The Dead Girl in 2A

by Carter Wilson

  Clara is panting. Elle, close by, has stopped moving.

  “I won’t if you won’t,” Markus says. His face is rigid as stone, but now I see the slightest shake in his outstretched hand.

  I don’t feel the rage I did earlier, but goddamned if I’m going to die in this filthy muck.

  “Shoot him,” I say again. “If you don’t, we’ll all die.”

  Each of them stiffens, their arms stretching out an inch more, their guns seeming to lean in for a kiss.

  The next spoken word is “no.” It comes from Eaton.

  I turn.

  “Both of you, put your guns down,” he says, his tone less bitter than resigned. I turn back, and neither Clara nor Markus has obeyed, but Clara has pulled her arm back a few inches.

  “Him first,” I say.

  “Markus,” Eaton says. “Put your gun down and take Elle for help.”

  This is the last thing I was expecting him to say. He remembered something under the water. Something changed him.

  “Are you sure?” Markus says.

  “Yes, just go. Save her, if you can.”

  Markus still hesitates, and then I yell, “Go!”

  This works, and Markus holsters his gun back to his ankle, then walks to Elle and lifts her with ease. Elle is limp in his arms, and blood trails along the pool deck as he leaves the room. I can’t imagine how he’s going to make it through the fallen trees and branches along the path and back to the car while carrying Elle. In the rain. And near darkness. But at least she’s being moved. Here, she’d die.

  I know with immediate clarity that, as quickly as Elle entered my life, this is the last time I will ever see her.

  Now we are alone, the orphans. Landis, Eaton, and myself, still in this cold, black-green water. Clara, nearly naked and shivering, standing on the pool deck, gun still in her hand.

  Landis’s gaze is fixed on Eaton.

  “It was you,” he says. “You killed my parents.”

  Eaton nods. “Does that surprise you?”

  “No. In fact, I had always suspected it. But I had to know for certain.”

  Through chattering teeth, Clara tells Eaton, “It was your idea. You were the oldest. You called yourself the Leader. You told us the vitamins were making us crazy. That’s why we were in the house that night, to destroy the vitamins. But then you snuck away by yourself and went up to their room.”

  I wade over to the edge of the pool, pushing away a pain-induced desire to vomit. “Give me the gun,” I tell her. “Get dressed. You’re freezing.”

  She hesitates. “No more death, Jake.”

  “I know. I don’t want anyone else to get hurt. But we have to protect ourselves.” Eaton and Landis can hear us, but I don’t care. Nor does it seem to matter, for after Clara bends down and hands me the gun, I turn and see the two men locked deeply into each other’s stare. They don’t even seem to be aware of anyone else in the room.

  “What did you remember under there?” Landis asks him.

  “I remember enough,” Eaton says. He takes a few slow and deliberate steps in the water toward Landis, who is so motionless, he could be carved from stone. “I remembered my boyhood tendencies, well before coming to the school. How I used to play with fire all the time. What I did to animals: first bugs, then lizards, and then finally a stray cat.” Eaton takes a long, slow breath and briefly looks to the ceiling. “I remember what I did to my own parents, which is how I ended up at this school. But your parents, they had no idea what I was. Not really. No one knew.”

  He takes a step closer, and now the two men are within two feet of each other. I hold the gun tightly but don’t point it at either of them. They remain a threat, but only to each other in this moment.

  Eaton’s voice is soft, a stark contrast to earlier. “I wanted to change, I did. I thought I had a chance when you came to me, and I’d hoped the program was a way to finally become someone different from who I am.” A half step closer. “But that was the problem all along, Landis. Your parents developed a program meant to augment our natural talents.” He gives a shake of his head. “They didn’t know my natural talent all along was death.”

  I inch away as Eaton confesses this. The pieces lock into place with what he said earlier about the things he’s done, and the clouds of confusion start to dissipate. Who knows how many lives he’s taken, or if it was indeed made worse by the Müllers’ work. But where Landis’s motivation to reestablish the program was to remember his parents and find their killer, Eaton just wanted to change, to be something different from what he was. I suppose the program was never meant to domesticate a feral animal.

  Eaton reaches out and places a slime-covered hand on Landis’s bare shoulder. For a second, I expect some kind of attack from either man, but it doesn’t come.

  “I would say I’m sorry, Landis, but I’m not. I’m incapable of feeling sorry. I just am who I am.”

  Landis barely moves his mouth as he speaks. “I forgive you,” he says.

  I think Landis has been waiting his whole life to speak those words. He just didn’t know who to say them to.

  He gently takes Eaton’s hand off his shoulder and, with a preternatural calm, raises his own arms and places his hands on top of Eaton’s head. Eaton nods in some kind of agreement only the two men share, and then Eaton begins to lower into the water, an inch at a time, first chest, then neck, then jawline. Landis keeps his hands on Eaton’s head but does not appear to be forcing him down. He’s just a part of this ceremony.

  Before Eaton is fully submerged, Landis tells him, “May your last memory be a good one.”

  Then Eaton is gone into the beneath. One minute passes. Landis’s hands remain softly placed on top of Eaton’s head.

