And so I slept. Afternoon. Night. Morning. It made no difference. Sleep was my forgetting. My oblivion. My only peace.
To sleep, perchance to dream …
Food forgotten, I grew gaunt, paper-skinned, my hair dull and matted. I wanted nothing—nothing but to be with him. I wanted to see him. I wanted to hold him. I wanted him alive. I’d do anything.
Anything!
I sat up in bed, my heart swelling with the sudden joy of possibility.
It took six rings before Drew finally answered his phone.
“Hello?” His voice sounded thick and pinched.
“Unlock your back door,” I said. “I’m coming over.”
“Lily, is that you? What’s going on?”
I couldn’t waste precious time explaining. “Just do it. I’m leaving now.”
Without bothering to change out of the nightgown I’d worn since returning from Collin’s funeral a week earlier, I raced through the midnight-dark streets until I got to his house.
The sight of it was almost too much to bear, the memories flooding back, piercing me with longing: Collin and I cuddled together on his sofa, laughing, feeding each other popcorn, kissing … I refused to let my thoughts go any further.
It would be like that again, I told myself. It had to be!
Drew met me at the door. He looked ashen, his eyes swollen from too much crying.
“The paw!” I cried. “Do you still have it?”
Bewildered, he nodded. “I couldn’t stand to look at it again. It’s still under my bed where I threw it that afternoon.”
I flung my arms around him. “Oh, Drew, why didn’t we think of it before? We must have been crazy with grief not to think of it sooner.”
“Think of what?”
“The other two wishes. You’ve only used one.”
“Wasn’t one enough? My brother …” His voice broke.
“We’ll use another wish!” I cried. “Don’t you see? There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy. It’s the paw! The magic paw! We’ll wish Collin alive!”
Drew shook his head. “You’re not thinking straight, Lily. People don’t come back from the dead.”
I wouldn’t listen. Instead, I pushed past him into the house, hurried up the stairs to his bedroom.
Drew followed me, flipped on his light. I glanced around. His once car-covered walls were bare, the posters all gone. I fell to my knees, rummaged around in the mess of dirty socks and half-empty Doritos bags under his bed until my fingers found the paw. I pulled it out triumphantly, waved it at Drew.
“Hurry!” I cried. “Take it and make a wish.”
Drew gripped my shoulders. “Come on, Lily. There’s no such thing as a magic monkey paw.” He looked away, and his voice dropped to barely a whisper. “It was just our imagination, that’s all. A coincidence.”
“You don’t believe that,” I said.
“Yes, I do.”
He was lying. He believed in the monkey paw’s magic as much as I did. So why wouldn’t he make a wish? Why wouldn’t he bring Collin back?
I knew what I was about to say was cruel, but I didn’t care.
“You owe him this wish, Drew. Your first wish—your selfish first wish—killed him. So you can either bring him back alive, or live with his blood on your hands. It’s your choice.”
“No,” he groaned.
“Wish,” I urged.
He hesitated.
“Wish!”
His expression turned fierce then, belligerent. Raising the paw above his head, he cried, “I wish Collin was alive again!”
Outside, the world fell silent, as if muffled by some giant hand.
Inside, the paw fell to the floor, and Drew’s fierce expression faded. Slumping onto the floor, he moaned, “No, no, no, no.”
“He’ll come to me now!” I shrieked gleefully. “I know it. He’s rushing to me already.”
I hurried to the window and looked out.
Love goes toward love.
“No, no, no, no.” Behind me, Drew was still moaning.
“He’ll come. I can feel it. Feel him. We just have to be patient.” In my madness to hold Collin again, I babbled. “The cemetery is two miles away. It will take some time. But the wish worked. It worked!”
I had already turned back to the window, searching the street for Collin—my beautiful, beloved Collin—when Drew said, “I know he’ll come. That’s what scares me.”
“Scares you? He’s your brother.”
Drew stood. Gripping my shoulders, he turned me to face him. “Think, Lily. He’s been dead for days—embalmed, buried, sealed in a box in the ground for seven whole days.”
