Stephen Graham Jones
Jeanie Silber died the night of our prom, nineteen years ago. I almost just said it was an ugly wreck, but any wreck that snatches two kids in their senior year is ugly, I think. For years afterward, Clint Berkot’s Grand Prix was the one you’d see in the parades, being pulled on a flatbed trailer. They never even put signs or words on it, or on the doors of the truck pulling it. But it didn’t need any signs. Its crunched-in front end and shattered windshield and crumpled doors and wheels not in line with each other anymore was warning enough. Because of Jeanie and Clint, class after class of Titans graduated whole and intact. Not dead. Not ramming into a dull yellow grass-cutting tractor cocked in the ditch.
There was never any explanation for how Clint’s car got that far off the road.
It was a tragedy, plain and simple.
Clint and Jeanie were just like the rest of us. They were going to class, counting the days, biting their fingernails about jobs and life and kids and everything else that was coming for us. Clint wasn’t the quarterback, Jeanie wasn’t homecoming queen. Normal kids, part-time jobs, church probably two times a month, out of habit. He was towheaded, she had kind of red hair, like her mom. This was, I believe, their fourth official date. Maybe they were going to keep on with each other too. Maybe they were going to have the next crop of kids to catch candy at the parade, and then stare at the wrecked car being dragged past.
I didn’t go to prom myself. Not because of any intuition or premonition—this isn’t that kind of place, I’m not that kind of person—but for the usual reason. I didn’t have a date. My girlfriend Chrissy had dumped me two weeks before, and cried so hard while doing it I thought she was going to choke. All these years later, I can’t even remember exactly why she broke up, but I do remember the relief I felt when it was over. It wasn’t the pleasure of being unattached at the hip, released into the wild again. It was that, with graduation looming, one of us was going to have to break up. It was either that or get married. You grow up in a small town like Milford, this is just how it works.
I did end up married, of course, and that next year, even, to Kay, the love of my life. She’s from Haverly, the next town over, and graduated a year before I did. We met at the courthouse of all places, were both paying speeding tickets. I know that probably sounds like I’m setting something up: Jeanie died in a car going, by the highway patrol’s estimation, seventy-plus miles per hour, and a year later I got popped doing thirty-five in a school zone, but it’s not any setup. The cops around here have a quota; tickets are a main source of revenue for the county.
As for me and Jeanie, there’s nothing really to tell. We’d gone to a movie in the park together in either seventh or eighth grade, but had gone different ways by the time of the next school dance. That’s how it is when you’re a kid: you try on this person, that person, and you keep on moving. What you’re doing, I think, is trying out different versions of who you are, or who you can be. With Jeanie, I remember I wanted her to think I was tough. How I got that across to her was by dismissing all the horror movies my big brother let me watch, when our parents were asleep. Maybe she was impressed, maybe she wasn’t. It doesn’t matter. I do still think about those movies in my weaker moments, but less and less as the years stack up.
Until Thanksgiving, that is.
Now they’re all crowding in around me.
Because it’s what you do when you’re married, Kay and I alternate holidays with her parents and mine. This year it’s supposed to be Christmas here in Milford, with my mom and her turkey we’ll eat just enough of to be polite, meaning Thanksgiving was in Haverly, with Kay’s parents.
What happened was Kay’s mother needed some fast-rising yeast from the store, for her famous rolls, and, since I was the one of us in the living room doing nothing—watching the game—I got volunteered to make the necessary run down to the store.
Of course I tried to engineer the trip as close to halftime as I could, but the third time Kay stepped into the doorway to look from me to the television, I got the hint.
“I can’t wait for her rolls either,” I said to her, draining the last of my beer as if those last couple of drinks had been the only thing keeping me planted on the couch.
“Neither can she,” Kay said, with an edge.
I eased my way to the door, collected my red windbreaker—got to show team pride—and hotfooted it out to the truck.
From previous Thanksgivings, we knew the IGA was open until four. I still had twenty minutes. It should have been just a quick jaunt down the road and back, and some idle conversation with the unlucky high schooler caught behind the register.
Except.
This wasn’t my home store, quite. I mean, every grocery store’s more or less alike, but there’s peculiarities, too. In Milford, I probably could have zeroed in on the fast-rising yeast inside of thirty seconds. In Haverly, I was trolling up and down the aisles. Would it be in the bakery section? No. With the butter? No, and I was probably only checking there because I loved to go overboard on the butter, on Thanksgiving. The cooking aisle, then, with the spices and birthday candles and small packages of walnuts and pecans.
No.
Finally I had to ask, but the kid at the register—I’d nodded to her on the way in, pursed my lips about all the piercings in hers—had abandoned her post, evidently. Usually you can find a stocker or a manager, but this was a holiday.
I stood there in meats, the seconds ticking down until halftime, and finally nodded to myself.
The back, the stockroom, behind the milk. There’d be somebody back there. There would have to be, in case a surprise delivery showed up.
I stood at the double aluminum doors and called ahead: “Hello?”
No answer.
I looked both ways, nodded to myself that this was justified, and stepped into the employee-only area.
It was cooler back there. And dimmer.
“Hello?” I called out again.
