The Kings and Queens of Roam: A Novel (30 page)

T
hey walked until dusk. Rachel moved through the forest as if she were following a well-worn trail, as if she were following signs that said
THIS WAY TO ROAM
; the rest of them stumbled along as best they could, because she wasn’t stopping—that much was clear. Around midday Jerrod, the slow boy, stopped to pee behind a pine tree. It took him a while, and by the time he finished up, everyone had gone. Someone told Rachel he was missing, but she didn’t even turn her head. No one ever saw him again.

When the last light of the sun shot through the army of pine around them and cast shadows as dark as ditches across the forest floor, Liling hurried, one quick small step after another, to get close enough to Rachel to touch her elbow. Rachel shook her off and kept walking. Liling touched her elbow again—she wasn’t scared of the blind girl (which is how she still thought of her)—and then grabbed it
and pulled. Rachel wheeled around and pushed her, and if she’d had a knife in her hand she probably would have cut her wide open.

“What?” Rachel said.

“Dark now,” she said. “We rest.”

“Dark or light,” Rachel said. “What difference do you think that makes to me? I’m not stopping. I know what I need to do.”

Rachel gave her one last hard look before stalking away.

“Why you leave Markus back in the Valley?” Liling asked.

This stopped her. “You left him, too,” she said, turning to her. “And for the same reason. Because he’s a liar.”

“He give you everything,” Liling said. “He show you everything.” Liling grabbed Rachel’s wrist and yanked her close. “He save your
life
.”

“No,” she said. “He didn’t save my life. The girl he found in the woods that day—and he killed her. I’m done with him.”

By then everyone else had caught up with them—worn-out, exhausted. Rachel drew on some vestigial kindness and relented. “We’ll sleep here.”

T
he night was so black that even a fire wasn’t enough to crack the darkness, the sparks from the fire rising and dying, swallowed up in it. Everybody slept but Ming Kai. He lay on his side in a small puddle of the magic water, staring into the nothing of the darkness ahead—until a glowing appeared, like a hovering cloud of insects, and coalesced into the figure of a man.

“Elijah McCallister,” Ming Kai said to the spirit. “See what you’ve done.”

On the outside Elijah looked like he did in the days before he died: all hollowed out. But now he had been filled up with the peace of death. “It’s not what I intended, Ming Kai. And please don’t say
I told you so.
”

“I told you so!” Ming Kai said. “You’ve cursed us! And the girls most of all.”

“I’m sorry,” the ghost of Elijah said. “I’m sorry for every terrible thing I did. I don’t know what else I can say.”

“One word cannot change the past.”

“But that’s just it, Ming Kai,” he said, his ghostly translucence moving closer to his ear, to whisper: “This isn’t about the past: it’s about the future. You know that now.”

“Future.” Ming Kai sighed. “There is no future for you, Elijah. Or even for me.” His old eyes, dimmed now, reflected on his ruined life. “But for them? Maybe.”

“So,” Elijah said. “What are you going to do?”

Ming Kai smiled. “You know so much, you tell me.”

But Elijah fell back into the night and soon was no more than a fire’s spark himself.

The next morning he was back. Ming Kai was being doused with the water as usual—he felt as if he had lived the last years of his life underwater—and when he looked at one of the old women there instead was Elijah.

Ming Kai sighed.

“You haunt me,” he said, “when it is I who should haunt you! What is it you want!”

“Remember?” Elijah said. “Remember what you said to me? About the worms.”

“No,” he said stubbornly. Though he did remember.

“
A worm is born a worm
, you said.
Then it becomes a moth. It is born twice. It has two lives.
”

Then, almost in unison: “We should all be so lucky.”

Ming Kai closed his eyes and rolled his head back and forth against the wet cot, and when he looked again, no Elijah. It was the old woman. He had forgotten her name.

“What you saying, old man?” she said.

He didn’t answer, but with his remaining strength he reached out and knocked the bucket from her hand. The water soaked into the loamy soil.

“Ming Kai!” she gasped. “What are you doing? Now you know what will happen? Without water, you will die!”

“I know,” he said.

