The Secret Life of Souls

by Jack Ketchum

  He rubs the cream into the back of her neck. Feels the smooth uneven ribbing of scar tissue beneath his fingers.

  “You tired?”

  “I dunno. A little.”

  “Sounds like you’re writing a book.”

  “And Pearl gets twenty-five percent. I heard.”

  It takes a moment to sink in. She heard?

  “You suppose I get to read what I say before I say it?”

  He laughs. “Good question.”

  “Boy, am I ever not sure about this.”

  “Don’t blame you. Not your idea.”

  “Nope. No way.”

  “Second thoughts, huh?”

  “Dozens of them! I mean, magazines, newspapers, the shows. And now . . . a book?”

  He dips his fingers again and works her right shoulder.

  “Ooh. Cold.”

  “They’re still goin’ at it down there,” he says.

  “I know.”

  “So. What did Aunt Ev have to say?”

  She’d called a little after dinnertime. He’d picked up and they talked about nothing much in particular for a minute or two and then she asked to speak to Delia. Not his mom, which he thought peculiar. But Delia.

  “She’d seen me on the Manny Choi Show. She said he was silly.”

  “He was. He is.”

  “She said she was proud of me. She said she was never brave when she was a kid. She said she hid inside her books. Do you think I’m brave, Robbie?”

  “I dunno. You’re my sister. You’re just Delia.”

  “That’s what I figure.”

  He rubs a little harder on the left side and she winces.

  “Sorry. It still hurts pretty bad, huh?”

  “Yeah, but it’s okay.”

  It isn’t okay but he lets it slide.

  He works in silence after that. When he’s done he recaps the bottle and goes to the bathroom to get her a glass of water and then hands her the pills one by one and watches her swallow.

  “Thanks, brother,” she says.

  “Sure. Anytime.”

  He stoops to pet Caity on the bed beside her and then heads toward the door.

  “Thanks for carrying Caity out of the hospital,” she says. “And for taking care of her in the car and all.”

  “Sure,” he says again. “’Night Deal, ’night Caits.”

  He’s halfway down the stairs before it occurs to him to wonder exactly how his sister knows it was him and not his dad who’d carried Caity to the car that day. As far as he knows nobody’s told her.

  FOURTEEN

  She steps into morning sunlight and even with the dark glasses the sun blares at her like the horn section of some fucking high school marching band. The headache is killer, a hangover that two Ambien and an oxycodone have yet to dissipate.

  She’s sleep-deprived as hell. She’d gotten two, maybe three hours before the alarm went off and about two more once she’d batted it into submission. She wishes now that she hadn’t taken those last two hours because now she’s running ridiculously late but she’d given it no thought at the time, her only thought was sleep.

  What was Bart thinking, trying to crawl all over her last night? It had been weeks, even a month since last she’d let him. So why now? Why last night? When it’s Barnes & Noble this morning, Delia’s first big signing. Sure, they’d had a few drinks over reruns of Law & Order: Criminal Intent but they were hardly drunk by bedtime and Law & Order was hardly erotica.

  And if he hadn’t tried, if he hadn’t thrown his growing bulk and spreading butt on top of her, she wouldn’t have gotten the hell out of bed for those two last stiff vodka martinis and her head wouldn’t be splitting this morning and she wouldn’t be feeling like some goddamn marionette fumbling with her purse, the cart with her suitcase and makeup kit, and the outfits for her and Delia going out to the car.

  When she’d finished the drinks and went back to bed it was empty. She’d known where he was. On the couch for the night. Pouting. Typical Bart behavior. She’d probably walked right past him. Then this morning when she gets up she hears his car pulling out of the driveway, he and Robbie already gone, “getting an early start,” he’d say. Mr. Passive-aggressive. Damn him. He hadn’t bothered to wake her, no. And that was typical Bart too. Make her squirm in order to get her shit together. Hers and Delia’s.

  And where the hell is Delia?

  What do they do at a signing if the signer’s late?

  She checks her watch. They’re already late—five minutes late. And even with no traffic the store is twenty-five minutes away.

