THE
KEEPER
SARAH LANGAN
For Carole, Chris, Michael, and Peter
The darkness of this house has got the best of us, There’s a darkness in this town that’s got us too
—“Independence Day,”
BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN,
from The River, 1980
CONTENTS
EPIGRAPH
PROLOGUE
SUSAN
PART ONE
THE FALLS
ONE
Behind the Cemetery
TWO
Instruction
THREE
A Locked Door
FOUR
The Thing in the Woods
FIVE
Mother, May I?
SIX
Screaming Trees
SEVEN
The Husband of the Woman Who Jumped Out the Window (Fall from Grace)
EIGHT
Guy Walks into a Bar
NINE
Another Fall
PART TWO
THE BODY
TEN
Excruciatingly Tight Acid-Washed Jeans
ELEVEN
When Bogart Was King
TWELVE
The Body
THIRTEEN
Wraith (Paul’s Flight)
FOURTEEN
Dead Soldiers
FIFTEEN
Down a Rabbit Hole
SIXTEEN
The End of the World, and Nobody Knew but Him
SEVENTEEN
Collision
EIGHTEEN
Phone Call
NINETEEN
Everything That Rises Must Converge
PART THREE
THEY COME BACK
TWENTY
The Place Where Gravity Bends
TWENTY-ONE
Mold
TWENTY-TWO
Acid Test
TWENTY-THREE
The Road to Kitty Dukakis Is Paved with Good Intentions
TWENTY-FOUR
High Tide
TWENTY-FIVE
Grape Juice and Children’s Toys
TWENTY-SIX
The Atom Bomb Is Your Fault, Too
TWENTY-SEVEN
Evacuation
TWENTY-EIGHT
Invisible City
TWENTY-NINE
The Pact
THIRTY
Five Cent Redemption at the Barricades of Heaven
THIRTY-ONE
Thief
THIRTY-TWO
Inside the Mirrors (the Other Side of the Fence)
THIRTY-THREE
The Third Billy Goat
THIRTY-FOUR
I Heard a Fly Buzz
PART FOUR
THE DEAD
THIRTY-FIVE
The Lady of the Woods Summer 1990
THIRTY-SIX
Soil 1994
THIRTY-SEVEN
The Haunted Place 1994
THIRTY-EIGHT
The Things Grown-ups Do 1995
THIRTY-NINE
Mouth Full of Sand 2001
FORTY
Garden of Lost Souls Present
PART FIVE
THE KEEPER
FORTY-ONE
It Should Have Been You
FORTY-TWO
A Man in the House
FORTY-THREE
The Troll Under the Bridge
FORTY-FOUR
The Mill
FORTY-FIVE
Father
FORTY-SIX
Excitable Boy
FORTY-SEVEN
Heart of Darkness
FORTY-EIGHT
The Keeper
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
COVER
COPYRIGHT
ABOUT THE PUBLISHER
PROLOGUE
SUSAN
They knew Susan Marley. They saw her climbing to the top of Iroquois Hill at dawn, or dipping a stick tied with string into the polluted Messalonski River, waiting for fish that would never come. She was seen knocking on store windows after “Open” signs had been flipped to “Closed,” and at the Clott Paper Mill in the dark twilight hours, where shifts of men had once departed into the night. She was even seen standing on the front stoop of her childhood home, her hand suspended over the bell, as if waiting for someone to open the door.
She was a beautiful woman in the most classical sense of the word; curly blond hair; blue eyes; a small, childlike body; and delicate features. So impossible to attain, it was not the kind of beauty that inspired envy. It was also not the kind of beauty that appealed. She was too empty to allure, too fragile to touch. Perhaps this was what made them especially aware of her, so that when they felt her presence on the street or outside their homes, they stopped for a moment and held their breaths like children passing through a graveyard.
By the time she was nineteen, Susan Marley stopped speaking. She did not thank the cashier at Puff-N-Stop when she bought her weekly supply of Marlboro Reds and Campbell’s Tomato Soup. She did not offer the sign of peace to her neighbors when she sat in the last pew of Sunday morning services at the Catholic Church of Our Lady of Sorrow. She did not even wave hello when old family friends driving by in Chevys and Subarus honked their horns in greeting.
They discussed this silence over family dinners, and in the vestibule of the town hall after monthly meetings had ended. From her grammar school teachers and family friends, they gleaned the fragments of her sad history, and attempted in vain to decipher a language. They made a map of the houses she passed during her late-night walks, trying to divine a pattern, only to discover that she walked a wide circle around the town that closed smaller and smaller within itself.
