______

Paul Tremblay

 

“The true weird tale has something more than secret murder, bloody bones, or a sheeted form clanking chains according to rule. A certain atmosphere of breathless and unexplainable dread of outer, unknown forces must be present; and there must be a hint, expressed with a seriousness and portentousness becoming its subject… Atmosphere is the all-important thing, for the final criterion of authenticity is not the dovetailing of a plot but the creation of a given sensation.”

 

I agree in principle with Howard (can I call him Howard?) that atmosphere can be the all-important thing in a weird/horror tale. But the hopeless contrarian in me says, “Atmosphere, schmatmosphere,” at least in terms of Howard’s prescriptive usage of the term. I’ve had an editor (who might be the same age as Howard) tell me that the atmosphere of the weird is always and forever the most important aspect of every horror story, which is simply not true. In so many of my favorite weird/horror stories (from Shirley Jackson, Flannery O’Connor, Richard Matheson, Stewart O’Nan, Peter Straub, and Kelly Link), the source of horror is the subversion of the commonplace through accrued detail, the bathing in the mundane and everyday and then peeling back the veneer of perceived normalcy to show the truth: that there is no normalcy and that any notion of salvation and/or safety are the biggest lies. The atmosphere of horror in those stories is our own. Aye, that’s the stuff.

And when Howard writes: “The story — tedious, artificial, and melodramatic — is further impaired by a brisk and prosaic style whose urbane sprightliness nowhere permits the creation of a truly weird atmosphere,” I like to imagine he’s talking about my story!

♦

She says, “Hi, honey,” loud enough to turn the heads of all the Moms at the small beach pond.

I do my own comically exaggerated double take. She sidles up next to me, gives me a quick kiss. If this had happened to the teenager-me (alas, that nerdy kid was lost to the world so long ago, and replaced by this older, crankier model), he would’ve instantly vowed to never wash his cheek, and then locked himself in the bathroom not washing his cheek.

“Um, wow, okay. Hi?” I stay rooted in my chair under the shade of a skinny tree, slouched like Sasquatch on injured reserve.

She laughs. “Nice to see you, too. Jeeze. Aren’t you surprised to see me?”

“Well, yeah. Of course.” The spot where she kissed me feels pleasantly swollen.

“It’s too nice out, and I’m jealous that you get to be out here on a Wednesday while I’m stuck at work, so I left. I’m playing hooky. Shh, don’t tell anyone.” She winks and smiles.

“I won’t tell. Dig the bathing suit, by the way.”

“Har har, funny guy. I jogged down here: 4.6 miles. Aren’t you proud of me?” Standing spotlighted in a sunbeam that burns its way through the thinning tree branches, she strikes a runner’s pose. I smile. Or I leer. No, I smile and I leer like some smiling, leering, drunken, leering, douchey frat boy. Seriously, I have no idea what’s going on or what it is she’s doing and what it is I’m doing. She wears black yoga/running pants (I don’t know the difference) and a baggy white tee shirt that modestly covers the wonderful (trying to be less of that frat boy, yeah?) swell of her butt. The tee has some logo above her breast that I don’t recognize. Her brown hair flecked with grey is tied up in a ponytail, and I long to know what her hair looks like when let down. She’s fit, pretty in an everyday way, and she doesn’t look anything like my wife, Shelley.

I say, “Very. I’m impressed,” and I do a quick impression of a cheering crowd and clap my hands together manically over my head, but then I get all self-conscious of my sun-starved skin, the arm-jiggle of my shoestring arms, and even my faded concert tee shirt, the band long forgotten. So, yeah, my half-assed push-ups and burpees three days a week aren’t exactly remolding my clay. I sit up straight and pretend not to hear the beach chair’s creaks and groans. Crossing my arms awkwardly over my chest, I say, “I get winded even driving that distance.”

“Hot. Why are you sitting under the tree, in the shade? I mean, why bother coming to the beach?”

“What do you mean? I’m being sun responsible. Protecting my precious, delicate skin. And it’s not like there’s a line of willing volunteers to slather me in sun lotion. It puts the lotion in the basket,” I say, doing my best Buffalo Bill from Silence of the Lambs, and I die inside a little bit because I realize that even my witty pop-culture references are middle-aged.

“Ew. You’re so creepy,” she says but laughs.

“When we get here, the kids sprint ahead of me, kick off their flip-flops, and crop-dust the beach, dropping their shit everywhere on their way to the water. If I shout, ‘Treeeee!’ after them like a madman, then at least they somewhat group their stuff near this spot.” I’m talking a mile a minute, and it’s already the longest conversation I’ve had with another adult at this beach.

