What the Dead Can Do, page 3
2) He still hadn’t gotten around to asking Nicole to consider getting help for her drinking.
Before they’d made that trip, Matthew was putting twice the number of wine bottles in the recycling bin than the year prior, a few vodka bottles too. Other than the one time he’d gotten sick on vodka as a teen, he never drank the clear spirit, and the amount of wine he allowed himself to enjoy in a week had rarely deviated from four or five glasses.
“I want to draw too!” Ethan said, pawing for the notebook.
“Are you done eating?”
Ethan threw one hand atop his other and over the bowl, protecting the cereal while shaking his head. A definitive “no.” It made Matthew laugh aloud, giggle even, and to be doing so refreshed him.
“I see. When you’re done, we’ll draw together.”
Ethan’s nod was reluctant but agreeable.
Matthew drew the number one in the top left corner of the second page and circled it. He tapped the tip of the pen to its right, stuck in the consideration of a good first parenting goal.
DON’T HALF-ASS IT.
Before he could think better of his only entry, he underlined it a few times, then went ahead and drew a circled two underneath it. The second entry stayed blank.
They chose us because they never thought anything would happen—because they never believed they’d die at the same time. Statistically, simultaneous deaths must be very rare. A commercial airline crash couldn’t have been high on their list of what-ifs. We were the “just in case” couple, not the “they’ll do a wonderful job that no one else could ever do” couple.
CRACK! The sound of ceramic busting into pieces jerked Matthew from his thoughts. There were enough Cheerios on their dark hardwoods to feed five kids. They had exploded in every direction and surrounded the table like a tiny army amidst the fragments of the bowl.
It’d startled him, and his reaction put Ethan on edge, but Matthew managed to recover quickly with an “uh-oh.” He forced his eyes into surprised saucers to complement the bright pop in his voice. It was the very same affected “uh-oh” he’d used to make with Emily.
“Uh-oh,” Ethan parroted. “Uh-oh.”
Matthew bent over to grab the three broken pieces of the bowl from the floor. He pinched his index finger and thumb around the less aggressive edges of each shard, then grouped those pieces on the table well out of the boy’s reach.
“Want to see a magic trick?” he asked.
“Yes!” Ethan said.
“Do you know how to cover your ears?”
Ethan nodded excitedly, as only little ones can when they know for sure they’ve done something they had seen grown-ups do.
“Great, let me see that. Let me see you cover your ears.”
His son cupped his ears as he closed his eyes tight.
“Shut eyes are key to muffling bad noises,” Matthew said, grinning yet again. Then, with four fingers in his mouth, he whistled.
Ethan frowned as the hiss of the command echoed around the kitchen.
Before its reverberations faded, the huge thump of sixty-five pounds of dog jumping from the bed upstairs shook the ceiling.
“I’m sorry, bud,” Matthew said. He put a hand on Ethan’s. “I’m sure a lot of what can and can’t happen around an almost three-year-old will come back to me. Don’t worry.” Getting the age right had already proven to be very important to Ethan.
Ethan smiled, put his hands down, opened his eyes, and looked toward the sound of four paws overdue for a nail-trimming thundering down the wood stairs. The scratch was grating.
“Here we go. I call this trick the a-bra-ca-clean-up!” Matthew said.
He pointed toward the scattered cereal on the floor.
“Come ’ere, Pepper! Come on!” Ethan shouted, eagerly twisting his body within the high chair for a better view. “Snack time!”
The mutt came into view—mouth at the floor, nostrils working feverishly to find and start with the Cheerios in the shadows underneath the loveseat against the room’s wall.
“C’mon on, Pepper, here, good boy!” Ethan cheered.
The child’s affection for the animal was contagious.
“Get ’em all, boy,” Matthew added. “C’mon. Eat ’em up, big guy!”
Hansel and Gretel had nothing on the dog’s ability to track each piece as it worked its way toward the kitchen. It licked up one after another on its way there.
“C’mon, boy! More in here!” Ethan said, tapping his tray to draw the dog closer.
