From Away

by Phoef Sutton

  “How did she die?”

  “Oh, she just did that on purpose. Just to get me in trouble. That’s all she ever wanted was to see me sad. I was just giving her a bath, and she made herself look like that. We were in a hotel, and I knew if I left her there I’d get in trouble, so I put her in my suitcase and brought her here.” She looked down at the clumsily wrapped parcel. “She looks all quiet, but don’t let her fool you. She’s just pretending. I hear her screaming some nights. I don’t even sleep good anymore.”

  I heard the front door open and Moseby’s voice calling out, “Nan?”

  She looked at me with worried eyes. “You won’t tell him, will you?”

  “I think I’m going to have to.”

  “Do you think he’ll make fun of me?” she asked.

  TWENTY-SIX

  There are places where bad things happen every day. Where cleaning up after death and disaster is a commonplace task. Fox Island isn’t one of them. So, the discovery of Jessica Delecourt’s body wasn’t something that could be easily slotted into anyone’s routine. Certainly not Donny Beirko’s. He stood looking at Jellica’s mummified body in the drawer with a mixture of disgust and irritation, refusing to accept that it was what it so clearly was.

  “You sure this is her?” he asked. He’d heard the story from Kathleen, he’d rejected it, and it clearly pissed him off to find himself in the middle of it.

  I told him I didn’t know for sure if it was her. But it was somebody dead in a drawer, so he probably ought to do something about it.

  Donny grunted unhappily. Doing something could only mean calling the mainland police in and then standing around like a helpless small-town cop while they did all their mainland police shit. It must have been a humiliating prospect.

  “Are you sure it’s even a body?” He squatted next to it for a closer look. “I saw something like this in a carnival in Bangor once. Turned out to be a dead monkey.” He reached out as if he might unwrap her, and I reminded him that this was probably what they called a crime scene. He nodded and stood up; I wasn’t sure if it was on account of my advice or queasiness at the prospect of touching the thing.

  When the mainland cops arrived, they were every bit as officious as Donny must have feared. Bustling into the place, skeptical at first that anything a Barney Fife-type like Beirko could say would possibly hold water, then pushing him aside at the sight of the body and asking, “What happened here?” as if there could be a simple or even comprehensible answer to that question.

  I told them the story as well as I could while leaving out everything that actually mattered. I had come here because a friend had recognized Nancy Delecourt from a child endangerment case in New York, and this friend wanted me to check to see if Mrs. Delecourt’s daughter was all right.

  “And is this the daughter?”

  Well, I couldn’t really say, could I? After all, I’d never seen Jessica Delecourt. In life. I looked down at Jellica, still wrapped in her plastic shroud, looking so much like the withered monkey from Donny’s freak show. It was her. The structure of her face, the color of her hair, the faded pattern of her dress. If I opened my mind, I knew she’d be there with me, watching this scene with wide, glittering eyes. Was she happy that she’d been found? Did it matter to her that her mother might finally be brought to account for killing her? That her little body would now be laid to rest with whatever honors this sorry world could give her? I wasn’t going to find out. That was a door that was going to remain resolutely closed.

  So, all I could say was that she matched the description my friend had given of the little girl in question. The cops went to Nancy Delecourt, but she simply denied that there was anything human in the drawer. She’d had a daughter once, she explained, but she’d been replaced by that thing, and she didn’t know where her real daughter was now. She was glad, though, that the cops were here, because they could take that thing away now, couldn’t they? Wasn’t that their job? It made too much noise at night, she told them, and she was sick of having it around.

  Moseby was no help either. He just sat in the kitchen with a beer and cursed his dead wife whenever anyone asked him anything. It was the forgotten man, Donny Beirko, who came up with the name of the one person on the islands who could identify this body as Jessica Delecourt’s.

