Resurrection Bay (3 page)

Or the way Betsy down at the nail salon kept redoing her own nails, happy as a clam, instead of doing her customers’ nails.

But the only thing I noticed was the strange way Rav was acting, especially toward me. He was avoiding me; he wouldn’t even look at me in class. When I finally did corner him by his locker, he yelled at me.

“Just go away. I don’t want to talk to you, okay?” And he stormed off.

He failed a math test that day, and I figured that maybe he was mad because I’d made him sit on that stupid roof watching for the undead instead of letting him study. Rational. Simple. Easily explained away.

A week later, Dad went out on a date. Believe it or not, one of the female geologists he had been flying around had taken a liking to him. She was one of the few still in town to take readings, but I suspect that was just because she wanted to see more of Dad. I wasn’t sure how I felt about it, but I wasn’t going to ruin it for him.

It was a bright full moon that night, and Dad was going to take her on a moonlit flight over the ice field. Very romantic. I, of course, was left at home to babysit Sammy, but at around eight o’clock, Rav turned up on our doorstep, knocking so timidly I was actually surprised it was him.

He stood there with his shoulders shrugged up awkwardly, like he was cold, even though he was wearing a heavy jacket. There was something on his mind. Something that was weighing on him so heavily, I could practically see his back curving from the burden of it.

“I just want to say I’m sorry,” he said. “I shouldn’t have acted the way I did to you.”

Since Rav rarely apologized for anything, I decided to milk it. I folded my arms and leaned against the door frame.
“No, you shouldn’t have,” I said, pretending I wasn’t ready to accept his apology, even though I was.

“Yeah, and I’m sorry.”

That weight still lingered on him. As much as I wanted to make him suffer, I couldn’t. “Apology accepted. So what’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” he said a little too quickly. “Nothing’s wrong at all. As a matter of fact, things are totally right.” He gave a weird little laugh; then he said, “There’s something I want to show you. I know it’s late, but do you think you can get out?”

“Sure,” I told him. “My dad’s not home anyway.”

Then Sammy, who had snuck up right behind me, asked, “Can I come, too?”

The look on Rav’s face said that Sammy wasn’t invited. I figured this might be about his apology and about us making up. The last thing I needed was Sammy along as a third wheel.

“No,” I told Sammy. His face got all twisted, and his body all limp boned. “Anika . . . ,” he whined.

I looked to Rav, but he shook his head. So I made a decision. “Sure,” I told Sammy. “. . . Of course, if you come, you’ll miss Dad flying by.”

“What?”

“Yeah, Dad’s gonna do a low flyby and wave to us—maybe even set down and pick us up to take us with him to the ice field.”

“Really? D’ya think he’d land right on the roof?”

“Maybe,” I said. “You know how Dad likes to surprise us.”

Then I waited for a moment before I shook my head and said, “Naah, forget it. He’ll have to do it another time. You have to come with Rav and me.”

“Why?” he said, getting all twisty and limp boned again.

“You’re too little to stay here by yourself.”

He looked at me, deeply insulted. “Am not!”

And that’s all it took.

Sammy promised to be good and not to watch anything scary on TV. I left holding hands with Rav, wondering what he had to show me, hoping it was something fun . . . and never even imagining the truth behind it.

There’s a before, and there’s an after. There are those events that surgically slice your life in two; and once it happens, you know that you’re on the other side of that painful incision, and there’s no going back to the way things were before. If you’re lucky, the wound heals into a jagged scar. And if you’re unlucky, it never heals at all; it just keeps bleeding. The knife came down for me on that bright, moon-pale night.

As Rav and I walked down the street, he said to me, “You know, I couldn’t stop thinking about what you said the other day. About that woman under the porch.”

I shrugged. “I was just being stupid. It wasn’t who I thought.”

“I think maybe it was,” Rav said.

That got me a little angry. Had I been so convincing that I had him believing it, too, or was he just making fun of me? Either way, I had spent so much brain power trying to make the whole episode go away, I didn’t want to bring it back up again.

Instead of heading to his house, we turned left at the end of my street and walked toward Main Street.

“Where are we going?” I asked.

“You’ll see.”

