“Are you saying that you...predicted these things?”
“More than that,” Jay said, then pointed somewhat limply toward the closet, its door half blocked by the mound of his bagged bottles. “At the back of the closet, on the floor, there’s a box. Go get it and have a look.”
Mari stood and went to the closet, pulling its door open amid a jangle of bottles sliding within the disturbed bags. She knelt and, in the dark space, found first something soft—an old sleeping bag—and then by touch alone the square cardboard box that she had been directed to. She took it in hand and closed the closet back up before returning to the bed, standing at its foot now as Jay watched her, his head lolled to one side.
“Go ahead,” he urged her.
She set the box, a fairly worn brown thing that was heavy without being HEAVY, on the bed where she’d been sitting, the form of her rump still pressed into the mattress that had seen better days. It was the size you’d expect something like a small microwave to be shipped in, but there were no markings of any kind on its exterior. The top was four flaps folded sequentially to overlap one another in that way she had never been able to master without getting a nasty papers cut. But opening this box was easy, as the flaps had softened quite a bit from use, it appeared. She peeled back one, then two, then three, and then the last stubby flap, and she could see plainly now what the box held.
“Impressive, isn’t it?” Jay asked. “Or depressive. Is that a word?”
Mari reached in and pulled two handfuls of envelopes from the box. She held each bunch up to her face, some of the envelopes fanning like a hand of cards so that she could see that all were addressed as the first two she’d read, to ‘occupant’, and all were sealed. She looked over them to Jay. “All of these?”
He nodded, his eyes barely slits now, the throb in his leg just a pulse that seemed gloriously inconsequential.
“These are like the other two?”
“Guilty,” Jay said.
‘Guilty?’ Was this what he was talking about when he said ‘confession’? “These are all things you predicted? Bad things?”
“Very bad things,” he agreed, adding emphasis.
“So you’re, what, confessing in these letters that you knew these things were going to happen?”
His sideways head shook, one cheek bumping the headboard. “No, that I made them happen.”
The letters drained by ones and twos from her grip back into the box. “This is your insane part coming, right?”
He managed a druggy smile at her quickness. “You see, I got this gift from someone. This ability to know things. To ‘predict’ things, as you called it. I used to pick stocks with it—at least I thought I was picking stocks.” His head came off of the head board and faced her straight on. “But then it changed, and I wasn’t seeing what stocks to pick, I was seeing death. Lots of death. Things like what you read, like what’s in that box. And that’s only the last six years, since I’ve been in Plainview. Before that...before that I hadn’t accepted the truth of the matter. The truth that I’d been clued into long ago.”
“What truth?” she asked, trying to follow him. A gift? Knowing? Stocks? Death?
“That seeing the future makes it real,” Jay said, recalling the way Sign Guy had put it. “Does a vision cast a coming reality in stone?” He nodded, and a sheen spread across his tired eyes. “From experience, Mari Gates, I can tell you that it does. In my damnable case it does.”
She thought on his admission for a moment, the insane part of his story, and though she did not know the truth of it, was his belief in it anymore crazy than her own aimless journey guided only by feelings?
“You believe you caused these bad things to happen?” she asked him, and his eyes closed as he nodded. One of his hands slipped from his lap to the bed and she thought he had drifted off.
But he had not, and he began rambling. “That’s why I think you were here to kill me. To run me down. You were supposed to put a stop to it. Right there, at number two five five one one. Bang. Squish. Just like the bald man, only it wasn’t him doing it this time. It was...” And his eyes opened a bit in some mini revelation. “...maybe it was me. Kind of a roundabout suicide thing, no? A little poetic justice. Kill by the tails, die by the heads. You know?” His head shook, his eyelids dropped almost fully now. “Of course you don’t. Why would you? You can’t understand it, ‘cause I can’t understand it.” His chin bobbed down to his chest, bouncing back up, the leg that had been afire now just a numbed length of damaged flesh and bone beneath its sheath of plaster. “What do you think about that?”
