The Damned Read online

  “—That you know what it’s like to be dead, too.”

  “Okay,” she said. “Okay. Guess I was right.”

  WILLA TOLD ME THE STORY of her After the first night we spent together, a couple days following our drinks at the Sheraton. I’d driven up to her place, a yellow brick bungalow in an upstate town called Marcellus, the morning of the day she invited me, saying she’d arranged for her son Eddie to stay the weekend at her sister’s and wouldn’t it be a shame to put a good evening to waste? We’d eaten Chinese takeout and were finishing our glasses of wine when Willa got up onto her knees from where she’d been sitting on the floor and, her eyes steady on mine, pulled off her sweatshirt. For a time she knelt there, allowing me to clear my head of whatever I’d been talking about the moment before. Then she wriggled out of her jeans as well.

  “Your turn,” she said.

  The next morning, when I asked why she’d chosen me over all the other second-time-rounders out there, the unafflicted Marcellus men who could be hers, she laughed.

  “Who says it’s a choice? Decisions like this aren’t made, Danny. You’re just in one place one moment, and the next you’re in a new place. Hopefully it feels right.”

  “So does this feel right?” I asked.

  She stroked her hand down the long journey from my lips to arrive between my legs.

  “Does this?” she said.

  LATER, SITTING UP IN BED, Willa told me about the day she died.

  “They came in the middle of the night,” was how she started, without introduction, as though in reply to something I’d asked, which in a way I had, the question of how she came to be an Afterlifer hanging between us since the book table at the Syracuse Sheraton.

  “I didn’t hear them break the window in the basement, which is weird, because I hear everything, y’know? Always been a light sleeper. Now? It’s way worse. Now I barely sleep at all.”

  Willa’s husband was a policeman, a sergeant. Judging from the one photograph of him in the front hall, the broad face that earned its moustache, the square shoulders and well-carried ring of weight around his middle, he was born to be a cop. Not one of the power-hungry types but the kind who want to help, to rescue dogs who’ve fallen through pond ice or deliver drunk teenagers home to their parents. She called him “a good man” and I felt I knew exactly what she meant.

  They met in college in Rochester, both raised in small, outlying towns, both wanting to return to such a place. Once they married and Greg made it onto the Marcellus force, Willa found a job teaching history at the high school. After Eddie was born she planned to return to work when he was old enough for day care, but “old enough” was a more slippery matter than she expected, and Greg wasn’t pushing her to go back, and the truth was she didn’t have a burning desire to be back in the classroom, and so she never did. She was a wife and a mom, and untroubled in these roles. “I wasn’t itchy about it the way some other women my age are,” she said, shaking her head as though mildly surprised. “I was busy, I was raising a child, I was happy. Just couldn’t see the shame in any of it.”

  Willa stopped there. It was a pause I’d seen dozens of times from others who’d told me their story. Everything up to this moment had been life, good or bad. People and events and decisions, all summoning their own regret, their own pride. And then the story gives way to something unrelated to all that’s come before. Not the end of life, but the beginning of death.

  “They came in the middle of the night,” she said again.

  Two men. “Known to authorities,” as the local paper put it afterward. Meth dealers, cookers. Their product, an especially potent compound, was called Superman by its users because of the strength it bestowed, the belief you could fly, the certainty that you were unkillable.

  They’d chosen Willa’s house because they knew that’s where Greg lived. Greg, the cop who’d busted them three years earlier and provided the most damning evidence at their trial and met their eyes when they were led from the courtroom after the verdict was read. Fourteen months. Once they were out they started up the business again, not knowing what else to do or where else they might do it. And Superman soon gave them an idea. They’d kill the cop who put them away and make it look like a break-and-enter gone wrong. And nothing would go wrong, nothing would touch them, because the meth made them feel so alive.

  “Even though they were already dead, know what I mean?” Willa said.

  They came in through the basement window and up through the dark house. The house we’d made love in the night before. As Willa described it, I could almost feel the weight of their steps on the stairs. The excited whistle of their breaths. Sounds she heard first.

