by Ronald Malfi
“Tim did all this?” he asked.
“Mmm-hmmm.”
“I get the sense that this is his usual MO, and not just because of . . . well, my situation.”
“He’s a cautious fella,” Gany said. “Now, will you keep quiet so I can catch some z’s?”
“Sorry.”
“There’s CDs in the glove compartment. Classic rock. And I don’t mean the new classic rock, I mean the legit shit. Have at ’em. Just keep the volume down.”
“I think the silence will be just fine.”
Gany didn’t respond. Judging by the deepening of her respiration, David guessed she had already fallen asleep.
50
According to the map, they were only about an hour from their destination—Tim’s so-called Fortress of Solitude—when the early morning sunlight glinted off a collection of chrome bumpers farther up the road. David slowed down. Gany leaned forward in the passenger seat and said, “What is this, now?”
“Daddy?” Ellie said, sitting upright in the backseat.
“It’s okay, hon. Looks like a fender bender, that’s all.”
“I don’t see any fender bender,” Gany said. She rolled down her window and stuck her head out. The morning air swooped into the car. It was downright cold.
Five or six cars stood in a queue behind a single vehicle that was parked slantways across both lanes of the road. The car—a pine-green Corolla with rusted quarter panels—did not appear disabled. Whatever had occurred, it must have just happened, because there were no police on the scene yet, and as David pulled up to the rear of the line, a few people got out of their cars and began to wander over to the Corolla.
“Should we see if they need help?” Ellie said. She was peering between the front seats now, gazing at the wreckage ahead of them.
“No,” Gany said. “Tim said no stopping. We don’t stop.”
David looked at her. She was right; he knew that she was.
“All right,” he said. He spun the steering wheel and rolled the Cadillac up onto the shoulder. There were grooves in the pavement, which caused the car to vibrate.
“But someone might be hurt, Dad.”
“There’s enough people around to help out,” he said. His hands were tight on the wheel, the vibrations traveling up his arms. Trees encroached upon the shoulder and he brought the car nearly to a stop in order to navigate around them.
“Hey, asshole!” someone shouted at them.
“Roll your window up,” David instructed.
Gany started to roll her window up . . . then paused. David eased down on the brake and followed her gaze. They were directly across from the Corolla now, and David saw that the driver’s door stood open and that a slim brunette had staggered several feet from the vehicle, dragging the rigid body of a child toward the center of the road. The woman held the child under the armpits, and at first David thought the kid was unconscious or possibly even dead until he saw the face.
The child was a girl, maybe a bit older than Ellie, mousy brown hair like her mother’s streaking across her pallid, sweaty face. She wore jean shorts, the hems of which were nothing but stringy white tassels. Her legs were smooth and white, the knees pink. A torrent of blood gushed from both nostrils, soaking her powder-blue shirt with a rhinestone unicorn on it. When her head lolled in David’s direction, he saw that she was perfectly conscious. The girl exposed all her bloodstained teeth in a hideous grin. When her hair fell away, David saw that her eyes were blind with madness and swelling from their sockets. As if to give David a show, the girl began chattering her blood-flecked teeth, that rictus grin fixed firmly on her face.
“Drive, David. Go.”
For a split second, his foot forgot which pedal was the accelerator and which was the brake.
“Daddy,” Ellie said again, her voice a rising whine. She grabbed a fistful of his shirt.
The woman in the street shrieked, “My baby! My baby!”
The would-be Samaritans froze in their haste to assist the woman, quickly turning into a gaggle of gape-mouthed onlookers too terrified to get any closer.
“My baby girl!”
That bloodied rictus grin persisted. David thought he could even hear the clatter of her teeth—clack-clack-clack-clack! The light behind those hideous mad eyes was nearly luminous. She flailed in her mother’s arms, and a too-white sneaker came off one slender foot and lay by itself now in the sun.
“Drive the car, man,” Gany said. She whipped her head around to glare at him.
