On the Edge of Twilight: 22 Tales to Follow You Home (10 page)

I was in quite a state, and my lungs was all filled with smoke, but I looked around and took in who was missing, and it was Drake. He was still inside. But I looked at the house, and knew I couldn’t do a flat thing. There wasn’t no way I could get back in there. The whole doorframe was blazin. All I could do was cover my ears, and cry, and watch, and wait for what I felt sure would happ’n.

And then Miss Riley showed up.

She came striding up the walk in her old black clogs, and she handed one of the cryin girls her tatty ol shawl, and there was a look in her faded eyes I never saw in nobody’s before or since. “Here’s sumpin I haven’t tried!” she said, and she didn’t stop walkin, just strode on in through the flaming door.

There was a long moment when nothin happened, except Drake’s screams stopped, and we all feared the worst. But then out comes Miss Riley, and the fringe of her dress was burning, and her face was all smudged and black, but she had Drake slung over her back like a cord of wood, his legs held tight in her wiry old arms.

She dropped him down on the sidewalk, and I caught his head in my hands, and he was breathin. His face was black but it was only soot, and I guessed right it was the smoke that got him mostly, and that he’d fainted dead away. And sure enough he got better with only a few bitty burns and some black in his lungs.

But Miss Riley, she had plans. She took a deep breath, and my
lan
she looked so sad. And she looked us up and down, and then suddenly her eyes blazed bright, and they didn’t look so old, and with a wide smile and a screech she ran back toward the smoking front door. A big lick of fire reached out to meet her, an a second later her white hair was nothin but burnin light, and the light wreathed around her head, and then she was gone.

We could hear her laughin for a long time, and her shadow flitted by the windows, and we could see her burnin in the flames, and then the whole house, it come down and she warn’t laughin no more.

I figgered Miss Riley would come out chucklin again soon enough. She’d taken worse in her day, I thought. But when the ambulance came I was taken away to the hospital in Plumville, and didn’t see no more of it. But I heard the fire department got there right fast, and it took ages to put out all the smolder, and the next mornin they dug under all the mess and rubble, and there she was, but there warn’t much left, and she wasn’t movin a whit. And I heard it said a great winter wind came up ahead of a storm not far behind, and it scattered her ashes all over town and beyond.

Well, it looked like the tired ol lady’d found her rest at last, and I must say I felt mighty good about it, even if town was a little less
interestin
without her in it. And Drake? He went on talkin to everyone who asked bout how she saved his life, which a course she had.

That said, I guess I was twenty when I first heard it.

Sure, it kept away for a good few years, but then there it was, and there was no hidin from it, and there still ain’t. Not in town, and not in the woods, neither.

It was laughter, and it came from nowhere but the wind. Sometimes it came on fast and left quick, sometimes it seemed to circle bout the house or down the street and back and stay awhile. And sometimes it was cryin I heard, high and hard one time, soft and tired-like another. Course, it coulda been just the wind, and not sumpin else carried on it, say like ashes. The wind can be funny sometimes, soundin like a person. But how many times you ever recognize the voice? How many times it sound like it’s singin through the dust of four black teeth?

So that’s old Miss Riley’s lot, and I guess some kinds of livin can be just as scary as dyin. Truth be told, I ain’t half as scared of droppin dead now as I once was. No, not half as scared.

Time to Go Home

The movers took the last furniture out of his grandparents’ house before nightfall, and then it was empty for the first time in seventy years. People had lived and died full lives, and the house had not known silence. Now it knew that, and it knew darkness.

John Haggerty shivered, feeling both on the back of his neck.

He stalked the empty halls and rooms. They didn’t echo because of the worn carpets. To him, they did. But the emptiness, however it sounded, was necessary. Only now, vacant, could he gauge the true condition of the house and decide whether or not to keep it.

What he found did not please him.

A great crack ran across the archway between the living and dining rooms. The corners of the carpeted floors in the study sponged beneath prodding fingers. Dank basement timbers hosted termite borings. Reams of wallpaper sloughed off walls, freed from behind bookshelves and cabinets, the air a catalyst for dead glue to give way.

John surveyed these problems and a score of others in silence, pausing occasionally to make a note on his Blackberry or mop his face. Once finished, he stepped out into the gathering shadows of a late-June afternoon and flipped open his cell phone.

No signal. In Still Creek, there never was.

* * *

He went for a walk. He knew the streets and side-streets well, and there weren’t many. A walk around Still Creek, through all byways and alleys, took only an hour. During that hour he thought, and the more he thought the more hardened his resolve became.

No one in the family felt he should buy his grandparents’ house. His uncle thought the idea “sentimental nonsense,” his mother “a money pit,” his father “a waste”—and his wife, more bluntly, “the hallmark of a true idiot.”

But as John turned onto Church Street off Main, then down to Pugh from Church, breathing in the smell of mown grass and late-afternoon backyard bonfires, he made up his mind: the house, regardless of how much it cost, would remain in the family.

