The Kings and Queens of Roam: A Novel

  But the way it was with that girl was the way it was with Helen. They didn’t have to say anything. They didn’t have to talk at all. They just looked at each other and they knew, even though with Helen it would take some time for her to admit it, to accept it. He knew her name and she knew his. This is something he wanted to talk about with Fang and He-Ping, those two old souls. But when he got back to the tavern that night they were gone, and he hadn’t seen them since. It was as if they had died—again. But it wasn’t like that at all, and he knew it: they were starting their second life, in their new home.

  He dressed, ate his breakfast, and walked down McCallister past the darkened storefronts and piles of discarded furniture, and when he passed the abandoned houses the old-timers came to the windows and waved. He waved back. They were always so happy, happier than most of the living he knew. They wanted for nothing, now that most of them had their homes back. Maybe that’s what contentment was, not to want anything anymore. Or maybe that’s what it meant to be truly dead.

  It had been a rough year, truth be told, for him, for Helen, for the whole town. But mostly for Helen. He’d visit her, after Rachel disappeared, once a week, then twice a week, then every day: he worried about her, not able or willing then to admit to himself that worry and love were not that much different. She didn’t eat, she lost weight, until her clothes hung off of her like drapes, and whatever light there was behind her eyes dimmed and darkened and died.

  He’d seen this happen before. Not with people, but with animals. He’d never tell Helen this story—he would never tell anybody—but he’d had a goat when he was a boy, and the goat fell in love with one of the wild cats that lurked around the barn, and the cat fell in love with the goat. They ate together, slept together, went everywhere together: they were a couple, even though they couldn’t have been more different.

  Then the cat died. Run over by a thresher out in the field. It was awful. Worse, after a few days of being alone in the world, the goat killed himself. Suicide. Digby saw it happen. The goat hurled himself in front of a team of horses, pulling a carriage with some dignitary in it—one of the last horse-drawn carriages in Roam. Digby had never seen anybody kill themselves before or since—until now: Helen really was giving it her best shot.

  She’d have done it, too, if it hadn’t been for Digby. He kept her alive. He brought her water and milk. He gave her food; he made her eat. He sat in a chair and talked to her. Then he sat on the edge of her bed. Then he slept with her—just slept, being a warm, living body, ready proof that someone in the world cared for her, that she wasn’t alone. Slowly, she came back, and when she got back she wasn’t the way she was before. It was as if she’d gone to a foreign country and learned things there, new customs, ways of being she had never imagined were possible. For starters, she was kind to him, and grateful, and she never mentioned—even once—what a small man Digby was, how close to being a midget without being one, and every night she made sure he had a fresh case on his pillow, because a fresh pillowcase was insurance against having bad dreams. And she prayed. She prayed all the time: when she woke up, before she went to sleep, and then three or four times over the course of the day. Why she did this was a mystery, but he didn’t ask because he didn’t want to rock the boat.

  Then, one night, she told him everything—the whole story, from the beginning, from that rainy day Helen was brushing Rachel’s hair to the day Rachel left and Jonas died. A month had passed since he’d come to stay with her, over three since her sister had gone, and she told him what had happened, what she’d done, her words hovering like moths in the bedside candlelight. And finally he understood her.

  A long quiet passed between them, and then he said, “It was raining, you say?”

  “What?”

  “The day you—um—traded faces with Rachel. It was raining, and the two of you were sitting on the bed listening to the rain?”

  “Yes, why?”

  They were leaning back against the headboard, the tops of their heads exactly even, and he couldn’t help but notice, as he noticed every night, how her toes, which gently jutted upward from under the sheets, were about two feet closer to the far edge of the bed than were his own.

  “Do you ever wonder what would have happened if it hadn’t been raining that day?”

  “Ah! It’s the rain’s fault!”

  He moved closer to her. “Imagine,” he said. “Imagine if it hadn’t been raining. You wouldn’t have been inside, bored, and she wouldn’t have asked the question. You wouldn’t have answered it. And we wouldn’t be here in this bed, talking.”

