The Damned Read online

  Willa nodded, and kept nodding. Not at the truth of what I’d just said but the horror of what she was about to say.

  “It was so dark down there,” she began, and with the words, her eyes darkened, too. “I don’t know how deep it was, but it could’ve been miles. I don’t think we ever touched bottom. So goddamned dark. Black water coming in every crack, around the windows, the air vents. Slow at first, so I thought we had some time. If the glass held we could stay down there until the air ran out and how long could that be? Couple hours? Then it started to fill up. Fast. I got Eddie out of his seat belt—he wasn’t awake, and there was a lot of blood coming from I don’t know where—I pulled him onto me and made sure his head was as high as I could hold him. So he might have time.”

  She stopped to take in an enormous, shaking breath. Like she was back in the car under the surface of the Charles and this was the last air she’d ever taste.

  “You saved him, Willa.”

  “I drove into the river for no reason,” she said, and exhaled. “It didn’t feel like it was me doing it, but it was. I didn’t save him. I nearly killed him.”

  EDDIE WAS BLUE.

  His hands laid atop the bedsheet, closed eyelids, his lips, all of him different shades of hurt. But it was the black line across the top of his forehead, a barbed wire of stitches, that was the hardest to look at.

  I held one of his hands and warmed it in mine.

  I’d died three times in my life but that was nothing compared to this. I would have done it three more times and stayed that way if it would’ve made his suffering go away. Made it mine instead.

  Even though I was watching his face I didn’t see the eyes open. One second he was asleep and then he was looking up at me, making the mental calculations of who I was, where he was, what brought him here.

  He put both of his hands around my arm and I expected him to use it to lift himself up against his pillows but instead he pulled me down close.

  “I saw her,” he said.

  “Where?”

  “In the car. Just before we went into the water. I looked into the backseat and she was there. Smiling at me.”

  “Eddie—”

  “She did it. Reached between the seats and grabbed the wheel,” he said, squeezing my arm so hard I thought he’d never let go. “She tried to kill us, Danny.”

  22

  * * *

  They released Willa from the hospital the next day but kept Eddie in for what one of the doctors, choosing a philosophical phrasing, called “the indefinite future.” His skull had been fractured, which was serious enough in itself. But they were worried about damage that might have resulted from the concussion, which meant tests and scans and people asking him if he remembered his birthday (got it right the first time, mixed it up with Christmas the second) and the name of his first pet (Charlie, a goldfish, nailed both times).

  Over those first couple days, the cops came by wanting to know how a Buick Regal up to date on its maintenance would come to plow off Memorial Drive and into the Charles River in broad daylight when there was no alcohol in the driver’s blood and no indication she was speeding. Willa told them she must have dozed off for a second. Eddie said he didn’t remember. They asked the same questions a second time, got the same answers. In the end, they had no choice but to accept their stories, even if they didn’t believe them.

  Willa didn’t feel good about it, but she had to lie.

  I’d told her what Eddie whispered to me. She reacted as though a growing suspicion in her mind had been confirmed. While she didn’t see Ash in the car, she did feel the wheel jerk away from her hands, a motion she felt sure wasn’t a mechanical failure but “something intentional, something really fucking strong.” She didn’t tell me about it at first because she didn’t think it was possible, that she might be subconsciously letting herself off the hook with a crazy idea.

  “But then I remembered all the things you told me about your sister,” she said. “How she’s nothing but crazy ideas.”

  It was hard to coax Willa away from Eddie’s bedside even to get something to eat or walk the hallway to stretch her legs. It left me to smuggle in decent food and dash back and forth to Porter Square for toiletries and clean clothes, along with the copy of The Fellowship of the Ring Eddie and I bought together and that he asked me to keep reading even if it looked like he was sleeping because “it’s good just to hear you say the words.”

  So I kept saying the words. In fact I read aloud through the whole of the second night, hoping to shield both Willa’s and Eddie’s dreams with magic. Kept awake by the fantasy that I was actually helping.

  I tried it on the third night, too, but, somewhere around when the hobbits are running from the Ringwraiths in a dark forest, sleep pulled me down.

  What felt like less than a minute later, I awakened in the same chair I’d fallen asleep in. Eddie in his bed, eyes closed. Willa on the far side in the other chair, also out. The same room in every detail except for the quiet. No nurses bustling along the hallway through the open door, no squeak of shoes on polished floor, no PA calls for Dr. This or Dr. That. The entire hospital cottonballed.

  I got out of the chair and looked around the corner.

  The hallway was dark. The ceiling’s fluorescent lights all extinguished, so that only the couple of desk lamps at the nurses’ station thirty feet to the left were still on. To the right, a yellow haze that dimmed to nothing before reaching the next door.

  I was starting back into the room. Maybe I hadn’t been noticed. Maybe the doorjamb could be quietly lifted and the three of us could hide until morning, when the light would return the flapping lab coats and squeaking carts and burbling phones.

  But something saw me.

  A single intake of breath. Like a gasp, but of a lower register. The suck of air that pulled other matter deeper with it. Wet hair or half-chewed food or sand.

