The Damned Read online

  Then Eddie handed me the ring. The same one my father gave my mother. A couple decades spent in the dark of a bank deposit box, then glittering on Willa’s finger.

  It was a long way down to her lips for the kiss. And once I was there, I took my time.

  Not now. Please.

  Eventually, the spell was broken by a sparse round of applause. The minister had pronounced us husband and wife but I hadn’t really heard him. I pulled Eddie in, made a circle. I was a married man and this was my family. I could happily say this out loud every couple of minutes for the rest of my waking life.

  We were walking down the aisle toward the doors when I heard her.

  Up here, Danny.

  I didn’t want to look. I never want to. But I always do.

  She stood at the altar where we had stood a moment ago. Dressed in bridal white, a veil over her face.

  “Danny?” Willa followed my line of sight. When she saw nothing there, she looked up at me. “You okay, baby?”

  “I’m great. It’s just—I thought I forgot something back there.”

  “Forgot what? You got all you need right here,” she said, slipping my hand around her waist.

  We carried on to the doors. Some of the guests threw confetti even though there were signs asking them not to. I could feel some of the papery bits get stuck in my eyelashes and slip down the back of my neck. Tickling and cold as snow.

  Before I was out, before I was blinded by the afternoon’s clear sunshine, I looked back again.

  Ash wasn’t standing at the altar anymore and at first I thought she was gone, was never there at all. But then I spotted her. Walking closer behind the rest of the guests. Lifting her veil.

  Her face burned, clawed by fire. The skin peeled back, white bone beneath. The flesh hanging off her forehead and cheeks on strings of tendon.

  You may kiss the bride . . .

  I told myself not to run. To keep moving out of the church, just try to smile at the cameras, make it to the limo waiting by the curb and everything will be okay. Just pretend she wasn’t there. The same game I’ve played my whole life.

  Not that I’ve ever won.

  16

  * * *

  The morning after the wedding, as a honeymoon gift, I took Eddie into Porter Square for breakfast and let Willa sleep in. We hit the bookstore first. I expected him to want out of there as soon as I grabbed the Globe I came in for, but I was happy to see him wander into the YA section and start pulling books off the shelves. I assumed kids didn’t read anymore outside of the passing Harry Potter and Twilight spasms, and even those mostly limited to girls. I’d been reading C. S. Lewis to him before the heart attack, but I figured he was only indulging me. Yet there was Eddie, a kid of few words, scowling at the spines and riffling through the pages of the titles he selected, the favored covers writhing with dragons and bosomy elves.

  “I just remembered we have to get back to The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe,” I said, sitting next to him on the floor.

  “I finished it.”

  “Really?”

  “In the hospital.”

  “Wow. That’s amazing. I didn’t know you liked to read.”

  “Me neither.”

  I checked out some of the books he’d stacked up.

  “So you’re thinking of some more fantasy?”

  He looked at me through a veil of real fear. “But no witches. I don’t like witches.” Then he brightened. “Battles and dragons and all that are cool, though.”

  We looked together for a while before I handed him a special boxed set edition of The Lord of the Rings.

  “I loved this as a kid. I mean loved,” I said. “And not a witch in the whole thing. But I bet you’ve seen the movies, right?”

  “Mom won’t let me yet.”

  “Really? Well, we could get around that by reading it.”

  He held the books in his hands as though judging their merit based on weight.

  “Is there magic in it?” he asked.

  “Lots.”

  “Do you like magic?”

  “I don’t think I’d be here without it.”

  I searched his eyes for anything that might show he saw that I might have been talking about him. That it was his presence, his magic, that delivered me all the way from the night field behind the house on Alfred Street to this café, this untroubled Saturday morning.

  “Okay,” he finally announced. Handed the box back to me. “Let’s read this one.”

  “Take turns with it, you mean?”

  “No, like the Narnia book. You reading to me. Except we’ll finish this one.”

  “It’s a big book. Three big books.”

  “We’ve got time, right?”

  After a faked trip to the Reference section so I could blink away the threat of grateful tears, we bought our paper and books and walked down a couple stores to Cafe Zing for cheese croissants and drinks, a mango smoothie for Eddie and black coffee for me. We found a table near the back with plans of sneaking in a page or two of The Fellowship of the Ring when Eddie said he needed to visit the bathroom first.

  “I’ll be here.”

  He gave me a don’t-be-a-dummy look. “I know,” he said.

  Once I saw the men’s room door shut I pulled out my cell phone and sent a text to Willa.

  I miss you, Mrs. Orchard.

  She wrote back almost immediately.

  You’ve been gone 45 mins!! (Sweet tho—I luv being yr Mrs!)

  I was thinking of my reply, grinning the idiotic grin of a man unused to composing love notes but enjoying himself in a way he can’t contain, when I became aware of someone stepping close to the table. Not passing by on their way to the rear hallway but pausing, as though reading over my shoulder. Someone who now sat in the chair across the small table from mine. Eddie’s chair.

  “That didn’t take long—”

  I looked up.

  It wasn’t Eddie.

  Writing to your girlfriend?

