The Damned (6 page)

Jealousy is the one emotion my sister has never had to fake.

So I closed the door on the world, on the fantasy of companionship, of family. Heeded her warnings. It seemed to have worked.

Over the past year or so, Ash's visits became less frequent. I even tried to convince myself that, maybe, she was nothing more than a ghost among ghosts. Distracting, yes, even a little frightening. But essentially just another thing one could learn to manage. Ghosts are the dead that can make themselves visible, but once you see there's nothing they can
do
they lose their power.

But I was wrong about that.

Ghosts
can
do things. They can speak, they can touch, they can hold their face over yours so they're the first thing you see when you wake.

And if they find a bridge that can carry enough of them from their side to ours, they can kill.

S
OMETHING ABOUT BEING TRULY ALONE
in the world gave me the idea of seeing if I could get
The After
published.

With my father gone there wasn't anyone, not a living soul, who I might want to ask if it was a good idea, or confide in, or protect. It wasn't money I needed (Dad left the house and his retirement savings to me, and given that I existed like a junk food monk, I could have lived on at the corner of Farnum and Fairgrove until the Orchard heart finally claimed me, too). It certainly wasn't a desire for attention. I think it was because dying was all I had, the only information I could offer the world. The only way I might provide comfort to another, even if it could be for no one other than a stranger.

After some calls and letters, there were a number of New York agents willing to submit the manuscript. I went with the one with the lowest expectations.

At the time, as one editor who rejected the book put it, “Heaven's not really big right now.” It was true that there weren't the number of afterlife memoirs on the shelves then that there are now. But a couple publishers liked the “hook” of my mother's Omega, and the
one I decided on eventually persuaded me to add
Evidence of Heaven
as a subtitle.

I ended up doing it for a living. The talks, the fly-in-fly-out book signings. Enough to make the payments on my narrow, two-story town house outside Porter Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where I more or less randomly moved after the book came out. Other than this, through the rest of my twenties and thirties I lived in self-imposed solitude. No wife, no kids. A handful of publishing-related acquaintances but no friends.

That was before I met Willa and Eddie. Before something happened to me far stranger than dying and coming back again.

I fell in love.

L
ove at first sight.

This was the exhausted phrase I used when asked how Willa and I got together. It's a question put to us more than most, given my shambling height next to her squat self, her tomboyish freckles and raunchy laugh.

“How did you two meet?” the world reasonably asked.

“It was love at first sight,” I said. “My sight, anyway. Not sure she even saw me at first.”

“You? I saw
you,
” Willa would jump in. “How could I
not
see you?”

It's a little give-and-go we did that prevented us from having to say we met at an Afterlifers meeting at the Sheraton in Syracuse, New York, where I was the keynote speaker. Following my talk, I took a chair behind a table bearing stacked copies of
The After
and readied my pen for the signing. Willa last in line.

“Who can I dedicate it to?” I asked, too shy to meet her eyes longer than my standard nod and half smile.

“Willa. Me, who's wondering if you have time for a coffee when you're done.”

“I try not to drink coffee after noon.”

“I mean a drink. ‘Coffee' always means a drink.”

“It does? I don't get invited for coffees—or drinks—much, I guess.”

“Neither do I.”

“Then how do you know?”

“I watch TV. How does anybody know anything?”

The thing I was thinking on the short walk down the corridor from the meeting room to the bar was how, if this woman wanted something more from me—as sometimes women at my events seem they might—I couldn't let it go any further than this. It would be dangerous. Even as we sat at a table in the corner and ordered scotches I kept an eye out for Ash to show herself in the mirror behind the bar, or turn on a stool to glare my way.

“You like single malts?” I managed to ask.

“I like having a babysitter until midnight,” she said.

There was some banter about what it was like to have my job, talking about heaven to roomfuls of what she called “nervous ninnies looking for a sneak peek of the Great Beyond.” I told her that whatever comes next, cosmologically speaking, is up to you. And in any case, I did less and less public speaking these days, in part because everyone who might be interested in hearing my story had already heard it.

“I've already heard it—or read it, anyway—a few times. And I'm here,” she said.

“Why's that?”

“Because I was curious about what you were like outside of that photo on the back of the book that makes you look like somebody made you smile at the end of a switchblade. And I wanted to see if you were someone I could trust. Who I might be able to tell—”

“—That you know what it's like to be dead, too.”

“Okay,” she said. “
Okay
. Guess I was right.”

W
ILLA TOLD ME THE STORY
of her After the first night we spent together, a couple days following our drinks at the Sheraton. I'd driven up to her place, a yellow brick bungalow in an upstate town called Marcellus, the morning of the day she invited me, saying she'd arranged for her son Eddie to stay the weekend at her sister's and wouldn't it be a shame to put a good evening to waste? We'd eaten Chinese takeout and were finishing our glasses of wine when Willa got up onto her knees from where she'd been sitting on the floor and, her eyes steady on mine, pulled off her sweatshirt. For a time she knelt there, allowing me to clear my head of whatever I'd been talking about the moment before. Then she wriggled out of her jeans as well.

“Your turn,” she said.

The next morning, when I asked why she'd chosen me over all the other second-time-rounders out there, the unafflicted Marcellus men who could be hers, she laughed.

“Who says it's a choice? Decisions like this aren't made, Danny. You're just in one place one moment, and the next you're in a new place. Hopefully it feels right.”

“So does this feel right?” I asked.

She stroked her hand down the long journey from my lips to arrive between my legs.

“Does
this
?” she said.

L
ATER, SITTING UP IN BED,
Willa told me about the day she died.

“They came in the middle of the night,” was how she started, without introduction, as though in reply to something I'd asked, which in a way I had, the question of how she came to be an Afterlifer hanging between us since the book table at the Syracuse Sheraton.

