Hitchers

CHAPTER 25

My pencil seemed to draw Little Joe by itself, leading my shaking hand. For a change it was shaking in anger, not because

Grandpa was coming.

“You want to play? Let’s play,” I said. Fuming, my breath rushing through nostrils that suddenly felt too small, I drew Little Joe, the tired old standard, the center of Grandpa’s universe.

I drew him for the last time.

“How do you like that? Little Joe is dead.” I dipped my shading brush, watched plumes of black ink leach into the clear water. “Dead, dead, dead. Croaked. Deceased. Pushing up daisies.” I could run with this plot line for weeks. I didn’t understand why no one was calling the government on such a transparent lie. No one who was actually in the city still believed this was a mental illness. There were dead people running around; there was no debating it. Yet the national press still led with the mental illness take.

I packed the strips and arranged for a UPS pickup that day. They needed to be out before Grandpa returned, so he couldn’t cut them up.

The thought of Grandpa’s return sent a wave of dread through my belly. I went to the living room and turned on MSNBC.

Tamron Hall was interviewing a hitcher, standing in the sea of shoes in Chastain Park.

“Do you remember where your mother bought them?” Tamron asked. The shot switched to a close-up on a pair of tiny, white, girl’s dress shoes, the size a six-year-old might wear.

“Yes. Stride Rite in the Lenox mall.” The woman who answered was fiftyish, with long black hair streaked with grey and a little girl zombie voice.

Tamron looked off-camera. “Mom, would you?” She reached to draw another woman into the shot, a heavyset woman in her thirties. I turned it off, then hurled the remote across the room for good measure. This was so messed up.

“Why was it so hard to act like a decent human being?” I shouted at Grandpa. I went back into my studio, stared up at those two framed strips hung side-by-side. “A normal grandfather would have taken me under his wing. He would have been proud to have me follow in his footsteps. You were never there for any of us.” I grunted a humorless laugh. “You weren’t there for Kayleigh, that’s for sure.” I’d never had the guts to say that to him when he was alive. It felt good. Sure, I was the one most responsible for her death, I could admit that, but there was plenty of excess blame to go around. “How could you let her go out to a pier alone, at night? You knew she’d been trying to get up the nerve to jump off that pier. How could you let her go out there alone? Where were you?” He’d probably snuck out to a bar.

Maybe I’d get my answers when Grandpa took over again, maybe not. Either way it felt good to ask questions I’d been swallowing for years.

It occurred to me that I could look for Kayleigh. After sixteen years she was probably gone, but I could drive down to Tybee Beach and check. She would have hung on to the world with both hands, the way Lorena had.

If there was anything left of her, though, it couldn’t be much. And she’d still be eleven. I didn’t think I could bear to see that.

The doorbell rang. I wasn’t expecting anyone. Mick would just let himself in, and Summer wouldn’t be along for another hour or so. That left my mother. Maybe she’d changed her mind about going to Aunt Julia’s house. It was awfully quick for a flight from Phoenix, though, not to mention the ride from the airport.

I opened the door to a woman with a microphone. Behind her a man was pointing a TV camera at me. “Mr. Darby? I’m Kimberly Perkins of CNN.”

I stared at her dumbfounded, giving her my best shocked, blinking, deer-in-the-headlights look. “I don’t give interviews at my home. Talk to my agent.”

“Mr. Darby, CNN—”

I closed the door and flipped the lock, but Kimberly Perkins only raised her voice and went on talking. “CNN received a call originating from your phone, from someone claiming to be your late grandfather, Thomas Darby. I’d like to speak to you about it.”

I pressed my forehead against the door, not even daring to breathe heavily.

“Mr. Darby? Was it your grandfather?”

I waited until Kimberly stopped calling through the door, then watched through the curtains as she headed back to a white van. Propping a foot on the bumper, she turned to talk to her cameraman. He pulled out a cigarette, cupped his hands around a lighter, nodding at something Kimberly said. They weren’t leaving.

This I didn’t need. I was sort of famous, had developed a reputation for being reclusive because I wasn’t making any appearances in the wake of Toy Shop’s growing success. If they could confirm that Grandpa was possessing me (or that I was suffering from post-traumatic identity disorder and thought he was possessing me), they would be all over it. I needed to call Steve, see if there was anything he could do.

I was just about to turn when Summer pulled up behind the van.

“Don’t talk to them, just come straight in,” I said aloud as Summer stepped out of her car and Kimberly and the cameraman rushed over.