Yet before he could snap out of it and plant the accelerator on the floor, he heard the Caddy’s back door pop open. A second later, he saw Ellie running across the highway toward the woman and the sick girl.
“Holy shit,” Gany said.
David hopped out of the car and chased after his daughter. In the road, the mother struggled with the girl, shrieking and calling for help. The girl twisted loose and staggered like a zombie a step or two in no particular direction, her one bare foot slapping on the blacktop. Her jaw chattered like some electric machine.
“Ellie!” David cried after her.
Ellie did not stop running, did not turn to look at him. She approached the girl, who cocked her head at a terrible angle, and only then did Ellie slow down to a deliberate walk. Blood sluiced from the girl’s nose. Her eyes blazed like twin moons.
“Ellie!”
Ellie reached out and grabbed one of the girl’s wrists.
A second after that, David reached her. He wrapped an arm around her waist and, with his other hand, tried to break Ellie’s hold on the girl’s wrist. Yet, at that same moment, he was overcome by such a powerful jolt that his vision briefly flickered to darkness. A moment later, he felt all his terror drain from him, leaving behind a vast, windy cavern of peacefulness, and he felt—
(calm perfect calm you can even sleep now if you want it’s so calm it’s so perfect it’s living up here in the cool grass and streams and the mountains and flying like a bird yes that’s right you’re flying you’re flying like a bird that’s how calm it is how calm how calm how calm you’re flying flying)
Ellie shoved him away. He staggered backward, the panic and fear flooding back into his body like boiling water, causing sweat to burst from his pores and his heart to hammer. So overwhelmed by the abrupt shift in emotion, he found he could do nothing but stand there, helpless, terrified.
He realized at one point that Ellie and the girl were no longer standing, but that the girl was laid out supine on the blacktop with her head in Ellie’s lap. Ellie had a hand on either side of the girl’s head, and she was leaning forward so far that their foreheads nearly touched.
The girl had stopped chattering her teeth. Those eyes—those horrible, impossible eyes—had closed. Now her face was nothing but a smooth canvas of peace, as if she had fallen—
(you can even sleep now if you want)
—asleep.
“What is she doing?” It was Gany, speaking in a low voice very close to him, although it took him several seconds to realize this. Not that he could answer her—he no longer possessed the strength to speak.
The only other noise was the sound of the girl’s mother sobbing as she stood a few paces behind Ellie, her hands over her mouth. When her daughter’s body appeared to go slack, the woman issued a high-pitched whine and sank to her knees.
Gently, Ellie rested the girl’s head on the pavement. She stood, and there was blood smeared on her shirt and along one pale white arm. She turned and, without hesitation, approached the mother who remained kneeling in the middle of the street. Ellie’s shadow fell over the woman’s face. She reached out and touched a hand to the left side of the woman’s face, as if to caress her. And indeed, the action looked very much like a caress—an act of comfort, of kindness.
The woman ceased crying. Her chest hitching, her breath coming in rapid gasps, she looked up at Ellie. David watched as the woman’s eyes softened, as her respiration slowed . . . as a semblance of . . . peace . . . settled over he
r face.
But not just her face.
Her entire body.
When Ellie was finished, she rejoined David and Gany at the side of the road. She took both their hands and led them back to the car.
“What did you do?” Gany asked her. “What the hell just happened?” She glanced over her shoulder at the girl, who remained prostrate in the middle of the street. The girl’s mother had crawled over to her and was cradling her now, weeping against her lifeless body. The crowd of onlookers stared.
51
They had driven less than three minutes from the scene with no one capable of speaking a word until Ellie said, “Pull over. I’m gonna be sick.”
Gany pulled the Caddy onto the shoulder of the wooded highway. The moment the car stopped, Ellie was out the door and hurrying into the trees. She got only about five yards before she bent forward and vomited in the grass.
David got out of the car and joined his daughter. When he reached her, she had finished retching, but remained bent forward, hands on her knees, staring off at the dark, intersecting branches of the trees. David rubbed her back. He didn’t say anything.