“I didn't hear them break the window in the basement, which is weird, because I hear
everything,
y'know? Always been a light sleeper. Now? It's way worse. Now I barely sleep at all.”

Willa's husband was a policeman, a sergeant. Judging from the one photograph of him in the front hall, the broad face that earned its moustache, the square shoulders and well-carried ring of weight around his middle, he was born to be a cop. Not one of the power-hungry types but the kind who want to help, to rescue dogs who've fallen through pond ice or deliver drunk teenagers home to their parents. She called him “a good man” and I felt I knew exactly what she meant.

They met in college in Rochester, both raised in small, outlying towns, both wanting to return to such a place. Once they married and Greg made it onto the Marcellus force, Willa found a job teaching history at the high school. After Eddie was born she planned to return to work when he was old enough for day care, but “old enough” was a more slippery matter than she expected, and Greg wasn't pushing her to go back, and the truth was she didn't have a burning desire to be back in the classroom, and so she never did. She was a wife and a mom, and untroubled in these roles. “I wasn't itchy about it the way some other women my age are,” she said, shaking her head as though mildly surprised. “I was busy, I was raising a child, I was happy. Just couldn't see the shame in any of it.”

Willa stopped there. It was a pause I'd seen dozens of times from others who'd told me their story. Everything up to this moment had been life, good or bad. People and events and decisions, all summoning their own regret, their own pride. And then the story gives way to something unrelated to all that's come before. Not the end of life, but the beginning of death.

“They came in the middle of the night,” she said again.

Two men. “Known to authorities,” as the local paper put it afterward. Meth dealers, cookers. Their product, an especially potent compound, was called Superman by its users because of the strength it bestowed, the belief you could fly, the certainty that you were unkillable.

They'd chosen Willa's house because they knew that's where Greg lived. Greg, the cop who'd busted them three years earlier and provided the most damning evidence at their trial and met their eyes
when they were led from the courtroom after the verdict was read. Fourteen months. Once they were out they started up the business again, not knowing what else to do or where else they might do it. And Superman soon gave them an idea. They'd kill the cop who put them away and make it look like a break-and-enter gone wrong. And nothing
would
go wrong, nothing
would
touch them, because the meth made them feel so alive.

“Even though they were already dead, know what I mean?” Willa said.

They came in through the basement window and up through the dark house. The house we'd made love in the night before. As Willa described it, I could almost feel the weight of their steps on the stairs. The excited whistle of their breaths. Sounds she heard first.

“I don't know why I didn't wake Greg,” she said. “He had to get up early and I think I wanted to let him sleep. Isn't that crazy? There's strangers in the house, in the hallway outside our room—our
son's room
—and the most important thing is not disturbing the cop lying next to me. What was I
thinking
? I wasn't thinking. I was sleepwalking.”

They kept a handgun—a small Browning semiautomatic—in a combination lockbox on an upper shelf in the closet. Greg had taken her to the range a couple times, taught her how to hold it, release the safety, how to aim and fire. They called it the Just In Case. She never thought that she'd ever actually pull the firearm box down on tiptoes, enter the numbers that came effortlessly to mind, pull it out. Never thought she'd move as quickly as she did, thinking of Eddie—Eddie asleep, strangers in Eddie's room, Eddie being carried away—and open her bedroom door, gun raised, bright with panic and fear.

Three figures in the hallway. The only illumination the nightlight in Eddie's room, a yellowy cloud like smoke.

Two men. One boy. Hers.

One of the men had his arm casually draped across Eddie's back like they were friends, like he was a Big Brother congratulating him on throwing a strike. The other man stood closer to Willa. The leader. Both men had guns, too. One held to Eddie's head, the other rising as Willa watched until it was pointed at her.

There might have been words then, a negotiation of some kind. It's what the two men, at once wild-eyed and dopey, seemed to expect.

Instead, Willa adjusted her aim and, the barrel still moving, fired.

Big Brother's head jolted back and hung there for what seemed like a while before the spray of blood and “skull junk” appeared against the wallpaper. His face registered no pain, only incredulity. The meth afforded him a moment of false life and he tried to pull the trigger. He was standing, aim dead on her face. But he was missing the part of his brain that makes fingers move and the gun twitched in his hand like a fish.

Eddie pulled away from the man. Without the boy to hold him up, he first knelt, then slumped onto his back, emptying the contents of his head over the floorboards.

Only then did Willa hear Greg rising from the bed behind her. A sound that made things move very fast.

Willa swung around to aim her gun at the other man but he leapt to one side of the hallway, then the other, the awkward jumps and landings of hopscotch. As he went, he fired. She thought he'd missed her. But when she heard a series of half hiccups, half coughs behind her she looked to see he'd hit Greg. Her husband's hands clutched around his throat.

When she turned back to the man in the hall he smiled at her. Not jumping anymore.

Willa did a couple things at the same time.

She tried to copy what the still standing man had done and leapt away from the shot she could see him squeezing off.

She said something to Eddie, an attempt at a shout that didn't come out but that he read on her lips all the same.

Go!

W
HAT SHE REMEMBERED NEXT WAS
a day like any other of the preceding few years. In fact, it was a day precisely the same as one she had already lived.

Willa toweling the frying pan dry in the kitchen after making
French toast for Greg and Eddie. Greg had just left a moment ago—the smell of his shaving cream going up the stovetop vent along with the bacon—and Eddie playing with his Batmobile on the living room carpet. It was the beginning of a day. The first of the hours that march toward dinner, the reward of a glass of wine and the three of them at the table together again. Nothing special about it, no party or acceptance of an award or packing to go on vacation. A day with her son before he was schoolgoing age, just the two of them, the sun making promises through every window.