I pat the tree next to my chair. The pocked and scarred trunk crawls with big black ants. On cue, I twitch, flail, and then flick an ant the size of a dachshund off my leg, and I look so amazingly macho doing so.

“You don’t have to justify your life choices to me, hon. How are the swimming lessons going?”

“Great. But I already know how to swim.”

“Is Michael on the other side of the dock with the older kids? I can’t tell who he is out there. All I see are heads bobbing in the water. Where’s Olivia? Oh, there she is. Think she saw me walk in?” She waves.

Olivia happens to be looking at us both. She returns a distracted and hesitant wave back. Olivia has always been friendly, too friendly really; her enthusiastically returning a hand wave is generally as autonomic as breathing.

The woman says, “Oh my God, she’s like a little teenager already. She’s embarrassed I called out to her. That’s not supposed to happen yet.”

Olivia dives forward into the water at the command of the instructor.

The woman shouts, “You’re doing great, honey!”

I cringe at how loud she is, and I do my best to ignore the reverberating shocks of her easy familiarity, of her kiss, and of her knowing who my kids are. The strangers on the beach are one thing (I don’t really care what they think), but what am I going tell Olivia and Michael about this woman? Maybe the kids met her at the Matthews’ party and I don’t remember? It’s possible, yeah? I hope. Doesn’t explain why she’s acting like she’s my wife and acting like she’s their fawning Mom and why I’m playing along.

Whatever strange act we’re spontaneously creating together, it’s wrong, very wrong, but my head is pleasantly drunk with it.

Olivia struggles to freestyle swim toward the young instructor. The woman says, under her breath so only I can hear her, “Olivia’s arms are as stiff as boards. Shouldn’t the instructor tell her to, I don’t know, bend her arms?” She pantomimes the correct swimming motion.

“You’d think you’d get more from fifty-dollar swimming lessons at the Bracken Pond, right?”

“Yeah. Where else can you get your kids’ two weeks of sun, doggy paddle, and E. coli exposure?”

“When you put it that way, it sounds like a bargain.”

“Ug, I can’t watch this. Can I go down there and help her?”

“She’s fine.”

“How old do you think the instructor is?”

“Dunno. Eighteen?”

“You wish.”

Olivia’s swim instructor, like the rest of the pond’s lifeguards (who also serve as the swimming-lesson instructors), is thin and tanned, wears a tight red bathing suit, and moves with the coltish combination of gangliness and grace of late high-school and college-aged kids. And it’s so goddamn depressing that my son Michael is only a handful of years and the great and terrible yawning divide of puberty away from being one of them. It’s to the point where I try not to look at him when he’s shirtless, afraid I’ll see a dark patch of hair under his arms. Because then it’ll be all over.

I say, “I’m going to ignore that creepy but accurate remark. And I can honestly say I do not wish to be eighteen ever again.”

“Yeah, me neither.” She steps confidently in front of my chair and sits to my right, on Michael and Olivia’s beach blanket. The blanket is pink and, when folded up, looks like a piece of sliced watermelon. It’s such a clever blanket. She looks around at all the beachgoers and says, “You really are the only guy, the only dad, on the whole beach. Lucky you. But come on, wearing those mirrored sunglasses outs you as a total perv. Or a narc.”

My face fills with blood and heat, and I sputter into what’s supposed to be self-deprecating laughter but probably sounds like emphysema. Christ, I’m melting into my chair like I’m a bowl of ice cream. I’m embarrassed not because it’s clear she knows I’ve been… shall we say… ogling the teen lifeguards and beach Moms, but because my patheticness is so predictable and obvious.

Mortally wounded, I say, “No one says narc anymore. You’re so not hip. And sunglasses are the windows to the soul.”

She reaches across my lap and tickles my knee playfully. Her hand and forearm is soft and she smells like plums, or a sweet tea, or those purple flowers that used to grow along the fence at my grandparents’ house. I don’t remember the flowers’ real name, but Grammy called them her garden mums. And I don’t know why I’m thinking about Grammy’s flowers when I should be simultaneously enraptured and terrified by the not-so-innocent touch of a strange woman.

“My hubby, the dirty old man.” She holds her hands out and nearly shouts to the rest of the beach, “Stand back, ladies! He’s all mine!” She laughs at her own joke.