“I’m sorry,” Ellie said. Then she spit on the ground several times.
“Feel better?”
“I guess so.” She turned her head and looked up at him. Her face was beet red, her eyes bleary. A trail of saliva hung from her chin. “It was a lot to take in.”
“I guess it was. Were you trying to save her life?”
“I’m not sure. I don’t know what I was trying to do. But she died, anyway.”
“Yes,” David said, still rubbing her back. “But much more peacefully than she would have, I think.”
“I took it all out of her and helped her get over,” Ellie said.
“It was very brave,” he said. “Very stupid, but very brave.”
She began to cry.
“Aw, hon. Come here.” He hugged her tight. “It’s okay.”
“I’m sorry,” she said, her voice muffled against his chest.
“Shhh,” he told her, squeezing her more tightly. He looked back toward the Caddy and saw Gany standing outside, leaning against the hood and smoking a cigarette. Watching them.
“What are we gonna say to her?” Ellie said. She was looking at Gany now, too.
“I’ll handle it. You okay to go? Feel better?”
Swiping the tears from her face, Ellie nodded.
“Okay,” he said. “Let’s roll.”
When they got back in the car, David expected Gany to hit them with a barrage of questions. But to his astonishment, she said nothing. Not a word. It made him uncomfortable, so he cleared his throat and proceeded to fumble through some sort of explanation that was somewhere between a half truth and a complete fabrication.
“Hey,” Gany said, interrupting him. “Listen, man. You guys don’t owe me an explanation. As far as I’m concerned, your girl back there’s got a big heart and was trying to help someone in need. We can leave it at that.”
“All right,” David agreed. “Let’s leave it at that.”
In the backseat, Ellie fell quickly asleep.
* * *
By the time Gany left the highway and pulled onto a narrow ribbon of blacktop that wound through acres of bare-branched forest, Ellie was awake again. She stared out at the trees, not talking. All conversation had pretty much died after the highway incident.
“This place is a retired chicken farm,” Gany said as she navigated the unwieldy Cadillac along the serpentine twist of roadway. “Tim’s been out here for about a year, I guess. Previous owners sold it to him for a song. Not much use for a chicken farm when there aren’t any more chickens.”
“What exactly does he do out here?”
“Whatever he wants,” Gany said. “He’s always been a bit of a recluse, only now it’s trendy.”
“But what does he do for money? Does he have a job?”
She looked at him. “You guys are brothers, right?”
“Well, stepbrothers. We haven’t spoken in a long time.”
“So, are you one of those guys who only reappears when he needs something?”
The question jarred him. About a million responses shuttled through his brain, but none of them seemed adequate enough. He opened his mouth to speak, but Gany cut him off.
“I’m just screwing with you, man,” she said, smiling at him. She had a bit of an Elvis curl to her upper lip.
“I just don’t want to get him in trouble,” he said. Then added, “Or you.”
“Tim’s no dummy. He looks before he leaps.” She glanced sidelong at him. “I’m no dummy, either.”
After about ten minutes, the blacktop gave way to packed earth. The trees crowded in closer to the car, and a few bare branches reached out and scraped twiggy fingers along the Caddy’s roof. David got the sense that they were driving gradually uphill the whole way.
The dirt road eventually emptied out onto a small sunlit glen, at the center of which was the farmhouse. It was comprised of natural, untreated wood, with a slouching cantilevered roof, green and furry with moss. A series of antennas jutted straight up from the center of the roof, forming a semicircle around a satellite dish. Running the length of the house was a wraparound porch that sagged beneath a shingled alcove. The windows were all shuttered, and there were NO TRESPASSING signs posted to the trees every few yards. A silver Tahoe was parked around one side of the house, decorated in splatters of mud.
“A deer,” Ellie said. “See it?”
David looked and saw a large doe standing motionless among the foliage to one side of the house.
“It’s a fake,” Gany said. “A phony.”
Ellie said, “Huh?”
