Paper Ghosts

by Julia Heaberlin

  I can hold it with my hands and feet tied, while a Texas snake of undetermined heritage circles me. I’ve spent three hours in a loaded garbage dumpster on a 98-degree night with a ripe dead raccoon. I am my own lonely reality show.

  I turn the knob, and my flashlight beam flies in the dark. The walls and the window are painted pitch black. Linoleum sticks to my shoes. The pink porcelain sink has a terrible, peeling sunburn. A pink toilet sits in the corner, lid down. I rake my neck on a cord that runs double across the old bathroom like a clothesline.

  A piece of L-shaped plywood is fitted in the corner. It holds an old enlarger, a stack of pans, a row of bottles. Fixer. Stop bath. Developer. Hypo clear. The fixer has a hole bitten out of it and the liquid has stained its way through the plywood onto the floor.

  The culprit, a rat, is lying dead six inches from my foot.

  In a darkroom where there should be photographs pasted to the walls and clipped to the line for drying, there are no photographs.

  I flip open the lid of the toilet. Dry, but reeking of sewage.

  Two things happen.

  The rat on the floor lets me know he isn’t dead.

  My flashlight clanks into the toilet bowl and dies for good.

  62

  The rotting slats of the swing scrape my back.

  Back, and forth. Back, and forth.

  I punch the button on the flashlight in perfect timing with the push of my foot.

  On, and off. On, and off.

  An exercise in madness. There is no on. The light is stone cold.

  The extra bulb and the batteries are in the backpack. Carl is probably using the backpack as a pillow right now. Maybe he dumped the contents twenty feet from me in the dark once he figured out how heavy it is. Hell, maybe he is twenty feet from me in the dark.

  The swing is lulling me. Now that we’re acquainted, I can see it is the same swing, with the same jagged teeth, as the one in Carl’s book.

  Back, and forth.

  If I push off hard enough, I can see a slice of sky beyond the roofline. Down here, I’m just another one of the shadows gathering on the porch like there’s going to be a surprise party. We had a surprise birthday party for Rachel once. For a second, I saw what her face would look like scared. Thanks to Carl, that is how I almost always picture it.

  The pain pills are a warm ocean lapping at my brain, a jazz singer humming under my skin. The pangs of hunger and the throb in my arm feel like they belong to someone else. The pine trees are rushing, a thunderstorm of leaves, the kind of sound that usually makes me feel like a little girl all tucked in.

  I need to make a plan for the night before I can’t.

  There’s no way I’m finding my way back up to the truck in the dark.

  Early dawn isn’t that far away. Six hours. Maybe five.

  It takes some effort to drag myself up from the swing. My whole body aches. The door is still open. I fumble in the kitchen for one of the straight-back chairs clustered around the small dining table. I scrape the chair noisily down the hall in the dark until it bumps into the sewing cabinet. Can’t think about that.

  I choose the room with the futon and shut the door firmly behind me. Carl’s room.

  Still blind, I tilt the chair under the knob, cross over to the window, and rip away the shade. It clatters down, no problem. The more noise I make now, the more control I feel. A gray balm casts itself coolly over the room, not a lot of light, but enough.

  I unlatch the window, shove it up, and suck in the harsh cinnamon of pine. I wonder if its tonic smell could cure cancer. There are tiny screen holes in my prison.

  I leave the window open. Let bug and man come for me, I need to breathe. From my arm sling, I carefully remove the pain pills, the bag of rocks, and the tampons.

  It was both considerate and disgusting of Carl to leave the tampons. I open the Ziploc bag of rocks and place eight of them in a row on the windowsill, another eight on the tilted edge of the chair seat. I scatter the rest in front of the door. It won’t be much of a warning, but it will be something.

  I pull the broom out of the closet and sweep it across the futon, hoping to disturb anything nesting there. I take my gun out of the holster and place it and the broom on my good side, within easy reach.

  I lay my head down on the dirty mattress and smell Carl’s scent in the fabric whether it is there or not. I feel for the key now hanging around my neck instead of Carl’s.

