The Loveliest Dead

by Ray Garton

  The Vicodin was starting to kick in, and the headache left over from the vision began to recede. Lily sat up on the edge of her bed and opened her bedstand drawer. Inside was a half-empty package of Oreo cookies. She plucked one of the cookies up and popped it into her mouth.

  During the two weeks she’d had the visions of the butterfly knife, Lily had become quite ill. She’d been unable to sleep, lost her appetite to persistent nausea, and even had dropped several pounds. She hoped that did not happen again.

  God knows I could stand to lose some weight now, she thought as she chewed the cookie. She washed it down with a few swallows of ice water. She took a deep breath and clenched her fists to stop the stubborn trembling in her hands. She knew the best thing to do was get back to work and not dwell on it. It would return soon enough, with more details, more information. She could try to figure out what it meant then. Lily left her bedroom and went back out front to the store.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Thursday, 10:33 AM.

  On Thursday morning, Jenna and Martha went for a drive around Eureka and made note of the locations of various stores, the mall, the hospital. It was a gray, rainy day and the chilly air smelled of the sea. They stopped at Humboldt State University in Arcata and walked leisurely around the campus as Jenna tacked cards to bulletin boards offering her editorial and typing services to students to make a little extra money.

  Jenna had majored in education in college, with plans to teach grammar school, but her heart had never been in it, not really. She had met David and her plans had changed. But she was an excellent editor and typist, and when their financial troubles had begun in Redding, she had offered her services for reasonable prices to students at Shasta College and had made a surprising amount of money as a result. There seemed to be no shortage of students looking for help and willing to pay for it.

  Back at the house, Martha went to her bedroom to take a nap, and Jenna called Dr. Reasor’s office in Redding. She told the receptionist, Kristen, that it was very important she talk to Dr. Reasor as soon as possible. She briefly explained what had happened the day before and expressed her concern. The receptionist took Jenna’s number and said the doctor would get back to her as soon as he could, probably during his lunch break.

  While she waited, Jenna got a hammer, a Phillips screwdriver, and a package of hollow-wall anchors and went upstairs to the bedroom. She carried a couple boxes of framed family photos out into the hallway.

  The upstairs hallway was papered in off-white, which had yellowed over the years, with an ugly repeating weeping willow pattern. Jenna hoped to get rid of it someday. The hallway was, to Jenna’s taste, too narrow, but worse than that, it had only one overhead light, which made it too dark. With bare walls, it looked long and bleak.

  She knelt beside the boxes and began placing the photos gently on the hardwood floor. She looked at each one as she removed it from the box, squinting as her eyes adjusted to the hallway’s poor light, and separated the ones she wanted to hang in the hallway from those she would hang elsewhere. Jenna had a dozen framed photos in two stacks on the floor when she pulled another from the box and froze.

  Jenna slowly moved off her knees to a sitting position on the floor, legs crossed, as she stared at the picture. A knot tightened in the pit of her stomach and tears stung her eyes. She remembered the day well.

  In the picture, she and David were seated on the bench of a picnic table with the remains of a KFC meal spread out on it. Their backs were to the table, the Sacramento River behind them in the distance, the sky a clear, brilliant blue. They were in Caldwell Park in Redding. Josh sat between them holding a string with a red-and-silver Mylar balloon attached that read, “HAPPY BIRTHDAY!” All three of them wore colorful paper party hats, and David held a colorful whistle in his hand. It was Josh’s second birthday. His cake— chocolate with white frosting, orange and green dinosaurs on top, from the Costco bakery—was on the table and had not been cut yet. A candle in the shape of a two stood unlit in the center of the cake. Josh was grinning happily. He had her blond hair and his father’s big deep-brown eyes, her crooked smile and his father’s straight nose.

  Miles had been a wailer when he was a baby, but Josh had been so quiet—Jenna remembered getting up repeatedly at night just to make sure he was still breathing. And she remembered that early morning when he had stopped breathing in her arms.

