When we talk to the dead, p.16
When We Talk to the Dead, page 16
Claude does that thing. Not quite a startle, but as if he’s surprised to be noticed. “Like a chair?” he says.
“Yeah, but higher.”
He goes, “Hmm.” Then he leans his head for her to follow.
They cross the meadow, go around the side of the house to a set of angled cellar doors. He opens them like metal wings. They go down to a large, dank basement, lit by ventilation windows at the top of the stone walls, some missing glass.
Sally looks at Claude and he gets her question.
He says, “I saw it when I was snooping last night, came down here.”
There are all sorts of mechanicals, big black metal things.
“What are all these?”
Claude knows some things right off—oil tank, furnace; some he squints at—an old fire chamber when they heated homes with coal, an incinerator where they stored vegetables.
Sally gives him a look.
He says, “You mean how do I know any of this?”
It’s like a challenge, to look at him and think the thought instead of saying it. He’s good at catching them. “Yeah.”
He smirks. “You think electricity magically happens. Water, heat, they just appear?”
“Pretty much,” Sally says.
We’re flirting, Sally thinks. It’s awkward being a person who needs to confirm the existence of flirting. But Sally finds it hard, when she has the desire, to let a flirting feeling come out freely. And when it seems she’s being flirted with, she dreads reading the situation wrong.
“Well,” he says, pointing to the machines, “this is where the magic comes from.”
She looks at him. “Cool.”
All that’s needed is for one of them to move a bit closer to the other.
But they walk.
There’s a large, full rack of wine.
“This you don’t have in every home.” Claude looks at her. “But you guys were fancy.”
There’s a shift, strong as the sound of silence after a loud clanging stops. Sally has the instinct to ignore it, but she can’t. “Why do I feel you’re mad at me?”
Claude shakes his head. “I’m not mad at you.” His mouth moves to say more, but then it closes, he looks at her, his expression clear, even through his zombie makeup. Sally feels him doing what she did, thinking a thought for her to catch. She hears it, a mixed-up thought that’s hard to say. After what happened all those years ago, Sally and her parents got to flee because that’s what fancy is, the ability to leave what’s bad, while he had nowhere to go.
Claude resumes walking, Sally follows, they come to a little staircase going up.
Claude passes the steps. “It’s under here, what I wanted to show you.”
Sally has stopped. She looks up the stairs at a closed door at top. “These go to the hallway outside the kitchen.” It’s weird when it happens, like swimming through a cold pocket of water, passing through these waiting memories. “Me and Emily would dare one another to go down; this place spooked us.”
“I know.”
“You remember that?”
“I do.”
It’s impossible to describe how it feels to have a memory and be told it is real. To know she can trust it enough to hold it as true. The urge to kiss him is intense. With their faces painted, Sally feels the potential, the bravery to act differently that comes when wearing a mask.
“So, it’s over here,” he says.
Sally walks past the stairs and under them, a section of ladders.
Sally picks the kind that opens like a triangle with a little shelf for a can of paint, or in this case, a camera. “This is perfect, Claude!”
* * *
The four colorful friends dance into the house. Zombie Claude is impassive as his old mate, Sally, full of life and color, beckons him to join. Zombie Claude’s expression shows a hint of emotion, the hesitant longing of a stray dog. Colorful Sally smiles; it’s okay. Zombie Claude attacks.
* * *
It’s afternoon. They are all cleaned as well as they can be. The water’s not working, so they used hand wipes Sally had to get off the face paint. They all stand behind Sally, watching the full video, a very rough edit she did while they had lunch before heading home.
Sally pauses the video. “That last part I’ll add some animation effects, but for now, imagine blood exploding out of their necks.” She presses play.
* * *
THE COLORFUL PEOPLE AND COLORFUL SALLY ALL IN A HEAP, DEAD, NOW COLORLESS. ZOMBIE CLAUDE STANDS OVER THEM. THE ONLY COLOR BLOOD AROUND HIS MOUTH, DOWN HIS NECK.
SALLY HAS BEEN RETURNED TO HER OLD STATE, AGAIN ZOMBIE SALLY. TORN-OPEN NECK, DEAD.
