One hand still in Brooke’s, he raised the other and pointed. He said, “Look at that.” It was hard not to grin because it was so ridiculous to see something out of the ordinary in a place already seeping it.
A dark carousel squatted, heavy and motionless between opposing buildings—a motel on the north side of the street, a hardware on the other, both framed by photography studio, grain store, but no banks, no Western Union, nothing that suggested economics—the buildings’ woodwork washed dull by sun and wind and sand, but the carousel itself looked brand new, its dark wood black and highly polished, the wooden or plastic horses still and shining even though the canopy above them cast a shadow over them and the stretch of road between buildings.
It was a very strange feeling that came over him upon seeing the oddity. It carried him back a couple decades, to when he’d been Natalie’s age. His stepfather had loved carnivals, and he shared that love openly with his stepson, who came to appreciate the glimmer and magic just as much, both of them knowing in their hearts that it was all ran by gears and illusions, but not caring, because it was the way it made you feel that mattered most: the thrill, the awe, the wonder, the anticipation...
He remembered boyhood screams of joy and anticipation, his stepfather’s heavy hand resting casually on his shoulder and guiding him from ride to ride. And as he got older, the place never lost its charm, though he realized that some of the men running the rides were very strange, until one by one, the traveling shows seemed to disappear.
It was very sad in a way, he felt, that the children of today knew only the state fairs, which, as bright and fast moving as they were, lacked the mystery and excitement of a here-today-gone-tomorrow side show.
He turned to Brooke, who seemed indifferent, and to Natalie, who seemed a bit shaken by the sight of such a glorious piece of machinery in such a decrepit little nowhere place.
He said, “They must be getting ready for Halloween, right? That’s what this is for, that’s why nobody is around. Maybe they’re all gone to grab other rides and bring them down into the valley. It explains why there aren’t any cars or people that we can see.”
He smiled to himself, imagining that this strange place probably put on one hell of a Halloween since they had little else to entertain them.
He said quietly, “Wish we could stay to see them set everything up.”
Neither Brooke nor Natalie answered him.
The wind cooled the skin the sun was slowly burning.
He’d always sported a somewhat fair complexion although his arms tanned easily. His time, most of his adult life really, spent working inside a video store had not improved how his skin handled the UV rays. No matter, he thought, smiling wide. He walked toward the carousel, glancing left and right at store windows which displayed bric-a-brac from ages long past. The stores themselves did not have names. Their signs simply stated Photography, Motel, Saloon.
He was only ten feet from the liquid-like gloss of the carousel’s platform—his attention completely absorbed in it as he realized horses that decorated the gizmo weren’t horses at all—when he heard a woman scream to his left.
*****
Brooke had wanted to tell Angel to stay put, that she didn’t want him climbing onto someone else’s property and horsing around when they were there to find a fuel station and get back on the road. But she had barely looked at the carousel before she saw the old woman, me, my white hair tied in a bun, my hands stretched out toward them and shaped like claws.
She thought I seemed to glide toward them, as if birthed of some horrible nightmare, my face lined, my eyes closed as if they’d been glued shut, my mouth locked open and the tongue inside it squirming as if to form words and failing.
Angel stood there, his arms raised to warn me off, or just slow me down, but to him I didn’t seem to notice his presence, which stung his wayfaring heart in a way he could not understand.
I ran straight for Brooke who hung her purse over left shoulder to free both of her hands. And at first my running toward her confused her since she could have sworn she had never seen me before. Yet there was something familiar about she thought, the way many old women look familiar since so many dress and move and act alike.
It took my pushing past Angel and wrapping my wiry arms around Brooke, and Brooke, feeling helpless, unable to do anything more than smell my desperation and feel my shivering, walking corpse, for something to click the ghostly recognition into place...
Her mother had that same horror on her face once, when Brooke’s father had passed on. Tom Pistil was a big burly man with a soft but confident voice, a man who looked more and more like Santa Claus as he aged, a man who exuded that same warmth and that same twinkle of the eye. They’d been married fifty years, and it seemed an unreal amount of time, even to them, which was a common joke they shared every Christmas. Longer together than they’d ever been apart. Eventually twice as long.
But he’d been out doing the things men his age shouldn’t do, on the roof of their home and replacing the tiles when he slipped. And Brooke’s mother had been inside, humming to herself, drying dishes as Tom fell past the window. She heard his back break, heard him scream, and miraculously, at least to her, she didn’t drop the plate she was drying.
She rushed outside, and it was horrible. He had bones poking through the skin of his forearms. His legs seemed to be positioned at a peculiar angle, and his throat issued breathing that sounded like crackling brush. She shushed him, placed her hand to his chest, felt his heart beating so hard, and so fast, and she shushed him again, said she was going to go inside and call the hospital. She promised she’d get him help.
But he died before she ever made it to the phone because one of his ribs has shattered and punctured his lung. She swore, even to this day, that she’d heard his last breath rush out of him in one final whoosh that rattled the branches in the yard. And somehow the day had grown a little darker. Clouds were there that hadn’t been moments before.
Brooke’s mother said she saw a man on the roof, smiling down on her as the first spray of rain hit her back, and then the man disappeared.
