Fictions

by Nancy Kress

  She hit the brakes, stopped just short of the bank, and laid her forehead against the cold plastic of the steering wheel.

  In her headlights, something dark moved over the water.

  She tried to pull herself together, to think rationally. Of course all the dirt tracks would lead back to the lake; the lake was probably where everyone—or such “everyone” as there was around here—wanted to go. Kids fishing. Hunters out after deer. Lovers looking for a lane.

  She resisted the impulse to open the car door and let the penlight search for used condoms.

  This time there was room to turn the Chevette around by the water’s edge, a wide shelf of weedy ground that nonetheless left her shaking each time the wheels approached the bank. The shaking made her inch up the rise, and so she was going slow enough to notice the nearly-hidden fork at the top. On the right, the clear road she had come down; on the left, a weed-choked path.

  She turned left. The path, wherever else it took her, headed away from the yellow truck. And after a hundred yards, it was even easier to drive on than the previous road. Caught between curiosity and dread, Jane stopped the car, opened the door just wide enough to take the width of the penlight, and shined it straight down.

  Asphalt.

  As she again drove forward, a sudden giddiness seized her. She even laughed out loud, a sound so high and abrupt that it made her shake her head ruefully. The car shimmied lightly.

  Dear Nicky,

  You my love are a fool to prefer your domestic little wife to a woman who can—single-handedly! yes!—defeat a mad hillbilly rapist AND a child-midget murderer AND—not to mention!—the dark forces rising from the gaseous swamps to ooze around the souls of the sinful, a group for which you and I definitely qualify. A pioneer of femininity, hacking her way through this slightly banal underbrush while your—

  Ahead, the pick-up blocked the road.

  Jane cried out. This time she nearly smashed into the passenger side of the cab before she was able to make her foot hit the brake. The tires squealed, laying rubber. Scabs of scrofulous yellow paint loomed at her.

  There was no sound. After unbearable moments of dark silence, Jane leaned into the horn. Thin blatting leaked out into the thick air, was absorbed by it as by soggy wool. No one came.

  The truck could not be there. There hadn’t been time, the road beyond angled even farther to the left, even farther away from where the pickup had been parked before. It could not be there. It could not.

  Shaking, Jane studied the truck. The front bumper was jammed against an outcropping of New England granite. But between the rear bumper and the trunk of a pulpy-looking tree Jane couldn’t identify, was a gap that might be just large enough to ease the Chevette through. Or might not.

  And if there was someone hunkered down in the yellow cab—someone small, a child—who reached up to turn on the ignition, to pull the clutch into reverse, to lean with both hands on the accelerator as the Chevy was easing through the gap, the pick-up would easily crush the passenger door. Would that make it easier or harder for someone to get inside? If the pick-up kept on crushing, would it twist the steering wheel into her chest?

  She could back up again, look for yet another side road. But this time she had been watching; there were no more side roads. Behind her was only the lake.

  For a long moment Jane squeezed shut her eyes, opening them only when the images inside the lids became worse than the one outside. Carefully she edged the Chevy toward the rear of the pick-up.

  The right door handle caught the bottom edge of the bumper, scraping a bright gash in the dirty chrome. On the driver’s side, bark smeared across the window. Once off the asphalt, the Chevette sank a few inches into loam and rotten leaves, and there was a moment where Jane thought it would not continue to move forward. But it did.

  Clear of the truck. Jane accelerated wildly. Four hundred yards down the road the trees suddenly withdrew and she was flying past flat fields, empty as deserts. The rear view mirror revealed the pick-up still motionless, still solitary.

  A drink—what she would give for a Jack Daniels, how late did Pennsylvania bars serve . . .

  Her watch said 10:03.

  Shocked, Jane slowed the car. That wasn’t possible. She had left Pike perhaps an hour ago, at roughly 10:00. There was no way it could be that early—

  Directly ahead, her high beams skimmed out over water.

  She stopped at the water’s edge, the road behind her both flat and straight, stretching like a plumb line to where she had left Cuba Lake receding in the other direction.

