The Kings and Queens of Roam: A Novel (25 page)

So Helen remained and discovered in her sister’s absence what love and the loss of it is; she discovered both at the exact same time. It’s not just a feeling: it’s a real thing inside of you made of a paper-thin glass, and when it breaks the shards move through your blood and cut you to pieces.

Helen missed church. She missed church more than she missed freedom and food. Had the dogs let her out that’s where she would have gone first. She missed her flock, the attentive dead who hung on her every word as if she had something important to say, as if there
were something she
could
say that would help them, though all she could do was tell stories, the same thing she had done all of her life. Different stories now, though: good ones. And they were more powerful than any lie she ever told her sister. She felt like she was finally becoming human, because out of all the life on Earth this is the one thing only people do. What other animal tells stories? Or more important: what other animal listens?

Helen felt like she’d died, too. There was a Helen, another Helen, whom she’d buried when Rachel left her, and like the spirits who were her congregation, the leftover Helen was a vaporous shadow, gray as a cloud—the only difference between her and the others being that she was growing into her new self, and they would be the way they were forever. That’s why all eyes were on her. No one even blinked.

“Welcome,” she had begun that first day, and she said exactly what Digby had told her to say. But after that, she hit a wall. It was a kind of stage fright, but more than that: she was scared of herself. She stood there for an entire minute, silently staring back at them, until one of them—James Harding—stood and said, “Tell us about yourself, Helen.”

“About myself?”

“Tell us what you’ve done with your life.”

Another minute passed before she spoke.

“Well, I did some things,” Helen said. “Some terrible, terrible things.”

“But
what exactly
?” he asked her. “I think we’ve all done terrible things”—and a murmur of agreement spread through the pews—“but just saying it isn’t enough. Cat of mine had a litter of kittens I didn’t need. So I drowned them in the river. Six of them, in a bag with a rock in it. Watched their bodies struggle against the silk until . . . well, until they stopped.” He sat back down and popped back up and said, “That’s what I’m talking about. Get it out and let it go.”

Jeddy Wong said from his seat, “Slept with my wife’s sister once.”

His wife looked at him and said, “Once?”

Others followed them, and more followed the others. It wasn’t confession as much as it was admission. Not that there was anything wrong with what they had done, but that wasn’t the point. The idea was that there was no one who hadn’t done
something
.

“So now,” James Harding said, about half an hour after he’d opened the floodgates. “What is it
you
have to share with us?”

Helen stood, feeling protected behind the pulpit. But this was no time to feel protected. She moved away from it and presented herself fully to the congregation.

“I let my blind sister walk into a bees’ nest,” she said. They stared, waiting. “I mean I walked her into it. She was stung all over, head to toe.” Helen wiped the palms of her hands across the front of her dress. “I rearranged the furniture so she’d run into it and hurt herself. That made me happy, to do things like that. I told her she stood a good chance of being hanged one day because she was a blind girl. I told her . . .” She let her words trail off into silence. Why was what she wanted to say now any worse than anything else she’d done to Rachel? Was there even a scale on which these things could be weighed, and judged? Helen thought: yes, there was. “I stole her face,” she said, “and I gave her mine.”

Digby watched her from the back.

There was too much to say for just one service. The next Sunday, Mrs. Cravens, the sixth-grade teacher (when there was a sixth grade in Roam), stood and told Helen and the spirits gathered there, “Everything I did was an accident. Everything good and bad. I floated on the surface of the river of my life and held on to whoever could keep me from drowning.” She blushed. “I don’t know what happened. I don’t know what’s happening now.”

Then Jonas stood up. He lowered his head toward Helen in a
gesture suggesting love and respect and sorrow. They had spoken, once, on the first day the church was open, the first time she’d seen him since he’d died. He’d been shy with her, the way old boyfriends were with the girls they still loved. He’d said, “I appreciate everything you did for me, Helen. I wasn’t easy. Especially when you tried to help me—you know. That last night. I appreciate that.”

That last night.

So today when he stood she thought he was going to talk about that. But he didn’t.