The Moms sharing the beach in our vicinity: they pretend to watch their toddlers running amuck on other people’s blankets and throwing sand (that fucking kid with the sharks on his bathing suit is such a pain in the ass, I seriously considered tripping him on the sly yesterday); or they bury their faces in magazines and beat-up paperbacks they bought at the grocery store; or they look at the pond pretending to be intently watching their kids ignore and give attitude to the swimming instructor; or they blankly look up at the blue sky for the clouds that will one day approach. I’m not being paranoid (okay, I am), but they don’t look at me and certainly don’t look at the woman. I swear they’re actively avoiding looking at us. I feel them not looking at me, which of course means they are judging me, saying in their heads we don’t know you, and we may not have ever met her, but we know she’s not your wife. I know better, but, goddamn me, it’s not an entirely unpleasant feeling.

I say, “The dirty old man says that’s not nice at all, and take off your shirt.” I think about returning her touch. A light tap on her shoulder, or maybe letting my hand linger there, to see if it feels different than when I touch Shelley.

She says, “I’m not nice, but that’s why you love me.”

“I guess so.”

“Oh, don’t be so glum, perv. Hey, remember that game we used to play when we started dating? We’d be in a bar, and one of us would say, okay, the world outside just ended, everyone disappeared or died or whatever, and all that’s left is us and the rest of the schmoes in the bar.” She pauses so that I can remember, so that I can cognitively catch up to her in the memory. Of course I don’t remember something that’s never happened, but I nod like I do. I nod like I’m so pleased and satisfied that anything of what I said or did in the earliest days of our relationship was something worth remembering. I nod because she’s offering proof that I still mean something to her.

“Yeah, wow. I remember.”

“Then we’d ask each other to rank ourselves in terms of mate-worthiness.”

“You were always top five,” I say, and then I add a detail, an anecdote that belongs to Shelley and I. “Especially at that friend’s wedding where that woman showed up wearing a tiny day-glow turquoise skirt and a pink North Face fleece.”

“You’re so awful. You can’t make fun of her, she had — issues.”

“Don’t we all.”

“Look around, though. Just think, if the world ended right now, and it was just all of us here on the beach left, then you’d be a lucky guy. You’d be — top three, easy.”

“Gee, thanks. So you’re saying I’m third in a three-man race behind the teen Adonis lifeguards.”

“You’re sort of Adonis-like, kind of. If you averaged those two kids together, maybe?”

“So I’m average-Adonis.”

“Don’t I know it.”

“Yeah. I don’t think they’d need my help to repopulate the species.”

“Hey, you never know. I bet some of the Moms here would go for the more mature look. And top three is top three. What about me? Be honest. Where would I rank?”

Before today, this past weekend’s party at the Matthews’ house was the only other time I’ve seen her (and by seen I mean its literal, non-dating or non-affair usage; as in I saw her standing on the other side of the room, far away from me). The Matthews are the first family we’ve really gotten friendly with since moving to Wrentham three years ago. Michael and Olivia are approximately the same ages as their kids, and they all get along very well. Emily Matthews thinks Shelley is a hoot, and I get along great with Richard; we’re planning to coach our sons’ flag football team in the fall, even though I know nothing about football, or flags. Future flag-football fun aside, the move to Wrentham hasn’t gone as expected. Our kids have had no problem uprooting and going to a new town and making new friends, but, for Shelley and me, becoming friends with other local parents and families hasn’t been easy. Branching out and being more social in the community is one of our family goals of the summer. We’re so cutely lame we even wrote out our goals on a piece of yellow paper; the list is magneted to the fridge.

So we went to the party, and I tried my best to smile and join in on the conversations about lawns and building stuff that I can’t build. I don’t know why it was such hard work. That’s not true; I do know why it was hard work: whenever I was asked what I did for work (stay-at-home Dad with some SAT prep tutoring on the side), the blank stares and jokes were all the same. So I mostly kept to myself and kept a full beer constantly in one hand. I was totally blitzed by the end of the night. And not coincidentally, at that same end of the night, the woman walked in the front door along with a guy named Terrance. According to Richard, Terrance was a good guy and a recent divorcee. The break was not a clean one. The Matthews and just about everyone else at the party were good friends with both Terrance and his ex-wife Mary. Mary wasn’t at the party, much to Emily Matthews’ chagrin. I’d heard her complaining to Shelley about it as they worked their way through a bottle of red wine.

Anyway, I remember the woman walking in, wearing cut-off jean shorts and a white tee shirt, and her hair was up like it was now, and she held Terrance’s hand. He smiled too, but it was a different kind of smile. After an awkward initial introduction (“Everybody, this is ______, and ______, this is everybody”), the party continued to go on around them as if they’d never arrived. I’m serious. Granted, I was all in the bag (see what I did there? as opposed to half in the bag?), but I’m not exaggerating when I say that, the party people, they shunned the new couple as though they were Dimmesdale and Prynne. Terrance and the woman banished themselves to the corner. The only person I remember talking to the woman was Shelley. Shells went right up to her, and they chatted while I stumbled around looking for shoes (it was that kind of night) and my kids, and not necessarily in that order. I was going to ask Shells what she and the woman were talking about when we got into the car, but I passed out.

