by Glen Krisch
“Uninhibited? Energetic? Yeah, so? He’s also a leader, and he’s sharp as a tack. Trust me, Trev is going to turn out just fine, and that’s all because of you.”
Jack felt both raw and emotionally drained. He removed the joint tucked behind his ear and perched it on his lip, his hands shaking. He fished out his lighter and lit the joint, drawing the pungent smoke into his lungs. He held it for several seconds before slowly exhaling.
“So … why did you leave? Did he hit you?”
He offered her the joint, but she waved him off.
“No, it was nothing like that. Curtis is the most nonviolent person I know. And, while I’ve always had my suspicions, I don’t know for certain if he ever cheated on me.” She blinked several times, as if deciding whether or not to continue.
“So … what was it?” Jack said and took another toke, his hands not so shaky.
“Don’t tell anyone, especially Krista because she doesn’t know the whole story.”
“Scouts’ honor.”
“Curtis turned into someone I didn’t recognize. We’ve never been wealthy people—”
“You don’t say!”
“Hey, asshole, I’m trying to bare my soul,” she said.
“Yeah, sorry, carry on, carry on.”
“Anyway, last year I started working at an artisanal bakery. It’s run by my two friends, Reece and Parker.”
“Sounds expensive.”
“It is, but it’s so worth it. So I started working behind the counter, taking orders, keeping everything stocked. It wasn’t much money, but it added up, and I got a nice discount.”
Jack felt a deepening mellow. “Sounds like a good deal.”
“It was … until Parker noticed checks and credit card slips went missing from the cash register whenever Curtis came to pick me up.”
“No way!”
“Yeah, my hippie dippy partner got involved in an identity theft ring, and he’s facing jail time. I wanted to let the courts sort it out, you know? If he went to jail, then our relationship would be pretty much kaput. But I decided I couldn’t do it. Sticking by him through that? That would mean I supported his bullshit behavior.”
“Yeah, that doesn’t sound like you. You’re all about the karma.”
“I know! So, while trying to figure everything out, I thought about you and how well you do as a single parent.”
“And, hell, if I could do it, why not you?”
“Take the dang compliment, will you?”
“If I must. But just because Trev isn’t a felon yet, doesn’t mean I’ve got life figured out.”
Leah laughed softly and reached for the joint. She brought it to her lips and took a drag. She coughed most of it out, but smiled as she handed it back to him.
“I thought weed messed with your vibrations?” Jack said.
His sister was the only hippie he’d ever met who didn’t partake in the occasional joint.
“Yeah, that’s my first hit since before the twins.” She looked like she was holding back, like she wanted to talk more. The corner of her mouth creased into a smirk. “Maybe I need some dulling.” She turned toward the sliding door. “You might want to distance yourself from the house. Poppa would lose his mind if he found you smoking the wacky tobacky.”
“Will do,” he said and nodded.
Leah reached for the door handle.
“Leah?” Jack called before she could open the door. “I’m glad we all decided to come back, even just for shooting the shit like this.”
“Me, too, little brother. Don’t stay up too late.”
“Can you do me a favor? Make sure Trevor isn’t tearing down the house or setting fires?”
“I’m sure he’s fine … but I will.”
“Thanks, Leah.”
After slipping inside, she turned off the light and drifted through the darkened interior of the kitchen.
Jack was alone with the impenetrable woods, the glimmering stars overhead, the loons and their forlorn cries. He drew on the joint, held it in, and ambled away from the deck, the smoke seeping slowly from his lungs.
The wooden stairs creaked beneath his feet, but by the time he reached the sandy dirt trail winding through the woods, he moved unseen, like a subtle intruder in a foreign land.
The weed turned down the noise of his thoughts. The sand was cold under his bare feet. There were other houses nestled around the lake, but he couldn’t see them. The black water stretched out to the horizon, to the curve of the earth. Pinpricks of starlight sprawled above, making him feel both incredibly small and incredibly lucky to be alive.