  He touched her on the cheek.

  “That’s how it is,” he said. “In a moment, everything can change. And we can change everything in a moment. One life is this far away”—he held his thumb and index finger a hair’s width apart—“this far away from another one, a different one, a new one.”

  The church hadn’t been opened for twenty-five years. The tall, heavy wooden doors—big enough for a bear to walk through—had been locked by some long-gone caretaker and forgotten. But the locks were unnecessary: no one wanted to be there. Church had never caught on in Roam. There were weddings, and funerals, and a preacher came through town once and tried to explain to whoever would listen all the good things a church could do for the town. But it didn’t take. It had been built to fill the void left by the death of Elijah McCallister, but it turned out that nothing could fill that void. Whatever meaning Roam had was attached so firmly to its creator that, once he was gone, meaning was gone, too, and no amount of invention was going to bring it back.

  But one day Helen passed the church on one of her walks with Digby (she took the same walks she used to take with Rachel, but there were no birds or Boneyards anymore: just the empty old town), and she stopped, turned, and stared at it. She stared for a good five minutes. Then she walked up the stone steps and tried to open the door. There was a large metal lock clasping the door handles, and she turned to Digby and said, “Can you help me get this lock off?” He returned a few minutes later with a crowbar.

  “This item was often used on the skulls of the more cantankerous tavern patrons. It has served me well.”

  Then he put it to the door, and in a moment the lock swung loose and fell to the stones with a thud.

  Inside the dark vastness, the air was thick with dust, and in seconds both Helen and Digby were coughing more than they were breathing. Digby gave Helen his handkerchief, and he pressed the sleeve of his shirt (which was too big for him, as almost all of his shirts were) against his mouth. Light barely penetrated the stained glass, and what light did eke through was colored thick shades of red and blue. Unable to see where he was going, Digby tripped over a wooden pedestal, and the flowerpot on top of it crashed to the floor.

  “That’s an omen,” Digby said. “Maybe we shouldn’t be in here.”

  She took his hand and squeezed it. “Or maybe you should watch where you’re going.”

  They made their way down the aisle until they came to the altar. There were two candelabras on either side of an ornate podium, and as they stood in silence Digby thought he could read Helen’s mind. He removed a box of wooden matches from his pocket and lit one of the candles. Suddenly the immensity of the church was clear: it was as if they were standing inside the belly of a whale. The ceiling was higher inside than it was outside, if that was possible. The rafters appeared not to have been cut from trees but to be trees themselves. Behind the altar was a mural of an angry god, robed in silk, with his eyes gazing heavenward; in his right hand he held fire and in his left ashes, which were falling from his hand like black snow. The face, Digby and Helen both recognized from the hallway portraits in their own house, was that of Elijah McCallister. The candlelight flickered; a bird left its nest in the rafters and fluttered past their heads. Digby had a moment of spiritual awakening during which he was able to sense the presence of some greater power living coexistent with him in the world; then he wanted a drink. He wanted a drink in the
worst way.

  “I guess we should get out of here before something falls on our heads,” he said and tried to turn, knowing there was no way it was going to be that easy. It wasn’t.

  Helen knelt and pulled him down with her.

  “Are we praying, Helen?” he asked.

  She nodded.

  “Do we have to?”

  “We do,” she said.

  And, for some reason Digby was unable to fathom, they did.

  It took them a month or more to clean the church, and they spent every single day doing it, just the two of them. There were still some people left in town who might have helped—there were probably two dozen warm bodies in Roam, fewer every day—but there were none who had any interest in improving a place they had every intention of leaving just as soon as they found another place to go to. Helen didn’t ask them to help, though, and neither did Digby. Digby didn’t even ask Helen why they were cleaning it, or for whom, because he knew. It was for Helen. Every moment she spent absorbed in the rehabilitation of this pointless structure was a moment she didn’t have to think about Rachel, or herself, or about what had happened and what she’d done. She’d given herself to something greater than herself, and that gave her a chance to escape herself.

