The Damned Page 4

  “And you didn’t see Mom? Why did I give you the watch and not her?”

  “She wasn’t able to, I guess. Or it was something you were meant to do, because she asked you to.”

  He nodded at this. A look on his face like someone who’d eaten something less than fresh for lunch.

  “I see your sister sometimes,” he said.

  “Me, too.”

  “She’s lonely, where she is.”

  He touched my face. His hand was cold.

  “Don’t let her stop you from living,” he said.

  How? I wanted to ask. Where can I go where she won’t follow?

  But I didn’t say anything. He let his hand fall away knowing he didn’t have the answer because there wasn’t one.

  HE WAS SITTING AT HIS desk when he died. Working late. A heart attack at fifty-two. The Orchard men being of weak hearts down the line. The kind of sudden passing you illustrate with a finger snap when you describe it to others.

  One of the cleaning ladies who worked the floors of the Ren Center overnight found him. Slumped over tidily arranged files, his head on his arms, the not uncommon sight of a white-collar man against a deadline catching forty winks. She might have just pulled his door closed and carried on with her vacuuming if it wasn’t for the picture frame on the middle of his office carpet. Photo-side down, so she had to tiptoe to turn it over and find the tempered glass shattered with such violence a mere fall off the edge of the desk could never have caused it.

  She went to my dad, put her hand by his nose to feel for air passing in or out. Her skin registered how cold he was without touching him.

  After she called 911 she pulled the photo out from the frame and laid it on the desk. She assumed he’d thrown it. Stress, trouble at home, who knew? A moment of anger he might regret from wherever his spirit lived now.

  But she was wrong about that. The coroner, too. Everyone who assumed my father was alone in his office when he died.

  Because it wasn’t his rage that smashed the picture of him holding Ash and me as swaddled newborns, miracle babies, one blue blanket, one pink.

  It was hers.

  8

  * * *

  I have a talent for dying. It’s the one thing it seems I can do, not just once like everyone but over again. Because the fire in the house on Alfred Street wasn’t the only time I’ve died and come back. The first was right at the very beginning. The day Ash and I were born.

  It was a difficult birth. Difficult in the medieval sense, in that it nearly cost our mother’s life, and for the first several minutes following our appearance, it had taken both Ash’s and mine. The umbilical cord. Noosed around our throats so when we came out we were purple and silent. Stillborn.

  My mother told my father—and later, in certain boozy moods, she told me, too—how she was so terrified by the idea of losing both of us she did what she’d only half pretended to do in church. She said a prayer. An appeal to any god or devil who might be listening.

  Save my babies and you can take me. I’m yours.

  The doctors and nurses continued to swim around her, wheeling in new machines, the faint-hope instruments of revival. Ash and I on either side of her being taped and prodded. My mother hadn’t been heard. Even though she felt her lips moving, the words passing through like warm bubbles, none of the white-smocked professionals in the surgery room paused to look her way. Other than two flat lines on a pair of screens, her babies unseen behind a raised sheet.

  That was when she added something new to her offer.

  If you do this, you can take whatever you want.

  Almost instantly the lead surgeon—Dr. Noland, a name my mother cited with a kind of nervous awe—stopped and looked down into her face. All the others on the medical team continued to obliviously circle him. For a stretch of seconds my mother and the doctor had been yanked out of the ongoing scene-in-progress, as if one of them had declared Time out! and, for once, the universe had listened. This was how my mother described the moment, anyway. A strange pause that might have been what she’d heard out-of-body experiences felt like except she was lying on a surgery table, not afloat or transported but still there.

  That’s why, when the doctor’s eyes turned from a cloudy green to red, narrowing into two bright pinholes of blood, she didn’t see it as a dream or side effect of the anesthetics but as real as the time that came before and after.

  The doctor looked at her with his red eyes and my mother instantly knew two things. The first was that, right then, Dr. Noland wasn’t Dr. Noland. The second was that she’d made a mistake, one she couldn’t yet guess the consequences of, and nothing could reverse her error, not even her own death.

  Then it was over.

  The doctor’s eyes dulled. Returned to the placid green that, over his mask, had for years watched life come and go.

  He went back to the hustle of needles and tubes, the ordering of dosages and reading out of numbers that is the hospital version of last rites. Just as my mother noticed the first sign of slowing in their efforts, the recognition that there was nothing more to be done that would soon be acknowledged aloud, the lines on the two screens jumped.

  Heartbeats.

  To their surprise the tubes and needles had brought us back. But my mother knew a third thing now. The doctors and nurses had nothing to do with it.

  We were out a long time without oxygen, so there were concerns about brain damage or physical handicaps of some kind. Yet other than a slightly weakened left leg that, combined with my height, would leave me with an irregular gait, we were both fine. Ash fared even better than me. To all appearances, she was completely untouched. Both of us, miracles.

  Yet Ash’s superiority was established right from the beginning. My twin possessively attached to her mother’s breast, me with rotating nurses in the corner, sucking on a bottle, as I was judged “too weak to latch” and thus exiled. They lined up to admire her (“So sweet! So alert!”) and shower me with pity (“Poor little guy!”).

