The Demonologist (10 page)

The waters
.

Suicide. Demonically provoked.

Christ asked the father how long the boy had suffered in this way.

And he said, From childhood.

H
ERE
’
S ANOTHER DEFINITION OF WANDERING: EMOTIONS SO GREAT
they require superstition to explain them. This is the core observation of my field of study, after all. Fear—of death, of loss, of being left behind—is the genesis of belief in the supernatural. For someone like me to suddenly find himself entertaining the myths of primitives can only be seen as symptomatic of a psychotic break of some kind. I know this to be as verifiable as the street numbers I walk past, as the time on my watch.
I am proposing that a demon took my daughter from me.
Just stop and say that out loud a few times. Just
hear
it. It is the sort of theory that rightly justifies locking someone in Bellevue for long-term observation.

So I move on. Surrounded by blue-green people on blue-green blocks.

And feel almost nothing.

That is, I miss Tess, I mourn for her, I am heartbroken. But to “miss,” to “mourn,” to acknowledge a “broken heart”—these are words so inadequate they border on the offensive. It’s not about finding a way to
go on
. It’s not about being angry at God. It’s about dying. About wishing to be dead.

The only things that register are children. It’s always been that way. There probably isn’t a parent alive who can watch strangers’
children play and not think of their own child. The laughter, the invitations to give chase, the anguish at the scraped knee or pilfered toy. All of it leads back to how our own did these same things, the quirks that marked them as both like and unlike every other child in the world.

There: A girl playing hide-and-seek with her mother amid the boulders and trees near the Turtle Pond in Central Park. It reminds me of playing the same game with Tess. Every time she hid—even if it was within our own apartment—there was always a half-second of real terror as I looked for her in the usual places and didn’t find her.
What if, this time, she was really gone? What if she was hidden so well that looking behind trees or under beds or in laundry hampers wouldn’t be enough?

And then, just as the fizz of panic started up from the bottom of my throat, she was there. Jumping out at the first surrendering call of “Okay, I give up!” from me.

This time, Tess is hidden and never coming back.

Yet she begged me not to give up.

Find me.

I stop by an iron gate and watch the mother pause to look about her. Pretending to be stumped by her daughter’s location. But when she tiptoes over to a maple and pokes her head around—
Gotcha!
—the girl isn’t there. And instantly, the worry comes. The thought that this time the game is not a game.

“Momma!”

The girl rushes out from the quack grass that surrounds the edge of the pond and the mother picks her up, the girl’s legs flying out behind her. Then the mother spots me. A man standing alone by the gate. It’s the first time anyone’s fully registered me since my return to New York.

I turn from them, shamed by my inadvertent invasion of their privacy. But the mother is already bundling the girl into her arms and starting away. Protecting her from the man who’s clearly missing some essential part. Someone not entirely there but all the more dangerous for that.

A wanderer.

T
HE TURQUOISE DAY TURNS TO TURQUOISE NIGHT
. I
RETURN TO THE
apartment and make toast. Butter the slices and cut it into fingers the way Tess used to like it. Sprinkle them with cinnamon sugar. Throw them out without tasting them.

I pour myself a vodka on ice. Walk around the apartment and notice the light on in Tess’s room. The
Lion King
poster over the bed (we’d taken her three times to the Broadway show, requests from two birthdays and a Christmas). A map of North Dakota on the wall (part of a school project, an in-depth study of one of the fifty states). The crayon drawings I’d honestly praised and had framed. The stuffed animals on the floor next to the chest of drawers, toys now long ignored, though still loved enough to avoid removal to the closet. The room of a girl in transition from childhood to the murky confusions of whatever follows.

I’m about to leave when I spot Tess’s journal on her bedside table (I’d placed it there after bringing it home from Venice, returning it to where it often rested after her jottings). I’d never thought to read it when she was alive, my fear of her discovering my betrayal far greater than any curiosities I may have had about her secret thoughts. Now, though, the need to hear her, to bring her back, outweighs discretion.

