The Damned (3 page)

I made it to the Oliver house on Derby Avenue shortly after five and tried the front doorbell though I figured there was little chance of anyone answering. At seventeen, Brendan was even older than the other older boys Ash was moving between, a wide-jawed senior on the basketball team known for his success with girls. He was the sort of aggressive, taunting, self-certain kid who went unquestioned in his actions, a towering collection of physical gifts set to play for Ohio the next year, not so much above the law but, in our world, the law itself.

All of this, along with the absence of his parents' car in the driveway, meant that he probably had Ash to himself somewhere inside. He would be murmuring his commands in one of the curtained rooms. He would ignore the doorbell until he was through.

It made me wonder what Ash wanted me here for. And as I thought about that, in an instant, the first real grief of the day arrived. The realization that my mother was gone forever came over me in a blanket that left me gasping and blind, reaching for the porch railing and blinking out at the street until its trees and awnings returned to focus. And when they did, I glanced back at the Olivers' door to see the hall light behind the pane of decorative glass dim and brighten. A sound, too. The low hum of machinery.

Ash had said something about Brendan's dad having a workshop in the garage behind their house. Even as I started up the driveway toward it I was thinking,
If I know there's a workshop back here, she wanted me to know it
. The conclusion that followed—
If I'm going to look through the window, she wants me to
—didn't stop me from lifting my nose over the splintered window frame to peer inside.

At first, it seemed like they were dancing.

Wrapped close and swaying to a slow song I couldn't hear, the side of Ash's face held against his chest and Brendan folded over her like a question mark. But it wasn't a dance. His shirt was off, for one thing. And their movements were a single-bodied negotiation: he trying to get her to the floor, where his Dondero High hoodie lay as a makeshift bedsheet, and she keeping him up, nuzzling her cheek against his ribs, directing his lips down to hers with a hand.

Without turning her head Ash glanced over to the window. Found me.

She related a couple of facts through her eyes alone. The first was that she'd been waiting for me to get there, had worked to situate herself and Brendan where they were at that moment, and now, finally, she could begin.

The second was that the standing bandsaw behind Ash was on.

It looks so sharp! Like teeth!

I could hear her voice, her very words from moments ago, like the trace of an echo in the air. She would have gasped after speaking them so that he could feel the heat of her breath. Mock-scared, mock-aroused. But the excitement real.

Could you turn it on, Brendan?

I watched him kiss her as she arched to meet him. Her eyes closed. His wide as an owl's bearing down on something small and doomed in the grass. Eyes that watched as Ash took his hand in hers and guided it toward the smooth table of the bandsaw. The blade a steady blur of motion.

It happened fast, though not that fast.

There was time for Brendan to see what was about to take place and stop it before it did. He could have pulled his hand away, jumped
back from her touch, demanded to know what the hell she thought she was doing. Instead, he watched as I did as Ash placed his hand on the table and slid his splayed fingers into the spinning saw's gray teeth.

If he screamed, I don't remember the sound of it. What I remember, before running down the driveway to the street, before I voiced a scream of my own, was Ash opening her eyes. Making sure that I saw.

What was important for me to see wasn't the violence, the seductive ease with which the bandsaw parted two of Brendan Oliver's fingers from the rest of him or the neat jet of blood that left what could have been an attempt at a valentine's heart on the plank wall, but how she'd made him do it to himself. He hadn't fought her, hadn't protested. He'd been as interested in seeing what she had planned for him as I was. And it would only be later, after telling his parents it was an accident and the revocation of his invitation to play for Ohio and the new, hollow resignation that haunted his face whenever I saw him, usually alone, on the streets of Royal Oak over the years afterward, that he realized the beautiful girl in his father's workshop hadn't stolen a part of him but the whole thing.

I
f you ask the Detroit police today where they keep her file, they'll tell you Ashleigh Orchard is a cold case. A girl who bicycled off with some friends to watch a matinee of
Dead Poets Society
at the Main Art Theatre to celebrate her sixteenth birthday, but instead led them down Woodward Avenue toward downtown.

All four of them would have understood the audacity of a bike ride into Detroit. It would take them into the world they normally viewed from behind the windows of their parents' cars, the doors locked. Homes abandoned and burned each year on Devil's Night. The gangs of Hamtramck and Highland Park left to themselves by police. Whole blocks returning to weedy fields, bricks piled here and there like funeral mounds.

Ash's friends wanted to know why. Why was she making them do this?

“I want to show you something,” she said.

Ash didn't slow. She pedaled on shining ballet-class legs, her long, yellow-blond hair waving against her back like a farewell.

It was Lisa Goodale who finally turned them around. Lisa
Goodale, pretty in the kittenish way that never ages well and who was doing ninth-grade math over for the third time in summer school and who taught blow job techniques to other girls (I came downstairs into our basement once to find her holding a banana before her puckered lips), who shouted, “Ash!
Seriously!
” and pulled over to the curb at the corner of Woodward and Webb.

Ash carried on for a moment. It seemed she hadn't heard. But then she, too, stopped. Gave them one of her killer smiles.

“Aren't you
curious
?” she said.

“No,” Lisa called back. It wasn't true.

Ash went on smiling and smiling. And though I wasn't there, hadn't yet been called upon to rescue her, I can see her face as clearly as if I stood on the same corner with those girls. Possibly even clearer, as it's a smile I've seen since. A look that says something like
You couldn't possibly know what I know
. Or
One day, I'll show you all the things I can do.
Or
I always win. You know that, right?

What she said in words was, “Don't tell.”

Then she stood on her pedals, working up to cruising speed before sitting on the saddle once more. The three girls watched her shrink into the shimmering waves of heat over the pavement, her hair now a finger tut-tutting them, reminding them of an oath to secrecy they never made.