  Another lake . . .

  But she knew it was not. Even as she watched numbly through the windshield still spattered with leaves and pulpy bark, something spectral moved over the distant surface.

  Wearily, with muscles that no longer seemed her own, Jane opened the door and walked towards the water. She sat at its very edge, knees clasped to her chest, tough weeds rustling under her weight and pressing their shapes through the wool of her slacks. It no longer seemed to matter whether she protected herself by staying in the car; whether she tried another road; whether she tried at all. There was no other road. There was only the yellow pick-up and the derelict with gray in his dark beard and the black thing over the water, and all roads led to Cuba Lake.

  “You can’t get there from here.”

  Dispassionately, with the curious clarity that comes from having worn out all emotion, Jane studied the darkness moving over the water. A kind of mist, without form, neither rising from the lake nor descending from the sky. “And darkness was upon the face of the deep, and the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.” Breshith, en arkhei, Beginning, Jane thought and, despite herself, smiled jeeringly. A professor to the last. The quotation created the reality.

  Dear Nick,

  Ask for me tomorrow and you shall find me a grave man—

  Nick . . .

  Her purse was in her hand, although she didn’t remember carrying it from the car. On impulse, eyes still hopeless on the dark lake, she fumbled among the make-up and wallet and glasses case for his letter. When she held it again, lukewarm colorless tasteless hemlock on sixteen-pound bond, anguish pierced her so sharply that she bent her head over her raised knees and rested it there. She thought it would be helpful to cry, thought it in just those detached pop-theory bullshit words; “It would be helpful, Jane, to cry.” But she knew she wouldn’t. The thought of the echoes of sobs returning to her from across that lake—that alone would have been enough to stop her.

  A long time later she released the straining clasp around her knees and lay, exhausted, on her back. The sky above was featureless. Jane stared at it, equally empty. She stared until the gray blank might have been either miles or inches above her eyes. Until the boundary between the flat void of the sky and her skull disappeared. Until her clothing was soaked with dew and her fingers so chilled they would not open around Nick’s letter.

  It took that long.

  Her watch said 10:03.

  Eventually, Jane rose, staggering on numb legs. She got into the car and started back along the flat, perfectly straight road. Glancing in the rear view mirror she saw, as she knew she would, the surface of the water empty behind her. After a few miles, the road roughened, swerved, and joined New York State Route 19. A little farther along, road signs re-appeared; farther still, she came to a caution light, blinking like a single yellow eye.

  Dear Nick,

  Not Wordsworth, not Byron, not even Stephen King. They all had it backwards. We shape it.

  Just before Pike, halted at a barren intersection, Jane rolled down the car window. The crumpled paper arced over the dirt shoulder and into an unseen ditch. There was the faint splash of water. Driving only slightly faster than the speed limit, she was able to glimpse the last light in Lehman Science Hall before whoever was still up there working winked it off.

  Dear Nick,

  But not each other.

  Her watch said 11:30.

  PHON
E REPAIRS

  “Wrong numbers” are usually a nuisance, but they can offer us an elusive glance at another way of life.

  When the phone rang, Dave Potter seized it with a desperate relief he tried not to let Caroline see. From the way her face froze and she turned her back away from him and toward the sink full of dirty dishes, Potter knew he had failed. She had seen the relief. It would only make worse the fight that was already bearing down on them, inevitable and dreary, like one of those unstoppable cold fronts picked out on weather maps in little blue spikes.

  The phone call was from his son Brendan, sixteen, whom Potter had not seen in three days. Their hours at home barely overlapped since school had let out for the summer.

  “Dad. I wrecked the car.” And—belatedly, laconically—“Sorry.”

  “What do you mean, you wrecked the car?” Potter said, his voice scaling upward in some subtle combination of fear and outrage. Caroline stopped clattering dishes. Her green eyes widened. “Are you all right?”

  “Sure,” Brendan answered.

  “He’s all right,” Potter said to Caroline at the same moment that Brendan said, “Why the hell were you on the phone so long? I’ve been trying to get through for forty-five minutes.”