  Did the people around me hear her? Did they see the uglybeautiful girl leaning closer to me, pushing me against the back of my chair? A glance around the room confirmed that none looked our way. None heard Ash speak in the voice that seemed to come from within my own head.

  She scanned the room just as I did. It seemed to remind her how little time she could stay, because something changed in her face. The triumphant cruelty slipped away and left her anxious.

  I need your help, Danny.

  “Help?”

  It’s time.

  “Leave me alone.”

  You have no idea what it is to be left alone.

  “You can’t hurt me anymore.”

  But that . . .

  Her face changed again. A blank. Her true self.

  . . . that’s not true.

  Ash lifted her hand and let it hover over the table. At first I thought she was preparing to count down the seconds with her fingers, or maybe lift Eddie’s croissant to the chapped skin of her mouth. But then the hand drifted forward, toward me. Slow as a spider, which it now resembled, the long fingers extending, the knuckles staring at me like empty eyes. She didn’t reach for me, though. The hand stopped before my full, still steaming coffee cup. Picked it up, making sure she had my full attention. Poured it over my hand.

  Even as the scalding coffee burned my skin there was a clear thought running through my mind, more troubling than the idea of what she might do next or the strain on my suddenly racing heart.

  She picked it up.

  This is what shouted through my head so loud I was sure everyone sitting around me could hear. So sure that when I met their faces I was astonished to see only the curiosity of those witnessing a nasty accident-in-progress.

  She picked up my cup but she’s supposed to be dead.

  I stood, almost knocked the table over with my knees. It fell against Ash, tipped her back in her chair, the metal frame toppling to the floor. But when I returned the table to its place, she wasn’t there. Only the chair, rollin
g on its back before settling in a puddle of coffee.

  A moment later Eddie found me by the condiments table, telling the barista there was no need to call an ambulance as I daubed my hand with napkins. Trying to hide the already blistering skin from his view.

  “What happened?”

  “Nothing. I spilled coffee on myself, that’s all.”

  “Does it hurt?”

  “A little.”

  He didn’t believe me. Not just the part about it only hurting a little, but the part about me spilling the coffee on myself. I could tell by the way his nostrils flared, detecting something familiar in the air. The way he scanned the room looking to catch a glimpse of something that was there a moment ago.

  “Danny? Do you—?”

  “Let’s go home so I can bandage this thing up. All right?”

  Eddie nodded. Let me lead the way out the café’s door as he brought up the rear, keeping an eye on the room as though in readiness against attack.

  ONCE I GOT HOME, MY hand in a bowl of ice water, I thought about how Ash’s latest visits had been different from any that came before.

  She’d never done anything so physical as pouring boiling liquid over a bare hand. Not to me ever, and not to anyone else since she died. But that morning she made something move in real time, an alteration of the world as she occupied it. Not a ghost, not a poltergeist or projection or whatever you’d call the shadow that had followed me for twenty-four years. She was there. For the moment that she reached out and made something happen, she was real.

  What she’d done at the chapel was new, too. The burned face she revealed when she lifted the bridal veil was a different mask, a new trick. She could put on costumes now. She could show herself not only as she appeared in life, but how she looked as the flames licked her skin.

  And another thing.

  We’d never had a conversation like the one we had in the café before. She’s spoken to me, delivered messages directly into my head, left behind notes of a kind. But then she was speaking across the table and when I replied, she heard me. Whatever barrier that made our communications a game of broken telephone had been removed, and she was present, her voice clear and sickeningly sweet as it had been in life.

  So what had changed?

  I’d died.

  Ash killed me and brought me to Detroit, the one she’d been assigned to, the one she tried to show me inside the house on Alfred Street. Had I gone all the way up those steps and through that door I would never have come out again. Because I would have been hers.

  The good news is that didn’t happen, because I came back.

  The bad news is I brought her with me.

  17

  * * *

  That night, after reading the opening pages of Eddie’s new book to him, Willa and I stayed up late drinking the champagne one of her friends had left with us as a wedding gift. It helped push aside the image of Ash sitting across from me in Cafe Zing and the even worse image of her walking down the aisle. The sweet bubbles of the wine, looking only at Willa, feeling the promise of her hand on my thigh. It almost kept her away.

  “Cheers,” Willa said, raising her glass.

  “We’ve already clinked.”

  “You can’t clink twice?”

  “I could clink with you all night.”

  “I like it when you talk dirty.”

  Love is silliness. I didn’t know that before. It’s serious, too, and rearranges what’s inside you in ways that are not always the most comfortable. But at that moment, half drunk with my beloved, it brought out the kid in me, the goof. The goofy kid I never had the chance to be.

  Why not?

  And this is how it goes.

  Happiness with Willa and Eddie reminded me of how little happiness I’d had in my life. Which is followed by asking why.

  Then the answer.

  Her hand tipping the cup over mine. Lifting the white veil.

  “Willa?”

  “Yo.”

  “I love you,” I said, changing my mind.