“I killed my father,” he said. He paused, looked around. “Still—I don’t know. I don’t have a feeling about it. I don’t feel much of anything about that.”

He shrugged, looking all around, as if for help. Then he sat back down.

The meetings had become a time of healing for her congregation, though she suspected they were there, in part, because they had nothing else to do. They were stuck here the same way the living had been stuck here, only the dead had no reason to go anywhere else. They were stuck in Roam forever, even as it succumbed to the rapacious and, now, relentless onslaught of greenery engulfing the homes and stores. They were always there, and would always be there, and if there was a reason she and Digby could see them when no one else could, she wasn’t sure what that reason was. But it would have been lonely had only one of them been able to, and this was reason enough for her. All she knew is that every Sunday she left the church a better person, changed for the good, while they all stayed the same. This was how she came to realize that she wasn’t there to help them, but they were there to help her. They did more than that, though: they saved her.

T
he quiet, inside and out, was unsettling. When the dogs stopped howling there was nothing to hear but the wind edging in through the windows Digby had yet to repair—a high whistling sound.

“We’re running out of food,” she said.

He looked at her, but she kept her gaze fixed on the door. Dust motes like a million miniature fish swimming through the lighted air, reproducing too fast to clean, a woman with her hands on her thighs, torturing herself with her past; and the man who really loved her not a few feet away, ready to do anything he could to make her happy.

“It feels a little like the end of the world, doesn’t it?” he said. “What preachers preach about it.
Know thou that dogs will come and
 . . . and I don’t know, surround your home so you can’t even go out to get a drink? Can’t get much worse than that.”

But she didn’t smile at his little joke. Instead she said, “I’ve been thinking about that, too. But the end of the world’s not dogs, Digby. It’s plagues. Plagues, floods, locusts, fires. And miracles. Lots and lots of miracles.”

He took her hand and held it tighter now, and she held his tighter back.

M
arkus fell out of the woods as if he’d been thrown out of them, his coat and pants torn and ripped in half a dozen places, light red stripes across his cheeks and even deeper cuts on his arms, where there was some serious blood, dirt smeared like camouflage around his neck and chin, gasping for air, looking behind him, ahead, as if at any moment something could come at him, from anywhere, and he had to be ready for it. Somehow, his hat had stayed on his head. Finally he either felt safe or gave up on feeling safe, brushed his pant legs and shirtsleeves off (as if that did any good whatsoever), and ran, ran just as fast as he could without falling. His shoes were mostly poster board and string now. With his face clenched from the blistering pain, he didn’t stop until he came to a sign. It was hard to assemble the letters into words because they were worn away by weather and time. He had to study it for a while.

WE COME TO RO M
THE SILK N  ARADISE
AND  ND
OF ALL EXP ORIN .
EL JAH MCCALL  TER, OWNER

So he had made it for sure. In his rush to get here—and to escape the dog that was chasing him—he wasn’t sure where he was. When he got to that bridge over the ravine (so old and worn and fragile he wasn’t sure it would support him), he ran across it as fast as he could, at the very least hoping that if it fell it would fall behind him, that he could stay a step ahead of the dog. But it didn’t fall. He wasn’t sure, but he thought the dog was just behind him and that it might be a good idea to cut the bridge down (it was hanging there by a single thick, fraying rope) but decided (the way such things are decided, in less than a moment) that he might need it if he were to go back.

Now he was here, the place he’d been moving toward one year ago. Ming Kai had told him stories about it since he was a small boy. How there had been nothing here but nature, and how two men made their way through the nothing of it all and created a world, a world so closely tied to the men who made it that when they became dead to each other the town itself began to die. From Markus’s small home in the Valley, remote from everywhere, Roam was never real. It was just a story. And now here it was.

He took off his hat and gave a look around. Even for a man who had never seen a real town before, Markus knew this one was dead. Empty, overrun by the forest, broken really—a lot like the Valley. But the Valley had never been much of anything, while Roam—according to Ming Kai, at least—Roam had been something. Markus closed his eyes and tried to see it the way it must have been, streets so busy you had to slide past the tide of people going the other way. Stores
bright with colored boxes from all around the world. And silk. Silken curtains, silken tents. Silken kites for the children. Silken everything. A soft, cool place to be . . . and now, but for a few lonely places, shuttered and dark.

