Eli’s vision blurred again. He sagged toward the floor, and the glasses dropped off his nose.
The empty feeling in his arm expanded. He felt shot through, as though by a bullet. He’s killed me, Eli thought, he shot me with my father’s own gun, but Mr. Krantz had done no such thing.
Eli was having a heart attack. It was nothing like the tiny heart attack he’d experienced in his early sixties. This was the massive one. This one was fatal. He lay on the floor, clutching his arm to his chest, bleary-eyed, openmouthed.
Mr. Krantz loomed over him with his gloomy wide mouth, his empty eyes, his large, apelike brow. The mean, ugly face lowered, closer and then closer. Finish me quickly, Eli thought. Mr. Krantz brought his round heavy mouth to Eli’s mouth with incredible force.
Eli faintly registered a woman on a phone somewhere, shrieking for an ambulance. “He’s dying! A man is dying! Come now! Hurry!”
He’s killed me, Eli thought dimly. He’s suffocated me.
Then, feeling the wide mouth withdraw, feeling those powerful fists slamming onto his chest, he gathered that Mr. Krantz was trying to save his life.
What had happened? Only a moment earlier, Mr. Krantz had wanted him dead. Their rage had been mutual.
The mouth returned, covering his own. His vision had gone black, but Eli remained tenuously connected to the conscious world. He felt Krantz’s putrid breath move into his lungs. The gray fetid smoke of him wafted into Eli’s legs and feet.
Consumed! Eli was giddy with it. His body bucked and jerked. It floated upward, toward the apartment’s chimney flue. He was going now.
The world left him, but not before he uncovered his last mortal thought. It was winter, and he flew through the night like a sleek missile.
I didn’t even say goodbye to him, he thought. Imagine! All those years and I never said goodbye!
GHOST STORY
VANESSA
Two weeks after Eli’s death, Vanessa listened to her step-daughter tell a room of mourners that her father was haunting her.
Someone asked, “Does he wear a white sheet?”
Amelia shook her head, perhaps missing the joke.
“He looks the same,” she said casually. “Gloomier. He’s wearing his old bathrobe, the robe he used to wear when he was married to my mom. He’s just slightly more visible than a fart.”
Vanessa winced. They were sitting in the den, reluctantly entertaining the latest round of well-wishers, who had brought Vanessa a lasagna and, inexplicably, an entire uncooked turkey. One of them giggled at the word fart, but the rest of the group sat in horrified silence, glancing meaningfully at Vanessa and then looking away. She was always difficult, these glances said, and we’re sorry for you.
Vanessa had, at one time, appreciated these looks. Now they annoyed her.
What Vanessa felt toward her stepdaughter was not shame or anger.
It was envy.
She had a dozen pressing questions for Amelia: Where? When? Is he here now? Can you see him? Can you touch him? How did he come to you? Why, oh, why, has he not come to me?
Instead, tongue-tied, she turned for support to Ginger, who said thoughtfully, “I suppose we could barbecue it. There would be lots of leftover meat for sandwiches.”
At first, feeling sick, Vanessa thought she meant Eli’s corpse. Then, realizing, she stuttered, “Oh, yes. The turkey. Sure. We’ll barbecue it.”
“At this very moment,” Amelia said, absently toying with her attractive white-gold watch, a wedding gift from her mother, “he’s gesturing toward all of you. He’s jumping up and down and yelling at the top of his lungs. He’s waving! He’s trying to say hello.”
The crowd waited, holding its breath. A sweet if slightly dotty old woman who had, in her more lucid years, babysat Ginger, lifted her hand and waved hesitantly in return.
Vanessa’s eyes roamed the room wildly. Where was he? She saw nothing; she felt nothing. She inhaled and caught no scent of him. Eli, she blazed, Eli, where are you?
“But what he really wants,” Amelia said, “is my forgiveness.”
Vanessa sat back against the couch, ruined. It was a profound moment, a moment of truth. A onetime colleague of Eli’s cleared her throat in disgust. But Vanessa thought, It’s true. That is precisely what Eli would want: Amelia’s forgiveness. Now of all times. Yes.
He had never really sought it before his death. He was always downright carefree about it, in fact.
“There’s nothing more I can do,” he would say. “She’ll either forgive me or she won’t.”