  Coming from the right. From the darkness that yielded its details the longer I stared into it.

  A patient.

  Gowned and barefoot and tilted like a skiff in a gale. The tentative quarter steps of the unwell. A woman who should be told to get back into bed.

  She slid her blue feet closer and I could see that it wasn’t a bed she’d risen from.

  Hoo . . .

  The gasp-that-isn’t again. Whistled up and out of her mouth. Or from where her mouth used to be.

  The hospital gown not a hospital gown but skin. Hanging and burned.

  My sister did two things at the same time.

  She came closer, showing herself in the outer reaches of the nurses’ station’s lamplight.

  She raised her arms out in front of her as if in invitation to join her in a dance.

  Hoo . . . HOO . . .

  I didn’t go to her. I didn’t pull away, either. Neither was possible unless she willed it.

  The hands came up and found her face. What was left of it. The fingernails hooking in. Pulling away.

  Who?

  Ash peeled the skin off her face to reveal the soft tissue below it, the hard cords of ligament and muscle. Kept ripping until there was only bone. Until her body was no longer visible and she was nothing more than a white skull floating in the hallway’s darkness.

  Who, Danny? WHO?

  23

  * * *

  Morning.

  Noisy and smelling of less-than-great coffee and oatmeal. Eddie sitting up in bed, looking at me struggling to escape the chair I’d slept in.

  “Bad dream?” he said, then shook his head. “Don’t answer that.”

  I needed to talk to Willa. The opportunity came within the hour when one of the nurses arrived to shoo us out so she could change Eddie’s dressing. I was about to try and convince Willa to step outside for five minutes of fresh air when she asked me first.

  We crossed the pedestrian bridge over Storrow Drive and found shade in a cluster of trees at the edge of Lederman Park, a Little League game in progress on one of the diamonds. Every once in a whi
le there was the crack of bat meeting ball, the hooting cheers as a runner rounded the bases. What would otherwise be reassuring sounds that instead punctuated our hushed conversation like gunshots.

  “I’m scared, Danny.”

  She said it like an accusation. A declaration of lost patience.

  “Me, too.”

  “But it’s something else now. I mean, I thought we had something to deal with before this. A presence or whatever. One nasty little bitch of a ghost following us around. I figured that was something I could handle, because I can get nasty myself if I need to. But this. This is fucked up.”

  Willa walked slightly ahead, so that her words flew back into me, lightweight but sharp, like paper released out the window of one of the speeding cars roaring behind us.

  “You’re right,” I said. “I should go. Leave the two of you on your own. Let Ash come after me alone.”

  “I don’t want that. Neither of us do.”

  “I want you to be safe.”

  “You running away won’t do that.”

  Willa stopped to let me catch up with her. We stood close enough to touch, but didn’t.

  “We’re a part of this now because we’re a part of you,” she said.

  That this was essentially the same thing I thought myself after Eddie told me of seeing Ash take the wheel of the car shouldn’t have surprised me. Willa’s answer to the question Why us? simply led her to the same place it led me.

  “She’s taken an interest in us, Danny,” Willa went on, and paused to allow the cheers at what sounded like a home run to die down. “Whether you’re here or a thousand miles away, she’s going to stay interested.”

  I put a hand on her shoulder. Instead of drawing her closer, it started her shaking.

  “It’s going to be—”

  “Don’t say it’s going to be okay, Danny! Don’t!”

  I pulled my hand away but she kept trembling. Her lips pale even as the breeze I’d detected before was shut off like the closing of an oven door.

  “We’re still alive,” I said. “And I don’t think that’s just blind luck, either. I think we’re meant to be.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “Her attacks on me, driving your car into the river—attempts on our lives, but ones that didn’t go all the way. If that was all Ash wanted, aren’t there ways to do it and be sure?”

  “She came pretty goddamned close the day before yesterday.”

  “But you’re still here.”

  “Why?”

  “Because she wants me to do something for her. Something she can’t do herself.”

  Who, Danny? WHO?

  The umpire hollered a strike call and a handful of boos filtered through the trees, settling in the branches like birds.

  “When I was with her the last time, on the other side, her side, she told me she wanted me to see something,” I said. “I figured it was something she already knew and was just leading me to, a windup. But I think I was wrong. I think it’s something she doesn’t know.”

  Willa unfolded her crossed arms and they dropped to her sides.

  “You think she was murdered,” she said.

  “Yes, I do. She was murdered and not even she knows who did it.”

  For a moment it appeared that Willa hadn’t heard me. She had the lowered eyelids and top-heavy sway of someone about to drop in a faint, so that I reached out to catch her if she fell. But she ended up supporting herself with an outstretched foot. Not falling. Walking away from me.

  “Eddie should be ready by now,” she said, her voice cast over her shoulder again as I followed behind her.

  “Ash wants me to go.”

  It made her turn.

  “You think you should do what she wants? As far as I can tell, that’s seeing the three of us dead.”

  “You may be right. But she wants something else first.”

  “How do you mean?”

