by J. S. Bailey
He moves into the entryway and halts when he sees two figures through the long, oval pane of glass.
Jenny and Jason have come home, too late.
They keep knocking, more and more frantic, and when no one answers the door, a key turns in the lock and the door swings inward with a creak. Jason, clad in a long black coat and gloves, steps over the threshold first; and Jenny, whose dark hair is styled in an updo held together with hairspray and pins, follows holding a gift bag emblazoned with a Nativity scene pattern.
Carrie hadn’t put up the tree that December. She hadn’t thought anyone would come by to see it.
“Mom?” Jason calls, his tone hesitant. “Are you here?”
Brother and sister step further into the house.
“Her car’s in the driveway,” Jenny says. “She might be in the bathroom.”
They stand there awkwardly. The lonely walker wishes he could be seen and heard so he can give them the comfort they’ll need.
“Mom, we have something important to tell you,” Jenny says.
The house reflects silence back at them.
Jenny clears her throat. “Are you here, Mom?”
“Something’s wrong,” Jason says.
The grown man who was once a little boy drawing pictures in the dining room shoves his way into the bathroom and lets out a cry. Jenny rushes in behind him, dropping the gift bag to the floor. Something inside it shatters.
“Oh no,” Jenny moans. “And just when we found out who—”
Not wanting to be further witness to their grief, the lonely walker slips outside without a glance behind him.
He tilts his head toward the winter-gray sky. Snow might come later, but for now the world is calm and peaceful.
He’d enjoyed living as Carrie despite her sorrows. He had hoped she would stay after, like he had, but she has moved on.
Now that she is gone, he will have to become someone else. Maybe a younger person this time. Maybe someone whose life sees no mourning.
He reaches the road, turns right, and keeps walking.
“SPEAKING of controversy,” Miss Gomez said, “what do you think about the children?”
“They were obviously adopted,” said Bree. “I knew that as soon as the author described them.”
“The story mentions that Carrie gave birth to them. What do you think about that?”
Bree shrugged. “Embryo donation. Big deal.”
“This whole story is like a snapshot in time,” said Eric in the second row. “It shows what people thought about touchy subjects.”
“It could be said that all stories are snapshots of the times in which they were written,” Miss Gomez said. “Wouldn’t you agree?”
Her students nodded. None of them looked half-asleep anymore. She would have to assign this story more often.
“So what do you all think this story is about?” Miss Gomez asked. She sat down at her desk and examined her students’ rapt faces as they thought about the tale they had read.
“The old controversy of embryo donation,” Gianna said.
“Transgender issues,” said Andrew.
The class was silent a moment. “I think,” said a normally-quiet girl named Susan, “it means that no matter how much you envy someone else’s life, it’s going to come with its own set of problems. No one’s life is perfect.”
Miss Gomez nodded. “Good point. Anyone else?”
“I don’t know,” said Bree. “Sometimes I wonder if stories are just stories.”
“Another good point.” Miss Gomez hid a smirk as the bell rang. Stories were always about something, even if no one knew it. “Now be sure to read this story if you haven’t yet. You’ll be quizzed on it tomorrow.”
As one, her students gathered up their things and filed out of the room.
FOUR
SARAH SET DOWN her pen and sighed at the mess she’d written. This thing would have to go through some serious editing before anyone else could look at it. Heck, maybe she could stick it in a box and let it simmer for half a century before daring to look at it again.
“Let someone try to find meaning in that,” she said to her cats lying in the sunny place on the office floor. She yawned, stretched, and rubbed her hands together. Time to get back to novel writing.
“HONEY, COME ON. It’s just a little bit farther.”
Harold lifted his gaze and regarded his wife, Tamara, who stood thirty yards up the slope from him, bundled in a violently purple coat with white fuzz around the hood and cuffs, red gloves, and a fluorescent pink scarf—looking, in general, like either a walking Valentine decoration or a tall adolescent going through a particularly colorful fashion phase.
Yet another gust of snow whipped through the woods, obscuring Tamara from view. “Give me a minute,” Harold said, trying to still his chattering teeth. He’d not dressed decently enough for this little outing. He’d forgotten to bring gloves, for one, and his coat had no hood, so it felt like his ears were about to shatter and fall off. Then, to himself, he muttered, “I should have stayed home.” He was missing the big game for this, but it was to make Tamara happy, and that was far more important than watching men much more fit than himself run around tackling a ball, right?
Tamara’s laugh was like music on the wind. “I heard that! Come on, it shouldn’t be more than a few minutes now. Trust me, the view is worth the trip.”
Harold shivered and put another foot forward. At least an inch of snow lay on the trail, and it was still falling from the sky in tiny icy pieces that stung his cheeks and forehead. Tamara had pestered him about coming out here for months, and somehow she’d convinced him to go during the worst weather possible.
“It’s not so bad out,” Tamara had said over coffee and eggs that morning. “And it’s not like we’ll get another chance to do it for months. You can even take your camera if it makes you happy.” She’d smiled then, and her blue eyes twinkled with the same mischief that had captivated him eight years ago when they met: back then he’d been a balding, overweight thirty-five, and she a bright-eyed blonde twenty-three.
