Goodnight Blackbird (3 page)

But sleep and the possibility of a Michelle guest appearance in her dreams weren't what she lived for now. Before she'd drift off for the night there was always the chance that she would smell it: the chlorine.

Sometimes in that half-awake, half-asleep twilight state, as she lay on her bed or the couch, the acrid scent of chlorine would waft in from somewhere. That was the sign that the magic was about to happen.

It was by no means a regular occurrence, though. Maybe two or three times a month. Sometimes it would begin and end with the subtle but still unmistakable chlorine smell—which was definitely not coming from the pool, because the pool had not been filled since that horrifying week six years ago. The scent would come and quickly go, and as disappointed as Jacqueline would feel at such a brief visitation, she would still feel a bit giddy. Because
she had been here
.

Sometimes—and these were the times Jacqueline lived for—it wouldn't end with the chlorine.

The chlorine would insinuate itself into the house, a subtle undercurrent at first, but then it would intensify and become as pungent as a spilled jar of bad cologne. Jacqueline's eyes would usually be closed by now. She would be too tired to keep them open but the inner core of her being would be too excited to give in to sleep. The chlorine stench would then develop an undertone—the cheerful berry scent of the shampoo Michelle had liked, the same type of shampoo that Jacqueline herself had used as a teen. It would be at this point that Jacqueline knew Michelle was in the room with her.

"Baby," Jacqueline would sometimes mutter groggily, her eyes still closed, not wanting to open them and possibly break the spell. At all costs she would not break the spell. It was like getting a squirrel to take a peanut from your hand. You needed to be as still as a statue—any sudden moves would scare him away for good.

Sometimes—not often—Jacqueline would feel a light touch on her hand, like a feather stroking her. And although sleep was by now starting to drag her resolutely away, Jacqueline would have enough of her wits about her to savor those three or four seconds of a feeling she had not had for years: happiness. Because Michelle had come back, like Botticelli's Venus rising from the waters. Michelle was back, she needed her mother, she had forgiven her mother—that feathery touch on Jacqueline's hand was forgiveness, pure and simple. It was a little girl's way of telling her mother that she had been a good mother who had done the best she could.

"Honey," Jacqueline would say, tears streaming from her closed eyes, and then the precious sensation would fade and sleep would finally come, like dark water pouring through a broken dike to drown her. Restful sleep—happy sleep.

This was Jacqueline's secret.

W
hen Darren got the e-mail from Jacqueline—
So, have you decided? One who suffers or one who teaches?
—he didn't immediately remember who she was. He dipped into his vast, rich reservoir of witty repartee for an appropriately engaging reply:
Who are you & what are you talking about?

Glad to see I'm so memorable, she wrote back the next day.
Starbucks? The lightning and the rain? You said your house was haunted. Wasn't too hard to get your e-mail. Looked at some articles on the McAvoy shooting, plugged the address into a couple public records sites, got your name, Googled it and found your contact info on the Northeast Aerospace website. Sherlock Holmes has got nothing on me. Yikes, it sounds like I'm stalking you. Sorry if I'm bothering you.

The whiff of dry humor was charming and the effort she put forth to track him down was flattering, as was her frank, apologetic closing statement. Things were slow at work—ominously slow, due to Northeast Aerospace recently losing a $5 million subcontract from Northrop Grumman—so Darren wrote back right away:
Lightning Woman! I remember you. That was one of the wildest things I'd ever seen. Tell me about the dream you had. More importantly, tell me about any dream you had in which lottery numbers appear.

Jacqueline:
I wanted to ask if you really have a ghost problem in your house or if you were just being melodramatic.

He didn't get a chance to answer. At Darren's office door stood Khabir Hassani, the IT guy and Darren's only real friend in the company. As usual, Khabir's face was as glum as a Russian novel. "I have my expert analysis of those e-mails."

Over the last week, Darren's junk mail folder had been getting spam that was stranger than the usual come-ons for cheap Cialis and lonely Russian brides. The e-mails were just brief strings of gibberish, as if someone had pounded the keyboard once and hit SEND. There was no sender address.

"My expert analysis: no friggin' clue. Can't figure out the sender. There's about a dozen ways to hide an IP address, but these messages are using something I can't figure. At least there's no viruses, though."

"Why send gibberish? I don't get it."

"It's not all gibberish." Khabir showed him a printout of an e-mail from yesterday. He'd underlined a single coherent word sandwiched between long strings of random keystrokes:
love
.

Love. The concept was very much on Darren's mind a few Saturdays later as he watched his brother-in-law, Sam Wilcox, dance with his five-year-old daughter, Darren's niece. Little Madison stood on Sam's big black shoes as Sam's booming voice mangled a verse of Billy Joel's "Just the Way You Are." Sam had a bottle of beer in one hand but a good portion of the beer had ended up either on the carpet or on his polo shirt. Sam was a Parma Heights patrolman, and he moved with the lumbering, swaggering non-grace of a born bully.

