The Keeper (20 page)

“T
hat angel was so stupid. Like this one guy really made a difference because of a savings and loan that probably invested in some nineteen-forties version of Enron.”

“Bobby?” she asked. They were sitting Indian-style underneath the pool table in his basement.

“Call me Peppe.”

They had been talking about their senior trip to Portland, the prom, whether marriage was a defunct social convention or the saving grace in an otherwise selfish existence, which third-world nations had nuclear weapons, and whether a preemptive war was justifiable. Well, Bobby had talked, filling space until the lump in her throat diminished, and she was no longer ready to burst into tears. “Right,” she had said. “Yes,” she had said.

He had just been about to launch into his favorite speech, about the fallacy of Frank Capra’s American dream in a town called Bedford Falls, when she worked up the courage to tell him what was on her mind. In her mind, for that matter. And her dreams (
dreams?
), and the air, and the raised hairs on the back of her neck.

“Peppe?”

“Oui?”

“What do you think happened in the parking lot at school today?”

Bobby let out a deep breath, and she understood that he’d been waiting for her to calm down before talking about it. She touched his hand, thanking him silently for that. For being someone who cared enough to put on an act. “It was messed up the way they stared,” he said.

“What do you think was going on?”

He shivered. “I don’t know. People in Bedford are weird. I don’t know why my parents stayed here. Except for you sometimes I wish they hadn’t.”

She swallowed deeply, and looked down at the carpet. There were no buckets collecting leaks down here. No brown worms curled into balls. Just thick, white carpeting stained with grape juice, and children’s toys spread out over the floor, waiting to be picked up for more play. “They know something. That’s why they stared.”

He nodded. She saw that he was near tears. Sometimes they pretended that she was the sensitive one, but that wasn’t really true. It was always Bobby who felt things first. It was Bobby who had a sense of how things in an orderly society should work, and became enraged when that contract was broken. She, on the other hand, had never held such high expectations. “Did anyone say they were sorry to you today? They let you spill that shit on yourself and watched you cry and no one even came over and said they were sorry. It’s because of her, too. They all talk about her like she wasn’t a person. Even my family does that.”

“You care. You were nice to me.” He bowed his head as if to show her that he hadn’t been fishing for a compliment, and she kissed his cheek.

They were silent for a little while, and she closed her eyes. From above she could hear his siblings tearing across bare wooden floors in stocking feet, and his mother setting out snacks. Cookies, probably. The perfectly shaped, store-bought kind, along with glasses of milk, or juice for Margaret, the strict vegetarian. Until she met Bobby, she hadn’t known that some mothers sat with their children after school, and asked them about their days.

“I hate Bedford,” she said.

He nodded. “Yeah. Me, too. Remember how I used to hang out with those guys? Louise and Owen and Steve? We’d go to the mill and drink beer. Sometimes when we put the kindling in the vat and set it on fire, these fumes would come out. And it was like everybody was waiting, even hoping, that something bad would happen. They wanted to get sick. Especially Louise. Nobody ever talked about getting out, or doing stuff, or taking a road trip to Portland, or even visiting a museum or something—not like I’d want to go to a museum, but you know what I mean. It was like living in slow motion, and most of the time I wanted to be home instead so I wouldn’t have to deal with it, but you get sick of being home. I do, at least. They made fun of me, too, did you know that? They made fun of me,” he said, blushing, because it was the first time he’d openly admitted this to her. “They made fun of me for talking about books all the time, and for doing my homework, like normal people don’t do their homework so they can get into a good college. You’ll see, they won’t even get into a bogus school like UMO,” he said, forgetting that if she got lucky, that’s where she’d be headed in September. “And the thing is, anybody whose parents might care, anybody like me moved away a long time ago. The people who stayed here don’t care.”

“I care, Bobby.” He seemed to take little solace in this, and so she added, “You’ll get out of here. You’ll get out and you’ll see other places.”

“I know. I can’t wait.”

She stiffened, but said nothing.

“People treat you so badly, and it’s all because of something made up. Like they heard Susan was some kind of monster for so long they believed it.”

