Bad Things (37 page)

Pioneer Square in Seattle that I’d used once in a while, back in the

old days.

“I think,” I said, “that it’s mine. When I lived here I used to go for

runs in the woods. This looks like something I used to wear.”

I realized there was something inside the shirt. Something hard

and unyielding. I put the T-shirt back down on the bed and carefully

unfolded it.

In the middle was a piece of jewelry, a sturdy silver bracelet half

an inch wide, with small pieces of turquoise inset at regular intervals.

I recognized it immediately, though it had become very tarnished,

and though I had thought it was lost.

B A D T H I N G S 267

“Oh Christ,” I said.

I moved it to one side, to get to the fi nal object. A piece of thick

paper, about four inches square. I turned it over. It was a Polaroid,

taken somewhere with very low light. Someone had held a fl ashlight

and shone it straight at a face, while taking the picture. A photograph

of Carol.

“Who’s that woman?” Becki said, her voice not far from hysteria.

“John, what the fuck
is
all this?”

“That’s my ex-wife,” I said.

“You’ve got
a wife
?”

“I did.”

I picked up the bangle again, turning it over in my fi ngers. On

the inside, hidden amid the mottled grays of discoloration, was an

inscription I knew would be there, and which I recognized well:

J2

“John? There’s something else in here.”

I turned sluggishly to see that Becki was peering inside the

T-shirt.

“You want me to get it?”

The truth was I didn’t know whether I did, but she went ahead

anyway, pulling out a piece of paper that had been neatly folded over

twice.

She handed it to me and I unfolded it. At the top were the stan-

dard log lines of an e-mail, with a date from three years ago. The

message said:

Yes, it s me. I *know* we re not suposed to be in contact

but I ve had WAY to much wiine withstanding Bill s clients

(still yakking it up downstairs) and I wish I was somewher

being touched by you instead. I m goig to feel crap about

this tomorow but I m pressing the button anyway. Don t

268 Michael Marshall

reply because I won t answer. And *fuck you* for making

me feel like this, you asshole :-) xox

I’d never seen the message before. But I knew who it was from,

and to.

“What is it? What’s it say?”

“Nothing,” I said, folding it again. I grabbed the shirt and the

bracelet and the picture and stuffed it all back into the envelope.

“It didn’t look like nothing. You look like you’ve seen a fucking

ghost.”

“Becki,
shut up
.”

She reared back as if I’d slapped her. I hadn’t meant it the way it

sounded. I just couldn’t think, couldn’t put the pieces together in my

head. “I’m sorry,” I said.

Our heads turned together then, at the sound of a door opening.

But it was not the door to the room we were in. “What the hell was

that?”

“Sounded like . . . John, it sounded like someone going into your

room.”

I opened the door and stepped out. There were no cars in the lot.

The maid’s cart was right where it had been, back down near room 5.

The door to my room was open about an inch, however.

I gently pushed it. It swung open slowly to reveal someone stand-

ing in the room, close to the desk. Courtney.

I walked in, not knowing what I was going to do about this. I heard

Becki enter the room behind me, then the sharp intake of her breath.

The maid heard it, too, and turned her head. “Oh, hi,” she said,

and returned to what she’d been doing.

Her voice was back to the way I’d heard it every time before, as if

she was on a heavy dose of meds. She held a dusting cloth in her hand.

The wastebasket from under the desk had been moved to the middle

of the fl oor, ready to be emptied.

B A D T H I N G S 269

I took another step toward her. Becki was becalmed in the door-

way, staring at the body on the bed.

“I asked you not to come in here,” I said.

“Oh, I know,” the maid said. “But, you know, I thought about it?

And I really don’t want to get on Marie’s bad side. I need this job.” She

paused. “And anyway—there’s no papers here.”

“What?”

“You said I wasn’t supposed to disturb anything. But there’s noth-

ing here. Which is kind of weird.”

“
That’s
weird?”

“Well, yeah,” she said, going back to wiping the desk in slow,

pointless circles. “Was it, like, a joke, or something? I don’t always

get jokes.”

“I was concerned,” I said, pointing toward the bed, “about what

you might think about what’s lying over there.”

“Oh, that,” she said, glancing over at Ellen’s body. “I already knew

about that.”