Harold knew that the only way to get Tamara to stop pestering him about going to the scenic overlook trail she’d supposedly loved as a girl was to actually go—sometimes one had to make sacrifices to have a little peace and quiet. “I’ll go find it, then,” he said, hefting his bulk out of the dining room chair and making his way toward his quiet study.
In the end he hadn’t been able to find his camera anywhere and decided he must have accidentally donated it to Goodwill along with the five giant boxes of dusty books he’d never gotten around to reading. (For months Tamara had complained that his growing collection of unread tomes was slowly suffocating her so he’d discreetly taken them to the thrift store one day when she was out at the mall. Peace had reigned once more in their household, if only briefly.)
So, gloveless and cameraless, Harold had driven Tamara thirty miles into the mountains, parked in the closed trailhead lot, and set out into the billowing and gusting snow, praying that Tamara would get too cold and ask to go home before they made it to the top.
Harold took another step forward and slipped, coming down onto his hands and knees so hard that tears sprang into his eyes.
Tamara was at his side in an instant. She must be part mountain goat to have gotten down here so fast, he thought as he struggled to his feet. Since she’d wrapped the fluorescent pink scarf across the bottom of her face, only her bright blue eyes were visible, as youthful and calculating as always. “Oh my gosh, are you okay?” she panted. “Let me see your hands!”
He dutifully turned his palms so she could see them. Somehow they looked too white and too purple at the same time. “I’m fine,” he said as she cooed over him like a child who’d found an abandoned kitten under the porch. “But sometimes I think you’ll be the death of me.”
HAROLD remembered the day he and Tamara met. It had begun an ordinary day marked by coffee, a late bus, and a dreary cubicle that Harold had tried to liven u
p with pictures of his ten-year-old gray tabby, Sprinkles. After he’d settled into the office twenty minutes later than he was supposed to, he heard an unfamiliar cough in the cubicle next to his and peered over the dividing wall to sate his curiosity.
A skinny blonde was staring into a compact mirror and daubing blush onto her cheeks. Detecting Harold’s presence, she turned and said, “Oh, hello. You must be Harold Swinson.” She snapped the compact closed and set it on the desk, eyeing him appraisingly.
At first Harold couldn’t speak. The blonde wore a dangerously low-cut black top and a white, calf-length skirt. She sat with her legs crossed, revealing pale ankles and shiny black high heels. Harold had the brief mental image of shirt, skirt, and heels lying in a pile on his bedroom floor, then shook his head and said, “How did you know my name?”
“I looked in your cubicle before you got here. It’s good to know your neighbors, right?”
Harold made an involuntary glance at his desk, where in addition to the many pictures of Sprinkles, he’d arranged a stack of business cards, a pad of yellow Post-it notes, and a cup of pens. “I suppose so,” he said. “What’s your name?”
“Tamara Winslow. I just started here this morning. Want to go to lunch with me?”
Harold found himself accepting before his brain could properly process the request.
When the office emptied out at eleven-thirty, he walked Tamara to the little café two blocks down, wondering why in the world a young woman like her would want to go to lunch with a man like him. He certainly wasn’t handsome—the girls in school had made that painfully clear, and things had only gone downhill for him since then, what with half his hair falling out and his pants going up five sizes and all—and he had about as much charm as a pair of toenail clippers forgotten in the back of someone’s vanity drawer.
Still, she’d asked him to lunch, which was possibly the best thing that had ever happened to him.
“Have you worked for Dorset and Perkins for long?” Tamara asked when they were halfway to the café, her high heels tap-tap-tapping on the sidewalk and her white skirt swishing with every movement. “I know we didn’t get to talk much earlier.”
“Thirteen years,” Harold said with a grimace. Then he remembered that women were generally more attracted to happy faces than unhappy ones, so he forced his expression into a smile. “But it pays the bills.”
Tamara beamed up at him. “Thirteen years? I was ten thirteen years ago.”
“Now you’re just making me feel old.”
“You, old? You don’t look a day over twenty-five.”
Harold was too pleased to care she’d lied. “I’m sure I don’t.”
“Oh, look at that!” Tamara said suddenly, pointing at the sky.
“What?” Harold started to say, but as soon as he followed her line of sight, he tripped and fell to the sidewalk like a dropped bag of cement.
HAROLD had to keep his arm in a cast for weeks. He’d tripped over half a brick someone had carelessly abandoned on the sidewalk, and when he went down, his left wrist had taken all 230 pounds of his weight and shattered into more pieces than he wanted to think about.
“And to think all I saw was a silly little bird,” Tamara said as she brought coffee into his cubicle and set it on his desk one morning. “If I hadn’t pointed it out, you’d have been looking where you were going and wouldn’t have tripped.”
She was very good to him during those weeks, fussing over him like she was his mother and flirting with him like she wasn’t. At least Harold thought it might be flirting—he didn’t have a huge amount of experience with that sort of thing, so he wasn’t completely sure—though when Tamara casually asked him if he’d like to go to the Diamond Lounge for drinks one evening, he knew he’d been right.