  Her head’s pounding.

  She tosses her purse into the front seat and manages to find the right key on her key ring and pops the trunk and dumps the cart inside and she’s lying the clothes neatly on top of it when the front door opens and there they are, standing together, Delia and Caity.

  Finally.

  “C’mon, kiddo. Dad and Robbie are there already. We gotta go. We’re late.”

  “I’m done, mom,” she says.

  Her hand freezes on the hood of the trunk.

  “What are you talking about?” her mother says. “Get in the car.”

  “Mom. I’m done.”

  She’s thought it over and over again, all last night and all this morning. There are places she just can’t go. It was one thing to do the interviews, even to be interviewed on TV—and when they were talking about Caity and what Caity had done for her it wasn’t bad at all, it was worth doing. It was probably even worth doing the Choi and Pearl shows, letting people know how she felt about herself. She figured that couldn’t hurt.

  It was honest. It was her.

  But this book.

  She’s read this book. It’s supposed to be in her voice. But it isn’t. It isn’t honest and it isn’t her. It’s a lot of self-help nonsense illustrated by examples of events she’s never even heard of much less ever thought or talked about. Research, they called it. Well, it isn’t her research. She thinks Delia’s Mirror deserves its mediocre-at-best reviews and doesn’t deserve its good sales at all.

  The book made her want to crawl into a hole and die. Certainly not sign the thing. Not meet all these people who’d read it or were buying it in order to read it, thinking it would help somehow, thinking it was worth something. The book made her feel ashamed. Nothing in all of this has made her feel ashamed but this. So she’s finished.

  “No bookstore, mom. No foundation. I’m done,” she says. “It’s got to be about us from now on. All the rest of this stuff? I want to put it away.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. Get in the car.”

  “It’s about us, mom. You, me, Robbie, dad, Caity. We’re supposed to be a family. We’re supposed to care for each other.”

  Her mother hasn’t moved. Delia does, along with Caity. She needs to feel closer. She steps over to the car.

  “Of course we care for god’s sake,” mom says. She’s annoyed. “Why do you think we’re doing this? You think I’d keep all this afloat if I didn’t care about us? You’ve been swallowing Pearl’s bullshit. You think she cares about us?”

  “No, she probably doesn’t. I know that. I’m not stupid.”

  “Well then stop talking stupid. Get in the car. I don’t have time for this shit this morning, kiddo. Really.”

  She smells like fear, Delia thinks. My mom smells like fear.

  It could practically break her heart.

  She holds out her arms, moves to embrace her, Caity right there by her side.

  “We need to be a family, mom, not some show, we need to forget about the book, the foundation, get rid of this thing with Roman . . .”

  “What? What did you say? What are you talking about?”

  Her mother backs away.

  “It’s okay, mom.”

  “Delia Ann Cross. What do you mean by that?”

  “I know about . . . about Roman. Don’t worry, I’m not gonna tell. I love you, mom. Caity and me, we’re just not doing this stuff anymore. We just wa
nt you guys . . .”

  She leans over and wraps her arms around her and immediately knows it’s a mistake, she can see it, feel it an instant before it happens, before her mother screams goddammit, you little shit! and pushes her, pushes her hard and there’s the yawning trunk of the car behind her at just the very corner of her vision as she falls and the lip of the trunk rising fast to meet her and the sound of Caity barking, one loud yip as though in pain and the sound of her neck cracking gunshot against the lip and . . .

  . . . Caity is alone, gone suddenly blind, stumbling where she stands and then pulling herself up, still blind, tripping over a warm inert body and then into a second body, a pair of legs standing there belonging to someone who’s screaming and kicking her away as she herself is howling wanting somehow to climb, to get in, to get out, Caity trapped there in the dark of a sunlit day as a fog slowly rises somewhere in front of her, her hackles bristling, trails of fog drifting slowly toward her and then fast, faster, much faster, until it flickers and disappears and she can feel it deep within, a warmth, a quiet, and her vision clears and on the ground in front of her Patricia is breathing, sobbing, into the open mouth of a dead dry husk that once was a girl whose name was Delia.

