TWENTY-SIX
Exactly the same. The house Jennifer had grown up in, and killed herself in, was unchanged. Even the Christmas lights were still there (her mother kept them up year-round).
The place had been painted every five or six years, she knew, or it would have looked a lot worse: white two-story house, green shutters and trim. Built in 1940, and when Jennifer lived there she and her mom had the run of the downstairs and rented out the upstairs, which had a separate kitchen, bathroom, and entrance.
The large yard—their house was on a corner lot—was still pretty dead; it’d be another month before everything was green. She didn’t recognize the car in the driveway, which was still gravel. And why was there a car in the driveway? It was Thursday afternoon. Why was Mom . . . ?
Stupid. She was retired, of course. Mom would be in her midsixties now.
Stop staring. Get moving.
She got moving: walked up the sidewalk, opened the porch door, and was instantly soothed by the sight of lawn chairs and a small table stacked for winter at the far end of the porch. The same chest freezer was still right by the door, no doubt stuffed with venison and trout and beef and pork and pudding pops and Klondike bars. They still made Klondike bars, right? Yes. They’d been her mom’s favorite when she’d been a kid; they both loved them. Klondike bars were eternal. She didn’t even have to look. She knew they’d be in there. No need to pause to check. She could keep going right into the house, see if the door off the porch still opened into the living room.
She wasn’t stalling. She was . . . reassuring herself. Not that there was any need for reassurance. Because they still made Klondike bars. Sure they did.
She popped open the freezer door and gasped. S’Mores Klondike Bars! Cookie Dough Swirl Klondike Bars! Oreo Klondike Bars! Rocky Road! Double Chocolate! Reese’s! Oh, what a glorious world the future was!
She closed the freezer—gently; her mom hated it when Jennifer would drop the lid with a bang that could be heard all through the house—then opened the front door and walked in, and cursed herself pretty much immediately.
Should have knocked. Stop acting like you belong here. Then: at least Cannon Falls is still a town where people don’t lock their doors 24/7. Rediscovering that was likely to be the best part of parole. And the many, many varieties of Klondike bars.
She heard steps in the kitchen and a familiar voice. A little rougher, but undoubtedly her mother. “Hello? Whoever you are, I have a ferocious guard dog I keep next to a loaded shotgun and they’re both here in the kitchen with me, so if you’re up to no good, prepare to embrace your violent death.”
She made a sound that was new to her, sort of a sob turned into a laugh, or vice versa. Mom’s habits hadn’t changed. Jennifer hurried through the living room as her mother came through the kitchen and they caught sight of each other at the same time.
She felt dizzy and realized she’d been holding her breath. I forgot what being short of breath felt like! Breathe, moron. The one thing that would make all of this worse is if you come back from the dead, then pass out at her feet. “Mom? I know this is going to—”
“Oh my God!”
“—seem incredible, like a dream—”
“Jennifer Bear!”
“—but I promise it’s—” Jennifer Bear, God, how could she have forgotten? Don’t cry. Don’t cry. “—really happening.”
Her mother took a step, stumbled, pitched to the floor. Jennifer lunged and missed, so they both collapsed in a heap together on the faded kitchen tile. She could feel her mother’s hands on her, touching her hair, her face.
“You’re real! You’re warm and—and here! You—oh Lord, I can’t believe it, I can’t believe it. This is really happening, this is actually taking place in our house right now and you’re back, how did you come back? Where have you been, oh my God, forgive me, forgive me, please, please say you forgive me.”
“What?” She jerked back, grabbed her mother’s wrists. “No, Mom, you’ve got it wrong, I’m the one who—”
“You couldn’t tell me. You were in the worst trouble of your life and you couldn’t come to me.” Her mom had put on about ten pounds but smelled the same: Crabtree & Evelyn’s Summer Hill perfume, and Cheer laundry detergent. “I did something, said something, to make you think death was the better option. I’m so sorry, Bear. Please, whatever it was, however I screwed you up, I swear it wasn’t out of malice, I—”
“No.” Jennifer climbed to her feet, helped her mother off the floor, marched her into the living room, gently pushed her into the easy chair. Hmm, that was new. The old one had been black. This one was navy blue. And her mom preferred slacks to skirts these days.
She knelt before her, took the older woman’s hands. Oh. Her hands. They got older, too. She looked up into small, dear, dark eyes overflowing with tears. “I was selfish, and cowardly. I let them punish Lars for what I did to Tammy. I didn’t say a word when they sent him to Stillwater. I couldn’t bear to tell you, but that was my failing, not yours. It was entirely on me and not even a little bit on you. Please forgive me.”
