Paper Ghosts

by Julia Heaberlin

  Last seen by: Friends with her on beach

  Details: Alcohol involved, skinny-dipping, very dark

  Suspects: None

  State of case: Declared accidental drowning with parents’ blessing, no body

  Linking photograph by CLF: Titled The Drowning (How he killed her? Has a thing for names that start with V?)

  13

  I break one of my rules. I use my burner phone under the shadows of the bridge to Google the closest emergency vet. So much for a vow to avoid electronic trails. We end up 1.7 miles away in a clinic in a yellow clapboard house badly in need of paint.

  I’d hesitated when I saw the sign: Budget Holistic Vet: Exotics and Emergencies Welcome. I almost peeled out of the parking lot for someplace else. But Carl was growling at me to stop the car, insisting the dog had only minutes, like he would know. I imagine the best killers, the ones who stay free, do. I took his word for it.

  I also have to accept the unspoken word of the freakishly strong waif of a woman assessing this barely breathing animal that she is a licensed veterinarian. It didn’t help that she had greeted us with, I’m Dr. Kiwi, like the fruit. When she bent over to scoop the dog off the couch in her packed waiting room, she flashed the tattoo that lined the smooth flat of her back above her Levi’s: Dog whispering is for bullies. My trainer wasn’t a fan of reality star dog trainer Cesar Millan, either. Dominance does not tame, he would tell me.

  The injured dog lies flat on his side on the exam table, whining through his teeth, lapping in shallow breaths, doing his heartbreaking best to be a good patient while Dr. Kiwi runs hands gently over him, exploring.

  I’m working the math on my shrinking budget while staring at tiny cats twisted into yoga poses or in the throes of tantric sex—the wallpaper’s too faded to tell. Carl’s sitting in the room’s only chair, arms crossed, lips crunched.

  I’m looking everywhere but at the dog—his gnatted eye, his stomach wound. His whine coils inside me like live electrical wire. I wish the pain were mine instead, a feeling I work hard to control.

  This radical empathy of mine extends to things God didn’t give a voice—the half-smashed fly wriggling his legs on the windowsill, the fish bleeding from a vicious hook, flapping, puckering his mouth in the air. At three years old, I’d bite into the skin of a peach and wonder if it was silently screaming. My trainer worked on this weakness and got nowhere. He really didn’t try that hard. He said it wasn’t much of a weakness.

  I need to focus on something else. Beyond this door, in the waiting room, people and animals living out unfortunate lives together are packed into claw-scratched folding chairs and old flowered couches. It’s biblical out there, a makeshift church waiting to be baptized. Everyone in that church insisted our patient go to the head of the line.

  I’m guessing the vet bill is going to be $400–$500, minimum. All Dr. Kiwi has said so far about the dog and our situation is that she offers a forty percent discount “for being heroes.” I’m still calling him “the dog” even though Carl named him something ridiculous in the car and the vet is calling him “sweetheart.” The dog’s whine has shifted down multiple octaves into a moan that reminds me of the eerie sounds my sister used to make while we stared into the lights-off darkness hanging above our twin beds. It was always too easy to scare me.

  Dr. Kiwi has to be wondering why I appear uncaring, why my eyes are focused on her kitty-cat wallpaper like there’s some deep message there. Carl has no problem at all keeping his gaze full throttle on the pitiful animal.

  “I happen to know the no-kill shelters in a fifty-mile radius are full,” Dr. Kiwi is saying, while pulling over an IV pole. “So are my cages in the back. The other shelters…well, if he makes it, this guy will be put at the top of the list for execution.”

  She’s already a pitchman for the dog, letting us know he has nowhere to go.

  Her eyes roam from my face to Carl’s, scratched from the thorny branches that held the dog in their claws. His cheeks and chin look like a toddler took a red ink pen to them. So innocent.

  Dr. Kiwi rests her eyes a little longer on my face than is comfortable. It takes a second to remember she is seeing a disguise and not the real me. It took effort to grow my hair to the middle of my back, and three tries to get it the shade of red I wanted.

  Three months eating French fries, fettucine alfredo, and cheesecake to add eight pounds to my thin frame. Three hours on Amazon to find comfortable heel lifts to push my height to 5'6" when I want to.