  He just wished she wouldn’t make him pray so much. Helen had a limitless enthusiasm for prayer. It could happen at any moment. It got so he was afraid to walk past her while they were working for fear she would grab some part of him and pull him down to the floor. He wasn’t against it, but he preferred to know why he did what he was doing. He preferred to have a reason, something tangible, like a bottle of scotch and a glass of potato vodka. But then he’d feel a hand on his shoulder, and that was all she wrote.

  “I think I’ve prayed for everything I can pray for, Helen,” Digby finally protested.

  “There’s no end to praying, Digby,” she said. “Especially for people like you and me.”

  “Why people like you and me?”

  “Because of all the time we spent not praying.”

  Together they lowered themselves to the floor. He let her start, because it was her idea and because it took her twice as long to get there.

  “Figure it out yet?” he asked.

  “What?”

  “Who we’re praying to, and what good it’s supposed to do. That sort of thing.”

  A shaft of sun highlighted the sea of dust between them. “You want a name,” she said. “You want a name and a face and a story. I understand that. You want to know if we’re praying to a him or a her or something else altogether. You want to pray to someone who’s going to help you. Someone who is going to do you a favor. Make it rain, make the sun shine. Bring my sister back. Pray to someone who’s going to look down and give us, of all people, some special attention.

  “But there isn’t anybody like that, Digby. I’m not praying like that. I’m praying because I’ve done nothing my whole life but hurt the people around me. I’m praying because I’m sorry. I’m praying because I don’t know how to make things better, or if there’s even any way to make them better. But I have to try. So what I’m doing when I pray is to make a place in myself and in the world where I can change—an opening where the good can rush in. Even if it’s too late. If you have to know, then, that’s what it is: I’m praying to the good, for the good; I’m looking to another world for help in this one. Because there has to be another world. Has to. You said that yourself. You said we could have another life, and that’s the same thing. So that’s why I’m doing it. And you’re doing it with me because . . . I want to do everything with you.” She kissed him on the cheek. “No harm in that, right?”

  Digby shrugged. “No harm in that,” he said. “It does pain my knees, though.”

  Being close to her, even on their knees, was worth it to him. Just feeling her skirt edge against his skin made him tremble a little, he had such feelings for her. It was worth bruised knees, and a whole lot more. And the thing was, sometimes she surprised him: he’d sigh when he felt her hand on his shoulder and realize it was time to go down to the floor again, but occasionally—more than occasionally—it wouldn’t be for praying.

  Helen was complicated like that.

  They were almost done now. Today he was going to ascend the ladder and scrape the last bit of grime from the stained glass windows. He had to admit, the way the light flowed through the colored glass and made the room virtually glow was stunning. He could imagine that a man who was sitting in a pew with an empty mind and an open heart could sense that glorious something, that invitation to another world, that escape. At the very least, he could indulge himself in the mystery of life, and there was a lot of that to go around. Old-timers stood in the windows of every abandoned home he passed. They waved, he waved. Digby wondered if this was something peculiar to Roam, or if it were a regular occurrence all around the world, unseen and unknown by anyone other than bartenders. Because Roam was weird. One morning when he was a kid Digby woke up to find the streets choked with deer, hundreds of them, wandering around as if they lived there. They were gentle creatures, gone in a week. And there were the birds that one time, sparrows that every night at dusk flew through open windows and down chimneys and perched on the walls of every home, the gentle way they lightly rustled, making the walls look alive, pulsating, feathered. A month or so later they flew away and no one saw them ever again.