Sam and Julia had brought the kids over to Darren's place to celebrate ten-year-old Brandon's recent promotion to fifth grade. However, young Brandon seemed blasé about this milestone. He paid little attention to the Mylar balloon tied to the back of his chair, a balloon which showed Snoopy in graduation garb dancing over the words
Job Well Done!
Brandon was slumped on the couch, fiddling with his handheld video game, his chubby mouth hanging open in a look of slack-jawed incuriousness that Darren assumed had been inherited from Sam. Madison, her pink dress already stained with grape juice and ketchup, was more lively. She declined another dance with her father and ran around the house like a dervish, looking for Darren's ghosts and constantly leaving Lulu underfoot for the adults to trip over. Lulu was a homemade doll constructed from socks and yarn.

"Maddie, for the last time,
no running
," Julia said. She poured milk into the kids' cups while Hurricane Madison crawled under the dining room table in pursuit of a pretend ghost. Julia shot Darren a cold look. "I don't know why you had to tell them you had ghosts."

"I thought it was interesting—"

"Sam, Brandon, come on," Julia said. "Cake time." Her lips arced downward with hostility when Darren began slicing the cake. "Yellow? What happened to chocolate?"

"It's cake. They'll eat it."

"I wanted chocolate," Maddie declared, staring at the unsatisfactory contents of her plate.

"See?" Julia said.

What Darren saw was Madison eating the cake anyway. Why was Julia so irritated with him?

"I'll tell you where you went wrong," Sam said to him. He poked Darren in the chest with his bottle of Miller Genuine Draft. "You never got the house blessed. You ought to call our parish priest, Father Petkovic, and have him do it."

"You once made fun of me for reading a book about psychic phenomena, but you want me to call in a Catholic witchdoctor."

"There's a difference between talk show kooks and a member of a legitimate religious institution, Darren. Got to bring in the big guns. You know, nutty as it sounds, maybe this whole thing is part of God's plan to bring you back to Jesus. Ever thought of that? When the shit hits the fan, that's when we usually need him the most."

In the kitchen, Darren bypassed the beer Sam had brought over and pulled a bottle of 7-Up from the back of the fridge. He toyed with the notion of pouring out half the beer from one of Sam's longnecks and topping it off with a little water from the upstairs toilet. Have another cold one, Sam, bottoms up.

Julia materialized beside him. "Do not start with him," she whispered.

"I'm not starting anything with him. Christ, I've barely spoken to him all afternoon."

"You're making faces at him behind his back and everything you say to him is just drenched in...
disdain
. Like you're so much better than him."

From the dining room came the sound of Sam Wilcox belching theatrically while Maddie just about collapsed in manic laughter.

"How could I ever be better than that?" Darren said.

Julia grabbed a handful of M&Ms from the bowl on the counter. Just as she had since she was a girl, she ate them color by color, reds first, then the blacks, then the others. "It just pisses me off that he makes an effort to bond with you and you treat him like something you found under a rock. Don't think he doesn't notice it."

What exactly did she mean by "bond" with him? Sam cheerfully starting off conversations with "You know what's wrong with you liberals?" Darren would have rather bonded with an armadillo.

Looking at his frizzy-haired younger sister, he was again struck by how much she had changed over the last twenty years. Julia Ciccone Wilcox, stay-at-home mom, had once been a fiery-tempered latter-day hippie, a summa cum laude Kent State graduate whose boyfriends had all been musicians and angry poets. She could have been fighting world hunger through Amnesty International or painting angst-ridden post-modern canvases in a SoHo loft. Instead, she was married to a paunchy cop who wore pastel-colored polo shirts and thought Reagan was the thirteenth apostle. That was the mystery of love—very often it was a map that led you to a place you never thought you'd go.

Julia stalked back into the dining room. "Maddie, you left Lulu behind again."

Darren took another swig of 7-Up and his eyes fell on the bowl of M&Ms. He had filled it this morning because he knew the kids liked them. Five seconds ago, when Julia had grabbed a handful, the candies were in the bowl. Now they weren't. They were scattered all over the counter.

No—not scattered. Like the bulbs in an old-fashioned scoreboard, the multicolored candies had been arranged into the shapes of letters: Y R U NOT GODFATHER.

The sudden racing of Darren's heart made him lightheaded. Waves of gooseflesh coursed up and down his arms and over his scalp. He hadn't heard a thing, hadn't heard the expected semi-musical ting-ping-ting of the M&Ms whirling around in the glass bowl. In the blink of an eye they had simply... moved. He tried to say,
Julia, did you do this?
but it was as if the wind had been knocked out of him. And of course Julia hadn't done this. Darren had been standing right next to her. Ten seconds ago the bowl had been full. What he was looking at would have taken several minutes to create by human hand.

Why are you not the godfather?

He felt nauseous. The question had actually been in the back of his mind ever since Julia told him the kids were coming over today. Whatever was in the house with him evidently knew Darren's mind pretty well.

