Denis Ever After

by Tony Abbott

  “GeeGee!”

  She’s frowning at the flower bed that runs along the inside of her fence. She’s wearing a blue beret, as if she’s going out, but she’s still in her bathrobe, which is hanging loose. She’s also barefoot, her little white feet reminding me of my single bare foot resting on the grass beneath the monument. She smells more like oranges than usual.

  “GeeGee?”

  She doesn’t hear me, doesn’t move. I’m not sure exactly what she’s looking at, or if she’s looking at anything in particular.

  I touch her arm. “GeeGee.”

  “I came downstairs without my feet this morning,” she says apologetically, and I wonder if she knows it’s me.

  “You have your feet, GeeGee,” I say, “but you left your shoes inside.” I cinch up her bathrobe.

  “That’s what I mean!” she snaps. “My . . . my . . .”

  My chest thrums. “GeeGee, are you all right? Maybe we should go back inside?”

  She looks up at me, confused, gives a little shake of her head, then smiles. “Of course.” I take her by the arm and we walk up the steps and in, settling in the kitchen. I pour her a glass of water. She doesn’t need to drink water; nobody here eats or drinks, it’s the idea of it. She takes the glass because I offer it. After a few swallows she pats my hand and appears to see me for the first time.

  “Denis, yes? Are you feeling better now? No fever?”

  “Am I feeling better? Are you?”

  “Oh, yes, yes. You give me myself back. You revive me.” She pronounces the word carefully, as if it has special meaning for souls, and I make a mental note to ask Russell if it does.

  Revive.

  Then she breathes in, settles her shoulders, and smiles at me. “There. Better. So. How did it go? Apart from the razor. You don’t have to share any details about that, thank you very much!”

  GeeGee seems almost back to normal, a sparkle in her eyes that disappears when she sighs.

  “The problem is my brother, Matt. He’s killing the death out of me.”

  She seems ready to smile at the joke, but doesn’t. I explain my visitations, thinking she’ll get a kick out of band practice and the red-haired kid’s neck, but I’m not sure she’s following what I’m saying. I fill a pot of water for tea.

  “There’s twisted stuff in our parents’ minds, GeeGee. They have secrets. They kept police records from Matt, which is just the tip of the iceberg. There’s a lot more they won’t talk about.”

  “It’s terrible for a mother to bury a son,” she says softly. “You can only hope to see him later. Families are so hard to keep together, you know. So hard . . .”

  Sitting quietly at the table, I feel a draft of cold air, and sense that things are happening to GeeGee because everyone who should be remembering her isn’t. If it were up to me, she would stay here forever. I know she wants to. I’d be nothing and know no one at all, if not for her.

  “I guess they’re grieving,” I say. “Matt too. Do you remember my father?”

  “Your father?” She perks up. “Of course. I believe his name was Gary.”

  “That’s right. Gary Egan. He’s your grandson.”

  “My husband was an engineer named Gary Egan, too. He built factories and coal mines, tunnels and bridges. Some people ask me, why did I go back to my maiden name? My sons, one of them was different. He used it. At the end I used it too. I’m not sorry. Twins run in the family, you know. Alcohol runs in families, too. Your grandfather was a troubled man. He and your father never got along. Gary’s mother died of smoking.”

  “Is my grandfather alive? Dad never talks about him. Joseph Egan. Is he up here?”

  Her look turns blank. “I visited, you know. People down there. Him. Others. Too often, perhaps. The razor.”

  “You visited your son, my grandfather?”

  “Oh, how he treated his poor brother. I loved Richard. He was different. Brothers can be so very different. Gary died in Florida on a bridge, did you know that? My husband. That’s why it was so sad, because he built bridges. Gary loved them, as a boy, too.”

  It’s confusing, not helped by the fact that both my dad and GeeGee’s husband were named Gary. “Are you saying my great-grandfather built bridges? I think about bridges a lot.”

  “Oh, dozens of them. Gary died when Gary was in school. I raised him, your father. His father kicked him out.”

  “My dad lived with you?”

