by Ninie Hammon
Jack was feeling his way, not knowing what he thought until he heard the words come out of his mouth. “That summer, a lot of what happened, the mean-ness, was directed at specific people.”
“Who?”
“Me, for one.”
“Why you?”
“Some folks are partial to vanilla, don’t much care for chocolate.”
“You and who else?”
“Daniel. And a little girl named Becca Hawkins.”
“She wouldn’t be kin to—?”
“Billy Ray Hawkins? She’s his daughter.”
“And the people who singled you three out were children, other children?”
Jack nodded.
“I believe I’m going to have me another sit-down discussion with some kids, starting with Ariel Murphy,” the sheriff said. Then he shifted uncomfortably. “But…spiders?” he asked. “Did the kids who were after you—?”
“No.” Jack’s voice was quiet. “Not spiders. Snakes.”
* * * * * * *
Jack and Daniel rode together in silence down the tree-lined streets of Bradford’s Ridge that now seemed sinister to Jack. It was a sensation deeper and stronger, though less tangible, than his cop’s sixth sense. It was as if what he had seen as he’d driven into town only a couple of hours earlier, what the casual traveler saw out their car windows was air brushed reality. Reality with the ugly covered over. Now Jack saw shadows of the old hag…the old witch…beneath the pretty powder and red lips of the town facade.
When they passed beneath Chapman Whitworth’s welcome sign, Jack spoke.
“What Michael Rutherford said to you, it’s not privileged information is it, like what you say to a priest?”
Daniel continued to stare out the window, his face expressionless.
“Daniel!”
Daniel started, turned to Jack.
“What?”
“You know, sometimes talking to you is a lot like being on hold with no music. It’s hard to tell if you’re actually connected.”
“I’m sorry, I was…” He stopped. “Ever since we got here, I’ve been remembering things, but the images don’t make any sense. They’re random, like pictures dumped into a heap on the floor, out of sequence.”
“And when you do get a clear look at an image,” Jack continued Daniel’s thought, “it’s like….like there’s a bell jar turned upside down on top of it. You can see it, but you can’t get in there to feel it, like a real memory.”
Daniel nodded agreement and seemed to relax. The ghost of a smile passed across his face. “Misery may love company,” he said, “but lunacy truly thrives on companionship.”
“Did you remember Rutherford after you saw him? Was he on the team with us?”
“Flashes, images of this little fat kid was all I got, but he said he wasn’t on the team. He was the bat boy.”
“What did he want with you, why did he want to see you?”
“I’m not sure I know. He was in terrible pain, stuffed so full of morphine most of what he said didn’t make a whole lot of sense. I’ve been trying to piece it together. He talked a lot about this one time when he was with Becca and me at—he called it ‘the crack in the rock,’ said it was an awful, scary place.”
“Where was he talking about?”
“I don’t know. I tried to ask but I’m not even sure he heard me. He said he begged us not to go in, that the ‘others’—he called them the Bad Kids—would kill us if we followed them. Then he went off about vines and moss that’d grow over our faces, and the screaming would drive us mad, stuff like that. He said we wouldn’t listen, though, went in anyway. But he didn’t. He was so scared he wet his pants and ran away.”
Daniel stopped.
“At that point in the story, he came to, sort of. It was the only time I was certain he knew who he was and who I was, that he was in the present, understood what was going on. He grabbed my hand and said…let me get this right, he said, ‘When you came out of there with Jack, your eyes were blank and you walked away separate, in different directions.’ He said that after that, you and Becca and I weren’t the Three Musketeers anymore, that it was like we didn’t even know each other.”
Jack could see storm clouds moving in from the west and knew they weren’t going to make it back to Cincinnati before the rain hit. Sometimes he enjoyed the pummeling of a hard rain—watching it from the comfort of a warm room with a glowing fire, of course. But he distinctly disliked driving in the rain.
“Mikey said it was happening again, the stuff that happened when we were kids. Do you know what he’s talking about? Do you remember it?”
