Nos4a2

by Joe Hill

  “You ever think of making a day trip to Dover with Wayne to see him? That can’t be more than an hour away from The Lake.”

  “I guess I’d get in touch with him if I needed to blow something up,” she said. “If I needed some ANFO.”

  “Info?”

  “ANFO. It’s an explosive. What my dad uses to take out stumps and boulders and bridges and so on. It’s basically a big, slippery bag of horseshit, engineered to destroy things.”

  “What is? ANFO? Or your dad?”

  “Both,” she said. “I already know what you want to talk about.”

  “Maybe I just wanted us to have Fourth of July together as a family,” Lou said. “Couldn’t it be that?”

  “Did Wayne say something about the woman who turned up at the house yesterday?”

  “He asked me about Charlie Manx.”

  “Shit. I sent him inside. I didn’t think he could hear us talking.”

  “Well. He caught a bunch of it.”

  “How much? Which parts?”

  “This and that. Enough to be curious.”

  “Did you know that Manx was dead?” she asked.

  Lou swiped damp palms on his cargo shorts. “Aw, dude. First you were in rehab, then your mom was dying—I didn’t want to lay another thing on you. I was going to tell you at some point. Honestly. I don’t like to stress you out. You know. No one wants you to go . . .” His voice faltered and trailed off.

  She gave him her lopsided smile again. “Batshit crazy?”

  He stared off through the dark at their son. Wayne had lit a new pair of sparklers. He waved his arms up and down, flapping his hands, while the sparklers burned and spit. He looked like Icarus just as everything began going wrong.

  “I want things to be easy for you. So you can be around for Wayne. Not, like, I’m laying guilt!” he added quickly. “I’m not giving you a hard time about . . . having a hard time. Wayne and me have been doing okay, just the two of us. I make sure he brushes his teeth, gets his homework done. We go out on jobs together, I let him run the winch. He loves that. He’s totally into winches and stuff. I just think he knows how to talk to you. Or maybe you know how to listen. Or something. It’s a mom thing.” He paused, then added, “I should’ve given you a heads-up about Manx dying, though. Just so you knew there might be reporters coming around.”

  “Reporters?”

  “Yeah. This lady who turned up yesterday—wasn’t she a reporter?”

  They were sitting under a low tree, and there were pink blossoms in it. A few petals dropped, caught in Vic’s hair. Lou ached with happiness, and never mind what they were talking about. It was July, and he was with Vic, and there were blossoms in her hair. It was romantic, like a song by Journey, one of the good ones.

  “No,” Vic said. “She was a crazy person.”

  “You mean someone from the hospital?” Lou asked.

  Vic frowned, seemed to sense the petals in her hair, swiped a hand back and brushed them away. So much for romance. She was, in truth, about as romantic as a box full of spark plugs.

  “You and me have never talked about Charlie Manx much,” she said. “About how I wound up with him.”

  This conversation was headed in a direction he didn’t like. They didn’t talk about how she wound up with Charlie Manx because Lou didn’t want to hear about how the old fuck sexually assaulted her and kept her locked in the trunk of his car for two days. Serious conversations always gave Lou the stomach flutters. He preferred casual banter about the Green Lantern.

  “I figured if you wanted to talk about it,” he said, “you’d bring it up.”

  “I never talked about it because I don’t know what happened.”

  “You mean you don’t remember. Yeah. Yeah, I get that. I’d block that shit out, too.”

  “No,” she said. “I mean I don’t know. I remember, but I don’t know.”

  “But . . . if you remember, then you know what happened. Aren’t remembering and knowing the same thing?”

  “Not if you remember it two different ways. In my head there are two stories about what happened to me, and they both seem true. Do you want to hear them?”

  No. Not at all.

  He nodded anyway.