“Of course I’ll go,” he said. “But you’re driving.”
She’d smiled her Tamara smile at him again, and he felt as though his entire essence had been reduced to a smitten puddle on the floor. Tamara Winslow was like a skinny, blonde goddess who had bestowed her favor on him.
The heels helped.
THEN there was the ladder.
Harold had married Tamara, and six months later it was December, when a storm covered their world in a sheet of ice.
“Harold, when are you going to hang the Christmas lights?” Tamara asked one afternoon when Harold came home from the office. (Tamara had already quit; her new occupations being Housewife and Spender of Harold’s Money.)
“When it isn’t a skating rink out there anymore,” Harold grunted as he undid his tie. It had not been a good day at the office. He’d gotten into an argument with his boss, Peter Dorset, over the proper use of office stationery, and then the office copier broke when he still had a hundred prints to run off. Hanging Christmas lights that same day would have amounted to some form of medieval torture.
Tamara put on her Tamara pout. “It’ll be spring by then. When I was a kid, my dad would hang Christmas lights every winter no matter what the weather was like, and we loved it. It’s still sunny out. Why don’t you just go get it done now while you have the chance?”
Harold sighed. “Let me go find my boots.”
HAROLD dragged the old wooden ladder out of the garage and propped it against the side of the house, then grabbed an armful of colorful lights and a bag of clamps and set them on the ground beside it. Tamara was right: it was still sunny, something he’d failed to notice on the drive home due to his foul mood but that was all too obvious now that he stood out in the middle of it. Everything looked coated in glowing yellow-white glass: the trees, the power lines, the mailbox, the bushes. Someone could tap one thing with a hammer and watch the whole world explode into icy splinters.
Shaking his head, Harold hooked the bag of clamps over one arm and took the light strand in the other, then started up the ladder.
He didn’t remember falling. He did remember waking up in an ambulance feeling like someone had used a hatchet on the back of his skull.
Tamara sat at his side in the hospital, holding his hand while machines bleeped and blooped around him. “It was just one of those freak things,” she murmured, stroking her other hand across his forehead. “The sixth rung just snapped when you stepped on it. You’re lucky you have me; you could have laid there for hours before someone noticed you.”
Harold felt immensely grateful toward his wife in that moment. She really had saved his life by calling the ambulance in time. He was a lucky man indeed.
HAROLD continued up the snowy path, Tamara pulling ahead of him once more. His wrist ached where it had been broken eight years earlier, and despite his efforts to ignore it, the pain only worsened.
“Almost there,” Tamara said. “We’re almost there.”
The trees ended and the path opened out over a snow-filled valley that made Harold really, really want his camera. He walked to the edge of the drop-off to get a better look.
“I told you it was worth the climb,” Tamara said. “Now you see why we always came here?”
The sight of the snow-covered trees in the valley arrested Harold so much that he forgot about the cold and his aching arm. It was like a scene in a snow globe, and the only thing that would make it any better was—
Tamara had stepped behind him.
He felt her hands on his back, and at first he thought she would massage the chill out of him, but then he felt a push.
TAMARA Swinson sat in her living room with her younger sister Gloria, drinking hot tea and laughing about a chick flick they’d just seen the night before.
Harold sat in his chair off to the side with vacant eyes, completely silent.
“I feel so bad for him,” Gloria said, looking toward her brother-in-law once their laughter had died down. “He may have been duller than a brick sometimes, but he was always so nice. Clumsy, though. I swear the man was trying to set a record for hospital visits.”
Tamara let her gaze rest upon her husband and allowed a tiny smile to turn up the corner of her mouth. Haro
ld’s chest rose and fell with regularity, but he made no other movements. Sometimes she wondered what he was thinking, or if he even thought anything at all. With Harold it had always been hard to tell. “They say there’s a chance he might improve.”
“Tamara, he landed on his head when he fell off that cliff. He’s not going to be up doing jigs anytime soon.”
“He never did jigs, anyway. I doubt he knew how.”
“Yes, well, at least he still knows how to breathe.” Gloria took another sip of her tea. “He’s lucky to have you, though. You’ve always been so good to him.”
Tamara’s smile broadened. And I always will be.
A SHORT STORY PREQUEL TO RAGE’S ECHO
HE’D HAD TO do it. Jerry Madison always told himself that.
But then Jerry had experienced a very equal and opposite reaction to his actions, resulting in his own gruesome and brutal death.
Jerry had opted to linger near his murder site (it had conveniently occurred behind a cemetery), which he’d felt would be better than staying at his house and suffering through new occupants who, more likely than not, would find a way to make it awful.
Jerry walked past headstones, memorizing the names engraved upon them. Here lay Millicent Adams, born in 1910, died in 1920, the poor girl; and here lay Karl Dumford, who’d made it to seventy before passing in 1981; and here lay…
Jerry halted, listening. Then he heard it again: a faint whimper coming from the direction of the parking lot.
He turned.
A strawberry blonde head bobbed in and out of view as the child it belonged to wove around the various monuments to the dead. At last she stopped at a stone bench, planted herself on it, and buried her face in her hands.