The Living and the Dead Page 4

  The rainwater running in streams of mud through his yard brought him back to those horrible jungles in Southeast Asia and a desolate and quickly flooding road that wound through a collection of thatched hut hooches somebody somewhere along the line had dubbed a village. He could still smell the death in the air, the sweet stench of charred human flesh only partially masked beneath the torrential downpour of a ruthless rain.

  Sometimes that all seemed as if it had happened to someone else, and at fifty-seven, it was hard to remember himself as the strapping young soldier he’d been in those days, the idealistic young man who had volunteered to go and kill and probably die on the other side of the world for his country. And that was just fine, as that person was dead and gone, his corpse left behind in those jungles as surely as those who truly had died there.

  Most days, Duck just wanted to forget.

  A long way and a lot of years from that hellish jungle village, he sipped his beer and watched the rain, his mind shifting from distant unpleasant memories to those more recent.

  Poor old Dempsey had collapsed in the sand that morning, drunk as all hell and babbling about the storm that was coming and what it was bringing with it. To most in town Dempsey was just a crazy old bastard that had once run a profitable business. When things went south in Tall Tree Junction he’d taken to working as a local garbage man. Though long since retired, he could still be seen driving around in his work truck, and even now and then wandering onto somebody’s property and emptying their trash. Most townspeople knew Dempsey meant no harm and was usually just confused or drunk, an old man trying to hang onto things long lost, so they paid him little to no mind.

  Duck had found Dempsey drunk and collapsed on the beach before, but that morning he’d been different than usual, with all that talk about something coming. Even though not much rattled Duck these days, Dempsey’s behavior bothered him. The old man wasn’t just drunk and confused like normal when he’d found him. This time he was terrified, like he’d seen a ghost, or worse, bearing down on him. Like he knew something he shouldn’t somehow, something horrifying. Duck had seen fear before, God knew, in all shapes and forms over the years. At eighteen, in 1971, his boots had hit the ground in Vietnam and given him a good long taste of terror he’d never before realized was even possible. The fear in Dempsey that morning wasn’t exactly the same, but it was similar. The old man was wracked with the kind of fear that comes from somewhere so deep inside you don’t even know you’re capable of feeling it until it grabs hold of you.

  Add to that the way Rae Vadoma had been acting of late and it just made matters worse. Duck drove back by her place not long after he dropped off the woman he’d taxied to the cottage, and found Rae and the children still standing listlessly before the mountain of belongings in front of their shack. He watched them through the blurred windshield a while, expecting Rae to acknowledge him, but she’d remained still as stone.

  Eventually he dropped his window and asked if they were all right.

  Rae glanced at him briefly but said nothing.

  “Rae?” he asked again. “What are you doing?”

  “Go home, Duck,” she said so softly it was barely audible above the rain.

  “Look, if you need some help, I—”

  “Still trying to get all them sins forgiven, huh? Little late for karma.”

  A hollow feeling washed over him. “What do you know about my sins?”

  “Just go home.” Rain dripped from her stringy hair. The children watched without comment, eyes tired and sleepy. “It don’t matter now. Not anymore.”

  He left them there in the rain.

  Duck downed another gulp of beer and traded those memories for one of the new woman in town. Lana. Wasn’t often someone like her came around. She was that rare type of person blessed with equal parts brains and beauty, and from his brief interaction with her he’d determined she knew full well how to use both. There was something about her, though. He’d seen it before, felt it before in his own life. She wasn’t just running. She was still on the run. There was a comfort that accompanied the knowledge that you’d outrun your demons, and she didn’t possess it. She was still in the looking-over-her-shoulder stage, another look he recognized well. He saw that look on the faces that came to him as dark memories, faces filled with so many emotions it was hard to grab hold of just one. Terror, disbelief, anger, pleading, and finally at the end, the moment when everything became clear, an acceptance of what he and they knew to be inevitable.

  The end, just like the beginning, was out of their hands, all they controlled was everything in between, and it was too late to change any of that.

  No doubt about it, he thought, that woman’s trouble.

  Duck was about to shut the floodlight off and go back inside when he saw movement near the little cat house. He squinted through the rain, saw the mother cat—a pretty tan one, her tail striped with alternate bands of white and tan—watching him from the side of the shelter. He’d put two entrances and exits on the house so the cats would feel comfortable about getting out of there if need be, and he’d outfitted one with a pair of rubber flaps that acted as a door of sorts. The mother cat had pushed her way through them and out into the rain seconds before, and now stood at the side of the house, eyes glowing and reflecting the floodlight.

  Duck stepped a bit further out the doorway until he felt the rain touch and sweep across him like mist. “You all right?” he asked the cat.

  The animal turned and looked behind her, at the woods. After a moment the cat glanced back at the house, as if to be certain Duck was still there.

  “What are you doing out in the rain? Go on back in your house, little one.”

  Striper, as he sometimes called her, hopped up onto the roof of the cat house and sat at the summit, her stare again fixed on the woods. Beyond those woods were rocky hillsides, beach, and eventually ocean.

