Before the Devil Fell

by Neil Olson

  He bailed out of the taxi a few blocks from home, to walk off his agitation. On a side street near Second Avenue, he passed a bar. Trinity Pub in yellow letters over the door. Will went inside. It was dark, cramped and loud. But the patrons were adults, not college kids, and there was an open spot at the bar. The Yankees were playing Baltimore on the television above. 2003 was supposed to be the Red Sox’s year, but Will was skeptical. It was always supposed to be their year.

  He drank a whisky in two gulps and a Guinness more slowly. The tightness in his chest relaxed. Will didn’t look at anyone and no one bothered him. The Yanks were mauling the Orioles’ pitcher, and leading five-two when he slapped down some cash and swung his jacket off the stool.

  Back outside, the breeze had picked up and Will could smell the East River. He was near his apartment now. Light from a corner deli glowed on the far avenue. Plane trees shot out of the broken sidewalk, leaning over the road. There were few lights on this block and he stumbled. The anxiety had worn off, and he was a bit drunk. A short Latino kid in a T-shirt and apron hosed out plastic tubs by the deli’s basement entry. He squeezed off the hose and stepped back to let Will pass. The sidewalk was soapy, and Will had to watch his footing. And then something was wrong. The shape of the young man, seen from the corner of his eye, became distorted. Don’t look, Will told himself. Do not look, just walk by. But he couldn’t help it. He had to look.

  Beside him, in the shadow of the brick wall, was a grisly mask. Black lips peeled back from yellow teeth. Bloodshot eyes stared out of the wrecked visage with hypnotizing intensity. Bad energy radiated from it—malevolence, or a desolation so intense it colored the space around the thing. Yes, the thing, because what else was it? Not a man. The mouth dropped open and it staggered forward, forcing two hoarse syllables from its ruined throat.

  Murder.

  Will reeled. Toward the street, stepping on the plastic tubs and going down hard. Knee, elbow, and then his forehead all banged against the wet concrete. Thoughts retreated, his mind unwilling to process what it had seen, or anything else.

  A low, guttural chanting of voices. Some laughing, some deadly serious. A panicked rushing, up and up, and then a blinding flash of light.

  The mottled bark of the plane tree filled his vision. Its trunk soared heavenward to the pearl sky of nighttime Manhattan. No stars. A shadow loomed and Will flinched, covering his face.

  “Mister. Mister.”

  The Latino kid was withdrawing the hand he had offered. Will looked closely at the face. A hint of mustache above full lips. Fear in the eyes. It was all the poor guy needed, some well-dressed gringo falling over his buckets, hurting himself. And just like that, so much for the dream of America.

  “I’m good,” Will said, but it came out a whisper. The kid reached out his hand again and Will took it. He needed the tree as well, but finally got to his feet. His vision swam. The elbow hurt, and his forehead stung. He would feel worse later.

  “Okay now?” the kid asked hopefully.

  Will studied him a while longer. Trying to figure out how he could have mistaken the face, but there was no mistake. One face had nothing to do with the other.

  “Yeah,” Will said more clearly. “I’m fine. Thanks.”

  * * *

  He was distracted from the fear of his dark apartment by the flashing red light on the answering machine. Two rapid blinks. Two messages. His mind went immediately to Helen, but before he could hit Play the phone rang again.

  “Hello?”

  “Will? Is that you?”

  “Yeah.”

  “It’s Muriel.” His mother’s friend. He was surprised not to recognize her voice, but then she did not seem to know his. Maybe nobody was themselves this evening. “I’m sorry, did I wake you?”

  “No,” he answered, a throbbing setting in behind his eyes. “No, it’s okay.”

  “I tried you before.”

  “I was at some faculty thing. What is it?”

  “It’s about your mom,” Muriel said stiffly. “Will, it’s not good news.”

  It never was.

  CHAPTER

  TWO

  Muriel was at the house when it happened. She and Abigail had some kind of argument, with Abby raving about a dream of Will in peril. That was familiar—she’d had those before. Yet something new had been added, agitating her dangerously.

  “I tried to calm her,” Muriel said. “Think I did more harm than good. She went marching out the back door. You know those damn concrete steps.”

  Cracked, uneven. Throughout childhood, Will had been warned against running down those stairs. You’ll fall and break your head, Abby would scream. Joke’s on you now, Ma.

  “A shallow coma.” He repeated Muriel’s phrase. “What is that?”

  “Better than a deep one, I guess. You need to come up, Will. Soon as you can.”

  He took a train from Penn Station early the next morning. The New York he left was summer green, but in New England it was already fall. Yellow patches flashed by the train window. The Saugus marshes were a forest of beige cattails and sea grass. Sugar maples flared orange, and it was not even October. His mother’s timing was brilliant, as always. The semester had just begun, and the school would struggle to find a fill-in. Will could not even tell them when he would return.

  Muriel was headed out of town, but stuck around long enough to meet him at the train. She was leaning against her battered green Subaru in blue jeans and a jacket, brown hair askew. Her hazel eyes looked him over closely.

  “What happened to your face?” she asked.

  “Fell.”

  “Some fall.”

  “Do I look that bad?”