Suddenly Pepper looked up from the living room floor, ignoring two dozen bits of cereal waiting for him. The dog set its gaze on Ethan, then stared hard to the boy’s left, over his shoulder and beyond him. At what? At nothing, best Matthew could tell. A small spider hung from a ceiling corner in that direction, but their dog had never minded those before. Pepper’s ears dropped flat as he raised his withers, every hair on the haunch was standing tall neck to tail, his teeth bared tight, and his guttural snarl was only the precursor to a barrage of barks more wild than domestic.
Ethan spun toward Matthew with enough force to pick the right side of the high chair up off the ground. He reached for Matthew with all he had.
Pepper gnashed and growled. The dog held his ground as his mouth snapped the air and his snout pointed toward nothing and then more of nothing.
Matthew plucked Ethan from the chair, and the child burst into earsplitting hysterics.
“Pepper! Cut it out!” Matthew said as he hugged Ethan into his chest. He searched the kitchen for the source of the dog’s ire. “Shut up! Dammit, Pepper, shut up!” he shouted.
His demands for obedience only intensified Ethan’s wailing.
Matthew shuffled toward Pepper as Ethan buried himself into his neck.
The dog kept his stare pointed at the back of the kitchen.
Matthew looked for anything unusual but came up empty.
“No!” Ethan shouted. “No! No! No!”
“It’s going to be fine, Ethan. Calm down.”
Matthew edged closer to the dog until he was able to squeeze himself between all its ferocity and the pocket door’s frame. With his back to Pepper, he hurried into the family room to set Ethan down on the loveseat, but Ethan wouldn’t let go.
“Ethan, I’m not going anywhere, let me just handle the dog.”
Matthew tried to set his son down again, but Ethan put every bit of what an almost three-year-old can into ensuring there was no way Matthew was leaving him on the couch.
“Ethan, you’re going to be fine, let me just—”
A short, sharp yelp interrupted Matthew’s pleas for cooperation.
The sound was followed by a thick silence.
He kept Ethan in his arms. The boy tried hard to get his tears under control, sucking up his fright in short inhalations that sounded like choking. Matthew tightened his embrace around his son as he turned to see why Pepper had gone silent so abruptly.
The hairs on the dog’s back were half-energized, erect but settling. Pepper entered the kitchen completely, had his mouth and nose back to the floor, and was huffing and licking up the cereal that remained there.
“I’m going to set you down,” he told Ethan. “See, it’s just Pepper being a dumb old dog.”
Between uneven breaths, Ethan responded, “Oh … kay.”
Matthew set the boy down on the sofa and stepped into the kitchen.
The dog continued its hunt for cereal along the baseboards.
There was one window, over the sink, no bigger than two stacked shoeboxes.
As Matthew stared out the pane into the space his family sarcastically referred to as their backyard, his skin went cold and the hairs rose on his neck. Maybe reporters breaking into the alley to score an interview was the latest wrinkle, a new normal for him and Nicole. No privacy at all was to be expected now—at least with the wackos who called themselves journalists. He found himself hoping that if he did see something—did see someone—it would be Katrina. All things being equal, she had at least sounded relatively harmless.
He moved toward the sink to get a better look, and as he stepped to the counter, he heard the distinct crunch of ceramic underneath his shoe.
He lifted his foot. It was one of the pieces of Ethan’s cereal bowl.
The other two were still on the table, where Matthew was certain he’d left all three.
THE TEXT | SECTION TWO
WHY YOU?
Many of you arrived here long before you imagined you would. Most of you have arrived alone, but some residents come as couples, and fewer still come as families.*
Even if you are one of our more elderly arrivals, you probably didn’t see it coming, at least not the exact moment. If a fortune teller “predicted” even a rough approximation of your passing on to Second Plane, it was a coincidence, we assure you! THERE IS NO GREAT MYSTERY TO SOLVE. THERE IS NO CONSPIRACY. Your time was your time but not by any grand design.
