by Brian Keene
There were times since the Official Visit and the letter, since the flag they had given her when he was buried in Chapel of the Chimes in Oakland, that the grief came over her so strong she felt like she was being swallowed alive by a thick, heavy fog—dark, all encompassing, dulling to her senses. It was likely she’d taken out the letters then and set them somewhere to read, and just forgotten where that was. During those times, it was like moving outside of real time and space, and thus, hard to remember later every little detail of where she’d put things and what she’d done around the house. It was usually less disconcerting to her then it should be, she supposed, but then, she’d never lost something as important to her as the letters.
It took her the better part of an hour and a half to comb through the downstairs as she had the upstairs. She searched the basement and her car. She even searched all of the trash. The letters were just plain gone.
Her head had begun to ache. She was exhausted. Sharon pulled one of Cameron’s t-shirts from the dresser and pulled it over one of his pillows. Then she climbed into the big empty bed, pulling the shirted pillow to her. She didn’t bother with the covers.
She closed her eyes, gave in to the aches within and without, and burst into tears, crying until sleep crept up on and overtook her.
On Saturday, over her morning tea (her stomach, unsettled, put her off to the idea of breakfast), Sharon glared at the stack of bills to be paid and thought about the night before. She’d awoken that morning feeling incredibly drained, more than usual, and knew that it had been a tough night, but found that try as she might, she couldn’t remember why. Something … something had been … taken? Lost? She wasn’t quite sure.
Maybe the feeling came from some part of a nightmare. She certainly had them often enough, when she managed to sleep. Likely, she’d dreamed of Cameron; often, those dreams evolved one of two ways, both equally painful. In the first kind, he would be somehow suddenly mad at her or worse, utterly indifferent to her, and would spend the dream either avoiding her and her attempts at communicating reconciliation or he’d be outright nasty to her, spitefully flaunting his attempts to drive her away. Those dreams were bad, but the other kind were worse. In those, they were blissfully happy and deeply in love, having fun, having adventures, making love, and planning their present and future lives together. She’d wake from the former knowing, at least, that those weren’t true, had only been bad dreams. But the latter … it was harder to be torn into wakefulness after those, to an empty house that was supposed to have been a home and an empty space beside her where all those dreamed moments should have been.
She never dreamed of his death. There had never been the good-bye dream, where Cameron appeared to her to tell her he was okay, that he was safe and would be waiting for her and where he was going was so, so beautiful. Other military wives posted about having dreams like that after, but for her, Cameron was just gone.
Usually when she had those kinds of dreams, it offered her some comfort to go through the box she kept under her bed, the one with all the flower petals from every bouquet he had ever given her, and all the ticket stubs from the movies and concerts they had gone to together. She decided to do that now. Maybe the rest of the day would be easier, and maybe this strange disquiet would dissipate, if she looked through those old memories.
As she walked to the bedroom, Sharon found herself wishing that she had kept Cameron’s letters and emails, as well. He’d never been much of a writer, preferring instead to call or Skype with her when he could. But surely, he’d sent a few cards and letters, hadn’t he? For her birthday, at the very least? She couldn’t remember.
When she pulled the box out from beneath the bed, and lifted the top off, Sharon gasped in dismay. All of her treasures, all of the mementos of their time together, were gone. The ticket stubs and flower petals had vanished. Even the empty Sweet Tarts box was missing.
She moaned, low and mournful, turning the box upside down and shaking it, as if the keepsakes would magically fall out. When they didn’t, she peered under the bed again. Maybe she hadn’t put them back in the box the last time she’d looked through them, or maybe she had the wrong box. She rifled through the nightstand drawers and searched the closet, and eventually all the other rooms in the house, but the treasure box was gone.
Just like Cameron.
Her melancholy lingered for a few hours. She searched for the missing items one more time, but to no avail. She sat in the kitchen and cried over a second cup of tea. But eventually, Sharon decided to get out of the house. She had no particular place to go, but just the act of leaving, of getting away from this temple to Cameron’s memory, seemed preferable to sitting here grieving all day.