  “No,” she said, squeezing him quickly. “You look good.”

  “So do you,” Will replied.

  “Liar.”

  In fact, she seemed worn. At forty-eight, she was five years younger than Will’s mother, but looked older. Exercise and a native toughness were clearly no match for the cigarettes and whiskey. Or was it some bad strain of DNA that had killed so many in her family so young? For all that, her mischievous smile stirred something in him. A reaction inextricably tied to his first romantic yearnings. As a teenager, Will had a thing for Muriel, and evidently still did.

  “Hospital,” she asked, “or home first?”

  “Hospital.”

  “I figured. Get in.”

  The Subaru bucked and stalled. Will remembered Muriel as a good driver, so it must be the car getting old. Several travel bags were on the backseat.

  “Where are you headed?” he asked.

  “New Hampshire. See my Mom. I was supposed to leave first thing this morning, but I wanted to be here for you.”

  “Sorry to mess up your plans.”

  “I called Joe.” She never said your father, always Joe. “Last night, after we spoke.”

  She said it tentatively, like she might have overstepped by doing so. Which, of course, she had, but Will was grateful.

  “Thanks.”

  “He’ll wait to hear from you before he does anything.” She glanced over at him as they sailed along a twisty road of oak and pine and dilapidated clapboard houses. “Were you drunk? When you fell?”

  “A bit,” he said.

  “Not my business, but isn’t thirty-three a little old to be getting plowed and falling down stairs, or whatever?”

  “It was a wet sidewalk. It was dark. There were some buckets.”

  “Okay.”

  “It’s not like I get drunk and fall down every night, Mure.” He sounded too defensive, even to himself. Who are you, he wanted to say, my mother?

  “Never mind,” she said, accelerating up the ramp onto the highway, then merging into traffic without seeming to look. A skill that impressed Will, who had never owned a car. They drove in silence for a while. There was color on the trees,
mostly yellows. A black turkey vulture wheeled overhead.

  The hospital was a big brick pile off the first rotary in Gloucester. It looked like the kind of place you went to die, Will thought. But what did he know? Anyway, there had been no time to take her anywhere else.

  Muriel wouldn’t come in. “I don’t want to be the first one she sees when she wakes up. She was cursing at me when she fell.”

  “I’m sure she won’t even remember.”

  He touched her arm. She squeezed his hand and gave him a pensive smile. Then leaned toward him, practically into his lap. When she banged the glove compartment with the side of her hand, he jumped in his seat.

  “Sorry,” she said, digging through a stack of papers for a loose scrap.

  “It’s okay.” What had he thought, that she was going to kiss him?

  “Here’s my cell,” Muriel said, handing him the paper after scribbling on it. “Call me with a full report. Her car is here. I had someone drive it over, so you can get home in that. I really need to get on the road. My mom will be nervous.”

  “You were good to stick around,” he said, distressed that she was not staying. Loner that he was, he still didn’t like facing this on his own.

  They hugged again, awkwardly, and Will got out of the car. There was a cool breeze off the Annisquam. He had barely slept in two nights and the bracing chill woke him. He took a moment to collect himself, then headed for the sliding glass doors.

  Intensive care was on the first floor. The duty nurse was lean and hard faced, but her manner was kind. The doctor would not be back until next morning, and questions of treatment or prognosis must be directed to him. She could tell him that the brain was swollen, but they were able to minimize fluid buildup with medication and had not needed to drill. Heart rate and breathing were stable. She was on a respirator, but that was just a precaution.

  “That sounds encouraging,” said Will.

  “We’ve seen a lot worse around here,” the woman replied.

  “But she’s still in a coma.”

  “That’s correct,” she said. “There’s been some muscle movement. Spasms in the hands and face, but she hasn’t woken yet.”

  “You expect her to.”

  “That’s a question for the doctor,” said the nurse, with a bland neutrality that could only come from years of practice.

  “She’s been out a whole day,” Will said. “Isn’t that a long time?”

  “More than six hours is serious,” she conceded. “But it’s too soon to draw conclusions.”

  Then she left him alone with his mother. Abigail. They had shaved the hair around the wound and what remained, flattened by bandages, was dull and lank. Not the lustrous black curls he had known his whole life. There was an IV line in her arm, and a clear mask over her mouth and nose. Her skin was paler than its usual pale, and there was bruising under the eyes. But the most striking thing was the slackness of her face. The flat mouth, the hollowed cheeks. Will tried to remember a time when he had not seen that face animated. She had dark moods, like anyone. Yet even then, there seemed a dormant energy, collecting up to burst back into life. He rarely saw her sleep, but when she did—a nap on the sofa, maybe—there was always movement. Her long arms thrashing around. Eyes shifting under the lids, the mouth pursed and twitching. And now this deathly stillness.

