Amelia Gray: Threats

One day while Franny was away, he took out all the forgotten food in the freezer. There were bricks of ground beef fuzzed over with frost, pints of old ice cream with one hard spoonful remaining. There were stale potpies, which David used to eat when nobody else was home, and four tubes of concentrated apple juice from years ago, when they had thought of throwing a party but decided against it.

He put a potpie in the oven and the beef in the sink. He let the ice cream thaw for an hour and drank the watery substance that remained. He mixed three pitchers of apple juice and lined them up in the fridge. He didn’t have a fourth pitcher so he mixed the remaining juice in an old vase. He drank apple juice and ate the potpie, which had leached in the flavors of the freezer and tasted like plastic and wet paper. He thought about how the potpie was a product of its environment.

When Franny came home, she found the freezer-burned meatloaf next to a potpie that was old enough to attend middle school. Her mother’s vase was full of juice in the center of the table. The sight of the vase reminded her of the woman her mother had been, the kind of woman who cleaned a vase with a moistened cotton swab in the event that someday, if someone felt the urge to drink juice out of it, they could pursue that urge. Franny sat down to eat with her husband.

FRANNY NEVER CAME TO DAVID in dreams, and he respected her for that. He had heard of ghosts that moved through empty houses, opening cabinets or moaning in the hallway. There was the variety of ghost that sat at the foot of the bed and smiled, but when you reached toward it, you found only the sheets twisted around your legs and the darkness of the room beyond. Ghosts might leave footprints on a porch or follow you down a crowded street, staying just far enough behind and ducking into an alley every time you turned around. There was the kind of ghost who would fill a room with her scent. There were ghosts that traveled in a collective of ghosts, making a competition of it, ticking points off their list as they haunted the darker hallways of historical buildings.

There were ghosts that disguised themselves as glowing orbs in photographs, in such a way that some people would claim they were simple tricks of the light, overexposure of the camera or imperfections in the lens, while others would doubt the trick and believe. The ghosts, which could have appeared in any shape, orblike or otherwise, had the power to trick the living while still making their presence known. All ghosts found this to be very funny.

Some ghosts were mute, and other ghosts murmured to keep themselves company. Some had the power to throw chains against walls, but they were ghost chains and behaved differently from chains one might find wrapped in a coil at a hardware store. There was sound without weight, because the ghosts rarely had the power to lift more than the individual hairs on a pair of arms. It was a frustration to the ghosts, many of whom had spent long lives lifting things. Ghosts tended to express their frustration by causing trouble. A few dug around in trash cans. They pulled out cotton swabs and left them scattered around the room. When the victim entered, he worried that things were not as they seemed.

If Franny was out there somewhere, frustrated, she made no sign. She was the type to employ the silent treatment. He remembered her frowning past him, sitting alone on the couch with one of her magazines, then taking the magazine and heading out back.

She always seemed to end up in the woods behind the house when she was upset. He followed her out there once and found her standing by the stream on the far side of the farmer’s fence. The stream was dry most of the year or covered in snow or leaves from the ash trees or ice, forming a thin line of flowing water when it warmed up enough for the snow to melt. When she saw he had followed her, Franny turned around and went back inside, and there was no dinner later. David toasted a piece of bread.

After that, he let her stay in the woods as long as she wished. She would go out unannounced and stay all day, returning hours later with webs in her hair.

IT HAD BEEN A CLOUDLESS SPRING DAY near the end of Chico’s first month as an officer, forty years before. He and his new partner got the call to head to an old motel. The place was boarded up and vacant but still had its signs up advertising color TV and a reduced rate, the rooms wrapped around a near-empty parking lot. The locks on the doors had been bashed away, and most rooms were home to off-book tenants favoring methamphetamines over their off-book kids, who cried bitterly and scrubbed their faces. The city had organized most of the resources required for a sting operation on the place but hadn’t yet collected enough money for a battering ram.

The call came in concurrently with an ambulance call for a drowning. No residents came out to greet the siren. The noise set off wails from two or three children who were heard but not seen in the recesses of the motel. Their noise made it seem as if the building itself was crying, the sound released from multiple points.

“Assholes,” said the older officer, knocking on the last door and then kicking it with some affection using the side of his boot. The ambulance arrived as Chico and his partner made the rounds. The paramedics either had been given more information or knew by instinct, and they took their gear to the pool.

The pool, long since drained, had found a second life dedicated to collecting rain and mosquitoes. A foot of green water shone and stank at the bottom, dotted with leaves and rust, which served to highlight the white blemish of a naked child floating facedown. One of the paramedics waded in with a stabilizing board smaller than any Chico had seen before. He turned the child’s body, secured it to the board, and lifted it up in his arms. Chico smelled burning plastic and asphalt. His kit belt was heavy around his waist. Each night that month, he took the belt off and rubbed a balm into the rashed skin.

The paramedic carried the board to the shallow end, where his partner was waiting. The child looked to be a toddler, a little girl, two or three years old. Her stomach was distended and her eyes were mottled with sludge. One of the girl’s arms was shrunken, which gave it the appearance of being held protectively close. Her body was naked, save for a bulbous white cloth diaper. Chico watched the paramedics swab the child’s face. He thought he saw some slight movement in the body and stopped walking to confirm that there was none. When he walked closer, he saw the twitch again. He was sure of it. The paramedics were packing up their supplies, kneeling next to the child.

“You checked the pulse,” Chico said.

The bigger paramedic put his hand on his chest and looked back at him. “You scared me,” he said.

“I want to make sure we follow protocol.”

“Jesus, you scared me. I thought you were back there by the wall and then you came up behind me and scared the word out of me. My goodness.” He touched the edge of the board. “This one’s gone,” he said.

“You checked her pulse, though.” He came closer, standing nearly overhead. He lifted his hand to block the sun from the child’s closed eyes. “You know what they say about protocol.”

The paramedic squinted at him. “What do they say?”

Chico understood that it seemed impossible for the child to be alive, but holding his hand over the sun seemed to shift the girl’s features, as if a flutter of a pulse could be coaxed out with the right lighting conditions. He held up another hand and shaded the child’s entire face. “It’s there,” Chico said, both hands stretched high. “Protocol is there for a reason.”