Denis Ever After

  Even though the quarry was nearly two hundred miles from the battlefield, Detective Sparn decided the car they pulled out of the water was very likely the same car, mostly because the Youghiogheny is only thirty or so minutes from Funland, where I was last seen alive.

  The Honda was reported stolen from a parking lot in New Castle.

  “When Detective Sparn called the house to say they’d identified the car,” Matt tells Trey, “my dad screamed, ‘They found the car! Bonnie, they found the car!’ ‘What car?’ I asked them. But Mom goes, ‘It’s not the car,’ without missing a beat, as if she’d been waiting every day for news and had an answer ready. ‘It is the car,’ Dad told her. ‘Ed thinks so—’

  “‘Even if it is the car, how does it help?’ Mom said. Then she got up from the kitchen table, stood there, her face all gray. ‘My God, Gary,’ she said. ‘You were moving on. We just got to a place where we could breathe again. Where I could think about Denis as a baby, the funny things he did that were just his own. Now this, the stupid car? And he’s dead all over again. Let Denis go. He’s in a better place. He’s not with us anymore. He’s gone.’

  “Dad looked at me then,” Matt tells Trey. “He was stunned or something and didn’t say anything, so Mom bolted from the room. She hadn’t even finished eating. Not a word about the car since then.”

  “Whoa,” Trey says. “That’s hard.”

  I’m listening to Matt, and I get that what Mom had said to Dad was harsh, but I sort of agree with her. After years underwater, of course, there was no evidence left in the Honda—neither blood nor my sneaker nor the missing tooth—so finding the stolen car went as nowhere as everything else.

  Mom was right about me being gone, too.

  I’d been up here nearly five years when that conversation happened, walking the streets day after day in the sun with GeeGee, playing ball, shooting hoops with old pro-basketball players kept alive by sports fans. But now that I hear the grim facts of the police file, I wonder:

  Did I know what was happening to me?

  How long was I conscious before I died?

  I must have been terrified out of my mind.

  8

  The Purpose of Death

  When I trudge up the sand, exhausted from my latest stint at the grotto, GeeGee is sitting on the veranda of the beach club. She is not alone.

  Every day, after watching the boats come in, she plays cards with Russell and a couple of the other souls. I’ve seen them every now and then read one of Russell’s old books. Or try to.

  They’re some bunch, these souls.

  One is a loud man with a crest of hot pink hair. The other is a lady in big black medical sunglasses who complains about everything. I call her Frannie McFrown. Together they play a game called bridge, and every time I hear them announce a fresh game, I find myself remembering bridges.

  As usual Russell’s up there with GeeGee, but he’s not playing this time. He sits with his arms around his knees, looking out over the water.

  “I’m still in shock,” I say after I tell them what I discovered.

  “Well, of course you are, dear boy. Murder!” Russell says, unhugging his knees and jotting this down in his notebook. “Do be careful, though. The more you get drawn into their life down there, the worse it is for you up here. The purpose of death, as you know, is to become clean. As clean as clear glass. I’m sure there is a technical term I’ve forgotten, but that’s what Port Haven is all about. The mess down below will taint you. As fascinating as they can be, all those threads ensnare you. You get soiled, and you drag that up here. No, no. There’s a proper time for each of us to fade and pass away. I’ve told you the danger of staying down there too long.”

  “Pish-posh,” GeeGee says with a kind of pleasant scowl. “You should visit your brother for real now. There’s only so much you can do by watching through a fog. I would go again right now, but no one wants an old dead woman lurking behind the curtains. You . . . you could do some good.”

  “I say stay away,” says Pink Hair, strolling over from the card table with a pitying look. “You get full down there, like you just swallowed five potatoes. Once you do, the razor’ll cut you up nasty, and you’ll rip in half when your time comes.” He sets his face in a know-it-all expression.

  “Rip in half?” I ask.

  “Rip, rip, rip!” he says, as if he couldn’t wait for me to ask. “And you should hear the screaming. Huh-uh, Buster, it ain’t going to do you no good messing around down there.”

  And the word ain’t suddenly shoots through me like a jolt of electricity.

