From Away

by Phoef Sutton

  The effect of the drawing was disturbing; like looking at an Edvard Munch kindergarten finger painting. It looked for all the world like one of those sketches psychologists use as evidence to prove that a child has been abused.

  You were back at the table now, looking up at me, eyes wide and wounded.

  “Is it bad?”

  “No, it’s a fine picture.”

  “I don’t think she liked it.”

  “It’s not really like your pictures, is it?”

  “I guess not.”

  “Why did you draw it?”

  “That little girl said, like, ‘that’ll be a good idea.’ I don’ think it was a good idea.”

  I sat down in the little chair next to you. “That little girl was here?”

  You looked around the room. “Well, sorta. You know the way they are.”

  I felt something settle heavy in my chest. “Yeah, I know the way they are. Did she tell you her name?”

  “Jellica. I told her it was a silly name, but I think I hurt her feelings.”

  Kathleen was almost to the Quarry Road by the time I caught up with her. She wouldn’t get in the car. I drove alongside her and called out the window, saying anything I could think of to get her to listen.

  No go. She cut off into the woods where the car couldn’t follow. I left the Mustang and went after her. The cold wasn’t bothering me now.

  “Listen to me. You want to know what’s going on, don’t you? Talk to me!”

  She turned and faced me, challenging. “All right. What’s going on?”

  “I have no idea.”

  She started to turn again; I took her hand. She fixed her eyes on me. It was a tough stare; the kind inner-city teachers learn when they want to scare the shit out of their students.

  “Who sent you here?”

  “Nobody. Nobody at all. It’s cold out here. Let’s talk in the car.”

  I swear it took a full minute of looking at me for her to decide. She walked straight to the car and got in.

  “How do you know her name?” she asked as I drove onto a section of paved road.

  “All right, I’m going to have to give you a little background before I tell you that—”

  “I don’t want any damned background. How do you know her name?”

  “She told me.”

  She softened a little. “When did you meet her?”

  “The other day. I saw her on your boat.”

  She shook her head. “Great. I finally meet somebody I like, and he turns out to be a fucking nutcase.”

  At least she said she liked me. “I saw her. When you fished me out of the water. A little girl. About Maggie’s age. With short blond hair. Shiny black shoes. She said, ‘My name’s Jellica.’”

  Kathleen was bobbing her head up and down, a bottle of contained fury. “That’s her all right. Do you get off on this? Are you one of these sick fucks who goes through the obituaries and makes obscene phone calls to widows?”

  “No. I did not ask for this, okay? All my life I have seen things. People. But before this, whenever I’ve seen one of these,” I still couldn’t bring myself to use the g word, “it was always somebody I remembered or somebody I figured I made up. This is the first time I’ve seen somebody I didn’t know who turned out to be real. And that’s different, that’s real different.”

  “Yeah, that’s what it is.”

  I sped up a little; I didn’t want her to think about making a jump from the car.

  “Maggie sees them too,” I went on. “I never wanted to admit it to myself, but she does. She’s seen…this girl. The girl is the one who led her to your house. She told her to make that drawing. Who is she, Kathleen?” No answer. “Is she your daughter?”

  She shook her head, rapidly. “No, no. She’s just someone I met.” I think she almost believed me for a moment, then forced it away. “And you know that. You know all this. You’re not telling me anything you couldn’t have found out in the papers or the court records. You’re playing some sick mind game.”

  “I’m not.” I pulled up in front of her house. “I swear. I mean, I know me swearing doesn’t mean a thing to you, but I swear.”

  Her eyes examined me again. “Even if it was true. Even if it was true. Why would she be here?”

  “I don’t know.”

  She looked around the car, checking the air around her. “Is she here now? Can you see her?”

  “I can’t do it when I want to.” I ground my teeth at the thought. “Especially when I want to.”

