From Away

by Phoef Sutton

  She looked down at her hands and shook her head. Moseby was laughing again. “No. She come back with nothing to show for it but three fucking heavy suitcases and these Jesus pictures she’s got stuck up everywhere. Gimme the goddamn creeps.”

  “Where did you go when you moved off?” I kept going, taking a quick sip to dry my cotton mouth.

  Nan again opened her mouth to speak, but Moseby was always too fast for her. “New York City.”

  “I think Nan can speak for herself.” I meant it to sound encouraging but I’m afraid it came off cross and bitchy. She didn’t like it any better than Moseby did. Father and daughter looked at me like I’d grown horns and a tail.

  “Well, you tell him, Nan. You tell the gentleman. You got such a way with words.”

  She spoke quietly, her gaze again fixed on her pudgy hands. “New York City. But we didn’t like it much.”

  Moseby couldn’t let her run on like that. “Her husband was one of those sidewalk preachers. You know, those crazy bastards who stand on the corner screaming about how everybody but them is going to Hell.”

  “He wasn’t,” her voice was firmer now. “He was just saved.”

  “Saved from you. Wonder where he is now? Sponging off some other poor retard, I guess.”

  “He’s dead, Daddy.”

  “Right, right. So, is he in heaven right away now or does he have to wait for the Rapture?” Moseby turned to me. “You want to hear her talk, you get her talking about the fucking Rapture. When she came back here, she wouldn’t shut up about it. Tell your new friends about the Rapture, Honey.”

  “It’s coming, Daddy. Laughing at it won’t stop it.”

  “End of the world,” he nodded to us. “She can’t wait for it.”

  She was looking up at him now, and I saw the first flash of anger in her eyes. “It’s not the end. You’re just gonna wish it was. All the saved people are going to be taken up and you’ll be left behind.”

  “A world without Christians,” Moseby chuckled. “Now we’re talking! Anything I can do to hurry that along?”

  “You better listen to me before it’s too late.”

  “Like she cares! She can’t wait to go floating up to heaven and look down at all of us poor sons of bitches. Her and Jesus and the heavenly choir are all gonna be singing, ‘I told you so!’”

  Nan looked down at her hands again, but the anger wasn’t gone, just shoved back inside.

  “You’ve done all you can,” I said to her. “He’s got to come to it on his own.”

  She looked up at me in surprise and, I think, some disbelief. I wasn’t sure I could pull it off myself, but I watched a lot of Christian independent films in the cult section of the video store (I highly recommend Thief in the Night, Mark IV Productions, 1972, five stars on the Kehoe Scale for creepy insanity), so at least I knew the Mark of the Beast from the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.

  “Holy shit, Neil, we got ourselves a couple of fellow lodge members!” Moseby drained his beer. “You go ahead and do your secret handshake, you two. We ain’t peeking.”

  Nan sprang to her feet and started clearing away the empties. When I got up to help her, she skittered out of the room, head bowed. I followed, offering to help and ignoring Moseby’s coughing laugh.

  In the dingy kitchen, she kept her back to me as she did the dishes, not looking up, not speaking. If she ignored me, maybe I wasn’t there. I picked up a threadbare dish rag and started drying.

  “I know what you’re going through,” I said. “My parents didn’t accept it when I found Christ either. At least, not at first.” Sam, I told myself, you’re really going to hell for this one. But then, I thought, if half of what Kathleen has said about this woman is true and God sides with her, I wouldn’t want to be saved by Him anyway.

  She shook her head. “He’s a sinner.”

  “We’re all sinners, Nan.”

  “He’s a bigger one.”

  “All he’s got to do is open his heart to Jesus. You’ve paved the way; it’s up to him now. It’s like they say, you’ve just got to keep acting ‘as if.’”

  She looked up at me from the scummy water. “As if what?”

  “As if it’ll happen.” I became uncomfortably aware that I was mixing Alcoholics Anonymous doctrine with born-again Christianity, but she was looking at me like I’d said something profound, so I guess it fit.

  “You think?” she asked.