  So, it was Donny’s fault that Kathleen was already gone by the time they let me and Neil head back over to Fox Island. Not that I’d been dying to break the news to her, to be the one to confirm her worst fears. But to not be with her when she heard, to be out of touch with her while she went through the ordeal of identifying Jellica’s body, seemed more than wrong. It seemed impossible. There had to be a way I could be with her or talk to her. But no one in the Rockland County Police Department could tell me anything about where Kathleen was or where Jellica’s body had been taken. All I could do was sit in the living room of our house on the Thorofare, watch the snowdrifts pile up in the moonlight outside, and not be with Kathleen. “She’s bound to come back, Sam. Or at least call. She’s bound to call.” Your mother said that every now and then, just to break the silence. I felt sorry for her; the news of the little dead girl being found on Brown’s Head Island had horrified her, and now she felt confused and vulnerable because there was obviously a lot more to the story that no one was telling her. I didn’t have the heart to explain it now. I wasn’t sure I ever would.

  More silence. She looked over at Neil, but he had dropped off to sleep, or at least pretended to. They hadn’t spoken since we’d come back from Brown’s Head. I hadn’t been sure Neil would even want to come back to the house with me, but as little as he fully understood what had just happened, he knew I didn’t want to be alone. We walked into the kitchen and sat down, drinking coffee instead of beer, since beer seemed only to remind us of Moseby. Over the baby monitor, I could hear Charlotte telling you a bedtime story. I dipped the volume for Neil’s sake. One crisis at a time, I thought.

  When your mother came down and saw Neil, she stopped dead still. A whole lot of stuff would probably have happened right then. Maybe Charlotte would have run back upstairs. Maybe she would have started crying. Maybe she would have thrown a punch at Neil. Maybe they would have run into each other’s arms and made up right then and saved us all a lot of trouble.

  I’ll never know. Because I headed it off, launching into the story of how we’d found the body of a child in Moseby’s house and how the police had taken Moseby and his daughter in for questioning. A story like that puts everyday heartache on hold. That’s why I told her. I thought if I shook her world up enough, she might see what really mattered and try to make things up with Neil. I had the same hopes for him. Instead, they just sat in silence, and all I’d achieved was a truce in their current cold war. I started to think it might have been better if I’d just let them fight and get it over with. The snow fell heavier outside.

  Neil’s fake sleep breathing slowly shifted into real sleep. Your mother curled up on the sofa and began to snore. I was left alone with my thoughts. Never good company.

  I must have nodded off myself, because the sound of Kathleen’s truck struggling down the road startled me awake. The wind whipped the snow sideways through the beams from her headlights as she lumbered to a stop in the driveway. I left Neil and your mother sleeping and hurried to the kitchen door.

  She had on a sweater but no coat, and I knew she must be freezing. She didn’t seem to care.

  “I didn’t think you’d make it back tonight,” I said.

  “They didn’t keep me long.” I got her a coffee. She stood at the window, melting snow dripping from her sweater onto the floor. “I don’t think they could figure out what to ask me. I told them I’d be back tomorrow. I just had to come back to the island to get my things.”

  “I thought you already packed your things.”

  She gave a half-smile. “I did.”

  Did that mean she’d come back for me? I felt slightly ashamed of myself for letting selfish hope intrude on this conversat
ion, so I quickly changed the subject. I tried small talk. I asked her if the cops had brought her back. She said she’d taken her boat back and forth. She loved that boat, she said. She was going to miss it.

  “It was her?” I asked, finally.

  “You know it was,” Kathleen said.

  I nodded, getting ready to tell her everything that had happened.

  “Is she all right?” Kathleen asked before I could start.

  “What do you mean?”

  She looked impatient. “Jellica. How is she?”

  I couldn’t answer right away. It was a question I’d never expected from her.

  “Kathleen….”

  “Just tell me, Sam,” she said, quiet, urgent.

  I leaned back against the sink. “I thought we both decided I was crazy.

  “Come on, Sam.”

  I shut my eyes. “I haven’t….” I hadn’t what? Heard from her? Contacted her? Christ, I didn’t even have terminology to use with this shit that didn’t make me sound like Madame Arcati. “I don’t know how she is.”

