The Damned (11 page)

This is what I wanted to ask the teenaged girl who stood with her back to me, flipping through the newspapers on her cart. I was trying to think of a polite way to put the question to her when she spoke first.

Special delivery for Mr. Orchard.

Everything stopped. Her back, the sway of long hair over her pink smock, the comings-and-goings in the hallway outside the door, all of it stilled.

Wasn't easy to find this, I can tell you. But we aim to please.

The girl turned. Mimicked the look of horror on my own face with widened eyes, her mouth stretched into a black oval.

No.

This wasn't a word, wasn't a failed scream. It was the hopeless denial I've felt every time she's come to me. The wish for her to go away that's never once been granted.

She frisbeed the newspaper onto my lap.

I recognized it instantly, though I hadn't laid eyes on it in years. The
Detroit Free Press
of July 10, 1989. The paper that was tossed onto the front porch of our house in Royal Oak the morning after the fire that took Ash's life and mine. The headline on the bottom corner of the front page pored over by my father, the paper laid on the kitchen table but never opened.
TRAGIC FIRE CLAIMS ONE LIFE, ALMOST TWO: TWIN BROTHER AND SISTER IN BLAZE, QUESTIONS REMAIN
.

I looked up and she was standing there. Looming over me at the edge of the bed.

Ash reached up and put her hand around my IV bag. Weighed it, swung it back and forth on its hook. Then her fingers tightened. The bag collapsing, forcing the fluid down the tube and into my arm. I felt it swell, followed by a shooting pain up my arm. My shoulder blades, my neck, my chest on fire.

She let go.

The bag expanded, sucking up the contents of the tube. This time, it brought blood along with the saline. Curdling the clear liquid, from pink to crimson to something darker still.

She squeezed it again.

And with it, the pain found a home inside me. My heart. Crushed as though held between the teeth of a vise.

My eyes squeezed shut. A red road map against the backs of my lids, the capillaries enlarged and throbbing.

From somewhere very close, Ash's smell. Her lips—the skin flaked with dryness, the touch cold—brushed my ear.

I miss you, Danny Boy.

I threw a blind fist out at where she stood but it met nothing but the IV pole, knocking it back. Opened my eyes.

The saline clear. The pain in my chest gone as though it was never there at all.

No Ash.

No
Detroit Free Press
on the bed.

But the smell still there. The lingering trace of perfume that sent me stumbling to the bathroom to vomit onto the floor after missing the sink.

I miss you.

A
fter almost three weeks, and given there was little more they could do for me until a heart came through the doors in an ice bucket, they finally let me go home. The surgeon I liked was the last one to sign off. He brought his own fresh copy of
The After
. I signed it “For Helping My Achy Breaky.”

“Cute,” he said, snapping the covers closed. A finality to it that made it clear he would never open them again.

“I wish I could do more to thank you,” I said. “You play golf? Red Sox tickets?”

“Gave up my membership at Brae Burn when I realized all the drivers I kept throwing into the creek were going to bankrupt me. And I've already got first-base-line season tickets at Fenway. But trust me. Your insurance has covered me just fine.”

“Well, then. Until we meet again.”

“Hmm?”

“The transplant?”

“Right.”

“If something becomes available—”

“Absolutely. We've got fingers crossed, I can tell you that.”

He gave me a look that said he believed in miracles as much as the next guy.

“I know everybody's been all over you about not exerting yourself,” he went on after he asked if he could drink the untouched cup of orange juice on my breakfast tray. “But you really have to take it easy. Hang in there so we can keep spinning the wheel at our end. Not too much excitement, okay?”

“So you're saying I should go easy on the hot-tub sex and half marathons?”

“I'd definitely drop the half marathon. That doesn't even
sound
fun. But I'm sure as hell not going to be the one to advise a fellow against the other activity if he's given the invitation.”

W
ITHIN THE HOUR
W
ILLA AND
Eddie were walking with me out the doors to the car, the sun hurting my eyes. Eddie was next to me the whole way, holding my elbow. I would have told him I was okay, it wasn't my legs that were in lousy shape but my heart, but his need to help was greater than my desire to make a show of a hopeful exit, and I leaned on him a little.

It's a short drive between the hospital and our place off Porter Square. Willa took a roundabout route that afforded a glimpse of the Charles, Harvard's spires, the rush hour traffic along Mass Ave. The faces of other passengers hinting of other stories-in-progress: the pissed-off, the anxious, the fulfilled, the bored. On the sidewalks everyone holding either a giant coffee or a cell phone, as though a law had been declared against public displays of empty-handedness. Everyday sights that struck me as original, heartbreaking, and funny at the same time. Too much life to digest all at once.

“What's wrong, honey?” Willa asked when she glanced over to see me drying my cheeks with a shirt sleeve.

“Nothing's wrong. I just remembered how good it could be.”

“How good what could be?”

I gestured out through the windshield. Kept my hand moving to point a thumb at Eddie in the backseat, then brought it up to graze Willa's neck.

“This,” I said.

I
t was Willa's idea to get married.

She asked me. I asked if she thought it was a good idea. She told me to shut up and give her an answer. I said yes.

This was on a Monday, less than a week after I was released from the hospital.

On Tuesday, we booked a church for the coming Friday. After that there wasn't much to arrange for outside of a quick-turnaround dry clean on my tux and a reservation at our favorite restaurant in the Square for dinner after the service. You keep the numbers small and slip in a “Truth is, I've only got a couple months to live” here and there, and you can put a wedding together in a couple days, no problem.

Which isn't to say I didn't have doubts about the whole thing. Just because my ticker didn't have many miles left on it didn't mean I deserved a woman like Willa, a woman who had already lost one husband and was now looking at her second leaving the stage, all well before she turned forty. She told me, in her forceful way, that
she wasn't doing this because of the shape I was in but because she wanted to. Because she loved me. She told me the same thing she said when she slid on top of me in our bed and I asked if she thought Eddie was asleep, if he might hear us.

