Come With Me

by Ronald Malfi

  “Aaron Decker,” said the officer as she approached. Her face was still stern, but there was something else there now, too. Something I thought might border on compassion.

  “Yes,” I said, and rose up from the chair.

  “I’m sorry to have to tell you this,” she said.

  And you, of course, Allison, know exactly what she said.

  CHAPTER TWO

  1

  When someone dies of natural causes, the mourning can be a private affair. When they die the way you did, Allison, we’re forced to share our grief publicly, at least for a little while. For days after the shooting, I couldn’t turn on the news without hearing your name, seeing your face, listening to recounts of what transpired in that little boutique. The Herald had provided a photo of you to other media outlets, and that was the one that kept popping up—you in that ridiculous pink scarf.

  Around the time you had said Come with me that morning, a twenty-three-year-old sociopath named Robert James Vols woke up in his parents’ basement. He ingested a bowl or two of Frosted Mini-Wheats (according to the coroner’s report), played Fortnite, then shot his sleeping parents in the head at point-blank range with a 9mm Smith & Wesson. The pistol, owned by Robert Vols’s father, had been legally purchased, and was kept in a lockbox in their bedroom closet. The key to the lockbox was in the top drawer of the nightstand. I guess it was a no-brainer. After the slayings, Vols left the house in his parents’ Mercedes. He did so with the pistol tucked into the waistband of his jeans and a hooded fleece pullover concealing it from sight. According to police, he drove straight out to the Harbor Plaza and parked the Mercedes right in front of the Ease of Whimsy boutique, where his ex-girlfriend worked. He entered the boutique with the hood of his pullover up, his hands in his pockets. He stopped and asked another clerk if his ex-girlfriend was working that morning, although he must have known this, because he had parked next to her car, a black Toyota Camry. This clerk—one of the survivors—said Vols’s ex-girlfriend was in the backroom. Vols thanked the clerk, and began to meander around the store, feigning interest in the various sundry items the eclectic little boutique had to offer. He peered at his reflection in ornamental mirrors, shook snow globes, poked a finger at bamboo wind chimes, left fingerprints along the stem of a champagne flute. Minutes later, when his ex-girlfriend appeared, Vols walked up to her and shot her in the face. He then turned and proceeded to fire randomly throughout the store. Three more people were killed, including you, Allison. The clerk who survived—a young girl who, I fear, will be forever traumatized by this event—later told me that you were the only person who rushed toward the gunman at the sound of gunfire. She said she saw you shouting at him, waving your hands, and rapidly approaching him. She said it looked like you were trying to confuse and disorient him to buy everyone else some time to get out of the shop. Maybe it worked; several shoppers managed to escape the store during the melee. It also got you killed, though, Allison; the shooter paused for perhaps a second or two, but it wasn’t long enough for you to strike him, disarm him, or just get the fuck out of the way. He shot you once in the head, and you went down. He then put the gun in his own mouth and pulled the trigger, abruptly ending the madness.

  There was a candlelight vigil held for the victims and their families in downtown Annapolis. I did not attend, but I saw some footage of it on the news: Main Street a somber tributary of people flowing toward Church Circle, a sea of black armbands and slender white candles tipped in a flicker of dancing light like wands capable of magic. There was a celebration of your life held at the Maryland Hall for Creative Arts, where a large poster of your face was set on an easel in the main hall and bordered in a heart-shaped wreath of flowers. I did not attend that service, either.