“Some. And more is coming back all the time.” Jack told Daniel about his conversation with the sheriff.
“Does it make any sense to you, Jack? Twenty-six years ago, a bunch of kids in Bradford’s Ridge did horrible things to us—to get at Becca, I think.”
He looked a question at Jack.
“Yeah, I think they were after Becca, only messed with us because we got in their way.”
“And now those kids are adults and they’re willing to kill people to find her, and meanwhile other little kids in Bradford’s Ridge are doing the same kinds of bad things they did. It’s crazy.”
“What did Rutherford say about the Bad Kids? Did he know who they were, specifically—names?” Jack swallowed hard. “It wasn’t the whole team, was it?”
It was clear Daniel hadn’t even considered the possibility that all of the boys in that picture—fifteen of them besides himself, Jack and Michael Rutherford—might go inexplicably nutso and start killing people.
“No, not the whole team,” he said quickly. “He said there were six of them, Jacob Dumas, Walter Stephenson, Roger Willingham, Victor Alexander, Ronald Martin and Cole Stuart. Cole was the ringleader, the head bad-ass, I think.”
Jack had relaxed perceptibly as soon as Daniel said there weren’t fifteen potential assassins.
“And we know where four of them are,” Daniel continued. “They’re dead. So that leaves Victor Alexander and Cole Stuart.” He looked earnestly at Jack. “Did you find those two when you were trying to locate the members of the team?”
Jack stared ahead as pudgy raindrops began to splat down onto the car and tried not to let his relief show.
“Yup, and neither one of them is going anywhere anytime soon so we’ve got a little breathing room before…” he didn’t finish. “Victor Alexander is locked up in a mental hospital in Texas, in solitary in an old building with walls three feet thick. Cole Stuart is a deck hand on a commercial fishing boat that left port in Gloucester, Massachusetts, three weeks ago. Those boats stay out for two or three months at a time.”
Daniel squinted and pinched the top of his nose, then rubbed his temples as if his head were throbbing. Dark half-moons showed under his eyes.
“Are you Ok?” Jack asked.
“Emily’s having an affair.”
Jack managed not to respond at all, merely stared ahead through the windshield.
“I said that out loud, didn’t I?” Daniel asked, his voice soft.
“Yep.”
“I’m sorry, I…”
“I handle all such disclosures like they were soap bubbles,” Jack said. “Just let them float there in the air, don’t touch them, because I know how fragile they are.”
“I didn’t mean to say anything, it just popped out. A thing like that… when you have a rotted tooth, your tongue goes to the hole all the time, even when touching it lights you up with pain.”
Jack hadn’t ever blown bubbles. Had never felt safe enough with anybody to be vulnerable about his private life.
“I was married once.” The words felt strange in Jack’s mouth. “My wife’s name was…”
He pictured her often—daily!—and remembered her, but he never said her name, hadn’t said it aloud since the night he’d wandered through their apartment calling out to her, crying out in disbelieving agony while the dust still hung in the air in the city. He wailed her n
ame again and again until his voice grew weak, made an eerie rasp and rattle, a sound like wind-driven sleet against a window pane or the whispery, scratching sound of scuttling cockroaches. He had stopped calling then. When the sound of that voice registered in his ears, he went instantly mute. And he hadn’t spoken her name aloud since, because he was afraid if he did, it would come out in that voice, the ugly, ragged voice of loss and grief.
“Lyla,” Jack said.
CHAPTER 25
Lyla’s face formed in Jack’s mind, the details as clear as a digital image on a hi-def television screen. Two-dimensional, of course. He could never summon her face into his mind as she had looked alive. It was always just an image, like a glove after the hand has been removed, with the detailed stitching on the outside plainly visible, but with no force to animate it, give it form and depth.
At first, he wouldn’t allow himself the indulgence of remembering. Memories were no comfort. The mental history of their years together, days, moments, sliced him open to the bone whenever he went anywhere near it.