His hands shook as he gathered up the M&Ms and put them back in the bowl. When he sat back down at the dining room table, his breath was coming in quick, shallow half-gasps.

Maddie's goblin-like grin was spackled with chocolate frosting and she was trying to feed Lulu a forkful of cake.

"Maddie, Lulu can't eat cake," Julia said. "Lulu's diabetic."

"Unbelievable how many houses are for sale around here," Sam said. "Same in our neighborhood too. I bet our house has lost twenty percent of its value. All because of these deadbeats who put no money down and then can't make the payments."

Darren tried to keep his hand steady as he reached for his coffee cup. The shock of what he'd seen in the kitchen was being replaced by the more comforting and familiar irritation with Sam.

"You can thank your Democrat geniuses for that," Sam went on. "Let's get all the poor people into houses, let's give 'em all no-money-down loans. Then they default, the neighborhoods end up gutted, and it's people like me who actually
pay
our bills who get screwed. Where's the fairness in that?"

"Sam, please," Julia said.

"I'm just saying! Now they're on this health care kick. Everyone's gotta get health care. All these poor people who don't have jobs, gotta give them health care. And who's gonna foot the bill? It's the revenge of the welfare state. I mean, screw them, I had to work for everything I have, why can't they do the same?"

"'For I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat,'" Darren said. "'I was sick and you did not look after me.... Whatever you did not do for one of the least among you, you did not do for me.' Guess you must have slept through that in Sunday school."

"Gimme a break," Sam said. "Jesus was all for personal responsibility. Being poor doesn't give you a blank check to be irresponsible—"

"How come you didn't pick me to be godfather?" Darren asked suddenly.

Sam looked confused. "What?"

"With Brandon. Or Maddie. How come you picked your brother and his wife and not me?"

Sam looked at Julia, who gazed at Darren with watchful alarm. "Because," Sam said, "they already have kids, they go to church, and the parish has rules for picking godparents."

"Ah, yes," Darren said. "The rules."

Brandon and Madison were now looking at their uncle too. They seemed to sense a shift in the tenor of the conversation.

Sam laughed. "What the heck, Darren? You're miffed about something this old?"

"I guess I'm miffed because I probably wasn't even considered. Not even for a second."

"Darren, this is ridiculous," Julia said.

But Darren's attention was still on Sam. Julia could take the church or leave it, like a store brand of laundry detergent. She probably just went along with whatever Sam wanted. Sam was the holy roller in the family. "Remember when your brother needed that cash so he could get his kid into that deaf school?" Darren asked.

"What does that have to do with anything? Jesus, Darren, he paid you back."

At the time, Sam and Julia had been up to their eyeballs with their kitchen renovations and didn't have the money. Enter Darren, everyone's favorite sap. "I'm not good enough to be considered as a godparent, but you have no problem treating me like a walking ATM. That's my value to you."

Sam blinked at him. "You know, that's pretty goddamned insulting."

"You bet it is."

"Darren, stop it," Julia said.

Darren put a hand on Madison's head. "Maddie, want to know why people go to church? It's for people who are too lazy to actually think for themselves. So they go to this big building with the cross, and a guy gets up there and tells them what to think, who to hate, whose lives they should make more difficult. And the people go home happy, because they think all those words came from God. But really they came from a closeted homosexual who likes to touch little boys in bad ways."

"Enough, Darren," Julia said.

Sam stood up. "Darren, I feel sorry for you—" But he didn't get to tell Darren why he felt sorry for him because a hardcover book flew off the middle shelf of the bookcase in the corner of the dining room and crashed into the back of Sam's head, making him cry out and nearly fall over. The book—
Haunted America
, a recent pickup—skidded across the table and flopped on the floor.

The kids gaped silently. Julia had a hand plastered across her mouth as if stifling a scream.

"Who the hell threw that?" Sam said. For some reason he glared at Julia, who was sitting closest to the bookcase.

Then another book soared off the shelf—Barack Obama's
Dreams From My Father
—and clipped Sam in the shoulder.

Now Madison was screaming, and so was Julia.

A third book flew from the top shelf—an old college paperback, Bertrand Russell's
Why I Am Not A Christian and Other Essays
—and this time Sam sidestepped it. It flopped onto the middle of the cake with an almost comical
swack
.

Sam charged the bookcase, his fists cocked as if he were facing down a troublemaker in a bar. Darren gave him credit for courage. Darren could only sit, immobile with shock and a queasy feeling of unreality. But Sam, the man of action, faced down the bookcase, punching at the spines of the books. "Come on!" he screamed. "You want to mess with me? Come on, I'm right here!"

Julia crouched as if she were under sniper fire. She grabbed the arms of the kids and pulled them along out of the dining room toward the back door. "Sam, come on, let's get out of here."

Sam threw a hard right cross, spilling a row of paperbacks onto the floor. "Come out and fight!"