Keeper, The

by Langan, Sarah,

  Ed O’Brian’s conference call ended on an unhappy note, and he arrived home to receive a message on his answering machine from his daughter, Georgia. He proceeded to cook dinner for her, his cranky girl, because she would be tired. He then retired to his study and began composing the speech he would deliver to his staff. “Dear friends…” it read. If his wife were alive, she would know what to say. She would tell him to write about all the years of invaluable service, the loyalty, the sadness they would all feel as this era of their lives, this town, these United States, came to a close. She was dramatic like that. Ed crumpled the paper into a ball, lit a cigar, and started a hand of solitaire. There would be no speech. Tomorrow he would start the phone tree and tell them, Looks like our luck’s run out.

  At eight-twenty, Danny Willow returned home from Montie’s Bar. He found his wife crying in the dark. She said she couldn’t find a picture of the dog to show people. How could they not have a picture of Benji? It was his fault, she’d bought him that nice digital camera and he’d lost it. And look, he’d been drinking, too. She’d sent him to find Benji and instead he got drunk. No help at all. Danny took his wife’s wrinkled hand and kissed it.

  Also at eight-twenty, Mary Marley rang up Colette Dubois’ Crest toothpaste and pork rinds, flipped the “Open” sign on her register to “Closed,” and took a break. Though she had never been intuitive about her children, she knew in some hidden place that the anxiety in her stomach had something to do with one of her own. She tore the heel from a loaf of day-old Italian bread and called home. She told Liz to be very careful tonight. Please don’t go out into the rain. Do you want to talk about anything? she asked. I was in a terrible mood at dinner but if you want to talk, please let me know. I can come home anytime. Nope, Liz told her, I’m just fine. Mary hung up and went back to work, chewing away at the bile in her throat. In her mind’s eye she saw a little girl in pigtails. “Mother, may I?” the little girl asked.

  In Corpus Christi, Georgia read last month’s People Magazine about celebrity adoptive mothers at her son’s bedside and felt grateful that this long day was almost over.

  Paul Martin thought about a broken egg that shatters into so many pieces that it can only be fixed in hindsight.

  At exactly eight-twenty, Susan Marley fell down a flight of stairs. People all over Bedford stopped what they were doing and listened to a soft buzzing that droned for a few short seconds, and then was gone. Some trusted their instincts and left Bedford right then, but most did not.

  PART TWO

  THE BODY

  TEN

  Excruciatingly Tight Acid-Washed Jeans

  At eight-thirty Thursday evening, Liz Marley fidgeted with her turtleneck. Pulled it this way and that. Inspected the marks with her Cover Girl blush compact. Thumbs in the front, three long fingers on each side of her neck. She shut her compact and hid her head under her pillow. Oh, this had to be a joke. She sat back up and looked at the marks again. She tried not to cry. She hitched her breath again and again. This wasn’t happening: the thing in the woods, the dream, her neck, all just a coincidence. A flight of fancy. If her mother was to be believed, the initial stages of madness.

  You. It should have been you.

  A tear rolled down her cheek, and she knew she was on the verge of a full-on crying jag. This would not do. Bobby could not see her like this. He’d think she was nuts or something. He’d decide to scratch dating Susan Marley’s sister off his list of charities.

  She knew how to make something bad go away. She’d done it enough, having shared a house with her father and Susan. It took a careful balance. She had to count a lot of things. She had to get very quiet, so quiet that she couldn’t hear anything going on around her. And she had to think happy thoughts. She could not think about Sylvia Plath’s sad poems, or the weirdos looking out their windows at her. Or even how strange it was that every year, it rained for seven days. And she definitely didn’t think about the handprints on her throat, or the thing that took a swipe at her leg, no way. Because if she didn’t think about these things, like magic they became less real.

  She didn’t even think about the good times. The way she and Susan used to play dress-up, vamping around their room in strategically placed towels. Or how they’d hold hands when they were frightened. She didn’t think about how odd Susan got over the years. How she started talking to herself, silently moving her lips when she thought no one was looking. Or the increasingly vivid nightmares everyone in this town had, in which Susan was always the starring character.

