The Marriage of Sticks (20 page)

The woman put her hands on her hips and frowned. “Excuse me, but who
are
you two?”

Walking toward her, McCabe spoke quickly, as if he didn’t want her to get a word in edgewise. “We’re visiting your next door neighbor, Frances Hatch. Would you mind if I tried that before we go?” Bending down, he put his arms around the stone and made to jerk it up. His eyes widened and he spluttered. “How heavy is this thing?”

“Seventy kilos.”

“A hundred and fifty pounds! You can lift it up and down like that? How do you do it?”

I caught his eye and gestured I was going. The woman asked me to close the door. Outside, I walked the few steps to Frances’s room. As I reached for the knob, someone nearby went, “Psst!” and I looked up.

Hugh and Charlotte’s little boy stood in a doorway across the hall. He wore the same striped swimsuit he’d had on when I saw him on television in the kitchen. His feet were bare. Worse, there was a small puddle of glistening water beneath each foot. As if he had just stepped dripping wet out of a swimming pool.

Instinctively, I looked at his hands to see if he held another rock.

“I’m not gonna go away.” His voice was a child’s, and held the terrible note of unending threat only a child’s voice can. Do you remember that? Do you remember how frightening and all-encompassing it was to be threatened by a classmate you hated because you feared them all the way into the marrow of your bones? You knew you could never defeat them, never, because they were stronger or prettier (or stronger
and
prettier), or smarter or bigger or horribly, monstrously mean. And because you were young and knew nothing of life, you knew this person your own age—seven, eight, nine—would always be nearby and a permanent menace until the day you died.

That is what I felt and the feeling was not small. A paralyzing dread came over me because this boy did not exist but was there nevertheless, ten feet away, looking at me with loathing in his eyes.

He began to sing. “In Dublin’s fair city / Where the girls are so pretty—” His voice was sweet, mischievous.

I took a step toward him. “I don’t know what you
want
from me! What can I do? What do you want me to do? I don’t understand.” Unintentionally I reached out toward him. Arm extended, palm up, a beggar’s hand: Please help.

His face was blank. He gave me a long look, then stepped out of the doorway and walked away. His feet left wet prints on the linoleum all the way down the hall. He began to sing again. “—I first laid eyes on Sweet Molly Malone.”

“Please stop.”

Nothing.

“Tell me what I can do!”

He never turned. Reaching the door, he pushed it open and was gone.

When I entered the room, an imposing woman stood above Frances, taking her pulse. She had a big sweep of lustrous black hair spun up and around her head like a cone of soft ice cream. Thick eyebrows, large eyes, small features, white skin. She wore a black Chanel suit that contrasted vividly with numbers of gold rings on her fingers and bracelets on her wrists. If I saw her on the street I’d have thought, Money, showoff, businesswoman, or wife with an attitude. Attractive without being special, her black eyes announced she knew exactly what she was doing. When she spoke the timbre and authority of her voice reinforced that.

“Can I help you?”

“Doctor, this is my friend Miranda Romanac. Miranda, Doctor Zabalino.”

The doctor turned one of the bracelets on her arm. “The boy is telling the truth: he
won’t
leave. You must make him go away.”

Appalled that she knew what had happened outside, I barked back, “How do you know about that? Who are you?”

Frances feebly propped herself up on her elbows. “Don’t be afraid, Miranda. I called you here because I’m sick. Very sick. The doctor says I might die, so I have to tell you some things. It’s essential you know them.

“The first is, if anything happens to me, Zabalino can help you. If you need advice, or a place to stay, you can always come here and you’ll be safe. From anything.

“But now you have to go back and live in the house. Stay there until you’ve found who you are. After that it’s your decision whether to stay or leave.”

“What am I supposed to do there? Help me, Frances. Give me some direction!”

“I can’t because I don’t know. But the house is the key, Miranda. The answers are all there.”

“Is that why you gave it to us?”

She shook her head. “No, but it’s the place where Hugh died and that’s its importance. The same thing happened to me in Vienna with Shumda fifty years ago. I had to stay until I discovered who I was.