A movie ticket stub marks the entry dated the day we left for Venice. Which means she must have written it on the plane.

Dad doesn’t know that I can see how hard he’s trying. The “funny” smiles, the hype about all the stuff we’re going to see. Maybe he is kind of excited. But he still wears the Black Crown.

I can see it more today than ever. It’s even like it’s moving. Like there’s something alive in it, making a nest. Worming around.

The trouble with Mom is part of it. But not all. There’s something waiting for us he doesn’t have a clue about. The Black Crown is coming with us. He’s wearing it but doesn’t know it’s there (how can he NOT know it’s there??).

Maybe the thing that waits on the other side wants to meet Dad, too.

All I’m sure about is that it wants to meet me.

This is followed by a page or so about the flight over, the vaporetto ride to the hotel. And then the journal’s final entry. Dated the day she fell. Written in our room at the Bauer during the time I visited the address in Santa Croce.

It’s here.

Dad knows it now, too. I can feel it. How scared he is.

How he’s talking to it RIGHT NOW.

It won’t let him go. It likes that we’re here. It’s almost happy.

Maybe we were wrong to come. But staying away wasn’t a choice. It would find us. Here or there. Sooner or later.

Better that it’s happening now. Because we’re together, maybe there’s something we can do. If not, it’s better if it takes us at the same time. I wouldn’t want to be the one left behind. And if we have to go THERE, I don’t want to go ALONE.

He’s coming now.

They’re coming.

The journal drops from my hands with a whisper of pages.

She went to Venice to face it.

I turn off the light and close the door. Rush to the bathroom to kneel retching over the toilet.

She went to wear the Crown so I wouldn’t have to anymore.

When I’m able, I head back toward the kitchen to freshen my drink and notice Tess’s door is open. The light on.

It’s an old apartment, but there’s never been a draft that could open a door. And we’ve never had electrical problems. So I
hadn’t
closed the door and turned off the light.

I turn off the light. Click the door shut. Start away.

And stop.

Only steps from Tess’s room and there is the clear
snick
of the doorknob being turned. The squeak of the hinge.

I swing around in time to see the light go on. Not
already
on. The room going from dark to yellow as I blink it into focus.

“Tess?”

Her name passes my lips before the puzzlement settles in my mind. Somehow I know this isn’t a hallucination, isn’t a waking dream. It’s Tess. In her room. Maybe the only place she could be strong enough to reach out to me. Tell me she’s still here.

I rush in. Stand in the middle of her room with arms outstretched, fingers grasping.

“Tess!”

There is nothing to feel but the room’s air-conditioned emptiness. Though the light remains on, she is no longer here.

I am, as crime reporters say of their sources, a “highly credible witness.” I hold a Cornell PhD, a handful of distinguished teaching awards, publication credits in the most respected critical journals in my field, a medical history free of mental disturbance. More, I am an insistently rational sort, a spoilsport by nature when it comes to the fantastical. I’ve made an entire career out of doubt.

Yet here I am. Seeing the unseeable.

I
N THE MORNING
I
AWAKEN TO FOUR MESSAGES ON MY PHONE.
One from Diane, asking, in the tone and script of bill collector, to call her back as soon as possible “to resolve an outstanding issue.” One from the detective in Venice I’ve been primarily corresponding with, informing me of the news that there is no news. And two from O’Brien, demanding to see me, the second of which advising me that I’ll “go batshit crazy up there all alone if you don’t talk to someone, and by ‘someone,’ I mean me.”

Because she’s Tess’s mother, and because I can only manage one human-to-human conversation this morning, I prop myself against the headboard and call Diane back. It’s only as her phone is ringing that I realize I’ve slept in Tess’s room.

“Hello?”

“It’s David.”

“David.”

She says my name, her husband of thirteen years, as though it is an obscure spice she’s trying to remember if she’s ever tasted before.

“This a bad time?”

“Stupid question.”

“Yes, it was. Sorry.”