  “They hadn’t examined—they hadn’t cut her open yet, but the pathologist thought she’d probably been drowned. Like you said. Did Jellica tell you that?”

  It was so hard to explain. “More like showed me.”

  “You said she was dangerous. Why would she be dangerous?”

  “She’s just a kid, Kathleen. She’s scared. Angry. Possessive. She doesn’t really mean any harm. But she wants you…to herself. She’s so alone.”

  Kathleen flinched. “Is she still alone?”

  I looked away from her.

  “I mean, it can’t be,” she said. “It can’t be that all this shit we feel when we’re alive, we can’t keep feeling that after we die. Then there’s no escape. There’s no peace. There’s no way out.”

  I didn’t have any comfort to offer her. It seemed like a hellish prospect to me, too. I could deal with the absence of heaven. The idea of a big fat nothing after death didn’t scare me. To be honest, it sounded pretty relaxing. But the idea of carrying the baggage of our lives throughout eternity seemed horribly unfair and bleakly exhausting.

  “She was haunting me,” Kathleen said.

  I nodded. “Her father haunted her when she was alive. That’s why her mother was so jealous.”

  “I don’t think she’s haunting me anymore.”

  It was quiet in the room. Only your steady breathing over the baby monitor eased the stillness.

  “When I saw her in the morgue, I felt…quiet. Like there’d been some electrical charge humming through my body for years and somebody just switched it off. This big knot of anxiety I’d had stuck in my throat for as long as I can remember was suddenly unwound. I felt relaxed. Peaceful. And I knew; it’s because she’s gone.” Kathleen laughed. “Jesus, am I just going to think I’m crazy tomorrow morning? Maybe this is all just relief at finding out what really happened to her. Maybe it’s my biochemistry finally getting used to being sober. Maybe I’m coming out of a depression I’ve been in for so long I don’t remember what it feels like to feel good.” She gave a humorless laugh. “Well, I might buy that tomorrow morning, but right now I know it’s bullshit. She’s been with me ever since she died and now she’s not. I want to know why.”

  She was looking at me. God help her, she was looking at me for answers.

  “We found her body,” I tried to explain. “She can rest now.”

  Kathleen shook her head. “I used to think, if she was dead, as least she wouldn’t be suffering anymore. Now I know it wasn’t true. And I don’t see why lying in a cooler in the morgue would give her any peace. I need to know if she’s okay. I need to know that she’s not hurting anymore.”

  I took a breath. “I would think, if you can’t sense her presence—”

  “Sam. Do…whatever it is you do. Talk to her. Or see if she’s even here. If she’s not, if she’s really gone, then I guess that would be good, right? That would mean she’s crossed over or whatever you call it.”

  “I don’t call it anything, Kathleen. I don’t know any more about this than you do. I can’t turn this thing on and off. I don’t even know how it happens. And I don’t want to know. You have to understand, I can’t ever do it again.”

  “Sam. Please.”

  I sat down across from her. “Kathleen, my whole life’s been screwed up by this…power or whatever the hell it is. And nothing I do makes it any better. Denial, acceptance, it’s all the fucking same.”

  “You have a….” I could see her start to say gift and stop herself. I’ll give her credit for being that smart. “An ability.”

  “Yeah. An ability no one wants. And one that I don’t have a clue what to do with. I’m like…did you ever read A Christmas Carol?”

  “What, Tiny Tim, Scrooge?” she asked, irritated.

  “Uh-huh. Remember Marley’s Ghost? His curse was he could see the suffering of the living, but he’d lost the power to do anything about it. I’m like the opposite of that. I see all these spooks and I know what’s hurting them, but I can’t help. So, what’s the point? It’s like I’m watching a closed-circuit TV of some torture chamber, but I can’t stop the pain. I can’t affect anything.”

  “When I was a cop I felt that way a lot of the time.”

  “Yeah. And isn’t that why you quit?”

  That shut her up for a second. But only a second.