He turned back onto Main Street and walked until the house came into view again. In the long-shadowed light, he half-expected to see his grandmother framed in the screen door, waiting for him like she always had, before Alzheimer’s, then death had taken her away.

The sun reflected off the door’s window glass.

John squinted.

The door opened.

And there she was.

* * *

“Come on in, supper’s almost ready!”

Light-headed, throat dry, he stumbled up the front steps and into the house.

His grandmother stood before him, a paragon of health. Black hair, flower-print dress, apron and glasses, light hazel eyes. Seeing her now, four feet in front of him, was like finding something familiar that had been lost for years—sight and memory had to reconcile the object—the
person
—before mind and reality could meet.

They did so now, and John stepped forward.
A ghost
. He touched her arm.
No. Real!

“What’s the matter, John?”

“Nothing,” he said slowly. She looked a quarter-century younger than the last time he’d seen her. “Just… you had some flour on your arm.”

His grandmother smiled. “Here now, shut the door. It’s cold outside.”

He turned back, surprised. Night had come, and snow fell steadily upon a sea of drifting white. Smoke rose from chimneys all down the street. Luminaria lit every driveway. Golden Christmas stars shone through tinsel on every telephone pole.

Numbly, he shut the door on the winter night.

“All day you’ve wanted to open presents, and now you’re stalling! We have to eat if we want the strength to tackle that mountain beneath the tree.” Grandma bustled off to the kitchen. “Your place is all ready,” she called over her shoulder. “You can sit next to your Grandpa. And remember, don’t give Sandy any turkey!”

Mouth working silently, John stepped into the living room.

Sandy, his dog, dead twenty years, lifted her head from its place of rest beneath the piano bench and eyed him drowsily before flopping back down again. On that bench sat his mother, twenty-five years younger, playing “O Holy Night”—fingers nimble, no arthritis. On a nearby couch his father talked with Great-Uncle Tom, who’d died of heart failure when John was 21. And listening quietly from the overstuffed armchair by the reading lamp—

“Grandpa,” John mouthed.

The old man listened quietly to the conversations around him, saying little, but his presence filled the room like that of a benign king: John’s hero of heroes, who had died of a heart attack in the February snow a week before John’s tenth birthday.

Before anyone except Sandy and his grandmother noticed he was there, John stepped quickly up the stairs and raced down the hallway to the bathroom. Breathing fast and heavily, he sank to his knees by the eagle-clawed tub.

It was the carpet that brought him back to himself—the fuzzy yellow strands, so familiar, that he ran through his clutching fingers.

Gingerly, he got to his feet. Ever so slowly the world stopped spinning. He looked in the bathroom mirror.

The face of a nine-year-old boy met his gaze.

He looked down at his hands. Big, worn, and glazed with years of work and living, he turned his palms up, then let them fall limply to his sides.

Through all his tumbling thoughts, one broke out louder than the rest.
Dinner’s waiting
, it reminded him.

Dinner’s waiting.

Five minutes later, John stepped down the stairs and joined his family at the table. 

It was a table surrounded by a dozen faces, its surface warm and breathing with the good smells he’d forgotten or half-forgotten, and he ate like he never had as a real child—two helpings, then two slices of pie washed down with milk and orange pop. He sat on the wooden bench pulled in from the kitchen, wedged between his grandparents, his dog beneath his feet, his young parents laughing about distant memories still recent to them, to everyone except him, and soon all his panic and disorientation fell away, lulled to sleep by his grandfather’s beloved voice and the smell of his great aunt’s green bean casserole. The frosted windowpanes fogged with steam. Uncles laughed. Cousins argued. And he, now the youngest again, thought of what he should say—all the things he’d wanted to tell these people which had come to mind far, far too late; all the questions that, through the years, he’d wanted to ask yet hadn’t…What had they
been?

He remained silent. But in the ebb and flow of the meal John was aware, from time to time, of his grandfather’s gaze upon him.

After dinner, it was back to the living room and the Christmas tree, all white tinsel and red bulbs, angel decorations and gold lights. And presents piled beneath it. And he, the youngest, to hand them out.

He did, enjoying the old job like no other.

Then, sitting in a giant circle, everyone took turns opening them. For John that meant clothes offset by a baseball glove and a fossil kit, a new pencil case for school and half a dozen
Star Wars
figures.

I still have these somewhere
, he thought.
Packed away, battle-damaged, accessories lost.
And the baseball glove
—
stolen in sixth grade by Bert Winger!

After all the presents had been opened and a second round of desserts eaten, cousins began to trickle off home and the house took on a drowsy feel. His parents spoke softly with Grandma and a few remaining uncles and aunts in the living room. Sandy, a bow on her head, slept once again beneath the piano bench. And John, forgotten for the moment, stole out to the back porch, dark but for the lights shining through the kitchen windows, and took a deep breath of cold winter air.

