The Charlie Parker Collection 2

by John Connolly

  “Why did you have to wake her?” said Rachel, holding Sam against her and stroking her gently on the back. “It took me hours to get her down.”

  I found my voice.

  “She was awake. I just went over to look at her and —”

  “It doesn’t matter. It’s done.”

  She turned her back to me, and I left them both and undressed in the bathroom, then took a long shower. When I was done, I went downstairs and found a pair of sweatpants and a T-shirt, then headed into my office and rousted Walter from the couch. I’d make a bed there for the night. Sam had stopped crying, and there was no sound from upstairs for a time, until at last I heard Rachel’s soft footfalls on the stairs. She had put on a dressing gown over her nightshirt. Her feet were bare. She leaned against the door, watching me. I couldn’t say anything at first. When I tried to speak there was again that tickling in my throat. I wanted to shout at her, and I wanted to hold her. I wanted to tell her that I was sorry, that everything would be all right, and I wanted her to say the same to me, even if neither of us was telling the entire truth.

  “I was just tired,” she said. “I was surprised to see you back.”

  Despite all that Joan had said, I still wanted more.

  “You acted like you thought I was going to drop her, or hurt her,” I said. “It’s not the first time, either.”

  “No, it’s not that,” she said. She moved toward me. “I know you’d never do anything to harm her.”

  Rachel tried to touch my hair, and to my shame, I pulled away. She started to cry, and the sight of her tears was shocking to me.

  “I don’t know what it is,” she said. “I don’t know what’s wrong. It’s — you weren’t here, and someone came. Something came, and I was frightened. Do you understand? I’m scared, and I hate being scared. I’m better than that, but you make me feel this way.”

  Now it was out. Her voice was raised as her face contorted into an expression of utter hurt and rage and grief.

  “You make me feel this way for Sam, for myself, for you. You go away when we need you to be here, and you put yourself in harm’s way for — for what? For strangers, for people you’ve never met? I’m here. Sam is here. This is your life now. You’re a father, you’re my lover. I love you — God Jesus, I do love you, I love you so much — but you can’t keep doing this to me and to us. You have to choose, because I can’t go through another year like this one. Do you know what I’ve done? Do you know what your work has made me do? I have blood on my hands. I can smell it on my fingers. I look out of the window and I can see the place where I spilled it. Every day I glimpse those trees, and I remember what happened there. It all comes back to me. I killed a man to protect our daughter, and last night I would have done it again. I took his life out there in the marshes, and I was glad. I hit him, and I hit him again, and I wanted to keep hitting him. I wanted to tear him to pieces, and for him to feel every second of it, every last bit of pain. I saw the blood rise in the water, and I watched him drown, and I was happy when he died. I knew what he wanted to do to me and to my baby, and I fucking wasn’t going to let that happen. I fucking hated him, and I hated you for making me do what I did, for putting me in that place. I hated you.”

  Slowly, she slid to the floor. Her mouth was wide open, her lower lip curled in upon itself, tears falling and falling and falling, misery without end.

  “I hated you,” she repeated. “Do you understand? I can’t do this. I can’t hate you.”

  And then the words ceased and there were only sounds without meaning. I heard Sam crying, but I couldn’t go to her. All that I could do was reach out to Rachel, whispering and kissing as I tried to quell the pain, until at last we lay upon the floor together, her fingers on my back and her mouth against my neck as we tried to hold on to all that we were losing by binding ourselves to each other.

  We slept together that night. In the morning she packed some things, put the baby in the child seat of Joan’s car, and prepared to leave.

  “We’ll talk,” I said, as she stood by the car.

  “Yes.”

  I kissed her on the mouth. She put her arms around me, and her fingers touched the back of my neck. They lingered there, and then were gone, but the scent of her remained, even after the car had disappeared, even after the rain came, even after sunlight faded and darkness rose and the stars scattered the night sky like sequins fallen from the gown of a woman half imagined, half recalled.

  And through the emptiness of the house a cold crept, and as I fell into sleep a voice whispered:

  I told you she would leave. Only we remain.

  A touch like gossamer fell upon my skin, and Rachel’s perfume was lost in the stink of earth and blood.

  And in New York, the young prostitute named Ellen woke from her place beside G-Mack and felt a hand upon her mouth. She tried to struggle, until she felt the cool of the gun metal against her cheek.

  “Close your eyes,” said a man’s voice, and she thought that she recognized it from somewhere. “Close your eyes and be still.”

  She did as she was told. The hand remained over her mouth, but the gun was moved away from her. Beside her, she heard G-Mack start to wake. The painkillers made him drowsy, but they usually wore off during the night, forcing him to take some more.

  “Huh?” said G-Mack.

  She heard five words spoken, and then there was a sound like a book being dropped upon the floor. Something warm sprayed her face. The hand was removed from her mouth.

  “Keep your eyes closed,” said the voice.

  She kept her eyes squeezed shut until she was certain that the man was gone. When she opened them again, there was a hole in G-Mack’s forehead and the pillows were red with his blood.