But when the pain was no longer eviscerating, he found he could gut it out for the muted joy of paging through the catalogue of their lives, flipping from one memory to the next, the touch of her skin, the just-washed smell of her hair, the bubbling lilt of her laughter, her grin when she’d kiss her palm and then blow it to him.
He’d been harsh. He could remember the sound of his own voice, hear it sharp and cutting. Even after all these years, the sound of it made him sick. How could he have spoken to her like that? How could that critical, unyielding tone have colored the last conversation he ever had with her?
“What. Is. This?” Jack speaks each word individually, drops them like rocks that clatter into the silence of the room. Lyla looks up from the sink where she’s washing the breakfast dishes and her cheery countenance drains away.
“What?” she asks. But she knows what he’s talking about it.
“Why would you do this, go here without even telling me?”
He tosses the little white card onto the counter beside the wet dishes in the drainer and water begins to soak into it, darkening the sterile, doctor’s-office whiteness of it.
“I only wanted to find out, that’s all, ask some questions. What’s wrong with that?”
“What difference will the answers make? So some doctor says, ‘Sure, we can perform a procedure,’ or ‘We can…’ oh, I don’t know, give you some exercises or a pill to take. And then you’ll be able to conceive. What good is that?”
“Jack, please listen. I—”
“Or maybe you’re looking for something…what do they call it…invasive. Or Star-Wars-ish where they grow a baby in a Petrie dish and implant it right before you’re due to go into labor so the kid will have a ‘birth’ day.”
“If I knew that not getting pregnant was fixable…”
“Why would that matter? What difference would it make? We’re not having children. We agreed to that.”
A light flares in Lyla’s eyes.
“Agreed? Excuse me. We didn’t agree to anything. You decreed how it was going to be, and because I didn’t launch an instant land battle to get my way, you took that as agreement.”
“You never said—”
“I didn’t know, Jack! In the beginning, I didn’t know. I didn’t say anything because it didn’t occur to me at the ripe old age of nineteen how much it would matter to me in a few years. How much I’d want to become a mother.”
“And you think that’s acceptable? To do a one-hundred-and-eighty-degree switcheroo on me. You think I shouldn’t be upset. Neither of us wanted children on the day I put that ring on your finger and now—”
“Are you saying you wouldn’t have put it there if you’d known then what you know now?”
“Don’t put words in my mouth, Lyla.”
“You wouldn’t have married me if you’d known I’d want kids someday—is that it? Because if that’s the way you feel about it…”
She tosses the dish cloth into the sink where it lands with a plop that splashes dish water onto the front of her bathrobe and then turns to leave. He catches her by the shoulders and holds on.
“I didn’t say that. I’d have put that ring on your finger if you’d had three heads and every one of them uglier than Mrs. Pugh.” That was the old lady who lived in the apartment beneath theirs, who actually had hairs growing out of her crooked nose and banged her cane on the ceiling if they made too much noise when they made love.
She doesn’t look at him, but she doesn’t try to wiggle out of his grasp either.
“Lyla…what’s wrong with the way things are? Aren’t you happy? Am I not enough?”
“You can’t fill a hole in me you weren’t meant to fill. Nothing can fill that emptiness except…a child. Your child. Oh, Jack, it would be so precious with your—”
“Don’t start, Lyla. We’ve been over and over this. It’s because a child would be adorable that I don’t want to have one. I will not bring a child into this world. You wouldn’t want to either if you’d seen what I’ve seen. If you’d seen crack mothers pimping their ten-year-old daughters, kids living in squalor you wouldn’t let a pig—”
“And because you see ugliness every day at work, you think there’s no beauty anywhere. Jack, God created a world of incredible love and beauty if you’d—”
“Don’t play the God card, Lyla. You know there’s not one in my deck. I’ve heard you. At night, I hear you whisper, ask God to ‘soften my heart.’ So why hasn’t he?”
She looks up at him then, a look of anger and defeat on her beautiful features.
