The Damned Read online

  HE WASN’T MY SON. HE was a boy I was starting to get to know. One who came with the package, the two of us connected by shared circumstance and low expectations and unspoken ground rules. But that didn’t stop me from being glad the door was closed and the room was otherwise unoccupied when I saw him in the bed, complicated by breathing tubes and monitoring wires, and let the grief pour out.

  The same sun-dotted, jug-eared kid assembled there beneath the white sheet, but absent in the ways that matter. You can feel it: the vacancy of the artificially life-supported, their claim on this world the weight of a penlight’s beam through the fog.

  His eyes were closed but the lids were twitching. I’m sure it was only some aspect of bodily autopilot and not an indication of consciousness, but it was like he knew I was there. The spooky feeling of being watched from behind, except from someone laid out in front of you.

  I held his hand. Told him I loved him. That I wasn’t totally honest when I said I never wanted to be a replacement dad to him, because a part of me did, right from the start, a part that grew every day we spent together. I never told him because I didn’t want to scare him away, and because I was happy just being around, learning how trust might be made between two beings shaped by suspicion and loss.

  I told him all this. And then I told him something else.

  “I’m going to find her, Eddie. I’m going to send her back so she’ll never hurt you or your mom again. You just have to hold on. Just think about that. Concentrate on that.”

  He heard me. There was nothing to indicate this, no telltale squeeze or effort at speech, but I knew he did. I’d been where he was now. You can see and hear a lot from the middle ground. Some of it pulls you back, some of it pushes you all the way over.

  I leaned in close enough for him to feel my voice as well as hear it.

  “Wherever she has you, I’m going to make her let you go.”

  Then I stood up while I still could. Released Eddie’s hand and stepped out into the hall.

  Willa wasn’t there. Probably in the lounge area, or the bathroom.

  I headed the other way.

  You can’t push her back to where she’s supposed to be, not from here.

  Down the elevators to the main floor and out into the swampy night that smelled faintly of the sea. Took a lungful in. Tried to remember this, too. The simple in-and-out of air, overlooked and miraculous.

  She can only be pulled.

  And that couldn’t be done from this side.

  I ran.

  A full sprint, or as close to it as my knees allowed. Plowing across busy Cambridge Street, almost knocked down by one of the cars that hit the brakes so hard they didn’t have time to lay on the horn. Into the narrow streets of Beacon Hill, fighting the slopes and slippery cobblestone, unworried about which way to go because I wasn’t going anywhere in particular. Only running.

  From a distance, in the dark, I would’ve looked like another late-to-the-game health nut trying to stave off the inevitable.

  In fact, I was a suicide-in-progress.

  The night was still but there was a rush of blood in my ears, howling at what it was being asked to do, how it wasn’t getting to the parts where it had to go. And soon the pain, too. All the new kinds, as well as the crushing pressure in the chest. Signs I ignored along with the traffic lights, clopping the length of Louisburg Square and south to Beacon Street, banging through a clutch of drunk tourists and into the Public Garden on the other side.

  Even then, right at the end, there was an appreciation of beauty.

  You’d think there’d be more serious considerations as the legs finally gave way just short of the duck pond and the stars extinguished, from dimmest to brightest, the heavens short-circuited. But as my head hit the ground and the willows and light-pricked buildings along Boylston Street and the sickle-shaped moon were turned sideways I was thinking, It’s so pretty here.

  The air.

  That’s what you end up clinging to. That old, lung-filling need. One more deep one for the road—

  But that was it. The last breath of this world tasting of grass. A sip of dew.

  So pretty . . .

  Then, right before the darkness, someone else added a thought of her own.

  Not so pretty where you’re going, Danny Boy.

  PART 3

  * * *

  Motor City

  34

  * * *

  Before I open my eyes I work to remember everything that brought me here. So long as I stay in the dark I can make most of it come back, shape it into a sequence of events I can almost make sense of. Memory is one of the first casualties of the After—I know this if nothing else—and while so much of my life is something I’d rather forget, some of the most recent past has been good, the best I’ve known, and I don’t want to let it go.

  Too late.

  This is the present.

  This is now.

  Nothing else counts but now.

  Ready, Danny? It’s time to move. For them. So open your eyes on three. One . . .

  The smell tells me where I am just as it did before. But it’s different this time. I’m back in my room. Where I am now. In the present that feels stretched out forever. Except this time, forever smells bad.

  The stale sheets and unwashed gym clothes, the burnt toast and lilac carpet deodorant, all of it sharpened to the point that when I wake it’s with the gagging cough of having smelling salts held under my nose.

  . . . two . . .

  There’s a new odor, too. The foul leavings of animal urine and shit. Neither dog nor cat but something wild, a creature born of another continent altogether. A meat eater.

  . . . three.

  I sit up and count the marks of its fury.

  The room torn apart from ceiling to floor. Gouges left in the walls from the sweeps of claws the size of crowbars. The Dune poster, half shredded, half still hanging by a taped corner. A chaos of scat-smeared clothes and splintered wood colored by blood. Ribbons of it over what’s left of the window’s glass, the headboard. And on the floor, faceup, the forced smiles of the one and only Orchard family portrait. Ash looking back at me as if to say I should have known it would end like this.