Everyone stopped, even Rachel, who turned to see what the problem was. She pushed her way through the ring of people until she was standing beside Ming Kai.

“What’s this?” she said.

Ming Kai shook his head, but Rachel wouldn’t leave without an answer. She was glaring at him, waiting for a reason she had been held up.

“I saw him,” he said.

“Who?”

“Elijah McCallister. We talked.”

“Really? About what?”

“Worms,” he said.

He looked at her rusted copper eyes, her drawn cheeks. Not so beautiful now—or beautiful in a different way.

“You hate him, don’t you?”

“Yes,” he said, with great affection. “I do.”

She laughed, once. “That’s why you wanted to come back with me: to see what it’s like to have revenge on the person who destroyed your life. We’re the same, you and me.”

Ming Kai shook his head. “No,” he said. “But we used to be.”

Rachel smiled at him, her lips tinged with malice. She rubbed his sunken chest with the palm of her weathered hand, as if she loved him. And she resumed her trek to Roam—all of them did. It wouldn’t be long now, not long at all. Ming Kai could feel it in his bones.

D
igby wanted a drink—not for him, but for Helen. She didn’t drink, though, and as far as he knew never had. But now would have been a good time to start. For a man who thought he had seen and heard everything there was to see and hear, he’d never heard anything like this. Best to just sit there, he thought. Best not to say or do anything. It just wasn’t his place.

Markus looked down at his hat and turned it three full times before looking up again. Outside there was a commotion. They heard one dog howl, then another. Soon it became a song, a canine chorus. Markus turned toward the window.

“She’s almost here,” he said.

Digby waited for Helen to say something, anything, but she seemed lost.

“Why did you come here?” he asked Markus.

Markus shook his head, still looking toward the outside, and shrugged, as if he weren’t really sure anymore. “She doesn’t have much use for me,” he said. “After what I’ve done . . .” Markus looked up at Helen, and Digby saw how it was with the two of them, how they lived in the same world, with the same guilt, born of loneliness and love. “I saved her life, but it didn’t work out the way I wanted it to. I messed up. I thought maybe if I could save you, I could save her—one more time. And maybe that would be enough.”

“She would never hurt me,” Helen said. “Never.”

Markus turned away. “Oh, Helen,” he said. “She would.”

“Where is she?”

“By now she’s at that bridge. Just barely made it across myself—looks like it’s about a hundred years old and held together by spiderwebs and spit. She could make it over, maybe. But not the rest of them. Not that the rest of them need to. She’s enough for whatever she means to get done.”

“Then I have to go,” Helen said. And Markus and Digby both nodded, relieved. This is what they wanted to hear. “To see her, I mean,” she said. “I have to go see her.”

“Have you been listening to this man, Helen?” Digby asked her.

“Of course I have, Digby,” she said. “That’s how I know what it is I have to do.”

“I won’t let you.”

But Helen, as if she didn’t hear him or it didn’t matter if she did, moved toward the door. Markus blocked her path. “You won’t be able to stop her,” he said.

“Who said I wanted to?”

He walked to the window and pushed back the shade as outside the dogs made a sound that filled up the world, baying and singing. “It’s the dogs I worry about, more than anything.”

“Helen,” Digby pleaded with her.
“Please.”

They met in the middle of the room and embraced. She kissed him, and again he took her in his arms and pressed her close, his head resting just beneath her breasts.

“I love you, Digby,” she said. “Don’t worry: I’ll bring her back here with me and she’ll see, see how things have changed . . .”

But even she didn’t believe this. The house was lovely. She tried to keep it clean.
A place for everything and everything in its place.
Cleaning a house was a way to show how much you loved it. She and Digby had rescued the house from time, but she knew it wasn’t enough. She’d wake up in the middle of the night, listening to the silent dark, knowing it; she’d told the whole dead world it wasn’t enough. The past never left her; there was nothing she could do to erase it.

On the way out she stopped and looked at herself in the mirror. Older now, she’d softened, the edges smoother, the eyes open and kind. While she didn’t have a face anybody would ever pick out of a catalogue, she didn’t feel the need to hide it from herself, nor did it cause her to shudder when she caught a glimpse of herself.
This is me
, she thought,
what I am
.