  My sister Trayci came to stay with me for just over a week. She was a rock during the funeral and fussed about the house in that same fastidious, workmanlike way Mom had done when we were kids. Trayci was three years older than me but possessed the spirit and the sheer determination to outlive me by two decades, if she wanted. She’d aged in the time since our last visit, however, which was maybe a year or so ago (too long), and there were now brash streaks of silver in her sandy hair, and the lines that bracketed her mouth had deepened. As she swept crumbs from the kitchen table, manipulated the TV remote, held her glass of Cabernet by the stem, I found myself hypnotized by her hands. Somewhere over the course of this life, Trayci had begun to wear the hands of our mother—thin, precise, cautious fingers, and a soft creping of the skin on the backs of her hands that somehow made them look both fragile and sturdy at the same time. Our mother long dead and our father, the playboy, living in Europe, Trayci was all the family I had left. She permitted herself one good cry—for me, I suppose, but for you too, Allison; she’d always loved you—and then she swiped at her eyes, cleared her throat, and got down to business. She answered the door when people stopped by to drop off food or pay their respects. I was in the mood to greet no one, and remained, for the most part, on the back deck of our townhome despite the rapidly plummeting temperatures. Twice it snowed while I was out there, and Trayci appeared, dusted the snowflakes from my hair and my eyelashes, then draped a coat around my shoulders. Sometimes she’d bring me hot cocoa.

  Reporters came to the house. Trayci kept them at bay, shooing them from our property the way you’d try to scare off a pack of stray dogs by making loud noises. Had she owned a flare gun she would have discharged bright spangles of light at them, I had no doubt. My cell phone became a portal through which news anchors, political aides, NRA representatives and all species of carrion birds could clamber out, rattle their dusty black wings and unspool their hectic, pitiless platitudes into my ear. On the rare occasion when I inadvertently answered one of these calls, the hunger and eagerness in the creature’s nearly human voice left me feeling violated. I stopped answering my phone altogether. When the battery eventually ran dead, I let it stay dead. Good riddance.

  The sensation of you simultaneously having fled from me and yet seeping into my pores invaded my brain, blurred my sight. There was a presence in the house now. I would catch a whiff of your Tommy Girl perfume in the upstairs hallway. I would glimpse movement in the periphery of my vision, but whenever I looked, there was nothing there. In bed, I’d be sliding toward sleep only to feel your lips brush my forehead, just as they did on the morning you died. The hopeful and hallucinatory mind of the aggrieved, perhaps, although I began to wonder if there wasn’t some echo of you that persisted in this house—the dark stain of you, and the life that had been cut short. One evening, after climbing out of the shower, I glanced up at the steamed-over bathroom mirror to find a partial impression on the glass, as if you’d glided in here and pressed your face to the fogged-up mirror. I could make out all the details of you. This shook me, weakened something vital and upright inside me, and I had to brace myself against the wall to keep from collapsing. Had you come in here and done this while I showered? Some leftover piece of you? I went out into our bedroom, walked out onto the landing, my mind frantic and irrational and feeling as if it were speedily unraveling. Was I expecting to find you out here? Back in the bedroom, there were damp footprints stamped along the carpet, moving in a semicircle around the bed. I cried out, an anguished, grief-stricken mewl, and then realized they were my own footprints. I returned to the bathroom, only to find the image of you already faded from the mirror. I felt like I had missed something important, and that the missing of it brought about some irrevocable tragedy. As if we needed more tragedy. It was then that I wept, my hands planted on either side of the sink, my flushed and hot face staring down into the unblinking eye of the sink drain. I saw a flash of white light down there at the bottom of the drain, an impossible wink of white illumination, there and then gone. And in that moment, I heard—or thought I heard—a disembodied voice, distant yet clear as day, issue straight up from the drain: “Who’s there? Is someone there?”

  I jerked away from the sink, my skin prickling as if some spirit
had reached across the void of infinite space and prodded me with an icy finger at the base of my spine. Steeling myself, I peered back down the drain, and saw that it was nothing but an unremarkable black hole once again.

  I was losing my mind without you, Allison. Because that’s what grief does. It robs us of a part of ourselves, leaving a crater of madness and irrationality in its place.

  What if I’d gone with you that day? What difference would that have made? My mind was a never-ending loop of alternate possibilities, of planes of existence where I had gone with you and you had survived, those other versions of us still living happily in the blissful ignorance of my grief. Twice, the stupid Alexa speaker, unprompted, began playing your eighties playlist, Patty Smyth belting out “The Warrior.” I let it play, and I cried.

