B
obby Fullbright jogged down Iroquois Hill, toward Liz. The smoke was so thick, he had to breathe through the collar of his shirt. Halfway down the hill, he saw a man racing toward him. He was surprised to see that it was his friend Steve McCormack. “Steve! Hey, Steve!” Bobby shouted so that his voice would rise above the sounds of this night.
Steve stopped short. There was something wrong with his eyes. They were dark, and even by the light of Bobby’s flashlight, they didn’t shine. There were circular sores surrounded by black char on the exposed parts of his skin. Burns, Bobby realized with a wave of nausea. From cigarette butts.
Steve smiled a desolate smile. A hungry smile, and Bobby understood that his friend had gone insane. The sounds of the night whispered to Bobby, and he saw something in his mind. His old friends; Louise, Owen, and Steve inside the mill. Filling the air with poison.
Still smiling, Steven answered Bobby’s question before he asked it. His lifted his chin, and Bobby saw that his entire face was burned. Her eyes weren’t black, they’d been hollowed out. Fluid oozed from his open sockets, but he could still see. He was seeing through Susan Marley. Seeing through her eyes now.
“The mill? Louise’s idea, but I helped. Thought it would make the dead stay dead. I didn’t know we were dead already.” Even his voice was flat like Susan’s.
“You’re crazy,” Bobby said.
Steve’s grin reached the empty sockets of his eyes, and Bobby could see Susan Marley in there. He could see her watching him. Bobby saw something else in his mind. He saw that Steve was headed for the most narrow part of the river. He was going to try to swim across, only he wouldn’t make it. As soon as he was knee-deep, the current would wrest him from the shore. Rocks from the bank would tumble down and crush first his thighs, then his back. His body would bounce lightly just once on the river floor, and then it would be still.
“Wait,” Bobby said, but then he knew that Steve wanted to drown. “Don’t go there, Bobby,” Steve shouted over his shoulder as he began to run toward the river. “You’ll eat your heart out. You think they’re different? They’re sisters, Bobby. They’re the same.”
Bobby took a deep breath through the collar of his shirt, looked one last time at Steve, and ran in the opposite direction.
G
eorgia O’Brian woke with a start. She tasted something funny on her tongue and her bedside lamp wouldn’t light up. Stupid lamp needed a bulb. Then she remembered the rain, and that the power lines were down. She hopped out of bed. The cold floor jolted her awake, and she realized that something was wrong. Her eyes burned. Something thick in the air. Smoke! A fire! Her house was on fire!
In seconds she was at Matthew’s bedside, rousing him from sleep. Together, they started into the hallway, where she found her father in his bathrobe and slippers. Disoriented, he asked, “What’s all this racket?” She shook him awake. “A fire, Dad!” she said, and the three hurried down the narrow stairway and out the front door.
When they got outside, she saw that the rest of the neighborhood was outdoors as well. Among others, there were the Reads, the Gallos, the Bagleys, and the Duboises. They held pieces of wet cloths to their faces, breathing deeply or coughing. They leaned in doorways, they lay in the middle of the street, they held hands or ran in scattered directions like schoolhouse jacks.
“This ain’t a fire,” Ed O’Brian said.
She shook her head. The smoke started to make her fuzzy-headed, and her thoughts moved slowly. She noticed the rain. It fell hard. So hard it almost had a voice. “Do you smell that, Dad?” she asked.
“What?”
“It’s sulfur, isn’t it?”
Ed sucked out his breath, and his entire body sagged. “Goddamn.”
“What?”
“The sulfur waste. Half a canister leaks, you’re supposed to clear out for a mile radius and call the Maine State EPA. There’s three of ’em over at the mill.”
“Call the police, Dad.”
“Trees knocked out the phone lines about an hour ago. You were sleeping.”
At her side was Matthew. She could hear the rattle of his wet lungs.
“It’s got to be the sulfur,” Ed said. “We could try to get out of town through the woods but in the dark and with this rain there’s not much time.”
Georgia’s stomach sank. “Somebody meant to do this, didn’t they?”
Ed nodded. “I guess they did.”
She looked east, and north, and then south. The town was closed off by the woods and river. No place to go but the mill. Plumes of smoke rolled down Main Street. The bandage slopped over Matthew’s shaved head was long gone, and the stitches in his scalp were surrounded by angry red skin. The rest of his face was startlingly pale. She was so frightened for him that it felt like a physical pain. “Do you think we can stop it?”
Ed ripped the hem of his blue flannel robe with the pocket knife on his keychain. He gave one piece to Georgia and placed the other over Matthew’s mouth. “We could try,” he wheezed.
