Karen Russell - Vampires in the Lemon Grove

“It’s been twenty goddamn years. Every other weekend, practically, I was there.”

“You did not— ”

“Dad thought you were crazy to stay, Mom practically begged you to go, so if you stayed, you did it for your own reasons. Okay? And I came to help plenty of times. I’m sorry if it wasn’t every fucking weekday like you. I’m sorry we can’t all be saints like you, Beverly. Healers— ”

Now she sounds like the older sister that Beverly remembers, her voice high and wild, stung, making fun.

“And I had my own family.”

“You had Stuart. The girls weren’t even born yet.” Beverly sputters. You got the girls , she manages not to say, although now her outrage is actually blinding.

“You’re not remembering right,” Janet insists. We were out there a bunch of times …”

“Janet! You can’t be serious!”

“We were and you know it.”

Beverly swallows. “But that’s simply not true.”

“I know I’ll regret saying this, okay, I’ve held my tongue for twenty years, I should get a damn medal like your little buddy out there. But who else is going to tell you? You are like a dog, Beverly.” Beverly can almost feel her sister’s fingers clawing into the telephone, as if they are wrapped around Beverly’s neck. “You’re like a sad dog. Your masters aren’t coming back. Sor-ry. Mom’s been dead for over a decade, do you realize that? You need some new tricks.”

Beverly takes a breath; it’s as if she’s been punched.

“You have no idea what I sacrificed—”

“Oh, give me a break. Die a martyr then. Jesus Christ.”

For many years, Beverly will remember every word of this conversation while failing to recall, no matter how hard she tries, who hung up first.

Quaking alone in her apartment, Beverly’s first impulse is to dial their old home phone number. If you were alive, Mom , she thinks, you would set the record straight . For years she’s assumed that she and Janet agreed on this point, at least: the basic chronology of their mother’s fight with cancer. What happened when. Who was present in which rooms. Beverly doesn’t know how to make sense of who she is today without those facts in place. With a chill she realizes there are no witnesses left besides herself and Janet. She has a sense memory of steering her mother down a long corridor, her wheelchair spokes glinting. Janet missed knowing that version of their mother. If Beverly stops pushing her now, or loses her grip, she will roll out of sight.

With her hand still tangled in the telephone cord, Beverly decides that she doesn’t want to be yet another of the cover-up artists. Can’t. She won’t go on encouraging the sergeant to lie to himself, just so he can sleep at night. She’s warped the truth, she pushed the truth under his skin, but she won’t allow it to go on changing. Suddenly it is vitally important to Beverly that Zeiger remember the original story, the one she has stolen from him. Whatever she’s wiped from his memory, she wants to restore. Immediately, if that’s possible.

“Derek? It’s Beverly. Can you come in tomorrow? I have a slot at nine …”

She gets a melting flash of an obscenely blue sky, blooming fire. A large bull is standing in a river, in chest-high green water, chains of mosquitoes twisting off its bony shoulders like tassels. Its eyes are vacuums. Placid and hugely empty. The animal continues lapping at its reddish shadow on the water, oblivious of the bomb behind it, while a thick smoke rolls over the desert.

When she sees Zeiger in person the following morning, with his big grin and his smooth, unlined face, she can feel her resolve fading. She knows she’s got to help him to recover his original memory, to straighten out the timeline of April 14 now, before she loses her nerve completely. He lies down on the massage table, and she’s glad his face is turned away from her.

“I was thinking about you a lot this weekend, Derek,” she says. “I saw a news show where they interviewed an army general about IEDs … I thought of your friend Arlo, of course. That story you told me once, about April 14—”

Derek doesn’t react, so she babbles on.

“This general said it was almost impossible to spot trip wires. He called them these ‘tiny wires in the dirt.’ And I thought, I’ll have to ask Derek if that was, ah, his same experience …”

There is no warning contraction of his shoulder blades.

“Of course it’s hard to spot the wires!” Derek explodes at her. He shakes off her hands, sits up. “You need TV to tell you that? You need to hear it from some general? Jesus Christ, it’s nine a.m., and you’re interrogating me?”

“Derek, please, there’s no need to get so upset—”

“No? Then why the hell did you bring up Arlo?”

“I’m sorry if I–I was only curious, Derek—”

“That’s right, that’s everyone. You’re ‘only curious,’ ” he snarls. “None of you has any idea what it was like. Nobody gives a shit.”

Derek rolls his legs away from her and stands, struggles into his shirt and pants, knocking into the massage table. Then he goes stumbling out of the room like a revenant, half dressed, trailing one sleeve of his jacket. Walking away from her so quickly that it’s impossible to tell what, if anything, changed on the tattoo.

Six thirty a.m. on Monday: Beverly is brushing her teeth when the phone rings. It’s Ed Morales, of course, who else would it be this early on a workday but Ed, his voice spuming through the receiver. Lance Corporal Oscar Ilana is dead, Ed tells her. Has been dead for two days. In the mirror, Beverly watches this information float on the surface of her gray eyes without penetrating them.

“Oh my God, Ed, I’m so sorry, how terrible …”

Not Derek is her only thought as she hangs up.

It remains that, beating in her head like a bat, a tiny monster of upside-down joy: not-Derek, not-Derek . Then the bat flies off and she’s alone in a cave. Oscar. She remembers who he is — was, she corrects herself. Another of their VA referrals. One of Ed’s patients. He’d survived three IED blasts in Rustamiyah. She’d chatted with him once in the waiting room, a lean man with glasses, complaining about how pale he’d gotten since coming home to Wisconsin although his skin was a beautiful maroon. He’d passed around a photograph of his two-year-old daughter. For a new veteran, he’d seemed remarkably relaxed. Cracking himself up.

The news of Lance Corporal Ilana’s death turns out to be hidden in plain sight in her apartment, spread out on her countertop, gathering leaky drips from her ceiling. After Ed calls her, she finds the Saturday newspaper where his suicide was reported—

The soldier died in his car of an apparently self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head at 11:15 p.m. At 11:02 p.m., he reportedly sent a text message to his wife informing her of his plans to harm himself.

Beverly cancels every appointment in her book except for Derek Zeiger. Then Zeiger fails to show. For the first time in three years, Beverly skips work. Beds down straight through noon with the blinds half drawn, the sunbeams rattling onto her coverlet. Through the mesh of light she can still see Arlo Mackey’s ruined face. Go away , she whispers. But the ghost is in her body, not her room, and scenes from his last day continue to invade her.

“It all came at you like you didn’t have a brain,” Derek told her once, describing the routine chaos of their patrols.

Beverly has never been a drinker. But after learning of Oscar Ilana’s death she returns from the liquor store with six bottles of wine. Between Monday and Friday four bottles disappear. Into her, it seems, as unlikely as she finds these new hydraulics of her apartment. It turns out the dark cherry stuff doesn’t help her to sleep, but it blurs the world she stays awake in. What a bargain for ten bucks, she thinks, on her tiptoes in the liquor store. Maybe she can fix the problem by moving the sun again. How far back would she have to rewind it, to instill a permanent serenity in Derek? Hours? Eons? She imagines blue glaciers sliding over Fedaliyah, the soldiers blanketed in ice. It seems incredible to her that she ever thought she might do this for him — wring the whole war from his tissue and bone. In Esau, night lightens into dawn. Cars begin to jump and whine across the intersection at six a.m. When an engine backfires, she flinches and grinds down on her molars and watches the Humvee erupt in flames.