Keeper, The

by Langan, Sarah,

She knew now why she had done this. It wasn’t just her dreams, or Susan Marley, or Bedford, or even wanting to have the boys in a way that no one else could. It was wanting, just once, to feel. Her life emptied out of her body, and still, she felt nothing, even as she realized, too late, that this was not what she’d wanted, after all.

  THIRTY

  Five Cent Redemption at the Barricades of Heaven

  He saw his two selves in her eyes, a cripple and a man standing tall.

  Ever hear the one about the priest and the rabbi in heaven? he thought. The guy with the duck on his head at the psychiatrist’s office? Two brunettes and a blond upside down? The drunk in the bar?

  Do it, he thought. Do it now.

  They sat on a bench in the park at ten o’clock on the last night of rain, Paul Martin and Susan Marley. Her hands squeezed against his ears, and the pain was sharp, like bursting metal.

  Please, he thought with what faculties he was still able to form thoughts: End this.

  A seesaw bounced up and down. A swinging fence turned round and round. Susan’s hands eased their pressure very slowly. For a few seconds after she let go, the pain remained sharp. His ears rattled. Adrenaline coursed through his veins. He prepared for his end, and his life seemed to him a very short and finite story that he could hold in his hands. A fragile thing that he would rather crush than inspect. But eventually the pain remitted, and he understood that he would not die just yet.

  When he stood, he saw Susan leaving the park. Her wet dress clung to her body, and her bare feet were now just mangled bones and tendons. She limped through the gate.

  She was both crying and smiling, and now that she’d touched him, he knew why. It was the same reason she had not killed him just now. Rossoff had been right. She loved him, and she also hated him. The horrific things that were happening on this last night of rain were both what she wanted, and what she did not want. So she cried and she smiled, and it was not clear to him which demon inside her was stronger. He and Susan were not so very different.

  He looked up at the sky. The rain fell hard but he didn’t feel it. His clothes were wet but he didn’t shiver. From the direction of the mill, he smelled burning sulfur.

  He left the park and entered flooded Main Street. A golden retriever came paddling past him. It treaded water so that its head bobbled in fits below the surface. Except the dog wasn’t exactly golden. It was covered in soot and he only knew its true color because he recognized the dog. Benji lumbered against the current. Paul grabbed its collar to help it reach dry land, but it growled and snapped its jaws at his fingers. Paul let go and it continued paddling on down the street. Except it hadn’t really been Benji, had it? Did Benji bite?

  At some point, power had gone out so that the streets were black. Even houses were black. Things moved in the darkness, they slithered. In the distance he saw a giant red spider spin a web around Chuck Brann’s house. If Chuck tried to leave, he’d get stuck to one of the sticky ropes like a fly. Ghosts walked the streets, their feet high above the water. They were a century old, or else pitifully young. They took no note of Paul, their intention only to return to the places they belonged. Down the street, the paper mill spouted black smoke that burned his eyes.

  He considered running, as he had done so many times before. He would break into Don’s Liquor and steal a few bottles of scotch. He would swim across the river to the highway. He would hide in some small corner of this town and wait for morning. He would slit his wrists so the worry inside him would finally be quiet.

  Instead, he started with the house nearest to him. It was a Cape Cod with blue shutters. Paul banged on the door, and Allie Brutton peeped out from behind a curtain. Paul kept knocking until his knuckles were swollen. Finally, his former boss Kevin Brutton opened the door. He was breathing through a monogrammed handkerchief that he held over his mouth and nose. A stench of rotting meat wafted out into the night, and Paul almost gagged. “You’ve gotta help me,” Paul said. “We need to evacuate the town.”

  “Go to hell,” Kevin answered, and slammed the door in his face.

  Paul ran to the house across the street. The door was so cold that when he knocked on it, his fingers burned. Peering out from the second-floor window, he saw Jaine Hodkin and her boyfriend, Craig Pittsfield, watching him. They stood in the candlelight of what looked like a hallway, shivering. He could see their cold breath. Paul threw a rock at the window they were standing behind and broke the glass. “Get out of there!” he yelled, but they retreated farther into the house.