“Just do what feels good,” she said. “Can you do that?”

As it turns out, I could. Even after a lifetime of training myself otherwise, a lifetime of Ash showing up to remind me that anything of the kind—a woman's love, the yielding to pleasure, the making of promises—was against the rules, I could feel good with the best of them.

And I was feeling pretty damn good standing at the altar of Marsh Chapel on the BU campus with Eddie, my best man, next to me, and the two of us turned at the organist's playing of “All Things Bright and Beautiful” to see Willa start up the aisle. She was breathtaking. Literally. So lovely in her silk suit and hair tied up in a ribbon of flowers that I forgot to inhale for the first half of her journey toward me, and I eventually gasped, my heart tom-tomming, the bow tie tightened around my neck.

Don't die here. Not now. Let me put the ring on, let me raise a toast to the bride, and then I'm yours. But not now.

It sounded like a prayer, but even as I thought the words I realized I didn't address them to God. I was begging Ash for mercy I'd never known her to show.

There were maybe a dozen guests sitting in the church, including the minister and ourselves. The remaining attendees were friends and family of Willa's. Other than Lyle Kirk nobody on my side because I didn't have a friend to invite. My public speaking agent? My publicist? The guy who does my taxes? Though it probably shouldn't have, it stunned me to realize I hadn't talked to anyone in years who I didn't pay to talk to me.

Except Ash. Not that she'd require an invitation anyway.

Which is why I was relieved that, when I scanned the pews, I didn't see her sitting at the back, or balancing atop the organ pipes, or peeking through a crack in the chapel doors as I half expected her to be.

Willa made her way up the altar steps, blowing all my worry away.
She wasn't a tall woman, my wife-to-be. Yet she was so much stronger than me. You could see it as she took my catcher's mitt of a hand in hers and leaned her head against my side, a lending of power that made me stand straight.

Then Eddie handed me the ring. The same one my father gave my mother. A couple decades spent in the dark of a bank deposit box, then glittering on Willa's finger.

It was a long way down to her lips for the kiss. And once I was there, I took my time.

Not now. Please.

Eventually, the spell was broken by a sparse round of applause. The minister had pronounced us husband and wife but I hadn't really heard him. I pulled Eddie in, made a circle. I was a married man and this was my family. I could happily say this out loud every couple of minutes for the rest of my waking life.

We were walking down the aisle toward the doors when I heard her.

Up here, Danny.

I didn't want to look. I never want to. But I always do.

She stood at the altar where we had stood a moment ago. Dressed in bridal white, a veil over her face.

“Danny?” Willa followed my line of sight. When she saw nothing there, she looked up at me. “You okay, baby?”

“I'm great. It's just—I thought I forgot something back there.”

“Forgot what? You got all you need right here,” she said, slipping my hand around her waist.

We carried on to the doors. Some of the guests threw confetti even though there were signs asking them not to. I could feel some of the papery bits get stuck in my eyelashes and slip down the back of my neck. Tickling and cold as snow.

Before I was out, before I was blinded by the afternoon's clear sunshine, I looked back again.

Ash wasn't standing at the altar anymore and at first I thought she was gone, was never there at all. But then I spotted her. Walking closer behind the rest of the guests. Lifting her veil.

Her face burned, clawed by fire. The skin peeled back, white bone beneath. The flesh hanging off her forehead and cheeks on strings of tendon.

You may kiss the bride . . .

I told myself not to run. To keep moving out of the church, just try to smile at the cameras, make it to the limo waiting by the curb and everything will be okay. Just pretend she wasn't there. The same game I've played my whole life.

Not that I've ever won.

T
he morning after the wedding, as a honeymoon gift, I took Eddie into Porter Square for breakfast and let Willa sleep in. We hit the bookstore first. I expected him to want out of there as soon as I grabbed the
Globe
I came in for, but I was happy to see him wander into the YA section and start pulling books off the shelves. I assumed kids didn't read anymore outside of the passing Harry Potter and Twilight spasms, and even those mostly limited to girls. I'd been reading C. S. Lewis to him before the heart attack, but I figured he was only indulging me. Yet there was Eddie, a kid of few words, scowling at the spines and riffling through the pages of the titles he selected, the favored covers writhing with dragons and bosomy elves.

“I just remembered we have to get back to
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe,
” I said, sitting next to him on the floor.

“I finished it.”

“Really?”

“In the hospital.”

“Wow. That's amazing. I didn't know you liked to read.”

“Me neither.”

I checked out some of the books he'd stacked up.

“So you're thinking of some more fantasy?”

He looked at me through a veil of real fear. “But no witches. I don't like witches.” Then he brightened. “Battles and dragons and all that are cool, though.”

We looked together for a while before I handed him a special boxed set edition of
The Lord of the Rings
.

“I loved this as a kid. I mean
loved,
” I said. “And not a witch in the whole thing. But I bet you've seen the movies, right?”

“Mom won't let me yet.”

“Really? Well, we could get around that by reading it.”

He held the books in his hands as though judging their merit based on weight.

“Is there magic in it?” he asked.

“Lots.”

“Do you like magic?”

“I don't think I'd be here without it.”

I searched his eyes for anything that might show he saw that I might have been talking about him. That it was his presence, his magic, that delivered me all the way from the night field behind the house on Alfred Street to this café, this untroubled Saturday morning.

“Okay,” he finally announced. Handed the box back to me. “Let's read this one.”

“Take turns with it, you mean?”

“No, like the Narnia book. You reading to me. Except we'll finish this one.”

“It's a big book.
Three
big books.”

“We've got time, right?”