  “Where’d you say you found him?” Dr. Kiwi directs the question to me. At the same time, I realize the dog has gone quiet. Too quiet.

  “We didn’t say.” I’m trying to think of what lie I want to sell, glancing out of the corner of my eye at the dog. Still breathing.

  “Under the damn bridge,” Carl mutters.

  Dr. Kiwi turns toward Carl. “The 17th Street bridge? A dumping ground. Cats, dogs. Guinea pigs. Rabbits kids got for Easter. They never catch any of these sons of bitches.”

  She didn’t mention the steel cross or the missing Nicole Lakinski, who, like my sister, was never found, or about Nicole’s depression, her every affair and mistake held up to searing white light by the defense. Did she run away with a lover? Kill herself? While the jury didn’t like Carl, they didn’t much like Nicole, either.

  Nicole’s son, Alex, now a skinny teenager, told me three weeks ago that his arm still aches from falling off that swing.

  Alex thought I was a reporter looking for his dad, but I’d waited until his father sped off on his evening jog. The boy opened the door after two knocks, like I’m sure he wasn’t supposed to. I felt guilty that I gave him a fake name. We sat on the porch steps. He was starving to talk about his mother. Yet the day she disappeared right in front of him isn’t burned into his mind. All he can remember now is the cruel snap of bone.

  I wanted to hold his still freckly face in two hands and urge him to pursue his mother. Start now. I also wanted to order him to forget. Move on. Never, ever give in to that tiny devil of obsession growing up in his chest. Instead, I overpromised. As he handed me precious old photographs, I said I’d be back. I didn’t say that his mother is only one of the red dots on my map, a few pixels in the big picture.

  Dr. Kiwi has leaned into the hall and is yelling for someone named Daisy. Carl has a weird grin or a grimace on his face, either one unsettling.

  I find myself standing over the dog, stroking his matted fur. We might have to change cars before I’d planned.

  A bouncy teenage girl in pink Hello Kitty scrubs has suddenly appeared in the doorframe. Her hand already rests on the IV pole, ready to help roll the dog to surgery. Daisy.

  There is something about her.

  Dr. Kiwi is looking at me strangely. “Are you all right?”

  “Your face is puke green.” Carl reaches out to steady my frame. I jerk away, heart slamming.

  He can’t touch me again.

  14

  For a second, Daisy had reminded me of Rachel. Her perfectly oval face. The lavender shadows under her eyes. Something.

  I’d caught myself on the wall of yoga cats and stumbled my way to the waiting room. I didn’t let Carl put a hand on me.

  Carl suddenly shifts his position on the floor beside me. I have to forcibly stop myself from reacting every time he moves. He’s ridiculously agile when he wants to be, I’ve noticed. An hour ago, we had loaded the dog in the car together. Carl had operated with both his arms, no problem.

  I take another slug of Coke and center my attention on the three black tails twitching in and out of the bars of a cat carrier. Think about how to trick Carl into getting back in the damn car before the surgery is over.

  The owner of the cats is squished beside me on a couch, tapping on her cellphone, a diamond-chip band barely perceptible on her chubby fingers. It’s a poor cousin to the glimmering diamond o
n the woman at the diner. To our grandmother’s square emerald that my mother promised to my sister and now keeps in a drawer.

  Primal, those rings. Cavemen twisted grass around women’s wrists and ankles and waists to mark their territory. To control them.

  “I want the dog,” Carl announces. “It’s a condition.” In the weathered face staring up at me, I see a boy, testing his mother. It’s hard not to recoil. This is not the relationship I want with Carl. I am not Mrs. T.

  “The dog is not going to be a condition,” I say as calmly as I can. I won’t let Carl have that power over me. He cannot be the better person, not now, not ever—to believe I wouldn’t have saved the dog without him.

  “Aunt Kiwi says I should register you while the surgery is going on. Are you feeling…better?” Daisy is at my elbow, cautiously addressing me, official with an iPad.

  Up close, the pieces of Daisy’s face don’t fit at all like Rachel’s. Another thing: Daisy smells like baby powder. She’s expertly switching the iPad screen from the cover of a smutty romance novel to a vet registration form.