  “I know. Tell me about your husband. What was his name?”

  She looked back to the sink, thrusting her hands into the hot, greasy water. “Bill.”

  “Bill what?”

  “Why do you want to know?”

  “Just because. Never mind.”

  “Delecourt.”

  “So, you’re Nancy Delecourt. That’s a nice name.”

  “He was evil,” she said.

  “Pardon?”

  “He thought he wasn’t, but he was.”

  “Was he saved?”

  “Oh, yes.” She turned her blank, sagging eyes to mine. “You can be evil and still be saved. That’s how powerful Jesus is.” There was nothing behind those eyes.

  She went back to work, her hands turning redder in the steaming water. I thought of Jellica in that tub and shuddered under my skin. Was she here with me? I almost glanced around the room to find her, but I shook off the temptation. You’re doing this on your own, Sam, with no spook interference. I was pretty sure that was my own voice talking to me.

  “Still, it’s hard to lose someone you love. You must miss him.”

  “I do.”

  “I remember when my mother died,” (forgive me, Mom, for involving you in this—but if you were right about the cosmos, you don’t know a thing about this, and if you were wrong then you’ll know I’m doing it for a good cause). “I thought I’d give anything just to talk to her one more time. Do you think that’s possible? Do you think the dead can come back to us?”

  She looked up at me, startled. “But that’s wrong. That’s evil. That’s sinful.”

  “Well, I know, but it’s one of the ways we’re tempted, isn’t it?”

  She stepped away from the sink, still facing me, blank eyes wide, her wet hands dripping on the dirty linoleum floor. “You’re one of them, aren’t you?”

  I could hear my own pulse throbbing in my ears. “No, I’m just saying. You wish you had something to remember him by. A child or something.”

  She turned away and trotted across the floor. “No, I don’t want a child. I don’t want a child.”

  “Really? ’cause you strike me as the motherly type. I can see you holding a little girl in your arms. Washing her in a tub.”

  Suddenly, she kicked the door open and screamed out into the living room. “Daddy! It’s one of them! It’s a devil! He’s saying things to me!”

  Moseby was on his feet, hollering back at her. “For fuck’s sake, shut the fuck up!”

  “He’s Satan, Daddy!”

  He moved toward her, fast as lightning despite his bulk. “I am sick of you acting crazy! When did you get so goddamned crazy!? You’re worse than your mother!”

  “I swear he’s the devil! He’s saying things!”

  “Everybody’s the devil! The goddamn fuel man’s afraid to come fill the tanks ’cause you keep howling at him that he’s the devil!”

  “Daddy—,” she was pleading now.

  “You stop! You stop right now, or I’ll throw you out on your fat ass, and then where the hell will you go? Who’s going to put up with your shit if I don’t?”

  She bolted through the room, banging open the door and running out into the snow.

  The room fell silent except for the sound of my breathing, heavy and fast, as if I’d run a marathon. Moseby stepped into the kitchen and I flinched. “Sorry,” I said.

  He brushed past me with an angry wave of his hand. “Don’t apologize for the lunatic.” He opened the fridge and yanked a Bud from its plastic collar. “I shoulda cut my dick off before I fucked her mother. Nev
er had a day’s peace since. Crazy bitches, both of ’em.”

  “Shouldn’t we go after her?”

  Moseby snorted. “She’ll be back.” He walked past the open door on the way to his chair and hollered out into the snow, “When her ass gets too cold, she’ll be back!” He kicked the door shut, dropped into the recliner, and turned to Neil. “Now you see why I don’t get any goddamned company.”

  Neil shrugged. “We all got family.”

  “What was her husband like?” I asked.

  Moseby shot me a dirty look for staying on this distasteful topic. “Hell if I know. She run off when her mother died. Met him later.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Why? Because she run away? I wasn’t. Finally had some fucking peace. Every now and then I’d get a letter from her. Lying about how good she’s doing. Saying she found Jesus. She met this great man. Christ knows what he coulda seen in her. I’d’a thought he was after her money if she had any. From the sound of the guy, just a bed to sleep in and three square might’ve been all he was after. And somebody to listen to his shit. I wrote back and told her that. Then I didn’t hear from her for a couple of years.”

