The Keeper (16 page)

T
he next few days passed quickly.

Early Friday morning, Georgia and Paul were the first to leave. When they left the hospital, Georgia knew what she was about to do. She knew how this would look. What people would say. She did it anyway. She kissed him on the cheek, took his hand. Told him to get into his car and follow her home.

At her house, she raised her finger to her lips to show him to be quiet. His hands were shaking so she made some coffee, liberally spiking both cups with brandy. They sat next to each other at the kitchen table that was spotted with Chips Ahoy! cookie crumbs.

“More brandy?” she asked in jest.

“Yeah,” he said, “as a matter of fact, I’d love some more brandy.”

He drained half his mug in one gulp and she filled it to the top with more of her father’s cherry brandy. “Swill,” he said after sipping it.

“You’re all charm.”

“Sorry, no indication of my feelings for you,” he said, sipping, not looking at her, his words so dry and bitter that they could not have been sarcastic.

“What are you going to do?”

“Move to Spain. Watch the bullfights. Drink absinthe. Want to come?” She had a blank look on her face. “Hemingway, Georgia.”

“That’s nice.”

He raised his hands in defeat. “I’m going to go home and sleep this off, unless there happens to be a police car waiting at my house, in which case I’m going to jail for fleeing the scene of an accident. Really, it all depends.” He gave her a wry smile. Not a slur. Every word spoken with slow concentration. She wondered how much he would have to drink in order for it to affect his mind. His body, she could safely say, had already been affected.

“I don’t mean to sound like such an asshole,” he told her.

She shrugged. “I used to babysit for Susan. I had a run-in with her parents. There were things going on there.”

He didn’t answer.

“Something feels very wrong about all this. It’s like I’m waiting for the other shoe to drop.”

“Has anything ever been right in this town?”

She shrugged again. “Were you with her long?”

“No. Just for a little while after you.” He said this as if there was a cause-and-effect relationship in there somewhere.

“But you gave her money,” Georgia said.

“For rent sometimes. She didn’t have anywhere to go.” He cradled his head in his hands.

“Do you think she needed to be hospitalized?”

“My fault, too, right?”

“Well, I don’t think it’s as easy as all that. She might have been crazy or mean or, well, I don’t know what, but I never heard about anyone except you treating her decent.”

He pushed his empty cup away. She made a motion toward it. “No, I’m all set, don’t you think?” he asked.

“Yeah.” Her eyes watered and she rubbed them. There usually comes a time when you see someone that you once cared for, and realize that you do not care any longer. When that happens, it is easy to show affection. It is easy to talk. It is easy to give a kiss on the cheek or a happy wave hello. Though that time should have come long ago, she still didn’t feel it. He noticed the water in her eyes, seemed to draw something from it, inspecting her, and then pretended not to notice.

“You’re a beautiful woman, Georgia,” he said.

“No, I’m not.”

He smiled as if this admission only made her more attractive. “How’s Matt?”

“Fine.”

“And how are you doing, Georgia?”

“I’ve been better.”

“Yeah.”

“My father got fired yesterday,” she told him.

“Figures.”

“I thought you’d have more to say.”

He shook his head. “I don’t.”

Before he got up to leave, he leaned over to kiss her on the cheek. She tilted her head a little, and their lips touched. He left without speaking. It was not until several hours after he was gone that she admitted to herself that she still loved him.

Saturday morning Mary confirmed funeral arrangements. It would be a quick ceremony. Susan was not insured. She called the bank and the funeral parlor. The wake was scheduled for Sunday, the burial Monday. Then she called the
Corpus Christi Sentinel,
let them know the times. They would print a notice in the weekend edition. When the reporter asked for more details she’d answered, “Ask Paul Martin. He knows her better than I ever did.”

The autopsy results showed no skin underneath Susan’s fingernails, no bruises on her face from a violent struggle, no cancer in her womb that would have killed her anyway. Accidental death, the coroner had declared it. Misadventure.

Mary had been given the next seven days off from work. She did not know what she would do with herself during that week because she could hear Susan around every corner on this bleak and rainy day, within the walls of her memory.

