What the Dead Can Do, page 25
As the train pulled into Amanda’s station, she turned confidently back to Gabriel and said, “I realize I’ve asked before, but I have to know … why are you helping me?”
The man’s head turned with uncertainty as his very regular eyes simultaneously struggled to locate his phone. When he registered how close Aidan’s body was to him, he managed to say, “Ever heard of personal space? Get the hell away from me, man!”
Gabriel was gone.
“Stand clear of the closing doors, please.”
Amanda jumped from her seat and ran for the train’s exit. The body’s leap and sprint were impressive, and she made it out of the car before the doors slid shut.
Though the visit from Gabriel had been troubling, physically she felt steady. She felt grounded. She smiled wide and Aidan’s mouth smiled. There was no tremble or glitch between her commands and his body’s actions. Her amusement with that development continued when, for the first time in dozens of tries, she walked Aidan through the station as comfortably as if his body were her own, practically dancing up the stairs and into the street.
Park Slope had always had a scent. All the boroughs did. Maybe it’d been her imagination, but this part of Brooklyn always smelled sweeter than the other neighborhoods. It was the scent of knowing you were home. She’d arrived—in Aidan’s body—and was too strong this time to give running back to Second Plane to get into it again with Gabriel a second thought.
25
MATTHEW
“Keep an eye on your brother,” Matthew said. “This will only take a minute.”
He and the kids had just walked through the front door, but if he was going to catch Lucinda before she was asleep, he needed to make the call quickly. As he climbed the staircase, Em stopped short of removing her puffy black jacket and slid it back over her shoulders. She grabbed the remote from the coffee table and practically pushed Ethan onto the couch, who was still in his blue parka, hoodie drawn tight around the exhaustion on his face.
“On it,” she said, with a zeal unbefitting of a family who’d spent the whole afternoon and most of the evening at the hospital, bedside with Nicole. “Who wants to watch some Minions?”
Since Ethan’s arrival, his daughter’s preteen angst had largely regressed to a more youthful, playful disposition, especially when her new brother was in the same room. That change had been heartwarming to witness and was no less so, even with next steps for Nicole on his mind.
His children had seen their mother bleeding and unconscious, hurried away by EMS amid the disquieting innuendo spoken in cruel whispers by supposed friends. They then sat for hours next to Nicole, who’d done little more than mumble to them and her doctor between bouts of fitful sleep. Nothing he planned on telling Ethan’s grandmother would traumatize the kids further, but keeping whatever conversation happened between him and Lucinda private was the responsible thing to do. His side of their talk, at least, so Matthew closed his bedroom door.
Over the past year, Lucinda had been reasonable, even kind. She clearly loved Ethan and had occasionally taken in Emily for a few nights. They were both her grandchildren at this point.
When Nicole was in rehab, Lucinda always ended every in-person get-together, phone call, email, or text with “Call me if you need anything,” though sometimes her voice-texting translated the message to “Call me if Eunice gets filings.” Always good for a laugh. She remained eager to lend a hand even after Nicole came back home. Slightly suspicious, maybe, but eager nonetheless. Tag never went into much detail about his father’s alcoholism or the abuse Lucinda withstood until he passed, but Matthew knew enough to put up with Lucinda’s doubts.
“Hope it sticks,” she said once to Nicole. “The kids are counting on you.”
Asking her to watch the kids a second time that week didn’t feel like an imposition, but Matthew reconsidered reaching out to her as he scrolled to her name on his phone.
For a moment, his ears tuned back into the kids and the TV downstairs.
“Oh, hey! Looka!” he heard a Minion say. “C’est un banano!”
“C’est un banano!” Ethan repeated, laughing extra hard as he often did just to get his sister to laugh with him. Emily didn’t leave him hanging. Their resilience was admirable.
With his thumb floating above CALL, he considered the consequences of reaching out.
