The Damned (14 page)

The door to the room opened.

The hush of the rubber runner along the bottom grazed over the carpet. The column of light from the hallway widening over the curtains, our clothes piled on a chair. It remained held open for a moment before it was released. Closed with the solid
ka-thunk
of the weighted latch.

Everything still. The faint noise of traffic coming out of Harvard Square, audible a moment ago, was silenced. I could feel Willa awake next to me, head raised from the pillow, scanning the darkness. Eddie holding his breath five feet away.

Maybe I was the only one to hear it.

Only a whisper, at once too close to my ear and too far away to
assume anyone not used to the sound might detect it. But it was clear to me all the same. Her bright, lifeless voice, announcing her readiness to play a new game.

Wakey-wakey!

The bathroom taps, the shower, the TV, the ventilation fan, every light in the room. All of it went on at once. A second later Willa's scream was added to the cacophony.

I ran around the room turning everything off. As I went, Ash followed me. So close I could almost feel her chin on my shoulder.

In a moment the room was returned to quiet. The only thing to hear was the door open and close across the hall, the hissed “Shit!” of the guy who got out of bed to see what the hell was going on in Room 614.

I stepped out of the bathroom and found Willa holding Eddie against her, the two of them standing at the end of his bed.

“We heard it, Danny,” she said. “We both did.”

“Of course you did. It was loud as—”

“Not the TV and stuff. The voice.”

Eddie stepped away from his mother's arms to stand between us.

“Wakey-wakey,” he said.

W
hen we made it back home Willa took Eddie up to our room and assured him they'd sleep next to each other for the rest of the night. I told them I'd be fine on the sofa.

Besides, I had some calls to make.

I'd thought of her before that night. Violet Grieg. The old woman who went to hell and brought her father back with her.

A good man.

She was the only Afterlifer I'd encountered whose experiences were similar to ours. The NDE that resulted not in consolation or wisdom but a curse.

Wherever I go, he follows.

It was four in the morning but I called Lyle Kirk's home number anyway.

“The fuck is this?”

“It's Danny Orchard, Lyle.”

“Danny?
Jesus
, man.”

“Sorry for calling at this hour, but I'm in a bit of a situation.”

There was a moment as I heard Lyle straightening from whatever futon or floor he'd been lying on.

“Sure thing,” he said. “That's what we do.”

“Remember the last meeting I came to? That lady who collapsed after talking about her father?”

“Debbie Downer. Absolutely, yeah. I remember.”

“Her name was—”

“Violet Grieg.”

“That's right. You have any contact info for her?”

“No, I don't. And even if I did, she can't talk to you, Danny.”

“Why not?”

“She's dead.”

I was standing. But now I sat.

“How do you know?”

“I set up Google alerts on everyone who comes to the meetings,” Lyle said. “You know, staying informed on news among the membership and all that. Her name popped up a couple days ago.”

“How'd she die?”

“Suicide. Got it right the second time around.”

I looked over my shoulder. The sensation of being watched. A sensation I've had, in greater or lesser degrees, my entire life.

“What the hell's this about, Danny?”

“Thanks, Lyle. I'll let you get back to sleep,” I said, and hung up.

V
IOLET
G
RIEG MAY HAVE BEEN
gone, but according to the internet white pages her sister Sylvie was still with us. I didn't warn her I was coming to Gloucester to see her, which it occurred to me, as I pulled off the 128 and made my way past the fishermen's outfitting shops and
FRIED CLAMS
! stands near the harbor, may not have been the best idea. It's a long way to have gone just to get a door slammed in my face.

The door in question belonged to a whitewashed two-story at the corner of Prospect and Main, across from Flannagan Gas Station, the air a rank competition between gas and sea. I parked directly on the street in front and got out, the chain-link gate at the sidewalk's
edge screeching when I swung it open. I was trying not to think about what I'd say, what I came there to learn. There wasn't time for thinking. Every time I paused, every time I started to wonder if it was over, if Ash was gone—that was when she liked to come. I had to move. Up the cement steps and knocking a fist against the locked screen door.

When a woman appeared to squint out at me from the other side it took a moment to recall that it was my obligation to speak first.

“Sylvie Grieg? My name is Danny Orchard.”

She didn't say anything to this. She may not have even heard it. When I spoke again I leaned in so close my nose pushed against the screen.

“I'm not selling anything. I'm just—”

“First thing, I can
hear
you. Pretty sure the neighbors a block over don't need to.”

“Sorry. It's—”

“And second thing, I know who you are.”

“You do?”

“Taller than I would've guessed. Got a few more gray hairs than the picture in the magazine, but I suppose I do, too, since the last time I read your book.”

I figured she'd open the door then but she didn't. Continued to stand there, looking at me like a street accident she'd come to gawk at before heading back to her coffee.

“May I come in?” I said.

“Not sure why you would.”

“I need some help, to be honest with you.”

“Help? That could mean pretty much anything.”

“In my case, it's—”

She opened the door.

“You're still
shouting,
” she said.

I
TOLD HER ABOUT
A
SH
.

All the parts that aren't included in
The After
. I told her about how my falling in love and having a chance to help raise a boy seemed
to have given her a new strength, one sufficient to take hold of the heart in my chest. I told her about Ash trying to lead me to hell but instead I came back and brought her with me. A series of sentences that sounded like the mumblings of a sanatorium patient even to my own ears. But Sylvie didn't react to any of it one way or another. She seemed as likely to call 911 as wrap her arms around me.

“Somebody told you about Violet,” she said once I finished. We were in her dark kitchen at the back of her dark house, sitting across from each other. Every once in a while there was the crunch of floorboards from upstairs but nobody came down. “Somebody told you a story.”