  “In that tiny house. No lawn, no garage, but I think he liked it. At first, he did. Later there was that awful day he went back. The school bus. And the leg, of course. Well, that changed things.”

  “Leg? GeeGee? What leg?”

  “Now, my grandfather Byatt was a soldier, you know. The 13th Pennsylvania Reserves. He lost one at Gettysburg. His right one, I think. Or his left. Leg, I mean.”

  “Gettysburg? They found me at Gettysburg!”

  And all at once I feel the threads pull a little tighter and begin to hum.

  “They called the Reserves the Bucktails. They were at the Wheatfield. I have a photo of him right up”—she looks at the blank wall next to us—“somewhere. Your father loved that photo. Always posing like Byatt. ‘No posing,’ I’d say. Gary was obsessed with the Civil War. Maybe that’s why he joined the service. Then after all that, the leg.”

  “What leg, GeeGee? You’re talking about my dad now? I know he was in Afghanistan. Is that what you mean? Did something bad happen there?”

  “How could it not be bad?”

  She says this, fussing with her hands as if wiping crumbs from the front of her robe. I tell her about what I saw in Buckwood and she startles me. “Matt is right. You should haunt him. It is your fault your family is broken. You should do whatever you can to stop them flying apart.”

  I don’t like her telling me this. “I told Matt I can’t do much. There are clues about my death, though. Weird little things.”

  GeeGee searches my face for a few seconds. “You could start at the end, see what’s there. Work back. It’s what they do in mystery stories. Start at the crime scene.”

  I conjure the images in the police file. “Are you saying follow the evidence?”

  “You’ll be the detective in your own mystery.” She smiles a sliver of a smile, then dabs her old finger on my cleft eyebrow. “I don’t remember you getting this.”

  “I’ve always had it. It must have been after you . . . you know . . . came here.”

  She turns her face from me, scanning her kitchen for something familiar but not finding it. “Oh, you wear me out. It’s been a long day.”

  It’s midmorning. Not even noon.

  GeeGee blinks at her teacup. Her hair is as thin as threads over her skull. When she looks up she seems surprised I’m there. “Maybe you should go now.” She falters to stand, and I help her. “You wear me out. I have to rest.” Her eyelids flutter as she shuffles from the kitchen to the front door. “Be careful on the stairs. They’re steep. Well, you know that.”

  “Okay, GeeGee. I’ll try to get to Gettysburg with Matt. Work backward like you said.”

  She puts her hand shakily on the door handle. “You’re a good young boy. I’m not quite sure who you are, but I love you. I think I do. I’ll let you know if I remember any more.”

  A little chunk of my heart falls off. “I love you, too, GeeGee.”

  “If that’s all, then . . .” She opens the door with her slender fingers, then retreats into the house. As I step down the stairs, she quietly closes the door behind her.

  17

  The Hurt of Night

  The walk outside her house is bright in the full sun. Her lawn, recently trimmed and edged, is the color of a fresh lime. The hydrangeas in the border are blooming full blue, lolling in the breeze from the shore.

  Be careful on the stairs, she told me. But her stairs are shallow, like all the stairs here, designed for the elderly. I want to batter down the door, run back in to her, but I don’t.

  “Matt needs me now, GeeGee. Have a go
od rest.”

  I climb away from her house to the hard room at the foot of the hills, where the razor seems more vicious than before. As if the blade knew that my previous visit was my first, it seems doubly angry with me. Does it hurt more to slice multiple times along the same line? Maybe the razor’s made that way. I try to shake off the pain, but the cut line burns me all the way through.

  Time must be different between the worlds. It’s still morning in Port Haven, but it’s dark on my street in Buckwood. Night cools the pavement. The blue of the trees to the north seems to wash over our neighborhood. As the lights in my house go off one by one, I think of the porch lamp lit for three solid days before it was turned off. Soon everyone will be asleep or just staring into the dark, trying to calm their hearts.

  An engine shifts gears, drives away.

  It takes me an instant before I look. Was it the pickup I’ve seen twice already? Is someone spying on my family? Does the driver notice me?

  The street is already empty. The night goes still.

