A Haunting of Words

by Brian Paone et al.

  “I don’t understand.” She sounded terrified.

  He dragged her to the rear of his mother’s car and punched right next to the license plate. The trunk slowly opened.

  Samantha gasped. “Oh … my … God.”

  She snatched her arm from his grip and placed all ten fingers against the sides of her lips and took a step forward. She reached into the trunk and brushed her hair away from her dead body’s forehead.

  Mark laughed. “And you thought some signature on a piece of paper would keep me away.”

  She leaned closer to her corpse and touched the ligature marks around her neck.

  “You … strangled me?”

  “You wouldn’t stop flopping around like a fish.”

  Samantha fell to her knees in a heap of sobs and undecipherable screams.

  “Now it’s time to say goodbye,” he said.

  She collected herself for a moment and looked quizzically at his face.

  He closed the trunk, sealing her cadaver inside, and pushed the car toward the waterline. The vehicle gained speed as the downward slope of the ground became steeper. Mark took his hands off the back of the car and watched it careen into the water. Massive ripples crossed Jupiter Island’s lake as the sedan floated and then slowly sank.

  He turned to Samantha. She rocked back and forth while trapping her knees with her arms.

  Dawson offered her his hand. She accepted, and he helped her to her feet.

  Mark started to cough. A deep, guttural cough. He lunged forward, grabbing his chest and heaving. He doubled over and fought with every ounce of energy to inhale. Water projectiled from Samantha’s mouth as she panicked, trying to catch her breath. They both fell on the ground, gasping for any bit of air they could drag into their lungs. Mark convulsed and clawed at his chest. Samantha’s lips were pressed against the dirt; with every breath she easily exhaled, she struggled to draw any new air into her lungs.

  Dawson looked at the lake. The car was almost completely submerged. He returned his gaze to the two people flopping on the ground at his feet, drowning in air. He looked back at the car and then again at Mark and Samantha. The farther the car sank, the more frantically they flailed, unable to squeak even the slightest breath into their mouths.

  The top of the car completely disappeared, and Mark and Samantha spewed water from their noses and mouths. Samantha started to seize; her body twitched and spasmed, like she was being electrocuted.

  Mark reached for Dawson and gurgled with one last dying effort. “What … have … you … done … to … me?”

  Dawson looked at Samantha. She had stopped moving. Her eyes remained open. He kicked her to make sure her phantom body was just as dead and drowned as her physical body in the trunk of the car.

  He looked across the lake and noticed even the bubbles had stopped floating to the surface where the car had sunk. Then he kicked Mark’s lifeless body, again to make sure his revenant body was also just as dead and drowned as his corporeal one in the backseat of the car.

  “It’s a shame murder victims don’t ever know they’re dead,” Dawson said and kicked the gun into a leaf pile, the muzzle still warm from the shot he had fired moments earlier.

  Bonnie jumped into his arms and purred when Dawson lovingly patted her.

  Mark released the last batch of air he had kept trapped in his lungs. Water poured from the bullet hole in his forehead, like a faucet. He thought he could hear the creaking of the rope attached to Dawson’s hanging body as it swung in the breeze, but the sound of rushing water as the car landed on the lake floor was too loud for him to be sure.

  Then nothingness and silence.

  Silence.

  Silenc .

  Silen .

  Sile .

  Sil .

  Si .

  S .

  .

  I was only five when Mom brought home a puppy, and for me it was better than winning the lottery. Snow blew in the front door when she entered, and the pup was such a tiny thing that Mom carried him inside her coat, snuggled warm against her body.

  Dad wasn’t as excited. “A puppy? A Labrador? Really, Bev, don’t we have enough going on right now?” He looked at me when he said it, but I was too excited about the puppy to feel the slight.

  Mom set him on the floor and he yawned, all squinty eyes and puppy breath. He looked around for a moment, sniffed the carpet, and made a beeline for one of my stuffed animals. When I took it away from him, he blinked at me and peed right there, in the middle of the living room.

  I wanted to call him Tinkles because, for the first week or so, that’s almost all he did. But Mom said his name was Rowdy, and he became my very best friend.

