The boy wanted to take the perfect picture of the world inside his head, as he saw it.
Suddenly, the boy heard a soft voice escape from a row of tombstones ahead. His mother looked in that direction.
"Joe. Is that you, Joe? I'm coming Joe. I'll find you."
"Please stop it, mom. Stop acting crazy."
"Don't worry Joe. Nothing will keep me from you. Keep speaking to me and I'll go to you. I swear. I'll find you."
Mary said these word to herself as she kept walking through the cemetery. Her lips moved, as if she were now talking to Joe, as if Joe were the only person that existed in her life.
"You can do it baby, my sweet Candy."
Joe's words came out of Mary's mouth.
In a way, she knew that those words weren't hers. But, it did not matter. In the end, it always felt natural. This was how it always was since she met Joe. It felt like her body no longer belonged to her. Once she felt that way, nothing mattered. It didn't even matter that the night was coming.
"Mom."
"Why should I do that. I would never stay away from you. Just tell me where you are."
His name hung from her parched lips and the space between her eyes started to fill with wanting pain. She was now only paying attention to something that she thought was Joe. Everything else was a blur.
"Mom! Why won't you listen to me?"
His voice barely rose above the heavy beat of his heart.
"Please listen, mom. We're not suppose to be out here after dark."
The boy pleaded as hard as he could. He begged her not to go any further. He was now twenty feet away from her.
"There's nothing out there. Don't leave me."
The boy was scared of the coming night. Only once did his cries echo over the field of graves. This time, his scream was loud enough to raise the dead.
The boy stood alone on the driveway of the cemetery, as she walked away, head first, looking and searching.
The boy was small, about 8 years old with long shiny black hair falling over his face.
For a final time, the boy tried to keep her from going deeper into the cemetery. Regardless, Mary kept heading in one direction, toward Joe's grave. She stopped and turned around to see her son for a final time.
"Have to seen him?" She asked the boy.
"No. He's dead, mom. There's nothing inside there for you. Let's go home."
She looked away. Then, turned back to her son to give him the last piece of advice.
"Nothing ever dies in this world. Nothing. Not anymore."
The boy watched his mother walk away and disappeared under the shadow of a tree. She was gone and and strong wind blew all the flowers off the graves. The whole time, the boy said nothing.
He had nothing left, not even tears.
Sixteen
He Squeezed All The Love Out Of Her
For a couple of years, Mary and her son lived a quiet life in their two-bedroom apartment in Astoria, Queen. That was a time before Joe. Mary had her camera and the boy had his mother.
However, things changed when Joe appeared and their little serene life was no more. To the boy, Joe appeared as if out of thin air. From then on, the boy knew to be careful around him and to keep his distance. Even the boy knew that there was something dark behind Joe's pale face.
Whenever Joe visited Mary, things always became difficult for the boy. So, the boy hung back, looking at his mother from a far. It was safer that way. The boy always kept his face protected, hidden half-way behind the doorway of the kitchen, admiring the thing that he loved for so long, wondering how she changed.
Now, Joe was dead and there was nothing to keep the boy away from his mother. However, she was not the same, afterward. Nothing went back to how it was, after Joe died. So the boy continued to hide, watching her from afar.
At night, the boy prayed to the almighty. He wished that things would go back to normal. He wished that he and his mother would go back to having an adventure in the street, photographing people and going out to eat. He remembered how she used to take him to Sunnyside for ice cream. Banana splits were his favorite.
But, something was missing and the boy was old enough to understand what it was. When his mother spoke, her words sounded empty and routine.
Love was missing, when she spoke to him.
It was as if Joe squeezed all the love that she had out of her body and left nothing for the boy. Even in death, the boy and his mother never escaped from under Joe's shadow.
One day, the boy was by the kitchen door staring at his mother, as she stood in the hallway. It was an old habit that the boy retained, from the old days when Joe was around. Light leaked in from the window at the opposite end and her shadow fell across the wall. She stood there like a statue staring at the wall for hours at a time.
This time, she took a photograph off the wall. It was a black framed picture that should have been taken down and thrown away with the rest of Joe's things. However, the photograph escaped her sister's wrath.
It was harmless.
When the boy saw his mother staring at the picture, it filled him with the need to know why she looked at that photograph so many times. Sometimes, it felt like she cherished the picture more than she did her own son.
Why that one? He wondered.
When his mother wasn't around, he would go over to it and examine it. The black and white picture of his mother was no bigger than a piece of paper. She looked breath-taking with a big smile across her face and wavy black hair, flowing onto her shoulders. Maybe she was coming to her senses. Maybe she was trying to remember the past.
However, the boy needed something concrete to understand why his mother became fascinated with that picture.
So, the boy asked her who took that picture of her. She told him that it was one of her girlfriends who shot the picture with a cell phone. They were galavanting down the street in Sunnyside, one summer.
