by Ellen Datlow
“Where’d she go?”
“She’s out there somewhere, I guess.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“She’s always around.”
Stockton scanned the desolate beach. “What happened to her? She didn’t have time to disappear like that.”
Keyes shrugged.
“She didn’t go into the water, did she? She could drown out there.”
Keyes took a drag off his cigarette and blew out a flag of smoke. “She’ll be all right.”
“How do you know?” Stockton asked.
Keyes didn’t answer.
She must have gone into the water, Stockton thought. “Maybe we should call someone.”
Keyes grunted. He ground out his cigarette on the wooden railing. He tucked the butt away in a pocket of his coveralls. “Is that what you want to do, Mr. Stockton? A man your age out here in the middle of the night, a young lady like that?”
Stockton thought of Judy, nudging him in the elevator. Your tongue’s hanging out.
“You go on up to your room,” Keyes said. “You get yourself some sleep. That girl can take care of herself.”
“But—”
“I got to finish hosing down this deck now.”
“Okay, then,” Stockton said.
At the base of the stairs he rinsed the sand off his feet, slid on his sandals, and pushed through the gate into the pool area. He rode the elevator up and stuck close to the wall as he traversed the gallery. Inside the apartment, he undressed and slipped into bed. He lay still in the darkness.
“Where’ve you been?” Judy said.
“Walking on the beach.”
“At three in the morning?”
“Yes.”
She didn’t say anything for a while. He thought she’d fallen asleep.
“Not a very good idea,” she said.
“No, I guess not.”
“Something bothering you?”
“I don’t think so.”
“You don’t think so?”
“No.”
She waited him out.
He said, “I’m worried, I guess.”
“About what?” And when he didn’t answer: “The doctor fixed you, Frank. You’re as good as new.”
“You think?”
“I think. She said so, didn’t she? Now go to sleep.”
But sleep was a long time coming. Stockton couldn’t get comfortable. Something was nagging at him, something odd. He couldn’t say what it was.
• • •
It came to him the next morning:
Keyes had known his name.
Stockton pondered this over coffee. He’d gotten up late. Judy had long since left for the pool, but she’d thrown open the drapes in the main room before departing. Stockton had closed them, wincing at the shattering sunlight.
Now, he sat at the counter in the shadows, and tried to sort it out.
There was something dreamlike about the whole episode: the moonwashed beach, the young woman striding purposefully toward him. Where had she gone? And the maintenance man, Keyes. How had Keyes known him?
There must be a thousand guests or more at the resort. The odds that a maintenance man would know any one of them by name must be vanishingly small. The problem vexed Stockton. That and the flat certainty in the man’s voice.
She’s always around.
What was that supposed to mean?
Stockton drummed his fingers on the counter. He finished his coffee.
He dressed and went out onto the gallery, averting his eyes from the void beyond the parapet, resolute. That impulse moved within him, stronger now. He could feel it, a dread anticipation in his guts, a kind of longing. He was sweating by the time the elevator doors shut before him. They opened again on the seventh floor to admit a thin woman with two little girls, four or five years old, both of them clutching buckets of plastic beach toys. He realized he’d braced himself against the back wall, half expecting the woman from the beach to step inside, dreading that as well.
He felt nauseated, dizzy, short of breath.
Lucky. He’d been lucky.
“Mommy, what’s wrong with the man?”
The woman drew her children close, shushing them. She offered him a weak smile. Kids.
Then the doors slid open and she hurried them off toward the beach.
Stockton stood in the heat, gathering himself. He took air in and let it out through his nose, counting his breaths. He felt easier then, the tide of anxiety retreating.
He walked up between the buildings to the front desk, on the street side of the central tower. “I’m looking for a man who works in maintenance,” he told the desk clerk. “Keyes.”
“If there’s something wrong with your room—”
“My room is fine,” Stockton said. “I just need to speak with this one guy.”
“And what was his name again?”
