The Keeper (17 page)

Y
ou’ve gotta do it.

There was a smell coming from the basement. These long days of rain had made everything wet and musty, and Mary Marley listened to drops plink in rapid succession against the metal drainpipe outside her kitchen window. It was around noon on Wednesday, the sixth straight day of rain, and the room was dark. The chair Mary was sitting on was speckled with clumpy white dust, and she mistook it for moist paint chips, some leak she wasn’t aware of, until she remembered the baking.

She had baked a great deal over these last few days. Her manager at Shaws had not charged her for groceries this week. A bereavement gift, like a mourning rate at the airport. Every parent who has a daughter die should get exactly thirty dollars and seventy-six cents worth of flour, imitation vanilla extract, butter, chocolate chips, and Crisco for free. That makes everything better.

This morning, Bobby Fullbright knocked on her back door and asked if he could take Liz to school. She told him that Liz was sleeping; he should go ahead without her. She probably wouldn’t want to face the world for another week or so. He asked if he could visit with her anyway. Against her better judgment (boys should never call on young ladies in their bedrooms unchaperoned), she told him yes, mostly because she did not have the energy to say no. She had not slept well since Susan’s death and her thoughts were increasingly difficult to string together. They were names disjointed from their faces that fluttered like the thin wings of moths in a somnambulist’s dream.

Ten minutes after Bobby arrived, he and Liz were walking arm-in-arm down the stairs together. Mary felt a tinge of envy when they left, although she could not locate which child her envy was focused on.

Soon after they were gone, she noticed the smell. At first it was just a kind of moldiness like the underside of a mushroom, and then it was thicker, like rotting. It came from the basement, and while she knew she should check on it, she saw no need to hurry. Nothing could be done until the rain ended. So she opened some windows and the drapes puffed outward. The wind circled the house in gasps. It reminded her of the way Susan used to play ghost when she was six, hiding inside the drapes, whispering
ooh, ooh,
at Mary, making the baby giggle. And then she thought about the way they used to bake cookies together. How Susan refused to lick the beaters or the bowl, would have none of the batter, only the first cookie that came out of the oven. Neat little thing.

To escape the smell, Mary went to Shaws and bought groceries. As she drove, all she could hear was the swishing of water under her tires and the voices of things that had happened a long time ago. The river underneath the bridge had swelled almost as high as the street. Workmen dressed in green plastic slickers from Corpus Christi had already been recruited to jetty the side of the river with bags of sand, Lord knows why. They’d never be able to keep the river from flooding or mobile homes from sinking into the mud.

On her drive Mary spotted several cars with chains secured to their tires for traction. Packed to the brim, they sped through the valley and across the bridge to the highway. At Shaws she heard that Theo Adams, the manager of the People’s Heritage Bank, along with his wife, Lois, had fled for Waterville without advising anyone of their departure. The bank, along with the Chop Mop Shop and most other stores in town, was closed. Some people, Mary guessed, had gone on vacation or else found jobs in other towns. But still, it was a strange time to leave, and with such haste. Most of the families on her block; the Murdocks, the Kellys, the Gustavsons, and the Brennans, were gone.

Before going home, Mary stopped by the high school and parked her car twenty feet south of the lot. She sometimes did this when she was nervous or tired, an involuntary act. Years ago, when both her girls had been in school, she had gone there with plans to take the children and never come home. But these days, there was no design to her visits, just the shadow of what she had once intended still looming close. She sometimes pretended that she was a young woman again with that same choice ahead of her. She sometimes pretended, while watching that school, that both girls, their fates not yet determined, were inside. She did not imagine taking them away from Bedford. Instead she imagined that moment, sitting in the car, trapped in time, with the choice and its repercussions still ahead of her.

She had watched the building today, thinking about how one daughter, let’s be honest now, her favorite daughter for no good reason except that the sound of her laughter had been the only thing that had made living in that house tolerable, was warm and safe. One daughter, her favorite daughter, in whom she had intentionally bred no love for Bedford nor loyalty to family, would survive. One child was sitting at a desk, and the other was buried in a pine box less than a mile away.