  “No one was on the phone. Look, what happened? Is anyone hurt? Did you hit another car?”

  “Nah. Telephone pole.”

  “Was anyone in the car with you?”

  “Nah. Look, Dad, it’s no big deal, all right?”

  “No big deal? What shape is the Buick in?”

  “Well . . .” Brendan said, and Potter heard the drawn-out reluctance and clamped down hard on his temper.

  “Where are you, Brendan?”

  “Cathy’s Towing. Corner of Elm and Hackett.”

  “I’ll be right there. Stay put.”

  “Can’t. Kelso’s already here to pick me up. We got the track meet in fifteen minutes. Why were you on the phone so goddam long?”

  “No one was on the phone!” Potter yelled. “Stay put until I get there!”

  “Hey, I said I was sorry!” Brendan snarled, the snarl now justified by Potter’s yelling, by Potter’s unreasonable order, by Potter’s failure to be an understanding parent.

  “Just stay there,” Potter repeated. Caroline, tight-lipped, began running water into the sink. On the other end, the phone clicked dead.

  When Potter arrived at Cathy’s Towing, Brendan wasn’t there. Potter’s Buick was symmetrically caved in on the passenger side in a deep U. Raw metal gleamed like fangs. Cathy, a beautiful mid-thirties blonde in the dirtiest overalls Potter had ever seen, regarded the car with something close to artistic satisfaction. “Been the other side, your kid’ve been a goner. If he hadn’t of been belted in, even.” Potter turned his back on her.

  At home, Caroline was on her hands and knees, scrubbing the kitchen floor and crying. Potter put a hand on her shoulder; she shrugged it off so violently that Potter nearly slipped on the soapy Congoleum. “Don’t touch me!”

  “All right,” Potter said wearily and went into the living room to make himself a drink. Caroline scrubbed more savagely; he could hear the stiff bristles of her brush rasp across what was supposed to be an E-Z-Care floor. The blue spikes moved closer.

  Money. Sex. Kids. In-laws. Those were supposed to be the big four, but Potter knew that this was something else entirely, something both less visible and more pervasive, like lethal radiation. His and Caroline’s marital rage seemed to come from everything and nothing, a melt-down at the core, beyond the puny fire-fighting of mere words. It had been going on for months now. Potter saw that it would go on for months more, while both of them watched helplessly, until at some point it no longer did. His hands shook as he poured himself a J & B.

  The phone rang.

  “Hello?” Potter said.

  “Bill!” a woman’s voice cried, low-pitched and husky with warmth. “Just a minute—now, kids!” Children began to sing “Happy Birthday.”

  “This isn’t Bill,” Potter tried to say, but was drowned out by the song. All the children—it sounded like three of them—stayed in tune, their voices high and sweet. When they had finished, the woman’s voice returned; Potter could hear the laughter in it.

  “And from me, too—happy birthday, darling. You don’t know how I wish we were home with you!”

  “This isn’t Bill. You must have the wrong number,” Potter said. He felt a perfect fool.

  A pause at the other end. “Isn’t this 645-2892?”

  “No, I’m sorry. This is one digit off that number.”

  “No, I’m sorry,” the woman said, a little stiffly. Stiffness didn’t destroy the husky timbre of her voice. “I must have dialed wrong.”

  “I’m sorry,” Potter said again, inanely, and hung up. In the other room, Caroline scrubbed and cried. Potter drank off the J & B and poured himself another, staring at the phone.

  Potter’s daughter Melissa sat cross-legged on the living room floor, scissors in her hand, bent over paper dolls. Her dark hair, a little too long at the bangs, fell in a shiny, tangled curtain over the shoulders of her yellow pajamas. Saturday morning cartoons blared from the television, mindless and irritating as blowing sand. The faded rug bore the wreckage of a Friday night at home: spilled potato chips, sticky glasses, Potter’s unopened briefcase, the discarded sections of last evening’s newspaper mixing with the discarded sections of this morning’s as Potter tossed them down from the sofa.

