The Calling (37 page)

Chapter 32

“S
o that’s it?”
 

Moses placed the Metro in park, turned off the ignition. “You’re talking to me now?”
 

“Does this mean it’s over? Did we ... did we beat Samael?”
 

It was six o’clock in the evening, the sun already sloping toward the horizon, sending a fading orange glow down on the valley just beyond The Hill.
 

Moses turned in his seat and stared at me for a couple moments. “What happened to you back there?”
 

“What do you mean?”
 

“Before those two kids with the guns came in, something happened to you. I could feel it. It was like ... like you were sitting next to me but you weren’t.”
 

It was Dean who’d seen them coming into the gymnasium. He shouted a warning and when it was clear that he’d be ignored he did what he had been trained to do: shoot to kill. The first boy, Martin Luhr, had died only seconds after hitting the ground. The second boy, Adam Grant, had only been wounded and was taken away in an ambulance.
 

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
 

“You’re lying.”
 

“Do you really want to fucking start with me right now?” I held his gaze, and when he didn’t answer, I said, “I didn’t think so. As far as I’m concerned, thirty-four people were supposed to die at that graduation. But they didn’t. And now it’s over.”
 

I unclipped my seatbelt and reached for the door handle when Moses spoke.
 

“Christopher, there’s one more thing I need to tell you.”
 

“Let me guess—you and Joey
did
kill my parents after all.”
 

He didn’t even flinch. “I told you before we didn’t.”
 

“No, but you knew it was going to happen. You could have prevented it but decided not to. So yes, in a way, you did kill them.”
 

I opened the door, started to get out.
 

Moses said, “Joey didn’t pass anything on to you.”
 

I stood frozen, one foot in the car, the other foot on the grass, staring at a red, white and blue pinwheel spinning in front of someone’s trailer.
 

“It’s important for you to understand. There are people just like Joey in the world who know things. They don’t know how they know what they know, or why they do, or how to control it.”
 

The pinwheel kept spinning and spinning, the colors mixing into one all-American shade.
 

“Christopher, do you understand what I’m telling you?”
 

My body unfroze, and I stepped fully out of the car, turned and ducked back down so I could see the man in the driver’s seat.
 

“Moses, please don’t take this the wrong way, but I don’t ever want to fucking see your face again. Got it?”
 

I slammed the door shut before he could say anything else. Then I was walking, taking slow deep breaths, trying to forget everything that had happened today. My plan was to check on my grandmother but I wanted to stop at my own trailer first, take a shower and change out of these clothes.
 

As I headed down the drive, a screen door banged open and a voice called, “Christopher! Christopher, wait!”
 

Carol, my grandmother’s friend who had only eight more months to live before dying alone in a hospital bed, rushed down the steps of her trailer. I hurried over to her, asking what was wrong.
 

Catching her breath, she said, “I was keeping an eye out for you.”
 

My gaze shifted over to my grandmother’s trailer. “What is it?”
 

“It’s Lily. She was rushed to the hospital.”
 

“What? When?”
 

“Almost an hour ago.” She paused, her hand to her chest, taking slow breaths. “I was walking my poodle Sky, and I heard her cry out inside her trailer. She said a name—it sounded like Kevin. I knocked on her door asking what was wrong but she never answered me. When I went inside to check on her she was right there on the floor. She looked just like my dear husband Stanley did when he had his stroke, God rest his soul.”
 

“She had a stroke?”
 

Carol shook her head. “Them ambulance people wouldn’t say, but I’m sure it was a stroke. Lord, first Nancy, now Lily. I’ve been trying to call Dean since it happened but I can’t get a hold of him.”
 

She told me about my note and how she’d been keeping an eye out for me. I asked her which hospital they’d taken her to, but I already knew.
 

“St. Joseph’s,” she said matter-of-factly. “Do you need directions?”
 

“No, I know the way.” I started down the drive, toward my car.
 

“Oh, one more thing.”
 

I turned back.
 

“Do make sure she didn’t get any burns. I checked her trailer after they left to see if the oven was on, or maybe her curler, but I couldn’t find what it was. I even mentioned it to the ambulance people, though they claimed they didn’t smell anything. But I swear I did smell it when I first went inside. I know I did.”
 

I was in a rush, but something made me pause, made me ask her what it was she’d smelled.
 

“Well, when I stepped inside the trailer, the first thing I smelled was something burning. It was an awful stink. An awful, nasty stink.”

Chapter 33

T
hey had her in a private room on the fourth floor. I sat in a chair beside her bed. The machines around it beeped steadily, the green thin lines on the monitor sloping up and down. The room had no noticeable smells, which bothered me. For some reason I felt I should at least smell disinfectant, or my grandmother’s dying body on the bed.
 

I thought of my final words to her last night, of telling her goodnight before I went to my trailer. Did I tell her I loved her?
 

She wore a blue paper gown. Her chest rose and fell. Her calm and long face was pale. Behind her eyelids, the movement was slight.
 

Before I knew it then that chill shot through my soul and I saw her just as she came out of the bathroom in her trailer. I was there with her, standing by the Magnavox in the corner. I could hear her radio, playing light jazz; I could smell the tuna sandwich she’d made herself for lunch, the potato chips and ranch dip. I watched helpless as she walked out and saw the figure standing there before her. Its clothes were charred, as was its skin, and though I only saw the back of its head, I knew it was staring at her with the darkest eyes she’d ever seen. Memories of her youth swarmed her and she cried out a name before her heart failed her. She fell to the floor, her soft head knocking against the edge of the counter
.
 

