The Loveliest Dead (7 page)

A shelving unit built into the wall beside the entertainment center held a large collection of hardcover Reader’s Digest Condensed Books and a few dozen paperbacks, mostly westerns and science fiction novels. An impressive collection of Roseville pottery was lined up on the shelves in front of the rows of books. There were several old magazines—
Modern Maturity, People, Popular Mechanics
—inside the coffee table, and they joined the wax fruit in the garbage.
 

David came home looking as dejected as he had the day before. This time, he didn’t even have any leads. Over dinner Jenna tried to cheer him up by making plans for the weekend.
 

“Why don’t you and Miles work on cleaning out the garage so we can actually park the car and pickup in there?” she said.

“Well, I guess you
did
paint the cupboards and hang pictures,” David said. “I suppose I should do
something.
” He turned to Miles. “What do you say, Tiger. Want to clean out the garage with me tomorrow?”
 

“Yeah, sure.”

“Might mean a couple trips to the dump,” David said.

“Really? Cool!”

“If I can find the dump.”

After dinner, Jenna went to the kitchen to clean up while everyone else went to the living room. As she stacked the dishes in the dishwasher, she could hear them laughing with a studio audience at something on television.
 

She heard something else. Leaning forward with a plate in her hand, she froze, cocked her head, and listened. She dropped the plate and it clattered against others as it fell into its slot in the rack.
 

It was the music she’d heard in the early hours of Wednesday morning, the music she had thought was coming from Martha’s radio downstairs. But now it sounded nothing like music from a radio, and more like that of a music box.
 

Jenna stood up straight and turned toward the music—toward the laundry room, which opened off the kitchen near the back door. She crossed the kitchen slowly. The closer she got to the laundry room, the louder and clearer the music sounded. She hurried the last few steps and flipped on the light as she stepped inside.
 

It was Brahms’s “Lullaby.” That was why it had sounded so familiar when she’d heard it Wednesday morning, probably half asleep. It was the song she had hummed to Josh just before he’d—
 

Mommy
—
 

The memory made her chest grow cold, her fingertips numb. She thought of the hooded toddler that had stood at the end of the upstairs hallway the day before. In her mind, she returned to that brief but explosive certainty she’d experienced that Josh had tried to communicate with her.
 

Hold it
, Jenna thought.
What mother hasn’t hummed Brahms’s “Lullaby” to her baby? I used to hum that tune to both the boys; all mothers sing that to their babies.

She barely had time to think that much, though, because she was too busy focusing on the fact that she was
hearing
it. And it was coming from behind the basement door.
 

She reached out and turned the basement door’s shaky old metal knob. The door was warped and she had to tug on it a couple times before it jerked open. She stepped into the doorway and looked down into the dark.
 

There were two bare bulbs hanging over the narrow, steep wooden staircase that led down to the basement. Jenna had not been down there yet. She didn’t like the look of the exposed bulbs—she’d had a fear of electricity ever since a string of Christmas-tree lights had shocked her mother and knocked her across die living room when Jenna was seven.
 

She reached in with her left hand and flipped the light switch. The bulbs came on only for an instant before throwing sparks and going dark with a couple dull pops. She gasped and stumbled backward.
 

But the twinkling music continued to play down in the basement.

Jenna stepped out of the laundry room and turned right. A long black Mag-Lite flashlight stood facedown, like a sentry, beside the back door. She picked it up and ducked back into the laundry room. She clicked the flashlight on, aimed the beam down the stairs, and made her way down.
 

The music was much closer, clearer. Jenna stopped on the stairs and turned the light past the wooden railing to her right, down into the basement.
 

The beam fell on the toddler in the hooded jacket standing in front of a pile of old damp, decaying cardboard boxes. In the light, Jenna saw that the jacket was navy blue. The child’s face was swallowed up in the shadow of the hood. He was hugging to his chest a brown teddy bear with a bright blue ribbon around its neck. The music was coming from the teddy bear, she was sure of it.
 

She remembered that Josh had had a teddy bear. Martha had given it to him for his first birthday. But it had plush black and white fur and had not played music.
 

Jenna tried to keep the flashlight trained on the child, but the beam shook with each step down. She lost the child and stopped again, sent the beam to the left through the dark.
 

She found him again on the other side of the basement, still holding the bear. She did not move, did not even breathe for a moment. Her eyes teared up and her heart pounded hard against her ribs. She took in a breath.
 

“Josh?” Her voice broke and she cleared her throat. “Josh? Is that you?”

The hood moved slightly.

Jenna stepped slowly down the stairs, keeping the light on the child. But he was gone. She gasped and stopped again, searched with the light.
 

The child was standing in the center of the basement, still holding the musical teddy bear, which continued to play its tune.

“Josh? Please hold still. Hold still for Mommy, okay?”

Two-thirds of the way down the stairs, she missed a step. Jenna screamed as she tumbled the rest of the way down. She landed on her back on the dirt floor with her feet up on the stairs, but she had not let go of the flashlight.
 

Footsteps thundered overhead. David appeared in the basement doorway. He was joined seconds later by Miles.

“Oh, my God, Jenna!” David raced down the stairs.

“No, it’s all right,” she said as she sat up. “I’m fine. I’m not hurt. Help me up.” She reached her left hand up and David pulled her to her feet. She looked up the stairs at Miles, who was on his way down. “No, honey, why don’t you go watch TV with Grandma. I’m fine, really, I’m not hurt at all. I just tripped near the bottom, is all.”
 

