Joe Schreiber: Chasing the dead

Stop it, Sue. Just stop it, right now.

She catches her breath. In spite of everything, she's startled into silence at how vividly she can hear him.

This is bad. It's the worst. But nothing's ever been solved with tears. So just…stop…crying.

"All right," she whispers. Not whimpers, just whispers. And in a moment she has nearly regained the fullness of her voice. Through the receiver she can hear her daughter still crying, but she's calmed down a bit too, thank God, and it sounds as if whatever the man on the other end was doing to her has stopped, at least for now. Maybe he was just pinching her, she thinks. Maybe not even that. If Marilyn really is there, maybe she was somehow able to protect Veda. Or comfort her. Marilyn would do anything for Veda, Sue knows, putting her own life on the line for Veda if that is what it takes.

At least this is what she chooses to believe, for this very moment at hand, and if it gets her through to the next moment, then she may continue to believe it.

"A long time ago," the voice on the phone says, "you and your friend did something that neither one of you will ever forget. You do know who I'm talking about, Susan. You know very well."

Sue Young sits perfectly still like a figure in a snow globe, amid the increasing chaos of tumbling white, staring out the windshield at the bare trees along the road, a dense thicket of questions tightening around her like some kind of barbwire shroud.

"Yes."

How does the voice on the other end know about this? It is one thing to know about her life now, where she works, where she lives, and what kind of car she drives. Even to have gone into her house and looked through her things-an intruder with enough intelligence and motive could have done that.

But nobody knows about what they did that summer, the thing that bonded them together permanently. In a peculiar way, she herself doesn't know about it. It has not been on her mind, at least the daytime part of her mind, since she graduated high school. In fact, it is as if some arcane form of psychological self-defense had wiped him completely from her consciousness even before she left Gray Haven.

Phillip, she knows, has not been so lucky.

For whatever reason-perhaps just because he is a man and not so consciously accustomed to the sprockets and flywheels of psychological micromanagement-he has not been able to expel the nightmares so handily. Only after they were married did she realize that he still had nightmares about it. They attacked in cycles, serially, industriously corroding whole layers of insulation off his ordered and businesslike thoughts right up until the point that he left her eighteen months ago. Sometimes he'd thrash so violently in bed that she was afraid he might hurt himself, or her. Sometimes he shot straight up in bed with a scream like nothing she'd ever heard from him when he was awake. His eyes were open but he was still dreaming. There was sweat in his hair, pasting it down in thick brown fingers to his forehead. Even when the dreams were at their worst, he refused to tell her about them, but Sue always knew-on the same level that she herself remembers. She knows all this because he is Phillip Chamberlain, the only boy she ever loved, and because they went through it all together, approximately one lifetime ago.

"Tonight you're going back to Gray Haven," the voice says.

"What?"

"You're going back to pay your respects. Do you know the place?"

"Who are you?"

"Answer the question, Susan. Do you know the place?"

"I know the place, but-"

"Good."

Again Sue is silent. In the background she can hear Veda again, not crying but whimpering, tired, hungry, wanting it to be over.Oh honey, oh sweetie, I sympathize. And Sue has to hang up on the voice to keep from asking to talk to her baby girl again.

Because she already knows this is how this game will be played.

Whatever privileges she might have had to make special requests are gone.

For the sake of her daughter she is going to do exactly what the voice asked.

She is going back to Gray Haven.

The roads are going to hell. Sue can feel it, that queasy little shimmy in the back tires whenever she adjusts the wheel more than a few degrees in either direction. It's snowing harder now. Still, the Expedition is holding steady at sixty-five, sometimes seventy-five when the road straightens out. She's got another half-hour until she gets to Gray Haven, maybe longer if the weather continues to fall apart like it is.

Still, she's had plenty of experience driving under adverse conditions. You can't drive an ambulance for eleven years without experiencing everything that bad weather, bad karma, and plain rotten luck have to offer. Before she left it all behind to become Mrs. Phillip Chamberlain, Sue delivered babies in the middle of electrical storms and drove stroke victims through nor'easters. Once, when her ambulance broke down in the middle of Buttfuck Idaho she and her partner kept an eight-year-old with his throat half torn out by a German shepherd alive and calm for an hour and a half until a helicopter arrived, and the kid eventually recovered enough to send her a crayon-drawn thank-you note. Sue used to keep it stashed above the visor of her ambulance. Back in the day, she was the golden girl-the one everybody said could eat stress and shit sonnets.

The road rises and falls and the opening lines of one of Veda's favorite board books, a story that Sue's read her at least a hundred times, keeps repeating stupidly through her head:"Up slippery hills cars creep, don't beep. Inside the hills the giants sleep." It is what you get with kids. The children's authors of America erect a little writer's colony in your forebrain, and no matter how grim or horrific the circumstances you find yourself in, they're always ready with a bit of utterly inappropriate doggerel.

Driving on. She's got the road mainly to herself. She passes several cars, a Dunkin' Donuts truck, even a couple of snowplows, but there's no sign of the farm pickup she saw earlier. The more she thinks about it, the more certain she is that it's the one from two months earlier, the afternoon of the pumpkin patch.

One day back in late October, a week before Halloween, Sue and Marilyn took Veda pumpkin-picking outside Lexington. Veda ran up and down the rows of gnarled green vines and pumpkins, stopping every few feet to attempt to pick one up until she finally found one small enough to lift. The three of them went out to dinner afterward and Veda fell asleep in the car, the crisp air and exercise having done its job. Sue dropped Marilyn back at her condo, then headed back to the house with her sleeping daughter still clutching the miniature pumpkin in her car seat.

They were just a few miles from home, cruising along a backwoods two-lane road, when somebody started flashing their headlights at her from behind. Sue slowed down, thinking the driver wanted to pass, but then he slowed down too, coming up close behind her, and Sue felt all her alarm systems go on at once. The vehicle was an old pickup with a big grille, round fenders, and wide-set headlights, just like the one tonight, and the driver was waving her over to the shoulder.

Maybe, she remembered thinking at the time, the guy was just flagging her down to tell her she had a taillight out or something. But a lonely stretch of road five miles outside of town was the last place she wanted to find out. When the farm pickup slowed down, Sue floored it and lost him, got her little girl home and locked the doors. In the garage she checked the Expedition. The taillights, and everything else, were just fine. And she hasn't seen the farm pickup again until tonight.

But is that really the case?

The headache between her eyes is starting to come back. Because now she's thinking of an evening just a week or so ago when she was downtown doing some Christmas shopping at Prudential Center, pulling out of the parking garage, and a pair of headlights swept out after her. She only got a glimpse of the vehicle before it vanished in traffic, but hadn't it looked like the same farm truck? Hadn't she recognized, just for a split second, that grinning grille and rounded front end?