This was getting ridiculous. Had the store already closed, the front door just been left unlocked? Was I going to singlehandedly ruin Thanksgiving dinner?
No, I wasn’t.
Moving in a way meant to signal that I wasn’t at home here, that I didn’t assume my being back in the stockroom was all right, I edged into the suite of thin-walled offices I would have assumed were there, had I ever thought about it. You have to interview people somewhere, I guess. The motion-sensor lights were off, even in what looked like the break room.
“Hello?” I said again, quieter. With no heart behind it anymore.
If I’d thought to bring my phone, I could have called Kay, asked her to ask her mother where the yeast was. This way I could at least document that I’d tried. I could have used the store phone, I suppose, but I didn’t think of that then.
I just wanted some famous rolls. And to watch the rest of the game. And to maybe talk to an actual human in a blue apron and off-white name tag.
Walking with more purpose now, I pushed through the transparent strips of plastic into the space behind the deli counter. Then I knocked on the door of the freezer, I couldn’t really say why. Nobody knocked back.
I laughed to myself. I ran my fingers through what’s left of my hair.
I decided that the girl with the rings through her lips would be my answer. That she was probably standing out by the ice cooler on the sidewalk, smoking an unauthorized cigarette or three.
That had to be it.
When I couldn’t figure how to get across the deli counter without clambering over it, falling down into a mess of ice that probably smelled of shrimp, I retraced my steps through the plastic strips and stockroom, pushed through the aluminum doors from the other side, stepped back onto what we’d call the sales floor at the dealership.
The store was just as deserted as before.
“Hello!” I called again.
Nothing, no one.
I walked down the wide aisle that divided the front of the store from the back, then hooked it left to beeline the registers.
I was walking past the toys on one side, the hardware on the other. Pop guns and mousetraps.
And then I stopped.
The IGA in Haverly is one of those stores—maybe because there’s a pharmacy in back?—where there’s angled-down mirrors all around the edge of the ceiling.
I looked up into the one slanted up over me, and it gave me the aisle I’d just stalked down.
Way at the back of it, there was a narrow wisp of a girl with auburn hair.
She was squatted down at the edge of a cardboard display like kids do, where you bend both knees out.
But she wasn’t a kid, quite. She was a woman. Seventeen, eighteen. Not the girl from the register, either. The girl from the register had had all black on under her blue apron.
This girl was wearing a thin, kind-of-white dress. Almost a nightgown.
The reason she was squatted down was she was reaching under the cardboard display, reaching deep enough she had to drop her shoulder down, turn her head to the side, away from me.
My first, unbidden thought, it was that she was hiding her face because of what Clint Berkot’s dashboard had done to it.
That was when I realized it was Jeanie Silber, dead for nineteen years.
Thanksgiving wasn’t ruined because of me showing back up to the house late. It turned out Kay’s mom had an emergency pack of yeast. Nobody noticed the desperation I drank the rest of my six-pack with, and if Kay’s dad noted the delay between him asking questions about the score and me answering, he didn’t comment on it.
And of course I didn’t say anything about Jeanie.
By the time I’d turned around, from the mirror to the aisle, she was gone.
I’d stood there with my heart pounding in my chest.
Finally, I breathed.
I’m not too proud to say I yelped when the girl from the register spoke from behind me, either, asking was I ready to check out.
She jumped too, and we laughed about it, alone in a grocery store on Thanksgiving Day.
“Do you know where the yeast stuff is?” I asked.
“For an—an . . . ,” she stammered, trying to find a way to say “infection,” I was pretty sure.
“Cooking,” I told her.
She relaxed, smiled, the silver rings in her lips glinting in the fluorescents, and together we found the last of the yeast, gathered together in a holiday endcap with the gravy packets.
“Anything else?” the girl asked, and I chanced a look up into the mirrors, shook my head no, and I paid with cash.
Three days later, though, I strolled back in.
Rolling between my fingers in my jacket pocket was a dime from the ashtray of my truck.
Looking at the items on their hooks at the other end of the toys and hardware aisle, I fumbled the dime down, then knelt to find it.
Tentatively, I pushed my hand under the cardboard display. It was for dog collars.
That was the part I couldn’t get over: What could Jeanie Silber have come back for?
It let me jump right over the fact that she was back at all.
I pushed my right hand into the unswept place, cast my fingers around blindly, and then, for a moment I’m as sure of as I’ve ever been sure of anything, a set of fingers lightly brushed the top of my forearm.
I stood all at once, toppling the cardboard display.
There was nothing under it.
The blue aprons collapsed on me. I guess I’m old enough at thirty-seven to look like I might need medical help.
I assured them it was nothing, I’d tripped, this was no cause for concern, and I tried to help them collect the dog collars I’d spilled. But then one of them looked up, her lower lip accented silver.
“Yeast,” she said to me, like making an identification.
“I’m sorry,” I said to all of them, and found the door myself, waited until the cab of my truck to close my eyes tight, let the panic breathing come. I rubbed and rubbed my forearm, where that contact had been made.
When it was over, I reached over with my left hand for the keys hooked to the belt loop on my right side, and registered at the last moment that this was wrong, that this wasn’t my left hand’s job.
Or, it was only my left hand’s job when my right hand was busy.
