Break the Bodies, Haunt the Bones
Page 9
It was around noon when Jane’s shift ended. Instead of going straight home, she drove around, braving the edges of downtown. On a street corner, she saw the top half of a ghost hanging in the air, wispy hands reaching out to her. She blew through the stop sign, not slowing down enough for it to be able to approach her car.
Driving past an old park—the hulks of unused playground equipment vine-covered and cancerous with rust, beer bottles smote upon the hard ground—she saw her father.
His jacket hung in pieces and his bald, scarred head gleamed in the sun. He was her name, was skin and blood of her, alone and out of his mind and living like a stray in the ruins of the town. She and her family had failed him utterly. It made Jane ache with shame.
Her father reached into the bushes with both hands, trying to get at something deep among the thorns.
Jane parked and went to him. He looked up, startled for a moment, but when he saw that it was only her, he went back to his work. Jane was the only person he wouldn’t run from. He ripped away the briars, leaving bits of leaf and stalk on the ground. Fine cuts wrapped his hands like lace.
“Dad, what are you doing? Are you trying to find food? Are you hungry?”
Her ghost was no help with him. It wouldn’t have known her father was there if Jane hadn’t told it. His mind had changed, retreating too far into memory and pain, a locked room that no ghost or person had the key to.
“I’m going to get you something to eat. Stay here.”
He didn’t acknowledge her. Jane got back in her car and went to a drive-through not far away. When she got back, her father was still there. He had made some progress with the vines, opening up a hollow big enough to step inside. What was he doing?
Her ghost, unable to get into her father’s mind, dug in to Jane’s instead. It dragged up memories from when he’d been himself. Flying a kite in a grassy lot behind a closed-down general store. Cooking to the radio while Jane did dishes at his side. A music shop manager telling Jane not to touch anything before taking a cassette away from her, and her father taking it away from the man and putting it back in her hands. He had been such a big piece of their lives once.
When she handed her father a burger, he turned away from the vines and sat on the ground to eat. She kicked the briars out of the way and sat with him. Sharing a meal was the closest thing she had to having a relationship with him anymore, the only way Jane could show that she cared. She didn’t know if he understood.
It was hard to look at him and not hate her mother. Her mom’s lips were pressed into his arms and neck. Her handprints on his head. Everywhere she had touched, he was burned, layers of scar tissue built up over years. No wonder he hadn’t been able to stay.
“You should be home,” Jane said. “It’s not safe for you to be out here. Cops might pick you up. Or you could hurt yourself. You could get sick. Being ghost-proof doesn’t make you invincible.”
You might as well be talking to yourself.
He finished the food she’d given him and went back to tearing away the vines. He had almost reached the fence behind it. Jane was about to give up, to leave him to his strange work, when, deep in the thorns, he pulled something free and turned around, showing it to her.
It was a soot-colored bird, dead a long time but still faintly smelling of decay. It had landed too hard and impaled its throat on a long, woody thorn. Its feathers were dark around its neck. It was half rotten, the head mostly skull and beak, eyeless, its clawed feet still tucked under its tail.
Her father took this small dead thing, patted it on the head, and tucked it into his pocket as if he had saved it. Then he left, disappearing into the shattered warehouses across the street, as always, without a word.
Jane went back to her car and sat down. She wiped her eyes and rested her head on the steering wheel. It was nothing, her father rescuing a bird that was already dead. Still, seeing him cup his hands around it, seeing him put it inside his coat like he could protect it, made her hope that her father still lived deep within himself. For a few moments, she let herself think that everything might be okay.
* * *
Pulling into her driveway, Jane heard the scream of a power saw from a few houses away. She was so stunned to hear a sound like that on her empty street that she left her car door open and walked toward it. A few homes down, there was an old house with a sagging roof and boarded-up windows. But the grass was cut for the first time that Jane could remember. The sawing came from the backyard, and from somewhere on the roof she heard shingles being ripped loose.