She showered and dressed, and managed to hold back tears during the process. Then she grabbed her purse, locked the door behind her, and walked out to the car. As she thumbed the remote to unlock the doors, Sharon noticed a weird stain on her Kia’s rear bumper. Frowning, she touched it. Her fingers came away sticky. The residue felt like bumper sticker glue, but that was bizarre. She’d never had a bumper sticker on the car. She hated those things. She remembered the Yellow Ribbon sticker a friend had given her shortly after Cameron’s deployment. She’d stuck it … somewhere. She couldn’t remember the exact location. Probably in a drawer or on top of the fridge. Maybe even in the box beneath the bed.
Sharon sighed.
Was she sad that the mementos were gone? Of course she was. Each item had been a part of her life with Cameron. But, she reminded herself, she still had pictures of their time together. And she still had this home they’d shared. And most importantly, she still had her memories.
On Sunday, Sharon paused on her way down the hall. She’d been stumbling from the bedroom to the kitchen. Her head hurt and she’d planned on making a cup of tea, but something else had caught her attention.
On the wall was a picture frame—the type that held multiple photographs. There she was with her parents. Another showed her with some girlfriends. But there were several empty spaces where photographs were missing. Sharon frowned, trying to remember what they had been. After a moment, it occurred to her they’d been various snapshots of her and her old boyfriend, Cameron. She’d been crazy about him at one time, but then he’d joined the army and … well, she supposed they’d drifted apart. She still thought of him from time to time, but she hadn’t heard from him in … well, a very long time. She couldn’t remember removing the pictures from their frames, but she must have at one point. The frame looked uneven with those empty holes, somewhat … unsettled, and she didn’t like that. She made a mental note to find some replacements for them.
Then she continued with her day.
On Monday morning, Sharon left her apartment in North Oakland and drove to work. It was a ritual she repeated five days a week, and had done so since moving into her place. She’d always wanted a house, somewhere to really think of as a home, but it was a big responsibility financially, and she just couldn’t swing a California mortgage alone.
Sharon smiled in bemusement. Wasn’t it funny? She’d dreamed of a house the night before, and a man who shared a home with her. She only remembered snippets of it—pictures of them in frames though the dream-faces were blurred, drawers with his t-shirts, socks, and underwear, a closet with her clothes hanging on one side and his on the other. She remembered a shoebox under the bed where she had been plucking and placing petals from flowers she knew, in the dream, he had given her. And she had been sitting on a big, soft bed in the bedroom with pillows that smelled like his cologne. It had been a pleasant enough dream, although she knew it was little more than her mind fantasizing about a life she wanted, but would probably never really have. She thought for a moment about the man in the dream. She couldn’t see his face, but remembered his arms—there had been tattoos, one of them military. And she thought his name had begun with a C—Casey? Cameron? Chris? Eh, it didn’t matter anyway, she told herself, because it had only been a dream. But the smile had slipped off h
er face.
Her daily commute took her through West Oakland. While stuck in a backup due to road construction, Sharon happened to glance out the passenger-side window, and saw a house there. It was a cute house, just the kind of place she had always dreamed of living in some day, but for some inexplicable reason, the sight of the place filled her with unease.
Maybe it’s haunted, she thought, and then traffic began to move again and within another block, she’d forgotten all about it.
On Tuesday, the house was gone, but Sharon Coulter never noticed.
A
RAVEN
IN THE
DOVE’S NEST
ROBERTA LANNES
Dead center in one of her amitriptyline dreams, Ruth waded through ever more vivid memories, drawn out and melded together into the nonsensical and fantastic. Four-thirty in the morning, a stunning progression of vignettes put her first in a plush chair in the Chapel’s lush, well-appointed mourning room. She grabbed onto the chair’s plump arms, staring into the glass case. There, the engraved marble book urn holding her husband’s ashes stood alone, awaiting the company of his family’s volumes to follow. Ruth felt the weight of expectation.
