Dividing Earth: A Novel of Dark Fantasy (23 page)

“I take it you don’t have a weapon.”

She raised the bat, patted it in her palm. “This don’t count?”

Robert stood, nearly touched his daughter’s shoulder, but thought better of it. He neared the front door as Grady did, still not hearing anything, but there was something. It was the same feeling he got when he felt someone staring at him, the prickling of hair and skin on the back of his neck. “What do you want to do?”

Grady gave him a look that told him she thought it was obvious. “You take one side, I’ll take the other.”

“Happen to have another bat?”

Grady smiled, shook her head, swung open the door.

Behind him, Jenn cleared her throat. He turned, raised his eyebrows, and she said, “Don’t sweat it. This is a once-a-month thing.”

“Oh, shut up,” said Grady, pushing open the screen and stepping into the night.

Robert smiled at Jenn, followed Grady out, watched her go right while he went left, hugged the bushes that lined the house, pricking his ears for any strange sounds. Tall lights hung over the golf course, keeping everything bright. He didn’t see how anyone could sneak up on one of the houses, and from what Jenn had just said, the girl had a tendency to overreact.

Then Grady screamed.

He lifted his head, broke into a run, heard something boom against a wall, and she screamed again, a vicious, attacking yell, but then there was a huge crack and he didn’t know if it was bat against bone, or something else.

A shadow was standing over a bush, a foot twitching on the ground, and that was enough: Robert rammed into the shadow. They tumbled on the ground, rolling, and he clamped onto a hand just as the other hand slammed against his head. He ducked a second blow, wrenched the man’s wrist into his mouth and bit into the soft flesh under the palm, tore through tendon and skin, tasted the wet rush of blood as it gushed over his mouth and chin, sluiced down his neck and over his chest. He thought the man screamed, but then he was hit again and he blacked out for a second and the guy was on him, hitting him with his good hand. Robert tasted more blood, knew it was his, brought his leg up, felt it connect solidly, and the man yelped, the wind rushing out of him. He rolled away, onto his feet, and the man took to his own, looking around for the baseball bat. But it was at Robert’s feet, where he grabbed it just as the man dove. There was a glimmer of steel, and Robert swung for all he was worth. A knife flew into the air, moonlight flashing on the blade as it spun. The man rolled over, clutching both hands now, and Robert swung again, connecting solidly with his back. The man slumped, looking back, but Robert had already ripped the bat through the air again. It caught him flush in the face and the man’s head twisted impossibly on his neck, blood scored into the air above him, and there was a terrible, final sigh, and then, for only a moment, the night was silent.

“
Grady!
” Jenn shrieked.

Robert spun toward the sound, and as soon as he saw Grady’s crumpled form he knew she was dead, or would be shortly. His heart sank as he edged over to the sprawled figure. The bush she’d fallen into scratched and clawed at his arms and chest, then across his face when he knelt.

Grady was gasping like a landed fish, her mouth popping open and shut. Her eyes were twitching, but seemed to land more often than not on him. The left side of her face was crushed. Robert tried to smile, and he thought she tried to contort her lips as well. Blood bubbled from them instead of a smile, and then her mouth opened wider, air rushed out, a hollow sound following.

“Take care of her,” she moaned. Robert nodded, grabbed her hand, told her he would.

A horrible, plaintive scream split the night.

Mary pushed Jenn out of the way, shoved Robert to the ground, and collapsed over her friend.

Robert, his eyes wide, looked on, listened to Mary’s cries and Grady’s coughs, but then, adrenalin rocketing through him, his leg began to shake, and he thought,
I’m in shock
, then coherent thought fragmented and blew away.

* * * * *

Eventually, his body silenced.

Mary now held Grady’s inert body in her arms, rocking forward and back, moaning her friend’s name. Jenn stood over them, her face in her hands.

Robert lay on the ground, a few feet from the man he’d killed. Slowly, he gathered himself and took to his feet. The man’s face was partially shaded by the overhanging roof. Still, he looked somehow familiar. Staring dumbly, he stood over the corpse for a time, only peripherally aware that Mary and Jenn were quieting beside him; he followed the line of the man’s jaw, the crooked slit of his mouth, his open, sightless eyes . . . .

