The Damned (23 page)

Waved.

I
repeatedly tried to get Willa on the phone while running down the terminal hall to the gate. Left two messages on the landline. Okayed a 911 call through the app to report a break-and-enter in progress. Fired off three texts in between.

GET OUT! NOW!

She's INSIDE

i'm serious.

Then my flight was being called, the doors closing, the PA announcing the last boarding call for
Mr. Orchard, Mr. Daniel Orchard
. I considered staying where I was, working the phone some more, trying to do something from my end before I was cut off in the air. But I knew that the only thing I could do was try to stop Ash myself,
and I couldn't do it from Detroit, so I ran to the door and slipped through, took my seat with the curious gaze of the other passengers burning into me.

The one hour and forty-eight minutes roaring through the night between Detroit and Boston were the most wretched of my life, and that included a childhood with Ash. It included hell itself.

My heart added a new kind of pain to its repertoire, a crushing weight pressed hard against its bone cage. More than once I thought my efforts to contain a scream would fail, that I would start kicking the chair in front of me or ripping the oxygen masks out of the ceiling and we'd have to land in Buffalo or Albany so I could be pulled off in handcuffs. I needed to stay calm until I got there. And then I needed to be ready to—to what? Change the game. I was through with trying to figure out what Ash wanted. That was the only thing that kept me in my seat the whole way. Conjuring all the ways I would make
her
feel something for once.

As soon as we landed I was on the phone again. Multiple texts and voice messages popped up. I ignored them all and called Willa before we were parked at the gate.

It rang close to a dozen times before she answered. Her voice hoarse. In the background, the sound of electronic bells ringing, the muffle of institutional air.

“Oh,
Danny.
Oh my God. This—oh my
Christ
—”

“Slow down, baby. Okay?”

“—this
isn't
fucking
happening
—”

“Just tell me where you are.”

“The hospital.”

“Eddie?”

“He was
fine.
Everything was
fine.
They couldn't believe how well he was doing. When they said he could go home you should have
seen
—he was so happy. And then I went up to his room to bring him something to eat and . . .”

“And what?”

“He was
gone,
Danny.”

A howl. It's the only way to describe the noise I made, loud and brief and unforeseen, cut off by putting my mouth against my shoulder.

“Willa,” I said when I was able, the flight attendant opening the door of the plane and everyone up and wrestling for their bags in the overhead compartments. “Gone how?”

“Out. Asleep, but not asleep. I tried. I
tried.
But I couldn't wake him up!”

“A coma. Is that it?”

“They're not using that word. But yeah, it looks that way.”

The passengers were shuffling down the aisle and out the door. Each of them taking a look down at me, the cause of concern in the second row they were glad to be putting behind them.

“I saw the messages you left,” Willa said.

“It was too late. I'm so sorry.”

“How do you know it was her?”

“The security camera. I saw her. Coming into the house.”

“She did this to my son?”

“Yes.”

“But you said everything was okay. That you'd figured things out—”

“I thought I had. I must have been wrong. Or maybe I was right, and it just doesn't make a difference.”

“If she did this, what's stopping her from—from coming back? From
taking
him? If she could get into the house she could get into the hospital, too, right?”

The hospital candy striper uniform. Showing me where she'd go next.

“I'll be there soon as I can,” I said.

“Danny? What are we going to do?”

The plane was emptied out except for me. The flight attendant looking my way, a look that said she was used to crazies who had to be pulled out of the sardine can at the very end of the day.

But I was getting up all on my own. Rushing into the terminal, passing others, a dash toward the
GROUND TRANSPORTATION
sign that
lit a new fire in my chest so that I couldn't answer Willa's question even if I had one to give.

Y
OU'D THINK A HEART ATTACK
would hurt most where your heart is. But it can show up anywhere: down the length of your leg, the back of your head, a knuckling behind the eyes. I had three-alarm versions of them all as the cab descended into the Callahan Tunnel crossing from East Boston to downtown, the fluorescent tubes strobing as we roared through the earth.

Then we were rising into the city at night, the driver weaving through the old streets designed for horse carts, running reds in pursuit of the extra hundred promised him if we did it quick.

They were close now. The pain retreated like a rat when the lights get turned on.

“How's
that
?” the driver asked in thick Dorchester-ese as we pulled up to the hospital's doors.

I gave him everything I had.

W
ILLA DIDN'T TOUCH ME.

I wasn't expecting an embrace or a kiss or anything—I'm not sure what I was expecting—but the way she jolted back when she saw me, an instinctual aversion to a known carrier of disease, threw me back as well. No mirror was necessary to see how I appeared to her: unclean, glassy-eyed, the yearning reach of the terminal case. Damned.

We stood in the hallway outside Eddie's room and took a moment to recover. Not as lovers, not as husband and wife, but as Adults in a Situation. The minimum control that made human speech possible. She told me Eddie's coma had been confirmed, that the doctors were puzzled by how it came about, one saying it was like “someone reached inside him and turned out the light.” I told her the facts of what I discovered in Detroit and how I must have been wrong in thinking the discovery of the truth would stop Ash, wrong that the truth was what she was after in the first place.

We stared at each other. Me concluding that there was no way to tell her how sorry I was. Willa trying not to swing her hand across my face.

“Can I see him?” I said finally. Asking permission. The fantasy that I was his dad, his
almost
-dad, over in four words.

“He loved you, you know,” Willa said, then took longer than she needed to correct herself. “Loves you.”

I took Willa in. My happiness in the shape of a woman, short and salty and firm. She was mine for a time I knew might be brief but now felt like it never was at all.