  Rachel liked to read about aliens. Holes into other dimensions. Horror. She left a musky, exotic scent on her sheets.

  “Can you spell your dog’s name?” Daisy asks.

  “It’s not our dog,” I say automatically.

  “B-a-r-f-l-y,” Carl spells slowly.

  I don’t like the way his eyes are traveling over her.

  “Barfly?” Daisy giggles, typing.

  “You say it Barf-LEE,” Carl corrects her.

  “Last name?” Daisy asks.

  “Smith,” I interrupt. “We are the Smiths. We’re from out of town so we can skip the rest of your form. I will pay cash.”

  “Barf-LEE Smith,” Daisy says, head down, dutifully tapping.

  “Lee is not his middle name,” Carl says.

  Now Carl is running his eyes boldly over the prosthetic leg of the man next to him. Old military guy, I think. The alert German shepherd beside him looks like he’d kill either of us with a single, sharp snap of the man’s fingers.

  “My dad had a fake arm,” Carl announces to no one in particular. “Got it chopped off in a hay baler at my grandfather’s farm. He said the fact that he could still feel his invisible hand fingering chords on his banjo was proof the soul goes on.”

  “Shut up,” I hiss. I throw a silent face of apology toward the man.

  I don’t remember that chilling detail about his father in trial testimony. Could Carl’s trick arm be psychosomatic? Could a brain tell an arm not to work? Did Carl believe it was OK to kill because his victims floated on some metaphysical plane?

  His grandfather’s farm is real, lurking, unmarked on my map. I can put my finger on it blindfolded. It lies hundreds of miles ahead of us in West Texas. In my nightmares, it is an infinite burial ground where I dig and dig like a diligent ant.

  The room has gone silent.

  Dr. Kiwi.

  I focus on her maroon-and-white Texas A&M surgical cap instead of on the thick red splash on her scrubs that makes it look like she just gutted a deer, or on the steel table through the open door behind her where the tip of Barfly’s matted tail is so very still.

  I’m holding back tears for a dog I don’t know. My clothes are smeared with blood. A house full of strangers can’t take their eyes off me.

  I’m so very far off course, so fast.

  15

  It’s like I’m watching a replay of Carl talking to Rachel for the first time. Charming my sweet, brilliant sister. Fooling her. How did he do it? I have to know. I can’t pull my eyes away.

  While Dr. Kiwi fills me in on the surgery, Carl’s across the room, intimately engaged with Daisy. Daisy’s smiling up at him, flashing braces with pink bands. The long chocolate-colored braid that had been sloppily wrapped around her head has fallen down her back.

  Get your fucking hand off her shoulder. Off those Hello Kittys.

  I’ve finally nailed the elusive thing that Daisy and Rachel have in common. It’s the glow.

  I’m catching only snatches of what Dr. Kiwi is telling me about the surgery. A .22 Long in the hip. No major organs damaged. No ID chip. One night of observation.

  “Are you listening?” Dr. Kiwi, impatient. “Daisy will watch your dog tonight for free; she’s amassing service hours for her Ivy League campaign.”

  I nod distractedly. I need to whisk Carl out of Daisy’s orbit. My head is fast-forwarding the tape. I’m picturing what he would do with that innocent braid and the prison of wires that clamp her teeth. With Rachel, it was her pierced ears and heart earrings. I dreamed about what happened to Rachel’s ears.

  “Carl.” I turn a little more. Raise my voice. “Carl.”

  He shrugs and bows to Daisy. “My master calls.”

  Outside, alone with Carl, I feel no relief. He’s already opening the door to the backseat again. What’s with the fucking backseat?

  I reach around him and slam the door. “Up. Front.”

  “Daisy says she can’t take Barfly because her mom’s allergic,” Carl says. “And she kicks things.”

  “We. Aren’t. Keeping. The dog.”

  Daisy, safe in the little yellow house.

  In the car, my nose is immediately assaulted by the salty odor of Carl’s sweat, or the leftover smell of shot dog, or both. It’s all OK, I’m telling myself. After the dog’s surgery, I’m down to $3,473.43. That includes subtracting Carl’s tipping budget. I’d confirmed while counting out the cash that he’d stolen $60 out of my wallet. He has $30 left. Knowing this for sure made me feel better.

