B
obby Fullbright didn’t reach the Marley house until almost five
A.M.
He stood before the threshold, and he could sense the house watching him. A pain radiated from his throat to his chest to his groin. His testicles retracted deep inside his pelvis, and he wondered briefly if they’d ever come back. But he had to find her. He had to tell her what he’d only realized for certain tonight. It wasn’t convenience. It wasn’t circumstance. He really loved her. He took a deep breath, and entered the house.
As his eyes adjusted to the dark, he stumbled down the hall and up the stairs to her bedroom. “Liz?” he called.
“Liz!”
he shouted. His voice reverberated through the house. It echoed. The first time it sounded like him. The second time it was deeper. The last time it whined her name.
“Liz!”
it jeered at him.
The smoke thickened with each passing second, and his mind moved slowly. Everything was dark. He started coughing and couldn’t stop. His skin throbbed like he’d been standing too long near a hot fire. It came to him suddenly, as he dry-heaved on the green carpet that looked gray through the smoke. He could feel her right then. His thoughts descended down the stairs, into the basement, into the black hole. Into Susan. She was down, there, in the basement. Liz was down there, too. He could see her in his mind.
He got on his hands and knees like they’d told him to do in health class. Around him, he noticed how the walls breathed and the boiler beat. Alive, he thought. This whole town was alive. But pretty soon he didn’t think about any of that, not even Liz. He just kept crawling for the sake of crawling, for the sake of instinct, for the sake of survival, until finally, he collapsed on the floor, right in front of the open basement door.
L
ike a polite guest, the smoke entered the Marley house through the front door first. It wiped its feet on the welcome mat and sneaked through the hallway. It coiled its black fingers around the kitchen table. It climbed the stairs and floated above the beds. It donned the cotton T-shirts and wool sweaters that its occupants had left on hangers, and smoldered them to rags. Finally, it married the rain that fell, and trickled through the basement windows just as Ted Marley gave his daughter a rose, Bobby Fullbright walked through the front door, and Mary got up from the kitchen table.
“Elizabeth Rebecca?” Mary shouted as she raced down the stairs. She reached out with blind hands. At first she only swiped at air, and she began to panic. But she grazed Liz’s sweatshirt with her fingertips. Before she had the chance to pull her close, Liz rushed at her. She pressed her face into the crook of Mary’s neck and began to cry in wracking sobs.
Mary did not try to stop her. She did not stiffen. She held her daughter. Liz cried harder, and for once Mary did not let go. She held Liz more tightly, and Liz let herself be held. She let herself forget, and remember, and love, and hate, and trust, because even on this night, the worst had not happened. Her father had not hurt her, and her mother had come to find her.
Mary took a breath and through the smoke was able to smell the scent of Irish Spring on her daughter’s skin. She stiffened. “Where is he?” she asked in a flat, low voice that meant harm.
“Gone,” Liz said.
She lifted Liz’s chin, and through the smoke Liz could see the shine of her eyes. “What did he do to you?”
“He gave me a flower,” Liz said.
Mary let out a sob of relief. Despite the heavy smoke in the air, Liz felt as if she had set down a great weight she did not know she’d been carrying. For the first time in a long time, the house was without secrets.
The smoke thickened, and both Mary and Liz started coughing. Together they headed out, but just then, someone came clopping down the steps. They stopped short, and Susan appeared before them.
Despite the darkness, Liz could see the way Susan’s broken neck lolled this way and that. An inhuman thing. A human thing.
Susan grinned, and inside her blue eyes Liz thought she could see all of Bedford. Every gurgle of the river. Every deer in the woods. Every particle of smoke. Every melancholy winter night. There was no hope in there. No joy. No trust. No love. And yet, somewhere inside this thing, Liz could also see her sister. Susan Marley. A pretty girl. A smart girl. A girl who used to laugh.
Susan advanced, and Mary tried to stand between them, but Liz would not be budged. She thought she knew the way to end this. A little girl racing down a hill. A stain of blood in the snow. A sensitive girl, who felt what other people could not. “Where are you, Susan?” Liz coughed out.
