Shadow Show: All-New Stories in Celebration of Ray Bradbury (6 page)

“Oh yeah?”

“I’m so sorry.”

“Thanks,” she said. “How did you know her?”

“High school.” I thought about Sir Walter Scott’s old quote about webs and deception.

“You went to school in New York?” she asked. “What are you doing out here, in Sterling Springs?”

The lies were building. “This is actually where I grew up. My parents just moved there for a few years, and that’s how I met Catherine.”

I had no clue where this was going.

“That so,” she said.

“The flowers are from me.” I tried a smile.

Candace Courington looked at the arrangement. “That’s nice of you.”

She stepped back to close the door. I knew this was my only chance. “Can I tell you a story about Catherine, Mrs. Courington? A story from our days in New York?”

Jesus
.

She stared at me for a moment, thoughtfully.

“Sure,” she said at last. “Come in. You want a glass of water?”

“If you don’t mind.”

The mobile home was dark and piles of bills were stacked on end tables, alongside prescription pill bottles. The TV was on, and a woman on the screen was sobbing.

We sat in the living room, on a saggy sofa with the plaid cloth worn thin on the edges. A framed print of that Impressionist painting by Seurat, “Sunday in the Park” or whatever it’s called, hung slightly crooked over us. It’s weird that all the people in that painting, all the well-dressed women with their parasols, and the men with their top hats and the dogs and the kids, and even the monkey, are all facing the lake or away in another direction. But not the little girl. That kid with her white dress and bonnet, right in the middle of the painting, is looking right at you.

Candace Courington fetched me a glass of water from the kitchen. On a coffee table was a magazine,
Modern Amputee
. I picked it up and looked at the attractive blond woman posing on the cover. She wore a prosthetic leg.

I thumbed through some unopened envelopes next to the magazine. One was addressed to Catherine Courington, 210 E. 5th Street, New York, New York—a phone bill. I folded it and put it in my back pocket. I felt like a douche bag but kept it anyway.

“What’s your name?” asked Candace Courington, returning to the room and handing me the glass of water.

“I’m Josh. Josh Dieboldt.”

“What do you do, Josh? Besides deliver flowers, I mean?” She sat down next to me. We were both sunk so low, it felt like we were sitting on the floor.

“I’m studying English lit at Rock River College.”

“What do you want to do with that?”

“Be a writer, maybe.” I shrugged and picked up the water glass but didn’t drink it.

Candace Courington stared at the ragged brown carpeting. “Catherine was a reader. That girl always had a book in her hands. Ever since she was little.”

She looked up.

“So what story were you going to tell me? How did you two meet?”

Across the street, a car engine growled—an eight-cylinder Godzilla. The guy in the driveway had started his El Camino.

“We just met on the street one afternoon. May,” I said. “It smelled like flowers and garbage, because they stack the trash bags up into little mountains on the sidewalks in New York.”

God, what a bullshitter.

“Catherine loved the city.”

“I know. She did. And I loved that about her. But, anyway, I just saw her one afternoon on a street corner in Soho, and introduced myself. I’d never done that before, but there was something about her. Something familiar and, for me, predestined. That’s what I wanted to tell you. I know this is weird, Mrs. Courington, but it was like I knew your daughter the minute I saw her. It was déjà vu, fate, astral influence, two trains on opposite tracks passing each other in the night and two passengers peering out windows and spotting each other, just for a moment.”

As I said these words, I knew that in truth, two trains had indeed passed each other, but only one passenger was looking.

“You
are
a writer,” she said, almost smiling. “What did Catherine say about all this talk of fate?”

“I didn’t want to scare her or freak her out, so I never told her. I wish I had the chance now. God, how I wish I could tell her. I hope this doesn’t scare you, but every atom in my being believes we were soul mates.”

Mrs. Courington shook her head. “You should have told her. She believed in all of that, you know, fate. She loved stories where things worked out differently. Alternate realities, she called it. It’s funny. She always had the sense that she’d find her one true love right here in Sterling Springs.”

