by Rhian Ellis
“There’s no train station around here,” I said. We were in the grocery store, looking for ballpoint pens. Peter hadn’t written a thing all summer, he said, and all of his pens had dried up. He figured he ought to have some when he got to Boston. “They tore up the rails years ago, when I was a little kid. And no trains had run on them, anyway, since I don’t know when.”
He looked at me sadly. “Port Gilbert. I called.”
I spent the night with him. We had mournful, self-conscious sex, then lay awake the rest of the night without talking. At four we staggered up, deeply cold in the dank morning air, and carried his lumpy duffel bags down to my mother’s car. For a spooky town, a town obsessed with death and spirits and trances and clairvoyance, it seemed awfully conventional that morning: all the lights were off, everyone was in bed under blankets, waiting for the sun to come up so they could cook their breakfasts. In the car I turned the heat up to high, and we rumbled down the gravel and potholes of Seneca Street, past the glimmering lake, and out onto the road.
“Good-bye,” whispered Peter. “Good-bye, good-bye.” His thin face was green in the light from the dashboard.
I’d never driven to Port Gilbert before. It was only an hour and a half away but I had no reason to go there, ever. Peter had asked directions from the person at the station, and they were easy to follow, at first. I zipped down the highway. No other cars were out, only semitrucks. They roared past us in the dark.
“Oh, my God,” said Peter. “Did you see that?”
“See what?”
“That semi driver had a clown mask on.”
“Are you kidding?”
He insisted he wasn’t. It was, he said, the creepiest thing he’d ever seen. “A malevolent clown mask, too. It had a huge smile but devilish eyes.”
“Maybe it’s a sign.”
“I hate to think of what.”
We got to the Port Gilbert exit of the interstate with plenty of time to spare. “How about a doughnut?” said Peter. A brightly lit cube of glass and plastic beckoned near the off-ramp. DAYLIGHT DONUTS said the sign. Beyond it, the sun edged up over the horizon. “Perfect,” I said.
We had two glazed doughnuts and two cups of coffee. Flies landed on the orange countertop, and around us, everyone was weird. The counter boy was so fat you could hardly see his eyes. An old man grumbled incoherently into his mug of tea. And an overdressed woman lounged across the seat of her booth, kicking her high-heeled foot in the air, saying nothing but giving us smoldering looks.
We were glad to leave.
But somehow we’d gotten ourselves turned around. Instead of the main strip, we were on a residential one-way street, rattling over the brick paving. Then we were speeding down a hill, Lake Ontario in the distance ahead of us, spread out like a flag.
“I’ll ask for directions,” said Peter, hopping out and running into a Ha-Ha store. He was back in half a minute. “Follow that bread truck,” he told me, pointing at a big white van. “He told me he was going right past it.”
The bread truck went down alleys filled with pallets and Dumpsters, it cut through parking lots, it made sudden turns without signaling. I had the feeling we were getting farther and farther away from the train station all the time. We passed a house that was on fire; the bread truck drove onto the sidewalk to get around the fire engines. We did the same.
All of a sudden the bread truck stopped, tooted its horn, and a white-clad arm waved at us from the side window.
“This is it, I guess,” said Peter.
We’d stopped at a big square building that had rows of greenish windows and a giant, round, handless clock over the double doors. It looked like a cross between a warehouse and a cathedral.
“Uh-oh,” I said. “The train’s already here.”
I turned off the car and helped him pull the duffel bags out of the back. We had time for a hurried, nervous kiss before he went galloping into the station, laden with luggage. But he’d only just disappeared behind the doors when the whistle blew, and the train slowly began pulling out of the station. I got back out of the car and leaned against the hood.
Three minutes later, Peter came out again. He dropped his bags on the dirty sidewalk. Then he didn’t walk toward me, he ran.
“You missed it,” I told him.
“I don’t know what I was thinking,” he said, over and over again. His arms were tight around my shoulders. “I can’t leave. I don’t think I can ever leave.”
“Never?”
“Never,” he said. “Never ever ever.”
