The Damned (7 page)

This was Willa's After.

When Eddie asked if he could turn on the TV she suggested going for a walk instead.

“Where?” he asked.

“I don't know. Maybe we just follow our noses.”

Eddie stood. Jutted his chin up so that his nose pointed to the front door and he marched toward it, cross-eyed. “Like this?”

“Exactly.
Exactly
like that.”

Eddie was four, turning five in a couple months. What Willa thought of as the Age of Edibility. Her love so ravenous she wanted to chew on her son's smooth legs, blow farts on his belly until it was blazing, kiss his face off. He was delicious. And she was hungry for him all the time, the same as he was for her. She thought of these days together, mother and son with hours laid out before them, as a perfect circle. Each was the unspoken answer to the other's wants.

Though she sometimes felt guilty for not putting Eddie into more programs as some of the town's skinnier, import SUV–driving mothers did—Willa could spend whole evenings hemming and hawing over her stack of science camp and beginner's piano and Go-Go Yoga! and Tennis for Toddlers pamphlets—the truth is she didn't want to yield any of this time with her son.

Not that they did anything special together. Willa was just another mom pushing her kid around town in a stroller, strapping him into the car's booster seat in the Nojaim Bros. grocery parking lot, giving him shriek-inducing “underdogs” on a swing.

And this day, her After, about the same. The happiest day of her life.

After breakfast they went to the Marcellus Town Park, where the Fall Fair had been set up: some agricultural display tables, a small midway of games and kiddie rides. Eddie chose a dragon to sit on for the carousel, Willa next to him on a winged unicorn.

“They don't make these things with horses anymore?” Willa asked Eddie, but he wasn't listening, making fire-breathing sounds so effectively his mother had to keep wiping the spit off his chin.

She'd brought lunch along but, drunk on early October sunshine, they had hot dogs instead. They both agreed they were the best they'd ever tasted, and it was true for Willa as well as Eddie. Something about the white bun, sweet as a donut, the single lines of glowing mustard she'd drawn. Or maybe it was the pleasure of feeling Eddie lean against her where they sat on a small rise behind the midway, his hand linking with hers, the sense she had of the two of them being on a “date,” a romance so purely distilled that only innocence remained.

He napped in his stroller on the walk home. She took a roundabout way, admiring the well-kept homes of her town, the mature trees and quiet streets, and felt almost overwhelmed by luckiness. As she pulled Eddie up, still asleep, and carried him into the house, she wished only for things to stay like this, stay the same.

She lingered in his room standing over Eddie's bed. The weight of his body the same as her heart inside her. She didn't want to let him go yet, she didn't want to part. An impossible thought occurred to her. If she remained there, remained still, might time forget they were here and pass them by? Could she hide in the quiet of her home at midday and hold her son in her arms forever?

“I
N A WAY, THE ANSWER
was yes,” Willa said, using the round of my shoulder to wipe the tears from her face. “Because that's where I left part of myself. That's when the doctors brought me back. And
you know what? Even though I was alive—lucky as hell to
be
alive—I couldn't have been more pissed off.”

They saved Willa. Went in to stem the bleeding in the places where the bullet had gone straight through her middle, racing to replace the blood that she'd spilled over the second-floor hallway, the ambulance, the surgery table. Near the end of the procedure she went into cardiac arrest. By the time they clamped the last artery and got the paddles on she'd been dead for almost three minutes.

When they brought her back, the first thing she remembered was the taste of hot dog in her mouth.

She asked about Eddie. The nurse watching her started to leave to get the supervising doctor but Willa wouldn't let her go. So the nurse—a mother, too, a wife—told her. Eddie was fine. Untouched. But Greg was gone. The man who Willa hadn't shot—the one who'd put a bullet through her gut and her husband's throat—had turned to Eddie after both his parents had fallen, waved his gun at the boy, steadied his aim between his eyes. But he didn't shoot. Instead, he shuffled over to Eddie and ruffled the boy's hair, the gesture of a coach comforting a Little Leaguer after striking out, and took his time going down the stairs and leaving the house by the front door. The police caught him within an hour. Blood-soaked, still high, trying to break into a car on Main Street. When told he was under arrest for murder he laughed.