I opened my right hand slowly, not even completely aware I’d had it clenched into a fist.
A dusty blue, broken rubber band.
I shook it off my palm, into the passenger side floorboard, and I drove back to Milford.
• • •
I could have told Kay about this, I know. Maybe I even should have told her about all this. What I tell myself is if there been something to show, something to prove I wasn’t losing it, I would have told her.
And, the thing about Kay? She would have listened. She wouldn’t have been trying to suppress a grin. She wouldn’t tell me I was getting carried away. I’m not saying she’s any kind of true believer, into crystals and horoscopes. Kay’s down to earth, always has been.
I think maybe the reason I didn’t tell her, it was that I didn’t want to have to imagine what she would be thinking while I was telling her. That her husband of eighteen years was starting to slip. That he was starting to see things. That he was starting to see people from his past, people who had died.
Which? Okay, so I’m going to be haunted. Fine. But why Jeanie Silber? Of all people? I hardly knew Jeanie. That movie we saw in the park, I don’t even remember for sure what movie it was. I know more about Clint Berkot’s Grand Prix they died in than I know about Jeanie. I can tell you what water pump it needs, I know what tires came factory on it, I remember a ding on the left side of its rear bumper.
If any of the dead people from my past were going to start slouching around in my peripheral vision, it should have been my dad. There’s some unfinished business there, I’d say. He could come back, tell me where the 9/16 box-end wrench that completes his prize set was. He could give me some parting message to pass on to Mom, I don’t know.
He would make sense, anyway.
With Jeanie . . . I don’t know. What it feels like with Jeanie, it’s that I was in a grocery store that was supposed to be ninety-nine percent empty. Like she’d targeted it right at that moment, so she could be there, do what she needed to be doing.
As for what that was, whatever errand she needed to run now that she was dead, I thought on that for probably two weeks after Thanksgiving. She’d wanted something, that was obvious. Something that was supposed to have been under that cardboard display of dog collars.
My impulse was to go back, stake the toy and hardware aisle out, catch her in the act, make her open her fist, reveal the earring or whatever she had to have. Do the dead like shiny things? Once you’re dead, do you start thinking like a raccoon, or a largemouth bass?
It made as much sense as anything.
And then there was the fact that she hadn’t aged even one day, as near as I could tell. It made sense, I supposed, but what I couldn’t figure out was where all the blood went. From what happened to her in the wreck. From what made her funeral be closed-casket. In death, do you dial back a few minutes, to how you used to be? Do you take on the form you kind of remember for yourself?
The blood, though . . . I’m kind of ashamed to say this. But I should get it out.
Clint Berkot’s Grand Prix. That summer after graduation, when it was still just sitting down at Salmon’s U-Pull-It yard, we’d go sit around and drink beers, toasting Jeanie and Clint into the afterlife. Salmon didn’t mind. One or two nights, he even dragged a bench seat up himself, drank right along with us. One of those nights, he showed us a trick, too. Evidently you can trail a line of spit down onto a dashboard somebody’s cracked their face open on, and, if there’s enough blood left in the vinyl, the water in your spit’ll reactivate it, make it bloom red again.
It felt holy and wrong at the same time, rubbing our spit into that dash. Rubbing our fingers in Jeanie’s blood.
That’s not why I saw her in the IGA, though. If it was, then Dave Timmons and Gracie Elder and Nash Waldrop and the rest of them would be seeing her too.
No, I’m fairly certain it was just that I wasn’t supposed to be there then, in that grocery store. And, even had Jeanie allowed that some last-moment shopper was going to be there, then what were the chances it would be someone who would recognize an un-aged girl who died nineteen years ago?
What happened was simple: I saw her when I wasn’t supposed to, when she was doing whatever small things the dead do.
And then I saw her again.
• • •
Because I was feeling guilty for not telling Kay about Jeanie—it wasn’t like I was cheating or keeping secrets, I know—I’d bought her a new set of pots and pans. I knew she wanted them because she’d been strategically leaving the catalog they were in open on the coffee table, on the kitchen counter.
Kay’s never been the kind to ask for anything, especially anything as extravagant as this set of copper pots and pans, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t covet them. Maybe she didn’t even know she was leaving the catalog open on their page. Maybe she’d be looking at them and then just drift off, into a version of the world where those pans were hanging from a rack over the island in the kitchen.
And, I don’t mean to reduce Kay to the kitchen, understand. She’s the most successful realtor in her office, has been on the town council, and she’s getting her master’s degree by correspondence. But she loves to cook, too. So I’d ordered that set of pots and pans, had them delivered to the dealership, and then smuggled them home in the passenger seat of my truck, left them there because that was the one place Kay wouldn’t stumble on them.
We live a good half mile from our closest neighbor, but still, I’d locked the door, and checked the passenger side too. Just on the chance.
Now, in my robe and slippers, Kay fast asleep, her book still open on her chest, I was sneaking out to my truck for her surprise. Because I was sneaking, I turned the porch light off, didn’t want anything giving me away.
It turned out the surprise was on me.
The dome light of my truck was already on.
I stood there, two steps off the porch.
The truck was parked like always, with the driver’s door toward the porch, so I couldn’t tell at first what was going on.
