Ash Wednesday (26 page)

When they were halfway up the walk the front door opened, and Kay, older and heavier by ten pounds, stared at them both. "Alice?" she said hesitantly.

Alice nodded, and Kay ran down the steps and threw her arms around Alice, weeping and laughing at once, and Alice began to cry too without knowing precisely why. Bob gave the embracing pair a gentle push toward the house and went to fetch the luggage.

"It is so
good
to see you," gushed Kay, unwilling to relinquish the hold on Alice's shoulders. "I
never
thought you would come back, and not now especially, but, my
God
, I can't think of anyone else I'd rather see. This place has gone
crazy
, Alice. You can't talk to anyone around here now; all they want to talk about is this terrible thing that's happened, and . . .” She paused for a breath. "Oh, I'm just so glad you're here."

"You look good, Kay."

"Pooh!" Kay laughed. "A dumpy old housewife next to you. And you're
older
than me too. You have a portrait in your attic? How about some coffee?"

"I could use it," Alice said, sitting thankfully in a kitchen chair while Kay pulled a jar of instant from a cupboard. "I got up at five-thirty."

Bob stuck his head in the door. "I asked Alice to stay with us, Kay. All right?"

"I wouldn't
think
of her being anywhere else. Honestly, Alice, you're like a godsend. I just want you to tell me
all
the things you've been doing, and tell me about the shows. I mean I haven't seen a show for
years
, except for the road companies when I can talk Bob into going. And what about that guy you were dating when I was up last? I could
swear
that I saw him in a soap a while back, and—"

"Kay," said Alice with a weak chuckle, "
please
slow down. My brain's so dopey right now I can barely follow you."

"Oh," Kay said, her face falling. "Was I talking too fast?" She tried to smile again, but faltered and took a deep breath instead. "Sorry." She turned her attention to the coffee.

"
I'm
sorry," Alice replied. "You don't have to stop entirely, you know."

"No, it's my fault. I'm not myself." Her hand shook as she set down Alice's coffee, sending the liquid over the cup's rim into the saucer.

Bob's head reappeared. "Gotta go out again. Your bags are in the guest room, Alice."

"Again?" cried Kay. "Bob, you haven't slept since—”

“I will tonight," he said, smiling. "I'll be home for dinner." And he was gone.

"He's been . . . busy," Kay added.

"I can imagine." Alice started to lift her cup, but froze as she noticed something stirring at the edge of her vision. A ghost, she thought blindly, but could not stop herself from turning to look. "Oh, God," she said in relief, "Vivo."

"What?"

"I thought she was a ghost . . . good old Vivo." Alice knelt beside the basket and scratched the pale brown head of the dachshund that was only now just finishing the lengthy yawn that had drawn Alice's attention. "Nice to see you, girl. You're looking a little worse for wear."

"Arthritis," smiled Kay. "You believe it? The one eye's gone for good, and her sight's real bad in the other."

Alice nodded. It was obvious. The one eye had atrophied and was wrinkled like a raisin. The other was as cloudy as an old marble. Nevertheless the dog's personality shone through the grizzled face. As always, she seemed to be smiling. "Is she in pain?"

"Sometimes. Bob thinks we ought to have her put to sleep. But I think as long as she can still enjoy things . . . Besides, she's probably the last dog in Merridale."

"What do you mean?"

"When this . . . this thing started," Kay explained, "the dogs just went crazy. Barking and barking and barking. Even when they were taken out of sight they still kept it up. As if they
sensed
them. So early this morning they had a roundup. Put all the dogs in cages and on some trucks and took them down to the SPCA kennels in Lansford."

"My God, there must have been hundreds of them."

"Try nearly a thousand. Bob said it was a nightmare." She smirked. "As if anything could be a nightmare after all this."

"It hasn't bothered Vivo?"

"No, her eyes are gone, she barely hears anymore. Maybe whatever senses the younger dogs have
Vivo's
said goodbye to long ago." Kay knelt beside Alice and rubbed the old dog's ears. "I'm glad. She'd never survive a stay in the kennels. Maybe a day or two she'd be all right. But who knows how long this is going to last?"

Who knows indeed? Alice thought, and bit back what she had been about to tell Kay, swallowed down her reason for returning to Merridale. But Kay knew just the same, although she didn't bring up the subject of Tim Reardon until late that evening.

The years had not changed the place. Jim didn't know what he'd expected to find—certainly no man-made response to the accident, no new sign saying, "Dangerous Curve for School Buses," no granite memorial by the roadside as they had every few yards at Gettysburg, where he and Beth and Terry had gone every summer. There was only the rough gray road, the hill, the curve, the high trees now nearly stripped of brown and dying leaves.

He pulled his car as far off the road as he could and got out. At first he listened, but heard nothing but the empty branches clicking together in the wind. He looked around to see if anyone else was there, but saw only a battered car parked several hundred yards down the road. Hunters, he thought. Taking a deep breath, he walked to the edge of the embankment.

