If You Could See Me Now (37 page)

Alison got to the porch and rushed inside. Whatever it was that followed her vanished like a smudge on a pane of glass.

A spout of material—grass, leaves, pebbles—lifted from the lawn and shattered against the side of the house.

There was one gas can left in the garage. I saw it in my mind and felt the way the grip would fit my hand, and without knowing what I would do with it or how it would help, I made myself run into the garage and lift it. It was full, as I knew it would be. By itself, the weight of the heavy liquid seemed to draw me outside again, as if it were pulling me down a slope.

I went toward the house. You have already done this once, I told myself, you did it last night: but I knew that beside the
quarry I had been ready to die and now I was not. I glanced back at Lokken; he was half crouching in the weeds into which she had rolled him, making noises in his throat. Blood covered his uniform shirt. No sound came from the house. I had a sudden mental vision of poor Duane, poor Polar Bears, pinned like fruit to the trees, their skin black and white, and obligation to the past—a feeling like love—moved me forward.

The smell was like water from graves, and it blanketed the porch. The gas can weighed heavily in my hand. I went through into the living room. Everything looked different. It was all there, nothing had been moved, but the room I had prepared for Alison Greening was now darker, meaner, shabbier; water stains blotted the walls. The smell was thicker inside than on the porch. Alison Updahl was cowering on a chair, her legs drawn up before her chest as if she would kick anything that came too close. I do not think that she saw me. Her face was a tight white shield. What she had seen when she had twisted around on the path was what Lokken and I had witnessed moving toward the house. “I'm not going to let her get you,” I said. “I'm going to get you out.” It was just noise.

I heard the windows breaking all over the house. The girl before me twitched: her eyes were all whites. “Stand up,” I said. She put down her legs and tried to lever herself out of the chair. I turned away, satisfied that she could move and began to splash gasoline around the room.
If we have to go this way
, I thought,
it will be better than
—I saw the bodies pinned to the trees. I doused the furniture and splashed the gasoline on the back wall.

She was there, I knew; I could sense her in the house. It was that awareness of a hostile force I had had on the first night in the woods. Alison Updahl was up on her feet, her arms out in front of her like a blind woman's. The floor of the room was
filmed with dirt; I saw a triangle of moss sprouting in a corner of the ceiling.

Then I saw a shadow against the gasoline-spattered wall. Small, formless, but essentially manlike. I dropped the empty gas can and it rang on the floor. Outside, a branch thwacked against the white boards. “Miles,” Alison Updahl said very softly.

“I'm here.” Useless words of comfort.

Leaves pushed against the broken kitchen window and forced it in. I heard them boiling in the corrupt air.

The shadow against the wall grew darker. I caught the girl's outstretched arm and pulled her toward me. Her eyes were fluttering, but I could see their pupils. “That smell…” She was on the edge of hysteria, I could hear it slice in her voice. She moved her head and saw the darkening shadow on the wall. The earth on the floor was stirring, moving in dervish circles.

“I'm going to light a match,” I said. “When I do, I want you to run out on the porch and jump through the screen. It's full of holes, it's weak. Then just keep running.”

In horror she was watching the shadow darken. Her mouth opened. “I dug up a cowdog once…after I buried it…”

The shadow was three-dimensional, standing out from the wall like a relief. The rotten air filled with the rustling of leaves. With part of my mind I thought that the room looked like it had been pulled up out of a flooding river. I tightened my arm around Alison Updahl's shoulder. She seemed scarcely to be breathing. “Now get out,” I said. “Fast.” I pushed her toward the porch. The air hissed. The matches were in my hand. My fingers shook. I twisted five or six matches out of the book and managed to scratch them in a general way against the lighting surface. They went up into flame, and I tossed them toward the back of the room.

Heat and light exploded there. Beneath the whooshing
sound of the gas igniting I heard the porch screen letting go as Alison tumbled through it.

Standing across the room from me was no shadow, no circling pattern on the grass, no tall outline of sticks, no dark thing from beneath the world's rind, but a living person. Maybe if I were closer to her I could have seen the seams and imperfections, the rough vein of a leaf or the discoloration in the white of an eye, but from where I stood she looked as she had in 1955, a perfect girl of bone and skin and blood. Even then, she stopped my breath, with the fire beating in on us, beating in. It was that face composed of a thousand magical complications. Not a man in fifty could have looked at it without aching—for the pain it would know, for the pain it would cause.

She was not smiling, but it was as if she were. Her gravity encompassed and suggested all feeling. Only gravity, the grave composure of such a face, can do this. Behind her figure small and slim the fire beat upward on the wall. My skin baked in the heat.

With moveless fascination I saw that the tips of the fingers on one of her hands had caught fire. Without passion, with a clear quiet gravity which promised more than I could know or understand, she held me with her eyes and face.

Upstairs the house let go with a noise like a sigh. Fire sucked in a flaming orange stream up the narrow staircase. I stepped backward, away from the flames. My eyebrows were crisping; I knew that my face was burned as if by the sun.

I understood, being looked at by her or what looked like her, that a contract was being made. I understood that she would rather have me dead, but that Duane's daughter, her namesake, was the reason I would live. Now her entire hand
was blazing, lost at the center of a glowing circle of light. Yes, there was a contract: I did not wholly comprehend it, I never wholly would, but I was bound to it.

She let me back away as far as the door. The expression on the face so much like her face had not altered by as much as a millimeter. The heat was unbearable, killing; I turned and ran, as much from the sense of bondage as from the fire.