  He knocked on another door that belonged to the Andriases. “Don’t you know what’s happening?” he yelled. Inside the door, he heard scuffling, and then retreating. All down the rows of houses he saw faces, and when he approached, those faces hid. Familiar faces. Warped faces. They looked more and more like the faces he’d seen in Susan’s mirrors. Actually, they looked a lot like Susan.

  Up ahead was the mill. Susan stood in front of it with her arms wide. Her chin was lifted into the air. Lightning tore the sky, and everything was illuminated. The mill, the smoke, a once beautiful woman. She was smiling and crying all at once. It was an awesome sight.

  Engines roared. Tufts of smoke billowed up from the pipe of the mill, followed by more smoke, followed by thick, black, viscous stuff that filled the sky, and the rain, and the ground, and his lungs. He suddenly understood what he was smelling, and went pale. It was worse than he’d imagined. A lot worse. Sulfuric waste products. Someone—now he could see it in his mind, Louise Andrias and her idiot cronies, had opened canisters of the stuff and cooked them. Combined with a little free-floating carbon, or better yet, heat, sulfur is a dangerous thing. You can breathe the concentrated fumes of hydrogen sulfide for maybe thirty seconds before you drop dead. And if you have some way of dispersing the stuff, say the pipe of a paper mill or a little rain that people might swallow, well then, what you have on your hands is an environmental disaster worse than Love Canal. The haunted town was the least of their problems. If enough of this sulfur got out, by the time the state troopers got here tomorrow, they’d pull off I–95 and into a graveyard.

  “No,” Paul whispered.

  Susan turned to him. Her face was calm. “Yes,” she said. In her voice he could hear every emotion, from regret to pity to joy to fury. The smoke poured into the sky until there was only blackness. No clouds. No stars. No moon.

  He ran into the mill. The few light bulbs supplied with electricity from the emergency generator did little to combat the smoke. He could hear the pumping of an eighty-year-old machine. A saw moved across an empty conveyor belt. A vat boiled. Gas heaters fanned the room.

  Phantom men worked the assembly line. They sliced and lifted the logs. They pressed the paper with a hot iron. All around him were phantoms of this town. They wore three-piece suits and torn work shirts, shit-stained boots and top hats. There were thousands of them. There wasn’t enough room for all of them, so they stood inside each other. Their faces were a combination of features. Young and old. Man and woman. Ugly and beautiful. Down below, he could hear something else. The men who’d been murdered by the mill’s founder, William Prentice. Their bodies had salted the earth, so that nothing good would ever grow. They made a single sound, all of them. It was a scream that did not stop. The longer he stood in the mill, the louder it got. And their eyes were Susan Marley blue.

  He thought about turning around. Running. But he understood better than most that there was no place to run. And so he passed the threshold, and entered the paper mill.

  He searched in the dark for an emergency brake. It would not stop the chemical reaction, but at least it might contain it to a small part of the valley. He moved through the dark, through the phantoms, like a blind man, feeling the hot machines that burned his hands. Smoke kept coming. It was noxious stuff, and already he was dizzy. His face, his hands, and the exposed parts of his neck itched. He knew he should get out. He should run right now, before he lost his chance.

  But then he found a box ag
ainst the wall. There were two levers up, three down. He made a guess and pulled another lever down. It eased without resistance and the conveyor belt stopped turning. “Yes!” he shouted, except his voice was a gurgle. He pulled the handle on the second lever. It broke apart in his hands so that all that remained was about a half-inch of splinters. He reached his fingers into the fragmented wood but couldn’t force it down. The heater under the vat continued to boil its contents, and the mill continued to spout noxious smoke. He bent over and vomited. The taste was alarmingly salty. Alarmingly like blood.

  Minutes passed. Five. Six. Seven. The voices screamed. The voices, he knew, wanted the place to burn. They surrounded him, these ghosts. He walked through them. He dug again at the broken handle until his fingernails tore away. Then he bent over and took a deep breath, forgetting that there was no air to breathe. He vomited again, and this time he was sure it was blood. He could feel his lungs bubbling. It wasn’t phlegm. It was the skin in his lungs turning to liquid.

