The Damned (33 page)

I find Ash's face and see how this was the vision she had when she died the moment she was born. It terrifies her. But she resists it even now. Does her best to appear defiant, even calm.

Don't leave . . .

She does it for me.

My sister, offering comfort. Shushing away a nightmare from her
bed across from mine when we were kids even when my nightmare was of her. Telling me she will always be here, there is nothing to be scared of other than being without her, that no matter what, in life or death or the places other than these I have yet to see but she knows awaits us, she will never let me go.

M
y eyes open and I'm certain of two things.

I'm alive.

And someone else's heart is inside me.

As soon as I can make my mouth work right I ask one of the nurses the same thing over and over as she sponges my crotch, changes the sheets from under me. A nurse with strong, expert arms covered with dark hair and moles that someone should probably take a look at.

“Whose heart?”

“You'll have to speak up a bit, sunshine. These ears aren't what they were.”

“Whose
heart
did I get?”

“Oh, we're not supposed to talk about—”

“I won't tell.”

She neatly folds the end of the sheet over my chest, smooths it flat. It gives her the time to decide to break the rules.

“Car accident,” she says. “Brain injury we couldn't do anything
about, but the rest of her barely even scratched. What we call an ideal donor.”

“Her?”

“It was a girl,” she says, the smile dropping, the big teeth smothered by big, downy lips. “A sixteen-year-old girl.”

W
ILLA HAS TAKEN TO RELIGION
. It was all the praying she did in the hospital chapel, asking for her son and husband to be returned to her. The promises she made if they were.

“Never was much of a churchy girl,” she says. “But I guess I've got to be
now,
right? A deal's a deal.”

I tell her we can go every Sunday, every day of the week if she wants. Anything she wants to do, we'll do.

“I want to go home and be normal for a while,” she says when I ask.

“That's it?”

“Have you been following current events around here, Danny? That's a
lot.
”

She wheels Eddie in to see me on the second or third day after I came back. I ask her to give us a moment alone together and she raises her eyebrows but slips out without any questions.

“We can talk about it all you want, or we never have to talk about it again,” I say. “But I need you to know that you were there with me on the other side. You saved me. Do you remember any of that?”

Eddie glances over his shoulder, confirms we're alone in the room. “I asked, but the doctors said you can't dream in a coma.”

“This wasn't a dream.”

“I know
that.
I'm just saying nobody else will believe us.”

“Nobody else matters.”

He doesn't remember everything, but he remembers enough.

Searching for me through an empty city, knowing I was alone and needed help, following my voice. And when he found me there was something after me, something he knew if he looked at he wouldn't be able to move or think, so he looked at me instead. Let the thing come after him so I could get away.

“I'm so sorry I let her do that to you, Eddie. It was wrong for me to get you involved at all. I should have stayed alone.”

“You didn't do anything wrong. She did. And nobody should be alone. Besides, you took care of her, right?”

“Yeah, I did.”

“Was it bad? For her, I mean. Did it hurt?”

“It was bad for her. And it hurt something awful.”

“Good,” Eddie says, not needing to hear anything more than this. “Then we're even.”

T
HE CARDIAC SURGEON
I
LIKE
is the one who led the team that did the transplant procedure on me. Not that I was aware of it as it happened, but knowing it was him removing my dud of a ticker and ladling a stranger's heart into the space it left behind is an immense reassurance, as if the intimacy of these elements—my heart, her heart, our two fist-sized slaves to life—is most appropriately handled by friends.

“Well, well. Seems you've got another book to write, Mr. Orchard,” he says the first time I'm conscious when he comes by my bed.

“Don't think so. This time, the secret stays with me.”

“That good, was it? Don't want the wife knowing about all the heavenly virgins offering themselves to you up there?”

“Something like that.”

He checks my pulse, blood pressure, reads the chart. Shakes his head.

“You're in unbelievable shape, aside from looking a little hungover,” he says.

“You look a little hungover yourself.”

“That's because I
am.
”

I thank him. It takes a while. Trying to tell him all the ways what he's done for me will change not just my life but others, as many as I can help in as many ways as I can. How it may not mean anything to him but I promise I won't squander the extra time I've been given. I ask what his first name is—Steven—and assure him that if Willa and
I have a child together, if we give Eddie a dog, if I ever buy a boat, we're naming it after him. He grins at all this, having seen versions of it before. The magical outcomes that come along among the more usual disappointments, the inability to make any difference, the fadings away.

“I'm just the mechanic around here,” he says. “You found a way back, Danny, not me.”

“What can I say? I like it here.”

