Chasing the dead

by Joe Schreiber

  But the fact is that Phillip Chamberlain has been a part of her life for almost as far back as Sue can remember. In elementary school back in their hometown of Gray Haven, Massachusetts, they were the two classic pillars upon which the caste system rested: Nerd Boy and Fat Girl. They've been through the shit together. By tenth grade Sue thinned out and sprouted breasts, and the big lips that had once been the object of such unimaginative scorn were regarded with admiration, jealousy, and flat-out lust. Meanwhile it was obvious to everyone that the reason Phillip didn't give a rat's ass what anybody thought was because he was smart enough to do whatever he wanted. And the first thing he wanted was to get out of Gray Haven.

  But even after he started getting scholarship offers to Harvard, Princeton, and Stanford, and she was turning down dates from quarterbacks, the glue between them-the intractable outsiders' bond-had only grown stronger. They tried being boyfriend and girlfriend for a while, even made out a few times in the backseat of Phillip's Toyota-it seemed like Extreme's "More Than Words" was always playing on the stereo-but it was always easier being friends.

  With that in mind, somebody once remarked (was it Phillip himself?) that their eventual marriage was built more on inevitability than any sort of romance or even affection. Certainly therewas plenty of affection too, maybe even a little steamy romance in their backseat mash sessions. But more than anything there was just the sense of having been there for each other during a particularly awful period of their lives, a moment so horrible that you needed to share it with somebody or else it would destroy you.

  After high school there was a ten-year-plus lull when they rarely saw each other. Phillip graduated from Harvard and began buying apartment buildings around town, little ones and then big ones. Sue dropped out of college and started driving an ambulance for a living, a job she found just crazy enough to temporarily satisfy the chaos-addict that she'd discovered lurking inside herself. Throughout the nineties they kept in touch via phone calls, Christmas cards, and e-mails, along with that occasional moment of ESP when she was sure that he was thinking about her at the same moment she was thinking about him. She worked maniacal hours, dated the usual string of police-scanner geeks and buzz-cut paramedics, went to bars, took drugs, and woke up in too many different places without knowing exactly where her clothes were.

  That period of her life had bottomed out on one Fourth of July weekend on the night she tried to drive home from Singing Beach, blind drunk, to the vacation condo she was renting in Beverly Farms. Despite the fact that the road refused to hold still, ambulance-driver bravado carried the day and she was sure she could make it, right up to the moment her old Jeep Wrangler left the road and rolled over three times before hitting a tree. Sue spent six hours in the OR but made it out alive, scared, scarred, and sober. It was all veryBehind the Music, but no less effective for all of that, a reminder that when life wants to get our attention it doesn't bother with half-measures. Eight months later she ran into Phillip at a Super Bowl party at a mutual friend's house. They ended up back at his brownstone on Beacon Hill, where he said nothing about the scars running up her abdomen and cleaving her right nipple in half, but only kissed her and held her in his arms. And Sue would be lying if she didn't admit, at least to herself, that the first emotion that she felt was a sense of relief, of finally being home.

  Six months later she was pregnant with Veda. The sensible thing, Phillip said, was to get married so Sue could quit her job and they could get busy taking vacations, spending the money he was making, and spoiling their kid. Sue surprised herself by saying okay. That was a little over two years ago, when they were both in their early thirties. He was already running a multimillion-dollar real estate business out of his office in Cambridge, holding business meetings by cell phone from his Boston Whaler, or telecommuting from his house on Nantucket-all of which, upon edict from Phillip's lawyers, now belongs to Sue. Phillip has seen to that, shifting ownership of everything to Sue in the seemingly endless jet stream of phone calls, e-mails, legal documents, and bank transfers sweeping out of Malibu over the first twelve months immediately following his departure. Throughout this last summer communications between them dwindled to a trickle, as the last loose ends were tied up, everything going into Sue's name. She hasn't heard from him at all since September, not even a Christmas card. And though he is scum for leaving, she can't help but think that having him here might somehow reassure her that she isn't losing her mind.