“Come here, son …” the voice called out behind him.
Her voice. Nan.
He jerked around, his steady buzz descending to paranoia.
“Hello?” he called out, his voice cracking on the last syllable. His heart ached in his chest, a slow lurch of adrenaline fighting through the languor of a daylong drinking binge topped off with grade-A weed. He blinked, starting to doubt his ears.
He saw nothing beyond the dark blue of the midnight sand, and the grassy eddies of encroaching wilderness unfurling from the hillside. Even still, he felt a presence, an insistent pressure issuing from the night. It caressed him, and his skin coursed with cold sweat.
And then a slight human shape materialized from the gloom, a gauzy white shimmer among the dark and darker backdrop. It flickered on the breeze like an ephemeral white flame.
“I’ve been waiting to see you …”
Graceful strides broke up the singular column of flowing white. Stick-thin arms reached out for him, and even though the person—Yes, person! Not a ghost. Not some fucking ghost—was still thirty feet away, he felt its icy touch against his face, tracing cold trails that held him rooted to the spot. He couldn’t move a step; his left eye twitched spastically.
He wanted to believe he was hallucinating. Surely this had to be Krista. The steely eyes, the lush curly hair, the note-for-note mannerisms. But his mind wouldn’t allow him this self-deception. This wasn’t Krista, no matter how much he wanted to believe.
“What are you doing here?” He was speaking to something, someone, who could not possibly be standing before him. He cleared his throat. “You’re not real. I saw you. You died. We had a funeral.”
“Yes, you saw me … you saw me die, and you did nothing to help me. Your face was the last thing I saw. Your fear. Your guilt.”
Her lips didn’t move, but he clearly heard every syllable.
“You fucking died,” he said through wet sobs. “What … what do you want from me?”
Finally able to move, he stepped backward, nearly catching his heel in the sand.
She said nothing.
A loon called nearby, the sound of utter despair.
He sensed movement in the periphery but saw nothing lurking in the woods. No one to save him. When he returned his gaze to Nan—Jesus, lord, it really is his Nan—she was inches away. She no longer appeared as he last remembered her, stooped, pained, but with laugh lines drawn deeply across her mouth.
Layers of her cycled to the surface in glimpses before ceding to the next. Her image flashed through every stage of her life, until the images blurred, until they became one.
“You always were a wicked boy,” she said, again her lips not moving.
She extended a hand veiled in white mist, reaching for him, and it drew in his heat, fed off him like a vampire gorging on blood.
Without thinking, he shoved both hands against her shoulders. Bitter cold greeted his skin and raced up his arms. She didn’t move.
“And you still haven’t learned.”
He stumbled away, not wanting to ever again feel her wretched cold touch. His stomach roiled, ready to spew Jim Beam soaked vomit.
And then he saw movement through the woods as a half dozen or more gauz
y white apparitions drifted out onto the sand as one. They formed a dome around him, pinning him to the shore. He backed away until his feet met water, and still they advanced.
“You wretched little boy. Wretched little thing …”
The spirits had vacant shadows for eyes, as if their vision had been hacked out by a dull blade. They wore simple nightgowns, or play clothes once made of rugged material. Waifish girls, no older than Clara. They all advanced, arms outstretched. Every one of them but Nan.
A weak wave lapped at his ankles.
Jack backed away, farther still, away from them, away from the consideration that any of this was really happening.
“We fucking buried you!”
“You would never listen to your Nan. Would never open your eyes and see anything besides your own interests. You wicked little—”
Jack turned and dove wildly into the water. He kicked hard below the surface. Even with his eyes open, he saw nothing more than a hint of air bubbles leaving his lungs. As he thrashed, trying to force his drunken limbs into something resembling a rhythm, he lost his bearings. His chest burned. Hot bile and whiskey bubbled at the back of his throat.