“No,” I said. “He wouldn’t come back like that. That’s not what you wished for. You wished for him to be alive like he was before.”
“Those who interfere with their fate only meet great sorrow,” said Drew, quoting from Mrs. Alvarez’s story. “Don’t you get it? The wishes always go bad.”
There was a soft knock on the back door.
I stood motionless, holding my breath, barely able to hope.
The knock sounded again.
“It’s Collin!” I cried. “It’s my heart!”
I took two steps before Drew caught my arm and held me tightly. “What are you going to do?”
“I’m going to answer the door. Let me go, it’s my Collin!”
Breaking free, I plunged down the dark staircase.
Drew was behind me, holding me back, frantic. “Don’t let it in,” he pleaded. “For God’s sake, Lily. Can’t you smell it?”
“Smell what?” I squirmed in his grip.
“Death,” sobbed Drew. “Wet earth and decay. You can’t let it in. I won’t let you.” He locked his arms around my waist and began dragging me back up the stairs to his bedroom, his skinny body stronger than I’d ever imagined.
For a moment, I hesitated, saw the certainty and determination in Drew’s eyes. Was he right?
O, that way madness lies …
“No!”
I fought him. I kicked and thrashed.
There was another knock at the door. More insistent this time. Then another. And another.
My beloved was there, within my reach, if only—
I sank my teeth into Drew’s upper arm. I felt his flesh give way, tasted the iron tinge of his blood.
He screamed, pushed me away. For one second, I tottered on the edge of the stairs, arms whirling, frantically trying to gain my balance. I made a wild clutch at the handrail. Then I was cartwheeling down the stairs, rolling over and over until I hit bottom. I felt a searing, sharp pain, my neck giving way with a loud snap! Then I was floating, floating away …
Drew stood at the top of the stairs, anguished tears streaming down his face, the monkey paw held high above his head. He had one last wish.
I heard another knock on the back door.
I felt my life slipping away.
One last wish, Drew. Save me!
His lips moved. “I wish my brother dead again.”
“Noooooo!”
The knocking stopped.
So, too, did my time on earth.
Mike felt a wave of sympathy so strong and spontaneous that it made his eyes sting. He blinked back the tears. The last thing he wanted to do was burst out crying in front of a bunch of kids—even dead ones. Still, that kind of loss—how could she endure it? Keeping his head down, he breathed slowly and deliberately.
It was Blanche who put into words what he was feeling. “Wretchedly tragic,” she said with a sorrowful shake of her head, “to have not only lost your life, but your love as well.”
“Oh, but I didn’t lose love,” corrected Lily. “Real love, like mine and Collin’s, has no final act.” She smiled. “And you know what else? Collin is out there, loving me and waiting for me. We’ll be together again. I know it.” She looked toward the sky, her eyes glowing.
“Doubt thou the stars are fire,
Doubt that the
sun doth move;
Doubt truth to be a liar;
But never doubt I love.”
Mike followed the direction of her gaze, half-expecting Collin’s ghost to float down from the sky. But all he saw was the polished-bone moon and a sprinkling of fading stars.
“It’s not just love that lives forever,” said a new voice.
Mike turned to find a boy in a pair of jeans and a T-shirt standing beside a simple granite stone.
“You see this grave with my name on it?” the boy said, pointing. “It’s empty … well, almost empty. If you were to dig down through the tree roots and earthworms, you’d find a casket and not much else. There is one thing buried down there, though.”
“What’s that?” asked Mike.
“A chrome hood ornament. It was the only thing my folks were left with … afterward. All those rescue workers. The salvage crew. And all they ever found was that rotten hood ornament. Weird, huh?”
Mike and the others nodded.
“Even weirder was Mom and Dad’s decision to bury it in my place, give it a funeral. I like to think Kev convinced them to do that, that he saw a way to be rid of the cursed thing and memorialize me at the same time. But I’ll never know for sure. All I know is that they nestled the ornament into the tailored red crepe of the Concord Casket Company’s Autumn Oak Special and buried it.
“Six feet down.
“Sealed for all eternity from leakage and rust.
