Electric Elizabeth: A Novel

  She touched my shoulder and walked out the door, her wide hips and stocky body slicing the pale hallway light. The door closed quietly behind her, and I was alone again. The hospital room hummed from the heating system, and the disembodied voices from the hospital paging system floated on the air like ghosts.

  ***

  I was discharged the next morning.

  Maria was waiting by the front entrance, standing next to her black patrol car. A nurse wheeled me out in a wheelchair, then locked the wheels and allowed me to stand like a mother bird releasing her young from the nest. I hobbled to the patrol car, and Maria held my left elbow, guiding me into the front passenger seat. Snowflakes fell from a gray-green sky, and cold wind blew through my blue hospital-issued pajamas and robe, penetrating my skin, muscles, and bones.

  Maria had called the previous afternoon, two hours after she'd left my hospital room. They'd searched the house, kitchen to attic, attic to basement. Liz's purse and cell phone were still sitting on her dresser, and the house itself was empty and quiet. Maria told me how the front porch light flickered when they arrived, so she said they checked the light switches and found them to be working fine.

  "Nothing there," Maria said as the patrol car sped down the street. "The phone rang a few times when we searched the house but nothing else."

  "Who was it?" I asked, my eyes squinting from the gray daylight.

  "I'm not sure," Maria said, steering the car onto the road that would take us back to Blackbridge. "We thought maybe you were calling to check on things."

  "I have been calling," I said. "I was hoping she'd pick up."

  "We saw the answering machine was filled with messages. I picked up the phone when it rang. Wasn't you, was it?"

  "No."

  "Kind of figured," she said. "Just some noises. Like someone's got their phone wires crossed with yours. Buzzing and whatnot. You might want to get your wiring checked out. You know, when you get the chance."

  I nodded.

  "You don't need cross-circuited phone calls at all hours of the night. You have enough on your plate, Milton."

  Maria steered the car over the wet, potholed Scranton streets. Christmas decorations still hung from streetlamps. Candy canes. Bethlehem stars. Candles. Twenty minutes later, we left Scranton behind and headed toward the low hills, now ashen in winterlight. We crossed a narrow yellow bridge above the icy rapids of the Lackawanna River, crossed old railroad tracks that still carried rolling stock through the narrow gaps in the hills, and turned onto Lowland Road. The road and railroad tracks ran parallel to the river, and we followed it south, followed it as it gently twisted and turned into the gap that closed Blackbridge off from the rest of the county.

  I thought of the first time I drove Liz down Lowland Road, how the tall green trees closed off the light and shaded our way, how she stuck her arm out the window as the cool air pushed through her hair, and how I thought that it looked like she wanted the air to lift her up and out of the passenger seat and into the sky.

  We rounded the last turn in the road, and Maria slowed the car. Lowland Road transformed into Polaris Avenue, pointing due north at the Susquehanna River gap during the day and the North Star at night. Blackbridge sat quietly under the flurried sky, the surrounding hilltops cottonballed with clouds, the forests dusted with snow. We crossed the town limits, passed Riverview Cemetery to our right, then turned right again onto Jay Street. The road rose up a slight incline as we passed quiet houses painted thick with reds and browns and greens.

  At the curve's apex where it turned left and became Vela Street, my house sat alone on its corner lot, white and empty, the steep eastern hillsides backdropping it with gray. We pulled into the driveway where Mom's old cranberry Saturn sedan and Liz's baby blue Volkswagen Beetle sat, both crusted over with ice and snow, the white dust surrounding them untrammeled by tire or footprint. I'd hoped to see Liz pull aside a curtain and look out at the road, smiling, her hands beckoning me to come inside.

  But the curtains remained closed, and the snow piled on the window frames was undisturbed.

  I was home.

  Chapter Two

  Blackbridge, Pennsylvania, sits in a geological bowl formed by tall, steep hills ringing the circumference and the two rivers slicing narrow gaps through them: the Lackawanna River from the northeast and the Susquehanna from the north. The rivers carve twisting routes before merging at the town's far southern end, the slow-churning Susquehanna swallowing the narrow, fast-moving Lackawanna before snaking south, scything away land to form islands and muddy sand bars from the crumbling banks.