Then Mary went home, unloaded her car, and baked. Now she sat, overlooking the mess she had created in the kitchen. Flour and sugar speckled the floor and her jeans. Cookies, some of them almost raw, were stuck to the counters, spotting grease into paper towels or through cooling racks. Waffles were stacked and Zip-locked in the freezer. On the table was a three-layer chocolate rum cake, Lord knows why, a death-day cake maybe.

The phone rang. It had been ringing all morning. She didn’t answer it. Probably that gossipy nitwit April Willow wanting to bring over a vegan casserole or tofu or some other useless thing. She let it ring. It felt good to let it ring.

Mary poured herself a glass of Gallo Zinfandel. The clock read two-thirty. The smells of baking did not obliterate the other smell, as she had intended. It was rotten like spoiled eggs and she lifted a dish towel over her nose to filter the stench. She did not want to go down there now, see that old stuff, the clothes, how Susan had lived during those last few years; amid the sound of the boiler, able to hear the footsteps of everyone else in the house.

You’ve gotta do it, there’s nobody else. You can’t ask any of your buddies from Corpus Christi. They’d get their pretty Ferragamo pumps all wet. You’ve gotta do it.
She had been thinking this all morning.

She took another swig of Zinfandel, and headed for the basement.

As she climbed down, the smell grew stronger. It reminded her of meat that has gone rancid in a broken freezer. When she got to the bottom of the basement steps, she found herself breathing through the collar of her turtleneck. She’d been down here only a few days ago, so how could anything smell this bad this fast?

Leaks in the foundation had left about an inch of water across the brown-tiled floor. Along the ceiling was a mass of pipes coated in so many layers of plaster insulation that it bunched in places like elaborate papier-mâché. As she walked into Susan’s bedroom, the stench overwhelmed her and her eyes teared up. Could mold make this smell? A sick animal? She moaned aloud: a skunk. It had to be a skunk that got scared and sprayed the whole damn place before it died.

When she looked around Susan’s old room, what she saw made her stand very still. The room was bright, lit by a black and blue striped ceramic lamp on the old dresser. The bed was made, eyelet sheets folded under the quilt she had packed away in the crawl space five years before. She closed her eyes. Opened them again. But the quilt, the lamp, Susan’s old sweaters folded on top of the bed, did not go away.

Liz. It had to be Liz, using this place for herself and Bobby. But no, Mary had been here Friday, and there had been only the dusty bed frame, the old mattress. “Who’s here?” she called. “My husband’s upstairs and I called the police.”

No answer. She considered doing just that. But whoever had been down here seemed to be gone. She’d call, and Danny Willow would think she was some kind of jittery wreck having hallucinations after her daughter’s death. Or worse, he’d come inside the house and see the kitchen, the baking. No, she couldn’t call anyone. And maybe this was the way she had left things, maybe she really was imagining.

“My husband’s got a gun,” she called.

Just then, the closet door opened and a monster stepped out of it. A lifeless thing, gaunt and pale. A thing so terrible that Mary’s heart stopped and she cursed God. It wore the dress Mary had given it, high collared and refined. But the buttons had all been torn, so that Mary could see black stitching knots along its throat and down its chest. Its skin was sewn together in a sloppy but functional manner, the way you might thread stuffed veal before placing it in the oven.

Mary leaned against a wall, but there wasn’t a wall to lean against. She stumbled backward and fell into the dirty water. It surrounded her thighs and splashed against her face. The monster watched her. The monstrous thing; she knew its face.

This wasn’t happening, Mary decided. She was dreaming. She was back home in Corpus Christi, still the apple of her tyrannical father’s eye. Or maybe she and her girls were driving the old Buick with all the windows rolled down, heading across the bridge and out of town. This life she’d lived the last fifteen years, it was the path not taken. It was the nightmare from which she would soon wake.

The boiler kicked, and the water churned. The monster approached, and something inside Mary died. She heard, or maybe just imagined, a snapping sound. She heard her sanity break, like a record needle that skips, and is returned to the wrong groove: All was well. All was fine. All was lovely. Where’s the wine?

