Oblivion (26 page)

He tosses his head in my direction. “This is Callie.”

She gives me a smile. Bounce, bounce. “Hi, Callie.”

“Hi.”

She lifts her chin—“What do you see in this guy, anyway?”—and shoots again.

“Funny. Real funny.” Once we’re beyond hearing distance and entering a laundry room, John leans in a bit closer. “Not so hard, is it?”

“Not so far.” But what am I going to do if the impulse to write overcomes me at the dinner table?

“John, is that you?” a female voice calls from deeper within the house.

“Yeah.” He deposits his athletic bag atop the counter, near the washing machine.

“Would you mind putting the wet clothes in the dryer?”

“Already on it.”

And he is. Adeptly, he’s tossing clothes from the washer into the dryer, while shoving the slightly wet shoes from his feet. It’s clearly part of his daily routine. I soften a little to see him in his natural habitat.

“You can hang your coat on one of the hooks behind you.”

No sooner do I accomplish the task—I opt to keep my scarf on to hide the mark on my neck—than he’s handing me his coat, too. When I turn to hang his coat on the hook next to mine, I hear the slam of the dryer door, and the rush of water filling the washing machine.

I tumble through archives in my mind. Scrape my shins against jagged rocks. Land at the flat bottom of a rowboat. Push, pull. Push, pull. Push, pull.

In the black of night, I’m rowing. Water is too choppy. I’ll never make it. Never make it. Never make it. Have to swim to shore.

I’m gasping for breath.

I feel the water rushing past my face.

Cold. So cold.

And muddy. The shore is muddy. My feet squish into the soft ground.

Branches rip at my flesh as I pound my feet against the earth, fall, get up, fall, get up again. Fall.

“Callie.”

“Yeah.”

“Hey.”

I feel the back of John’s hand against my cheek moments before my surroundings reemerge from the clouds in my mind. I’m sitting on the blue slate floor of the Fogels’ laundry room, backpack open to my right, notebook open and propped on my knees. John is crouching in front of me.

“You okay?”

I’m holding one of my red pens.

I focus on his eyes. Swallow hard. Brave a glance at my notebook:

Let my love open the door let my love let my love open open the door the door the door the crimson door in your mind.

“I like that song.” He twitches a smile. “Classic. Good rhythm. Great lyrics.”

“Yeah.”

“I remember it a little different than you’ve written it.”

I chuckle, although it isn’t funny. “Yeah.”

“John, are you—”

A woman is standing in the doorway.

“Mom.” He stands in a liquidlike motion, helping me to my feet along the way. “This is Callie.”

She’s drying her hands on a dish towel, then extends her right hand for a shake. “Welcome. I hope you like lasagna.”

“Yes.” I shift the pen to my left, then take her hand. “Thanks.”

“She’s a writer,” John says. “A poet, actually.”

“Is that right?”

“Yes,” I say because even if it isn’t wholly true, it’s easier than explaining. “I write.” I only hope I don’t write much more this evening. I busy myself with removing my penny loafers, thankful for the excuse to break the gaze.

“Listen,” Mrs. Fogel says as she inches out of the laundry room, “are you free to pick up your nephew from day care next Tuesday after practice? I have an appointment.”

Nephew. He’s an uncle. Something warm and comforting filters through my system.

“Six o’clock?” He gives me a wink, and leads me farther into the home. “We can probably do that, can’t we?”

We?

“Great.” Her voice reverberates in the hallway. “I’ll tell Tracy to leave a car seat when she drops him off …”

An old, acoustic guitar propped on a stand in the corner of the family room catches my eye. As desperately as I try to focus on the conversation, I can’t take my eyes from it. Amber in color, with a burgundy swirl hand-painted along the arc. Shaped like a woman’s body. I’ve seen it before. At least I think I have. Maybe at the Vagabond.

“Who plays?” God, I just interrupted his mother.

“Pardon?” She glances at me over her shoulder. If she’s irritated with my interruption, she doesn’t show it.

“I’m sorry … that guitar.” I glance up at John. “Do you play?”

“Yeah.” He smiles. “A bit.”

“It looks …” Will I sound like an idiot if I say the guitar looks familiar? Who says that sort of thing? “Looks old.”

“Family heirloom of sorts.” Her lips press together as she curtly nods.

“I’m sorry.” I shake my head, manage to redirect my attention. “Can I help with dinner?”

“Sure.”

Before I know it, I’m chopping radishes and carrots, but I can’t shake the feeling. I’ve seen that guitar before.

W
ith the exception of six words, which I’d written on a paper napkin at the table—Trip me with your benevolent intentions—dinner with John’s parents, and the two youngest of his four sisters, went well. I’m sure they thought it was weird the moment I cracked out a felt-tip and, in the midst of a panic attack and a side of steamed green beans, started writing. But no one stared, no one asked, no one commented.

And now, I’ve brought John home, to the apartment of the Vagabond, where I’m getting ready for tonight’s trek out to the Point.

Red words spin around me, but I can’t take my eyes off John, who looks rugged in layered flannel, ripped jeans, and Carhartt work boots.

John’s eyes are wide as he slowly turns in a circle, staring at the bathroom walls, seemingly spellbound with my graffiti. “So this is where you were? This is what you were doing for the day and a half after Hannah disappeared?”

“Yeah.”

“What did the police say about what you’d written?”

My glance goes directly to the space two inches from the doorknob, where I’d written:
I KILLED HIM. His blood is on my hands. His heart is in my soul. I KILLED HIM.

