The Keeper

by Langan, Sarah,

  A bubble of dread inflated and then began to leak in Liz’s stomach. It filled her arms and legs and chest until she was wet and heavy with it. She walked toward the woods. “Susan? What are you doing?” she asked.

  Susan pressed her face between the thick black bars of the gate and smiled. Her teeth were small and white against bright red lips.

  “It’s freezing, Susan. Why aren’t you wearing a coat?”

  Susan didn’t answer. Instead she pointed at the iron crossbar two feet off the ground, and motioned for Liz to mount it.

  Liz shook her head. It was dark over there. Thick trees blocked the rising sun. “You come here, Susan. It’s dead over there.”

  Susan continued to point, and Liz wanted very much to walk away. For years she had tried to forge some sort of peace with her sister. For years she had sent letters, and ridden her three-speed Schwinn by her apartment, and waved hello at her in town, only to be greeted by silence. It was because of Susan that people looked at her like she was Jeffrey Dahmer’s drinking buddy. And now, at five in the morning in a cemetery on a cold winter day, Susan wanted her to climb a sharply spiked fence. Sounded about right.

  Susan’s small white teeth chattered. Her eyes were wet and dewy from the cold. Crocodile’s tears, Liz thought. But still, this woman was her big sister. This woman was her blood. Against all her best instincts, she put her foot on the first crossbar and hoisted herself up. She didn’t see Susan’s gleeful smile as she jumped down and landed squarely in a snowdrift.

  It was dark on the other side of the fence. Light did not penetrate the clouds or dense forest. The air was thick, and Liz’s breath came heavy, as if trying to extract oxygen from water. Even her mind felt different, like someone had disturbed a snow globe full of buried things and shaken them to the surface. There was anger—no, not anger: rage. There was sorrow. There was happiness, a manic kind of joy, and if it had been a color, it would not have been green or blue, but red.

  Liz stood. Though she didn’t know it, she was crying.

  Susan’s irises danced, blue against black. The blue got big, and then small. It moved in waves, like the ocean tide. Liz knew suddenly that her sister was insane, and that the feelings she had inside her right now were somehow coming from Susan’s mind.

  “Stop,” Liz mouthed, but her voice was trapped in her throat.

  In a grotesque parody of a little girl’s curtsy, Susan lifted her dress. She pulled the thin blue fabric over her knees, her hips, her white panties, all the way up to her gaunt waist. On her stomach was a sunset of bruises colored red and orange, black and blue. Some had faded over time while others looked fresh.

  “Who did this to you?” Liz whispered. “Did he do this?”

  Susan dropped the dress’s hem and it fell back down over her knees. When Liz looked up again, she saw that Susan’s face was bloody. A gash opened in the back of her scalp and blood dripped down her forehead and along either side of her neck. Her pretty blue dress became wet. Like menstrual fluid, it trickled between her legs and stained the white snow red.

  Liz took a breath. Then another. Another. All in a row. Quick. Another. She grew dizzy, no longer breathing, simply hitching. In the sky, it was as if dawn had receded into night. And were they alone? No, she and Susan were not alone. She could feel eyes watching her from the woods, from the cemetery, from the town. If she looked hard enough, she thought she would see faces.

  “What have you done?” Liz cried.

  Susan smiled. Clots of blood as thick as phlegm clung to her front teeth. It was an angry smile, a mean smile. A smile Liz knew very well. A hungry smile. In the snow, the stain of blood grew larger.

  Liz ran. Her feet sank below the drifts as she charged the fence. She slammed against the metal posts and hoisted herself up. But then, with a strength she would not have guessed possible, Susan yanked her by the back of the neck and hurled her into a snowbank. The wind rushed from her body in a whoosh as she lay dazed on the ground.

  Suddenly, something heavy was on her chest. Something was squeezing her throat. She screamed, but all that came out was a muffled whimper. Her air was cut off. All gone. Her eyes felt tight and bulging, and the meat of her tongue flopped in her mouth. What was happening? She tried to breathe, but the air, where had it gone?