Sunlight streaming through the atrium cast her bent shadow onto the tile floor. That shadow took on the shape of a large beaked bird, lengthening and expanding over the pale expanse. As the bird’s head bobbed in a pecking rhythm, its shadow grew black as India ink. The void of light spread until it eclipsed the room. Ruth’s heart raced as she was consumed. Startled at the touch of someone grasping her shoulders, she flung them away with a shriek!
She wrapped herself tightly with her arms, blinking away the utter darkness. Freckling pinpricks of light grew slowly into a dazzling constellation. In a filmic fade, she stood in an amber lit hotel ballroom. The air, perfumed with pomade, cheap cologne, and sweat, vibrated around her as a swirl of soldiers, sailors and pretty young women moved feverishly to a band playing “Organ Grinders Swing.” Then, there was Louis; all six foot two and boyish twenty-three years of him, slim-hipped in his sailor whites. He flashed his future salesman’s radiant smile and she bought it. Falling into his strong arms, their feet took to jitterbugging as if they’d danced together for years.
When the music slowed to a romantic tune, Louis held her close as they slow-danced in her childhood bedroom. They kissed. Deeply. Easing her gently onto the bed, Louis told her she was lovely. Ruth, naked and filled with a double whiskey of courage, trembled in Louis’s arms. When he kissed and stroked her breasts, her nipples went so rigid they ached. Her body responded to his touch with gooseflesh and electric warmth all at once. He whispered her name, kissing her belly, moving her legs apart, his mouth focused between. Tenderly yet unrelentingly, his tongue nudged and prodded until she disappeared into an explosion of rapture!
Euphoric, her body still pulsating, she lie alone, naked on the cold tile floor of the mourning room. Her eyes fluttered at the sound of the Chapel’s chimes, clear and beautiful. They pealed again and again, their sound increasingly dull, like a doorbell. She shut her eyes, tumbling onto an ultramarine cloud, the sun on her back.
A more insistent ring jolted her. Annoyed at being ripped from her pleasure, Ruth swam up from slumber. The doorbell!
Her every joint squawked with pain as she rolled her ninety-three-year-old body out of bed. Drug-dragged, with slatted eyes, she wobbled along in her routine of sliding on her slippers and her purple robe, then went to her dresser mirror. Her fingers moved like wooden pegs, weaving her long white hair into a haphazard braid as she shuffled toward the toilet. The doorbell went again.
Padding through the house, the amitriptyline stupor took her balance. She thumped against the walls, then down the stairs she nearly missed steps. Had she ever felt this intoxicated? Ruth flicked on the hall light, blinking toward her front door. She supported herself, hands against the walls, as she swayed onward. Too numbed to wonder who’d wake her at this hour, she brought her eye to the peephole. Even under the wan, yellowed light and a very long time having passed, Ruth recognized the woman’s face. The woman. The one whose name she could never remember from somewhere she couldn’t recollect.
Damn this medication, she thought as she pulled open the door.
“Oh. Hello.” Ruth’s hand flew over her mouth to cover a gasp. Her eyes fell to bloody nightgown and slippers, then back up to the woman’s wild green eyes and blue-black hair.
“Please. Can I come in? It’s cold out here.” The woman shivered, her hands tucked under her arms. “I’m lost.”
Baffled, Ruth squinted at her. “Are you hurt?”
The woman put her bloody hands out, flipping them palm to back. She stared at them as if they weren’t her own, her head cocked. “I don’t know.”
“Well, come in.” Ruth frowned, her speech slurred. “But, take those slippers off. Leave’em outside.”
The woman kicked off the slippers as Ruth peered out toward the street for signs of the woman’s car. She felt silly, then. How would she know the woman’s car from any other after all these years?
“I don’t know why I’m here. I just thought of you. Your kindness. You are kind, aren’t you?”
“I hope so. People’ve been kind to me.” And they had. She took a chance. “You were.”