I was silent.
I was that true love
.

“I don’t mean to pry,” I said finally, “but can I ask what happened? I was just so shocked when I heard the news.”

She looked at me, startled. She put her hand over her mouth.

“You don’t know?”

“No, I don’t.”

She looked devastated, and really old. “I’m sorry, I can’t talk about it right now. It’s just too much. I’m afraid you have to leave.”

“Sure,” I said, not wanting to leave, but standing up anyway.

“Thanks for the flowers. That was very thoughtful. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

I stepped out into the hot afternoon sunlight, and the door closed behind me. The guy across the street turned and looked at me again. I felt insanely frustrated.

Crossing the street, I approached him.

“Hi,” I said. He wore a muscle T-shirt with the words
ALL WOUND UP
on it. His goatee was uneven; he had shaved too close on the right side, and it had left a big gouge where the hair used to be. The unevenness was distracting.

“Yeah?”

“I was just wondering,” I said, “How well do you know Mrs. Courington across the street?”

“Well enough,” he said, wiping his greasy hands on his jeans.

“Do you know what happened to her daughter?”

“She’s dead.”

“I know. But
how
did she die?”

The guy’s eyes grew skinny.

“What business is it of yours, peckerwood?”

“I’m sorry?”

“Why don’t you go askin’ her mother? What you askin’ me for?”

“Never mind,” I said, turning back to the van. I climbed in, started the engine, and turned it around. The whole time, the guy continued to glare. He was saying something, too, pointing at me, but I couldn’t hear him because the windows were up.

After work, I went home and straight downstairs. I pulled the phone bill out of my back pocket and unfolded it. I felt guilty for stealing the thing. I stared at the New York City address. I imagined some old gray-stone building along a tree-lined street. The building had a lobby with brass mailboxes set into the wall. The phone bill would have been delivered there, waiting for Catherine.

I tore open the envelope. The bill was several pages. It had an itemized list of the calls made in the last weeks of May. Many were to Illinois, probably to her mother. Dozens were to New York numbers, a few to Newark and Boston, one to Chicago. I thought about going to New York City, going to the apartment building and meeting her neighbors. Find out how she died.

But then I realized it didn’t matter at all. It didn’t matter how she died. What mattered was that she was no longer alive, and I had no chance at all. I thought of the soft fabric of that sweater under my fingertips, her closed eyes and smooth skin, that slight scar and how she got it—and the dreams. I thought of those dreams and how she never spoke to me.

I looked at the phone bill.
Jesus.
The phone bill. At the top of the first page was her number. I picked up my phone and dialed. The first ring. The second. And a third and a fourth and then the voice mail answered.

“Hi,” she said, her voice strong and clear. “This is Catherine. I’m not here right now, but you know what to do.”

And then there was the beep, and I hung up the line.

About “The Girl in the Funeral Parlor”

When I was nineteen, I delivered flowers in a far-west suburb of Chicago where the strip malls ended and the farmland began. One crisp Saturday morning I set an arrangement up in a funeral home before the services. I was all alone, just me and the deceased resting in a plush, open casket. I glanced at the body that day, and the image has been branded in my mind ever since. Lying in the casket was a young mother holding her baby. I was shocked. I left and climbed into my delivery truck and started to cry. That mother and child have haunted me ever since.

It was this memory that caused me to write “The Girl in the Funeral Parlor.” But I didn’t want to just retell my experience; I wanted to look at my memory through the prism of fiction, as Ray Bradbury has regularly done in such stories as “The Lake,” “The Crowd,” “Banshee,” and so many others. I wanted my story to take on a life of its own, as good stories so often do. It was at this point that the concept came to me—what if you met the love of your life and it was too late? What if that true love was dead?

The story almost wrote itself from that moment forward.

