The Kings and Queens of Roam: A Novel (24 page)

Helen was complicated like that.

T
hey were almost done now. Today he was going to ascend the ladder and scrape the last bit of grime from the stained glass windows. He had to admit, the way the light flowed through the colored glass and made the room virtually glow was stunning. He could imagine that a man who was sitting in a pew with an empty mind and an open heart could sense that glorious something, that invitation to another world, that escape. At the very least, he could indulge himself in the mystery of life, and there was a lot of that to go around. Old-timers stood in the windows of every abandoned home he passed. They waved, he waved. Digby wondered if this was something peculiar to Roam, or if it were a regular occurrence all around the world, unseen and unknown by anyone other than bartenders. Because Roam was weird. One morning when he was a kid Digby woke up to find the streets choked with deer, hundreds of them, wandering around as if they lived there. They were gentle creatures, gone in a week. And there were the birds that one time, sparrows that every night at dusk flew through open windows and down chimneys and perched on the walls of every home, the gentle way they lightly rustled, making the walls look alive, pulsating, feathered. A month or so later they flew away and no one saw them ever again.

He turned the corner from McCallister to Ming Kai Lane and stopped, because he saw something there he’d never seen before: two old-timers, out for a walk. He recognized them: the one on the left was Chen, and the one on the right, Kelly Neighbors. He hadn’t seen them since they left the tavern, when their houses opened up. The sun shone straight through them; they glowed like the last embers of a fire.
Up ahead he saw six or seven others, some of whom he knew—Daisy Chow, Kepler Cosgrove, Melanie Grinney—strolling down the street as if they didn’t have a care in the world. (He guessed that, in this case, that was probably true.)

“Digby.”

It was Jonas. After he’d fallen into the ravine and appeared at the tavern, he’d stayed for a couple of days and then left without saying good-bye.

“Jonas, my friend,” Digby said. Jonas had that same starved quality about him, like a dog who’d been abandoned on the side of the road and hadn’t eaten in a week. He stared up at Jonas and smiled. “You look—”

“—the same,” he said disconsolately. “I look the same.”

“Where’d you go? We missed you down at the tavern. Everyone spoke fondly of you in your absence.”

“Nice to hear,” Jonas said.

“Yes,” Digby said, suddenly discomfited and—just as suddenly—realizing why. It was only the strangeness of the circumstance that had kept him from immediately understanding the import of this moment. Helen.

“And so,” Digby said. “Where are you—where is everybody off to? It appears to be an exodus. Don’t tell me even you folks are leaving.”

“We’re going to church, Digby,” he said. “Everyone is going to church.”

“The church? You and . . . the rest? But why?”

He shrugged. “It’s nice,” Jonas said. “Some of us went over there last night for a look. It’s nice. And big. Not many places like that around here, you know. And then there’s Helen.”

“Helen?” Digby said, as if the name rang a bell, but only a small one.

Now Jonas looked Digby hard in the eye. When he wasn’t smiling, his face went slack and flat as a fence post. “You and Helen,” he said. “You two are together now. That’s what I heard.”

“Yes, well, that’s true,” Digby said. “If by together you mean—”

“Sleeping together,” Jonas said. “Living together and sleeping together. In love.”

“Then most certainly yes. I hope that’s not . . . an issue with you? You are dead, after all.”

Jonas shrugged. “I have to admit, when I first heard about it I felt like I’d swallowed a hornets’ nest. But it’s okay now. More than okay. Is she happy?”

“After all that’s happened,” Digby said, “I don’t know if she’ll ever be happy. But as happy as she could be under the circumstances. I think it would be fair to say that.”

“I’m good with it, then,” Jonas said. He dragged the tip of his shoe along the sidewalk. “Can’t wait to see her, though. I guess I’ll—”

“You do that,” Digby said. “I’ll be right along.”

Jonas caught up with the rest of them as Digby hung back. Had someone seen him—the few people left in town to be seen by—he would have looked odd, odder than usual, dressed in his coat, hat, and red-and-gold-striped tie, with black boots and a pocket watch strung across his vest—the clothes Helen had laid out for him. He looked like a toy man. He accepted that. To be that man and to be seen standing talking to the air, though, was perhaps too much.