  Mommy—

  Although she tried to hold it back, a sob wrenched its way out of Jenna as she put the picture on the “elsewhere” stack. Taking a deep breath, she took another framed photo from the box, this one of Josh staring in awe at a neighbor’s kitten in the yard in front of their old apartment building.

  Three years sounded like a good piece of time, but as she looked at the picture, it seemed like no time at all. The years dissolved and Jenna felt as if she had just lost Josh all over again. She continued to sob as she took another photo from the box.

  Josh grinned at her from the back of a pony at the Shasta District Fair. It was the last picture taken of him before the headaches got so bad that he didn’t go out much anymore.

  Mommy—

  Jenna sniffled and sobbed some more. Movement caught her eye and she raised her head. The murky hallway was fractured through the tears in her eyes, but she saw a small figure standing at the other end. It was very small, no more than three feet tall, wearing a little jacket with a hood that covered its head. It stood un-moving, well back from the pool of dim illumination cast by the single overhead light, a mere shape, facing her.

  She stopped crying, stopped breathing for a long moment as she stared at the blurry figure. With the knuckle of her left index finger, she wiped one eye, then the other, and blinked rapidly several times until her vision cleared.

  The shadowy sillhouette of a hooded child stood at the other end of the hallway, still and silent.

  Jenna thought of Josh looking at her that last time, his puffy eyes so intense.

  Mommy—

  Her voice was throaty and broken. “Juh ... Josh? Is that you? Josh?”

  The dark little figure spread its stubby arms wide and began to hurry jauntily toward her. But it did not make a sound—no footsteps on the hardwood floor, no happy child’s cry, only silence.

  The telephone chirped and so startled Jenna that she tossed the picture into the air and yelped as her head jerked around toward the open bedroom doorway. The picture crashed onto the “elsewhere” stack and the glass in the frame shattered.

  When Jenna looked down the hallway again, the small figure was gone. She stared at the spot where it had stood a heartbeat ago as the telephone continued to trill a second and third time, her lips parted, teary eyes wide. Her heart pounded so hard, she felt it in her fingertips.

  There was a child standing there, Jenna thought. A toddler. Just now. I couldn’t have imagined that. Could I?

  Mommy—

  She realized the answering machine was about to pick up and it was probably Dr. Reasor returning her call. Clearing her throat, she got to her feet, hurried into the bedroom, and picked up the cordless receiver.

  “Hel—Urn, hello?”

  “Jenna? Dr. Reasor calling.”

  “Dr. Reasor, urn ... thank you for calling. I, uh ... I was just, uh ...” She cleared her throat and sniffled.

  “Is everything okay?”

  She cleared her throat again and assured him that yes, everything was okay, as she tried to collect her thoughts. She told him what had happened the day before with Martha.

  “Is that normal?” she asked. “I mean, should I be concerned that she, uh ... well, that she’s seeing things?”

  “Are you positive she was seeing things? Is it possible there were some kids in the yard?”

  “I didn’t see any, and I couldn’t get past the fact that she said they disappeared into the ground. I’ve been worried about it ever since. I didn’t know if it could be a side effect of the stroke, or if maybe... well, I was worried about the possibility of something
like Alzheimer’s disease.”

  “Well, even if she were in the early stages of Alzheimer’s—and I have no reason to believe that she is—hallucinations would not be a part of that. Early Alzheimer’s would include memory loss, maybe mild disorientation, but not hallucinations. Was she wearing her glasses?”

  “Yes.”

  “When was the last time she had her eyes checked?”

  “You know, I hadn’t thought of that. It’s been... well, a while.”

  “It’s possible she saw some children in the yard, and from her point of view—and if, say, her glasses need a new prescription—it might have looked to her like they disappeared into the ground when they took off.”

  “Yes, I guess that’s possible.” She glanced at the bedroom’s open door.