Blinking, I was back in the hospital room, not standing but sitting, staring at my grandmother’s near-lifeless body. For a moment my mind was a complete blank. Then thoughts and shards of the past began seeping in and I understood.
 

“You didn’t say Kevin,” I whispered. “You said Devin.”
 

I remembered the man whom I’d thought was Lewis Shepherd tell me a fragmented history of the Beckett House, and that he said
Supposedly Reverend Beckett was involved with one of the local girls ... supposedly she was a minor
.
 

I remembered my first day in Bridgton, sitting beside my grandmother on her swing as she told me how she’d only been in love with two men her entire life, and about the first she said
It was really nothing more than a hopeless crush on a man twice my age
.
 

And while it may have seemed like some very thin evidence, I connected the dots, I saw the link. Once again that feeling passed through me and I saw them there, back in 1953, a young Lily Thorsen going to meet with an older Devin Beckett, a man with whom she had a crush on but a man who respected God and himself, who even respected Lily. They talked about simple things, like school and the weather, and more complex things, like God and the Bible. Lily quickly understood that while she thought she was in love, it was only a crush, and while Beckett agreed to speak with her in private about whatever she wished to talk about, he made it a rule that it would be their secret. He knew how townspeople liked to gossip and didn’t want to think what would happen if word got around he’d become friends with an underage girl.
 

Except, of course, that secret was finally revealed, which somehow sparked a massacre that kept killing unto this day.
 

“Everything,” I whispered. “It all comes back to you.”
 

Whether her unconscious mind heard her me or not, she made no response. The only sounds I was left with in the cold sterilized room were the steady beeps of the machines. The steady beeps, and the slow rise and fall of her chest.

•
 
•
 
•

I
MUST
HAVE
dozed off. The last thing I remembered before closing my eyes was that it was a little after seven o’clock. When I awoke, my arms were crossed and I was slouched in the chair. Through the slim space between the plain curtains I saw it was nighttime. Dean stood at the foot of Grandma’s bed.
 

“What time is it?” I asked.
 

He glanced at his watch, told me a quarter after nine.
 

“How long have you been here?”
 

“Ten minutes.”
 

He never even looked at me, instead stared down at the woman in the bed. Her face was still long and calm, there was still movement behind her eyelids, but nothing else.
 

“Have you talked to the nurses?” I asked.
 

“Yeah, I did. Heart attack.” He shook his head. “They said the only things keeping her alive right now are those machines.”
 

His face reminded me of the first five days he’d been in Lanton. Hard and cautious, his eyes cold. Only now his face was red too, and wet from tears. Because the room had no distinguishable scents, I had no problem smelling the lingering cigarette smoke coming from his direction. I imagined him smoking ever since he heard the news—on the drive over from Bridgton, flicking the ash out the window as he sped down 14, then in the parking lot, sitting in the Explorer and chain-smoking his Winston’s until he was finally able to come inside. Now here he stood, in the same clothes as this afternoon, his arms at his sides, his hands flexing in and out of fists.
 

“I saw what you did today.”
 

I didn’t think he was going to answer me. He continued staring down at his mother. Finally he nodded. “I know you did, Chris. Everybody there did. They saw me screw up.”
 

“Screw up? No, you were a hero. You saved lives.”
 

Thirty-four lives, I thought but didn’t say.
 

His eyes shifted away for the first time, stared back into my own. He looked so helpless there, so alone. Nothing like the man who’d confronted me earlier today just outside the gymnasium, the man who’d nearly called Moses Cunningham a nigger.
 

“When you become a cop they tell you to learn the law. To memorize it, to live it, and that’s what you do. They tell you to keep the law, to enforce it, and you do that as best you can. But you know something? The only thing the law does is protects the bad guys. No matter what somebody does, there’s always a technicality to get him off.”
 

He shook his head.
 

“Sometimes I wonder if it’s worth it in the end. That all the time and energy I spend trying to catch the bad guys and keeping the peace is even worth my time. Driving home every night I ask myself what I’m sure every cop asks himself—am I making a difference? Am I doing something that will somehow make the world a better place?”
 

He shrugged, wiped at his face.
 

“But it’s not like I can complain. Hell, I’m just a deputy assigned to some sticks town, not a cop walking the beat in New York City. But today when I saw those two, instinct took over and I reacted. I shouted at them, I told them to stop, to drop their weapons, and when it became apparent that they wouldn’t, when the one in front even started to raise his rifle, I knew I had no choice. I fired at them both. The one’s dead. The other ... he’s actually in this hospital somewhere. I think they have him on the third floor.”
 

“Dean,” I said, leaning forward in my chair. “What is it? What’s wrong?”
 

He stared down at the bed. He actually grinned, though it was an empty grin, the grin of a defeated man.
 

“As it turns out I didn’t warn them that I would shoot. I shouted stop and I shouted drop your weapons, but I never gave them that warning. You probably think it’s no big deal, and in reality it’s not. But some lawyer came forward about an hour ago—he was actually at the graduation, some school parent—and he said he’ll represent the Grant kid, and the Luhr family. Says that I could have handled the situation differently. Says both parties might still be alive. That had I done my job properly none of this would have happened.”
 

“But that’s bullshit. Those kids were planning on shooting up the place. They wanted to kill people.”
 

“I know that, Chris. You know that. Hell, everyone there knows that. But the thing is, with our fucked up judicial system that doesn’t matter. Because there’s always some technicality a lawyer will try to play. It’s a game to them. He might get it past a judge and jury, he might not, but in the end it doesn’t matter. He’s going to drag this thing out for as long as he can to get his name in the papers, because he thinks he’s doing what’s right. And that’s really what pisses me off. That
he’s
the one who thinks he’s making a difference.”