Behind the house, she saw a pig man stripped to the waist, his pink gut hanging over a pair of jeans with suspenders. He was smaller than Hogboss, only about the size of a man, and his skin was smooth and unscarred. He laid boards across a sawhorse and cut them, stacking them on the ground. Younger pig men, lean and paint-splattered, picked up the boards and carried them inside. From the open door, Jane could smell fresh paint.
The house’s spirits are gone. Her ghost sounded disappointed, angry.
“I didn’t know there were ghosts here,” Jane said.
Only a murmur of them, a collection of memories stirred together. They roosted in the attic like birds. Not anymore, though. The pigs changed the house, and they didn’t have anything to hold on to.
Jane walked a few blocks down to the old house where she had played as a girl, the green-smelling place where her ghost had haunted her. Pig City work trucks, their beds filled with new drywall and lumber, sat in the driveway. A pig girl read a book in the newly hung porch swing. All the old curtains, rotted to yellowed strips over the years, had been replaced clean and white.
“I’m sorry about your house,” she said to her ghost.
Her ghost circled wide inside of her, then collapsed tightly around Jane’s heart and made it race, like an embrace or a threat.
It’s fine. As long as I’m with you, I’ll always have a home.
Walking back, Jane saw more cars than usual on her street. People crept down the road with their windows rolled down, their eyes darting from house to house.
They heard that more pigs moved in. They’ve come to see.
Trigger texted her to say that he was awake. Jane ignored it. She needed to eat something. She walked back home and opened the door to the sound of the robot vacuuming. From upstairs, Henry played sad music. The song was familiar, but she couldn’t remember why.
Trigger texted again. My dad had to run some errands. He’ll be out of the house for a few hours, if you wanted to come over.
Jane grabbed a granola bar from the kitchen and ran back to her car. She’d asked to go to his house before, but he said his dad wouldn’t like it. He shared so little of himself, was so guarded. Even her ghost had a hard time getting to the bottom of him. There were things Trigger just wouldn’t think about, or wouldn’t think about when Jane and her ghost were around. She’d been hoping that if she went to his house, then she might really know him.
Text me your address, she wrote.
It’s not a good place, he wrote back. I’m letting you come so you’ll understand.
* * *
Trigger lived on the outskirts of Swine Hill, his house close to the forest surrounding the plant. A dirt track cut steeply back and forth to where his house sat on a hill. The yard was tangled with briars and wild blackberries. Old bits of trash, Styrofoam cups and rain-washed paper, hung in the thorns. The house was small, sitting up on concrete blocks. There was no truck in the driveway. A dirt path led to the door.
Jane stopped with her hand on the doorknob. “Are there ghosts inside?”
Just one. But, oh, Jane, it’s enough.
She went in without knocking.
It was dark and cold. Above her head, branches knit together, pressing their thin fingers against a bloated moon. The floor was thick with pine needles, fallen branches, and dead scrub, all of it clotted with ice. Leaves lay stacked, their brown edges frozen, like stars dead and fallen to earth. Through the elephantine trunks, wi
nd pushed endless and heavy and sobbing like a train.
It took her a moment to find the furniture, to see the couch facing a busted television, the kitchen table piled high with snow. She moved aside leaves and found dirty carpet, frayed and hair-covered. Low animals crept in the corners of the rooms. Black squirrels and birds moving in and out of the branches. Rabbits, heads down, beggaring their way over the floor. From the hallway, a deer stared at her.
The only bright things in the dim were flares of blood, red-black and heavy as jewels, dotting the floor. Gunpowder and smoke hung so thick in the air that they coated her tongue. There was a hum, a ringing needle of sound that seemed almost on the verge of fading but never did.
Trigger was behind her, slipping a hoodie over her shoulders and rubbing her skin through the fabric. “You don’t have to stay,” he said. “We can go whenever you want.”
“There’s a whole memory in this house. It’s not just the ghost of a person. It’s the ghost of a place and time. It’s the ghost of something that happened.”
