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Mrs. Patel looked drained and scared on her upturned bucket. She seemed to be asking Lydia for forgiveness, or at least for understanding. But it wasn’t Lydia’s to give.
“You don’t even know why I’m here,” Lydia said.
“Because you and Raj found out about Joey,” Mrs. Patel said, but there was a lilt of doubt in her voice. “I will make it up to him, Lydia. Maybe now that Raj knows, we can find a way. I will make it up to him.”
“You can’t,” Lydia said.
“I can, Lydia. I just don’t know how yet.”
Lydia had been so caught up in this knot of secrets that she’d nearly forgotten why she’d stepped foot into the Vital Records office last week in the first place: to track down Joey’s mother in order to share the news of his suicide. She deserved to know, Lydia had told herself then. After all, his mother had been seeking him out.
“You can’t make it up to him,” she said, “because Joey is dead. He hanged himself in the bookstore where I work.”
“No, he didn’t.”
“Check the newspaper. Joey hanged himself. That’s why I’m here, Mrs. Patel. I came to tell you that your boy is dead.”
“He’s not, Lydia. I saw him when? Three weeks ago? Less than three weeks. What is today?”
Lydia could see her struggling with her own denial, but the certainty of her words had broken through. Mrs. Patel’s mittened hand clutched at a phantom spot on her chest.
“Joey’s heart was already broken,” Lydia said, “and you broke it again. He couldn’t recover this time.”
“I will make it up to him.”
“It’s too late.”
Lydia opened the door to the alley. She heard voices out there and in a moment of terror expected to see Mr. Patel—but it was only a homeless couple, pushing a shopping cart through the slush. Just beyond them, across the alley, was the rusty old ladder bolted to the side of the motel. It hurt to remember Raj in his buckled jumpsuit, climbing rung by rung to its top and pouring a curtain of powdery creamer as little Carol held out her pack of matches below.
Lydia was glad that it wasn’t Mr. Patel she’d heard in the alley. He’d killed Mr. and Mrs. O’Toole, and he’d killed her friend Carol, and he’d killed the broken Joey—or at least caused him to die—and it only took one look at Mrs. Patel to see all the damage he’d done to her as well. Before she could face him, or call Moberg or the police, she promised herself she’d first speak with Raj, empty herself of all these secrets, and maybe even figure out a way to shield her father from the secrets he’d kept as well.
“I will make it up to him,” Mrs. Patel said.
“Joey deserved a better mother than you,” Lydia said, buttoning her coat and stepping out the door.
“I will make it up to him,” Mrs. Patel repeated, but Lydia was already trudging through the alley slush, glancing at the ladder, thinking about the fiery flower—warm and alive—that her friend Carol had conjured from the air.
EPILOGUE
On the night before Thanksgiving, Lydia’s ghost appeared on television.
At the time, she was in the kitchen, pulling down boxes of stuffing and cans of yams and periodically slapping the cold pimpled turkey thawing in her sink. From where she stood she could see Raj in the other room, wearing a gray wool sweater and cut-off army pants. He thumbed the TV remote.
“Maybe nothing good is on,” she said.
“Something good is always on.”
Raj had offered to come over and help get the meal ready, but since he didn’t have cable yet in his new apartment he’d gone straight for her remote. To save a little money, Lydia had planned on getting rid of cable when David moved out six months ago, but Raj had been coming around often enough that she’d postponed making the call. He would watch just about anything, the cheesier the better, but she usually didn’t mind. For all the perks of living alone, one downside was how long the nights could sometimes feel with no one there to grasp.
Her dad would be coming over for the holiday tomorrow as well, his first trip to Denver in two decades. Lydia hadn’t seen him in person since last winter’s visit to Rio Vista, but he’d been calling every Sunday like clockwork and she was usually glad to hear his voice. Most of the time they kept their conversations away from anything too substantial, but at one point during the summer, after a few beers at a Bright Ideas barbecue, she’d bravely suggested that he turn his cabin into a used-book store, since he had plenty of inventory already and Rio Vista could sure use a—
He hung up the phone before she even finished. Their calls continued, but neither of them ever mentioned the used-book store idea again. By way of an apology, she mailed him an assortment of reading glasses.
Lydia had hoped to invite David over for Thanksgiving dinner as well, but he wouldn’t even return her calls, and she really couldn’t blame him. The original plan last spring—hers, anyway—had been for them to try living apart for a while, just as a test, to see what would happen if they had some distance between them. After discovering that he’d known for years, in silence, about Little Lydia, she’d been spotting his faults all over and losing her ability to overlook them. If the two of them were meant to be, she reasoned, they’d be drawn to each other again like a pair of cranes or vultures, ready to mate for life. David begrudgingly agreed, and she helped him get set up in a studio apartment near the University of Denver, a bit closer to his office.
Those first weeks of separate living had invigorated them as a couple, as if the arrangement had merely given them a new place to have sex and a new neighborhood to grab coffee. But something happened once the first month wore off. David gradually stopped inviting her over to his studio, claiming perhaps rightly that spending all of that time together felt too much like cheating on their agreement, and within another month he’d come right out and accused her of trying to have it both ways. He had plenty to offer, he said, and if she didn’t want all of him, she couldn’t have any of him. It hurt how right he was. By the time Halloween rolled around, he’d gone totally cold.