We drove home. Peter left his hand in my lap the whole way. Other cars were out now, families and commuters and school buses, and we listened to the local radio station as we got back onto the interstate. “Good morning, early risers!” said the deejay. “It’s a beautiful day!”
It was. The sky was clear and cloudless, and the sun was up, so bright and glaring we felt like we were driving straight into it.
8
witch
I took the boat out on the lake again. I hadn’t done that much in the last few years—my boat was rusty and had some leaks in the bottom I didn’t know how to fix—but the morning before my mother and I were to go to the forensics lab, I thought it would feel good to be alone for a little while, away from every living soul. In summer the lake was always choked with thick green algae, impossible to row through, but the colder fall weather had brought clear water. I rowed hard for a bit, then stopped and drifted. Now and then I’d have to bail out the water with a yogurt container of Ron’s I’d brought along.
From the lake, Train Line looked like an island. I hunkered down in my boat, windbreaker zipped to my chin, and looked out at it: the pointed rooftops poking out from the trees, empty flagpoles, shuttered windows. There was Winnie Sandox raking leaves; there was old Francis Liggett smoking his pipe in the middle of his lawn. Other times I’d gone out on the lake, I’d seen people taking walks, and going out to their cars, and having cocktail parties on their patios, but they never noticed me. It was as if the lake was a wall to them. I could have waved or even shouted, but they’d look around, look up at the trees, and still never see me. There I was, completely out in the open, but invisible. Spirits must feel like this, I thought.
After a while I stopped rowing and ate some chicken-flavored crackers from a box. My fingers were wet and numb from bailing, and my hair was whipping around. It was too cold to be out, but I liked it there and thought maybe it would be better if I were to lie down in the bottom of the boat, since I’d be out of the wind. I spread the tarp on the bottom and gently lowered myself down, holding on to the oars.
It was warmer there, and quiet. The only sound was the clunk of water lapping the metal hull. Without a horizon the sky looked strangely depthless, like a lid. I ate some more crackers, imagining how odd the boat would look from shore, if anyone bothered to notice.
When I stood up again, fifteen or twenty minutes later, I lost my balance. That had never happened before. I must have stepped too close to the left side of the boat, because it tipped sharply, and when I flung myself to the right side I overcorrected. The boat flipped over, and I splashed like a big sack of junk into the water.
It seemed like a long time before I came back up again. Under my windbreaker I was wearing a heavy cotton sweater, my pants were wool, and my shoes were clunky leather loafers. I kicked and struggled against my suddenly weighty clothes for what must have been a whole minute before my face broke the surface. I spat and gasped and pushed my hair out of my eyes. My cracker box bobbed in the waves three feet ahead of me, but the boat was gone. I couldn’t believe it. It took so little to sink the boat; it took nothing, a tiny miscalculation. I swiveled around in the water. There were the oars, but the boat had vanished. And the shore, I realized, was awfully far away.
I nudged my shoes off with my toes and floated, trying not to panic. Though I’d never been much of a swimmer, I could do the back float all day, I thought. But the water was choppier than I’d expected, and
waves kept washing over my face, and the current—what there was of one on Wallamee Lake, anyway—seemed to be pushing me in the wrong direction. I had to roll over and dog paddle until I got tired, then rest and float, then dog paddle again. Swimming in a full set of winter clothes was harder than I could have imagined. I got myself out of my jacket and sweater, but left my pants and undershirt on. Ten, fifteen minutes went by, and the shore didn’t seem any closer. I kicked and flailed, fluttered my feet as fast as I could.
While I was swimming, I calmed myself down by trying to imagine the bottom of the lake. Was it smooth and sandy, or rocky and muddy and littered with rowboat hulls? I knew of a few boats that had gone down in Wallamee Lake. Eighty or ninety years before, a boat full of teenaged girls from Train Line sank, and in their long dresses and lace-up boots they didn’t have a chance of swimming to shore. There were seven of them, and every one drowned. I didn’t know if they found any of the bodies or not, or if they all sank. When I was a little girl, a retarded boy from Wallamee stole his father’s rubber raft, took it out on the lake, and was never seen again. Was the bottom of the lake covered with bodies? I wondered how far down the bottom was. I imagined a cross-section, me dog-paddling on top, yards and yards of cold brown water beneath me, then the lake floor, with its mud and sunken boats and dead things.