They heard that she frequented Montie’s Bar in the afternoons, drinking vodka gimlets like water. She often shared her bed with the men she met there; country men, lost tourists, and—God help us—Bedford boys thinking they’d discovered the world. The women near her apartment kept an eye on who came and went, and only rarely did rumors surface about married Dennis Murdock, sweet Jonathan Bagley, or drunken Paul Martin sneaking with hunched shoulders out the back door and walking to cars they’d parked a block away.
For a while, she was all they talked about. “Did you see Susan Marley last night?” they asked each other over the phone, or at Montie’s Bar, or in the Shaws Supermarket. “I saw her lying on her back in the cemetery with a blade of grass sticking out of her mouth like it wasn’t thirty degrees outside,” one person might say, and another would answer: “Danny Willow told her she should check herself into a hospital but she wouldn’t go. These days, you can’t do anything for these people unless they slit their own wrists.”
Beneath their curiosity was outrage. The town had its share of troubled souls who drank all day, and women who hid the bruises on their faces with thick layers of skin-colored makeup, but even these people knew the limits of their behavior. They did not stare, they did not wander the town, they did not display the scars of their lives for all to appraise and pity. Doesn’t everyone have scars? was the unspoken question. Haven’t we all had to live through bad times, and come out the other side? What made Susan Marley so special, when poor Margaret McDermott was raising three girls on her own, and Bernard McMullen had been born without the sense of a bird? These people did not complain: These people had the courage to face their lives and find happiness where they could. Their outrage drew full circle, and they were offended by Susan’s circumstances, and offended again by her silent insistence on making those circumstances known.
After a few years, they became inured to her strange behavior. The Clott Paper Mill, in decline for years, was about to close. They had decisions to make and lives to attend. An implicit agreement was made, and in u
nison they let her recede. Slowly, the talk of her died down. If they saw her walking at night, they did not mention it the next day. They stopped studying her peripatetic wanderings, and they stopped caring whom she chose to bed. They decided that she was just another crazy, a drunk perhaps, who was broken beyond repair. Some girl, lost, who could not possibly be found. These things, never pretty, never nice to admit, do happen.
Eventually, she became a shadow to them in their thoughts, a hazy image without shape. When they saw her they did not remember how she looked, or what she wore, but only the feeling of something undone, something quite wrong, at the sight of her. They did not talk about this—they would never talk about this—but when they spied her in the woods, or near the paper mill, or in front of their homes at night, didn’t she turn to them? Didn’t she look them right in the eye? And did she smile? Was there the trace of a grin? Didn’t it seem, in that instant before they turned away, thinking about the next big snow and whether their cars would make it through another winter without a tune-up at Ed’s Domestic Auto, that she had stirred something inside them? Hadn’t there been the faint sound of locks turning, doors opening, drapes drawn to reveal dusty attics that should never see the light of day?
Later, those who survived would say that they were not surprised by what happened. They knew Susan Marley, after all.
PART ONE
THE FALLS
ONE
Behind the Cemetery
Liz Marley was a pretty girl with brown eyes and brown hair. Her attractiveness came less from her looks than from a generosity of character. When people spoke, she listened. When they needed comfort, she overcame her natural shyness and offered words of consolation. These qualities, easy to overlook, can make a plain face beautiful. But underneath her eyes were chronic dark circles, the result of too little sleep and bad nutrition. Over the years she had tried the cabbage diet, the protein diet, and the toothpick diet, all supplemented by late-show nachos and Cheez Whiz. Throughout these diets, her body had remained an adamant fifteen pounds overweight. In bed at night she sometimes squeezed the extra inches of fat on her stomach, silently accusing her body of betrayal.
It was an early Thursday morning in March, and the sun would not rise over this stretch of northern Maine for several hours. Liz Marley was standing inside the wrought-iron gates of the Bedford Cemetery. She blew out a deep breath, and watched the cloud of it billow in the cold air, and then dissipate into nothing. Down the hill the town still slept, and in front of her the cemetery was veiled in a layer of the most recent snow. Though this visit was a somber occasion, she was giddy with courage. Being here was a brave secret that no one would ever know.
In the center of the cemetery, a large stone angel presided over William Prentice’s body. One of its wings was missing, and over the years the features of its face had been ground smooth. William Prentice had invested heavily in the Clott Paper Mill, and for a long time, it was his vision that had allowed the town to prosper. But the mill closed last month, and “For Sale” signs now adorned the houses on Nudd, Chestnut, and Mayflower Streets like decoration. The stone angel reminded Liz of a poem she’d read in English class about a forgotten king in a wasteland, warning all to look on his works, ye mighty, and despair, in a place where lone and level sands stretched far away.