“Was I?” The woman stepped gingerly down the hallway in her bare feet, clearly remembering her way to Ruth’s kitchen. The woman glanced back over her shoulder, smiling blandly. As she followed, Ruth noticed the blood staining the hem of the woman’s robe ombred up from near black to a ruby red, as if she’d been dunked in it and hung up.
Ruth turned the oven on low and left the door open a crack to warm the neat Tuscan-styled kitchen. Ruth went into a sort of drunken hostess mode. She started the coffee machine, searched for pastries, hoping the woman wouldn’t sit in Louis’s chair. Louis’s place was set as if he might wander in and sit down any moment. Everyone, friends and family, knew not to sit there. Ever!
Coffeemaker started, cookies in a decorative tin put onto the table, Ruth set dish towels on a chair. “Here. Don’t want that stuff on the chair.” Ruth patted the seat cushion, nearly tipping over. Her face went red, her scalp tingled as the woman sat down. She recovered, straightened.
Ruth leaned against her counter. “What happened?”
The woman flipped her hands palm to back again, grabbed at her bloody robe, mystified by it all. “I don’t remember.” She gazed up at Ruth. “Can I call George?” Then she fixed her eyes on Ruth’s cordless phone, sitting on the counter beside the paper towel stand and a knife block.
Ruth’s mind wouldn’t clear as drug and a dull dread saturated her. “Of course, if you want to.” George. Who’s George?
The woman nodded like a stunned child. “He’ll wonder where I am.”
Ruth picked up the phone, pressed for the directory, as if she’d somehow recognize the woman’s name if she saw it. “Tell me your phone number. I’ll dial.”
The woman chuckled mirthlessly. Eyes to the ceiling, she muttered, “Ahh … 510. Wait, no. That’s the area code. Try 619-2030.”
Ruth dialed, her eyes crossing, fingers half off the buttons. The phone rang and rang. A machine caught it. You’ve reached Sal and Mercia. Leave a message. You know what’ll happen if you don’t! There was laughter and a beep. Ruth pressed END.
“Sorry, that’s not it.” Ruth’s hand shook as she put the phone in her robe pocket.
The woman pressed her fingers over her eyes. “I can’t think straight.”
Ruth turned away at hearing the coffeemaker squeeze the last of the water through its filter. Hands trembling, fingers aching, Ruth sloshed coffee onto the saucer and counter as she filled two cups. Ignoring her mess, she set a cup in front of the woman, another at her place. Ruth plopped onto her chair, jostling the table. The woman paid no attention.
As the coffee cooled, they both stared unfocused at their hands. Ruth surreptitiously cast an appraising eye at the woman. In her unreliable mind, two t
houghts danced. The woman was in dire need of her help; why else show up on her particular doorstep, covered in gore and clearly desperate unless someone had harmed her? Or, had she’d been involved in the harm of another? The stultifying amitriptyline loosened its grip a moment as her belly turned icy cold.
The woman glanced up at Ruth, whose eyes shot back to her hands. Ruth strained to summon the businesswoman mask she’d worn all the years she’d run the elder care facilities she and Louis owned. Something to hide her burgeoning panic, like the ‘Everything’s-Just-Fine’ look with a touch of ‘Trust us, we’ve-got-it-all-under-control.’
Coffee cooled, they drank the bitter brew. Ruth grimaced, then ladled sugar into the cup. The woman seemed unfazed by the strong stuff and drank it down.
The woman picked up a cookie, smelled it, then took a bite. “Mm, that’s better. Can I get another cup?”
Ruth nodded and hauled herself up. She barely remembered when getting up from a chair had not been punishing. Thinking of Louis, how he’d soldiered on through eleven years of cancer treatment, she always felt petty for thinking her arthritis was the most horrible of afflictions. She poured the woman another cup, making less of a mess.
Twenty minutes, they sat in dazed silence. Ruth took the phone from her pocket and stared at it, struggling to recall the woman’s name. Perhaps, she thought, she’d never known it.