“Maybe your heart is so hard even God can’t change it.”
“If my heart is hard, it’s only because it’s jammed so full of love for you that it’s like…you know, like…an impaction.”
She bursts out laughing, doesn’t want to, but can’t help it. And as soon as she starts, he gets caught in it, too.
“An impaction? You missed your calling. You’d have made a fortune writing Valentine cards.”
“It would work. You could rhyme it with attraction.”
“Or putrefaction.”
And they are off again, roaring until their sides hurt and tears run down their faces. Jack knows he’s won, though. At least this round. He leans over and kisses the top of her head.
“You better scoot or you’ll be late for work,” he tells her, shoving her gently toward the bedroom door with a final pat on the butt. “I think I’ll spend my day off looking up words that rhyme with…there’s subtraction and…”
She has left the room. He reaches over and only glances at the soggy card as he tears it in two and tosses it into the trash can: “Bessinger Fertility Clinic, 9 a.m., September 11, 2001.
Jack changes out of his uniform as Lyla showers, puts his gun in the bedside drawer where he always leaves it and gets ready to go to bed as the day is starting for his wife. Ahh, the joys of a split shift. But he’ll be on days again next week and he’s planning a surprise. He has snared tickets to that new off-Broadway show Lyla hasn’t shut up about.
He is stretched out on the couch in his shorts and t-shirt, dozing, when she leans over to kiss him goodbye. Her perfume settles over him in a fragrant haze. Lyla always smells like flowers. He opens his eyes enough to see that she is wearing that red dress, his favorite, the one with the full skirt. As a joke, he bought her a bright-red, taffeta petticoat to go under it. He wonders if she’s wearing it…but she is gone and he drifts back off to sleep.
The waking nightmare begins with the sounds of sirens, hundreds of sirens, wailing and warbling in a haunting symphony he would hear in his nightmares for the rest of his life.
The view out their bedroom window shows the top two or three floors of Tower One high above the distant skyline. He teases Lyla that when she waves at him from her office window there, he can see her. She says she can see him when he waves back.
The view from the window today shows no one waving. Only flames and smoke
.
After that, there are only snapshots.
Speed Dial: Lyla. All lines busy.
He snaps off a button on his shirt as he tries to put it on while he’s running. It arcs in slow motion up into the air and looks for a moment like a dark planet in front of the sun of the flaming buildings.
Speed Dial: Lyla. All lines busy.
Traffic is stopped, snarled, frozen and so he runs.
Speed Dial: Lyla. All lines busy.
A crazy soap box preacher proclaims the end of the world; men in business suits and Italian shoes loot a camera store where crowds desperate for a picture of “history” have broken out the window and door glass.
Speed Dial: Lyla. All lines busy.
In desperation, he grabs a bicycle from a kid and barks “police business,” but the youngster doesn’t even protest. He merely stands there, looking up.
Speed Dial: Lyla …
“Jack! Jack! Is that you?”
He slams on the brakes of the bicycle, loses his balance, and falls. The stampede of people running away threatens to trample him, so he rolls over into a doorway, holding the phone to his ear in fierce desperation.
“Lyla! Are you all right?”
If he can keep her on the line talking to him, the very force of their connection will keep her safe.
“There’s smoke…” she coughs violently. “It’s everywhere. It’s burning below us. We can’t get out.”
“You’ll be fine, Sweetheart. They’ll send a helicopter, take you off the roof of the building. You need to get to the roof.”
“Can’t see. There’s too much smoke.” She is coughing out the words rather than speaking them. Then he hears a rumbling sound and she screams, “The fire broke through. It’s coming!”
“Get to the roof, Honey. If you—”
“I don’t want to burn to death, Jack!” She cries out the words in hysteria. “I can’t…I—they got a window open!”
“Lyla. Lyla!” She doesn’t answer. He can still hear noises, so the line is not dead. “Lyla, answer me!”
“I’m here.” She’s gasping, but not coughing.