The Loveliest Dead (6 page)

“Are you positive she was seeing things? Is it possible there
were
some kids in the yard?”
 

“I didn’t see any, and I couldn’t get past the fact that she said they disappeared into the ground. I’ve been worried about it ever since. I didn’t know if it could be a side effect of the stroke, or if maybe... well, I was worried about the possibility of something like Alzheimer’s disease.”
 

“Well, even if she were in the early stages of Alzheimer’s—and I have no reason to believe that she is—hallucinations would not be a part of that. Early Alzheimer’s would include memory loss, maybe mild disorientation, but not hallucinations. Was she wearing her glasses?”
 

“Yes.”

“When was the last time she had her eyes checked?”

“You know, I hadn’t thought of that. It’s been... well, a while.”

“It’s possible she saw some children in the yard, and from her point of view—and if, say, her glasses need a new prescription—it might have looked to her like they disappeared into the ground when they took off.”
 

“Yes, I guess that’s possible.” She glanced at the bedroom’s open door.

“You’re a worrier, Jenna,” Dr. Reasor said with a smile in his voice. “Have you made an appointment with Dr. Wenders?”

“Yes.”

“Okay, take her to see Dr. Wenders, but make an appointment with an eye doctor as well, okay? Just in case. Tell Dr. Wenders what you told me and see what she has to say. If there’s any reason to be concerned, I’m confident she’ll pick up on it. She’s a very good doctor.”
 

“Thank you so much, Dr. Reasor. I feel kind of silly now. I’m sorry to have bothered you.”

“No bother. Give your mom my best.”

After replacing the cordless phone on its base, Jenna hurried to the bedroom door. The hallway was still empty. No one stood at the other end. She leaned her shoulder against the doorjamb and began to cry again.
 

Jenna had never been a believer in the supernatural and was not even a religious person. Her mother had never once taken her to church or Sunday school when she was little, and on the few occasions when friends had asked Jenna to attend with them, her mother had always said no. Although she never expressed any dislike toward them, Martha did not trust churchgoing people. She sometimes said, “Anybody who smiles that much is up to something.” For Jenna, God had always been something other people believed in.
 

When Josh died, she had been irritated whenever someone told her that he had gone to a better place, that he was in Heaven, even though she knew they had the best of intentions. To Jenna, dead was dead, and her baby had died, had ceased to be—that was bad enough without believing he’d gone to some faraway place where she could not reach him without dying herself. Had she believed that, Jenna would not have hesitated to end her own life to get to Josh’s side as soon as possible. She had not given an afterlife so much as a moment’s consideration when Josh died. To do so would have been to go insane.
 

Jenna went to the two boxes on the hallway floor and knelt beside them. She picked up the picture of Josh on the pony at the fair. He grinned from behind a web of cracks in the glass, where Jenna’s tears shattered as they dropped from her eyes. She was frightened by the thoughts she was having so suddenly, thoughts foreign to her. She did not have the strength to resist them, though, and that was even worse.
 

Helpless against it, Jenna surrendered to the possibility that her dead son had tried to communicate with her just minutes ago.
 

By one o’clock, the rain had stopped, and so had the roller coaster of thoughts in Jenna’s mind. For about half an hour as she hung pictures, she had driven herself nearly crazy thinking about what she had seen. But her heartbeat gradually calmed as she reminded herself of her state of mind at that moment, and the fact that she’d been crying and had tears in her eyes, and of the bad light in the hallway. By the time she put a frozen pizza in the oven for lunch, she had calmed herself down. It helped that she’d sneaked one of Martha’s Xanaxes.
 

Although the possibility lingered in her mind that some essence of her dead son had reached out to her for a moment, she decided to keep it to herself for the time being. It was not because she was afraid of how David would react—she knew
exactly
how he would react. There had been silence between them for months after Josh’s death. They had been afraid to speak, unable to trust their own voices. The silence finally ended one night while Jenna and David were in bed, staring into the darkness instead of sleeping. David had suddenly released an agonizing wail and curled up in a ball beside her. They’d spent most of that night holding each other and crying. But even once they were talking again, their wounds remained open just beneath the surface, raw and ready to bleed again. They had not healed. Jenna knew they never would, not entirely. She knew if she simply mentioned Josh’s name to David, she would be prodding at that wound.
 

If Jenna were certain that Josh had tried to communicate with her, she would have gotten into the car, gone out, and hunted David down to tell him about it without wasting a second. But she was not certain of what she had, or had not, seen—whether she had seen a small figure at the end of the hallway, or had wanted, perhaps even needed, to see one. It would rip David open to bring it up, so she would not. Not just yet. She would wait. For what, she was not sure. But she would wait.
 

When Miles got home from school, he went to his bedroom to do his homework so he could spend the rest of the afternoon and evening playing outside and watching television. David got home shortly before four o’clock, and Jenna knew as soon as she saw him that he had not found a job. He came into the kitchen, where she was preparing a stew for dinner.
 

“One possibility,” he said. “At a garage in Fortuna, there’s a guy retiring next month, and so far, they don’t have a replacement. I filled out an application and spent a while talking to the manager. I’m the first one to apply for the job. The manager’s a good guy—we hit it off.”
 

“That’s
great
,” Jenna said. “It sounds very promising.”
 

“I’m not holding my breath.”

“But don’t dismiss it, either. You got along with him, nobody else has applied. It sounds good to me.”

A smile broke through David’s long face. “Are you baking something?”

“Mom’s baking a cake for dessert.”

Sitting at the breakfast nook, Martha looked up from one of her tabloids and smiled. “Chocolate,” she said.

David’s smile grew even larger. “Hey, Grandma’s chocolate cake. Well, the day’s not a total loss, then.”