To Brooke I wore that same face, that lost and empty and broken face her mother wore at Brooke’s father’s funeral. It was an expression of utter sorrow and regret and helplessness. I clung to her so tightly she couldn’t breathe, feeling as desperate, truly, as I’m certain I appeared.
Angel stood there helpless, the way men will when stripped of direction.
Natalie moved closer, ran a hand up and down my back showing a side of her that her mother had forgotten had always warmed her heart when Nat had been younger, the child hurting when her friends hurt, and though the action made Brooke smile slightly, confused about what was happening, it only made me cry harder because what they shared only shone a terrible light upon what I’d lost and feared I could never regain.
*****
Natalie felt a place in her heart soften much more quickly than she would have expected once I began crying and clutching her mother. She thought at first it was because I reminded her of her grandmother, but there was more to it than that. As young as she was, she knew grief, and she knew that one day her mother would be in what she thought of as my shoes, and one day, much later, she herself would be an old crone, unable to face her oppressors, unable to avoid the stench coming from the door of eternity, the stink unfamiliar like those we’ve come to love, or the mundane blandness we’ve come to expect.
There was a fear in her heart, not only for herself, but for everybody. She had trouble naming it, but could feel it from time to time, her own mortality, and the questions it brought with it, the unanswerable ones.
And that lay at the core of her fear, that after passing on, after those you loved laid you in the dark dirt and the backhoes filled it, eternity itself may stretch before you like a long, silvery road glossed by moonlight. And who knew what was up ahead? She feared that even those who set out on the silver road, alone, without anybody from their earthly existence
, they’d meet god in the form of monsters, the unexpected, the sheer isolation on a road that went on and on and on to nowhere.
I quivered beneath her touch, amused in a way, and touched also by the first true outsider who didn’t want anything from us.
Natalie brushed her mother’s hand, met her eyes, questioning.
Brooke shook her head.
Natalie gave us space and Angel stumbled closer, glanced over his shoulder once toward the carousel, then back. Natalie approached him. She said, “Do you have the feeling that something really bad happened here?”
Angel didn’t answer, struck dumb by her question. But the child was right of course. Something bad had happened in Gossamer, and had been happening for a while, culminating into a final and explosive moment the night before when Julian finished with the young, quiet boy I named Peter.
The carousel sat empty for now.
And as much as I enjoyed the young does touch and heart, I needed her family to help me bring my children back from the dead.
*****
Angel held the door to the motel open as I held Brooke’s hand and pulled her inside. Natalie followed us, her head down for a second, watching the threshold perhaps for something that might trip her. The carpet was thick, red and black designs shaped like spiders bodies, the red legs meeting black legs, branching out and out, and Angel had to look back up because looking at the design made him sick to his stomach.
What the kid had said was still banging around inside his head—Do you have the feeling that something really bad happened here?—and it was a thought he didn’t want to think about too much. It was best to see if they could somehow assist me quickly, and, if I was a local like he assumed, he could have me point them to the nearest gas station so they could be on their way.
It was nothing more than his cowardly side getting the better of him, to leave other people to deal with their problems on their own, the way many men will though they pretend to be strong and courageous.
But at least he wasn’t a boaster, talking about what he would do or had done. He remained quiet, weighing their options. If they stayed to help they would more than likely be there if others from the town returned with more rides, and he could help them build them—though, truth be told, he had no mechanical prowess at all—while Brooke and town women tended to whatever situation I faced.
It crossed his mind that they didn’t know me and I could easily be a crazy, possibly even behind whatever happened and pretending otherwise to throw them from my trail. It wasn’t hard to imagine such a scenario as he looked at Brooke and noticed her Colorado State Police baseball cap.
He stood in the doorway a moment longer. He figured it was about six hours to sundown. He looked at his watch, noticed it was no longer working, so he tapped the glass face as if a little abuse might set it right. When that didn’t work, he closed the door behind him, relished the cool air blowing from hidden vents inside the structure, his eyes taking a moment to adjust to the contrast beneath the hot high desert and this quaint little gloomy vestibule.
A small counter occupied one wall, the left, and to the right a few plush floral-patterned benches, where Brooke and I sat, Natalie hovering close by, but beyond us, her gaze locked on the steps that led upstairs.
The room was an open and not unwelcoming space. He noticed double doors at the back of the room that he guessed led to a kitchen and a small door off near the service desk that led into a bathroom. He caught Brooke’s eyes and pointed to the toilet. She nodded. He went inside and with slightly trembling hands dabbed cold water on his face with a napkin from the dispenser and looked at his reflection in the mirror. The skin covering his cheekbones seemed to swell for a split second, the skin stretched so far from the bone that it appeared it would tear.
He gripped the sink.
He blinked.
He looked again.
There was blood on his bottom lip. He didn’t remember biting it, but thought that he easily could have when my presence surprised all of them. He dabbed his lip with the damp napkin but there weren’t any traces of blood on the cloth, or any on his lip when he looked again. A trick of light, he told himself. There had been many times, when he was a small child, that he’d experienced one trick of light or another, when it was late, bedroom curtains slightly parted, a full moon out and the wind howling, times when he thought he saw a man crouched in the branches outside his bedroom, and looking in.
