Bad Things (38 page)

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

B A D T H I N G S 275

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 al-

lowed 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 fi nd, 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 after-

thought, 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

276 Michael Marshall

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 approach-

ing. The shape itself was limitless, unbounded, but it chose to co-

alesce 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 self-

hatred is a massive dose of relief.

So strong that it almost feels sexual.

When she fi nally stands up to get her shit together and go to

work—she still has to function in the real world, after all—she real-

izes something else.

She wants a cigarette.

C H A P T E R 3 7

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 bro-

ken, 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 fl oor. 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 ap-

peared to be nothing for them to adjust to. My vision stayed milky

black, the only variation coming from the waves and mists of chem-

icals fi ring in my retina as they tried to fi nd something to grab onto.

278 Michael Marshall

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 fl oor, 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 fl icked it again, three times before I got a light.

Carol was sitting on the fl oor 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 dif-

ferent, 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 fl oor. I held the lighter in my other hand and lit it again,

B A D T H I N G S 279

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 fi nd 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 breath-

ing 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 fl oor

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?”

280 Michael Marshall

“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.”

B A D T H I N G S 281

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 sit-

ting 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

282 Michael Marshall

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 con-

necting two
J
s. 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 be-

tween 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 redefi ned 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