The Dark Side of Nowhere (15 page)

The toddler wandered into the room, and I glanced over to see Paula entering behind him. She seemed more vulnerable and more uncertain than I had ever seen her. By now she must have known that I meant to break up with her. I turned back to the old woman.

“I—uh—heard he was a town hero.”

“Oh, yes, J.J. sure is something—everybody loves
J.J.” said Mrs. Pohl, beaming at the thought of him. “He's in Vietnam, don'cha know, fighting the war.”

There was a moment of uncomfortable silence.

“Mrs. Pohl,” Paula said gently, “the war's been over for a long, long time.”

Mrs. Pohl took in the information, reprocessed it, and corrected herself: “Yes . . . yes it has. And they gave J.J. a Medal of Honor when it was over, for what he did!”

“What did he do?” I asked.

“Well,” she began, “a helicopter went down in the jungle. All that fire, and napalm everywhere. He went in, pulled a man out before it blew up, and carried him miles to safety.” Then her face sobered a bit. “Terrible thing to go through all that, just to get sick and die at home a few years later.”

She reached over and tickled the toddler under the chin. “This is my great-grandson—J.J.'s grandson. He's named after him—aren't you, Jason?” The toddler cooed, and I shifted uncomfortably.

“He's a Jason, too,” Paula had to point out.

“Yeah, me and half the country,” I grumbled.

She scowled at me, clueless as to why I had brushed that off.

The old woman smiled. “Would you like to see his medal?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Yeah, I would.”

“What about bingo,” Paula asked Mrs. Pohl.

“Oh, it'll still be there.”

As she led us into the spotless living room, Paula turned to me and whispered, “What is it with you?”

Then, the second Paula turned her back, I reached over and grabbed the old woman's glasses, which were sitting on top of the microwave, and hid them deep in my pocket.

They say when you die, your life flashes before your eyes. And now, as I felt the human part of me dying, it was J.J.'s life that was flashing before me.

Above the mantel was a wide wall covered with framed photos of him. J.J. and his family, J.J. with his bride, J.J. with his daughter, who must have been little Jason's mother. I had thought I would just see a medal—I hadn't expected to see a shrine.

“He kind of looks like you,” Paula said to me—and then her face paled. There was a picture of J.J., black and white—must have been early sixties. He had a flat-top butch and a broad smile. He must have been around fourteen, and there was no denying that it was me, right down to his smiling teeth. It ripped the wind right out of me—and must have hit Paula even harder. She just stared at the picture. Then she reached over and pushed my hair back off my forehead, to see how I might look with hair
that short. She studied my face, then drew her hand back, unable to say a thing. I had always assumed that Paula had backup speech centers in her brain that kicked out clever lines in the thickest of situations. I never thought I'd see her speechless.

There was a lump in my throat as I took in the images before me. It was both horrible and wonderful. There were older pictures of his daughter on the wall, too. Even she looked like me.

Still, Mrs. Pohl had no idea. She reached up and pulled down a small wooden box from the mantel. Inside, on a velvet background, the Medal of Honor was pinned, still shining like new.

“President Nixon himself gave this to J.J.,” she said, then pointed to a picture of Nixon shaking my hand. Paula was still looking back and forth at me and at the pictures, but her investigative instinct finally wrestled back her bewilderment.

“Exactly when did your son die?”

“Over twenty years ago.” She shook her head sadly. “It was that awful, awful flu. It took some good people, it did. I can only thank the Almighty that J.J.'s wife and daughter were halfway across the country, visiting her family. Otherwise they all might be gone.”

“But . . . you mean it wasn't spiders?”

“
Spiders?
Well, maybe in the sense that people were dropping like flies, I suppose.”

I felt that pit beneath me grow deeper.

“Most people didn't know about the epidemic until it was all over,” said Mrs. Pohl. “They kept it awful quiet. Still, I would have liked to have seen him one last time.”

I offered her a smile. “Maybe you will someday.”