Was this Kay’s way of telling me she knew what I was doing? Had she come out after dinner, twisted the headlight knob so the dome light would be on when I came out?
Except Kay is a practical woman. She would never use up the battery just for a joke.
This was something different.
I breathed in once, twice, and stepped wide around the bed of my truck.
The passenger door was open.
There was a pale lower leg extending from it, keeping contact with the driveway. A bare foot, the veins in it pulsing gray.
Jeanie Silber.
Locked doors don’t matter to the dead.
I stared and stared at that leg. It was moving slightly. She was in the truck, looking for something. Not on the seat, where the pots and pans were, but the . . . floorboard?
Then, as smooth as oil, that leg pulled itself up into the truck.
I looked up to the back glass, fully expected her face to be pressed there, watching me.
Nothing.
How could there even be room in there for her, with the seat taken up by the pots and pans?
I opened my mouth, was maybe going to say something, I guess—I can’t imagine what—but was interrupted by her pale right hand reaching delicately down out of the cab, past the rocker panel.
Her fingers were spread, the pad of each finger delicately coming into contact with the packed dirt of the driveway. Like she was relishing it. Like she was putting on a show.
But she didn’t know I was there, I don’t think.
Then, quick as a cat, the rest of her poured out of the truck.
It left her on all fours.
At which point she did see me.
Her lips peeled back from her teeth and she hissed.
I stumbled back, sure she was coming for me, but then she stood instead. Into the girl I’d sort of known.
What I keyed on, what I couldn’t help noticing, it wasn’t her oily hair, her drawn cheeks, her hipbones and ribs nearly pushing through her gown. It was her left hand.
It was balled into a fist.
She was holding something.
I looked from her hand up to her face. There was a line of fluid starting to descend from a corner of her mouth—my first thought was it was all the spit we’d rubbed into the dashboard—and then the porch light clicked on all at once.
I turned to tell Kay no, no, turn it off, and when I jerked my eyes back to the truck, Jeanie was gone.
• • •
Still I didn’t tell Kay.
As far as she knew, she’d caught me trying to sneak a present in for her.
But, when I reached into the truck to pull the box of pots and pans to me, I did it slow enough to case the cab of the truck. From my twenty-minute drive into the dealership, and from it just being my truck, I knew every speck of it, every molecule.
For two weeks, at that point, I’d been keeping an eye on that broken blue rubber band from under the dog collar display in Haverly, that I’d left in the passenger side floorboard. I’m generally pretty neat about my truck, will pinch up fluff from the carpet, brush lint from the seat covers. This rubber band, it was an anomaly over there under the glove compartment.
I’d been telling myself I could throw it away any time I wanted. Just, I didn’t want to, quite yet.
Had I have thrown it out, then none of the rest would have happened, I don’t think. Had I left it in a trash can at the dealership, or just let it go out the window, or even returned it to the IGA, then Jeanie never would have had to come to my house for it.
It was just a rubber band, though.
How could I have known?
It was what had been clenched in her left fist. It was what I saw missing, when I leaned down to hug Kay’s pots and pans to my chest, haul them inside.
When I worked them down to my thigh, too, to lock the passenger door before closing it, I had to note that the passenger door was already locked. That it was still locked.
The next morning, Kay inaugurated the pots and pans with breakfast, and, maybe I expected the eggs to carry some bitter tinge from having been close to the dead, but they didn’t. Everything was good. Everything was great, even. Normal.
Until I went out to walk the fence. It was kind of my Sunday ritual in lieu of church, I guess.
Because we’re just down from the lake, all the high schoolers out popping coyotes, they tend to leave their beer cans in my ditch. I don’t fault them for it. I was just the same at their age. I used to think a beer can fading in the grass through the years made the world feel lived in. Really, I was just leaving those cans to show signs of my passage, I suppose. To prove I’d been there. To pretend, at least to myself, that I mattered, that I was leaving a mark.
My Sunday ritual was to walk out to the road in as straight a line as I could, because a straight line is the most efficient line. It’s not that I’m compulsive about wasted steps, but, since Kay had us both wearing those watch things that counted our activity through the day, I’d become aware of my walking in a new way.
There were only fourteen cans, from at most two cases—two different brands. A light Saturday night. Good for the coyotes.
The way I could tell if I’d walked straight or not, it was that, coming from the road, the winter wheat I’d always run there just out of habit—I didn’t hire anybody to come in with their combine, just let it seed out—it would show where my feet had parted it, coming through. From the house it was invisible, because of the way the stalks bent, with the wind. But, from the road, my path would be a line of shadow that would last for a day or two, like when you rub suede the wrong way.
My path was arrow straight.
Jeanie’s wasn’t.
I stood there at the fence for probably five minutes.
At the house, Kay was hanging her new copper pots and pans this way, then that way. By my leg in a plastic bag were fourteen beer cans, to pour into the recycling bin in the garage. There cutting through the wheat was one trail, going home, and another, leading off somewhere else.
I followed Jeanie Silber.
• • •
You can tell where the dead have passed.
I didn’t want to have to know this, but I do.
I don’t think they’re solid, not in the way we are, but there’s something there that—it interacts at some level with the world.