When his mother was at work and he had no school, the boy took the picture off the wall to examine it. There was something weird about that picture. The boy sensed it, once he held the frame in his small hands.
The boy pondered over it, almost as much as his mother. He thought about what was so odd about it and why it bothered him. He tried to think of as many things as possible to try to come to a reasonable solution. Maybe that was part of the problem. Nothing made sense or seemed reasonable when it came to Joe.
Maybe, it wasn't the picture, itself. Maybe, it was because he saw Joe and his mother standing in this spot in the hallway. He remembered Joe telling his mother that he loved her. Even the boy knew that Joe was lying. He wondered why his mother believed everything he said and why she was so blind to everything that was going on.
Somehow, this black framed photograph had escaped his aunt's campaign to rid the house of everything that Joe had touched. However, she missed one. It wasn't her fault, the photograph seemed harmless at first. It was a picture of Mary, more than anything else, of a time when she looked content and even happy. Maybe Amy left it to remind her sister of who she once was.
Since Joe died, that same picture hung in the same place, as it always had for the last year. There was even a layer of dust that covered the glass.
One day, the boy wiped away the dust and looked over every inch of that photo. The boy looked at the black and white picture and saw his mother's big smile and soft round shoulders. He scanned every inch, looking at every detail, the smooth variation in light to dark. Then his eyes moved on to the background of the picture. There was a crowd on the opposite side of the street. There was a group of young people standing under the 7 train in Sunnyside, waiting for the light to turn red. They were office workers who were coming back home from a full day of work. They waited while the sky dimmed over the skyscrapers of Manhattan .
Most of the faces in the background were smudged or out of focus, except for a few. He looked at the ones that he could make out and they looked normal enough.
Then, he spotted something behi
nd the crowd and just to the side of them. There was a garbage man with one hand on the rim of a wire trash can. Anyways, the man in the picture was too small to see. For a moment, it looked like the garbage man was looking at the camera too. But, there was something familiar about him. Over the night, the boy remembered that Joe was a garbage man too, because of the way he sometimes smelled. Sometimes, he smelled like rotten tomatoes.
On the next day, the boy stole a magnifying glass from the corner store. He wanted to take a closer look at the garbage man in the picture. The man had dark brown rimmed glasses and pale white skin with a slight smile. It was at that moment when the boy's eyes opened wide like a pair of highlights on a dark night. The boy recognized the man.
It was Joe.
The boy was sure of it.
It was Joe who was lurking behind that crowd, when that picture was taken. However, Joe wasn't really looking at the camera. He was looking at his mother. The boy couldn't believe it. Joe had laid his eyes on his mother before they actually met.
It was at that moment when the boy did what She couldn't, he dropped the picture frame and broke it into a thousand little pieces.
Seventeen
The Night Had Turned On Us
All week long, Mary and her son heard about all the strange things happening over the rail yard from where they lived. Whenever they went to Starbucks, Foxy's Diner or Key Foods Grocery Store, they heard people talking about all those, who had gone missing. There had been about four women and a child in all who had disappeared, almost over night.
Everyone wondered what happened to them. But, no one knew where they were or how they were taken. Some of the relatives of the missing pleaded for their loved ones return. So, they took to the papers, the radio stations and television screens. Tears filled all the outlets as they begged for their mother, daughters, sister or wife to be returned unharmed.
At night, the police sirens filled the black sky and shook the dark clouds. Squad cars zipped passed their living room window and painted their apartment walls with red and blue emergency lights. At night, the boy always stood at the window watching the lights pass by, while his mother sat in the kitchen, thinking about what was going on out there, trying not to remember his name.
She had to forget about him for the sake of her son.
For the last couple of nights, residents from neighborhoods surrounding the cemetery have disappeared from the street without a trace. The number of missing persons reported had jumped over a period of a couple days. They were mostly women. The first were Veronica Aguirre, Melissa Daniels, Avonte Simmons, Lourdes Mendoza, and then a boy, no older than her son. All of them disappeared within days and miles of each other and no one knew what happened to them.
In their wake, the missing left their loved ones broken-hearted and brewing with worry, where the worst part was not knowing.
Each time the news reported a missing person, it was either a child or a woman who was taken. Each time one was reported, they were last seen going into the dark streets and they never returned. It was as if the night had snatched them off the sidewalk, as if they vanished into thin air. And no one knew if they were alive or dead or anything.
Mary recalled the local police precinct warning all the children and women in the neighborhood to stay in their homes at night. The community tried to urge the police to place a mandatory curfew in the areas most affected. However, that wasn't practical. In New York, the commercial stores in the area sometimes made their whole take at night. In the end, the police recommended that woman and children keep safe at night by staying in. That was the best that the police good do. Until they found who was responsible for these string of disappearances.
During the nights, Guardian Angels stood by the train stations of Sunnyside, Woodside and Jackson Heights, and even Astoria. They stood with their red berets passing out paper notices to anyone who who read them. Some of the guardians even escorted women and children to their homes.