Fish bumped me with their cold snouts. Bits of algae clung to my hair.
I wasn’t going to make it. The cold became a suffocating blanket that wrapped my head and face until I could hardly see and could hear nothing but the sound of my own breathing. Let go, I thought. Just sink.
I couldn’t.
If your faith is so strong, I told myself, why not let go?
There would be a funeral, closed casket, whether they found my body or not. Lots of people would come, many of my customers, unless the weather was bad and then they wouldn’t bother coming out; they were mostly old, after all. My mother would be devastated, Troy and Dave the Alien and Ron and Jenny stoic. Elaine wouldn’t allow Vivian to come, and would tell her some lie about how I’d moved out of town, or something. After a little while someone new would rent my rooms. Well, that might take some time, months even, since it was winter. But next summer I’d be a distant sad memory, my rooms cleaned out and my furniture given to the Ladies’ Rummage Shed, and a cheerful new person would be living there, someone who’d get along wonderfully with Ron and Jenny, and they’d stay up late drinking herb elixirs and laughing. My mother would get over it. I’d come to her séances. Or would I? Maybe I’d go to hell. Or maybe I’d just be gone, utterly and completely vanished, even more gone than Peter, whose mystery, at least, was keeping him vital.
Then my feet touched bottom, and, somehow, my head was still above water.
Washing ashore I felt as huge and slow as a sea monster, my hair and clothes dragging like plates of armor. Miraculously, I was only a few yards from where I’d put out. I lay on the bank with my face in the soggy grass, so cold I could hardly feel it. But then I could feel it, so I sat up and wrapped my arms around my knees, teeth chattering.
Across the lawn of the Silverwood, Jenny walked by, wrapped up in a heavy wool coat and with a scarf around her head. Her hands were deep in her pockets. I thought about yelling for her, but suddenly felt embarrassed at my state: my undershirt clung like plastic wrap to my breasts, and you could see right through it to my safety-pinned bra. Anyway, she was on her way back from her reincarnation group, and I didn’t want to hear about it. I’d heard enough already. Tony K. and Winnie Sandox were in it and had recently revealed that they had been, respectively, T. S. Eliot and Ptolemy Epiphanes, ancient king of Egypt. Reincarnation was a touchy subject in Train Line, and had been for a long time; officially, it is not a part of spiritualism, but few spiritualists are particularly doctrinaire. Many of the newer, and New Agey, mediums are all for it, but I’d always felt reincarnation raises a few more questions than it answers. Once, when I was just starting out, I told a woman at a message service that I had her father’s father here, but she just shook her head emphatically. “Impossible!” she declared. “He reincarnated twenty years ago!” What can you say to that? Not much.
But Jenny liked the group and claimed that she’d been animals for most of her former lives, which caused a heated debate. There’d been some discussion, too, of where Jenny was headed next. Would she be rewarded for living a good life this time around with a better one? How soon would she reincarnate, and if she did, how would they be able to contact her? Would she have any say in the matter?
“I want to live this same life over,” she’d told me that morning. “But more happily.”
Something about that depressed me. I wondered, would I be in that life, too? I hoped not. Imagine living your life over and over again, making new mistakes each time and fixing them, your soul like a page of homework rubbed thin with your eraser. It was exhausting to think about. But perhaps less exhausting than the idea of spending an infinity in the spirit world, at the beck and call of the living.
Jenny turned up Fox Street, her head scarf fluttering in the breeze. The wind had picked up and changed direction, and now it came off the lake, turning the water coarse. I lumbered to my feet. When I slapped myself my cold flesh rang like a copper bowl, and I smelled like the lake. How odd to be alive! It felt like a mistake.
