Denis Ever After

by Tony Abbott

  Matt probably doesn’t mind the twelve minutes of solitary biking to school. It’s a dark, sticky web of tension in the house. Hard to take and easy to leave.

  I don’t want to go in.

  I walk.

  If you take a left at our mailbox, go to the end of the street, and take another left for three blocks, you’ll find yourself on Woodrell Avenue. It runs through the middle of Buckwood. Take it east for five blocks and go left before the brick offices and shops begin. Vlautin Road comes up about a half mile on your right. Down a little more and you reach Buckwood Middle School, where I would have gone with Matt.

  I could be there in a split second, but I take my time, draw in the town as it slowly blinks its eyes open and stirs. I shouldn’t, but on sidewalk after broken sidewalk I let the sights and sounds and smells of a small town overwhelm me.

  Some thirty slow minutes later, I arrive at the school. A couple of cars are pulling into the very far spaces of the lot. Soon after, a pair of old-guy custodians, some young men with tattooed arms in kitchen whites, a young woman carrying a stepladder, and three mom-age women collect in the circle, before slipping in through a single open door.

  More cars enter. A couple of teachers in sweaters stroll down the sidewalk from a nearby neighborhood. A dark blue sedan pulls into a spot near the front of the lot, and out jumps a zippy woman in a gray jacket who, showering easy sparks on everyone and saying nine things at the same time, I take to be the principal.

  I round the parking lot three times. I’m sucking up the vibes, tensions, the often funny ways a school opens for the day. It’s all movement and life. I know I shouldn’t be, but I’m sad again, this time that I never got to go here.

  Young women get out of small new cars, second-career men in family cars—these are more teachers and aides. I know these things about them because they’re light inside.

  Gradually, the lot clutters and fills. One of those custodians reappears with a kitchen lady. He unlocks the other five front doors as she hoists the flag up the pole in the circle. The pole reminds me of that nagging vertical line on the edge of my left eye’s vision, but it’s not quite right.

  The man, head tilted up at the rising Stars and Stripes, lights a cigarette, and something about the little white stick smoking between his fingers nags at me, but that also goes nowhere like the lost sneaker and the car in the quarry and Bo’s shattered ankle.

  As the sun rises on the snapping flag, I hear Matt getting near—“Denis! Georgia! Murdered!”—and I know I have to make it all stop or never sleep the peaceful sleep of the dead. I take a last look around, but it’s time. It’s time.

  Wandering two floors and the many halls, longer and wider than the elementary’s halls, I get lost. It happens. Plus, I never came for orientation. I try not to feel frustrated.

  By the time I locate the band room, several bells have rung. Hundreds of students have thundered down every hall. I wait for it all to dry up, wait for another bell, then whisk myself into the noisy room.

  Matt is already in the second row, rolling his fingers over the buttons of his trumpet, eyeing the music on his stand.

  Scanning him from every angle, I hover above the mostly empty row behind him for the longest time, running over GeeGee’s and Russell’s advice about how to start haunting. I decide to sit directly behind Matt and wait for the perfect opportunity to buzz him.

  When I finally sit down, however, my seat is occupied.

  12

  A Twin and His Solo

  I’m sitting in a lap.

  A girl’s lap. The lap of a girl.

  Brown hair. Green eyes. Long, loose braid over her left shoulder.

  I know, right?

  I’m seven years old and sitting on a girl, so extreme ick. But I’m also twelve or whatever, so . . . interesting. Except it suddenly gets weird—weirder—when the sax part comes along because the muscles in the girl’s arms and legs tense and she raises the mouthpiece to her lips. I jump off.

  Most people don’t feel spirits near them, but this girl—a penciled note on her sheet music says “Ally”—squirms, dusts her lap, and frowns at the boys on either side, as if they could pull off anything like I’ve done. Finally, Ally just blinks and falls in a note or two behind everyone else.

  I step out of the row, slide back against the classroom wall. About forty chairs and as many music stands are set on risers, sloping down to the conductor—the board says Mrs. Marquez—who is waving her arms and talking over the music. There are posters of composers, diagrammed instruments, a smell of wood and brass and body odor. A piano sits to one side. Instrument cases and backpacks are spread everywhere on the floor, under the seats, against the wall by the door.

