The Loveliest Dead (9 page)

“David! That’s it! Do you hear it?”

He looked up at Jenna, who stopped near the bottom of the stairs. “Be careful,” he said. “It’s just a toy.”

She came off the stairs and hurried to his side, looking down at the bear. As she swept it up off the floor and held it in both hands, the music wore down and stopped. She turned it over to find a key sticking out of the back. Jenna turned the key a couple times and the music continued. She turned the bear face up again.
 

“My God, David, this is the bear he was holding,” Jenna whispered. “Except... it looked like new. It was clean and had both eyes, the ribbon was a bright blue, and the stuffing wasn’t—”
 

David looked up at Miles in the doorway and said, “Go check on Grandma, Tiger, see how she’s doing, okay?”

Miles sighed, knowing full well he was being gotten rid of again. He said, “Okay,” and left.

“Jenna, it’s just an old teddy bear that fell out of one of these boxes.”

“Yes!” She looked up at him with round eyes, a few strands of her long blond hair dangling over her face. “That’s why he was down here, for the teddy bear. He knew it was down here, and he just wanted to find it and play with it, probably because we don’t have any of his toys here in—”
 

He snatched the bear from her hands and said angrily, “Jenna, will you
stop
it!”
 

She flinched, and the outer corners of her eyes crinkled.

Quietly, he said, “You’re talking crazy.” He tossed the teddy bear down on the fallen boxes. “He’s gone, Jenna, and he’s not coming back. You’ve got to stop this, because I can’t take it, I really can’t. Do you understand? I feel bad enough as it is. If you keep this up, you’re gonna start to scare me, you know what I mean? We can’t afford any counseling right now. And I really don’t think we need it—I think we’re pretty normal, under the circumstances. But if you keep this up, you’re gonna tear me apart, okay? So please, you’ve got to—”
 

“I’m sorry.” She put her arms around him. “I’m sorry. You’re right.”

He put an arm around her and they stood that way for a while. Then he said, “Come on, let’s go upstairs. It’s freezing down here.”
 

“Aren’t you going to change the bulbs?”

“I did. They blew out again as soon as I flipped the switch. I think there might be something wrong with the wiring.”

Her tone was wary. “Something wrong with the wiring?”

“Yeah, but don’t worry about it. We just won’t come down here until we—”

“We’ll have an electrician take a look at the wiring, then.”

“We can’t afford an—”

“Mom will pay for it.”

Mom will pay for it
. David was beginning to hate those words. He needed to find a job before he started hating Jenna for saying them.
 

“David, we don’t know anything about electrical wiring, and I’m going to be worried sick if I think there’s an electrical problem in this house.”
 

“All right, all right. Talk to your mother about it.” He pushed her gently toward the stairs. “Go on. I’ll be up in a minute.”

Jenna hesitated, stepped around him, and went over to the teddy bear on the dirt floor. She bent down to pick it up. “I’d like to take this and—”
 

“No.”

“But I just wanted to—”

“
No
. The bear stays down here with the rest of this junk. After I clean up the garage, I’m going to come down here and throw all this stuff out.”
 

Jenna took one last look around in the dark, then went upstairs.

The breaker box was on the wall at the foot of the stairs. David opened it, turned the flashlight on it. It looked like a regular breaker box to him, but Jenna was right—he didn’t know any more about electrical wiring than she did.
 

He turned and went to the center of the basement and aimed the light upward. There were exposed pipes overhead, and a chain dangled from a single light fixture hung from a cord without a bulb.
 

He passed the light over the mess once again. Of the boxes that had toppled, a couple had broken open. Some toys and old magazines had spilled out onto the floor. An old wooden high chair was leaning against a stack of boxes near the corner. Its wood was splintered in places and its black paint was peeling like dead skin. Part of one leg was missing. But there was something odd about it. David stepped over to the chair. Six black leather straps dangled from it, three on each side, three with buckles.
 

What kind of high chair has leather straps
? he wondered.
 

He reached down and pulled the high chair away from the stacked boxes. Old cobwebs clung between it and the boxes.

David suddenly was overwhelmed by a deep feeling of growing horror. Like a current of electricity, it traveled up his arm from the chair itself and filled his entire body. Something about the chair felt so wrong, so corrupt, that he let it go, let it drop back against the boxes. He stumbled back a step, chest rising and falling with rapid breaths.
 

The basement’s cold seemed to sink into his bones. The darkness around him appeared much darker, pressed in on him like a force.
 

A couple more notes tinkled out of the teddy bear.

David turned and hurried up the stairs, relieved to step into the light and relative warmth of the laundry room. Before closing the door, he looked down into the basement one more time. A shudder passed through him that he did not understand. He told himself that Jenna’s fantasy that Josh had appeared to her in the basement the night before had gotten under his skin. That was all.
 

He was closing the basement door when he noticed an old surface bolt-lock on both the inside and outside, each about a foot above the doorknob. David slid the inside bolt back and forth in its track and was surprised by the smooth movement. He frowned at the locks, wondered why anyone would need to lock the basement door on either side.
 

David closed the door and left the laundry room. It was time to get to work on the garage.

Half an hour later, Jenna told David she had to do some grocery shopping, put on her coat, and left the house. The truth was, she simply wanted to be alone.

Her mind had been racing ever since she’d seen the teddy bear in the basement. It was the same teddy bear she had seen the hooded toddler—
stop thinking of him that way
, she thought.
Admit it, you think it’s Josh
— carrying in the basement the night before, and it had played the same music she’d heard twice and traced to the basement. Jenna was unable to rid herself of the nagging certainty that it was all somehow significant, but it was a significance she did not yet understand. That was why she wanted to be alone—to think.
 