  Will dragged a heavy vinyl chair to her bedside, the legs squealing against the tiled floor. He took his mother’s left hand in his own, surprised at its coldness. Then surprised at himself. She always had cold hands; it was a joke among her friends. When had he forgotten? When had he last touched this hand? Christmas, nine months ago. Which had been his first visit in a couple of years. They had fought almost the whole time. Abby asking why she hadn’t met Helen yet, why he didn’t visit more often, why he didn’t call his father in Seattle—the same father she had warned him against trusting. Will scolded her over the sad state of her house and finances, her drinking and smoking: you’ll have a stroke before you’re sixty, and I’ll have to take care of you. He was angry with her, deeply and constantly. For his traumatic childhood. For her weirdo pals, her eccentric behavior. She embarrassed him.

  He knew that his anger was justified. Knew too that it would not go away easily. It was just hard to make it important at this moment. He placed his hot forehead on her cold hand and closed his eyes. Can you feel that, Ma? Can you feel me here? He waited for the expected welling up of grief in his chest. Waited eagerly, in fact. What sweet relief from this numbness, from this emotional sedation that would be. Sadness was all he could manage. And exhaustion. The cold hand answered nothing back.

  Later, he sat by the nurses’ station, trying to finish forms Muriel had started the day before. There were things for him to sign. He could barely take in their meaning, but was pretty sure he was agreeing to make medical decisions on his mother’s behalf, and to pay for whatever her lousy insurance did not. Abigail taught art at the Alternative School and was a substitute teacher in the public system, and Will was used to covering some of her expenses. He scribbled his signature and the date three times and dropped the forms with the night nurse.

  “Coffee?” he asked her.

  “There’s a machine. Down this corridor, then left and all the way in back.”

  “Thanks.”

  The alcove in question held multiple machines. Candy bars, sandwiches, coffee. In front of the last stood a young woman in faded jeans and a powder-green shirt like the nurses wore. It took a moment for Will to realize she was looking not at her coffee choices but at him. It took another moment for him to realize he knew her.

  “Hey, Will.”

  She was smaller than he remembered. The bright hair had gone straw-colored. The soft face had acquired some definition, but the serene expression in the blue eyes exactly matched his memory. That smile had once unnerved him, presaging as it so often did some scary knowledge, or wondrous vision. But that was long ago. Long before they had become casual friends, then lost touch completely.

  “Samantha.”

  “When did you ever call me that?” she said.

  Not a line in her face, and yet she was two years older than Will, if he remembered right. Two years, or two hundred.

  “I’m sorry. Sam.”

  “That’s better. You want coffee?”

  “That’s what I’m here for,” he said, the tiredness too obvious in his voice.

  “How is she doing?” Samantha asked, turning her profile to him now and dropping coins into the old machine.

  “You know about my mother?”

  “I know most of what goes on here. Went to see her earlier. Just sat by the bed and talked a little, you know?”

  She handed him the steaming paper cup of coffee. Dark, no sugar, the way he took it. He didn’t ask how she knew, or offer her money. The Samantha he remembered had little patience for niceties. She did not get coffee for herself, which made him wonder why she had been standing there in the first place.

  “Thanks,” Will said. “And thanks for checking on her. I appreciate it. There isn’t any change.”

  “Her car is in the south lot, near the entrance. Muriel Brown asked me to drive it over.”

  “She said someone had—I didn’t realize she meant you. I guess I have a lot to thank you for.”

  “Thing is—” she tipped her head, and slid one foot forward and back “—it means I need a ride home tonight.”

  “Right. Of course. Well, I was...”

  “Going to stay until visiting hours were over,” Samantha finished for him. “That’s fine. I’ve got people to see, and I can always find things to do.”

  “Great. That’s great, thanks.”

  “Stop saying that.”

  “Okay,” Will agreed sheepishly. He tried to remember when he had last seen her, what he had heard about her in the last... Fifteen years? She had gotten married som
e time back, he knew that much. “Where are you living these days?”

  “Didn’t your mom tell you?” She seemed more amused than surprised, and probably guessed within a moment that his mother had told him very little of late. “I’m back in my grandfather’s house. I’m your neighbor again, William.”

  CHAPTER

  THREE

  It was hard for Will to remember a time before Samantha was a presence in his life. Before the lightning strike and the night in the field, he had been aware of the spooky girl next door. Trotting up the long slate walk beside her grandfather, she seemed harmless enough. But racing like a wild animal through the woods behind their houses, or flitting about the low candlelight in her house, she was a daunting and beguiling presence. Two years older, that would have been enough, but there was more to it. She would stare without blinking, and always said what was on her mind, even if it hurt or frightened you. She had no friends that Will ever saw, and did not seem to need them. But on certain nights, when Will was already in bed, he would creep to the window and look out. And see her by the lilac bushes, blond hair white in the moonlight. Gazing up at him.

  “It pulls you, right?” Sam said.

  He glanced away from the dark road to the woman in the passenger seat. Trying to connect her with that blond specter from his youth. The same steady gaze. The quiet, uninflected tone. But where memory made that voice hypnotic and foreboding, the woman beside him seemed merely withdrawn. He had to remind himself that they had become friends later. That he had known her, though less and less well, right through high school. That her unnerving presence in his childhood had been forgotten years ago. Only resurrected now by dreams.

  “The car,” she clarified. “There’s a tugging to the right.”

  “Yeah?” he replied, coming out of his trance. He loosened his grip on the wheel and could indeed sense a slight drift. “I feel that.”