  The piece they play is severely off-key. This is Buckwood Middle, not the Pittsburgh Symphony. But off-key is better than Matt’s screaming inside my head.

  I edge the wall as the band runs through the piece from top to bottom without a stop. Matt has a trumpet solo. I wasn’t the musical twin, so I don’t know for sure, and it’s only a few seconds long, but it sounds like he’s hitting all the right notes. I look at my ghostly fingers and wonder what it would have been like to have had the lessons he’s had—but what’s the use of that?

  From this angle I’m really able to study Matt’s face, which—except for his pimples and my sliced eyebrow—is a clone of my own. Despite the anger and confusion that I know he’s feeling, he loves this, loves music. Reading his mind—or rather that whirling thing that is his heart—I sense that besides Trey, and biking by himself, music might be the one thing that gets him through his dark days.

  I recall why I’m here. Get his attention for a moment, then stand aside.

  The piece ends raggedly.

  “Hmm . . .” Mrs. Marquez glances at the clock on the wall. “We have a few minutes. Let’s run through the middle bars again, and this time when the saxes pull back, Matt, why don’t you enter with a big, bright attack on your first note? Knock us off our seats.” She smiles.

  “Sure,” he says, “I like that.”

  His first note? Big, bright attack?

  Thank you, Mrs. Marquez!

  She tells them the measure, then counts off. The band starts more or less together and is soon up and swinging. Matt listens, all the while rolling his middle fingers over the buttons the way he seems to like, when Ally and the saxes do their long sweep up.

  Matt lifts the trumpet to his lips, fills his cheeks with air, and just as the saxes drop off, I slam my hands down on his fingers as hard as I can. There’s no pressure, of course, but if Matt is so obsessed with me, he’ll feel something.

  Boy does he.

  My touch goes through him like a million volts. His fingers seize up, but—and here’s the great part of haunting a trumpet player—he’s already pushing two lungfuls of breath into the mouthpiece.

  He blows a sound like a cow fart.

  Mrs. Marquez jumps and slams back into the whiteboard, the players around him shriek to a stop. One—the joker of the woodwinds—falls to the floor, kicking over his music stand—“You knocked me off my seat!”

  Matt is left there holding his trumpet while the rest of the band gags. His face is lobster red, his eyes as wide as moons.

  This is the moment I choose to scream inside his head.

  “Heyyyyyy, Matttttttt!”

  He jumps to his feet. “Ahhhhh!”

  The bell rings, the class collapses, and Matt tears out into the hall.

  He tears out into the hall and accidentally bumps a kid lightly with his trumpet case. Matt barrels away, wanting only to be invisible. You wouldn’t believe the angry sparks flying off him. They’d cut you.

  The kid he bumped into so lightly—who, if he were anywhere near normal, would have let it go—starts shouting at Matt.

  “Hey, doofus!”

  He sports an upright quiff of red hair and a red face to match his red T-shirt. All that red matches the anger of Matt’s sparks.

  Now, this kid is in school
, he’s got good teachers—I saw him sitting in the class with that teacher who didn’t give Matt detention—but he’s not thinking about learning anything. No, he has to prove himself.

  “Hey, get back here!”

  Matt moves on, unaware, to his locker. Red tramps after him. When he’s near enough, he flicks Matt’s hair and snaps his fingers at his ear.

  “Leave me alone!” Matt jerks away from the lockers and pushes his way down the hall.

  Kids are dumb. They pick on you because your pain makes you different. “You’re suffering? Let me make fun of you so you’ll feel worse. That’s my power.” Not even animals think like that.

  “Hey, Egan. Your father cuts our lawn. He stinks at it, too!”

  Matt goes on his way, and I see in this kid’s confused mind that he’s thinking of something worse. When he starts with “My dad says your father’s a drunk,” I focus all my energy and thrust my hand into his neck.

  Not at his neck. Into it.

