The Damned (15 page)

A man stood at the top looking down at me.

He wore his hair combed, shiny with Brylcreem, his shirt and pants dated but neatly pressed. His smile was the smile of a caregiver, a bedside hand-holder, gentle and knowing and inviting trust. He looked like a country doctor from the sixties. A good man.

I looked to Sylvie, who glanced up at where I'd been looking but didn't seem to register anyone there.

“If you don't mind my asking, do you live here on your own?”

“Since my husband passed. Sixteen years now,” she said. “You looking for somewhere to stay?”

“No, no. Just a question.”

I stepped out. The day unthinkably bright. My car by the curb, ready to take me away from the salt air and gas station fumes and the house behind me, all of them things I knew I would try to forget but won't.

But before I let the screen door slap shut I gave Sylvie a last wave of farewell and in doing so saw that her father still stood at the top of the stairs. His kindly expression hadn't changed, yet something passed between us. It's in his eyes. A darkening that left only a red laser point at their center, burning down at me. Eyes that pulled me in, letting me in on something. The sort of awful secret Ash liked to share with me.

And what his eyes said was that he
knows
.

Knows I have the gift of seeing others who are here but shouldn't be, that I know who he is and all he's done and that's just fine with him. It's all good.

B
Y THE TIME
I
WAS
back on the 128 heading south toward Boston the afternoon had grown muggy and windless, though I drove with the windows down instead of hitting the AC just to feel the real air swirl around me. Trying to blow all the voices out of my head.

It helped. But it didn't stop Sylvie Grieg's words from repeating themselves. Words that seemed to either open a door or close it forever.

You can't push her back. She can only be pulled.

Violet's father wanted to claim her in death just as he had in life. And now he waited for Sylvie to join them, to force her to go with him even if she was meant for another place just as Ash tried to force me into the house on Alfred Street.

What does Ash want?

The old question again. Maybe there's a different answer now than over the years she merely watched over me as a stalking cloud.
Maybe she wanted from me what she wanted from Lisa Goodale and Michelle Wynn and Winona Quinlan, the girls she tried to lead on a bike ride downtown.

She wanted them to
see
.

I closed the windows. Pumped the AC up to max. But before the fan drowned it out, I heard my phone vibrating on the passenger seat next to me. Expecting it to be a
When will you be home?
text from Willa, I tapped the screen to life only to see it wasn't a text at all but a phone message. A number I didn't recognize.

Odds are it was only a telemarketer, or my speaking agent asking if a date looks good for me to fly in to Denver or Biloxi, or Lyle Kirk wanting to know if all went well in my search for Violet Grieg's sister. But something told me it wasn't.

I was going to pull over at the next exit but, seconds later, realized I wouldn't make it.

A stab in my chest so sudden my left arm fell off the wheel and I drifted onto the soft shoulder too fast, fishtailing over the gravel, pumping the brakes until I eventually coaxed the car into a diagonal stop.

There was an excruciating swelling around the base of my neck that sitting forward or sideways didn't ease. I couldn't tell if it was a warning flare from the stress of the morning or simply the inevitable reblocking of a valve and this was it, this was where I go, sitting in a Ford Focus somewhere between Manchester-by-the-Sea and Beverly.

After a time the stabbing reduced to a throb and I was able to lift the cell again. Listen to the voice message on speakerphone.

“Mr. Daniel Orchard? This is Marion Cross of the Cambridge Police Department,” a voice said. The low register of a bad-news professional. “Could you please call me back as soon as possible? My number—”

I thumbed the call off. Pressed
CALL BACK
.

With every ring the pain returned. It left me to whistle my breath through clenched teeth. Both fists slapping the wheel.

“Marion Cross,” the voice said when it answered. She seemed to know it was me just as I seemed to know what she was about to say.

“This is Danny Orchard.”

“Thank you for returning my call, Mr. Orchard. I wonder if there's any way you could make your way—”

“What's going on?”

“It might be better—”

“What
happened
?”

There was a quarter second of silence before she spoke. A quarter second of sympathy that proved she was a human being.

“There's been an accident.”

T
he rest of the drive back was a blur of speed and rain. A downpour that hit as soon as I entered the Boston city limits and only came down harder by the time I parked at Mass General and ran, soaked, through the emergency room doors.

This was where Marion Cross, the voice on the phone, told me I'd find Willa and Eddie.

She said more than this but I heard only half of it, maybe less. I just tossed the cell into the passenger-side footwell and drove, weaving through everything in front of me. I heard
vehicle
and
they're doing everything they can
and
divers
. But there was nothing more I needed to know after
There's been an accident
and the name of the hospital.

I was shouting at the sleepy guy sitting behind the glass at the triage desk, asking where they were, when I felt a hand on my shoulder.

“Mr. Orchard?”

I swung around to find a middle-aged woman in a Cambridge Police uniform.
CROSS
on her shirt.

“Are they alive?”

It's not the question I meant to ask first, but it was the first one that came out.

“They've been through a lot today, but yes. Both hanging on pretty good, I'd say.”

“You said divers. On the phone.”

“Let's sit over here, Daniel.”

“
Danny
. Why divers?”

“Just come over here with me, Danny. Okay?”

The guy behind the glass smirked as he watched the officer lead me to an unoccupied corner of the waiting room. I was wrong about him. He wasn't sleepy. He was just a dick who found amusement at the sight of people suffering the worst moments of their lives.

“We're still investigating the cause,” Marion Cross was saying, adjusting the gun at her belt so she can sit without it jabbing her in the side. “But there was no other vehicle involved.”

“What did they hit?”