The air grew suddenly hot and he feared he’d faint as vertigo clutched his guts and twisted them. He braced himself on the sink. Once the vertigo passed he pressed his shoulder blades to the cool tiled wall. It made him feel safer, more grounded, if only for a moment.
A small window was stationed high in the wall above the toilet. Its glass was thick and mottled and threw distorted shadows about the room as if someone was on the other side and peering in, the sun high behind them.
He heard Brooke call his name.
Stuffing the napkin in the trash can next to the sink, he thought himself a young boy again, surrounded by mysteries he might never understand, and although they frightened him a fraction, he also found them thrilling. There had been things he’d never shared with Brooke. Not because he felt that she would blame him, he’d only been a child then, like Natalie, but they resurfaced now, flitting with the shadows across the hard tile floor. They were shapes, geometric designs of night. He’d last witnessed them twenty five years ago. And even then they had seemed as a dream.
*****
Brooke let me gather myself completely, my small, dainty hands bobbing above my lap as if I were searching for something to grab onto. And in a way, she was correct. If she had to guess, and she did, she’d place my age around eighty, or eighty-five. Frail, but strong.
Brooke’s neck hurt from my terrorized strength while hugging her outside, but she pushed the pain away, watched me jumping at every little noise Angel made in the bathroom, watched Natalie near the steps, possibly considering going upstairs to investigate if anybody else was around.
She had a very strong urge to tell her daughter to stay within sight. But since Natalie didn’t move, just hovered there with her fingers tapping the bottom of the stair rail, she said nothing. Then I turned my head and opened my mouth. To Brooke, my breath was rank, as if I’d eaten spoiled meat. Brooke recoiled instinctively, ashamed of herself when I turned away, slightly embarrassed and ashamed of how I must mislead them. I lowered my head.
To break the ice, breathing through her mouth as she had earlier when first smelling the strong odor of old, musty paper, she said, “What is this place?”
I shrugged.
Brooke said, “Are you from here?”
“No,” I answered. I stared at the carpet, a weave of reds and black, an intricate design—red and round in the middle, eight red arms branching from the body and intertwined with blocks and dashes of black. I said absentmindedly, “The carpet was different when we came in…” The design seemed to fascinate me, my concentration so incredible, like I thought if I could deduce a hidden riddle, I might regain whatever it was I lost.
Brooke took my hand, which was cold, and she held it. She said, “Is there some way we can help you?”
I swallowed, once, with difficulty, and said, “I lost my husband and our grandson.” A tremor ran through me, almost as if the lie was reality, and I squeezed Brooke’s hand fiercely. “Lost them,” I said, pulling my eyes from the carpet to the cream-colored ceiling.
Natalie moved closer and sat on the floor near our feet, casting her gaze about the room for a while, a strong distaste apparent in her eyes and the frown she wore. She pushed herself up awkwardly and returned to the stairwell when she grew bored.
“Lost them?” Brooke said, confused. “Lost them how?”
*****
Natalie had just returned to the stairs when she heard a soft click like a door being closed quietly and saw a blur of motion on the landing above as if someone had been watching down on us. It looked to her like a boy aro
und her age, perhaps a little bit older, but small for his size if that were the case. She couldn’t be sure since only seeing his back and legs, and him disappearing within a blink.
She looked back at her mother, her stomach empty and her nerves jumping.
She whispered, “Mom. I think there is someone up there.”
I said, “There’s no one else anywhere. I’ve looked.”
“You’re wrong,” Natalie said, feeling sorry for me still, but not so sorry for me that she would go on being ignored. She said, “There is someone here with us.”
Her mother looked uncertain. Natalie said, “Mom,” hating the sound of the whine in her voice, but not minding so much the sound of the anger beneath it. Her mother looked for a long time at the stairwell as I repeated—there is no one else here—and then Brooke stood and called Angel’s name. Natalie felt like she’d won a small victory. She smiled but when she glanced at me again I was frowning severely, and to the beautiful child my eyes appeared lifeless.
*****
Angel didn’t want to leave the bathroom but Brooke called again. He swiped a hand through his hair and shuffled out into the foyer. His fiancé was standing next to me, where I sat ramrod straight, a smile on my lips as I nodded to him.
Brooke said, “She said she lost her husband and grandson.”
“Lost them how?” He directed the question at Brooke but he hoped I would answer.
My smiling like that bothered him. It set off primitive alarm sounds in his lizard brain. He tried not to think of what he’d felt in the bathroom because he had an unsettling suspicion that I was sifting through his thoughts, weighing them the way a butcher would.
He thought, What have we gotten ourselves in to?
He knew that if they didn’t just leave then they would find out exactly what, and very soon. But he was remiss to leave because Gossamer had a hold of his imagination, but whereas it put the young girl, Natalie, on edge, it got his juices flowing, made his mouth water, made him rigid, and he thought that I was thinking all of this and putting it in his head and he was getting a hard on that could break blocks of concrete, so he turned away, toward the front window.
Gossamer: A Story of Love and Tragedy Page 8