Vanessa had once fallen on her knees before him, begging him to give Amelia what she wanted, which she imagined was the most tearful sort of apology, an outpouring of his darkest guilt, a dramatic showcase of regret and woe for her difficult childhood. She hoped that it would put an end to the girl’s wrath.
Eli had refused, as resolute as ever. “I don’t regret a thing. I did nothing wrong, other than fall in love with you. Do you really think an apology would matter? The only thing I’m sorry about is marrying Gladys in the first place.”
Unfortunately, he relayed this last sentiment to Amelia one evening after drinking too much vodka. Vanessa had cringed, watching Amelia (then a young woman, attending community college and piecing her life back together), whose expression had collapsed and then tightened.
“Well,” Amelia had retorted hotly. “That would be the perfect solution, wouldn’t it? Then I wouldn’t be here at all. You could have your perfect threesome, and I’d be dead. Never even born.” And Eli hadn’t risen to stop her when Amelia sped from the house, seething.
“You’re only making things worse,” Vanessa had told him. “You’re only making things worse for me.”
How silly she was to involve herself with a married man! She should have known that his first marriage would plague her for their entire relationship and beyond, but her reservations about him were so stupid and naïve, revolving around his quirkiness instead of around the fact that he already had a family of his own. Christ, he was married! It had seemed so cosmopolitan then, so liberated. Marriage was an insipid institution, she had always felt. And she thought this now, too, sitting here with all of these people, who felt sorry for her because she had lost her husband, but not because she had lost her best friend, the only person who truly understood her and forgave her, the only person, other than Ginger, who she truly understood and forgave, too.
I should get dinner ready for him, Vanessa thought automatically. Then, pitying herself: No. All of that’s over now.
She would never get used to this.
Amelia turned to her half sister then and said, bored, “I hate barbecued turkey. All the carcinogens. Might as well spray a can of aerosol down your throat.”
The guests stood to leave, one by one. Vanessa tried to bid them farewell as gracefully as possible, but her mouth had gone dry. She felt relieved and exhausted when the last of their cheerful set departed.
“I can’t see anyone else today,” she finally said to Ginger. “I need to lie down.”
The daughters watched her walk up the stairs. She looked back at them, her hand falling on the balustrade. Ginger’s face was a soft pink balloon of concern; Amelia’s face was a hard angular viper pit.
“We’ll leave tomorrow,” Amelia said sharply to Vanessa’s heels. “We’ll stay with Gladys tomorrow night. She’s grieving, too, in her own way.”
“Okay,” Vanessa said, wanting to argue, wanting to beg her to stay a week, a month, a lifetime, lest she take Eli’s ghost along with her.
“I’m surprised Eli hasn’t haunted her,” Amelia said. “If anyone needs to forgive him, it’s Gladys.”
Oh, bullshit, Vanessa thought. Gladys was a shitty person. She had done horrible things to Amelia and to Eli both. Nothing was beneath Gladys: self-immolation, slashing tires, wicked lies. She would do anything to make Eli and Vanessa unhappy, even if it meant her own daughter’s discomfort. She deserved little kindness and was lucky enough to have Amelia’s loy
alty.
“It will be good for you to see her,” Vanessa said. “Send her my regards.”
“I won’t,” Amelia replied.
Vanessa nodded. She knew Amelia didn’t mean this to be cruel. If Amelia passed along Vanessa’s tidings, well meaning or not, she would be excoriated.
Alone now in the room she had shared for more than thirty years with Eli, Vanessa curled into his pillow and sobbed. It still smelled of him. When she was able to calm down, she asked the pillow, “Why are you haunting Amelia? Why Amelia? Haunt me instead. Haunt me. Isn’t there something you need from me, even now?” She smacked the pillow with her hand.
After Eli’s death, she had considered asking Amelia and Jim to stay at home, rather than with them. The couple had their own house in Lilac City, after all, and Vanessa didn’t need the extra help. She had assumed that Amelia would be more than willing to comply. But Amelia insisted, and Ginger would have balked if she’d been denied—she always balked whenever Vanessa disagreed with Amelia. They had a complicated relationship, these two half sisters, one filled with jealousy and rancor and, somehow, admiration and love.
