Chasing the dead

by Joe Schreiber

  Maybe, she remembered thinking at the time, the guy was just flagging her down to tell her she had a taillight out or something. But a lonely stretch of road five miles outside of town was the last place she wanted to find out. When the farm pickup slowed down, Sue floored it and lost him, got her little girl home and locked the doors. In the garage she checked the Expedition. The taillights, and everything else, were just fine. And she hasn't seen the farm pickup again until tonight.

  But is that really the case?

  The headache between her eyes is starting to come back. Because now she's thinking of an evening just a week or so ago when she was downtown doing some Christmas shopping at Prudential Center, pulling out of the parking garage, and a pair of headlights swept out after her. She only got a glimpse of the vehicle before it vanished in traffic, but hadn't it looked like the same farm truck? Hadn't she recognized, just for a split second, that grinning grille and rounded front end?

  Even then, the connection between the two events pulsed in and out of her mind and vanished as quickly as it had arrived. Because who would really be followingher? What were the odds that it was the same truck?

  But now she realizes that it was.

  How long, exactly, has he been following her?

  Again her thoughts go to Marilyn and Sue prays (yes, prays, and any ambulance driver who tells you they've never muttered a prayer is lying, heartless, or both) that somehow the nanny is able to protect Veda or at least reassure her, hold her hand or sing to her. An eighteen-month-old girl can't possibly understand what's happening to her. Sue doesn't know enough about childhood trauma to know if this is a blessing or a curse. She just prays that Marilyn is insulating Veda from the worst of it, that the man who has her has done nothing to either of them physically, prays that despite hearing Veda scream that one time over the phone. But even if he hasn't touched Veda, except for the time he made her cry on the phone, even then, how much therapy will she need as an adult just to get her through the distant memory of this night?

  But maybe, just maybe, it's still all right. Maybe Veda's already cried herself out and fallen asleep. It is possible, isn't it? Eight o'clock is her bedtime. Maybe in the morning she'll wake up and Marilyn will be there and Sue will arrive and it will all be like a bad dream.

  Or maybe they're already dead.

  "Stop that," Sue says aloud to herself. "You stop that shit right now."

  But behind that tough snarl-and it is tough, Sue can hear that much just listening to the sound of her own voice-another scared, selfish question hangs, rotating slowly, the one question that she simply cannot help asking on some level. Just two hours earlier she was an affluent thirtysomething-year-old ex-wife and mother, and Veda was just another one-and-a-half-year-old coming home with her nanny to get ready for her nightly bath before bedtime. Why is this happening to them?

  Because the past is never done with us. Not in any substantial way.

  Screw you, Phillip, Sue thinks. Screw you, you unreliable rat, you child-abandoning shitbag, you worthless waste of skin. You're in Malibu right now, no doubt jogging naked down some beach when you're not mixing up a pitcher of sour apple martinis for your newest surgically enhanced fuck doll while three thousand miles away some faceless maniac does Christ-knows-what to your only daughter. So forgive me if your charming philosophical views on the past don't quite engage me like they used to back in the jolly old days of yore.

  Instead Sue thinks of Veda, holding the image of her daughter in her mind's eye. In this vision Veda is sleeping, chin tucked, mouth slightly open, snoring gently but deeply enough that Sue can see the straps of her car seat tightening and loosening slightly across her daughter's chest. Marilyn sits beside her, awake, alert, ever vigilant. Sue embraces the image, coddles it. As if imagining Veda in her car seat might somehow preserve her, protect her.

  Which she knows is patently ridiculous.

  But Suealso knows with that same lead-pipe certainty that a certain amount of ridiculous faith in oneself must be waterproof, fireproof, and shockproof until it is impervious to doubt. For better or worse, she has learned two or three hard lessons about the depths of human depravity, probably knows more on the subject than anyone she's ever met. And the one thing she took from that experience in the summer of 1983 was that when there's blood on the line, whether it's your own or somebody else's, there is no room for self-doubt.

  It's surely the reason why she got so bored in college and dropped out to become an EMT. Once you've been fire-baptized, you lose your taste for the milk and cookies of academic life.

  And Sue thinks, here we go loop-de-loo, dovetailing into the central undercurrent of her life, something that a bald, pretentious little psychiatrist named Dr. Henry from Harvard Square had pointed out to her the one time she actually tried therapy. Dr. Henry's observation-put forward manfully enough considering that he was a short little clinician with a high-pitched voice and coffee breath-was that Sue Young has always related to the best things in her life neither through their presence nor their absence but their loss.

  And not even bald, fat little Dr. Henry was fey or fussy enough to suggest that Sue Young's "innocence" might have been the first and most influential loss of her life, the one by which all other losses would be measured. But the idea had still sat there unspoken between them, session after session, staring at them like a lab rat chewing on a legal pad. Until the day that Sue walked in and handed his receptionist an envelope containing a letter that said, in essence, she was going to find another way to spend the hour from two to three on Thursday afternoons.

  The sign up ahead reads:GRAY HAVEN -6.

  Sue floors it.

  9:06P.M.

  GRAY HAVEN,the white sign says.ESTABLISHED 1802.