“Tell Frannie I can’t see him today. But tell him his wife is very ill and must have a thorough examination. She can still be saved but
must
be checked immediately.”

The door opened and McCabe strode in like the mayor of the place. “Hiya, Frances. What’s going on, girls? Am I supposed to stay next door with Rock Woman?”

I heard something. I couldn’t recognize
what
but instinctively knew it was bad. The way your head snaps back from a revolting smell before the brain registers.

The noise got louder.

“What is that?”

They all looked at me. The women traded glances.

McCabe shrugged. “What’s
what
?”

“Don’t you
hear
it? That breathing sound? Loud breathing?”

He rubbed the side of his chin and smiled. “Nope.”

Frances and the doctor were not smiling. They looked as upset as I felt. “Miranda, you have to go. Right now, get
out
of here! Take Frannie. Go back to Crane’s View. Go to the house.”

McCabe was facing me, his back to the two women. “What’s goin’ on?” He looked happily baffled, as if a prank was being played on him.

Behind him, Frances called his name. He turned. Nothing passed between them—no look, touch, word, or gesture. But he suddenly spun back to face me and his expression was four-alarm fire. “We gotta get out of here! Miranda, come on. Come
on
!” He took my arm and tried to push me toward the door.

I hesitated now, certainly frightened, but also determined to find out something. “What is it, Frances? What is that breathing sound?”

Zabalino spoke in a warning rush. “It’s
you.
It’s part of your self waiting outside. You must go now and find answers. It won’t hurt you, or us, if you leave now.”

“But Frances said if I was in trouble I could come here—”

“Later. Not now. Until you find out certain things and then decide what to do, none of us are safe while you’re here. It’s waiting. It can’t touch you while you’re inside. It’s as close as it can get and wants you to know that. Fieberglas is a haven, but not for you yet.

“Frances never should have asked you here. First you need to know who you are. Until then, it—” Zabalino pointed outside, where a frightening and unknown part of myself was breathing loud and close against the walls of this dubious place.

Fear made my feet feel like they weighed two hundred pounds. Strangely, a line from childhood shoved its way to the front of my mind and kept shouting itself over and over. It was the Big Bad Wolf’s threat to the Three Little Pigs as he stood hungry and full of murderous confidence outside each of their houses, knowing he was about to eat the inhabitant: “I’ll huff and I’ll puff and I’ll blow your house down.”

“Miranda, come
on
.” McCabe took my arm. I shook him off.

“Frances, did I cause Hugh’s death?”

“No, definitely not.”

“But you have to help me! I don’t know what’s happening!”

Outside the noise got louder. The breathing faster, somehow thicker.

“Go back to Crane’s View, Miranda. The answers are there. If not, then I don’t know anything. It’s the only thing I can tell you that might help.” She was about to say more but Zabalino touched her arm to stop. Frances Hatch licked her thin lips and stared at me with pity. And apprehension.

When I was a girl I contracted meningitis. One summer day I came in from playing with Zoe Holland to tell my mother I had a headache and my neck hurt. She was watching television, and without taking her eyes from the set, she told me to go lie down. When her program was over she would come in and take my temperature. I went to my room and quickly fell asleep. When my mother came in she could not rouse me. The most interesting part of the experience was that although I had slipped into a coma, all the while I was completely aware of what was going on around me. I simply could not react to it. When mother panicked because she could not wake me up, I heard everything. I just couldn’t open my eyes or mouth to say, I’m here, Mom, you don’t have to scream.

I was aware of the ambulance men coming in and working on me, of being carried out of the house and the sounds we made while leaving, of the ride in the ambulance to the hospital, everything. It was not like a dream so much as like being behind glass or some kind of thin curtain, half an inch away from the regular goings-on of life. Two days later I woke from the coma when I felt the urge to go to the bathroom.

Riding back to Crane’s View with McCabe, I thought about those days and what it had been like to be conscious but in a coma at the same time. There but not there—cognizant but completely cut off. Now much the same thing was happening. Since witnessing the phantom boy’s birthday party, I had been watching my life take place from the
other side
of something. Something impenetrable and mysterious. My life was
over there,
not where I was. Or it was life as I had once known it. And there was nothing I could do to get back to it. What would going back to the house in Crane’s View do to help? But what alternative did I have?