  I hear it deep in my ears, a cruel voice: angry, nasty, distant, long ago.

  Ain’t.

  I wonder. Near the end, in my last days alive, did someone say the word ain’t to me?

  “Russell?”

  “Mmm?”

  “What does it mean if instead of forgetting, you start to remember things?”

  “Ho-ho! It means you’re getting dirty again,” Pink Hair butts in. “You’re getting confused and heavy. It means you’re bucking the system, Frankie. You don’t want to be a mingler.”

  “Mingler?”

  Pink Hair sneers. “A crosser. A laggard.”

  “Those are unpleasant words,” GeeGee says. “Even for you, sonny boy.”

  Pink Hair shrugs. “A mingler stays too long, gets filthy. Up here, you forget and get clean. They planned it so you forget. That’s the point. To be all innocent to get back in. Why you think they call it Garden Hills? Plus, they need homes for all the other souls coming here. Look—another cruise liner. See what I mean?”

  GeeGee wrinkles her wrinkled face at Pink Hair. “They’re not homes we live in, dear boy, they’re houses. And that isn’t the reason anyway. It’s simply the right thing for us older folks to become one with the universe. But, David, you were so young, poor dear. I’ve tried to tell you things, and teach you what I know before I forget.”

  “You do teach me, GeeGee. You tell me lots. Birds and the names of things. Plants. Words and what they mean. Things about weather and people. Grown-up stuff.”

  “But I never really knew Matt,” she says. “Not as I know you. That’s always made me a little sad. Don’t you feel that, too?” She eyes the nick in my eyebrow and reaches a finger toward it, then lowers it. “Your brother won’t stop haunting you until you go down for real. He must need you desperately. That’s reason enough to go.”

  “He’s haunting you. A plot twist!” Russell writes that, too.

  “Well, he’s sure making my death miserable,” I say. “With all the noise, I can barely hear you guys anymore. I guess I have to go.”

  “It won’t do you no good,” Pink Hair repeats. “Believe me, it’s an unkind world for some of us.”

  “It’s true the razor will hurt,” GeeGee says, and places her palm against my forehead. “But doing it once is all right. And what a dear boy you are to want to visit your twin brother.”

  9

  Counterattack

  Once I decide to take the plunge, they’re all excited to pitch in with advice, especially GeeGee.

  “You have to plan these things,” she says, “and you have to do it in stages, or the shock can kill the poor dears, simply kill them dead. It has happened.”

  “Or he could combust,” Pink Hair says, and I wonder how he cannot know that people think he talks too much. He plops down at the nearby card table and shuffles two decks into one. “Boom! Game over. If your daddy isn’t ready, that is.”

  “My brother,” I say. “And he’s so ready.”

  “All right, then,” GeeGee says. “Let’s start with three visitations. I’ve always liked going from public to private.”

  “I agree,” Russell says, repositioning himself at the card table now and cutting the cards, which he passes back to Pink Hair, who shuffles them again.

  It seems to me that in all the times I’ve come here, I’ve never actually seen them play bridge. They just shuffle and deal, then shuffle and deal again
. I think they’ve forgotten the rules.

  “The first time you show yourself, make it startling,” Russell advises, “but a bit vague. This tells him to be on guard, but if nothing else happens, he simply forgets.”

  “Get his attention for a moment, then stand aside,” GeeGee adds. “Be gentle about it. If your brother’s as sensitive a boy as you are, Donald, he’ll be stupefied!”

  Russell nods. “Exactly. For number two, I’d suggest an incident a bit more intense, but still brief. Just enough to give him a pitter-patter in his bowels. Finally, a private place—”

  “Not a bathroom,” laughs Pink Hair. “That’s a hotbed of problems, let me tell you!”

  “Perhaps his room at home is best?” GeeGee offers.

  “Just so,” says Russell. “This is where you finally reveal who you are. Allow him to be surprised, but not in front of anyone, so you control the scene. You simply confront him and say, ‘Hello, Marcus!’”

  “Matt. I’m going to visit Matt.”