She peered at me through her teary, unfocused eyes, unable to make out the details of my features. Then she turned away, put back the medal, and took down a photo album. She sat on the couch, and little Jason, who had torn down the foldout fence to get in the room, climbed up next to her as she opened the album. The kid pointed at a picture. “Ga-ga!” he said.

“Yes,” said Mrs. Pohl. “You're right, that's Grandpa!”

He looked at me and laughed.

Mrs. Pohl turned the next page, as if she momentarily forgotten we were there.

Paula cleared her throat. “Uh . . . Mrs. Pohl?”

She looked up at us, momentarily startled, and sighed. “You know, I don't feel much like bingo tonight,” she said. Then she dug into her sweater pocket and held out a roll of dollars bills to Paula.

“Here,” she said, “it's only right—you came all this way.”

“No, you don't have to.”

“Please,” said Mrs. Pohl. “I want you to have it.” When Paula didn't take it, she put it in my hands, and smiled, much happier now than when we had arrived. “Take her to Braum's, and get yourselves a couple of those giant banana splits,” she said. “J.J. just loves banana splits.”

As she turned, I stopped her and said, “Oh, look—here are your glasses! They were on the mantel all along!” I handed them to her. “Here. You'll be able to see the pictures now.”

“The mantel! Well, doesn't that just figure.” She turned and headed for the couch. I was gone before she slipped the glasses on.

P
aula didn't say a word to me as I walked her home. But then I didn't say a word to her, either. It was as if the sudden reality of J.J. Pohl came down between us like a soundproof wall. I wouldn't break up with her tonight. Even if tonight was the last night we ever saw each other, I refused to say those words.

Something was brewing inside of me now—something about Paula, and J.J. and Grant and my parents—and I knew if I wasn't careful, I'd have one of those moments where everything comes together. I wasn't ready for that.

As we neared her house, she stopped me by the curb. “Wait here,” she said.

She went into her garage and came out a minute later, carrying a pick and a shovel. Somehow I didn't think we were going to use them for banana splits. She handed me the shovel and strode off down the street. I followed.

“What's this for?”

“First you tell me how a man who died seven years before you were born has your face.”

“He doesn't have my face—I have his.”

“And maybe you can tell me how you could look me in the eye when Grant was feeding me that garbage about the spiders. I'll bet you all had a good laugh, didn't you?”

“I didn't laugh.”

“Fine,” she said. “Then maybe now you can tell me whether or not Ethan's alive.”

This pit had no bottom; I knew that now. “I have no idea,” I told her. What did it matter what I said now?

“Well, it's time we found out,” she announced. “So we're going to the cemetery and dig up his grave.”

I
n the cold moonlight, the graveyard was all blue monoliths and long black shadows. You'd think a graveyard
would be a terrifying place at night—and it is when you're standing on the outside. But once you hop over that fence, you realized it's not much different from the land around it. Except of course for the dead people.

Ethan's grave looked much the same as it had two months earlier. Small plugs of ivy had been evenly spaced across the mound of dirt like a cheap hair transplant. There was no headstone yet, and it looked woefully lonely.

“Paula, this is crazy!” I insisted. “This is nuts!”

“So put me in a padded cell in the morning—but right now this is what we have to do.” She looked at me as I held my shovel. “You start,” she said.

The corner I was in couldn't have been any tighter. Either I dug, or I left and she did it by herself, which I felt she might just do. Paula could achieve just about anything, whether it was grandiose or depraved. I couldn't justify leaving her alone to do this, so I began to dig, hoping that she'd change her mind a few feet down.

I only dug the spade in once, then flung the dirt off to the side . . . and when I looked up, I saw a moonlit fist flying in my direction.

Bam!
She threw a right hook to the jaw that practically spun my head around.

“You lousy, stinking, lying creep!”

There was one possible response to that.

“Huh?”

“If there was any chance that Ethan was really down there,” she said, “you wouldn't have gone anywhere
near
that grave, and you know it! You wouldn't even have come to the cemetery!”