By the time he got to the church himself, no one was there but Helen, standing in front of the big wooden doors alone, waiting for him, her arms at her sides, her dark hair lifted by a burst of a breeze, the hem of her blue dress rippling in it as well. He took off his hat as he mounted the stairs and stood before her.

“Look,” she said, and she moved aside so he could.

Digby peered through the open door: the church was full, every
seat in every pew. He’d never seen so many dead people in one place before, and their collective milky essence glowed like a wave of pure light. In the very first pew he saw Fang and He-Ping. He stared at them until they turned to him, smiled, and waved. Digby took a deep breath and held it for a second or two, then turned back to Helen.

“You never told me you could see them, too,” he said.

“You never told me, either.”

“I didn’t want you to think I was crazy.”

“My mother and father are in there,” she said. “Jonas is in there.
Elijah McCallister
is in there, Digby.”

“And Rachel?”

She shook her head and scanned the crowd again, probably for the hundredth time. “I don’t see her,” she said. “But everyone else—they’re waiting, Digby.”

She sounded like a girl about to go onstage for the school play. Stage fright, that’s what it was. But it still took him a moment to get it. Waiting? He liked to think of himself as the kind of man who got things, but he was slow on the uptake today. Tired. He was tired, plain and simple. The road to now had been a long one. But they’d survived the worst, and here they were.

“For you, you mean?” he said.

“For me,” she said. “To hear me say something, and I don’t know what. What do I do? What do I tell them?”

He thought about it. He felt real for the first time in his life: the woman he loved had asked him what to do. She needed him the same way he needed her. In that moment—not yet even in the church—they were married.

He took her hand. “A woman is sometimes required to do things she’d rather not,” he said, “in part because she is a woman and has no real choice in the matter either way.” He stood on his toes and
whispered in her ear. “Tell them the truth,” he said. “Tell them that everything is going to be all right.”

“But is it?”

“Sure it is,” he said, and hoped she believed him. “One day.”

And that’s what she did, that day and the next, and the next, and the next, days becoming weeks, the weeks a month and more. For anybody and everybody who came, whether it was one or a hundred, she told them—she told herself—that everything was going to be all right. And hoped they believed her, too.

T
he dogs came first: two, three, then half a dozen at least. There hadn’t been a single dog in Roam for a long, long time, not since Lumberjack Smith left, and their absence, while never consciously noted, was something deeply felt by those people who remained behind. There was an emptiness—when even the dogs give up, you know things are pretty bad.

But then they crept on back. All black, one no different from the next, they wandered up and down the streets of Roam as if they owned it. No one touched them; no one even got close to them. On the one hand, they didn’t cause any trouble, but on the other, if you tried to shoo them or didn’t step aside they confronted you with a fiery malice in their eyes until you backed away and went about your business. Not that there was much business to be had in Roam anymore.

After just a couple of days of this, the few citizens who had been on
the fence about leaving now had no doubt at all. The remaining population was halved. No putting up
FOR SALE
signs, of course; the truth is that anyone could have come and taken possession of a nice home and made it their own through no more effort than it took to move in. On a Main Street that once boasted a dozen stores selling everything from the most elegant feathered hats to rare Chinese noodles, eventually there was only one: a general store selling whatever was left over and behind. You were as likely to find a brass commode there as you were a bag of flour. Old Man Cummings manned the register, his half-inch-thick eyeglasses reflecting the light from the huge, ancient candelabra hanging from his ceiling, smoking incessantly. If he was awake he had at least one cigarette going, sometimes two or three. And he drove a hard bargain—he wouldn’t take a penny off the price of anything. Sometimes he’d raise the price while you were looking, just because he wanted to. But when the dogs came, he locked the doors and never opened them again.

The dogs ended up gathering around the McCallister house, there beneath the dying magnolias, the withering pin oaks, the relentless kudzu winding around the porch columns. Oh, this house! Just two years ago it was a rotting hovel held upright by nothing more than hope, one strong wind away from collapsing entirely. But it had been transformed, saved by the labor of the smallest man in Roam, Digby Chang. He’d sealed up all the holes in the floor and installed a banister the length of the winding stairs. He’d painted almost all the rooms, most of them in soft colors—Helen loved peach. He cleaned the windows, removing years of cobwebs, leaves, and dirt. Helen cleaned the kitchen (“Scour for an hour every day and all the grime will go away,” her mother always said) until, one day, it began to gleam. There was something magical about order, Helen had come to believe. Something happened when everything was
just so,
when every piece of the puzzle fit and perfection—fleeting perfection—was
achieved. Was that happiness? Satisfaction at the triumph over disorder?

