Kiss Me Deadly

by Trisha Telep

  There wasn’t any screaming now, on this night. Not yet.

  “She’s moving, Donny. I really saw her move.” Mike sounded terrified.

  “Too early,” Donny said. He had heard of some coming back that fast, but more typically, it would be anywhere from six hours to a day. There was the one time that a kid, a drowning victim, had sat up in the back of the ambulance, unable to talk because water had filled his lungs. But all the others, that Donny knew of personally, took their time about it.

  He’d just never heard of one coming back that fast. They weren’t sure how long the bodies had been there, but the trucker who called it in said that the snow hadn’t filled in the tire tracks yet, the treads like a long black snake uncoiling off the road. Donny’d arrived seven minutes later, and Cal rolled up three minutes after that.

  “She’s moving. Her eyelids are moving.”

  Donny went to her. He felt for a pulse, and it wasn’t there and then it was. Faint. An echo of life.

  Donny swore. “We’ve got one still alive!” he said. “Alive!”

  He yelled orders, people moved. Cal Wilson was running. Mike moved. Other than she-of-the-fluttering-eyelids, none of the other bodies on the ground had moved.

  Cal Wilson ran over too. The girl on the ground was bruised and bleeding, but she wasn’t his. Hope, like love, can be a dagger in the heart.

  Not his. Not Mandy.

  She was still in the front seat of the van.

  ***

  They made Sanders High School the center for grief counseling. There were those in the area who thought that was an idiotic idea, seeing the school as a large brick-and-chalk-dust reminder of those very kids they’d just lost, but there were others who understood. Sanders High School, for many, was the last remaining edifice that held some sense of the community that Sanders once was. It was where Mayor Marshland had town meetings. It was where the rotary club met. It was where the spaghetti suppers and the fundraisers and the socials were held. It was where Alma Gustavson held adult ed classes in macramé and needlepoint.

  It was where the dead kids had gone to school.

  No one could fault Mr. Stockton, the school’s guidance counselor, for his breakdown early in the day. He was qualified to help the graduating seniors, all twenty-nine of them, to locate and apply to college, or to help them find placement with one of the few local businesses within city limits or in Wells, the larger town that the van had been returning from. He’d known these kids well, and one of them especially well, having guided her through a troubling situation at home. Four kids D.O.S. in one accident, with a fifth comatose and most likely crippled for life in a bed at Wells hospital. Who could provide guidance or counseling for that?

  A “grief specialist” from Boston was brought in. Again, there was talk, and grumbling, but at the end of the discussion most agreed that it was necessary. This way the town could pour all of their grief—and their resentment, and their hatred—into this person and then send her back to Beantown with her check and never have to see her again.

  Cal Wilson took a seat toward the back of the room at a respectful distance from the other grieving parents. A few seats ahead of him, Bill Trafton lifted his hand in a curt wave of acknowledgment. Bill owned Sanders Hardware downtown. He was also a volunteer fireman who was fortunate enough to have missed the call the previous night. Cal was glad it was he, and not Bill, that had found his son Curtis lying in the snow.

  Chuck Barnes looked back at him but didn’t acknowledge him at all. Chuck’s wife didn’t even turn around.

  They started the meeting with introductions—of the parents, the counselor, and various town functionaries who wished to bear witness to their grief. After a brief shuffling of feet and staring at the floor, the woman from Boston started the session.

  “Good evening,” she said. “Let’s talk about why we are all here.”

  She pronounced the “ r ”. She was wearing a sharp suit that set her apart from the grief stricken, who were mostly in sweatshirts and jeans. Mayor Marshland was worried that she wasn’t a Bostonian at all, but a New Yorker in disguise.

  “We don’t know for certain why they come back sometimes, or even if they will come back.” She stopped, and smiled. She was a small woman, young, with glasses and long chestnut hair.

  “But we know that the possibility exists, and we should talk about what will happen if they do return.”

  The parents of the children were silent. It was difficult to tell what they were thinking—whether or not they felt as though they were being counseled or if they were only a moment away from dragging the lady from Boston out into the street. But the woman thought she knew.

  “I know what you are thinking. I’d be thinking the same thing if I were in your position. All the things going through your head. Is my child coming back? Is he not coming back? Do I want her or him to come back? Will he or she be different? The same? What will I do?”

  She paused and looked at each of the parents in turn.

  “You are wondering: what will happen if my child comes back from the dead?”