Jane’s ghost brought her fragments from Trigger, something he was trying to suppress. I am what happened. This place is me.
She pulled him against her. “Why would you stay here? Why punish yourself ?”
Trigger didn’t say anything. He couldn’t get the words out, not knowing where to start. Everything in him was a snarl of self-loathing and anger. But he let himself feel everything, didn’t try to hide it from her. Jane’s greedy ghost drank it up.
The house isn’t haunted. He is. This is the same ghost he carries everywhere.
“Show me,” Jane said. “I want to know what happened.”
He took her hand and led her down the hall. The walls shimmered in and out, one second brown paneling, the next a stand of dark trees. There were pictures hanging, though frost obscured most of them. She brushed away the ice from the glass and saw a family portrait, his father, mother, brother, and him.
The beads of blood grew thicker down the hall, giving way to a violent slick of black. Dark blood. Heart’s blood, still steaming in the cold. He waved her toward the bedroom alone and went to his room to wait.
He can’t look at it again. He’ll be waiting for you when you’re done.
Jane pushed open the door, cobwebs stretching wide and tearing. No one had been in here in a long time. His mother’s clothes still lay bundled in a hamper. On the dresser top, a scattering of leaves covered a set of porcelain boxes. Jane brushed the dirt and ice away, her fingers stinging with cold. She found a jewelry cabinet, a few simple rings stacked together within. And she found a music box, the brass key on the bottom caked with tarnish. She turned the key and held the box to her ear, but there was nothing. She slipped it into the deep pocket of the hoodie.
You would trust Henry with something so important?
“Maybe Trigger would like to have it fixed. Maybe it would give him a piece of his mother back.”
When has Henry ever made anything better?
Jane ignored her ghost. Blood sank deeply into the carpet, a trail leading to the closet. Inside its dark mouth, dresses hung, as silent and pale as ghosts. Jane walked through them, into darkness and wind, coming out in a little clearing under the moon. It was night, and winter, and years ago. Branches hung down to catch in her hair. A family of deer startled and crashed away, leaving a circle of flattened grass and the steaming trails of their breath.
Here, in the hollow where the deer had slept, a child lay on the grass. A bullet wound lanced through his small chest. Blood stuck his shirt and orange vest to his body. The rifle shot rang loudly here, like it was right inside her head. The child, so obviously dead, turned to look at Jane.
He says that you should go, her ghost said. He says that Trigger did this, and it’s only fair that Trigger remembers. Nothing will ever change that.
Jane stared into his dark, hateful eyes. “I’m going to bury you.”
Is he wrong? her ghost asked.
Jane went into Trigger’s room and found him lying in bed. She shrugged her hoodie off and lay next to him, stroking his back.
“You should probably go soon,” he said. “My dad will be angry if he finds you here.”
“You were really young when it happened.”
“Yeah.”
“And it was an accident.”
He started to cry, but her ghost pulled images and memories out of him, all the things he couldn’t say. His father had taken them on a hunting trip. Trigger had insisted on carrying the rifle. Said he would be careful. He’d seen some shape move in the woods and switched his safety off. He darted forward, got his feet tangled around a fallen branch in the dark. He twisted and fell. The gun went off in his arms, his baby brother standing cold and afraid only a few feet away. His father had run the bleeding boy back toward the truck, through the fallen leaves, and into the dark, blood pouring out of him. “Goddamn you, Trigger Fingers,” his father had shouted. “Look what you did.”
“He only said that because he felt guilty,” Jane said. “Your dad blames you so he doesn’t have to blame himself.”
“My brother blames me,” Trigger said. “I’m the one he haunted.”
“He’s a child. All these years later, he can’t be anything but what he was.”
Her ghost moved darkly in her, feeling rebuked.
Trigger turned to face Jane. She took his face in her hands and kissed his eyes, smearing the salty wet over his cheeks. He pulled her hard against him, so close that she could feel his sad heart beating through his chest.
