In Silent Graves

by Gary A Braunbeck

  “Do we have to bring that up now?”

  “Yes!” She hit the steering wheel with her fist, once, just as a siren screamed to life and flashing visibar lights appeared in the rear-view mirror. Robert’s entire body tensed as the police cruiser closed the distance between them while Lynn was trying to decide whether or not the cops were after her for speeding or some other violation. Robert could picture Emerson stepping out of the cruiser and walking up to the car, hand on his holstered gun: Went by your house just to see how you were doing and when you didn’t answer the front door I went around back. There was this big, ugly raccoon digging up your garden, so I shooed it away and damn if there wasn’t this box the thing had dug up and—well, being a detective and all, professional Nosey Parker, I looked inside...and you have the right to remain silent....

  The cruiser overtook, then passed them, its siren singing Me Iaaaaannnnn...Me Iaaaaannnn....

  Robert was so relieved he was surprised he didn’t wet his pants.

  “Bobby?”

  He blinked, exhaled a breath he wasn’t aware he’d been holding, and said, “Wh-what?”

  “Are you listening to me?”

  “About half. Sorry.”

  “Pay attention. Look, I never told you how much it meant to me that you protected me from what was going on with Dad when he was still drinking. I had no idea how bad things were at the house. You always managed to diffuse things—or clean up the mess afterward—before I was exposed to it.”

  “You were only a kid.”

  “We were all only kids once—except maybe for you.” She laughed sadly. “Sometimes I think you were born thirty-nine years old.”

  Robert pulled Ian’s handkerchief away from his nose (How many others like him are out there? Are they all following me? God, do they know what I did with Emily?) and saw that it was stained with blood, but not as badly as the first one. He couldn’t say the same for his shirt, which looked as if he’d been on the losing end of a particularly vicious street fight.

  Denise used to worry so about the way his nose bled when he was stressed.

  Denise.

  She worried about so much.

  As if reading his thoughts, Lynn glanced at him, her eyes brimming with unshed tears, and tried to smile. “She always used to say how it felt like she was training you after you got married. ‘He’s coming along very nicely,’ she’d say. ‘I expect he’ll be ready for unveiling any day now.’ God, Bobby, she was really funny. Like a character from a Noel Coward play, you know? A real dry wit.”

  “I know,” whispered Robert, his chest tightening. “I used to have to bite my tongue damn near in two to keep from laughing—I didn’t want to let her know she’d gotten me with one of her jokes or zingers and—” He stopped, convinced that he finally felt tears coming. He hadn’t been able to cry for Denise and Emily since the night they’d died.

  Nothing.

  “I never told her how funny she was, Lynn. I never told her how she always made me smile, even when I didn’t feel like it.”

  Lynn, crying freely, asked, “Why not?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know why I never told her a lot of things. I don’t know why I reacted so coldly when she told me she was pregnant, or why I was so selfish toward the end, or why I can’t for the life of me find it in myself to cry for her and the baby—no, wait, scratch that last one.” He turned to face his sister. “I realize that a person in mourning is supposed to go through all that Kübler-Ross crap, the five stages, anger, denial, bargaining, cha-cha-cha...but for the last couple of days I’ve had this nagging feeling in my gut that the reason I haven’t cried, the reason I can’t really grieve for her is because my memories of her have been...increasingly more vivid. There’s this...notion with me all the time, and even though it’s connected with my memories of her, it’s like it isn’t my notion. Is this making sense? Don’t answer that, I know it sounds like I’m babbling. Listen—you know those stories about how some people have fillings in their teeth that pick up radio signals, so they hear voices in their head because of it? I feel like there’s something in me that’s picked up on a signal of some kind, a thought or idea that Denise left behind, only it’s not complete, understand? It’s in pieces, scattered all over the house, or at the places we used to go together, sometimes in the pages of one of her favorite books, and every so often I get this feeling that something I can’t see is...is trying to come together, to form itself, and I’m supposed to help it gather up its missing pieces until it’s whole. Then I’ll know what she’s trying to tell me, and then...then....” He parted his hands before him and shook his head, unable to make it any clearer.