His heartbeat throbbed in his ears as the pressure mounted. He couldn’t do it. If he could only swim across the entirety of the Little Whisper, he would sprint away with some semblance of his sanity. But he was too slow, definitely too drunk, and in the depths of his soul, he was too weak. Weak of spirit.
Instead of fighting to reach the surface, he let his body go slack. He drifted in the darkness, his thoughts just as aimless, his body nearly passed out from exertion.
Vomit scorched up his throat and plumed around him as he surfaced.
He fanned his arms around him to keep his head above water. A loon’s call greeted him; that, and nothing more. He was alone, a mere ten feet from the floating dock.
So much closer than the empty shore.
“What was all that?” he whispered aloud. “Seriously. What the fuck?”
Jack dog-paddled to the anchored dock, and since the ladder was on the opposite side, he took hold of the deck’s edge to pull himself up. His feet kicked under the dock and encountered the slimy chain tethering it to the anchor. A sickening feeling, but he didn’t care. He sputtered, short of breath. His hands slipped and his arms quavered. He finally hoisted himself onto the deck, like something rotten washed up on shore.
He panted as he caught his breath, his eyes fixed on the beach. Nothing. He began to question the weed, wondering if it had been laced with something. LSD maybe. He shivered, feeling foolish being stuck out here on the dock. He wanted to be in his bed, covered in quilts stitched from Nan’s own hands. He wanted to put not only this night behind him, but the one from earlier, the night of Nan’s death.
Shoving the thought away, Jack removed the pint of Beam from his pocket. It was still over half full. He sat and wrapped his arms around his knees, unscrewed the bottle, and took a warming gulp. The alcohol burned, fighting his vomit-coated throat. Not the first time he fought fire with gasoline, and most certainly not the last. He took another pull.
A loon called once, then the night air was still.
No, not just still, but empty. Void of life.
And as he strained to hear the second loon’s reply, he noticed a number of shimmering white shapes, glowing as if lit up from within, lurking just beneath the surface of the water, closing on the floating dock.
“No …” he whispered. “No-no-no, this can’t be happening. It has to be tainted weed. Has to be.”
The shapes glided through the dark water, illuminating ringlets of sluggish seaweed as they passed. All at once the faces of eyeless children broke the surface, surrounding the dock on all sides. Arms rose from the water, reaching for him, imploring him.
The dock tipped to one side, drawing his frantic gaze from the water. Ascending the ladder—one hand after another pulling higher—climbed Nan. Every layer of Nan’s life cycled through her visage like shifting photographs: from youthful beauty to withered old woman, with pain straining her every movement.
Jack stepped as far away as he could and the dock bobbed under his feet. The children, in their soaked play clothes and nightgowns, rose from the water, grasping for the dock. A dozen or more eyeless faces leered at him. The children hissed, as if their lungs were once again expelling their final breaths. Jack sank to his knees and tipped the bottle of whiskey to his lips. He drained it, fuck all, not caring what happened to him. He sobbed as the world beneath him began to sway.
He closed his eyes as one dead child after another stepped onto the deck.
“You were always such a wicked thing …”
He could feel Nan reaching for him.
Jack leaned over, pulled his knees to his chest. He plugged his ears with his fingers and started chanting, quietly at first, then louder and louder still, until he no longer feared ever having to hear Nan’s undead words ringing through his head.
“Not going to hear no more … no more, no more. No, I’m not going to hear no more, oh no …”
He rocked himself, still chanting, still plugging his ears, waiting for the whiskey to take him in its murky embrace. Unconsciousness made more sense than what he found before him, where the barrier between the living and dead was no longer black and white.
His mind teetered, on the brink.
CHAPTER 11
Krista woke just after dawn but didn’t know why. She hadn’t gotten nearly enough sleep, didn’t have to pee, didn’t hear a noise, or have any pressing need to drive her from the comfortable warmth of the covers, but even so, as she lay in Neal’s arms, she realized she wouldn’t be able to fall back to sleep.