  Cal nodded along with the others, but that isn’t what he’d been wondering at all.

  He wished he’d stayed with Laura Davis at the hospital. Laura’s son Stevie had been in the far back seat, the only boy without a date. Cal had offered Laura a ride—he supposed they were friends, at least their kids had been friends for a few years—but Laura said that she wanted to be there when Stevie “woke up.” That’s how she’d put it. Woke up. As though her son’s death was just a bad dream they were sharing, one that would vanish the moment he opened his eyes.

  The doctor said that it was too early for any of them to start coming back, that she should go talk to the trauma specialist, but Laura wasn’t having any of it.

  “Doctors don’t know jackrabbit about it,” is what she’d said. Jackrabbit. She’d be sitting in the hospital with a mystery novel and the largest cup of coffee she could get from Dunkin’ Donuts, while Cal and the other parents were listening to the woman in the expensive red suit tell them how they felt.

  “I’ll call you,” Laura had told Cal, her eyes clear as she looked up at him from her blue vinyl seat. He wanted to hold her hand, to hug her, but in the end he stood there like a statue. Laura lost her husband in a fishing accident a few years ago, and Cal had spent the last few months wondering if enough time had passed for him to ask her out.

  “Call me?” he said.

  “You’ll be the first to know,” she replied. Ice clicked in her giant plastic cup. She drank her coffee iced, even in January. “If anyone wakes up.”

  “Oh,” Cal said. “I’ll ... I’ll take notes for us.”

  It was the sort of stupid platitude that he regretted immediately upon speaking, but Laura’s eyes softened for the briefest of moments, making him glad that he’d at least said something.

  Wake up, he thought. Please, Mandy, please wake up.

  Cal realized that the trauma counselor was still speaking, was ticking off all the different things that you could expect if your child returned from the dead.

  “They will be slower. They won’t be able to move the same way that they could move in life. Some of them will not be able to speak, and most will not sound anything like they used to.”

  Something unraveled in Cal’s chest. He loved many things about his daughter, but the sound of her voice was very high on his list. Her always-reliable “Hi, Daddy!” when he got home from work was quite often the highlight of a hard day. Those two simple words washed away his wounds.

  But “I think I love him, Daddy,” had a different effect on him at the time, he recalled. His initial reaction was one of shock, as though Mandy had dropped an obscenity. His second reaction was one of concerned amusement. He liked Jake but doubted sincerely that the boy could sustain his daughter’s interest over the long haul.

  Love? he thought. You don’t know jackrabbit about love.

  ***

  Cal saw Jake’s father Chuck Barnes s
cowling beneath his trucker’s cap. His wife sat cowering beside him like a plump beige mouse taking shelter under a cabinet. Mandy and Jake started dating last March, nearly a year ago, but it wasn’t until last week that Mandy had informed Cal that she was in love with him.

  Jake had been driving the van when it left the road. Mandy had been sitting next to him in a new sweater she’d bought just for the party. He was her first real boyfriend.

  The woman from Boston cleared her throat, as though she’d noticed that Cal’s attention had been drifting.

  “Their lack of mobility and their inability to communicate immediately can be very difficult to deal with,” she said. “In most cases you can expect them to make incremental improvements in both of these areas. Some differently biotic people have shown marked improvements over time, to the point where many of them can move and talk nearly as well as they did in life.”

  Sandy Trafton raised her hand, Bill’s arm tightening across her shoulders. The grief counselor gave her an encouraging nod.

  “Why do some differently biotic people make improvements?” she said, her voice raw from crying. “How can we help them?”

  That, Cal noted, earned a pale smile from Mayor Marshland.

  “I’m afraid that we don’t understand the why of almost anything that concerns the differently biotic,” the counselor said. “Some studies indicate that db people respond favorably to encouragement and support.” Here she paused, her eyes flitting across the room as though to gauge who would and would not be providing encouragement and support. She stopped upon Chuck Barnes, who had crossed his thick arms, resting them upon his belly.

  “Love,” she continued. “They seem to respond to love, just like any teenaged child.”

  Cal saw Chuck make a comment that only his mouse-brown wife could hear. Chuck did not seem to notice his wife recoil from the comment as though from a blow, nor did he seem to notice the tears that were coursing down her pale cheeks.

  “So we know a little about the how, but not the why. Since teens began returning from the dead—and new research indicates that the phenomenon may have begun as many as five years ago, much before the Dallas Jones incident—we have tried our best to study the phenomenon, but various...” She trailed off, again settling her eyes on Chuck. “...social forces have made a serious scientific inquiry difficult.”