“I think that the medication might be making you think some things,” she said. Not that she didn’t believe him, or believe that he believed, but he was obviously right on the edge of going under, weighed down by the pills he’d swallowed. She wondered if he’d followed the directions, but resisted the urge to ask, and to look at the bottle herself. She was not his mother.
“Poor man’s truth serum,” Jay told her, his words wet and bulbous now. He slid slowly down the headboard until he was flat on the bed again, his head cradled in the pillow Mari had fluffed for him. “Makes baring the soul that much more manageable.”
She was sure now that he was losing the battle to stay awake. “Would you like me to go so you can sleep?”
“I can sleep without you going,” Jay muttered, then added disconnectedly, “I wonder why I didn’t die?”
She looked down at the box on the bed, at the gathering of confessions within, at the record of deeds he believed he had wrought. “Jay?”
He bubbled up from sleep. “Hmm?”
“Can I read through the letters? Can I open them?”
He waved a hand at her, his whole arm flapping like the dead appendage of a marionette. “Doesn’t matter now. No more tails. God, no more tails please. Open away. Open away.”
She took the box from the bed and sank into the embrace of the wingback chair, putting the letters at her feet. It was quiet, a very still quiet but for the whir and the tick of the fan, and the deep breaths of the man who believed she was supposed to kill him. And despite thinking cool, she was not, the bulk of her sweatshirt trapping the stale heat of the room against her. But she could live with it. Besides, there was a window to let in some air. She stood and went to it, working the twist lock atop the lower sash, and pushing upward. Hard upward, but it wouldn’t budge.
“Doesn’t open,” Jay said from behind her. She turned. His eyes were shut, but he was not quite gone yet. Just way, way out of it. “Never has opened. So how could you just leave your home like that?”
The question caught her off guard, like his query about her roasting had, and she wanted to talk about this as much as that. “There was nothing there for me.”
“No family?” Jay asked woozily.
“No,” she said, and pulled her sleeves down to her palms. His head moved in a small way, maybe a nod, and then he was gone again.
Mari sat and thought cool, and took several letters from the box and put them on her lap. She expected no answers in them, mainly because she believed one of her questions had been satisfied. Her journey, the feelings that drove her, guided her, they had brought her here. To a man whose life was no less torn than hers. Maybe a little more, as he had suggested. But here she was, striking him down with her car, and was sitting in his room about to delve into the depths of some torment that had brought him to believe that he was responsible for the deaths of...(and she glanced at what lay on her lap, and what remained in the box)...countless people. And amongst all the strangeness that no ‘traditionally sane’ person could ever comprehend, she realized that one truth, that one answer, because the feelings were no more. There was no urge to move on. This was where she was supposed to be.
But that begged the question, Now what?
Jay sucked a deep, loud breath, and Mari looked to him, wondering not on that new question, but on the possibilities of what he believed.
She looked down at her lap and picked
up one of the envelope and peeled back its flap. And then she began to read.
* * *
Jay stirred just past nine, not waked fully, and glanced toward Mari. She was not in the chair now, but on the floor, her back rested against it. Two neat stacks of envelopes straddled her, one opened, one unopened. One spanned the valley between her crossed legs, the single page it usually contained in her hands as she studied it.
“Which one is that?” Jay asked, and she looked up from it.
“A ferry is going to sink,” she said, his glassy eyes upon her. “I remember this from the news. It was three years ago.”
Jay nodded. “Up in Maine. It was going to an island, but it hit a fishing boat and they both sank.” He looked away from her, to the ceiling again. The fog had parted only briefly, and was curling tight around him once more. “Seventy two people died. Water filled their lungs. It was cold but it burned.”
She folded the letter and put it back in the envelope, then moved onto the next as he seemed to drift off again.
“Don’t sleep in your car,” he said from the deepening fog.
“What?”