  That was eleven years ago.

  His breath doesn’t smell like puppy anymore. It’s gotten foul over the past few months because his kidneys are failing. He takes a long time to get up now, and it’s painful to watch him stumble after a ball, even if it’s just rolled across the kitchen floor.

  I’ve known since he was a puppy that this day would come.

  We start with a car ride to the dog park early in the morning so no one else will be there. Rowdy can’t run with the younger dogs, and it breaks Mom’s heart to see him wobble after a happy pack that leaves the old gray-faced Lab behind. We sit under Rowdy’s favorite tree with a view of the pond, the fields just starting to green up for spring.

  After the dog park, we go for ice cream, but Rowdy only takes a couple of licks, and anyone can see he only does it because he can tell how much Dad wants him to. He hasn’t really eaten much of anything for a week, and the vet said that’s how we’d know it was time.

  Mom cries the whole way from the Dairy Hut to the vet’s office. It breaks my heart to see her cry, but there is nothing I can do to make it better.

  The doctor is a kind woman who gets right down on the floor with us.

  “Oh, old man,” she says to Rowdy, who is lying on a fuzzy fleece blanket. “What a good boy you’ve been.” She pats his bony head, explains the procedure, and leaves us alone in the exam room while she gets everything ready.

  I lean over and whisper into Rowdy’s ear. “It’s just a shot, buddy. You’ll just go to sleep. It won’t hurt or anything.”

  His hearing went a long time ago, and I know he can’t hear me, but his tail thumps a little at the nearness of my face to his.

  “It never gets easier,” Mom says, and Dad kneels behind her, sniffling into her hair. “I thought I’d do better this time, but …”

  Dad squeezes her shoulders. “I know, honey. Just can’t imagine the house with no dogs in it, you know?”

  The vet comes back in, and Rowdy doesn’t even move when she pokes his skin with the first shot. In a few minutes his eyelids go slack and his breathing slows.

  “Are you ready?” The vet holds a syringe full of bright blue liquid.

  Mom and Dad nod.

  The liquid flows into Rowdy’s vein, and before it’s all in, his breaths go silent.

  Mom collapses over his still form, and Dad wipes his eyes.

  “Thanks,” he says to the vet. “We appreciate everything you did.”

  The vet nods, her hand resting on Rowdy’s still chest. “Two dogs in two years is too many. Wish we’d had fifteen years, like Ranger. I’m so sorry we didn’t get longer with Rowdy.”

  She leaves and Dad bends over Mom, whose tears wet the fur on Rowdy’s soft ears.

  They don’t see when Rowdy jumps up out of his body. He yawns and blinks at me, just like that very first day they brought him home.

  “Go see Ranger,” Mom whispers. “He’s waiting for you on the other side.”

  But I’m not on the other side. I’m right here where I’ve always been. With Mom and Dad and my best friend Rowdy.

  We sniff a greeting, and Rowdy leaps across the room, free of painful hips and sick stomach. Dad helps Mom out of the hospital, and Rowdy and I bound after them into the warm spring sunshine.

  I watch you from the walls, and I see your
pretty life playing out like a shadow show. I watch you whenever I can because I have nothing else that I can do. I’m sorry if I scare you, I don’t mean to. If I could, I would be part of your life, and I would learn to love you. I speak this to each of you who have lived in my house, to all those I have tried to love, and lost.

  Time doesn’t move the same for me as it does for you, although each moment for me is honey-sweet or bitter with my own mistakes.

  I’ve had a long time to think. When I was living in this old house, I knew every creak of each board of the floors that I scrubbed gray, cleaning on my hands and knees. They walk across the floors, and I try to stave off the deep anger that I feel when I see how little they care for the planks that came from living trees, that were carefully milled and installed by my father, still so rough they gave me splinters.

  In those days, there were no mops on sticks. Now I see lazy cleaners putting rags on sticks and smearing the filth around, then they say they have cleaned the floor.

