The Damned Read online

  I ran inside. Because that’s where she was, holding on. For me.

  Not that I saw her through the choking dark. Not that I heard her voice. I knew she was there because we’re twins, and twins know things. They know even when they don’t want to, wordless and instant as pain.

  I found her at the foot of the cellar stairs. Except the cellar stairs weren’t there anymore, so that only her face and raised hands were visible in the swirling black. A girl drowning at the bottom of a well.

  “Danny!”

  She was still standing. Her hair curling into charred buds.

  “Don’t leave me here! DANNY!”

  She wasn’t speaking of the fire or the house. It was death. She pleaded with me to not leave her alone in whatever came after this.

  And I didn’t.

  Even knowing what she’d done, knowing what she was, I lay against the floor’s buckled wood and threw my hand down to pull her up. But she was too far. I told her to jump—or wanted to, tried to—but the heat seared my throat closed against a scream.

  I reached down to my sister, and she reached up. But the only thing we touched was fire.

  She didn’t want to die. But the flames took her anyway.

  Just like they took me, too.

  5

  * * *

  When you’re dead, you know that’s what you are.

  You always hear about the other ones, the souls who need help “crossing over,” the confused loved ones in those paranormal reality TV shows who ghost around at the foot of the bed, needing to be told it’s time to go. But in my experience there’s no mistaking it with being alive, because where I went after the fire was something better than being alive. Heaven, you’d have to call it. A slightly altered replay of the happiest day of my life.

  I was thirteen. Sitting next to my father in the Buick Riviera he drove then, floating down Woodward Avenue toward the round, black towers of the Renaissance Center, where he worked. A drive through inner-city Detroit on a sunny day, the pawnshops and cinder-block motels passing by through tinted windows.

  It was the day we took Ash to Cranbrook. The day I let myself imagine it was possible for her to be left behind.

  What did we talk about? I can’t really remember all that much. We laughed a lot, anyway. Dad telling stories of his teenaged years upstate in Saginaw. His life before us revealed as a series of exciting or ridiculous but ultimately blameless crimes. Throwing rocks at a wasps’ nest and suffering the worst stings on his butt after a bunch of them got trapped in his shorts. Falling through ice and having to walk home without pants on because they froze hard as cement. Driving a Beetle down the main hallway of his high school only to be given a congratulatory slap on the shoulder and told not to try that again by the cop who met him at the other end.

  It was a memory of a day that had actually happened, though it was more vivid than any memory or dream. In fact it felt more real than the first time I lived it, sharpened by my awareness of how special it was to hear the untroubled version of my father’s voice. All of it colored by the knowledge that none of it would last long.

  Heaven was driving down Woodward with my dad, pretending we were just like other fathers and sons. A family without an Ash in it.

  We parked in the lot next to the black towers. Paused to look across the milky tea of the Detroit River.

  “There’s a border in the middle,” my father told me, just as he had in the living world. “An invisible line.”

  It was a pairing of concepts—invisible/border—that gripped my young mind as we walked through the revolving doors and into the building’s broad atrium. Cars and trucks, all “solid GM product” as my father invariably called them, sat shining on the floor below us, while a couple flashier models, a Corvette and a Fiero, turned slowly in midair, suspended by wires on cast-iron pads.

  We proceeded around to the glass elevators that would take us up to his office. He stepped in and guided me with him, the weight of his hand on my shoulder igniting a current of warmth within me.

  The doors closed. We began to rise.

  The elevator drifted up through the open stories of the atrium and then we popped through, climbing the outside of the main tower. An endless view that improved the higher we went. Below us the river and the stubby skyline of Windsor on the opposite shore and, beyond its limits, the rest of Canada. Vast and flat, fading out before reaching the horizon as though a landscape painting abandoned for lack of a subject.

  “That’s forever, Tiger,” Dad said, and slipped something into the palm of my right hand. Closed my fingers around it to prevent me from seeing what it was.

  The elevator slowed as it approached the forty-second floor. I didn’t want it to stop. Not that I dreaded whatever awaited me on the other side of the doors, but because I wanted my father to stay with me and knew that he couldn’t.

  I knew that, if I turned away from the window and looked, he’d already be gone.

  DING!

  The elevator doors opened.

  I stepped away from the window. A dizzy rush like butterflies trying to escape the inside of my skull. I tried to blink it away.

  It worked.

  “HE’S BACK,” A WOMAN SAID. She looked pleased. It made me wonder who “he” was.

  Despite all the bright lights, the room was duller than the Detroit morning I’d just come from. And with this came the information—the strangers standing around me, the chemicalized air, the first flare of pain—that told me this wasn’t the happiest day of my life anymore.

  “So he is,” a man said. He looked more amazed than pleased.

  IN AND OUT. IN AND out.

  Every time I was in, I asked the same thing. Where’s my sister? And every time, the same answer, no matter who the question was asked of.

  “Let me get your dad. Okay, Danny?”

  Which was an answer in itself.

  AND THEN MY DAD WAS the one standing there.

  There was relief in his face, there was gratitude. But more than this, he looked baffled.