  I see terrible things inside those drawers on the other side of the door.

  I force my mind back to the trail and the scraps of napkins I’ve left waiting in the trees to guide me out.

  A sudden, delicious rush floods my ears, my arms, my legs, my toes. The pills have been patient, held back by adrenaline. Not anymore.

  The ocean sweeps me out and I let it.

  I can see flashes. My sister’s face. The Marys. Barfly’s eyes.

  I’m back at the napkins. They’re waving at me.

  I watch them transform into beautiful white butterflies beating their wings.

  One by one, they fly away, taking my way out with them.

  63

  When I wake, pale light gilds the pine floor and bare walls. The eight rocks sit undisturbed on the window ledge. The chair is still propped under the doorknob. The broom and my gun are companions beside me. The shade that I tore off its rod lies crumpled in the corner.

  It is 6 A.M., maybe a little earlier. Guessing the time is one thing I was born to do. My trainer could rarely trick me even when he blindfolded me. When I roll off the futon and stand, it feels like a brick struck my right temple. The aching in my arm is a quiet ping in comparison.

  I slide over to the window and peer out at a peach tree, its fruit rotting on the ground where it fell. A stone well with crumbling mortar stands to the west of the tree. Beyond it, I see the glint of a stream where I’m guessing Carl filled my water bottle. My eyes settle back on the well.

  Waterproof watch (resistant @ 300 meters). The thought comes unbidden, and ridiculous. That well is not a thousand feet deep. Maybe ten. At most, a hundred.

  I turn my attention to the rusty umbrella clothesline sticking out of the ground and a neglected patch of dirt that once grew vegetables. Not much farther, the small green oasis ends abruptly in forest. This must have been a happy little haven for an acquitted killer.

  I wiggle the chair out from under the door and let the rocks clatter to the floor.

  Then I listen. Nothing but the early chirping of a few cicadas trying to get the most out of a short life after hibernating for seven or thirteen or seventeen years. The cicadas share an odd love affair with sleeping and prime numbers. I know my cicada trivia, too, Carl.

  I run through the house and rip off every single blackout shade, wondering if they ever kept a kidnapped girl from keeping track of time.

  Either the noxious smell is dissipating or now I’m immune.

  In five minutes, the house is suffused with fresh air and the light of sunrise. I venture outside and walk two slow circles around the house. A piece of brittle, ruined plywood covers the well with a massive rock in the center to keep it in place. Too heavy for me to lift alone. I wonder if the well was hand-dug by Carl’s uncle, or by Carl himself.

  The stream is tiny, full of algae, making me regret last night’s sip of water. I yell Carl’s name. Nothing. I’m thinking about my trainer’s warning—that it is worse to be hunted in the daytime in a strange place than at night in someplace familiar.

  More cicadas are chiming in, ratcheting things up.

  In the kitchen, I search out a rusted butter knife, a sleeve of saltine crackers in an old tin and three orange Gatorades that expired two years ago. I cut away the bad spots on a few peaches. The breakfast feels like a feast.

  Rebooted and ready to go.

  So here I am in the hall ag
ain. The daisy knobs are smiling at me with their round white faces and yellow eyes.

  They are saying, Open up.

  * * *

  —

  The largest door in the cabinet is center-perfect and labeled Big Bertha. It makes me think of Buffalo Bill in Silence of the Lambs and the way he stole only fat girls and starved them so he could use their extra skin to sew his costume. Rachel was thin.

  When I yank on the door and find an old Singer sewing machine tightly strung with beige thread, ready to go, I nearly throw up.

  I didn’t think it was possible to hate Carl more. But every second that passes in front of this hideous cabinet, breathing in its musty stench, sinks me to a deeper, darker place.

  Who do I pick next? Cinderella because he called her that in the notes in his book? Scarlett because my sister and I watched Gone With the Wind countless times one summer, or Poppy because it is my mother’s favorite flower?

  If I’ve learned anything, it’s that every lost girl has exactly the same value. They all deserve to go first.