However, the boy noticed that no one in the paper or television mentioned the cemetery. Even the boy knew that these disappearances were occurring around the cemetery. But, the police never mentioned it and the newspapers never picked up on it. Even the boy knew that there was something about the cemetery that tied all the missing people together.
As the boy sat in his bed with several comic books scattered throughout, he thought about what the newscaster said. He thought about the words that he never forget.
The night had turned. The man on the Internet said.
The phrase stayed in the boy's head as he looked at the sun slowly descending toward the horizon and disappearing out of existence.
The boy understood very well that he and his mother should have been home by now. The world he lived in was something else.
As the boy walked with his mother by the cemetery, he realized that the man on the Internet was right. But, it didn't make sense to him, until now.
The night had turned, said the man.
"The night had turned on us all," said the boy.
Eighteen
The Boy's Eyes Widen
In the living room, a quilted blanket saddled the couch and Mary's son lost track of time with a glowing tablet. Mary sat on the arm chair of the couch looking at all the things that she had on her plate. For a moment, it seemed like she were floating in a ocean, waiting for land to appear.
Since Joe was gone, Mary tried to make the rent by herself. On the weekends, she made some extra money, to supplement what she made during the week day. She ran errands for people around the neighborhood. This past summer, she cleaned, raked and watered the front yard of the building. There was little money in that. But, it was the only thing that she found during the hot summer.
She should have moved to a different apartment, a cheaper one. But, she couldn't bring herself to packing up all her things and moving to a smaller place. There were other apartments that she could afford with her son, smaller ones. Somehow she couldn't imagine living somewhere else. Besides, looking for an apartment in New York was always a crap shoot. Every time she looked online or in the paper, she felt overwhelmed about the thought of moving.
Later, she thought.
Later, she'll worry about finding a cheaper place. After awhile, later became... months later.
The living room was dark and the cell phone by her son's feet buzzed with light. The boy glanced at it and then went back into his glowing tablet. The face of the cell blinked with blue light.
For a moment, Mary thought about ignoring the call. She had not really spoken to anyone in a days and didn't know what to say to her sister. Anything she said, would be a lie.
Last time her sister Amy called, Mary didn't pick up. And that just made everything worse. Amy ended up taking the train all the way to Queens from Brooklyn. She made her way into Queens through the N train.
Amy was the kind of person that would walk a hundred miles at night for her sister. Nothing stopped her from looking for her sister and making sure that she and the boy were okay. Some one had to look after them.
The phone kept blinking, when it should have just died on the couch.
Mary had to answer it. There was no way around it. Besides, Mary didn't want her sister traveling all the way to Queens, especially after dark. With all the strange things that have been going on in the neighborhood.
Mary picked up the cell phone and headed pass the couch and toward the living room window. She held the phone to her ear.
"Mary. Is everything okay?"
Mary hesitated answering for a moment. Then, she pulled the curtains aside and watched the street glow with a pale blue light. It was getting dark outside and it was almost time for her son to have his dinner. Tonight, she was heating up a frozen pizza for the both of them. It was cooling on the kitchen counter. Mary was about to call the boy over to kitchen to eat. But somewhere along the way, she found herself sitting on the arm of the couch, losing all sense of time.
"Mary. Please talk to me. I'm here."
/> Amy was worried, as usual.
"We're fine." Mary said.
She stared at the dust clinging to the window. It had been a while since she had cleaned the place. For a moment she felt like writing his name on the dirty window, but wisely thought against it.
"Have you?"
"Yes." Answered Mary.
Sometimes, it was as if Mary could read her sisters mind and not listen to a word she said.
"Of course, I still have the camera. I'm just waiting for the right day. That's all."
"You need to get out of the house."
"I am okay. I'm doing good. I go to work every day."
"And the boy."
"He's great. He's with me right now and having a good time."
She didn't even glance at her son.
"Mary, I can keep him longer, if you need more time. It's no problem. I have more than..."
"No. No. We're doing fine."
Mary looked at the present sitting on the dinner table. It was surrounded by small framed pictures. The present sat there unopened.
About two weeks ago, Amy gave her sister a camera that cost about a thousand dollars. Amy bought it because she knew that Mary needed to occupy her mind around this time of year. It was almost a year since Joe died. For some reason, it was still too soon to for Mary to be left on her own.
Then, Mary glanced back at pile of unopened mail laid out on the coffee table and bookshelves.
"I'm probably going to go take pictures with the boy tomorrow during the day."
Mary continued to reassure her.
"But, he has school," said Amy.
"I know. I mean that I'll take him, as soon as he gets out of school. We'll probably stop by somewhere, so I can treat him to a banana split or something..."
"Yeah. He'll probably like that."
Mary glanced at the coffee table. She could see that the credit bills piling up. On top of the debt, she hadn't paid the rent in two month.
The Dead Never Die Page 9