  “God, Bobby, I miss her so much already,” choked Lynn. “And I feel so lousy for you. I wish I could...I don’t know....”

  “Me, too,” he said, taking her hand.

  So why do I feel like I’m being haunted by a ghost of someone else’s making?

  Then they were in front of the house and Danny was thanking the babysitter and there was the still-sniffling Eric who came running up to the car and threw his arms around Uncle Bobby’s legs, then looked up at Robert with the most heartrending expression of worry ever worn on a four-year-old’s face; then, as everyone made their way inside, the wind came whipping by and the wet shirts hanging on the clothesline in Robert’s brain started snapping again: They’re dead...They’re dead...They’re....

  Chapter 2

  The “guest room,” as Lynn called it, was actually a storage space at the end of the upstairs hall that contained, among other things, a small sofa-bed. Several things had been gathered up and crammed into a closet whose door was being held closed (barely) by a bulky antique sewing machine.

  One wall was almost completely hidden by a long row of tall bookshelves overflowing with knickknacks, photographs both framed and loose, statuettes, and, of course, books: John Updike, Emily Brontë, Stephen King, Kurt Vonnegut, William Peter Blatty, Jane Austen, Carson McCullers, Russell Banks, Madeleine L’Engle, Dave Berry, on and on, the collection so varied that “eclectic” didn’t even begin to describe it. Denise’s own tastes in books, movies, and music had been the same way.

  Robert sat down on the edge of the sofa-bed and examined the shelves while Lynn taped the metal splint back into place (she’d insisted on cleaning him up as soon as they were through the door; both of them had been shocked at how swollen and discolored Robert’s nose had been, not to mention the size of the cut on the side).

  “All finished,” said Lynn, smoothing the last strip of medical adhesive tape.

  Robert was staring at the doll on one of the shelves. “Where’d you get that?”

  “Get what?” said Lynn, looking to where he pointed. “Oh, the nesting doll?”

  “Matryoshka doll,” Robert corrected. “Denise was fanatical about calling them by their proper name. Is that one of the set Mom used to have?”

  “No. Denise made it for me—and I got the same lecture about its proper name. It was my birthday present from her last year. I remember she felt bad because she gave it to me two weeks late.” Lynn took it off the shelf, then joined her brother on the sofa-bed. “This one holds three more inside. Denise did a great, great job.”

  She offered the doll to Robert, who was stunned to see the degree to which his wife (late wife, he reminded himself) had perfectly, almost eerily, captured Lynn’s face.

  He took the pear-sized and -shaped doll from his sister, examining it more closely. Denise had not only conveyed the basics of Lynn’s face—any sketch artist worth their carbon base could easily have done as much—but had gone much deeper, capturing the subtleties of her features, as well; the way the corners of her eyes scrinched up when she was smiling inside and didn’t want anyone to know it, the mischievous pout of her mouth when she was bursting to share good news with someone and there wasn’t anyone around, the sharpness of her cheekbones that looked almost regal when she chose to accent them with just a hint of rouge—all these details leapt out at him, impressi
ve and mystifying, their craftsmanship nothing short of exquisite.

  He’d never really thought she was—had been—this gifted.

  “God, I hope you thanked her about a million times.”

  “What do you think? Open it.”

  He did, finding an equally sublime depiction of Danny on the doll inside, then a brightly innocent but very much alive likeness of Eric on the doll within that. The last matryoshka was that of an infant, newly-born and wrapped in a soft-blue blanket.

  “You don’t have another kid—or is there something you’re not telling me?”

