Elsinore Canyon (16 page)

She tried not to swing her fists at his big, hollow head. “Yes—no, do what you want. She’s going to Costa Rica. She was threatening to go right after Garth and I got married, but he talked her out of it.” She swept through her office and hit the intercom. “Oscar!” She snapped her arms across her desk, looking for cigarettes, water, her keyboard. “Whatever it is that’s eating her, she can try to get over it down there. Different atmosphere. Different people. Let her practice Spanish, burn down the rainforests. Stay there until the term starts at Stanford.” She looked at Polly. “Where are Rosie and Gale?”

“I—I’ll find them.”

“People, guests,” she grumbled, “wandering around this place, left alone. I want all the arrangements made, I want this done and wrapped up before this movie night tonight. I’m actually going to try to
relax
and
enjoy
myself with my new husband, in my new home for a change.”

I was cleaned up from my workout at one o’clock. Hungry, too. When I got to my car, I found a message in my phone, from Dana. “Horst, please meet me at the adobe.”

I got on the road and called her back, and she answered on the first ring. “Horst, I’ve had a horrible morning.” She described the last part of it, which made me groan. “Of course I’m not,” she said.

“Good to hear.”

“Horst, I will never tell you one false word. If you ever wonder about anything I say to anyone else, take me aside and I’ll let you know.”

“All right.” A few seconds passed. “Dana, you there?”

“Yes.”

Silence.

“Dana?”

“Yes. Horst, you know, I’ve never done it with him.”

“Oh. Well, I didn’t think you had.” Holy shit. I hoped she couldn’t tell from my voice that my guts were practically coming out my mouth. It was true, I didn’t think she had, but I still felt like I’d barely missed plunging off a cliff.

“Other things, but—”

“All right, whatever.”

“It’s just that I know you and I have different opinions about some things, but I don’t want you to think I’d do certain things.”

We did have different opinions about some things, and God had we had fights about them. I was beginning to wonder if Mr. and Mrs. Hamlet had been that way.

We kept talking as I drove. I winced as her voice filled with concern over Phil. He was like a beautiful wild bird with its foot caught in a net, she said; she felt sad and scared. And her temper tantrum at brunch had snowballed. Costa Rica was officially on and she was flying out tomorrow. Rosie and Gale were going, and they were already at their homes packing. “If you see me acting halfway excited, don’t be fooled,” she said.

“Are you going?”

“I haven’t the slightest idea. It depends on what happens tonight. But I’m packing, just in case.”

“Why do you want to meet me at the adobe?”

“Because,” she said deliberately, “I want to tell you exactly what happened that night.”

I hadn’t been down there since then. That small, stifling room. Dana, encased alive under that layer of black. I felt a familiar heartsickness as I threw my chair into a cart and rolled down to meet her.

When I rolled in, Dana was sitting on the brick steps, barefoot. She came running down with a look of relief. “I brought food anyway,” she said, opening some paper bags. “Are you sure you don’t want anything?”

“No, but you eat.”

She stopped unpacking the food. “I’m not hungry either.” She picked up the bags and shouldered my wheelchair as we made our way up to the roof. I crawled behind her, as we had done dozens of times over the years in school, with me scarcely minding it back then. Today I did, as I imagined Phil with his godlike physique not only springing up the cottage steps but bearing Dana herself in his arms.

The brick roof was warm and inviting under the sun, and the breeze was like being right on the beach—I seldom got to go down on the sand anymore. I didn’t get into my chair, just stayed on the ground, and Dana walked around and scattered the food for the birds. “Something for everyone,” she said. “The bread-eaters and the meat-eaters. I wonder how long it will take for them to pick it all clean.”

“I want to hear about the ghost,” I said.

Dana wadded up the wrappers. She came to me and sat with her dress rippling at her knees. “I’m still not sure if she meant for me to tell.”

“But you’re going to.”

“I need to share things with you, Horst. It’s selfish of me because it feels like spilling acid all over you.” Her eyes and voice softened. “I’m sorry.”

“Tell me.”

“She made me want to do things I couldn’t tell anyone. I felt guilty, and scared.”

“I’m not liking her.”

“Then listen.” She started with the moment she had left me and Marcellus behind. Him groaning in the blackness over the bite she’d given him, me crawling towards the stairs, whacking my way through legs of chairs and feeling wildly vulnerable and exposed on top, as if the brick roof might collapse on our heads. She had ascended in terror and awe behind the ghost, which glanced behind at her twice as it made its way to the top and out the trap door. Dana thought we would make good on our threats to follow, but frighteningly, the door had slammed behind her, and she was alone, outside on the roof, with the thing.

Dana emerged under a translucent navy sky. The ghost stood on the edge of the roof, near the ocean. There wasn’t a sound of the waves or the wind even though it licked and pricked Dana’s skin as if it should have shaken every leaf and blade of grass in the canyon.

Dana took a step towards it, then stopped, transfixed, her throat shut tight with fear. “What, what are you?” she barely mouthed. “What are you? Don’t let me call you ‘Mom’ unless you are.”

