The Damned Read online

  A picnic. That’s what I ended up suggesting. I grabbed Eddie’s soccer ball, told Willa we’d get something to eat along the way, and led the two of them out the door.

  We took the T a single stop and rose up into Harvard Square, picking up supplies on the walk to Cambridge Common. Just past the Civil War Memorial, beyond the cover of trees, the light had dried the dew from the lawn, and we chose our spot. It was maybe a degree or two cooler than the ideal, but as the three of us laid out our blanket and gazed across the Common, surveying the spires and chimneys of the old college, the clarity of the air was more than sufficient compensation for the chill.

  Before I knew it Eddie had pulled the soccer ball out of my duffel bag and was dribbling it in a circle around us. I watched Willa as she laid out the food and poured juice into plastic cups. I thought about tickling her into submission, launching a kiss attack. But before I could Eddie called to me, sent me out with a pass, and I was running after it.

  I tried something more difficult than I had any right to attempt—a kick straight up and then juggling the ball on the tops of my thighs, finishing with a jumping header—and it pretty much worked. It surprised me. Eddie, too.

  “Daddy!” he shouted in celebration.

  That’s what I’m almost sure I heard. Not Danny. Daddy.

  When I looked at him to see if I was right he just looked back, his face betraying no special graduation, no big deal. Maybe it was the mistake of wish fulfillment on my part. Maybe I would always be Danny, hoping for more.

  The smell knocked me back a step.

  A wave of rank sugar. Perfume that failed to hide the odor of moldering flesh. So thick it surrounded me like a blanket, heavy and wet. Soaked through with the foul sweetness of the dead.

  I spun around, trying to find her. But the Common was peopled just as it had been: a dog walker on her phone, Willa sitting on the blanket, biting into a cookie.

  And Eddie. Kicking the ball just before his attention snared on something. Something he stared at over my shoulder.

  The ball rolled past me. The hush of bent grass as it carried on before coming to rest fifteen feet away.

  My head swiveled. The ball there, just to the side of a wide-trunked maple.

  I started over to retrieve the ball—to keep the game going, to hold off the smothering presence by pretending it wasn’t there—and fought against the weight in my legs, shifting and unwieldy. It took what felt like the better part of a minute, but I got there. Almost got there.

  A pair of arms reached out from behind the tree. Grabbed the ball. Pulled it back.

  Bare arms. The hairs white, the fingers long, bone-thin. Limbs you might call elegant. Except they were too white, too long, so that they bordered on the off-putting, the grotesque.

  I couldn’t see the ball or who held it now, both hidden behind the tree. It required me to take a half dozen steps forward.

  . . . three . . . four . . . five . . .

  Counting them off like a child playing hide-and-seek.

  Danny! Look!

  She was there. Holding the ball.

  I would have told her to go, insisted she couldn’t be here, but no breath was permitted past my closed throat.

  Ash smiled.

  I looked back at Eddie. He’d taken a few steps away from the picnic blanket to improve his angle on my position so that he could see Ash behind the maple just as I could. And now he stopped. Knowing exactly what it was standing there. How the pretty girl holding the ball wasn’t a girl. Wasn’t alive.

  I made a move to go to him, but I was stopped by a seizure of pain. A burning that started at the soles of my feet and shot up to my chest, swelling and hard.

  It was Ash. Her fingers squeezing the soccer ball so tight it was an oval. Knuckles bulging against her skin.

  That was my heart she held. Squeezing the life out of it. The last of its blood.

  I was on the ground before I knew I was falling.

  One side of my face buried in the grass, one eye looking up at her. The ball bulging, ready to burst in her hands. Her face showing the cold curiosity of watching her brother’s terror, his spasming fight for air.

  There was what at first I took to be a scream from my own throat. Followed by a calmly logical thought: That’s not you. You can’t even breathe. So how could it be you?

  As it became clearer, I recognized the voice that shaped it. Eddie’s. A shriek that shattered across the Common, sent clouds of sparrows from the trees.