Her mother’s grip tightened. “You didn’t leave a note.”
“No.” The coup de grace of her cowardly act: she knew she wouldn’t be around to face the consequences of her actions and still couldn’t admit what she’d done, even in a suicide note. “No, too chickenshit, even at the end.”
“I knew. Not before. After. There was only one reason you would have . . . hurt yourself like that. Killed yourself.” Her mother’s grip hurt, felt like fleshy clamps grinding the frail bones of her fingers together. Jennifer didn’t say a word. “I spent the next few years blaming myself for not seeing—”
“No, Mom. You did nothing wrong. Nothing.”
“I—I can’t believe you’re here.”
Tell me about it. She shrugged and managed a smile.
“Are you a vampire?”
Her smile dropped away. “What? No.” Was her mother slipping into shock? “What in the world made you ask that?”
“They’re real, I guess. Vampires. It’s been all over the news the last few weeks. When I saw you standing there, looking exactly the way you looked on that last day, that was my first thought.”
“Well, I knew vampires were real, but no, I’m not one.” Was this a good time to mention that the queen of the vampires was running Hell, and Jennifer was on a first-name basis with her? No, her mother had never been impressed with name-dropping.
“Then where have you been all these years?”
“In Hell,” she replied without thinking, and her mom’s grip, which had been loosening, tightened, clamped down on hers again. “Youch!”
“Hell’s real?”
“Well, yes. You sound surprised. You’re the one who made me go to Sunday school,” she teased. “Sunday school, Easter, and Christmas: holiday Christians, that was our th— Oh. Oh, don’t. Mom. Don’t cry.”
“Did—did they hurt you?”
Oboy. Jennifer had thought this would be difficult, but as happened so often, the reality was much worse. How to explain Hell to someone who had never been there? “No, not really,” she said gently. “It’s not brimstone or lakes of fire.” Unless you needed it to be. “It wasn’t my fate to be physically tortured. Mostly I was bored and the only thing I could do was think about why I was in Hell. Thirty-one years of that was worse than torture, I think.”
“I don’t understand.”
“It was more boring and frustrating than anything else—my last job was working in a food court.”
“But you hate food courts! Ever since you were little and gulped that Orange Julius too fast and threw up all over yourself in public.”
Jennifer smiled. “Guess where in the food court.”
Her mother blinked and swiped at her eyes. “You worked at an Orange Julius?”
“For years.” Or a few weeks. Time was strange down there. But this was better, much better . . . her mom was still crying but was now trying to smile, and Jennifer would take a watery half smile over sobs. “So gross.”
“But, Bear, why are you here? Are you supposed to take me to Hell? Is it my time?”
“What?” She jerked back so hard she almost fell on her ass. “No! Christ, of course not, oh my God!”
“Language,” Mom snapped, then clapped a hand over her mouth. When she lowered her hands, she had a sheepish expression on her face. “Sorry. You still look like my girl—but you’re forty-eight now.” Of course her mother would know her real age, probably to the day. “Old enough to decide when it’s appropriate to blaspheme.”
“Don’t worry about it. And—I can’t emphasize this enough—I’m not here to take you to Hell like some kind of morbid Angel of Death. Gross.”
“Then why are you here, Bear? Here, sit up here with me.” They moved to the couch, which was fine with Jennifer. Her mother couldn’t stop touching her, patting her back, holding her hand, and that was fine, too.
“It’s a long story, but the quickie version is, Hell is starting a parole program. The new devil—”
“Oh, my.”
“—yes, it’s complicated, but there’s a new boss, and she’s trying—”
“She?”
“—yes, there’s never been a glass ceiling in Hell—anyway, she’s instituting parole for some of us. I’m the test case. She let me come back to confess my sins and make amends.”
“So you’re back for good. You’re . . . alive again?” She squeezed her hands again. “You feel alive.”
“Yes. But, Mom, I have to warn you . . .” Ow! Her mom might be a retired office worker quietly living in a small Minnesota town, but she still had quite a grip. “. . . if I screw up, if I can’t make it right, I go back to the food court.”
“In Hell.”
“In Hell.” She took a breath. “Mom, where’s Lars? I know he was sentenced to—”
“They let him out after twelve years, Bear.”