  He ran to the vat and tried with his bare hands to suffuse the heater underneath it. The white-hot pain made him realize what a truly stupid idea that was. He searched blindly along the vat, looking for an emergency stop button, but his hands were so badly burned, they had lost their feeling. Still, he searched the rim and the walls and the floor. He found nothing.

  Soon enough, his breath gave out. Soon enough, he could no longer walk, and his lungs felt like fire. “Please,” he called. “Susan, stop this.” Only his voice was gone, and he was drowning in his own blood.

  Susan entered the mill. She walked unevenly on a broken ankle, and her head lolled above her neck. The only thing about her that was animated was her eyes.

  He laughed an empty laugh that this was how it would end for him. He would die in the paper mill he’d spent years trying to save. The irony was not lost on him. Then he sobered. This was how it would end. One thousand people tonight would meet their maker.

  He thought of Cathy, and was proud of her that she had found a way out. And then he thought of Georgia, who had not. He remembered his sons, and wished most of all that he could live another day, to tell them that he loved them. But at least, yes, at least he was not running. And maybe that was good enough. Maybe for once, he could let go. In a way, he’d found a kind of grace.

  The last thing he saw was Susan standing over him. She touched his cheek, only this time, it did not hurt. He whispered her name. The sound of his voice carried throughout the town so that for a moment every person in Bedford heard his prayer, and then just as suddenly, he was silent.

  THIRTY-ONE

  Thief

  It was after midnight, and April Willow was close to hysteria. It was not having to sleep in the basement of this church with dirty trailer people (they all carried scabies—she knew it!) because she hadn’t wanted to be separated from Danny during the storm, or the open confessional doors upstairs made her feel like she was supposed to step inside one of them and recite the Act of Contrition, nor was it even this rain that leaked through the windows and into the air so that the skin on her face glistened with small beads of water. It was Benji. She knew the dog was probably dead by now. Run over and buried by some neighbor who hadn’t wanted to encounter her wrath. Her poor dog. She imagined him wandering through town, sick and cold and missing his mother.

  No one down here sleeping. They listened to the rain. It lulled them. It made sounds that rain should never make, like the din of internal voices from a dream. When had that happened? When had the voices started? She wasn’t sure. But they felt familiar, like déjà vu, and it was not clear to her whether she should be comforted or terrified.

  Retarded Bernard McMullen was wrapped in his mother’s hulking arms. Amity Jorgenson and her daughter, Andrea, pressed their hands against the gutter windows, as if trying to commune with the thick drops that fell. Over the last half hour, the rain had gotten darker, and its strange chemical smell made her nose itch. Thomas Schultz sat between his two Siberian huskies. Some were on cots, others stood. All were still. All were quiet.

  This is what it feels like, she thought, when someone walks on your grave.

  She put her hand on Danny’s stomach. It was big and soft, and at night when they were alone she sometimes encircled his entire girth with her arms, to let him know that she could. “What’s out there, Danny?”

  “Listen,” he told her. “Just listen.”

  She closed her eyes and heard the voices. The chatter, like a thousand different radio stations competing against each other at once.

  This is what it feels like when someone knocks on your door, she thought.

  “Is Benji out there?” she asked.

  “Hush, April. Hush,” Danny said, and then, ashamed, he turned away from her. She saw that he was crying. She saw that many of them were crying.

  This is what it feels like when a thief carries your heart.

  Her footsteps made echoes inside the church basement. No one noticed. Not even Danny. They were too busy listening to the rain. She went upstairs into the church. She entered the confessional, and closed the door behind her so that she sat in a small box that smelled of hot metal and electricity. She slid back the screen. “Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned,” she said, crossing herself, “It’s been six weeks since my last confession.” There was no answer from the other side. She fingered the prayer book, and read aloud the Act of Contrition mounted against the wall. Downstairs, she knew, they were waiting for her. Downstairs, maybe they could even hear what she said. Maybe it carried with the rain.