“Keyes.”
The clerk’s face was suddenly immobile, mask like. “Let me get somebody who can help you,” he said, picking up the phone.
Five minutes later, Stockton was being ushered into a private office by the property manager, a tall, blond woman, maybe a decade his junior, who’d introduced herself as Parker Nelson. The room was luxurious and impersonal. Dark, glossy furniture and plush carpet, innocuous nature prints on the walls. Even the photo on the shelf behind the desk looked like a prop: a handsome man in a golf shirt, and a matching set of kids, male and female, eight or nine years old, as blond as their mother. Stockton felt sweaty and ill at ease.
Nelson waved him to a chair by the desk. “What can I help you with, Mr. Stockton?” she asked, settling herself on the other side.
“I’d like to talk to one of your employees,” he said. “His last name is Keyes. He works in maintenance.”
“Is there something in your suite that requires attention?”
“No. It’s him I want to talk to. Keyes.”
Nelson pursed her lips. She tapped at her computer. “We don’t have an employee named Keyes,” she said. “Not in any department.”
“I saw him. I talked to him. Out on the decking by the South Tower, on the bridge over the dunes.”
“When?”
“Last night. It must have been three thirty, maybe four. This morning, I mean.”
“Are you sure his name was Keyes?”
“It was on his name tag.”
“Maybe you misread it? It was dark.”
“No.”
She stared at him for a moment. “Is this some kind of joke, Mr. Stockton?”
“I don’t understand.”
“If it’s a joke,” she said, “it’s in poor taste. If it’s not—” She broke off.
It came to Stockton with the force of revelation: “He’s dead, isn’t he?”
“Is there anything else I can do for you, Mr. Stockton?”
A dismissal. Stockton got to his feet. “Thank you for your time,” he said. “I’ll see myself out.”
He left the office and closed the door. The lobby was busy: a group of kids checking out shuffleboard equipment from the concierge, an ice-cream social in the adjoining Seacrest Room. The modest business center next door—two desktop PCs and a printer—was empty. Stockton sat down at one of the computers and pulled up Chrome. He googled “Keyes” and “OceanView Plantation.” Clicked on the news icon. It was the third hit down, an article from the local paper dated December thirteenth, three years ago: “Maintenance man killed at OceanView Plantation.” Stockton scanned the neat paragraphs of text. The details were simple. An accident, a fatal fall from the roof of the South Tower. Recriminations from the family, carefully worded condolences from OceanView. And further down the page several more hits: a history of depression, a lawsuit, an out-of-court settlement and a nondisclosure clause. Then silence.
Stockton sat there for a long time, staring at the screen.
The ice-cream social went on in the Seacrest Room. The concierge was on the phone.
S
tockton stood up. The desk clerk busied himself at his computer.
Outside, the heat was breathtaking. Stockton went to find Judy.
• • •
But what could he say?
That he’d seen a ghost? Judy would think he was having her on. Frank. Her Frank, the epitome of rationality. He didn’t believe in ghosts. He had misread the name tag. It had been late and he’d been strung out from lack of sleep. It was nothing.
He found her on the deck by the tiki bar. He sat facing her on the lounge she’d saved for him, and tried to frame the whole thing in his head in a way that made sense: the woman on the beach, his conversation with Keyes, the obscure impulse that he felt move within him. He opened his mouth to speak, closed it. What would Laurie say?
He was anxious, that’s all. And no wonder. It had been a close call. He’d been lucky.
“I thought you were never coming down,” Judy said.
“I slept late.”
“I know. Up walking the beach at three in the morning. What were you thinking?”
Stockton shrugged. “I don’t know,” he said.
She smiled and patted his knee. “Well, you’re here now. Is it too early for a drink?”
“We’re on vacation.”
“Just what I was thinking.”
His muscle-bound friend was at the tiki bar. Gym, Beach, Repeat. “What can I get you, boss?”