  Ash dropped the ball and it bounced toward me, rolling over the grass, growing in my line of sight until it was all I could see. I tried to put my hands up to stop it, but my hands didn’t move. Nothing did.

  You’re dead.

  This came to me plainly, inarguably. It didn’t trigger any assessment, a life flashed before my eyes. A flat, deadened voice I recognized as my sister’s.

  The ball kept rolling, longer than it should’ve, as though nudged invisibly forward.

  “Danny!” I heard Eddie calling from very far away. Not Daddy. Though he was running to me, desperate to help, to make the dead girl go away.

  The ball touched my nose. A leathery kiss.

  You’re dead.

  And then I was.

  Again.

  12

  * * *

  It’s not a drive along Woodward Avenue this time. Not heaven. It’s the smell that told me, even with my eyes closed.

  Not Ash’s smell, nothing outright bad, but unwelcome all the same. The faint odor of feet that clung to the bedsheets, of gym clothes kicked to the back of closet corners, of air unfreshened by an open window for the entire length of childhood, of boy. The room I grew up in.

  My opened eyes told me I was right.

  There was the Dune poster taped to the back of the door, its corners torn from multiple embarrassed teardowns followed by regretful remountings. There were the Dondero High Chess Club medals—one silver, one gold—with chains looped over a corner of the dresser mirror. There was the one and only family portrait we’d had done by a professional photographer who’d managed to coax halfway convincing smiles out of each of us but could not make us rest hand on shoulder or put leg next to leg on the sofa, so that we were spaced apart like strangers.

  I’m home.

  I’m dead.

  And then another realization, more chilling than these.

  Even when I was alive, it felt the same as now.

  I sat up on my elbows and took a full breath. It tasted like burnt toast (Dad) and, through the crack under the door, the carpet deodorizer periodically sprinkled around the house but never vacuumed up (Mom). No Ash. Not detectable in here, anyway. Come to think of it, this room was a place she rarely entered. She called it gross, “too sad for words,” a Nerd Hole. And while I could see that she was right on all counts it struck me that maybe, through some small kindness, she let it be mine. A sanctuary for the licking of wounds.

  The curtains were pulled tight over the window but the dull light that fingered out from its edges suggested it was day outside. Early morning or dusk. The Royal Oak light of Sunday afternoons.

  It was only when I swung my legs off the bed that I heard the squeak of the bedsprings and registered it as the first sound I’d heard. It held me where I stood next to the bed, trying to listen to whatever else may have been beyond the door, breathing along with me. Waiting.

  Nothing I could hear. But there was something.

  The thing you imagine when you get up in the middle of the night, wakened by what might have been a footfall downstairs. What you don’t rise to search for because you’d rather talk yourself into believing it’s not there. Except it is there. You can feel it in the stillness. The too-quiet of a creature that can hold its breath longer than you.

  I shuffled over to the window and peeped through the curtains.

  At first, it looked just the way the view from my room always looked. The corner of Farnum and Fairgrove through the branches of our side yard oak, the pavement recently slicked
by rain that looked more like a glaze of oil. The cracks in the sidewalk beneath my window patterned like lightning bolts. A few blocks away, the top floor of the commercial buildings of Main Street just visible over the Quinlans’ roof.

  All of it smudged by fog. Unusual for the living Detroit. As though a cloud had descended to ground level and absorbed all the color from the world, leaving only a palette of grays and browns, stone and sand. A mist that thickened and thinned even as I watched it. Breathing.

  When the fog lifted again, I saw what wasn’t there.

  No cars moving on the streets.

  No movement behind the neighbors’ windows.

  But the gate to our yard was open. Swinging in a nonexistent breeze. Banging against the latch but not catching, opening wide again, over and over.

  I let the curtains close. Instantly enveloped by the house’s quiet. Listening for the thing that waited for me to open the door and leave the protection of my room.

  If this was eternity then I had no choice.

  I opened the door.

  The second-floor hallway was only dimly lit, as all the other doors along its length—the bathroom, my parents’ bedroom, Ash’s room—were shut. Yet something moved out there. I felt it before I saw it. Down the stairs, the brass chandelier swayed an inch or two before it was stilled.