“My mother left after that. She couldn’t stand to look at me.”
“Then she failed you,” Jane said. “It sounds like a lot of people have.”
His mind butterflied open, grateful and guilty and vulnerable. She saw deep into him, sinking into the frozen lake of his mind. She knew all of him, knew him better than she’d ever known anyone. His thoughts and feelings collided with her own, Jane feeling like she was two people in one skin. She drank him up.
Jane pulled off his jeans and her own, their pant legs twining together on the floor. They were still wearing their shirts, the blanket pulled close around her shoulders. His mind focused completely on Jane, her eyes staring into his eyes, her breath against his neck. He felt nothing but her, and she took the feeling back, feeling herself through him. For a short while, he didn’t hate who he was.
* * *
While they lay together, skin on skin, a layer of ice and leaves collected on top of the blanket. Jane’s phone kept buzzing in her pants pocket on the floor. Worried something might have happened to her father, she shook free of the blanket and stood to get dressed.
When she pulled Trigger’s hoodie back on, the weight of the music box thumped against her side. He felt stunned and happy, watching her dress in simple adoration. It was nice to have her ghost bring her something sweet for once.
She flipped open her phone and read a string of messages from her brother.
Jane? It’s gone. Jane, where are you? I can’t feel my ghost anymore. The CD you made for Trigger stole it.
“You gave Henry the CD I made for you?”
Trigger sat up and started pulling on his clothes. “He was at the plant last night. I told him the CD didn’t work and asked him to give it back.”
“Did you listen to it?”
He tried to think of something else, but couldn’t focus. Guilt flared in him again, and a quiet, stubborn anger.
“You didn’t. What the fuck is wrong with you?”
“My brother doesn’t have anyone else but me.”
“Neither does mine. And your brother is a ghost. You aren’t responsible for him anymore.”
“I’m more responsible for him. It’s my fault he’s dead. You have a ghost. You should understand.”
“My ghost doesn’t hurt me. If it did, I’d get rid of it.”
There was a spike of shock from her ghost, but Jane ignored it.
“Why are you so mad about this?” Trigger asked.
Trigger wouldn’t meet her eyes. “He should be happy, right? Maybe we’d all be happier without our ghosts.” He didn’t believe it, though. At the bottom of him, he felt that he deserved to be haunted. He wondered what Jane was thinking, what she wanted from him, how he could make things right.
She walked out of the room, glad that he couldn’t read her mind. “I have to go.”
Trigger’s father, Mason, opened the door and found the two of them standing in the living room. The older man held his keys oddly in his mangled hand, tweezing them between thumb and ring finger. Jane and Trigger looked at each other, confused and cold, like lost hunters in the woods.
“You aren’t supposed to have company,” Mason said.
He didn’t look at Jane, but his mind was full of her. She was a stain to him. A blemish in his house, a thing that didn’t belong. She had seen the ugliness of their run-down home, and he was ashamed to be made so low in her eyes. Her being here made him feel like less, and feeling so made him hate her. He wanted her and everyone like her cast from the earth.
“I was on my way out,” Jane said. “We’ll talk soon, Trigger. I’m not letting this go.”
She closed the door and went back to her car, mouth dry and shoulders tight from seeing herself through Mason’s eyes. Her hands trembled badly enough that she almost dropped her keys.
They’re fighting, her ghost said.
Jane put the car in gear. “Don’t tell me.”
His father pushed him. They’re screaming. I think Mason might hit him. Her ghost rolled in the feeling, finding its own anticipation delicious.
Jane pulled out of the driveway, not wanting to stay long enough for her ghost to tell her what happened. She turned up her music and sped down the road. Whatever wrath Mason took out on his son, was that her fault too, for staying and trying to make things better when she knew nothing could? She felt sick, but she couldn’t deal with that right now. She had to go face her brother after taking away the thing that mattered to him most.