  He turned the corner from McCallister to Ming Kai Lane and stopped, because he saw something there he’d never seen before: two old-timers, out for a walk. He recognized them: the one on the left was Chen, and the one on the right, Kelly Neighbors. He hadn’t seen them since they left the tavern, when their houses opened up. The sun shone straight through them; they glowed like the last embers of a fire. Up ahead he saw six or seven others, some of whom he knew—Daisy Chow, Kepler Cosgrove, Melanie Grinney—strolling down the street as if they didn’t have a care in the world. (He guessed that, in this case, that was probably true.)

  “Digby.”

  It was Jonas. After he’d fallen into the ravine and appeared at the tavern, he’d stayed for a couple of days and then left without saying good-bye.

  “Jonas, my friend,” Digby said. Jonas had that same starved quality about him, like a dog who’d been abandoned on the side of the road and hadn’t eaten in a week. He stared up at Jonas and smiled. “You look—”

  “—the same,” he said disconsolately. “I look the same.”

  “Where’d you go? We missed you down at the tavern. Everyone spoke fondly of you in your absence.”

  “Nice to hear,” Jonas said.

  “Yes,” Digby said, suddenly discomfited and—just as suddenly—realizing why. It was only the strangeness of the circumstance that had kept him from immediately understanding the import of this moment. Helen.

  “And so,” Digby said. “Where are you—where is everybody off to? It appears to be an exodus. Don’t tell me even you folks are leaving.”

  “We’re going to church, Digby,” he said. “Everyone is going to church.”

  “The church? You and . . . the rest? But why?”

  He shrugged. “It’s nice,” Jonas said. “Some of us went over there last night for a look. It’s nice. And big. Not many places like that around here, you know. And then there’s Helen.”

  “Helen?” Digby said, as if the name rang a bell, but only a small one.

  Now Jonas looked Digby hard in the eye. When he wasn’t smiling, his face went slack and flat as a fence post. “You and Helen,” he said. “You two are together now. That’s what I heard.”

  “Yes, well, that’s true,” Digby said. “If by together you mean—”

  “Sleeping together,” Jonas said. “Living together and sleeping together. In love.”

  “Then most certainly yes. I hope that’s not . . . an issue with you? You are dead, after all.”

  Jonas shrugged. “I have to admit, when I first heard about it I felt like I’d swallowed a hornets’ nest. But it’s okay now. More than
okay. Is she happy?”

  “After all that’s happened,” Digby said, “I don’t know if she’ll ever be happy. But as happy as she could be under the circumstances. I think it would be fair to say that.”

  “I’m good with it, then,” Jonas said. He dragged the tip of his shoe along the sidewalk. “Can’t wait to see her, though. I guess I’ll—”

  “You do that,” Digby said. “I’ll be right along.”

  Jonas caught up with the rest of them as Digby hung back. Had someone seen him—the few people left in town to be seen by—he would have looked odd, odder than usual, dressed in his coat, hat, and red-and-gold-striped tie, with black boots and a pocket watch strung across his vest—the clothes Helen had laid out for him. He looked like a toy man. He accepted that. To be that man and to be seen standing talking to the air, though, was perhaps too much.

  By the time he got to the church himself, no one was there but Helen, standing in front of the big wooden doors alone, waiting for him, her arms at her sides, her dark hair lifted by a burst of a breeze, the hem of her blue dress rippling in it as well. He took off his hat as he mounted the stairs and stood before her.

  “Look,” she said, and she moved aside so he could.

  Digby peered through the open door: the church was full, every seat in every pew. He’d never seen so many dead people in one place before, and their collective milky essence glowed like a wave of pure light. In the very first pew he saw Fang and He-Ping. He stared at them until they turned to him, smiled, and waved. Digby took a deep breath and held it for a second or two, then turned back to Helen.

  “You never told me you could see them, too,” he said.

  “You never told me, either.”

  “I didn’t want you to think I was crazy.”

  “My mother and father are in there,” she said. “Jonas is in there. Elijah McCallister is in there, Digby.”

  “And Rachel?”

  She shook her head and scanned the crowd again, probably for the hundredth time. “I don’t see her,” she said. “But everyone else—they’re waiting, Digby.”