  Not only have they not cleaned the floor, but by being haphazard in their ways, they show a disrespect for what had once been towering trees that danced in the wind. They had lived and died as summer turned to autumn turned to winter and then, like a miracle, they were reborn each spring with infant buds. The same could not be said for me. I aged and my life turned into the grays of a winter sky, and spring never came to renew me.

  My sister and I were only a few years apart: pretty Alice who could do no wrong and me, the elder, the spinster. My name is Elizabeth. The difference between us was that she was sugar that melted away and vanished in death, leaving nothing of herself behind. Meanwhile, I was, and am, a salmon bone that stuck in the throat of death and refused to leave anything behind and move on to wherever those fragrant blossoms who move on go.

  Beautiful Alice, who had married Lawrence, the boy two years younger than me, who had thought I was an old lady when I was eighteen and he was sixteen. How I had loved him, his ochre eyes and his curly dark blond hair that fell into those same earth-toned eyes. I thought about the color of ochre his eyes might be; it’s a family of tones and in some lights, they shone like sienna and others—like ferrous ochre. I thought about his colors while scrubbing the floors even after their wedding. Pretty Alice with her smiling children. She never grew old, she only dimmed her light, and I tended her until her light dimmed and then went out. There was no horror of death in her. It wasn’t violent or disgusting anymore than a flower dying for want of water is anything but a sorrow rather than a visceral showing.

  I thought Lawrence would marry me after her death. He cried on my shoulder like a little boy, and Alice’s son held my hand while I held her infant daughter in my arms, and they lowered her into the rain-soaked earth. Earth the colors of ochre. Sienna, ochre, umber—the ground was colored like layers of cake as they laid my beloved sister to rest. I envied her ability to rest when I must go ever on, but still I thought of Lawrence and how he needed me and how I needed him.

  Alice and Lawrence had moved back to the family home when I was twenty-three. Alice had married Lawrence at the respectable age of seventeen, only a few days after Lawrence had turned eighteen. I was twenty, and after Alice married, everyone whispered behind their hands that I would never marry. They were right, but the ones who said I would never know the embrace of a man were wrong.

  My parents’ deaths, sudden and brutal, were the catalyst that had brought Lawrence and Alice back home. It was a big old house that cried out for a family. The gray boards chattered merrily to the sound of the children’s feet. The boards had ceased to be trees a long time ago, they had ceased to feel the wind blowing on their hardened skin or the rain caressing their cheeks. Their leaves caught the raindrops, and the old roots, gray under the earth like worms or the dead boards or my dress, were the only reminder to them that they were alive.

  Then, like a girl who realizes all at once that her dreams will never be realized, the trees were cut down and crashed to the earth, their branches broken under their fall and sap leaking from their wounds. They were fed into the board planer and laid out by my father while I watched the wonder of something built where once there had been nothing.

  When my mother taught me how to scour the boards with damp sand and then wash the boards, oil and repeat—something I would do for the rest of my life—I had taken to the task with joy. I didn’t notice how the sand roughened my hands, even as it smoothed the boards, or how my dresses slowly merged to a uniform gray that blended with the aging planks.

  “I don’t know why you do that every day,” Alice said. She was leaning on the doorjamb, flowers entwined in her blonde hair and pulled back in a crown of braids. Golds and pinks were the colors that surrounded her the way I was shrouded in gray and Lawrence always the colors of the earth.

  “To keep it clean. Doesn’t it look lovely?” I answered, my mind thinking cross, petty thoughts I would never speak. Brassy-colored hair, I said internally, instead of Golden tresses, as was only fair, proper, and true.

  “It looks clean,” she offered.

  I sniffed. “You don’t get splinters in your delicate, pink feet anymore. I should think you’d be happy.”

  “Beth—” She knelt beside me, careful to lift the hem of the white lace that trimmed the rose pink of her dress from the floor. “—there’s more to life than the floors and the gardens and the dishes.”

  “I know that. There is needlework, quilting, embroidery—”

  She had been fifteen then, and I still dreamed that Lawrence would ask me to marry him. I was seventeen, but my birthday was only a few weeks away.