  For the first time, I was glad you had no living relatives, Allison. Your father had been killed in an automobile accident when you were just a child, your older sister had drowned when you were both teenagers, and your mother had drunk herself to death years ago, probably due to the misery that had plagued your family. Perhaps this lost family was the reason for the darkness that reflected out of you—that bottomless, lightless cavern that was your soul. You rarely talked about them, although I got the sense that you missed them, or at least longed for the familiarity and warmth of a family beyond just the two of us. It sounds terrible, but in the days following your death I was grateful they were gone, because I didn’t think I would have been able to make those phone calls. I wouldn’t have been able to have those people in our house, where I’d be forced to interact with them and address their grief and move about like a real live man. I just couldn’t have done it.

  In my dreams, I was constantly pursuing you through abandoned houses, searching for you among junked cars and through mazes of wire fencing. Dogs wearing the faces of people barked at me. I saw you standing at a bus stop in the rain, then climbing into a boat with men in balaclavas. I saw you in the window of the Fat Rooster Café, eating a plate of French toast, but when I went inside, all the tables were empty, except that your half-eaten breakfast was still there in front of a vacant chair. You sometimes stood at the far end of Arlette Street, in the center of the four-way intersection like a crossing guard, and I would run to you, slow as molasses (as they say), my bare feet pulling hot, tacky strands of asphalt up from the ground, as if I were running through a tar pit. I never reached you in time—you always vanished before I got there. Sometimes, you’d run so fast you’d leave Allison-shaped streaks of light in your wake. Fast and transitory as a comet. And as bad as these nightmares were, it was worse to awaken and realize you were gone in real life.

  The cardboard box containing the first clue to your secret life arrived at the house a few days after your funeral. Some UPS guy had placed it on the porch, anonymous as a shoulder-bump in a crowded room. Trayci retrieved the parcel and set it on the kitchen counter, among Tupperware containers full of cookies from our neighbors and a thickening stockpile of mail. I glanced at the box just once and saw that it had been sent from your office at the Herald. Presumably, one of your colleagues had cleared out your desk, fitting the culmination of your entire career at the newspaper in a box just slightly larger than a basketball. I contemplated not opening it, and just carrying it directly to the fire pit in the yard where I would set it ablaze. Things would have been drastically different had I done that, of course. But that’s not what I did. As days turned into weeks, I just simply ignored it, letting it sit there on the counter. Forgotten.

  2

  “Why don’t you come back with me?” Trayci suggested on the night before she was to return home. “Owen’s been traveling but the kids would love to have you.”

  “I don’t think so, Tray. Not just yet.”

  “Well, I don’t like you being alone right now.”

  “You can’t babysit me forever.”

  “It’s still so soon. I wish I could stay longer.”

  “You’ve stayed long enough. And I appreciate it. But you’ve got your own family.”

  “You are my family, Aaron. My little brother.”

  I summoned an exhausted smile. “Thank you, Trayci.”

  “Christ, Aaron. What a mess, huh?” For the briefest moment, her face softened. But then she firmed up once more. She hugged me, and when she spoke again, it was with the tone someone might use to talk sense into someone with a mental deficiency. “You listen to me, Aaron. If you change your mind, there’s always a spare bedroom back at my place. You know that. For as long as you need it.”

  “I do,” I told her. “I know that.”

  “Also, I’ve made you a list of daily chores.”

  “Are you kidding?”

  “Just some things you should remember to do—like eat, take a shower, breathe. Take it slow when you need to. Those kinds of things. I’ve stuck it to the fridge.”

  “You’re just like Mom, you know that?” We were on the couch having some beers. I looked at her hands and felt a strange, sad nostalgia for my childhood.

  “I just want to make sure you do things. And don’t just stay bottled up in this house. At least go for a walk around the neighborhood or something. Get some sun on your face. Anything, Aaron. Keep active. Grief hates a moving target.”

  “Don’t worry, Tray. I promise to eat and breathe. All those things. Anyway, I’ve got my work. I’ll just get back to work.”