  “Danny? How you doing, Tiger?”

  Tiger? He hadn’t called me that since I was a little kid. After we went to the old Tiger Stadium and watched my one and only big-league game.

  He hadn’t called me that since I was dead.

  “Ash is gone,” I said. “Isn’t she?”

  “Yes. She is.”

  He let this sink in. Then: “Danny, do you know what this is?”

  He pulled something out of his pocket and held it in front of my eyes.

  “A watch,” I said, squinting. “Mom’s watch. The one Granddad gave her.”

  “That’s right. Know how you got it?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “After the fire. When the doctors—when they saved you. They opened up your hand and you were holding it.”

  He looked like he might cry. I couldn’t tell if it was because he was angry, or grief-stricken, or impatient to know what he wanted to know. More than anything it looked like he was afraid.

  “You gave it to me,” I said. “Going up in the elevator.”

  “Elevator?”

  “In the Ren Center. When I was—”

  “No, no—”

  “—wherever I was when I was gone.”

  “No. I couldn’t have.”

  “But you did.”

  He pulled the watch away as though it were a gift he’d suddenly reconsidered giving. And then the tears fell. A reddening, unshaved face of frightened tears.

  “I couldn’t have given it to you, Danny. I couldn’t,” he said. “Because your mother was buried wearing it.”

  6

  * * *

  When I was feeling well enough for them to dial down the drugs after the skin grafts on the backs of my legs (the only place where the burns were severe) healed, I started talking about the After to whoever happened to be in my room. Heaven is real! You know what happened? When I was dead, after the ceiling came down and all the air was sucked out of my lungs? I relived
the best moment of my life! And it’s not fluffy clouds or tunnels of light, it’s not cheesy angels playing harps, it’s part of your past! The afterlife is inside you already! You’re living it now!

  It would have been easy for the doctors and nurses to write these declarations off as postshock nonsense or morphine ramblings were it not for the watch. My grandfather’s gold Omega that my mother cherished and wore most of her life and always told me would be mine one day. The watch that my father, as witnessed by a circle of mourners, slipped around her wrist in the moment before her coffin was shut for the last time and was lowered into the ground at Woodlawn Cemetery across from the State Fairgrounds.

  The watch made me something of a burn-ward celebrity. For those inclined to believe—or persuaded by the evidence—I was Detroit’s own seer, whisked to heaven and back again to bring the news that eternity is the best day of your life.

  Not that everyone was convinced. More than once, my visions were patiently explained away as nothing more than a trick of the brain as it fizzled its way to the end. And the watch? That earned me knowing winks and you-can-tell-me looks. For the doubters, the Omega was only a ghoulish bit of sleight of hand. Nobody suggested how it might have been done, though.

  The homicide detectives who visited were interested, too, and listened intently, jotting notes, when I spoke of what I’d come to call the After. They asked if I wanted to go to heaven. If I did, wouldn’t I want to bring my twin sister with me, too? And how well did I know Meg Clemens, Ash’s friend who went missing? The girl whose teeth were found next to Ash’s at the fire site?

  “What were you doing there, Danny?”

  This is what they asked more than anything else. Though even through the haze of painkillers I heard it for what it was.

  Did you kill your sister and that other girl, Mr. Heaven-and-Back?

  I told them the truth.

  It was my birthday, too, but I wasn’t asked along to the movies, and Dad wouldn’t be home until dinner, so when Michelle Wynn called our house from a pay phone at the Detroit Zoo after riding back from leaving Ash behind, I was the one to pick up. The minute she said that my sister was headed downtown, I dropped the phone and took my mom’s car—which had sat in our driveway for a year, waiting for us to graduate from bicycles—and drove down Woodward to find Ash.

  Other than circling parking lots a couple times with my dad, I’d never driven before, and I remember weaving between the lanes, fighting the steering wheel. When I passed the zoo I glanced over at the entrance, trying to see if Michelle, Lisa, and Winona were still there.

  “And were they?” the detective asked.

  “Not that I saw.”

  “So you kept driving. To save your sister.”

  “Yeah. But right then I was thinking about something else.”

  “What’s that?”

  “The birthday party I had at the zoo once. The year I turned six. The only party I can remember that was just for me. My parents got a magician and everything.”

  “What else?”

  “He was a little weird.”

  “Who?”

  “The magician. Creepy in a you’re-standing-too-close way. And he wore way too much makeup,” I told the detective, his pen held still over his notebook, waiting for me to get to where he wanted me to go.

  The next thing I remember was seeing black smoke rising from somewhere just north of the downtown core. The half dozen blocks where the big houses used to be.

  I knew that’s where she was. That she was in trouble.

  “How’d you know?”

  “We’re twins.”

  “So?”

  “Twins know things.”

  “Help us with that.”

  “I’m half her, and she’s half me.”

  Then they asked the question I didn’t have the answer to. They asked why Ash would go to that house in the first place.

  “Maybe somebody made her go,” the detective suggested, like the idea just occurred to him.

