Doug Allyn - The Best American Mystery Stories 2000

And that’s just how it was. Beautiful.

Here’s a blowup of Nicole’s eyes. (click) Here’s one of her mouth. (click) Her hand. (click) I floated there in the water, watching, my eyes and nose just above the surface, my mouth and ears beneath the water. You know that sound? That underwater sound? And the next thing I remember is coughing. I couldn’t get the water out of my lungs. And then my grandmother was there, and she leaned down and waded in. Nicole must’ve still been in the water then. Why did she jump in the water? I was out, though, coughing. Why was I coughing? And she was still in the water, in the pool, in the blue. A blue just like this. (click) Now the projector’s stuck again. Shit. (click) (click) (click) That’s what it looked like, though, flashes of white. I saw the whole thing through flashes of white, empty slides. The sun flashing off the water. (click) (click) Like this. (click) (click) (click) Oh Jesus, I watched her. I watched the whole thing happen through the blue and the gold and the white flashes. The white flashes. I saw Nicole. I saw her pointing, running. I saw her jumping. Did she think I was drowning? Was she trying to save me? I watched. I knew what was happening but like with Jamie I was far, far away. I was watching through the light. And then my grandmother came out and yelled at me. “Kevin!” And I was startled. I inhaled some water, that’s why I was coughing. Nicole was floating facedown, among the flashes (click) (click) when my grandmother came out and yelled. She pulled Nicole out, and then I got out, coughing. And my parents came out and I was still coughing and someone said Kevin tried to save her, he tried to pull Nicole out, my grandmother, I think, saying, but he couldn’t, oh the poor dear. But I knew what happened. I knew Nicole wasn’t supposed to be in the water, and I watched it. I was looking through the light, into the heart of the light. I knew my sister was drowning and I watched it. I let it happen, because it was beautiful to see.

(click)

Under the water, she called my name.

(click)

What I saw was a flash of light, like these empty slides. (click) (click) ( click). And what I heard? What did I hear?

Put your hands over your ears.

Press down.

From Oxford American

Back in late May a tornado dropped screaming into the canyon, snapped limbs and whole treetops off, flung squirrels and birds into the black sky. And in the wet and quiet shambles after, several new stray dogs crept into the yard, and upon their heels little Maeve. You’ve seen pictures of those children starving on TV, living in filthy huts and wearing rags and their legs and arms just knobby sticks, huge brown eyes looking up at you. That’s what she looked like.

These strays, I sometimes think there is something their bones are tuned to that draws them here, like the whistle only they can hear, or words of some language ordinary humans have never known — the language that came from Moses’ burning bush, which only Moses could hear. I think sometimes I’ve heard it at dawn, something in the green, smoky air. Who knows what Maeve heard, maybe nothing but a big rip-roaring on the roof: the black sky opens up, she walks out. She follows an old coon dog along the path of forest wreckage through the hollow and into my yard, her belly huge beneath a sleeveless bit of cloth you might call a nightslip.

I knew her as my Uncle Sebastian’s youngest child, who wouldn’t ever go out of her room, and here she was wandering in the woods. They lived up beyond the first dam, some three miles up the creek. She says to me, standing there holding a little stick she’s picked up along the way, “I don’t know where I’m at.” She gives it an absent whack at the hound. He’s a bluetick with teats so saggy I thought him a bitch till I saw his old jalapeño.

I said, “Lift up that skirt and let me see you.” I looked at her white stomach, big as a camel’s hump and bald as my head, stretched veins like a map of the pale blue rivers of the world, rivers to nowhere. I saw her little patch of frazzly hair and sex like a busied lip wanting nothing but to drop the one she carried. Probably no one could bear to see it but God, after what all must have climbed onto her, old Uncle Sebastian and those younger boys of his, the ones still willing to haul pulpwood so he hadn’t kicked them out on their own, akin to these stray dogs lying about the yard, no speech, no intelligent look in their eyes.

This creature in Maeve would be something vile and subhuman.

I said, “The likes of those which have made your child, Maeve, should not be making babies, at least not with you. It was an evil thing that led to it.”

She said, “Well, when the roof lifted off the house and blew away I climbed on out. They was all gone, out hiding or gone to town.”

She took to wearing the little blue earphones radio I got in the mail with my Amoco card. I had no idea what she was listening to. She wandered around looking at nothing, one hand pressing a speaker to an ear, the other aimless, signing. She scarcely ever took them off, not even when she slept. She was quiet before, but now with her head shot through with radio waves she was hardly more than a ghost.

She would never even change out of her nightslip, though when I’d washed it for her it nearly fell apart. She was pale as a grub, hair a wet black rag all pressed to her head. Not even seventeen and small, but she looked old somehow. She’d seen so very little of the world and what she’d seen was scarcely human. She would forget, or just not bother to use, the toilet paper. Climb into the dry bathtub and fall into naps where she twitched like a dreaming dog. She heaved herself somehow up the ladder and through the little hole in the hallway ceiling to sit in the attic listening to her headset until she came down bathed in her own sweat and wheezing from the insulation dust. Maybe the little fibers got into her brain and improved her reception.

I made her put on a raincoat over the nightslip and took her to the grocery store, since I didn’t want to leave her alone. I thought if I took her there she wouldn’t think herself so strange compared with some of the women who lurk those aisles. Town is only three miles away but you would not think it to stand here and look at the steep green walls of the canyon. And what does it matter? The whole world, and maybe others, is in the satellite dish at the edge of the yard, and I have sat with Maeve until three in the morning watching movies, industrial videos, German game shows, Mexican soap operas. It’s what Greta would do sometimes while she was dying, her body sifting little by little into the air. When I started to get the disability and was home all the time I could see this happening, so I wasn’t surprised when one morning I woke and she didn’t. I grieved but I wasn’t surprised. She was all hollowed out. We’d never had a child as she was unable, and near the end I think she believed her life had been for nothing.

I felt the same way about myself after some twenty-odd years at ChemGlo. Sometimes it seems I wasn’t even there in that job, I’d only dreamed up a vision of hell, a world of rusty green and leaky pipes and tanks and noxious fumes. But as I was not there anymore and was not dead, I began to believe or hope my life might have some purpose, though nothing had happened to confirm that until Maeve appeared.

At the grocery store I couldn’t get her away from the produce section. She wouldn’t put on any shoes, and she was standing there in her grimy, flat, skinny bare feet, the gray raincoat buttoned up to her chin, running her dirty little fingers all over the cabbages and carrot bunches, and when the nozzles shot a fine spray over the lettuce she stuck her head in there and turned her face up into the mist. I got her down to the meat and seafood area, where she stood and looked at the lobsters in their tank until I had everything else loaded into the cart, and I lured her to the cashier with a Snickers bar. She stood behind me in the line eating it while I loaded the groceries onto the conveyor belt, chocolate all over her mouth and her fingers, and she sucked on her fingers when she was done. And then she reached over to the candy shelf in the cashier chute and got herself another one, opened it up and bit into it, as if this was a place you came to when you wanted to eat, just walked around in there seeing what you wanted and eating it.