“Oh my God,” he whispered, backed up, but kept his eyes on the face.

When you open a door, things can get out as well as in. They hunt you.

He turned to Mary, who was rising, her eyes red and puffy, her shirt soaked with Grady’s life.

“It’s my fault,” he said, his heart slowly coming to his mind’s conclusion. “I’ve visited this on you.” He began to cry, to wail in anger, in frustration, and after a time of this he remembered no more.

4

“Is he up yet?” asked Jenn.

Mary shook her head.

“Okay,” Jenn said, looking past her, out the window and into the mountains that divided the sky and looked, at this distance, like the humped back of a great animal.

They sat together on Mary’s bed. They hadn’t left each other since it had happened. It was near nightfall.

Mary hadn’t said much. After the police and doctors had left (and had drugged Robert, rendering him mute and unconscious), she and Jenn had retired to this room shortly after nine this morning. They’d fallen in and out of sleep the remainder of the day.

It was dusk now. The doctor had administered a sedative, and her head still felt fuzzy. “He might not come out of it until tomorrow,” Mary told her, the first part of the sentence coming out dry and hoarse, then flattening into the familiar tone of her voice. For some reason, she felt reassured by her ability to speak.

“I miss her,” Jenn said.

“Shut up,” snapped Mary, and it surprised her. She felt Jenn staring at her, felt the hurt. In seven years, she hadn’t so much as raised her voice.

For a while, they just looked at each other. Finally, Mary placed her hand on Jenn’s leg, whispered an apology, and fell back into the bed with a sigh. She began to cry and Jenn joined her. Mary wiped her eyes, and they were tender to the touch. She ran her hands through her hair instead, and found that her scalp was sore too.

“You hungry?” Jenn shrugged her shoulders, and Mary understood: It was strange to think of mundane facts of existence at a time like this. “Feel like pizza?”

Then Mary sensed a shadow in the doorway. She sat up, stiffened.

Robert stepped from the shadows, his hand out. “Sorry,” he said. “I’m still woozy. Didn’t think to tell you I was here.”

Mary was panting. “You scared the shit out of me!”

“Please forgive me.”

“It’s okay.”

“Do you, uh, want me to order it?”

“What?”

“The pizza?”

“Oh. The pizza,” she repeated.

And this was how it began.

5

Two days later the three of them arrived at the service for Grady Melinda O’Malley. When Robert greeted Grady’s mother, she slapped him ferociously, hissing, “You found her all right.”

With a hand on his red face and his head down, he made his way to the back. Mary touched his arm, feeling along it, and brushed her fingers over his hand. He turned to her, tried to smile. She leaned over, whispered, “It wasn’t your fault,” and put her arms around him. Startled, he stiffened at first, and she let go just as he was getting used to it.

The church’s insides were bland, an everyday country meeting house, and the service itself was much like the church—it was conducted in the monotone of an aging Baptist preacher, a man whose Southern drawl was punctuated only by his pronunciation of the deity:
Gawd
. Robert tried to tune him out, hoping to find in his heart an appropriate poetry to commemorate an extinguished life, but he found only words. He hadn’t known the life.

After the service, they drove to the cemetery. They entered between two marble angels, slowly made their way toward a semi-circle of black coats and dry, open umbrellas, passing slabs of stenciled marble and granite, upright and rowed like teeth. A drab voice fought against the wind, dispensing the old myths of gold-paved streets and angels floating in the mist. Robert slowed, glanced around and thought of the land of stone that centered an unfinished world. He didn’t believe it, but couldn’t un-believe it either: He remembered it. But even his memory didn’t reassure him. Some said that memory was not like the present moment. Some said memory was just a form of beginning.

They strode down a grass aisle, and Mary took his hand, holding it tight until the minister finished his incantation for the living, the hope that death was not the end of the
I
, the dream of a body-less, freed consciousness roaming the edges of Man’s existence.

Then they lowered the mahogany box into the ground, and they all stood there, watched as the mourners filed out, and waited for the men to begin filling the hole.

* * * * *

They returned to the bungalow around eight. Mary sat out on the porch with a book, and after hiding a while in her room, Jenn came out to the living room, sharing the couch with her father. He hid his smile behind his hand.