  16

  Without Rachel and Sam around, I fell into a black place. I don’t recall much of the twenty-four hours that followed their departure. I slept, I ate little, and I didn’t answer the phone. I thought about drinking, but I was already so consumed by self-loathing that I was unable to lower myself further. Messages were left, but none that mattered, and after a time I just stopped listening to them. I tried to watch some television, even flicked through the newspaper, but nothing could hold my attention. I pushed thoughts of Alice, of Louis, of Martha far from me. I wanted no part of them.

  And as the hours crept slowly by a pain grew inside me, like an ulcer bleeding into my system. I lay fetally upon the couch, my knees drawn into my chest, and spasmed as the hurt ebbed and flowed. I thought that I heard noises from upstairs, the footsteps of a mother and a child, but when I went to look there was nobody there. A towel had fallen from the clothes dryer, the door of which now stood open, and I could not recall if it was I who had left it that way. I thought about calling Rachel every second minute, but I did not lift the phone. I knew that nothing would come of it if I did. What could I say to her? What promises could I make without doubting, even as I spoke the words, that I would be able to keep them?

  Again and again, Joan’s words came back to me. I had lost so much once; such a loss would be unendurable a second time. In the new and unwelcome quiet of the house, I felt time slipping once more, so that past and present blurred, the dams that I had tried so hard to erect between what once was and what yet might be weakening still further, spilling agonizing memories into my new life, mocking the hope that old ghosts could ever be laid to rest.

  It was the silence that brought them, the sense of existences briefly halted. Rachel still had clothes in the closets and cosmetics on her dressing table. Her shampoo hung in the shower stall, and there was a strand of her long, red hair lying like a question mark on the floor beneath the sink. I could smell her on the pillow, and the shape of her head was clear on the cushions of the couch by our bedroom window, where she liked to lie and read. I found a white ribbon beneath our bed, and an earring that had slipped behind the radiator. An unwashed coffee cup bore a trace of her lipstick, and there was a candy bar in the refrigerator, half eaten.

  Sam’
s little crib still stood in the center of her room, for Joan had retained the one used by her own children and it was easier to simply retrieve that from her attic rather than disassemble Sam’s own crib and transport it to Vermont. I think, perhaps, that Rachel was also reluctant to remove the crib from our house, knowing the pain it would cause me with its unavoidable implications of permanence. Some of Sam’s toys and clothes lay on the floor by the wall. I picked them up and put the dirty bibs and tops into the laundry basket. I would wash them later. I touched the place where she slept. I caught her baby smell on my fingers. She smelled as Jennifer once did.

  And I remembered: all of these things I did before, when blood lay drying in the cracks on the kitchen floor. There was discarded clothing upon a bed, and a doll on a child’s chair. There was a cup on a table, half filled with coffee, and a glass bearing traces of milk. There were cosmetics and brushes and hair and lipstick and lives ended in the middle of tasks half-done, so that for a moment it seemed as though they must surely return, that they had merely slipped away for a few moments and would come back eventually to finish their nighttime drinks, to place the doll on the shelf where it belonged, to resume their lives and permit me to share that place with them, to love me and to die with me and not leave me alone to grieve for them, until at last I grieved so long and so hard that something returned, phantasms conjured up by my pain, two entities that were almost my wife and child.

  Almost.

  Now I was in another house, and again there were reminders of lives around me, of tasks left unfinished and words left unsaid, except that these existences were continuing elsewhere. There was no blood on the floor, not yet. There was no finality here, merely a pause for breath, a reconsideration. They could go on, perhaps not in this place, but somewhere far away, somewhere safe and secure.

  Fading light, falling rain, and night descending like soot upon the earth. Voices half heard, and touches in the darkness. Blood in my nose, and dirt in my hair.

  We remain.

  Always, we remain.

  I awoke to the sound of the telephone. I waited for the machine to pick up the message. A man’s voice spoke, vaguely familiar but nobody I could place. I let the cassette roll on.

  Later, after I had showered and dressed, I walked Walter as far as Ferry Beach and let him play in the surf. Outside the Scarborough Fire Department, men were cleaning down the engines with hoses, the winter sunlight occasionally breaking through the clouds and causing the droplets to sparkle like jewels before they disintegrated upon the ground. In the early days of the fire department, steel locomotive wheels were used to summon the volunteers, and there was still one outside Engine 3’s station over at Pleasant Hill. Then, in the late 1940s, Elizabeth Libby and her daughter, Shirley, took over the emergency dispatch service, operating out of the store on Black Point Road where they lived and worked. They would activate their Gamewell alarm system when a call came in, which in turn set off air horns at the station houses. The two women were on duty twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, and in their first eleven years in charge of the service they went away together only twice.

  One of my earliest memories of Scarborough was of watching old Clayton Urquhart presenting a plaque to Elizabeth Libby for long service in 1971. My grandfather was a volunteer member of the fire department, helping out when the need arose, and my grandmother was one of the women who worked the mobile canteen that provided food and drink to the firefighters when they were tackling big blazes, or fires of long duration, so they were both there for the presentation. Elizabeth Libby, who used to give me candy when we visited her, wore winged glasses and had a white flower pinned to her dress. She dabbed happily at her eyes with a white lace handkerchief as people she’d known all her life said nice things about her in public.

