Keeper of Dreams (55 page)

Truman got her pants unzipped and unbuttoned, but she braced her legs against the seat in front and squirmed as best she could to keep him from getting her pants down.

“Look, she’s getting into it,” said Truman.

But Ryan, who had the job of trying to control her, wasn’t amused. His fingers pressed into her wrists until she thought he was going to snap her bones it hurt so bad and he whispered “Hold still sweetheart” like he was her lover. And then it was only seconds till her pants and underpants were down around her ankles and Truman had his hand between her legs and she was crying helplessly and then the bus rocked just a little bit as the driver got on.

“I don’t know what the hell you kids are doing but not on my bus, got it?”

He hadn’t finished the sentence before Truman had her sweater pulled back down and all of a sudden he and Ryan were both standing up, blocking the driver’s view of her while she pulled up her pants and rezipped them and then reached under her sweater and pulled her bra back down into place.

“Friend of ours was crying,” said Truman, “and we were trying to make her feel better.”

“I know exactly what you were doing, asshole,” said the driver. “And I also know your big asshole buddy is a football player but here’s a clue, boys. You’re just high school tough, and that’s pure pussy to me. I was in the Gulf War killing badass Iraqis with my bare hands when you were still holding Mommy’s hand to go wee-wee in the girls’ bathroom, so please, please try something.”

“You got us wrong,” said Ryan.

Deeny felt Truman’s breath on her face. “Say anything and I’ll f——you with a file,” he whispered.

She turned her face away from him.

“Call me anytime,” he said, loud enough this time for the driver to hear. “I’m always willing to listen.”

“Get away from her, asshole,” said the driver. “Now.”

Truman waited just a moment longer, to show how free he was. Then
he sauntered down the aisle. It was small satisfaction to Deeny that when they passed him and started down the steps, he planted his foot on Truman’s ass and shoved them both out onto the parking lot.

Truman bounded up, limping but too mad to let the pain stop him. “You just f——ed yourself, big man, you just lost your job!” Ryan was trying to get him to shut up.

The driver leaned out the door. “You think that girl is scared of you, but if you try to get me fired, you just see what she says to the board of inquiry. Think she’ll stand by you?”

Truman looked at her. Ryan looked at her. She thought of Truman with a file in his hands, while Ryan held her against the ground. She thought of how it felt to have him touch her. Look at her naked. Mock her to her face.

She held up both hands, displaying one finger on each. One for each of them.

They went away.

The bus driver came back to her. “You OK?” he asked. “You OK?”

And she just kept nodding until she could finally control her voice enough to say, “Really, please, I’m fine.”

“They get away with shit like that because they’re in school and Daddy’s got money, but someday they’re going to go after somebody with a gun and the gun won’t care how much money the family has or how good their lawyers are, because lawyers can’t bring assholes back from the dead, much as they’d like to try.”

“You,” said Deeny, “are a poet.”

He grinned. She managed a half-assed smile back.

And then sat there while other kids piled onto the bus and then emptied back out, stop by stop, until there were only six kids left and it was her stop.

She went into the house. Nobody was home, of course. Nobody to talk to, but she wasn’t going to talk to them anyway. Not to them, not to Lex or Becky, not yet anyway, and not to Jake Wu, not ever to him. Not to anybody.

Except there she was in her room, naked and wet from the fifteen minutes in the shower, three times soaping herself and rinsing it off and she still felt dirty, there she was naked and it wasn’t her underwear she was
getting out of her drawer, it was this, this cellphone, whose batteries were probably run down, yeah just one little bar, not ten seconds worth of battery, but she pressed
PHONE OPTIONS, RINGER OPTIONS, RING TONES, TEST
, and then
OK
.

It rang. She held it up to her ear.

And he answered. “Deeny, I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry.”

All she could do was cry. He knew. She didn’t even have to tell him. He knew.

After a while she could talk, and even though he knew she told him. How it felt. How ugly and dirty.

“Because it was by force,” he said. “It was meant to degrade you. It wouldn’t feel that way with a man you loved. It wouldn’t be that way.”

“You’re only saying that because you wanted to do the same thing, all along, that’s what you wanted.”

“No,” he said. “No, Deeny. I only wanted you to have whatever it was you wanted. A lover on the phone, that’s what you wanted, and I could do that, so I did.”

“Who
are
you? Why do I get you on the phone when I call
nothing
?”

“I’m nothing,” he said. “I’m ashes. I’m dust. I’m an exhaled breath.”

“What’s your
name
!” she demanded.

“My name is Listener,” he said. “My name is The One Who Always Cares.”

“Bullshit!” she screamed into the phone, and then repeated it about six times, louder each time until she felt like she was ripping her own throat out from the inside.

“My name,” he whispered, “is Carson. Vaughn Carson. I lived all of twenty-five years and I died when I put my car into a tree and it killed the girl who was with me because all I could think about was showing off to her so maybe I could get laid that night and she said, Please slow down, you can’t control the car at this speed, so I went faster and I can’t . . . leave here. I don’t want to. I can’t go on because if I do I’ll have to face . . . what I did.”

“You just faced it,” said Deeny. “Telling me.”

“No,” he said. “You don’t know. All I did was
tell
you. I can’t—I’m a coward. That’s what we are, the ones who linger here. Cowards. We just can’t go on. We’re too ashamed.”

“So you haunt cellphones?” She couldn’t keep the derision out of her voice. Did he expect her to believe this? Of course, she
did
believe it, because it made more sense than any other possibility that had occurred to her. So the dead live on. And some of them can’t bear to take the next step, so here they are.