She was tired, but could not bring herself to climb the stairs to her bedroom. Instead she poured herself a glass of wine and sat on the couch. Too early to answer phones, listen to people say how sorry they were.

But the phone did ring. She did not want to answer it. The machine would click on. The phone kept ringing. She picked it up. Said hello. No one answered. The connection was bad, all static. She did not know why she said this, could not explain to anyone, except that once, this had happened before. Once, someone had called, then hung up, and only later had she guessed who it had been. “Susan?” she asked. There was a buzzing on the line. “Susan, come home,” she said because it was something she always should have said. The person on the other end hung up.

Only the Fullbright and Willow families paid their respects at Susan’s wake Sunday evening. The rain was falling hard, and after picking up supplies to collect the rain that seeped through their ceilings, most people stayed indoors. Because of the autopsy and the position of the injury, the casket was closed. Nevertheless, Susan’s body was fitted into a high-necked blue dress that Mary had supplied. The night was a quiet one, interrupted only by the sound of the rain.

The funeral the following Monday was even less attended. Danny Willow was called out to a traffic accident at the old train tracks on Mayflower Street, so only the Fullbrights made the trek to the top of the hill. The shallow grave was only four feet deep. The mattock the gravediggers used to loosen the earth had cracked against a six-inch-thick sheet of ice in the middle of the job. Almost all the snow had melted on the hill. The sewers in the valley were clogged, and the water-logged old railroad tracks mired several small cars. The sound of hydroplaning could be heard all over town. At the cemetery, Liz Marley listened to Father Allesando talk about ashes and dust and the great hereafter, while she held Bobby’s hand.

When Liz and her mother got home Monday night from burying Susan, they sat at the kitchen table. Two people lived in the house, when once there had been four. There were worlds of things they could have said to each other. Worlds of regrets, and desires, and emotions like love that had somehow persevered. In the corner of Liz’s eye was a clump of yellow sleep, and Mary reached over and wiped it away. Liz did not flinch or raise her hand defensively, as Mary might have expected. Instead she sat perfectly still. Stiff.

On Tuesday evening, Susan Marley opened her eyes.

She was trapped inside something very dark and underground like the basement she had lived in long ago. It was so small that she could hardly move her arms. She heard a rapid patter, like knocking, and when she forced her way through the lid above her, a deluge of wet, grainy matter surrounded her. Mud. It filled up the box and she swam, not needing to hold her breath, not breathing, until she reached the top.

When she was out, she stood atop Iroquois Hill, among gravestones, one of them her own. Her feet sank down into wet dirt. She felt something on her neck, her thighs, and the insides of her elbows. It was like blood only not blood. Darker, no pulse. She touched her breasts with her fingers, and they were as cold as the rain.

She could see the town down there, all of it. There were lights glowing in the valley below and she could see each person in each house or apartment or trailer. Some made love, some slept. Some drank black coffee before leaving for night shifts at the hospital or the toll plaza on I–95 or else they stayed awake because they were afraid of what they might find waiting for them in their dreams.

She descended from the hill and traveled home. If it had been a clear night, someone might have seen her muddy silhouette striding into town. Jerome Donally, who was pilfering Oh Henry! bars at the Puff-N-Stop, or Amity Jorgenson, who was sitting outside her sister’s trailer and wondering if this relentless rain would ever end, or anyone else that night might have seen her slumped shoulders and the way her eyes shone, like a cat’s in the dark. But they only felt her in their hearts or their bowels or their stomachs. They only knew she was coming.

It happened on the sixth night of rain. Georgia was giving Chuck Brann a trim. He liked it to be cut dry so that there wasn’t any extra cost and he always asked for Georgia, because she smelled like sweet musk. Georgia felt it like a knife running inside her, coming up from the bottom and twisting between her legs. She dropped the razor to the floor, where it buzzed in little circles on the tile like a cockroach.

Paul was shaving with a dry razor and hand mirror in the quiet of his study. He felt her presence inside him. He almost called out her name. He knew it was she, no question. He did not look into the mirror in front of him, for fear of seeing her face. So he ran out into the rain, leaving her behind.