  Twins. So unequal in gifts, so set upon different courses from the first moments of life, we were rarely described as such as children, even by our parents. By the time we entered kindergarten only the teachers knew we were from the same family. Sometimes, when a grown-up would nod at me, the boy standing behind her for no apparent reason, and ask, “Now who is this?” I would have no reply when Ash answered, “I’m not sure. Who are you?”

  When faced by the same question over the years she was alive as well as the years she wasn’t, my first answer never had anything to do with me, nothing I’d built or accomplished, other than my relation to her.

  I’m Ashleigh Orchard’s brother.

  If this was difficult to believe, what followed was usually taken as an outright lie.

  Her twin.

  IT WAS AROUND WHEN WE entered the middle grades that Ash first told me how she remembered her “time away” at our birth. I had no memory of it myself, and found it hard to accept that she could recall something as a newborn. It might have only been a fiction inspired by the story of our mother’s prayer and the red-eyed doctor except that she told it to me before we knew about any of that. And she always described it the same way, the details consistent and clear. Over time, given the way things turned out, I’ve come to believe her.

  In her tellings, she never called it heaven. Because it wasn’t.

  She stood barefoot on a frozen river. Somewhere off to one side, a huge tanker was nosed through the ice, its stern raised in the air, the rotors rusted the color of dried blood. Nothing on the far side of the river but a row of gray, uninhabited houses. But turning around to face the shore behind her she found a city. Older, Art Deco buildings with graffitied water tanks tilted on their rooftops. Five round, black-glassed towers almost touching the ice. The skyline of Detroit.

  Along with a solitary figure standing on the bank at the base of the Ren Cen buildings. Squinting, she could see it was a grown-up me. Making the first steps down to the ice to join her.

 
That’s when she heard the thuds.

  A spasmodic drumroll, low as far-off thunder. As soon as she registered it the banging grew louder. More and more bass notes beneath her feet. So strong the vibrations made it hard to keep her balance.

  Along with the sound of cracking ice. A spiderweb of fissures radiating out across the river’s surface. Spits of oily water coming up through the gaps.

  She looked down. Saw the thuds were coming from a million human fists.

  All of them punching up against the ice from below. Scratching, too. Fighting to find a way up to the air. To her.

  Ash glanced to the shore. I was at the ice’s edge now, testing it with my foot, about to step onto its marbled surface.

  NO!

  She tried to shout but little more than a rattled breath came out.

  STAY THERE!

  Her arms raised, waving me off. I saw her and paused. A look of bafflement on my face that changed to horror when I heard the pounding from under the ice as well.

  The fists stopped at the same time.

  Pulled their hands away to let their faces float up. All different. Black, white, mothers, men. Staring at her through the river’s mottled window.

  “Like they wanted to see who the new one was,” Ash said. “And they were surprised to see it was me.”

  “Because they thought it would be someone else?”

  “Because I was a child.”

  The ice opened up beneath her. Their hands grasping at her feet, ankles, her legs. Pulling her down into the cold.

  “I was dead but it wasn’t the light I went to,” she’d say. “It was the other place. That’s where I’m going. Where I belong.”

  “Then I belong there, too.”

  “No. Because I saved you.”

  “Why would—?”

  “I saved you, Danny.”

  Ash believed that this dream of the one and only decision she made while in possession of a soul—preventing her brother from going to the darkest place one could go after death—was proof of her fate, and that it was determined before she was an hour old. It meant that while she appeared more outwardly blessed than her brother, her self-sacrifice gave him the capacity to feel and live where she could not. It explained why she could act alive without being alive.

  The only way she came close was when she caused other people to feel something. Desire, envy, hate.

  Pain.

  GROWING UP, A VEIL OF shyness seemed to nudge me to the sides of crowds and the back rows of seats, wondering what to do with my hands. Not that I was regarded as unappealing. I was tall, my hair a shining black, “a handsome boy if you only lifted your chin so people could give you a look” if my mother was to be believed. She may have been right. All through school, girls of a certain kind—the bookish, the secret-holders, the looking-for-something-elsers—would seek me out. I may be a bit gangly, they told me, but I was still cute, sexy even. More than this, there was something about me they wanted to get closer to, a puzzle to be figured out.

  And I wanted to get closer to them, too. Not that Ash ever allowed it.

  However unsettled she made me, whatever she did to others, I saw Ash as my sister, but she only saw me as hers: less a brother than an embarrassing appendage, a withered limb that reminded her of something and could therefore never be parted with.

  But why possess someone you didn’t love?

  This was the question I worried at for our lives together, and for a long time after I was the lone Orchard survivor. Why did my sister hover over me all the years of my adult life, preventing me from reaching out to another? I’m convinced it has to do with the logic of twins. I was Ash’s sole connection to the human, the person she might have been if she’d been born whole.

  When she begged me to stay with her in the house on Alfred Street, I was meant to burn in the fire, too, to complete her in death as I had in life. And for a brief moment, when the firefighters pulled me out, I was dead. But then the paramedics performed their emergency CPR and I coughed the ash out of my chest and I was back.

