The Kings and Queens of Roam: A Novel

by Wallace, Daniel

  She looked out the window. She could have been looking at a painting: no movement at all, nothing, not even a bird. The dogs were gone. They’d filled the yard for so long (only a few days, really, but it felt like forever) that their absence made the view a lonely one.

  Then something did move. She saw it now: a single dog. It sat at the edge of the field, waiting. The dog caught her looking, and in the moment their connection was made it raised itself up on all fours and ambled away. Looked back just once to make sure she was still watching. A little farther on it stopped, sat, and waited again.

  She opened the door and stood by it for a moment: she knew exactly what came next, and wasn’t sure whether she was up to facing it. But then she decided of course she was. Her life had been practice for exactly now. Markus and Digby watched her from the window as she walked through the yard, through the vast and empty field, and disappeared into the forbidding forest beyond.

  MRS. MCCALLISTER

  Mrs. McCallister knew Rachel was coming. She heard it the way one hears things when you’re dead: news just blows past your ears, and if you’re listening you can pick it up.

  She’d been there on the other side of the bridge for an hour, waiting. Then she saw her daughter, pushing through the woods, a crowd of the oddest-looking people behind her.

  Mrs. McCallister waved. It had been a long time since she’d been anywhere but the church. Sometimes she visited her own grave, because it felt like home. Kids would come down in the middle of the night and gather around her stone while one of them told the story, in hushed tones, of how she died, how Mr. McCallister drove off the bridge and into the lake in pure daylight. No one knows how or why it happened, they said. Maybe they saw a ghost themselves!

  It was a bird! she wanted to tell them. A bird flew into my hair! But she didn’t want to give them the satisfaction. One time they gathered in their spooky little group on top of her grave and a twig snapped somewhere out in the woods and they ran for it. Chickens. She remembered being scared like that; it was how she spent most of her life, actually. Death turned out to be quite a relief, for her and her husband both. They still cared about things, of course, cared a great deal. But they didn’t worry, because what could they do? They were dead.

  Rachel had changed. Mrs. McCallister could see that. She was a woman now, all grown up, but the change went deeper than that. Rachel looked as though she’d died, too. She looked like a statue carved to honor the girl she used to be. Even her hair was different. Once it glowed a gentle orange, like a late setting sun; now it blazed a fiery red.

  “You knew, didn’t you?” Rachel said, getting right to it. “What Helen did to me.”

  Mrs. McCallister smiled. “You know me,” she said. “Even though—”

  “I know you,” Rachel said. “I imagined you just like this.”

  “So not even a hello?”

  “Not even that.”

  In the forest Mrs. McCallister saw more of those dogs slipping in the shadows between the trees. They were a nuisance. One of them had defecated quite near her grave.

  “Did you know?” she asked again.

  “No,” Mrs. McCallister said. “No. Not until it was too late. And when I found out it broke my heart. But back then? Of course not.” She paused, let this sink in until she had a feeling Rachel believed her. “A man came by here,” she said. “Earlier.”

  “A man?”

  “Young. Dressed in black. With a hat.”

  “Markus,” she said. She shook her head. “It doesn’t matter. Nothing he does matters anymore.”

  “He skittered across the bridge like a little bug,” Mrs. McCallister said. “But it doesn’t look safe to me.”

  “Don’t worry about me, Mother,” she said. Something in the way she said it hurt Mrs. McCallister; the suggestion was that she had never worried about her much, or enough. The opposite was true—she had worried about her daughters too much, both of them.

  “I wanted to see you, Rachel,” Mrs. McCallister said. “And for you to see me. You never really have before.”

  “And so your job here is done.”

  This girl, she wouldn’t give an inch. “I also wanted to talk with you,” Mrs. McCallister said. “To tell you that, as I see things, you should forgive your sister. That’s the only real power any of us have—to forgive. We make mistakes and we’re forgiven for them. That is what happens. Otherwise, we can’t go on . . .”

  “These wounds don’t heal by themselves,” Rachel said. “It’s only right she suffers the same way I did.”

