Bad Things (39 page)

sweet to her. I’d picked up a novel I knew she had her eye on, from the

Yakima Borders, and brought something easy for dinner. As we lay

together in bed that night—only about forty feet from where Carol

now sat in the darkness telling me these things, her voice low and

dry—she knew the grown-up thing was to just let it go.

That this was the way to deal with me, anyhow. But Jenny? That

was something else.

This was a woman she’d cooked supper for, gone shopping with,

B A D T H I N G S 283

chatted over coffee to. Who’d been at her house. Often. Before, dur-

ing, and since.

Carol couldn’t let that go.

My cigarette was long finished, and we sat in blackness now. Tyler

had kept quiet throughout, but I’d noticed Carol using long or adult

words to make it unlikely he’d understand much of what was being

said. And he was only three and a half, after all. You have to get a

lot older before you realize how much you can fuck things up just by

being stupid, that living in the moment can be a fi ne way of screwing

up an infi nite series of later moments.

“What did you do?”

I heard her swallow.

“What did you
do,
Carol?”

She said she tried to let it go. That she’d told herself that Jenny

Raines was no more to blame than I was. But she couldn’t get the idea

to take. She kept remembering an afternoon a month or so after Tyler

was born, when she ran into Jenny in Roslyn. They wound up hav-

ing a pastry together. Jenny held Tyler for a little while. Carol didn’t

know whether we were actually having sex at the time or not. It didn’t

much matter. The woman shouldn’t have been able to be that easy

with her either way.

I hung my head. I knew how she would have felt. I once made the

mistake of staging a surprise party for Carol. She hated it. The fact

of friends turning up to wish her well was utterly outweighed by the

knowledge that she’d talked to many of them in the preceding weeks,

and not one had let anything slip. They’d all lied to her, in effect, dis-

torted her world through omission, making her feel that the reality

she perceived was not to be trusted.

“So I put a sadness on her.”

“What’s a ‘sadness,’ Carol?”

284 Michael Marshall

“What it sounds like,” she said.

“In words of one syllable?”

“Getting up and not being happy. Not being able to see the

point. Looking around at the things you’re supposed to value and

supposed to care about and not being able to remember a single

reason why.”

I recalled how Bill had described Jenny in the months before she

left town. “You mean, depressed.”

“No. It’s real. It’s something you can do.”

I shook my head, pointless though that was in the darkness.

“Carol, this just sounds like nonsense. Please tell me. What did you

actually
do
to Jenny?”

“I’m
telling
you, John. I didn’t actually do anything. I went to

someone who could.”

“Who?”

“Brooke.”

“Brooke
Robertson
? And she did what?”

“She directed it. At Jenny.”

“Are you saying Brooke is a
witch
?”

“Not her. You’re not from around here, John. You wouldn’t un-

derstand how it works.”

“Oh, screw this, Carol.”

She spoke in a strange, singsong voice. “I went to Brooke. I paid

the fee. I gave her the things you need. She did what I asked. It . . .”

She ran out of words, and started crying again, hard.

“It
what
, Carol?”

“It went wrong.”

“Mommy?” Tyler had become discomforted by the sound of his

mother being upset. I had, too, but I couldn’t stop.

“What are you—”

“It was just supposed to be a sadness
.
”

“Carol . . .”

B A D T H I N G S 285

“
Listen,
you asshole. You asked, so fucking
listen
. Didn’t you feel
anything
?”

“When?”

“The day that it happened. Didn’t you?”

I stood up and walked away, but I didn’t have anywhere to go—

and whatever Carol was doing, I didn’t think she was lying to me.

I turned back toward her.

“Tell me.”

C H A P T E R 3 8

She said she had felt uneasy since lunchtime that day, but put it

down to tiredness, Tyler’s continual crying in the night, an oncom-

ing stomach upset. She said I’d made her a sandwich—which I did

not recall, though I remembered everything that had gone into

Scott’s sandwich—and she had left most of it, blaming its dry, stale

taste on the way she felt.

Afterward I had gone back to my study, and she took the baby

outside, hoping fresh air might make her feel better and maybe help

the little guy sleep. He grizzled for a time, but slowly his crying

softened, and then from nowhere she realized he wasn’t making

noises anymore and his eyes were shut and all was good.

So she sat looking down toward the lake, idly wondering—not

for the fi rst time—why it was called Murdo Pond. She was a Roslyn

girl, a town only twenty miles distant, but around here that was far

enough for things to be a mystery and remain that way. Gradually

she started to feel her own breathing growing more measured, her

eyelids getting heavy. She thought that, for a few moments, she

might even have drifted off to sleep, but she wasn’t sure.

If she had, it would have explained why the light looked altered,

the sun’s change in position causing it to fall in slightly different

B A D T H I N G S 287

ways. The breeze had died, too, and a heavy stillness came over ev-

erything.

She began to feel hot, clammy, but the one piece of advice her

mother had passed down was “ ‘Never wake a sleeping baby,’ and if

that isn’t in the Bible, it should be.” She heard gentle rustling in the

trees over on the left, where the ornamental paths and the remains

of the settlers’ cabin lay, but it wasn’t reaching where she sat; nor was

the breeze which must have been moving over the water of the pond,

causing the long ripples across its surface. There was an odd smell

from somewhere. Perspiration began to stand out on her brow, and

even her insides began to feel warm, as if her kidneys or liver were

overheating, something at her core running too fast.
I hope I’m not

about to throw up
, she thought.

And that’s when I had said, from the deck: “Where’s Scott?”