She shrugged. “Bobby? There’s something I want to tell you, but I don’t know how to say it.”

“What? You can tell me anything.”

She looked at her pale hands that were practically pruned from all this rain, and at the carpet, thick and full, and at her faded Keds. There was a butterfly in her stomach the size of a basketball. “I’d know if she was gone. I’d feel something, but I don’t.”

Bobby pulled away from her so that he could look her in the eyes. “She’s dead, Liz. You buried her.”

“Yes. She’s dead.”

He held her shoulders, squeezing through her T-shirt with his small hands. “It’s not your fault.”

Her throat constricted. How would he know what was her fault? How could anyone say for sure? “Have you dreamed about her since she died?” she asked.

He averted his eyes. “No,” he said, and she had the strangest feeling that he was lying. Why would he lie?

“Oh. Remember how we talked about my dream, that she could hurt me inside it?”

Bobby inched a little farther away from her on the floor. Probably he didn’t even notice he was doing it, but she did. “Yeah.”

She rubbed her neck, where the bruises were now healed. “Well, I think I was right. Except it wasn’t exactly how I figured.”

Bobby’s eyes were wide, and she knew she was supposed to laugh now. She was supposed to say:
I’m so silly, Bobby! Why do you put up with me? I get the strangest ideas sometimes! I’m a regular Lucille Ball!
She didn’t laugh. “In a way, she really was a witch. She was born different. She could see things that other people couldn’t, and because of that she went crazy. Somehow, by seeing those things, she made them more real, and when they got more real, she got even crazier, and they fed off each other. If she’d been born someplace else, or people had been nicer to her, she might have been okay. It wasn’t just my dad and the stuff he did to her that made her screwed up. It was the way she was born, and this town, and the mill, and all the thoughts that she couldn’t control…”

Bobby shook his head. “What bad things are you talking about?”

“Think about it. If you’re inside a haunted house and it’s colder than it should be, then that’s a physical property, isn’t it? It really is cold—atoms really are moving more slowly. So maybe if Susan saw what was making the place cold, some old echo of what had once happened, like a murder, or just an angry person who once lived there, that made it more real. The place got even colder when Susan was in it. And then, that made Susan worse, too. What if Bedford is like one giant haunted house that Susan brought to life?”

“You believe this?” Bobby asked.

She looked at the underside of the pool table instead of at him. Yes, she realized, she did believe it. She was sure of it. A part of her, the part that had lived with Susan for twelve years, had known all along. She wasn’t as frightened as she had expected. Instead she was numb. “In my dream in the cemetery I heard this buzzing, these terrible emotions. I think that’s what Susan heard her whole life. And as time went on, the buzzing got louder, because all that bad stuff was becoming more and more real. There was good stuff, too, I guess, but it got forgotten. Susan didn’t listen for it. When we were at her apartment, I saw these faces in her mirrors. They were kind of messed up, you know? Warped. But also familiar. I thought I was going crazy.”

“Umm,” Bobby said. She tried not to look at him, afraid that if she did, her numbness would crack wide open, and she’d burst into tears.

“At school today I heard the buzzing again, kind of like voices. And I saw some of those same faces as in the mirrors, only they belonged to the people watching us in the parking lot. Louise Andrias and Mr. Brutton and Steve McCormack…It was like they were the same people, but also different. Darker.”

“I’m not following,” Bobby said, but she got the feeling he did follow. Some part of him may have guessed, only he didn’t want to believe. She could understand that. She didn’t want to believe it, either.

“I’m saying that over time, the things that haunt Bedford became a part of Susan. That’s why she could be in our nightmares, because our nightmares were buried inside her. That’s why I saw those faces in the mirrors; because she
was
those faces. That’s why I heard those voices when she visited my dream, or whatever it was that happened. Because those voices, that buzzing, the dark part of Bedford, Susan carried them inside her. And the reason she could hurt me in my dream was because those things were getting stronger. They were starting to become real, like the thing that chased me in the woods. And now that she died, they’re not inside her anymore.”