  She lurched left and then right. Tried to roll. Balled her hands into fists and punched the thing on her chest, the weight. What was this? What was happening? A moment of clarity told her it was Susan. Susan was kneeling on her chest. Susan was strangling her, of course.

  She punched harder, but she didn’t have any leverage. Her lungs spasmed in silent screams. They hurt. Everything hurt suddenly. Everything was screaming. She needed to breathe!

  She jammed her fists into Susan’s back. Tried to breathe again. Gasped, then sobbed, even though there was no sound. She punched again, but it wasn’t easy. She could hardly make a fist. Her muscles were beginning to cramp. They curled up inside her like basement bugs playing dead in unison.

  Overhead, all she could see was the dark sky and her bloody sister’s dancing eyes. She swung her fists again, but this time only reached Susan’s sides. Her eyes hurt so bad, she thought they might have popped out of their sockets. Her throat hurt, too. But she only vaguely knew that part. Only vaguely cared. All she wanted was a breath.

  She punched again, more weakly. Again. Again. Still trying to breathe. She punched again. This time she missed completely, and swiped at air. Something thick and wet dribbled across her face and she knew dully that it was Susan’s blood.

  Please, God. Dear God. I’m only eighteen. Please, she thought.

  Red and gray sparks filled the air, and her body stopped screaming. She sank deeper into the snow that crumbled around her. She thought about sleep, but she noticed the way the trees weren’t moving. Birds weren’t chirping. Even Susan’s struggles above her were without sound. She kicked up her legs and tried to roll even though Susan had her pinned. It was the sound of silence she fought against. She knew it was the sound of her own death.

  A warmth trickled between her legs as her bladder released. Her legs stopped wriggling. She felt herself go loose. Felt herself stop caring. Knew that she should care, but somehow, she didn’t. The sparks faded into nothing, and her eyelids fluttered before they closed.

  She drifted. Not a good kind of sleep. A terrible one. She didn’t see a light waiting for her. The tunnel was shiny black, and inside of it was her daddy.

  Daddy? Daddy, did you do this?

  He was walking toward her, and he wasn’t smiling.

  But then the tunnel got farther away, and his body became a speck in the distance. Then the sparks returned. And the pain. Then she was on her side, gasping at air that tasted so sweet it might have been sugar. Just as quickly as it had happened, it was over. Susan had released her. Susan had let go.

  Liz coughed. She looked up at her sister. The blood had matted Susan’s blond hair into something dark and wet. Her face was bloody, too, so that she was unrecognizable, save for her wild, blue eyes.

  Overhead, a breeze came and the trees shook in the wind. The snow they carried fell on the two girls, sprinkling their hair with white. If there were birds foolish enough to venture into these woods, they would have flown away. If Liz had not been prostrate where she lay, she would have run. It did not matter where.

  Susan pointed at Liz, and though she did not speak, Liz knew what she was thinking. You. It should have been you.

  “No,” Liz rasped.

  Susan nodded: You. And then she retreated, her bare feet treading soundlessly, deep into the woods.

  TWO

  Instruction

  Paul Martin wondered if he might be suffocating. But that was life, you were always suffocating. The radiators at the Bedford High School were on overdrive today, and beads of sweat ran down his back and under his arms. He kept his elbows bent as he wrote on the board, but only a red-eyed albino wouldn’t notice the crater-sized pit stains on his shirt.

  He dr
ew an isosceles triangle with a phallic-looking pipe at its apex and the words “Capital” and “Jobs” at either angle along the base. Couldn’t make it much simpler. He looked down at their bent heads. He had asked them a question about the mill, and they were supposed to be reading about subsidies in the handout he had given them from the Wall Street Journal in order to answer it. Most were examining their fingernails or doodling on the white space of their Xeroxes. Even their doodles looked bored; little hearts, lyrics to songs. A few were looking out the window.

  He followed their gaze and noticed that it had just begun to rain. Although he’d lived in Bedford for almost twenty years, he’d never gotten used to the rain.