  “You’re a worrier, Jenna,” Dr. Reasor said with a smile in his voice. “Have you made an appointment with Dr. Wenders?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay, take her to see Dr. Wenders, but make an appointment with an eye doctor as well, okay? Just in case. Tell Dr. Wenders what you told me and see what she has to say. If there’s any reason to be concerned, I’m confident she’ll pick up on it. She’s a very good doctor.”

  “Thank you so much, Dr. Reasor. I feel kind of silly now. I’m sorry to have bothered you.”

  “No bother. Give your mom my best.”

  After replacing the cordless phone on its base, Jenna hurried to the bedroom door. The hallway was still empty. No one stood at the other end. She leaned her shoulder against the doorjamb and began to cry again.

  Jenna had never been a believer in the supernatural and was not even a religious person. Her mother had never once taken her to church or Sunday school when she was little, and on the few occasions when friends had asked Jenna to attend with them, her mother had always said no. Although she never expressed any dislike toward them, Martha did not trust churchgoing people. She sometimes said, “Anybody who smiles that much is up to something.” For Jenna, God had always been something other people believed in.

  When Josh died, she had been irritated whenever someone told her that he had gone to a better place, that he was in Heaven, even though she knew they had the best of intentions. To Jenna, dead was dead, and her baby had died, had ceased to be—that was bad enough without believing he’d gone to some faraway place where she could not reach him without dying herself. Had she believed that, Jenna would not have hesitated to end her own life to get to Josh’s side as soon as possible. She had not given an afterlife so much as a moment’s consideration when Josh died. To do so would have been to go insane.

  Jenna went to the two boxes on the hallway floor and knelt beside them. She picked up the picture of Josh on the pony at the fair. He grinned from behind a web of cracks in the glass, where Jenna’s tears shattered as they dropped from her eyes. She was frightened by the thoughts she was having so suddenly, thoughts foreign to her. She did not have the strength to resist them, though, and that was even worse.

  Helpless against it, Jenna surrendered to the possibility that her dead son had tried to communicate with her just minutes ago.

  By one o’clock, the rain had stopped, and so had the roller coaster of thoughts in Jenna’s mind. For about half an hour as she hung pictures, she had driven herself nearly crazy thinking about what she had seen. But her heartbeat gradually calmed as she reminded herself of her state of mind at that moment, and the fact that she’d been crying and had tears in her eyes, and of the bad light in the hallway. By the time she put a frozen pizza in the oven for lunch, she had calmed herself down. It helped that she’d sneaked one of Martha’s Xanaxes.

  Although the possibility lingered in her mind that some essence of her dead son had reached out to her for a moment, she decided to keep it to herself for the time being. It was not because she was afraid of how David would react—she knew exactly how he would react. There had been silence between them for months after Josh’s death. They had been afraid to speak, unable to trust their own voices. The silence finally ended one night while Jenna and David were in bed, staring into the darkness instead of sleeping. David had suddenly released an agonizing wail and curled up in a ball beside her. They’d spent most of that night holding each other and crying. But even once they were talking again, their wounds remained open just beneath the surface, raw and ready to bleed again. They had not healed. Jenna knew they never would, not entirely. She knew if she simply mentioned Josh’s name to David, she would be prodding at that wound.

  If Jenna were certain that Josh had tried to communicate with her, she would have gotten into the car, gone out, and hunted David down to tell him about it without wasting a second. But she was not certain of what she had, or had not, seen—whether she had seen a small figure at the end of the hallway, or had wanted, perhaps even needed, to see one. It would rip David open to bring it up, so she would not. Not just yet. She would wait. For what, she was not sure. But she would wait.

  When Miles got home from school, he went to his bedroom to do his homework so he could spend the rest of the afternoon and evening playing outside and watching television. David got home shortly before four o’clock, and Jenna knew as soon as she saw him that he had not found a job. He came into the kitchen, where she was preparing a stew for dinner.

  “One possibility,” he said. “At a garage in Fortuna, there’s a guy retiring next month, and so far, they don’t have a replacement. I filled out an application and spent a while talking to the manager. I’m the first one to apply for the job. The manager’s a good guy—we hit it off.”