I say to the woman, “On this and any beach at the end of the world, you are number one.”

“Yay!” She holds up a celebratory I’m-number-one finger. “You’re a horrible liar, but I’ll take it.”

“Do you mean I am horrible in addition to being a liar, or that I’m not proficient at lying?”

“Now I mean both.”

“Fair enough.”

Our playful conversation ends with the blow of the lifeguard’s whistle. The swimming lessons are over. Half of the kids run out of the water like someone spotted a shark, others stay and thrash around like greedy parasites in blood. Olivia stands waist deep in the pond, arms wrapped around herself. She’s shivering, and her lips are blue, but she won’t come out of the water. You have to drag her out, or at least dangle a towel in front of her.

The lifeguard’s trilling whistle explodes in my head and ends in a sharp stabbing point inside my ear. My head feels stuffy all of a sudden. Maybe I’m getting one of those summer colds. Wouldn’t that be convenient? I try coughing; a precursor to an excuse. It sounds fake and as forced as the sheepish shrug and smile I offer to the woman who suddenly seems as equally unsure of herself.

A shiver passes through me, as though I’m empathically feeling Olivia’s coldness. I say, “All right, I think we’ll just dry off and head out. Go home. It’s noon already. Leftovers, more juice boxes, sandwiches, two pizza slices left…” and I trail off in volume, my speech degenerating into a weird, bipolar lunch-word association game. I grab Olivia’s Harry Potter towel and shake out the ants. “It was nice —,” and I’m going say talking to you.

The woman stands up quickly, brushes sand off her legs, and says, “It’s okay. You stay. I’ll bring her the towel.” She takes Olivia’s towel out of my hands, and grabs a second towel out of my beach bag.

She hustles away from my shady spot, and I hold my hand out like I can reach out and grab her, pull her back, and keep her chatting and sitting next to me on the blanket, because that was all just harmless fun. We were all safe that way. But not now: anything that happens next will be irrevocable. And as she walks away and grows smaller from distance and perspective, I briefly pretend my hand covers her up, a rare back-of-my-hand eclipse, and, because I can no longer see her, that means she’s not really there and that I’ve imagined her. It’s the only scenario that won’t end badly.

My head buzzes, and swims, gets thicker. Maybe I’m becoming the hypochondriac Shells always accuses me of being; I open and close my jaw, pop my ears, and shake my head, and nothing feels like it works right. My neck muscles are tight and stiff, the ligaments turning to bamboo.

Olivia comes running out of the water and into the open towel that the woman holds out for her. Olivia doesn’t hesitate. The woman kisses the top of Olivia’s head, and then rubs the towel all over, drying her off. She says, “Go see your father. He’ll help you get dressed.” She wraps Olivia up tight in the towel, brushes the wet hair out of her face, and tucks loose strands behind Olivia’s ears. The woman points at me sitting in my chair, and that’s all I’m doing, sitting, watching. Olivia stumbles up the beach, wrapped in a towel cocoon. She’s shivering when she reaches me. Her teeth click together.

I say, “You okay, Liv? Your teeth weren’t made to smash into each other like that, you know.”

“I’m cold.” She worms an arm out of the towel and scratches behind one of her ears. Her hair falls in front of her face. She won’t look at me. I don’t blame her.

“Let’s get you dressed. We’ll get lunch at home. Okay?”

I hold up the towel around her as she peels out of her two piece and struggles into underwear, shorts, and a tee shirt. She’s still wet.

The woman is down at the shore, and no one stands within ten feet of her. She’s like a human crop circle, which would be a funny joke to tell her if it wasn’t true. I suddenly want to take Olivia up into my arms and just run. Fuck the car and fuck this town and just run and never stop running until I’m somewhere else, nobody knows where, and only then will I maybe call Shells and tell her that I’m sorry for the rest of my life.

Michael comes out of the water, and the woman gives him a coy little wave. He smirks at her, that look that says he sees you, doesn’t want to talk to you, not in front of anyone else, but he’s still glad you’re there. The woman sneaks up beside him and, in one motion, drapes the towel over his thickening shoulders and sneaks in a quick hug around his neck. He’s already almost as tall as she is. He says, “Stop it,” but smiles and gives an embarrassed little laugh. He rubs a spot on the side of his neck absently. He’s always been a distracted, twitchy little kid, and now’s a charmingly distracted, twitchy big kid, just like Shells. It’s amazing how much he looks and acts like her. Michael lifts the towel off his shoulders and drapes it over his head. The woman walks next to him, and bumps her hips into his. From under his towel-hood, he laughs, and says, “Stop,” again.

