Being Dead (3 page)

I turned the light off and settled down again. The water bed stopped moving.

Then started again.

A snake or a mouse had gotten in between the covers—I
knew
it.

I jumped up and yanked the top sheet down. Nothing. I pulled off the under sheet. Then the mattress pad. Nothing. Gingerly I poked with my toe at the comforter, which had fallen to the floor from where I keep it folded across the foot of the bed. I saw nothing. Which didn't guarantee that there was nothing there.

It wasn't bad enough my parents had to tear me away from my school and my friends to plunk me down in the middle of Green Acres? They had to buy a house that was crawling with vermin?

Reluctantly I picked up a corner of the comforter, sure that something was just waiting to run up my arm.

Nothing did.

"And don't come back," I muttered.

I shook out the sheets, just to be sure, then remade the bed. I switched off the light and climbed back into bed. Well,
that
was nice and restful. Home sweet home. I closed my eyes.

Something moved.

All right, I'm sixteen years old and I wasn't currently on speaking terms with my mother—but I ran to get my parents, anyway.

They were still up, reading in bed.

"There's something in my bed!" I yelled.

"Is it Goldilocks?" my father asked.

Mom, even though we were mad at each other, gave him a dirty look and followed me into my room.

Silently, still not talking to me, Mom pulled the sheet back a bit more than it already was.

I told her, "I took all the covers off and I couldn't see anything, then when I got back in, I felt whatever-it-was moving again."

My father came in carrying the flyswatter.

"I'm not talking about a bug," I told him, aware that my voice was veering into shrillness. "Something big enough to make the mattress move."

My parents didn't say anything, but they stripped the bed, shaking out the sheets.

"I
did
that already," I said.

"Could something have gotten between the mattress and the frame?" Mom asked Dad.

"Something big enough to make the mattress move?" Dad sounded skeptical. And understandably so. Even to get the comers of the mattress pad around the mattress, you've got to wedge and jam. It was hard to believe anything living could fit in there.

Still, Dad looked. He worked his way all around the bed, peeling the edge of the heavy mattress back from the frame.

"I don't see anything, honey," he assured me.

"This place has rats," I complained.

"No, it doesn't," Mom said, which I guess meant we were talking again, even if she was disagreeing with me. 'I'll get fresh sheets."

I'm sure they were convinced it was a spider.

Mom and I made up the bed with the clean sheets.

"How's that?" Dad asked as I climbed back in.

I was about to grudgingly admit it was fine, when I felt something move beneath me.

I shot out of bed. "It's in the mattress!" I yelped.

"There can't be anything in the mattress," Dad protested as I once more pulled the bedding off.

We stared at the bare mattress. Ifs a dark blue plastic, so of course you can't see in, but I was sure we'd see it bulging here and there as whatever was inside poked around.

But we didn't.

"There's something in there," I insisted.

"A rat could not live in a water-bed mattress," Dad said. "First of all, how would it get in? Second, how would it breathe?"

I was angry, even though he was right. "I don't know," I said. "It doesn't have to be a rat. I couldn't see
what
it was. I only felt it."

Dad rested his hands on the bed. He moved them around, pressing, to entice whatever was in there to move. Nothing did.

"It would have to be a fish," Mom said.

Dad gave her a wary look.

"To live in the water."

"How would a fish get in?" Dad asked.

How could anything get in? We all looked at the plug in the water bed—just big enough to accommodate the end of a hose.

"I was only trying to be helpful," Mom said. Obviously she was joking, trying to lighten the mood. But talk of fish reminded me of what I'd seen in the pond that afternoon. Except that hadn't been a fish—it was a hand. Standing there in my bedroom, knowing that there was something in my water-bed mattress, I admitted to myself what I had been denying all afternoon: That hadn't been any kind of exotic or mutant or tumored fish or frog I'd seen in the pond—it had been a hand, a living hand, in a spot that wasn't big enough or deep enough to accommodate the person that hand had to be attached to.