  Turning away, she seemed to pull into herself, to block me out. “She can’t be here,” she muttered, to herself, not to me. “She couldn’t be with me.” She was looking at me again now, demanding, interrogating. “What does she want?”

  I shrugged. “She just said she wanted to play.”

  She bolted out of the car and was through her front door before I could follow.

  “Kathleen!”

  “I don’t want to see you!”

  She slammed the door.

  My mind was reeling. It couldn’t contain all this. I mean, you go for weeks, months, years at a time with nothing really coming inside, nothing new, nothing you have to compute and then, pow, a couple of truckloads are crammed into your skull all at once and you can’t even come close to hearing it, looking at it, much less making sense of it; it’s just a swarm of bees buzzing behind your eyes. And, what’s more, you don’t want the buzzing to stop, to resolve itself into thoughts and words, because you aren’t at all sure you want those thoughts and words in your head, in your life.

  I floored it, kicking up cold dust, speeding up the hill. Cranked the radio, even though I couldn’t find a station. Static was just fine.

  I went as far as you can go on the island, slamming the brakes and skidding to a stop at the end of Long Haven Road. I got out and walked to the end of the jetty, looking at Long Haven Island across the water. Vast wealthy houses dotted the shore. All empty. Windows boarded up for the season. Almost no one lived on that island but rich Summer People, so in winter it was a ghost town.

  I laughed out loud at the term. Ghost town.

  You and I should move there, Maggie.

  The sky turned an uncountable number of blues as I sat there watching the sun set and the lights flicker on the far island.

  The thoughts kept whipping back at me like a live electrical wire. Was it all true? Were the spooks real?

  No. I tried to crowd my mind with noise, with vivid images and compelling sexual fantasies, anything to take up room, to squeeze out the obvious.

  Reflections of the town lights glittered on the black water, and I imagined a ghost ship, a Flying Dutchman, flowing through those floating stars. I tried to picture it just as powerfully as I could, to convince myself that Jellica and all the others had been imagined, too. It was useless. Try as I might, I couldn’t project that mere thought onto the real water; couldn’t make it into a solid, staring, speaking thing.

  The car door swung open. I jumped in surprise as Neil slid in next to me.

  “Hey, little buddy.”

  “Hey, Skipper.”

  That was all we said for a while. The moon rose over Long Haven.

  “Long Haven gets damn empty in the wintertime. I think I’d go crazy if I lived there.”

  I laughed, since I knew that was exactly what all the Summer People said about Fox Island. The grass is always browner on the other side.

  “Charlotte and Maggie were a little worried. Sent me out looking for you.”

  I didn’t have to ask how he found me. There were only so many places you could go on the island. “I just went for a drive.”

  “Yeah. After the screaming lady ran out of the house. What’s that about?”

  I didn’t answer. Neil pulled two beers out of his coat. Handed one over to me. We drank.

  “She’s okay, though?”

  I shrugged and nodded and shook my head all at the same time.

  “You wanna talk about it?”

&n
bsp; Now, don’t go all touchy-feely on me, Neil. “Can’t say I do, ’cause I don’t.”

  “Okay.”

  A few more sips. A little more silence.

  I figured it was my turn. “So, what do you think of Maggie?”

  “Great kid. Real pepperpot.”

  “What do you think of Charlotte?”

  “What do you mean, what do I think of Charlotte? I’ve known her all my life.”

  “Okay.”

  Silence. Sips.

  “Tell me about the husband,” Neil said.

  Dear God, he didn’t really believe there was a husband, did he? Well, why should he think we’d lie to him?

  I was faced with a moral dilemma, and to be honest I was grateful for the distraction. “I gotta tell you, I didn’t really like the guy.”

  Neil grunted. “How long were they together?”

  “Not long. I mean, long enough, but not long. She met him right after, you know, Mom and Dad and George died. I don’t think she’d have done it if she hadn’t been in such a state. I think he kind of took advantage of the situation.”

  “How so?”