  “In one version, the version I told the federal prosecutor, I had a fight with my mom. I ran away. I wound up at a train station, late at night. I called my dad to see if I could stay with him, and he told me I had to go home. When I hung up, I felt a stinging in my backside. As I turned around, my vision blurred and I fell into Manx’s arms. Charlie Manx kept me in the trunk of his car all the way across the country. He only took me out to keep me drugged. I was aware, vaguely, that he had another child with him, a little boy, but he mostly kept us apart. When we got to Colorado, he left me in the trunk and went off to do something with the boy. I got out. Forced the trunk open. I set fire to his place to distract him and ran to the highway. I ran through those awful woods with all the Christmas ornaments swinging from the trees. I ran to you, Lou. And you know the rest after that,” she said. “That’s one way I remember things happening. Do you want to hear the other way?”

  He wasn’t sure he did but nodded for her to go on.

  “So in a different version of my life, I had a bicycle. My father gave it to me when I was a little girl. And I could use this bicycle to find lost things. I would ride it across an imaginary covered bridge, and the bridge would always take me wherever I needed to go. Like once my mother lost a bracelet and I rode my bike across this bridge and came out in New Hampshire, forty miles away from home. And the bracelet was there, in a restaurant called Terry’s Primo Subs. With me so far?”

  “Imaginary bridge, superpowered bike. Got it.”

  “Over the years I used my bicycle and the bridge to find all kinds of things. Missing stuffed animals or lost photos. Things like that. I didn’t go ‘finding’ often. Just once or twice a year. And as I got older, even less. It started to scare me, because I knew it was impossible, that the world isn’t supposed to work that way. When I was little, it was just pretend. But as I got older, it began to seem crazy. It began to frighten me.”

  “I’m surprised you didn’t use your special power to find someone who could tell you there was nothing wrong with you,” Lou said.

  Her eyes widened and lit with surprise, and Lou understood that in fact she had done just that.

  “How did you—” she began.

  “I read a lot of comics. It’s the logical next step,” Lou said. “Discover magic ring, seek out the Guardians of the Universe. Standard operating procedure. Who was it?”

  “The bridge took me to a librarian in Iowa.”

  “It would be a librarian.”

  “This girl—she wasn’t much older than me—had a special power of her own. She could use Scrabble tiles to reveal secrets. Spell messages from the great beyond. That kind of thing.”

  “An imaginary friend.”

  She gave him a small, scared, apologetic smile and a brief shake of the head. “It didn’t feel imaginary. Not ever. It felt real.”

  “Even the part where you bicycled all the way to Iowa?”

  “Across the Shorter Way Bridge.”

  “And how long did it take to get from Massachusetts to the corn capital of America?”

  “I don’t know. Thirty seconds? A minute, tops.”

  “It took you thirty seconds to pedal from Massachusetts to Iowa? And that part didn’t feel imaginary?”

  “No. I remember it all like it really happened.”

  “Okay. Got you. Go on.”

  “So like I said, this girl in Iowa, she had a bag of Scrabble tiles. She could pull letters out and line them up into messages. Her Scrabble letters helped her unlock secrets, in the same way my bicycle could help me find lost objects. She told me there were other people like us. People who could do impossible things if they had the right vehicle. She told me about Charlie Manx. She warned me about him. She said there was a man, a bad man with a bad car. He used his car to s
uck the life out of children. He was a kind of vampire—a road vampire.”

  “You’re saying you knew about Charlie Manx before he ever kidnapped you?”

  “No, I’m not. Because in this version of my life, he didn’t kidnap me at all. In this version of my life, I had a dumb fight with my mom, and then after, I used my bicycle to go looking for him. I wanted to find some trouble, and I did. I crossed the Shorter Way Bridge and came out at Charlie Manx’s Sleigh House. He did his best to kill me, but I got away from him and ran and met you. And the story I told the police, all that stuff about being locked in his trunk and being assaulted—that was just something I made up, because I knew no one would believe the truth. I could tell any story I wanted about Charlie Manx, because I knew that stuff he had really done was worse than any lie I could make up. Remember: In this version of my life, he’s not a dirty old kidnapper, he’s a fucking vampire.”

  She was not crying, but her eyes were wet and shiny, luminous in a way that made Fourth of July sparklers look chintzy and dull.

  “So he sucked the life out of little kids,” Lou said. “And then what? What happened to them?”