Stockton ordered a Caribbean Cooler and a gin and tonic. He slid a twenty across the bar. “Go a little heavier on the gin, why don’t you,” he said. The bartender grinned and pocketed the bill. “Why not?” he said.
Stockton signed the slip and turned away.
Back at the lounge chairs, he handed Judy her drink. It was hot, and the cocktails went down easy. Stockton went back to the bar for another round and then another. He got ahead of Judy. The bartender had warmed up to him. He kept the pours generous and made casual conversation. Where was Stockton from and what did he do for a living? Was this his first visit to OceanView? Stockton grew looser. He thought about his encounter with Keyes. The whole thing seemed faintly ridiculous, even embarrassing. Maybe he had misread the name.
Stockton looked for the woman in the pink bikini. He finally spotted her down on the far end of the pool below the North Tower. She lay still in the sun, her head angled toward him. She might have been staring at him from behind her dark glasses. She might have been sleeping. More likely, she was entirely oblivious. What was he to her?
Yet she had turned toward him on the beach, as if to intercept him.
He finished his drink and heaved himself out of his lounge chair, unsteady on his feet. He looked at Judy. “You ready for another?”
“I’m fine,” Judy said. “Maybe we should go up.”
“One more.”
At the tiki bar, Gym/Beach/Repeat said, “Listen, boss, you sure you—”
Stockton slid another twenty across the bar. He watched the bartender mix the drink, signed the slip, turned away. The woman at the far end of the pool was gone. When he got back to the lounge chairs, Judy was packing up. She studied him critically. “Time to get you upstairs,” she said. Sipping his drink, he let her lead him to the elevator. The door was sliding closed when the woman in the pink bikini slipped in.
Judy frowned. “What floor?” she asked.
The woman leaned over to punch the button for sixteen. As she stepped back she brushed past Stockton. She pushed her sunglasses up onto her head and glanced over at him. There was something familiar in her hazel eyes. She held his gaze. Stockton looked away. He studied his feet. He thought of the parapet, that impulse moving within him. The elevator lurched higher.
They rode up in silence.
He recalled her on the beach, changing course to intercept him, the way he’d forced himself to walk faster, the anxiety pulsing in his chest.
The elevator stopped at fifteen.
The doors opened.
As he stepped out, Stockton risked another glance at her. She stared back, unblinking.
The doors shut, and it was like a tense line snapping. Stockton drank off the gin. He wanted to keep drinking. He could drink all night. He stood at the parapet and gazed down into the garden far below.
“Come on, Frank,” Judy said. “You’ve had too much gin. You’ll fall over if you’re not careful.”
He stepped back and followed her to the suite.
Inside, he poured a glass of chardonnay. “Wine?” he asked.
“Not right now. We need to get some food in your stomach.”
She opened the curtains and went back into the kitchen. He watched her from the counter. She put in a pork tenderloin to bake and made a salad. Stockton poured himself another glass of wine.
“How much are you planning to drink?” She was cleaning broccoli to steam.
“Have you ever seen a ghost, Judy?”
She looked up. “No, and neither have you.”
“I don’t remember the heart attack,” Stockton said. “One minute I’m getting out of the truck, the next I’m coming out of surgery. I don’t remember anything in between.”
She sliced the floret off a stalk of broccoli. “You don’t remember when you’re asleep, either.”
“You remember your dreams.”
“You were under anesthesia.” She sliced the head off another stalk, the blade snapping hard on the plastic cutting board. Then another stalk. And another.
“Not in the ambulance,” he said.
The blade jumped off the cutting board, came down on the next stalk, and took a layer of flesh off her knuckle, thin as the filmy husk of an onion. She threw the knife clattering into the sink. She brought the wounded finger to her mouth. “You’re drunk,” she said. “I was dead,” he told her, and she stormed out of the kitchen. She slammed the bedroom door behind her.
Sighing, Stockton turned off the oven.