  “Never seen her do that before,” Duck muttered. He threw back the rest of his beer, his other hand hesitating over the light switch. He’d learned over the years to trust the instincts of animals. They knew things, saw things, heard and sensed things human beings couldn’t, he had no doubt. Maybe old Dempsey was right. Maybe there was something coming in on this storm, something bad.

  Striper remained perched on the roof of the house Duck had built for her and her family, watching those woods as if convinced something was on its way through them any moment.

  It was late and he was exhausted as hell, but Duck figured he’d stay up a while longer. He moved into the house but left the door open. He put the empty beer bottle next to the kitchen sink then pulled a chair from the table and set it down in the open doorway facing the yard. He wouldn’t be able to sleep now anyway, too many things were still alive in him.

  Duck sat in the chair and wrestled a pack of smokes from his shirt pocket. The only light on in the kitchen was a tiny one over the stove, so he could still see Striper sitting atop the cat house. She was so focused on the woods she barely seemed to notice the storm around her, and showed no indication of getting out of the rain anytime soon. “OK, little one, you and me, we’ll sit here a while and watch the night.” He rolled a cigarette into the corner of his mouth, struck a match and drew hard on the filter. “And whatever else is out there.”

  6

  The extended dusk that preceded night this time of year cast the world in an odd hue, leaving the sky streaked with muted but beautiful ribbon-like slashes of red and orange, remnants of a day slowly dying mixed with a creeping, hazy darkness destined to snatch it all away. What one wanted or needed in relation to these things was irrelevant, they were inevitable.

  Night, with its magic and dark toys, would not be denied.

  Chris couldn’t be sure how long he’d stood staring at the old photograph in his hand, but when it faded beyond recognition he realized darkness had fallen. He switched on a lamp and a pool of light broke over the aged snapshot of his sister. No more than eight or nine at the time the photograph was taken,
the little girl staring back at him had an impish quality Chris fondly remembered most whenever he thought of Lacy, an elfin look somewhere between innocent and gleefully mischievous. With her unkempt mousy brown hair hanging to her shoulders, her skinned knees, bare feet and dirty hands, until she’d reached her teens she’d been something of a tomboy, always rambunctious, laughing and presumably happy, even in a place and time when no one else seemed capable of such frivolities. Though two years younger than he, Lacy often behaved like the wiser and more seasoned sibling, and maybe she was. Lacy had always been a planner, and Chris realized now that that had been her sanctuary. Talk of escape and how one day she’d get out of Tall Tree Junction, leave that life behind and find true happiness is what had kept her going. “There’s a whole world out there waiting for us. Believe in your dreams, and they’ll come true.”

  I did believe in my dreams, Chris thought. They just didn’t believe in me.

  His education and experience had prepared him to sift through most of these things in a clinical sense. He knew all the angles, understood all the psych theories and applications and was wholly aware of the whys and wherefores. It was, after all, his profession. And yet, in the end, it was all too close. Even after so many years these things cut right to the bone. He often still found himself in mid-thought, wondering what might have been had he not left home two years before she ran off. He’d literally snuck off in the middle of the night, leaving her behind not because he wanted to, but because he was only an eighteen-year-old kid himself, and at that point wasn’t sure he’d even be able to care for himself, much less a sixteen-year-old kid sister. With the luxury of years and wisdom that accompanied retrospect, he’d have done things differently now, but at the time he saw it as the only move he really had. The one chance—and by extension the one chance Lacy had—was getting out. He’d always planned to come back for her once he’d established some sort of base for himself, but in the course of the next two years only spoke with his sister a few times when he’d call from wherever he was at that moment. When he made that first call home, a few weeks after he’d left, it was apparent that the fire of hope that burned in her since she’d been a little girl was gone. That part of his sister had died. Quickly. The old man had killed it like everything else. And in some ways, Chris knew he’d been an accomplice in its murder, too.

  I’ll come back for you when I can, Lacy. I swear to you I will.

  But I’m already gone.

  And she was. So gone, in fact, that when she ran no one ever heard from her or saw her again. When it came to their father Chris understood (and even envied) her total estrangement. But as her only sibling, had he really done the things his nightmares suggested? If he had, were his sins truly unforgivable? Were anyone’s?

  Maybe all these years later it had reached a point where contact (much less reconciliation), seemed futile to her. Could he really blame her? In the end, did he even disagree? Lacy had become a phantom, a little girl in a photograph and a teenager in his memories, and he had undoubtedly become the same to her, as his sister was now a forty-four-year-old woman living a life that probably included a husband and children and possibly even grandchildren of her own, a life apart from the past, her troubled family and the older brother who had abandoned her. He kept telling himself that. He had for years.

  Even after all this time, Chris would’ve given anything to simply hold her hand a while, apologize and tell her how much he loved and missed her.

  But it really was too late.

  Wind and rain lashed the house. Lightning blinked once, and then again.

  He slipped the photograph back into his wallet, where’d he’d kept it for years, quickly rifled through a stack of mail on the kitchen table then checked his phone once more for any last minute messages or emergencies.