“What’cha watchin’?”

He muted the television. “The news.”

“How’s the world.”

“Unchanged.”

“You remember, before it happened, you promised me something.”

He nodded. “I remember.”

She placed a hand on his knee, leaned forward, caught his eye. “Where were you?”

Robert waited. He didn’t know how to continue. Finally, he figured the only thing to do was tell the truth. She would either buy it or not. “You know about my mother, right?”

Jenn nodded. “She died young.”

“Turns out it wasn’t that simple.”

“What wasn’t?”

He paused, looking over. Jenn’s eyebrows were raised. “Do you believe in ghosts?”

Her eyebrows drew together. Her face was unreadable. “I don’t know.”

“I don’t know, either.” A bald faced lie.

“So why’d you ask?”

Robert buried his face in his hands. How could he explain it?

She scooted over, took his hand, rubbed over the veins on top of his hand. “It’s okay,” she told him, continuing to knead his hand.

With Jenn rubbing his hand, he found the courage to explain. He started way back, back in a forgotten, mythical West, in a town called Tempest.

He told her everything. When he’d finished, she asked him what she was, and he did his best to tell her. Jenn seemed frightened, a little shocked, but like Mary, perhaps because of Mary, she accepted it far easier than he had imagined possible.

When he’d finished, Jenn put her arm around him. “I missed you, Daddy. I missed you so much.”

He wrapped his arms around her and began to cry.

They cried and he apologized, again and again, and finally Jenn asked him if he was all better. Robert laughed and cried, and Jenn joined him.

* * * * *

Around midnight, Mary came inside. She and Robert recounted the funeral, pretended it was beautiful, but then Mary snorted. “God, it was horrible, wasn’t it?”

Caught off guard, Robert laughed, nodding his head.

“She would have thought it was horrible,” laughed Mary. “She would have liked everyone to get together, tell stories about her, and toss back pitchers of beer.”

“Got any beer?”

Mary smiled at him, a gleam in her eye. “She drank Pabst,” she told him, the laughter suddenly taking hold of her. The gleam became a tear. She shook with it, the laughter.

Robert chuckled, opened the refrigerator, took out two cans, popped the tops, handed one to Mary, and they clicked them together. “To Grady,” he said, and they took long, slow swigs. When they lowered their beers he asked, “Got any stories?”

“Oh yeah,” said Mary, grinning, a tear streaking her cheek.

* * * * *

It didn’t take Robert long to ease into the habit of just living again. He might have thought it would, but routine is a magic thing. At first he noticed it one morning when he opened his eyes and felt little or no anxiety. It was a slight peace to be sure, but it was there just the same. He laid still for the better part of an hour, not moving from the couch because he didn’t have to.

At ten minutes to noon, Mary strolled into the kitchen, asking how he liked his coffee. He told her he liked it the same way he liked his men: hot and black. He smiled at her, hoping she recognized a joke when she heard one, and she smiled back. To Robert this moment seemed like one a husband and wife shared. Provided they didn’t hate each other.

“How long you been up?”

“Exactly one minute.”

“Me too. Nice to sleep in.”

“Can’t remember the last time I could.”

Mary filled the pot with water, set the decanter beneath the spout, and began to scoop coffee into the filter, started the brew cycle, then came over and joined him on the couch, where they spoke of the mundane a while. When Robert noticed that she was scooting closer every few minutes, he wondered if his earlier thought had been right on. He’d wanted to kiss her for days, but hadn’t believed she was interested. Even now, as the sweet smell of her perfume neared, he wasn’t sure. But then he felt her hair on his shoulder. He kept on talking, nervous now, and then her hair was on his neck and she was kissing it. He turned and she kissed him on the lips, on the chin, on the cheek, and soon a familiar feeling came over him.

* * * * *

“Why do you think they call it
having
sex?” asked Mary, leaning over him, her long hair brushing his stomach.

Robert looked over. “What?”

“You have lunch, you have a baby, but don’t you
do
sex?”

He laughed, shook his head.

“No, really, the only way you can make sex sound like a verb is if you say the
F
word. Otherwise, it sounds like a buffet.”