Halloween: Magic, Mystery, and the Macabre (37 page)

How to answer without either encouraging him or sounding like

a callous bitch? “If it wasn’t for Cody’s sake? I don’t know that I’d be going through with this after all.”

BRIAN HODGE [279]

“Oh yeah?”

“It might be good for him,” she said. “He wasn’t there when Drew

had his heart seizure. And I’m glad of that much, that Cody didn’t have to see it. But it robbed him of his chance to say goodbye. He goes to kindergarten one morning and he’s got a dad, and by the time he comes home he doesn’t. So tonight would probably be good for

him.”

Troy traced a finger along the downy blond fuzz at her temple,

which felt better than she wanted it to. “And what about you?”

She couldn’t find the words, and of course, that spoke volumes.

“If you’re ambivalent, I can understand that,” he said.

“Were you, with Angela?”

“Yes and no. The circumstances, they couldn’t have been more

different. With her, there was so much we didn’t know. There were so many questions we would’ve liked to have answered. Obviously.”

Obviously. Like,
Who took you, Angela? Who kil ed you? And

where’s the rest of you?

She hadn’t known Troy then, not in person and barely by sight.

The first she’d seen of him was Halloween three years ago, Troy joining Angela Pemberton’s sister Melanie, the two of them kneeling beside each other at the foot of the scarecrow, in that first row that custom reserved for the hopeful. It had been someone else’s night, though, Angela apparently choosing to remain silent then and forever.

To see Melanie afterward, her crushing disappointment, was to

understand the cruelty of this night. Trying not to be obvious about it, Bailey had watched Troy console her, and he’d seemed so kind

and attentive that she wondered at the time if he and Melanie might become a couple in their own right. But it had never happened, and now she knew how naïve that was. Death and bereavement would

always be the foundation of the relationship.

So now she saw that night for what it really was. Troy had been

sowing his seeds in her heart without realizing it.

“But,” he went on, “you learn what happens here, or you grow up

with it, and you think it’s going to be this great experience. You think, wow, who gets this chance, how lucky this place is. And some years, for some people, yeah, I’m sure it does turn out to be everything they

[280] WE, THE FORTUNATE BEREAVED

hope it will be. But a part of me was scared. I wanted it to happen for Melanie’s sake, it was her sister and all, but for me? The closer the night got, the more I didn’t want it after all.”

Bailey hung on every word. This was it.
This
was the thing nobody in Dunhaven ever talked about, at least not publicly, even

though you could see it in their eyes every October. You could see the trepidation, the misgivings. Could recognize the look of someone who was going through with an act even though they’d begun to

have second thoughts. None of which they would ever admit to. For

obvious reasons: Who wanted to be first to come out and admit to

being an ungrateful freak?

“What scared you about it?” she asked.

“I’d gotten to a place where I’d accepted that Angela was gone,”

Troy said. “That she wasn’t coming back. I’d gotten to a place where I’d accepted we might never know what happened to her. And I

realized I didn’t
want
to know anymore. I didn’t want to know how she’d suffered. And then . . . ”

He seemed to have trouble, but Bailey thought she might be able

to take it from here. “And then everybody expects you to put that

aside for one night, and it’s not as easy as it sounds?”

Troy nodded. “That’s it. You’d know, wouldn’t you?”

“And because you just get them back for one night, how are you

supposed to deal with the pain of having to let them go all over

again?”

He laughed, very quick, very soft. “You’ve obviously given this

some thought. It’s like you’ve got a stake in this for yourself, or something.”

“But I do want it to happen for Cody,” she said with resolve.

“That’s the bottom line. That’s all that matters.”

“Then I hope you get it. I hope it’s him.”
Him
, Troy always said.

He never called Drew by name. “Who’s the competition, do you

know?”

She didn’t, not exactly. They could only recall who’d died in the

past year, and who among them might match up with the anonymous

gifts lain thus far beneath the scarecrow’s perch. The glove and the sheet music, the medal and the cake.

BRIAN HODGE [281]

“The Purple Heart . . . I bet that was Larry Hughey’s. He would’ve won that in Korea. He’s the only veteran I can think of who’s died this year.”

“Oh god,” she said, and imagined the man’s poor widow coming

out to leave the medal on the grass. “Candace Hughey’s got to be

in her eighties. Seems like she should be the lucky one tonight on seniority alone.”

“Absolutely not,” Troy said. “If you feel guilty about that, stop

right now. Every time it goes to the geriatric crowd, it’s a wasted year.

It’s like old people winning the lottery, you know? They’re going to be dead in another three years anyway, so what’s the point?”

She didn’t want to laugh at this, but couldn’t help it. “You’re going to Hell for that one, I’m afraid.”

“And if you’re all lucky, I’ll come back and tell you what it’s like there.”

She wasn’t laughing anymore, and wondered why she had at all.

It wasn’t just talk, not in Dunhaven. Say a thing like that, and it could well turn out to happen.

“ ‘Hell is other people,’ ” she mused, for no better reason than that it came to mind. Then again, there was always a better reason for

most things. “Did you ever hear that? I don’t remember who said it.”

“No. But whoever it was, I’d buy him a drink.”

They dawdled some more, in bed and then out, and shared a

bite to eat—breakfast for him, brunch for her. They ate in the little nook before a bay window, overlooking the fading trees of autumn,

bare enough and tall enough to appear to scrape the bellies of the charcoal clouds. It was almost like being outside, in the chill and unpredictable wind, on this day when the spirits gathered to roam.

And when it came time to leave, she both wanted to, and didn’t.

“You going to be there tonight?” she asked.

“Should I? Do you want me to?”

Who could say what spirits understood, or were prepared to

overlook? If they saw you getting on with your life, when theirs had been over a mere eight months, was that, to them, another kind of

Hell?