After dinner, David went to the store and picked up a few lightbulbs. When he got back, he took the stepladder upstairs and put a brighter bulb in the hallway’s overhead light. They watched television for a while, then Jenna told Miles to go upstairs and get ready for bed. A few minutes later, she went up to his room.
 

She kissed Miles goodnight and, as she went out, left the bedroom door open about a foot. A cat-shaped night-light plugged into a low outlet in the hallway outside the door sent a soft glow spilling into his bedroom through the opening.
 

“Goodnight, honey,” she said.

“‘Night, Mom.”

Miles propped himself up on both arms in bed, in the dark, wide awake. He was not sure what had awakened him, but he had the impression someone had come into his bedroom.
 

The wind blew outside and sent a spatter of rain against the windowpane. Miles could hear the distant surf crashing against the rocks at the foot of the cliff behind the house. His bed was against the wall across from the door, and there were two bare windows just above it. The ivy on the outside wall of the house whispered secretly every time the wind blew. Maybe that was it—the strange new sounds of the night had awakened him, sounds it would take a while to get used to, that was all. And the room was new, the bed, everything. Even the things he had brought with him from Redding took on new shapes in the dark—the toy dinosaurs on the shelves, the stuffed King Kong huddled in the corner, the lamp and books crouching on the desk.
 

But something was not right. He could feel it.

“Come on, be a good puppy.” The whispered voice was rough, and it came from within Miles’s bedroom. “C’mon over here and be a good puppy.”
 

Miles made a small, strangled sound in his throat just before it closed. His elbows locked at his sides and he was paralyzed by fear. His eyes moved to the spot in the room from which the voice had come—over by the shelf with the dinosaurs on it, but low, near the floor. Miles’s eyes dropped and he saw a figure in the dark— round shoulders and a large, oddly shaped head. The figure rose slowly up out of the floor, a black shape within the darkness, out of reach of the hallway night-light’s glow. Arms took shape at the round sides of the fat figure as it rose, large and hulking.
 

“Gitcher butt over here, y’fuckin’ puppy.”

Miles was not aware of the exact moment when he was finally able to scream; he only knew he was screaming.

The overhead light flashed on after what seemed an eternity. The room filled with light and Dad and Mom were beside him, sleepy but frantic. Mom’s arms were around him, and he was able to stop screaming.
 

Mom glanced up at Dad. “David, what did I tell you about those movies?” She pressed her cheek to Miles’s head. “No more horror movies.”
 

Even as Mom hugged him, Miles’s eyes held on the spot where, just seconds before, he had seen the figure of what had appeared to be a fat man wearing something on his head rising up out of the floor.
 

“There was a man in here!” Miles said.

Mom backed away suddenly and frowned down at him. “What?”

“There was a man in here just a minute ago!”

She looked up at Dad, who frowned at her.

Dad said, “What man?”

“He was coming up out of the floor.”

They both rolled their eyes.

“See what I mean?” Mom said. “No more monster movies, period.” She smiled at him and kissed his cheek, then put her hand on his chest and gently pressed him back toward his pillow.
 

Miles moved away from her hand and sat up. “No! I don’t want to go back to bed! He’ll be back!” He did not know why, but he had no doubt of this. There had been a purposefulness to the man’s voice that suggested he was not yet finished with Miles. “He called me a puppy!”
 

Mom laughed. “He called you a
puppy
? Well, that’s kind of sweet, isn’t it?”
 

“Not the way he said it. Can I come sleep with you? I don’t want to sleep in here.”

Mom sighed and looked up at Dad.

After a moment, Dad said, “Okay, but don’t get used to it. This is a one-time deal, okay? No more after this.”

He bobbed his head up and down with vigor. “Okay. Okay.”

Miles lay between them with his eyes wide open and stared into the dark long after they were both asleep. They thought he had a nightmare—they didn’t even have to say it out loud, it was an accepted fact. But he knew he had not been dreaming. He kept his eyes open until he finally dozed off a couple hours later. Miles no longer trusted the dark.
 

CHAPTER FOUR

Friday, 1:38 P.M.

The next day, Jenna spent the afternoon working on the living room. It was dark and dreary, and she hoped someday to be able to redecorate and brighten it up. It had been decorated last, she guessed, sometime in the seventies.
 

There was a rust-colored shag carpet that hadn’t been vacuumed in a long time, and matching drapes on the picture window behind the large Mediterranean-style couch upholstered in brown crushed velvet. A matching coffee table stood in front of the couch with a centerpiece of wax fruit that was gray with dust. The couch was flanked by two matching end tables, and on each stood a hideous lamp with a cream-colored, chimney shade and a light in the fat round base of amber glass. There was an old wooden straight-back chair with a brown cushion tied to the seat and back. The brown vinyl-upholstered recliner had seen better days—David said it was comfortable, but tears in the upholstery made it an eyesore. Another end table stood beside the recliner, with another matching ugly lamp on it.
 

First, Jenna threw the wax fruit in the garbage. She dusted everything and vacuumed the carpet. She put a tan-and-cream afghan Martha had crocheted over the back of the couch. On the mantel over the fireplace, which had been bare when they moved in, she set out a collection of handblown glass animals that had belonged to her grandmother. She found it odd that there were no photographs in the house—none on the walls in the living room or hallways, none on the mantel. She set out a few of their own framed pictures on top of the entertainment center, a black cabinet that held the television, VCR, DVD player, and an old stereo that included a turntable, all of which had been there when they arrived. Among the photographs, she set out a collection of ceramic elves she’d had since she was a girl. There were already a couple hooks in the ceiling just in front of the picture window, over the couch—no doubt the chains of a swag lamp once had hung from them— and she hung a potted philodendron from each one.