All Hallows Page 11

  No, but you asked. How did you think that was going to go?

  About like this.

  The ants were clearing what, for them, would be Sisyphean boulders. The wasp darted at the workers. Abby couldn’t tell if there were more ant parts strewn-about than before; the ground was cluttered with the mess of an early frost, no precipitation, and gusting winds.

  The ground? Abby was sure she’d been watching the sky, or what she could see of it.

  Things had been hard, and not because she didn’t constantly obey apps on a phone telling her what to do. She knew what the hell was wrong with Abby, just as she knew what was wrong with John. Her girlfriends didn’t know—but Nell and Tina didn’t know about Samuel.

  Abby didn’t need an app or a pop-up reminder to recall the loss of her firstborn.

  Her memory of LexisNexis and Abacus was foggy, and she couldn’t begin to remember the name of the document management program she’d used for going on three years.

  But Samuel… his memory was always at the ready.

  Her girlfriends would never understand, and Abby didn’t want them to; Samuel was hers—her baby. They could keep their first-world problems of vinyl stickers and diets and too many employees.

  She had Kenna, and she had the memory of her son.

  Abby felt the heat of a sob crawl into the back of her throat; the voice was speechless, anticipating. She pushed the sob away and pushed off her elbow.

  The black wasp took flight as Abby rubbed the corners of her eyes in gentle circles. She used light pressure out of long habit, not because of the yellow crud, but to avoid smudging mascara she wasn’t wearing.

  Why would she make herself up?

  John wasn’t due on furlough for a month—maybe a month. And if John still cared what she looked like, he hadn’t shown it. Not intimately, not as a partner—not the handful of times they’d tried. Kenna was practically an immaculate conception.

  After Samuel, neither she nor John could look at each other with the lights on—not in that way—and in the dark was somehow adulterous. Mechanical. Dirty.

  Abby knew what her friends would say. The problem was, she didn’t want to look good for herself. She wanted to look good for John. To John.

  The only thing she wanted to do for Abby was to sleep for about a million years without pumping, washing, bathing, shopping, feeding, burping, or changing anyone or anything. No changing sheets, no changing diapers, no changing the channels that made her think of Gramma.

  If she ever awoke, she’d look like Bavarian cream had been piped above her cheekbones—and so be it. It would match her brand new booger-eyes, which she was not to touch (and just had).

  “So gross,” she whispered.

  The hunk of yellow matter rolled between her fingers. Abby watched, fascinated; it suggested a lone, moistened, jaundiced sprinkle of Parmesan cheese. It wasn’t conjunctivitis, because Kenna… she stopped rolling the goop abruptly.

  Had she called to schedule a follow-up with the pediatrician?

  A stir of panic slithered in her insides; the strings of her anxiety twitched. Had she established the next appointment already? She didn’t think she had.

  Not the end of the world.

  She needed to relax. To let it go. The important part was, the tests were done, and whatever it was, the whatever wasn’t pink-eye.

  She should call to be sure, though. To confirm. If she got it over with, the worry couldn’t pull at her nerves.

  Call them, Abigail. Doctors are gods. Ask them. Ask what happened to Samuel. Ask how a child wrapped in blankets, safe in his crib, a child that could not walk or crawl—a baby with his mother in the same room—ask how he could simply… disappear.

  Abby bent for her phone, but she hesitated. She wasn’t alone on the bench, easy as the fact was to forget.

  The other woman was elderly, but she might be more aware than her years suggested. She was probably a resident or visitor from the nearby nursing home, the hospital annex, or the low-income center that abutted the park on the east and south (the conjoined parking lots inflated the overlook’s modest size and contributed to its isolation).

  An old person wouldn’t steal her identity, but Abby shared her husband’s abhorrence of publicly announcing personally-identifiable information: dates of birth, existing and prior conditions or surgeries, the names and dosages of prescriptions. Your street address…

  John said you were asking for it when you threw a call like that on speaker and merrily gave away your social, account numbers, PIN confirmations; your full legal name, your blood type. When it came to that sort of stuff, John had become… rigid.