Ice settled deep in his throat as he saw them, only dim shapes in the late-morning sun. He stood for a long time before moving down the slope toward the bare patch where even the weeds had not grown again. Ten yards away from the nearest shape he stopped.

It was several inches above the ground, the thickness, he tried to reason with detachment, of the side of the bus. Though it glowed with a weak blue light, the texture of its skin (could
skin
be so wrinkled, so puckered and deeply fissured?) made it look black. They burned, he told himself, and then remembered that he knew they had burned, that the bus had burned and they were inside. But he had come back today to learn something else, hadn't he? To learn
how
they had died. To learn how Terry had died.

Now he knew. Not in the accident, not in the rolling and battering descent down the hill, but in the fire. They had died in the fire. Their pitiable images were like photographs taken at the moment of death. If the flesh would have been smooth and untouched save by the kinder cruelties of jagged glass and sharp metal, Jim Callendar could have walked away. But the sad little ghost before him had been touched with flame, blackened by the fire before death came.

There must have been screams. Why can't I remember the screams?

And he thought that perhaps he had been in the air all that time that the children had been screaming, locked in the middle of that leap from which he was not certain he had as yet descended.

He closed the ten yard gap then, walking dreamlike to the banquet table to gorge himself on the physical evidence of his guilt. The guilt opened now, like a bloom fully mature, its five blue petals gleaming in the sun: Bobby Miller, his hair charred to a pale ashy fluff, as easy to blow away as a dandelion gone to seed, his eyes hollow, abraded, the blood from the cavities frozen in tiny bubbles on his blackened cheeks, as though about to boil. . . .

Tracy
Gianelli
, her burned hands out in front of her as if warding off more flame, her black changeling eyes ruptured by the heat, mouth wrenched open in a silent scream. . . .

Jennifer
Raber
, in a more peaceful position than the others, lying
fetally
curled, her flesh only darkened, not burned, as though she had died more quickly than the rest. Perhaps, then, Terry had not suffered for long either. . . .

Frank Meyers, his fingers like burned sticks clutched to his throat, trying to rip out the searing pain that had lined his nose, mouth, windpipe, lungs, his body blackened and wrinkled far more than the others, proof that he had taken far longer to die. . .

Finally he saw Terry, apart from the others. He was lying as Jim had seen him
lie
a million times, facedown, arms bent so that his hands were next to his face, his head turned to the left. His naked skin was clear and untouched by the fire. His eyes were partly open, his mouth a small "O" of surprise.

He didn't burn. The crash killed him. He didn't burn
.

At that second guilt dropped from him to let the wide expanse of relief flow in, not for himself, not from any sense of vindication, but solely from the knowledge that his boy had not suffered too much. Jim Callendar cried in that relief, and lay on the cold bare ground next to Terry's still shade, his face only inches from the boy's, as he had years before, sharing the closeness of father and son, grabbing the moment in a wish that it would stay forever and the boy would never go away.

But the hollow, he learned quickly, was no cozy bed; the vision beside him, no living son whose breath puffed in and out with a reassuring metronomic precision. This was his dead boy, now truly ash, just the impression in sand of a seashell whose inhabitant is long dissolved in the waters. He took one more look at the small face and stood up, again aware of the other blue forms nearby, again allowing the guilt to settle on him with crushing weight. Then he heard the voice: "This must be visiting day."

Jim whirled, staggered, righted himself, looked twenty yards up the slope to where a man was standing. He was of medium height, stocky, in an old fatigue jacket. Long hair and a beard nearly hid his face. At first Jim didn't recognize him.

"Startled you? I'm sorry." The man walked down the slope toward Jim with a feline grace. As he came closer Jim remembered the close-set eyes, the straight white teeth in the wide mouth that now grinned at him without humor.

"Meyers? Bradley Meyers?"

"Brad's fine. For my friends. And we ought to be friends. After all, we've got a lot in common, huh?" He jerked his head at the tableau of dead children. "Each lost a son, right?"

Jim nodded.

"What's that?"

"Yes."

"Ah." Brad looked around with slight interest, as though he were in a singles bar checking what was available. "So. This is your first time?"

"What?"

"Out here. First time you came out here? Since the bang-up, I mean."

"Yes."

"Really something, isn't it? You know, if it hadn't been for this weird thing that's happened, why, we really
wouldn't've
known
how
our kids died. I mean
really
died, not just what the coroner says." He shook his head back and forth. "I think there's a
reason
why things like this happen—oh, not the accident, but these, uh,
ghosts
. What do you think?"

"I don't know." Jim felt sick, but unable to walk away from Brad Meyers.

"Do you believe in God?"

Jim nodded.

"Sorry, I didn't get that."

"Yes. I do."

"That's good. I do too. Maybe not, uh,
God
exactly, but in
something
. That divinity that shapes our ends. I think there's a reason for everything. Even the smallest thing that happens. The way the leaves fall off the trees. Where they land. It all affects other things." Brad crouched, resting his buttocks on his heels. "Haven't you ever thought that when some things happen, they happen just for you?"

"I guess so."