  “No,” Clara says.

  I look over and she’s now dressed, with her soaked bra and underwear discarded on the deck. “No more death.”

  “It’s his decision,” Landis replies, looking down into the pool. “His responsibility.”

  The seconds tick by. Two minutes surely have passed by now, and Eaton’s mind must be flooding with imagery. I wonder what he sees as his final seconds transpire. Is there one good thing buried in that brain of his, something soft and sweet to take him from this world?

  Or maybe his mind contains nothing but death.

  Eaton. We were all supposed to be great through an innate understanding of death. You understood it better than us all, and look where you are.

  Then, a small thrashing in the water, and for the first time, Landis applies force to keep Eaton underneath. This is the moment suicide and murder intertwine, and it doesn’t last long, only seconds, a final splash, and then stillness and calm. Landis keep his hands in place a while longer and finally lets go. Eaton’s body rises, facedown, floats gently in the algae, as if just a natural extension of all the decay and bacteria already here.

  Landis doesn’t even acknowledge what’s transpired as he gets out of the pool and puts on his clothes. He fully dresses, including tucking in his shirt, securing his belt, and placing his fedora back on at an angle. His clothes spot from the water still on his skin, but he doesn’t seem to care.

  “I’m going home,” he says.

  Then Landis walks away, leaving me wondering to what home he’s even referring.

  Seventy-Four

  Clara

  Together we walk, Jake and I.

  The rain has moved on, leaving behind a chill that burrows into my skin, threatening my bones. Jake is colder yet, having gone into the pool fully clothed, and his wet clothes hang heavy on him like freshly applied papier-mâché. We each shiver as we walk the grounds of this place where we once knew each other.

  One of the places, I should say.

  The sky turns a fierce, rusted orange for a brief moment, then bruises over and continues to darken.

  We walk into the remains of the M
üller house, a two-story structure consumed by fire and time. We don’t stay long. The house is the kind of dark and cold place that just begs to be left alone. The stairs are still intact, though I can’t say for sure what remains of the bedroom where the child Eaton murdered the husband-and-wife headmasters of this ghost of a school.

  I shudder, thinking their bones may still be up in that bed.

  Most likely some anonymous workers from an anonymous agency disposed of the corpses. If not, the bodies have surely been picked over by animals.

  I know Landis has come to the house because a set of car keys is on the kitchen counter. He may even be upstairs right now, eyes closed, in the room where he watched his parents die, filling himself with memories until he’s drunk with them.

  We don’t go up to investigate, but we do take the keys.

  Next stop, the fire-eaten ruins of a nearby building, the one I thought looked like barracks. I think this is where we slept as children. Four rooms, and we explore each. Children’s clothes are littered in the remains. Sweatpants, T-shirts, winter gloves. I kick through the ash and rubble, looking at the things that used to be ours, memories forming and fading almost simultaneously, zeroing each other out, leaving me dizzy.

  Something sparkles, catches my eye. In all these remains, something shines, catching the embers of the dying sun. I reach down and pick it up.

  A watch. Gold edging around the glass.

  Child’s size.

  A smiling Mickey Mouse splashes across the face of the watch.

  “What is that?” Jake asks.

  I hand it to him. He studies it a moment before his eyes widen.

  “Oh my god,” he says.

  “What?”

  “It’s the watch from my father. My biological father. I don’t remember it, but I have a picture of me wearing it on my sixth birthday.” He looks up at me. “On the plane, you asked me if I’d ever lost something and then found it in a place I was sure I’d already looked. That made me think of this watch. I don’t know why, since I’d never found it. But this is what I thought of.” He smiles, seems to fight back tears, then slides the watch into his front pocket.

  “A little bit of magic,” I say.

  “I suppose so.”

  Back in the main building, Jake and I decide what to do. Night closes in, we’re cold, wet, and hungry, our fatigue pronounced, and his injuries aren’t going to get better on their own. But I don’t see how we can navigate the tree-covered path back to the car in the dark, and if we somehow manage it and drive away, Landis will be stranded here in the mountains. Maybe he prefers it that way, and perhaps he plans to simply give himself fully to this place. But wherever he is in this moment, we agree we’re not ready to abandon him.

  There’s no power in the building. We find flashlights with dead batteries, but we also find several boxes of matches. There is food, most of it rummaged or rotten, along with cans of soup and vegetables that expired decades ago.

  Jake is unable to move without pain, but I use the remaining light to race around the small campus and gather some supplies, returning each time with arms full. Bathrobes and blankets from the Müller’s house, which I found in a downstairs closet. A first-aid kit. Two tiki torches and a bottle of citronella oil from the maintenance shed. And, miraculously, a bottle of red wine. Jake unearths a corkscrew from the kitchen.

  We fill and light the torches, which give off an acrid smoke that smells of my newly discovered childhood. Outside, on an old picnic bench by the firelight, Jake strips and cleans his wound the best he can, which mainly consists of pouring rubbing alcohol on it until he nearly passes out from the pain. He then wraps it in fresh gauze.