  “Were you worried about her?”

  Moseby shrugged and thumped a dog. “I figure, she’s alive or dead, you know, one or the other. Then she calls me, all snot-nosed and crying. She’s at Rockland. Ain’t even got the price of a ferry ride. So, I head over, and there she is, with her suitcases, a bible, the clothes she’s standing up in, and fuck all else. Oh, she showed me, didn’t she? Running off. She did damn well for herself, didn’t she? Well, I drug her and her shit back here, and she took over the back room and that’s been, what, three years, four years? I can’t fucking get rid of her.”

  He glanced at the window. The snow was heavier and the wind was gusting. He scratched a dog’s head. “Blowing pretty bad out there,” he said and fell back into silence. Then, he hauled himself out of his chair, swearing under his breath, “Freeze my balls off looking for her, damn it, that’s just what the crazy bitch wants me to do.” But he pulled on his sweater and coat and swung open the door. The dogs bounded out into the storm. “Go find her! Hold her down for me!” He glanced at me as if to let me know this was a joke, then started out after the dogs. Neil went with him. I offered to stay behind in case she came back on her own. At this, Moseby gave me a dark look and slammed the door, muffling the howling of the wind and leaving me alone in the quiet house.

  It was odd to sit alone in a strange house. No music on. No TV. No task to perform. Nothing to do but sit and wait. It was unnerving. I tried to make the best of it. To close my eyes and think about the best way to use this unexpected moment of idleness. Perhaps there was nothing I needed to do. I had proved that this was Kathleen’s Mrs. Delecourt; my task here was completed. But here I was, in her house, alone. Wasn’t there something more I could do?

  I could ask Jellica.

  I could use the skills Mrs. Day had tried to teach me and bring Jellica here—hell, she was never too far away, was she? I could ask her what it would take to let her move on. Ask her if punishing her mother would set her spirit free.

  Fuck that. I was no more ready to bring that little creature back into my brain than I would have been to shave my head in a garbage disposal. Who needed her, anyway? The world was full of people who dealt with trouble without ever seeing or even thinking about ghosts and shit. From this day on, Sammy, you’re one of the great, un-psychic unwashed. The normal dull ones. Hallelujah to me.

  I got up and went into the kitchen. Coffee would warm me up; better yet, making coffee would give me something to do. All I found was a jar of freeze-dried instant. Being a good man of my generation, it had been years since I’d had anything other than fresh roasted. Well, you’re in the wilderness, I told myself, you’ll have to learn to rough it. I put the kettle on and waited for it to whistle.

  I never really decided to search the house. I started gradually, glancing in cabinets to check cereal and soup preferences (generic, heavy on sugar, bought in bulk) and progressed to a quest for the bathroom, which had me opening doors and finding bedrooms.

  I guessed that Moseby’s room was the one with the dog beds in one corner and the broken lobster traps stacked in the other. I guessed hers was the one with the Bible and Chick Publications cartoon pamphlets on the bedside table. I picked up one of the little comic books—I remembered the things from high school. Drawn and written with all the subtlety of a Tales from the Crypt, their goal was to scare the shit out of kids until they accepted Jesus and hated Catholics, Jews, and Muslims. This one told the touching tale of a teenaged prostitute who had been gorily blinded by two thugs who somehow looked Semitic, black, and gay all at once. In the end, she found Christ, so it all turned out all right. I put the pamphlet down with a shudder. There were more, explaining why we’ll never have peace in the Middle East and why Mohammed and the Pope were the anti-Christ, and why The X-Files will turn your children into Satanists. Another time, I probably would have laughed at the things and felt smugly superior to their message. But in that room what struck me was their utter sincerity. The stupid, fear-ridden, simplistic, hateful message of those drawings came from a place so rooted in belief that they pulsated with power and fire. And in Nan they had an audience who would work to bring their world to life.