  Whatever was here was hunting. And when it didn’t find what it was looking for it left a show of its power and size and the terrible things it can do.

  You can be afraid in the After. You can feel the terror of death even in death.

  I’m up and tiptoeing to the door, careful to avoid the upturned nails and wire ends. When I spot my chess club medals I nearly bend to pick them up, wonder why, and instantly answer myself: they are proof of the only game I was ever good at. My specialty was escape. Hiding the king, hoping my opponent slipped up. The same tactics I employed against Ash.

  At least in chess it sometimes worked.

  The hallway has been scratched and soiled and bloodied, too, but not as badly. As though the animal knew where to look.

  There’s confirmation of this in my parents’ room which, while visited—the door ripped off, territorial sprays of piss over the wallpaper—is largely undamaged aside from a crosshatching of gore on the bedsheets where, last time, the indentation of my father’s body had been left behind.

  I back out to the top of the stairs. Wonder whether this moment is an opportunity to get out of here that will be missed if I linger, if what I’m here to do will be stopped in the first minutes by a rending of claws.

  Which begs the question: What have I come here to do?

  Do what Sylvie Grieg told me. You can’t push her back. She can only be pulled.

  Try to save the living by dying.

  But dying only gets me here. It doesn’t save anyone. All it means is I’ll never see them again.

  No. Not allowed to think about that. If I stop moving I will be held in place forever. That’s how it works here. You stop to ponder the past and it will screw you to the spot.

  So let’s try it again, Danny: What have you come here to do?


  I’m here to yank Ash out of the living world and anchor her here, in the After. Her hell. Now mine as well.

  How is it done? Sylvie Grieg didn’t know that part and neither do I. But I’m pretty sure of the first step: I need to find the part of Ash that’s still here. Play a different chess game than what I’m used to playing. Be the hunter instead of the hider for once.

  Ash’s door is the only one that remains untouched.

  I’m expecting it to be barricaded as it was before. But this time the doorknob turns. The door whispers open over pristine carpet with a single nudge.

  “Ash?”

  I find my voice on the first try. Brittle, but audible. It summons nothing but the overpowering scent of the room. The same as it smelled when we were alive but denser now, so strong I raise my hands to push it aside. Fruit candies and lavender and talc. The industrial essence of 1980s girlishness.

  Everything as it was. A space so clean and organized and free of character—no posters, no photos, no books—it feels like a film set. A script that called for A Good Girl’s Room and neglected to provide any details aside from the arrangement of various framed Certificates of Excellence on the wall, shelving that supported nothing but trophies. Tennis. Math-a-lympics. Swim Team. Science Fair. Best Actress.

  The only thing on her desk is her diary. The leather strap holding it closed. Locked.

  TO MY DAUGHTER, ASHLEIGH—DAD

  Left here for me. But not the key.

  I could cut the strap but that’s cheating. And I’ll be punished for cheating.

  So I start out looking under the bed and feeling the closet floor on hands and knees. In the end, I throw everything onto the floor, smash the glass on the Certificates of Excellence, sling the trophies against the wall. Grind the little plastic tennis players and actresses under my shoes until they crack.

  When I find the key it’s on a second pass through her underwear drawer. Buried deep among the panties, so that I have to feel its hard copper through the soft cotton and silk. Another joke. Making me look like the horny brother, caught in the act. Pervy, as she approvingly described any boy who looked her way.

  I unlock the strap. Start on the first page. Flip to the next. The middle, the end.

  All three hundred pages of it the same.

  I’m not here.

  I’m not here.

  I’m not here.

  I’m not here.

  I’m not here.

  The handwriting careful, unhurried. A written self-portrait that was as close to the real Ash as she could get. Her autobiography.

  All at once, the room’s perfumes double in intensity. It forces me out to prevent myself from vomiting all over the carpet.

  By the time I make it to the bathroom and kneel over the toilet, it passes. I’m partway to standing again when I hear it.

  A drip of water from the faucet into the full tub.

  It will require me to pull back the curtain to see what’s there. The shower game. This time, there will be something other than a spinning soap-on-a-rope waiting for me.

  There’s no point waiting.

  A body submerged beneath the still surface except for the head at the far end. My mother. Naked and drunk as the day I found her after school.

  Her bloodshot eyes blink open and pull me into focus.

  “Danny?” she says, a hand breaking through to hold on to the side but without the strength to pull herself up.

  “It’s me, Mom.”

  “You’re here, too?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why? What did you do?”

  “I’m here to find Ash.”

  “Of course,” she says, nodding so deeply her nose dips underwater and she has to sneeze it out. “Funny how it’s hard to think of your children—how they run out of time the same as we do. The last thing a mother wants to think about.”

  “Nobody likes to think about it.”

  “Of course. Why would they?”

  She’s doing her best just as she always did. The Of courses and overstated gestures an attempt at an unruffled control of her own thoughts and words. As in life, she does it for me more than herself.

  I kneel down on the bath mat and stroke the wet hair from her eyes. “Can I help you out of there?”

