Keeper, The

by Langan, Sarah,

  He waited, quite sure now that he was going to die. She squeezed harder, and the three bones of his inner ears (he really could feel them) rattled. He waited. He was so tired. He was so sick of upholding the fiction that there was a better man inside him that was trapped beneath a bottle when really there was nothing. Really, he was a loser. A coward who, let’s be honest, sometimes exaggerated his own drunkenness so that to himself, his wife, the people who believed in him, he would in some way be less accountable. He was so tired of fighting when never once had he witnessed grace.

  Susan kept squeezing, and he saw that she meant to crush his skull.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  High Tide

  The three of them stood at the edge of the river. Louise Andrias, Owen Read, and Steve McCormack. Voices prodded them, like scalpels carving new gullies in their minds. They listened. They watched the water. They were not conflicted. They had known all along what they would do.

  Louise Andrias wasn’t a nice girl, not at all. There was something inside her that didn’t feel, like poking needles through nerveless skin. She smiled the right way, and she dressed the right way, but she sometimes forgot that the people around her were people at all. She forget that they breathed, or that when they were alone they had their own thoughts that she would never know. Once, she squeezed a calico kitten too tightly and it stopped moving. So she squeezed the second kitten, just to see if it would happen again. She wasn’t sorry that they died, but in order to keep her allowance, she made very sure to cry about it to her mother.

  Nobody had ever hurt her growing up. Nobody had lifted an angry hand, or locked her in a closet. She was just born without a conscience, the way some people are born with extra toes.

  Louise liked Owen and Steven pretty well. They were nice to her, which was important. Owen didn’t like girls, not that way. He’d never said so, but he’d never needed to say it. He didn’t look at girls’ asses, didn’t get hard-ons when they watched porn on late-night HBO. Didn’t ever have crushes or ask girls out. He flirted with them all the time, told them they were pretty, teased them, pretended to be hot for them, but mostly Louise could tell he was just mad at them. Mad because he knew he was supposed to like them, but he didn’t.

  Once, she led Owen by the hand into the basement of the mill. Cajoled him into a dry-lipped kiss. Unbuttoned his jeans and rolled them down his legs so that he looked all vulnerable and frightened, like a kitten. She’d smiled at him, thinking: He can’t run very far, not with his pants down around his ankles. Then she took him in her hands. This wasn’t her first time, and she knew what she was doing. He tried for her. She saw him try. Saw him close his eyes, furrow his brow. Try. Try. Try. After a while, he came. Then he held her and started to cry, and she knew he’d convinced himself that he loved her.

  After that she and Steven McCormack shared a sleeping bag in the mill a couple of times. When they made the sounds of sex, Owen would wander the dark basement, all moony and depressed. The boys never fought with each other; she made sure to play the one off the other in just the right way. That’s how she managed to keep them by her side. Three points that would never form a triangle.

  At the river now, Louise Andrias pulled the hood of her jacket over her head. To her left was Owen, to her right, Steven. The water rushed the banks, and rain fell. The buzzing spoke to them. They heard it like a song they knew by heart. Like intelligent déjà vu. It had always existed, would always exist. Louise bent down and touched the water. It rushed so fast it slapped her hand, and its coldness cramped her fingers into a claw.

  Once, she’d imagined her future. Glimpsed it from far away. A nurse in a pretty white uniform, living in a small apartment she’d furnished with her own money. A wicker table just because she liked wicker. The boys nearby, so she could see them every day. But she was no fool. With a job after graduation waiting tables at the Weathervane in Corpus Christi that she’d been lucky to get, she knew what was to come. Sure, she knew the world didn’t owe her anything. And yet, sometimes, she was sure it did.