  First, Red stops dead in the hall. Then I wiggle my fingers around, and he grabs his throat and makes choking noises. He tries to talk, but it’s a squeak. He staggers away from Matt, twitching and gasping, and runs down the hall to the water fountain, to the applause of ten or twelve kids whose thoughts tell me he’s taunted before.

  All in all, a good first haunting.

  13

  Trey Is Trey Is Trey Is Trey

  I hang back while Matt mopes around for the rest of the day. If he sees a pencil, he wants to throw it. After supper, when I watch him bang out the screen door and cut across the lawn into the woods, I know what visitation number two will be.

  Him and Trey together.

  I’ll see what’s what between these two.

  As you head north into, then out of, the patch of woods on the side and back of our house, you come to a long flat lot between our block and the one behind. It’s not quite deep enough to build on, so it’s just grass and weeds. The surrounding houses divide the task of mowing—Dad pitched in one summer I remember—making a ridge where the various lawns meet.

  I tag after Matt as he crosses the lot to the upper street. It’s cooling now, the sun is nearly down. He reaches the northwest corner and takes a right onto Campbell, where he trots diagonally across the street.

  I don’t have to look, so I just step out after, when this pickup accelerating from the far corner does a sudden squiggle, and brakes, just a tap, as if its driver sees me. Is it the same pickup as this morning? I didn’t pay enough attention then, but I do now. It’s small and gray, not new, with a vertical dent in the driver’s door. I step away to the sidewalk and peer inside the truck as it passes. The driver’s a man, I can tell, but he motors off too quickly for me to see his face. It’s about seven in the evening, so the sun is low and lying flat on the road.

  To materialize, you catch the light and use the dust in the air to take a bit of form. You’re like a shaft of thickened air. Maybe I’m so wrapped up in the whole Matt thing, I’m collecting air faster than usual. This will tend to make me more there than normal. Even if the pickup driver didn’t actually see me, he may have noticed a sudden wisp of shadow and reacted.

  Matt turns when he hears the truck hit its brakes, but he doesn’t slow. He hurries to the next corner, turns right, crosses again, and jumps up the front steps of a two-story factory house more or less like ours. He rings the bell, but that’s just a courtesy, because as he does this he tugs on the handle and enters.

  I enter too, no handle required.

  While Matt’s greeting Trey’s parents, who welcome him into the living room, I glide up to Trey’s room to size it up. Moving is the easiest thing for dead people. You just go where you want.

  Trey’s bedroom is plain, and Trey is not in it. There are two big windows, dark now, three light green walls, one dark blue. The bed is wedged into a sort of alcove, with a large poster of an old book cover on the wall over the foot of the bed. Of Mice and Men. A jammed bookcase stands on the left side of one of the two windows. I look around for stuffed toys, tutus, pennants, bows and arrows, posters of NASCAR drivers or pop stars, male or female. None. Outside of being kind of booky and serious, I can’t tell much from the room about Trey’s personality.

  The door swings wide, and Trey—in jeans and a purple T-shirt with a faded Prince symbol on it—plops on the bed in the middle of maps and papers suspiciously like Matt’s.

  Two seconds later my brother climbs the stairs. Trey bounces up, smiling, and the zingy thing happens. Calm sparks from Trey. Matt’s are sharper, but blue, and coil around Trey’s head.

  “So . . . ,” Trey says, settling back against the pillows while Matt slinks into the desk chair and I squirrel up in the corner. “I’ve been sort of obsessed with Georgia—”

  “Mrs. Marquez taught us that song,” Matt says with a sad chuckle.

  Trey stares. “Yeah, I don’t know what that means.”

  “‘Georgia on My Mind’?” Matt says. “The famous song? Gosh, if it’s not Prince, you are musically illiterate.”

  “Wow, two words, eight syllables. Such a brainiac you are. Look, forgetting that your dad was born in Georgia, you said he was stationed at Fort Benning?”

  “He trained there, and his unit or whatever went to Afghanistan.”

  “What about your mom?”

  “She wasn’t in the army. Or the marines or navy or air force, either.”