  “They went to a place called Christmasland. I don’t know where that is—I’m not sure it’s even in our world—but they get great phone service, because the kids there used to call me all the time.” She looked out at the children standing on the stone wall, Wayne among them, and whispered, “They were ruined by the time Manx drained the life out of them. Nothing left in them but hate and teeth.”

  Lou shuddered. “Jesus.”

  A small knot of men and women erupted into laughter nearby, and Lou glared at them. It didn’t feel as if any people in their general vicinity had any right to be enjoying themselves at this particular moment.

  He looked at her and said, “So to recap: There’s one version of your life where Charlie Manx, a dirty ol’ fuckin’ child murderer, kidnapped you from a train station. And you only barely got away from him. That’s the official memory. But then there’s this other version where you crossed an imaginary bridge on a psychically powered bicycle and tracked him down in Colorado all on your own. And that’s the unofficial memory. The VH1 Behind the Music story.”

  “Yes.”

  “And both of these memories feel true to you.”

  “Yes.”

  “But you know,” Lou said, eyeing her intently, “that the story about the Shorter Way Bridge is bullshit. Deep down you know it’s a story you told yourself, so you don’t have to think about what really happened to you. So you don’t have to think about . . . being kidnapped and all the rest of it.”

  “That’s right,” Vic said. “That’s what I figured out in the mental hospital. My story about the magic bridge is a classic empowerment fantasy. I couldn’t bear the thought of being a victim, so I invented this vast delusion to make me the hero of the story, complete with a whole set of memories of things that never happened.”

  He sat back in his chair, his motorcycle jacket folded over one knee, and relaxed, breathed deep. Well. That wasn’t so bad. He understood now what she was saying to him: that she had been through something awful and it made her a crazy person for a while. She had retreated into fantasy for a time—anyone would!—but now she was ready to put the fantasy away, to deal with things as they were.

  “Oh,” Lou added, almost as an afterthought. “Shit. This kind of got away from what we were talking about. What does all this have to do with the woman who came to your house yesterday?”

  “That’s Maggie Leigh,” Vic said.

  “Maggie Leigh? Who the hell is that?”

  “The librarian. The girl I met in Iowa, when I was thirteen. She tracked me down in Haverhill to tell me that Charlie Manx is back from the dead and coming after me.”

  LOU’S BIG, ROUND, BRISTLY FACE WAS ALMOST COMICALLY EASY TO read. His eyes didn’t just widen when Vic told him she’d met a woman from her own imagination. They popped, making him resemble a character in a comic strip who has just had a swig from a bottle marked XXX. If there had been smoke jetting from his ears, the picture would’ve been complete.

  Vic had always liked to touch his face and could only barely resist doing it now. It was as inviting as a rubber ball is to a child.

  She had been a child the first time she kissed him. They both had been, really.

  “Dude. What the fuck? I thought you said the librarian was make-believe. Like your covered bridge of the mind.”

  “Yep. That’s what I decided in the hospital. That all those memories were imagined. An elaborate story I’d invented to protect myself from the truth.”

  “But . . . she can’t be imaginary. She was at the house. Wayne saw her. She left a folder behind. That’s where Wayne read about Charlie Manx,” Lou said. Then his big, expressive face came alive with a look of dismay. “Ah, dude. I wasn’t supposed to tell you that. About the folder.”

  “Wayne looked in it? Shit. I told her to take it with her. I didn’t want Wayne to see.”

  “You can’t let him know I told you.” Lou made a fist and rapped it on one of his elephantine knees. “I am so shitty at keeping secrets.”

  “You’re guileless, Lou. That’s one of the reasons I love you.”

  He lifted his head and gave her a wondering stare.

  “I do, you know,” she said. “It’s not your fault I made such a rotten mess of everything. It’s not your fault I’m such a colossal fuckup.”

  Lou bowed his head and considered this.

  “Aren’t you going to tell me I’m not so bad?” she asked.

  “Mmm-no. I was thinking how every man loves a hot girl with a history of making mistakes. Because it’s always possible she’ll make one with you.”

