The Damned (16 page)

The hallway was dark. The ceiling's fluorescent lights all extinguished, so that only the couple of desk lamps at the nurses' station thirty feet to the left were still on. To the right, a yellow haze that dimmed to nothing before reaching the next door.

I was starting back into the room. Maybe I hadn't been noticed. Maybe the doorjamb could be quietly lifted and the three of us could
hide until morning, when the light would return the flapping lab coats and squeaking carts and burbling phones.

But something saw me.

A single intake of breath. Like a gasp, but of a lower register. The suck of air that pulled other matter deeper with it. Wet hair or half-chewed food or sand.

Coming from the right. From the darkness that yielded its details the longer I stared into it.

A patient.

Gowned and barefoot and tilted like a skiff in a gale. The tentative quarter steps of the unwell. A woman who should be told to get back into bed.

She slid her blue feet closer and I could see that it wasn't a bed she'd risen from.

Hoo . . .

The gasp-that-isn't again. Whistled up and out of her mouth. Or from where her mouth used to be.

The hospital gown not a hospital gown but skin. Hanging and burned.

My sister did two things at the same time.

She came closer, showing herself in the outer reaches of the nurses' station's lamplight.

She raised her arms out in front of her as if in invitation to join her in a dance.

Hoo . . . HOO . . .

I didn't go to her. I didn't pull away, either. Neither was possible unless she willed it.

The hands came up and found her face. What was left of it. The fingernails hooking in. Pulling away.

Who?

Ash peeled the skin off her face to reveal the soft tissue below it, the hard cords of ligament and muscle. Kept ripping until there was only bone. Until her body was no longer visible and she was nothing more than a white skull floating in the hallway's darkness.

Who, Danny? WHO?

M
orning.

Noisy and smelling of less-than-great coffee and oatmeal. Eddie sitting up in bed, looking at me struggling to escape the chair I'd slept in.

“Bad dream?” he said, then shook his head. “Don't answer that.”

I needed to talk to Willa. The opportunity came within the hour when one of the nurses arrived to shoo us out so she could change Eddie's dressing. I was about to try and convince Willa to step outside for five minutes of fresh air when she asked me first.

We crossed the pedestrian bridge over Storrow Drive and found shade in a cluster of trees at the edge of Lederman Park, a Little League game in progress on one of the diamonds. Every once in a while there was the crack of bat meeting ball, the hooting cheers as a runner rounded the bases. What would otherwise be reassuring sounds that instead punctuated our hushed conversation like gunshots.

“I'm scared, Danny.”

She said it like an accusation. A declaration of lost patience.

“Me, too.”

“But it's something else now. I mean, I thought we had something to deal with before this. A presence or whatever. One nasty little bitch of a ghost following us around. I figured that was something I could handle, because I can get nasty myself if I need to. But this. This is
fucked up
.”

Willa walked slightly ahead, so that her words flew back into me, lightweight but sharp, like paper released out the window of one of the speeding cars roaring behind us.

“You're right,” I said. “I should go. Leave the two of you on your own. Let Ash come after me alone.”

“I don't want that. Neither of us do.”

“I want you to be safe.”

“You running away won't do that.”

Willa stopped to let me catch up with her. We stood close enough to touch, but didn't.

“We're a part of this now because we're a part of you,” she said.

That this was essentially the same thing I thought myself after Eddie told me of seeing Ash take the wheel of the car shouldn't have surprised me. Willa's answer to the question
Why us?
simply led her to the same place it led me.

“She's taken an interest in us, Danny,” Willa went on, and paused to allow the cheers at what sounded like a home run to die down. “Whether you're here or a thousand miles away, she's going to stay interested.”

I put a hand on her shoulder. Instead of drawing her closer, it started her shaking.

“It's going to be—”

“Don't say it's going to be okay, Danny!
Don't!
”

I pulled my hand away but she kept trembling. Her lips pale even as the breeze I'd detected before was shut off like the closing of an oven door.

“We're still alive,” I said. “And I don't think that's just blind luck, either. I think we're
meant
to be.”

“What are you saying?”

“Her attacks on me, driving your car into the river—attempts on our lives, but ones that didn't go all the way. If that was all Ash wanted, aren't there ways to do it and be sure?”

“She came pretty goddamned close the day before yesterday.”

“But you're still here.”

“Why?”

“Because she wants me to do something for her. Something she can't do herself.”

Who, Danny? WHO?

The umpire hollered a strike call and a handful of boos filtered through the trees, settling in the branches like birds.

“When I was with her the last time, on the other side,
her
side, she told me she wanted me to see something,” I said. “I figured it was something she already knew and was just leading me to, a windup. But I think I was wrong. I think it's something she
doesn't
know.”

Willa unfolded her crossed arms and they dropped to her sides.

“You think she was murdered,” she said.

“Yes, I do. She was murdered and not even she knows who did it.”

For a moment it appeared that Willa hadn't heard me. She had the lowered eyelids and top-heavy sway of someone about to drop in a faint, so that I reached out to catch her if she fell. But she ended up supporting herself with an outstretched foot. Not falling. Walking away from me.

“Eddie should be ready by now,” she said, her voice cast over her shoulder again as I followed behind her.

“Ash wants me to go.”

It made her turn.

“You think you should do what
she
wants? As far as I can tell, that's seeing the three of us dead.”

“You may be right. But she wants something else first.”

“How do you mean?”

It was then that I voiced aloud for the first time the thought I'd been inching toward since that afternoon in the laundry room. A thought that gained the certainty of truth as soon as it was spoken.