  “I know why you don’t want to do it anymore,” she said. “But this one time you can help. You can help me. If you can tell me she’s gone…well, I won’t know if she’s in heaven or if she’s just disappeared, but at least I’ll know she’s not still stuck in place. Still in that bedroom with the windows painted black.”

  I wanted to help her, God knows I did. But it was like I was an alcoholic and she was asking me to take just one drink. I knew if the door opened, I’d never be able to shut it again.

  Telling her no was the hardest thing I’d ever done in my life. Was it hard because I was hurting someone I cared about? Or because I knew if I at least tried to help her, I might see that affection and caring in her eyes that had been there when we kissed the first time? Was it hard because I was resisting temptation and doing the right thing? Or was it hard because I knew it was stupid and cowardly not to help her? How was I to know which was the right impulse? Which voice in my ear was the devil and which was the angel?

  I felt her hand touch mine and looked up at her. There it was. That look of affection I’d been hoping for. Not quite the same as before, of course. Then, it had been mixed with excitement and hope; now, it was tempered with sadness and grief. But the core of it was the same. “Look,” she said, “I don’t know what it takes to…I don’t even know what I’m asking you to do. If it’s too much….”

  Dear God, she was letting me off the hook. It was up to me now. I could decide on my own whether to act or not. Jesus, I hate that.

  “Fuck you!”

  I was yanked from the precipice of decision by Charlotte’s yell from the living room.

  Kathleen and I sprung from our chairs as Neil stomped into the room, heading for the door. I blocked his way—it wasn’t as hard for me to take action in other peoples’ dramas.

  “What the hell’s going on?” I asked.

  Neil’s a big guy; I’d never seen him mad before, so I’d never realized how big he really is. “Out of my way, Sam.”

  “I’m not letting you go like this.”

  “Yeah, you are.”

  “Let him go,” Charlotte called out behind me.

  “Damn it, nobody’s going anywhere,” I shouted at them both. “Jesus Christ, how can you look at what happened today and think that you have problems?! You’re two people who’ve known each other for years and you love each other. The rest is shit, the rest is details! Let it go!”

  If I thought my words of wisdom would chasten them, I was as far off as I usually am.

  “What the fuck do you know about it?” Charlotte said.

  “Just shut up and s
tay out of this,” Neil said. At least they could agree on something.

  “He asked me when I was going to tell Maggie about that video—”

  “I didn’t say that!” Neil protested. “Do you want me to get pissed at you, is that it?”

  “I just want to know what you really think!”

  I made small bleating noises to quiet them down. Not surprisingly, they went unheeded.

  “We were talking about the little girl on the island,” Neil explained, but he was talking to Kathleen, not me. I was clearly on both their shit lists. “About how hard it would be to explain something like that to Maggie. But she thought she ought to. She said she didn’t think kids should be left in the dark about important things. So I asked if, if she was going to explain to Maggie about her video—”

  “Like that’s a reasonable question,” she was in his face now. “Are you saying that’s a reasonable question?”

  “I don’t know, maybe not. But are you ever going to tell her?”

  “No, I’m not. Of course not. I care about what she thinks of me. Why the hell would I tell her?”

  “Then why did you tell me?” The anger suddenly fell out of Neil. “I didn’t want to know that.” Weariness, vulnerability, and bone-deep disappointment filled his eyes.

  Charlotte saw it. Her voice softened. “I wanted you to know. I wanted you to know and still be okay with me.”

  “I wish I was the guy who could do that,” he said, quietly.

  I watched them, my heart pounding in my throat. They were so close. Why didn’t one of them take the step? The right word from either of them and they could start mending this. But I didn’t know what that word might be, and I don’t imagine they did either.

  “Sam?” Kathleen was tugging at my sleeve. I glanced over quickly, not wanting to take my eyes off Neil and Charlotte. Kathleen was looking toward the stairs. “Where’s that snow coming from?” she asked.

  I followed her gaze. Snow was drifting down the stairs. A breeze caught it, whirling in the stairway, twisting it into a little spiral, like a storm seen from a long way off.