  “And if Matt doesn’t want to believe it,” Russell says, “you remind him of the first two times. ‘Do you recall when I tripped you in chapel, or the time I pulled your braid on the polo field?’ That sort of thing. You need to prime the pump. By the third time, you’ve got him. You tell him in no uncertain terms, ‘Stop haunting me!’ That’ll set him straight. Then you come back, forget all about it, and get pure.”

  “Sounds good to me,” I say. “Murder is icky, and this noise in my head is scrambling my brain.”

  GeeGee is nodding through this, and finally, so are Pink Hair and Frannie McFrown, who has just joined the table and is building a house from the cards that Pink Hair has just dealt.

  “So,” GeeGee says, “what is Matt’s life like? Where does he go, what does he do? Give us the details, as they say.”

  I think about it. “Well, there’s our house, his friend Trey’s house—you’d like Trey, GeeGee—also the woods and streets between the two houses, the neighborhood—Matt bikes lots of places—the school, sports stuff. He plays trumpet in the school band. Plus, he must go to the library to look up old newspapers. My death was reported in lots of them.”

  GeeGee beams. “First stop, band practice. So much wind is blowing around that room, you’ll be right at home.”

  “But keep it simple. Don’t appear to anyone but him, and don’t stay long,” Russell warns, tapping his finger on his notebook. “Glide through, try not to use your senses. The more you see and feel, the heavier you become, and, well, I wouldn’t risk it. You can’t do the razor more than a few times. I did once or twice. This young lady here has too, if I recall.”

  “I have,” GeeGee says, almost shyly. “You don’t want to anymore, though. Not at my age.”

  “And watch out for encampments,” Pink Hair adds. “Rippety-rip-rip!”

  “Encampments? What do you mean?”

  Pink Hair just chuckles to himself, while Russell’s face manages to pale even more. “What our friend is referring to are those grim places where souls are trapped, unable to wrench themselves free to return. Finally, however, the process overtakes them. Violently. And minglers are forced to return here. Stay clear of such places, for your own health.”

  “Remain a few hours at most,” GeeGee adds. “You must protect yourself.”

  “Thanks, GeeGee,” I say. “I love you. Please don’t go anywhere while I’m down there.”

  She pats my cheek, checks my forehead again. “Oh, it isn’t up to me, dear. Put in a good word for me down there, though, will you? Slow things down a bit. So I can spend more time with you . . . Oh, I do love you . . . mmm . . . which one are you again?”

  I put my arms around her shoulders and they seem so slight, they almost fold under me, like paper.

  “Denis,” I whisper in her ear. “I’m Denis.”

  And my heart, or whatever is in there, aches.

  10

  The Razor

  Next morning I wake early, Matt’s voice having dragged nails across my brain all night. Following a winding path into the foothills that GeeGee and Russell told me about, I hike up to the very edge of Port Haven. It gets colder with every step, and I know Garden Hills is just beyond the crest, but luckily, I find what I’m looking for at the end of a narrow trail—a large dented metal structure like an abandoned utility shed.

  This is where they keep the razor.

  I know the stories—Russell and GeeGee have both told me what they know, Pink Hair, too, of course—but I find out soon enough that grotto-gazing is cheesecake compared to this.

  After nudging through the iron door into the dark—it’s not locked; that would be cruel—you close it behind you, draw in a breath, and pretty much die again.

  They call it the razor because when you pass into the other life, it’s like pushing yourself face-first into a tall vertical razor that stretches from your head to the floor. Imagine slicing yourself in half and reassembling on the other side of the blade, which, by the way, burns like a hot wire.

  This is just what the razor feels like, you understand. There’s no real seven-foot-tall blade anywhere in heaven, because that would be not only uncool, but insane. We’re souls, not bodies. But this is what it feels like.

  So I do it.

  I slice myself in half.

  Since it’s my first time, it takes longer and hurts more than I feared. I’m sure they design it that way to keep people from haunting somebody for a joke. We don’t have bodies, but with the razor, you’re convinced you have one, and you feel every fiber of it as one by one your nerves are severed. You feel as if you leave bits of yourself on the blade, tissue and sinew, except you don’t want to look back to see.