  Four black steel rail bridges dot the riverscape, one over the Lackawanna River, three over the Susquehanna. Only one of the Susquehanna bridges is still in operation, still holding up the long lines of rail traffic that move from north to south and south to north. Decades ago, the bridges helped haul anthracite coal from mines to steel mills and factories. Eventually, the mines closed, and the town began to die. The two dormant bridges sit and rust, awaiting the day when their bones can no longer hold them up and eventually collapse into foam and dark brown waters.

  The hilltops surrounding Blackbridge are dotted with antenna farms that scrape clouds with their tall, thin masts, red warning lights throbbing in timed sequences, bright and steady. Some of the antennas are owned by the state for police and fire departments. Some of them bounce television and radio signals across the rivers and the gaps. Some of the antennas seem to have no owner, relaying and radiating things that none of us know, maybe things we're not supposed to know.

  Some nights, the town's edges are alight with balls of floating wisp light that float around the cemetery, the forests, or the pine swamp at the town's extreme northern edge, floating silently and seemingly without purpose, dim blue-green like light through dirty ice. They rise at twilight from the earth and drift like glass floats, pulling away when one tries to touch them. They dance silently, just out of reach, holding steady over the thickest forests and the roughest river currents, sometimes gathering around the antennas like acolytes praying to electric gods. At sunup, they flicker and die, leaving only empty spaces.

  Some nights, luminous, vaporous green clouds rise from the cemetery or the hillsides and form legs, arms, torsos, and heads, then walk routes that only they know. They walk down streets and alleys, down sidewalks and past houses. They stop, look down, and stand as if in thought, then fade away. I saw my first vapor when I was five. I watched it from my bedroom window as my father raged in the kitchen downstairs. As the evening went from purple to black, a lone vapor ambled down the sidewalk, moving slowly as if unsure where each step would take it. It stopped beneath me, looked up, then formed a wide mouth and two dark, ragged eyes. It reached up to me as if wanting me to lift it to the window and take it inside, then faded like fog under sunlight, leaving the street dark again and my father screaming at my mother in the kitchen.

  Some like to think the vapors are loved ones visiting us, consoling us, telling us that they're always with us to comfort us. Few seem to consider that maybe they're watching us with envy, wanting to bring us over with them. We often forget how loved ones tend to hurt us the most.

  Sometimes Catholic mystic shrines appear by the roadsides, small altars of brick and hand-painted icons ablaze with dripping holy candles.

  Sometimes there are fluttering sounds in empty homes, like invisible birds slapping their wings against the window glass to escape.

  Sometimes the shadows whisper here.

  Sometimes the streets cry.

  And now, sometimes people disappear into shafts of lightning.

  We live in houses built when the town still had dreams, before the dreams went to that other world. Some work in the ever-shrinking railyard on the western edge of town, the ever-shrinking school district or town government, or in the few remaining downtown stores. Most work over the hills in Pittston, Scranton, or Wilkes-Barre, leaving the town empty for most of the d
ay until the late afternoon, when the residents return with paychecks and groceries, speeding home down the one road connecting the town to the rest of the county, trying to beat the falling dark. At night, most close up their homes and retreat to their living rooms or bedrooms, where the windows are painted blue from television light.

  There is a newspaper, the Blackbridge Banner, and a small radio station, WCAM, that once reported the same information that most small-town media outlets usually do, at least before Bentley Burke took them over: sports news from the local high school, government news from town hall, classifieds from local residents, weather reports, and so on. Now the newspaper has subscriptions from as far away as Oregon, and the radio station has listeners several counties over who tune their radios and position their antennas to hear the broadcasts bounce into their homes.

  Sometimes the outside world intrudes with vans or cars crammed with camera-carrying tourists and ghost hunters who seek a thrill, a postcard from that other world. Sometimes they leave empty handed, other times they get too close and leave town without a word, but always they ask us why we stay while the streets are alive with vapors, the treeline is afire with wisps, and the shadows are saturated with strange sounds.