Susan smiled. “Everywhere.” Her voice sounded like Ted Marley. Like Liz. Like Mary. Like Susan. Like Paul Martin. Like Bobby Fullbright. Like Georgia O’Brian. Like Danny and April Willow. Like Andrea Jorgenson. Like Montie Henrich. Like Thomas Schultz. Like Louise Andrias. Like every person in this town.
Liz shook her head. “No. I can hear you someplace,” she said, and then she stopped to cough while Mary held her by her shoulders to keep her from falling. “I can hear who you used to be.”
Susan’s smile became less certain. “That’s why you came back here, isn’t it? You could have waited in your apartment. You could have let the house get us, or the smoke, or these things you brought, but you wanted to see us. You just had to see us. What do you want, Susan?”
Susan’s eyes flickered and her smile became a scowl. “Nothing,” Susan said. “It’s all nothing.”
“He didn’t hurt me, even though you thought he would,” Liz continued.
Susan frowned, and Liz knew that Susan was surprised. She’d been unable to know or guess this. Unable to conceive of it.
Liz pressed forward. “Nothing is all bad.” She looked around the smoke-filled room, where the boiler kicked and the walls breathed and the smoke had burned red welts into her pale skin. “Even in the worst places, nothing is all bad. You know that, or you used to know it. Even in this house, you had yourself. You had me.”
She was coughing again, only this time, when she gasped for air, she found none. Her coughs became choking sounds, and then finally, she stopped coughing. Without her noticing, somehow she and Mary were now down on their knees in the cold water.
Sparks flitted across Liz’s field of vision, and her throat burned as if someone was strangling her. “What do you want?” Too weak to speak, Liz whispered this with her mind. “Tell me what you want.”
Susan reached out her bony hand to Liz. “No,” Mary said, but Liz did not hear. She did not hesitate. She took it. They were sisters, after all. Always, in the end, it came down to this.
When they touched, Liz felt a shock of electricity. Felt soft fingers prod her skin, inside her skin. Felt them ask permission, felt herself say yes. They opened her up, piece by piece. Through her skin, her blood, her bones. She remembered sleeping in bed next to her big sister, who had smelled like tea rose perfume. Sitting on her father’s lap. Curling up under a blanket with her mother. Trying, and failing, to hock a loogie of phlegm through her fingers at the Nudd Street bus stop. Climbing trees. Playing quicksand with her big sister. A first kiss. A taunting for snarly hair and big hips. A family road trip that took ten extra hours because Dad couldn’t read maps. Believing in everything, even when the evidence told her to doubt. Believing in nothing, because she dared not hope. A sister lost. A father’s death. A mother drifting away. A first love. Living in this town, where all things bright began to look gray, and bad thoughts found a home inside Susan Marley.
As Liz remembered these things, Susan remembered them, too. She lived them. She became the younger sister, the woman on the other side of the fence. She saw a man in a basement who for once did the right thing. She saw a woman in a kitchen devour her own regret with one simple act. She saw all these things, and she envied them, and she wished that they belonged to her, and wondered why they did not, and at last made her peace with them, that the girl they belonged to shared her blood. The girl they belonged to loved her, and perhaps that was good enough.
Susan let go of Liz. Her blue eyes became still. She remembered the girl she had been long ago and the woman she had become. She saw the flower that Liz had dropped to the floor and wondered if it had been meant, not as a gift for Liz, but as an offering from a fallen man to his fallen daughter. She picked it up and tucked it inside the hole in her chest where her heart had once beat. Nourished somehow by what lay inside, its petals turned red and opened into full bloom.
She stood back and looked over the smoke-filled room. The smoke-filled town. The beating boiler. The ticking paper mill. The flooding roads that felt like blood through her veins. She did not want this. She wanted it. She had always meant to do this. She had never meant to do this.