  “Forgive me, God,” she said. “I’m sorry I never confessed it. I’m sorry, I never wanted to tell another human being. Dear God, forgive me. Please give me back my Benji.”

  She waited for a long time, but the walls did not crumble around her. The screen on the other side did not open, and she did not see the face of her wrathful God.

  This is what it feels like when you steal from yourself.

  The door to the church was open. It wasn’t usually. But tonight, in case people found a need to come or else go outside and smoke, Danny and Father Allesando had agreed to keep it open. She thought that maybe Benji was out there. Maybe he was hunched miserably on the front step, and all she had to do was look and if she didn’t, she’d see him in purgatory or worse, limbo, because they don’t allow pets in heaven, and he’d say he’d been waiting for her. Why hadn’t she looked for him? Why had she left him all alone?

  April peeked outside. Rossoff was having a cigarette. He had come here because he said his own house was flooded. But that wasn’t true. He didn’t like being alone in that squalid place after Susan Marley had died. It smelled, and no matter how much Pine-Sol he poured over the floors, that smell didn’t go away. She haunted him in his waking hours, not her ghost, it didn’t even need to be her ghost, just her memory, that was enough. She lingered in his bed. She laughed at him with angry eyes. She bled from the places he’d once struck her. Last night the faucets in his house had all run red.

  Poor man, he would die soon. She wondered how she knew that, that he would die, that he was afraid of his own home, but she was sure of it. There were little cancer worms crawling all over him like lice. He turned and tipped his hat to her. She tried to smile but couldn’t. He was an ugly man. A pimp.

  She heard heavy breathing. It was not Rossoff. “Who’s that?” she called into the night. “Who is that?”

  She saw her dog swimming up to the steps of the church. Her Benji. Oh, her baby had come home. God had answered her prayers. She could see his eyes shining. She’d know his eyes anywhere. But his coat, it was so dirty it was black. Something about him had gone sour. Poor baby. He carried something in his mouth. He came closer. It was a garbage bag, something inside a plastic Hefty bag. The bag was covered in black, too, as if it had been dug up.

  This is what it feels like when they dig up your body.

  April gasped. Her fingers ticked in the air like the movement of a spider’s legs. All ten of them spasmed in
quick, disjointed movements. Benji plopped the bag in front of her and then retreated a little, as if offering her a gift.

  “Looks like he brought your baby,” Rossoff said. The worms crawled out of his mouth and down his beard. “I know you missed it. A girl, right?”

  “Yes,” April said. “A girl. She never cried.”

  “Really?” Rossoff asked.

  “Just once,” April answered.

  Rossoff flicked his cigarette into the darkness and went inside. April looked down at the still bag. She squeezed her hands into fists to stop their movement. “Benji!” she called. “Benji, come here.” But he got down on his hind legs. He growled at her, waiting for her to accept his gift. She called him again. He growled louder and went back on his hind legs, like he was about to attack.

  She took a step back. Then another. Something in the bag moved. It wriggled, and she told herself it was the wind. She took another step back. Through the threshold. She shut the heavy door. Had to kick the plastic bag just a little bit so the door would close tight. Felt her foot come in contact with something soft. Too soft. Hardly even formed. She could hear Benji whining as she shut him out. He’ll drown, she thought. He’ll wait out here for me to come back and the water will rise. He’ll get tired of treading. He’ll drown. She heard him whine behind the closed door. It was an awful kind of wailing. But was that Benji, crying?

  This is what it feels like when you don’t know who you are. The things I could have taught you, little girl, you do not want to know.

  Back in the basement, everyone in the shelter turned to her, breaking their reverie with the rain. Some stood, some turned away from the windows. Their eyes went through her. She hid her face.

  This is what it feels like to remember.

  Danny extended his hand. Did they disapprove? Did they loathe her? April Willow the hypocrite. April Willow the shrew. She put her hand over her baby’s mouth. But no, she could hear them in this rain. Their voices carried. They did not disapprove. They welcomed her.