He took me to his father’s pub, which was closed. That was odd, because it was a favorite local hangout—especially this time of year when most of the other bars were closed for the winter. Even worse, the windows were frosted in that white, soapy stuff they use to mask the glass when a place goes out of business.

“My dad’s up north,” Rav said.

“You mean Anchorage?”

“No, I mean
north
, north. But he’ll be back soon.”

Now, in most other places when you say someone’s “up north,” it doesn’t mean very much; but when you live in Seward, Alaska, all you’ve got up north are places so cold you don’t want to go there. They call winter “The Hammer” because when it comes down, it hits hard, and all you can do is hunker down until the thaw. So the thought of his dad going north for any reason didn’t sit well with me.

“What’s he doing?” I asked. “Hunting?”

“Yeah,” said Rav. Then he thought about it. “Kind of,” he said. Then finally, “No, not really.”

“So where is he?”

“Prudhoe Bay,” he told me. I got a shiver just thinking of it. Prudhoe Bay is so cold it makes Resurrection Bay look like the Bahamas. It’s where the Trans-Alaska pipeline starts, way on Alaska’s northern shore, up above the Arctic Circle. One of the coldest places on Earth.

“You guys aren’t thinking of leaving here, are you?”

“No,” said Rav, then he thought about it. “I don’t know,” he said. Then finally, “Yeah, maybe.”

But before I could even consider the idea of life around here without Rav, he took out his keys and unlocked the pub.

He opened the door a crack, then slowly peeked in. It was dark in there. Only faint, diffused moonlight spilled through the clouded windows. I could hear music playing somewhere as we stepped in.

Rav closed the door behind us but didn’t make a move to turn on a light yet. It was guitar music playing, an acoustic guitar by the sound of it—a gentle, mournful plucking.

“Don’t be scared,” Rav said. “It’s important that you’re not scared.”

Then I began to get an awful feeling in my gut. The kind you get when the phone rings at two in the morning and you know in your heart of hearts, even before you pick it up, that it’s really, really bad news.

I reached for the light switch, but Rav firmly grabbed my wrist before I could.

“You know all that stuff you were saying? About how the glacier dug its way through the cemetery on purpose, like it knew what it was doing?”

“I never said that!”

“But I know it’s what you were thinking, wasn’t it?” And then he said, in a terrible whisper, “Well, you were right.”

He reached over and turned on the light.

There, in one of the farthest booths, sat a woman playing the guitar, but most of her face was still in shadows. Rav, still holding my wrist, pulled me toward the woman. Something was telling me I didn’t want to see this—that I didn’t want to be there at all. But my curiosity was more powerful than my instinct to run.

Her hair was dangling in front of her face and over the guitar strings as she played. The guitar was covered with frost; icy condensation spilled from its open hole like when you open a freezer door. Only then did I realize the entire room was very, very cold.

Rav said, “I brought someone to see you, Mom.”

She turned to me, her head moving in that same jarring, gritty way that the woman under the porch had moved. I instantly recoiled, backing right into Rav’s chest, but he stood there like a boulder, not letting me get away.

“It’s okay,” Rav said. I don’t know whether he was talking to
me or to this . . . this
thing
in front of me.

“Don’t let this frighten you,” Rav said, but how could I not be frightened? I had gone to this woman’s funeral. She had been dead for two years. Even now her face bore the signs of death. Her lips were a little too thin, her eyes were set too deep in her face, her cheeks were too sunken.

Rav must have known what I was thinking because he whispered, “It was worse when she first came back, but each day she’s looking a little bit better. She’s not as confused as she was, either. Every day she remembers more and more. She’s becoming like she used to be.”

The dead woman held me in her gaze, her eyes a deep blue like the depths of a glacier crevasse. Then she forced her lips to form a smile. “Anika!” Her voice was both gentle and gruff. Inhuman. “How are you?”

Every ounce of me wanted to scream, but my throat felt frozen shut. I could only stare.

“Answer her,” Rav prodded. “Don’t be rude! She won’t like it if you’re rude.”

I cleared my throat and swallowed. “I . . . I’m fine. . . .”

“Look how you’ve grown. Just like my Rav,” said the woman who had once been Mrs. Carnegie. “Come closer, Anika.”