The accident must have happened only minutes before we came around the bend. Smoke was still rising in a sinuous cloud from beneath the crumpled silver hood. A sharp thick smell of hot oil and scorched metal filled the air. The song “Sally Go Round the Roses” blared from inside the car. No one else was around. The song bored through the strange silence surrounding us on that narrow road a few miles outside of Crane’s View.

McCabe cursed and slewed hard to the right a hundred feet behind the wreck. We bumped onto the unpaved shoulder of the road and stopped amid a loud whirl of flying stones and dirt. Without saying anything, he jumped out and ran across the road to where the BMW was rammed so hard into the telephone pole that its front end was two feet off the ground. Some kind of grim liquid dripped steadily out the bottom of the car. I assumed it was water until I saw the dark color. I looked up the length of the telephone pole. Strangely enough, birds were perched on the black wires, looking busily around and chirping at each other. The wires jiggled a bit under their slight weight.

McCabe ran to the passenger’s side and bent down to look in the window. I was right behind him, my hands pressed tightly against my sides.

He spoke calmly to whoever was inside. It was almost beautiful, how sweet and warm his voice was. “Here we are. We’re here to help. Anybody hurt? Anybody—” He stopped and stepped abruptly back. “Bad one. Bad one.” Before he turned to me, I saw inside the car for the first time.

Hugh Oakley was impaled on the exposed steering column. His head was turned in the other direction so I couldn’t see his face, thank God. Charlotte Oakley had not been wearing a seat belt and had gone full force into the windshield. The safety glass had stopped her, but her head had hit with such impact that there was an enormous crystal spiderweb on the glass. What was left of her beautiful face looked like a piece of dropped fruit. A section of the black steering wheel lay in her lap, evilly twisted, looking like some odd tool. The child, their boy, was in the backseat, dead too. He lay on his back, both arms above his head, one eye open, one closed. He wore a T-shirt with a picture of Wile E. Coyote holding a stick of dynamite in one paw. The boy’s head was bent at a fatal angle. But most important, he was older than when I had seen him only an hour before in the hall at Fieberglas. He had
aged.

Staring into that car full of bodies, I knew what this was.

What would have happened if Hugh had lived, eventually left me, and gone back to Charlotte? This.

They would have had the boy and been happy for some years. Maybe eleven or twelve, maybe thirteen. Then one day they would go for a ride in the country in their elegant new silver car. And it would end like this: a face like a burst plum, Wile E. Coyote, the wrong beauty of a cracked glass spiderweb.

When McCabe walked back to his car to get a cell phone and call in the accident, my “coma” still surrounded me, protecting me. In any other situation, seeing Hugh Oakley like that would have driven me mad. Now I just stayed by him and listened to the eerie, beautiful song coming from the radio. I didn’t even feel bad, because I knew this was not true; this was
not
how it happened. He had died with his hand on my head, quietly, just the two of us, at the end of a summer evening rainstorm. That way was better, wasn’t it? Quietly, in love, with the second half of his life to look forward to, living with someone who loved him more than she ever thought possible? I would have given him everything. I would have pulled down planets to make our life work. I looked at him. I had to ask a question he could never answer because he was dead. Dead everywhere. Dead here, dead in my life.

“Which life would have been better for you? Which one would have kept you whole?”

Unconcerned, the birds above us hopped on and off the wires, chatty and busy with the rest of the day.

THE SLAP OF NOW

I
RETURNED TO CRANE’S VIEW
with a member of the town’s volunteer fire department. McCabe remained at the scene of the accident. After the fire truck and ambulances had arrived and the personnel had done everything they could, he’d arranged for me to go home with a friend of his.

We rode in silence until the man asked if I knew the victims. I hesitated before saying no. He tugged on his earlobe and said it was a terrible thing, terrible. Not only because of the accident, but because the Salvatos were fine people. He had known Al for years and even voted for him when he ran for mayor a few years before.