Mary closed her eyes. Opened them. Looked down at her hands, at the ceiling. When she looked back at the closet, the monster was gone. Mary smiled widely. “My lovely,” she said.

In place of the monster stood a little girl of about six years of age. She wore pigtails tied with thick blue yarn, and a blue dress bordered with white lace. A darling girl.

“Where am I?” the little girl asked. Her voice was flat and without inflection. Cold.

Mary smiled. All was well. All was fine. All was lovely. A box made out of pine.

“Sweetie,” Mary said. The little girl’s eyes were cornflower blue. The boiler roared, and shallow whirlpools rushed across the floor. Mary crawled through the icy water. She leaned in close to the girl. So close that she could smell the child’s sour breath, feel the moisture of it collect on her cheek. “Don’t you look pretty, my Little Miss Muffett,” she said.

The girl cocked her head, and Mary was reminded of a young Susan who had held her one-year-old sister in her arms. She hopped up onto the edge of the bed and sat. Her legs were too short to reach the ground, and her wet shoes dripped water.

“I’ve got no place to go,” the little girl said. She smiled at Mary, and her teeth were spotted with specks of red.

“I’m so sorry,” Mary said, and began to cry. She tried to stop. She’d never cried over Ted’s death, or even at the funeral this week. But that was fine and well. That was right and good. This was just a dream, and she was not really in hell.

The girl kicked her legs against the side of the mattress. The whirlpools on the ground churned faster, slapping against Mary’s thighs. Making her numb. “My mother abandoned me,” the little girl said.

“Maybe she didn’t know any better. Thought what her husband said was law.”

“I’ve got no place to go,” the girl said.

“This can be your home,” Mary said, because it didn’t matter that this girl stank like something foul. It didn’t matter that she wasn’t eager to please, as her own Susan had once been. It didn’t matter that her clothes were muddy and her skin was washed out and gray, or that every sane part of Mary was telling her to run right now because this child was a gift. She had to be.

The girl smiled. “No place like home, Mom. Home sweet home. I’m hanging my hat. Home again, home again, jiggety-jig.”

“I’m glad, Susan,” Mary said, and she couldn’t remember. Had Susan died? Was this little girl Susan?

“Are you really glad?”

“So glad,” she said. “We can set up your room and I’ll clean it for you and I baked you a cake, Susan.”

“This room here, in the basement?” Susan asked. Her feet rocked so hard now that her whole body was swinging.

“Wherever you want.”

The little girl’s smile spread wider. So wide that her lower lip split open, and black blood trickled down her chin. “Show me how glad you are.”

Mary’s panic returned, and this time she could not marshal it. She blinked, and saw for an instant that this thing was not a little girl at all. It was a woman. Her blond hair was gone—there was only the pale white of scalp and the black of sutures. A terrible thing. A godless thing. A familiar thing. She blinked again, and the little girl returned. The happy, sweet, beautiful little girl.

“Show me,” the child commanded. She beckoned Mary to the bed with a pudgy little arm. Her aspect shifted, at once a child, and then a tiny woman, and then both. Mary looked around the room, expecting to see blood or plague or the end of the world, or a man, her husband, but there was nothing.

Mary followed her daughter to the bed. She hugged the girl. Sweet Susan. Lovely Susan. The stench of paper mill and rotting meat was so strong she gagged, and Mary realized, too late, that this was no gift and it was no dream. The house began to moan, then, and through the air and the walls and the deep blue holes of this little girl’s eyes, Mary could hear the sound of laughter.

I
n homeroom at the Bedford School Wednesday morning, Liz Marley expected a few raised eyebrows, a nod or two of sympathy, and perhaps a mention of Susan’s name. But although more than half the class was absent, it was another day as usual and no one said a word to her. Instead, they watched the rain. After the pledge, some of the kids stuck their hands out the windows and opened their mouths wide as if to breathe it. Andrea Jorgenson hurriedly wrote out the homework she had not done the night before, and Owen Read threatened to spit on her in a light-hearted, flirty kind of way, but sucked it back into his mouth instead. “You’re gross,” she told him. “You’re easy,” he told her, and she hid her head behind her notebook.