Susan took a deep breath in. The sound was a high-pitched whistle, like wind against glass windows. The barometric pressure in the basement suddenly got very high, and Liz’s ears popped. The smoke swirled in the shape of a small, black tornado. It circled the room, again and again, and still Susan kept breathing in. Her small chest puffed out to twice its size. The tornado smashed the bookcase into a thousand pieces on the floor, and spun the dresser and bed in the air, until it finally plunged inside Susan’s nose and eyes and ears and mouth. She took another breath in, and all the smoke entered her, leaving the air bright and clear. She took another breath in, and Liz’s own breath was lost. It left her lungs, and entered Susan. Immediately, the welts on Liz’s skin were gone, and her wet lungs were dry.
Liz looked over at Mary, who was no longer coughing or even out of breath. Susan smiled at them. Her grin was without cruelty. Still, her head lolled. Still, her bones jutted through her festering skin. It was so difficult to look at her.
Then Susan reached out her arms. For one long second, there was no one to receive her. Just Susan standing in the room with her arms wide and completely alone. But then Liz stood and embraced her sister. Mary followed. The three of them formed a circle. They held on tightly, trying in their awkward ways to express the inexpressible.
A
t five o’clock Thursday morning, the smoke in the Marley house thinned, and Bobby woke up. He raced down the stairs and found the three women standing in a circle. At his approach the circle broke. Liz left from her mother and sister, and went to Bobby.
Susan turned from them and started up the stairs. She left the house and walked down the flooded and smoke-filled street. As she limped, one foot sliding along the water, the other thumping down through the mud, Liz, Bobby, and Mary followed from a distance.
At the mill, there was a crowd of people, all with blue eyes. The buzzing sounds of the night became one sound; an endless, soulless scream. As Susan approached, the crowd parted for her. She walked through them and toward the black pipe of the mill, as if marching down an aisle at a church.
She looked at every face, remembered every story. On the periphery of the crowd stood Bobby’s family. They held the twins in their arms while their daughters stood by their sides. In front of the mill was Danny Willow, who was tending to his wife’s body. He pushed down hard against the gaping wound that would not stop bleeding. Behind her, Montie Henrich pinned Kate Sanders to the ground to still her flailing arms. The recently dead were there too: Louise Andrias, Steve McCormack, Owen Read, Laura Henrich, Chuck Brann, and Thomas Schultz. And in the distance William Prentice was shrouded in shadows, a negligent father forsaken by his children.
Ragged and limping, Susan kept going. The smoke poured from the orifices of the mill like a bleeding wound. Its machinery made kicking sounds like the boiler of her house. Like a heart. Like the voices. Like the rain. It beat faster and faster. Faster and faster.
She got to the broken door of the mill, and then turned to look out over the crowd. She saw Lori Kalisz, Michelle Torrens, Artie Schupbach, and a handful of others, who would leave this town tomorrow if they lived, driving away as fast as they could. She saw the Fullbrights, who even now were thinking that they should have locked their doors, they should have lived farther up the hill, they should have built their house from steel instead of brick, as if such things could have made them safe. She saw Georgia O’Brian, whose only thoughts could be read on her face.
My son,
she was thinking, unable to go any further than that, shaking him, crying over him, listening to his chest for small breaths.
She saw Liz, who held her boyfriend’s hand. They whispered words of consolation to each other, and Susan knew that together or alone, they would finish this thing better than they had started. She saw Mary, who smiled weakly at her. Mary was already beginning to forget. If she lived to see morning, she would tell herself that all of this had been a dream, and only remember the flicker of a moment in which her courage had overcome her fear. She saw her father’s ghost standing far back behind the crowd. A shadowy figure, he nodded at her, and then turned away. There was one last person she looked at. She met his gaze. The worms wriggled through his beard, and into his mouth. They bored through his skin and the sockets of his eyes. Rossoff dropped to his knees and died.
She turned to the mill. Inside its doors, Paul Martin’s ghost beckoned her. He stood taller, his stubble clean-shaven and his suit neatly pressed. She knew why she had been drawn to him years ago, why she had sought him out over and over again, why their fates had always seemed so inextricable. Because she had known that all things between them had added up to this moment, and that he would not let her go through this alone. He smiled at her; a kind, placid smile.