My mother picked me up at one o’clock. I’d taken a very long bath and washed my hair twice, but I couldn’t get rid of the lake smell, so I’d tried to disguise it with Jenny’s lemon-scented bath powder. The combination was unfortunate: sweet and fetid. My mother didn’t mention it, but as she drove down the interstate toward Hollington her nose twitched, and she gave me some curious glances.
“Are you taking care of yourself, Naomi?”
I told her I was.
The forensics lab was hidden behind a hill just off the highway. Like everything else in Wallamee County built since the fifties, it was low and uninspired. We parked near some police cars and hobbled across the gravel parking lot in our high heels. I had dressed up and my mother had dressed down, and consequently we met somewhere in the middle, both in sober navy blue. Still, as we stood in the cramped lobby waiting for Officer Peterson, surrounded by slim, uniformed people, I felt huge and overblown. I felt like my mother. She was examining her makeup in a little, tiny mirror, oblivious to the fact that no matter where in the lobby we stood, people had to go around us. I kept blushing, apologizing, shuffling out of the way.
Officer Peterson appeared from behind a cubicle wall, his hand extended toward us. His hair was freshly cut, as upright and stiff-looking as the bristles of a toothbrush, and his eyes gave nothing away. “Glad you could make it,” he said. He seemed more polite than he had on the phone; perhaps my mother reminded him of his own.
He led us back through the catacomb of cubicles, past file cabinets and computer screens and people working at jobs I would never in a million years be hired to do, through a swinging door that opened to a wide, hospital-like hallway. Our shoes clicked and echoed, and the air smelled like the high school biology lab, like the preserved crayfish I dissected sophomore year. Formaldehyde. I remembered how hard it was to get that smell off your hands. It would get in your hair, taint your sandwich at lunch.
Peterson stopped outside a door with a glass mesh window and pushed it open for us. We entered a bright room full of sinks and drawers and metal tables, and a short man in a white coat eating from a small bag of chips. Peterson introduced him as Dr. Freeze.
“That’s F-R-I-E-S,” said the man, crumpling his empty chip bag.
“Oh,” I said.
“They’re the ladies I told you about,” said Peterson. “Here to see John Doe.”
“Right, right.” He stuffed the bag into one of his pockets and rubbed his hands together, then pulled what looked like a handful of white balloons from another pocket. “You’ll want gloves,” he said, handing us each a pair.
We snapped them on. It was at this point that I began to feel a little dizzy,
as if the hard tile floor had suddenly acquired some give. I reached for one of the metal tables.
“Don’t!” cried Dr. Fries. “Don’t touch anything yet. We don’t want any cross-contamination.”
I took some deep breaths.
We followed Dr. Fries to the back of the room, where there was a whole wall of wooden drawers. He pulled one out and extracted a plastic bag full of small brownish things. “Now, does it matter what bones you look at? This is a hand. Skull’s down the hall.” He reached in again and pulled out another bag. “This is, um, looks like another hand. Let’s see…foot…” He put the bags on a table and opened a new drawer. “Here are the big bones…ribs, legs…” He looked up at us inquiringly.
My mother cleared her throat. “I was hoping to see the back bones. There’s a lot of power in the spine.”
Dr. Fries shook his head. “Sorry, no can do on that. There was some flesh preserved there, and we’ve got it refrigerated across the hall.”
“All right then. These will do.” She indicated the bags on the table. “Let’s try a hand.”
He nodded, put the other bags away, and brought the hand bones to a glass tray on the counter. He carefully shook the bones from the bag and pulled a gooseneck lamp over the tray, then flicked it on. The bones looked like nothing so much as a few pieces of dog kibble.
“No squeezing or scratching, please,” said Dr. Fries. Then he gave Officer Peterson an ironic salute and wandered back across the lab.
My mother picked up one of the small brownish lumps and cupped it in her hand, then closed her eyes. She stood there, swaying, for a minute or so. While Peterson and I watched, she made a fist of the hand with the bone in it, and brought the fist to her forehead. She exhaled deeply.
“Hunhhhhhh,” she said, opening her eyes. “Well. Aren’t you going to try, Naomi?”