  I turn to the house again. Mom’s car is gone. Dad’s is parked at the top of the driveway. There is sadness rumbling inside the rooms. Steeling myself, I float up the front path and peer inside the window by the door.

  The TV flickers in the living room. Dad is sitting alone in front of it, maybe asleep. I shimmer upward and enter the house through Matt’s window. His light is on, but he’s not there. Something slides across the attic floor above me. I ooze up through the ceiling and find Matt crouching over an old suitcase.

  I don’t want to be funny, I really don’t, but what would you do if you had the chance? I wait until he starts fiddling with the lock, then I scream.

  “Stop! Thief!”

  “Holy crow!” he gasps as he rolls back on his feet. “You idiot! You’re insane!”

  “Maybe,” I reply. “But you asked me to haunt you.”

  “It’s been three days!” he hisses under his breath. “Where have you been? I thought I dreamed you up!”

  “Three days? Bro, I’m sorry. I don’t know what happened. I was only there for minutes.”

  “Heaven should get a clock. Now, clam up. I don’t want Dad to hear me.”

  “He’s sleeping in front of some show.”

  “And I waited forever for him to do that.” Matt breathes deep to calm himself. “This is Mom’s old suitcase. Trey gave me the idea to look for her stuff. Mom keeps it buried up here.”

  He twitches the paper clip in the lock, stops, then catches me in the flashlight. “Wait. You can’t get this open, can you?”

  “Sorry. I’m not Houdini. I’m just dead like him. And taller. Did you know he was short? He’s short.”

  He grumbles and fiddles again. But it’s an old suitcase with an old lock, and soon—click—it’s open. Setting the suitcase down, he lifts the lid, then groans again. “Clothes.” He holds up a fancy pink sweater with pearls sewn into the neckline.

  “Mom never wore that,” I whisper. “She’s not a pink person.”

  “Maybe she used to be, before . . . everything.”

  Which might be a dig at my selfish death, but I let it go. There are a couple of blouses; skinny lady belts wound in coils and tied with ribbons; several folded scarves; and two, no three, berets in different shades of blue.

  “This might be GeeGee’s stuff,” I say. “She wears berets. Sometimes. She had one on . . . before.”

  It’s only after Matt lifts the clothes away that we see something else. A silver-framed photograph from the nineteenth century, the kind that have an odd silvery sheen. It’s a young man in an old uniform, staring grim faced into the lens, a long barreled musket at his side.

  “Is this from the Civil War?” I whisper. “GeeGee told me about him. Her grandfather or someone. Bryan? B-something. I forget. He fought at, guess where, Gettysburg. Plus, our dad was all about the Civil War when he was young. I bet this is GeeGee’s stuff from when he lived with her.”

  “Which probably means something I have no idea of,” he says, mangling the language.

  Scrabbling through the rest of the stuff, Matt finds another photograph. A snapshot of a white farmhouse surrounded by fields, with rolling green hills in the background.

  “Familiar?” he asks me.

  “No.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah, why?”

  “Ghosts don’t actually know very much, do they? First, how to tell time. Now this.”

  “Just keep looking.”

  Next is a stack of bad kid artwork. A drawing I see as a green balloon on a string Matt insists is a tree with a skinny trunk. Pages of turkeys made from small painted handprints.

  “These are our hands. Look at the dates,” Matt whispers, holding the flashlight close. “They’re from when we were . . . two. Mom keeps them hidden up here?”

  “You’re not suggesting they should be framed?”

  “Well, mine.”

  Tons more artwork made out of construction paper, caked with thick gobs of paste. Suns with squiggly beams. Nightmare houses where no line is straight. Finally, tucked into a satin pocket at the very bottom of the suitcase, is an envelope of doctors’ records. Matt sifts through them.

  “The usual checkups at the doctor we must have had as kids. Sore throats, ear infections, antibiotics, bee-stings.”

  There is a stack of vaccination records. He flips through several identical cards.

  “You start getting flu shots when you’re one,” he says, like he’s an expert, “then every year for a few years—”

  “Wait, go back,” I say. “There. That one. It’s different. The stamp on it reads . . . ‘Armstrong County Health Department, Kittanning.’ The others are stamped Lawrence County. Buckwood is in Lawrence. What were we doing in Kittanning?”