The Lucinda he’d grabbed Ethan from a year ago wasn’t the woman Matthew knew now. If she held out some hope of bringing Ethan home to live with her permanently, she’d never told him. The legal battle he once suspected would come never materialized. Even when he had shared the situation regarding ACS and their investigation into Nicole and their family, Lucinda offered half a dozen contacts she believed could help Matthew steer through the process. Since then, maybe the few times she’d watched Ethan over a weekend had left her weary of caring for the boy full-time. Aging parents do a slick job of forgetting the trials of full-time parenting.
He clicked CALL, and as the phone trilled, Matthew couldn’t discount the possibility that Ethan’s grandmother had always been waiting for the right time and an obvious tragedy to make the necessary legal fuss required to become the boy’s custodial parent. Would that even be bad?
“It’s late, Matthew. Is everything all right?”
He hadn’t expected a hello, but it put him off kilter when she skipped the pleasantry.
“Hello, Lucinda, yes … everything is OK. How are you?”
OK? It wasn’t exactly a lie. Emily and Ethan were unharmed, at least physically, and watching cartoons downstairs. Their durability in the face of their mother’s self-inflicted misfortunes was old hat by now. What each might say about Nicole and him to future therapists was easy to guess. But that was a black hole to fall into some other day.
“Everyone’s OK? You sure about that, Matthew?”
It sounded like she somehow already knew, some sort of Grandma intuition.
“Yes, we are all OK.”
Technically, Nicole was stable. She was in the capable hands of the staff at New York-Presbyterian Brooklyn Methodist Hospital, bandaged and banged up but asleep when they’d left. She’d arrived with some internal bleeding. “Nothing fatal,” the attending physician had said.
Nicole was OK. They were OK. He was OK. He was doing the right thing, he thought, by phoning Lucinda for help. All of these facts could be neatly housed under the very definition of OK. He’d self-vindicated the use of the word. They were OK.
Lucinda let out a long sigh, more tired than annoyed.
“I’m OK, too, thanks for asking. Reading in bed, though, I think I nodded off a few pages back. Book club is brunching tomorrow to discuss this catastrophe, and I’m sure the other biddies will take a cruel delight in realizing I’m many chapters behind. I’ll fake it, best I can.”
Matthew felt she was expecting a laugh, so he forced one through his growing anxiety. It barely made a sound. The children’s giggles downstairs had more volume than his manufactured amusement. Whatever the Minions had done, it was enough to cause a second bigger laugh from the kids, one that penetrated the walls of his bedroom.
“Is that the kids I hear? Kind of late for Ethan to still be up, isn’t it?”
On the way back from the hospital, Matthew had committed to getting right to the point—he wasn’t surprised by his second thoughts, but his brain struggled to come up with alternative believable excuses for having phoned at 10:30 PM on a Saturday.
“I don’t mean to be rude, Matthew, but there is a reason you rang me, isn’t there?”
“Nicole’s had an accident,” he answered and chewed at his lip after he had.
“Oh my, is she hurt?” The sleep in her voice vanished. “What happened this time?”
This time. She made it sound as if she’d been tallying their problems all along. Nicole had created more than her fair share of problems in the past, but lumping in this accident with those—an accident the old bitch didn’t even know anything about yet—sickened his stomach.
His regret for sharing the news was instant, but there was no turning back now. He desperately needed the kids out of the house the whole week if he was going to be of any real help in helping Nicole get well enough to navigate her reentry into recovery successfully.
“I didn’t see it happen,” he answered. “But she either fell through a window or walked into it … maybe she threw herself into the pane. No one knows for sure.”
“I don’t understand. Threw herself through a window? How? Or … why?”
According to the doctor, Nicole’s blood alcohol level measured in the range where a loss of consciousness had been possible. He hadn’t needed a hematologist’s results to know she was loaded. Her stink of booze and perspiration probably still lingered in the host’s kitchen.
“Stuart? Makalino?”
“Banana … banana!!”
“Bob! Stopa!”