The ghost stared at Dana in anguish. Its voice was slow and labored, as if coming through passages obstructed with tubes. “Dana, I’m your mother’s spirit. I’m in pain.”

“Mom!” Dana whispered.

“My darling. Don’t. Don’t come closer. Don’t talk. Just listen. I can’t stay long. Dana, I wasn’t perfect in life.”

“Oh, Mom—”

“The path to where I am now begins with the first time we choose wrong over right, even in the smallest way.” The ghost’s voice continued slow and difficult. “It might have been different if I’d had warning, and time, but the failings I didn’t settle and the wrongs I didn’t right surround me and
burn
like—oh, Dana, I’ve seen suffering beyond human comprehension!” Her face was pure agony. “I didn’t get my chance. I didn’t soothe or heal the injuries I did to others.”

“Mom, you were good!”

“Those things seem small in life, easily prevented, but here they’re magnified and they’re all I feel: wounds my hands needed to fix, tears of sympathy and remorse I needed to shed to wash my conscience.”

“Not for me! None for me. Just know that, Mom!”

“If you love me, Dana—”

“Oh dear God!”

“—restore justice to the life I left! I’m nothing but ashes, unable to move my arms or speak, and the world is turning without me. I loved you, Dana. I built and straitened myself on you. You’re all I have! You can’t undo the sins I committed. Only, avenge me against the killer who put me in this state.”

“Killer?”

“They say I died of natural causes, but the true cause is the creature who replaced me.”

“Oh, I knew it!”

“She’s an opportunistic germ that invades at a site of weakness. I was a good wife—but after my death your father was corrupted by his luxury and fine joy. In his need, he forgot me and she sucked him into the life they share now. With all my faults and all her charms, she’s nothing to what I was.”

Dana covered her face with her hands wretchedly. “I can’t stand this!”

“Listen to me, Dana. You have to hear the worst. It was my custom to drink tea every afternoon, from an engraved cup your father gave me. On the day I died, the wife he has now prepared that cup herself and carried it to me. It made me drowsy. I couldn’t stand. It plunged me into a hard sleep and stifled my senses, and she injected me in my heart with a deadly poison. She abused her office to misreport the nature of my death. That was how she stole my husband, the achievements of my life, and now the comfort of my soul. And you, Dana. It cuts me like a knife, that my daughter should be forced to watch her father live the way he does! The gossips speak your name with his, and mix you in his degrading lust as if you chose your part in it.”

“Oh, how could Dad—”

“However you set it right, don’t touch
him.
He has a conscience. Let it do its work. Help me, Dana!”

The ghost looked at Dana longingly, turned—

“Mom, don’t go! There are things I need to tell you!”

—stepped to the edge of the roof—

“Mom, I’m sorry about everything, I love you!”

—and vanished from sight. The sounds of nature returned. Dana screamed and dashed to where the ghost had stood, looked every way around her, and threw herself down on her arms and knees and screamed at the waves, which crashed noisily back up again. “Mom! Can you hear me? I’ll remember you! I swear I’ll do what you said, I’ll work night and day!” From her knees, she tightened down into a ball. “Aunt Claudia, you bitch, you smirking, filthy bitch!
I am coming for you,
you bitch!” And then she was screaming madly and crying, no words, just screams, rolling at the edge of the roof, pounding her fists and screaming, and that was how Marcellus and I found her when the door swung open and we rushed out to drag her back inside.

Dana sat beneath the sun and looked at me, perfectly still. The breeze lapped at her skirt and lifted tendrils of her hair. “Right here. I swore to her. If she’s telling the truth, Aunt Claudia killed the person I owe everything to. How would you treat a killer like that?”

My heart was pounding. I had seen that ghost, too—twice. I had to believe Dana, and yet I had to doubt that black presence, that—good lord, Dana’s vision of hell, her fears, her antics, her neglect of me for all those weeks and then her call for help—this was what it was about. How would I treat a killer like that? I knew it wasn’t a rhetorical question. That demonic ghost, damn that thing, was it making me the biggest dupe in the world?
Jesus,
did tortured souls somehow purge their pain and sins on loved ones like Dana? Dana. She needed me. I tried to imagine what she was describing, but the only loss I could ever feel that deeply would be the loss of Dana herself. I knew what I would want to do.

“What’s ‘everything,’ Dana? Do you owe her your soul?”

“Why did she tell me what happened? How am I supposed to make things right?”

“I don’t know. But remember, Dana: we’re the living. We’re the ones who have action. We’re the ones who have decision.”

Dana lowered her eyes. “She said she couldn’t move her arms.” She licked off a few tears. “We’re alive. And she’s not. It’s so harsh.”

What could I do to comfort her? “I love you, Dana.” I didn’t say it. “We have each other,” I said. She raised her eyes to mine. “I mean, the living do. To make things less harsh.”

“I want to kill Claudia. It’s the thing I have to do before anything else, and it’s the thing I can’t say to the most important people in my life. But I’ve said it now, to you. And I’ve poisoned you. How can I be so schizoid? I also want to live with the people I have, and be happy. I have Phil—almost. I have you.”