  It was the first time she hadn’t had me with her. And it was lonely where she was. So she vowed to make it lonely for me, too.

  She’s told me this herself, in her midnight whispers. A voice audible just under the white noise of the shower stall, a singsong that followed me through the streets on my long, pointless walks.

  You’re not supposed to be here, Danny. But as long as you are, you’ll live like you’re dead. Like me.

  She was most threatening on the two occasions over the last twenty years when I asked a woman out to share a meal with me. The first time my date asked who the blond girl standing behind my chair in the restaurant was, and left before the main courses arrived. The second time the woman herself called to say she’d be unable to make it out as she’d fallen ill, though I could tell from the quaver in her voice that Ash had come to see her.

  Jealousy is the one emotion my sister has never had to fake.

  So I closed the door on the world, on the fantasy of companionship, of family. Heeded her warnings. It seemed to have worked.

  Over the past year or so, Ash’s visits became less frequent. I even tried to convince myself that, maybe, she was nothing more than a ghost among ghosts. Distracting, yes, even a little frightening. But essentially just another thing one could learn to manage. Ghosts are the dead that can make themselves visible, but once you see there’s nothing they can do they lose their power.

  But I was wrong about that.

  Ghosts can do things. They can speak, they can touch, they can hold their face over yours so they’re the first thing you see when you wake.

  And if they find a bridge that can carry enough of them from their side to ours, they can kill.

  SOMETHING ABOUT BEING TRULY ALONE in the world gave me the idea of seeing if I could get The After published.

  With my father gone there wasn’t anyone, not a living soul, who I might want to ask if it was a good idea, or confide in, or protect. It wasn’t money I needed (Dad left the house and his retirement savings to me, and given that I existed like a junk food monk, I could have lived on at the corner of Farnum and Fairgrove until the Orchard heart finally claimed me, too). It certainly wasn’t a desire for attention. I think it was because dying was all I had, the only information I could offer the world. The only way I might provide comfort to another, even if it could be for no one other than a stranger.

  After some calls and letters, there were a number of New York agents willing to submit the manuscript. I went with the one with the lowest expectations.

  At the time, as one editor who rejected the book put it, “Heaven’s not really big right now.” It was true that there weren’t the number of afterlife memoirs on the shelves then that there are now. But a couple publishers liked the “hook” of my mother’s Omega, and the one I decided on eventually persuaded me to add Evidence of Heaven as a subtitle.

  I ended up doing it for a living. The talks, the fly-in-fly-out book signings. Enough to make the payments on my narrow, two-story town house outside Porter Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where I more or less randomly moved after the book came out. Other than this, through the rest of my twenties and thirties I lived in self-imposed solitude. No wife, no kids. A handful of publishing-related acquaintances but no friends.

  That was before I met Willa and Eddie. Before something happened to me far stranger than dying and coming back again.

  I fell in love.

  9

  * * *

  Love at first sight.

  This was the exhausted phrase I used when asked how Willa and I got together. It’s a question put to us more than most, given my shambling height next to her squat self, her tomboyish freckles and raunchy laugh.

  “How did you two meet?” the world reasonably asked.

  “It was love at first sight,” I said. “My sight, anyway. Not sure she even saw me at first.”

  “You? I saw you,” Willa would jump in. “How could I not see you?”<
br />
  It’s a little give-and-go we did that prevented us from having to say we met at an Afterlifers meeting at the Sheraton in Syracuse, New York, where I was the keynote speaker. Following my talk, I took a chair behind a table bearing stacked copies of The After and readied my pen for the signing. Willa last in line.

  “Who can I dedicate it to?” I asked, too shy to meet her eyes longer than my standard nod and half smile.

  “Willa. Me, who’s wondering if you have time for a coffee when you’re done.”

  “I try not to drink coffee after noon.”

  “I mean a drink. ‘Coffee’ always means a drink.”

  “It does? I don’t get invited for coffees—or drinks—much, I guess.”

  “Neither do I.”

  “Then how do you know?”

  “I watch TV. How does anybody know anything?”

  The thing I was thinking on the short walk down the corridor from the meeting room to the bar was how, if this woman wanted something more from me—as sometimes women at my events seem they might—I couldn’t let it go any further than this. It would be dangerous. Even as we sat at a table in the corner and ordered scotches I kept an eye out for Ash to show herself in the mirror behind the bar, or turn on a stool to glare my way.

  “You like single malts?” I managed to ask.

  “I like having a babysitter until midnight,” she said.

  There was some banter about what it was like to have my job, talking about heaven to roomfuls of what she called “nervous ninnies looking for a sneak peek of the Great Beyond.” I told her that whatever comes next, cosmologically speaking, is up to you. And in any case, I did less and less public speaking these days, in part because everyone who might be interested in hearing my story had already heard it.

  “I’ve already heard it—or read it, anyway—a few times. And I’m here,” she said.

  “Why’s that?”

  “Because I was curious about what you were like outside of that photo on the back of the book that makes you look like somebody made you smile at the end of a switchblade. And I wanted to see if you were someone I could trust. Who I might be able to tell—”