  The police department had told them it wasn’t that. It didn’t read as premeditated. Not a stalker. Nobody they knew, unusual as that was.

  What signs there were pointed in other directions; pointed to a random event, to a crime of unfortunate opportunity—but neither she nor John had shaken the perception that they had been targeted, that…

  Samuel was destined to be mine.

  You don’t have him. It wasn’t you—wan’t me.

  It wasn’t you, but it was because of you. Because of John.

  John wasn’t there, but that’s not his… if I… if I died, I’d see our son again. You don’t have him. If I… if Samuel can hear me, mommy loves him. We miss him so much. His daddy—

  —His daddy can’t hear you, and neither can your son. Nobody’s listening, Abigail. Only me.

  I don’t know that. Who could? If you can hear me, I’m sorry, sweetie. Whatever happened, my angel, I need you to know that I… it wasn’t like it looked. Mommy… I was watching over you—swear to God and hope to die. Nobody knows what happened. You were right there, and then… and I think about you every day, and I wish I could—

  —Make it right? You can’t. His body won’t not rise from a lake. No jogger’s dog will bring a piece of him home. You can’t accept that he’s with me. You’d rather he be dead.

  Abby’s phone rang, a bleating that startled her such that, had the phone been in her hand, she’d have answered it simply to stop the noise. She dove for the diaper bag—the ringtone was at full volume, and she’d chosen the most annoying chime that came installed. When that hadn’t done the trick, she’d found the most annoying sound that was free online.

  The ringtone was meant as a novelty—it was an exaggerated mix of barnyard animal calls—but something about the blend of donkeys and sheep and roosters made the short hairs stiffen on her arms.

  It was the temp agency’s sales staff. The girls weren’t called salespeople, officially, but that’s what they were. They had several trunks of numbers in blocks. There was no caller identification as a result, just the number on her screen, but Abby recognized the prefix.

  Work. Real work. Speak of the devil.

  Abby pressed the red button, sending what she knew would be a falsetto, sing-song desk girl off to a mailbox Abby hadn’t checked in weeks.

  She’d come close to setting a custom greeting, thinking it unprofessional to let the default notification handle her absences, but it was like John said: they could get you that way, too.

  Voice recordings, vocal mapping, machine learning—if it wasn’t scary today, it would be tomorrow. Those permanent records lived in a cloud somewhere, tagged in cold storage, waiting for whatever invention could exploit the data.

  That was John, lately; urging others to fear the present because they should fear the future. Abby’s parents thought John was a nutcase, but his friends in uniform supported him. Abby was eternally grateful that they hadn’t abandoned him—most hadn’t—which she placed as a credit to military camaraderie.

  But John’s friends were more careful now. They knew the words and triggers that could… sort of set him off. Abby was careful, too, but she understood. Empathized.

  For all she knew, John had a voice of his own.

  She stowed the cell and pressed the button that muted the timer—no need to open the flap, the buttons large and familiar. She c
hecked on Kenna through yet another flap, this one covering a sheet of clear plastic that was part of the moveable shade.

  Kenna was flushed and grinning, her poop face gone. Babies had any number of problems, but constipation was low on the list.

  Peek-a-boo through the shade-flap was a full-diaper favorite of theirs, and after a couple of rounds to establish the pattern, Kenna was shrieking in delight, batting at the rattles and shapes and glassless mirrors, feet and hands expressing boundless energy.

  “Ahhh… boo!” Abby said, smiling legitimately. Kenna made a sound like a thrown kitten and rocked the carrier, feisty and apparently quite proud of her latest diaper art.

  The phone rang again, an air raid of farm animals. Abby looked at her daughter, the diaper bag, and left the phone to whinny and moo.

  She sat back, sparing a quick glance at the old woman on the other side of the bench (it was not especially wide). The silver-haired woman appeared oblivious to the phone. She sat as she had from the beginning, bloodshot eyes straight ahead; dried toothpaste—or spittle—crusting the sides of her large mouth.