“Okay,” she said. Then she lifted her arms high in the air.
“Hey!”
she shouted. Her voice was a siren above the rain. It rang clear and loud.
“Hey!”
she shouted again, and her neighbors all stopped to listen. “We think this stuff is coming from the mill! We’re going to try to contain it!”
When she began walking, the rest of the neighborhood followed. Some came close while others trailed her at a distance. At each corner she passed, she was joined by more of them. People she’d known all her life, family friends, acquaintances, shut-ins. By the time she reached Our Lady of Sorrow where the people from the shelter had emptied out onto the front steps to get away from the smoke in the church, the crowd became at least three hundred. It was the protest that should have been. There were a few, she could hear them, who ran in the opposite direction. They tried to swim across the river, or find a way north through the woods. They cowered in their homes, even while thick smoke blackened their lungs. But most followed her.
As she walked, she heard each person’s voice, each person’s story. She heard Danny Willow trying to comfort his wife. She heard Steve McCormack take a last, gasping breath before the river carried him away. She felt Elizabeth Marley looking into the eyes of her long-dead father. She heard Kevin Brutton, who tonight had told his wife Allie that he loved her for the first time in their twenty-three-year marriage. She saw inside them all.
She didn’t know why she was hearing all of this. She didn’t care. She only knew she had to get to the mill.
As she neared Main Street, Matthew’s coughing tapered off. His face was red, as if from choking, and she saw that he was too weak to cough. She picked him up and carried him.
At Main Street they met with the families from Iroquois Hill: the Realmutos, the Fullbrights (who had broken from their reverie, pulled away the bookcase barricading their front door, and finally fled once the smoke filled their house), the Gonyas, the Murtaghs. Five blocks farther east, they reached the mill. She could not see it; she could only hear it. Pumping. Churning. Throbbing. Like a volcano, black smoke spouted from its pipe. It mixed with the rain and stung her tongue. It hovered in the atmosphere, so dense she could hardly see her feet on the ground.
The voices were loudest here.
I can’t breathe,
one said.
Where are your children? You should have eaten them long ago. This is what it feels like, when you steal from yourself. There are pretty things, too, I wish I could remember them right now.
The voices became a thumping, a throbbing. They were one voice though they said different things. All one voice.
She looked behind her, and saw a crowd of frightened faces. All of Bedford. And then their eyes changed, and became the color blue. And then they were not people for one terrifying moment. They were Susan Marley.
She arrived at the mill’s open door. “There’s an emergency generator,” Ed shouted over the rain. “It looks like a fuse box along the wall facing the offices. I’ll go in.” But his breathing was labored. His hand was clenched over his left side, and she knew that his heart was bothering him.
“No, I’ll go,” she said.
He started to object, but then nodded instead. She passed Matthew into his arms, took a deep breath, and ran inside.
The place was cold. So cold that it reminded her of the way her house had felt on the morning of her mother’s death. Spiteful, and without hope. She wanted to cry, though doing so would have made her lose her breath. Grinding machines rumbled in her ears; steel and water and fire. She passed the rubber conveyor belt that wound through the old building. There were still bits of woodchips in its mouth. She passed the lamps that dried the pulp, and the office where her father had spent so much of his life. Though she did not breathe, she could feel black air burning the pink parts of her skin: her nose, her ears, her eyes, the soft parts of her hands and cheeks, and a fresh cut on her thigh from the corner of a steel shredder she’d bumped into.
On the far wall she found something that looked like a large fuse box, and hoped it was connected to the generator. One of its wooden stop handles was broken. She tried to pull it down anyway, but it would not be budged. She gave up, and started searching for an emergency stop button on the side of the vat that would stop the sulfur from cooking, but could not find one. The voices droned, so loud. So full of nothing. They droned, and she started to forget where she stood. She started to forget that her eyes burned, that everything burned. She tripped over something soft but substantial, and fell on top of it. The sound it made when she landed was a wet slap. It only took her a fraction of a second to recognize Paul’s black hair, but it seemed like much longer. Then she was back on her feet, crying but trying not to cry. Trying to hold her breath even while the smog filled her lungs, and she wondered not at all idly whether he had been her last chance at happiness, and they’d both somehow managed to screw it up.
Shit comes from shit, Georgia Ellen O’Brian. You know he’ll never amount to anything. You know you never wanted him,
a voice that sounded just like Georgia’s whispered in her ear.