  “Well, he ran the funeral home where we sent Mom and Dad and George. And, I don’t know, I think that’s unethical. Like a psychiatrist and a patient, you know? Or a teacher and a student. Know what I mean?”

  “Not really.”

  “I mean, he took advantage of her vulnerable condition. He let her cry on his shoulder and then he saw his moment, he just moved right in and….” This much of what I said was true.

  “Married her?”

  “Exactly.” Let the lies begin. I took a swig. “A real sleazeball.”

  “And then he went into the army?”

  I’d forgotten about that ridiculous part of the ridiculous story. “Yeah. Well, National Guard, I think it was.”

  “They use undertakers?”

  “Why not? I guess they got a whole division of them. You know, for afterward.”

  Neil grunted again. Did he have doubts? Maybe. But he was giving me every opportunity to tell the truth. And in the end, he trusted us. So, why didn’t I set him straight? I didn’t think it was my place, for one. And for another, I guess I was starting to prefer the lie myself. A rotten thing to say, I know, but I never claimed to be perfect—though I always hoped you thought I was.

  “Do you think she’s…” Neil paused, shifting around uncomfortably, “…think she’s over him?”

  That was the question that was really troubling him. The rest was just background. “Yeah, I think she’s over him. I mean, a person would have to take it slow, but…I think she’s almost ready to move on.”

  Another grunt. Another sip. “Well, I wish her luck.”

  “So do I, Neil.”

  TWELVE

  The next morning, we realized it was a week before Christmas and all through the house there was nothing particularly Christmas-y anywhere. We’d never spent a winter on the island, after all, so the only decorations in the attic were red, white, and blue bunting for the Fourth of July. You offered to color the white stripes green, but we decided that would be anti-American.

  Buying holiday decorations might be easy in other places, but on the island it was a matter of either settling for the one string of lights and can of spray snow they had at the hardware store or getting on the ferry and driving up to the Wal-Mart on the mainland.

  We stood on Main Street, weighing the pros and cons of taking that journey; the mainland seemed an impossibly far distance away, and the water looked nauseatingly choppy. Still, we couldn’t very well let you have a Christmas without all the bells and whistles.

  Neil came to the rescue. He was making a habit of hovering on the periphery of our lives to sail in when needed. Swinging his big shiny pick-up around, he swooped us up like Batman and drove us out to Indian Point. There, ax in hand, he led us through the woods to an orchard of perfect Christmas trees. You spent an hour wandering among them, talking to them, picking one, then falling for another, on and on while we grown-ups sang carols and stomped our feet and froze our balls off. In the end, you picked one that looked far too big for our living room. You wouldn’t be dissuaded. This is was the tree of your dreams.

  “Finest kind,” Neil said, and wasn’t that the truth?

  Neil whacked it down; we dragged it to the truck and tossed it in. Back home, it fit perfectly, leaving just enough room between top needles and ceiling for Charlotte to fit the star you’d made out of tin foil. None of us had ever made a Christmas from scratch, as it were, and we felt very pleased with ourselves.

  You set to work making a chain out of red and green construction paper, while I poured popcorn into the air popper. Neil and your mother reviewed the placement of the tree for the hundredth time and decided that it was, after all, on just the right side of the room in front of just the right window, in just the right house, on just the right island, on just the right planet.

  There was nothing particularly romantic about what we did that morning, but there was a glow about it, a warmth of family and friendship that brought a shine to your mother’s eyes that I hadn’t seen for a long time. She certainly didn’t embrace Neil or hang on his every word; she paid him no more attention than she paid the two of us. But she knew, as we all knew, that this day had started out troubled and annoying and had been transformed into something glittering and hilarious and memorable, and that transformation was all due to Neil. So, even if she didn’t look at him more often than she used to, when she did there was something in her eyes that hadn’t been there before. She was seeing him in a new way.

  I kept my fingers crossed.

  “You need lights,” Neil was saying.