It was only after none of them could see her anymore that they started back.

A
FTER THE GIRLS TURNED AROUND
Ash cycled on to (or was carried to, driven to, dragged to) an abandoned house on Alfred Street. That's where she was burned alive. Down in the same cellar where the remains of Meg Clemens, a classmate of ours who had gone missing ten days earlier, were also found. Two girls, same age. Two bodies almost erased forever by fire, except something went wrong the second time around. Whoever did it, whoever knows, left Ash unfinished. Screaming in a pit at the bottom of a house nobody had lived in for longer than she and I had been alive.

There are even fewer witnesses, even less known about what Meg Clemens did or where she went after her mother gave her a ten-dollar bill and watched her walk out the door of her house on Frederick Street, a block and a half from where we lived. Meg wrote for the school paper, publishing “investigative reports” about the nutritional atrocities of the cafeteria. She wore glasses, tortoiseshell frames a little too big for her face that slid, charmingly, down her nose. She regularly declined invitations to go out with boys, so that she bore an unfair reputation for being stuck-up. That was all anybody knew about her. Or all that I knew about her.

Two girls, both raised on the same playgrounds and schoolyards and in the family rooms of Royal Oak homes with the Stars and Stripes hanging over one of every three front doors. It naturally gave rise to fears of a connection, despite the police's reminders of a lack of evidence. In the Holiday Market aisles and standing at the video store's New Releases wall our parents allowed themselves to whisper about the possibility of a monster living among us, plucking their children off the street.

Meg Clemens's disappearance was a mystery that started our minds down paths that led to private horrors, our own individually imagined outcomes, none of them good. But it was, for ten days, still only what the authorities were orchestrated in calling an “isolated incident.” Then Ashleigh Orchard disappeared, too, and they had to stop calling it that. Two girls old enough to be referred to as “young women,” an acknowledgment of their knowing looks in the photos that appeared on the news. “Young women” meaning the enjoyment of independence, of mysterious, troublemaking time spent outside their parents' view.

And sex. “Young women” meant
sex
, where “girls” did not.

A
FTER THE FIRE, WHEN
I was in the hospital, the investigators asked if my sister had any reason to entertain suicide, and I told them there was no chance of that. It was impossible to think of Ash leaving behind all she'd claimed for herself in Royal Oak, the school
she half ran and the “best friends” she'd anoint and abruptly exile for no apparent reason and the older boys who literally threw themselves off rooftops into backyard pools and streetside snowbanks to win a flicker of her attention. She would never abandon me, the brother she wished dead most of the time but also needed in a way neither of us could begin to describe.

I know because I went into the house to save her.

It was a mansion once. When that part of town was more than ruins, more than brick and glass returning to meadow. A stately home for some doctor or city-builder, then deserted, the windows wide and black as dilated pupils. All of them billowing smoke when I drove over the curb in my mother's car and sprinted for the open door.

I ran inside. Because that's where she was, holding on. For me.

Not that I saw her through the choking dark. Not that I heard her voice. I knew she was there because we're twins, and twins know things. They know even when they don't want to, wordless and instant as pain.

I found her at the foot of the cellar stairs. Except the cellar stairs weren't there anymore, so that only her face and raised hands were visible in the swirling black. A girl drowning at the bottom of a well.

“Danny!”

She was still standing. Her hair curling into charred buds.

“Don't leave me here!
DANNY!
”

She wasn't speaking of the fire or the house. It was death. She pleaded with me to not leave her alone in whatever came after this.

And I didn't.

Even knowing what she'd done, knowing what she was, I lay against the floor's buckled wood and threw my hand down to pull her up. But she was too far. I told her to jump—or wanted to, tried to—but the heat seared my throat closed against a scream.

I reached down to my sister, and she reached up. But the only thing we touched was fire.

She didn't want to die. But the flames took her anyway.

Just like they took me, too.

W
hen you're dead, you know that's what you are.

You always hear about the other ones, the souls who need help “crossing over,” the confused loved ones in those paranormal reality TV shows who ghost around at the foot of the bed, needing to be told it's time to go. But in my experience there's no mistaking it with being alive, because where I went after the fire was something
better
than being alive. Heaven, you'd have to call it. A slightly altered replay of the happiest day of my life.

I was thirteen. Sitting next to my father in the Buick Riviera he drove then, floating down Woodward Avenue toward the round, black towers of the Renaissance Center, where he worked. A drive through inner-city Detroit on a sunny day, the pawnshops and cinder-block motels passing by through tinted windows.

It was the day we took Ash to Cranbrook. The day I let myself imagine it was possible for her to be left behind.

What did we talk about? I can't really remember all that much.
We laughed a lot, anyway. Dad telling stories of his teenaged years upstate in Saginaw. His life before us revealed as a series of exciting or ridiculous but ultimately blameless crimes. Throwing rocks at a wasps' nest and suffering the worst stings on his butt after a bunch of them got trapped in his shorts. Falling through ice and having to walk home without pants on because they froze hard as cement. Driving a Beetle down the main hallway of his high school only to be given a congratulatory slap on the shoulder and told not to try
that
again by the cop who met him at the other end.

It was a memory of a day that had actually happened, though it was more vivid than any memory or dream. In fact it felt more real than the first time I lived it, sharpened by my awareness of how special it was to hear the untroubled version of my father's voice. All of it colored by the knowledge that none of it would last long.

Heaven was driving down Woodward with my dad, pretending we were just like other fathers and sons. A family without an Ash in it.

We parked in the lot next to the black towers. Paused to look across the milky tea of the Detroit River.

“There's a border in the middle,” my father told me, just as he had in the living world. “An invisible line.”