  The notion evaporates, and she is just driving again. After a moment she tastes salt.

  She realizes that she is thinking about Veda, and weeping.

  And just like that, the phone is in her hand.

  It occurs to her that the man's threat of listening in on her calls could be a bluff, but probably not. After all, she owns a baby monitor, and she's been on her cell phone and heard snatches of her own conversation crackling through Veda's bedroom enough times that she doesn't even use the cell inside the house when her daughter is upstairs napping. And the paramedics and ham radio operators that she's dated used to entertain themselves for hours listening in on other people's calls, miles away. It not onlycould happen; it happened all the time.

  Then you have to assume that he is listening. All the time.

  But in the silent emptiness of the wooded road around her, the thought of calling Phillip refuses to go away. What if she were to call him and havehim call the police, using some kind of code that Veda's abductor might not recognize, and then hang up? She already knows what she could say, the phrase that would send up a red flag for him, without alerting the man on the phone what she was talking about.

  She picks up the phone.

  Don't be stupid. Is it really worth risking Veda's life for this?

  What if she doesn't say a word? She could just dial his number. He'd see it on his caller ID, andThen she sees them, a half mile back.

  Headlights.

  I'm watching you.

  They're coming up fast, too fast, swooping to narrow the distance between them in what seems like a split second, already close enough to drag her shadow upward across the dashboard.

  Sue shoves the phone down between the seats as the headlights swallow her. She can hear the engine, an irregularBLAT BLAT BLAT that sounds more like a single-engine plane than a car. Now it is alongside her, and she sees it's a truck, actually, but the driver's face is obscured as it plows past her and swings up in front, cutting her off.

  Sue hits the brakes, dropping back, tasting a sudden reflux of fear. Brake lights flare in front of her, forcing her to slow even more. Her tires squeal; the seat belt catches her hard and makes her sternum ache. The box containing the steamed lobsters tips up on its side and she hears them flop over sideways with a thump. Up ahead of her, twenty feet away, the truck has come to a complete stop, its engine throbbing. It is one of those old no-color farm pickups with rounded corners, a great grinning grille, and something boisterously wrong with its muffler.

  She can feel the driver's eyes gleaming in his sideview mirror, reflected back at her in the volcanic-black darkness. Examining her face.

  Then she can't move.

  Sherecognizes this truck. She's seen it before. Now that it's right in front of her, she's almost positive that it's the same one thatThe phone rings.

  8:18P.M.

  "Hello?"

  "Susan."

  "I'm…please, I'm sorry. I slipped. It was a mistake."

  "Susan."

  "Don't hurt her. Do whatever you want to me. I'm sorry. I swear it won't happen again. Just please-"

  "Susan."

  Her teeth snap shut. She closes her eyes. She cannot bear the moist optic glimmer that she senses coming from the pickup's eccentrically tooled sideview mirrors, those dark eyes shining like tumors from their rusty chrome sockets.

  The driver's side door opens and a man steps out. His face is lost in the darkness, but she can tell from the angle of his head and shoulders that he's looking straight at her. Snowflakes spill through the head
lights aiming off into the woods.

  Holding the phone very close to her ear, Sue says, "Please. Please don't hurt her."

  For a moment the man doesn't move. He seems to be watching her even more closely, as if trying to make a decision about something. Then he gets back up behind the wheel and slams the door.

  "Thank you," she says. "Thank you so m-"

  The truck spins its tires and lurches back into motion, its motor pounding off down the highway in a steadily diminishing array of asymmetric taillights. It leaves her there clutching the phone, not sure whether the voice is still with her or not. In the silence she realizes she can hear him breathing.

  "You've made it this far," the voice says. "But so far it's been relatively easy. What you're going to do next isn't going to be nearly so easy. But I know you can do it, Susan." And does he actually chuckle? "I have faith in you."

  She waits. He does not make her wait long.