  I opened her closet. Hers and her father’s were indistinguishable; flannel shirts and jeans on the hangers, muddy boots on the floor. I picked up one boot and shook it—it was only then that I realized I was searching the room. The idea scared me a little and confused me more—what did I think I was going to find?—but I was in for a pound, so I decided to keep going.

  A large chest of drawers sat next to the bed. There was an empty frame mounted on top of it; a few shards of mirrored glass still reflected gray light around the edges. Beneath that, a plastic hairbrush, a box of Tampons, more comic books. Opening the drawers felt like a further step in the violation of Nancy’s privacy, so I had to take a breath first, but I did it. T-shirts. Underwear. I reached my hand among them, looking for what, I don’t know.

  The second drawer was empty. I thought about a life so empty it could only fill one drawer, then moved on to the last one. I couldn’t open it at first. It was jammed up to the top with socks. I had to pull with all my strength, and I almost gave up before it shot open, socks popping out at me. The drawer tipped over from the weight and slanted down onto the floor. Why the hell had she stuffed this drawer so full and left the upper one empty? I rummaged around to see what made it so heavy. There was a layer of bubble wrap underneath the socks. I pushed them aside and saw a large object all wrapped up in the shiny plastic, like an old forgotten UPS package. I scooped up an armful of socks and tried to look through the overlapped layers of bubble wrap—it was like peering through the icy surface of a frozen lake.

  At first I thought it was a doll. Blond hair swirled around her face like a mermaid’s; her arms were twisted around her body, the left one flung awkwardly behind her, the right draped across the collar of her flowered dress. But the face was drawn and tight and withered and not like a doll’s at all. I recognized her. I’d know Jellica anywhere.

  “Do you know where my dad went?”

  I turned to see Nancy Delecourt in the doorway behind me, melting snow dripping from her clothes and puddling on the floor.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  She walked to my side and looked down at the open drawer. “I know I should do something with that,” Nancy said. “But there was this whole problem with the police back in New York, and I was afraid somebody would make a big deal about it.”

  I didn’t respond.

  “I thought when I got home here, I’d find a place to put it, but I didn’t want Daddy to see. You know him; I’d never hear the end of it. And then, you know how it is when you stick something somewhere and just kind of forget about it and hope it goes away?”

  “Who is she?” I asked.

  “Well, she was supposed to be my
daughter, but something happened, some kind of mix-up, you know, and she changed.”

  “When did she change?”

  “Oh, early on. When she started crawling. I didn’t see it at first, but Bill did. That’s my husband. He started talking all ‘oh, she’s so pretty,’ and ‘doesn’t she look so grown up?’ And he started spending all his time with her. I was like nothing. The cook. The clean-up lady. Wiping up her shit, that’s what I was good for. Pretty soon, he’s spending every night with her. But it wasn’t his fault, you know. It was her. What she’d turned into. It turned him, too. Turned him against me. That’s when he went all evil.

  “One time I came in real late, ’cause, like, I’m still working, I’m the one with a job, and I switch on the lights and she was…they were…he was all on top of her like she was a whore. You shoulda heard that little bitch, the way she was screaming. I lost it. Screamed right back at her. And he, he took her side. Started beating on me. Oh, we’d had fights before, but this was different. He wasn’t holding back. And she was sitting on the bed just all screaming like something that wasn’t even human.

  “It blew over, you know, like stuff like that does. But it wasn’t the same. Went on like that for, I don’t know. Years. And I’d been so happy when he loved me. Now, it was all…he stopped even trying to get work. All he’d do was drink and do stuff with her. Then he got sick and he died.”

  Neither us had moved since she started talking.

  “I wanted to kill her then. But that’s a sin, so I thought maybe if I could change her back. Like she was when she was first born. Before the bad stuff started. But she just stayed evil. She talked to demons. She brought ’em right into the room with her. So they could do things to her. That’s how evil she was. Then Bill came back.”

  “Your husband? Your husband who had died?”

  She looked up at me, challenging. “You don’t believe me?”

  “I believe you.”

  “He came back. But only for her. Only to see her. Wouldn’t even look at me. That’s how much she’d taken him away from me.”