“Hi, Grandpa,” he said.

“Hello yourself!” The old man, tall even when sitting, waved him over to the wicker chair beside him. His breath, raspy from the Black Lung that eventually killed him, sawed through the silence of the night in a quiet rhythm. They sat side by side for a long time, there in his grandfather’s favorite place, until Grandpa finally spoke again.

“Tell me, John, what’s on your mind?”

John turned to look at him. The old man gazed back intently.

“I…” He stopped, started again, fell silent.

“Let me help,” his grandfather continued. “All day you’ve been different. Your mannerisms, your smile, even your appetite!” He chuckled at John’s expression. “Surprised I noticed?”

“No,” John said immediately. “You always saw everything.”

“
Saw.
Past-tense.” His grandfather nodded.
“There’s the rub. Eyes, John. A famous dead writer once said eyes are windows to the soul. And your eyes? They, too, are different this evening.”

John looked out into the darkened back yard, clear moonlight shining down on a perfect blanket of glittering snow. In the middle of the yard he could just make out the shadow of the old maple tree that lightning had struck down when he was nineteen.

“Grandpa, can I ask you something?”

“You know you can.”

John licked his lips. “What if I told you that a man, thirty-five years old, was cleaning up his grandparents’ former home and deciding whether or not to sell it. And that after taking a walk around the block to clear his head, his grandmother, who… who…” He cast a sideways glance at his grandfather. The old man looked back at him steadily.

“…who was no longer around,
answered the door
. And that he walked out of a June afternoon in 2008 and into a winter evening in—”

“1983,” Grandpa finished, leaning forward and smiling faintly. “And what if I told you that when a certain old man looked at his nine year-old grandson a quarter-hour to midnight on Christmas Night, 1983, he saw a thirty-five year-old man looking back at him from behind his face?”

John swallowed. “I’d say he was a very perceptive old man whose grandson still loves him very much.”

Another long silence, save for the old man’s breathing and a slight rocking of the chairs. Then: 

“Grandpa, why am I here?”

The old man coughed, a great racking cough that shook his body. John winced.

“I’m fine,” said his grandfather. “But I don’t have all the answers. Why am
I
here? Either of us? Brought together out of time. No, no answers.”

John sighed.

“But if I had to
guess?
” 

Now it was John’s turn to lean forward.

“I’d guess you’re here to say goodbye.”

The breath kicked out of John’s body. “
No
.”

His grandfather nodded. “John, I’ve always said I want to live to see you graduate high school. From the look in your eyes tonight, that doesn’t—
didn’t
—work out.” He paused. “There were so many things I could have told you during those later years,” he said. “So much advice, some of it even good
.
”

He smiled, and John, after an unsteady moment, did likewise.

Grandpa glanced at the white face of his gold watch. “Ten minutes to midnight,” he mused. “So I have to choose my advice carefully. Something tells me that at midnight, this gift will have run its course. So here.”

He cleared his throat and stood up. He opened the screen door. Together they walked around to the front sidewalk, where they could take in the whole panorama of the house.

“When I was in college, working nights in the mines and taking classes by day, I took an acting course. Did you know that?”

John shook his head.

“Well, I wasn’t any good. Instead, happily, a teacher’s life for me.”

“And me,” John added.

Grandpa nodded approvingly. “Well, in this acting class we learned that an actor can only return for so many bows, no matter how successful the show. I think this is my last bow to you, John. And you, in the audience, must likewise go home, leave the theater, and continue on. There’s nothing more depressing than an empty theater, seats folded, lights up, then off, and all the people who gave it life gone elsewhere.”

A strong hand squeezed John’s shoulder. He grabbed it, and the house full of warmth and light blurred until he wiped his eyes.

“Now Christmas is almost over, and I want to give you one final gift,” said Grandpa. “I want you to go back in, take a good look around, give everyone a hug, and sneak Sandy a piece of turkey. And when you do, tell each of them you love them. I’d trade almost anything to go back and do that to the people I loved. And you can.”

“And
then
?”

“Then go up to your bedroom, slide under the quilt your grandmother made you, and go to sleep. And, sleeping, dream of all the good things the future will bring. Then, when you wake at dawn, leave this house and never come back.”

John took one final look at the half-dozen cars in the driveway, at the orange Christmas candles in each window, at the well-lit living room from which muffled laughter touched the otherwise silent night. Then together, hand in hand, John and his grandfather walked up the steps to the front door and into the waiting warmth.

* * *

And in another year, a bright, sunny June morning, John woke on the bare floor of his old room, oddly refreshed. Quickly he descended the stairs, shut the front door behind him, and locked it. He pulled his car out of the weed-choked driveway, and, humming, clicked the gear into drive.

Looking back at the house through his rearview mirror, he thought he caught a glimpse of someone—
two
people—waving from the open front doorway.

He blinked and looked again. Now the door was shut, just as he’d left it.

Still humming, he drove toward home.