  It was then that I voiced aloud for the first time the thought I’d been inching toward since that afternoon in the laundry room. A thought that gained the certainty of truth as soon as it was spoken.

  “I think she wants me to find out who started the fire,” I said.

  Willa slid closer and I looped an arm around her. Pulled her closer still.

  “I wish I was somebody who could honestly say, ‘I don’t believe any of this,’ but I’m not,” she said. “So what are we going to do?”

  “Not you. Me. I’m going to Detroit.”

  “Today?”

  “We can’t wait,” I said. “Ash isn’t going to.”

  “What are you going to do once you get there? What can you do that twenty years and a bunch of homicide detectives couldn’t?”

  “I don’t know, to be honest. But if there’s something out there that might make her go away, I’ve got to try and find it, don’t I?”

  “Why you?” she said, pivoting to show new black pouches under her eyes. “Couldn’t we hire a private investigator or something? You’re not well, Danny. The doctors said to—”

  “Nobody else can do it. All the clues are here,” I said, tapping the side of my head with a pair of fingers.

  “Name one.”

  “They’re not those kinds of clues.”

  Willa walked up to me, lowered her head, and punched me in the stomach. A shot hard enough that it was all I could do not to double over.

  “Sorry,” she said. “Better you than a wall.”

  “You want to punch something? I’ll always be here for you.”

  She looked up. “Will you?”

  Willa made the motion with her hand that is her signal for me to bend for a kiss—a three-fingered Down here pull—and grazed a quick one, dry and cool, on my cheek.

  “I’ll explain it to him,” she said. “Because if we’re doing this, we’re doing it now.”

  Then she walked back over the pedestrian bridge toward the hospital, the passing traffic howling beneath her.

  I watched for as long as I could. Memorizing her shape, holding her voice in my head, breathing in what was left of her scent in the air. Hoping all of it might be brought back one more time before it was gone for good.

  24

  * * *

  The clerk eating Taco Bell behind the counter at the airport’s Budget Rent a Car who handed me the keys to my Chevy Impala asked if I’d ever visited Detroit before.

  “I used to live here,” I said. “A million years ago.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Bet it’s changed a lot since then.”

  He looked at me with genuine disbelief. “Bet it hasn’t,” he said.

  Outside, pulling my carry-on bag toward my car, the night was high and starless, as though space itself had retreated from the earth.

  Is there a lonelier place than a car rental lot after the last domestic flights of the evening have landed and no one but yourself slips behind the wheel?

  Yes, there is. That lot could be in Detroit.

  I’d gone from Mass General to Porter Square, thrown a couple shirts and jeans into a bag and headed straight to Logan, looked up at the Departures board and found the next flight out. The roar of the engines had lullabyed me into a deep sleep even before takeoff, so that the flight attendant had to shake me awake after the door had been opened at the terminal and I was the only passenger left.

  The drive into the city produced nothing familiar, nothing to say this was a place of importance to who I am. The down-market billboards for personal injury lawyers and bail bondsmen. The land that’s neither farmer’s field nor residential neighborhood but the in-between of scrap metal lots and self-storage compounds and light-industry factories, all shut down, all with truck trailers backed up to the loading bay doors as though meant not to deliver a shipment but to barricade something inside.

  Then I was curving onto a ramp that traded the interstate for the expressway that ran the southern border of downtown. And there they were.

  The pillars pushed up from out of the horizon, their dark glas
s reflected blue against the night. The electric GM atop the highest tower floating so far apart from everything else it was a monogram stitched onto the night.

  I knew I should find a room somewhere but kept driving instead. Through the near-empty streets of downtown to where Woodward Avenue began its long, dead-straight course away from the river. Detroit’s spine.

  The view outside felt just as otherworldly—an environment experienced as an animal might experience it, hyperconscious to escape routes and threats—as it did on the other side. What’s doubly strange is that doing it while alive made me feel like I was dead. Which may have only been what the return home after a long time away is for anyone.

  As I reached the far side of the overpass that left downtown behind I realized that Alfred Street was only a couple blocks ahead. I could hang a right and, within two minutes, park in front of the house (or the empty lot, or whatever had been built on its ashes).

  I didn’t.

  Stopped the Impala in the middle of the lane. Pulled a U-turn. Stomped the gas.

  A second later there was a warning tingle running the length of my left arm.

  With one hand over my heart as if I were about to take the Pledge of Allegiance, I drifted into the garage at the back of the Greektown Casino-Hotel and shuffled to the front desk for a room. I couldn’t have looked good. But they were used to people like me, traveling alone and not looking good.

  Up on the eighteenth floor my window framed the city’s core. Broad-shouldered stone buildings of the kind they haven’t built in fifty years. The raised concrete tracks of the People Mover monorail curving through downtown, a failed solution notable among the city’s history of failed solutions. Figures on the street here and there. Shadows standing on the corners, none walking when the lights changed.

  My underworld.

  25

  * * *

  Dawn arrived on crimson clouds. From the bed, I watched it color the city in Martian hues before it lightened to orange, then pink, as if the day were deciding between a palette of alien options before it landed on the yellow sun of home.