Bad Things

by Michael Marshall

  Her mother turned and looked at her.

  “I want you to get out of the car now, honey,” she said.

  Eventually Kristina got out of the shower. She dressed, feeling as if it was for the first time. The first time after kissing someone you should not have kissed, a kiss that led nowhere but to broken lives. The first time after shoplifting and getting away with it, after telling a lie that would break someone’s heart. The first time after slipping into someone’s room in the dead of night and doing things that are not allowed under law or by any other measure of human kindness.

  Good things never change the world. Nothing is different after you drop coins into a charity box, lend your arm to an old lady, or help build a school in some doomed third-world disaster area. You may get a fleeting kick out of these deeds but nothing in you is actually altered. You can never define yourself through actions you know witnesses would find admirable. They’re too easy. They don’t count.

  After you do a bad thing, however, everything is altered. When you sin, you become an active force. You step through a veil and start to shape the world. Why else would people keep doing it? After bad things your universe is never the same, and as Kristina had walked into the forest the previous evening, she had been all too aware of the permanence of what she was about to do.

  And almost as afraid, she thought, as on the night when she had stood by the side of the dead-end track and watched her father reverse the car down the road. She waited until its headlights had disappeared, then until she could no longer hear the car’s engine. Until she was utterly alone.

  Then she turned to face the trees.

  She had been told nothing about what was to happen now. At first it’s okay. She’s just standing in the forest, after all. If you live in these mountains, you know the woods. You go for hikes, walks, picnics, school trips to peer at the barely discernible ghosts of rotted cabins and long-ago roads. The forest is there all the time, at the periphery of your vision. It’s where you are. It’s who this place is.

  But of course . . . it’s different at night. You think it’s just the noises, but it’s not. You think it’s the rare sensation of being utterly alone, fully adrift from human contact, but it’s not that, either. You may think it’s the cold, or a concern about animals, or any number of explicable fears. They all play a part, naturally. But they’re not the thing.

  They’re not the bad things.

  And it is they whom you will sense for the first time that evening, the long, terrible, and horrifying night. The night on which you are abandoned in the forest with no promise that you will ever come out—because the possibility of bottomless descent is the point of this exercise. The point is that you become so scared, so deep-in-every-cell terrified, that for a time you lose your mind. You find it again at some point during the procedure, but it’s never entirely clear (even years later) if it’s the same mind that you lost, or whether part of you has become host to something else. This night will shatter you to tiny bloody pieces, and a different young woman will emerge on the other side.

  Whatever mind it is she ends up with, it is sane enough at least to stop her howling and crying, and from biting her own skin, and to help her find a stream in which to wash away the excrement that has run down her legs. It is even enough to help her track down her clothes, so when she is discovered standing neatly by the side of the road, later that morning, it will look as though everything is all right, and nothing has changed.

  It has, though.

  When she gets back home, her father—whom she loves, very much—won’t even look at her. Her mother gives her a long, warm hug. She is proud. The next generation has been corrupted, inducted, had her legs spread wide. There is much to learn, but it has begun. Kristina has become the newest of a long line, stretching back into family history.

  Slowly, with the fear only just beginning to build in her breast, the long-ago fourteen-year-old turned from the track, and started to walk into the forest.

  In every way that counts, she never came back.

  After that, there are supposed to be years of becoming accustomed, tuition, practice. Kristina never had those. When her father died her mother came into even sharper focus, and Kristina decided she did not want to be like her, a peasant with power, her life controlled by someone else. The rich own the farm, the peasants till the soil. It works that way with this as everything else.

  Kristina rejected everything, all at once, as children do. Just as adults sometimes change their minds.

  Was her decision to drive into the forest the night before, after the bar closed, entirely to do with a man she had met? Was it honestly centered on the idea of helping him, trying to stand in the way of what was heading his way? She doubted it. Nothing could happen there, after all. Especially, she realized dismally, now that she’d allowed herself to accept the mantle that had been waiting for her all her life. If you like someone, you do not cast them into that role, make them spear carrier to a town’s dirty little secret.

  Perhaps it was just like taking the drink you know will send you off the wagon. Lifting the phone and making that drunken call. Scratching that burning itch to do wrong, to allow the bad things out, and by doing so, become alive.

  She had driven into the woods and found the place from that long-ago night. It should have been hard to find, but it was not. It was like swirling down a drain to the center of the world, and she could have driven there with her eyes shut.

  She left the keys in the ignition and got out, and as an afterthought, took off her coat and left that in the car as well. Then she closed the door and walked straight into the forest. She did not feel cold. After a few hundred yards she unbuttoned her dress and let that fall behind her. In the patchy moonlight, by the glow that seeped in and around the snow which managed to make it down through the trees, her skin already looked blotchy and blue. But on the inside she felt very warm.

  After a while she found the trunk of a tree which, though now fallen, she recognized. An important tree, and one which she had spent a portion of a long-ago night clinging to. She stood by it, head lowered, for a period of time it was hard to measure.