You’re more than just a face
, Digby had told her.
But that face I love, too.

Digby was the best thing in the world.

She wished she had more time to fix her hair, but she felt like she should go. She brushed it back behind her ears and let it fall down around her shoulders. That would have to do. All of this happened in a moment, but it felt like time had slowed to a crawl now. It was as if she were memorizing her life.

She looked out the window. She could have been looking at a painting: no movement at all, nothing, not even a bird. The dogs were gone. They’d filled the yard for so long (only a few days, really, but it felt like forever) that their absence made the view a lonely one.

Then something did move. She saw it now: a single dog. It sat at
the edge of the field, waiting. The dog caught her looking, and in the moment their connection was made it raised itself up on all fours and ambled away. Looked back just once to make sure she was still watching. A little farther on it stopped, sat, and waited again.

She opened the door and stood by it for a moment: she knew exactly what came next, and wasn’t sure whether she was up to facing it. But then she decided of course she was. Her life had been practice for exactly now. Markus and Digby watched her from the window as she walked through the yard, through the vast and empty field, and disappeared into the forbidding forest beyond.

M
rs. McCallister knew Rachel was coming. She heard it the way one hears things when you’re dead: news just blows past your ears, and if you’re listening you can pick it up.

She’d been there on the other side of the bridge for an hour, waiting. Then she saw her daughter, pushing through the woods, a crowd of the oddest-looking people behind her.

Mrs. McCallister waved. It had been a long time since she’d been anywhere but the church. Sometimes she visited her own grave, because it felt like home. Kids would come down in the middle of the night and gather around her stone while one of them told the story, in hushed tones, of how she died, how Mr. McCallister drove off the bridge and into the lake in pure daylight.
No one knows how or why it happened,
they said.
Maybe they saw a ghost themselves!

It was a bird!
she wanted to tell them.
A bird flew into my hair!
But she didn’t want to give them the satisfaction. One time they gathered in their spooky little group on top of her grave and a twig snapped somewhere out in the woods and they ran for it. Chickens. She remembered being scared like that; it was how she spent most of her life, actually. Death turned out to be quite a relief, for her and her husband both. They still cared about things, of course, cared a great deal. But they didn’t
worry,
because what could they do? They were dead.

Rachel had changed. Mrs. McCallister could see that. She was a woman now, all grown up, but the change went deeper than that. Rachel looked as though she’d died, too. She looked like a statue carved to honor the girl she used to be. Even her hair was different. Once it glowed a gentle orange, like a late setting sun; now it blazed a fiery red.

“You knew, didn’t you?” Rachel said, getting right to it. “What Helen did to me.”

Mrs. McCallister smiled. “You know me,” she said. “Even though—”

“I know you,” Rachel said. “I imagined you just like this.”

“So not even a hello?”

“Not even that.”

In the forest Mrs. McCallister saw more of those dogs slipping in the shadows between the trees. They were a nuisance. One of them had defecated quite near her grave.

“Did you know?” she asked again.

“No,” Mrs. McCallister said. “No. Not until it was too late. And when I found out it broke my heart. But back then? Of course not.” She paused, let this sink in until she had a feeling Rachel believed her. “A man came by here,” she said. “Earlier.”

“A man?”

“Young. Dressed in black. With a hat.”

“Markus,” she said. She shook her head. “It doesn’t matter. Nothing he does matters anymore.”

“He skittered across the bridge like a little bug,” Mrs. McCallister said. “But it doesn’t look safe to me.”

“Don’t worry about me, Mother,” she said. Something in the way she said it hurt Mrs. McCallister; the suggestion was that she had never worried about her much, or enough. The opposite was true—she had worried about her daughters too much, both of them.

“I wanted to see you, Rachel,” Mrs. McCallister said. “And for you to see me. You never really have before.”

“And so your job here is done.”

This girl, she wouldn’t give an inch. “I also wanted to talk with you,” Mrs. McCallister said. “To tell you that, as I see things, you should forgive your sister. That’s the only real power any of us have—to forgive. We make mistakes and we’re forgiven for them. That is what happens. Otherwise, we can’t go on . . .”