The Haunting of James Hastings (12 page)

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Authors: Christopher Ransom

Tags: #Fiction, #Action & Adventure, #Suspense

BOOK: The Haunting of James Hastings
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‘If you do not make peace with her, others will follow her home. She will bring evil into this house and there will be no peace for you.’
 
‘What—’
 
‘Goodbye!’ Olivia left her brush on the floor and slammed the front door on her way out.
 
After her little Nissan truck’s engine faded away, I walked through the kitchen and out the back door. I stood on the patio, surveying the lawn. At first it was almost funny, and then it was everything but. There were eleven holes, each one dug out about a foot wide and a foot deep, the little piles of dirt next to them still moist as if freshly turned. Next to at least half of the holes were additional pairs of Stacey’s shoes, similarly dirtied. Her little green Chucks. Her black velvet clogs. Her pink espadrilles. Others I had forgotten about but which pierced my heart anew. Off to one side of the lawn was a dirt-caked shovel. Someone had been digging for gold. Gold patent pumps, it would seem.
 
Olivia thought I had gotten drunk and buried my wife’s shoes and then, in some form of daze last night, when I was sober, dug them up?
 
I had not. Would not, could not, never would.
 
But did I know this for sure?
 
In my hand was the check I had made out for one hundred dollars. In the upper left corner, above my address, it said JAMES HASTINGS & STACEY HASTINGS. We still had a joint checking account. A psychologist might suggest this was further evidence that I was holding on to her.
 
But digging holes in the yard. What kind of sleepwalking would this require?
 
Someone else was messing with me, and, when I found out who, they would regret it. I ripped the check into pieces anyway, making sure the first tear went between our names.
 
11
 
Ever since Stacey died, I was terrible with keys, sunglasses, remote controls. Anything pocket-sized and losable, I lost it. Which is why I had no way of knowing if someone had broken into my storage locker at the Self-Store-It Center, where I had installed a junior high kid’s combination lock on my unit instead of the kind that you can blast with a shotgun. Those babies come with two little brass keys, and I would have lost them. The combo lock was still there, though - locked. There were no signs of forced entry, but someone with scintillatingly brilliant powers of deduction just might have figured it out. It was the date of our wedding, for one. For another, there was a card taped to the floor of my desk’s center drawer which read, in large red felt tip, STORAGE LOCKER COMBO. And below that: 09-04-04
 
I opened the lock, put it in my back pocket and slid the metal door up. I saw nothing out of place, but this didn’t stop my stomach from clenching, my skin breaking out in the same nervous itch. I was a junkie in the presence of my favorite fix.
 
Stacey’s things.
 
I had stacked the boxes along the walls, leaving a slot in the middle so that I would not have to empty the whole damn lot just to find one of her old mixed CDs, a photo of us at the lake house, the rugby shirt she had stolen from me in college, any old thing. As if tending a version of her grave, I had stacked and labeled everything in a tidy fashion, going so far as to place a small hand-woven rug Stacey had been fond of and half a dozen scented candles in this metal cage. The carefully drawn block letters from my Magic Marker on the boxes - STACEY’S SWEATERS, STACEY’S BATHROOM TRINKETS, STACEY’S JACKETS (SPRING) - now seemed to mock me, the me I was back when I had seemed to mock me, the me I was back when I had decided establishing this shrine was healthier than a drop off at Good Will. Someone should have taken me aside last summer and stamped FRAGILE on my forehead.
 
Problem: there was only one box labeled STACEY’S SHOES. I pulled it down and inspected the top. The packaging tape was still intact. The cardboard around it had not been ripped or tampered with. But there had been three boxes of her shoes. Stacey was no Imelda, but she liked her shoes. Which meant that two were missing. Someone had been in here.
 
‘Hey,’ I said to the dust. ‘It wasn’t me.’
 