Certainly, Bradbury’s 1957 novel-in-stories,
Dandelion Wine
, was a tremendous influence on my story—the small-town setting; the theme of unrequited love; the element of magic and sorrow in the everyday; the pervasive sense of melancholy. One of my very favorite lesser-known Bradbury short stories is “The Swan,” from
Dandelion Wine
(the titles of the stories in that book were removed to lend the further appearance that it is a novel rather than a connected collection). In “The Swan,” a man and a woman meet at completely different junctures in their lives. He is young and just starting out; she is old and at the end of her countless splendid days. My story looks at this theme of missed connections through a darker, more extreme lens. The two lovers never meet, for it is too late. One of them is already gone.

—Sam Weller

THE COMPANIONS

David Morrell

F
rank shouldn’t have been there. On Thursday, unexpected script meetings required him to fly from Santa Fe to Los Angeles. His discussions with the film’s director and its star ended on Friday evening. Usually, he would have spent the weekend with friends in Los Angeles, but he loved opera, and he had tickets for the next night when Santa Fe’s opera company was premiering Poulenc’s
Dialogues of the Carmelites
, a work Frank had never seen. The tickets included a pre-performance dinner, along with a lecture about the composer.

“You just arrived in L.A., and now you want to fly back?” his wife, Debby, asked when he phoned. “If there’s an Ultimate Commuter award, I’ll nominate you for it.”

“I’ve really been looking forward to this,” Frank answered. Using his cell phone, he sat in his rented car outside the newest Beverly Hills restaurant, where the final meeting had ended. “Do you remember how many times I called the box office and kept getting a busy signal? The person I spoke to said I got the last two tickets.”

“The dinner’s supposed to be in a tent behind the opera house, right?”

“Right.”

“Well, the tent might not be standing. Yesterday the monsoons started.”

Debby referred to a July weather pattern in which moist air from the Pacific streamed into New Mexico, creating rains that were often violent.

“The storm was really bad,” Debby continued. “In fact, there’s another one coming. I shouldn’t be on the phone. It isn’t safe with the lightning this close.”

“I bet tomorrow will be bright and sunny.”

“It’s not supposed to be, according to the weather guy on channel seven. How were your meetings?”

“The director wants me to change the villains from presidential advisors to advertising executives. The star wants me to include a part for his new girlfriend. This opera will be my reward for listening to them.”

“You’re that determined? Be prepared to get wet.” The prolonged boom of thunder echoed behind Debby’s voice. “I’d better hang up. Love you.”

“Love you,” Frank said.

F
rank’s plane was scheduled to leave Los Angeles at ten in the morning, but it didn’t take off until two.

“Bad weather in New Mexico,” the American Airlines attendant explained.

The jet came down through dark, churning clouds for a bumpy landing in Santa Fe shortly after five. The overcast sky made the afternoon dark.

“It’s been raining all day,” an airline employee told Frank. “This is the first break we’ve had.”

But a new storm beaded Frank’s windshield as soon as he got into his car. Poor visibility slowed traffic so that what was normally a fifteen-minute drive home took three times that long. Frank pulled into his garage at six. The dinner at the opera was supposed to start at seven.

He’d made various cell-phone reports to his wife. Even so, Debby looked relieved, as if she hadn’t seen him for weeks, when he walked in. To her credit, she was dressed, ready for the evening. “If you’re game,
I
am. But I think we’re both nuts.”

“I’m afraid I’m more nuts than you.”

“The umbrella’s in here.” Debby pointed to a knapsack they always took to the opera. The theater’s sides were open—people who dressed for daytime summer temperatures could feel frozen as the mountain air dropped from ninety to fifty degrees at night. “I’ve also got a blanket, a thermos of hot chocolate, and our raincoats. This had better be a good opera.”

“Look.” Frank smiled out the kitchen window, pointing toward sunlight peeking through the clouds. “The rain stopped. Everything’s going to work out.”

T
he theater was eight miles north of town. As Frank headed up Route 285, traffic was fast and crazy as usual, drivers changing lanes regardless of how slick the pavement was.