  Matt focuses on the signature and date. “October twenty-ninth. Dr. Vishna-something.”

  “Fine, but why did we get vaccinations in Buckwood every year except that one? We got all the others here. Why not when we were two?”

  “Whoa, Sherlock,” he says. “Maybe we were traveling when we needed them?”

  I try to swat him. I fail. “Except you schedule vaccinations. You don’t get vaccinations when you’re driving through strange places.”

  The two forms—Matt’s and mine—are so unspecific. Our names, the date, a couple of check marks, Dr. V’s flowery signature.

  I keep working at it. “Unless . . . unless you’re there for a while. Unless you’re staying there. Where is Kittanning anyway? You’re all about maps.”

  “I don’t know—”

  “Matt? Are you on the phone?” Dad growls from the foot of the stairs. “Why aren’t you in bed?”

  We freeze. Of course I don’t really have to, but I do anyway.

  “In a minute, Dad!” Matt calls back. “Sorry!” He quickly shoves everything back into the suitcase, scurries down to his room, and leaps into his bed. “Okay, so Armstrong County? Why were we there when we were two, and for how long? I’ll put Trey on the case.”

  “Trey, huh? You really like Trey, don’t you?”

  “What are you, still seven?”

  I try to come up with something snarky, but it stings to hear Matt’s comment, so I don’t. “Anyway, the real reason I came back from Port Haven is to tell you I have a plan.”

  Matt sits up on his elbows. “A plan to solve your murder?”

  “Uh-huh. We—you—we—need to follow everything we know, all the clues, from Gettysburg back to the beginning. GeeGee told me that’s how you do it. It’s the only way to get the big picture and the only way to put me to rest.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Tell them to drive you to Gettysburg.”

  “You are insane. Mom will completely freak if I so much as mention the Civil War. The war between the states, brother versus brother, it all equals Denis, Denis, Denis. She’s sick to death of your death.”

  “Then Dad. Just you and him go. And invisible me, of course. I could find out stuff you can’t, then
tell you. You’ll seem like the genius I am.”

  Matt is quiet for a while. “Seriously, if we could end this thing, Mom and Dad might be human again. You’ll appear to them?”

  “I can’t spread me around. You can tell Trey, but no one else.”

  He laughs. “Oh, I already told Trey. How could I not?”

  I half expected this. “Fine, but just Trey. Oh, and I almost forgot, someone’s watching you.”

  “From above?”

  “From a truck. I’ve seen it around a few times. Maybe it’s that red-haired kid’s father, waiting to get revenge for the throat thing.”

  “His name is John Foley, and that’s on you.”

  “I’m just saying. A gray pickup.”

  “Perfect. I’m being stalked. That’s all I need.”

  “Ask Dad tomorrow about Gettysburg. And don’t forget to get Trey working on Kittanning.”

  Matt rests his head on his pillow. “Now I’ll never sleep.”

  18

  The Big Ask

  Because time seems messed up between Port Haven and here, I stick around while Matt grinds through a ton of words in his head, a real gravel soup, for the best way to ask to see where they found my body. Every time he seems ready to, he chickens out because, for Mom, Gettysburg is practically a swear word, and even thinking it proves that Matt is betraying her.

  Trey’s advised him to “ask your dad when it’s just the two of you,” but Matt’s convinced that if Mom’s present when he brings it up, it won’t be half as bad as if he and Dad conspire between themselves, then spring it on her.

  I back away from the debate, but maybe not far enough.

  Wednesday night at dinner, they’re sitting around the table. This is ground zero for heavy discussions and, honestly, I don’t like the place anymore. I used to, lots, but there are only three chairs since Mom took mine away. Who am I to complain, except, you know, it was my chair. . . .

  Anyway, they talk about school, fire drills in the rain, the dozens of new plantings, and the five temporary classroom trailers Dad helped put in because two elementary schools merged because Buckwood’s population is dropping because jobs are drying up because stores are closing because natural gas drilling because international because because because.