  Then suddenly she raised her head.

  Slowly she turned around.

  Out of the darkness between the trees she saw a shape approaching. The shape itself was limitless, unbounded, but it chose to coalesce a tiny portion of itself into a form she could understand.

  She watched the big, dark dog as it came toward her. And it felt like coming home.

  As she sits in her alien apartment the next morning, she doesn’t know how much the night will have changed. She doesn’t know what she’ll now be able to do. But amid the feelings of nausea, and guilt, and selfhatred is a massive dose of relief.

  So strong that it almost feels sexual.

  When she finally stands up to get her shit together and go to work—she still has to function in the real world, after all—she realizes something else.

  She wants a cigarette.

  CHAPTER 37

  I was lying on my side. The back of my head hurt and the inside felt black and twisted. My face was pressed into something that smelled dusty and scratched against my cheek.

  When I opened my eyes it made no difference, so I closed them again.

  A little while later I became aware once more. I was on my back, and my neck hurt. My head now felt merely brittle instead of broken, and so I opened my eyes and kept them that way. It still didn’t change anything. I gingerly slid my hands up toward my shoulders and used them to lever my upper body away from the floor. This took longer than I would have expected. When it was almost done I pulled my feet back until I was sitting in a hunched position. I reached behind my head and found a bump there which hurt to touch. So I stopped touching it.

  I gave my eyes a few minutes to adjust to the light but there appeared to be nothing for them to adjust to. My vision stayed milky black, the only variation coming from the waves and mists of chemicals firing in my retina as they tried to
find something to grab onto.

  I rubbed them and my face with my hands, hard, but that only made things worse.

  I made a slow check of my pockets, and found that although I no longer had my cell phone, I retained my wallet and cigarettes. I stuck one of the latter in my mouth and sparked the lighter in front of my face. The cigarette was half lit before I realized I could see someone.

  Sitting three or four yards away, crossed-legged on the floor, was Scott.

  “Christ," I shouted, the cigarette falling out of my mouth. The world went black again, all the darker for the moment of light.

  “Hey, John,” said a female voice. “Welcome home.”

  I was on my feet without being aware of doing it. The back of my head still hurt and I nearly fell straight back down but I held the lighter up in front of me and flicked it again, three times before I got a light.

  Carol was sitting on the floor close to the boy. She looked a lot thinner than when I’d last seen her, and older. I took a step forward and looked at the other person, as he looked up at me.

  It wasn’t Scott, of course.

  After a couple of seconds I realized the planes of his face were different, and his eyes. The resemblance was strong, but whereas people always said Scott looked like me, this boy without question took after his mother.

  “Is that Tyler?”

  He kept staring up at me as if I was a monster, and he’d been told that if he stayed real still, I might not attack immediately.

  “Yep,” Carol said. “Tyler, this is your dad.”

  The lighter got too hot to hold and I let it go out. For a moment I was glad of darkness.

  I took another pace forward and carefully lowered myself back down to the floor. I held the lighter in my other hand and lit it again, and looked with incomprehension into the face of the woman who had been my wife.

  “Carol—what the hell is going on?”

  She told me that they had been snatched from her rented house in Renton, in the middle of the night before last. Two men had come for them, one of whom she recognized from having delivered a message at the library where she worked. Since then they had been stashed here, inside our old house. She had already tried to find a way out, but whoever sealed the house had done a good job.

  “That’s not what I meant,” I said. “I meant what is going on?”

  She didn’t reply. I could hear the sound of her and Tyler breathing in the darkness, almost in unison. Now that I understood where I was, I could feel the shape of the place where we had lived for several years. The lighter got too hot again and I reached behind on the floor and found the cigarette I’d dropped.

  I lit it, and each time I took a drag it glowed just enough to show their faces looking at me.

  “You shouldn’t have come back here,” Carol said.

  “Why?”

  “You just shouldn’t.”

  “I only came because someone told me they might know what had happened to Scott.”

  “And did they?”

  “I don’t know,” I admitted. “A lot of the time it seemed like she wasn’t altogether there.”

  “She?”

  “Her name was Ellen Robertson. She was Gerry Robertson’s wife.”

  “Was? What happened to him?”

  “He died, a few months back. How come you even know the name?”

  “I grew up not so far from here, remember?”

  “You knew him?”

  “Not really. I knew Brooke.”

  “You know Brooke? How?”

  “We went to school together.”

  “Were you friends?”

  “Brooke’s not anyone’s friend. She’s just Brooke. She’s a Robertson.”

  “Funny. Bill Raines said something similar to me this morning. I still don’t understand what it’s supposed to mean.”

  “You’ve seen Bill?”

  “Yeah.”

  “How is he?”

  Now it was my turn to be silent. I took another pull on my cigarette and saw Carol’s pinched face, six feet away from me in the darkness. “Have you got something to tell me?” I asked.