“And you know what else?
“I bet … no, I know it’s glowing down there in the pitch-blackness of my grave. Can’t you feel it?
“Glowing red.
“And seething mad.
“Evil that never dies …”
MY BEST FRIEND, KEV, wasn’t a crazy driver. You need to know that right up front. On the day it all began, his license was only two weeks old, and he was being even more cautious and uptight than usual.
Basically, this meant he was a total basket case.
“Tell me again,” Kev said nervously as we exited onto I-94 and headed east toward Indiana. “Why are we doing this?” Both his hands clenched the steering wheel, his white knuckles positioned at ten and two just like we’d learned in driver’s ed.
“Because it’s an adventure, man,” I replied, trying as usual to pump up his enthusiasm. “Because we’ve got nothing better to do. Because”—I patted the car seat—“the grandpa-mobile deserves something a little more bangin’ than Papa Smurf.”
Earlier that summer, Kev’s folks had given him the keys to his grandfather’s old Chrysler Newport, a puke-beige four-door complete with rooftop luggage rack and bench seats. Honest, bench seats! They’d even come with those beaded seat covers tied over them. You know, the kind that are supposed to massage your back while you’re driving? Anyway, the first thing Kev did was yank out those covers. Underneath, the upholstery was pockmarked with cigarette burns, and tufts of padding poked up through the holes. Until he could find something better, he’d covered it all up with a Smurfs beach towel he’d taken from his mom’s linen closet.
“Really? You couldn’t have just grabbed a plain brown one?” I’d said the first time I’d planted my butt on that sprawling village of blue cottages. Shuddering, I’d inched closer to the door so I wouldn’t have to sit on Papa Smurf’s face. Talk about creepy!
Kev gulped. “I didn’t want to take anything too nice. My mom might have gotten mad.”
I snorted. Like cookie-baking Mrs. Longo was going to go nuclear over a Kmart brand bath towel, right? But that was classic Kev. He maneuvered through his life as timidly as he drove his car, his eyes constantly searching the horizon for phantom accidents, his foot always hovering above the brake pedal.
I patted the crazy towel, reminding him of our errand. “Really, man,” I said. “If you go back to school next week sporting this, nothing can save you, not even me.”
I’d been saving Kev ever since that day way back in eighth grade when he’d walked into the lunchroom of Richard J. Daley Junior High School. Half the size of the other guys and skinny as a Twizzler, he stood there—the new kid—one hand picking nervously at a scab on his pointy chin, the other clutching the handle of his Battle-star Galactica lunch box. He scanned the room, looking for a place to sit down.
“Look what the cat dragged in,” drawled the ever-original Doug Buell. “A munchkin!”
A couple of the guys at my table snickered.
Encouraged, Buell went on, “Hey, runt, where’d you get that lunch box? From Babies ‘R’ Us?”
“Come on,” I said, seeing Kev’s face redden. “Leave him alone.”
But Buell figured he was on a roll. He swaggered over to Kev. “So this is what Oscar looks like out of his trash can. Man, that’s uh-uh-uh-gly!”
Kev kind of ducked into himself, like a turtle into its shell.
And I pushed up from the table. I wasn’t trying to be a hero or anything, but when you’ve got three little sisters at home, you can’t help developing a soft spot for the weak and defenseless.
I stepped toward Buell. “Chill out, Doug.” I poked him in the forehead with my finger.
He poked me back.
I shoved him in the chest.
He shoved me back.
I punched him in the shoulder. Twice. Hard. “Leave him alone,” I repeated. Maybe it was the seriousness of my tone, or the fact that none of the other guys were laughing anymore, or maybe the timer on his tiny attention span had gone off. Whatever the reason, Buell backed down. But not without a parting shot. “Guess you’ve found a member of your own species, huh, Grabowski?”
I shrugged. “If you mean the human species, then I guess so,” I replied. I headed back to the table, Kev in tow.
I’d been towing him ever since.