David would not be spending Thanksgiving with Lydia and her father, but she was comforted by the fact that Raj would be there. And Raj was comforted, too. For the first time in his life, he had nowhere else to go.
Ten months ago, the day after leaving Mrs. Patel at Gas ’n Donuts, Lydia had been organizing a pile of board books in the Kids section when Plath approached, wearing flip-flops and a skirt she’d made from a shower curtain. She held out the morning paper and bit her lip.
—If it’s another picture of me, Lydia said, gesturing to the newspaper, I don’t even want to know.
—You look tired, Plath said. I’ll come back.
—What is it?
—It’s bad. Really bad. Murder-at-the-doughnut-shop bad.
Lydia was supposed to meet Raj for breakfast this morning, but he hadn’t answered her calls. She assumed he’d spent all night poring over Irene’s files and needed to catch up on his sleep, but now her heart began to pound.
—What happened? she said. What murder?
—Late last night at Gas ’n Donuts. That’s your friend’s place, right?
Lydia felt herself falling into a panic—thinking first about Raj, then about Mrs. Patel, then she was unable to think at all. She grabbed the paper out of Plath’s hands.
—Who got killed? Who—?
—The guy who owned the shop, Plath said. Your friend’s dad. He’s dead.
> Lydia’s hands were so shaky that Plath had to spread open the pages for her to read: Local Business Owner Slain in Late-Night Robbery.
—You okay? Plath asked.
Lydia frantically read the article. She learned that after dropping his deposit bag into the after-hours slot at the bank, Mr. Patel had returned to Gas ’n Donuts to pick up his wife and finish locking up. When he stepped out of his Monte Carlo, someone emerged from the darkness behind the dumpsters and shot him multiple times in the back, then in the head. The police were speculating that the shooter wanted the deposits and panicked when it was discovered that Mr. Patel had already been to the bank. A passing driver may have seen someone walking away on foot, but no further information was known about the assailant.
—Maybe you should go over to the doughnut shop, Plath said, pay your respects.
—I don’t have any respects.
The Hammerman was dead, and Lydia’s immediate reaction had been to rush to a phone and try calling Raj again to find out if he knew, what he knew, and to see if there was anything she could do to help. All afternoon his phone rang and his answering machine didn’t pick up, and even when she stopped by his apartment on the way home from work no one answered the door. She considered calling Gas ’n Donuts or his parents’ house but couldn’t bring herself to punch the digits.
Early the following morning, as a few yawning BookFrogs lined up at Bright Ideas for their day’s wordy intake, Lydia stood at the newsstand, combing through the paper for any updates. She’d barely dented the Metro section when Raj came rushing across the floor and landed smack in the center of her embrace.
—Raj, my god, your dad.
—I know.
—How’s your mom—?
—They got her, he said.
—What?
—The police. They got her.
Then he collapsed into sobs and had to plant his hand against the magazine racks in order to stop himself from falling sideways.
—They took her, Lydia. They took my mom.
Raj didn’t tip over, but he did end up with one arm around Lydia’s shoulder as they hobbled to a table in the coffee shop.
Raj had been at his mom’s side nonstop during the thirty-two hours since the shooting, but it wasn’t until the two of them had been called into the station near City Park for yet another informational session that one of the detectives, a young guy with big ears who seemed embarrassed to be there, came into the room and asked Mrs. Patel if she wanted to enlist a lawyer. Then he presented the old Montgomery Ward .22 rifle that Mr. Patel had kept under the Gas ’n Donuts counter for years. The rookie had barely even placed it on the table before asking Mrs. Patel if she had any idea how it had ended up in the dumpster behind the shop.
She did, she told him. And yes, she would very much like that lawyer now.
Years ago, it was Mr. Patel who’d advised her that in the event of a life-threatening situation, she should yank back the slide, aim the rusty rifle, and pull the trigger until the tube was empty. Spray and pray, he’d called it, and that’s exactly what she had done behind the dumpsters that night, just after Lydia left the shop: waited for her husband to step out of his car, then fired. Three bullets hit his back, two hit his head, and five hit the car—though not in that order. Then she ditched the gun and called the police.
—They let me stay with her for a while as we waited for the lawyer, Raj said, and she told me everything.
—Everything?
Raj wouldn’t look Lydia in the eye.
—Enough, anyway. It won’t be long before she tells the police everything, too. It’s like she wanted to get caught.
Lydia considered asking Raj what he’d meant by enough, but he seemed so distraught that she knew this wasn’t the time. She thought about the last words Mrs. Patel had said to her, on the slushy night of the shooting as she exited the doughnut shop: I will make it up to him. To Joey. Her lost son. She’d tried.
There at the coffee shop, Lydia bought Raj a pastry and a bottle of juice. They sat together for a long time, mostly in silence, and when he left the store that afternoon, he put on a pair of sunglasses and gave her a clumsy kiss on the cheek. On the way out he bumped into a table of books.