She listened to Neal’s breathing, considered leaning in to kiss him, but from his inhalations she could tell he was in a deep sleep. His cheeks bristled with beard stubble. He normally shaved like clockwork every morning, but since they were on vacation he’d let the habit lapse. She only now noticed the beginnings of gray creeping into the growth, and she brushed her fingers ever-so-lightly across his jawline. His breathing remained steady, but his lips formed a slight smile. She wondered what he was dreaming about, and if her gentle touch had changed the course of his subconscious events.
The longer she remained awake, the more alert she became, and that alertness made her lament forgetting to down some aspirin. Her head throbbed with a dull ache.
Neal slept with his hand draped over her hip. She shifted away, rolling until her feet dangled off the edge. She stood slowly, carefully, trying to minimize the jostling of both the bed and her head.
She looked back at Neal, but he hadn’t even stirred. After slipping into her robe, she slinked out into the hallway. A weighted silence filled the house, as if she had caught nature drowsily curled in on itself against the chill. She closed the door behind her as quietly as possible and made her way to the kitchen.
The view out the back windows made her nearly forget her mounting headache. Dense fog drifted off the lake, sweeping up the hillside, filling in the empty spaces between trees like quicksand finding its level. It reached the back deck, heavy clouds trapped by gravity.
As she stared into the white blanket, she filled a glass from the tap and drank down the water’s rusty coldness. Poppa hadn’t changed much since she had last visited, so it wasn’t surprising when she found a bottle of Excedrin in the first cabinet.
It’s like I never left the place.
She shook two pills into her palm and downed them with another glass of water. Though it was likely wishful thinking, the tension was already easing from her temples.
It crossed her mind to return to bed. Sure, she would most likely not fall back to sleep, but maybe she didn’t need to. Maybe she could rouse Neal to rekindle their fun from last night. Remembering the intensity, heat rushed across the length of her neck.
She knew she should let him
sleep, so she wandered the ground floor, hoping to hear someone else stirring. The house withheld any auditory reply; the walls themselves seemed to hold their breaths.
Krista stopped in her tracks when her mind flashed with the crystal-clear image of Nan’s quilt suspended in midair, looking every bit a secret clubhouse fashioned by children. And the giggles; those sounds were so real in her memory. But she had been mistaken. Certainly mistaken. She shook her head, trying to clear it. If anything, she had recalled memory from her own youth, of Leah and Breann and herself, willing away a rainy summer afternoon.
Satisfied enough to quell her thoughts, she entered Poppa’s library. The writing desk tucked into the near corner drew her attention. A crescent shaped clutter of papers, folders, and research books. The bare center of the crescent was his writing surface, where he jotted his work longhand before typing it into his computer. The desk faced a shelf of his published work. He’d written fifteen or so nonfiction books dating back forty years.
Even though he’d kept producing quality books for decades, he was mostly known for his second book, the now classic of the environmental movement, To Heal the Land. That one title alone had allowed Poppa to decide his own path in life, to pursue whatever his desire. Other people would have given in to sloth or decadence, but Poppa’s relative wealth had freed him to live his authentic self. He’d long supported the conservation movement with his time, money, and passion. In the 1980s he’d led protests against a logging company wanting to buy up the local forests for clear-cutting. He’d wound up buying parcels of land amounting to hundreds of acres when the owners felt like they couldn’t pass up the logging company’s offer. He’d then turned the land over to the local park district, and with the help of a hefty donation on his part, they’d become caretakers.
Besides To Heal the Land, Poppa had mostly written about predatory relationships in the wild. He’d written about coyotes and opossums, and the ever-opportunistic raccoon. He’d also written about deer and beavers changing the very geography of their habitats based on the ebb and flow of their populations.
Krista ran her fingers across the old battered desktop. How many hours had he spent in the room, refining his words to exact precision?