Jeanie’s ghost legs had parted the wheat the same as mine had, but the wheat stopped where the trees started, and the trees are thick enough that there’s only leaf litter under them. The loam was mucky enough in low spots that there could have been a footprint, but I don’t think Jeanie really weighed anything. Not in a way that can press a shape into mud, anyway.
But there were kind of shadows on the trees. That’s the only thing I know to call where her hands had touched, as she passed through. In the movies, when an elf girl is running through the woods, she’s always stopping to lean on this tree, look back, to lean on that tree, look ahead.
That’s what Jeanie was doing.
Not every tree had a smudge of shadow. But when I found one, I could stand there, take a bearing, study all around me enough until I fixed on another point of darkness.
A couple hundred yards into the trees, even though I’d been back here setting blinds and chasing dogs for fifteen years, I started dropping my shiny beer cans behind me, to mark my path. Then I’d walk ahead a bit and look back, make sure the can was still there.
In some of those stories about elf women, they’re leading men out deeper and deeper. For their own reasons. I know this, but I kept following her all the same.
I’d just dropped my twelfth can, meaning I was maybe a half-mile gone, was going to hit the lake soon, when I saw a tree with one whole side smudged with shadow.
I circled it. Looked all around.
And then I looked up.
Jeanie Silber wasn’t up there like a cat, waiting to spring on me. But she had been up there. I could tell she’d crawled up on the north side. The bark was darker there.
I sat one silvery can on the east side of the tree, one on the west, like performing my own ritual, and then I hauled myself up on the thickest limb.
Like most of the trees this close to the lake, this one had a kind of crotch right up where the trunk split into all its big limbs. As a kid, we’d sometimes find coachwhips coiled up there. Always just one snake, never a bunch of them. One time I’d found a rat nest in that kind-of hollow, sunless space, and came back to it with a pump-jug of kerosene, flushed the rats out. They’d flowed down the tree screaming.
Usually it was just rotting leaves and such, though. Maybe a dead bird.
That’s what this tree was holding: nothing much.
Not until I pulled myself all the way up, set my foot there to climb higher.
My boot crunched in, through the sodden twigs, the rotting leaves.
There was a cavity there, of sorts. It belched up a stench that made me cover my nose with the back of my wrist.
I stood there for a long minute, my foot pushed down into that space.
What I was waiting for was Jeanie, roused like I’d once roused those rats. Maybe this was where she slept. Maybe this was where she’d been living ever since the wreck.
It made as much sense as anything.
She wasn’t there. But she had left something: the blue rubber band. It was down there in the muck, along with a silver tack, a sharp little white tooth, a piece of fabric, and maybe a rock. I couldn’t tell if the rock was just there already, or if it was part of her collection.
I knew better than to touch them.
This was for the dead, not for the living.
I lowered myself slowly from the tree, stood there by the trunk breathing hard.
As much and as hard as I cased the woods around me, there were no more shadowy handprints leading anywhere.
My guess was that, in order to carry the corporeal thing the rubber band was, Jeanie had to be corporeal herself, for as long as that walk took. Afterward, though, after she’d delivered her cargo, she could just step into that same space she had when she left the grocery store, the same place she’d gone in an instant, when Kay turned the porch light on.
I don’t know the rules of the dead. Don’t let me tell you otherwise.
But I did, now, know that they like to collect cast-off nothings, and secret them away in hidey-holes.
I also knew I wasn’t supposed to know this. I wasn’t supposed to have found this hidey-hole. Because I was alive.
I walked away without looking back, and didn’t even need the beer cans to find my way home.
• • •
Until the week before Christmas, I was able to pretend that Thanksgiving and Jeanie Silber had never happened. Sales were in a slump, but that’s the way it always is in December. Come January, I’d be standing in the showroom and getting to decide which couple out in the lot I wanted to carry hot chocolate to, as hello.
The only real difference in me, I think, was that I had become the neat freak around the offices. Which, I say “offices,” but we’re really all in cubicles, so we can stand up and ask this or that to whoever happens to be available. It’s supposed to make the buyer feel like we’re all a family. They don’t know that the questions we ask each other are all part of a script, some standard call and response, but that’s neither here nor there. What matters about the cubicle situation is that I was always the one pinching my slacks up a bit, to squat down, pick up this stray paper clip, that staple. Whatever trash there was.
I didn’t want to round a cubicle wall, see Jeanie pinching the staple up from the threads of the carpet.
I wondered if the junk she was compelled to collect was stuff that had happened to be on the dash she’d lost her life on. A rubber band. A tack. A random pebble. I wondered if it was like that for all of us, if we’re all compelled to spend eternity chasing down whatever arbitrary detritus that’s with us at the moment we go. I wondered what would happen if she ever collected it all. I wondered and wondered and wondered, and I left the doors on my truck unlocked, most nights, and once, ferrying a garden hose to Kay’s parents, I’d even walked the aisles of the IGA in Haverly again. The girl with pierced lips wasn’t there, and the cardboard dog collar display had been retired, and the floors were fresh-waxed, not a speck to pick up, throw away.
I left feeling better.
One night, even, in a partial unburdening, I asked Kay if her high school had heard about our big car wreck over here, prom night. It serioused Kay down, kind of made her wince. She looked up and to the left, which is where the past is located, I guess.
