Ellen Datlow - The Best Horror of the Year. Volume 4

“I’ll bet it was shiny,” I say, though I’m entranced yet again. How is it possible that I know so little about the life my mother led here, before she became the way she is?

“You bet right. And not just shiny. Pink and shiny. And a Jag.”

My jaw drops. “I didn’t know they made pink Jags. Or that anyone on this side of Olympic had that kind of money.”

“His daughter bought it for him. And this is the thing about Leyton Busby, Ry. This is what I think Evie never understood. That was all he wanted to talk about. It was all he cared about. I don’t think he cared about the car itself one little bit. ‘She paid half down,’ he told me. He never even walked around it, he just stood there in his shiny pajamas, which his daughter also bought him, beaming away. ‘ Half . To cheer me up, she says. Like I need so much cheering.’”

“But he was cheerier that morning. Just not about the car. I always hoped…” The sudden turn of my mother’s head catches me off-guard. Headlights from a passing car sweep her face, and her eyes flare like fireflies in the gloom. Guilt blows through and past me, faint and salty.

“Well,” says my mother. “I just hope his daughter knew that. Somehow, I got the impression maybe she didn’t.” Shadows have settled back over her face, but I can still feel her eyes on me. Another one of those near-smiles flutters across her lips without landing there. “For a long time, Mr. Busby and I just looked at his car. Once, he said, ‘Watch this,’ and then he jumped from one side of the bumper to the other, then pointed into the paint job. ‘You see that?’ he said. ‘There’s a pink me in there.’ I was about to go inside when he asked, ‘You figure she’s awake? The old bat?’

“I told him I didn’t even know what time it was.

“‘Sun’s up,’ he said. ‘She’s super-old. And I don’t hear moaning, do you?’ When I shook my head, he said, ‘Right. Let’s go see what we can do.’

“I was too surprised to do anything but follow. And… I remember the air, right then. It was so clean. Like it never is here. There were hummingbirds beating around the bougainvillea. And bees buzzing. You could actually see the outlines of all the trees and cars and people, without that haze around them, you know? Everything just seemed so substantial , or something. Like we were really here, for once. If that makes any sense.”

“I actually know exactly what you mean,” I say quietly.

This time, for one moment, that smile actually lands. Beats its wings on her lips. Lifts away again. I want to reach out, snatch it back. But it’s too late already. Again.

“We got upstairs, and Mr. Busby banged on Evie’s door, and he was right, she was up, dressed, had her hair out of her curlers. I think she maybe forgot herself, because she just threw the door open, then shut it halfway real fast, but not fast enough. That’s when I realized Stan was still in there.” Now it’s my turn to stare. My mother’s staring, too. But at the building, not me.

“Mom. What?”

“It’d been eight days. Maybe longer, I don’t know. I just caught a glimpse. The hospital bed, the i.v. stand with the tubing wrapped around it for disposal. And Stan. He was half-curled up in the sheets. This little cocoon husk she’d been married to for sixty-three years.”

“Wait. You mean his body? She kept it?”

“‘Oh my God,’ I remember saying. I tried to elbow Mr. Busby out of the way, but he wasn’t going.

“‘Is that Stan?’ he kept saying. ‘Mary Mother of God, woman, is that Stan?’

“She tried to slam the door on us. But Mr. Busby wedged himself in the frame and wouldn’t let her. I think she hit him. He didn’t budge. She looked terrible. Bloated and pale and patchy. Maybe it was the light, but even her skin had gone gray. She was practically transparent. Like a column of dust motes you could scatter with one hand.

“‘Oh, Evie,’ I told her. ‘Come downstairs. Let me take care of this for you.’

“She didn’t put up much fight. She hit Mr. Busby a few more times. Then she said she’d appreciate that. But that she’d wait up here with Stan.

“So I went down and woke you and showered and looked in the Yellow Pages and found an undertaker who said he’d come. And then I went to work. When I got home, I knocked on Evie’s door, just to check on her, but no one answered.

“And then you got the mumps. And my work went crazy, and I almost lost my job because I kept having to take off to care for you. And your dad got himself thrown in jail again. And the spiders got into everything. And somehow, weeks passed…”

This time, instead of muttering, she goes completely still. Sits there in the grass. Until, with a shriek, she scuttles backwards on her hands, smacking at her legs and jabbing her hands up the sleeves of her summer blouse and raking downward with clawed fingers. Welts well up in her skin and boil over. I try to grab her wrists, but she claws me, too, then scrambles all the way to the sidewalk and stands up.

All this time, she’s kept her eyes glued to the upstairs windows. My tears surprise me. I’m not even sure what they’re for. It’s not like this is atypical behavior.

“Mom,” I whisper. “I’m sorry I brought you here. I didn’t mean to.”

“It wasn’t real,” she says again, spitting the words. “You need to know I know.”

“Okay. I know you know.”

“No you don’t.”

I close my eyes. “Okay, I don’t.”

“Maybe you want to know what I saw. Maybe you should. Maybe then you’d stop looking at me like that.”

“I’m not looking at you like anything,” I sigh, standing to start negotiating her back toward my car.

“That’s what I mean,” she says, starting to cry. “So I’m going to tell you.”

We’ve attracted attention, finally. A curtain has stirred in the apartment next to our old one. Mr. Busby’s old place. And across the side-street, a stoop-backed old woman with a basket on her wrist and a long, white cane has emerged onto the sidewalk. Her hair is some crazy L.A. old-lady color, practically fuchsia in the twilight. She has a hand shading her eyes, as though even the echoes of orange in the west are too bright for her.

“Hey, Mom? We should probably go. I think it’s time to get you home. Simon Cowell and the gang are waiting.”

“I don’t know what made me call them,” she says. “The undertakers.” The sky has gone royal blue, and even the blue is draining away as though it’s being siphoned. The breeze has developed a bite, too, and the old woman across the street has made her way to the crosswalk, and now she’s inching in our direction. She’s thin, all in white, her stoop so pronounced that she almost looks likes a cane herself, for the shadows to lean on.

“Mom?” I say, with even more force than I intend. “I want to go, even if you don’t.”

“I hadn’t seen Evie in a while. I went up and knocked a few times. Mostly, there was no answer. I thought she’d finally gone away to see her sister or something. But then sometimes I’d hear her through the door. She sounded so small. I could hardly understand her.

“Mr. Busby tried a few pranks. ‘Going to lure her out,’ he’d say. ‘Get her blood going. Leyton knows what the ladies need.’ He’d stop every Jehovah’s Witness and Mormon missionary he saw and direct them to Evie’s door. One night around midnight, he came out on the grass with a ukulele and sang ‘Tiny Bubbles’ at the top of his lungs, except he kept saying ‘Tiny Evie’ instead. But she never appeared at the window. We had this possum family that took up residence by the dumpster, and he made a trail with orange peels and lettuce right to her door and got the whole family to camp outside it. But as far as I know, she never saw them.