  But I do it for Matt. I do it for Matt, I tell myself, because I’m such a good brother. I want to see him and spend an hour or two with him, before I tell him off and jet back to Port Haven to come clean. But I do it for myself, too. If I really was murdered—which I still can’t believe—don’t I need to know more, even if it hurts?

  Can I leave the awful thing alone? Can I really move on before discovering what these things mean?

  Yellow leaves.

  The shadow in my eye.

  Floating and drowning.

  Ain’t.

  I feel altered after the razor—sad, sick, even ashamed. It takes some minutes before I can focus my eyes and see where I am.

  A narrow rain-wet street of squat two-story houses with attics. Some have front porches, rough driveways, and detached single-car garages. Most have peeling paint or buckled siding, overgrown lawns, untrimmed shrubs, all of it so different from the neatness of Port Haven.

  The road is paved, but potholed and uneven. Litter collects in the gutters. It’s a gray little street like millions of others, I guess, but I remember it. More than that, I feel this street. I see it and smell it. I hear it and touch it and taste it in my mouth. I know I shouldn’t, but I do.

  It’s where I used to live.

  11

  Buckwood

  Buckwood’s not all the way awake.

  It’s late September, barely summer anymore, but the air hasn’t turned yet. That will change. A cool wind will steal in one night, and October will be here. Then November will fall over the town like iron, hard and cold. Ugly November. I hate November.

  I know I’m supposed to forget all of this, but it rushes at me like a herd of horses, and I’m suddenly afraid to forget. What’s happening to GeeGee is sad, and it scares me. I don’t want to drift off into the hills. I know in my soul that remembering is against the rules, and what Russell said haunts me like a mantra. The purpose of death is to become clean. There’s a proper time for each of us to fade and pass away. But being here again, I crave for people to think of me, love me, keep me dead in their hearts and minds. I didn’t get enough of that when I was alive because I wasn’t around long enough.

  That’s what hurts me now.

  Get clean of everything, forget the funkiness of life, flee from the clutter in the world you live
d in—that’s what Pink Hair and the others were on about. Shower off the sloppy jumble of life, the smell, the taste, and touch of it, sure, that’s the law. But I’m standing on the bit of crooked sidewalk running the length of my front yard, and I can see each weed and blade of crabgrass sprouting in the cracks. A crumpled coffee cup lies in the gutter, a plastic wrapper, the stalk of a pen. The band of lawn between the walk and the street needs serious trimming. So does the yard. The grass is ragged. I practically hear it growing. I know Dad is a landscaper, and this can’t be good for business, but it’s like nobody cares enough because they can’t care enough because they’re too busy dealing with the junk of having to be alive.

  I don’t know. I don’t, but right now, I feel sad to have left it all.

  My room, the room I shared with Matt, is in the corner on the left on the second floor. One window looks south, the other west. The front one gets the morning light at an angle.

  The house faces pinewoods and a range of blue hills. Because the rising sun is behind them, the hills are even bluer this morning. The gables of our house are just beginning to catch the orange light. They’ll turn yellow, then white when the full sun rises.

  This is the happy house I grew up in, and now its rafters are shaking with pain.

  A gray pickup slows carefully at the stop sign. The willow in the side yard Matt and I used to climb barely holds its leaves. We’d play detective in the woods beyond, find each other, hide again, making a game in what we thought were big woods but that now look sparse.

  There’s a familiar click, and our front door opens. Mom whooshes down the steps, dressed for work. Her face is blank. The pickup drives away from the stop sign. In a few quick moves, Mom is in her car, starts, backs out onto the street, and drives off as if she’s left an empty house.

  In fact, both Matt and my father are inside.

  Maybe Dad is still hunched over breakfast.

  Matt could be pulling his school junk together. In a few minutes he’ll say some words to Dad, leave the house, hop on his bike. He lives too close to school to rate a stop on the bus route. Mom doesn’t work at the school library anymore, but an hour away in Pittsburgh. It’s a matter of minutes one way or the other if she breezes into work or gets stuck in traffic. I sense all of this.