“We did a candle thing,” she said, moving green beans around on her plate. “A vigil, I mean.”
“We never knew,” I told her.
She laughed, stabbed a green bean, said, “Were we supposed to call over, say y’all should send someone over, to see how much we care?”
I smiled too.
She was right, as usual. You do a thing because it’s right, not because you want it to be acknowledged as right.
Not that the dead care much about candles, I don’t think.
I wondered if what Jeanie was doing was trying to arrange her little bits of junk so as to make a doorway or a path Clint could come back through, or on.
Why was she in that aisle, and not him?
Or, was he just in some other aisle, in some other little town around here? Did he have his own hidey-hole—a coffee can left to rust out in the tall grass, a hubcap leaned up against a fence?
You can think your whole life on what the dead do, and why they do it, and not get any closer to figuring it out.
Until I saw Jeanie, I don’t guess I ever even considered them. My older sister used to have a story about a ghost she’d seen, but she had stories about everything, if telling them meant you’d sit there and listen to her.
In the movies and on television, the dead are usually hanging around for justice, or to tell some secret.
Not Jeanie.
She just wanted the rubber bands we were always losing track of. She wanted to hold them close and scurry away, put them in their perfect place. Like a child, I guess. A child with a rock they find by the lake, how they’ll designate that rock special, perfect, a forever rock, and then you have to put it up in the windowsill until they grow up, forget about it.
Maybe that’s the dead. Maybe they’re like children. Maybe they’re starting over.
I wish that for Jeanie.
It’s a cliché, but she really did have her whole life in front of her, that prom night. It wasn’t fair she was in that car after the last dance, meeting that tractor at seventy miles per hour. But at least it had been a good prom for her. At graduation, when the photograph of her and Clint Berkot went up onscreen, her in her shiny purple dress, him in his big brother’s suit jacket, there hadn’t been a dry eye in the auditorium. Including me.
In a way, it was like Jeanie and Clint could have been any one of us. Like they’d died instead of all of us.
Maybe when Clint’s Grand Prix had drifted over into the ditch, when the grass had started hissing against the undercarriage, maybe Jeanie had reached across to hold his hand on the gearshift, and maybe she’d smiled at the thrill of it all, and maybe she’d gone out like that—happy, full, ready for life.
I hoped so.
You’ll notice that’s in the past tense, there.
That’s because this isn’t over.
• • •
Two days before Christmas, Kay’s mother fell and broke her hip. It was terrible, but it could have been worse. That’s what we tell ourselves, right, so as not to call down any more bad luck? We play like we’re grateful for the bad luck we’ve already had. Like not complaining can be the end of it.
Kay’s father had been right there in the living room when it happened, anyway, and the ambulance had been there minutes later, and it was all going as well as it could. Kay and I had never had kids, just flocks of nieces and nephews, so, while we tried to make Christmas up into something special, it was really just going to be a day off from work, when we’d let ourselves pour a couple fingers of this or that into our morning coffee.
I wasn’t even thinking of Jeanie Silber after Kay left for the hospital again, I mean.
Not until I noticed, way down at the end of the stretch of road I could see, a dull yellow tractor parked on that steep slope like it was a lost cow, trying to clamber back up onto the blacktop. It wasn’t pulling a shredder—cutting the dead grass in the heart of winter didn’t make much sense—had probably been dropped off there to dig for a power line or a utility pole, but still, it was the same color as the one Jeanie and Clint had rammed into at seventy, nineteen years ago.
I stood on the porch and drank my coffee and made a mental note to call in when the county offices were open again, see if any of our services were going to be interrupted before the new year.
And then I heard it: a car’s radials, whining in the distance. Coming this way, and fast.
I shook my head no, that this was nothing, that I was being stupid, but, stupid or not, I dropped my coffee, was running in my slippers down the drive, waving my arms.
I didn’t make it even close to in time.
It didn’t matter.
The car was a Buick, light blue. It slipped past, unaware of the fate I’d been so sure of.
I stood there, and fell to my knees when the Buick was gone. In thanks.
I wasn’t crying, I’m not sure my eyes really know how to anymore, but there was a choking sob or something welling up in my throat.
I hadn’t known Jeanie Silber, no.
But she had died, instead of any of the rest of us.
And then—and then I realized: If that was true, if one or two of the graduating class had been meant to die that prom night, just to keep the statistics accurate or the books balanced or whatever, then . . . then if she was coming back, that meant it was one of our turn to step behind the veil in her place, right?
I looked to the woods. I hadn’t been in them since I’d followed her.
Was that why she’d shown herself to me in the IGA? Was that why she’d left those dark marks on the trees, for me to follow?
Back in the house, I poured four fingers scotch into a different coffee cup. A whole hand. A whole trembling, unsteady hand.
If Kay had only been there to steady me, right?
I would have spilled it all to her, then. But she was in Haverly, at her mother’s bedside, being the obedient daughter.
I sat at the kitchen table breathing hard, as if I’d been cutting wood or carrying furniture. I was just thinking. And thinking.
And finally I had to see.
I rinsed my cup in the sink, left it on the drying rack. The idea was that, if I didn’t return, then Kay wouldn’t have to clean up any mess I’d left.