  “What are you going to do to your sister?”

  “I don’t know,” she said, though her mother could tell this was something she’d been thinking about. “We’ll see.”

  “Oh, Rachel: she told you some stories—that’s all. And they were terrible. I’m not defending her, because she was awful. But she was just a girl, and she’s changed—changed so much—and, in the end, what is she really guilty of?”

  “We’ve all changed,” Rachel said. “You, me, Helen.”

  Mrs. McCallister moved closer to her daughter. She reached out to touch her, but she couldn’t, of course: her hand went right through her.

  “What have you become, Rachel, that you would want to hurt your only sister?”

  “I just want things to come out even,” she said.

  Mrs. McCallister cried. Now she knew how this was going to end. She saw it clear as day, and she couldn’t bear it. Rachel turned away for an instant, toward the crowd behind her, and Mrs. McCallister took that opportunity to leave. When Rachel turned back, Mrs. McCallister had vanished; all there was to see was a church spire against a gray sky.

  Like a good mother who loved all of her children equally, Mrs. McCallister went to the one who needed her most.

  THE CURE

  Helen stopped at the edge of the forest. It was a bit warmer than she expected, so she removed her shawl and folded it into a square and placed it on the ground. That’s something she could say to Rachel when she saw her, just to start a conversation. It’s a nice day, isn’t it? Warmer than I expected. Best to start things off with something trivial; the rest would come on its own.

  The dog was gone now, so she walked into the forest alone, following the old trail first walked by Elijah McCallister over a century ago. The shadowed path was crowded by trees, tall and thick and ancient; looking up, she could see the sky in only small patches. All she could hear was the sound of dried and brittle twigs breaking beneath her feet. She had been here before, looking for Rachel—the night Rachel left, and then the day after, and the day after that and again, until it was clear to her and Digby and Smith that she had died the way Jonas had died, or worse.

  Helen should never have given up.

  Then she heard something: wings. A bird, screeching. She stopped, held her breath. But it was just a bird. She kept walking into the forest’s darkness. The trees seemed to lean toward her until she had to turn one way and then the next just to slip through them. But then, just beyond the last dense canopy, she saw a pool of yellow light. She broke through the smaller branches (it was like breaking out of a tree-lined prison) and emerged into the suddenly bright and iridescent day.

  The sunlight burned into Helen’s eyes, and for a moment she couldn’t see: it was as if the forest had filled with fog, the trees draped in spiderwebs. She squinted, held a hand up to block the sun, and that’s when she spotted her sister, impossibly close and impossibly far away, on the other side of the bridge. Dressed like a spinster.

  “Rachel.”

  Helen stepped closer, but the ravine scared her, its cavernous darkness so deep and mighty it threatened to swallow her if she got too close. How far away was her sister now? Close enough to look into her eyes, close enough to see her being seen. But Helen didn’t look away, and neither did Rachel. It was as if there were nothing left in the world but the two of them, and everything depended on them and what they did here. Helen didn’t even see all the people and the dogs just a few fe
et behind her sister on the other side.

  How long were they like this, silent, staring? It felt like forever. But it was probably just a moment or two until the tips of Rachel’s lips became a dark, sly smile. “You,” Rachel said. “Look at you. You and your terrible, terrible face.”

  “Rachel—”

  Rachel kept staring, as if she were still not sure she could believe her eyes. “You’re everything I thought I was.”

  “Rachel,” Helen said again. “Sweet Rachel.”

  “Not so sweet,” she said. “Not anymore.”

  And Helen could see that this was true.

  “Why?” Rachel asked her. “Why did you do this to me?”

  “You must know,” Helen said. “Now that you can see. Now that you can see who I am, what I am.”

  “And you thought that, since I was blind, it wouldn’t matter who I thought I was. And not just me—but the world. You made up this terrible place for me to live in. Did you ever tell me anything that wasn’t a lie?”