  “I don’t know why I didn’t wake Greg,” she said. “He had to get up early and I think I wanted to let him sleep. Isn’t that crazy? There’s strangers in the house, in the hallway outside our room—our son’s room—and the most important thing is not disturbing the cop lying next to me. What was I thinking? I wasn’t thinking. I was sleepwalking.”

  They kept a handgun—a small Browning semiautomatic—in a combination lockbox on an upper shelf in the closet. Greg had taken her to the range a couple times, taught her how to hold it, release the safety, how to aim and fire. They called it the Just In Case. She never thought that she’d ever actually pull the firearm box down on tiptoes, enter the numbers that came effortlessly to mind, pull it out. Never thought she’d move as quickly as she did, thinking of Eddie—Eddie asleep, strangers in Eddie’s room, Eddie being carried away—and open her bedroom door, gun raised, bright with panic and fear.

  Three figures in the hallway. The only illumination the nightlight in Eddie’s room, a yellowy cloud like smoke.

  Two men. One boy. Hers.

  One of the men had his arm casually draped across Eddie’s back like they were friends, like he was a Big Brother congratulating him on throwing a strike. The other man stood closer to Willa. The leader. Both men had guns, too. One held to Eddie’s head, the other rising as Willa watched until it was pointed at her.

  There might have been words then, a negotiation of some kind. It’s what the two men, at once wild-eyed and dopey, seemed to expect.

  Instead, Willa adjusted her aim and, the barrel still moving, fired.

  Big Brother’s head jolted back and hung there for what seemed like a while before the spray of blood and “skull junk” appeared against the wallpaper. His face registered no pain, only incredulity. The meth afforded him a moment of false life and he tried to pull the trigger. He was standing, aim dead on her face. But he was missing the part of his brain that makes fingers move and the gun twitched in his hand like a fish.

  Eddie pulled away from the man. Without the boy to hold him up, he first knelt, then slumped onto his back, emptying the contents of his head over the floorboards.

  Only then did Willa hear Greg rising from the bed behind her. A sound that made things move very fast.

  Willa swung around to aim her gun at the other man but he leapt to one side of the hallway, then the other, the awkward jumps and landings of hopscotch. As he went, he fired. She thought he’d missed her. But when she heard a series of half hiccups, half coughs behind her she looked to see he’d hit Greg. Her husband’s hands clutched around his throat.

  When she turned back to the man in the hall he smiled at her. Not jumping anymore.

  Willa did a couple things at the same time.

  She tried to copy what the still standing man had done and leapt away from the shot she could see him squeezing off.

  She said something to Eddie, an attempt at a shout that didn’t come out but that he read on her lips all the same.

  Go!

  WHAT SHE REMEMBERED NEXT WAS a day like any other of the preceding few years. In fact, it was a day precisely the same as one she had already lived.

  Willa toweling the frying pan dry in the kitchen after making French toast for Greg and Eddie. Greg had just left a moment ago—the smell of his shaving cream going up the stovetop ven
t along with the bacon—and Eddie playing with his Batmobile on the living room carpet. It was the beginning of a day. The first of the hours that march toward dinner, the reward of a glass of wine and the three of them at the table together again. Nothing special about it, no party or acceptance of an award or packing to go on vacation. A day with her son before he was schoolgoing age, just the two of them, the sun making promises through every window.

  This was Willa’s After.

  When Eddie asked if he could turn on the TV she suggested going for a walk instead.

  “Where?” he asked.

  “I don’t know. Maybe we just follow our noses.”

  Eddie stood. Jutted his chin up so that his nose pointed to the front door and he marched toward it, cross-eyed. “Like this?”

  “Exactly. Exactly like that.”

  Eddie was four, turning five in a couple months. What Willa thought of as the Age of Edibility. Her love so ravenous she wanted to chew on her son’s smooth legs, blow farts on his belly until it was blazing, kiss his face off. He was delicious. And she was hungry for him all the time, the same as he was for her. She thought of these days together, mother and son with hours laid out before them, as a perfect circle. Each was the unspoken answer to the other’s wants.