I booted up, collected my jacket, forged out into the trees.
It doesn’t snow around here generally, so the beer cans I hadn’t bothered to pick up, they were still there, showing me the way. I didn’t collect them this time either, which I translated in my head to hope: I was going to need to find my way out again, wasn’t I?
Yes, yes, I was.
This was just me being stupid, me being weak, me letting my thoughts get the better of me. I’d been too alone the last couple days. Or maybe—maybe Kay’s shiny new pots and pans, maybe the copper wasn’t copper, but something insidious, poisoning us, making us see things, think things.
I didn’t want Jeanie Silber to be real, I mean.
The twelve shiny cans delivered me to the tree she’d been hiding her treasures in.
From a distance, I could see it was still alive.
Good, good.
From closer, I could see something else.
It was covered in something, now.
I slowed my walk, circled a bit to make my approach even slower.
Burls.
The trunk was knotted with burls, those knotty, tumorous outgrowths I knew were kind of like layer on layer of impacted buds. Like cancer.
I leaned over without telling myself to, splashed my scotch and coffee onto the ground. At the end I was coughing, and stringing the thin strands of vomit away with my fingers. But it was stretchy, wouldn’t let go. I was getting tangled in my own stomach contents.
I ran, I don’t know how long.
I wasn’t following the pathway of beer cans.
A single burl, it takes years and years to happen.
A whole trunk of burls, it meant the tree was diseased, didn’t it?
From what?
From a rubber band, and a tooth, and that other little junk?
Was that what was Jeanie was doing? Not collecting stuff she found interesting, but stuff that was necessary for this, like a recipe?
She needed just the right stuff.
Finally I fell over a fallen tree, cut my hand on a broken beer bottle, and then just lay there, holding myself.
I didn’t know what I was doing.
• • •
The next day, the day after Christmas, fortified with a night of rational thinking, I returned to what I was calling the Black Tree.
I had a two-bit ax.
If a dead girl wanted this sick tree to bloom in the spring, let its rotten pollen drift up into the air, then it had to be my duty to stop that from happening, I told myself. I was the one who’d delivered that last vital ingredient, right? That made this my problem.
I’d brought a flask of vodka, to keep my mind from wandering.
I didn’t give myself time to talk myself out of it, just walked right up to the tree, hauled the ax back like you do, and slashed it forward, into the most prominent burl. It’s not how you angle to cut a tree down, I realized the moment the bit cut into the wood. It’s the way you hit something you want to kill.
The ax stuck. I worked it free, struck again.
Of course the wood of the burl was dense, thick, hard. I’ve seen woodworkers go far out of their way to collect burls off fallen trees, to make bowls and newels from. Something about the swirly grain in there, how it polishes up.
I’d also heard tell a burl was like what an oyster does with a speck of dust: licks it into a pearl.
Hunting, every missed shot, you can imagine it slapping into a young tree, and that sapling caring for that slug of lead, layering it in knot after knot of its best, richest wood.
Would I find a blue rubber band at the center of this biggest burl?
I slashed again, using all of my weight, and the tree splashed back at me, so I had to close my eyes.
Not sap, not water, but not quite blood either. It was too thick, too dark.
Poison.
I spit, coughed, wiped furiously at my face, and then, mad now—madder—I swung and swung and swung, until I carved into the heart of this tumor.
It was meaty, and pale.
This angered me even more, a tree keeping something wrong like that inside itself.
I probed it with the head of my ax and the viscous, gutlike meat, it writhed around the metal.
“Don’t like that, huh?” I said, and smiled.
This wasn’t work for an ax anymore.
I took up the flask, poured it onto the burls, then, before the pungent alcohol could evaporate, I struck a match, held it to the spill until the fire flashed awake.
Trees don’t burn as easy as we think, but this one did.
It went up like tissue.
I backed up, watched for hours, until it creaked, splitting down the middle, halving itself two directions at once.
When the flames threatened the underbrush, the other trees, I stomped them out. And then I waded into the smoke, chopped at the burls on the tree until they collapsed into the embers.
It was nighttime by now, but, the same as I’d brought matches and a flask, I’d also brought a flashlight.
I nodded a final good-bye to the tree and started back, using the light to pick out the shine of the cans. A few trees back from the one I’d killed, there was a darker smudge on a pale trunk, as if someone had been leaning there, watching.
I raised my arm, wiped it off with my sleeve.
• • •
I know now I should have been more suspicious.
Walking out of the woods that night, I’d assumed the beer cans were where I’d left them. That I was walking back out into the same world I’d left.
Jeanie Silber had been out there with me, though.
She very well could have rearranged the cans, led me out into a completely different place. One that looks just the same on the surface.
That’s what I have to assume happened.
There’s no other explanation for . . . for what I’ve become.
A dutiful husband is what I appear to be. A respectable landowner. A good enough son-in-law.
None of those are me anymore.
What Jeanie Silber came back for, I think, it was to pull off my mask, show me my true self, the one I’ve kept coiled up inside for my whole life, I guess. The dead know more about life than the living. And they want to show it to you. They want to make you see.
I still contend it was happenstance that I was the one to see her in the IGA that Thursday, though. That, really, every person there on a last-minute errand might have seen her the same as I did. Even the girl with the piercings. But it was me who recognized her. Who knew she didn’t belong. Not anymore.