Afraid to disobey, I swallowed my terror and took a step closer.

“It’s good to see you,” she said. “I’m so happy to be back.”

But the more I looked at her, the more I came to realize
that this wasn’t Rav’s mother at all. The truth was in her voice; it was in her eyes; it was in her breath—that flow of warm air drawing toward her, cold air flowing away.

“You’re not Mrs. Carnegie!”

Rav grabbed me, squeezing my arm to get me to shut up, but I just shook him off. “I don’t know what you are, but you’re NOT Rav’s mother!”

She slowly breathed in. . . . She slowly breathed out. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“Yes, you do!”

Then the smile left her face. She looked at me with cool calculation, and I thought at that moment she could either grab me and hug me or she could reach out and rip my heart out of my chest. For her it would make no difference. But she did neither of those things. Instead she said, “I have her body; I have her memories; I feel everything she felt: her frustrations, her fears, her hopes. And her love. I am her in every way that matters.”

“Except for one,” I told her.

“Stop it!” Rav shouted. I turned to him and shook him, trying to make him see.

“This is not your mother!”

“Don’t you think I know that?” Rav snapped. He looked at the woman sitting in the booth, then he looked back to me. “My mother’s soul is gone. I get that, okay? But now she’s got a new soul. It’s not evil, it’s just . . . different. It wants to be
whatever we want it to be.
She
wants to be my mother.” There were tears in his eyes now. “Who are you to tell me that it’s wrong?”

When I looked back to Mrs. Carnegie, she was smiling at me, tilting her head. Then she said to me, just as that other woman beneath the porch had:

“I know you. . . .”

“Of course you do, Mom,” said Rav, “it’s Anika.”

“No,” Mrs. Carnegie said, still smiling. “That’s not what I mean.”

Then she reached toward me as if she wanted to grab me with those pale hands.

“No, Mom!” Rav said.

She stopped short. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I forgot.”

And when I looked at Rav’s right hand, I understood. He had touched her. How could he have kept himself from doing so? His fingertips, all the way down to the first knuckle, were white and dead. Frostbitten. The result of touching a spirit colder than a frigid arctic night.

I turned and ran.

“Anika, come back,” Rav called, but I wasn’t turning around. I burst out into the street, and as I ran I could see the truth all around me now, everywhere I looked.

In one window, I saw the mailman dancing in circles with his dead bride, his hands frozen to the wrist and he not caring in the least.

In another window, Mrs. Mason, my English teacher, spoon-fed a baby in a high chair—a baby that had not survived to its first birthday.

And on a porch, a woman I didn’t even know sat in a rocker, gently creaking—but it wasn’t the wood creaking; it was her frozen bones. She waved to me, smiling that “I know you” kind of smile.

I just wanted to get home now, grab my brother, leave this place, and never come back.

I pushed through the gate and fumbled with my keys at the front door, only to find it unlocked.

“Sammy!” I called as I burst in. I could see that Dad wasn’t home yet. He was still off soaring over the glaciers with no idea what was going on in town. I didn’t know where we could go that would be safe, but anywhere was safer than here. We could leave Dad a note and hide up in the woods until he found us. “Sammy, wake up!” But when I went into his room, he wasn’t there. Sammy loved to play hide-and-seek with me; however, this was not the time.

“Samuel Randall Morgan,” I demanded, “you come out right now.” The one thing that always ended hide-and-seek was calling him by his full name. It was always my admission of defeat—proof that he had stumped me. Then he would bound out of his hiding place in victory. But not this time.

And then I began to think,
What if they got him? What if one of those things got him?
My head was spinning—I was
hyperventilating, so I made myself sit at the kitchen table.
They’re not zombies
, I told myself.
They’re not zombies; you said it yourself, Anika. They’re not monsters; they’re just
. . .
other.
After all, Mrs. Carnegie didn’t hurt me. . . . They won’t hurt Sammy. Still, I couldn’t convince myself.

I splashed cold water on my face, trying to slow my racing thoughts. There had to be a logical explanation for Sammy’s absence. He got scared. He watched something on TV that frightened him, and he went over to one of the neighbors. Of course! That’s what happened! It was just a matter of finding out which neighbor’s house he went to, that was all.