  It is, as she remembers it, a muttered curse of a town. It has little to recommend it except that whatever else life has in store for you will be an improvement.

  Sue hasn't been back here in almost fifteen years, since her mother died. The truth is she misses it like acne and braces.

  Townsend Street, meanwhile, has not changed noticeably. The corner bar, the Blue Parrot Lounge, is still here with its single neon Budweiser sign sputtering in the window. There is a video store and a nail salon and the Exxon station. The textile mill where her dad put in thirty-two years is still down to her left, a series of boxlike buildings sloped awkwardly against one another's shoulders like a group of men who can't remember what they had in common except the mutual inability to stand without assistance. The streets and sidewalks are empty. The snow tumbles down, looped crosswise through the intersection in front of her. Narrow row houses with broken porch lights. Somebody's idea of the future, once upon a time.

  Sue drives straight through. If she wanted to go back to the old place she would take a right on Crill Avenue and follow it three blocks east. There would be the yellow one-story house where her unemployed dad sat with theBoston Herald and his oxygen tank for the last six years of his life, hunting through the classified section with a ballpoint pen. When a "business opportunity" caught his eye he would draw boxes around the listing, over and over, until the ad would lift right out, to be deposited in a neatly stacked pile of similar gray rectangles to his right. Every night her mother threw the pile away. Every morning her father started a new stack.

  Coming up on the right is Sheckard Park. The wind whips harder here, ramming its way down the hillside, blasting snow hard against the side of the Expedition. The swings and slide where she played as a child are still there, their steel framework submerged in drifts like the masts of some doomed polar expedition. In the middle of it stands a statue of a bald man in muttonchops and a long doctor's coat, holding a Bible and a bone-saw, gazing stoically off to the west. Sue knows the plaque underneath the statue identifies the man as Isaac Hamilton, but it doesn't say what he did to deserve to be immortalized for decades, maybe centuries, of having pigeons shit on his head. There's a fair amount of writing on the plaque, some kind of poem, she recalls vaguely, but she's
not sure. Although she grew up less than a mile from here, Sue's never bothered to look it up.

  Past the park the lights of town diminish to a dull, pale haze in her rearview mirror and in front of her are occasional farmhouses, bankrupt auto body shops with state inspection signs dangling by one corner, and miles of nearly uninterrupted darkness.

  Two miles down the road she turns right onto Old Gorham Road. It is a long, dithering country lane whose sole defining characteristic seems to be its determination to continue sloping steadily downward. It forks twice, and both times Sue bears left, the second time onto a one-lane gravel road with no posted name. Here the pines are close enough that their needles hiss against her windows. The gravel is covered with half a foot of snow but the Expedition makes short work of it. America's upper class is nothing if not prepared for a little impromptu off-roading.

  The road straightens out. Up ahead in the high beams she can begin to make out the old playground, two metal swing sets now devoid of swings and a rusty, slumping slide, all of it overgrown by weeds. Sue's not sure whether this land was owned by the township or simply abandoned here by some private landowner, but at one point it was the choice make-out spot for a generation of townies, and not long afterward, a favorite place for local kids to hang out, just far enough away to require bicycles and determination.

  Beyond it is the bridge.

  It's less than an eighth of a mile in the distance but to Sue it seems a whole world away. Like the tired little cluster of playground equipment and the road leading up to it, the bridge has never had any name that she knows of nor has it needed one. It is a lonely, one-lane structure buried deep enough in the woods that the only people who could find it would have to know these dark back roads inside and out and thus have been searching for it specifically, or have stumbled upon it completely by accident.

  Underneath the bridge is an overgrown swamp, two square acres at least, where a creek once flowed, long since dead. In the shadow of those rotten timbers, sunken beneath the stench of decaying leaves and plant life from decades before she was born, was the spot where something happened back in the summer of '83.

  Sue feels her neck and back coiling forward as if somehow to muffle her accelerated heartbeat. Suddenly her mouth is full of sour adrenaline, its mercury drip in the back of her throat.

  There is a memory here, half-buried in the wintry hush of falling snow, a thing out of some child's nightmare that years ago somehow made the leap into the real world.

  All at once her phone chirps.

  A great flutter of muscle causes her arms to fly up sideways, her left hand whacking the door.

  "Hello," she manages.

  "You made it," the voice says, sounding low and insolent, urgent, making her think of phone sex. "I've been waiting."

  Waiting.Sue stares out into the dark woods, her entire body momentarily reduced to what feels like an enormous pair of eyes, darting and searching the thick blackness piled in layers around her. "Are you out there?"

  "What do you think?"

  Sue is breathing through her mouth. Her heart goesthump, thump. She can hear herself, her body doing its job, keeping her brain alive. Something vaguely reassuring about the lumbering way that it goes about its work. Come hell or high water it's just another day at the cracker factory for the old human body.

  He is out here too, somewhere. In the darkness, she thinks, very nearby. Perhaps under the bridge waiting for her or even closer. With the trees and the darkness and the snow, he could almost be close enough to touch.