Markus put his hat back on and started walking until he heard the crack of a twig somewhere behind him, a stifled growl. Without looking back again he ran, ran toward the dark house he saw looming above the desolate and decaying town.

T
here were three dogs prowling around the front porch, so Markus slipped around the side of the house. He didn’t have time to knock. He threw his shoulder against the door, and when it didn’t open he tried the knob, but it was locked. He slammed his hand into the window and it shattered, but the opening wasn’t big enough to do him any good. He knew the dogs were coming. Inside he saw someone, what he thought at first was an old woman and her little boy, but then realized he was a man, just a very small one, and a young woman, just very homely. When they saw him they froze, in a kind of shock. He held up Rachel’s brooch, which he had kept with him all this time, and when the woman saw it she went straightaway to the door and opened it, and he fell in the house just as he felt on his ankle the nip of a dog’s sharp teeth. She closed the door and he lay there, not sure he could get up, and not really wanting to, for having made it to his final
destination he was spent, even though he had yet to do what he came to do.

The little man said, “Who are you?” And the woman: “Where did you get that brooch?”

A whole minute passed before he was able to lift his head, to stand, to sit in a chair and breathe. He raised his head and looked at the woman. He had never seen an uglier woman in his life, and coming from the Valley that was saying something. He turned away, not because he couldn’t stand to look but because he didn’t want to hurt her feelings, for surely she could see in his eyes his wonder at her remarkable face and she would know what it meant. But she was kind. She poured him a glass of water from a pitcher and handed it to him. He took it and swallowed and just that quickly felt his strength returning, his breath, the power to speak.

“I need to see Helen McCallister,” he said.

“I’m Helen McCallister.”

He looked at her again.
Couldn’t be,
he thought. He said, “Helen McCallister, Rachel McCallister’s sister. That’s who I mean.”

The little man stared hard at him, not in a threatening way really, but protectively. Markus felt like he needed to move slowly, to speak carefully, or he might do something to set the little man off. Markus was not a fighter, and little men were the worst; they were tough and mean as rusty nails.

“I’m her sister,” the woman said.

Markus blinked, thinking. Her sister. It kind of made sense, with all he knew about Rachel and her sister. Helen McCallister and the little man, though, they looked like they’d been hit in the head by a rock and were standing frozen the second before they fell.

“You’re Helen McCallister,” Markus said. He shook his head.

“What?” Helen McCallister said. “Why are you looking at me like that?”

“You’re just not what I expected,” he said. “The way she described you. I thought you looked different, that’s all.”

Helen took the brooch from him as though it might crumble at her touch, cradling it in the palm of her hand, studying it. She looked back and forth from him to the brooch, and he could see her putting it all together but not believing it. “Because she told you I was beautiful,” she said. Markus realized Rachel was right: Helen thought she was dead. All this time.

“That’s right,” he said. Then: “She’s alive, Helen.”

She swiveled her head toward the little man, no words necessary now.

“We looked for her the night she left,” Helen said. “Digby and I looked. Jonas, too. Smith. Some time had passed. We didn’t know where she’d gone. How far could a blind girl go? That’s what I was thinking.” She laughed, and just as quickly stopped. “Where could a blind girl go?”

“Turns out, pretty far,” Markus said.

“What’s your name?” the little man said.

“My name’s Markus. You Jonas?”

The little man shook his head and frowned. “Digby. Jonas is dead. He died the night Rachel—”

“—disappeared,” Helen said. “She was nowhere. Nowhere. We sent out word to Arcadia, in case someone delivered her there, in whatever shape. We wanted to know. I
needed
to know. I had nightmares,” she said. “But then, you know, one day you just stop and try to accept it. That she’s gone and she’s not coming back. And that’s when it gets even harder. It’s just really, really hard to know what to do then. I pray about this every day.”