It sounds odd, but you must allow yourself to not care. This is key to finding traction with residency. THAT SAID, if you choose to spend any of your stay here thinking about a galactic meaning for your removal from Prior Plane, so be it. HAVE FUN! But know that the tranquility you feel from such speculations is just a mimic. REMINDER: you are here now. Not there. So, GO FORWARD!
*Please see page four: “The Children.”
3
NICOLE
Nicole’s reasons for a nip here, a swig there were plentiful—obvious even, if only to herself. Her excuses for drinking during the day weren’t necessarily logical, and wouldn’t look good on paper, but she hadn’t ever claimed them to be. Besides, like so many rationalizations made to self-approve self-destruction, the value of one reason or another for a tug on the bottle was relative. Or moot.
The point is, she had her reasons.
Her problems weren’t illegitimate, but to date, no friends or family members had bothered to ask what her problems were. She had to pay for someone to ask. And she had a therapist, so technically, she was. Therefore, any evaluations, judgments, or condemnations made by those same people not asking squat about her issues or her self-medication techniques amounted to bupkes as far as Nicole was concerned.
She’d snuck a quick sip outside of MS 51 plenty of times. She stood there now and had been taking the tiniest little swigs of vodka since arriving. Nicole didn’t particularly care for the spirit, but wasn’t it said that vodka was the drink of choice for the smartest drunks committed to conducting necessary and public business?
Like every other day she’d gone to pick up Emily, not one parent on the sidewalk outside the school expressed a “gotcha” or an “I saw that.” Not verbally nor silently, not subtly nor using overt contortions of smug facial features.
Oh shit, was she buzzing already?
Nicole knew she wasn’t the first mom in the history of momming to carry a quarter-pint bottle of booze in her bag. In fact, “Mommy Juice” culture was real—acceptable even, perhaps honorable—but she was loath to declare herself part of the trend or become a card-carrying member of the Wine Mom club. She was a drunk. The rest of them? Pretenders.
Covertly sneaking the drinks she needed was even more important now that Ethan was in the picture. She had to be ninja-like. A sauced expert in stealth boozing. Being busted drinking while under the watchful eyes of journalists would do no one any good. She wasn’t a monster, though, not by any definition she’d ever read, but she didn’t want to compound her problems.
But the reporters—goddamn, the reporters—were all looking for any excuse to keep Ethan’s story more sensational than it already was. It wasn’t enough that he was the only survivor of Flight 2332. No, the vultures needed those clicks, needed those eyeballs to pay the bills, and no twenty-first century anyone cared about anything for very long. The parents of all the kids that had been gunned down in the United States over the past decade could attest to that.
These fuck-sticks were practically begging her to be piss-drunk at all times. They wanted her to be supremely inebriated so that she would screw up. The journalists themselves were just another reason to drink. Definitely an issue worth drinking over, should anyone ask.
And they loved her, didn’t they? Not just a mom now—at least not just Emily’s mom—but the newly anointed mother of the Miracle Boy. Could there have been a better story than one in which Nicole fucked over his life worse than the plane crash had, by being an irredeemable drunk?
No one had to have known Amanda personally to compare her to Nicole. Amanda’s mothering would remain forever perfect now that she was dead. And the looky-loos were comparing Nicole to their own A-plus parenting, too, she was sure.
After the crash, the press was on Ethan’s story light-switch quick. They found Nicole’s family even before the Miracle Boy was there and did so as easily as if there’d been a giant spotlight parked on their stoop. He was headed their way, a new mom, a new dad, and though they’d asked, no one could tell them how the press had caught wind of that fact before his residency in Nicole’s home had become a reality. She suspected Lucinda had leaked that information to derail their guardianship before it could begin, and oh boy, how she wished the older woman had succeeded. It wasn’t a crazy thing to think, even if Matthew had said so.
Those first few weeks, the reporters knocked, phoned, texted, emailed, and even sent letters. Matthew’s nonstop refusals to grant the networks an interview with the Miracle Boy didn’t stop the news from creating stories. There were cameras on all of them at all times.
