isn’t it?” O’Brien says, staring at the drop. “Going over the falls in a barrel.”
“Minus the barrel.”
O’Brien takes hold of my hand.
“Whatever we find, wherever we’re going, I’m ready,” she says. “Not reckless but . . . clear.”
“You’re always clear.”
“I’m not talking about the mind. I’m talking about everything else.”
“That makes two of us.”
“Not true. You have Tess.”
“Yes. Except for Tess. She’s the only thing that’s clear for me.” I pull O’Brien against me. “And you, too.”
When the mist finds its way through our clothes to chill our skin we head back to the Mustang and find the highway again. Drive around the western end of Lake Ontario, through the peach orchards and vineyards of the peninsula, then into the growing density of the outlying towns and industrial cities before Toronto. A glimpse of its towers, then the turn north again. The new suburbs looking old. The rolling croplands.
A couple hours later the multiple lanes shrink to an uncertain road, tightening through the wooded curves, the sudden overhangs of blasted rock. We’re past the Muskoka lakes with their multimillion-dollar summer compounds and private golf courses, and past now, too, the smaller, cheaper lakes that follow. Soon we are making one after another of the thousand turns through the unpeopled land. A thread of blacktop teased out over a landscape of endless forest so that there is no decision but to advance or retreat. Which, in our case, means no decision at all.
It’s dawn by the time we pull over onto the shoulder and I get out, stiff-kneed, to haul open the metal gate at Fireweed Lake Lane. Though “lane” hardly suits: an unmaintained trail through the brush, two wheel ruts in the earth and branches shaking hands across the gap. The cover of trees so thick it darkens the way in greenish night.
“How far?” O’Brien asks when I return to the car.
“About a half mile in. Maybe a bit more.”
O’Brien leans over. At first I think it’s to whisper something in my ear but instead she kisses me. A real one, almost warm, on the lips.
“Time to see what he wants us to see,” she says.
Over even the last few hours her skin has been pulled tighter over her cheeks, her chin. Core pounds lost despite the steady cheeseburger and vanilla shake diet. Yet she is still here. The essence of Elaine O’Brien, the last of her, meeting my eyes.
“I—”
“I told you. I know already,” she says and returns to sit straight in her seat, staring into the shadowed trees. “Now, let’s go.”
22
THE MUSTANG ROLLS OFF THE SHOULDER AND WE ARE INSTANTLY swallowed up by the green.
I remember doing this drive in the backseat of my father’s Buick station wagon, a wood-paneled monster that handily managed to jostle through the mud slicks and over the larger rocks on the juicy suspension of yesteryear. The Mustang, however, lets us feel every knock and worry over every tire-spinning hesitation.
We break through a final veil of scrub to have the old Ullman cabin revealed to us. Not that it was ever really ours. Not that it’s really a cabin.
An aluminum-sided bungalow with a pair of squinty, curtained windows, one on each side of the front door. The kind of hastily constructed kit home you find in the downmarket neighborhoods of factory towns, yet in this case plopped in the northern Ontario woods, as though lifted by a tornado and long forgotten about.
We get out of the car and lean against it a moment, breathing the surprisingly cold air and getting our legs back. No other tire tracks in the leaf-littered yard. No sign that anyone has been here for weeks, or probably longer.
“What do we do now?” O’Brien asks.
“Look around, I guess.”
“What should we be looking for?”
“Doesn’t matter. It’ll find us.”
The front screen door, hinged only at its bottom, swings open in a curl of breeze and utters a rusty yelp. I find myself walking toward it without any clear intention of opening the door behind it. But that’s what I’m trying to do. Hauling on the handle, shouldering into it in case it’s merely stuck in its frame.
“Locked,” I say.
“There a back door?”
“It’s probably locked, too.”
“Let’s have a look-see anyway.”
I follow O’Brien around the corner and the river is suddenly before us, seventy yards down a sapling-dotted slope of waving grass. The current looking stronger than I remember it, whirlpools spinning about at the midpoint, stray branches racing by the shore. Not a wide crossing—maybe a hundred feet or so—but I wouldn’t want to try it. I’m not sure anyone ever did.
On the far side, the dark forest. Gnarled and dry.
“You’re right,” O’Brien announces off to my left, rattling at the rear door at the top of a deck blackened by mold. “Locked tight.”
There’s a football-sized rock on the ground not far from where I stand. I pick it up with both hands and join O’Brien.
“We’ll just have to pick it,” I say, and swing the rock down on the handle, shearing it off. The door swings open half a foot.
O’Brien is the first in. She pulls the curtains open and lets the available light spill onto the floor. Tries the light switches, but none work. Pokes her head into the bathroom I know to be just around the corner from the kitchen. All before I take a step inside.
“This look familiar to you?”
“I was just a kid the last time I was here,” I a
nswer.
“That doesn’t answer my question.”
“It’s all different. In the details. But yes, it’s familiar, all right.”
“So why don’t you come inside?”
“Because it smells like the past.”
“Just smells bad to me.”
“Bingo.”
But I do go inside. And it does smell bad. Damp wood and pine needles that, together, obscure something rank, a once living creature now trapped or poisoned beneath the floorboards or behind the wall. A nasty surprise for whenever the current owners decide to return, if they ever do.
And the kitchen’s turquoise walls. The original color of loss.
“I’m going outside,” O’Brien says as she passes me, looking even more ill than earlier.
“You okay?”
“It’s just hard to breathe.”
“I know. It’s a bit foul in here.”
“Not just inside, but out.” She grips both hands around my forearms. “There’s something wrong about this place, David.”
There always was, I almost say. But before I can help her O’Brien releases me and shuffles out the back door where I hear her pull in a couple gasps as she stands on the deck, hands clutched on her knees.
Now that I’m here I breathe it in. And the life I’d buried fills my lungs in an instant, so that I’m remembering from the inside out.
The first thing that appears is my brother. Lawrence. Standing just beyond reach and looking at me with the same mixture of affection and obligation as he did in life. Two years older than me and always tall for his age, which meant he was often mistaken for being more mature, more able to “manage it,” as my father put it, where the thing to be managed was himself.
He would sometimes call him Larry but I never did. He was no more a Larry than I was a Dave, both of us too serious, too brooding and reserved to properly wear a shortened name. Not that Lawrence was a fearful kid. As we moved from school to school he protected me from every bully, shielded me from the taunts of every clique, sacrificing his own opportunities for inclusion (he was an athletic kid, and had invitations) in the name of preventing me from being alone.