Keystone (21 page)

“You’ve got to see that what you’re looking at is the same as a seashell on the beach,” he says. “From your peripheral vision, look to the right of the body.”

The body.

It makes me want to puke, but I do what Garrett says. My gaze seems stuck on the bristles of the Fury Man’s patchy beard, but if I stretch my vision, I see a mist gathering off to the right. The more I focus on it, the more I see it’s not mist at all. It’s the Fury Man, crouched beside his own body, crying. His face is in his hands. It’s more disturbing to watch him sob than it is to have his dead body in the same room with me.

“He crying,” I say, choking up as I watch. “Can you see him?”

“Yes.” Garrett says.

“How come he’s still here? Isn’t he supposed to cross over or something?”

“He pulled the emergency lever on the exit hatch.” Garrett says. “He went too early.”

“But I don’t get why he’s crying.”

“He’s seen his mistakes,” Garrett says, “but now he has no way to fix them. Dying probably seemed like an easier way out, but he probably didn’t believe that his problems would follow him into the afterlife. But now he’s got to face everything, without any possibility of fixing it. Now that there’s no gain for anything, what’s left is experiencing the emotions of everyone else involved in each situation and how his actions affected
them.
The consequence of giving up and moving on is that he’s lost his
hope
.”

“How do you know all that?” I ask.

“From the people who have been through the rings and decide to stay,” Garrett says. “Like Zane’s dad. He came back from the rings, straightened himself out, and now he’s one of our best.”

I watch the Fury Man, sob and sob and sob. Garrett’s right- it’s not like I have to watch anymore, but I’m still fascinated. I’m watching a ghost. I wonder if this was what it was like for my mom when she wrote them. If they sobbed as they stood in line to be written. I watch the Fury Man and wonder, if Roger ever had a moment like this, when he regretted killing my grandfather or my mom. He sure didn’t seem remorseful at all when he plowed his way through our Memory ceremony.

“We should look for my grandfather’s Memory,” I say, since my eyes are finally off the Fury Man. “What do you think it looks like?”

“It’d be a piece of paper,” Garrett says as we stare at the heaps and piles of paper all around us. We both sigh.

As I take a good look around, where I’m at really sinks in. The air is still, but it seems to scrape on my arms. This shed holds my entire life up to a couple months ago, packed into one cold room.

Our old couch is set on its side a few steps away from me. The end cushion is still sunken down from having milk crates of paper stacked on it for so long. My mom’s shoes poke out of an open box, along with her summer jacket and her purse that always reminded me of a bloated dachshund.

I pull the box toward me and peer in, pushing the jacket aside. One of her bracelets is at the bottom, one of her treasured pieces of junk jewelry that will probably turn my skin yellow. I smile as I slip it on my arm. I take out her hairbrush, still threaded with her hair, and lay it beside me. And then I spot something that doesn’t belong in this place at all. I lift out the photo of my father, the one in the brass frame that my mother kept hung on our living room wall.

I’ve looked at it a zillion times since I was little, memorized it, and finally accepted the photo’s presence in our house and in our lives. It is as familiar and meaningful as our couch.

The photo is a black and white. Roger’s face is a little blurred, as if the focus was too close. His head is tipped down to one side, like he’s trying not to be caught laughing, so his almost-profile fills the whole frame.

When we lived in our house, my mother hung him on the wall and when we had to move to our apartment, she hung him up there too. I’d pass him on my way to wherever I was going- the fridge, my bed, to go out.

I’d made up fantasies of him when I was little, nothing too eccentric, because I couldn’t imagine much about him from just his blurry face. I thought up fantasies of how he would come back and how we would suddenly be like the families on TV. Later on, I made up fantasies of him coming back to us with huge apologies for being gone so long and then, probably since eighth or ninth grade, I just passed by his picture and tried not to think of him at all, because I finally realized he wasn’t thinking of us.

Staring at his picture now, the only thing I see is that he was too much of a coward to show his face to the camera.

“That’s your dad, isn’t it?” Garrett says from over my shoulder. It’s such an acceptable thing to say, it’s the truth even, but it hits me in a place that isn’t protected by bones.

“No,” I say. “That’s the guy that killed my mom.”

A scratchy and uncomfortable silence follows, like I just drew a line down the middle of the shed, with Garrett on one side and me on the other. I didn’t mean to do that. Tears suddenly pierce the corners of my eyes.

“I just…” The knuckle in my throat cuts me off. Garrett waits for me to finish.

“I don’t want to be part of him,” I finally say. And then everything tumbles out of me. “He’s killed my family…and he
is
my family. He’s part of me and there’s nothing I can do about it. Parts of him are parts of me.”

“Nalena,” Garrett’s voice is soft. “You’re not a duplicate. You’re you. And your dad wasn’t some bad seed. He wasn’t born evil. I’m sure he was a good man once, but he just ended up making a lot of wrong choices…”

“Wrong choices?” I jump to my feet, the frame in my hand and the tears streaming down my face. “Murder isn’t a
wrong choice,
Garrett! He
killed
people! He wanted to kill me! If he wasn’t evil to start with, than the same thing could happen to me! Roger was a coward and a murderer and I DON’T WANT TO BE HIS DAUGHTER!”

I reel back and whip the frame as hard as I can, across the shed. It hits the wall and explodes, the frame and the glass scattering on the storage-shed floor.