“I think she wants me to find out who started the fire,” I said.

Willa slid closer and I looped an arm around her. Pulled her closer still.

“I wish I was somebody who could honestly say, ‘I don't believe any of this,' but I'm not,” she said. “So what are we going to do?”

“Not you. Me. I'm going to Detroit.”

“Today?”

“We can't wait,” I said. “Ash isn't going to.”

“What are you going to do once you get there? What can you do that twenty years and a bunch of homicide detectives couldn't?”

“I don't know, to be honest. But if there's something out there that might make her go away, I've got to try and find it, don't I?”

“Why
you
?” she said, pivoting to show new black pouches under her eyes. “Couldn't we hire a private investigator or something? You're
not well
, Danny. The doctors said to—”

“Nobody else can do it. All the clues are here,” I said, tapping the side of my head with a pair of fingers.

“Name one.”

“They're not those kinds of clues.”

Willa walked up to me, lowered her head, and punched me in the stomach. A shot hard enough that it was all I could do not to double over.

“Sorry,” she said. “Better you than a wall.”

“You want to punch something? I'll always be here for you.”

She looked up. “Will you?”

Willa made the motion with her hand that is her signal for me to bend for a kiss—a three-fingered
Down here
pull—and grazed a quick one, dry and cool, on my cheek.

“I'll explain it to him,” she said. “Because if we're doing this, we're doing it now.”

Then she walked back over the pedestrian bridge toward the hospital, the passing traffic howling beneath her.

I watched for as long as I could. Memorizing her shape, holding her voice in my head, breathing in what was left of her scent in the air. Hoping all of it might be brought back one more time before it was gone for good.

T
he clerk eating Taco Bell behind the counter at the airport's Budget Rent a Car who handed me the keys to my Chevy Impala asked if I'd ever visited Detroit before.

“I used to live here,” I said. “A million years ago.”

“Yeah?”

“Bet it's changed a lot since then.”

He looked at me with genuine disbelief. “Bet it hasn't,” he said.

Outside, pulling my carry-on bag toward my car, the night was high and starless, as though space itself had retreated from the earth.

Is there a lonelier place than a car rental lot after the last domestic flights of the evening have landed and no one but yourself slips behind the wheel?

Yes, there is. That lot could be in Detroit.

I'd gone from Mass General to Porter Square, thrown a couple shirts and jeans into a bag and headed straight to Logan, looked up at the Departures board and found the next flight out. The roar of
the engines had lullabyed me into a deep sleep even before takeoff, so that the flight attendant had to shake me awake after the door had been opened at the terminal and I was the only passenger left.

The drive into the city produced nothing familiar, nothing to say this was a place of importance to who I am. The down-market billboards for personal injury lawyers and bail bondsmen. The land that's neither farmer's field nor residential neighborhood but the in-between of scrap metal lots and self-storage compounds and light-industry factories, all shut down, all with truck trailers backed up to the loading bay doors as though meant not to deliver a shipment but to barricade something inside.

Then I was curving onto a ramp that traded the interstate for the expressway that ran the southern border of downtown. And there they were.

The pillars pushed up from out of the horizon, their dark glass reflected blue against the night. The electric
GM
atop the highest tower floating so far apart from everything else it was a monogram stitched onto the night.

I knew I should find a room somewhere but kept driving instead. Through the near-empty streets of downtown to where Woodward Avenue began its long, dead-straight course away from the river. Detroit's spine.

The view outside felt just as otherworldly—an environment experienced as an animal might experience it, hyperconscious to escape routes and threats—as it did on the other side. What's doubly strange is that doing it while alive made me feel like I was dead. Which may have only been what the return home after a long time away is for anyone.

As I reached the far side of the overpass that left downtown behind I realized that Alfred Street was only a couple blocks ahead. I could hang a right and, within two minutes, park in front of the house (or the empty lot, or whatever had been built on its ashes).

I didn't.

Stopped the Impala in the middle of the lane. Pulled a U-turn. Stomped the gas.

A second later there was a warning tingle running the length of my left arm.

With one hand over my heart as if I were about to take the Pledge of Allegiance, I drifted into the garage at the back of the Greektown Casino-Hotel and shuffled to the front desk for a room. I couldn't have looked good. But they were used to people like me, traveling alone and not looking good.

Up on the eighteenth floor my window framed the city's core. Broad-shouldered stone buildings of the kind they haven't built in fifty years. The raised concrete tracks of the People Mover monorail curving through downtown, a failed solution notable among the city's history of failed solutions. Figures on the street here and there. Shadows standing on the corners, none walking when the lights changed.

My underworld.

D
awn arrived on crimson clouds. From the bed, I watched it color the city in Martian hues before it lightened to orange, then pink, as if the day were deciding between a palette of alien options before it landed on the yellow sun of home.

I should be sleeping. But every time I closed my eyes they demanded to be opened again to confirm I'm actually here.

Detroit.

Canadians crossing the border to buy stuff cheap always pronounced it in three syllables (De-
troy
-it), those of us in the suburbs made the
e
short (D-
troyt
), while the people who lived in the city itself stretched the vowel long (
Dee
-troyt). There wasn't a single right way to say it, though everyone made fun of how others got it wrong.

I tried each of these versions aloud as I watched the night pull off the skyline like a sheet. The police cars that lined certain streets and ignored others, the past-their-prime office buildings, the river blackly glinting through the gaps—there was no way to pretend I was anywhere else. Though that's exactly what I'd spent the last restless
hour trying to do. Wishing I were home, or in one of the other Anycities where I gave a talk and had to remind myself where I was.