There was no laughter from either Em or Ethan this time. It made sense they’d crashed so quickly after the day they’d all had.
“Matthew,” Lucinda said sharply, snapping him back to the call. “Why it happened doesn’t really matter, does it? Is Nicole home with you now? Are the kids hurt?”
He’d phoned for help and had no right to be angered by her concern, but a furnace went on inside of his gut. Containing the heat, preventing his insides from boiling out and through his mouth in the form of expletives, would be difficult. Best to try and back out.
“It’s fine … she’s at a hospital a few blocks from here—”
“I’m coming over. Don’t say another word.”
There was a legitimate ringing in his ears, one he knew was possible any time all the blood rushed to his head and found no exits to relieve the pressure. Underneath it, he heard the woman shuffle out of her bed and to her closet. This was what he wanted, wasn’t it? Her help?
He needed to focus on Nicole. A week would barely make a dent. He needed time to find out what had actually happened with Nicole, outline a plan with her and her doctors, and do so without worrying about what the kids were hearing, how much they were eating or not eating, or who was trying to pick them up or not picking them up without his permission.
“Lucinda, coming over right this minute isn’t necessary,” he said.
“Mmmhmm” was all he heard back. The woman had made up her mind, and inexplicably, her commitment to helping them immediately only angered him more.
She had the means to get there safely. She had the means to care for them both. She had the means to watch them indefinitely. Her help was going to make everything easier. He needed it. He couldn’t deny that. There was no one else in the world more trustworthy than a blood relative. She wasn’t his blood, but she was Ethan’s, at least. Fighting her arrival was dumb.
His thoughts stacked quickly, blending into one another and making too much sense. They were interrupted briefly by what sounded like Lucinda talking to someone else at her home. Like she’d cupped the receiver and grabbed a landline to reach out to someone else while dressing. Even if she wasn’t now, who might she alert once she found out Nicole hadn’t just had an accident but had disappeared the night before and gotten filthy drunk?
The year so far had been calm relative to the clusterfuck this week had become, and it’d gone tits up not long after the anniversary of their last clusterfuck. He believed Lucinda liked him. She’d remarked positively on the connection he’d fostered with her only grandson a handful of times, but how much additional slack would she be willing to give?
He heard a conversation; it was faint through what felt like plugged ears. What was the old woman saying to someone else as she dressed to come to their rescue? She lived alone. His mind was spinning out on the possibilities now—charging ahead on absurd postulations while remaining oblivious to the sound of Pepper barking violently downstairs.
“Who are you talking to, Lucinda?” He’d practically screamed it.
“I’m not talking to anyone,” she said, still calm on her end. “The TV is on.”
“I thought you were reading.” He sounded less angry but no less suspicious.
“What are you implying, Matthew?” she asked.
“If you’ve called someone, I have a right—”
“And what’s got the dog so riled up?” she interrupted.
All the blood stuck in Matthew’s head flushed back toward his chest, overloading his heart. Free from their obstruction, his ears keyed in on the repetitive boom of Pepper’s worry. It was a shrill barking that Matthew had never heard before, and it grew more and more haunting as he raced down the stairs to the otherwise quiet family room below.
26
TAG
Tag had left the hospital well before Matthew and the kids. While there, Nicole had been unresponsive to his attempts to possess her a second time. Now, he was just a ghost again, standing on the moonlit sidewalk outside Matthew’s home in case Amanda showed up in Aidan’s body, and utterly uncertain of what to do about her if she did.
He decided his failure to occupy Nicole’s body properly had been a lucky break. Had it worked, anything he said through her to Matthew in front of that kind of supervision might have seen a nurse or doctor administer a stronger sedative. She was already zonked. If a decision was made to put her in the psych ward, the eyes on her and the body he needed would surely double.
Then again, maybe possessing Nicole the first time had been the lucky break.
“Putting a body on isn’t for everyone,” Gabriel had said. “Especially the meek.”