“Okay.” That was something. At least he hadn’t done the whole twenty. “Do you know where he is?”
Mom nodded and wiped her eyes again. “After his dad died, he moved into their old house.”
“So out by the fairgrounds?”
She shook her head. Mom was still a brunette, which was kind of cute. “They moved after the—you know. The trial. They had to, because of all the—anyway, they ended up moving to Burnsville, and when they died a few years ago, Lars inherited the house. I can dig up the address for you.”
“Okay. And Tammy’s parents? I have to find them and explain . . . No?” Her mother was slowly shaking her head. “Oh. They’re dead, aren’t they?”
“Yes. She died of cancer about ten years ago, and he went in a car accident a year later.”
She was relieved; how was that for cowardly? “Okay. I can’t do anything for them, but I still have to go to Lars. Can I borrow the car?”
Mom giggled, which was understandable. It was giggle or scream. “I think your license might have expired.”
“That’s the least of my problems.” But she saw the humor in it, too, and smiled. “I’ll be careful, I promise. And what’s this?” She reached up and tugged softly on a hank of her mother’s hair. “My, my, still a brunette, hmm? If I checked your bathroom I wouldn’t find any L’Oréal products, would I?”
“Old women are allowed their vanities,” she said with the acerbic tone Jennifer well remembered.
“You’re not old,” she lied. She tapped her mother’s knee. “Keys, Mom? Please?”
“You have to go right now?”
“Yes, I have to go right now. It’s what she let me come back for. I can’t let her down.”
“The—the new devil?”
“Yes.”
Her mom had gotten up, gone to her purse, rooted around. “You don’t sound . . . afraid of her, exactly.”
There really wasn’t a word that described how she felt about Betsy. “I’m done letting people down,” was all she said, but it seemed, by some miracle, that her mother understood.
“How will we explain this? How do we explain you? If the new devil lets you stay? What would we say to people?”
“I can’t think about that now.” Truth. Because those problems, in the face of what she had to do to earn her freedom, didn’t really sound like problems. Golly, what will the neighbors say? Who gives a damn?
But facing Lars? Confessing? Bracing herself for whatever came afterward?
What if he hurts me? Hits me, beats me up?
Well. What if he does?
Her mom, though. She was thinking about the things she could help with, the way she always did. “You’ll need a new social security card,” she was muttering, and Jennifer knew by her expression that she was already making lists in her head. “Your old one wouldn’t work, obviously. If you looked your age—your real age—we could say it was all a mistake, that you faked your suicide and, I don’t know, fled the country but now you’re back because reasons.”
“Because reasons?” What the hell did that mean?
“Something the kids say. If that was the case, you could use all your old IDs and just get a new driver’s license . . . but you don’t look your age.” Her mother reached out, tucked a hank of hair behind Jennifer’s ear. “My Bear. Pretty as the day you d—as when you were a girl.” She paused. “We could move. Get a new start somewhere. Or stay put and just say you’re a grandniece or something. My sister’s daughter’s girl.”
“You don’t have a sister,” Jennifer felt compelled to point out.
“Oh, who cares? Then we can put any comments on your looks down to simple family resemblance.”
“Mom, I have to focus on you and Lars. I’ll worry about making a new life here if I’m allowed to stay.”
“And if you’re not?”
“Then it was still worth it, if only to see you again, and tell you how sorry I am.” Mom looked like she smelled something awful, which was what her face did when she was about to burst into tears. Jennifer rushed to head off more tears. “So find Lars’ address and then let’s dig up a paper and pencil so I can write down the directions.”
That made her mom laugh, for some reason. “Oh, honey. You’re going to love MapQuest.”
“What?”
“Come with me to the office . . . I’ve got things to show you.”
Ten minutes later, Jennifer was carefully pulling out of her mother’s driveway. Driving her mom’s new car, a burgundy Ford Fusion, was like piloting the space shuttle. And it was a hybrid! Which meant it ran on gas and electricity. Unreal! And MapQuest! Wow.
Mom had made her a sandwich and insisted Jennifer take it with her for some reason. It was on the passenger seat beside the printout of directions to Lars’ house. Her mom had tried to give Jennifer her cell phone, but Jennifer politely refused. That thing also looked like some futuristic space mechanism to her uneducated eyes.
She resolved not to eat the food. Perhaps one of Betty Palmer’s world-famous club sandwiches would at least get her in Lars’ front door. Stranger things had happened. That very day, in fact.