  No, the part of Liz that went to school and ran errands and smiled even when she didn’t feel like smiling was not thinking about any of this. It was the other girl, the angry girl who cried for no good reason and raged with such a fury that she sometimes bit her own skin, who was thinking about these things. Deep inside, she was connecting dots, solving a mystery whose answer was just beyond her grasp. Deep inside, she was spinning and spinning, the very model of hysteria.

  Liz knew what to do. She thought about the one thing that was good in her life, or close to it. She thought about Bobby.

  Bobby Fullbright was what people generally referred to as a tool. A power tool. He was the first son of the only doctor in town and he had a nice car and a nice house and people hung around him because of it. They ate the Twinkies and fresh donuts his mother kept in the snack drawer, and he was always the designated driver on weekends, carting all his friends around in the back of his souped-up Explorer, thinking that they liked him for it. Never mind those things they called him, those names like pygmy and ass wipe. Those were terms of endearment.

  Before they started dating, she and Bobby rarely spoke. Liz hardly ever spoke to anyone. But she ran into Bobby at the Corpus Christi Library during her junior year of high school. He was short. Cute, but short. And he walked with this swagger like he was trying to make up for it. They had both been trying to find books for a research paper on Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery,” and said curt hellos before going in their separate directions. She’d watched him swagger and pose, leaning up against any and all things handy. He accidentally knocked over a stack of New Age self-help, and then made a hasty retreat to the other side of the room. After the librarian April Willow told him to please pick those books up, she knew he didn’t make messes in his own house, he’d better not do it here, he returned them to their places and sat at a desk behind her, watching.

  After a little while of staring at her like she was some kind of carnie freak, he got up and joined her. She knew why he did it. He wanted to prove that he was one of the few souls possessed with an enlightened view concerning social strata. Yes, he could prove that he was the kind of guy who would hire an untouchable in India. He would sit next to Liz Marley when his friends weren’t around.

  She bent her head over an analysis of the incidence of cannibalism in small New England towns, and tried to make it look like she was really busy.

  He sat backward in his chair and nudged her, sticking a book under her nose. It was Albert Camus’ The Stranger. “You ever read this?” he asked. His voice was unnaturally deep.

  “No,” she answered.

  “You’re smart enough. You’d like it.” He puffed out his chest, and his voice, somehow, got even lower. “I’m an existentialist.” He said this in that way that meant he knew from smart. He might hang out with the dumb kids, but he had a deep need for a kindred spirit. And for now, until she proved herself otherwise, he had decided that Liz would understand.

  “Actually, I only have a forty-five IQ,” she told him. “No one ever thought I’d be able to dress myself. I’ve only been doing it this last year or so.”

  He frowned, like he might walk away. Great, she thought, a guy tries to talk to me and I tell him I’m retarded. That’s just great. No wonder I have no friends. Great. And then, after a second or two, Bobby got the joke. He laughed.

  Then he pulled his chair closer, and told her his theories. He talked about how the middle class appropriated rebellious a
rt forms and made them their own. How dominant ideology represented the status quo and those who struggled against it might win out for a little while, but in the end they always failed. Saturday Night Fever had once been about a bunch of poor Italian Catholics with no way out until some lame-ass Bee Gees fans turned it into a pop-culture disco anthem. He talked about how the only people who wanted subsidies to keep the mill open were the ones who didn’t think anyone in Bedford could rise above where they came from. He talked while waving his hands around like a madman. He talked so spastically that the veins in his neck bulged, and she’d wanted to giggle. He talked a lot.

  At first she felt stupid because she didn’t know what ideology meant and she had never heard of Saturday Night Fever, and then she realized that this was what people did. Friends. They talked about things that mattered to them; they wasted time. She was sorry she’d missed out on this. And finally, as the hour passed, she’d just felt sorry for him. She imagined him saying these things to Steve McCormack and she understood that they didn’t make fun of him because he was short. They made fun of him because he was Bobby.