ZOMBIE CLAUDE PUTS HIS HAND OUT. ZOMBIE SALLY RISES. THEY WALK OFF HAND IN HAND.
© Your Gal Sal
* * *
They all cheer, clapping and whistling, making a show of being impressed.
“It’s still only a rough edit,” Sally demurs.
Challenging the veracity of Sally’s modesty, Omisha smirks. “Yet you had time to put on your copyright stamp.”
“There’s a lot I have to clean up,” Sally insists, secretly enjoying that her quiet vanity is recognized.
Marcus says, “It’s a bit, like, postwar Italian surrealism cinema derivative—inspired, sorry—so I’m sure you’ll get an A.”
Ignoring his slight, Sally says, “I’m not using this for class, but thanks for your vote of confidence.” To the others: “Though Marcus knows as well as me our prof said his job wasn’t to be the final judge of the quality of art, so as long as we show up, do the work, we all get A’s.”
“No one’s getting any grades from here. Can we go?” Maeve says with buzzkill energy.
“Can you stop being such a broken record?” Sally says, nastier than she realizes she felt.
Maeve flinches from the clapback. “Fine.” She gets up.
“Maeve,” Sally says. “I’m sorry. Maeve.”
“I have class tomorrow—but whatever.” Maeve goes to the love seat, picks up the book she’s been reading.
“We’re going back,” Sally says. “I was basking in the glory of this,” Sally says, pointing to the computer.
Maeve doesn’t look up from her book. She doesn’t soften. She nods that she gets it.
A bar of sunlight on the floor fades. The room abruptly darkens, the sound of wind kicking up. The front door swings up, making them jump; cold air rushes in, making things flutter and fly. A deep, long rumbling. They all go to the porch. Low, dark clouds rush overhead.
Sally has never seen this before, watching the edge of a weather system approaching, a moving wall of rain. It moves over the forest, the trees instantly whipped around, soaked. The rain moves fast across the field and the army of her mother’s sculptures, and in an instant, it is drumming on the porch overhang, then the whole house, the entire island quickly engulfed in a heavy downpour.
“We’re not going anywhere in this,” Claude says, stating the obvious.
They all nod and grunt in agreement.
“It could pass,” Maeve says. “It’s not even four, so we might have some daylight left.”
The others pretend to agree as the deluge of rain pours with a deafening weight.
Omisha says, “Personally, my first class isn’t till three, so worse comes to worse, long as we head out early tomorrow … And if we’re stuck here,” she continues, saying aloud what they all know to be true, “Sally, didn’t you mention something about wine?”
“Now we’re talking,” Marcus says. Thankful to not be in the doghouse, he cozies up to Omisha, whispering seductively in her ear, “Booze and another night trying to call the spirits.”
“Should I get a fire going? Wouldn’t want anyone catching a chill,” Claude says.
Marcus gives Claude the finger.
Claude runs down the porch stairs. He presses close so the overhang protects him from the torrential rain as he gets logs from under the porch. He passes them up; Sally takes them, making a pile. He nudges his head at the rain. “Told you,” he says, enjoying his victory.
“Yeah, yeah,” Sally says.
“What?” Maeve says, stepping closer. “What did he tell you?”
Sally looks at her. “Nothing.” Then she says, “When we were upstairs this morning, he said the wind on the ocean might be regular wind or might be wind in front of a weather system.”
“So you knew?” Maeve says.
“There was nothing to know. He was saying it could be this or it could be that.”
Maeve’s face goes sharp. “You wanted us to stay here.”
“There wasn’t some big plot,” Sally says.
Maeve says, “I get that it’s a whole thing for you to be back here, but I haven’t stopped feeling sick since we got here. All those stories in that stupid book—it’s not like I believe in ghosts and curses, but—I don’t know, maybe tragedy does leave something behind, bad juju. Whatever it is, every cell in my body tells me I don’t want to be here, and you knew that. You knew we might be stuck here another day, and you just did what you wanted.” Suddenly enraged, she screams. “You’re two-faced!” Maeve points at Sally. “Two-faced!” She runs down the stairs and out into the pouring rain, and she screams. “Fuuuuuuuck!”