  I tied Walter to the cemetery gate and walked to the place where my grandfather and grandmother were interred. She had died long before he, and I had few lasting memories of her apart from that occasion when Elizabeth Libby received her plaque. I had buried my grandfather myself, taking a spade after the mourners had gone and slowly covering the pine casket in which he lay. It was a warm day, and I laid my jacket upon a headstone. I think I talked to him while I worked, but I don’t remember what I said. I probably spoke to him as I had always done, for men are ever boys with their grandfathers. He was a sheriff’s deputy once, but a bad case poisoned him, taking hold of his conscience and tormenting it so that he knew no rest from the thoughts that pursued him. In the end, it would be left to me finally to close the circle and help to bring an end to the demon that had taunted my grandfather. I wondered if he left those agonies behind him when he died, or if they followed him into the next world. Did peace come to him with his last breath, finally silencing the voices that had haunted him for so long, or did it come later, when a boy that he had once danced upon his knee fell upon the snow and watched as an old horror bled away to nothing?

  I pulled a weed from beside his headstone. It came away easily, as such plants will. My grandfather taught me how to distinguish the weeds from the plants: good flowers have deep roots, and the bad ones dwell in shallow soil. When he told me things, I did not forget them. I filed them away, in part because I knew that he might ask me about them at some future date, and I wanted to be able to answer him correctly.

  “You have old eyes,” he used to tell me. “You should have an old man’s knowledge to match them.”

  But he slowly began to grow frail, and his memory started to fail him, the Alzheimer’s stealing him away, little by little, relentlessly thieving all that was valuable to him, slowly disassembling the old man’s memory. And so it was left to me to remind him of all that he had once told me, and I became the teacher to my grandfather.

  Good flowers have deep roots, and bad ones dwell in shallow soil.

  Shortly before he died, the disease gave him a temporary release, and things that had seemed lost forever returned to him. He remembered his wife, and their marriage, and the daughter they had together. He recalled weddings and divorces, baptisms and funerals, the names of colleagues who had gone before him into the last great night that glows faintly with the light of a promised dawn. Words and memories rushed from him in a great torrent, and he lived his life over again in a matter of hours. Then it was all gone, and not a single moment of his past remained, as though that flood had scoured away the final traces of him, leaving an empty dwelling with opaque windows, reflecting all but revealing nothing, for there was nothing left to reveal.

  But in those last minutes of lucidity, he took my hand, and his eyes burned more brightly than they had ever done before. We were alone. His day was drawing to a close, and the sun was setting upon him.

  “Your father,” he said. “You’re not like him, you know. All families have their burdens to bear, their troubled souls. My mother, she was a sad woman, and my father could never make her happy. It wasn’t his fault, and it wasn’t hers. She was just the way that she was, and people didn’t understand it then. It was a sickness, and it took her in the end, like cancer took your mother. Your father, he had something of that sickness in him too, that sadness. I think maybe that was part of what attracted your mother to him: it spoke to something inside of her, even if she didn’t always want to hear what it said.”

  I tried to remember my father, but as the years passed after his death it grew harder and harder to picture him. When I tried to visualize him, there was always a shadow across his face, or his features were distorted and unclear. He was a policeman, and he shot himself with his own gun. They said that he did it because he couldn’t live with himself. They told me that he killed a girl and a boy, after the boy seemed about to pull a weapon on him. They couldn’t explain why the girl had also died. I guess there was no explanation, or none that could suffice.

  “I never got to ask him why he did what he did, but I might have understood it a little,” said my grandfather. “You see, I have some of that sadness too, and so do you. I’ve fought it all my life
. I wasn’t going to let it take me the way that it took my mother, and you’re not going to let it take you either.”

  He gripped my hand tighter. A look of confusion passed across his face. He stopped talking and narrowed his eyes, trying desperately to remember what it was that he wanted to say.

  “The sadness,” I said. “You were talking about the sadness.”

  His face relaxed. I saw a single tear break from his right eye and slip gently down his cheek.

  “It’s different in you,” he said. “It’s harsher, and some of it comes from outside, from another place. We didn’t pass it on to you. You brought it with you. It’s part of you, part of your nature. It’s old and —”

  He gritted his teeth, and his body shook as he fought for those last minutes of clarity.

  “They have names.”

  The words were forced out, spit from his system, ejected like tumors from within.

  “They have names,” he repeated, and his voice was different now, harsh and filled with a desperate hatred. For an instant he was transformed, and he was no longer my grandfather but another being, one that had taken hold of his ailing, fading spirit and briefly reenergized it in order to communicate with a world it could not otherwise reach. “All of them, they have names, and they’re here. They’ve always been here. They love hurt and pain and misery, and they’re always searching, always looking.

  “And they’ll find you, because it’s in you as well. You have to fight it. You can’t be like them, because they’ll want you. They’ve always wanted you.”