Our memories of what happened next were different. She be-

lieved the air had become yet more still as I hurried along the paths

at the start of the woods. She says I called out when I saw Scott at the

end of the jetty looking out into the pond, though I don’t think I did.

She heard
something
, anyway, or perhaps felt it, some jagged sound of urgency and danger, and assumed it was me.

When we were down at the base of the jetty she remembered be-

ing compelled to turn and look back, by the expression on the boy’s

face, as he stared past me up toward the house and woods—and see-

ing nothing. By which she meant . . . that
nothin
g was there. As if the power had gone down, everywhere and for good. No sense, or reason, none of the intangible and unconscious ties that bind the world

together. The sound of no voice, shouting so loud as to drown out

everything else. She could see trees, the bottom of our lawn, the boat

dock, slivers of the house, the sky. But none of those things seemed

to mean anything, to be connected to one another or to her. In that

instant she saw everything in creation as a jumble of refuse, strewn

upon the abandoned earth like a midnight rockfall discovered the

next morning: meaningless, silent, dead.
This
was what she saw in

288 Michael Marshall

Scott’s face, an utter horror of everything, the expression of a child

who had seen his parents suddenly become eerie strangers and the

world fl ipped into a reeking void populated only by faceless mon-

sters.

Then Scott had shouted in denial, called my name as if to save

me, and it was all done.

I recognized something of the feeling she’d described, from when I’d

stood at the jetty on my fi rst afternoon back in Black Ridge. But I knew

her talking was precarious, and didn’t say anything to derail her.

“Brooke did what I asked, and a bad thing came,” she said again.

“But it didn’t go away. It stayed around. It was what made you start to

drink, what kept pulling you down to that
fucking
lake.”

“No.” Much though I might have been happy for the blame to

go elsewhere, I knew whose fault those things had been. “That was

just—”

“I know you
think
it was you,” she interrupted. “But you never

drank before—why start then?”

“My son had just
died
.”

“So? Is that how you handled your mom dropping dead of a heart

attack, two days before Christmas? Did you grab a bottle in Iraq ev-

ery time a guy you knew got blown to pieces by some asshole with a

rusty claymore?”

“No,” I said, not wanting to add that on those occasions, my ac-

tions had not been exaggerated by carefully concealed feelings of

guilt. “But—”

“Everything started being wrong. That’s why I kept pushing you

to sell the place. I
knew
we needed to get out. That’s
why I left
—I couldn’t wait any longer for you to get the message. I needed us out of

that house before anything else happened.”

“You wanted out of
everything
,” I said, only then realizing how

B A D T H I N G S 289

much it had hurt. I’d been so consumed by knowing her actions were

reasonable, that my drinking and distance and uselessness were suf-

fi cient cause to convict, that I hadn’t allowed myself to hate her for

the abandonment.

“
No
. I just wanted to be somewhere else before it was too late.”

“Carol, Scott just d—”

“No, he
didn’t
. Scott was killed.”

“Oh, Carol, by
what
?”

“One of the things that live out there.”

She jerked her head backward, presumably indicating the forest

that surrounded the boarded-up house. “They’ve always been here.

Across America, Europe, caves in Afghanistan. I have researched
so

much
into this, John. You have no idea. Every culture has a different word for them. They’re everything about a place except the concrete

and physical. They’re the spirits we’ve feared and make sacrifi ce to,

the things we’ve always
known
live between us. They’re what ma-

gicians encountered when they thought they were summoning the

devil. They’re
everywhere
, but they’re most powerful in the wild,

which is why the wild scares us. We started living in towns in the

fi rst place to try to swamp them with numbers, to blanket them with

noise and light, but even in cities we feel lost and empty and sad and

it’s because
they’re still there
—behind the buildings and underneath

our streets and living in the parks. We cut down the forests and we

gouge holes in the earth to make it harder for them to hide—but they

can still get inside us. They still ruin everything.”

She started to cry again, soundlessly.

“Carol,” I said. I felt terribly sad for her, and knew I should have

been better at keeping in contact, before this mania had time to get

such a hold.

“It’s with me all the time now,” she said, her voice barely above a

whisper. “Sometimes I can hear it walking around us. Waiting out-

side the house.”

290 Michael Marshall

“In Renton? But how would that—”

“They crawl inside, fi nd carriers. That’s why you haven’t felt it.

You may just have been running away from everything, but actually

you did the right thing. I didn’t get far enough, and now I can’t.”

“Why?” I said, though I was reminded of something Ellen had

started to tell me in the coffee shop, about how there were some

things you could not get away from.

“I’m dirty inside. Everything I touch turns to shit. I don’t trust

anything. I can’t . . . I can’t even believe that I’ve locked a
door
properly.”

She broke down then, fully. Unable to speak coherently, barely

able to breathe.

I shuffl ed over in the dark, knelt down and put my arms around

her shoulders, let her sob into my neck. She felt bony and hot and not

like any woman I had ever held. She was saying that she had set this

thing on Jenny, and that it had gleefully overstepped its bounds—and

instead hurt the thing which had mattered most to the man who had

mattered most to the other woman at the time. That she hadn’t meant

to, but that it was her. That she had done it.

“What do you think you did, Carol?”

She looked up at me, her face so pulled by grief that it was barely

recognizable.

“I killed Scott.”

Nothing I said seemed to get through. In the end I stood up and left

her to it. She had wrapped her arms around her knees and was rock-

ing back and forth in a tight ball, whispering to herself.