“You should. Here is pretty damned good, most of the time,” he says, and steps closer, lowers his voice to a more serious register. “So let me ask you this. If you're so attached to this mortal coil, why'd you take a sprint into the Public Garden? Some guy with a knife after you? Trying to make last call at the Four Seasons?”

I don't want to lie to this man. And something tells me that, if I told him the truth, he would get it, or at least see that I believed it even if he didn't. But how far do you go in telling a story like mine? Too little, and it won't make sense. Too much, and he might sign me up for a psych ward evaluation.

“I had something to take care of over there,” I say in the end.

“I take it you mean over
there
there, and not over there on Boylston Street.”

“If it was Boylston Street, I would've taken a cab.”

He seems halfway satisfied by this. He doesn't ask anything more about it in any case. Just shakes his head again in that agreeably baffled way of his and steps away from the side of the bed, signaling the serious moment has passed.

When I ask him when he thinks I might be getting out of here, he makes a face of mock gravity.

“Well, we have at least one other test to run,” he says. “Rather unpleasant, I'm afraid.”

“Okay. What is it?”

“Rectal exam.”

“Why?”

“To see if we can find the horseshoe you've got stuck up there.”

E
VENTUALLY, ONCE THEY GET PERMISSION
from her parents, a hospital administrator tells me the name of the girl who was in the car accident, the one whose heart now beats inside me.

Nadine.

For the rest of my time in recovery I write a letter addressed to Nadine's mother and father and family “and All Who Loved Her.” History's most inadequate thank-you note. But I include a postscript that I hope might provide real comfort. The promise that wherever Nadine is now, it's a good place. The best day of her life forever.

When it's finished I fold the pages and, along with a copy of
The After,
lay them in the bottom of a FedEx box. Before I seal the flaps and give it to Willa to send to the address they gave me, I take the Omega off my wrist and slip it in.

I
LIED TO THE CARDIAC
doctor when I told him I had no plans to write another book.

The fact is, after only two months at home, I'm deep into something new. An account of the After from the perspective of someone who's been to the place we worry might exist, that might be where we end up if it does. The place Violet Grieg spoke of and that Lyle Kirk said made her an Underworlder. Which means I'm an Underworlder now, too.

It's about what happened to my mother and father, about a burning house, about Ash. It's about the fates we're born with and the ones we make for ourselves. A true story that tells of solitude and hauntings and finding unexpected ways to be happy even when happiness seems to lie on the other side of an uncrossable river.

I'm calling it
The Damned.

The tricky part is going to be the ending.

There are some questions I don't know the answer to, as there
always are about the future. Willa and Eddie and the lives I wish them to have. How long Nadine's heart will carry on with its duties in its new home. Whether Ash will ever come back or not.

But you know what I know and you hold as close to the present as you can. Keep your eye on what's certain.

Ash went through the ice and I didn't.

She's somewhere lower than Detroit, a place where she's fixed in water hard as stone. A place so distant from the world of light it would be impossible to rise up and find me in it, though she'll try.

She's something else now, something I hope to never see, but she'll always be my sister.

Which means she'll never stop trying.

First, thanks to my editor, Sarah Knight, who has talked me off ledges and pushed me to the edge of some of those same ledges, always brilliantly and productively. My gratitude also to all at Simon & Schuster, Simon & Schuster Canada, and Orion who've had their hands on this book: Carolyn Reidy, Jonathan Karp, Marysue Rucci, Richard Rhorer, Kevin Hanson, Alison Clarke, David Millar, Kate Gales, Molly Lindley, Elina Vaysbeyn, Amy Jacobson, Amy Cormier, Michelle Blackwell, Jonathan Evans, Joshua Cohen, Lewelin Polanco, Jason Heuer, Jon Wood, Kate Mills, Jemima Forrester, Gaby Young, and Graeme Williams. Additional thanks to Anne McDermid, Stephanie Cabot, Peter Robinson, Jackie Levine, Howard Sanders, Sally Riley, Monica Pacheco, Martha Magor, Chris Bucci, Jason Richman, and Danny Hertz.

In researching
The Damned
, I read many books about Detroit, but would like to acknowledge in particular the excellent
Made in Detroit
by Paul Clemens,
Detroit: A Biography
by Scott Martelle, and
Detroit: An American Autopsy
, by Charlie LeDuff.

Finally, thanks to my wife, Heidi. There's no one I love being caught in a brainstorm with more than you.

ALSO BY ANDREW PYPER

The Demonologist

The Guardians

The Killing Circle

The Wildfire Season

The Trade Mission

Lost Girls

Kiss Me
(Stories)