The green-and-white exit marker came up on our left. Kev put on his signal and conscientiously checked his rearview mirror. Then, puttering along at ten miles below the speed limit, we drove down Cline Avenue to Columbus and made a right into a car wasteland bogusly called Darryl’s Auto Salvage. I say bogus, because Darryl’s was nothing but twelve acres of crushed and rusted car remains surrounded by a five-foot-high corrugated tin fence. The place blended in real good with the rest of the junk that lined the southern lip of Lake Michigan—oil refineries, steel mills, pawnshops.
Kev pulled onto a graveled patch that looked like a parking area and turned off the car’s engine. “I don’t think we’re going to find any seat covers here.”
I figured he was right. Still, we’d just braved the Chicago traffic, driven the forty miles from Tinley Park. “Let’s check it out,” I said.
We wound our way through the maze of scrap metal and car parts. Around one curve we found a slip-sliding mountain of hubcaps; around another was a precariously balanced tower of balding tires. I freed a front spoiler from a tangle of belts and hoses, kicked at an oozing battery. That’s when I saw the hood ornament, its flawless chrome glowing bright against the rusting skeleton of a Packard hearse.
Kev saw it, too, and he gave a little gasp. Walking over with exaggerated casualness, he picked it up. I know it’s weird, but for a second he looked like he was holding a ball of fire, like the thing might actually scorch his hands. Its glow lit up his face, spotlighting the smile forming on his lips. He didn’t have to say a word. I knew he wanted it.
The ornament was shaped like a stallion rearing up in a fighting stance—neck arched, muscles taut, front hooves beating the empty air. On its ferocious face, its nostrils flared, and its eyes—red stones sunk deep into the metal—flashed with anger. Two nubs, like tiny horns, sprouted from its forehead. And its chrome lips, curled back in the heat of battle, revealed teeth that were not really teeth, but fangs. Razor-sharp like a wolf’s, not a horse’s.
What’s that about? I wondered.
Kev glanced at the price tag taped to its bottom.
“Ten bucks,” he said. He pulled out his billfold, counted his money, sighed. “I don’t suppose—”
I shook my h
ead. “Sorry, man, I’m busted.”
“Then there’s only one thing to do,” said Kev. He tucked the ornament under his shirt.
“No way!” I gasped. “You’re going to steal it? You?”
I couldn’t believe it. Not Kev. Not the guy who made his bed every morning, who returned his library books on time, who came to a complete, three-second stop at every stop sign!
“You’re kidding, right?” I said.
But I knew he wasn’t. Crossing his bony arms over the conspicuous lump under his shirt, he sidled toward the parking lot. “Are you coming, or what?” he asked.
Licking my lips, which were suddenly dry, I glanced over at the shack that served as the junkyard’s office. Through its one grimy window, I could see Darryl—a concrete block of a guy—talking on the phone. His face had the look of a pit bull. He leaned forward to peer at us through the streaked glass.
“This is not a good idea,” I hissed.
But Kev just kept going. Bent over, pressing the ornament to his belly, he speed-walked toward the gap in the corrugated fence and out into the parking lot. Not exactly nonchalant.
The office door popped open, and Darryl’s beefy shape filled the frame. “Hey,” he shouted, “what’re you kids up to?”
“N-n-not a thing,” I stammered, trying to keep my cool. Whirling, I took off after Kev.
He was already in the Chrysler, the motor running. “Quick, get in,” he said.
As I flung myself into the passenger seat, Kev put it into gear. Even though he was driving the getaway car, he signaled before turning left onto Cline Avenue.
“This is no time to drive like an old man!” I shouted. “Put the pedal to the metal!”
He inched the grandpa-mobile up to the speed limit.
I caught my breath, let a few miles pass before turning to Kev. “What was that about? We could have gotten our friggin’ butts flattened back there,” I told him, although friggin’ and butt weren’t exactly the words I used. “And all for that … that piss-ugly piece of metal.” I looked down at the ornament lying on the seat between us.
“I couldn’t leave it, Rich,” said Kev, his eyes kind of glazing over for a second. “I don’t know why, but I had to take it. It was like it wanted me to … like it insisted.”
On the Day I Died Page 9