Bobby let out a long breath. “Where are they?”

“Have you noticed how many people left town this week?”

He raised an eyebrow. “Liz, this is too much.”

“I think some people guessed what was going to happen and they left town.” Now Liz was beginning to feel it. Her throat was tight, like a balloon was inflating inside it, and she fought the urge to curl herself into a fetal position and turn into an hysterical pile of Liz Marley. “She’s my sister. Don’t you think, of all people, that I’d know why she’s different? When she talked to herself, it was crazy, sure, but it also made sense. She was talking to ghosts in the room—things that had already happened, or were about to happen. She knew when my dad was pissed about something, and she knew about the people who’d lived in the house before us, even though we’d never met them. When she was mad at me, I always dreamed about her. It was always some fucked-up nightmare, you know? Like a dog would bite me, or we’d be sitting in a tree and she’d shove me out of it. In the morning I’d tell myself that it was just a dream, but it was more than that. It was her way of getting back at me. I wish I could forget. I wish I could pretend this wasn’t happening, but I have to tell you about it. I don’t know what else to do. I grew up with her, Bobby. I
know
she did something. And people wouldn’t have been watching me in the locker room, or in the parking lot today, if they didn’t know, too. Are you sure you didn’t dream about her? Maybe you dreamed something so bad that you can only remember little bits of it?” Her voice was starting to break.

Bobby’s face went completely red. “I did not dream, Liz.”

She ran her fingers through the thick carpet. “I’m frightened, Bobby. I think, well, I think I can feel her inside me.” He didn’t answer, so she tugged on his shoelace, but he’d made double knots so she couldn’t pull it free. “You think there’s something wrong with me, don’t you?”

“No,” he told her, “There’s nothing wrong with you. Not like you think.”

“What do you mean?”

“What did your dad do to her?”

“I don’t remember,” she said, but of course she did remember. It was one of the many things that boiled in her mind, bubbling to its surface on occasions she least expected, like when she was eating dinner with her mother, or taking a drive with Bobby, or in the middle of chemistry class while all the normal people thought their normal, happy thoughts.

“Try. You must remember something.”

She looked down, playing with her socks, pulling at the cotton ribbing and snapping it back into place. Then forced the hem of her T-shirt over her knees. He could probably guess. Everyone in this town, for that matter, could probably guess.

It should have been you. Why wasn’t it you?

“I can’t remember.”

“What is the bad stuff? You keep talking about bad stuff that’s like alive or something because of Susan. What bad stuff?”

She looked down at her feet. “Just bad things.”

He took a deep breath. “I heard somebody hit her. I heard that Georgia O’Brian used to babysit for you, and she called the police. That’s what I heard.”

She balled her hands into fists. “I don’t know anything about that.”

He leveled his eyes at her, and they both knew she was lying. “I heard how she paid her rent. Owen Read said his brother went to her, but she was too freaky so he left. Maybe she learned that someplace, what she did for a living, if you want to call that living.”

Liz put her hands over her ears. She was very near to crying. A tickle in the back of her mouth. A lump in her throat. A storm in her stomach. “Shut up, Bobby.”

“I heard you used to ride your bike by her house. I followed you once, when we first started dating. I got the feeling that even though you never talked about her, you couldn’t let her go. Like maybe you want to think she’s alive because you can’t let her go.”

“Shut up!” she screamed.

She heard footsteps overhead, and Bobby’s mother, perhaps in the midst of eavesdropping, dropped a dish.

Bobby waited a second or two and then asked in a hushed tone, “Why can’t you talk to me?”

“I’m trying to talk to you,” she whispered, conscious now of her voice, of his family, of her wrongness in this clean basement.

Bobby took her fists and forcibly uncurled them. She saw that she’d squeezed them so hard that the skin on her palms was spotted with blood. “Oh,” she said, trying to pull her hands away while he held them tight.

“God,” he said.

“It’s nothing, really Bobby.”

He lifted her hands to her face so she could see where her skin was broken in four half-moon patterns on each palm. “Look what you did to yourself.”