David had been right, of course. Everything he’d said had made perfect sense. They were both thinking of Josh more than usual because they had moved to a new town, but their family was not intact. But even though she knew David had been right, she could not accept that she’d been wrong. No matter how reasonable David’s argument, it did not explain away what she had seen. The teddy bear in the basement made her feel certain she’d seen
something
. But she still did not understand it.
 

Jenna pulled into the parking lot of the supermarket and parked the Toyota. She hadn’t written up a shopping list, but could think of a few things she needed to pick up. Grocery shopping relaxed her, and she needed to do something that would make her feel normal, because she did not feel that way right now. She had not felt normal since seeing that small figure standing at the end of the upstairs hallway.
 

She pulled a shopping cart from the train of carts outside the store, wheeled it through the automatic doors, and began roaming the aisles. Her eyes scanned the shelves, but her mind was back in the dark, damp basement of their new house.
 

If the small figure she had seen—first in the upstairs hallway, then in the basement—was Josh, why had he been carrying a teddy bear that was packed away with all the other junk down in the basement? It had been the same one, she had no doubt of that—the only difference was that the one Josh had carried had been like new, with shining black eyes, clean fur, and a bright blue ribbon around its neck. The one David had found—the very same teddy bear—was old, falling apart, missing an eye, and filthy.
 

Jenna stopped in front of a bank of shelves that held jars of pickles and scanned them slowly. She knew they were out of bread-and-butter pickles for sandwiches, and she thought vaguely that it might be nice to have a jar of dill pickles in the fridge as well. She took a large jar off a shelf, cradled it in her arm, and examined the label without focusing on it.
 

When she’d told David that Josh had come down to the basement because he liked the teddy bear, she’d been spouting the first explanation that had entered her mind. But it made perfect sense.
 

Jenna had held on to Josh’s toys and clothes for those first few months after his death. She could not bear the thought of getting rid of them, or even moving them. But after the silence that had fallen over her family finally lifted, she and David agreed they had to get rid of Josh’s things. To keep them would only worsen their pain. Every time they saw the tiny clothes Josh had worn and the toys he had played with, they would bleed inside. So they’d boxed everything up and taken it to the Salvation Army.
 

Josh had no toys left. There was nothing to play with in the house, nothing of his own. But somehow, he had discovered that teddy bear. Maybe through Josh’s eyes, the teddy bear looked brand-new. Perhaps through some interdimensional prism, he saw the bear as it had once been, and Jenna, in turn, saw a projection of that.
 

These are not my thoughts
, Jenna thought as she stared, unseeing, at the label on the pickle jar.
I can’t believe I’m thinking these things.

At the same time, it all made a kind of gut-level sense that plucked at her soul. Even in the face of her own disbelief, she was asking herself questions that would have made her laugh coming from someone else. But she wanted answers, and she had none.
 

Jenna had been staring at the jar of dill pickles for a long time, oblivious of the supermarket employee who had spoken to her twice. When the woman touched her arm, Jenna was so startled, she cried out and dropped the pickle jar. It hit the floor with a flat crunch, and pickles, juice, and shards of glass went in all directions.
 

“Oh, shit,” the woman said, quickly stepping back. She put a hand over her chest and looked at Jenna. “I’m sorry. I mean ... oh, boy.” She smiled.
 

Her name tag read “Kimberly.” She was in her mid-thirties, plump and bosomy, with full, shiny black hair tied back in a ponytail. She wore the same uniform all the store’s female employees wore: white blouse, red vest, and black pants.
 

“Are you okay?” Kimberly asked. “You aren’t cut or anything, are you?”

Jenna realized she was crying, and became terribly embarassed. She turned away from the woman and tried to make herself stop.

Kimberly said, “C’mon, let’s get away from this mess.” She took Jenna’s elbow and steered her away from the spill. “You looked awfully interested in that pickle label, and you didn’t hear me the first couple times I spoke to you, so I... I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to scare you.”
 

Jenna fought to stop her tears, but somehow that only made it worse.

Kimberly leaned close and lowered her voice. “Are you on something, honey?”

Jenna surprised herself by laughing. She shook her head as she got a tissue from her purse. “No,
no
. I’m sorry, my mind just wandered off and ...” She dabbed at her eyes, blew her nose, stuffed the tissue back in her purse. “I’ll pay for the pickles.”
 

“Don’t worry about the pickles. Sure you’re okay?”

“No. I’m not. But I have to be. My husband and son and I, and my mother... we just moved here from Redding, so I don’t really have time to not be okay.”
 

“Oh? You’re gonna love it here. I’ve been to Redding in the summertime, and it’s like Indian summer in hell. It’s much nicer here, I think. You renting or buying?”
 

“We’re ... inheriting. From my father.”

“Oh? That’s something you don’t hear every day. My husband’s in real estate. You inherited a whole house?”

Jenna nodded vaguely—her mind was already drifting off again, back down to the basement, to that musical teddy bear.

“Where is it?” Kimberly asked.

“I’m sorry—what did you say?”

“Where’s the house? If you don’t mind my asking.”

“Off of Starfish Drive.”

“Oh, it’s very pretty over there. How do you like it?”

Tears welled up in Jenna’s eyes, and she reached for another tissue. “How do I like the house?”

“Yeah. Are you all right?”

Jenna laughed again as she dabbed at her tears. “Like I said, no.”