Like Duane's Dream House, the old farmhouse was igniting behind me, and when I turned around on the lawn to watch it go up, I saw that it too was a dream house. I felt as though part of me was still inside it. I was bound to it, bound for life, as I had been for twenty years. Seven hours earlier I had thought I had come to a new accommodation, and I now saw—still only half-comprehendingly—that all accommodations are the same accommodation. I felt simultaneously heavier and lighter, with my face burned and my life returned to me freighted with the responsibilities I had always had because I had taken them, because I was simply the person who had them. My cousin's daughter was standing before the walnut trees, watching me with disbelief. When I noticed the expression in her eyes, I began to shake more noticeably. I turned away from her regard and watched the house. Dave Lokken lay whimpering behind us.

I thought of her in there, sealing me to my bargain. The whole upper and rear portions of the house were distorted by flame. I had laughed at Duane without recognizing that I too owned a dream house; and he had paid for my illusions, on the night when they were strongest in me.

“There was a—a person in there,” breathed Alison Updahl. “I thought you were going to die.”

“And I thought you were,” I said. “I didn't know I could really do anything to stop it.”

“But you could.”

“I was here. That was enough.”

The house was roaring now, making a vast devouring sound. She moved right up next to me. “I saw something horrible,” she said. “Miles—”

“We saw it too,” I told her, cutting off her gasp as she remembered. “That's why he's like that.” We both glanced at Lokken, who was kneeling now and looking at the house with red stunned-looking eyes. Blood and vomit covered his shirt.

“If you hadn't come just then…”

“You would have been killed. And so would I. That's what it was about.”

“But now that—person—won't come back.”

“I don't know,” I said. “I don't think so. She'll never come back like that, anyhow.”

The whole house was in the last stage before collapse, and I could feel the heat beating against my face. I had to immerse myself in cold water. Blisters were forming on the palms of my hands. Behind the flames the old building was so skeletal that it looked as though it could float.

“When I dug up our cowdog it smelled like that,” Alison said. “Like inside.”

Boards and rafters began to tumble inward. The entire porch leaned against the wall of flames, sighed like a tired child, and soundlessly sank down into flatness.

“If she doesn't come back like that, how will she come back?”

“As us,” I said.

“Your father and I loved her,” I said. “I suppose he hated her too, but he named you after her because he loved her first, before he hated her.”

“And he killed her, didn't he?” she asked. “And blamed it on you.”

“He was just there. It was really Zack's father. He was the one.”

“I knew it wasn't you. I wanted you to tell me, out at the quarry. I thought it was my dad.” I could see her throat fluttering, jumping like a frog's. “I'm glad it wasn't.”

“Yes.”

“I feel…numb. I can't feel anything yet.”

“Yes.”

“I feel like I could talk a lot or not say anything at all.”

“I know,” I said.

The sides of the house were still upright, bracketing two open rooms of surging and twisting fire. At the center of a strand of flame stood an immovable shadow, a brief column of dark. Dave Lokken staggered to his feet.

“Is my father…?” She took one of my hands, and her touch was cool.

“We weren't in time,” I said. “Lokken and I found your father and Polar Bears. Up in the woods. I wish we could have done something. Lokken will bring them down.”

The shadow I was watching as she clung to me darkened in the midst of the fire. Her tears flamed in the damaged skin at the base of my neck.

I led her to my car. I could not stand there anymore. His eyes stupid with shock, Lokken watched us getting into the VW. We too were in shock, I knew. My hands and face hurt, but I still could not feel the pain, it was only an abstraction of pain. I backed out into the drive and stopped to look at the house for the last time. Good-bye grandmother, good-bye dream house, good-bye dreams, good-bye Alison. Hello. Good-bye. Good-bye Alison. Who would be back—as a gesture seen on a crowded street, or as a snatch of music heard from an open window, as the curve of a neck and the pressure of a pair of hands, or as a child. Who would always be with us, now. Neighbors were coming slowly up the road, some of them walking, holding dishtowels and tools in their hands, some of them getting out of their pickups with taut, worried faces. Red and Tuta Sunderson were moving slowly across the lawn, going toward Dave Lokken. The old farmhouse was nearly gone and the flames were low. I backed the car through the people and swung it out on the road so that it was facing deeper into the valley.

“Where are we going?” asked Alison.

“I don't know.”

“My father is really dead?” She put a knuckle in her mouth, knowing the answer.

“Yes. So is Polar Bears.”

“I thought he was the one—the one who killed those girls.”

“I thought so too, for a little while,” I said. “I'm sorry. Polar Bears thought so too for a little while. He was the one that finally put the idea in my head.”

“I can't go back, Miles,” she said.

“Fine.”

“Will I have to go back?”

“You can think about it,” I said.

I was just steering, just driving a car. For a while her crying was a wet noise beside me. The road seemed to wind generally westward. I saw only farms and a winding road ahead of me. After this valley there would be another, and then another after that. Here the trees grew more thickly, coming right down to the buildings.

She straightened her back on the seat beside me. There were no more crying noises. “Let's just drive,” she said. “I don't want to see Zack. I can't see him. We can write back from wherever we get to.”

“Fine,” I said.

“Let's go someplace like Wyoming or Colorado.”

“Whatever you want,” I said. “We'll do whatever you want.” The curve of a neck, the pressure of a pair of hands, the familiar gesture of an arm. The blisters on my hands began truly to hurt; the nerves in my face began to transmit the pain of being burned; I was beginning to feel better.

At the next curve of the valley the car trembled and the motor died. I heard myself begin to laugh.