  PART THREE

  FIFTEEN

  His mind keeps shooting blanks at him, deafening explosions that seem to have no object, no target, no sense, no direct hits. Through it all, from his father’s face gone bloodless as he listened on the cell phone to dashing out of the bookstore to the race back home, his father talking, groaning, the car pulling up half on the sidewalk and half on the street and the two of them piling through the open front door to his mother on the couch wrapped in an EMS blanket with a cop, a new cop, unfamiliar to him, a balding cop in shirtsleeves and tie sitting across from her, leaning in, writing in his notepad, through all of this only bursts of understanding which first slam home and then go utterly silent inside him moment to moment.

  Delia. An accident. A real accident this time. And Delia . . . dead?

  No.

  “. . . we were racing to get out the door . . .”

  His mother’s hands like leaves swirling in a strong wind.

  His father, beside her on the couch, reaching over, taking one of them.

  “. . . and Caity . . . I dunno . . . Caity was hyper this morning. Did you notice? That Caity was hyper this morning? Did you notice that?”

  He has no idea what she’s talking about. He can’t even remember seeing Caity this morning. His father seems not to get it either. His father seems to study her, expectant, like he’s been waiting for his cue, his line, but then almost misses it when it comes.

  “I didn’t, no.”

  He is talking to the cop, not to her.

  “But then I’ve seen her get like that. Especially when . . . when Delia’s upset. Those two are joined at the hip.”

  It hangs in the air. The cop nods. His dad has used the present tense. Are. But there isn’t any is or are anymore, is there?

  His mother lights a cigarette. The veins in her hands shift like thick blue worms burrowed shallow inside her skin.

  “We were fumbling with all our stuff . . . trying to get out the door, get it in the trunk . . . and Caity . . . she just jumped right between us . . . she was too excited or something . . . and she hit Delia in the chest and her feet came out from under her and she fell and hit the car, the trunk of the car and I could hear it and I tried to wake her, to get her to breathe, you know? And Caity . . . Caity just sat there, she didn’t mean it, she knew something was wrong, she just . . .”

  His mother begins to cry. His father takes her in his arms, stares over the top of her head as at something distant, as though at something far away. The cop watches them, silent, his eyes soft, his face benign. Robbie looks at Caity lying at the foot of his chair. Caity is watching them too. And it’s only then, looking down at Caity inches from his feet, so close he can almost feel the heat of her body beside him, hear the breath travel through her lungs, that he feels finally an access to his own feeling, his own immense unforgiveable loss, and he too begins to cry, and he sets his hand gently down to rest on her back, for solace, for the familiar, for the solid truth of her undeniably there and not forever beyond his reach.

  When she is through listening and he is calm at last she moves out from beneath the warmth of Robbie’s hand and slowly climbs the stairs. Everything hurts. Not just the sharp biting pain in her ribs where Patricia has kicked her but her shoulders, head and neck, an ache that travels down through her legs as she ascends and hoists herself onto the landing and into Delia’s room.

  A pair of socks on the floor. A towel from this morning. She smells the bed. Gathering herself against the pain she jumps up to Delia’s side of the bed, to the still fresh scent of her and settles in. She can hear the voices below but the voices mean nothing to her now. She must sleep.

  When she wakes the house is dark and silent but for the quiet muffled sobbing coming from Robbie’s room. She can picture him clearly. Lying curled up on his side, legs pulled up nearly to his chin, the pillow pressed over his head. She could go to him but she aches. It is all she can do to shift positions on the bed. Her ribs stab her as she breathes.

  She will see to him in the morning. He will be there. Now she needs to sleep. Again she settles in.

  It is a quiet, private funeral. Very private. Her sister Evvie had wanted to fly out but Pat said no. Just us. And Roman. Not her mother, not her sister. On the phone Evvie had sounded terribly disappointed and Bart felt bad for her. But Pat was adamant. It surprised him that she wanted it that way. But in sum it was all to the good. No complications.