For Lydia, Mr. Patel’s murder had reaffirmed something that she’d been gradually facing up to her entire life: the Hammerman would always be with her. He occupied an immeasurable space inside her that would never be altered by the outside world—not by rifle shots or a therapist’s couch or a child’s tiny grip on her finger—and, paradoxical though it was, the reliability of this had always offered her some strange semblance of identity. Even if Mr. Patel was forever gone, the Hammerman would always be out there, and Lydia would always be that girl beneath the sink.
Always Little Lydia.
Which was why what happened to her on the night before Thanksgiving felt so unexpected. She’d been in the kitchen, drinking a glass of the wine that Raj had brought, plunging her hand into the turkey and trying to pry out a bag of giblets that were still frozen to its cavity, when Raj abruptly stopped changing channels.
“Are you seeing this?” he said, his voice eager and unsteady. “Lydia? Quick—come in here!”
Lydia was up to her elbow in the turkey but when she looked at the television she could see a static image of the O’Tooles’ small, familiar house. Without washing her hands she stepped toward the couch. She felt her skin tighten and everything but the screen faded away. A buried phrase crackled from the television: Little Lydia, the voice said—only it had been sifted through an accent and surrounded by rolling Spanish: Leetil Leedyah.
“What is this?” Raj said, turning to look at her. “Should we turn it off?”
“Turn it up.”
“It’s in Spanish,” he said, looking at the remote. “Some kind of ghost-hunting show. Do you even get this channel?”
“No idea.”
Most of what appeared on the screen was filmed through an obnoxious green night-vision camera that tracked through the O’Tooles’ house in the dark. In the center of the green, a flashlight halo dragged over the carpet and the walls and the pictures and the doors. The production values were painfully low, yet she could see that the O’Tooles’ orange shag carpet had been replaced by a speckled brown Berber and that all the fixtures had been updated. Otherwise the layout of the home was almost exactly the same, as if the new family were working from the blueprints of the old.
Raj covered his mouth with his hand.
“Oh my god,” he said. “That’s inside Carol’s house?”
Lydia could only nod.
The host of the program was a histrionic thirtysomething with slick black hair and a black leather jacket. As he walked through the house, he whispered into the camera, periodically raising a finger and allowing his eyes to roam from wall to wall, floor to ceiling. He opened closet doors and peeled back the shower curtain, and occasionally the screen would cut to a close-up of the Ghostometer, a ridiculous contraption that looked like a mix between an old-fashioned radio and a pasta colander. An outdated oscilloscope screen attached to the device showed a glowing flat line of inactivity, at least until he carried it into the hallway, just near the master bedroom doorway. The host looked at the camera with wide eyes when the beeps grew frantic and the display showed a flurry of green waves.
“I guess that means there’s a ghost,” Raj mumbled.
Lydia felt her heart pounding and every few seconds she felt someone blowing gently on the back of her neck. As the host continued down the hall, the screen showed grainy photographs of each of the O’Tooles, one at a time: Bart first, then Dottie, and finally Carol. Then the camera focused on a girl with straight black hair, twelve or thirteen years old, wearing a pink sweatshirt and fidgeting in an overstuffed chair. The girl obviously now lived in Carol’s old house, and she was being interviewed about a ghost who lived in her hallway—the ghost that this show was apparently there to find.
As the girl spoke to the camera, the voice of a tra
nslator crowded over her words, but she could still be heard faintly in English beneath:
Sometimes, she said, in the middle of the night, I can hear someone crawling fast through my hallway. Only no one is there when I look.
Lydia’s first reaction was to feel terrified for this girl, but when she saw the smile on her face—like she was trying not to laugh, like she was doing this on a dare—she realized that this was more about entertainment than fear.
One night, the girl continued, I was getting a drink of water and I could hear someone breathing inside the sink.
The screen cut to a night-vision view of the O’Tooles’ kitchen. Slow and unsteady, the camera roamed over the humming refrigerator, the scuffed baseboards, and finally, the cabinet beneath the sink. Lydia could hear the voices of the girl and her translator behind the images.
The story I heard at school was this one girl hid under there all night. She didn’t get killed because she was so hidden. But in the morning no one could find her. Like she just disappeared into thin air.
Leetil Leedyah.
On the screen the host’s hand reached out, opening the cabinet beneath.
It was apparently inconvenient for the producers to show the famous photograph of Lydia being carried off the neighbor’s porch by her father, surrounded by police and paramedics; that would break the paranormal narrative they were creating. What they showed instead was the host’s hand lowering the Ghostometer into the dark space beneath the sink. Inside, below the disposal, she could see grimy pipes and a pair of crusty shutoff valves. The space was crowded with cleaning products and a roll of trash bags, and her stomach dropped at the thought of folding herself tightly enough to fit inside. Predictably, the machine’s oscilloscope lit up, splashing green waves, screeching beeps, proving undeniably that there was a ghost under there.
Lydia felt her body stiffen. She could sense Raj swaying against the couch.
She was in there forever, the girl’s voice continued, and then she was just gone.
On the screen a hand pressed closed the cabinet door: ke-tick.
Midnight at the Bright Ideas Bookstore Page 26
