The Secret Life of Souls
Page 21
“Caity!” says Stella.
“Wiggle-butt!” says Charlie.
Caity lopes over and the kids’ packages are abandoned in favor of wet dog-kisses, pets, and hugs. Around Caity, Stella always seems to forget that at nine she’s the elder of the two and loses any pretense of her usual, slightly self-conscious, slightly superior dignity.
He helps Ana carry the packages into the kitchen and pile them on the butcher-block table.
“Mission accomplished,” she says. “There shall be Halloween!”
She laughs, face flushed from the October chill. That deep throaty laugh, he thinks, was the first thing about her that seduced him his sophomore year at Plymouth State College. He was an English major, for no other reason than, like his aunt, he loved to read—everything from Stephen King to Will and Ariel Durant. She was Languages. She could still read perfectly well in Japanese.
But when they discovered they were both antique-freaks college fell by the wayside. Ev had loaned them most of the cash to set them up in business before they were even married. Prescient, he’s always thought, that they would be before too long.
They set to unpacking, groceries first. Häagen-Dazs in the freezer.
“You’ll never guess what I just recorded,” he says.
“What?”
“Pearl’s twentieth-year retrospective. Me at age twelve. The whole family. Promoting that damn book.”
“You swore, dad. What book? You were twelve?”
They haven’t even heard her approach. Like her mother, Stella is light on her feet.
Charlie and Caity appear in the doorway behind her.
“That book sent your daddy to college, sweetie,” Ana says.
“Want to see what we got, dad?” says Charlie.
“Absolutely.”
His son sets to rummaging through the packages on the table. Bags of candy for the trick-or-treaters who probably wouldn’t show. Halloween decorations—three orange-and-black cardboard owls, a cardboard skeleton hinged at the joints, a pair of papier-mâché witches on broomsticks, and a plastic toothless jack-o’-lantern for the door. Finally he finds what he wants.
“This one’s Stella’s,” he says.
She tugs the box out of her brother’s hands and opens it. Inside is a pretty red fake-velvet costume, complete with leggings and a draped hood. She pulls the hood over her shoulders.
“See? Little Red Riding Hood,” she says.
She does a half-turn for her audience. Including Caity, who’s up on her hind legs, paws on the kitchen table.
“That’s terrific, Stel’,” he says. “Do I perhaps see a wolf in this picture?”
Charlie laughs and high-fives him and pulls out a second box. A full-body gray wolf costume. Not too high-end, he thinks—they’re by no means rich—but not too shabby either. They’ll make a fun pair, barreling along in the truck from neighbor to neighbor. Charlie puts on the mask and growls through its feral toothy grin.
Caity barks right back at him.
“Can I have a Twizzler?” Stella asks. “Me and Caity?”
“Just one,” he says. “Bad for her teeth.”
“How ’bout a FarBar?” says Charlie. “Just me. No Caity.”
“Sure. One.”
The kids unwrap the candy and Stella hands a cherry Twizzler over to Caity who gets down off the table and sits munching it between her paws, delicate, small bites at a time.
“What book, dad?” says Charlie. “One you wrote?”
“I just talked. Somebody else did the writing. It was . . . about your Aunt Delia.”
“Aunt Delia? Really?” says Stella. “Can we see?”
Charlie nods enthusiastic agreement. Delia has become something of a family legend to these guys.
He and Ana exchange glances. He wonders yet again when the kids would begin to question what Ana had learned from him and come to accept long ago. Why this Caity had the same scars and slashes of pure white fur along her belly, the lightning-bolt from ear to chin, as her supposed mother.
“What do you think?” he says.
“Can’t hurt I guess,” she says.
“Caity?”
She looks up at each of them in turn. The kids first. Rob last. Then barks and wags her tail. They have permission.
“Okay, leave that stuff, Ana,” he says. “Come on, guys. My room. The study. Let’s go watch your dad on TV.”
He herds them out of the kitchen. Ana smiles at him over her shoulder.
He bends down to Caity. She nuzzles his open hand, his chin.
“Know what I heard on the news this morning?” he says. “No, you were sleeping. Meteor shower tonight. That’s right, falling stars. So what do you think? You up for that?”
He kisses her on the forehead.
“Yeah, I thought so,” he says. “I was pretty sure you would be.”
They rise together and walk on down the hall.
It’s night. The house is silent.
Ana lies propped up on two firm pillows, leafing through an issue of Town & Country Magazine. A boutique hotel in Abruzzo has caught her eye, the bedroom of a medieval house now a cozy place for guests to sleep, its walls aglow like honey, its furnishings simple, spare, and elegant. Not unlike their own home on a bright summer day.
In their beds, in their separate rooms, Stella and Charlie are asleep. Each, as it turns out, dreams of the other.
In Charlie’s dream his sister walks a long wide path through a garden, all reds and blues and yellows. She stops to examine a spiderweb. And in it, the spider. She’s not afraid of spiders. Though Charlie is a little afraid for her. She turns to laugh at something far behind her and skips away.
In Stella’s dream Charlie has a hammer in his hand and he’s breaking through a wall. The wall is thick and Charlie’s sweating. It’s a lot of work. But her brother doesn’t seem to mind. He’s purposeful, methodical, finding all the weak spots. And finally there’s a hole big enough to peek through. He does, presses his eye blinking to the hole. She has the distinct feeling that she’s on the other side.
On the gently slanted roof is a blanket, tattered by now in places, mended and tattered again. But comfortable and familiar as a second skin.
Here two figures sit quiet and content waiting in the stillness and the deep country dark for the sky to starburst above them.
The dust of the heavens, fashioned in violence into bright trails of light.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
JACK KETCHUM would like to thank Paula White, Alice Martell—and Joanne Moran, for the long privilege of knowing the real Caity.
LUCKY McKEE would like to thank Shay Astar, Vanessa McKee, Guillermo del Toro, Veronica McKee, and all the mutts he’s ever known.
THE SECRET LIFE OF SOULS
Pegasus Books
148 W 37th Street, 13th Floor
New York, NY 10018
Copyright © 2016 Dallas Mayr and Edward Lucky McKee
First Pegasus Books edition November 2016
Interior design by Maria Fernandez
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in whole or in part without written
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.
ISBN: 978-1-68177-234-9
ISBN: 978-1-68177-280-6 (e-book)
Distributed by W. W. Norton & Company