The Waking Dark

by Robin Wasserman

  The rest of the month was dominated, as per usual, by election drama, which this year culminated in a mayoral victory by local businessman and walking comb-over Mickey Richards. Known to the satisfied customers who drove off his car lot as Mouse – and to the former football players who’d shared his high school locker room as Mouse Dick – the new mayor had coasted to an easy victory. It didn’t hurt that, a couple of years before, he’d recruited a corporate tenant to inhabit the refurbished power plant on the edge of town – a white elephant into which a previous mayoral regime had sunk millions the town didn’t have. But Mayor Mouse’s real selling points were one: his financial involvement in the reconstruction of the Church of the Word, which had burned down on the day of killing. And two: his key campaign promise, the firing of Oleander’s long-serving chief of police, Richard B. Hayes.

  The almost total absence of surviving murderers to imprison had left behind a free-floating lynch mob’s worth of blame. It had, unsurprisingly, settled on the town’s top cop. In his decade in office, Hayes had established a long and undistinguished record of crosswalk management, the occasional meth-lab bust, and the quiet fixing of parking tickets for any teacher willing to give his kid an A. The killing day had overwhelmed his mediocre investigative abilities, and his final conclusions were best summed up as: “A lot of people had a bad day.” Occasionally, when pressed for more, Hayes suggested, “Must’ve been something in the air.”

  November meant the annual all-church bake sale, its funds buying Thanksgiving dinners for indigents all across eastern Kansas, its participants vying eagerly for bragging rights that would last well through Easter. This year’s sale, in honor of the recent church groundbreaking, was co-chaired by Ellie King, who everyone agreed had, of late, gone a bit spooky around the eyes. Something about the way she looked through you, as if aiming for your soul but coming out clear the other side.

  November meant football and cheerleaders and a warm beer on a cold night rooting for a team that had not a chance in hell of winning, and a rote moment of silence for the lost soul Nick Shay and the assistant coach who’d killed him. The moment was briefer than intended, broken as it was by the howls of the marching band, who’d just discovered the feces that certain thuggish members of the team had secreted in their instruments. This, too, or at least some crude and beastly act like it, was tradition. The participation of Jeremiah West – about whom the thuggish branch of the team had harbored its suspicions until he’d turned up at practice this season a new and brutish man – was not.

  By November, Daniel Ghent was finally sleeping through the night. Though he still had nightmares of bullets and blood, he no longer jerked awake at two a.m. in a puddle of his own sweat, and he never remembered them in the morning.

  There was no Founders’ Day tradition in Oleander, no bunting-bowed ceremony of child-chanted couplets and paeans to hometown pride. It was an odd absence in the communal calendar, odder still in a town that had been founded twice. The first settlers arrived in the fall of 1855, Boston abolitionists determined to ensure Kansas’s entrance to the Union as a free state.

  There are towns in the Midwest where residents can trace their heritage back to Civil War days – where even the meth-addled Dumpster divers can map out the exact boundaries of their forebears’ ancestral homestead. But not in Oleander. Here history stretched back no further than 1899, because here, while the rest of the country celebrated the birth of their Lord and awaited the birth of a new century, Oleander died. It was a Christmas Day fire. That much was known, but nothing more – not how it began, or why, or how it happened that not a single resident survived. On Christmas Eve, there had been 1,123 souls living in the town. By sundown the next day, there were none.

  There were charred bones and piles of ash, and that was all.

  They founded a new town on Oleander’s mass grave, and gave it the same name. They never spoke of the dead; they spotted no ghosts. The new town filled up with strangers who saw the possibilities of cheap property and ripe fields rather than the outlines of buildings that no longer stood and the gray dust of a cremated world. The new Oleander bustled and shone, its determined noise drowning out any echoes of the past. Grass and flowers and trees sprang from fallow ground. The scents of corn and life drove out the lingering smoke, and finally, the fire and its carpet of bones could be safely buried in the past and allowed to slip through the cracks of collective memory. But the earth had memory of its own.