  The old woman’s watery green eyes were following a pair of crows with intensity; the crows chased each other around the concrete table where decrepit men could play oversized games of chess.

  Abby lingered on the table. Had anyone played today? Much as she and Gramma had never finished Bergman’s opus on chess and death, Abby had yet to see a game completed in the park, though she’d seen many begun: the end would come in a paper cup, or by way of a sugar-free birthday cupcake; from calls to structured meals, or when the weather came-up.

  The game suspended, those combatants who could rise, did, shook boneless hands, and exchanged good-natured boasts as to how many moves they’d been from achieving checkmate.

  It struck Abby that the woman on the bench was elderly, yet unattended. Her good health stripped a decade from her—possibly two. Her hair was long, natural, and thick; she held a purse that looked like it would be heavy when empty—on top of that, she could follow racing birds at thirty paces, and without glasses.

  The crows were either fighting or flirting.

  Abby was not sure if crows distinguished between the two, but a wink of shining trash appeared central to the performance. It looked rather like a sport; baseball combined with soccer. She’d never understood the rules of most human sports, either. The basics, sure—Abby wasn’t a moron—but she’d never seen the subtle, strategic layers John assured her were on display.

  If an old person at Vista Patzer was nothing new, it was less usual for Abby to meet a stranger, or it was by now—she’d been visiting the park regularly for months.

  She would have liked to meet someone she knew; to ask about the one or two things Abby had filed about the individual.

  Because the usual tedious salutations were slow to reach Abby’s tongue—and because it had been too long to simply say hello—she continued to watch the crows.

  Kenna would soon fuss about the diaper; would want fed after that; feeding would irritate her gums, and it would be time to pack-up, drive home, and prepare for a holiday Abby dearly wanted to ignore.

  Fool. She may be a stranger to you, but I know this woman well. You are trapped, lackwit. Do you truly not see?

  Abby would have remembered the old woman in flesh-colored hose (whose flesh was debatable; the person would be pigmented a regrettable shade of beige).

  Even more notable were the high-dollar running shoes, clean and new. Yuchos, or maybe a seasonal release of Albion’s Armor. If the shoes were not knock-offs—they looked real enough—a pair of either constituted a fair-sized mortgage payment. The gloriously neon shoes fit to short, wide feet.

  A mink stole was wrapped loosely around the woman’s neck, matted with something like sputum. The fur was too flat and flawed to be faux, and it paired… interestingly… with plaid pants in a psychedelic print.

  The park’s usual octogenarian attire called for sexless pastel track suits and white sneakers, but Abby’s bench partner was draped in unusual finery, an ensemble of cast-offs and batty selections from surprisingly exclusive brands.

  Haphazard or not—clean or not—the outfit was expensive, or would have been, new on the hanger. And those shoes: a veritable beacon of the inconformable.

  How had Abby so carelessly discarded a toucan-bright madwoman? Her hideous purse was inches from Kenna’s head.

  What was next? Should she hand Kenna to a group of pock-faced thugs with wireless white earbuds? Plop the carrier down as a breakdancing prop? Expose her daughter to angry young men who cursed in rapid-fire, misogynistic freestyle, their wrists and hands constantly shaping violent street gang signals?

  Good Lord—what if the old woman had been someone dangerous?

  Abby could hear the voice in her head moving around, but she was plenty horrified without the voice. What would John say? What in God’s name had she been thinking… closing her eyes? Staring at ants?

  An oversight, to be sure. Not that you’ll tell Johnnie-boy about this. You’ll hide it… if you survive.

  She’s not a psychotic gang member on drugs.

  Gangbangers? Here? You are missing the devil at your elbow, you fool.

  I’d have recognized real danger. Old women can get odd, but they don’t pull a knife on you in the park. Heck, she probably talks to herself more than I do.

  You have been warned. Cuddle with the crone if you want. Didn’t learn much, did you?

  She’s an old woman. Old people come here every single day.

  Not like her. Kill her, Abigail. Right now. Stand slowly, press at your sore back, stretch, yawn, leave the child, and circle the bench from behind. Ram the point of a flagstone into the crown of her head. Hit her with everything you have, then run.