Miles stood on the stairs a moment, reluctant to go. “Okay,” he said. He turned and went back up the stairs as Martha appeared in the doorway.
 

“What the hell happened?” she said.

“I’m fine, Mom. I just tripped and scared myself, that’s all.”

“Well, you scared the crap out of us, too.” She left the doorway.

Jenna sniffled and wiped her eyes with a knuckle.

When David realized she was crying, he gripped her shoulders. “You
are
hurt!”
 

“No, I’m not, I was crying before I fell.”

“Why?”

Jenna turned away from him and held the long, heavy flashlight in both hands. She passed it slowly through the basement, over the boxes and crates stacked against the cinder-block walls.
 

“You’re not going to believe me,” she said, just as a sob escaped her.

He turned to her and put a hand on her back. “What’s wrong?”

She recognized the tone of his voice—he was a little irritated. Jenna turned to him and clutched his arm. The glow of the Mag-Lite oozed up over his face. “Honey, you’re going to think I’m crazy, but... Josh ... was just here.”
 

The features of his face relaxed for a moment, then tensed into a painful mask as his eyes slowly widened. “
What
?”
 

Jenna glanced up at the doorway to make sure it was empty. She didn’t want Miles or her mother to hear, not yet. She turned to David again and whispered rapidly, “This is the second time it’s happened. I saw him upstairs in the hallway yesterday. He just stood there at the end of the hall, watching me. And then he started to run toward me, but the phone rang and I turned away, and he disappeared. And just now, up in the kitchen, I heard music, and it was the same music I—”
 

“What are you
saying
?” His voice was loud, but quavered. “Are you hearing what you’re saying, Jenna?”
 

She placed her hand flat against his chest, over the blue sweatshirt he wore. “I know, honey, I know, but wait, just listen to me. It was the music I said I heard Wednesday morning. Remember, when I said I heard music in the middle of the night? It was Brahms’s “Lullaby,” honey—remember how I used to hum that to him all the time? And to Miles, both of them. And I was humming it to Josh when he ... just before he ... before we lost him. And down here, he was holding a teddy bear. Remember how much he loved his teddy—”
 

“
Every
kid loves his teddy bear, Jenna!” David said. It sounded as much like a plea as a declaration.
 

She closed her eyes a moment and nodded as she took a deep breath, tried to calm herself down. “You’re right. I know how this sounds. But listen to me, David—if it wasn’t Josh, then I’m crazy, because I saw him. I
saw
him. Does ... does that mean I’m crazy, David? Does it?” Cold fear gripped her, and she quaked with sobs.
 

David took her in his arms. The light was smothered between them. “You’re not crazy. I know you’re not crazy. Don’t think that.”
 

“But I saw him.”

“I see him, too.” David took a trembling breath. “You think I don’t see him?”

“But... I saw him in the hallway.”

“He disappeared, didn’t he?”

After a moment, Jenna nodded against his chest.

“And he disappeared down here, too, didn’t he? I mean, if he were here, he’d still be here, right? He’d be here right now, wouldn’t he?”
 

“I know, I know, it doesn’t make any sense, all I know is—”

He held her upper arms gently as he pushed her a few inches back and looked at her. “I’m saying it makes
perfect
sense, Jenna. I’ve been thinking about it because I see him, too. And I think it’s because we’ve moved to a new place, and we couldn’t bring him with us. So we’re missing him even more than usual. Have you had that feeling?”
 

A fresh round of sobs came when Jenna realized she
had
been feeling that way, but had been unaware—or unwilling to be aware of it—until now.
 

He held her to him again. “That’s all it is, honey. We’re just missing him all over again.”

Jenna stood there and cried on his shirt for a long time. After a while, she became quiet. They turned and started up the stairs, Jenna first.
 

“Be careful, okay?” David said.

Jenna looked up at the dead bulbs. “Those bulbs must be old. They blew out as soon as I turned them on.”

“I’ll have to replace them. I’m gonna have to come down here and clean up this mess sooner or later anyway. Might as well have light.”
 

She stopped on the stairs and looked over her shoulder at him. “Will you do it tomorrow?”

“Look, I’d rather you just didn’t come down here, okay? Miles, either. I’m afraid you’re going to fall from the
top
of these stairs, and then you’ll—”
 

“Do it tomorrow. Please?”

He smiled. “You and your electricity thing. Okay. I’ll do it tomorrow.” Outside the laundry room, he put the Mag-Lite back in its place beside the back door.
 

Jenna woke at 2:41 with a full bladder. David snored beside her. Wind blew the rain against the windowpane above the headboard. She got up and shivered in the cold, slipped on David’s robe, and padded barefoot out of the bedroom. She went down the hall to the bathroom and relieved herself. When she stepped into the hallway again, she stopped and listened.
 

She could hear David snoring in the bedroom, the wind and rain outside, but nothing else. The house was silent.

She noticed Miles’s bedroom door was closed, which was odd. She and David always left his door open about a foot—Miles preferred it that way, always had. Light streamed out from under the closed door.
 

Jenna went to his door and opened it a crack. Miles was sound asleep in his bed with the overhead light on.

“Damned horror movies,” she whispered. She reached in, turned the light off, and left the door open several inches before going back to bed.
 

Miles opened his eyes in the dark and was immediately wide awake. Was it because he’d heard the voice? Or was it only because one of his parents had noticed his door was closed and his light was on, and had turned it off? He’d closed the door hoping they wouldn’t notice his overhead light was on, but apparently someone had, and had left him in the dark.