“Even as I heard all that the thing that hurt most wasn't losing Greg, but having to do the grieving,” Willa said, sitting straight up. “I mean, I was dead, right? I was gone, game over, buh-bye. And it was
good
over there. Then I'm here in the shit. The aftermath, whatever they call it. And you have no choice. You've
got
to feel, you've
got
to handle it, you've
got
to
go through the stages
. I honestly don't think I would have even bothered trying if it wasn't for Eddie. You need a reason to live, a good one, I know that now. Otherwise the living can just be too goddamned hard.”

I knew what she meant. I understood just as she hoped I'd understand, why she read
The After
three times, why she came to my talk hoping I'd be someone—maybe the only person she might ever find
in the world—she could connect with. Hell is a place on the other side. But it can also be here. The experience of living without a reason to.

And with this woman, I knew that for all the risk I was about to invite into our worlds, I'd found mine.

W
hen I asked Willa if she and Eddie (who could be named nothing other than Eddie, with his reddish curls and ears that stuck out like tea cup handles) would like to move into my house in Cambridge, we'd been seeing each other for less than a month. It was crazy. But it didn't feel crazy. It felt like the most sane thing I'd ever done.

Still, I didn't really expect Willa to accept. She'd buried her husband in Marcellus a year earlier. That part of upstate had been her home since birth. I figured it was too fast, that it would be too hard for her to tear herself away.

“Let's do it,” she said instead.

“Really? I thought—this is your place—”

“I loved my husband, Danny. But I'm attached to people, not places. And I want you to be one of my people now.”

“What about Eddie?”

“You can ask him yourself if you want, but I know he'll say yes.”

“Why?”

She punched me, hard, in the arm. “He
likes
you. Probably for the same reason I do.”

“Yeah? And what's that?”

She turned thoughtful. For a time, it wasn't clear if she'd answer at all.

“You understand how it can all be taken away,” she said finally. “You've had that happen. But you're still here. Just like we are.”

Just like Ash.

S
OMETIMES THERE IS A SCENT
that precedes her appearances, less borne on the air than held tight against my face, an invisible, smothering cloth. And soaked in this cloth an odor that carries a
feeling
with it, particular as the past. It's the same sugary, teenaged-girl perfume that clouded the rec room parties and school gym dances of our youth, combined with something foul, something gone wrong. A neglected wound spritzed with Love's Baby Soft.

In the last couple weeks since Willa and Eddie entered my life Ash has not only returned, but doubled her power. She feels heavier than before, more particular, a thing of metal or stone.

As she appeared two Sundays ago.

Standing in the kitchen, six feet from where Willa and Eddie sat eating scrambled eggs. I pushed the fridge door closed and she was there. So detailed I could see that the wrinkles around her falsely smiling lips were actually scabs, broken and healed, broken and healed.

I turned to block their view of her, to stand between them if Ash decided today was the day she would once and for all leap from the spectral into the material. And then do whatever she'd worked so hard to come here to do. Something terrible. The sort of thing she'd be curious to see.

That was her most frequent explanation, when the things she did could still be understood as the boundary testings of a smart, inquisitive child.
Curious
. That's the magic word she'd call upon when asked why she locked her best friend from first grade in the basement bathroom with the lights off until she clawed three of her fingernails
into the door, after hearing the girl confess to being terrified of the dark, or why, as an eight-year-old, she picked up our neighbor's toddler from the front lawn where he was playing with his Thomas the Tank Engine and placed him in the middle of the street.

“I was only
curious,
” she'd say, and widen her eyes, as though you merely had to stop and look into them to be convinced of her harmlessness. And most of the time, that
was
all you had to do. Just look into her and see how nothing bad could possibly live in those pretty blue pools.