  I console myself that we will only be a few hundred miles behind schedule by staying overnight. If I leave the dog behind right now, there is a chance that Carl will shut down. So I will use this time practically. Figure out where to dump the car early. Buy a little dog food, plastic sheeting, and a blanket to cover the premium leather backseat. Let Carl lick a Dreamsicle. Talk him into a haircut, shorter, with a little rinse on the gray. If we have to, we can shave him bald.

  Carl is oblivious to my internal morale boosting. He’s unfolding a homemade pamphlet he must have picked up on the paper-cluttered desk inside the clinic.

  From this angle, I make out the spidery shape of a tree, drawn freehand, and a guy’s name. Matthew. I’m guessing this is a plea from a tree service guy who will be out of business soon if his skill at shaping trees in real life is not better than drawing them. Carl is engrossed by the piece of paper.

  I count to three. “Carl. Listen. You have to cut back on all your requests. Your conditions.”

  He delivers a hard stare. “My preacher always said, Listen, at the pulpit right before he read a Bible verse. I’ve always thought of it as kind of an order.”

  Carl thrusts the piece of paper to my face so the rest of the words are no longer obscured.

  Never forget, it reads.

  Matthew 13:42.

  Not a man’s name—a Bible verse about a blazing furnace. He flips the pamphlet over. He points at the hand-drawn map, to a tiny X off a farm road.

  Is that X for Rachel?

  “Listen,” he says. “New condition. We’re going here.”

  16

  Carl is pretending to snap pictures, bringing his hands up to his face, pressing a finger on a button that isn’t there. He’s like the woman at Mrs. T’s knitting nothing. He stands in the middle of a grassy field, weeds up to his knees, about two hundred yards from me. Black clouds are boiling on the horizon. A few buildings are scattered across the property like matchboxes, but otherwise it is all grass and emptiness.

  We’d backtracked on this country road once, twice, three times before we found it. It could be any isolated ranch. Any gravel turnoff with a Keep Out sign.

  Carl insists he’s just a tourist, a student of history—that he found the flier on the ve
terinarian’s bulletin board.

  There is no remnant of the smoking ruin, the religious compound eight miles out of Waco that was blasted off the earth by the FBI twenty-five years ago, killing more than eighty people, including babies. No trespassers but us—a man pirouetting in a field and a girl with hair being torn apart by the wind. This private field is still owned by the Branch Davidians, and no one is selling tickets.

  A developer once had plans to turn the site of the Waco siege into a biblical amusement park, but Waco is very good at cleaning its bloody carpet and forgetting. There is also still no historical marker in town noting that the courthouse hosted one of the most grisly lynchings in U.S. history in 1916. Ten thousand people gawked. The most giddy took fingers and toes of the burned body as souvenirs and mailed manufactured postcards to friends.

  I know all of this because Carl read to me from the angry, informative pamphlet on our drive over. Carl has a nice voice for reading aloud, with a lilting inflection. With every word, I imagined him cheerfully reading to my sister, tied up in the backseat of his pickup, while she had no choice but to listen.

  Since then, the raised bumps on my arms, the ragged knot in my chest, have settled in. Carl’s behavior in the field, like a child at play, is deeply wrong. Yet I don’t feel like this is The Place. He is not searching for anything at all out there.

  I watch him frolic, and the questions I’m not ready to ask keep pounding. Did my sister have a flat tire on her bike? Did you offer to throw it in your truck to get it fixed? Did she run across you shooting a photograph on her route? Did she stop to ask about it? What moment did she realize her mistake? Did she say anything at the end? All these and hundreds more catalogued in my files and journals.

  The air is churning, half-hot, half-cool, cream being poured into hot coffee. The disquieting way Texas storms roll in.

  I turn back to the small brick memorial by the gate, the only thing that marks the site of the massacre. A litter of rocks and coins stretches across the top of the brick wall. I know the Greek roots of the neatly arranged pennies and nickels and quarters—a myth that the dead need money for passage on the boat that rows them away from the living.