  I slip on the robe, monogrammed WLM, and its softness reminds me just how exhausted I am. Likewise, Jake slips into his robe and we open the wine. We have no glasses but are comfortable taking swigs back and forth. It’s cheap red wine, the kind that doesn’t get better with age, but it’s the best thing I’ve ever tasted.

  I look up and see the stars, which are packed so densely together, it looks like a phosphorescent fog. Not too often a girl from Boston gets to look to the sky and see the Milky Way, but I vaguely recall doing this very thing, night after night, long ago.

  More and more memories return, some of them finally staying put, letting me rebuild my past. It’s not the feeling I imagined. I always thought if I could suddenly remember, it would be overwhelming. A sensory and emotional overload. But it’s not that at all. It’s just a feeling of needed comfort, like sitting by a campfire on a brisk night.

  Maybe the overwhelming part comes later as I really start to process all the images in my mind. The school, the other children. The Müllers. The vitamins and the books.

  And even before that. My birth parents, looking back and smiling at me as we eat ice cream in our car.

  That is one memory standing out above all others, and perhaps it will overwhelm me, but right now, it just feels perfect. So unexpected, but now it makes sense.

  It’s a memory of Jake from when we were children.

  But this memory is from before the school.

  That image of eating ice cream in the car. My parents look back and smile at me, but they smile at Jake too. He is sitting next to me in the back seat. Mussed hair, scrunched nose, and a tiny brown spot of chocolate ice cream on his chin, which he doesn’t even know about.

  I take a swig of wine and pass the bottle to Jake.

  “Do you remember?” I ask him.

  Seventy-Five

  Jake

  What a huge, open question.

  Do you remember?

  A few days ago, the answer would simply have been no. There were no memories of anything a few days ago. Now there are thousands of them.

  But Clara isn’t asking if I remember things in general. She’s asking about one thing.

  One specific memory from my past.

  It came to me as I was underwater, when I thought I was on the losing side of the life-death balance. A memory of Clara from the lost time. The time before the school.

  “I do,” I say.

  She stares straight ahead at the torch flame and reaches her hand out to me, which I take. I know now I have a history of holding her hand. I did it when we witnessed the murders in the house behind us. I did it when we were told our own parents were dead. As a child, I would always grasp Clara’s hand when she was scared, telling her Everything’s going to be okay.

  That’s just what a big brother does.

  Seventy-Six

  One month later

  Jake Buchannan stared down at the checkerboard and waited for his daughter to make a move. As he did, he gave himself a quick test.

  What did I have for dinner last night?

  The answer came after a few, long moments.

  Chicken piccata. Asparagus.

  He’d quizzed himself frequently since coming home. The answers to his short-term memory questions weren’t coming much faster than before, but they came. He rarely searched his mind only to find blank space, certainly not as frequently as before.

  And the past.

  The way past. The lost time.

  Jake had found it.

  His childhood, his early years. Even as far back as age four. It was all there. Mostly.

  Jake wanted to think he was becoming normal, but that wasn’t quite it. There was nothing normal about the sudden wells of creativity and inspiration he’d experienced since his time in the Colorado mountains. It certainly wasn’t normal for him to take these bursts and contain them, absorb them, and use them with such high degrees of productivity.

  Jake had finished his novel.

  The one about nostalgia, the novel that was nearly as old as Em and had still been sitting half-written on his laptop’s hard drive. He’d had it all visualized in his mind but had not yet written anything down, maybe a little out of
fear of his ideas turning rotten once they were actually written down.

  In the past month, he’d restructured and rewritten all of what he’d had, about forty thousand words, and then added an extra fifty thousand to complete it. He was on his second draft now, excited at all the ways he’d been finding to make it better.

  The entirety of it simply unfolded before him soon after he started the program, and all he had to do was type the words. Even though he’d since discarded all remaining pills and hadn’t taken another look at the book, all his ideas about the novel remained firmly rooted in his mind.

  The novel wasn’t quite about nostalgia anymore. When he thought about it, he realized it was about finding things long since lost. Time. Love. Money. Memories.

  Magic.

  Em made her move. With ruthless efficiency, she jumped three of Jake’s black checker pieces and landed on the edge of the board.

  “King me,” she said.

  Jake topped her piece with one of hers he’d captured earlier. As he did, the word king stirred the faintest quiver of panic inside him.

  Let’s play a game of war.

  “Tell you what,” he said. “I’ll queen you.”

  “What does that do?”

  “Gives you the same power as a king, but also makes you nicer and smarter.”

  Em shrugged. “Fine. I’m still going to win.”

  “So much for being nicer,” he said.

  Em burst out giggling, which always ended in a snort of delight.

  Jake decided then and there he could listen to that sound for the rest of his life.

  At the game’s end (she won, with only the slightest lack of effort on Jake’s part), Jake cleaned dishes in the sink and told Em to get ready for bed. Abby was entrenched in a show on the couch, and Jake planned to join her after getting the mail. He didn’t even like the show, but wanted just to sit next to her and not think about anything.

  He fetched the mail in the dark, which grew ever earlier this time of year. He tried to rifle though the pieces under the streetlight but gave up.