I put the box on top of the others, scanned everything once more and turned away and reached up to drag the metal door down. But I paused, forgetting something. I lowered my arms and turned. I tried to remember what was in each box. How much of her remained, and what I had thrown out or given away. I was drawn to one of the boxes in the right corner, a smaller carton with a blue band of rubber packing tape around the base. Without knowing why, I kneeled and began edging it out from under the stack. It scraped across the concrete floor and popped free, leaving the heavy pillar of boxes above it to canter and tumble down at odd angles. I pulled it to the center of the bay and crouched, peeled off the tape and opened the box.
 
Inside were three shoeboxes but no shoes, and I remembered how Stacey used to save shoeboxes for other storage purposes: letters and stationery, discarded perfumes, knit hats and mittens she might have worn twice a year. I opened the top shoebox, a shiny black Nine West job now splitting at the seams. Inside this was a small Christmas present. The paper was frosty blue with ice crystals and foil twinkles, tied off with a scissorpermed silver bow. I knew Stacey had wrapped it; that had been her favorite part of wrapping presents, using the scissor blade to strip the ribbon so that it sprung back into a coil. She had loved the texture of it, the
rheatrheeeeeat
and pop of each strand. The present, or pressie, as Stacey would have called it, had no label, no ‘To: -- and From: --’ tag.
 
Had I packed this up? I didn’t remember ever seeing it. I had probably found it buried in some closet and thrown it in before moving on. I might have been drunk, angry, in a hurry to get it over with.
 
I opened the present, crumpling the paper into a ball. Under the paper was yet another box (this was starting to feel like a game of Russian dolls) and I ripped that open too, at last removing from layers of lemon-colored tissue paper a silver photo frame with a glass front. Behind the glass was a photo of Stacey in Cabo San Lucas, leaning against a wooden sign in front of our favorite taco stand, a cold Corona in one hand, a fried shrimp taco in the other, smiling at me, the photographer. Then, to my astonishment (and momentary revulsion), the photo changed.
 
Now I was staring at a photo of Stacey at home, standing over the sink, looking over her shoulder at me, one hand in dish suds, the other flipping me the bird. Her hair was mussed, she hadn’t wanted me to snap this one. The photo changed again, and again, and I realized I was holding one of those digital frames that scrolls through dozens or hundreds of photos.
 
I fell back on my ass and leaned against the boxes, holding the frame with both hands as the photos phased in and out, one image of her replaced by another, and sometimes - though much more rarely - with the both of us. I realized this had been intended as a gift for me. A gift from Stacey last Christmas, the Christmas she never had. I hadn’t turned it on. She might have meant for it to be scrolling as I opened the carefully wrapped box of silver and blue. Amazingly there was life in the battery yet, and I sat numb against the boxes of her possessions as the digital frame played through the entire chronology and started again, progressing from younger to older, elementary school to the high school years to college and her twenties, daytime, napping, nightlife, bartending, singing into a wine bottle, laughing, watching me, standing with me, ignoring me, each a photo I had admired or taken, and some I had never seen, ones she might have borrowed from her parents or friends in order to scan them for me. It was, I realized with deepening, almost unbearable weight in my throat, the story of Stacey since I had known her, her every mood and the rise through our history together playing now like a sad synopsis of the first third of what should have been a lovely life.
 
Stacey at sixteen, the braces have just come off, white spaces on her teeth. So proud.
 
Stacey at seventeen, pale with nerves in her blue prom dress. Ruffled sleeves, her big hair, so pretty then, so embarrassing in retrospect. I’m next to her and look worse.
 
Stacey bowling in senior year gym class. Gutter ball. She actually looks sad about it.
 
Stacey in her Chili’s uniform. Her blonde hair in a ponytail. She had smelled like fajitas and quit after only two weeks, but still gave the restaurant two weeks’ notice.
 
Stacey riding a mountain bike near the Arkansas River. She is wearing a pink helmet and pink gloves, holding on for dear life. Not talented athletically, but game for the activity.
 