This is the house that was surrounded. Helen was inside. So was Digby. Eight or nine times a day one or both of them would be standing at the living room window, pulling back a curtain and staring. It was like this going on three days. Digby had tried to go outside once and had almost lost a finger.

“Still there,” Helen said, not even needing to say it. The idea that the dogs would ever leave now seemed impossible, unimaginable.

“I keep waiting for the lumberjack,” Digby said. He sat on the couch with his hands on his knees, his knees pressed together, and his feet flat against the floor, as if he were a spring-loaded mechanism that might at any moment pop up. “They’re his dogs. I keep thinking he’s coming off the mountain and they know it and they’re waiting here for him.”

“Well,” Helen said.

“What?”

“Remember the last time we saw them?”

Digby was silent. He remembered and was hoping Helen wouldn’t. “I remember,” he said.

“Smith said they’d save her. Jonas told me he said that. His dogs would save her.”

“True,” Digby said. “That was said by Lumberjack Smith. I didn’t understand it then and I don’t now. But those words were spoken.”

“And we haven’t seen them since. That’s all I’m saying.”

Digby gazed into a middle distance, somewhere between himself and the living room wall.

“Do you remember the birds and the deer and the bears, Helen? The way they used to come and take over the entire town. And then they left, and it was ours again. I think this is the price one pays for living in the wilderness.”

“So you think the dogs will just go away?”

“We’ll wake one day and they’ll be gone and we’ll go about our lives as if they were never here, and then, soon, we’ll forget they ever came.”

She walked over to the couch and sat beside him. He kissed her on the cheek.

“I know what you’re thinking,” he said.

“That’s because I told you what I was thinking.”

“But even if you hadn’t, I would know.”

He kissed her on the cheek again, in the same spot, or thereabouts, where he had planted a thousand of them in the last year. “He sent his dogs away to save her,” she said. “He said they would save her, not that they would bring her back.”

“And so now that they’re back—”

“I haven’t seen her in church,” Helen said, “with the others.”

Digby was silent.

“You would think she would come,” she said.

Helen’s services, which were held three times a week (twice on Sunday and once on Wednesday night), had become standing-room-only affairs, as more and more of the old-timers were drawn to her sermons of hope and redemption. Helen had the sense that, even though they were essentially without the ability to change themselves or anything that had happened through the course of their lives, the dead still had a stake in life itself, the same way the Chinese who came to Roam so long ago still had a stake in China. The fact that they didn’t live there anymore didn’t change anything for them.

“So what you’re saying is—and this is something I can’t quite fathom—you believe there’s a possibility, however slim, your sister is still alive.”

“No,” she said. “I don’t. But it’s not
completely
impossible.”

“But that’s what possibility is, Helen, the absence of
complete
impossibility.” He sighed, as if readying himself to perform a task he’d performed many times already. “One year,” he said. “Twelve months, Helen, three hundred and sixty-five days she’s been gone and not a word.”

“All we found was her shoe,” she said.

“She’s at the bottom of that ravine—”

Helen closed her eyes and placed a hand on Digby’s knee, squeezing it. “No. Don’t. I see her in my dreams every night. I know what must have happened. Still.”

“Still,” he said. “It’s important to accept it. So we can move on.”

Neither spoke now. For a long time they sat together on the couch like two old lovers. That’s all Digby wanted: fifty years from now if they were still together, sitting on the couch holding hands, he would be happy. Or anywhere on any couch. How long could they hold out in Roam, the way things were going? Even before the dogs came, Digby had been trying to convince Helen to go away with him, it didn’t matter where. Arcadia wasn’t far, he said, but there were other places beyond Arcadia—who knew how many? An infinite number. And out of all of them, all they needed was one. But she wouldn’t go. Helen thought about it—it was impossible to watch the exodus and not want to join it—but she wouldn’t. At first Helen stayed in the hope that Rachel might return; then she stayed for fear that she never would.