* * *
The rain continues like it’s never going to stop. Claude gets a fire going. Maeve has changed, her hair still wet; she sits in front of the fire, staring intently into the flames, eyes watery with upset, arms around her legs pulled to her chest. Omisha finds a radio in the kitchen that works on solar panels and a hand crank when that runs out—it’s just the type of thing, Sally thinks, that Dad gets. Feeling charmed by this, she finds herself longing for him, for the comfort that comes only from family, even messed-up ones. Omisha and Marcus fight over finding songs on the radio.
Sally says she’ll get dinner going. She goes to the kitchen. It’s still jarring walking into this place frozen in time. She sits at the table at her old seat. There’s a bunch of books. She flips through them, feeling a quiet, sad affection for the little girl who loved them. Peter’s Chair, about a little boy who’s jealous of his new baby sister and struggles over feeling displaced. He’s cute; Sally smiles remembering she had a crush on him. How the Whales Became. She’d felt so grown-up that she could kind of read it, fantastical, mythological stories of how different animals came into being. Where The Wild Things Are, of course. She flips through it, looks at the picture of Max waving from his boat on the water, the wild things rushing to the shore, their eyes filled with sadness and rage because they can never leave. Sally feels how powerless the wild things are. Watching Max, with his complacent smile, free to go, their threats are all bluster. They’re frightened, desperate, little inside. Their love for him is so great they’d rather eat him up, to keep him anyway they can, than to see him go. Sally reads aloud the line she was thinking of this morning, and it nearly breaks her heart.
Claude walks in.
Sally grimaces. She laughs. She closes the book. “Caught me being weird.”
Claude sits across from her, at Emily’s old seat. He looks at her drawing. “This was Emily’s?” He gets a funny kind of smile, then looks at Sally. “You know how you keep remembering things? I just had that, remembering Emily drawing a lot.”
Sally says, “She was so good, right?”
Claude says, “You guys had that artist mom.”
“Yeah.”
Claude says, “You got it too.”
Sally appreciates what Claude’s trying to do. She nods, accepting being humored.
Claude reads her expression. “I’m not blowing smoke. It’s just, like, a fact. Your film? It’s cool you can do that.” Seeing that she remains doubtful, Claude wants her to see what he sees. “Watching your stuff, it’s more than just ‘This is so cool.’ You feel stuff. Everything on your channel’s that way. It’s all, just—real. I don’t know how to say it about these kinds of thing, except—isn’t that being an artist, or whatever?” Claude feels shy, uncomfortable and unfamiliar with this kind of assessment. “I mean, that’s why Marcus is so jealous of you, right?”
Sally’s every fiber is trained to resist compliment, a reflex to never be noticed too much. She longs to believe him. Deep, deep down she believes this about herself. More than anything she’s desperate to have a non-fucked-up connection to her mom. She says, “Thanks.”
“Just saying what’s true.” He frowns at Emily’s drawing. “She didn’t finish.”
Sally turns her head to see. The creatures are filled in, all but one left as an outline waiting for its color. It makes the drawing feel more intense, even more a remnant of the fact that she was taken away before she finished. Then Sally notices. Surveying the table’s clutter, her books, her parents’ paperwork, dishes, cups, Emily’s drawing, there are no crayons. Sally has a pang. Did her sister die and when they were leaving, did Sally steal her crayons? She feels rotten.
Sally gets up, grabs a box of pasta, gets a pot, puts it in the sink, turns on the water, remembering. No water. “Right,” she says to herself.
Claude leaves the kitchen for the hallway to the side door. He returns with a bucket of water. “When it started pouring, I lined up a bunch of buckets to collect rainwater.” He shrugs. “Power gets cut off so much, you get used to doing things like that.”
“That happens in our apartment. Not like in the country where a storm knocks out power—it’s an old building that needs to upgrade some things,” Sally says.
“Not so much just the storms for us either,” Claude says. He shakes his head, smiles.