  “That’s great,” Jenna said. “It sounds very promising.”

  “I’m not holding my breath.”

  “But don’t dismiss it, either. You got along with him, nobody else has applied. It sounds good to me.”

  A smile broke through David’s long face. “Are you baking something?”

  “Mom’s baking a cake for dessert.”

  Sitting at the breakfast nook, Martha looked up from one of her tabloids and smiled. “Chocolate,” she said.

  David’s smile grew even larger. “Hey, Grandma’s chocolate cake. Well, the day’s not a total loss, then.”

  After dinner, David went to the store and picked up a few lightbulbs. When he got back, he took the stepladder upstairs and put a brighter bulb in the hallway’s overhead light. They watched television for a while, then Jenna told Miles to go upstairs and get ready for bed. A few minutes later, she went up to his room.

  She kissed Miles goodnight and, as she went out, left the bedroom door open about a foot. A cat-shaped night-light plugged into a low outlet in the hallway outside the door sent a soft glow spilling into his bedroom through the opening.

  “Goodnight, honey,” she said.

  “‘Night, Mom.”

  Miles propped himself up on both arms in bed, in the dark, wide awake. He was not sure what had awakened him, but he had the impression someone had come into his bedroom.

  The wind blew outside and sent a spatter of rain against the windowpane. Miles could hear the distant surf crashing against the rocks at the foot of the cliff behind the house. His bed was against the wall across from the door, and there were two bare windows just above it. The ivy on the outside wall of the house whispered secretly every time the wind blew. Maybe that was it—the strange new sounds of the night had awakened him, sounds it would take a while to get used to, that was all. And the room was new, the bed, everything. Even the things he had brought with him from Redding took on new shapes in the dark—the toy dinosaurs on the shelves, the stuffed King Kong huddled in the corner, the lamp and books crouching on the desk.

  But something was not right. He could feel it.

  “Come on, be a good puppy.” The whispered voice was rough, and it came from within Miles’s bedroom. “C’mon over here and be a good puppy.”

  Miles made a small, strangled sound in his throat just before it closed. His elbows locked at his sides and he was paralyzed by fear. His eyes moved to the spot in
the room from which the voice had come—over by the shelf with the dinosaurs on it, but low, near the floor. Miles’s eyes dropped and he saw a figure in the dark— round shoulders and a large, oddly shaped head. The figure rose slowly up out of the floor, a black shape within the darkness, out of reach of the hallway night-light’s glow. Arms took shape at the round sides of the fat figure as it rose, large and hulking.

  “Gitcher butt over here, y’fuckin’ puppy.”

  Miles was not aware of the exact moment when he was finally able to scream; he only knew he was screaming.

  The overhead light flashed on after what seemed an eternity. The room filled with light and Dad and Mom were beside him, sleepy but frantic. Mom’s arms were around him, and he was able to stop screaming.

  Mom glanced up at Dad. “David, what did I tell you about those movies?” She pressed her cheek to Miles’s head. “No more horror movies.”

  Even as Mom hugged him, Miles’s eyes held on the spot where, just seconds before, he had seen the figure of what had appeared to be a fat man wearing something on his head rising up out of the floor.

  “There was a man in here!” Miles said.

  Mom backed away suddenly and frowned down at him. “What?”

  “There was a man in here just a minute ago!”

  She looked up at Dad, who frowned at her.

  Dad said, “What man?”

  “He was coming up out of the floor.”

  They both rolled their eyes.

  “See what I mean?” Mom said. “No more monster movies, period.” She smiled at him and kissed his cheek, then put her hand on his chest and gently pressed him back toward his pillow.

  Miles moved away from her hand and sat up. “No! I don’t want to go back to bed! He’ll be back!” He did not know why, but he had no doubt of this. There had been a purposefulness to the man’s voice that suggested he was not yet finished with Miles. “He called me a puppy!”