  The pulse points in my body are hammering away. My hand pulls at the knob for Cinderella. Then Vivian. Mary Louise. Jean. Sophia and Penelope. I tug at the drawers and cabinets in this monster until they are all gaping wide open, and I can be certain.

  I’m staring at cameras.

  Carl didn’t just name George, his traveling camera.

  He named all of his other cameras, too.

  * * *

  —

  The lenses glare back at me like an assortment of empty eye sockets. I can’t place my emotions. Relief that I didn’t find Carl’s macabre trophies? Trepidation that Carl is still in control of the game?

  I grope behind the sewing machine and come up with nothing but dust. I remove Eleanor, a boxy old Kodak Duaflex, and Jean, a vintage Canon with a long accordion neck, and place them on the floor.

  When I studied Carl, I also studied cameras. I could name almost anything set in front of me. I search the back of the cubbyholes that held Eleanor and Jean. They are otherwise empty, so for the moment I’m going to assume there is nothing in this cabinet but Carl’s camera collection.

  A large, shallow drawer that I didn’t notice last night runs across the bottom of the chest. No daisy knob, just a small keyhole.

  I get it, Carl. The little key to nothing goes to something.

  I strip off the necklace and kneel down. I don’t find out if the key fits because I don’t need to use it—when I tug the drawer, it topples out, and half the contents stuffed inside slide onto the floor.

  More paper ghosts.

  64

  Shadows and light, angles and blurs. I’m guessing Carl stored at least a hundred photographs, all 8X10, all black-and-white, in the drawer. It took four one-armed trips to carry all of the pictures to the living room couch, where I’m hastily sorting through them.

  There are no closeups of the lady in the rain or the girl in the desert. No broken bodies, no bones scattered beside rusted cars at the bottom of a Piney Woods gully. No Marys. Most of the pictures I’ve never seen before. At least a quarter of them are portraits of dogs.

  All of them are filled with the dimensions of Carl I like to deny.

  My chest tightens with all that he provokes. The regret, the triumph, the longing. The idea that we miss so much waiting for what is right in front of us, that the ordinary is magical, that the exotic is in our backyard, that every animal has a soul, that there is this terrible, wonderful novel in every human being. He shoots through a dark glass. Nothing lasts, he’s saying. Not joy, not pain.

  Carl never aimed to be in the right place to preserve an iconic moment in history. Marilyn Monroe’s skirt flying up, a busboy on the floor trying to comfort Robert Kennedy after he was shot. Carl shot what was right in front of him. The proud dog, the dying tree, the poor child wearing an adult’s face, the rich adult wearing a child’s.

  I feel suddenly exposed. It’s like a camera is pointed at me through every one of the windows I’ve so recklessly flung open. I’m fighting the urge to leave, to be done with Carl’s house in the woods.

  I turn to the next photograph quickly, and the next and the next and the next, hardly seeing them as they whir by. But something registers. I stop. Go back.

  Wisteria is blooming in front of a simple house.

  Two story, white frame, one window box, a pitched roof. A girl is balanced on top of it, wearing an old flowered sheet as a cape.

  Her arms are stretched from her sides like she’s already soaring. Her eyes are closed. A thin mattress from a crib is lying on the grass to catch her if for some reason her plan doesn’t work.

  I don’t need to use my imagination to make up what happens next in this picture. I was standing just outside the frame.

  My sister jumped and broke her ankle and two ribs.

  It was seven years before she disappeared. I had just turned five.

  If Carl took this photo, he must have been spying on us for a very long time.

  * * *

  —

  I’m tugging every white scrap off the branches as I hike up, erasing my footprint.

  I shove them into the sack I created out of the Hawaiian shirt, which is hauling two orange Gatorades, a large selection of Carl’s photographs, the rusted butter knife, the pain pills, and the water bottle, still full, a backup. I’m less worried about consuming old Gatorade than parasites from the stream.

  Wherever I remove a napkin, I leave one of Carl’s rocks at the base of the tree. In the daytime, I can see that he chose them carefully—there is a little sparkle to them in the light dribbling down through the branches.