Paper flutters down on top of the broken pieces. Garrett reaches for me and I throw myself into his arms. In this moment, I
have
to touch him because there’s no other way out of this moment for me, unless I do. I don’t care if he drains away every last ounce of my energy. I just need to feel like there’s someone else who believes that I will never end up like Roger.

Garrett rubs my back as I hiccup and sob and make horrible noises that he should never hear me make. But the indigo feeling of his touch slows me down and the grief trickles away, leaving behind a wide, damp ring on Garrett’s shirt. We step away from each other.

“Sorry,” I say.

“For what?” he says, as if it’s nothing. As if I wasn’t just sniveling on his chest. He walks to the wall where the broken frame landed and squats down, grabbing some paper to use as a makeshift dustpan. He sifts through the glass and frame bits and looks up at me. “Nalena, did you know there were other things in the frame, behind that picture?”

“What things?” I drift over to him. He holds out a picture and a business card that I’ve never seen before. The picture is an old black-and-white with white milky dots on it, like something dripped on it, but I can still make out most of what’s in the photo. There’s an old fashioned black car that looks brand new. It has a slashy, silver stripe racing down the side and a bunch of teenagers are lined up and leaning on it. I recognize my mother instantly, right in the center, young and lit up with a grin. Her arm is around a young Roger—I recognize him from the only time I saw him in person, rather than his picture. He is leaning on one hip, his arm slung over her shoulder like he owns not just her, but maybe even the entire world.

My mom’s angled, with her back to another boy. He’s looks to be about the same age as Roger, but taller. His lips are pulled into a smug, reckless smile aimed straight at the camera and his thumbs are hooked into his front pockets with shotgun fingers, pointing at his crotch.

Beside the reckless boy is a blond girl. I can only tell it’s a girl because she’s wearing a long skirt. One of the white drips covers most of her face, but she’s plastered against the boy’s side and has one knee, beneath her skirt, overlapping the boy’s leg. One arm is thrown back in the air, another white drip cutting a half circle out of her hand, and her other arm is looped through his, as if he’s a pole that she’s dancing on.

On the other side of Roger is a third girl, the youngest looking of all of them, with a slouchy boy next to her. The girl is gangly, with a limp ponytail and a face like the tip of a pencil, leading out to the sharpened point of her nose. Even though her face is pointed toward the camera, leaning against the front fender with her hands behind her back, her gaze is actually sideways and glued to the side of Roger’s face. The boy next to her isn’t looking at the camera at all. He’s got one hip on the fender of the car, leaning toward the pencil-faced girl, as if he’s impatiently waiting to talk to her.

The only thing written on the back of the picture is in my mom’s writing and it says:
The gang and Dad’s new car.

The business card is yellow and smudged on one corner and says
Big Dog’s Junkyard
followed by an address I don’t recognize. When I flip it over, the unfamiliar scrawl on the back says:

angie—

Call me. PLEASE.

Ig

“Who’s Ig?” Garrett asks.

“No idea,” I say. I race through everyone my mom knew, but there’s not many people. My mom didn’t have friends. She didn’t hang out with anyone but me. We didn’t have any family, alive or dead, with that name or even those initials. None of the social workers or office supplies clerks or grocery store cashiers even had names that started with an I and I doubt they’d give my mom a junkyard card or that she’d keep it.

“Big Dog’s Junkyard,” Garrett says. “I’m pretty sure Zane goes there for parts. It’s out in Clare County. It’s about four hours away, at least.”

I hold up the business card. “I wonder why she kept it?”

“Don’t know,” Garrett shakes his head. “We’ll show them to the Addo. Maybe we’ll take a drive out to the junkyard and see if there’s someone out there that might know.”

I look back at the old photo of my mom, surrounded by a husband and friends I never knew. And then I hear the murmur of dark voices outside, whispering to us through the aluminum garage door, “Hey, you still in there?”

Chapter 10

I STUFF THE PICTURE AND the card into my pocket.

Garrett goes to the edge of the garage door, waving me behind him. He whispers, “It’s the Emen, I think, but be ready.”

I focus and my field blows out around me. My body drops down into a crouch, ready to face whatever doom comes at us. Garrett slides up the door.

But what’s waiting outside isn’t doom. Not even close.

Instead, there are five men with beer bellies standing outside, all dressed in un-tucked, wrinkly plaid shirts, cargo shorts, and sneakers. They could be the dads of any one from my school. One has a six pack tucked under his arm and another is dragging a big, blue picnic cooler.

“Hey chief,” one of them rubs his forehead in Garrett’s direction and then mine, flashing the Ianua impression in his palm. “Heard you need something moved?”

“Yeah,” Garrett exhales, stepping aside. “Thanks for coming. It’s right over there.”

The Emen file in and I’m still in shock. They are the kind of men I’ve seen everywhere: standing in bowling lanes, holding their wife’s bags at the mall, riding a mower across their yard. They all look the same: middle-aged men with a layer of extra chin; a small crowd of sensible haircuts, all combed to the side. And instead of a dead-body-retrieval service, they seem to have shown up for a tailgate party.

Garrett and I join the Emen in a half-moon arc around the Fury Man.

“So where’d he come from?” The guy with the beer asks.

“In here,” Garrett tells him. “He was waiting for us when we opened the door.”

“Mhm.” The guy with the cooler nods as he eyes the body on the floor. He glances up at Garrett, skips to me, and then jumps back to Garrett. “So anybody done the rings yet?”