We Are Here (33 page)

“But
I
can see you.”

“Yes, you can. John too, evidently. Some people have always been able to see things out of the corner of their eye. And children sometimes, and animals, cats especially. With others it happens when we get drawn to their attention—if something gets knocked over, or someone points us out. Once you’ve seen one it’s easier to see others, apparently. You call these people ‘mediums.’ Luckily, almost all of them are fake.”

“We saw you because we were trying to find out who was following Catherine Warren.”

Lizzie nodded.

“And why were you?”

“You can’t work it out?” Lizzie’s voice was almost too quiet to hear. “I’m her imaginary friend. Or, I was.”

“What, like … the things that
kids
have?”

Lizzie smiled stiffly. “Yes. Those things that kids have. And then forget. That’s what happens. People grow up and forget. Doesn’t mean we just
stop
.”

She turned to Kristina, looking old and miserable. “You ever have a dream, something you thought you’d do one day, that you fantasized about for hour after hour, and planned to the last degree, and truly believed you’d make part of your future come what may … But then life changed, or you did, and you slowly forgot about it?”

“I guess.”

“We’re like that. Like the guitars that sit in the corner of living rooms, never played. Like plans for the year in Paris that never happens. Like months of unrequited longing that never ends in a kiss. Once that much energy has been poured into something it never completely goes away. It’s a part of that person’s life forever, something that didn’t happen. Negatives shape people too, like white space on a page. A dream doesn’t die just because it doesn’t come true. And … neither do we.”

“Do you—”

But then Lizzie was standing, and a second later the plump girl leapt to her feet and was running, fast—the boyfriend not far behind. Lizzie set after them.

Kristina did her best to follow. She saw a woman weaving on the side of the street, fifty yards away, holding the hand of a child—a girl about four or five years old. Traffic was coursing up and down the street—not thickly, but fast.

The little girl seemed to be more aware of this fact than her mother, who was determined to cross the street and to do it right there and now. Flaxon was headed straight toward them. She was fast—eerily fast.

The little girl’s mother kept making attempts to cross the road. The girl looked unsure, but this was her mother, and she had a tight grip on her hand. The little girl was not in control. She was going to have to trust that her mother knew what she was doing.

Flaxon got to within twenty feet and decelerated, so abruptly that Kristina had to pull her head back to see her again. She was catching up to Lizzie now but neither of them were going to make it there before whatever was about to happen took place.

The mother finally lost patience with the traffic. You could tell this from the set of her shoulders, from something that communicated itself through the air. She’d decided now was good enough and she was done waiting for the assholes to let her cross.

Her girl had become distracted and was no longer looking at the cars, but frowning … turning to look around her, as if aware something was coming her way.

Flaxon strode right past behind them, grabbing the mother’s shoulder just as she started to step out into the road. She pulled it hard—a quick, sharp movement—before carrying on past.

The girl looked up, as if knowing something had passed behind them. Her mother was pulled off balance. With one foot raised to step out into the road, there was no way of keeping herself upright.

She toppled backward awkwardly, kept from crashing outright by her daughter’s hold on her, just as a motorcycle came from out of nowhere.

It came so fast and so close that you could smell the leather the driver was wearing and hear the smeared residue of his snarl to get the fuck out of the way.

The woman landed flat on her back on the sidewalk, mouth open, eyes horribly wide. She knew damned well what had just happened and how it would have gone if chance hadn’t caused her to slip and fall backward.

“Oh holy Jesus,” she said. “Oh Jesus, Jesus.”

Her little girl stood blinking down at her. “Mom, are you okay? What happened?”

“I’m okay,” the woman said, getting back to her feet. She looked around and saw a pedestrian crossing a hundred feet up the street. She seemed shaken, pulled back out of whatever mental or chemical fugue had brought her so close to being a small, sad item somewhere low down on page seven of tomorrow’s newspaper. “Let’s use the crosswalk. We should
always
do that, right?”