He emptied his wine glass and retrieved the bottle from the refrigerator. Holding it by the neck, he walked to the balcony door and stood looking out. Twilight had fallen. The sea was calm. Small rollers broke upon the sand. Someone was flying a kite down by the water. It snapped and turned in the wind before him.
Stockton refilled his glass and placed the sweating bottle on the coffee table.
He sat on the sofa, and looked out over the balcony to the horizon. He didn’t know how long he sat there. The sky grew dark. He splashed more wine into his glass. The young woman cut across the sand to meet him. When he dozed off, she followed him down into his dreams.
• • •
The nurse leaned over him.
You should be dead, she told him, and he woke into the silence of deep night.
Stockton clambered to his feet, bewildered. The room tilted, as though the Earth had slipped on its axis. Then he was okay. Unsteady, but okay. He drained the wine bottle and set it back on the table. He felt drawn to the balcony. He put his hand on the door handle and pulled, the glass whispering in its track. He stepped outside, into the humid night air. The moon cast a pale streak across the black water. Below him glittered bright pools, garlanded with palm trees. Curling his hands around the railing, he hoisted himself up and over and clung there on the narrow lip of concrete.
The ocean heaved in the dark.
Here it was, then, the crescendo everything had been hurtling toward since he’d opened his eyes in the recovery room. It felt like a circle closing, ineluctable, true, as though he had no choice in the matter, as though he’d been driven to it, or summoned. Now he would unclench his hands, now he would push himself out into the night. He saw the black earth lurching toward him, the pools, the trees—
From the doorway, Judy said, “Frank, baby, please—”
Stockton clutched at the railing. His hand slipped. The building pitched and yawed. Blank terror seized him. And then he had it, he was stable again, and all the world spread out below him. The resort was an island of light in a dark sea that ran out to the horizon, illimitable.
“Frank,” Judy said.
“Frank, baby, please. Come back to me now. You don’t have to do this. Why would you do this? Why would you leave me, baby? Why would you do that?”
She stepped out onto the balcony.
Wind swept in off the ocean. It tugged at him, rippling his clothes, calling out to him, all that dark and void. And Judy. Enjoining him to stay.
Stockton hung there in fine equipoise, balanced on the knife edge of the moment. There was nothing else and had not ever been or would be, just this fleeting instant of time.
“Frank,” Judy said.
And then he was pulling himself up and over, onto the balcony. He went to his knees. Judy knelt to take him into her arms.
“It’s okay,” she said. “You’re okay now.”
Stockton was weeping.
• • •
They didn’t sleep until nearly dawn, and when they woke neither of them spoke of what had happened in the night. They moved carefully around each other and talked quietly about small matters. Stockton’s close call on the balcony lay under these surface trivialities like a chasm. To broach it would be to admit how perilous was their position on the brink of the abyss. A time would come when they would have to hash it out, Stockton knew. He supposed he would have to consult someone about it—Judy would insist, and Laurie would be happy, even gratified, to give him a name. But for the present anyway, they acknowledged it no further than in their tacit agreement that it was time to go home.
Judy supervised while the bellman loaded the luggage into the car. Stockton went inside to check out. The same clerk stood behind the desk, professionally courteous. There was something in his voice. He didn’t make eye contact, just pushed a sheet of paper across the counter. Sign here, initial this, date that. Stockton didn’t bother with the small print, just scrawled his name on the line, dated it, and handed it back.
Done.
Stockton turned away, searching for the men’s room.
He found it down the corridor from Parker Nelson’s office. Inside, everything was gleaming and clean, the mirror and the countertops, the white towels in their baskets by the sinks. Somewhere an unseen atomizer murmured, releasing into the room a subtle fragrance of oranges. Stockton stepped up to the urinal. Finished, he leaned over the vanity to wash his hands. He was tossing the towel into the bin when someone came in and slipped by at his back. Stockton moved to the door. His hand was on the push plate when—