  I’d thought of this, too. It was impossible to imagine there not being people who’d want to kill my sister. If not for explicit revenge or some indulgence of poisoned desire, then only to be close to her, to be the one to see, finally, who she really was.

  “Why?” I said.

  “To hurt her. Like they hurt Meg Clemens.”

  “Who would do that?”

  “I don’t know. You, maybe?”

  “Me? Drag Ash somewhere to—?” I almost laughed. “You obviously didn’t know her.”

  And then I did laugh. Or maybe I was crying.

  I GOT BETTER.

  When my legs healed enough that I could walk without wincing every time my pants touched my skin, they let me go home. Though home was a word that could only be used for lack of any other. It was the same address, the same rooms, but now at once empty and claustrophobic, dark with all the lights on. Dad worked even longer hours than before and left more money than I needed on the kitchen counter every morning. There wasn’t a delivery pizza in the greater Detroit area I hadn’t tried. I knew all the Royal Oak 7-Eleven staff by name. Blockbuster gave me a T-shirt at Christmas for being a Most Valued Customer.

  I didn’t mourn Ash, but I felt her absence at every moment. It struck me as impossible that she was gone, that she could do so human a thing as die and not come back.

  And it was impossible. Because she did come back.

  7

  * * *

  I knew she was dead, that she wasn’t there in the way the sofa she sat next to me on or the TV remote I dropped to the floor were there, yet the first time Ash appeared to me after the fire she seemed more real than anything I’d seen since she was alive.

  It was just me alone in the living room, watching the Red Wings lose a midweek game to New York. Dad asleep upstairs. And then, from out of the clustered shadows of the fake potted fern and front window curtains, she stepped forward. Stood there until I turned my head to acknowledge her. Once she had my attention, she moved into the dim lamplight to take her place next to me, feigning interest in the game on the screen.

  What’s the score? she asked, but didn’t say aloud. Her voice in my head just as I’d heard it at least once every day since she died, except now her body had come along with it.

  “You’re not here,” I tried to say, but it came out in a sob.

  And she wasn’t there. Not completely. Not yet.

  I was unable to move any part of myself other than my eyes, darting from the TV to her and back again. It was impossible to see all of her at once. As if she could only manifest herself in framed bits—a bare knee through a rip in her jeans, the reddened knuckles of her hands—like some kind of photographic trick, a clever patchwork of memory and shade.

  But then there was her smell. The sound of her breathing. The aura of cold radiating from her that told me I was more wrong than right.

  I’m wherever I want to be, she said without saying.

  WHEN THE TIME CAME I chose Michigan State over any of the liberal arts colleges I might have gone to because I thought it would be easier to hide there. And I was right. But it’s probably easy to hide, no matter where you are, when nobody is looking for you.

  There were classes, more or less randomly chosen, and decent grades for the first term. But soon all I could think of was how arbitrary the “life decisions” I might make were (there seemed little difference to me between pre-law and pre-cabdriver) and I was adrift. I started skipping lectures more and submitting essays less. My dorm room cramped by towers of take-out boxes. The sound of students horsing around outside my window like a TV I wished I could ask to have turned down.

  I wanted a friend but hadn’t a clue how to go about finding one. I wanted a girlfriend, but this was so far beyond my grasp, so fantastical, I felt foolish even entertaining the thought, like a kid old enough to know he’ll never be Spiderman or play for the Pistons but who can still vividly imagine both.

  They were moot points in any case. Friend or girlfriend, Ash wou
ld never let it happen. She guarded my solitude without sleep. Once, she followed behind me an entire afternoon, a presence that chuckled into my ear whenever I glanced at a pretty girl passing in the hall. Another time I sat on the lawn with a study group from my class, and when I looked to my right she was beside me, pretending to be fascinated by the opened pages of A Brief Introduction to Sociology. Her appearances seemed intended to remind me that all this—the whispered jokes over study hall tables and long kisses in the quad—wasn’t meant for me.

  My sister made sure I remained alone. Alive, but not free to live. Still, it wasn’t a depressive idleness she pushed me into, it wasn’t a dope-smoking stupor. Because the thing is, I was busy. Working from morning into the night, overcaffeinated, smelling weird.

  I was writing a book.

  Not that I knew it was a book when I started. There was no idea of how many pages it might end up being, or what I wanted it to mean, let alone consideration of having anyone else read it once it was finished. It was just something I had to do.

  It was the story of how I died and came back on my sixteenth birthday. My journey down Woodward Avenue and up an elevator with my father. The watch. A case for heaven being real.

  Not being a proper book it didn’t need a title, but I gave it one anyway.

  I called it The After.

  I DROPPED OUT BEFORE THEY could ask me to leave. There was nowhere else to go so I moved back to Royal Oak, tried to take care of Dad and pretend that, if you didn’t look forward or back, time would leave you alone.

  It was a while before Dad asked why I left college. I showed him the book I wrote and he read it in one sitting.

  “Why was I with you? In the After?” he asked. “How could I be there if I’m still here? Still alive?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe I carried you with me. Things, feelings, people. Souls. Maybe they can go back and forth more than we think.”