  Go on.

  Not a command from within. Not a voice from outside me, either.

  That’s the way it is with twins.

  Take a look around. Old times’ sake.

  I started with my parents’ room.

  The curtains closed there, too. In the airless twilight, I could make out all the things left as they were. The bed made. The glass menagerie of perfume bottles on the dresser, the Chanel No. 5s and Diors and Oscar de la Rentas still almost full, my father’s standard birthday gifts preserved like museum pieces. The full-length mirror that fattened whoever stood before it, reflecting a bowling pin–shaped me. Trembling and greasy-haired and looking even more frightened than I felt.

  I was about to close the door when I noticed the outline on the bed. A body-shaped depression left atop the sheets on the near side. As though someone had lain there not for sleep but only to recall how it felt. Followed by a clumsy attempt to smooth the bedspread.

  The sort of clumsiness I’m known for myself. Like father, like son.

  The body shape on the side of the bed my dad slept on. His size. The width of his head. And with this came a brief scent of him left in the air: bleached undershirt and Brut soap-on-a-rope.

  He’d been here.

  Which meant maybe he still was.

  The bathroom next. A part of me dreading the sight of my dad on the john, or in the midst of some private act, the unwanted spectacle of him without clothes on. But there was nobody there.

  The shower curtain had been pulled closed. And there was the wink-wink-wink of watery drips meeting the enamel tub.

  “The shower game?” I heard myself whisper aloud as I slid closer to the curtain. “Really?”

  Really.

  After we watched a Hitchcock marathon on PBS when we were eleven or twelve, Ash made me play the game for weeks afterward. The rules were straightforward: Every time I came into the bathroom and she had left the shower curtain closed, I had to pull it open. If I didn’t, I’d lose. If I didn’t, there’d be “penalties.”

  Sometimes she’d be there, fully clothed, startling me with a “BOO!” Sometimes the hot water would be left on, steam filling the empty stall. Sometimes she’d be in the shower herself, rinsing shampoo from her hair, and when I pulled the curtain open she’d scream and rear back against the tiles as though I were bringing a knife down on her.

  I pulled the curtain back slowly at first. Thought I heard the squeak of wet feet and yanked it back all the way.

  No skin, no body, no scream. Just my dad’s soap-on-a-rope. Spinning one way, then the other.

  I was scared. I wanted to go home.

  You are home. And you were always scared.

  I saved Ash’s room for last. The door I least wanted to open. And for the same reason then as before: I’m not permitted.

  Whenever I looked in on the rare occasions when the door was left open I always saw the same thing. Ash sitting at her impeccably ordered desk or on the edge of her bed, the stuffed animals of childhood arranged as an attentive audience to watch as she wrote in her diary. Her most treasured object. Leather-bound and with a strap that could be locked to prevent anyone but the holder of its key from reading it. A gift. Personalized with a gold inscription on the back (TO MY DAUGHTER, ASHLEIGH—DAD) and therefore prized. Not “Love, Dad,” only “Dad,” an acknowledgment of who she was but also his distance from her. Ash saw this, too; she must have. Yet she guarded the few offerings given to her by her father all the more ferociously because of it, as though these coldly neutral presents, bought under obligation the day before her birthday or late on Christmas Eve, were sacred relics.

  Other than this, I had a hard time remembering any details of what she kept in there. Were there posters of bands or movie stars? Were there bookshelves? What did Ash read or watch? What did she like? Nothing occurred to me in answer to any of this. It may have been because there was nothing there in the first place. No “personal items” because there was no person.

  My hand gripped the cut-glass doorknob before I told it to. It felt warm.

  “Ash?”

  This came out as less than a whisper. The parting of sleep-dried lips.

  I turned the handle but it didn’t go all the way. Locked.

  Except the doors didn’t have locks up there.

  Tried it again, driving my shoulder against the wood. There was no give. Barricaded from the inside, maybe. Or held in place by something other than bolt or bureau because I wasn’t meant to open it. Not yet. I was meant to carry on and see whatever else she wanted me to see.