  "What do you want me to do?" she asks. She thinks reflexively of those girls in the 1-900 ads they run in the back of theBoston Phoenix and the comparison, though jarring, is not without validity.Hi, my name's Sue. Tonight I'll do whatever you want. Just name it. Sue can practically hear her friend Natalie rolling her eyes, saying,Please, but right now that's how the voice on the phone has made her feel. Tonight she is his fear whore.

  "Stop the car and get out. Keep the phone with you."

  Sue puts the Expedition in park and cuts the engine. Doing this she thinks only of Veda, but now apprehension for herself has joined her fear for her daughter. She opens the door and slides down and out into the cold air. Her jacket bunches up momentarily around her waist, allowing for the blade of the wind to graze her bare skin, and she shudders, an all-over tremble that spreads from her extremities inward to the base of her spine. Without thinking she puts on her gloves and stuffs her left hand in her pocket.

  Her eyes water and her nose stings at the sharp temperature drop. Standing beside the car with the dome light on and the reassuring little chime of civilization reminding her that, whatever else is going on, the door is still ajar, she waits for the sensation to come back, the feeling of being watched.

  She doesn't have to wait long. She feels his stare pressing down on her from somewhere close. It is horrible, this feeling. The fear sinks to the pit of her stomach.

  "Get the shovel and the canvas out of the back," the voice on the phone says. "You'd better take the flashlight too. It's going to be very dark where you're going."

  "What do you want me to do?"

  "I want you to go down underneath the bridge."

  "Is that where you are?" she blurts, although it's not actually what she means. What she means is,Is that where my daughter is? But these questions-and any others she might care to raise-are met with such total preemptive silence on the other end that Sue realizes that he's hung up again. And now she senses that there will be nothing more forthcoming until she does as she's told.

  And of course there is another problem. The items he asked her to get out, the shovel and the canvas, are not in the Expedition. They are not in the Expedition because she didn't bring them. In the case of the canvas tarp, at least, the voice on the phone must know this, since he was the one who came and took the tarp from the garden shed himself.

  She does however have the flashlight and for the moment the flashlight will have to do.

  Now ankle-deep in snow, she begins edging her way toward the embankment, where the bridge takes over, with the phone in one hand and the flashlight in the other. Shining it under the sagging timbers she realizes immediately the light itself will do very little good since she has no idea how deep the snowdrifts are down there. On the third step her right foot plunges through the snow to her crotch, throwing her off-balance, and for an ugly, dizzy moment she is sure she's going to go tumbling headfirst down the slope to land in a heap in the frozen swamp below.

  Instead she grabs one of the timbers, hooks her left arm around it, and clings there for a span of seconds until her center of gravity is at least partially restored. Then, turning the edges of her feet against the angle of the hill, she inches downward once again, eyes riveted to the circle of the flashlight's beam ten feet in front of her. As she descends fully beneath the bridge the drifts taper away to wet, bare ground. No amount of wind could blow snow down at this angle.

  Then the smell hits her, not incrementally but all at once.

  The ripe and boggy rot panting upward from the very pores of the earth. It speaks directly to her limbic system and suddenly it is a long time ago and she and Phillip are standing down here, with pieces of hay and grass and sticks stuck to their skin, sweating and filthy among the clouds of gnats and mosquitoes. Staring at each other dead-eyed with the knowledge of what they've done and the work that is still ahead of them on that endlessly long afternoon.

  You can't tell anybody,he tells her.

  Sue nods at Phillip's ghost, his earnest, eleven-year-old face split down the middle by a single ray of sunlight falling from a crack in the bridge above their heads. A bird cries out with a cackling trill.

  Now she is standing at the bottom of the hill. It is so dark down here that the very absence of light itself seems to swallow her up, consuming the flashlight's illumination in a single gulp. Still, if she looks out of the corner of her eye she can make out the rough outline of wooden piling twenty feet to her right, its base im
planted crookedly in the dirt. There is no wind down here, but it is cold and damp.

  Her cell phone rings in her hand. She touches the button to answer but doesn't say anything. For a moment neither does he.

  "Are you in the place?"

  Sue realizes she's just nodding. Clears her throat. "Yes."

  "You're sure?"

  "Positive."

  There is silence again. Only this time she knows he has not hung up. And not too far off in that impenetrable blackness Sue thinks she hears something moving beneath the bridge, a slow, moist rustle of motion against the clutter of decaying foliage. Something down here with her, moving steadily, unhurriedly in her direction. It might be a deer or some other kind of animal. It could be anything.

  Abruptly she thinks of a line from another one of Veda's board books,Big Red Barn, one line in particular that always struck her as a little sinister somehow.

  And that is where the children play. But in this story the children are away. Only the animals are here today.

  "Who are you?" she whispers into the phone.

  But in this story the children are away.

  The rustling sounds stop. Sue snaps her head around, breathing fast and hard. Blood pounds in her throat. It's almost painful.

  Only the animals are here today.

  The flesh up and down her back feels like it's going to leap right off her shoulders and run away.

  And the voice on the phone says, "Start digging."

  9:42P.M.

  Sue makes her way over to the crooked wooden post. She stares at it. She says, "I don't have a shovel."