  Like all trails, it’s steeper on the way up. With only one working arm, my headache still pounding, it feels like Mount Everest.

  I’d gotten so used to the cicadas’ cacophony and the cool cover of pine trees that I am fifteen minutes in before I realize the screeching insects have abruptly shut off like they were on a switch.

  A storm is coming, maybe a bad one. The last time insects gave me such an ominous signal, the wind flattened my Girl Scout tent while I cowered in it with an anxious girl like me named Lily, the one who hid food under her bed and never ate it.

  Up or back down? What if Carl managed this climb, and the truck is gone? The pine needles are beginning to chatter and dance. The breeze filtering down is raising goosebumps under my shiny sweat.

  The decision is simple. I won’t spend another second at Carl’s cabin. I plunge forward, visualizing the truck still parked in the clearing, the extra key still hidden in the wheel well, Carl at a Whataburger mirage chowing down.

  The last thirty steps to the clearing feel like a mile. The truck hasn’t moved. Barfly is tied to a tree, whining. Trees are going crazy. The sky is an ugly black finger painting.

  As soon as Barfly sees me, he tugs at his leash and barks in frantic, staccato beats. I can’t believe Carl abandoned him out here while he probably sits inside the truck, radio blaring, chatting to Walt.

  I finish that thought in my head just as I reach Barfly to untie him. Something’s wrong. It doesn’t match with the respect I saw in those dog portraits or Carl’s obstinate affection for Barfly. Carl loves dogs more than people. More likely, instead of people.

  I whip around. Two figures are running out of the trees straight at me. Barfly is urgent and snarling. The men from the bar? Who tried to run me down? Behind them, I glimpse Carl, a gun in his hand. A .22. What is going on? One of the truck windows shatters. Or Carl aimed for my head and missed.

  The crack of the gunshot seems to surprise the men, too. They make the mistake of turning their backs to look. I sling the full weight of my makeshift sack as hard as I can at the closest one, stunning him.

  I whip the sack again. He stumbles down easily. In the daylight, I see my pursuers for what they are: thirtysomethings with
memory muscle and flab, whose current exercise rigor is probably mowing the lawn.

  Barfly is going nuts, straining at his leash. The guy still standing is making his move on Carl. Carl fires. The scream is a shrill, bone-shattering sound that shouldn’t ever come out of a man his size. He’s on the ground, clutching his leg.

  Carl has already pulled out the duct tape and rope from my backpack.

  There’s blood in the dirt near Carl, but I can’t tell where exactly it’s coming from. Carl roughly tapes the man’s ankles together, then tosses me the duct tape. “Wrap that one. Hands and feet.”

  “Hey, wait a minute…” My guy, groggy as he is, has started to assess his future. The threatening sky, the snarling dog, the wild-eyed old man now looping a rope a few feet away.

  “No talking,” Carl admonishes. “Shove him over here when you’re done.”

  In minutes, both men are expertly coiled to a tree.

  “Cartoon bandits.” Carl stands back, grinning. “Nice job with the luau purse. We’ll wait out the storm with Barfly in the truck. Then we’ll get their story.”

  He grabs Barfly’s leash to unwrap it and whispers something in his ear. Barfly licks his cheek.

  “We are not a team,” I protest dully, but the thunder drowns me out.

  65

  “Explain,” I demand.

  We’re in our old positions. Barfly in the back, Carl at the wheel, me in the passenger seat. The wind and rain are slamming away, the thunder almost constant. I’m not afraid of the storm. I’m pretty sure nothing will flatten this Chevy truck.

  “I took a walk,” Carl says, “and look what I found when I got back.”

  “Explain better.”

  “I tied Barfly to the tree and went to take a dump in the woods. We had just woken up. I heard a car engine. These two parked about two hundred yards back and got out. Same car from the other night. I just waited while they chatted. Couldn’t hear much. Fat one’s named Marco. They mentioned something purple. What took you so long? Did you find the girls?”