  She smiled, reached across the space between them, put her hand on his. “I have a long history of making mistakes, Louis Carmody, but you weren’t one of them. Oh, Lou. I get so fucking tired of being in my own head. The screwups are bad, and the excuses are worse. That’s what both versions of my life have in common, you know. The one thing. In the first version of my life, I’m a walking disaster because Mommy didn’t hug me enough and Daddy didn’t teach me how to fly kites or something. In the other version, I’m permitted to be a crazy fucking mess—”

  “Shhh. Stop.”

  “—and ruin your life and Wayne’s life—”

  “Stop kicking yourself.”

  “—because all those trips through the Shorter Way Bridge messed me up somehow. Because it was an unsafe structure to begin with, and every time I went across it, it took a little more wear. Because it’s a bridge, but it’s also the inside of my own head. I don’t expect that to make sense. I hardly understand it myself. It’s pretty Freudian in there.”

  “Freudian or not, you talk about it like it’s real,” Lou said. He looked out into the night. He took a slow, deep, steadying breath. “So is it?”

  Yes, Vic thought with a wrenching urgency.

  “No,” she said. “It can’t be. I need it not to be. Lou, do you remember that guy who shot the congresswoman in Arizona? Loughner? He thought the government was trying to enslave humanity by controlling grammar. To him there was no question it was happening. The proof was all around him. When he looked out the window and saw someone walking the dog, he was sure it was a spy, someone the CIA had sent to monitor him. Schizos invent memories all the time: meeting famous people, abductions, heroic triumphs. That’s the nature of delusion. Your chemistry fouls up your whole sense of reality. That night I stuck all our phones in the oven and burned our house down? I was sure dead children were calling from Christmasland. I heard the phones ringing even though no one else did. I heard voices no one else heard.”

  “But, Vic. Maggie Leigh was at your house. The librarian. You didn’t imagine that. Wayne saw her, too.”

  Vic struggled for a smile she didn’t really feel. “Okay. I’ll try and explain how it’s possible. It’s simpler than you think. There’s nothing magic about it. So I have these memories of the Shorter Way
Bridge and the bike that took me finding. Only they aren’t memories, they’re delusions, right? And in the hospital we had group sessions where we’d sit and talk about our crazy ideas. Lots of patients in that hospital heard my story about Charlie Manx and the Shorter Way Bridge. I think Maggie Leigh is one of them—one of the other crazies. She latched onto my fantasy and made it her own.”

  “What do you mean you think she was one of the other patients? Was she in your group sessions or not?”

  “I have no memory of her in those sessions. What I remember is meeting Maggie in a small-town library in Iowa. But that’s how delusion works. I’m always ‘remembering’ things.” Vic lifted her fingers and made imaginary quotation marks in the air, to indicate the essentially untrustworthy nature of such recollections. “These memories just come to me, all at once, perfect little chapters in this crazy story I wrote in my imagination. But of course there’s nothing true about them. They’re invented on the spot. My imagination provides them, and some part of me decides to accept them as fact the instant they come to me. Maggie Leigh told me I met her when I was a child, and my delusion instantly provided a story to back her up. Lou. I can even remember the fish tank in her office. It had one big koi in it, and instead of rocks it had Scrabble tiles on the floor. Think about how crazy that sounds.”

  “I thought you were on medicine. I thought you were okay now.”

  “The pills I take are a paperweight. All they do is pin the fantasies down. But they’re still there, and any strong wind that comes along, I can feel them rattling around, trying to slip free.” She met his gaze and said, “Lou. You can trust me. I’m going to take care of myself. Not just for me. For Wayne. I’m all right.” She did not say she had run out of Abilify a week earlier, had to spread the last few pills out so she didn’t come down with withdrawal. She didn’t want to worry him any more than necessary, and besides, she planned to refill her prescription first thing next morning. “I’ll tell you something else. I don’t remember meeting Maggie Leigh in the hospital, but I easily could’ve. They had me pumped so full of drugs in there I could’ve met Barack Obama and I wouldn’t remember it. And Maggie Leigh, God bless her, is a lunatic. I knew it the moment I saw her. She smelled like homeless shelters, and her arms were scarred from where she’s been shooting junk or burning herself with cigarettes or both. Probably both.”