  And they never seem to understand that, no matter where we go, the ghosts of Blackbridge follow us everywhere.

  Chapter Three

  I was born miles away in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, on a cold December night, my birth greeted with graupel and wind. The next morning, the streets were slick with ice, and power lines sagged and groaned with glaze ice under a cold sun. My father, Ronald, had been stuck miles away in Scranton at the Conrail office where he'd worked. My mother, Mary, had me alone at the hospital. It was another day until the roads were completely salted and cindered before I was taken home, my shivering body wrapped in a blue blanket covered with stars.

  My first memory is of a room in late afternoon. I'm lying on a bed, and the walls, though painted white, are pink from sunset. There is a crucifix on a wall. There is a breeze tapping at the window.

  There is a shout from a room beyond the closed door.

  My father was a tall man, towering over me by almost a foot by the time I reached my height in high school. His eyes were coal, his hair salt and pepper, his body straight and solid like an antenna braced against the sky. Those dark eyes followed me whenever I passed them. That body blocked my path wherever I walked, and I always stepped clear of its shadow. I held my breath when I smelled his aftershave, deodorant, or shaving soap, keeping him out of my mouth, my nose, and my lungs. I cleaned my room spotless everyday to keep any of his particles out. I stayed out of the house as long as I could to keep his words from my ears.

  At night, I couldn't tell the difference between the crash of boxcars in the railyard and the slamming of doors in the house, each violent slam shaking my chest and making me jump like sudden summer thunder. Even now, when a door slams, my nerve-numbed leg jumps, and I await the thump of work boots on hard wood, a shouted word, a heavy mumble outside my bedroom door.

  When Dad punched me, the pain penetrated from one side of my body to the other like electricity finding its path. My chest and back were his favorite targets. Maybe because they were the largest targets, or maybe because they were the most easily hidden. And maybe he used his closed fist because using his feet meant using feet weary from walking around the office all day, or maybe he kept his hands closed because slapping meant using fingers weary from writing invoices and reports all day. I never asked him why he punched me in the back hard enough to bring blood to my mouth, or why he punched my chest hard enough to knock me flat on my back.

  But I once asked Mom.

  "The war," she said. "I think it was the war."

  He never bothered to tell me. Like Blackbridge, he burned with his secrets, and when he died one hot July afternoon in a Scranton parking lot from a burst brain vessel and was interred at Riverview Cemetery a few hundred yards from our house, I burned with mine: That I was glad he was dead.

  Mom burned with her secrets, as well.

  I know that she told no one at City Hall what our home life was like, that she typed away and filed and collated without saying a word. That she told no one about the days of silence, the afternoons of rushing home to make sure dinner was on the table, the evenings of sitting by the front window waiting for him to come home. That she sat in silence when he raised his right fist to me. That her sentences were spoken in quiet tones. That even though our house had three living souls walking its hallways, it was more empty and lifeless than cemetery pathways. She just wore her bright dresses in summer, her dark sweaters in winter, her white shoes before Labor Day, and her black pumps after.

  She'd grown up in Blackbridge, and she'd met Dad in their junior year at the high school. She went to secretarial school while he went to Penn State to learn accounting. Others have told me that she was always quiet and that the home that she'd inherited from her parents on Raven Street on the north side of town was a haunted one, which says nothing as are most homes in Blackbridge. She'd grown up quietly, and her house contained a mother and a father, and sometimes people saw the mother hanging clothes or sweeping the front porch, and they saw the father every morning and afternoon as he drove to and from work in the railyard, but otherwise saw nothing else except my mother walking by herself, clutching books to her chest as she made the two-block walk to school.

  The people who live in that house now hear footsteps in the middle of the night, a slow shuffling that stops at every door. They hear doors slamming in the kitchen and a deep breathing when the moon is full.

  Mom once pointed to the cemetery from our backyard at a pair of low concrete headstones at the graveyard's western edge sitting alone, edged by high grass. "That's my mom and dad," she said. "Did you know, Milton, my mom wanted to look out over the river after she died?"