  Though she sometimes felt guilty for not putting Eddie into more programs as some of the town’s skinnier, import SUV–driving mothers did—Willa could spend whole evenings hemming and hawing over her stack of science camp and beginner’s piano and Go-Go Yoga! and Tennis for Toddlers pamphlets—the truth is she didn’t want to yield any of this time with her son.

  Not that they did anything special together. Willa was just another mom pushing her kid around town in a stroller, strapping him into the car’s booster seat in the Nojaim Bros. grocery parking lot, giving him shriek-inducing “underdogs” on a swing.

  And this day, her After, about the same. The happiest day of her life.

  After breakfast they went to the Marcellus Town Park, where the Fall Fair had been set up: some agricultural display tables, a small midway of games and kiddie rides. Eddie chose a dragon to sit on for the carousel, Willa next to him on a winged unicorn.

  “They don’t make these things with horses anymore?” Willa asked Eddie, but he wasn’t listening, making fire-breathing sounds so effectively his mother had to keep wiping the spit off his chin.

  She’d brought lunch along but, drunk on early October sunshine, they had hot dogs instead. They both agreed they were the best they’d ever tasted, and it was true for Willa as well as Eddie. Something about the white bun, sweet as a donut, the single lines of glowing mustard she’d drawn. Or maybe it was the pleasure of feeling Eddie lean against her where they sat on a small rise behind the midway, his hand linking with hers, the sense she had of the two of them being on a “date,” a romance so purely distilled that only innocence remained.

  He napped in his stroller on the walk home. She took a roundabout way, admiring the well-kept homes of her town, the mature trees and quiet streets, and felt almost overwhelmed by luckiness. As she pulled Eddie up, still asleep, and carried him into the house, she wished only for things to stay like this, stay the same.

  She lingered in his room standing over Eddie’s bed. The weight of his body the same as her heart inside her. She didn’t want to let him go yet, she didn’t want to part. An impossible thought occurred to her. If she remained there, remained still, might time forget they were here and pass them by? Could she hide in the quiet of her home at midday and hold her son in her arms forever?

  “IN A WAY, THE ANSWER was yes,” Willa said, using the round of my shoulder to wipe the tears from her face. “Because that’s where I left part of myself. That’s when the doctors brought me back. And you know what? Even though I was alive—lucky as hell to be alive—I couldn’t have been more pissed off.”

  They saved Willa. Went in to stem the bleeding in the places where the bullet had gone straight through her middle, racing to replace the blood that she’d spilled over the second-floor hallway, the ambulance, the surgery table. Near the end of the procedure she went into cardiac arrest. By the time they clamped the last artery and got the paddles on she’d been dead for almost three minutes.

  When they brought her back, the first thing she remembered was the taste of hot dog in her mouth.

  She asked about Eddie. The nurse watching her started to leave to get the supervising doctor but Willa wouldn’t let her go. So the nurse—a mother, too, a wife—told her. Eddie was fine. Untouched. But Greg was gone. The man who Willa hadn’t shot—the one who’d put a bullet through her gut and her husband’s throat—had turned to Eddie after both his parents had fallen, waved his gun at the boy, steadied his aim between his eyes. But he didn’t shoot. Instead, he shuffled over to Eddie and ruffled the boy’s hair, the gesture of a coach comforting a Little Leaguer after striking out, and took his time going down the stairs and leaving the house by the front door. The police caught him within an hour. Blood-soaked, still high, trying to break into a car on Main Street. When told he was under arrest for murder he laughed.