“I contradict myself a lot on these walls, so they assumed it’s gibberish, at first. But Ewing thinks I’m interpreting what I remember. Morphing it into a shape I can handle, because I can’t handle it in its rawest form … not yet.”

I have to change clothes. I feel sort of self-conscious doing it in front of him—which is silly, as he’s seen all there is to see of me—but as the words on the walls have garnered his attention, at least for the time being, and we’re in a race against sunset … I pull off my sweater, then the polo beneath it. After hanging the uniform over the shower bar, I yank on an old pair of jeans, a T-shirt, and one of John’s old sweatshirts, which I’m borrowing for tonight’s quest.

“You know, you wrote a lot of this in your notebooks. This passage here:
abiding like the tide
. And this one:
amber ashes in her hourglass
. Lots about water. Lots about death. Choruses, if you will, followed by contrasting bridges. You’re not just remembering here. You’re creating. Poems. Lyrics.”

“Ain’t it grand being me.” I cough. Cough again. It’s coming on. With a vengeance. I dart for my backpack. Tear it open. Suddenly, I can’t breathe. I’m underwater, groping for something, anything to push against to resurface.

I open my eyes, feel the sting of the icy cold water against my eyeballs. I see him—Palmer—through the rippling surface. My hand meets something hard and blunt, like the edge of the fountain, but even when I attempt to pull myself to the surface, no relief comes. He pushes me down again.

“Callie!”

I feel the earth slipping away, receding like the tide. I cling to the shore, only to be washed away on the ebb.

I gasp.

Allow my lungs to fill with air, only to choke on more water.

He’s turning me over, holding my hair back, as I spew the water back into the fountain.

Only it isn’t the fountain anymore, and nothing’s coming up. It’s the pink bathtub in the place above the Vagabond. I press my cheek to the cool porcelain and study what I’ve just written:

Bubbling into oblivion bubbling bubbling bubbling into oblivion.

“That’s what it means,” I say. “Drowning.”

“You okay?”

I struggle to catch my breath. Maybe to him, I was simply dry heaving thirty seconds ago. But in my mind, I was
fighting for my life last year. “Why do they call drowning a sweet death?”

“Sounds sweeter than some of the other things written here: buried alive, burned, crucified, quartered, stoned, pressed …” He’s sitting on the bathroom floor next to me, raking through my hair. He flashes a smile. “Hey, you.”

“Hi.” My head still rests on the edge of the tub. I try to smile back.

“Went well tonight with my family. They like you.”

“Only because your family’s far too polite to call me out at the dinner table.”

“What, that little writing stint? Don’t worry about it.”

“Easy for you to say.”

“I’ve bolted out of Christmas dinner before to write music. This isn’t any different.”

“You write music?”

“It makes sense to me, you know?” A faint smile warms his eyes. “Words come to you; notes come to me. I mean, I get it from my dad. He taught himself how to play piano and guitar.”

“The guitar.” I straighten. “It’s his. Your dad’s.”

“It used to be. He gave it to my cousin before I was born.” He squints for a split second. “That’s another reason we know he didn’t run away. He would’ve taken that guitar with him.”

I hear the song, see the white room in a distant corner
of my mind:
Let my love open the door
. “I’m not crazy, but—”

“No one thinks you are.”

“—but I know that guitar. From the Vagabond, maybe. Did your cousin ever go there?”

“Maybe. I’ll text my dad.”

“It’s getting darker.” I move to stand and brush past him on my way toward the door.

“Hey.” He catches me, holds me against his chest. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you about Lindsey.”

I breathe in the clean scent of him. “Okay.”

“I know it doesn’t fix things, but … I’m sorry I didn’t tell you.”

“She’s my sister, Johnny.”

“She doesn’t care about me as much as about getting everything she wants. She’ll get over the insult to her ego, and I’m going to fix this rumor.”

“Can you tell me something? I mean, I guess I understand how it happened, but if you don’t do that sort of thing with girls … don’t, you know, sleep around … didn’t you want to make it right? Try dating her? You could’ve done a lot worse, right?”

“Yeah, I guess I could’ve.” He rocks back, puts some space between us, drags a few fingers through his hair. “Maybe I would’ve. I was going to call her the next day. Thought about taking her to lunch. But, I don’t know … there’s something about the way it happened. I just didn’t
see how we could recover from it, how we could ever be more than what happened. Cheap. On the surface. And then she kept throwing herself at me, and I just … couldn’t do it.”

I’m massaging the writer’s cramp in my palm.

John reaches for my hand, takes up the task.

I’m staring into his navy blue eyes. I think he’s telling the truth. But the truth will always be there, and soon, the sun will set. “We have to go.”

He nods in agreement. “Burning daylight.”

“We have shovels?”

“Yeah, I brought a couple.”

R
ain pelts my back like icy daggers, and my arms ache. The scent of the lake fills my nostrils, and I shiver with the cold. Yet still, I toil on. Dig. Chink. Sift. Talk about déjà vu. How many times have I contemplated performing this task?

A crescent moon is on the rise, yet we can’t see it through the mask of clouds canvasing the sky. A watery, pink filtering of setting sun is low on the horizon. It’s a terrible day to be outside. Even worse day to be digging.

But I have to know if the door is where I envision it, I have to know what else is buried up here. I have to know what’s real, and what’s only imagined.

Images of that night haunt me. The sounds of the shovel.
The cool, flat bottom of the rowboat. Hannah’s cold body lying next to mine, her fingers wrapped around my hand.

I dig into the earth again. My shovel hits something hard.