  She’d always liked Susan Marley. Her eyes like corpses stacked in a pile. A few months ago she’d sent Owen over to knock on her back door and pay the man who lived on the ground floor fifty bucks. Sit with her. Watch her. Fuck her. Just a test, really. She hadn’t expected Owen to do it. But he did. Like death, he’d explained after he left the apartment and found Louise smoking a cigarette on Susan Marley’s front lawn. His khakis hadn’t even been zipped yet, which had made Louise laugh, and he’d told her, Like waking the dead.

  Things changed after that for all of them. They changed after that, in a bad way. Louise liked it. She slept with Owen one more time, and Steve, too. When they looked at each other after that, sometimes they saw Susan Marley. She populated their dreams. Her smell was on their skin. She infected them. When they went to the mill to drink their beer and light fires after that, they started to hear voices. Murmurs of men long dead. They pressed their ears to the wet floors until they became haunted, too.

  They’d talked about their plan last night, and then again this afternoon outside the school. They’d decided to meet here at the river. Give themselves one last chance to turn back. A last chance to say no. But no one backed out. The water rushed fast, and they knew they’d never make it out of Bedford. The current was too strong, and the bridge was out. No place to go. They came to a decision then. The three of them. They did not need to speak aloud; they did not need to.

  They would go to the mill tonight. They would do what the voices asked. What they’d planned, for months, to do. A final prank on this shithole town. A mill of fire, just like in their dreams.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Grape Juice and Children’s Toys

  “That angel was so stupid. Like this one guy really made a difference because of a savings and loan that probably invested in some nineteen-forties version of Enron.”

  “Bobby?” she asked. They were sitting Indian-style underneath the pool table in his basement.

  “Call me Peppe.”

  They had been talking about their senior trip to Portland, the prom, whether marriage was a defunct social convention or the saving grace in an otherwise selfish existence, which third-world nations had nuclear weapons, and whether a preemptive war was justifiable. Well, Bobby had talked, filling space until the lump in her throat diminished, and she was no longer ready to burst into tears. “Right,” she had said. “Yes,” she had said.

  He had just been about to launch into his favorite speech, about the fallacy of Frank Capra’s American dream in a town called Bedford Falls, when she worked up the courage to tell him what was on her mind. In her mind, for that matter. And her dreams (dreams?), and the air, and the raised hairs on the back of her neck.

  “Peppe?”

  “Oui?”

  “What do you think happened in the parking lot at school today?”

  Bobby let out a deep breath, and she understood that he’d been waiting for her to calm down before talking about it. She touched his hand, thanking him silently for that. For being someone who cared enough to put on an act. “It was messed up the way they stared,” he said.

  “What do you think was going on?”

  He shivered. “I don’t know. People in Bedford are weird. I don’t know why my parents stayed here. Except for you sometimes I wish they hadn’t.”

  She swallowed deeply, and looked down at the carpet. There were no buckets collecting leaks down here. No brown worms curled into balls. Just thick, white carpeting stained with grape juice, and children’s toys spread out over the floor, waiting to be picked up for more play. “They know something. That’s why they stared.”

  He nodded. She saw that he was near tears. Sometimes they pretended that she was the sensitive one, but that wasn’t really true. It was always Bobby who felt things first. It was Bobby who had a sense of how things in an orderly society should work, and became enraged when that contract was broken. She, on the other hand, had never held such high expectations. “Did an
yone say they were sorry to you today? They let you spill that shit on yourself and watched you cry and no one even came over and said they were sorry. It’s because of her, too. They all talk about her like she wasn’t a person. Even my family does that.”

  “You care. You were nice to me.” He bowed his head as if to show her that he hadn’t been fishing for a compliment, and she kissed his cheek.

  They were silent for a little while, and she closed her eyes. From above she could hear his siblings tearing across bare wooden floors in stocking feet, and his mother setting out snacks. Cookies, probably. The perfectly shaped, store-bought kind, along with glasses of milk, or juice for Margaret, the strict vegetarian. Until she met Bobby, she hadn’t known that some mothers sat with their children after school, and asked them about their days.

  “I hate Bedford,” she said.