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “That a naughty word,” Tyler said quietly.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. I knew I should probably be reaching out to him, giving him a hug, doing something fatherlike. In the glimpses I got of his small face I could see the ghost of a baby I had held, and fed. I also knew that he hadn’t seen me in nearly three years and that I had no idea how much time we had, and that there were things I needed to know.

  “Ellen’s dead,” I said. “Someone murdered her and left her with a message to me.”

  Silence.

  “You want to know what the message was?”

  Silence.

  “A shirt I ran in when we lived in this house. A piece of jewelry I was given. And an e-mail. An e-mail to me, from Jenny, which I never saw.”

  Another drag on the cigarette, and I saw a tear rolling down Carol’s cheeks, one from each eye.

  “Tell me,” I said. “Carol, it’s been long enough. I have a right to know.”

  She said she’d had no prior suspicion and maybe that was true, but it wasn’t clear what else would have made her go into my study one morning after I’d gone to work, or to go look at my computer. There shouldn’t have been anything on there anyway. Jenny and I were not in contact at the time, and even when we had been, e-mails had been removed immediately: this is Having an Affair 101, as I’m sure you know.

  I had my software set to automatically check for mail on schedule, however. Once at midday, and prior to that at nine A.M. When I was working from home I tried to stick to this routine, to avoid the day clogging up with the constant back-and-forth of replying to people and then replying to their replies. When things were on between me and Bill Raines’s wife, I disabled this schedule and collected e-mails manually. On the day in question things were not on between us, and hadn’t been for several months, and so it was enabled again.

  The point is the nine A.M. sweep had done its thing that morning, and downloaded an e-mail sent in the middle of the night. It was sitting right there in my in-box when Carol looked at the screen. Pure bad luck, though you make your own luck, I’ve been told.

  Carol read it, the message I had now seen printed out. She stood over the desk light-headed with emotions for which there are no names, and considered what to do. In the end she printed the e-mail and then deleted it from my machine.

  She spent most of the day on the lawn with the baby, reading and rereading the e-mail, turning it over in her head. It was open to only one interpretation. Strength of emotion was evident, as was a prior history of indeterminate length. Carol eventually also put together that the inscription on a bracelet another man’s wife had made, and then given me for my birthday, could be interpreted as a way of connecting two Js. Jenny and John.

  In a court the jury wouldn’t even bother to leave the room. The question was . . . what happened in real life?

  It was evident from the e-mail that whatever had happened between this woman and her husband was over, or at least in abeyance. Carol was a lot wiser than she ever gave herself credit for, and knew right away that one option would be to simply let it go. Swallow the pain, let matters take their course. People do things, after all. Not all of them last, or change the world forever. A single hurricane doesn’t mean you have to dismantle your house and spend the rest of your life living underground. Carol also understood that just because Person A might be—or might have been—intermittently fucking Person C didn’t mean they didn’t still owe their heart and life to Person B.

  But it hurt. It hurt in the way that it hurts when people die. It hurts how it can only hurt when the world is redefined in an instant, when countless moments implode, when memories are undermined and smiles turned into lies.

  “How could you, John? I mean, how could you do it? When I was pregnant? And afterward? Tell me, because I have spent
three years trying to understand and still I just don’t.”

  “I don’t know, either,” I said.

  When I returned from work that evening, I was by all accounts sweet to her. I’d picked up a novel I knew she had her eye on, from the Yakima Borders, and brought something easy for dinner. As we lay together in bed that night—only about forty feet from where Carol now sat in the darkness telling me these things, her voice low and dry—she knew the grown-up thing was to just let it go.

  That this was the way to deal with me, anyhow. But Jenny? That was something else.

  This was a woman she’d cooked supper for, gone shopping with, chatted over coffee to. Who’d been at her house. Often. Before, during, and since.

  Carol couldn’t let that go.

  My cigarette was long finished, and we sat in blackness now. Tyler had kept quiet throughout, but I’d noticed Carol using long or adult words to make it unlikely he’d understand much of what was being said. And he was only three and a half, after all. You have to get a lot older before you realize how much you can fuck things up just by being stupid, that living in the moment can be a fine way of screwing up an infinite series of later moments.

  “What did you do?”

  I heard her swallow.

  “What did you do, Carol?”

  She said she tried to let it go. That she’d told herself that Jenny Raines was no more to blame than I was. But she couldn’t get the idea to take. She kept remembering an afternoon a month or so after Tyler was born, when she ran into Jenny in Roslyn. They wound up having a pastry together. Jenny held Tyler for a little while. Carol didn’t know whether we were actually having sex at the time or not. It didn’t much matter. The woman shouldn’t have been able to be that easy with her either way.

  I hung my head. I knew how she would have felt. I once made the mistake of staging a surprise party for Carol. She hated it. The fact of friends turning up to wish her well was utterly outweighed by the knowledge that she’d talked to many of them in the preceding weeks, and not one had let anything slip. They’d all lied to her, in effect, distorted her world through omission, making her feel that the reality she perceived was not to be trusted.