“She reached out to the Afterlifers group in Boston.”

“Afterlifers group! Sounds like an insurance company. Fat heap of help those tunnel-of-light piss parties are to anyone.”

She slammed her palm on the table, a single smack, then returned her hand to her lap like it never happened.

“They didn't know what to make of your sister's case,” I said. “And I can't pretend I do, either. But I believe it. What I heard of it, anyway.”

“What good is believing it going to do you?”

She was somewhere in her early eighties but seemed even older, though this could have been an augmentation of the house and its shut-in scents, its smoky curtains and Vick's VapoRub. A sinewy, ball-knuckled woman who would've been good in a fight, all wound-up muscle ready to deliver swift, unpredictable blows.

“Maybe hearing what you know of what happened might help me,” I said. “That's why I'm here. To see if there's a way I can stop my sister from taking my life so that I might have the chance to live a little of it first.”

She searched the table's surface for a drink that wasn't there. Upstairs, someone marched down the hallway and stopped. It was hard to see this woman living with a husband, with anyone, though someone was here with her.

“He started with me when I made the turn into my teens. But I was a different sort of girl from Violet—not just two years older but
different
—and he knew it,” she said. “I'd tell. I'd fight. But in the end I ran away the first chance I had and left my sister there with him. You couldn't imagine the ways I've told myself how this was the only thing I could do, how I had no choice. All lies. Because she needed me to protect her. She was
alone
. And for the years I pretended I was being strong I was only the worst sort of coward, because my life was paid for through hers.”

Her tears were brief and came with a shake of her head that spilled two lines down her cheeks. But that was it. The next second she was as steady as someone who'd recovered from a sneeze.

“She tried to kill herself,” she said. “This was years after he died, after she was free of his hands but not what they left on her. Did her best to keep it to herself but I knew the pain she was in. Violet couldn't recover from it, couldn't shake him.”

She wiped her sleeve under her nose and inspected her shirt as if it revealed the long-awaited results of a medical test. When she continued she was still inspecting it, saddened by the news it brought.

“She tried the easiest way to do it. Took a glass of wine and a straight razor into the bath and made a right mess. But she started too early. Before she had a chance to turn the taps off she was already slipping under and the water was spilling onto the floor and going right through to the couple who lived under her, dripping on their heads as they watched TV. They thought they saved her life, because she was dead for a time in that tub before the paramedics came. And that's where she met up with dear old Dad. Doctor Good. That's what they called him in our town. Doctor Goddamned Good.”

“Who came back with her.”

“He never let go! That's what she always said. ‘Sylvie, Daddy will never let me go.' ”

Another shuffle of footsteps upstairs, coming through the ceiling directly above us. I involuntarily glanced upward but Sylvie didn't follow my eyes.

“Things got worse for her after that. ‘Dad walks with me,' she'd say. ‘Holds my hand like he's taking me to school but when he whispers something in my ear it's the worst of the secrets he made me
keep.' Things you couldn't live with if you were her. If you were anybody.”

“So she tried to kill herself again.”

“Made damned sure of it this time. Put our father's hunting rifle down her throat and pulled the trigger with her toe. Same way Dad did it. Using the same gun.”

“My God. I'm sorry.”

“You know where she got the rifle? He gave it to her in his will! Like it was a joke.”

“Or a command,” I said before I could stop myself.

She looked at me like I'd just blown a bubble gum bubble and it popped. “How's that?”

“He went out that way, so he was saying she had to follow him. It'd be something my sister would do.”

“Oh yeah? People think she was a good girl?”

“They thought she was an angel.”

The old woman nodded. It seemed to help her come to some internal decision.

“So what you came here for,” she said. “You want to know if there's any way to make your sister stop.”

“You know of any?”

“The only one who might is Violet, and she's not here anymore. But I know she tried. Her parish priest, those Afterlifer friends of yours, a New Age minister or whatever you call voodoo in Massachusetts. Knocked on every door she could think of. Didn't do any good. Just like I expect none of them could do any good for you.”

“Why are you so sure of that?”

“Because your sister is
dead
. One foot on the far side of the river and the other on your throat. You can't
push
her back to where she's supposed to be, not from here. She can only be
pulled
.”

Sylvie reddened. A bloom of heat that came upon her so suddenly she leaned against the back of her chair, puffing for air. I got a glass out of the cupboard and poured her some water. She took a sip and shivered as though she'd swallowed much stronger stuff.

“I wish you luck, Mr. Orchard,” she managed. “But right now, I think I need to lie down.”

Sylvie rose on unsteady feet and let me take her arm. Started shuffling toward the front door with me squeezed next to her in the narrow hallway, my shoulder nudging against the framed photos on the wall as we went. One I knocked hard enough that its wire slipped off the hook and I had to catch it with my free hand before it hit the floor. When I put it back I saw it was an image of Sylvie, eleven or twelve years old, standing in a bathing suit at the end of a dock next to a younger girl I took to be Violet. The two of them have just gotten out of the lake, their long hair glued to their necks. A standard setup for a holiday snapshot.

Yet something about it held me. Something wrong.

If you looked closer you could see that the girls' grins betrayed an effort, their closeness to each other an instinct of mutual protection as much as a sharing of warmth after a cold swim. It let me see who held the camera. How the lens and the man who trained it on them captured not only their images but their fragile, shivering selves.

We carried on to the door and Sylvie removed her arm from mine. Found her balance.

“Thank you,” I said, and she murmured something I couldn't make out in reply, though the intent was clear.

Just go.

Before I opened the screen door I turned to look up the stairs to the second floor.