“I don’t know if that would be a good idea or not,” she said.

[282] WE, THE FORTUNATE BEREAVED

He nodded. “I’m sure I’ll hear all about it tomorrow.”

When she left, every step between his door and her car felt like

a few more degrees of transition between worlds—this time back to

putting herself second, because that’s what mothers were supposed

to do. Halloween was the perfect day for this feeling, for changing masks so many times, one after another, so quickly that she could no longer be sure which of them was most real.

Trick-or-treating was a supervised event in Dunhaven, the kids going out in groups overseen by at least one parent, or better yet, two. You had to love them, of course, and their excitement, all dressed up and everywhere to go, but you still didn’t want them roaming at will,

losing track of time. It was better for all concerned that they get in by curfew, before nightfall, when Halloween was taken over by more adult concerns.

Bailey had
wanted
to be one of the parents helping out to escort the kids around. She’d volunteered for duty again and again, but the other mothers and the few dads who pitched in wouldn’t hear of it.

Telling her no, of course not, you’ve got enough to worry about this year. Like they couldn’t see that this was precisely the point—that today, of all days, was a day when she could use distractions instead of dwelling on what might or might not happen after sundown.

So after she’d collected Cody from the party at St. Aidan’s, and

gotten him into his costume, then dropped him off at the grade-

school gym where the candy-fueled army teamed up and set out,

there could be no going home. The last thing she wanted was to sit around listening for the doorbell so she could spend the next hours throwing miniature Snickers bars at other people’s children.

It was time to check on the offerings they’d left this morning

anyway.

She was relieved to find them still there, right where they’d been left, along with the rest, nothing tampered with. They’d even been joined by a few more items, one a stuffed teddy bear with the nose half-chewed away, and with this one it only took a moment to figure out the likely source: the latest generation of Ralstons, Ellis and Kristen, who’d lost a baby girl to SIDS last spring.

BRIAN HODGE [283]

Oh, come on
, Bailey thought.
She wasn’t even a year old, she
wouldn’t have been speaking anything more than a word at a time, so
what’s she got to tell you now?

For which she felt perfectly ashamed a few moments later.

This day, this weird day—it
did
things to you, none of them good.

She’d never appreciated what a merciful thing it was that only

those who’d died in the past year were able to come through. This

limitation kept the incivility contained. If anyone could come back any year, the whole town would be at one another’s throats each and every October. There wouldn’t even be a Dunhaven by now, she was

sure of it. The place would have imploded generations ago.

It wasn’t just the sabotage from your fellow mourners you had

to worry about, someone snitching your offering away to thin the

competition for their own dearly departed. It was the sabotage

you
couldn’t
foresee coming that had, other years, made things interesting.

You didn’t have to be old enough to remember it firsthand to

have heard about the year James Gosling was caught stealing a locket and other items set out to call a woman named Meredith Hartmann,

for fear of what her spirit might’ve had to reveal about the decade they’d kept secret from their spouses.

And beyond any living person’s memory was a year that had

passed into local legend. One of Dunhaven’s most disreputable sons, Joseph Harrington, was alleged to have salted the earth of the entire town square, and soaked the wood of the fence post in holy water, in an attempt to keep
anyone
from coming through. Several people had died that spring, on the same night on the eve of May, three in ways that, it was said, left their bodies so mangled they looked as though they’d gone through a combine—although no one ever needed to

run a combine until harvest. Whatever had happened, Harrington

had thought it better to incur the wrath of all of Dunhaven than let someone have a chance to say a word about what they’d been up to

out in the woods and fields far from the heart of town.

Anywhere else, people would write that off as lore that had

grown so much in the telling that by now the episode was more fable

[284] WE, THE FORTUNATE BEREAVED

than fact. But here, given what everybody
knew
would happen each October . . . ? Here, you couldn’t be so sure.

Either way, the dead had secrets, and sometimes the living had

a powerful interest in making sure both stayed on the other side,

unseen, unheard.

Oddly enough, the local police kept out of this part of it, stepping in only when deeds and disagreements turned violent. People

complained, but Bailey got the logic behind this—it would be that

much harder to keep the peace when people started thinking you

played favorites when it came to pilfering and petty theft of things left in plain sight, on public property.

If we want the privilege of speaking with the dead
, she thought,
we’re on our own.

So as long as she was here and dreaded going home, she decided

to do her civic duty and take a turn on unofficial watch. She hoofed it a block away, to the Jittery Bean, where she bought a hot chocolate, and brought it back here to the square and settled onto one of the benches in view of the waiting scarecrow, to make sure it all stayed on this side of fair.

She could feel it already, while dodging people on the sidewalks

to and from the coffee shop, and could see it now from the bench: the eagerness of morning giving way to the nervousness of afternoon.

The day was darkening too soon, it seemed, the sun gone weak in the south, the clouds sinking lower over the town, like a roof to screen them from the eye of God. A deeper chill rode in on a blustery wind that rattled leaves and windows alike.

We should’ve moved
, she thought.
We should’ve moved away
before Cody was born, the way we talked about. Drew would still be
dead . . . but we wouldn’t still be waiting to see if he’s coming home.

From here, she could see the blue-and-white of the shirt, the red

lacquer of the Pinewood Derby car.

Go on
, she thought.
Somebody come take them already. I’l cut you
some slack, sit right here and pretend I don’t see you.

Before long, she thought she might have had a hopeful prospect,

a scarf-wrapped woman walking up to the scarecrow and giving the

offerings a studious look without having brought one of her own.

BRIAN HODGE [285]

She soon drifted toward another walkway, in no hurry to leave. In

profile and from behind it was hard to tell who it was, but once she sat down on another bench, Bailey could see her clearly, and realized that it was Melanie Pemberton.