He hated how it had phrased the act of possession. Of course, he hated a lot of what Gabriel had said to him when they’d connected.
As the noises of the city, near and far, faded in and out on the wind, Tag thought back on the conversation he had with Gabriel and wondered if, in truth, he’d had no luck at all. Everything since their meeting had felt more like a curse. Plus, as the beast had said, maybe Tag didn’t have the guts to see possession through. “Not like her—not like Amanda.”
Curse or no curse, the connection itself could have been categorized as divine intervention.
* * *
When Amanda left him, Tag had only the name Gabriel. How many residents in Second Plane also went by Gabriel or Gabe or even Gabby? At a minimum, many centuries’ worth of residents had to have arrived with that name or some variation of it. Others may have taken on the designation as a nickname for whatever reason, religious or kooky. Tag had no last name, and even if he had, there was nothing in the way of a phone book. He didn’t know where to start.
Then, he remembered how Rebecca, Amanda’s first mentor, had once taken a chance on him. She had tried to warn him—in her ass-backward way—about what lay ahead for Amanda. She’d spoken of the symptoms of something darker happening within Tag’s wife. Though, as he recalled it, Rebecca had been vague, almost cryptic, about what she thought Amanda was up to.
She’s seeking an answer to a question no decent resident here will answer.
Perhaps not understanding her insinuations at the time had been his fault. Maybe he hadn’t really been listening to the woman, or maybe he hadn’t wanted to believe her. He hadn’t been all that pleasant, either, and she might have held a grudge against him … or his wife.
With only the name Gabriel in hand, he reached out to Rebecca, hoping for nothing and expecting even less than that. It was a long shot, but better than no shot. All he could do after was wait to see if she’d accept his invitation to connect. To his surprise, she did.
When they met, Tag hadn’t bothered with conjuring scenery for the visit, but what Rebecca had created around herself was a perfect recreation of a 1980s suburban kitchen. Hers, no doubt, and a stunning effort either way. It was a claustrophobic galley-style layout with white laminate cabinetry above a ceramic tile counter with a thick gray grout that looked difficult to keep clean. The wood veneer on the tops and sides of the microwave was the first tell, but it was the faux brick linoleum floor that gave the era away completely.
As Amanda had insisted, Tag saw what Rebecca had created because he had chosen to see it. Rebecca waited for him behind the living room side of the kitchen counter, perched on an overstuffed barstool that might have passed for chic during that decade. Her smile was still bubbly, but unlike their original meeting, neither made any benign pleasantries to start this conversation. Tag would never know if Rebecca knew why he’d come to see her beforehand because, as it was, he’d been unable to keep the name and reason for being there under wraps.
No hello. No how have you been? Just out with it:
“Do you know someone named Gabriel?” he asked.
Her smile snapped flat, and he thought he had caught a few of the appliances disappearing in his periphery. She wasn’t quick to respond but eventually said, “Yes. Unfortunately, I do.” Like the first time they met, she did most of the talking from there.
Rebecca knew Gabriel because, at some point during her residency, Gabriel had wanted to know her. It had sent the requisite invitation to connect, “It’s about your husband, Henry.” Although Rebecca had observed Henry in Prior Plane recently, she had hurriedly agreed to meet.
Once she revealed to Tag that she knew who Amanda had been talking to and could point him to Gabriel, it became difficult for him to feign interest in the rest of Rebecca’s story. He wanted to leave. He wanted to get on with it. Ethan’s life was on the line, and he assumed that only Gabriel had the answer to his question. The same question Amanda had once sought. He needed to connect with Gabriel. Thankfully, perhaps sensing his urgency, Rebecca kept it brief.
She told Tag she believed Gabriel had sought her out because of how long her “one true love,” Henry, was taking to die. Rebecca admitted that, at times, she couldn’t understand why, like her, Henry hadn’t taken his own life by then. Gabriel had offered to help Rebecca kill her husband or cause an accident to get Henry to Second Plane sooner.