Stacey and her dad by the U-Haul on moving day. He looks like he wants to kill me for whisking her away to Los Angeles. She looks too young to go. The amount of trust and faith she put in me is staggering.
 
Stacey in front of Barney’s Beanerie, drinking a Bloody Mary, doing a bad metalhead thing with her finger horns. Our first week in Los Angeles. Her snow-blonde hair is long and straight, almost long enough to reach the top of her butt. God how I loved her hair. Look at her. She’s coming out of her shell.
 
Stacey with Viggo Mortensen. Spotted him at Starbucks and couldn’t help herself. She looks drunk with lust. Viggo looks embarrassed for her. She loved
The Lord of the Rings
, the books and the movies. Called them her guilty pleasure. I never understood the guilt part.
 
Stacey painting the ballroom, her brush extended, she’s too short to even reach halfway up the wall. The optimism of the new move. The endless energy for redecorating. Where did it all go? Into the house, or just away?
 
Stacey in a puffy parka and knit cap blowing on a cup of coffee, somewhere cold, mountains in the background, maybe Colorado, a road trip I can’t remember. I was probably traveling for work. She looks chapped, cold.
 
Stacey and her friend Heather Keinzle from Redondo Beach, sisters in pedicure. Happy. She had been in a real funk after learning that Heather was moving away, a new best friend that was not to be.
 
Stacey eating a bowl of Frosted Flakes on the couch, Henry in her lap staring at the spoon like it is God. Thus begins the stay-home phase, where Stacey would rather spend all day with her dog than go out and be with people.
 
Stacey staring into her own phone taking her own picture with her pearly white teeth bared, this one taken and attached to a text reminding me to get my teeth cleaned. She always made the appointments, and kept them. She wanted me to take better care of myself. I thought she was nagging me.
 
Stacey lighting a candle on the dining-room table that is set for Thanksgiving, her chef apron hanging over the stemware. So serious, the pressure of her first holiday meal enormous.
 
Stacey in the passenger seat of her car on the drive to Pismo Beach, her hair golden and flying in the wind and the Pacific Ocean out her window. We had been fighting. This was one of those make-up trips. She was a downer, unable to summon the false enthusiasm. I don’t remember what we did for two days.
 
Stacey with a towel around her waist, one arm covering her breasts, shouting at me to stop it. We haven’t had sex in almost two months. This was not the way to get the ball rolling again.
 
Stacey leaning back on someone’s green Vespa in Santa Monica, posing with a cigarette. For the first time she looks hardened. Something in her has been lost. Is she depressed now? Really? Or was she just annoyed with me this day?
 
Stacey walking Henry on the path in Laurel Canyon, her floral print sundress tilting off her hips as if an invisible hand were tugging the hem, her gait tight, anxious, scurrying ahead of me.
 
Stacey looking up from her pillows, flat on her back, her eyes wide and her forehead lined as I stand over her taking this photo in bed, minutes after The Sex. We must have recovered somewhat. Sometimes the sex was still good. But it was like she wasn’t really there.
 
See them all again. Stacey happy, happy, happy, cool, sometimes surprised, sometimes chagrined, but almost always a crack of a smile, the eyes glinting with mischief. A normal girl becoming a woman. Two dozen photos, three dozen, four. Sixty, seventy photos in, the cracks begin to appear. More blank expressions than smiles. Her cheeks sucked in, her face drawn in some of the photos. In others, her normally natural white blonde hair a little off, one too many bad highlights, ashen. The forced smile. A tension in the shoulders. In later group photos, she was never quite looking at the camera. Her eyes seemed to be drifting, unfocused. It wasn’t obvious until the second pass, but a presence began to make itself known, the invisible cloud hanging over her. Is it the pall of adulthood, the party ending, or something worse?
 
Stacey with four friends at Coachella Music Festival, tailgating. She is fucked up in an unhealthy way, worse off than her friends. Muddy boots, someone’s baseball hat askew on her head. She looks miserable.

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