In math class they talked about derivatives. Liz scribbled out her notes, and tried, repeatedly, and failed, to solve for
y.
In English class they talked about
The Great Gatsby.
Dori Morrison said that talking about the moral implications of running a woman over in a car on the way to East Egg starts to become irrelevant when you’re dealing with amoral people to begin with. “I know he’s supposed to be some romantic American dream and all that, but isn’t it really egotistical to buy a house and throw parties just so some chick will notice you?”

In gym they played dodgeball. As usual, no one tried to peg her with a Nerf. In the locker room she changed back into her corduroys, realized that those thick, velvet ribbings made her look like a cow, and began to wonder if she had lost her mind. Perhaps the reason no one had mentioned Susan today was because she had never died. She was still alive, wandering through Main Street or else sitting in her apartment, chain smoking and acting professionally weird.

After she finished changing, Andrea Jorgenson approached her. Andrea lived with her aunt and mother in the Halcyon-Soma Tent and Trailer Park on the south side of town. She also wore thigh-high FM boots, that stands for Fresh Meat, and all the graffiti on the bathroom walls said she was a slut.

She touched Liz’s shoulder. “Are you okay?” she asked, tucking her thin auburn hair back behind freckled ears.

“I don’t think so,” Liz said. “My sister died. Did you know that?”

Andrea shuffled on her high-heeled boots. Around them was the surreal white noise of chatter; lockers being shut, makeup being applied in front of mirrors, and bodies being appraised by friends:
No, you don’t look fat.

Andrea lowered her voice. “Yeah. It’s not right.”

“What isn’t right?”

“I feel her. Can you feel her? It’s like she’s inside me. Is there a word?” Andrea furrowed her brow. “Possessed. That’s the word.”

Liz’s mouth felt like dust.

Andrea looked like she wanted to say more, but instead she left the locker room. The other girls were now watching Liz. Carrie Dubois and Laura Henrich, Louise Andrias and Jaine Hodkin. All of them. There was something about their eyes that was empty. Lifeless. They reminded her of Susan. Liz closed her locker. When she turned around again, the girls had gone.

Because of the intensity of the rain, school was letting out early. Fourth period chemistry would be Liz’s last class of the day. She sat at her lab station in the back of the room and tried to listen as her favorite teacher, Ms. Althea Gonya, who had platinum blond hair that was black at the roots, recited the lesson.

The fluorescent lights above buzzed, and the rain pounded against the windows. A half mile away was the cemetery, whose black gates she could see from her seat. She doodled in her notebook, squiggly lines and figure eights.

Ten minutes later, she was at work on her experiment. She was supposed to find the saturation point of a stable solution when a solid is added. The theory was that while most heated solutions suspended and dissolved a certain amount of solid material, once they reached a certain point, their saturation point, they can hold and dissolve nothing more. At this point, all the suspended solid in the solution falls to the bottom of the beaker. It was a universal truth that held not just for chemistry but for life: There is only so much crap that anybody can take.

She filled her beaker with solution and readied her solid suspension. The lit Bunsen burner glowed like a prayer candle at church. When she lifted the beaker, it slipped through her fingers and bounced against her hip before shattering on the floor. Hydrochloric acid stained her blue sweatshirt. Fragments of glass scurried across the freshly waxed floor like the legs of a crab. Fearing that the acid would burn her skin, Steve McCormack, who’d once informed Liz that her sister fucked for money, filled a liter-sized beaker full of water. She might have told him that the HCl was diluted for a reason, and that the only thing it might eat through was a chewable aspirin, but there wasn’t time. Steve poured the water all over her lap. It soaked her pants and ran down her legs.

The classroom went silent. They were all looking at her. Just like the night at the mill. Just like the faces she’d seen inside the mirrors of her sister’s apartment. Just like the girls in the locker room today. Faces.