“We never haunt
things
,” he said. “Not houses, not any
thing
. It’s people. We have to find some way to make ourselves . . . noticeable. To people. Somebody who knows how to look at other people and really see them. Somebody who’s willing to accept that a person might be where a person couldn’t be. Or a voice might be coming out of something that shouldn’t have a voice.”

“Why me?” she said. “And besides, Lex heard you, too.”

“Lex heard what she expected
you
to hear. Not the same voice, but the
idea
of the same voice. The voice you were hungry for.”

“I wasn’t ‘hungry’ for a man,” she said.

“You were hungry to have people think of you differently at school. But what you chose, what you
pretended
, was a man. A lover on the phone. And I could do that. I remember it . . . not how it felt because I don’t even have the memory of my senses, but I remember that I once felt it, whatever it was, and I liked it, and so I talked about what I did that I knew made girls . . . shiver. And ask for more. And let me do more. I remembered that. It’s what you wanted. I couldn’t miss it—you were screaming it.”

“No I wasn’t,” she said. “I never said it to anybody.”

“I told you, I can’t
hear
. I can only
know
. You were like a siren, moving through the streets. You were so lonely and angry and hurt. And I—”

You pitied me. She didn’t say it into the phone, because the battery was already dead, and anyway, he could hear her whether she spoke aloud or not.

“No,” he said. “Not really. No, I was attracted to you. I thought, here’s what she needs, I could do that.”

“Why bother?” she said.

“I’ve got anything else to do?” he asked.

“Granting wishes for sex-starved ugly teenage girls?”

“See, that’s the thing,” he said. “You’re not ugly.”

“I thought you couldn’t see.”

“I can’t. But I know what
you
see, and you’re completely wrong, the very things that you hate about yourself are the things that seem most sweet to me. So young, fragile, so real, so kind.”

Oh, right, Miss Bitch herself, let’s check this with Ms. Reymondo and see what
she
thinks.

“Stop listening to Treadmarks,” said the voice. The man. Carson. Vaughn.

“You really
are
raiding my brain,” she said.

“You know what? Your father is really just doing the best he can to deal with the fact that he lusts for you. You haunt his dreams.”

“Oh, make me puke,” she said. “That’s such a lie.”

“He never actually thought it through, but by treating you so badly, he guarantees that you’ll hate him and so he’ll never be able to get near you and try the things he keeps dreaming of doing. He hates himself every time he sees you. It’s very complicated and it doesn’t make him a good father, but at least he’s not as bad a father as he could have been.”

“What, were you a shrink?”

“Come on, I’ve been dead for seventeen years, I’ve had time to figure out what makes people tick. Never had a clue while I was alive, no one ever does.”

“So how many other girls have you talked dirty to.”

“You’re the first.”

“Come on.”

“The first who ever heard me.”

“Lex was first.”

“She heard me because you wanted her to.”

Deeny began to cry again. “I didn’t really. I didn’t know what I wanted.”

“Nobody ever does. So we try for what we
think
we want and hope it works out. Like me and Dawn. I thought I wanted to impress her so she’d sleep with me. All I did was scare her and then kill her. That wasn’t what I wanted. What I really wanted was . . . to marry her and make babies with her and be a father and watch my kids grow up and if I’d married her, if I hadn’t killed us, then maybe our first child would have been a girl and maybe she would have looked like you and when she was so lost and angry and hungry and sad, then maybe I could have put my arms
around her, not like your poor father wants to, but like a
real
father, my arms like a safe place for you to hide in, my words to you nothing but the truth, but the truth put in such a way that it could heal you. Show you yourself with different eyes, so you could see who you really are. The dreamer, the poet, the singer, the wit. The beauty—yes, don’t laugh at me, you don’t know how men see women. There are boys who only see whether you look like the right magazine covers, but men look for the whole woman, they really do,
I
did, and you
are
beautiful, exactly as you are, your body and mind and your kindness and loyalty and that sharp edge you have, and the light of life inside you, it’s so beautiful, if only you could see what I
know
you are.”

“The only guy who sees it is a dead guy on the phone,” she said.

He chuckled. “So far, maybe you’re right,” he said. “Because you’re still in high school, and the only males you know are just boys. Except a few. This Wu kid, he’s not bad. He saw you.”

“Only after I got a reputation as a whore.”

“No, I know better than that. I really
know
. He saw you
before
. Before me. He just took a while to work up the courage.”

“Because his friends would make fun of him if he—”

“The courage to face a woman in all her beauty and ask if she’d give a part of it to him, just for a few hours, and then a few hours more. You don’t know how hard that is. It’s why the assholes get all the best women—because they don’t understand either the women or themselves well enough to know how utterly undeserving they are. But look at the guys who did that to you today. Look what they confessed about themselves. They already knew that the only way they could get any part of your beauty and your pride was to take it by force, because a woman like you would never give it to trivial little animals like them. All they could do was tear at you, rip it up a little. But they could never
have
it, because a woman of true beauty would never even think of sharing it with
them
.”

To her surprise, the words he said flowed into her like truth and even though they didn’t take away what had happened that afternoon on the bus, it took away some of the sting. It didn’t hurt so bad. She could breathe without gasping at the pain and shame of it.

“Now I know what I wanted,” she said.

“What?”

“On the phone,” Deeny said. “What I wanted on the phone.”

“Not a lover?”

“No,” she said.

And in her mind, she did not say the word aloud, but she thought it all the same, knowing he would hear.

What I needed was a father.