“You knew about it?”

“Of course.” She looked at me as if I was being obtuse. “How do

you think he got it in here?” She reached in the pocket of her house-

coat and pulled out a large ring of keys. “Duh.”

“But . . .”

“Don’t worry. It’ll be our little secret,” she said, and went back to

dusting.

“Who was it? Who put her in here?”

“I don’t know,” she said apologetically. “I’m sorry. He didn’t have

a face.”

Becki was no longer looking at the body, but staring at the maid.

“We’re leaving now,” I told her.

“You got it.”

Courtney held up her hand. “Oh, wait,” she said. “I was supposed

to give you this. Sorry. I don’t think very clearly sometimes.”

270 Michael Marshall

She fi shed in her coat pocket again and held something out to-

ward me. I took it.

It was another Polaroid. This time it showed a jetty stretching

out over a lake, in fading light. It was the jetty near our old house.

A house in which it would now be very dark, and where, should you

wish to photograph someone, you would need to shine a fl ashlight at

their face.

“Oh no,” I said, and started to run.

Becki tried to follow but I’d left her behind before I even got to the

road. I heard her calling after me for a while but then it was drowned

out by the sound of my panting, and the thudding of blood in my

ears.

I fumbled the keys out as I ran across the bank’s parking lot and

headed straight for my car, and I didn’t hear the men coming out

from behind the blue truck until it was far too late.

C H A P T E R 3 6

When Kristina had got back to her apartment just before dawn, she

trudged straight to the shower and stood under it, staying there

long after the hot water had run out. It fi nally got too cold to bear

and she turned it off, but remained huddled in the corner of the

tiled cubicle, her face in her hands.

She didn’t feel any cleaner.

She felt as if she had remembered every bad thing she had ever

done, every bad thing
anyone
had ever done. She felt as if they were

in her hair, under her fi ngernails, coating the lining of her stomach

and crawling through her veins. She felt as if were she to spit, or

throw up, or bleed, then particles of these deeds would be there,

like tiny, twisting worms.

And the worst of it all was that she couldn’t be sure that feeling

this way was unpleasant.

She had known this potential all her life, and running around the

world had not made any difference in the end. Suddenly, last night,

she had undone decades of resistance—like deliberately stepping in

front of a car. A story told to her over coffee in a pizza restaurant—

by a man she really barely knew—had fl ipped a switch she’d had her

fi nger hovering over ever since she’d been back in Black Ridge.

272 Michael Marshall

No. It wasn’t that simple.

Of course not. And she ought to know better than to blame oth-

ers for what she’d done. Nobody forced people to behave in the ways

they did. With a few sad exceptions, most people did what they did.

They chose their paths through the woods, even if those choices

were sometimes shaped by who they were, and what had been done

to them.

Done to Kristina, for example, on the night her parents had brought

her to the turnoff on Route 61 a little after nine-thirty in the evening.

It was very dark, and cold. Her mother was in the passenger seat,

not speaking. Her father was driving, doing—as usual—what he was

told.

Kristina was in the back, by herself, and she was already afraid.

Though no one had said what was about to occur, she was beginning

to get an inkling. Why else bring her out all this way into the forest,

this late, on a school night? Why had the neighbors been told she was

away, staying with friends?

Her dad took the forestry track that skirted close to the Robert-

sons’ land, driving deeper and deeper into the woods. Eventually he

stopped the car and got out. He walked a few yards from the vehicle,

until he was invisible in the darkness except for the fi refl y light at the

end of his cigarette. Five years later he’d be dead of lung cancer.

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 fi rst time. The fi rst time after kissing someone you should

not have kissed, a kiss that led nowhere but to broken lives. The fi rst

time after shoplifting and getting away with it, after telling a lie that

would break someone’s heart. The fi rst time after slipping into some-

B A D T H I N G S 273

one’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 fl eeting kick out of these deeds but nothing in you is actu-

ally altered. You can never defi ne yourself through actions you know

witnesses would fi nd 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 fi rst

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.

274 Michael Marshall

They’re not the bad things.

And it is they whom you will sense for the fi rst time that eve-

ning, 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

terrifi ed, that for a time you lose your mind. You fi nd 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 be-

come 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 fi nd 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.