Looks like you wet your pants.
The thought was almost funny. She covered her mouth and started to laugh, not hard laughing, just giggles.
Looks like you’re a joke. Now nobody’s gonna like you.
Almost funny, not as funny. She laughed harder.
You fat, stupid cunt. Now they’ll never stop talking and they’ll tell Bobby you’re an idiot. They’ll tell Bobby and he’ll finally leave you because he’ll figure out the truth. He’ll wake up and see you for what you are. A fake. A loser. A waste. A nothing.
These thoughts raced through her mind. They were not her own. Close, but not hers. She laughed harder.
Looks like you wet your pants. They think you wet your pants.
She looked down at her wet corduroys, and now she could not remember: Had she wet her pants? No, she couldn’t have; she’d feel warm.
You got so upset you wet your pants and now they all know you’re fucked up. They know everything. They see how you wet your pants.
Whose voice was that?

You worthless piece of shit, it should have been you.

Susan. The voice belonged to Susan. She was not dreaming. It was daytime. And Susan was in her head. Holy crap. Susan was inside her head. Liz was laughing so hard now it sounded like crying.

Ms. Gonya made her way to the back of the room. Instead of smiling she looked at Liz with a vacant stare. She reached out and lifted Liz’s chin. Long, hot-pink painted fingernails grazed her neck. Liz jerked away, for an instant thinking:
This woman is going to slice my throat right open.
“Elizabeth?” Ms. Gonya asked.

“Looks like I wet my pants,” she said, and then she started to cry.

A
fter her episode, it was agreed that Liz should go to the teachers’ lounge, where the school psychologist would call her mother to take her home. But her mother could not be reached over the phone, and so it was Bobby who stopped by the lounge, carrying her backpack along with his own.

They left the lounge together, and as they walked, the bell rang and the halls filled with people going home early because of the rain. She could hear echoes: laughter, shouting, and underneath that, a buzzing. An electrical whine. The sound was familiar—this buzzing. It was the same sound she’d heard in her dream the night before Susan died, and she thought that it came from the people in the halls. It belonged to them, was underneath their laughter and polite conversation. Things started to come together for her then, and she began to understand what was happening.

As she walked, she rubbed her hand against Bobby’s. He picked it up and squeezed. “I love you,” she whispered, because it was one of the only truths she could believe in right now: wood made a particular sound when you knocked on it unless it was on fire; things fell down instead of up unless you were in space; bloody sisters did not visit you in cemeteries unless they were Susan Marley; and she loved Bobby Fullbright no matter what.

When they walked outside the front doors to the school where her mother had parked only two hours before, every student and teacher stopped what they were doing. Mr. Brutton dropped his briefcase onto the wet pavement, and did not bother to pick it up. The seniors in the parking lot stopped running toward their cars, and the ones who were driving slammed on their brakes. The buses did not move forward, and the kids standing under the awning did not climb aboard. “Let’s go to the mill tonight,” Liz heard Louise Andrias tell Owen Read and Steve McCormack amid the general murmur of conversation. “In my dream—” and then the words died on Louise’s tongue. All the words died.

It went completely quiet, except for the sound of the falling rain and the buzzing, still that buzzing. No cars moved. Only faces, watching them. Every person at the Bedford High School, watching them. Familiar faces. Angry faces. She remembered the faces in the mirrors at Susan’s apartment, and from out her window the night Susan died, and from the locker room this afternoon, and from chemistry class twenty minutes ago. Faces. They looked like Susan. Every one of them.

Bobby squeezed her hand tighter. “What the hell?” he whispered.

She yanked him forward, and together they ran to his car. As they drove away, she looked out the window and saw that slowly, people were starting to move again. Like a trance that had been lifted, they trembled, and then opened car doors and drove off, or picked up their briefcases, or perhaps they even resumed their conversations. “In my dream,” she could almost hear Louise Andrias say, “Susan Marley came back.”

Liz knew what was happening. Just like tapping her ruby slippers three times, she’d known the answer all along. She fought the urge to scream.