  And that’s what I did, Allison. For a while, anyway. At the time of your death, I was halfway through translating a Japanese-language Shunsuke Ogawa novel to English. You know I’ve always been passionate about my work, but I now clung to this Ogawa novel like someone drowning would cling to a life-preserver. On our first date, when I told you I translated Japanese novels for a living, you thought I was pulling your leg. I may have possessed the industrious quality of a career academic, but you were not expecting a white guy from suburban Maryland to have majored in Japanese literature, to have practiced writing Japanese characters with the care and dedication of a surgeon, to delight in the mental acrobatics of finding commonality in two languages where no etymological kinship exists. “It’s the alien quality of it all that makes it so beautiful,” I had explained to you. Strangely, you’d understood.

  I found it also to be a temporary respite from my grief. There is a switch that is flipped when I work, a notable alteration in my brain when I’m operating in Japanese. In the days and weeks after your death, I found that this other-Aaron had somehow remained fully intact and unencumbered in the aftermath of your death while the real-life Aaron—your husband; me—had transitioned into a vaporous phantom who slept for maybe a fitful two hours a night and who wandered the darkened corridors of our townhome like something that should be rattling chains and frightening children. I retreated wholly into other-Aaron during this time. I let him take over. Not just while working, but also in my daily routines. Other-Aaron showered for me, ate for me, went to the grocery store, paid the bills. He donned a windbreaker and slippers so he could traverse the length of our driveway to retrieve the mail. He was thinking and functioning in Japanese, a stranger untouched by the grief that had crippled me, wholly unfamiliar with all of grief’s alien aspects and human weaknesses.

  Given the situation, I could have asked my editor for an extension on the delivery date of the Ogawa manuscript, but I didn’t need one; other-Aaron was fully focused, on target, operating like some mechanical thing engineered to do so. Occasionally, I would peer out of other-Aaron’s eyes—formerly my eyes—and marvel at the industrious, goal-oriented, emotionless fervor of him. Look at this strange and beautiful thing that had been living inside me all these years. I had no idea he was capable of such majesty.

  In the breaks between working on the manuscript and hiding in the shadow of other-Aaron, I began on occasion to peek out into the light of day. Check my email, power my cell phone back on, flip on the television in the living room. I did these things gradually, almost skittishly, tempered by the expectation of you waltzing i
n the door at any minute, as if this had all been some horrible nightmare. As if to go back to some simulacrum of normality might summon you back into existence. But I was a wreck; indeed, there was something fawnlike about me in these moments, terrified of anything and everything, trembling and vulnerable to the slightest shift in mood. I had avoided the outside world in the weeks after your death, heartsick at the prospect of hearing your name or seeing your face on a screen somewhere. But this is America, where tragedies roll along on a conveyor belt with alacrity. One is boxed up and shipped out just as another arrives, shiny and new, on the showroom floor. Soon, the shooting at Harbor Plaza was replaced with a news story about the search for a missing teenage girl somewhere down south. Sore ga jinsei da—such is life.

  3

  It was other-Aaron who opened the cardboard box that had been sent from your office. I wouldn’t have had the courage. Inside were notepads containing your illegible scrawl; a mug that said stop the presses: we’re out of coffee; the nameplate from your desk; random office supplies; some folders containing various people’s contact information; a stress ball that looked disconcertingly like a cow’s udder; and various other work-related paraphernalia.

  The folded sheet of paper was nearly overlooked, Allison. Other-Aaron picked it up, unfolded it, and would have cast it aside had I not been peering out of his—my—eyes at that very moment. It was a receipt for a two-night stay at The Valentine Motel in a place called Chester, North Carolina, back in late October. According to the receipt, you paid not with a credit card but with cash.

  I stared at it for a long time. At first I considered that it might have belonged to someone else at your office, and that it had gotten erroneously deposited in this cardboard box when whoever it was had cleaned out your desk. But it was your name on the receipt, Allison.