She was right. It was a trick, she got me, and now I was dead.

“He's alive,” she announced, “and you've known it all along, haven't you?”

“Uh . . . well . . .”

“Forget it,” she said, taking my shovel, and her cap. “You've already given me your answer.” Then she stormed off, leaving me standing over the empty grave.

I
plodded my way toward Old Town. By now they were probably wondering where I was, and I'd have to come up with a good story. More lies. My breakup with Paula had not been the clean surgical procedure it was supposed to be—it had turned into a chainsaw massacre, and the more I thought about it, the worse I felt. I kept thinking about what I had done to her and about how the lies got layered so thick, I could barely breathe. It would have been bad enough if I had done this to a stranger, but I had done it to someone I truly cared about.

The thought pulled out an intense flow of tears. Ethan had said we could just cut the thoughts and feelings out,
but I wasn't there yet, and I could not live with this.

I doubled back, racing at full speed, till I reached the graveyard, then continued on toward Paula's house, my superior lungs never getting tired, my superior legs never getting weak.

I reached her house and jumped over the fence, determined to tell her the truth a million times over until she believed it—but as I crossed the yard, I was intercepted by an unexpected countermeasure. Mookie.

The second he had smelled me, he bounded out of the doghouse. Without a single hesitation, he grabbed my leg in his powerful jaw and bit clear through my pants and into the flesh.

I yowled in pain and reached down, prying him loose, but he lunged again. And so I kicked him—forgetting how powerful my kick would be.

Mookie never stood a chance. He went flying over the doghouse and over the low-hanging moon, then landed in a patch of dense grass—and didn't move.

That's when I looked up to see Paula watching out of her window, her eyes gaping in horror.

I didn't mean it, I didn't mean it,
I wanted to say, but the only thing that came out of my mouth was a desperate, mournful wail.

She screamed, and I bolted.

There were so many things that were beyond salvage
now, and inside my head I heard Grant, and Ethan, and everyone else saying how I should put it out of my mind.
Just let it
go,
their voices said.
It will all seem unimportant in a little while
. I cursed myself for not being able to be more like them and more like my parents, who had successfully put the past behind them, no matter how hard it might have been.

My mind was reeling—filled not only with thoughts of Paula, but of J.J., the stranger whose face I stole. And then I found myself thinking about all the strangers, in all the pin-prick road-apple towns in the world that were exactly like Billington, people with no idea of the big surprise looming on the horizon. There must have been something seriously wrong with me, because all I could think of were them, instead of my friends in Old Town.

I looked down at my leg, which was spilling blood all over my sneaker, and suddenly a realization hit me that seemed more horrible than anything I could remember. In the dim moonlight, I couldn't even tell what color my blood was.

I
was running with no destination, but my homing instinct brought me to my old house, the one I'd lived in when things were nice and normal. I had no key, so I kicked in the door with my good leg.

Inside, the house was much the same, less a few chairs and mattresses—but most everything else had been abandoned there, just as everything in Old Town had been abandoned many years before. I sniffed the air. Mom and Dad had had the electricity turned off, but they hadn't emptied the refrigerator, and the stench of putrefied food filled the stagnant air like a disease.

I searched through the usual places for a flashlight, and when I found one, I took a deep breath and aimed it down. The blood was red. There was a lot of it, but it was red, and I could deal with that.

I bandaged my leg in the bathroom, then went into my parents' closet, not even knowing what I was searching for until I found it—and once I found it, I didn't even realize what I was about to do. It was as if I were outside of myself, watching it all happen.

I silently returned to the bathroom and pulled off my shirt. Then I turned the flashlight on my face and studied myself in the mirror. In the harsh contrasts of the light beam, I could see my change intensified. The delicate shape of my nose, the smooth cut of my cheekbones, the perfect curve of my chin, and that shimmering pelt of angel hair beginning to coat my shoulders.