  “No, we don’t,” Charlotte answered.

  “Fuck, you don’t. What’s a Christmas tree without the lights?”

  “We’ll use candles, like they used to in the old days.”

  “In the old days when they burned their houses down?”

  “Well, we don’t have lights, and where are we going to get them?” Charlotte asked.

  “My old man’s got a bunch at his house.”

  “We’re not going to steal your father’s Christmas decorations.”

  “He won’t know; he’s almost blind these days.”

  Which struck us all as the funniest Christmas sentiment ever.

  Neil assured us that his Old Man hated putting the damned things up and would consider it a favor if we took them off his hands, so off he went to get them. Charlotte volunteered to help.

  I waved them good-bye from the driveway, and you laughed and danced in the driveway as they sped off. I’d been happy as hell to see the two of them hitting it off, but as they drove out of sight, self-pity started to set in. There was my sister finding happiness in love, or at least a chance at it. And here was me, having scared off yet another prospect with my freakish qualities. I felt myself sinking into that blackest of depressions, the Christmas Blues. Try as I might, I couldn’t shake it.

  I’m back in your hospital room now.

  Neil grabbed me around noon and forced me out to have lunch. I wasn’t his first choice, of course, but your mom wasn’t about to leave your room.

  I wasn’t too willing either, but we didn’t have a change of clothes with us on the mainland, so Neil persuaded me to go with him to Wal-Mart and buy some things. I weakened and went.

  I blinked and twitched like a vampire as I stumbled out into the cold daylight. Inexplicably, Rockland looked the same as always. Didn’t it know what was going on? Even the water in the bay was coughing up those same brutal whitecaps from its battleship metal surface that it had the night before last, when we’d flown over, cold and nauseated in the paramedic’s helicopter.

  I choked down a greasy hamburger at Reedy’s and then wandered the endless aisles of Wal-Mart, absentmindedly picking out cheap, ugly clothes.

  Driving back to the hospital in the old Buick Neil kept on the mainland, I prayed for him to hurry, cursing myself for hoping that when I
got there I’d find you sitting up in bed, slurping down Jell-O and watching the Cartoon Network.

  When we got here there was no change.

  I went into the bathroom to put on my new clothes and give myself a whore’s bath. Gagging on four Excedrin, I vomited into the bowl.

  So, now I’m hungry all over again, and my new clothes already feel like they’ve been slept in. I won’t be tempted to leave here again. Not until you do.

  There are a million board games crammed into cupboards and closets in the Thorofare house. Classics like Monopoly and Hi Ho! Cheery-O. Obscure ones like Ubi or Eddie Cantor’s singalong game. Your favorite was always Quicksand.

  You loved it because there was very little reading involved and you got to throw two sets of dice. Also, the game piece was a cunningly crafted little pith helmet–wearing British explorer with a handlebar mustache, and I used to do a cheesy C. Aubrey Smith imitation when I moved him that made you laugh so hard you couldn’t breathe. The game board was Darkest Africa, teeming with quicksand, wild animals, and dangerous savages (needless to say, it dated from the pre–politically correct days). The plastic explorer could be divided into four segments: legs, torso, head, and helmet. If you made an unlucky roll with the quicksand dice, you had to remove a piece of your man from the bottom up, so that he appeared to be sinking into the board. Once you got down to just your helmet, you were in serious trouble.

  I played that game with you the same afternoon we put up the Christmas tree with Neil, while we waited for them to come back with the lights. Sitting across from you at the kitchen table, up to my helmet in quicksand, I thought, Well, that about sums it up. I remembered my dad talking literary shop around the house, expounding on something called the “pathetic fallacy”; that’s where a character’s mood in a book is mirrored by the weather. You know how it goes, Heathcliff is brooding so the moors get all storming and bleak. Well, I sat there wondering if there could be a pathetic fallacy for board games, ’cause that helmet floating on the cardboard quicksand looked a whole hell of a lot like me.