  “Not yet,” said Lynn, beaming. “But Danny and I have been trying for a few weeks. Denise knew how much I wanted another child, so she gave me one—at least, with the doll. She told me that the Russian mystics believed that the matryoshka had certain powers, that if a person believed enough in the scene the dolls portrayed when they were taken apart and set side-by-side-by-side, then it would come true. I guess a lot of old-country matchmakers used to make matryoshka dolls for the women of their village who were trying to find husbands and start their own families. I even read that someone once made a set of them for Princess Alix of Hesse-Darmstadt that showed her marrying Nicholas II and having several children.” She held the last doll close to her, a wistful look on her face. “Wouldn’t it be nice if that legend were true? That these dolls would cause Danny and me to have another child, a girl this time like Denise painted? We decided if that happens, we’ll name her after Denise.”

  “She’d like that. Romantic and slightly sentimental and a touch bittersweet. She loved that sort of thing.”

  Lynn put down the doll and embraced him tightly. “I’m sorry that I talked about Danny and me wanting another baby. I know how hard you and Denise tried, and then to have some...some fucker steal the body like that...I was being selfish, I wasn’t thinking. Forgive me?”

  “Nothing to forgive.” Robert returned her embrace with equal affection, his mind flipping through its memory-pages until it came upon Denise’s cramped work area in the basement, and he saw her there as she must have looked when working, alone for countless silent hours, concentrating with almost superhuman intensity as she layered detail upon detail until the face of each doll seemed alive, her back aching from the lumps in the old swivel chair that she was forever refusing to replace, as above her, neatly aligned on the shelves of a hutch she’d bought for twelve dollars at a yard sale two years ago, other matryoshka dolls watched over her, giving silent thanks to her for having brought them into existence.

  Turning the doll over, he saw that she had signed the bottom—her handwriting was always lovely—with her calligraphy pen. He remembered when she’d taken the calligraphy class at the community center, how excited she’d been, because it meant that she no longer had to buy pretty-picture Hallmark cards, she could make her own. “I think it makes it more special, don’t you?” she’d said. “Doing the card by hand—and I can use different colors of ink. They’ll be gorgeous...if I don’t screw up.” And her calligraphy had been smooth and elegant—as was her name written on the bottom of the first doll. Until the day he died, Robert would recognize her handwriting and calligraphy on sight, even though he’d never really told her how terrific she’d gotten at it. He never told her how terrific she’d been at a lot of things.

  He wondered—Mr. Clueless—why she’d never painted a set of dolls for him. Had he been that apathetic about her chosen hobby? Did his apathy cross her mind during those long, silent hours of painting detail upon detail, causing her to wonder if anything she did held real value or possessed a meaning beyond the visual pleasure of looking at the finished product?

  I’m sorry, hon, God, I’m so sorry...forgive me...forgive me....

  Lynn pulled away, patted his shoulder, and—after reassembling the dolls—announced it was time to go downstairs and get a decent, tasty, home-cooked meal into him.

  He didn’t argue.

  It would be good to feel something warm inside.

  * * *

  In sleep he surrendered to the chill timelessness that always accompanies the suppression of grief. The place in his heart where once love for Denise had existed was silently, stealthily replaced by a lonely ache that filled every crevice of his body.

  He awakened to look down upon his sleeping self. He saw a man isolated, apart; ineffective and meaningless. A blink, a sigh, a shiver, and he was lying in the bed once again, reunited with his flesh.

  He stared at the ceiling, feeling overwhelmed and invaded, as if another Self, a sad, broken thing that had lain dormant for so long, impatient and inaccessible, was insinuating itself into his flesh, forcing out the man he’d always thought himself to be. Pale moonlight shone like a beam from a projector through the window, alighting on the full-length mirror leaning against one of the walls.

  In this bed, he was alone.

  But not so in the mirror’s reflection.

  Denise, her wide gray eyes radiant, was lying next to him there.

  The mirror’s reflection was repeated in the glass of the window behind him, and that reflection, in turn, was repeated in the mirror, back and forth, one into the other, a hundred Roberts, a hundred Denises, reflected one within the other within the other into infinity.