  "You're familiar with Route 114, aren't you?"

  "Yes."

  "It runs east and west, right along the state line. If you follow it far enough to the east it takes you out to the coast. But you're going to start out by taking it west. Back to a little town called Gray Haven. You do know Gray Haven, don't you, Susan?"

  "Of course." Her voice feels detached from her, like something recorded a long time ago and played back. It doesn't sound like her at all. "I grew up there."

  "That's right, Susan. You grew up there. In fact, you left something behind and tonight, you're going to get it back."

  "I don't know what you're talking about."

  "I don't know what you're talking about,"he mimics cruelly, and it seems like he should be laughing, but he's not. There is no hint of humor, not even sarcasm, in his voice. It's like before, when it turned nasty, but this is much, much worse. "You listen to me, you worthless little cunt, because I'm only going to say this once. The only thing you're doing when you play dumb is putting this knife closer to little Veda's throat. Now, do you know what I'm talking about?"

  There's another pause, Sue leaning forward into the phone, and in the background, horribly, she can hear Veda again, starting to cry in a shrill wail. It is not a cry of fear now, but unquestionably a cry of pain.

  "Wait, please, stop!" Sue shouts, tears in her eyes again, voice going to pieces. "I'll do whatever you want! Just please don't hurt her anymore!"

  He doesn't answer her and she's left with the sound of Veda crying louder. Sue feels the abrupt soreness in her breasts and the left cup of her bra is wet with milk from her undamaged left nipple, the left breast being the only one able to produce milk for Veda after the accident. She hasn't nursed her daughter in almost six months but her body doesn't seem to care about this. Sue is still crying too, unable to control herself, and the next voice she hears isn't the man on the phone at all. It's Phillip's voice, in her head, calm and clear and in its way almost as real as the one coming through the cell phone.

  Stop it, Sue. Just stop it, right now.

  She catches her breath. In spite of everything, she's startled into silence at how vividly she can hear him.

  This is bad. It's the worst. But nothing's ever been solved with tears. So just…stop…crying.

  "All right," she whispers. Not whimpers, just whispers. And in a moment she has nearly regained the fullness of her voice. Through the receiver she can hear her daughter still crying, but she's calmed down a bit too, thank God, and it sounds as if whatever the man on the other end was doing to her has stopped, at least for now. Maybe he was just pinching her, she thinks. Maybe not even that. If Marilyn really is there, maybe she was somehow able to protect Veda. Or comfort her. Marilyn would do anything for Veda, Sue knows, putting her own life on the line for Veda if that is what it takes.

  At least this is what she chooses to believe, for this very moment at hand, and if it gets her through to the next moment, then she may continue to believe it.

  "A long time ago," the voice on the phone says, "you and your friend did something that neither one of you will ever forget. You do know who I'm talking about, Susan. You know very well."

  Sue Young sits perfectly still like a figure in a snow globe, amid the increasing chaos of tumbling white, staring out the windshield at the bare trees along the road, a dense thicket of questions tightening around her like some kind of barbwire shroud.

  "Yes."

  How does the voice on the other end know about this? It is one thing to know about her life now, where she works, where she lives, and what kind of car she drives. Even to have gone into her house and looked through her things-an intruder with enough intelligence and motive could have done that.

  But nobody knows about what they did that summer, the thing that bonded them together permanently. In a peculiar way, she herself doesn't know about it. It has not been on her mind, at least the daytime part of her mind, since she graduated high school. In fact, it is as if some arcane form of psychological self-defense had wiped him completely from her consciousness even before she left Gray Haven.

  Phillip, she knows, has not been so lucky.