  Caroline, bare-footed, padded in from the bedroom. Potter glanced at the smooth line of her thigh beneath her short summer robe, and looked away. Caroline began shrieking.

  “Damn it, Dave, why the hell are you letting her cut those up!”

  Potter raised himself on one elbow. What he had assumed were paper dolls were in fact photographs, all the family pictures kept in a red- topped dress box which Potter had failed to recognize because the red top was removed and upside-down. Melissa had methodically sliced into at least three dozen of the photos, cutting off all the people’s heads. The little girl’s eyes, raised suddenly to Potter’s face, horrified him.

  “ ‘Can’t you watch her while I at least get some sleep on a Saturday morning? Can’t you at least do that?” Caroline shouted, her voice gone shrill with hysteria. She grabbed for the scissors in Melissa’s hand. Potter saw beheaded pictures of Caroline waving in front of the Washington Monument, of Melissa and Brendan at the beach, of a dog they had owned briefly three years ago. He saw his wedding pictures.

  “That’s not too goddam much to ask!” Caroline shrieked. Melissa moved her gaze from Potter, still stunned by it, to her mother’s contorted face. Eluding Caroline’s grab for the scissors, she twisted her small body to plunge them into Potter’s briefcase. The leather released air and a pungent smell like riding tack.

  Caroline gasped and seized Melissa. Her eyes met Potter’s over the child, their green wiped perfectly blank by shock. Melissa wrapped her legs around her mother and began to sob into her neck. Caroline carried her into the bedroom and closed the door. Potter heard it lock.

  On his knees he sorted numbly through the photos, looking for some clue to what Melissa had done, some of the reassurance that might come from finding a pattern to the pictures she had chosen to destroy. There was none. Pictures of relatives, friends, people Potter no longer recognized—all had been equally defaced. In the wedding photo, Caroline, Potter, the best man and maid of honor had each been decapitated. Caroline’s white gown floated around what was left of her, tight at the waist and a billowing cloud below, a silk so light and delicately scented that it had once seemed like mist against his hands.

  Potter squeezed his eyes shut as tightly as they would go.

  The voice on the phone was deep, with a reckless lilt of gaiety. “Connie? Listen, darling, we finished up early here and I’ll be coming home on the 8:45 flight TWA tomorrow night, and wait till you hear the news I’ve got for you, you lucky sexy broad!”

  “I’m sorry,” Potter said, a litt
le resentfully. He knew his voice was pitched a little high for a man and the husky-voiced woman’s was low, but there was still a difference. “I’m sorry. You have the wrong number.” Silence, and then the man said in a changed tone, “Is this Dave? At 645-2872?”

  Surprised, Potter nodded, caught himself, and said, “Yes. How did you know?”

  “We’ve been getting your phone calls for a few weeks now. The lines must be crossed. Have you been getting our calls?”

  “When you all stay home long enough to get any,” Potter said, out of a sudden spitefulness that took him by further surprise. The man’s—Bill’s—voice hardened.

  “I’ll call the phone company. Don’t sweat it. Sorry for the inconvenience.”

  “Yeah,” Potter said. “Me, too.”

  “She needs therapy,” Caroline said to Potter during a commercial for laundry detergent. They had been watching TV in isolated silence for two hours, only one dim bulb left on in the shabby living room. Both children were asleep. Potter had gone to check on them during the previous commercial: Brendan scowling even in sleep, his ungainly adolescent face a clenched fist; Melissa’s features so smooth and soft that Potter’s heart had clutched in his chest.

  “She should go at least four times a week, Dr. Horacek says,” Caroline continued. In the semi-darkness Potter could not see her face, was glad of it. “That’s at first. Maybe more, maybe less after he gets a feel for her disturbance. That’s what he said: ‘a feel for her disturbance and what might be causing it.’ ”

  “Four times a week. Jesus, Caroline, the company insurance only pays half of any non-physical therapy. I checked today.”

  “Yes,” Caroline said. She didn’t sound surprised. The TV commercial ended and the program, whatever it was, resumed.