Who could roll sober with that scrutiny?
NBC, ABC, FOX, CNN, and the others had packaged, promoted, and aired their multiple exposés on the probability of Ethan’s inexplicable survival, yet the harassment hadn’t ended. Because while the mainstream media had moved on to some high-stakes congressional standoff, the underbelly of America hadn’t.
And the underbelly of that underbelly never would. Any knucklehead with a phone had taken it upon themselves to get the “real” story. They didn’t care the crash was under investigation by the NTSB. Few of the oddballs that approached Nicole and her family actually asked for permission to record videos, take pictures, or ask questions. They did as they pleased.
The amateur interview requests came from every direction at all hours. If Nicole walked Ethan to or from the park two blocks from their home, the weirdos were there. Turn a lamp on at dusk—oh, wonder who’s that banging at the door? Some had lists of questions that rivaled a receipt from CVS; others were content to snap a quick shot and run.
One influencer from New Hampshire had claimed in a multipart post that Nicole and Matthew had been chosen by the Devil to raise his own son—the next Child of Disobedience, the poster had called him. All the signs were there, this little fucker had said. He colored red lines from the crash site in Nevada to their home in Brooklyn as two points to a pentagram drawn over a screenshot of North America from Google Maps.
There were so many theories.
But there was no silver lining to being saddled with a miracle toddler if you weren’t going to profit from tending to him. If you weren’t going to let his inadvertent fame fill your coffers while it could.
It felt yucky to feel like that, and Nicole hated herself for thinking that way, but hating herself didn’t make the notions go away.
In Ethan, they had an opportunity. She and Matthew were broke—no drink or drug could obscure that fact—with no reason to believe their finances would change for the better. Maybe not broke, but scraping by, and what had Matthew done about it? Sure, he hadn’t pinned his firm’s failure on her outright, but he didn’t have to. She could read between the lines.
They had been given a chance at real money. Cosmic shit, really, one in 11,000,000 odds. Even only a few appearances would have netted serious bank. At least, that’s what Matthew had indicated at one point, but then, out of nowhere, he’d decided it felt unethical. There’d been no conversation about it, just his proclamation of his decision. Nicole might have been angrier at him had she not been secretly terrified about performing like a perfectly sober doting wife and mother, a have-it-all who could do it all for the cameras, hosts, reporters, and public.
She was a self-described anxious sort. Everybody knew so. No prescription cocktail removed her anxiety completely, which reminded Nicole that she needed a new therapist, but she couldn’t be bothered to reach for her phone to add it to her list of things to do.
Bottom line: If they couldn’t make bank, everyone needed to leave her the hell alone.
Of course, it could have been worse.
The face of a two-year-old, even one recently ordained a miracle in headlines and cable chyrons alike, just isn’t that recognizable. They are cute, in their own way, but all look the same. You’ve seen one towheaded toddler, you’ve seen them all. Thank God for small favors.
In time though, Ethan’s visage would resemble that of his dead biological parents’. The boy would grow up to be as handsome as Tag or as stunning as Amanda, or his face would be some amalgamation of them both. Nicole was sure of that.
Ethan would grow up a gene-pool lottery winner, and Ethan the teen would be instantly recognizable—maybe a model. Would anything he earned be available to her? Not likely. Plenty of producers, publishers, or anyone else who didn’t actually have to raise Tag and Amanda’s son would get wealthy off the boy’s improbable story someday. But not them, not her.
It was quiet on the sidewalk that afternoon, though. Nicole realized she hadn’t been bothered on the way to pick up Emily, and hadn’t been that morning either. Was interest fading? Maybe it was the economy, maybe it was a new virus, maybe the news had finally figured out a way to make people care about UFOs—she couldn’t say. But she had to admit, the random street interruptions were happening with less frequency, as good a reason as any to celebrate with another quick drink.
She grabbed the bottle from the bottom of her oversized satchel and, without pulling the booze into view entirely, gave the cap a quick turn. Then, under the shadows of the maples overhead, she brought the glass ring to her lips.