  Christmas in Oleander now was a twinkling wonderland, complete with an unexpected Christmas Eve snowfall. No one but Grace Tuck and her parents remembered that little Owen had been meant to play baby Jesus in the winter pageant. The Tucks skipped Christmas that year. Grace – no one called her Gracie anymore – had frozen pizza in front of the TV, trying not to look at the corner where the tree should have been. Her mother had not come out of her room since the night before, while her father had been drunk since Thanksgiving.

  They weren’t the only family in town to bypass the festivities: Ellie King gave herself up to a marathon prayer session in the skeleton of the half-rebuilt church. While she was out, her father packed up the last of his belongings and carted them over to the Sunflower, a sad apartment complex for a sad assemblage of men whose families had moved on without them. The daughter who’d once been his secret favorite, back before she turned into a bigger zealot than her mother, promised she’d come visit the next morning. She never got around to it.

  The remaining Prevette brothers sought salvation in the form of hammers and spray paint, laying midnight waste to the town crèche. They broke every window at town hall before graffitiing giant red genitalia across its century-old stone face. Scott signed his name at the bottom.

  Daniel Ghent was alone. The Preacher had taken to the road; the Preacher had not been home in three days; the Preacher had developed a habit of sleeping on the street, in small lean-tos improvised from cardboard and plastic wrap, the better to stay close to his flock. The Preacher had been claimed by God, and Milo had been claimed first by social services, then by his mother. Giuliana Larkin had materialized in the Preacher’s life a few years after Daniel’s mother died, and dematerialized before Milo was on solid food. For good, they’d all thought. But then came the killing day and Daniel’s turn in the media spotlight, and she’d spotted Milo on the evening news. A week later, she was back and settled into a house on the luckier side of town. She’d needed only one efficient hour to pack a small red suitcase for Milo, then pack Milo into a small red Civic. One hour to dissolve any illusions Daniel might have had of a family. This year there would be no reason to feign a belief in Santa and no need to hastily wrap an old stuffed animal from the bottom of Milo’s toy chest with a card attached reading “Love, Dad.” Around the Ghent house, there lately didn’t seem to be much reason for anything.

  Jeremiah West’s Christmas was picture-perfect, at least judging from the family portrait that topped the family’s annual Christmas letter. The West patriarch, it was reported, had posted record earnings in farm-equipment repair. Mother West intended to spend the winter perfecting her pie recipe in time for the spring bake-off. This year nothing would stop her from taking home the blue ribbon, not even her “dear neighbor” Maddie Thomas’s “white-knuckle grip on the trophy” thanks to her “thoroughly reliable pumpkin pie.” (The letter’s careful breeziness here could not disguise the bitter determination underlying this upcoming grudge match.) The letter detailed Jeremiah’s record-breaking rushing and receiving stats, but not the joyriding escapade for which he’d spent a night in jail.

  Winter passed, cold and barren, with hearty meals and stoked fires, empty streets and packed bars. Down at the Yellowbird, where Old Winston had been a constant fixture, beers were hoisted in his honor, their departed patron saint of lost weekends. The regulars lived for that time of night when the door would swing open and a sullen Jule Prevette – always in those mannish combat boots and distinctly unmannish fishnets – would arrive to escort her new stepfather hom
e.

  Oleander thawed, snow melted, crops sprouted, and the Preacher prepared for the end. He saw the angels of death shadowing their prey; he saw Satan’s handmaidens digging their pit to hell. Oleander thawed, but the chill lingered in the shadow that was cast over the town, promise of dark days to come. Only the Preacher saw the signs. Only the Preacher knew what lay beneath the earth, the darkness stirred up by the misguided creatures above. Only the Preacher heard the song whispered by the budding branches, the end the end the end of days. The Preacher warned them, though they would not heed. So be it. When the time came, they would be lost to the shadows. When the pit opened and loosed its demons upon the world, he would be prepared.

  He would take care of his own.

  The year passed from Sunday to Sunday, the churches vying for souls with brimstone sermons, potluck dinners, bingo nights, and the ever-shifting tiles on the welcome signs that hung by their doors:

  FREE COFFEE. EVERLASTING LIFE. MEMBERSHIP HAS ITS PRIVILEGES.