  Down the stairs, the carpet shushing each barefoot step. The chandelier over the hall (Was it always that lopsided? That tarnished? That ugly?) swaying again. Then I felt it: a lick of outdoor air, cool and smelling of wet mulch. Yet the front door and windows in the living room and family room were all closed. Which left only the kitchen. Down the length of the main-floor hall.

  Nothing on the countertops or in the sink, the surfaces cleaned as though in preparation for a Realtor’s open house. I paused in front of the fridge. Was I hungry? Is there food on the other side, or drink, or need for either? Whatever the answer, the idea of chewing or swallowing caused my stomach to flip.

  I pulled the fridge door open. The only thing on its shelves a jug of Five Alive. What I more or less lived on as a kid, chugging liquid glucose for breakfast and keeping a plastic Darth Vader collectible cup on hand to wash down my mother’s burnt dinners. Put there as a joke. But there was something about the glowing orange liquid, the only color in the white fridge, that prevented it from being funny. A treat I couldn’t taste, not anymore.

  Closing the fridge door let me hear it.

  . . . Croc-EEL . . . Croc-EEL . . . Croc-EEL . . .

  Outside. A rhythmic repetition I thought might have been the gate smacking shut but it was too regular to be something pushed by the wind.

  I turned to see the sliding glass back door was open. Not open a moment earlier.

  . . . Croc-EEL . . . Croc-EEL . . .

  I squeezed out to the side yard. Tried to be quiet even though whatever opened the door knew I was there. Knew I was following the bread crumbs it had dropped for me.

  The sound was coming from the back of the house. Just a few steps and I’d be able to look around the corner and see what was there. And though it didn’t feel like a dream, there was that same unstoppability, the not wanting to do something but doing it nevertheless.

  . . . Croc-EEL . . .

  She sat in the tire swing I’d never seen her touch in life, let alone slip her legs through and go for a ride. Pumping it higher than it was meant to go, so that the branch the ropes were tied to bent ea
ch time the tire went back to nearly touch the toolshed, her skirt blown high around her hips.

  “Want a turn?”

  The search for words must’ve shown on my face because Ash laughed before I could summon an answer. It struck me that maybe I couldn’t speak there. Maybe there I would be a mute.

  But this was only the sickness of being near her again. Of hearing her voice not in my head but out in the air.

  She kept swinging. Eyes on me. She seemed glad. Not one of her masks but genuinely pleased, her smile the reflex that came with the wash of relief. She swung and smiled, swung and smiled, and before I could feel it coming I was smiling, too.

  “Do you know what it is to be lonely, Danny?” she said.

  I was about to attempt an answer but she cut me off.

  “I’m sorry! Of course you do.”

  Because of you, I wanted to say, but couldn’t.

  “But we won’t be lonely now. I’ll show you. Brother and sister. That sounds right, doesn’t it?”

  It did. It sounded as right as family or safe or love. A sound I’d fallen for a thousand times only to end up learning the difference, over and over, between the idea of a thing and the thing itself.

  Ash dragged her feet over the lawn, slowing the tire. Pulled herself out and walked to the open gate where two bikes—the ones she and I rode as teenagers, a driveway-sale Raleigh for me and the fancy Schwinn she rode on the last birthday of her life—leaned against the low wooden fence. She pulled hers up and walked it a few feet away, ready to jump on.

  “C’mon, D-Boy,” she said, glancing back at me with her old smile now. The mask smile. “Let’s go for a ride.”

  WE HEADED SOUTH DOWN MAIN Street. Past the same businesses that were there when we were in high school, though none appeared to be open despite some of the lights on inside and the sandwich boards advertising lunch specials or cheap flights to Florida standing on the sidewalks. The traffic lights all flashing red as they do sometimes after a blackout, though there was no traffic to stop. Nobody walked on the streets, nobody waited for a bus, nobody could be seen inside the apartments over the Zúmba Mexican Grille or Mr. B’s Pub, readying themselves to head off to work or make dinner or do whatever they did at whatever time it was.