  He nodded. “Yeah. Me, too. Remember how I used to hang out with those guys? Louise and Owen and Steve? We’d go to the mill and drink beer. Sometimes when we put the kindling in the vat and set it on fire, these fumes would come out. And it was like everybody was waiting, even hoping, that something bad would happen. They wanted to get sick. Especially Louise. Nobody ever talked about getting out, or doing stuff, or taking a road trip to Portland, or even visiting a museum or something—not like I’d want to go to a museum, but you know what I mean. It was like living in slow motion, and most of the time I wanted to be home instead so I wouldn’t have to deal with it, but you get sick of being home. I do, at least. They made fun of me, too, did you know that? They made fun of me,” he said, blushing, because it was the first time he’d openly admitted this to her. “They made fun of me for talking about books all the time, and for doing my homework, like normal people don’t do their homework so they can get into a good college. You’ll see, they won’t even get into a bogus school like UMO,” he said, forgetting that if she got lucky, that’s where she’d be headed in September. “And the thing is, anybody whose parents might care, anybody like me moved away a long time ago. The people who stayed here don’t care.”

  “I care, Bobby.” He seemed to take little solace in this, and so she added, “You’ll get out of here. You’ll get out and you’ll see other places.”

  “I know. I can’t wait.”

  She stiffened, but said nothing.

  “People treat you so badly, and it’s all because of something made up. Like they heard Susan was some kind of monster for so long they believed it.”

  She shrugged. “Bobby? There’s something I want to tell you, but I don’t know how to say it.”

  “What? You can tell me anything.”

  She looked at her pale hands that were practically pruned from all this rain, and at the carpet, thick and full, and at her faded Keds. There was a butterfly in her stomach the size of a basketball. “I’d know if she was gone. I’d feel something, but I don’t.”

  Bobby pulled away from her so that he could look her in the eyes. “She’s dead, Liz. You buried her.”

  “Yes. She’s dead.”

  He held her shoulders, squeezing through her T-shirt with his small hands. “It’s not your fault.”

  Her throat constricted. How would he know what was her fault? How could anyone say for sure? “Have you dreamed about her since she died?” she asked.

  He averted his eyes. “No,” he said, and she had the strangest feeling that he was lying. Why would he lie?

  “Oh. Remember how we talked about my dream, that she could hurt me inside it?”

  Bobby inched a little farther away from her on the floor. Probably he didn’t even notice he was doing it, but she did. “Yeah.”

  She rubbed her neck, where the bruises were now healed. “Well, I think I was right. Except it wasn’t exactly how I figured.”

  Bobby’s eyes were wide, and she knew she was supposed to laugh now. She was supposed to say: I’m so silly, Bobby! Why do you put up with me? I get the strangest ideas sometimes! I’m a regular Lucille Ball! She didn’t laugh. “In a way, she really was a witch. She was born different. She could see things that other people couldn’t, and because of that she went crazy. Somehow, by seeing those things, she made them more real, and when they got more real, she got even crazier, and they fed off each other. If she’d been born someplace else, or people had been nicer to her, she might have been okay. It wasn’t just my dad and the stuff he did to her that made her screwed up. It was the way she was born, and this town, and the mill, and all the thoughts that she couldn’t control…”

  Bobby shook his head. “What bad things are you talking about?”

  “Think about it. If you’re inside a haunted house and it’s colder than it should be, then that’s a physical property, isn’t it? It really is cold—atoms really are moving more slowly. So maybe if Susan saw what was making the place cold, some old echo of what had once happened, like a murder, or just an angry person who once lived there, that made it more real. The place got even colder when Susan was in it. And then, that made Susan worse, too. What if Bedford is like one giant haunted house that Susan brought to life?”

  “You believe this?” Bobby asked.