  STAYING IN BED SHOUTING “OH GOD!” DOES NOT CONSTITUTE GOING TO CHURCH.

  YOU HAVE ONE NEW FRIEND REQUEST FROM JESUS: ACCEPT OR DENY.

  DO NOT WAIT FOR THE HEARSE TO TAKE YOU TO CHURCH.

  EVEN SATAN BELIEVES IN GOD.

  IT’S THE TEN COMMANDMENTS, NOT THE TEN SUGGESTIONS.

  SEVEN DAYS WITHOUT GOD MAKES ONE WEAK.

  DOWN IN THE MOUTH? TRY A FAITH LIFT.

  SANTA CLAUS NEVER DIED FOR ANYONE.

  SIGN BROKEN. MESSAGE INSIDE.

  GOD SHOWS NO FAVORITISM, BUT WE DO – GO ROYALS!

  THINK IT’S HOT HERE? IMAGINE HELL.

  Eventually, though it never seemed possible through the days of clouds and frost, the sun returned, and with it the birds and the leaves and a planting festival as exuberant as the harvest extravaganza. Amanda West took second prize in the bake-off; the 4-H club showed off its wares, its hand-churned butter and free-range goats; the high school’s ag class staged the annual slaughter and barbecue of its chickens. Grace Tuck rode the rickety Ferris wheel and threw up behind the custard stand. Daniel Ghent watched Milo’s Cub Scout troop perform a knot-tying demonstration; he watched from a distance, and left before the parents crowded the muddy field to congratulate their precocious offspring.

  Eventually, though it never seemed possible, Eisenhower High School emptied its hallways for the summer and a lucky few, with a fanfare of halfhearted speeches and tossed caps, got to leave it for good. Jeremiah West was not among them, but – small consolation – at least got to join the rest of the team’s rising seniors in the ritual streaking across the stage.

  Summer was, traditionally, too hot for traditions. Summer was for sitting on porches sipping lemonade – or talking wistfully of a time when summer meant sitting on porches sipping lemonade, when there were fewer bills to pay and no DVDs to watch, and of how in this mythical past, this rustic paradise of outhouses and unlocked doors, life had been good. Summer was when the gossip that had been fermenting all year was finally ready to pour. Tempers rose with the heat; grudges defrosted; things got interesting. This summer was no different, except that as August approached and blanched the town with its white heat and its memories of the killing day, the rumors took on a new intensity. It was as if the murders themselves had become Oleander tradition. Any argument, any lovers’ quarrel, any innocent encounter in the new drugstore, catty-corner to the old, carried the seeds of potential violence. Surely it was only a matter of time before one would bloom. People waited; people watched. People whispered: about the source of Mayor Mouse’s campaign funding, about the Tucks’ failing marriage and the way that girl of theirs wandered with no apparent supervision, turning up in the strangest places at all hours of day and night. They noted, with their communal eye, the way that man looked at his stepdaughter Jule, who seemed always to be by his side. They knew the King girl had turned into a bigger Jesus nut than ever, as they knew about the restraining order Milo Ghent’s mother had taken out against his father and half brother – and about the way Daniel had taken to lurking in bushes, just to catch a forbidden glimpse.

  They never stopped talking about the murders, but by the time summer had fully settled itself over the town, they’d learned to once again talk of other things, the pettier the better. Somehow, the town talked itself back to life.

  They never talked of Cassandra Porter.

  There had been no trial for the sole surviving Oleander killer. Cassandra Porter, who could not remember her crime, pleaded not guilty by reason of mental disease or defect. The DA offered a deal: conviction with a sentence of twenty years to life, to be served not in a maximum-security prison but the slightly cushier state mental hospital.

  She supposed she should have wanted to fight. Her lawyer had explained: If it was true she’d lapsed into some kind of fugue state, an insanity with the life span of a fruit fly, then she was innocent. At least in the eyes of the law. (If, on the other hand, she’d purposefully squeezed the air out of Owen Tuck’s lungs… if she, Cassandra Porter, being of sound mind and body, had held the boy in her hands and ended him, with malice aforethought, for reasons her brain now contrived not to remember? She was, as they say, guilty as sin.) These were the issues her lawyer walked her through as she lay in a hospital bed recovering from the leap she couldn’t remember taking. Floating on a morphine cloud, dizzy with the pain of twelve broken bones, she nodded along, pretended to listen, and let her parents decide for her.