  “Time to go home, children,” Mrs. Willow finally told them as she started turning out the lights in the stacks. Bobby moaned. “Chil-dren,” he mocked in an imitation of Mrs. Willow’s prissy voice, and it seemed all wrong coming out of his mouth. It seemed like he thought he was supposed to be mean, but he couldn’t pull it off. A very endearing tool.

  He gave her a ride home that night, and when he dropped her off he asked her out for the next night, a Friday. “Yes!” she told him, so nervous and excited that she shut the door and fled for her house without saying good night.

  In English class the next day, he did not talk to her. He draped his arm over the back of Steve McCormack’s desk and asked things like, What are you doing this weekend, huh? Huh? He pretended Liz was not there, even though she was sitting right in front of him.

  Under ordinary circumstances, she would never have called him that night. She wasn’t much of a talker. Didn’t even know how to wave with conviction. She told herself that she called because she was angry at the way he had treated her in school. She planned to tell him that he had risen to her expectations: He was, indeed, a power tool. But mostly, it was the idea of staying at home that made her call. The week-long rain had started falling that evening, and the thought of being trapped inside the house with no reason to leave, no one to leave with, had made her wonder if perhaps she had been offered a way out and who cared whether the emissary was Charlie Manson or Bobby Fullbright, she’d better take it.

  She didn’t bother saying hello when he picked up the phone. Didn’t even ask if this was Bobby she was speaking to. “Are we still going out tonight?” she asked.

  He sighed and she knew this had been a mistake. She should have told him she didn’t like him anyway. And even though he used lots of big words, he was still a tool. Did he know everybody thought he was a tool? “Uhhhhh, is eight o’clock okay? I could pick you up then,” he said.

  He arrived at exactly eight. Her mother kept her waiting at the top of the stairs, saying: This is how sophisticated people behave, they interview the suitor while the daughter gets ready. Since your father’s not here anymore, I’ll have to do it myself. At the door Mary asked questions like, “Are you getting financial aid for college, or are your parents spending some of their doctor money on tuition?”

  When Liz finally came down the stairs (she decided that if she waited for her mother to retrieve her, he might run back to his car, leaving a Bobby-shaped hole in the door), Bobby took her in with his eyes. For a moment she saw what he saw; Susan Marley’s ugly sister wearing excruciatingly tight, secondhand store acid-washed Jordache jeans that made her ass look like two quarreling dogs, and a lot of black eyeliner she didn’t know how to apply.

  They got into his car. Before he started the ignition, he looked at her. He had dark brown hair and soft skin like someone very young. He was the kind of guy you brought home to Mom and Dad if you happened to have a dad. The kind of guy who took pity on wallflowers but would never sink so low as to date one of them. She knew what he was going to say: Let’s go to a movie in Corpus Christi. He’d put their coats on the chair between them, saying he liked the legroom. After it was over, he’d drop her off and tell her, Let’s keep this to ourselves. She didn’t care so much about going out with him, she wanted to explain: It would be nice just to have a friend. She didn’t say anything. And then, somehow, her eyes got watery. Just a little. Enough to notice.

  He broke the silence. “Your mom always meet your friends at the door?”

  “I wouldn’t know.”

  He took a deep breath. “Since they stopped running night shifts at the paper mill some kids have been going there. We found a way in, and as long as we’re quiet, nobody cares. It’s dry and we can drink, so it’s cool. Some of my friends’ll be there. You know them, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You up for it?”

  She thought she had been very wrong. He was not your textbook nice guy. He was the kind of guy TV mothers warned their children about. His friends would not be there. It would be just the two of them. Alone. In an abandoned building. “Okay,” she told him.

  They drove east, past Main Street and the river, farther still, to the mill. He pulled over to the side of the road. They got out of the car and she jumped onto the snowy ground. “It’s just over here,” he called above the rain. From above, she could see a small plume of smoke coming out from the pipe of the paper mill. She followed him down the path and through the side door whose lock had been pried open.