“If it gets late, there’s a sleeping bag in the closet. I used it before I got the bed at the Salvation Army store. It’s closed now.”
“I don’t want to impose,” Mari said. It had been a long time since she’d slept under a roof not made of metal and hanging upholstery.
“The floor’s not bad,” he told her, then he was Darvon’s guest once more.
He settled into a sleep and she read on. Treaded death’s record into the night. Twenty confessions, thirty, forty, past midnight, past one, his breathing slow and steady, the lamp she’d set on the floor to read by burning soft white light on each letter. Fifty, sixty, in no true order, not arranged for convenience, death here and death there, fires here crashes there, past two in the morning to three, past seventy letters until there was one that Mari Gates opened that she could not move past. She read it. Then read it again.
Then she looked up to the bed with blue eyes afire.
Thirty
Mama Bear
It was the sound that dragged Jay up from sleep at just past three in the morning, taking him that first tentative bit toward the waking world. Glass breaking, his floating mind thought. Yes, glass breaking. It was a realization that might have pulled him all the way from the fog, but another thing altogether interceded.
Something pounced upon him.
“BASTARD!”
His eyes snapped open in that way that only fear can make one wake, the tornado siren screaming or the earth beginning to shake in the dead of night. But this was not that. This was not that at all, he knew, when he saw Mari atop him, straddling his chest, her legs pinning his arms and a look of perfect hate in her raging blue eyes. To his throat she held the business end of a broken bottle, stale beer dripping to his neck, the liquidy ticks making him think of the blood pulsing just scant millimeters from the jagged points. His blood. In her other hand she held a piece of paper, and even in the light cast upward from the lamp on the floor he could see it was one of his letters. It was crushed in her fist, and she was thrusting it at his face like a declaration of guilt.
“YOU GOD DAMN BASTARD!”
He couldn’t read what was on the letter through the maddened creases her deathgrip had pressed into it, but then he did not need to see the words to suspect what they were. What they were to her.
And in a sad and crazy way, he thought, it all still made sense, and seemed even more apropos this way.
Her blue, blue glare seethed at him, and she seemed the sum of a world’s loathing right then. She pressed the points of the bottle roughly against his throat and said, “December Thirteenth, last year—sound familiar? Huh, Jay Marcus Grady? Ring a bell?”
It did. Dates always did. But he did not respond. Despite her asking, he knew no answer was required. Or wanted.
“I remember it,” Mari said, her voice not so loud now. Above normal, but in that way an animal growls to warn just before a strike. The only difference was that animals did not hate, could not hate, and at that moment as she sat pinning this man to his bed, she hated. Yes, she hated. With all the fury of the cheated she hated. “I remember it exactly. Would you like me to tell you about that day? Hmm? Would you?”
Again, he made no reply, as none was needed.
“I was on a plane that day,” Mari began, her face lowering toward his so he would know the depth of her enmity for him. “I was on a plane with my husband, and with my little boy. My four year old son.” Her blue hate glistened right then. “My family. We were coming back from a trip to Minnesota, to the Mall of America, a really silly kind of vacation, you probably think.”
He didn’t, but made no effort at sharing that.
“Just my small family and our stupid little vacation. We had fun there, you know? The rides, the sights. But it was over, and we were coming home, and we were landing, only...”
Burning, and the roar of metal ripping, and the screams, God, the screams, and his arm afire, and the smoke, and then the nothingness, Jay remembered. Yes, he remembered. Flight 1601, left wing hit the runway, the 757 cartwheeling. A hundred and ten people had died. Except...
...except how could she have been on that plane? She was alive.
“We crashed, and everybody was dead,” Mari told him, accused him, tears welling now and dropping one by one from her blue eyes to his face, bathing him in her anguish. “My husband, my son. My little boy. Dead.”
Jay swallowed, the bottle’s edge pricking him as the bitter ball rolled down his throat.
“Dead,” she repeated, as if imploring him to understand what that meant to her. How much of a hole it had opened in her soul. “All dead. All dead but me.”