Me either.
The poison or whatever that splashed on my face from the tree, it washed off easy enough, and the smoke I inhaled from its tumors didn’t leave me coughing up blood or seeing things that weren’t there, but the act, the fact of me messing up whatever Jeanie was doing out there in the woods where nobody was watching, that clung to me. At least as far as she was concerned.
She came back, yes.
That’s what the dead do.
Kay too. She crunched into the driveway just before the year was over, never knew to ask if anything dark and momentous had happened out in the trees while she was gone. She had news about her mother, though. A blood clot had shown up in her leg, so it was looking like she still had two or three more weeks in the hospital. Meaning Kay was going to be burning up the road between Milford and Haverly.
It was about to be the busy season for me at the dealership anyway, so I just shrugged that that was too bad. Inside, though, the new me felt relief, I think. Relief at the bad news.
I was a different person.
And then, like I’d probably been expecting—like I was due—I woke one morning to find a seed head under my back, scratching at me.
When you live in a field of wheat you don’t harvest, the seeds can find their way into most every place. Even the bed. This was a whole seed head, though. I sat on the edge of the bed and studied the stalk.
It wasn’t torn. The sever point was flat and even, anyway.
What I saw without meaning to, it was a thin, pale girl lowering her mouth over that stalk, only biting down when the sharp seed points scratched the back of her throat.
Then she spit it down into her hand.
At the same time, it could have caught on my shirt, on my sleeve, and gotten into bed with me that way.
I didn’t tell Kay, just deposited it into my nightstand drawer.
Three days later I woke thinking of paperwork from my last two sales.
On my chest was a half-rusted washer.
I flinched back, flicked it away, pushed up into the headboard.
“What?” Kay asked sleepily.
“Bug,” I said, even though it was winter, and then, after she was gone to Haverly again, I pored over the carpet until I found that washer.
It was happening.
I shook my head no, no, that it wasn’t fair. But then neither had it been fair for Jeanie, that tractor waiting in the ditch for her.
The very next morning, I found a little oval sticker stuck to the inside of my forearm when I woke. Like you peel off a banana.
Neither me nor Kay can tolerate bananas.
I stood in the shower until all the hot water was gone, and then I stepped out with resolve, walked naked to my nightstand drawer.
So far there was only the sticker, the washer, the seed head.
Had I missed something else?
I went to the utility room, dug though the lint trap—we’d washed the bed linens just a few days ago—and found the most damning ingredient of all: a dime. Probably the same one I’d fake-fumbled onto the floor of the IGA, in order to have an excuse to dig under the dog collar display.
I leaned over the dryer and I tried to cry, couldn’t find any fluid or heat in my eyes at all.
I wouldn’t grow a burl, I knew—a man isn’t a tree—but maybe I’d get a . . . what had my dad called it? A bezoar. Those calcifications or whatever an animal can get in its stomach, that are also prized by people. Not for woodcutting, but for remedies.
A bezoar, a growth, a tumor, it didn’t matter what it was called.
All because I’d messed up whatever Jeanie was doing.
All because I’d done my duty.
It wasn’t fair.
I slammed the side of my fist into the top of the dryer until it dented in, and then I walked away.
Two hours later, dressed in my work clothes—slacks, a golf shirt—I stepped into the doorway of Kay’s mom’s hospital room in Haverly. The whole way over, there’d been chance after chance to ram my truck into this pole, into that abutment. There’d even been a tractor in the ditch, calling my name.
I hadn’t answered.
I wasn’t that person anymore.
I wanted to live.
“Mama Jenk,” I said to Kay’s mother, and she reached her hand out to me palm-down, and I took it, hugged her lightly, as you do the infirm, and then Kay was going on about what a surprise this had been, and her father was back with three lunches, which they insisted we split four ways, and all was well.
Close enough.
On the far side of Kay’s mother, nestled between the sheets and her frail, blood-clotted self, there was now a seedhead, a washer, a penny, and a little sticker with tiny meaningless words on it.
It was a recipe, for whatever the next round of tests were going to find in her, since her bad luck of a fall. Whatever it wouldn’t be a surprise for someone of her age to have.
I sighed to have the awful, necessary deed done, to be rid of the burden—I’d carried the ingredients here in a cigar box wrapped in a plastic bag—and then I leaned back, to stand among the living.
Except.
Kay, the good daughter, vigilant as ever, was already at the other side of her mother’s bed.
“What is—?” she said, and then grubbed her hand into the covers, came out with, I’m certain, everything I’d left. Every single last thing.
She shoved it into the chest pocket of her blouse.
Breast cancer, then, I said to myself, and looked away, out the window, to the idea of Jeanie Silber standing in the tall yellow grass at the side of the road, Clint Berkot pulling his Grand Prix up alongside her.
She steps in and down, yes, but not before looking back to me to smile and wave.
The dead don’t do anything randomly, do they?
The whole time since Thanksgiving, she’d been capering me to this hospital room, this moment.
I lift my hand to tell her bye but Kay crinkles her nose in confusion, thinks I’m waving to her, from point-blank range.
And I guess, sort of, I am.