“Right.” The girl reached up and took her mother’s hand again.

Her mother gripped it tight and looked down at her, face trembling. “Okay, honey.”

They waited at the light until it was safe to cross, and then did so slowly and very carefully. Kristina watched. Behind her she was aware of Lizzie going over to Flaxon and kissing her softly on the cheek.

“Get off,” Flaxon muttered. “Weirdo.”

But she looked pleased.

As they got to the other side, the little girl looked back at where Kris stood with Lizzie and Flaxon and her guy. Kristina saw the girl looking right at her, didn’t want to be a scary adult, and smiled.

The girl registered this, but it hadn’t been Kris she was looking for.

Kristina became aware that her phone was ringing. It was the restaurant. For a while she’d forgotten she had a job and that she was now very late for it. Right now, in the midst of this evening and what had just (nearly) happened, she didn’t give a crap about serving people more cheap wine than they needed. But she hit the button and prepared to use her charm on Mario one more time.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I got–”

It wasn’t Mario, but his sister. She sounded freaked out. “You have to hurry. You have to go there now.”

“What? Why?”

“It’s John. He’s in the hospital.”

Talia sat at her table. Her laptop was in front of her but it was closed. That was okay. A growl in her stomach reminded her she hadn’t eaten anything. That was okay too. The hunger was hypothetical. The words … well, she’d written nothing for two days. Nothing in the novel, nothing even into the diary where she’d written at least
something
every day since the shooting star. The conversation with George had planted a seed in her mind, a seed that had grown, sucking up whatever nutrients the words used to thrive on.

At work it was easier to ignore. There was always stuff going on, somebody to greet and serve, something to clean or refill. Except for her exchange with David—which she’d come out of feeling like a bit of an ass, though she doubted he’d have noticed anything—work just rolled on, lots of business as usual.

But at home …

Of course it was absurd, because not one thing had
changed
, but her home felt different. It was still tidy. It remained pretty full of cats. Everything, as far as she could tell, was in its place.

Her spatula was where it was supposed to be.

In the time since, she’d wondered about that. She’d wondered if maybe it
hadn’t
been a case of her breaking the habit of many years by hanging the damned thing up on the other side, but if someone else had been in here, if they’d taken the spatula down to look at it and then put it back up in the wrong place.

Why would somebody do that? No reason.

Unless they’d recognized the spatula, perhaps. It was old and battered. Talia had owned it a very long time—had used it to lever some of those own-brand brownies out of the baking tray back in the mists of yesteryear.
Maybe
someone who’d been around back then might have thought to take a nostalgic look at it.

Maybe.

She’d looked around the trailer, looked
hard
, and hadn’t been able to find much else out of place. Everything was shipshape and socked away, as Ed used to say. She’d noticed something about her diaries, though. These were kept in neat rows on the shelves behind the little TV, which she hardly ever watched. Every one was the same, inexpensive red exercise books of the type that didn’t cost much at any time of year but you could get even cheaper during back-to-school promotions—which is what she’d always done, buying ten at once and stashing until needed. They stood in orderly ranks, the spines getting more faded as they went back in time, aged by the light that came through the window in the afternoons. She kept them in order. This wasn’t some anal-retentive thing or the result of any effort. You finished a book, you put it next to the previous one and did the same the next time and the next. Much like events in the real world, chronology looked after itself.

Except … last night she’d found a couple out of order. Way back—from the early days, on the far left of the top shelf. It could be that she’d put them back in the wrong order; once in a while she’d pull a volume down to remind herself of things that had happened and to convince herself that keeping a diary wasn’t a wholly pointless exercise. She made sure to put the book back in its right place, though, which was easy given each was numbered on the spine with the dates it covered and also a sequential number. It’d be hard to imagine messing that up, even if she’d had a beer or two, which (though she’d never again toyed with the too-many-is-not-enough approach from the months after Ed’s death) was not unknown. Could also be a catrelated event. Some of the younger ones liked to go nuts midevening, galloping around the place and knocking things down. A couple of times they’d knocked books off those shelves. She might have been in a hurry to clean up the mess and shoved them back up there without worrying too much about the order.