  Some people could predict when it was going to come or how bad a year it would be. They said they could feel it in their fingers, their knees, and their lungs, as if it came from something inside them.

  Last year, the rain had flooded all of Main Street and filled up the valley like a bathtub. The water had mixed with the chemicals from the mill so that when it rolled down his nose and inside his lips, he’d tasted rotten eggs and acid rain, the stuff people used to breathe every day here, on his tongue.

  The Clott Paper Mill had closed one month ago, but even now Paul could smell traces of the sulfur that had leached to the air and water. Vats of the volatile stuff were still sitting in the vacant mill, waiting for pickup by waste management vendors. If a few kids, or better yet, brain-damaged former employees, set off a couple of firecrackers in the old place, the town could go up in a puff of smoke.

  Paul looked at his students. There had been no rebellion from them the day the mill had closed its doors for good. No indignant editorials in the student paper. No efforts from the town council to lure new industry. Just tight-lipped, New England resignation. And now the rain that came every year was falling, and none of his kids seemed surprised. They did not marvel at it or wonder why it happened only in Bedford. They were crazy, like everyone else in this town.

  He sighed. “What’s the news?” he asked the nineteen high school seniors in his American history class. He taught both history and math and tried, whenever possible, to combine the two into economics. It was one of the few perks about teaching in a low-paying district with a small population and only a handful of teachers. You could do whatever you wanted and no one gave a damn. That, and down here in the valley there wasn’t any cell phone reception, so he didn’t have to compete with phones chirping to the beat of Kelly Clarkson’s latest crap anthem in the middle of his lectures.

  His students stared off, watching the metal clock that hung behind him. It was three-fifty on a Thursday afternoon in March, five minutes before the bell rang and school let out for the day.

  “It’s raining,” Carrie Dubois said. She smiled an aren’t-I-cute? sort of smile, but he did not smile back.

  “Yeah. That happens. What do you think about what you read?” he asked, then pointed at the board. “I don’t have to explain this, do I?”

  No one volunteered a hand. He tried to think of something that would make them laugh. He could not. It made him feel old. It made him feel like he couldn’t blame them.

  He looked at them again. A showdown. Talk, people. Talk. Say anything. Jaine Hodkin, the self-declared trendsetter of the class because she visited New York during Christmas breaks and carried purses made out of junked seat belts, yawned. Paul glared at her. She directed her eyes at the window as if to say: The rain. Sorry buddy, it’s the rain.

  He cleared his throat and pointed at the triangle. “I’m assuming you know what this means. I won’t insult your intelligence. What about subsidies? Do you think they could work?”

  No one answered. He tried to lock Louise’s eyes. Maybe even Craig’s; he always had something to say. They stared down at their hands, which were folded over their notebooks, and he knew they were counting down the seconds until the bell rang.

  He took a breath of wet air, opened a window, and considered running away. “You’re right. It doesn’t matter. Hey, it was just a mill. It smelled anyway. And look what the chemicals did to our water. So what if all the amphibians are dead, and we’ve got five times the pediatric asthma rate as the rest of the country? They don’t owe us anything for all the years they’ve stolen, do they? What do you care that the company moved to Canada? No skin off your backs. It’s not like your parents were canned, right?” he asked.

  He caught the eye of Owen Read, whose long legs were wrapped around the seat of the girl in front of him like he was Christ’s gift to anything in a skirt. Paul felt his control give way. In its place burgeoned a dull, impotent rage.

  He knocked on Owen’s desk until Owen reluctantly sat up straight. “This isn’t study hall,” he whispered, knowing as he said it that he sounded like an ass.

  “Hey, it’s not like I care. I’ll keep my job for at least another year, until so many people move away that the school shuts down. And anyone who leaves here’ll be fine, unless your parents stay, in which case you might have to support them. But that’s okay, too. You’ll just let ’em starve, right? Who the hell cares?” He raised his voice and noticed that most of the class was looking in his direction now, surprised expressions on their faces. “Who the hell gives a shit?”