  He concentrated on the reflection in the mirror, wondering if he should chance touching her—the Self in the mirror did the same things he did, their movements and gestures synchronized like two Olympic swimmers; if he were to make that Self caress her, would he himself feel the warmth of her lips, the smoothness of her skin, the ordered, necessary, unavoidable erotic truth that was her body? He’d always felt that way. Every time he saw her, every time they kissed, every time he caught a scent of her perfume that entered a room just before she did, he was amazed at the rush of emotions within him. Being with her wasn’t like having a fantasy come true before he was ready for it; it was like having a fantasy come true before he’d even had the fantasy.

  In the mirror, he put his arm around her, and they began to drift off to sleep—

  —They’re dead...They’re dead...They’re—

  —Robert sat up and turned on the small bedside (or was it sofa-side?) lamp, his body soaked in sweat.

  He shuddered, then looked at the mirror.

  The black-eyed, bandaged-nosed reflection of him-Now and him-Alone stared back.

  Dammit, why did this have to happen again? The first time he’d had a hallucination—or flashback, or waking dream, or whatever in the hell you wanted to call it—had been the night after he buried Emily in the back yard. He spent the remainder of that night sleeping—scratch that—trying to sleep at a nearby motel, but any bed was too big without Denise next to him, so he decided he would not spend the next night in the house, either, or the night after that, or any night, if he could help it. The first step in that plan had been to spend the night in a seat at the movies, but then his nose had—

  “Ah, hell.”

  He leaned forward, rubbed his eyes, and looked at the time.

  3:47 a.m.

  He hated the idea of taking another sedative on top of the Demerol—from such mistakes were junkies and corpses made—but he had to get some sleep. The funeral was in seven hours, and he didn’t want to show up looking dead himself.

  Fifteen minutes later, after taking half a tablet of his prescribed sedative and turning the mirror around so that it faced the wall, he was more awake than ever. He thought about going downstairs to watch television but was afraid his moving around would waken Lynn and she’d panic and go into her mother-hen routine—

  —that wasn’t fair to her. She was only doing what she thought necessary, coming after him and all of that. Who’d have thought she’d turn out to be the responsible one?

  Okay, then: read something.

  Denise had gotten him into the habit of reading at bedtime, claiming that it gave the mind focus and therefore made it easier to relax and fall asleep. It also—depending on what you chose to read—helped to unconsciously b
olster your literacy level. This last claim of hers, which had seemed absurd to him at the time, gained some respectability later on when Gene MacIntyre, the news director at Channel 7, complimented Robert on his “solid copy.”

  “I’ve always preferred the Edward R. Murrow, no-bullshit style of television reporting,” MacIntyre had said. “Most reporters hand in copy that’s too concerned with grabbing the viewers’ attention and holding it—no wonder broadcast journalism has degenerated into over-baked sensationalism. I don’t know what you’ve been doing to sharpen your writing, Bob, but it’s working like nobody’s business. Your last few pieces have been models of clarity and structure. I like that right down to the ground.”

  His copy wouldn’t have looked so good had not Denise coaxed him into reading more.

  And he’d been arrogant enough to think that all of his recent success was his sole doing.

  He pulled himself out of bed and stood in front of the bookshelves, searching for a book with the kind of title that would have piqued Denise’s interest.

  He thought of the bookshelves back at the house that held her favorite books; bittersweet, melancholy, even tragic novels like The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne, Georgy Girl, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, Other Bells For Us to Ring, The Small Rain, The Dean’s Watch, tales filled with alienation and regret and longing. He once asked her (more out of idle curiosity that genuine interest) why she was drawn to novels that were so sad.

  “Because there are only two things that really count,” she said. “People you love, and sadness; everything else traces back to them, eventually.”

  He found himself staring into the eyes of Lynn’s matryoshka counterpart.