  But now here they are, plenty of complications, right at his doorstep. The press. Hyenas biting at his flanks as he, Pat, Robbie, and Roman exit the SUV.

  This one immediately in his face.

  “Mr. Cross. Mr. Cross? What happens now?”

  He brushes past the guy only to be confronted by another. No comment from Pat. No comment from Roman. Robbie with his head down as though in a rainstorm. All of them pushing through toward the front door.

  “Mr. and Mrs. Cross! What are you going to do now? So sorry for your loss. What are your plans?”

  Flashbulbs, video cameras, phone cameras. The works.

  “Mr. Cross!”

  Bite your tongue, he thinks. Play nice. Try, at least. Patricia’s key is in the door.

  “Listen, listen up!” he says. “Not that it’s any of your business, guys, but we’re going to take it one day at a time, okay? Okay? Now please, give us some privacy. Have a little decency.”

  Then they’re inside. Caity at the door. He slams it shut behind him.

  “Jesus!”

  Pat tosses her black handbag on the couch.

  “‘We’re gonna take it one day at a time.’ Where did you come up with that one, Bart?”

  “Well hell, one of us had to say something.”

  “Oh we did, huh? You’re a fucking idiot. Hey, you could have told them that. ‘I’m a fucking idiot, what do I know?’ There’s a real sound bite for you!”

  “Look, this is hard on all of us, Pat. Have a little . . .”

  “Decency, Bart? Was that what you were going to say? Another good one. Yes! Also brilliant!”

  What the hell is her problem all of a sudden? He didn’t see this nastiness at the funeral. He’s very aware of Robbie, who’s pegged his coat in the hall and has turned away toward the kitchen, loosening his tie. Robbie doesn’t need to hear this.

  “She’s right, brother,” says Roman. “Those shitheel trash collectors can take every scrap of footage, every word you say and turn it into anything they want. Better to just keep your mouth shut. Period.”

  And man, does that burn his ass. Bad enough his wife. But Roman? Roman all pious, crossing himself at the service. Roman at his wife’s elbow through the entire thing. Roman the wised-up know-it-all hotshot agent who got them all into this goddamn mess in the first place. His son is out of earshot now. G
ood. He moves in.

  “You know what, you dumb fucking Okie? Guess what. You’ve opened your mouth one too many times when it comes to me and my family.”

  Weren’t expecting that, were you Roman?

  “Hey, pardner. Let’s just relax and have a drink. Okay?”

  “No, pardner. I’m going to have a drink with my wife and you’re going to walk your ass out the door, right now. I’ve had it. Your opinions are not welcome here. Go have a drink with the boys out there in the press corps, since you know them so damn well.”

  It’s nice, real nice to see him back off so fast.

  “Fine. Okay. That’s just fine. I’ll give you a call in a day or so. You need your time.”

  “No. You’re not calling anyone. You’re fired, Roman. I am not gonna have some employee undermine me in front of my family. Got that? Fired.”

  “Bart . . . ,” says Patricia.

  “Sorry, hon. But I’m done with this prick.”

  He feels himself waver a little under her steady gaze. Hold firm, he thinks. Firm. That’s right.

  “That’s just the way it’s gotta be. It’s all over anyway, right? Isn’t it? We don’t even need your services anymore. I sure don’t.”

  And what flickers between them then? It’s there and gone.

  “There’s a lot I could say right now, but I won’t,” Roman says. “I’m sorry for your loss, Bart, Patricia.”

  “Just go. We’re done here.”

  He turns toward the door and stops.

  “You sign off on this thing, Pat? Nothing you have to say?”

  She crosses her arms, regarding him.

  “My husband thinks it’s best if you leave, Roman. I suggest you do.”

  Then he’s out the door and into the crowd. Bart closes the door behind him. He feels a little sheepish now, like he probably overreacted but what the hell, sometimes you had to, didn’t you? Didn’t you?

  “Sorry, babe,” he says, “but I think this is for the best.”

  She gives it a beat. He can see the mind working. He knows her so well.