  “Even as I heard all that the thing that hurt most wasn’t losing Greg, but having to do the grieving,” Willa said, sitting straight up. “I mean, I was dead, right? I was gone, game over, buh-bye. And it was good over there. Then I’m here in the shit. The aftermath, whatever they call it. And you have no choice. You’ve got to feel, you’ve got to handle it, you’ve got to go through the stages. I honestly don’t think I would have even bothered trying if it wasn’t for Eddie. You need a reason to live, a good one, I know that now. Otherwise the living can just be too goddamned hard.”

  I knew what she meant. I understood just as she hoped I’d understand, why she read The After three times, why she came to my talk hoping I’d be someone—maybe the only person she might ever find in the world—she could connect with. Hell is a place on the other side. But it can also be here. The experience of living without a reason to.

  And with this woman, I knew that for all the risk I was about to invite into our worlds, I’d found mine.

  10

  * * *

  When I asked Willa if she and Eddie (who could be named nothing other than Eddie, with his reddish curls and ears that stuck out like tea cup handles) would like to move into my house in Cambridge, we’d been seeing each other for less than a month. It was crazy. But it didn’t feel crazy. It felt like the most sane thing I’d ever done.

  Still, I didn’t really expect Willa to accept. She’d buried her husband in Marcellus a year earlier. That part of upstate had been her home since birth. I figured it was too fast, that it would be too hard for her to tear herself away.

  “Let’s do it,” she said instead.

  “Really? I thought—this is your place—”

  “I loved my husband, Danny. But I’m attached to people, not places. And I want you to be one of my people now.”

  “What about Eddie?”

  “You can ask him yourself if you want, but I know he’ll say yes.”

  “Why?”

  She punched me, hard, in the arm. “He likes you. Probably for the same reason I do.”

  “Yeah? And what’s that?”

  She turned thoughtful. For a time, it wasn’t clear if she’d answer at all.

  “You understand how it can all be taken away,” she said finally. “You’ve had that happen. But you’re still here. Just like we are.”

  Just like Ash.

  SOMETIMES THERE IS A SCENT that precedes her appearances, less borne on the air than held tight against my face, an invisible, smothering cloth. And soaked in this cloth an odor that carries a feeling with it, particular as the past. It’s the same sugary, teenaged-girl perfume that clouded the rec room parties and school gym dances of our youth, combined with something foul, something gone wrong. A neglected wound spritzed with Love’s Baby Soft.

  In the last couple weeks since Willa and Eddie entered my life Ash has not only returned, but doubled her power. S
he feels heavier than before, more particular, a thing of metal or stone.

  As she appeared two Sundays ago.

  Standing in the kitchen, six feet from where Willa and Eddie sat eating scrambled eggs. I pushed the fridge door closed and she was there. So detailed I could see that the wrinkles around her falsely smiling lips were actually scabs, broken and healed, broken and healed.

  I turned to block their view of her, to stand between them if Ash decided today was the day she would once and for all leap from the spectral into the material. And then do whatever she’d worked so hard to come here to do. Something terrible. The sort of thing she’d be curious to see.

  That was her most frequent explanation, when the things she did could still be understood as the boundary testings of a smart, inquisitive child. Curious. That’s the magic word she’d call upon when asked why she locked her best friend from first grade in the basement bathroom with the lights off until she clawed three of her fingernails into the door, after hearing the girl confess to being terrified of the dark, or why, as an eight-year-old, she picked up our neighbor’s toddler from the front lawn where he was playing with his Thomas the Tank Engine and placed him in the middle of the street.

  “I was only curious,” she’d say, and widen her eyes, as though you merely had to stop and look into them to be convinced of her harmlessness. And most of the time, that was all you had to do. Just look into her and see how nothing bad could possibly live in those pretty blue pools.

  As I looked into them that Sunday morning two weeks ago. At her.

  My long-dead twin sister, parting her too-full lips to speak in a voice only I could hear.

  Time’s up, Danny.

  11

  * * *

  I had to get them out of the house. A roll through the car wash, a window-shop along Newbury Street, I didn’t care. Any excuse to escape the room where Ash had stood, leaving a vague motion of shivering air before it was stilled again, like clamping a lid over a pot of steaming water.