  "What did your dad want?" I asked.

  Mom only folded her arms.

  Mom said her silence was just her nature. When Dad was alive, I'd think about what her real nature was and what she wanted to be, or if, like me she'd sat in the Blackbridge High School cafeteria and stared at the hills, or if she wondered how far away the Atlantic Ocean was and how the salt water would feel against her ankles, how the Death Valley sun would feel against her face, or how fast she could run over the Midwestern grasslands, or, when she turned the car onto Polaris Avenue on her way to work or on her way to dropping me off at school, if she wanted to turn the car south onto Lowland Road and leave the town behind forever. Or if she wanted to drive the car right into The Swamps and leave everything behind forever. I knew she typed well, filed well, kept appointments well, managed the town hall well enough that it spared the town the expense of a larger staff, but I knew nothing about the dreams that kept her warm at night.

  One early October day, the blue sky was alive with bird clouds that corkscrewed and rolled to the south. Mom drove her cranberry Saturn sedan to the edge of the longest bridge spanning the Susquehanna River on the town's western edge. The river was swollen from heavy rains in upstate New York, and the waters churned with swift currents. She had on her navy blue dress, and it flapped like a flag in the wind as she walked the span. She must have been wearing her blue pumps, her simple pearl earrings, and her butterfly pin that she used to secure her thick black hair. She must have. I couldn't find them afterwards. Mom stopped in the middle of the span, looked around, stepped off the bridge, then sank into a swirl of brown water and white foam.

  That night, the police boat searchlights made haloes in the river mist.

  The next day, they searched the riverbanks miles downstream, the sandbars, and the river islands. Some said they heard voices on the islands singing cryptic dirges.

  That's when I was seventeen, when I lived alone in a house overlooking a cemetery in a town ringed by dark hills, in a town where vapors walked the streets, where wisps wandered the woods, where we were and where we are constant
ly reminded that our end is coming. Soon.

  ***

  For weeks afterwards, I was visited by child protective services and police chief Robert Lorenzo. Child Protective Services wanted me in a foster home, but Chief Lorenzo said I'd be fine where I was, that I'd be eighteen in a month anyway, that I had no family nearby that he or I knew of, and that I could handle myself. A judge agreed, a life insurance check cut by a company most likely angered that Mom had leapt into the river two years after the suicide deadline on the policy arrived in the mail, and a court-appointed lawyer got me access to what was left in my mother's checking and savings accounts. He advised me to set aside money for bills, to get health insurance, to hold on to the house since it was paid-for, and that it would give me a place to stay while I worked through whatever life plan I had, if any.

  I thought of Mom, and again of what she might have wanted in life. I got her a flat grave marker though she had no grave and had it placed at the far eastern edge of the cemetery, away from her parents and away from Dad. For weeks afterwards, I stared at the cemetery, watching the vapors rise in the night and walk the roads, their dim glow cutting paths in the darkness.

  The local bank informed me of a safe deposit box in my mother's name sitting in their vault. In the thin, narrow box, she'd left a short note handwritten on yellow paper wrapped around a rolled bundle of what felt like sheets of parchment: I couldn't take the silence anymore. —Mom

  I unrolled the parchment and unfurled a stack of drawings: the town, the bridges, the hillsides covered in snow, the hillsides covered in burning autumn flame, the streets wet with rain, the streets lit by walking vapors. My fingers pulled away charcoal grains, ink flakes, oil pastel dust. I sat in the private bank room, running my fingers over the drawings, running my eyes over the lines and colors. In the corner of each drawing, a small name: Mary Conroy. One drawing was dated the day before her suicide: a dark pencil sketch of her feet standing on a railroad track. She wrote her name in simple cursive in the lower right-hand corner: Mary.

  ***

  The Blackbridge School District is not so much a district as it is a two-floor, two-winged building in the shape of an elongated L. The town's population is small enough that it was decided that the arrangement would suffice for any future projected growth in student population.