Debby pointed toward a police car, an ambulance, and two wrecked cars at the side of the road. “They’re putting somebody into the ambulance. My God. Somebody must have died. They covered the body.”

Traffic threw up a gritty spray that speckled Frank’s windshield. Troubled by the accident, he turned on the windshield wipers and reduced his speed. Horns blared behind him, vehicles racing past. Straining to see beyond the streaks on his window, he steered toward an exit ramp and headed up a hill toward the opera house.

There, he walked with Debby to a tent behind the theater. A bottle of wine stood on each table.

Half the seats were empty.

“See, not everybody’s crazy like us,” Debby said.

“Like
me.
”

After choosing salad and chicken from a buffet, they sat at a table.

Frank glanced toward the entrance. Two men entered, surveyed the empty seats, saw Frank and Debby alone, and came over.

One of the men was short, slight, and elderly, with white hair and a matching goatee that made him look rabbinical. The other man was tall, well built, and young, with short, dark hair and a clean-shaven, square-jawed face. They both wore dark suits and white shirts. Their eyes were very clear.

“Hello,” the elderly man said. “My name’s Alexander.”

“And I’m Richard,” the other man said.

“Pleased to meet you.” Frank introduced Debby and himself.

“Terrible weather,” Alexander said.

“Sure is,” Debby agreed.

“We drove all the way from Albuquerque,” Richard said.

“I can beat that,” Frank told them. “I came all the way from Los Angeles.”

The two men went to get their food. Frank poured wine for Debby and himself, then offered to pour for Alexander and Richard when they came back.

“No, thanks,” Alexander said.

“It makes me sleepy,” Richard said.

The pair bowed their heads in a silent prayer. Self-conscious, Frank and Debby did the same. Then the four of them ate and discussed opera, how they preferred the Italian ones, could tolerate the German ones, and felt that French operas were sometimes an ordeal.

“The rhythm’s so ponderous in some of them,” Frank said, “it’s like being on a Roman slave ship, rowing to a drumbeat, like that scene in
Ben-Hur
.”

“But
Carmen
’s good. A French opera set in Spain.” Richard found that amusing. “And tonight’s opera is French. I’ve never heard it, so I have no idea whether it’s worth our time.”

Frank was pleased by how easy they were to talk to. They had an inner stillness that soothed him after his frustrating Hollywood meetings and his difficult journey home.

“What do you do in Albuquerque?” Debby asked Richard.

“He
doesn’t live there.
I
do,” Alexander said. “I’m a retired computer programmer.”

“And I’m a monk,” Richard said. “I live at Christ in the Desert.” He referred to a monastery about thirty miles north of Santa Fe.

Frank hid his surprise. “I assumed the two of you were together.”

“We are,” Alexander said. “I often go on weekend retreats to the monastery. That’s where Brother Richard and I became friends.” Alexander referred to the practice of leaving the clamor of everyday life and spending time in the quiet of a monastery, meditating to achieve spiritual focus.

“Alexander doesn’t drive well at night anymore,” Brother Richard said. “So I went down to Albuquerque to get him. This opera has a subject of obvious interest to us.”

What he meant was soon explained as the after-dinner lecture began. An elegant woman stood at a podium and explained that
Dialogues of the Carmelites
was based on a real event during the French Revolution when a convent of Carmelite nuns was executed during the anti-Catholic frenzy of the Reign of Terror. The composer, the speaker explained, used the incident as a way of exploring the relationship between religion and politics.

As the lecture concluded, Frank wished that he’d followed Alexander and Brother Richard’s example, abstaining from the wine, which had made him sleepy.

The group got up to walk from the tent to the opera house.

“It was good to chat with you,” Frank said.

“Same here,” Brother Richard said.

By then it was half past eight. Santa Fe’s operas usually started at nine. Darkness was gathering. Alexander and Brother Richard proceeded into the gloom, while Frank and Debby went to restrooms near the tent.