You can tell when a person wants to share something but also wants to cover it up—saying without saying. Sally nods to let him know she heard it but he can keep invisible the details of his circumstance. Sally thanks him for the water, pours into the pot.
“I saw the main pump house out back. If you wanted water running through the house, you’d need to get that thing up and running.”
Sally hands him tomato sauce, premade garlic bread. “We don’t really need that.”
“I know,” he says. “Just saying, I bet I could get it running.”
Sally grabs the pot of water, a box of pasta. She grins. “Just showing off?”
“Pretty much.” He smiles.
Back in the main room, kneeling, Sally boils the pasta at the fireplace. Heats the sauce, crisps the bread. Before feeling connected to her mom, now, feeding people, she feels connected to Dad.
They carry buckets of rainwater into a bathroom, and they use an ancient bar of soap to wash up for dinner, everyone but Maeve.
Sally finds her in one of the three guest bedrooms on the ground floor.
“Hey,” Sally says. “Food’s done.”
“I’m sleeping here tonight.”
“Okay.”
Maeve gets up, brushes past Sally.
The storm ends, they light candles, night comes.
Marcus leaves, returns with a bottle of wine. He rips off the foil and there’s a cork. “How do you open this?” he says, picking at the cork.
Sally goes to the kitchen. Knowing what it looks like, she finds a wine opener. When she returns, Omisha has taken the bottle and is doing a variation of Marcus’s ineffective picking. Sally makes a show of it, pulling the top of the wine opener, which looks like a triangular head, that moves the two arms it has. She pulls it up and down so the wine opener looks like a figure flapping its arms, making a snow angel, while a corkscrew shoots down like a penis. Sally’s seen Dad use it endless times, but she’s never. She takes the bottle, puts the opener on top. If she was paid all the money in the world, she doesn’t know what’s next. She does random, pointless things. Maeve sighs, snatches the bottle and opener. They watch her position it, turn the triangular head that makes the arms slowly rise as the corkscrew steadily drills into the cork. Pushing the raised arms down, the corkscrew pulls the cork up and out with a pop.
Maeve takes a swig. “It’s my job to open bottles when my parents have parties.”
Sally feels the words in her throat, making the joke that Maeve is a lush. A joke that now leaves Sally melancholy because something broke and changed between them, and that old joke belongs to close friends. Sally thinks, they’ll leave here, return to school with a story of the crazy time they all went to the island. Maeve will forgive her. So long in the habit of being best friends, they’ll carry on. But Sally envisions it. It will start with little things. Forgetting to tell the other when they’re heading to dinner, getting deeper into the different things they get into. Sitting here right now, Sally feels the first hints of a distance that’s seeped into the space between them. Truth be told, Sally first sensed it freshman year when Maeve became enamored of Omisha. But Maeve has never let herself acknowledge it. Now that she has, it will expand. The joke of Maeve being a lush is funny because it says how much Sally knows Maeve. Of all the people, she would never be. The joke belongs to then and this feels like the beginning of now. The joke sits in Sally’s throat, but she feels it’s not hers to have. She stays quiet.
They sit in a circle, winding up the radio, changing stations, eating, passing the wine, and the mood lightens. When Sally looks at Maeve, her face isn’t open, but it relaxes, and in the larger group, she’s fully in the conversation and Sally wonders if she is being melodramatic. The five talk about this and that, fun nothingness, laughing, moving shoulders to the staticky songs.
“Gotta piss,” Marcus says, running off.
Claude stacks the dirty plates.
“You don’t have to,” Sally says.
“Okay.” But he takes the plates anyway.
The three girls alone, an awkwardness returns because Maeve’s bad feelings for Sally, eased by wine and the crowd, harden back up. Omisha clocks it. She holds up the Ouija board, raises her eyebrows, to entice them with an activity. Dad does the same thing, cheerleading Sally and Jivani to the table to do a puzzle or board game to pretend they’re a happy family. Sally looks at Maeve, hoping to share a laugh at Omisha’s Goth schtick. Sally’s even okay if giving her a look will let Maeve work through her anger by rejecting Sally’s overture, taking a seat away from them but near enough for Sally to see her seething. Enough to know she still matters.