The last statement sounded almost a question, the way she spoke it, as if she wanted to know why that was. Why had she lived? Why was she not with them?
“I lived,” she said outright, perplexed by the fact. She pressed the bottle harder against the tender, vulnerable flesh of his neck. “I’m alive. Why?”
“To do this,” Jay said, finally speaking, and a bit more the shattered bottle pressed just below his Adam’s apple.
She glared at him through her agony, her loss, her hate, and she knew what he meant. The car had not done him in, so now it was time to finish the job. To fulfill some prophecy he had deduced from her age and the mileage on her Honda.
“Go ahead,” he told her, with all the sincerity he could ever have known. He wanted it to be over. He deserved this. Deserved to be thrust into his own personal nothingness. The coins had decreed it, so it must be done. He closed his eyes and said, “I’m sorry. I never wanted it to happen.”
Mari sniffled, her chest heaving beneath the sweatshirt, an adrenalin rush of hate and vengeful urges driving her, pushing her, telling her that he deserved it. That he had killed her family. That he was the one. That he was the reason she was here. All very proper things to feel, to think, except for one thing. Something he had just said.
She kept the bottle to his neck and asked, “What do you mean you never wanted it to happen?”
He opened his eyes. “I didn’t.”
She straightened a bit, easing back from him. All but the bottle. “You didn’t want any of it to happen?”
“No,” Jay said. “How could I?”
Now the bottle did move, a hair, away from his neck. “If you didn’t want to kill any one, then...then why would you?”
It wasn’t a question of ‘would’, or ‘should’, he thought. It was a question of ‘could’. Wasn’t it?
“How...how can you kill people if you don’t even...” She stared at him, perplexed, the anger in flux for that instant, rallying back and forth between belief and doubt. He did it—he couldn’t have—he did it—he couldn’t have. The bottle pulled back some more, doubt gaining. Wonder gaining. “I can’t understand how that could be.”
He watched her body tip back further, until she was upright astrid
e his chest, the bottle still at his throat, but its threat now was tentative at best.
“No,” Mari said, looking at him, at the letter in hand, at the bottle, and then off toward the dark corner of the room near the door. She shook her head. “No, this can’t be it.”
“Just do it, Mari,” Jay quietly urged her.
She shook her head and pulled back completely, getting off of him, standing now half hunched at the side of the bed, the bottle in hand and held out his way but not at his throat anymore. Not ready to hurt anymore. “No, this can’t be the reason. Not to kill you. I haven’t driven all over half the country to come here and kill you. No. That just can’t be it.”
Jay hardly moved at all, just his eyes following her as she backed toward the chair and settled into it, the bottle in hand, still, but now clutched to her chest like some implement of defense. He touched his throat and felt the dampness of old beer, and the slick warmth of his own blood.
“No,” she said again, to herself mostly. She looked at the letter in her hand and let it fall to the floor. Then the bottle she put on the window sill. “I’m supposed to be here, but not to kill you. I don’t care what you believe. I know I’m not supposed to do that.”
Jay’s head raised a little right then. “Then why did you find me? Why did we find each other?”
Mari pulled her legs up into the old wingback and wrapped her arms around her knees. She looked at him, the skim of spent tears gleaming in her eyes. “Not for this. Whatever it is, not for this.”
He rubbed his throat, the thin film of the blood she’d hardly drawn greasing his fingertips. She was alive, and he was alive. His death had not come as he’d expected, as the heads had foretold. Only...
...maybe they hadn’t foretold that at all.
“Go back to sleep,” Mari told him, seeing his eyelids flutter as he stared off at something, in thought maybe. In regret. Or relief. “It was all a dream. Just a dream.”
A dream, Jay thought as his head sank back into the pillow. All a dream. Her lie was wishful, yes, but what a perfect lie. If only it all, all of the past eight years, could be just a dream. A dream, and not the waking nightmare that it was.
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