H
E WASN'T MY SON.
H
E
was a boy I was starting to get to know. One who came with the package, the two of us connected by shared circumstance and low expectations and unspoken ground rules. But that didn't stop me from being glad the door was closed and the room was otherwise unoccupied when I saw him in the bed, complicated by breathing tubes and monitoring wires, and let the grief pour out.

The same sun-dotted, jug-eared kid assembled there beneath the white sheet, but absent in the ways that matter. You can
feel
it: the vacancy of the artificially life-supported, their claim on this world the weight of a penlight's beam through the fog.

His eyes were closed but the lids were twitching. I'm sure it was only some aspect of bodily autopilot and not an indication of consciousness, but it was like he knew I was there. The spooky feeling of being watched from behind, except from someone laid out in front of you.

I held his hand. Told him I loved him. That I wasn't totally honest when I said I never wanted to be a replacement dad to him, because a part of me did, right from the start, a part that grew every day we spent together. I never told him because I didn't want to scare him away, and because I was happy just being around, learning how trust might be made between two beings shaped by suspicion and loss.

I told him all this. And then I told him something else.

“I'm going to find her, Eddie. I'm going to send her back so she'll never hurt you or your mom again. You just have to hold on. Just think about that. Concentrate on that.”

He heard me. There was nothing to indicate this, no telltale squeeze or effort at speech, but I knew he did. I'd been where he was now. You can see and hear a lot from the middle ground. Some of it pulls you back, some of it pushes you all the way over.

I leaned in close enough for him to feel my voice as well as hear it.

“Wherever she has you, I'm going to make her let you go.”

Then I stood up while I still could. Released Eddie's hand and stepped out into the hall.

Willa wasn't there. Probably in the lounge area, or the bathroom.

I headed the other way.

You can't push her back to where she's supposed to be, not from here.

Down the elevators to the main floor and out into the swampy night that smelled faintly of the sea. Took a lungful in. Tried to remember this, too. The simple in-and-out of air, overlooked and miraculous.

She can only be pulled.

And that couldn't be done from this side.

I ran.

A full sprint, or as close to it as my knees allowed. Plowing across busy Cambridge Street, almost knocked down by one of the cars that hit the brakes so hard they didn't have time to lay on the horn. Into the narrow streets of Beacon Hill, fighting the slopes and slippery cobblestone, unworried about which way to go because I wasn't going anywhere in particular. Only running.

From a distance, in the dark, I would've looked like another late-to-the-game health nut trying to stave off the inevitable.

In fact, I was a suicide-in-progress.

The night was still but there was a rush of blood in my ears, howling at what it was being asked to do, how it wasn't getting to the parts where it had to go. And soon the pain, too. All the new kinds, as well as the crushing pressure in the chest. Signs I ignored along with the traffic lights, clopping the length of Louisburg Square and
south to Beacon Street, banging through a clutch of drunk tourists and into the Public Garden on the other side.

Even then, right at the end, there was an appreciation of beauty.

You'd think there'd be more serious considerations as the legs finally gave way just short of the duck pond and the stars extinguished, from dimmest to brightest, the heavens short-circuited. But as my head hit the ground and the willows and light-pricked buildings along Boylston Street and the sickle-shaped moon were turned sideways I was thinking,
It's so pretty here.

The air.

That's what you end up clinging to. That old, lung-filling need. One more deep one for the road—

But that was it. The last breath of this world tasting of grass. A sip of dew.

So pretty . . .

Then, right before the darkness, someone else added a thought of her own.

Not so pretty where you're going, Danny Boy.

B
efore I open my eyes I work to remember everything that brought me here. So long as I stay in the dark I can make most of it come back, shape it into a sequence of events I can almost make sense of. Memory is one of the first casualties of the After—I know this if nothing else—and while so much of my life is something I'd rather forget, some of the most recent past has been good, the best I've known, and I don't want to let it go.

Too late.

This is the present.

This is now.

Nothing else counts but
now
.

Ready, Danny? It's time to move. For them. So open your eyes on three.
One . . .

The smell tells me where I am just as it did before. But it's different this time. I'm back in my room. Where I am now. In the present that feels stretched out forever. Except this time, forever smells
bad.

The stale sheets and unwashed gym clothes, the burnt toast and lilac carpet deodorant, all of it sharpened to the point that when I wake it's with the gagging cough of having smelling salts held under my nose.

 . . . two . . .

There's a new odor, too. The foul leavings of animal urine and shit. Neither dog nor cat but something wild, a creature born of another continent altogether. A meat eater.

 . . . three.

I sit up and count the marks of its fury.

The room torn apart from ceiling to floor. Gouges left in the walls from the sweeps of claws the size of crowbars. The
Dune
poster, half shredded, half still hanging by a taped corner. A chaos of scat-smeared clothes and splintered wood colored by blood. Ribbons of it over what's left of the window's glass, the headboard. And on the floor, faceup, the forced smiles of the one and only Orchard family portrait. Ash looking back at me as if to say I should have known it would end like this.

Whatever was here was hunting. And when it didn't find what it was looking for it left a show of its power and size and the terrible things it can do.

You can be afraid in the After. You can feel the terror of death even in death.

I'm up and tiptoeing to the door, careful to avoid the upturned nails and wire ends. When I spot my chess club medals I nearly bend to pick them up, wonder why, and instantly answer myself: they are proof of the only game I was ever good at. My specialty was escape. Hiding the king, hoping my opponent slipped up. The same tactics I employed against Ash.

At least in chess it sometimes worked.