Did she remember that happening? No.

But then, presumably she wouldn’t.

She didn’t lock the trailer when she went into town. She took her laptop with her, always. There was nothing else worth stealing.

So somebody
could
have come in here, taken down a volume or two, and looked through. The town’s younger element were likely too consistently stoned for a mission of that complexity, though, and lacked the imagination. Anyone who was enough of an asshole to do it would have probably messed the place up, too, and left a turd in the middle of the floor for good measure.

A little mystery, huh. Maybe she should tell David about it, see if he could use it to break through his writer’s block. But she doubted she would. She’d seen the way he’d looked when she’d told him about George’s hitchhiker. She’d given him enough.

After a while she tired of running the problem around and got up to feed the cats. It was nearly ten already. She should have done it hours before. The entire crew was in attendance, and most stood up with her, knowing it was well past time.

As she squatted down to shell the gunk out of tins into their bowls, Talia found herself noticing the bottom of the kitchen cabinets. Nicks. Little scrapes and rust spots. Her home felt small tonight. And make-do, and old. It’d never felt like that before. It was Talia Willocks’s firm, comfortable exterior, the side she showed to the world—or would have, if anyone ever came to see. Now it felt like a bubble had burst, releasing whatever had made it a home and leaving a thin, empty skin.

She straightened. Looked around. A fifty-five-year-old woman living by herself in a trailer with a bunch of cats. Is this what the younger Tally-Anne thought was coming down the road? No. That hot little number had foreseen a few more years of fun and games and then a marriage day—be it ever so simple and small, catered by friends and served on the finest paper plates Dollar Tree had to offer. A handful of kids. A little house. School concerts. Yard sales. Stuff like that. She didn’t miss most of it. By her age she’d be out the other side of those things, probably be cussing about how much free babysitting Grandma was getting hit up for.

But she’d have someone to complain to, someone who’d know she didn’t really mean it, a man who’d be by her side for all the stuff coming down the pike, as he’d been there for everything before.

That’s
what was missing.

The cats snaffled and chomped around their bowls. Talia watched them with love.

And then the knocking came on the door.

As she stood outside the trailer, the wind rose. It had been that way the previous night, too, when the knocking had come a second time—though then she hadn’t opened the door, but stayed inside, huddled on the couch. She felt that when someone who wasn’t there came knocking, this was the best approach.

Tonight she’d decided differently. That was why, though she’d taken her bath as usual, she wasn’t wearing stretch pants and the pink toweling robe. She wore a dress in beige and cream that she’d had a few years, and sure it was very tight around the hips and upper arms and everywhere else and she probably looked like a tank in desert camouflage, but it was the best she had.

There’d been no one there when she opened the door, but Talia had decided you didn’t hear knocking on your house three nights running if there was truly nobody outside.

She heard a rustling sound and glanced down to see Tilly by her feet, looking up at her. Probably wondering why the big human was outside the mothership at this time of night.

“Mama’s just waiting,” she told her, and bent to scratch her ears. “Be back inside in a little while.”

Maybe the cat understood, maybe she didn’t, but after a few more sniffs of the air she turned and went back in the trailer.

Talia stayed where she was. She wasn’t waiting, not really. What could she be waiting for?

But she stayed.

Ten minutes later she heard someone call. It was faint, as it had been on the first night. Very weak, as if the caller had traveled some distance and was weary and that low cry was the best he could muster for now.

This time the sound did not come from up the direction of the graveyard, however. It came from the other direction, past the end of the road, from somewhere along the track that led toward the steep sides of the creek. It was about the same distance away, though, and she could hear what it said at least as clearly as before.