I turn my back to them; I can’t watch anymore and can’t think anymore. I hurriedly fold up the watermelon blanket, doing it all wrong, and it ends up as misshapen as an asteroid. I stuff it and the rest of the kids’ stuff into the green beach bag. If I grab Olivia now and run, would Michael know enough to follow me? The left side of my face feels swollen, like I’ve been punched, and slack too, and Christ, am I having a stroke?

Michael’s shadow falls over me. His is the only shadow there. He’s alone, I think. If she’s there she’s not saying anything. I’m not going to look for her. When did this (this being whatever it was I thought I was doing, I don’t know, I don’t know) become such a horror show? Has it always been a horror show?

I tell the kids we’re going home. I don’t give them the option of not going home. Olivia and Michael walk around in front of me but don’t say anything, and they don’t look back at me. My eyes fill with tears, and my chest is tight with panic, everything in my head spinning so fast it can only fly off its track and smash into a million pieces.

Michael doesn’t bother changing into his dry shorts and tee shirt. He’ll sit in the car on his wet towel. Even though Olivia changed into her clothes, her wet towel hangs loosely over her shoulders: a limp, sagging cape.

“Come on,” I tell them. I’m impatient. It’s how I lie to them: Yes, Dad has done something recklessly stupid, but he can fix it when we leave here, when we get home. “Come on, now! Walk. Move. Let’s get home, okay?” I don’t ask them to help me carry anything, so my arms are full of all the stuff. We stagger up the small, sandy hill, and then through the fence to the parking lot.

The woman calls out to us from behind. We stop. She stands next to a boulder that demarcates one section of the parking lot. We’re five cars away from our car. She holds up surrender hands. Her smile stretches out across the rest of the lazy summer afternoon, yes, but there’s something sad in her smile too. It’s an all-good-things-must-come-to-an-end look. I know that look, I do.

She says, “Hey, guys, forgetting something? You really going to make me jog back home?”

We wait and she catches up to us. She says, “You guys are so mean to Mommy.” She pats my butt, reaches into my bathing suit pocket and grabs the car keys. “I’ll drive.”

We fall in step behind her. She opens the trunk, and I dump the chair and everything else inside. The kids dutifully climb into the back seat. They don’t argue about who gets to go into the car first and who sits on what side like they normally do.

Earlier, when I parked, I forgot to leave the windows open a crack. The car is a sauna. I sit heavily in the passenger seat and sweat instantly pours off my face. I catch a glimpse of my left cheek in the side-view mirror: there’s a puffy mass as red as a boiled lobster. My right eye is closing up.

There’s an ant on my thigh. I try to pinch it between my fingers, but I keep missing it. I brush it off my leg to the floor of the car. We’ve already pulled out of the lot and onto the street. I hadn’t noticed we were moving.

The windows are down. The woman is driving. I look at her. She’s been crying, or maybe still is crying, because she wipes tears off of her face. She looks an awful lot like Shelley does when she cries but pretends not to.

She says, “So, um, how were the swimming lessons, kids?” Her voice is bright and cheery.

They don’t say anything. I turn around and look at Michael. He’s sitting ramrod straight in his seat, eyes open as wide as an ocean, and they are fixed on the woman in the driver’s seat. His neck is patchy red, like he’s breaking out in hives, and he shivers despite the heat. His bathing suit goes dark in the crotch as piss trickles down off the car seat and onto the floorboards.

I yell, “Jesus, Michael! Are you okay? I think he just had — had an accident?” My own voice sounds like it’s coming from so far away. I look over at Olivia, and she’s just like her brother. They twitch and convulse together like partners in a dance. Her shorts —

There’s a sharp sting on my neck. Everything goes darker and fuzzier at the edges. I settle back in my seat. The woman’s hand hesitantly returns to the steering wheel, and maybe I see something protruding from the pad of her thumb before she vines that hand around the steering wheel.

She says, “Don’t worry, they’re all right. They’ll be fine.” Her voice wavers and is at the edge of breaking. She covers her mouth and blinks back tears.

I shake and shiver, and it hurts in my bones, like I’m shaking hard enough that I might fall apart on my own.

She takes a deep breath, composing herself, and says brightly, “They probably just need something to drink, something to eat. Is anyone else hungry? I don’t know about you guys, but I’m starving.”