  “Would you?” she says. “I don’t know—I must have fallen asleep.”

  “It happens.”

  “How dreadful! A son shouldn’t have to lift his mother out—”

  “It’s all right, really. It’s fine.”

  She squeezes up a smile at this. There’s gratitude in it, and enormous sadness. But there’s relief, too. She has been alone so completely these shared words are like the warmth that comes with the first swallow of wine.

  It’s a little easier getting her out using a thirty-nine-year-old’s arms than a ten-year-old’s. Not that it still isn’t a struggle.

  Once she’s out and sitting on the mat I go into my parents’ room and find her something to wear. A billowy summer dress she reserved for “cleaning days,” the afternoons of incomplete vacuuming and abandoned miniprojects. I get her to raise her arms and, together, we pull it down over her. She slaps the wet floor, inviting me to sit, and I settle my back against the wall opposite her.

  “Did you see whatever happened here, mom?” I ask, casting my eyes out into the damage in the hallway.

  “Look at that. Terrible. I thought it was a dream.”

  “What was it?”

  “I only heard it. I suppose I was trying to pretend it wasn’t really here so I didn’t want to look. But it was big, whatever it was.” She shakes her head. The same disbelieving shake she’d give the TV news at the announcement of a fresh round of layoffs or lousy weather forecasted for a holiday weekend. “There’s odd things on this side, Danny. Some more odd than others.”

  “Is Dad here with you?”

  “No. But I wish he was.”

  “What about Ash? Does she visit?”

  “I wouldn’t call it visiting,” she says, blinking. “She comes and goes and sometimes I happen to see her when she does. But she’s not here for me.”

  “What’s she here for?”

  “She doesn’t say.”

  “Do you go with her sometimes? Out of the house, I mean?”

  She cocks her head like I might be teasing her.

  “This is my place,” she says. “This house. It’s where I stay. Even if I wanted to, I couldn’t leave.”

  “But Ash can.”

  “She roams.”

  “How?”

  “It must be because she wasn’t properly attached to anything—to anyone. Back then.”

  “The thing that was here. The animal. It can roam, too?”

  She crosses her arms as though against a sudden chill. “I don’t know about much outside these walls, Danny. I’m here on my own. I’m meant to be here on my own.”

  “I can’t stay, either, Mom.”

  “Oh?”

  “There’s something I have to do.”

  “You mean outside?” My mother reaches out her cold hand and hooks her fingers through mine. “Promise me you’ll be careful.”

  “Why? What’s out there?”

  “Monsters. People,” she shudders, as if the second of these is the more hideous.

  “What can anyone do to us? We can’t die. We’re already here.”

  “There’s always a new way to die,” she says. “Just like there’s always a worse version of here than here.”

  She slides forward over the puddled floor and pats my hand the way she did when I was a child.

  “Dying is different in this place, but it still happens. And it’s awful,” she goes on. “When you come back the next time everything’s the same—you still come back to your here—except there’s even less sun, less order, less hope. Less of the good things you’re able to remember from being alive.”

  The good things. What were they for her? Me, I feel sure. But she couldn’t think of me without thinking of Ash as well, which s
ituated me in the purgatory of the bittersweet.

  She wasn’t always the way she was. In the photos of our parents taken before we were born they were often laughing, wearing funny hats at a New Year’s Eve masquerade, Dad dipping her low in some dance competition while she playacted a swoon, the two of them beaming and lipstick-smeared outside the church at their wedding.

  The best day of her life had to be back there somewhere. Starting out together with Dad, buying this house on the edge of what was then a still prosperous city. And if I’m right about that, it means that this is the dark flip side for her. Alone in a house that her husband avoided as much as he could, blacked out from drink in a cold tub. My mother’s After is the hell of denial. Her being here proves that not doing what we ought to do can condemn us just the same as doing what we know to be wrong.

  That, and making the wrong kind of prayer. The wrong kind of trade.

  “I’m glad you got it,” she says now, nodding at the watch on my wrist.

  “Why didn’t you give it to me yourself?”

  “You were in a place I couldn’t go. But sometimes the things we carry can pass through, even if we can’t.”

  When I stand I offer her my hand to help her to her feet but she refuses it. Splashes a hand in the water on the floor as if to say she’s fine where she is.

  “Can I ask you something, Danny?”

  “Sure.”

  “You knew, didn’t you, that Ash was with me when I died?”

  “With you how?”

  “Here. In this room. By the tub.”

  “Not helping you.”

  “Not helping me, no. Rather the opposite of helping me.”

  She watches me like a doctor waiting for an injected drug to take effect.

  “She drowned you?”

  “It didn’t take much, God knows.”

  “Mom! Oh Christ—”

  “The funny thing is I thought she was going to wash my hair. Her face was almost gentle. Almost sweet.”

  “She murdered you!”

  “It only took one hand on my head to slide me down and keep me there. She didn’t seem angry or anything like that. She didn’t say a single word. It was like she was only vaguely interested in watching me take the water in and fight as best I could, try to pull myself up by her arm. I remember looking up at her pretty face and thinking, It’s like she’s watching a show on TV. And then I thought, A show she’s already seen.”