As I looked into them that Sunday morning two weeks ago. At her.

My long-dead twin sister, parting her too-full lips to speak in a voice only I could hear.

Time's up, Danny.

I
had to get them out of the house. A roll through the car wash, a window-shop along Newbury Street, I didn't care. Any excuse to escape the room where Ash had stood, leaving a vague motion of shivering air before it was stilled again, like clamping a lid over a pot of steaming water.

A picnic. That's what I ended up suggesting. I grabbed Eddie's soccer ball, told Willa we'd get something to eat along the way, and led the two of them out the door.

We took the T a single stop and rose up into Harvard Square, picking up supplies on the walk to Cambridge Common. Just past the Civil War Memorial, beyond the cover of trees, the light had dried the dew from the lawn, and we chose our spot. It was maybe a degree or two cooler than the ideal, but as the three of us laid out our blanket and gazed across the Common, surveying the spires and chimneys of the old college, the clarity of the air was more than sufficient compensation for the chill.

Before I knew it Eddie had pulled the soccer ball out of my duffel
bag and was dribbling it in a circle around us. I watched Willa as she laid out the food and poured juice into plastic cups. I thought about tickling her into submission, launching a kiss attack. But before I could Eddie called to me, sent me out with a pass, and I was running after it.

I tried something more difficult than I had any right to attempt—a kick straight up and then juggling the ball on the tops of my thighs, finishing with a jumping header—and it pretty much worked. It surprised me. Eddie, too.

“Daddy!” he shouted in celebration.

That's what I'm almost sure I heard. Not Danny.
Daddy.

When I looked at him to see if I was right he just looked back, his face betraying no special graduation, no big deal. Maybe it was the mistake of wish fulfillment on my part. Maybe I would always be Danny, hoping for more.

The smell knocked me back a step.

A wave of rank sugar. Perfume that failed to hide the odor of moldering flesh. So thick it surrounded me like a blanket, heavy and wet. Soaked through with the foul sweetness of the dead.

I spun around, trying to find her. But the Common was peopled just as it had been: a dog walker on her phone, Willa sitting on the blanket, biting into a cookie.

And Eddie. Kicking the ball just before his attention snared on something. Something he stared at over my shoulder.

The ball rolled past me. The hush of bent grass as it carried on before coming to rest fifteen feet away.

My head swiveled. The ball there, just to the side of a wide-trunked maple.

I started over to retrieve the ball—to keep the game going, to hold off the smothering presence by pretending it wasn't there—and fought against the weight in my legs, shifting and unwieldy. It took what felt like the better part of a minute, but I got there. Almost got there.

A pair of arms reached out from behind the tree. Grabbed the ball. Pulled it back.

Bare arms. The hairs white, the fingers long, bone-thin. Limbs you might call elegant. Except they were
too
white,
too
long, so that they bordered on the off-putting, the grotesque.

I couldn't see the ball or who held it now, both hidden behind the tree. It required me to take a half dozen steps forward.

 . . . three . . . four . . . five . . .

Counting them off like a child playing hide-and-seek.

Danny! Look!

She was there. Holding the ball.

I would have told her to go, insisted she couldn't be here, but no breath was permitted past my closed throat.

Ash smiled.

I looked back at Eddie. He'd taken a few steps away from the picnic blanket to improve his angle on my position so that he could see Ash behind the maple just as I could. And now he stopped. Knowing exactly what it was standing there. How the pretty girl holding the ball wasn't a girl. Wasn't alive.

I made a move to go to him, but I was stopped by a seizure of pain. A burning that started at the soles of my feet and shot up to my chest, swelling and hard.

It was Ash. Her fingers squeezing the soccer ball so tight it was an oval. Knuckles bulging against her skin.

That was my heart she held. Squeezing the life out of it. The last of its blood.