  Cal didn’t really care about a serious scientific inquiry. He just wanted his daughter back.

  He wondered how he would have felt had something happened to her prior to the whole db phenomenon, back in the days when there was absolutely no hope of her returning. Would he have just let the massive tide of grief roll over him in one annihilating wave?

  Mandy was dead. No matter what happened, Mandy was dead. But it hadn’t hit him yet, not in the way it should have, because he could still allow himself to believe that she was coming back. He could still deny what had happened to her because he could still hold hope that she would open her eyes and return to him.

  But not everyone came back.

  The grief counselor was still talking about other changes that could occur when she said something that snapped him out of his thoughts. “But perhaps the most traumatic aspect of a return that a parent can deal with is the lack of expression.”

  Cal watched Bill’s hand moving in slow circles on his wife’s back and tried to swallow back the lump forming in his throat.

  “Your child, if he or she returns, will not express emotions in the same way that they used to. Their facial muscles simply won’t work properly, and so much of the communication that used to pass between the two of you will be gone. You mustn’t confuse their inability to express these emotions with their not having them. I assure you, your child will be just as sensitive as they were in life, they just will not be able to show it. Do not get discouraged when your child doesn’t seem to be responding to your efforts to reacclimate them to ‘life.’”

  She paused, her smile and voice softening.

  “Don’t stop showing them affection and love. Your child most likely will not be able to smile, or frown, and will not be able to communicate the thousand little things that we can communicate with our eyes and mouths. It may not sound like much now, in light of what just happened, but dealing with the lack of emotional responsiveness and expression will be one of the most difficult things you will face as the parent of a differently biotic child. If you have ever tried to talk to your child when they were playing a video game or engaged in the Internet, you can imagine what I’m talking about. You will be able to see your child’s face, you will be able to see them move, but when you speak to them or hug them you will get the sense that they aren’t really there.”

  “That’s because they aren’t really there,” Barnes said, his gravel voice rumbling around the room like the cough of an old pickup truck.

  “I’m sorry?” the counselor from Boston said, her face going blank much like the db children she’d just been describing. Cal had been expecting this from Chuck. He was more interested in the reactions of the other parents than in Chuck’s predictable meltdown.

  Chuck stood up, a sight Cal had gotten used to in town meetings when Barnes felt a school budget needed to be voted down. “They aren’t really there. They’re dead. And they aren’t ‘coming back’ or ‘returning’ or any of the above. What ‘comes back’ isn’t our children, and the sooner everyone in this room is aware of that, the better.”

  “Mr. Barnes...”

  Barnes leveled a squat, calloused finger at her. “Don’t interrupt me, missy. You’ve said your piece, and now I’m going to say mine. I think it is a disgrace the way that you are playing upon these poor people’s grief and loss to get them to subscribe to your warped worldview. My wife is sick—just sick—over this and you aren’t helping. Our children are dead. Dead. There’s no such thing as a return from death. What inhabits their bodies after they pass on is not of this world.”

  “You are upsetting my wife,” Trafton said, quietly, but loudly enough for Cal to hear the tremor in his voice. “If you don’t want to discuss this, why don’t you just leave.”

  Chuck laughed, leaning forward against the table that was too small for him. “But I do want to discuss this. I want to discuss what we should do if demons infest our children,” he said. “We should burn them. We should burn the corpses right now before they even start to come back.”

  Sandy burst into a loud wailing that filled the room with her pain. Trafton came up out of his chair, and Cal could see his arms shaking with rage and frustration. Chuck Barnes, hardened from years of physical labor, and outweighing Trafton by a good forty pounds, simply looked at him and shook his head. He got to his feet after a moment’s deliberation, and Cal saw that he was smiling. Certain men took an enjoyment out of casual violence.

  Cal wasn’t one of them, but sitting there, he decided that he would beat Chuck Barnes within an inch of the life their children had just lost if he did anything more than smile at Bill Trafton.

  “Mr. Barnes,” the grief counselor was saying, as though she could talk the men back into their seats. “It is now illegal in the state of Maine to harm the differently biotic. It is also illegal to...”

  “Laws! Laws!” Barnes said, his eyes, full of contempt, still fixed on Bill Trafton. “You think passing a human law makes something all right?”

  “...interfere with the body of a deceased young adult before the requisite seven days have passed.”