Bobby didn’t know. But he felt uneasy. He went into his yard and tried to let the rain wash this feeling from him, but it didn’t. Back in the house he found Margaret sitting in the dark kitchen. “Hey, dollface,” he whispered. “I think I’m scared of the rain,” she told him. The skin by her lips was very chapped and her eyes were sunken deep. He gave her the kind of warm, comforting hug that only a big brother can give.

Mary was sipping her wine, eyes closed. She could hear voices in the house, memories. There were good ones, but she did not remember those. She knocked the glass over, and thick, sugary wine spilled onto the table. It made her cry. Stupid to make her cry. Just sponge it up. She let it drip onto the floor, the sound in rhythm with the fall of the rain. And when it happened, she felt nothing. She was so inside her own cold grief that it was as if she had understood all along how things would be.

Liz was waiting to cry. She was looking through the old photo album, trying to make herself feel. Susan in her Sunday dress, Susan with the big black bruises, Susan with the meanness swallowed down and digested so it was all over her body like embalming fluid. And when it happened, Liz felt it worse than anyone else. It crept inside her slowly like a bitter cold, working its way though her extremities and to her center. A voice inside her said: “You,” and then it was gone. And she told herself it had never happened. That the voice was a form of grief. That it was not saying that it should have been Liz, it should always have been Liz.

Other people felt shivers or just a sadness so fleeting that they did not remember it in the morning. They slept fitfully that night, saying nothing.

S
he walked down Iroquois Hill and into the valley. In the hallway of her old apartment, bloody footprints formed the pattern of a widening spiral. Rossoff’s door was shut tight, and a blue eye peeped through the keyhole at her. A man’s breath churned, and she could smell his fear. She slowly dragged her hand down the side of the door so that she could feel his warmth through the wood, the way his heart beat faster. His nose began to bleed, and he backed away. She started up the stairs.

The people in this town were like strange and varied songs, and she knew each tune by heart. When they were lost or sad, they thought of her. Though they did not know it, in their hours of desperation, it was her name they called. In her apartment, her bare feet sank into the green shag carpet. Her blue dress brushed against the tops of her bruised shins. In a line from her neck down to the V between her legs were black plastic stitches, and she walked slowly to keep from tearing her lifeless skin.

She stepped through the cigarette ashes that speckled the air, and looked at the paper mill out her window. It was silent for now, but would not remain that way. Then she turned. In the mirrors, she did not see her own reflection. Instead she saw the familiar and foreign faces of this town. Dark things. Lost things. Buried things. Ugly things. They watched her, trapped inside the glass. They banged hard, clamoring to be let out. She felt them banging from inside the mirrors; she felt them banging from inside her own body.

The things in the mirrors encroached. Their motley songs howled all at once, vying to be heard, and the sound was a discordant buzzing. It was the sound of madness, but she was accustomed to that.

They pushed at each other: a furry black spider with pale blue eyes; a woman holding the half-smoked Parliament that had been extinguished on her teenage son’s soft flesh; a dapper William Prentice wearing a three-piece suit. He smiled a crocodile smile, while his hands clasped behind his back dripped blood. There were thousands of them. She lifted her hands and smashed the first mirror. Slivers of glass shattered in a circle around her fists. Her fingers bled black blood. She smashed the next mirror. And the next. And the next. And the next. And the last.

Out from the broken mirrors came a procession of things, all half formed. River creatures whose livers were riddled with holes. They moved in weaving circles. Men with burnt skin and black lungs who’d once worked at the mill. An infant wrapped in a plastic Hefty bag. It was too young to breathe and yet, somehow, it squalled. A yipping dog named Benji that had been mowed down by Douglas Boucher’s snowplow a week before. A six-year-old girl whose pigtails were tied with yarn. “Mother, may I?” the little girl asked. Ted Marley five years dead. He held a spade in his hand, and remembered the stars in the sky. An army of them crawled out of the apartment and down the steps. As the dawn broke early Wednesday morning, they slithered quietly, unseen, to the places where they belonged.