  “Have you thought about a husband?”

  “Of course I have. You’ve seen my hope chest,” I said proudly. I wished she would stop talking to me. I wanted to get the floors done so I could check on the garden and then get in to work on some squares for my new quilt before the bugs started to come out for the evening.

  “There’s a dance tomorrow. I’m going to ask Father if I can go. You could ask to come too. Put away your gray dress and put on something pretty.” She brushed a loose dark hair out of my eyes. “You’re so beautiful, Beth, but you insist on being so plain.”

  She had asked Father to go, and he had let her. She had asked for us both to go but I refused. I was tired, and my back was sore. I had only a few more squares to finish before I could begin the edging of my Bachelor’s Despair quilt. I had anguished over the design and saved for the fabric to make it perfect. What man could resist a woman clever enough to make a flawless, complex quilt such as the Bachelor’s Despair?

  That night Alice and Lawrence danced together while I sat at home and sewed. The charcoal-colored seams at the edge were thick where the layers of fabric gathered together to make the border with the crimson edging, and I pushed the needle hard into the fleshy pad of my index finger. A large drop of blood dripped like a ruby onto the virgin-white central square of the fine quilt I had made for my hope chest. I knew then that I had made a mistake. It was not for Lawrence to despair for me, it was I to despair for all. The only color I had put into my quilt was blood red and blue, all the rest was grays, whites, charcoals, and black.

  It was the last quilt that I made for my overflowing hope chest, although not by far the last quilt I would make. When the nights are right and the realm between your world and mine is particularly thin, I can leave the attic door at the top of the stairs open and hope that someone from the pretty world of life will follow me and look at my hope chest with the specter of me. Few of them follow me. Most curse the wind or the foundation of the old house that makes doors open and slam with my humors. The ones who come, and the very few who open the chest, find a box of rags. The Bachelor’s Despair is now faded all to grays, like the wood, like my dress. They are eaten by moths, despite the cedar the chest is made of, and fall to pieces like forgotten dreams in the hands of the living.

  Why do I keep showing them to the living? What insanity besets we, who are dead, to repeat the same actions while f
ailing again and again?

  After Alice died, Lawrence came to me for comfort. He was no bachelor; he was, in fact, a widower, and there is a different quilt that one makes for a widower. He came to me, first in the garden, and then in the kitchen, and finally in the sterile sanctity of my maiden’s bed. I spilled blood again, this time on my white sheets. The quilt that covered my twin bed was a simple Roman Cross. I had made it from one of my old dresses and two of Alice’s, so her gold and pink brightened my room like a gust of wind in a stale attic.

  I didn’t mind the spilled blood or how quickly Lawrence fell asleep. I traced out the Roman Cross with my fingers, the dusty rose satin soft under my coarse finger tips. When I woke in the morning, somewhat later than usual I confess, Lawrence was gone. He had returned to his own bed, and he thanked me coldly and distantly when I served him his coffee and eggs. The children stared at us as I froze midway toward kissing his cheek and turned awkwardly away beneath his hostile stare. There was no love for me in his eyes; they were the color of winter dirt.

  I wasted no time for weeping. Instead I walked into town and picked out fabric: blue, gray, black, and red; the same colors I had chosen so many years ago for Bachelor’s Despair. I would make a new quilt; a quilt for a widower: Widower’s Choice.

  I stayed up most of the night cutting out squares and organizing the pieces into neat piles. He did not come to my room that night. I told him in a chill tone to tend his own children when he came to ask me what was for lunch. He watched me. I felt his eyes on the back of my head. I sat on the floor, my dress the same gray as the boards. I was part of the house. I was an angry part of the house.

  Blue for Lawrence, gray for me,

  Black for death, and red

  For love for me and thee.

  I repeated the little verse to myself, making a tune of it as I did.

  I sewed day and night until the squares were made, and I breathed a sigh of relief. It was time to begin assembling them. Lawrence was relieved when I returned to my fulltime duties as nurse, nanny, housekeeper, cook, and concubine. His visits to my bed became nightly, only to have him flee each morning.