  “You’re on fire tonight. You should do Vegas,” Trey deadpans. “Was she ever in Georgia? Even for, like, a minute. A layover at the Atlanta airport, maybe? That’s a big hub. A hub is what they call the major headquarters for an air—”

  “I know what a hub is, you hub.” Matt shakes his head. “Nope. No Georgia for Mom. That’s been proved. I have it here.” He swings his messenger bag into his lap and searches among its contents for the police file. He slips it out, flips through some pages, and reads.

  “‘Mrs. Egan claims she has never lived in or visited the state of Georgia. Subsequent background checks reveal this to be correct.’” He looks at Trey. “I know zero about when my dad was a kid. He never talks about his past. Maybe there’s nothing to learn. I don’t know. . . .”

  “What’s eating you?”

  Matt shrugs. “Weird band practice today. Never mind.”

  Trey chews this over. “Military stuff could be tough to find out, if he’s not sharing, but my mom does genealogy, and I could look up when he lived in Georgia. What’s his birthday? Middle name?”

  “Really?” Matt perks up a little. “April 30, 1979. Robert. Gary Robert Egan.”

  Trey drags a laptop across the bed and starts typing. “Gary Robert Egan . . . There’s a census every decade, they should have some . . .” Trey reads, scrolls, reads more, clicks a couple of times. “And . . . boom—805 East Magnolia Street, Valdosta, Georgia. He’s there in 1980. He was a baby. And again in 1990. The house is still there. I’ll download a picture of it. Ten years later he’s living in Pittsburgh.” Trey punches the return key a couple of times, and a printer on the desk slides out several pages.

  Matt snatches the sheets with a quivering hand. “This is his house down there? It’s tiny. Wow, Dad lived there. Seriously, he never says a word about when he grew up.”

  “Maybe he made enemies with a neighbor kid. He stole a girl’s ball or something, and she grew up and got revenge?”

  “Because Georgia has only the one ball?” Matt says. “Trey, you’re so weird.”

  “You’re weirder. When was he at Fort Benning?”

  “Oh-two. Then Afghanistan a year later.”

  More clicking. “That was early days in the war. Forty-eight men died in Afghanistan in oh-three. Hard to tell from this if any were from Fort Benning. Here’s another printout. You know, sometimes, soldiers get PTSD. Post-traumatic—”

  “I know what PTSD is. I don’t think my dad has it, but who knows?”

  I’m trying to find my moment, but this is all stuff I never knew. On the latest printout is a ridiculously s
hort summary of the Afghan war, and a grid jammed with the totals of American casualties month by month, through seventeen years. I think of warships docking in Port Haven.

  “Does he talk about it?” Trey asks. “What happened over there?”

  Matt makes a sound halfway between a sigh and a groan. “Not with me. Why the heck don’t they just tell me stuff?”

  “Parents are all about secrets,” Trey says. “Except mine. Man, no secrets at all. Which I guess is maybe good probably. Did you ever think to poke through your mother’s secret junk. Maybe she has more police files. Or other clues?”

  “I really don’t think I’m going to get lucky twice.”

  Lucky. Yeah. Real lucky.

  Seriously, I feel bad, lurking here, knowing the police file, the maps, even this printout, are completely about me, and all I’m doing is gawking. I decide I need to stop the funny business. No more pranks. He’s on the edge. But before I’m able to do visitation number two, his phone bings.

  He yanks it from his pocket. “Eh. Mom wants me home. For some reason.”

  Trey glances at the clock on the desk. “It is kind of late. Sorry. I know it’s tough to be there.”

  Neither of them moves for, like, two full minutes. I like Trey. I want to appear to Trey the way I’m planning to appear to Matt, and I know I could because of the sparks and because there’s so much light coming from Trey. But not yet. It ain’t going to do you no good, Pink Hair said. I have to get my brother alone first, anyway. And soon.

  Matt finally stands, folds the printouts into his bag, opens the door. There’s a little hug, then he heads out and down the stairs.

  The moon, three-quarters full, is up over the trees. Its light is ghostly pale, making shadows even blacker. It’s colder since he left our house. I feel October’s breath just around the corner, dying to slide in.