There wasn’t any screaming now, on this night. Not yet.
“She’s moving, Donny. I really saw her move.” Mike sounded terrified.
“Too early,” Donny said. He had heard of some coming back that fast, but more typically, it would be anywhere from six hours to a day. There was the one time that a kid, a drowning victim, had sat up in the back of the ambulance, unable to talk because water had filled his lungs. But all the others, that Donny knew of personally, took their time about it.
He’d just never heard of one coming back that fast. They weren’t sure how long the bodies had been there, but the trucker who called it in said that the snow hadn’t filled in the tire tracks yet, the treads like a long black snake uncoiling off the road. Donny’d arrived seven minutes later, and Cal rolled up three minutes after that.
“She’s moving. Her eyelids are moving.”
Donny went to her. He felt for a pulse, and it wasn’t there and then it was. Faint. An echo of life.
Donny swore. “We’ve got one still alive!” he said. “Alive!”
He yelled orders, people moved. Cal Wilson was running. Mike moved. Other than she-of-the-fluttering-eyelids, none of the other bodies on the ground had moved.
Cal Wilson ran over too. The girl on the ground was bruised and bleeding, but she wasn’t his. Hope, like love, can be a dagger in the heart.
Not his. Not Mandy.
She was still in the front seat of the van.
They made Sanders High School the center for grief counseling. There were those in the area who thought that was an idiotic idea, seeing the school as a large brick-and-chalk-dust reminder of those very kids they’d just lost, but there were others who understood. Sanders High School, for many, was the last remaining edifice that held some sense of the community that Sanders once was. It was where Mayor Marshland had town meetings. It was where the rotary club met. It was where the spaghetti suppers and the fundraisers and the socials were held. It was where Alma Gustavson held adult ed classes in macramé and needlepoint.
It was where the dead kids had gone to school.
No one could fault Mr. Stockton, the school’s guidance counselor, for his breakdown early in the day. He was qualified to help the graduating seniors, all twenty-nine of them, to locate and apply to college, or to help them find placement with one of the few local businesses within city limits or in Wells, the larger town that the van had been returning from. He’d known these kids well, and one of them especially well, having guided her through a troubling situation at home. Four kids D.O.S. in one accident, with a fifth comatose and most likely crippled for life in a bed at Wells hospital. Who could provide guidance or counseling for that?
A “grief specialist” from Boston was brought in. Again, there was talk, and grumbling, but at the end of the discussion most agreed that it was necessary. This way the town could pour all of their grief—and their resentment, and their hatred—into this person and then send her back to Beantown with her check and never have to see her again.
Cal Wilson took a seat toward the back of the room at a respectful distance from the other grieving parents. A few seats ahead of him, Bill Trafton lifted his hand in a curt wave of acknowledgment. Bill owned Sanders Hardware downtown. He was also a volunteer fireman who was fortunate enough to have missed the call the previous night. Cal was glad it was he, and not Bill, that had found his son Curtis lying in the snow.
Chuck Barnes looked back at him but didn’t acknowledge him at all. Chuck’s wife didn’t even turn around.
They started the meeting with introductions—of the parents, the counselor, and various town functionaries who wished to bear witness to their grief. After a brief shuffling of feet and staring at the floor, the woman from Boston started the session.
“Good evening,” she said. “Let’s talk about why we are all here.”
She pronounced the “ r ”. She was wearing a sharp suit that set her apart from the grief stricken, who were mostly in sweatshirts and jeans. Mayor Marshland was worried that she wasn’t a Bostonian at all, but a New Yorker in disguise.
“We don’t know for certain why they come back sometimes, or even if they will come back.” She stopped, and smiled. She was a small woman, young, with glasses and long chestnut hair.
“But we know that the possibility exists, and we should talk about what will happen if they do return.”
The parents of the children were silent. It was difficult to tell what they were thinking—whether or not they felt as though they were being counseled or if they were only a moment away from dragging the lady from Boston out into the street. But the woman thought she knew.
“I know what you are thinking. I’d be thinking the same thing if I were in your position. All the things going through your head. Is my child coming back? Is he not coming back? Do I want her or him to come back? Will he or she be different? The same? What will I do?”
She paused and looked at each of the parents in turn.
“You are wondering: what will happen if my child comes back from the dead?”
Cal nodded along with the others, but that isn’t what he’d been wondering at all.
He wished he’d stayed with Laura Davis at the hospital. Laura’s son Stevie had been in the far back seat, the only boy without a date. Cal had offered Laura a ride—he supposed they were friends, at least their kids had been friends for a few years—but Laura said that she wanted to be there when Stevie “woke up.” That’s how she’d put it. Woke up. As though her son’s death was just a bad dream they were sharing, one that would vanish the moment he opened his eyes.
The doctor said that it was too early for any of them to start coming back, that she should go talk to the trauma specialist, but Laura wasn’t having any of it.
“Doctors don’t know jackrabbit about it,” is what she’d said. Jackrabbit. She’d be sitting in the hospital with a mystery novel and the largest cup of coffee she could get from Dunkin’ Donuts, while Cal and the other parents were listening to the woman in the expensive red suit tell them how they felt.
“I’ll call you,” Laura had told Cal, her eyes clear as she looked up at him from her blue vinyl seat. He wanted to hold her hand, to hug her, but in the end he stood there like a statue. Laura lost her husband in a fishing accident a few years ago, and Cal had spent the last few months wondering if enough time had passed for him to ask her out.
“Call me?” he said.
“You’ll be the first to know,” she replied. Ice clicked in her giant plastic cup. She drank her coffee iced, even in January. “If anyone wakes up.”
“Oh,” Cal said. “I’ll ... I’ll take notes for us.”
It was the sort of stupid platitude that he regretted immediately upon speaking, but Laura’s eyes softened for the briefest of moments, making him glad that he’d at least said something.
Wake up, he thought. Please, Mandy, please wake up.
Cal realized that the trauma counselor was still speaking, was ticking off all the different things that you could expect if your child returned from the dead.
“They will be slower. They won’t be able to move the same way that they could move in life. Some of them will not be able to speak, and most will not sound anything like they used to.”
Something unraveled in Cal’s chest. He loved many things about his daughter, but the sound of her voice was very high on his list. Her always-reliable “Hi, Daddy!” when he got home from work was quite often the highlight of a hard day. Those two simple words washed away his wounds.
But “I think I love him, Daddy,” had a different effect on him at the time, he recalled. His initial reaction was one of shock, as though Mandy had dropped an obscenity. His second reaction was one of concerned amusement. He liked Jake but doubted sincerely that the boy could sustain his daughter’s interest over the long haul.