She squinted, and it aged her a decade. “Didn't you hear me on the phone?”

“Not everything.”

“Water,” she said. “Your wife drove her car into the Charles River with your son in the passenger seat late this morning.”

Two things hit me at once, both of equal weight.

Drove her car into the Charles River
was one.

Your son
was the other.

“But they got out?”

“Our marine unit was out on patrol, which was fortunate. They were able to reach the scene right away and send a couple divers down to get them out of there.”

“Are they hurt?”

“The doctors are still assessing them. But it looks like your wife's injuries are minor.”

“And Eddie's?”

“He took quite a bump to the head on impact. Regained consciousness by the time he got here, though, which is the good news.
But I think he'll be staying for a while to make sure there's no long-term damage, that kind of thing.”

What felt a moment ago like a thousand questions vaporized all at once. Left me with only one.

“Can I see them?”

W
ILLA WAS SITTING UP AND
looking reasonably composed when I entered her room. Then she saw it was me. And lost it.

I held her as best I could and let her scream into my shirt.

“It was my fault,” Willa said once she was able to. “It was
me
, Danny. But I don't know how it happened.”

“We don't have to figure all that out right now.”

“The hell we don't.”

“The main thing is to fix the two of you up. You're both alive. Everything else—it doesn't matter.”

Willa nodded, and kept nodding. Not at the truth of what I'd just said but the horror of what she was about to say.

“It was so dark down there,” she began, and with the words, her eyes darkened, too. “I don't know how deep it was, but it could've been miles. I don't think we ever touched bottom. So goddamned
dark
. Black water coming in every crack, around the windows, the air vents. Slow at first, so I thought we had some time. If the glass held we could stay down there until the air ran out and how long could that be? Couple hours? Then it started to fill up. Fast. I got Eddie out of his seat belt—he wasn't awake, and there was a lot of blood coming from I don't know where—I pulled him onto me and made sure his head was as high as I could hold him. So he might have time.”

She stopped to take in an enormous, shaking breath. Like she was back in the car under the surface of the Charles and this was the last air she'd ever taste.

“You saved him, Willa.”

“I drove into the river for no reason,” she said, and exhaled. “It
didn't feel like it was me doing it, but it was. I didn't
save
him. I nearly
killed
him.”

E
DDIE WAS BLUE.

His hands laid atop the bedsheet, closed eyelids, his lips, all of him different shades of hurt. But it was the black line across the top of his forehead, a barbed wire of stitches, that was the hardest to look at.

I held one of his hands and warmed it in mine.

I'd died three times in my life but that was nothing compared to this. I would have done it three more times and stayed that way if it would've made his suffering go away. Made it mine instead.

Even though I was watching his face I didn't see the eyes open. One second he was asleep and then he was looking up at me, making the mental calculations of who I was, where he was, what brought him here.

He put both of his hands around my arm and I expected him to use it to lift himself up against his pillows but instead he pulled me down close.

“I saw her,” he said.

“Where?”

“In the car. Just before we went into the water. I looked into the backseat and she was there. Smiling at me.”

“Eddie—”

“
She did it.
Reached between the seats and grabbed the wheel,” he said, squeezing my arm so hard I thought he'd never let go. “She tried to
kill
us, Danny.”

T
hey released Willa from the hospital the next day but kept Eddie in for what one of the doctors, choosing a philosophical phrasing, called “the indefinite future.” His skull had been fractured, which was serious enough in itself. But they were worried about damage that might have resulted from the concussion, which meant tests and scans and people asking him if he remembered his birthday (got it right the first time, mixed it up with Christmas the second) and the name of his first pet (Charlie, a goldfish, nailed both times).

Over those first couple days, the cops came by wanting to know how a Buick Regal up to date on its maintenance would come to plow off Memorial Drive and into the Charles River in broad daylight when there was no alcohol in the driver's blood and no indication she was speeding. Willa told them she must have dozed off for a second. Eddie said he didn't remember. They asked the same questions a second time, got the same answers. In the end, they had no choice but to accept their stories, even if they didn't believe them.

Willa didn't feel good about it, but she had to lie.

I'd told her what Eddie whispered to me. She reacted as though a growing suspicion in her mind had been confirmed. While she didn't see Ash in the car, she
did
feel the wheel jerk away from her hands, a motion she felt sure wasn't a mechanical failure but “something intentional, something really fucking
strong
.” She didn't tell me about it at first because she didn't think it was possible, that she might be subconsciously letting herself off the hook with a crazy idea.

“But then I remembered all the things you told me about your sister,” she said. “How she's nothing
but
crazy ideas.”

It was hard to coax Willa away from Eddie's bedside even to get something to eat or walk the hallway to stretch her legs. It left me to smuggle in decent food and dash back and forth to Porter Square for toiletries and clean clothes, along with the copy of
The Fellowship of the Ring
Eddie and I bought together and that he asked me to keep reading even if it looked like he was sleeping because “it's good just to hear you say the words.”

So I kept saying the words. In fact I read aloud through the whole of the second night, hoping to shield both Willa's and Eddie's dreams with magic. Kept awake by the fantasy that I was actually helping.

I tried it on the third night, too, but, somewhere around when the hobbits are running from the Ringwraiths in a dark forest, sleep pulled me down.

What felt like less than a minute later, I awakened in the same chair I'd fallen asleep in. Eddie in his bed, eyes closed. Willa on the far side in the other chair, also out. The same room in every detail except for the quiet. No nurses bustling along the hallway through the open door, no squeak of shoes on polished floor, no PA calls for Dr. This or Dr. That. The entire hospital cottonballed.

I got out of the chair and looked around the corner.