  There is only a very small number of people who might believe me if I were to tell them that my long-dead sister is an afterlife stowaway. And I imagined Willa stood as good a chance of being among them as anyone. But I wasn’t going to tell her.

  I wanted to protect her. Eddie, too. From knowing what I see, the injuries I’m ready to privately bear. That was the reason that topped the list. I would do what I’d always done: I would contain Ash within my own world, hold on to the secret of her radiant evil so that it might shine only on myself.

  That was the plan.

  It didn’t work then, my younger, unsilly self pointed out from somewhere below the champagne fizz. Why would it now?

  “I love you, too,” Willa said, and clinked my glass a third time.

  SINCE THE HEART ATTACK, WILLA had insisted on doing the cleaning up around the house, telling me to leave it to someone who knew what she’s doing. She said it as a joke, the bossy wife claiming her domestic domain, but I knew it covered a real worry about me doing too much. Specifically, me going up and down between floors. The house is narrow and tall, as are the stairs, a common feature of the colonial-era town houses in old Cambridge. Climbing them required a leg raised higher than usual, a miniworkout to go from main-floor kitchen or living room to second-floor bathroom or bed. You had to watch yourself on the midway landing in particular, a tiny platform that turned sharply to the right, which could be a bit tricky if carrying a bucket or a vacuum.

  It’s where I met Willa. Me halfway up, she halfway down with a hamper of dirty laundry in her arms.

  “Where do you think you’re going?” she said.

  “Eddie in his room?”

  “Reading. Why?”

  “I wanted to talk to you.”

  “Sounds serious. And we haven’t been married a week yet.”

  “We can’t do it this way.”

  “Do what what way?”

  “Me the patient, you the nurse, making sure I stay consigned to bed. I feel useless.”

  “Useful’s overrated.”

  “But this isn’t how people are. Not the people I want us to be, anyway.”

  I expected another quip from her, but she softened. Did this thing with her nose, a Bewitched wiggle at the tip, that was her tell that whatever came next would be the real deal.

  “Who do you want us to be?”

  “A couple. A family,” I said. “Not looking over our shoulders, just looking ahead like everybody else. But for now, I’d be happy just to do the damn laundry.”

  She didn’t like it, but she could see this was something she had to let go of. She handed the hamper over to me.

  “Go nuts,” she said.

  A couple minutes later, making a show of taking my time, I was two flights down in the cool of the unfinished basement. The laundry room is at the back of the house, farthest from the stairs. Just a roughed-in drywall square, plywood door, a single 100-watt bulb hanging from one of the ceiling crossbeams. I’d always liked it down there. Even when I was living alone I’d close the door and take my time feeding the washing machine, measuring the detergent, starting the cycle and lingering to hear the water pour in, the slushing of the tub.

  The dryer has its charms, too. The front-entry door with its glass porthole allowing me to watch the crashing underwear and T-shirts with the same comforting repetition of the tide. If you looked long enough, you could notice subtle shifts each time around, each tumble unique. Pant legs tossed upward like a swimmer kicking his way under. A sock leaping against the glass as though begging for escape.

  Or this.

  A windbreaker I hadn’t noticed in the wash. White with green stripes down the arm. A pattern that caught in my memory though I couldn’t place from where. A flash of the nylon back, the cotton collar. The sort of retro thing you saw people wear these days, but not me. Did Willa shop at vintage stores?

  I almost started upstairs but something about the dryer held my attention. A thudding from inside, li
ke a roll of quarters I meant to cash at the bank, or one of Eddie’s toy cars.

  Except the thudding started in the middle of the cycle. The moment I raised my hand to switch off the light and go.

  Instead of turning off the light, I turned off the dryer. It sighed to a stop, the clothes collapsing into a pile.

  For the first time I noticed how warm it was. The heat of the dryer contributed to it, the indicator light next to HOT still blinking red. But something more than that, too. Air escaped through the cracks of the machine as though it were a living thing.

  I bent down and pulled on the door. It yielded a quarter inch before sucking back into place.

  I curled the fingers of both hands around the handle. Heaved it back.

  The air came out so scorching and baby powdery it stung my eyes, an oven that had been baking sheets of Downy at 500 degrees.

  And then I saw the windbreaker move.

  It could’ve been just the last thing to settle, a belated resting of its slippery material amongst the firmer cottons. Except it did it on its own. Lying there on top of the other clothes and then, with a clear reach and pull of one of its sleeves, it made its way two inches closer to the open door.

  An everyday illusion. The sort of thing you start trying to write off the moment after it’s happened.

  Then it moved again.

  The other sleeve pulling itself up from the back of the piled clothes and slapping down next to the other. Two sets of green and white stripes, side by side.

  My colors.

  This came out of nowhere, like the name of a lost acquaintance you’d long stopped trying to recollect.

  My high school colors.

  I reached in and grasped one of the sleeves around the wrist. Felt it crumple in my grasp. Yet as I pulled, the jacket rising up from the dryer’s other contents, the arm expanded, solidified. Something forming inside the sleeve, the shoulder, filling out the windbreaker’s chest. The other sleeve rising and jerking on its own, too. Learning to move again.