The car keys dropped out of her trembling hand. Her face was flat, expressionless—a flesh mask.

I bolted out the door. “Lorena!”

She pushed past Kimberly Perkins, stumbled. “Finn?”

I wrapped my arm around her, led her toward the door. Tears streamed down her cheeks. “I waited for you. I was sure you’d come.” I wanted to tell her not to speak until we got inside, away from the reporter, but I couldn’t bring myself to silence her. “The wind kept blowing but I tried to hold on.” Her voice was a watery horror. Despite how badly I had wanted to talk to her, despite everything, I was afraid. My dead wife was here, returned from two years in that place.

“I couldn’t get to where you were,” I said as I closed the door and led her to the couch, my heart breaking at the thought of Lorena waiting by that river. “I would have if I could.”

She took my hands in hers and squeezed. “I know that now.” Her head dropped; she shook it slowly. Summer’s pigtails swayed with each turn. “I kept forgetting I was dead.” She raised her head, reached to me and gathered me toward her. “Please hold me. I want to feel that I’m really here.”

It made my skin prickle with involuntary dread, but I hugged her, felt her shoulders bounce as she cried into my neck, felt Summer’s small breasts pressed against my chest. It was strange to be holding my Lorena but feeling Summer’s thin arms, seeing skin so pale the blue of veins shone through where Lorena’s warm brown should be.

“I’m sorry I left you in the boat. I’m so sorry. I should have been there.”

She laughed spasmodically. “I’m such an idiot. Why didn’t I listen to you? I died of stupidity. It’s not your fault I’m stupid.”

“You’re not stupid. You have a phobia.” Or was it had a phobia? How do you refer to someone who’s both alive and not? I squeezed her tighter, wanting to cherish every second, wishing she smelled like Lorena. I closed my eyes, pictured my Lorena the first time I held her, on our first date. I’d taken her to Ele, the best restaurant in the city where I could get a reservation, and spent a fortune trying to impress her.

Lorena pushed away from me, hard.

“Get your hands off me!”

“I’m sorry. I’m sorry.” I held up my hands. Summer was shaking hers as if she’d just touched some horrible bug. “I was holding my wife. I thought I’d lost her forever, and I had a chance to hold her. How could I not?”

“This is not your wife’s body. Don’t you ever—” She made a fist, raised it to punch my shoulder, then lowered it to her lap, gasping for breath.

I thought of Grandpa kissing Grandma, how violated it made me feel. “You’re right. I really am sorry. I wasn’t thinking. Can you see how you could forget, if someone you loved suddenly came to life right in front of you?”

Summer rubbed her face with both hands. “It feels like being buried alive.”

“That’s a good way to put it.”

“God, I don’t want this to happen any more. I can’t.”

I was stinging from the disappointment of Lorena leaving so quickly. I wanted to see her again. At the same time, I knew what it felt like, and I didn’t want Summer to have to suffer it again. Somehow I was able to separate those two desires and wish for both.

“She’s come back because of you,” Summer said.

“What?”

“‘I waited for you. The wind kept blowing but I tried to hold on.’” Summer was staring off toward the staircase, her tone listless, almost plaintive. “The ones coming back are the ones who don’t want to be dead. The ones who find it most intolerable. Ghosts haunt because they’re not at peace. They desperately don’t want to be dead. Or they have unfinished business, like Gilly.”

I thought of Lorena. If there was a way to get back to the world of the living Lorena would be the first in line. Grandpa had been drawing the day he died, clinging to this world. Not even death would snuff that much ambition. And Gilly—as soon as Gilly came out, he started working on The Album, the one that was going to relaunch Mick’s career and make them friends again.

“Yeah. That sounds right.” And it seemed important. “What was it Krishnapuma said? Under the right conditions, the dead might get pulled back into the world of the living. Maybe if enough dead in one place wanted back in, they could storm the gate, so to speak.”

Summer didn’t look like she was in the mood to muse on the motives of the dead. She nodded absently, hugging herself and rubbing her upper arms as if she was freezing.

It made me uneasy that we’d be running with a conclusion based on so little evidence, though. If we wanted to drive the hitchers back to where they came from, it seemed important to be sure we knew why they were here. We should hunt down other people who knew who was haunting them, see if they were all restless souls, not ready for that wind to take them up. If Annie were back, for instance, we were on the wrong track. She’d wanted to die.

“Hang on,” I said.

Before I could voice my idea, I was gone again.