And if my parents were looking at me weirdly now, how would they look if I told them
that?

"I'm not getting back in that bed," I told them.

"Brenda...," Dad said reasonably.

"I'm sleeping on the couch." I picked up my pillow.

Dad sighed. "We'll drain the bed. Not now"—he glanced at my alarm clock, which showed 1:30—"but we'll do it in the morning."

I knew he wouldn't find anything in the morning.

It wasn't bad enough my parents had to move to Green Acres. They had to buy a house that was haunted.

Whatever had been in my water bed didn't migrate to the couch.

That does not mean I slept well. The house creaked. Cars went by all night long—not a lot of them, but
all night long.
And the boxes stacked in the living room suddenly struck me as a good place for something scary to hide behind. Then, early, early, early in the morning—just as in countless Disney films—I heard a rooster crow. But guess what? They don't do it just once. And you know what else? People always talk about good, fresh country air, but I kept getting whiffs of something that was neither good nor fresh but definitely country.

Of course, the bedrooms have window air-conditioning units; besides, my parents' room faces the backyard and Danny goes to sleep with his radio on, so none of them were bothered by the road noise. Apparently they slept through the barnyard racket and were oblivious to the fact that the whole house could use a breath mint. They woke up with way too much energy and good cheer.

When I come in after people are asleep, everyone expects me to close the door gently and tiptoe my silent way to bed. You'd think
they'd
have the same consideration for me when they get up while
I'm
asleep.

I moaned loudly to show that they were disturbing me, but they were making too much racket in the kitchen to hear. When I got up to complain, Mom said, "The day's only going to get hotter. The morning is the best time to work."

"Central air would be nice," I pointed out.

"So would a condo in Palm Beach," Mom said.

Which I guess meant
Lots of luck.

Dad asked me, "What do you think; do you still want me to drain the water bed?"

"I don't care." I knew he wouldn't find anything.

Dad looked relieved, but Mom asked, "If we don't drain it, will you sleep in your room tonight?"

"No," I admitted. "But I won't even if you
do
drain it."

"You can't sleep on the couch for the rest of your life," Dad said.

"Just until college."

"Drain it," Mom told Dad. She was probably figuring if I got hot enough in the living room I'd return to my room for the air conditioner.

We spent the morning unpacking and settling in. Dad was in charge of hooking up the TV, VCR, and stereo. Danny put our books in the bookshelves. Mom and I worked in the kitchen—me washing, her drying all the dishes that we'd had to wrap in newspaper to protect during the move. But after a while I ended up doing both washing
and
drying, because she was having trouble settling what should go where in the kitchen cupboards ("That's the glasses cabinet; no, wait, that's where we'll keep the mugs; no, wait..."), and as she kept changing her mind, I ran out of space in the dish drainer.

When the water was all out of my bed, the mattress lay pretty much flat. Mom poked at the wrinkles left in the plastic. "Whatever it was could have drained out with the water," she suggested, looking at the hose that Dad had dangling out the window. "Was anybody watching?"

It had taken almost four hours. Of course nobody had been watching.

Danny snickered. "I think her brain drained out."

I wasn't sure it hadn't.

By then we were done with the dish washing, and Dad hooked the hose back up to the kitchen sink to refill the mattress.

By midafternoon the important boxes were all unpacked and flattened for recycling. Dad moved the remaining boxes into the basement, from where we could gradually unpack them as we needed the stuff, or at least wait until Mom had one of her I-can't-stand-this-clutter fits. Not that anyplace besides the basement was at all cluttered, but she gets like that. With everything either put away or still in its box, the house was neater than our house in Buffalo had usually looked, and the rooms were bigger, so it would take a longer time of things not being picked up before the place would look messy. We had more room to spread out, too. There was die extra bedroom, where Mom had set up a guest bed that looked a lot more comfortable than the couch, and that's where the computers went, too: the Mac for serious work, the IBM for games. And there was a wraparound porch, so you could sit in your rocker and watch the neighbor across the street hold up traffic by driving his tractor down the road, or you could sit on the right side of the house and watch that neighbor rounding up his cows. I still hated it.