  For whatever reason-perhaps just because he is a man and not so consciously accustomed to the sprockets and flywheels of psychological micromanagement-he has not been able to expel the nightmares so handily. Only after they were married did she realize that he still had nightmares about it. They attacked in cycles, serially, industriously corroding whole layers of insulation off his ordered and businesslike thoughts right up until the point that he left her eighteen months ago. Sometimes he'd thrash so violently in bed that she was afraid he might hurt himself, or her. Sometimes he shot straight up in bed with a scream like nothing she'd ever heard from him when he was awake. His eyes were open but he was still dreaming. There was sweat in his hair, pasting it down in thick brown fingers to his forehead. Even when the dreams were at their worst, he refused to tell her about them, but Sue always knew-on the same level that she herself remembers. She knows all this because he is Phillip Chamberlain, the only boy she ever loved, and because they went through it all together, approximately one lifetime ago.

  "Tonight you're going back to Gray Haven," the voice says.

  "What?"

  "You're going back to pay your respects. Do you know the place?"

  "Who are you?"

  "Answer the question, Susan. Do you know the place?"

  "I know the place, but-"

  "Good."

  Again Sue is silent. In the background she can hear Veda again, not crying but whimpering, tired, hungry, wanting it to be over.Oh honey, oh sweetie, I sympathize. And Sue has to hang up on the voice to keep from asking to talk to her baby girl again.

  Because she already knows this is how this game will be played.

  Whatever privileges she might have had to make special requests are gone.

  For the sake of her daughter she is going to do exactly what the voice asked.

  She is going back to Gray Haven.

  8:42P.M.

  The roads are going to hell. Sue can feel it, that queasy little shimmy in the back tires whenever she adjusts the wheel more than a few degrees in either direction. It's snowing harder now. Still, the Expedition is holding steady at sixty-five, sometimes seventy-five when the road straightens out. She's got another half-hour until she gets to Gray Haven, maybe longer if the weather continues to fall apart like it is.

  Still, she's had plenty of experience driving under adverse conditions. You can't drive an ambulance for eleven years without experiencing everything that bad weather, bad karma, and plain rotten luck have to offer. Before she left it all behind to become Mrs. Phillip Chamberlain, Sue delivered babies in the middle of electrical storms and drove stroke victims through nor'easters. Once, when her ambulance broke down in the middle of Buttfuck Idaho she and her partner kept an eight-year-old with his throat half torn out by a German shepherd alive and calm for an hour and a half until a helicopter arrived, and the kid eventually recovered enough to send her a crayon-drawn thank-you note.
Sue used to keep it stashed above the visor of her ambulance. Back in the day, she was the golden girl-the one everybody said could eat stress and shit sonnets.

  The road rises and falls and the opening lines of one of Veda's favorite board books, a story that Sue's read her at least a hundred times, keeps repeating stupidly through her head:"Up slippery hills cars creep, don't beep. Inside the hills the giants sleep." It is what you get with kids. The children's authors of America erect a little writer's colony in your forebrain, and no matter how grim or horrific the circumstances you find yourself in, they're always ready with a bit of utterly inappropriate doggerel.

  Driving on. She's got the road mainly to herself. She passes several cars, a Dunkin' Donuts truck, even a couple of snowplows, but there's no sign of the farm pickup she saw earlier. The more she thinks about it, the more certain she is that it's the one from two months earlier, the afternoon of the pumpkin patch.

  One day back in late October, a week before Halloween, Sue and Marilyn took Veda pumpkin-picking outside Lexington. Veda ran up and down the rows of gnarled green vines and pumpkins, stopping every few feet to attempt to pick one up until she finally found one small enough to lift. The three of them went out to dinner afterward and Veda fell asleep in the car, the crisp air and exercise having done its job. Sue dropped Marilyn back at her condo, then headed back to the house with her sleeping daughter still clutching the miniature pumpkin in her car seat.

  They were just a few miles from home, cruising along a backwoods two-lane road, when somebody started flashing their headlights at her from behind. Sue slowed down, thinking the driver wanted to pass, but then he slowed down too, coming up close behind her, and Sue felt all her alarm systems go on at once. The vehicle was an old pickup with a big grille, round fenders, and wide-set headlights, just like the one tonight, and the driver was waving her over to the shoulder.