Liz walked to the back of the cemetery. At the far corner, she found what she was looking for. The stone was smaller than most, and there were fresh red roses, their petals clinging closely together, at the foot of the grave. The inscription might have read husband or father or skinny asshole, but it said none of those things. Ted Marley (1963–2001), it read, and that was the best way to remember him: a name.
“Hi Dad,” she said. “It’s me. Lizzie. The daughter who isn’t crazy.”
She waited, almost expecting him to say hello back. Hi, princess! he might say. In her most perfect fantasy, he would call her princess and look at her with eyes full of pride like those dads on the WB: I’m not really dead. I was just sleeping. But now I’m back and I’m going to make everything right.
She sat down on the wet ground, and snow seeped through the nylon of her jacket. In the months after his death, Liz’s mother had quietly embarked on a mission to erase Ted Marley. She donated his clothes and Red Sox caps to the Goodwill in Corpus Christi, and took down the photos of him, even family photos, from the end table in the television room. The rest of his things she stuffed into boxes and abandoned at the public dump.
Despite her mother’s best intentions, Liz remembered a lot of things about her father. He used to drink Rolling Rock because he said it was worth the extra fifty cents, rather than choking on a Bud. He’d smelled like skunk from working around hydrogen sulfide fumes all day at the mill. Each night he’d showered with Irish Spring soap, and then announced at the dinner table, “Fresh as a daisy, ladies and gents.” On his days off he’d worked in his garden, planting beans and spinach and cucumbers that they had eaten all summer long. After dinner he used to have her sit on his lap. He’d say things like: “Don’t worry Lizzie Pie, you’re okay. And all those nasty girls who say you have cooties are gonna be toothless and pregnant by the time they’re sixteen, so don’t you worry.”
Really, she liked almost everything about him. It was just the other things, the things he did to Susan. There had been a time when she wondered if it had happened to her as well. But eventually she had accepted that for some reason, she had always been safe. For some reason, she was the lucky one whose stomach he had not scored with bruises.
And maybe she had it all wrong. Maybe none of those bad memories were true. Just stuff you invent when you’re feeling blue. Susan was not normal. Long before things with their father went wrong, Susan had been strange. I can fly if I want, she used to tell Liz. I just have to move my arms really fast. I can make myself invisible. I can see things you can’t.
Years later, when Susan was in high school and the bruises stopped appearing, Susan was still strange. She moved down to the basement and only came up for meals, and she got mean. Like something rotting right in front of them at the dinner table, she got mean.
Susan dropped out of high school and moved to an apartment on the east side when she turned eighteen. Occasionally, Liz saw her taking one of her famous walks through town. Always, Susan would smile at her like they shared a dirty secret. And then she’d turn away, like she couldn’t stand the sight of her own blood.
People in Bedford said Susan was a witch. They said she visited their dreams. They said she was the reason the mill had closed. They blamed her for the rain that came every year, and all the fish that had died in the river. They said she told them things about themselves that she had no business knowing. When Liz let herself think about Susan, which happened almost never, she knew that the people from town were right. Susan was a witch.
“You shouldn’t have left us,” Liz said to her father’s stone. “Sometimes I pretend you didn’t die. I pretend you made Susan come home and you fixed her.” Liz sighed, “But then, I also pretend I have friends…. So maybe I’m the one who’s crazy.”
She waited, as if the man now made of dirt and ash would answer back. He didn’t, and she continued. “…I’m not depressed anymore. I don’t watch nine hours of infomercials on the weekends or anything. I met this guy. He’s nice, you’d like him. Well, I don’t know if you’d like him. I don’t know you very well…. Anyway, I guess I was your favorite, but that doesn’t mean I forgive you. I’m going to college soon and I’m never coming back to this stupid town. I came here to tell you that.”
His stone answered her in silence.
“I mean it!” she said.
She waited, realizing now why she had come to the cemetery today. She had hoped he would send her a sign. Lightning would flash in the sky and sever a tree, and she would know that he was listening. She would know that he was sorry. If she heard that, she thought that maybe she could go on. She could leave for college and live a normal life, marry a nice boy, maybe even Bob
by Fullbright, and trust what lay ahead of her.
But there was no bolt of lightning, no rose in bloom that fell from the sky. She traced the engraving on his headstone with her fingers and whispered, “I miss you, Daddy.”
As she stood, she looked out onto the northern edge of the cemetery that led to overgrown woods. She spotted movement out there, the color blue. She squinted and saw that the blue was a dress. Beyond the wrought-iron fence a woman watched her. The woman was small with blond hair. Her dress fluttered in the wind to reveal a set of bony white legs, and her skin was as pale as the snow.
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