  She looked at the underside of the pool table instead of at him. Yes, she realized, she did believe it. She was sure of it. A part of her, the part that had lived with Susan for twelve years, had known all along. She wasn’t as frightened as she had expected. Instead she was numb. “In my dream in the cemetery I heard this buzzing, these terrible emotions. I think that’s what Susan heard her whole life. And as time went on, the buzzing got louder, because all that bad stuff was becoming more and more real. There was good stuff, too, I guess, but it got forgotten. Susan didn’t listen for it. When we were at her apartment, I saw these faces in her mirrors. They were kind of messed up, you know? Warped. But also familiar. I thought I was going crazy.”

  “Umm,” Bobby said. She tried not to look at him, afraid that if she did, her numbness would crack wide open, and she’d burst into tears.

  “At school today I heard the buzzing again, kind of like voices. And I saw some of those same faces as in the mirrors, only they belonged to the people watching us in the parking lot. Louise Andrias and Mr. Brutton and Steve McCormack…It was like they were the same people, but also different. Darker.”

  “I’m not following,” Bobby said, but she got the feeling he did follow. Some part of him may have guessed, only he didn’t want to believe. She could understand that. She didn’t want to believe it, either.

  “I’m saying that over time, the things that haunt Bedford became a part of Susan. That’s why she could be in our nightmares, because our nightmares were buried inside her. That’s why I saw those faces in the mirrors; because she was those faces. That’s why I heard those voices when she visited my dream, or whatever it was that happened. Because those voices, that buzzing, the dark part of Bedford, Susan carried them inside her. And the reason she could hurt me in my dream was because those things were getting stronger. They were starting to become real, like the thing that chased me in the woods. And now that she died, they’re not inside her anymore.”

  Bobby let out a long breath. “Where are they?”

  “Have you noticed how many people left town this week?”

  He raised an eyebrow. “Liz, this is too much.”

  “I think some people guessed what was going to happen and they left town.” Now Liz was beginning to feel it. Her throat was tight, like a balloon was inflating inside it, and she fought the urge to curl herself into a fetal position and turn into an hysterical pile of Liz Marley. “She’s my sister. Don’t you think, of all people, that I’d know why she’s different? When she talked to herself, it was crazy, sure, but it also made sense. She was talking to ghosts in the room—things that had already happened, or were about to happen. She knew when my dad was pissed about something, and she knew about the people who’d lived in the house before us, even though we’d never met them. When she was mad at me, I always dreamed about her. It was always some fucked-up nightma
re, you know? Like a dog would bite me, or we’d be sitting in a tree and she’d shove me out of it. In the morning I’d tell myself that it was just a dream, but it was more than that. It was her way of getting back at me. I wish I could forget. I wish I could pretend this wasn’t happening, but I have to tell you about it. I don’t know what else to do. I grew up with her, Bobby. I know she did something. And people wouldn’t have been watching me in the locker room, or in the parking lot today, if they didn’t know, too. Are you sure you didn’t dream about her? Maybe you dreamed something so bad that you can only remember little bits of it?” Her voice was starting to break.

  Bobby’s face went completely red. “I did not dream, Liz.”

  She ran her fingers through the thick carpet. “I’m frightened, Bobby. I think, well, I think I can feel her inside me.” He didn’t answer, so she tugged on his shoelace, but he’d made double knots so she couldn’t pull it free. “You think there’s something wrong with me, don’t you?”

  “No,” he told her, “There’s nothing wrong with you. Not like you think.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “What did your dad do to her?”

  “I don’t remember,” she said, but of course she did remember. It was one of the many things that boiled in her mind, bubbling to its surface on occasions she least expected, like when she was eating dinner with her mother, or taking a drive with Bobby, or in the middle of chemistry class while all the normal people thought their normal, happy thoughts.

  “Try. You must remember something.”

  She looked down, playing with her socks, pulling at the cotton ribbing and snapping it back into place. Then forced the hem of her T-shirt over her knees. He could probably guess. Everyone in this town, for that matter, could probably guess.