Ginger had such a good heart. Ginger, who was always apologizing for her parents’ poor behavior: past infidelities, present-day drunkenness, perceived insensitivities. Ginger was a saint.
Amelia, too, was here out of good intentions. She was here because she wanted to support Vanessa and because, in her own twisted way, she loved her father. Her presence, however, pained Vanessa, as it always had; she could not look at Amelia without thinking of her life’s greatest transgressions, could not speak to her without wanting to defend her most deleterious self. She tried to gloss over all of this with fake chatter and ill-timed compliments, a kill-’em-with-kindness routine that made Amelia’s mistrust all the greater, but it was so much more comfortable for Vanessa than playing the part of the evil stepmother. She hadn’t meant to hurt anyone. She hadn’t. Why must she always feel the need to defend herself? Why did Amelia refuse to see her as anything but the venomous spider, the gold digger, the other woman? Why didn’t Amelia accept that Vanessa simply loved Eli, that all she had ever done wrong was to love a married man?
Once upon a time, Vanessa felt that she, too, had a good heart. This was (she now knew) an estimable lie. Her love for her husband, her love for Ginger had nothing to do with goodness. Loving was about need and fear and commitment and survival. She would die for Eli and Ginger if need be, would eat their pain in order for them to remain painless, would cut off her legs for them to remain upright, would do anything in her power to protect them both—kill, maim, steal, lie, destroy—but these urges blossomed not from some tender soul-soil of goodness, like gentle beanstalks winding skyward, but rather lurched from a more primordial earth, tangled within her teeth and guts and bones, monstrous and dark and thorny, utterly powerful. There was no room for goodness there, no matter what others might say, no matter how many greeting cards she collected from Ginger exalting her generosity and affection.
To the best mom in the entire world, those cards read. Vanessa kept them all in a drawer in her bedroom and cried over them every few months.
But love and goodness had nothing to do with each other.
AMELIA
Eli is haunting me like a total asshole. He’s there in the bedroom with Jim and me, he stands at my elbow when I’m on my headset with clients, he’s with us in the backyard when we’re building a snowman with the kids. It’s been like this since the funeral. I’ve been showering less, making love less, because, what the hell? My dad is here. Even doing bills is embarrassing.
He hates it, too, I can tell. He turns to the wall when I undress or shower or shit, but he can’t leave. He’s waiting for something. An apology, a blessing, a curse? I try not to make eye contact. Most of the time, I pretend he’s not there. The rest of the time, I’m asking him, What do you want, Dad? Come on! Speak up!
Eli can’t speak but he can gesture, and he gestures at me urgently, as if he’s trying to land an airplane. OVER HERE, he’s saying. KEEP YOUR NOSE UP. AVOID THE WATER, THERE ARE SHARKS.
To this, I can only shrug. No idea, Eli. Does not compute.
When he’s not gesturing, he’s gazing at me in a mopey way. The mopey expression makes him look even older than he was when he died.
He died a typical asshole death. Heart attack. Too involved with his work to take care of himself. You’d look at a small, thin guy like him and you’d think, Wow, what a healthy person, but, really, his arteries were choked. When sliced open, they would have leaked cottage cheese everywhere. I know about this stuff. I sell pharmaceutical products to patients with calcium deposits in their hearts. All of these guys are the same.
This is what stress does to you, asswipes.
I sound unappreciative, like I don’t love Eli. It’s not that.
I’m even flattered. I mean, he could have haunted Vanessa (God knows she’d love it), or Ginger (who would be fucking terrified), or even Gladys (who is going be a hell of a ghost herself one day), but he chose me. This means he owes me something. Unfinished business, as they say.
But then I’m not sure. It’s a problem for me, and it’s a problem for Eli.
Maybe it’s meant to punish us both.
VANESSA
It occurred to Vanessa that Amelia might be making all of this up, just to upset her.
But Amelia had never been a fantastical person. Ginger was another story. Ginger, even now, had the imagination of a small child, with her paintings and her unicorn obsession, although she’d never been very interested in Eli’s Sasquatch. His eternal hunt for the beast—a hunt that had ended with a degree of humiliation and amusement—had not been seen by either daughter for what it was: creative, original, baffling, and inspired (as it was seen by Vanessa, who understood Eli’s passion in terms of poetry, an equally elusive creature). Instead, they saw it as as misinformed, corny, confusing, and bogus. To Amelia, it was the career of a liar and a philanderer; to Ginger, the career of an adventurous if mistaken man.