  To her surprise, his friends were there: Louise Andrias, Owen Read, Steve McCormack, and a few of the older kids who had graduated or were about to graduate from Bedford High. They were warming their hands around the fire they’d built from dried wood inside the mill’s empty vat, and drinking from cans of Milwaukee’s Best. Rusted old machines were stored in a corner, and some of the windows along the private offices were broken. There was no night watchman, and no one so far had come looking to see why smoke was blowing out the mill’s pipe. From the look on Bobby’s face, she could tell he thought all of this was great fun.

  A yellow Sony radio played “Fairytale of New York.” Louise danced around the room with her arms outstretched; the physical embodiment of what looked to Liz like joy. These were the people she had lived with all her life. The normal people, though to her, they seemed on the periphery, someplace not quite fully visible. For a fleeting instant, she hated every one of them.

  There was a chemical smell to the burning. She guessed there were remnants of sulfur in the vat. She’d learned in chemistry class that when sulfur burns, particularly hydrogen sulfide, it becomes toxic. It mixes with air and irritates the lungs as acid rain, or mixes with heat and water and becomes explosive. And here were the cool kids of Bedford, hanging out in an abandoned mill smoking pot and breathing the stuff. It became clear to her right then, in a way she’d never before recognized, that she was poor.

  She followed Bobby as he walked toward them. The song ended and Louise stopped dancing. Bobby slowed and they stayed in the shadows like Peeping Toms, feeling the mood of the group. This couldn’t be easy for Bobby, taking her here.

  Louise looked up at the ceiling. “We could blow it up, you know. All these old chemicals. Pour them out, throw in a match, and the whole thing will go.”

  “You’re such a pyro.” Owen laughed.

  Bobby stepped forward and smiled. “Hey,” he said. “Brought somebody.”

  They turned to Liz in unison.

  In that moment, Liz let her imagination run away with her. She didn’t usually let it out to play, but somehow it had escaped. It was climbing trees, it was doing penny drops, it was extending itself to its limit. Human sacrifice, it was thinking. Bobby had brought her here as part of his initiation to the cool people’s club. He could join, so long as he slit her throat with a serrated beer can and threw her into the fiery vat. Brought som
e body.

  Louise wore loose blue Levi’s and a hooded jacket. Her wool gloves were cut off at the fingers so that she could hold her Camel Lights unencumbered. The instant she saw Liz, the air changed. It became thick. “Hey, Liz,” Louise said with a gravelly voice and a smile too wide to be real.

  “Hi,” Liz said.

  Bobby spread his L. L. Bean fleece down on the dusty floor and sat, motioning for Liz to share it with him like a picnic blanket. She did. Steve McCormack spat brown chew into an empty can of Milwaukee’s Best.

  “She screws for money, right?” Steve asked. A few weeks ago she’d seen Steve spray painting the side of Susan’s apartment. In red letters he’d written, “Susan Marley sucks cock.” Maybe that was the kind of thing popular people thought was funny. Maybe Steve McCormack was a jerk.

  “She’s a witch.” Louise giggled, and Liz guessed she was high, even though she’d never seen someone get high before, never smelled pot before, never even smoked a cigarette or filched her mom’s cheap wine. Louise gestured at the paper mill where they were sitting. “Susan takes me here when I sleep. We go to the basement. People died down here, you know. Lots of them.” Then Louise was laughing convulsively, until she was red-faced and crying.

  “What are you talking about?” Bobby called over the sound of Louise’s laughter.

  “Susan Marley, she screws for money,” Owen Read jumped in. “Right Liz?”

  “Or a free pack of smokes, I hear,” Steve said.

  Liz looked at them in the dark mill: Louise, Owen, and Steve. The light flickered under the fire. Their eyes were empty, without intelligence. Feral. Their irises got big, and then small. They bore a resemblance, for just a moment, to Susan.