Minutes later, after a chilly walk, Frank and Debby entered the opera house, made their way through the crowd, found the row they were in, and stopped in surprise.

Alexander and Brother Richard were in the same row, five seats from Frank and Debby.

Smiling, the two men looked up from their programs.

“Small world,” Debby said, smiling in return.

“Isn’t it,” Alexander agreed. Frail, he shivered as the wind increased outside, gusting through the open spaces on each side of the opera house.

“Could be a better night,” Brother Richard said. “Let’s hope the opera’s worth it.”

Frank and Debby took their seats. A row ahead, a well-coiffed woman in a flimsy evening gown hugged herself, typical of many in the audience, presumably visitors who hadn’t been warned about Santa Fe’s sudden temperature drops.

As the wind keened, Debby looked over at Alexander, noticing that he shivered more violently.

“I’ll lend him our blanket,” she told Frank.

“Good idea.”

The five intervening seats remained empty. Debby went over, offered the blanket, which Alexander gladly took, and held out the thermos of hot chocolate, which he also took.

“Bless you, how thoughtful.”

“My good deed for the day,” Debby said when she came back.

T
en minutes into the opera, Frank wished that he’d stayed with his friends in Los Angeles.
Dialogues of the Carmelites
turned out to be aptly named, for the cast droned its musical lines in a dreary operatic approximation of dialogue. Although the female singers needed to lower their pitch to accommodate the atonal effects, they nonetheless gave the effect of screeching.

Worse was the libretto, which had been translated into En-glish and took one of the most
un
spiritual approaches to religion that Frank had encountered, claiming that the Carmelite nuns were emotional invalids dominated by a masochistic abbess who convinced her charges to linger and wait to be executed so that she could prove how powerfully she controlled them.

Halfway through the first act, lightning flashed. The storm clouds unloaded, sending a torrent past the open sides of the opera house, causing the audience in those sections to retreat up the aisles.

Nature as critic,
Frank thought.

H
e had a headache by the time the seemingly interminable first act ended. Ushers hurried to the wet seats near the open sides, toweling them. As Frank and Debby stood, they found Alexander and Brother Richard coming over.

“I don’t know how I’d have gotten through that act without your charity,” the elderly man said, looking even colder.

“A terrible opera,” Brother Richard added. “You should have stayed in Los Angeles.”

“Don’t I wish.”

“Thanks for the blanket and the thermos.” Alexander returned them. “We’re going home.”

“That bad?”

“Worse.”

“Well, we enjoyed meeting you.”

“Same here,” Brother Richard said. “God bless.”

They disappeared among the crowd.

“Well, if I’m going to be able to sit through the second act, I’d better stretch my legs,” Frank said.

“You’re determined to stay?” Debby asked.

“After all the trouble I went through to get here? This damned opera isn’t going to beat me.”

T
hey followed the crowd to an outside balcony. The rain had again stopped. There were puddles in the courtyard below them, where well-dressed men and women drank cocktails, coffee, or hot chocolate. In the distance, lightning lit the mountains. Everybody oohed and aahed.

Frank shivered, then pointed at something in the courtyard. “Look.”

About a third of the audience was leaving through the front gate. But coming from the opposite direction, from the parking lot, Alexander and Brother Richard emerged from the darkness, making their way through the courtyard. What puzzled Frank wasn’t that they had left and were coming back. Rather it was that a spotlight seemed to be following them, outlining them, drawing Frank’s attention to their progress through the crowd. They almost glowed.

The two men went into the gift shop across from the balcony. Almost immediately they returned without having bought anything and again made their way through the crowd. They disappeared into the darkness past the gate.

“What was
that
all about?” Debby asked.

“I have no idea.” Frank couldn’t help yawning.

“Tired?”

“Very.”

“Me too.”

Frank yawned again. “Know what? If this opera’s bad enough for Alexander and Brother Richard to leave, I’m going to bow to their superior taste.”