Why don’t you stop pretending you’re someone you’re not? Why don’t you give up, the way you know you want to? Take a deep breath, Georgia. Take a very deep breath.
Georgia slammed her fists against metal. She kicked the vat in slippered feet, breaking three toes so that they dangled awkwardly. “Stop!” she shouted, “Stop it. Stop!”
The mill filled with ghosts. People born two hundred years ago, people who’d died five minutes ago. They lined the walls. They watched with mad blue eyes. They worked the line, filling the vat, cooking the wood. And down below, the people who’d been buried in this place began to moan.
At first, Georgia couldn’t distinguish them from the living. They all looked the same. But then she saw that some people had followed her inside. Danny Willow shot his pistol at the vat’s engine and hot steam gushed out, burning his face while he screamed. Kevin Brutton wandered in circles like a wind-up doll. Amity Jorgenson sat down in the water and cried. April Willow ran laps around the room, searching underneath tables and inside lockers.
(For what? Oh, right, the thing she lost.)
Georgia rushed outside and took a deep, wet breath. Matthew had fainted in her father’s arms. Behind her, she heard another round of pistol fire, and knew without having to look that April Willow had grabbed her husband’s gun and put it to her head.
For the first time in her memory, Georgia screamed.
T
hough the power was out, she could still see the way the water moved in ripples, just like that time long ago. She could see the bookcase in the corner, half built, that had been chopped into splinters years before. There it was. The smell of fresh sawdust. She touched it and she could feel the smoothness of pine, freshly sanded. There it was. And loneliness. She could feel it.
Was this really her father, or a monster of Susan’s creation? She looked across the basement floor, and knew that it was both things; a man and the shadow he had cast.
He stood in the darkness. A small man. She knew now that he was not an appealing man. Ugly little man. She outweighed him by ten pounds. His face was dark, his eyes drawn haggard. He held something in his hand. Picked at it with his fingers. It must be something awful. Something terrible, she knew. A knife. Something to kill her with. Or worse. A heart. His own rotten heart, picking at it, trying to make it whole. He stayed in the shadows and she knew he saw her. She knew he was watching her, picking at his heart. A scabby thing.
He started toward her. A little move, an inch or so. He picked at the thing in his hand. Yes, it must be his rotten heart. His sick and rotten heart. He placed it in the water where it bobbed up and down. She could not stop herself. She picked it up. Not his heart at all. A white rose. She held it in her hand. A gift for his girl.
He came at her and she knew what would happen. What always should have happened. Because he did not love her. That was the fairy tale. That was the joke. Oh yes, she knew what he would do. The thing she had escaped, not because he cared for her, but by luck. Dumb luck.
He extended his hand but did not touch her. He waited, and she hitched her breath. It came to her that this was supposed to be her decision. Her choice.
Tears filled her eyes, and she became present again. The different parts of her smashed together, the parts that wanted to die and the parts that wanted to live. They came together, the parts that remembered and the parts that forgot. The parts that loved and the parts that hated. All these things that could not be reconciled came together. They became one thing.
She let out what she thought would be a giggle. Laughter. So funny, eating a cake that beats like a heart. So funny, my father’s a rapist who hated himself so much he willed his heart to stop beating. So funny, he came back to life, not to tell me the secret of existence, not to bother with something petty like telling me why, but to give me a flower. So funny, that big sisters, fathers, boyfriends who only pretend to love you, even strangers on the street carry these things inside them. So funny, that every one of them, deep down, is a monster. They’re all so fuckin’ funny I could laugh forever. This is the place I come from. This is ground zero. This is the reference point for every decision I have ever made, everything I will ever be. Oh, the joke’s on me. Because I’m the only one who isn’t in on it.
She did not giggle. She let out a sob.
He held out his hand. Her choice. What choice? She looked at him. She didn’t want to know. She had to know. She had to know. She had to know.
She took his hand. He pulled her in. Put his mouth over her hair and kissed her. She closed her eyes. He squeezed her tight. He held her, and she remembered the other things she’d chosen to forget. She remembered her mother, who had once possessed a gentle beauty, and the safety she had felt at night, when she and Susan had shared a room. She remembered snow days, and the smell of warm Pop-Tarts at the breakfast table. She remembered that there were good things, too. She remembered that even when the worst happened, there was always hope.
“It’s up to you, what you carry,” he whispered as he let her go, and she began to sob.
Her father slowly left her, then. He became a shadow that faded into darkness that faded into nothing. All that was left was the smell of sawdust, and the old bookcase, and the churning water, and the inexplicably beautiful flower in the palm of her hand.