  “It just came out; I didn’t know what would happen, that I would keep doing it, what kind of person I would become. I was just a girl, Rachel, the—”

  “I don’t want to hear it,” Rachel said. Her trembling voice echoed in the ravine. “I think you’re evil. You hurt me, Helen. So much. And you should pay for that. Why shouldn’t you pay for that?”

  Then everything was quiet. Her people, hovering close behind her, moved a step backward and huddled together. They looked lost and frightened—all but an old Chinese man who sat up from the cot where he was lying. He was so old. His bones looked like they had turned into dried little twigs, his face wrinkled and lined, like the skin of a dead animal. And yet, shaking, he stood.

  Rachel took a step onto the bridge. Then another. It swayed and creaked, unsteady beneath even her thin frame.

  “I’m not that person anymore,” Helen said. “I’ve changed.”

  “So have I,” Rachel said. And then, as if it were the saddest truth she knew: “So have I.”

  Rachel took another step, then another, down into the curve of the sinking ancient bridge. The hundred-year-old twine uncurled around a supporting branch, and the branch dropped into the ravine. No one heard it hit the bottom.

  “I love you,” Helen said. “I didn’t then. I didn’t know how. But I’ve learned.”

  A single tear drew a wet trail down her face. Rachel saw it, watched it fall with a child’s heartless curiosity.

  “Wait,” Rachel said, as if she’d just understood. She laughed once. “Of course: you want me to forgive you. After everything. That’s what you want from me.”

  “No,” Helen said. “I would never ask for that. Never. But—”

  Helen wept. Her voice was so soft, Rachel had to strain to hear it across the ravine. “I don’t know what else to say.”

  The bridge was slipping, inch by inch. Helen could see it shudder and then catch itself, as if falling were the last thing it wanted to do. Rachel didn’t seem to notice, or care.

  “Come off the bridge, Rachel,” Helen said. “Please.”

  Rachel didn’t move, not forward or back.

  “Look,” Helen said. Helen reached into the large pocket stitched to the front of her dress and removed a small shoe. An old white shoe, worn and torn, held together with string and tape. She lifted it into the light. “It’s yours. The shoe you lost the night you left. I found it not far from here. I’ve kept it with me every day since then. Every day.”

  She held it out for her sister. “Here,” she said.

  But still Rachel didn’t move. She looked down at the shoes she was wearing: the one brown shoe Markus had found for her at the motel, too big for her, heavy and hot. And on her right foot the match to the shoe Helen was holding, its mate.

  Behind Rachel, the old Chinese man was hobbling toward the bridge, stopping to summon more energy. He looked at Helen, and smiled. A lovely smile, wide and toothless. Helen had never seen a kinder smile. His hoarse whisper was carried through the air like a feather.

  “Can’t you see?” he said to Rachel. “Your sister loves you.”

  Rachel shook her head. “All I see is a shoe,” she said.

  “Forgive her,” Ming Kai said. “Forgive her as I have forgiven Elijah McCallister.” Ming Kai took a deep breath. He looked to the heavens and as loud as he could, he shouted, “I forgive you, Elijah McCallister! I forgive you for everything! For everything!”

  “It’s too late for that,” Rachel said.

  “No,” he said. He could barely talk: shouting to a dead man had taken his breath away. “No. It is never too late.”

  Rachel’s eyes softened, and for a moment she looked like the girl she used to be, sweet and loving. But then the bridge shifted and fell half a foot, trembling and swaying, and Rachel had to take hold of the guiding ropes to keep from falling. When the shaking stopped, she took yet another step toward her sister. She was in the very middle of the bridge; the risk of moving forward or going back was the same now.

  “Come off the bridge, Rachel,” Helen said. She held out the shoe again. “Quickly. You can do it. The bridge will hold if you hurry.”

  Rachel didn’t move. There was a fiery light behind her eyes, but it was dying. She wasn’t bitter anymore, or mean: she was resigned.

  “No,” she said. “Bring it to me.”

  “What?”

  And Rachel held out her hand. “If you love me,” she said, “bring me my shoe.”