  Bobby Fullbright raised his hand. Paul nodded at him in a way that said: Make it short. Bobby was a basketball player. All those kids were pretty dumb. Hell, all the kids in Bedford were pretty dumb. Liz Marley had even written that the European Economic Community was comprised of “sugar, spice, and everything nice,” on the last current events exam.

  “I don’t understand why we’re talking about this. The mill’s not gonna open again. Even if we’d gotten government subsidies, it was a losing business. There’s no reason for a grant to reopen it or anything, it doesn’t make sense. It’d be buying time.” Bobby’s voice was soft and croaking like a dying frog. Paul had to admit he respected the kid. But he always had the easy answer. He never thought things through. Or maybe he did. Maybe he was the heartless descendant of Adam Smith.

  “Does anyone agree with Bobby?” Paul asked. No one raised a hand. Bobby blushed.

  “Do you care at all?” he said, maybe to Bobby, maybe to all of them. “How can you people give up like this? How are you going to get through life if it’s this easy for you to give up? There won’t be another industry. We’ve gotta have subsidies unless we want to turn into a micro Worcester where everybody looks like they’re two paychecks away from a park bench and their teeth are black because they can’t afford a dentist. That’s how the world works. It doesn’t need to be efficient. It just needs to keep everybody with a job.” Paul leaned over Bobby’s desk. “Tell me this—who cares about economic sense when you’re dealing with real people, real live people who have to stand in line for day-old Dunkin’ Donuts crullers in a church basement while some doctor who puts in four-hour days at his country club gets to send his kids to private college in the good old U. S. of A. Tell me, Bobby.” Paul finished by waving his arms in a big, sweeping gesture.

  Bobby opened his mouth. The bell rang. Students filed out.

  “So read your texts tonight!” he called out to the second-semester seniors who had either been accepted at a college and didn’t care, or weren’t going to college and had stopped caring a long time ago. “Do some homework, for once,” he said as the last student exited the class.

  A half hour later, Paul was looking over some papers at his desk. The door to his classroom was closed, and he took a swig from his metal thermos. Absolut vodka and lime juice. His stomach gurgled queasily and he wished he’d brought something else, maybe a big ole martini. No, that wouldn’t go down any better. His favorite was scotch and soda, a wee splash of soda. This morning, he’d found his liquor cabinet to be depleted of the scotch. He’d have to remember to drop by Don’s Liquor Bonanza on his way home in case Cathy forgot.

  Since Cathy had gotten better two years before, which, coincidentally or really not so coincidentally, coincided with Paul’s affinity
for morning nightcaps, she’d stopped buying booze. She said she didn’t want to be a codependent. From her years of lying in bed and watching Oprah all day, she had learned words like “straight talk” and “tough love.” She used them frequently, and it reminded Paul of that movie The Stepford Wives, where all the women turn into mechanical robots that repeat the same meaningless bullshit over and over again. If it weren’t his life, it would be funny.

  Unfortunately, it was his life.

  Cathy liked a mix of lithium and Prozac. At first they put her on Xanax, but that just made her cry more. Then they tried pure lithium. That was around the time Paul would come home straight from work, dress her, plant her at the kitchen table, and cook dinner for the kids. When she’d start crying over her pasta, he’d say things like: Mom’s crying happy tears! After that they tried straight Prozac and that was better, but not much. She’d get up at night and dig at the Saran Wrap–covered leftovers with her fingers. She gained thirty pounds and wouldn’t go out in public because she said she looked pregnant. Finally, two years ago, they found a doctor who prescribed the perfect combination. It was like finding the right drink, really. Two parts scotch, one part soda, a little lithium with your gin? And she became cool and busy and never got sad and never got really happy, either.

  Paul wanted to say he liked the change in her. But he couldn’t help feeling that people don’t miraculously get better in the same way that people don’t just get sick. There is something inside them, some chemical imbalance, that makes them who they are. The pills might chain it down for a while, but any day now, it would surface. Funny or not so funny, he hadn’t seen that sickness in her until after they were married.