  They had, in short order, decided to deliver her up to the criminal justice system, then pack their belongings and skip town. The Porters had settled with relatives in a faraway coastal city where they could pretend to whoever asked that their smart, successful daughter was off at boarding school – or perhaps that she’d never existed at all. Cass knew this because of the emails they sent, in lieu of calling or visiting or sending the packages of cookies and clean underwear the lawyer had repeatedly told them they were allowed. She knew this, but not the city to which they’d moved, the relatives with whom they were staying, or the address where they could be found.

  No one told her what had happened to the house. She preferred to imagine it intact, her belongings stored away in the bedroom she’d lived in since she was three years old, each scrapbook, homework assignment, stuffed animal, memory filed in its proper place. Gathering dust, maybe. But still, somehow, hers. Impossible to imagine the house given over to strangers, the kitchen where she’d been planning to bake cupcakes for the student-council election given over to someone else’s TV dinners. The dining room where she would have filled out her neat stack of college applications crowded with someone else’s awkward Thanksgivings. The living room couch where she’d spent more than a few nights waiting, in vain, for Jeremiah West to take off her clothes or in any way indicate he hoped she would do so – cushioning some other, happier daughter, one with a future rather than just a past.

  She tried not to think about that. As she tried not to think about the baby.

  What she did to the baby.

  After, she jumped out the window. That’s what they told her, and when she refused to believe them, they showed her the video. The nanny cam captured life in a fuzzy black and white, but the sequence of events was clear. There she was, like the distressed damsel in a D-grade horror movie, creeping into the baby’s room as the audience shrieked at her to stop. She’d shrieked, too, when the lawyer first showed her the video, and she’d watched herself lift the baby from his crib. But the figure on-screen continued with silent determination no matter how loudly the real Cassandra screamed. She pushed Gracie Tuck out of the way, moved calmly to the window, and, with no visible hesitation on her dim face, flung herself into the night. Cass remembered none of it. Nothing but waking in the dirt, in pain, staring up at the police, the flashing lights, and Gracie Tuck’s empty eyes.

  That was what she saw, every night, when she waited for sleep to rescue her. Gracie’s dead eyes.

  The broken bones had eventually healed. It was the infection that follow
ed that left her floating for months in blissful oblivion. In that timeless time of fever haze, she would close her eyes in one impersonal room and wake up in another, always surrounded by strangers. There was something wrong with her blood. That was what they told her, when they told her anything, which wasn’t often. She was a possession of the state now, like a sewage pipe or a garbage compactor. She was broken, and so they would fix her. But you didn’t tell a sewage pipe what was wrong with it, and you didn’t hold its hand when the pain kept it awake all night, writhing in sweaty sheets, begging for help. You didn’t explain to a garbage compactor why you were performing this test or that one, or which ones would hurt.

  Later, when she was healthy again, and the questions came one after another after another, she would realize how good she’d had it. There was an ease and simplicity to being an object, to lying still and letting the world exert its will.

  When she was healthy again, they’d locked her in the cell. It had no bars, just a bed, a desk, a sink, a toilet, and softly padded walls. They allowed her books, but no newspapers or magazines, nothing that would tether her to the outside world. Emails from her parents were printed out and delivered to her room, until the day the emails stopped. Cass had seen plenty of movies set in mental hospitals. All of them played variations on a theme: moon-eyed inmates drifting about a sterile hospital lounge, playing checkers and shouting at shadows; inmates forced to bare their souls in a group-therapy circle of trust; dazed and cooperative inmates lining up for meds; rebellious inmates flattened by linebacker orderlies. But there were no inmates here, as far as Cass could tell, and no orderlies, either. There were no lounges or corridors or electroshock laboratories. No checkers games. There was only Cass, and her room, and the doctor.