The crowd closed in around her. The mill kept beating, faster and faster. Faster and faster.
She hesitated even while they coughed, and two more fell down dead. One was Richard Miller, the other Jonathan Bagley. Jonathan’s wife, Anna, knelt down and flicked his cheeks with rain as of to wake him from a pleasant dream.
Jerome Donally was the first to throw a rock at Susan. It missed, but then Bernard McMullen smashed a Heineken bottle against her face. It bounced off her chin and rolled downhill. They closed in around her. The crowd. Alexandra Fullbright ground Susan’s shoulder joint out of its socket. Kevin Brutton yanked on her other arm until he came away with a sleeve of her skin. Faceless fingers poked through her stitches until her stomach opened, and her organs tumbled out. A spleen, a kidney, the gray tubing of her small intestine. They tore until she was only muscle and bone.
She collapsed to the ground, and the crowd stood over her. She saw their eyes, wild blue eyes, and knew that they had gone mad. They had become what she had been in life. She could read their thoughts. They did not want her to save them. They wanted to tear her apart.
Just then, she heard a loud pop, and the crowd pulled back. Danny Willow pointed his gun into the air and fired again, and they scattered. Still, the smoke kept coming. Three more fell. Sean O’Connor, Dan Hodkin, Amity Jorgenson.
Too weak to stand, she crawled toward the mill’s open door. Georgia O’Brian hoisted her up by the waist and held her wretched body steady. With her mind Susan communicated what she had to do.
The two of them watched each other, and in Georgia’s eyes, Susan saw her own reflection. She saw the things she had chosen not to know. She saw that while she had always told herself that none of the things she carried belonged to her, some of them did. She saw that a part of her had wanted all this to happen to Bedford, and had wanted it all along. She had fantasized of a black cloud that filled Main Street, and revenge for the life that this town had stolen from her. She had fantasized of a little sister in a basement, taking a punishment no one deserved. She saw that she hated every one of them, even the ones she loved. Especially the ones she loved.
Susan saw her true reflection in Georgia’s eyes. A girl and a woman. Corruption and innocence. Cruelty and kindness.
The smoke kept coming. “Go,” Georgia said. “It’s not too late.”
Still, Susan hesitated. In the distance, Matthew O’Brian took a final, rattling breath.
“Now,” Georgia said sternly. “Do it.”
Susan looked at the crowd one last time. She searched for a face and found it. Liz lifted her chin at Susan. Her favorite in the world was her sister.
Why not Liz? Why not anyone else? Why Bedford? There are no answers to some questions, no matter what you do. Susan walked inside the mill. Georgia shut the door behind her.
Inside, Paul Martin’s ghost stood by her side. She took a deep breath and wind rushed the streets of Bedford. The black smoke receded, exiting houses in the direction it had come. It whirled back through chimneys and out of drapes. It carried the corpses of thirty-four men, and lost little girls, and dogs named Benji, and old hurts and grudges inside it. A tornado of shadows, of shapes, of buzzing noise, and of smoke whirled down Main Street. It spun past Don’s Liquor, the Chop Mop Shop, People’s Heritage Bank, Shaws, Kmart, Gifford’s Ice Cream, and the park. It went down the mill’s pipe. It shot through the vat, and inside Susan Marley. She swallowed it whole.
The smoke filled her pores, her skin, her bones. It whispered a thousand stories. It told her its worst secrets, her own worst secrets. It begged to be let out. She did not let it loose again. She knew then what she had become. Not a child running down a hill with a heart as white as snow. Not a woman made grotesque by her own corruption. She had become something different in this moment. She had become Bedford’s keeper.
The mill kept ticking, faster and faster, until at last a pressurized pipe in the vat broke, and gas and flames ignited. She looked around the room that suddenly became bright, and she and Paul Martin watched it together like watching a sunrise. The fire licked her body, and touched the sulfur inside her, and then there was an explosion. The paper mill burned to the ground.
Outside, the crowd watched the blaze until the mill’s embers grew cold. There was silence as the rain became a drizzle, and then a patter, and then nothing. All was silent.