"Want to go into town and see what there is to see?" Mom asked.

Go
into town. See what there is to see.
They were already talking like hicks.

"Thanks all the same," I said. "I'm going to take a shower."

"You can take one when we get back," Dad said.

"Oh, boy, good suggestion," Danny said, holding his nose.

"Yeah?" I told him. "What makes you think anybody wants to smell you after you've been working all morning?"

"We can leave the windows down," Dad offered.

I shook my head. I was so sticky I couldn't stand myself.

Mom said, "We can wait. We could go
after
your shower."

"No, you catch all the highlights," I said, "and you make out a list of what I need to see."

After they left I changed my mind about the shower. Things had been weird enough with the pond and the water bed so that when I stepped into the shower and started to pull the curtain closed, I had a sudden vision of that scene in
Psycho
where Janet Leigh meets Mother Bates.

Options: Well, I could wait for my parents to come back home after I'd made such a fuss about needing a shower right away.

Or I could hose myself off in the driveway.

I opted for a bath instead. Not that I expected anyone to sneak up on me. But at least that way if someone
did,
I could hear him coming.

I put in an extra scoop of Mr. Bubble, so the bubbles were extravagantly close to overflowing, then decided to be entirely decadent and poured myself some wine. (The glasses had ended up in the cupboard to the left of the sink.) Sometimes my parents let me have half a glass of wine with dinner, but they would not have approved this, so I knew I would have to make sure the glass Was washed and back in its place by the time they came back.

Standing next to the tub, I couldn't help myself: I stuck my foot in and pushed the bubbles around enough that I could be sure there was nothing besides the bubbles in there.
Brenda,
I told myself as I got in,
sometimes you
can be such a baby.
But I still felt better for having checked.

I balanced the wine on the edge of the tub and was taking the "How Fashion Savvy Are You?" quiz in
Cosmo
and was feeling pretty Savvy and downright sophisticated when I reached for the glass and felt something drip on my arm.

I was in a tub—of course things were drippy. I didn't even glance up from the page I was on. I took a sip from the glass, and only then, with my arm crossed in front of me, did I see a red spot on the back of my forearm.

Why am I not surprised that something is dripping rust in this old bathroom?
I asked myself: But even as I thought it, I knew it wasn't rust. Rust is more orange. And the wine I had poured myself was blush, not nearly that red.

I looked up.

A little girl was standing there.

My heart felt as though it stopped for a second, then it began to thud. The wineglass dropped from my numb fingers into the bathwater.

I tried to jump to my feet, and my heel slipped before I'd gotten more than a couple inches up—so that I sat down heavily, smacking my butt and sloshing water over the sides of the tub. I was incredibly lucky that I didn't come down on that wineglass.

My heart was racing, but the little girl was just standing there, looking as though she herself had just stepped out of the bath, clothes and all. She couldn't have been even ten years old, and she was wearing shorts and sneakers, and a T-shirt with a unicom on it, and she had a bicycle helmet on her head, all dripping wet.

"What the hell are you doing here?" I demanded, surprised that my voice worked, thinking
Damn country manners...

But then I
really
looked at her face.

It was gray, and there was a smear of blood around her nose and mouth despite how wet she was.

Nobody could be that gray, I realized, no matter how badly she was hurt Nobody
alive
could be that gray.

I had just yelled at a dead girl. A dead girl was standing in my bathroom.

I backed up as far away as I could, into the corner of the tub. If I could have fit down the drain, I would have tried that. Instead I grabbed the shower curtain and tried to wrap myself in that. (Fat lot of protection a vinyl sheet would provide.)

I fought my inclination to just sit there and scream. I could barely get my voice above a squeak. "Who are you?" I asked. "What do you want?"

She stood there a moment longer, water running off her hair, a drop of blood quivering on the end of her chin, then she turned and walked out of the bathroom.