“It’s made of rubber. There’s a camera in its head. Wave, gang. We’re on CCTV.” Gany stuck her arm out the window and waved to the deer. The deer’s head swiveled mechanically, following the vehicle’s progress around the side of the house.
“You’re kidding me,” David said. “What’s that all about?”
“Precaution,” Gany said.
“Precaution from what?”
Gany eased down on the brake and shifted the car into Park. “You should really speak to your brother more often, man,” she said.
They got out of the car, feeling the cool, unblemished breeze on their skin, and inhaling the scent of pinesap in the air. There was an ax-head wedged in a tree stump and a few archery targets fixed to bales of hay. A rusted artesian well jutted crookedly from the earth, looking like something that had landed there after dropping off the fuselage of a 747. Also, there were the bugs: Out here, halfway up a mountain and in the middle of the wilderness, the air was teeming with tiny, flying insects. Larger things catapulted out of the grass. Glancing around, David saw a number of gauzy webs strung up in the forks of trees. He thought of the gigantic spider on the lamppost back in Goodwin, Kentucky.
Gany pulled her hair back and tied it behind her head with a rubber band. “It’s beautiful out here, isn’t it?”
“The air feels thinner up here,” David said. They had driven halfway up a mountain, the height nearly dizzying. He could feel the change in elevation in his bones.
“Cleaner, too.” The voice was male, booming. David turned to see his stepbrother standing on the porch, a cigar parked in one corner of his mouth, his big arms, blue-gray with tattoos, folded over the porch railing.
“Holy shit,” David said. He couldn’t help but smile. “It’s like looking at a ghost.”
“Maybe you are,” Tim said, returning David’s smile. He had a gruff but warm face, with sharp blue eyes beneath gingery eyebrows. His hair was long and tied behind his head in a ponytail. When he stood upright off the railing, the top of his head nearly touched the sagging lip of the roof. “Maybe we’re all just ghosts floating about through the ether, occasionally bumping into one another.” He turned and looked at Ellie, who stood near one of the hay bales, one hand around the shaft of an arrow ready to pull it out. “My God, is that you, El
? Smokes, you’re a goddamn woman!”
The smile that came to her face was enough to brighten her entire being. Something within her seemed to swell. “Hi, Uncle Tim!”
“Come and give me a hug, El.”
She trotted across the yard and mounted the creaking porch steps. Tim met her halfway, snatching her up off one of the risers in one muscular arm and swinging her against him. She wrapped her arms around his neck and he hugged her back. Before letting her go, he kissed the side of her face. It had been years since she had seen him, yet she went to him with familiarity. With trust.
“I thought you said kids were lampreys with legs,” Gany said.
Still smiling, Tim jabbed a finger in Gany’s direction. He made his way down the stairs and ambled over to David. As he approached, the smile on his face transitioned to a sympathetic firmness of the lips. His eyes softened.
“I’m sorry about Kathy,” he said.
David felt something loosen inside him. Before he could embarrass himself, Tim snatched him up in a bear hug that lifted both his feet off the ground. The crook of Tim’s neck smelled like cigar smoke, his flannel shirt like marijuana. David felt tears spring from his eyes; it was almost as if Tim was squeezing them out of him.
“Thank you,” David said once they’d parted. “You have no idea what this means, letting us come here like this. You probably saved our lives, Tim.”
Tim tucked the cigar back between his lips. He asked Gany if they’d had any trouble.
“Smooth sailing,” Gany said, though her gaze darted briefly in David’s direction. “I tossed his cell phone right after I picked him up.”
Tim nodded, pleased. “Why don’t you take Eleanor to see the rabbits?”
Ellie looked at her uncle, wide-eyed. “There’s rabbits?”
“Bunnies,” he said. “Newborns. A whole brood.”
“Come on,” Gany called to her.
Ellie went halfway down the steps, then paused and looked at David.
“Go on,” he said.
Smiling, she rejoined Gany on the lawn. Gany took hold of Ellie’s hand and they proceeded to trot around the side of the farmhouse.