She takes a breath. Not the hesitation of someone reluctant to cause pain to another, but merely, again, the pause of the bill collector, pulling out the right dialogue sheet for a particular subcategory of delinquent.

“I wanted to make it official,” she says. “My moving out. Beginning the process.”

“Process?”

“Divorce.”

“Right.”

“You can use Liam if you’d like,” she says, referring to the lawyer in Brooklyn Heights who did our wills. “I’ve already spoken to someone else.”

“Some Upper East Side tiger to take on Liam the tabby cat.”

“You can choose the counsel you wish.”

“I didn’t mean to accuse. I was just being . . . myself.”

She makes a sound that could be a small laugh, but isn’t.

“I just don’t understand the urgency,” I say.

“This has been going on for a long time, David.”

“I know that. I’m not fighting it. I will be the most helpful, acquiescent cuckold in the history of New York State matrimonial law. I’m just asking, why this morning? Less than a week after Tess went missing.”

“Tess isn’t missing.”

“They’re still looking.”

“No, they’re not. They’re waiting.”

“
I’m
still looking.”

A silence. Then: “Looking for what?”

You can go as balls-out insane as you want to
. My inner O’Brien, coming to my rescue.
But do you have to let
her
know you’ve lost it?

“Nothing,” I say. “I’m not making sense.”

“So you’ll speak to Liam? Or whomever? Expedite the application?”

“I’ll expedite. You’ve never seen such expediting.”

“Fine. Good.”

She is in pain, too. Not that she’s shown me any of it. I can only assume Will Junger is offering the comfort and bearing the brunt, though he doesn’t strike me as much of a brunt bearer, not for long. In any case, Diane is Tess’s mother and now her daughter is gone and it can only be tearing her into tiny, useless pieces as it is me.

Yet here’s the thing: I can’t stop wondering if I might be wrong about that. There is loss in her voice, and resolution. But there’s an awful satisfaction in there, too. Not about Tess never coming home, nothing so monstrous as that. But satisfaction that I was the one who was there—that it was my failure—when it happened.

“I don’t care if you blame me. If you hate me. I don’t care if we never speak again,” I say. “But you have to know that I tried to save her. That I didn’t let go. That I didn’t just
stand by
. I
fought
for her.”

“I acknowledge what you’re trying to—”

“Every parent says—or at least thinks—they’d lay down their lives for their child. I don’t know, when the test comes, if that’s true for everyone. But it’s true for me.”

“But you
didn’t!
”

This shout comes so bright and hot down the line that I have to pull the phone from my ear. “You
didn’t
lay down your life for her,” she says. “Because you’re still here. And she’s not.”

You’re wrong about one thing
, I want to say.
I’m
not
here
.

Instead, as I’m readying some farewell, an acknowledgment of our time together and the one thing we did right, the one thing we’d never regret, she hangs up.

W
HO SITS IN A CHURCH IN THE MIDDLE OF A WEEKDAY AFTERNOON
? Drunks, runaways, addicts in all their varieties. The lost who have only themselves to blame. I know because I sit among them. Praying for the first time in my adult life.

Or trying to pray. The iconography, the forced quiet, the stained glass, all of it feels overcooked. Yes, it’s a church: it’s
supposed
to be churchy. But I feel no closer to holiness here than I did outside on 43rd Street moments ago.

“You get disconnected?”

I turn to find a slightly grizzled man in his midfifties. Rumpled suit, hair in need of all manner of attention. A businessman—or former businessman—belonging to the drunken class, would be my guess.

“Sorry?”

“Your prayer line. To the Big Guy. He put you on hold? Does it to me all the time. Then damned if you don’t get disconnected.”

“I never even dialed the number.”

“You’re better off. If you’d gotten through, it would have been press ‘1’ for miracles, press ‘2’ for picking the winning horse in the eighth at Belmont, press ‘3’ for ‘I’m sorry for what I did . . . but not
so
sorry I wouldn’t do it again.’ ”

“Might as well just go to my shrink.”

“Yeah? She good at picking horses?”