“I destroyed the camera,” he told her. “And all the other tapes. I patched up the hole beneath the stairs.”
“I’ll never be warm again, Martin.”
“I’ll keep you warm.” He wrapped his arms around her.
She turned her back against his touch. “I’ll never be beautiful again,” she whispered.
“You’re lovely.” He fastened his lips on the rim of her ear. “You’re perfect.”
She jerked her head away from his mouth. Outside, a remnant of oily mist layered the surface of the lake, tiny wisps that coalesced, refusing to burn away in the morning sun.
Christopher Barzak
Dead Boy Found
Christopher Barzak has published stories in a variety of magazines and anthologies including Nerve, Realms of Fantasy, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, Strange Horizons, The Vestal Review, The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, Descant and Trampoline. He lives in Youngstown, Ohio. Recently Barzak completed a novel, One for Sorrow, which continues the narrative begun in “Dead Boy Found”.
“I wrote this story during the summer I turned twenty-five,” recalls the author. “At the time several friends had either died suddenly or had some life-damaging event happen to them, and quickly the world became a scary, uncomfortable place for me to live in. I couldn’t help wondering what horrible thing would happen next, and if I would survive it.
“The only other time in my life that I’d felt that way was when I was a kid and a young boy who lived in the next town over was brutally tortured and murdered by two men whom he’d stumbled upon in the woods while walking home from his Boy Scout meeting. His death sent ripples through the surrounding area, and for months I was obsessed with what had happened. I couldn’t comprehend how such a thing could occur. I kept imagining the scene, trying to give his murder some sort of rational coherence, but I always utterly failed.
“When death came crashing too close for comfort once more, I began thinking about that boy again, and what had happened to him. And again I started to try and make sense of these losses we all face.
“I don’t think I ended up making any sense out of the death of that boy from my childhood. Nor do I think I made any sense out of the death and damage that struck my circle of friends when I was twenty-five. The only thing I managed to do was to make this story out of that failure to comprehend their sudden absences.”
All this started when my father told my mother she was a waste. He said, “You are such a waste, Linda,” and she said, “Oh, yeah? You think so? We’ll see about that.” Then she got into her car and pulled out of our driveway, throwing gravel in every direction. She was going to Abel’s, or so she said, where she could have a beer and find herself a real man.
Halfway there, though, she was in a head-on collision with a drunk woman named Lucy, who was on her way home, it happened, from Abel’s. They were both driving around that blind curve on Highway 88, Lucy swerving a little, my mother smoking cigarette after cigarette, not even caring where the ashes fell. When they leaned their cars into the curve, Lucy crossed into my mother’s lane. Bam! Just like that. My mother’s car rolled three times into the ditch and Lucy’s car careened into a guardrail. It was Lucy who called the ambulance on her cellular phone, saying, over and over, “My God, I’ve killed Linda McCormick, I’ve killed that poor girl.”
At that same moment, Gracie Highsmith was becoming famous. While out searching for new additions to her rock collection, she had found the missing boy’s body buried beneath the defunct railroad tracks just a couple of miles from my house. The missing boy had been missing for two weeks. He disappeared on his way home from a Boy Scout meeting. He and Gracie were both in my class. I never really talked to either of them much, but they were all right. You know, quiet types. Weird, some might say. But I’m not the judgmental sort. I keep my own counsel. I go my own way. If Gracie Highsmith wanted to collect rocks and if the missing boy wanted to be a Boy Scout, more power to them.
We waited several hours at the hospital before they let us see my mother. Me, my brother Andy, and my father sat in the lobby, reading magazines and drinking coffee. A nurse finally came and got us. She took us up to the seventh floor. She pointed to room number 727 and said we could go on in.
My mother lay in the hospital bed with tubes coming out of her nose. One of her eyes had swelled shut and was already black and shining. She breathed with her mouth open, a wheezing noise like snoring. There were bloodstains on her teeth. Also several of her teeth were missing. When she woke, blinking her good eye rapidly, she saw me and said, “Baby, come here and give me a hug.”
I wasn’t a baby, I was fifteen, but I didn’t correct her. I figured she’d been through enough already. A doctor came in and asked my mother how she was feeling. She said she couldn’t feel her legs. He said that he thought that might be a problem, but that it would probably work itself out over time. There was swelling around her spinal cord. “It should be fine after a few weeks,” he told us.
My father started talking right away, saying things like, “We all have to pull together. We’ll get through this. Don’t worry.” Eventually his fast talking added up to mean something. When we brought my mother home, he put her in my bed so she could rest properly, and I had to bunk with Andy. For the next few weeks, he kept saying things like, “Don’t you worry, honey. It’s time for the men to take over.” I started doing the dishes and Andy vacuumed. My father took out the trash on Tuesdays. He brought home pizza or cold cuts for dinner.
I wasn’t angry about anything. I want to make that clear right off. I mean, stupid stuff like this just happens. It happens all the time. One day you’re just an average fifteen-year-old with stupid parents and a brother who takes out his aggressions on you because he’s idiotic and his friends think it’s cool to see him belittle you in public, and suddenly something happens to make things worse. Believe me, morbidity is not my specialty. Bad things just happen all at once. My grandma said bad things come in threes. Two bad things had happened: My mother was paralyzed and Gracie Highsmith found the missing boy’s body. If my grandma was still alive, she’d be trying to guess what would happen next.
I mentioned this to my mother while I spooned soup up to her trembling lips. She could feed herself all right, but she seemed to like the attention. “Bad things come in threes,” I said. “Remember Grandma always said that?”
She said, “Your grandma was uneducated.”
I said, “What is that supposed to mean?”
She said, “She didn’t even get past eighth grade, Adam.”
I said, “I knew that already.”
“Well, I’m just reminding you.”
“Okay,” I said, and she took another spoonful of chicken broth.
At school everyone talked about the missing boy. “Did you hear about Jamie Marks?” they all said. “Did you hear about Gracie Highsmith?”
I pretended like I hadn’t, even though I’d watched the news all weekend and considered myself an informed viewer. I wanted to hear what other people would say. A lot of rumors were circulating already. Our school being so small made that easy. Seventh through twelfth grade all crammed into the same building, elbow to elbow, breathing each other’s breath.
They said Gracie saw one of his fingers poking out of the gravel, like a zombie trying to crawl out of its grave. They said that after she removed a few stones, one of his blue eyes stared back at her, and that she screamed and threw the gravel back at his eye and ran home. They said, sure enough, when the police came later, they found the railroad ties loose, with the bolts broken off of them. So they removed them, dug up the gravel, shoveling for several minutes, and found Jamie Marks. Someone said a cop walked away to puke.