  What? Kill her?

  That was enough of that.

  Abby pushed a finger into her ear until the pain eclipsed her ability to hear another word. She had questioned herself for years, but this new voice was frighteningly external. Worse, it felt real.

  The words were awful, but it was more than that. The voice spoke with an accent, with phrasing and a cadence that were not Abby’s own.

  Yes, she could have inspected the old woman—maybe frisking her would have turned-up blunted scissors—but it was loony to be afraid of a geriatric woman quietly watching crows.

  As to overlooking danger… the woman sat like a stone. Aside from the neon shoes, she might as well be wearing a ghillie suit. The hair, the furs, the blouse, and that frilly, caramel skirt over plaid slacks—she stuck-out from a fashion standpoint, but, immobile, the woman faded against the background of turncoat leaves and crisped grass.

  There were sticks in her hair, for crying out loud. Could anyone expect Abby to be vigilant after so many restless days and sleepless nights?

  That damnable voice, constantly second-guessing her.

  Abby had read that a person could literally die if they stayed awake for long enough. It made sense that insomnia would eventually play on her mind. It had given birth to the voice, after all.

  Still.

  Seated and drooling, the old woman was safe enough… but she could have been doddering down the street, her dusty scarf a match for leaf-filled gutters, her earthy clothes weaving the woman’s outline into the backdrop of autumn.

  If Abby had come upon the woman in the road, camouflaged and half-deaf, it would have been all too easy to miss her until the last second, those wild eyes turning in terror, green as plugs of grass…

  The Power Wagon’s unforgiving bumper connects at twenty miles an hour; the truck’s diamond-patterned plates of metal devastating calcium-depleted bones…

  Abby shook her buzzing head, but the image slipped through, the bull bar clipping the old woman, her body sliding under the Power Wagon’s brush guard; the double clump beneath beefy tires.

  Panic fluttered deep in Abby’s chest, strings tightening on the puppetry that was wound through her organs. Remembering the techniques, Abby breath
ed in a one-two count.

  It had taken months for her to properly describe such moments: her chest was a cedar at twilight, its boughs sagging with restive birds. A slight disturbance could set them aflutter, and a larger shock could send pairs bursting from the branches—contagiously so. Shake the tree and the flock would explode, a murmuration of starlings forming and reforming in monstrous, ink-blot shapes as darkness solidified overhead.

  Now, Abigail. Do it. Strike while you still can.

  A millstone crushing her chest, Abby reached for any semblance of normality. She had to loosen the grip of creeping dread, the sense of impending death, the vertigo; the numbness crawling over her face like cockroaches.

  Words spilled from Abby’s lips, a sentence she did not hear, nor understand as language.

  She was, of course, Abby.

  The elderly woman was named Maren.

  Separated by generations and an infant-carrier, the two women found they shared an enthusiasm for autumnal days, found nothing else bland enough to discuss safely, and thereafter shared the uncomfortable, bolted-down bench in tired silence, following a troupe of fluffy songbirds together—the crows had disappeared.

  You said old people come here every day.

  They do. Maren’s an old person.

  Older than you know. But where are the others?

  The park was seldom bustling, but on such a warm day, Abby would have predicted a good population of the regulars: elders in their dotage, or in recovery, or in their final days. They walked and limped and rolled, grouped in clusters or shuffling alone.

  To the elderly, Abby was that young missy, the one with the baby—the one with her husband called off to the service.

  At some point, she and Kenna had become part of the park itself, less worthy of further comment than a visiting jay or hummingbird.

  In part, the lack of patrons came down to the nature of the park itself, for the absence of rolling bluegrass precluded the park’s use for most ground sports, or for circuit cycling, or serious running, or picnics involving children or bare feet, or much of anything beyond slow walks spent primarily in appreciation of the narrow ribbon of patched concrete that meandered through crisping purple sage, flowering yucca (now in its pod stage), and a staggering variety of waist-high grasses and lower-growing plant life that carried painful needles and thorns.