  Their home, a beautiful four bedroom colonial on an exclusive cul-de-sac in Plymouth, was quiet and mostly dark tonight. The usual emptiness here hung in the air like a pall, gnawing at him with the zeal of a famished rat and constantly reminding him how wide the gulf had grown between what he’d wanted his life to be and what it had actually become. On the surface his appeared to be a life many would have killed for. He had a successful career, a beautiful home and nice things, money in the bank, new cars in the driveway every few years, a solid investment portfolio, a good retirement plan, and while most of their friends had divorced or separated, he and his wife had been married for twenty-two years. They had no children. Parenthood had never been a priority. Though he knew it was probably for the best, once he’d crossed into his forties, Chris had come to regret that. Nancy, a photographer, owned and operated a small studio in town specializing in wedding gigs and the like, and Chris had spent years educating himself and working his way into private practice, so their careers hadn’t left much room for kids anyway. Even if they had, Nancy never had much interest, and Chris decided early on that although he and his father were markedly different people, as an only son he could see to it that the family name ended with him. And that’s exactly what he planned to do, because when all was said and done, that was the only way to be sure there would never again be another Abel Dempsey. Or another Chris.

  He thought of Anita. She came to him at the strangest times.

  Shaking her free of his mind, he looked to the suitcase by the door. He’d come home to find it packed and ready for him, along with a quickly-scribbled note on the kitchen table from Nancy explaining she’d run out to the store but would be back before he left. She’d also picked up the latest issue of The New Yorker for him and left it atop the suitcase along with his backup pair of sunglasses and his AAA membership card with a sticky note attached that read: Just in case. He couldn’t help but smile. Sporadic waves of guilt aside, Chris had descended so profoundly into apathy over the last several months that he rarely felt much of anything when it came to Nancy. But there were times, like now, when she could be so thoughtful and attentive, the same as she’d been when they’d met in college, and later, in the early years of their marriage, that it conjured in him the same emotions it always had. Glimpses of the woman he’d once known, fallen in love with, married and spent the majority of his adult life with still appeared from time to time—and perhaps that’s what gave him hope that they might still have some sort of future together—but those instances were few and far between. Normally Nancy was manic yet withdrawn, rarely overtly happy or even pleasant, had developed odd nervous habits (such as constantly saying his name whenever she spoke to him, and referring to and treating her job with a level of fanatic importance normally found in those with high-pressure, life-and-death-type professions), and no longer seemed to derive joy from anything other than her business, which completely consumed her. As a result, this often left her exhausted and even more remote at home. When she went to work she came alive and was very good at what she did. People responded to her, and she to them. She presented as a bright, strong, successful, funny, dynamic and completely together woman, but the moment she was off the clock that Nancy was put away and the version she’d become emerged in its place. Chris had attempted to discuss therapy and even depression medication with her but she refused to hear any of it. He still loved her and always would, and knew she loved him too, but he wondered if they were still in love with each other. Their marriage was in major trouble, and although they both knew it, neither seemed capable or willing to approach even the concept. Maybe somewhere deep down he still believed as a psychologist he could save her, and ultimately himself. Or maybe, despite their problems, staying put was easier for both of them, more comfortable, safer.

  The Devil you know.

  Chris strode to a set of French Doors and flipped a switch for the back spot. An extensive deck and backyard appeared in the newborn light. A wall of enormous trees stood at the edge of the property, giant sentries that had lorded over this land long before he or anyone else had been imagined, their silhouettes barely perceptible yet unmistakable in the darkness and rain.

  And somethin
g…more…

  There yet not there, it summoned in him an uncanny sense of foreboding and despair. With a sigh, Chris rubbed his eyes and looked again. Nothing now, but he hadn’t just seen something, he’d felt it. An unmistakable presence…

  “Ridiculous,” he muttered. Had he truly seen something through the curtains of rain, slipping impossibly across the treetops like a ghost just then? What you saw was a trick of tired eyes and an overwrought mind, Chris assured himself, a simple misinterpretation of something else, perhaps a bird or an owl or some other banal creature seen through the distorted filter of a stormy night.

  The slow, slinking movement of headlights cut across the room, reflected along the panes of glass in the French Doors. He flipped off the back light and moved to a window on the far kitchen wall. Nancy’s green Volvo had pulled in alongside his Audi. The headlights went out but she remained in the car for an inordinate amount of time. Chris imagined her sitting there, willing herself to get out and go into the house. But then he saw the glow of her cell phone.

  Probably a business call, he mused. Or maybe it was of a more personal nature. In the last few weeks Chris had begun to suspect Nancy might be seeing someone else—or perhaps flirting with the concept—though he couldn’t be sure if his suspicions were genuine or more a product of his guilt, an excuse to lessen the magnitude of his own digressions. After all, if his wife was doing something along those lines then maybe what had happened with Anita wasn’t quite so bad. Perhaps what he’d done was understandable—even forgivable—given such circumstances. Sure, you keep telling yourself that, sport.

  After a moment Nancy emerged from the car with a bag of groceries cradled in her arms. Rather than making a mad dash for the house, she moved with a slow, arduous stride, eyes down and shoulders slumped.