  Helen knew what this meant before she took the first step onto the bridge; she was resigned as well. She heard her name: it was being whispered by a hundred people, and she felt them, the dead; she felt them everywhere. Helen. Helen. But she couldn’t see them, not the way she did before—her gray congregation. They were one now, like a fog rolling in, her mother and father and Elijah and Jonas, Dr. Carraway and all the rest. They were all there, she knew they were there, but she couldn’t see them for who they were. She watched them go, a plume of smoke, sweeping into the air above her, above Rachel, and fading into the gauzy edge of a cloud.

  Helen had hoped that once Rachel had seen who she was—just by looking at the face she had been born with—she would know why Helen had done the things she’d done. That they wouldn’t even have to speak, to explain, to justify, defend. It would all be clear, once she was able to see her, and together they might be able to begin again.

  But that isn’t what happened.

  Helen took another step toward her sister, and another. The rotten branches beneath her feet didn’t even break: they crumbled. The ropey twine unraveled. But somehow it still held long enough for her to take another step toward her sister, and her sister another step toward her, until they were close enough to touch. Helen held out her hand for Rachel to take just as the last of the old rope finally snapped, as they knew it would, and the bridge fell, disappearing into the dark ravine.

  But they didn’t fall. For an instant they seemed to be floating, suspended somehow in the open air with nothing above them but sky and nothing below but a fathomless dark. And then, in a moment so brief it may not have actually happened, their faces—the masks they wore—transformed, and each saw the other as the other saw herself—not beautiful anymore, but not plain, either: but sisters. Just sisters. It was just the two of them now, and there was no magic or science or prayer, no great men and the memory of the great things they’d done; Roam and the rest of the world had disappeared. Because it wasn’t about that. It was instead about the smallest things: a bird, a dog, a fever. Locoweed and a river, water and a rock. Most of all, though, it was about what happened to two girls on a rainy day, a day their parents had gone to Arcadia to see Dr. Beadles for the water they hoped would cure their Rachel. It began with a single lie.

  One lie, and look at what had become of them! They almost smiled to think about it, that a moment so small, almost trivial, could change everything. But it did. It was like what happens to a leaf as it weaves itself down a stream, the way it can get caught on someth
ing, and how the other leaves and twigs following behind it, the bird feathers and snakeskin, the frog bones, the ants—nature’s discarded parts—all flow up behind that first leaf and they get caught, too, and the stream eventually is dammed up, and stops. But water can’t be stopped, it always finds a way around; it always makes another stream. So this is what they thought before they fell: what if, like this other stream, they could make another world? One in which everything unfolds just a little bit differently, one where that question—What do I look like?—was never answered, because it was never asked. Everything else would be the same there: one girl is beautiful, the other not; one can see, the other has been blind for years. Their parents have left them there alone. A moth rests against the window screen. The same rainy day has trapped the girls inside the house, and Helen is brushing her sister’s hair.

  But then the rain stops, the clouds part and scatter, and the sun comes out, and the light bursts so brightly through the window that Helen has to shut her eyes. The sun slips beneath her silken eyelids anyway, as if it wants to show her something that, even with her eyes closed, she’ll need the light to see. And in this heartbeat of a moment, sitting beside her sister, Helen sees it: Roam, all laid out before her, as if she’s floating above it, flying above it. She sees the rain stop, and watches as the town comes to life. Doors open one by one. Like wary animals leaving their sheltered dens, people peer up at the sky: they can come out now. All morning long the rain has been falling, turning Roam into a soggy ghost town, but now that the sun is here the sidewalks quickly fill with life. Everybody has some business to attend to, some errand—or maybe, after being pent up for so long inside, they just need to take their dogs out for a walk.

  The children who live in the old Yott place—there must be half a dozen of them now, at least—stream from their home and run fearlessly into the street, through big glassy puddles, shattering the skies reflected on each of them. Then it’s into the fields to play one of their games: today, hide-and-go-seek. Running past that giant oak at the edge of the field, its ambitious roots breaking through the sidewalk and the street itself, they all slap it, as if for luck. What a great climbing tree that would be—if they could only reach that first big branch.