But he believes in it, Vanessa had argued, in different tones, with both her daughter and stepdaughter. He believes in it very much. And belief is everything. Don’t you see that?
Amelia, for one, argued that he did not believe. How could he, without being insane? He was in it for the money, she surmised, for the weird glory it provided. He was in it for the travel, for the long woodland trips away from all of them. Vanessa never argued with her, only listened to her rants with a sinking heart. Eli was happy, so Vanessa tried to be, too.
Eventually, Eli’s confidence and dedication waned. The whole SNaRL program was taken over by younger cryptozoologists. They understood the Internet in a way that was beyond Eli, putting the entire business online, creating an informative if dense website, an online donations portal, and a comments section. The Internet meant far more sightings, but far less of them were sincere. Eli couldn’t keep up with the speed of the thing. He became irrelevant. His book continued to enjoy healthy sales, but even he knew that it was purchased as a gag item, a funny gift to give a monster aficionado or skeptic at a birthday party.
It wore on him, Vanessa saw, and she tried to encourage him and flatter him and distract him.
In the end, it killed him.
Vanessa ruminated over the night of his heart attack. She liked to pick apart the details, as if somehow she would find the tiny key that, if twisted, would pop open the lock and bring Eli back to life. She would never forget the hospital where she was summoned, the sterility and brightness of it, so opposite the clutter and darkness in her heart. Eli was alive then, just barely, but they thought, or told her they thought, that they could save him.
That funny couple was there, too—Mr. and Mrs. Krantz. Mr. Krantz’s presence was disturbing. He was gigantic, an eyesore, but he hung back from everyone, pressing against the wall as though trying to hide.
She had wondered to herself: Who were these people? Why was Eli with them when the heart attack struck? She e
yeballed Mr. Krantz with a sense of urgency. He was a man who would seize anyone’s attention. He was a man who seemed too mannish.
Mrs. Krantz had sprinted up to Vanessa in her tall heels, bubbling over, frantic with apologies, and relayed everything to her. She had arrived home with dinner to find Eli collapsing onto the floor and had gone right for the phone to call for help.
“Fell right next to his rifle, the poor thing!” She turned and opened an arm toward her brute of a husband. “Blue as a Smurf. Krantzy jumped right in. CPR and the whole bit! Learned it from watching TV, can you imagine? The paramedics were really grateful to him.”
“Eli had his rifle?” Vanessa had asked. “Why did he have his rifle?”
“Oh, who knows?” Mrs. Krantz replied. “Men love to carry guns around.”
It dawned on Vanessa then who Mr. Krantz was. She recalled what Eli had told her about the monster from his childhood, the creature who had stolen everything from him. And now she remembered the clunky, Germanic-sounding name: Krantz. Her face whitened.
“They know each other,” Mrs. Krantz said, perhaps noting Vanessa’s stricken expression. “Yes, I’m sure of it. Krantzy’s silent on the matter, but I can tell they are old friends.”
Vanessa could think of nothing to say. She knew what this stupid woman did not: Eli had gone to kill Mr. Krantz.
She caught Mr. Krantz’s eye, and he stared back at her emotionlessly.
“Thank you,” she finally said to him. “Thank you for saving his life.”
She wasn’t sure at first if he had heard her or not, but then he gave a slow, brief bob of his immense head.
“God, what a night,” Mrs. Krantz said, fake eyelashes wet with tears, the splendid peach bulbs of her cleavage heaving above a pink camisole. She reached for Vanessa’s hand and squeezed dramatically. “Krantzy did everything he could. The paramedics were so fast, I swear it, as quick as bunnies! I’m sure your husband will be right as rain by morning.”
Mr. Krantz continued to lurk in whatever shadows he could find, limping from one corner to another. He was a dark, monstrous figure in a thin denim coat, shiny tuxedo pants, crisp white sneakers. He had recently shaved. His primitive face was all cut up from the razor, with tiny bits of Kleenex stuck to his skin by red tacks of blood. He was a massive, hideous man. Vanessa continued to stare.
The Sasquatch Hunter's Almanac Page 30